If you hate Justin Bieber, patriarchy wins

I just want to remind Charlotteans that you can come hear my talk--and 11 other great talks--Tuesday at Ignite Charlotte 4. For those of you who aren't local, they are taping the talks, and I'll post a link to the video once I get it. 

My talk is called "If you hate Justin Bieber, patriarchy wins," and it is based on this blog post from January.

 

Contract Theory, Intersectionality, Neoliberalism, and Absolute Music

I’m working on a manuscript that, among other things, ties classical liberalism to a specific “aesthetic”—what I call “liberal realism”—and neoliberalism to another sort of aesthetic—what I might call “neoliberal formalism” (I’m not entirely decided on this latter term). While other scholars have made this or similar distinctions, I’m arguing that “liberal realism” is both the product of a centering of the visual in feminist/philosophical analyses, and also reinforces the continued centering of viz-based frameworks. Neoliberal formalism, on the other hand, eschews viz-centric analyses, and is more robustly and accurately captured by sound-centered frameworks.

I want to take some time to flesh out an example we discussed a few weeks ago in my graduate Feminist Theory seminar, because it clearly and effectively connects classical liberalism—in the form of social contract theory—to viz-centrism and realism, and suggests how and why neoliberalism requires different, non-viz-centric, non “realist” interpretive tools.

In his discussion of “intersecting contracts” in Contract & Domination, Charles Mills includes a chart depicting the relative positions of white men, black men, white women, and black women, vis-à-vis one another and, more importantly, to full moral/political “personhood.” This chart has two axes: race is the Y axis, gender the X axis. Mills uses this chart to illustrate his claims about the intersection of the “racial contract” with the “sexual contract” to form what he calls “racial patriarchy.” He’s arguing that racia-sexual contracts create white men as “full persons,” nonwhite men and white women as “subpersons,” and nonwhite women as “non-persons.”

It is interesting that classically liberal social contract theory lends itself so easily to two-dimensional representation on a more-or-less Cartesian grid. Classical liberalism, with its realist focus on identity-content, treats identities as separable variables which can be graphed “intersectionality” in 2D. But what do I mean by this “realist focus on identity-content”? Classical liberalism—the Modern social contract theorists—created “race” and “gender” as social identities. Sexual difference and ethnic/national difference existed in premodern Europe, but the idea of “social identities” is a product of Modernity. Social identities are external, visual representations or signals of internal, invisible, inner “content” (e.g., skin color is a representation of intelligence, just as one’s taste in film can supposedly be inferred from one’s gender). So, social identities assume that there is a “true inner ‘self’” that may (or may not) be accurately expressed by one’s visible appearance.  (Though I won’t talk about it much now, it’s here, in this idea of the true inner self, that the “realism” factors in.  Liberalism treats identity as content which we are obligated to authentically represent or express.) This idea of the “true inner ‘self”” is a product of the Enlightenment—in fact, it, too, is Cartesian (Cogito, ergo sum, as they say). So, the conception of race and gender as social identities is a specifically Modern, which is to say, Contract-based, way of handling sexual and ethnic/national “difference.” So it historically/contextually makes sense that this classically liberal social identity models of “difference” lend themselves to representation in Cartesian grid form. In fact, this Cartesian grid is, more or less, the “traffic intersection” in Kimberle Crenshaw’s theorization of intersectionality: the X and Y axes “intersect” like roads. As Jasbir Puar argues in her “I”d Rather be a Cyborg than a Goddess” essay, “intersectionality” is a classically liberal discourse that treats “intersecting” identities as “matter that functions…through signification” (8).  I’m arguing that there is also a fundamental conceptual link among classically liberal social identity and the 2D Cartesian grid.  Race and gender, as social identities, are contents which can be isolated as variables in an equation, and then re-presented on a 2D Cartesian grid.

However, as my students pointed out, if you try to introduce another variable—like class, or sexuality, or immigration status, this graph collapses, breaks down, and fails. Perhaps one could introduce a Z axis, but we’d need at least two more axes to include the few extra variables I’ve just mentioned. And the underlying problem can’t be solved by increasing the number of axes/variables, because treating race and gender as “identities” that can be translated into isolatable “variables” is itself the problem.  Especially in neoliberalism, race and gender aren’t identities but technologies—i.e., if they’re not represented content, but relational processes. As Puar explains, in neoliberalism, “the focus [is] not on content but on relations, relations of patterns…specific connections with other concepts is precisely what gives concepts their meaning” (4). Cartesian coordinate systems can’t adequately describe or capture these neoliberal formal processes. Put differently, neoliberalism treats race and gender as technologies, as a how, but the classically liberal social identity treats them as a what. The 2D Cartesian grid can represent the what, but not the how, the content but not the patterns of relations.

We need different metaphors, different discourses, different forms of notation, to describe this “process” or “technological” aspect of race, gender, sexuality, etc. Word clouds are a good, if still “visual” example here: they show the relations among word frequency in a passage of text; they do not indicate words’ meaningful/signified content (if only for the fact that there is no grammar or syntax).

Music (by which I mean Western art and popular musics, and sometimes sound art) doesn’t and generally never has been a medium focused on signified/represented “content;” listening to music involves paying attention to relationships among events, it involves pattern recognition. (Obviously I’m bracketing lyrics here—I would go so far as to argue that lyrics, insofar as they function verbally as signifiers of signified content, aren’t really “music” at all.) In the manuscript I develop a number of ways that musical works, concepts, and practices are productive resources for theorizing both neoliberalism itself, and strategies to subvert/resist/critique it. For example, one thing I’ve been thinking about today is the discourse of absolute music.  This is really rough, and I haven’t at all thought through it in any detail, and could probably really use y’all’s help here. BUT, I think the discourse of “absolute music” might be an early, 18th/19^th c manifestation of some of the concepts, structures, and values we now associate with neoliberalism. “Absolute music” is music without words or programmatic content—instrumental music (usually) that “is about” music itself.  (In this way, Western art music was Greenbergian-modern (as distinguished from Cartesian-Modern) in the 19^th century: music was “about” the formal properties of its medium.) In absolute music, there is no expressive “subject,” no represented content—just formal relations. Meaning was crafted through formal relations—e.g., Haydn’s “Surprise Symphony” built the eponymous “surprise” from relations among “dynamics” (what non-musicians might call “volume,” or loudness and softness). Tonal harmony is classically liberal, but the discourse of “absolute music” approached neoliberalism, even if pieces of symphonic/absolute music were tonal.

It’s worth noting that the discourse of absolute music rose to philosophical/musicological prominence in, for example, Hanslick's work at that same point in the 19^th century that “the biopolitics of the population” came to prominence, in, for example, the equally new discourse of sexuality.

Ultimately, I’m not sure yet if this neoliberalism:absolute music comparison holds—I need to do the research. But I suspect it might. And I suspect it might tell us something interesting about biopolitical/neoliberal technologies of race, gender, and sexuality.

Roman Go Bang

Not that I have time to work on this mix, but somebody seriously needs to mash Minaj/Weezy's "Roman Reoladed" with Dinosaur L/Arthur Russell's "Go Bang." Just listen:

 



Towards the end of "Reloaded," Weezy's "bang"s would fit perfectly in the DL/AR track...It would also be interesting to try to put the rapping over FK's mix.

Not A Piece of Cake: Ethics, Aesthetics, & “Chris Brown & Rihanna” Problem

“It’s too close for comfort…So If you must falter be wise” (Disturbia; written by Brown, performed by Rihanna)

The recent ink (or, more often, binary code) spilled over Chris Brown (sometimes in relation to Rihanna) raises a lot of interesting philosophical problems about aesthetics, ethics, gender, and race. I want to examine some of these problems here. These questions require the tools of both black/WOC feminism, and philosophical aesthetics—two things that aren’t really often combined. But, I’ll try to do some of that below.

I want to emphasize that I’m not going to tell anyone what s/he ought to do. I’m really trying to avoid positioning myself as the omniscient academic who swoops down and saves the day by telling everyone what the correct position/view is. In this case especially, there is no ‘correct’ position. What I do want to accomplish in this post is to trouble what is commonly being offered as the “correct” stance one ought to take re: Breezy & RiRi. One’s moral outrage at this series of incidents is just being used as a performance of one’s own moral superiority: we are [ethical, feminist, etc.] because we recognize they are not. But, as my wonderful Ethics Bowl students say, ethics is a dirty business: the most fair and philosophically accurate assessments of a situation often refuse resolution into neat and tidy right/wrong or yes/no dichotomies, so the best we can do is distribute the dirt as fairly as possible—including and especially to ourselves as critics/analysts/philosophers/etc. So, let’s get dirty, as Xtina might have said about ten years ago:

Ambiguity, or, The Issues, Theirs and Ours

The outrage over Chris Brown’s performance at the 2012 Grammys, and his subsequently publicized new collaborations with Rihanna, has extended beyond the feminist blogosphere and into the mainstream media (e.g., on Wednesday 2/22, Donnie Deutsch (a rich white dude if there ever was one) was on NBC’s Today Show moralizing about how women should relate to abusive partners). People condemn Brown’s domestic violence against former girlfriend Rihanna, what appears to be a quick temper/anger management problem, and general bad attitude. Middle-class white mainstream audiences take it for granted that Brown is a bad man, that Rihanna should not appear with him on any recordings. The widespread acceptance and taken-for-grantedness Chris Brown as boogeyman-du-jour strikes me as…problematic. Is Breezy sometimes a jerk in public? Sure. Should we condemn his, and all, domestic violence? Absolutely. But should Brown be prohibited from performing on television? Should Rihanna be effectively prohibited from making new work with a former collaborator? Should we never take pleasure in any of Brown’s works or performances? …These questions require more nuanced responses. As music critics such as Ann Powers and John Caramancia have pointed out, the underlying questions refuse reduction to yes/no binaries. These questions undermine all-or-nothing responses, and there’s no morally or politically “pure” position we can, in good faith, take. There’s no uniformly, cohesively “right” or “good” answer, response, or position available here; those responses that attempt pure outrage, uncomplicated judgment, and simple yes/no conclusions misconstrue the issues at best, and are racist and/or sexist at worst.  People are so intensely and continuously fascinated with this case because the issues trouble any attempts at self-righteous ascription of blame or prescription of action. To do the issues justice, we critics, fans, observers, and scholars have to implicate ourselves in the same messy, complicitious milieu as Brown and Fenty (Rihanna’s legal name is Robyn Fenty). So we are so attracted to the issues in the case because it begs us to confront our own issues—with racism and sexism, with aesthetics, and with ethics.

In the rest of the post, I’m going to unpack individual issues/questions.

1.    Why do mainstream audiences, who are usually mildly to vehemently misogynist, suddenly care so much about domestic violence?

In my Feminist Theory class earlier this week we were talking about how 20^th century advances in civil rights are often granted because these “advances” further US national projects otherwise unrelated to civil rights for oppressed groups. For example, at the same time the Irish were beginning to be considered “white,” women were granted the right to vote; these two phenomena coincide nicely with the first world war, when the US is attempting to cast itself as more progressive and democratic than the Kaiser/Germany/Eastern Europe. Similarly, as Nell Painter points out in her book The History of White People, WWII saw significant advances for women and especially African-Americans—all because the US was interested in contrasting itself, as a racially egalitarian democracy, to racist/fascist Nazi Germany. Now, as Jasbir Puar has argued, we treat the project of gay and lesbian civil rights as evidence of our cultural/political superiority over “Muslims” and other “traditional” societies. So, there’s a long tradition of white patriarchy using women and people of color as pawns; so-called “feminist” or “anti-racist” projects are not at all motivated by concern for women or people of color, but are rather about furthering white patriarchy’s projects, about making white (men) look better with respect to other groups, feel better about themselves, etc. This is FINO or ARINO: feminism-/anti-racism-in-name-only. This is not really about Brown or Rihanna, but white people using brown people, and brown women, as instruments or mediums for white moral and political posturing. Critics get to position themselves as morally/politically superior to fans, to black men, to women of color, and to women generally. It’s about white patriarchal paternalism.

(a) So, while there is evidence to suggest that Chris Brown is an immature asshole, “Chris Brown” fills the role of the stereotypically scary, violent black man. “Chris Brown” is the current representation/figurehead of hundreds of years of cultural baggage; he’s the current incarnation of the “black boogeyman” role/figure. He’s not just guilty of one action, but his very being or essence is fixed as “the violent black man.” [Resonances w/Fanon are intentional…] Thus, it’s somewhat inaccurate to try to just talk about Brown himself, and the specificities of his case. Regardless of the individual named Chris Brown’s actual guilt, the adequacy of his penance, etc., “Chris Brown” is the currently fashionable signifier for cultural anxieties about black masculinity.

(b) These anxieties about black masculinity motivate the “saving brown women from brown men” excuse. In other words, white feminists and white patriarchs use this excuse to justify their paternalism towards Rihanna, and their condemnation of Brown. While this excuse claims to be motivated by concern for “brown women,” it isn’t: in reality, it denies brown women’s self determination, and assumes that only whites can adequately save these supposedly poor, ignorant fools. As Yolo Akili puts it:

Let me say this: she is a grown woman. She can make her own choices. Perhaps before we step up to condemn her choice, we might pause to consider the undertones of this discourse that denies Rihanna her right to forgive or engage Chris after his transgressions. It seems to have a strikingly similar undertone to the idea that as a woman, she is not intelligent enough to make up her own mind. And we all know where that logic has led us to, don’t we?[1]

If we actually want to respect Rihanna, and not further deny her agency, we need to recognize that she’s a complex person who has had to make some very fraught and difficult decisions. She chose what she considers to be the least bad or most tolerable options from among a seriously shitty field. These are not one-sided issues, and there is no simple, neatly “good” or “praiseworthy” response to them. Losses will have to be cut, and we shouldn’t begrudge Rihanna her prerogative to decide which compromises she finds least compromising to her. Here’s an example of one such question, where the compromise should be chosen by Rihanna, not for her:

2.    Brown and Rihanna were collaborators on their music prior to the DV incident (e.g., “Disturbia” was written by Brown & performed by Rihanna), and regardless of the status of their romantic relationship, they had a productive working relationship. Should she sever the professional relationship?

There are reasons to sever and not to sever the professional relationship. She might dislike him as a person. She might not want to “damage” her brand by association with his—Breezy’s career needs the boost from RiRi more than the other way around. She is one of the most bankable pop artists today, whereas CB’s career has severely suffered post-DV incedent. She might like his songwriting more than she dislikes him as a person. She might be able to compartmentalize, and have a productive working relationship in spite of any personal feelings towards (or against) him. She may want to earn as much money as she can now, for some future use (retirement, charity, who knows). Or, she may just think Brown is a gifted artist, and working with him expands her artistic chops, which she finds inherently valuable. So, there are numerous pros and cons. But she shouldn’t have to reduce her professional life to her personal life, nor should she have to be a simple, mono-dimensional person. We let male artists get away with lots of bad choices—and cite these “bad choices” as evidence of their genius! We don’t tell Daniel Barenboeim (a renowned Jewish pianist and conductor) that he can’t ever play or program Wagner. Sure, he might get criticized for it, but he’s not scolded and told he ought to know better.

3.    But obviously feminists should condemn those women’s claims that they wanted Brown to beat them, right?

There’s at least two things to consider here: (a) the saving brown women from brown men excuse (again); and (b) the limited scope of what counts as “agency” or “resistance.” I’ve talked about (a) above; we need to avoid paternalisms that assume women don’t know what’s best for themselves and need to be rescued by white, middle-class feminists or FINOs. As Gayatri Spivak explains, “Imperialism’s image as the establisher of good society is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind.” But (b) is not getting much coverage in any of the discussions I’ve seen online. In the same essay that Gayatri Spivak coins the “saving brown women from brown men” phrase (“Can the Subaltern Speak?”), she argues that mainstream Western feminists have a limited, and culturally-specific conception of what counts as “agency” and “resistance.” (J Halberstam discusses this also in The Queer Art of Failure).

In fact, making “subaltern” women’s agency and resistance fit hegemonic models of agency and resistance in fact further oppresses these women—it further denies their agency and assimilates them to hegemony.[2] It demands that they resist and act in ways “we” hegemonic feminists and FINOs deem appropriate, and that “we” are the only competent judges of this. “Subaltern” women’s resistance to intersecting hegemonies often refuses easy or clear reduction to hegemonic terms—it makes sense that counter-hegemonic practices are unintelligible to hegemonic notions of agency and resistance, right? There are at least “two contending versions of freedom,” as Spivak puts it, and we need to allow that women resisting multiple, interlocking oppressions might need different models of agency and opposition than those derived from single-oppression models. So I’m suggesting that we compare the “Breezy can beat me any day!” tweets to Spivak’s example of bride-burning in colonial India. Rihanna and the tweeters may not be the passive victims mainstream feminist and FINO media portrays them as being. “The oppressed, Spivak argues, “under socialized capital, have no necessarily unmediated access to ‘correct’ resistance.” So let’s at least acknowledge that Rihanna and the tweeters may be exercising complex forms of resistance that hegemonic frameworks don’t even register as such.

4.    Should feminists stop listening to (and liking) Breezy’s music (& performances)?

In The Queer Art of Failure, Judith Jack Halberstam observes that most Americans (and maybe Westerners in general) “cannot tolerate the linking of our desires to politics that disturb us” (153). This desire for the purity of our own desires, tastes, and preferences motivates a lot of the discussion about how we ought to deal with the Breezy/RiRi collaborations. The issue is presented in totalizing terms, as though the only two options were “loving it” or “leaving it.” But here I wan tto argue for a complex liking. We can take aesthetic pleasure in works by people we find distasteful. This is different than saying we can take aesthetic pleasure in works whose politics we find distasteful. I would still argue that such complex pleasure is possible and ethically/aesthetically permissible, BUT, it’s a slightly different philosophical problem, and one I won’t address here. I’m limiting my argument to the claim that it is ethically, politically, and aesthetically permissible to enjoy works by artists whose personal politics, comportment, etc., we find distasteful. The only source of distaste here would be at the artist, not in the work itself (which we find pleasurable). Ultimately, we need to be able to find use or value in (parts/aspects of) works by artists, writers, and other intellectuals whose personal views or behaviors we dislike, because nobody is perfectly, purely “good”. Adorno was a raving misogynist. Kant was a rabid racist. And let’s not even talk about pop musicians: The Stones? Sexist, and racist. Elvis? At least somewhat racially problematic, in the “Love & Theft” way. Pretty much every 18^th and 19^th c opera? Full of misogyny, racism, and Eurocentrism. Should we just throw everything out? No. Sometimes we will have to throw everything out because nothing can be salvaged after you take the problematic stuff out (e.g., Kant’s moral theory is, in my relatively expert opinion, unsalvageable…but, uh, I still read and teach his work, if only to point out the limitations…). If we only appreciated the work of purely “good people,” then, uh, we’d have little art, literature, or philosophy (to say nothing of science & technology) to appreciate. More importantly, however, we need to allow ourselves to appreciate works by morally/politically imperfect creators—and even morally and politically problematic works—because this lack of tolerance for ethically problematic aesthetic tastes is really a way to scapegoat others for our own moral/political compromises. We demand this “purity” in our aesthetic liking because it allows us to disavow and avoid admitting our own complicity in systems of oppression, like patriarchy. I was raised in and acculturated to patriarchy, and aesthetic norms grounded in patriarchial structures.  People would rather disavow their complicity (and renounce pleasure) than admit both their complicity and some enjoyment. In this instance, it is more morally and politically advantageous to bathe the baby in dirty bathwater, so to speak, because if you throw both out you loose the ability to confront the reason why the bathwater is dirty, and why the baby needs a bath.

5.    How do we handle the relationship between an artist’s life and an artist’s work?

This is a tough one. In the early 20^th century, Walter Benjamin argued that in industrial mass culture, the “aura” that formerly belonged to artworks had been transferred to artists, i.e., celebrities. So we tend to overlook artworks and focus solely on the artist, because that’s what seems “authentic” and “original.” But, of course, authenticity and originality are very 19^th c European aesthetic ideals, and it’s possible to have aesthetics that don’t prize or prioritize authenticity and originality. For example, rock aesthetics are rather 19^th c Romantic in nature, and they do value authenticity and originality, but American pop aesthetics tend to give these factors less weight, especially relative to things like sensationality, “groove,” pleasure, accessibility, etc.  So there’s a tension here between (a) the empirical fact that artists’ works are not reducible to their lives; and (b) the mass culture aesthetics that invest in celebrity over art object. Pop stars are performers: Breezy is not the same as the private person Chris Brown, just as Rihanna is not Robyn. It’s difficult to tell where the line between Robyn and Rihanna is drawn; I think it’s best to assume that everything released under the name “Rihanna” is the performance, by Robyn, of a character, and not the intimate confessions of her own innermost life. Why do I err on the side of work rather than life?

The reduction-to-biography problem: As Adrian Piper noted, we tend to reduce work by women artists of color to the artists’ biographies. That is: we act as though women of color are incapable of creating art, and are limited to narrating/confessing “truths” about their lives. This follows from the assumption that women of color can’t think abstractly enough to do anything than directly report facts. Obviously, this reduction-to-biography is racist and sexist, because it implies that women of color can’t be artists. So, in trying to reduce Rihanna’s (and Breezy’s) performances to their biographies plays into this longstanding racist/misogynist habit.

In spite of all this, we both must and must not separate the public persona of the artist and his/her work from the private individual. We are morally and politically obligated to both consider the work itself, and, given the current state of pop music production/aesthetics, to consider the life of the artist (both as the “artist,” and as the private individual).

…Which returns me to my original point: there’s no neat, clean answer to any of these questions. This issue demands complexity and compromise. There’s no moral high ground here.

---

[1] http://yoloakili.com/2012/02/its-not-my-birthday-i-dont-want-cakeon-rihanna-chris-brown/

[2] http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCkQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mcgill.ca%2Ffiles%2Fcrclaw-discourse%2FCan_the_subaltern_speak.pdf&ei=z71GT5emGZCatwfa2M3_DQ&usg=AFQjCNH0igQGklvRrEVZpEjkptOqzw-dUA&sig2=eMsZRp2cJyVAm_7J8yXXAA

Come Hear My Talk at Ignite Charlotte

I've been selected as one of the speakers at Ignite Charlotte! You can find the full schedule and details here. My 5-minute talk is titled "If You Hate Justin Bieber, Patriarchy Wins." I've blogged about this topic before, but this time I'll be speaking in more lay, accessible terms. So, bring your friends! I promise I'll make you reassess some of your most taken-for-granted assumptions about pop music, teen girls, and how feminists ought to subvert/resist patriarchy!

(I'm resisting the temptation to make myself a complimentary badge that says "I'm Mystifying"--the dialectical complement to "I'm Enlightened." But I don't think that's the forum for Adorno jokes.)

Rick Santorum, Keepin Patriarchy Real (aka, It's All About Teh Menz)

While some Republican presidential candidates are skillfully using coded racial language ("food stamps"), I've gotta hand it to Rick Santorum for being super, extra explicit about how patriarchy actually works. As he tells ABC News here, patriarchy oppresses women not because it directly hates women, but because it wants to protect men, masculinity, and the privileges that go with them. Qualifying his earlier remarks about women in combat, Santorum says:

“I was talking about men’s emotional issues; not women,” Santorum told ABC News. “I mean, there’s a lot of issues. That’s just one of them...So my concern is being in combat in that situation instead of being focused on the mission, they may be more concerned with protecting someone who may be in a vulnerable position, a woman in a vulnerable position,” Santorum said.

I'm really amazed and thankful that Santorum so overtly and explicitly lays bare how patriarchy actually works. According to Santorum, the reason why women shouldn't be allowed in combat positions has nothing to do with actual women, and everything to do with men's inability to grow the eff up and deal with the fact that women are around. So any discussions of the women-in-combat issue (which is problematic for militaristic-imperialist reasons above any gender reasons) that focus women miss the underlying issue: part of male privilege is not having to feel uncomfortable, especially if that discomfort is caused by women. From patriarchy's perspective, this issue isn't actually about women. It's about protecting male/masculine privilege. It just frames the issue as a "women's issue" in order to deflect attention from the real problem. Yet again women are the scapegoats for men's problems.

Patriarchy is male/masculine hegemony. It makes sense that patriarchy wouldn't center women/femininity, even as the object of derision. We need to be careful not to get caught up in patriarchy's attempts to re-frame men's issues as problems with/for women. Sometimes, the apparent centering of women actually only serves to obscure the fact that the underlying issues are not actually about women, but about patriarchy's sentimentalization of women in service of male/masculine privilege.

Jasbir Puar, Non-Metric Time, Steve Reich, and Kelis

This is an excerpt from the introduction to the manuscript I'm working on. Here, I'm discussing Jasbir Puar's reworking of Foucaultian biopower into her notion of "superpanopticism." She argues that superpanopticism operates not just in space (i.e., in 3D) but also temporally, in 4D. Here, I use some musical examples to unpack what "nonmetric" time is, and how it might work.

Puar often uses musical terms and concepts to describe superpanoptic (biopolitical) processes. Her discussion of the all-important fourth dimension, time, is framed in almost entirely musical terms. Theorizing in 4D means taking “speed, pace, and duration [as] ontological properties rather than temporal qualifications” (xxii). In other words, time becomes a dimension of being—an ontological plane—not just a linear graph of before and after (which can be done on, for example, just an X axis). Thus, Puar explains that working in 4D means

measuring time outside of the past-present-future [linear] triad and their scrambling, as an intensification or de-intensification of the experience of time, as one of ‘registering larger or smaller numbers of events in a given time.’ Relationships between speed (how fast or slow time feels), pace (the tempo, rate, or intervals of registering events within time), and duration (the length of time within which these events are registered) alter or are altered” (xxi; emphasis mine).

Framing time as frequency rather than as linear progression forward or backward, Puar offers us a musical ontology of the fourth dimension. The temporal element in Western music is rhythm. Rhythm is a measurement of instances in a given unit: the number of beats per measure, the number of beats per minute, the duration of notes in or across a beat, etc. Rhythm is not linear progress forward and backward; that’s actually part of a work’s compositional form, not it’s rhythm. She explicitly mentions tempo, meter/rate, and duration; while she does not explicitly name pitch as such, pitch is really just a measure of the intensity of a sine wave: high and low pitches are really just “larger or smaller numbers of events in a given time.” So, while these 4D processes of intensification and de-intensification might be difficult to visualize, Western music has a well-developed vocabulary for describing, explaining, and analyzing exactly these sorts of relationships.

            While rhythm, pitch, and tempo are all metric conceptions of frequency (a pre-defined, regular number of consistent incidents in a pre-measured unit of space/time), Puar argues that 

time must be conjured not only as nonlinear, but also as nonmetric…Nonmetric time deconstructs the naturalization of the administrative units of the measurement of the ‘familiar, divisible, and measurable time of everyday experience’ and challenges the assumption that the repetition of these units, these ‘stable oscillators’ at different scales, is ‘composed of identical instants.’ Quite simply, one second is not the same as another second” (xxi-xxii).

Convienently for my argument, twentieth century Western musicians have already written plenty of non-metric pieces. Free jazz often ventures into the non-metric, and sound art even more, um, frequently so.[1] A particularly clear example of non-metric avant-garde composition is Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music. This piece consists of a microphone, hung over a beam or other support, over an amplifier. The mic must have a very long cord, because though the mic itself may be very close to the top of the amp, it is hung from high above the amp so that it can swing back and forth over it.  The mic is, in effect, a pendulum over the amp. To perform the piece, the amp is turned on, the volume turned up, and the mic is pulled back and released so that it swings over the amp. With each pass, the feedback between mic and amp waxes and wanes. But, because the pendulum looses energy with each pass, each pass is increasingly shorter than the one before. So, while the pendulum marks out and divides up time, no one unit is the same as any other unit. Time is, effectively, nonmetric.  One could object that in Pendulum Music is still somewhat metric, because even though each individual unit of time is not consistent in duration, there is nevertheless a consistent, predictable pattern of decay. In other words, there is a “regularity” to the irregularity of temporal units, a method to the madness, so to speak. However, Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain demonstrates the factual irregularity of apparently regular, metric patterns. In this work, Reich has a “found sound” recording of a street preacher exclaiming “It’s gonna rain!”, followed by the flapping of a pigeon’s wings. He has looped the sample, and copied the loop onto two tapes. He loads each copy on one of two identical tape players. Both players are started simultaneously, so the tapes are in synch. But the point of the piece is that the identical tapes, on identical machines, do not stay in synch, but go ever more gradually out of synch, only to (eventually) return back into synch. So even what ought to be regularly, rigidly, mechanically metric, is not in fact metric. The phasing in It’s Gonna Rain demonstrates that no one second is ever the same as another second, even and especially when these “seconds” are measured by precision mechanical instruments. Not even apparently “metric” time is actually metric. (Hence the need for leap days, leap seconds, etc—the universe itself isn’t regularly metric.) 

Reich’s work calls the very idea of “metric” time into question, and this critique is not limited to the sphere of avant-garde art music.  Kelis’s 2010 single “Acapella,” at least in its original album version, makes this same point.[2] By destabilizing the apparent regularity of its meter, “Acapella” challenges the very idea of “regular” meter. First, the very idea of singing “a capella” indicates that there is no instrumental accompaniment, such as a rhythm section or a drum machine loop (what might be referred to as “beats”), to either keep time or to make explicit the meter implicit in the melody. As the lyrics say, when Kelis was without accompaniment, “There’s a beat I was missing, no tune or a scale I could play.” The song itself is not composed in the form its title suggests;[3] it begins not with unaccompanied singing, but with a drum machine pattern. The four-beat, one-bar pattern in the introduction (0:00-0:15) does, however, destabilize the apparent regularity of its 4/4 meter. The sixteenth-two-eights pattern that bridges the “and” of beat three and the downbeat of beat four creates a “hiccup” or “shuffle” effect. This effect is similar to the shuffling that marching band/drum corps members use to get back on the correct foot when they find themselves out of step. So, this rhythmic motive gives the effect of being out of synch, or out of meter, even though the meter has remained mechanically regular the whole time. In other words, this rhythmic motive makes the meter feel unmetric.

“Acapella” can destabilze meter, but, because it’s a pop dance track, has to ultimately remain metric. Time can be nonmetric in Pendulum Music and It’s Gonna Rain because they do not posit rhythm (ie meter) as a fundamental organizing principle: it’s not in 4/4, cut time, 6/8, 5/4, etc. Rather, the pieces’ organization is grounded in their process of performance, not in their “compositional form”— it would be more Reichian to say its compositional form is or emerges simultaneously with the process of its performance. Conceiving of superpanoptic frequencies as processes, and not as substantive structures or contents, we can understand how 4D “time” can be “nonmetric” and “nonlinear.” It is not a coincidece that musical examples help us do just this.

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[1] Western popular music is more standardly metric. I am grateful to Andrew Dilts, Sina Kramer, and Chris Nasrallah for helping me in a not very successful attempt to find an example of nonmetric popular music. The best we could come up with was Chris’s suggestion of Bjork’s “Harm of Will,” which I’m not entirely convinced is nonmetric. The music-box theme introduces meter into the piece, which otherwise eschews and frustrates attempts to locate a metric, regular beat.

[2] Kelis. “Acapella” on Flesh Tone. Interscope, 2010. All references are to the video, available here: http://youtu.be/U8D9xCBcfzw. Accessed 2/7/2012 4:48pm.

[3] Only 3:08-3:20 actually is acapella.