The Expressive Subject: Prosumers, Virtuosi, and Digital Musical Control

This chapter proposes expressive subjectivity as a framework to describe relations between the creativity dispositif, prosumer culture, and digital musical controllers, also known as MIDI controllers. Drawing on a Foucaultian biopolitical framework, expressive subjectivity is understood as a partially self-constituted enactment that evokes the maximisation of expression as an aesthetic strategy, a pleasureful activity, and a more virtuous type of consumption. It intersects with the creative subject, described by Angela McRobbie and Andreas Reckwitz, and the prosumer subject, described widely in consumer studies. The softwarization of music production forced a re-evaluation of the role of expression in music performance, as the tactile gestures afforded by conventionally expressive musical instruments do not necessarily translate to the technical or aesthetic needs of electronic musicians. Digital musical controllers seek to bridge this gap, bringing tactile interfaces to electronic music production beyond the mouse and keyboard. This ongoing discourse has long been connected with consumerism and technology start-ups. To elaborate on expressive subjectivity and its evocation through the historical lens of the softwarization of cultural production, two families of products by the music technology start-up ROLI are examined: Blocks, and the Seaboard. In the former case, a modular, proprietary platform with diverse kinds of musical expression is “bought into,” creating an instrument that is never formally complete and always open to expansion and a steady cycle of increasing prosumerism-by-accumulation. In the latter, the company cultivates a longer-lasting commitment from users to generate long-term aesthetic value to that instrument, thereby creating a new category of virtuosic cultural producer: the Seaboardist. These categories provide nuance to descriptions of creativity and consumer behaviour in electronic music, and the shifting roles and forms of musical expression after softwarization.