So, I need to spend some more time with Kanye West's new album, "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy." You can count on some more developed posts about it; those are on the slate for winter break. However, I thought I'd put a few initial observations into circulation.
Imma use a claptrack, too:
So, "Power," the first single Yeezy releases after the infamous "Imma let you finish" incident echoes the very song that Kanye thought should have won Taylor Swift's VMA. As I have argued before on this blog, Beyonce's "Single Ladies" is basically a claptrack with sound effects and vocals. "Power" begins similarly with a claptrack; Ye emphasizes this in the remix, where his verse begins "Now when I walk in, everybody do the Power clap," and the refrain through this section is "clap, clap, clap." So, the question is: is Kanye making a direct reference to "Single Ladies" here?
Two more things to note about this "Power" remix: (1) oh, SNAP! So, there's the obvious sampling of Snap's "I Got the Power"...I guess it's not surprising that a kid who grew up in Chicago in the 90s is gonna turn to some house music...however, it's interesting that he uses a Belgian group...(2) "Norman Mailer shit"--Mailer's (in)famous essay "The White Negro" is one of the most well-known treatises on white appropriations of black music, and often cited in discussions of white hipness. I wonder if this is further evidence of a turn to what I've called "postmillenial black hipness" (i.e., black artists appropriating white appropriations of black culture)?
Kanye West, Feminist?:
Both "Monster" and "Runaway" seem to argue that patriarchy is really damaging to women, and normatively "macho" d00ds are total assholes to women. This is most clear in Kanye's solo at the piano in "Runaway," about 13:45 into the video. Here, he proposes "let's have a toast for the duchebags, let's have a toast for the assholes," etc., and in response he suggests "baby runaway fast as you can...You've been putting up with my shit way too long." So, men are rewarded for treating women like shit, and women ought best to get the hell out while they can. This sentiment is echoed in "Monster," where West repeatedly claims "Everybody know I'm a motherfuckin monster." Then, in the scene immediately following the performance, West's Phoenix (i.e., avian) girlfriend is served roasted poultry for dinner. She responds with disgust and abject revulsion. Perhaps the idea here is that patriarchy gets women to buy into/eat up their own oppression? Here's the video--I suggest you start at 13:45:
Now, I'm not suggesting that West is intentionally or "fully" feminist...but I do think there is some evidence of an awareness in the way that patriarchal gender roles harm both women and men.
30 November 2010
16 November 2010
London's Burning, #1: Lee Edelman Fought the Law, and the Law Won
This is the first in my “London’s Burning” sub-series of posts on punk music and queer futurity/anti-futurity debates.* Here, I want to cover Judith Halberstam’s particularly illuminating critique of Edelman. Halberstam argues that Edelman calls on a supposedly critical “negativity” in a way that ultimately undercuts its critical force. Put somewhat more glibly, Halberstam calls out Edelman for being a poseur or (to quote Television Personalities) a “Part Time Punk.” Noting that the title for Edelman’s book comes from a line in the chorus of The Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” (which is—appropriately for a book on queer theory—on an album titled Nevermind the Bullocks), Halberstam argues that the content of Edelman’s claims evoke punk negativity, but the form/style of his writing reinstalls traditional notions of “good writing.” Halberstam explains:
Edelman’s style refuses punk’s DIY ethos and aesthetic of failure. His negativity is highly virtuosic and very, very tidy—perhaps in this sense a little more Joy Division than Sex Pistols. The comparison to Joy Division—a band named after a group of SS officers who raped Jewish women—is even more apt when we consider Halberstam’s claim that Edelman’s “apolitical anti-social agenda…cuts both ways and while it mitigates against liberal fantasies of progressive enlightenment and community cohesion, it also coincides uncomfortably with a fascist sensibility” (143). So, perhaps Halberstam isn’t entirely correct in her diagnosis of Edelman as anti-punk. This “facist sensibility” was a prominent feature of certain punk bands and subcultures (especially in Britain)…Joy Division’s dark minimalism certainly qualifies as a “facist aesthetic,” and, on the more working-class skinhead side of this “fascist sensibility,” there’s a reason why the Dead Kennedys wrote a song titled “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” Thus, while Edelman may not ultimately follow the ethos or aesthetic of the punks he (perhaps unintentionally?) references, this does not mean that he falls totally outside of punk. In later posts, I will argue that there are good reasons for situating him with post-punk rather than “punk” proper; I’m sure some of you might even argue that Joy Division is in fact post-punk.
But, back to Halberstam and the Sex Pistols. Halberstam uses “God Save the Queen” to rework Edelman’s notion of negativity into a more “properly” punk one. First, the Sex Pistols’ track, and then, an extended quote from Halberstam:
According to Halberstam, what punk has and Edelman lacks is a notion of “political negativity”—or, what I’m calling “anti-utopian relationality.” Political negativity values traditional punk’s DIY ethos and aesthetic of failure—or, as Halberstam puts it, the “promise of self-shattering, loss of mastery and meaning, [and] unregulated speech and desire” (152). I have spoken of this aesthetic of failure in previous posts (on Munoz and !!!, but also my post on James Chance and white awkwardness), and I think it is something common to BOTH punk and post-punk music. I will argue in a later post that political negativity is perhaps most prominent in post-punk and No Wave. These are both genres that exhibit the combination Halberstam describes as “funky, nasty, over the top and thoroughly accessible” (154). Political negativity can also be found in “classic” punk. In what follows, I compare the Sex Pistols’ aforementioned “God Save the Queen” to The Clash’s “All the Young Punks,” and demonstrate that the latter track imagines exactly the sort of anti-utopian relationality Halberstam argues for.
According to Halberstam, “a truly political negativity,” is not only “one that promises, this time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock and annihilate, and, to quote Jamaica Kincaid, to make everyone a little less happy” (154), it is also a relational, collective endeavor. This relationality is absent in the Sex Pistols’ track, but quite central to The Clash’s. “All the Young Punks” is the last track on The Clash’s second album, “Give ‘Em Enough Rope.” The song’s lyrics craft the myth of the band’s origins, and situate its beginnings in terms of punk ideological commitments to, among other things, a DIY ethos and to the formerly working-class youth now structurally unemployed in Britain’s de/post-industrialized economy. Here’s the song:
The track’s anti-utopianism or anti-futurity is most evident in its chorus: “Face front, you got the future shining like a piece of gold/but I swear as we get closer, it looks more like a lump of coal.” In this respect, then, The Clash share the Sex Pistols’ sentiment that there is no future for England’s working class. However, where the Sex Pistols prescribe anarchy and “destroy[ing] passerby,” The Clash advocate a different sort of punk negativity, one grounded more in irony than in aggression. The chorus concludes with the lines: “All the young punks, laugh at life it ain’t much to cry for/All the young punks/living now cause there ain’t much to cry for/All you young punks/laugh at life cause it ain’t much to cry for/All you young cunts/live it now cause there ain’t much to die for”. “Laughing” and “living” are not necessarily positive, feel-good emotions. For example, Strummer “laughs” at the fact that he was fired from and thus no longer has to “waste his youth” in a boring factory job. Most importantly, though, this song is about being in a punk band. The song begins with a version of how the band’s guitarist and bassist met and recruited its singer:
Hanging about down on Market Street/Spent a lot of time on my feet
When I saw some passing Yobbers/Waiting just to speak
Well I knew how to sing, you know, and they knew how to pose
One of them had a Less Paul all attack machine
Importantly, being in this band, being a punk, is seen as the antidote to “working for the clampdown”—i.e., living a life where: “You gotta drag yourself to work/work yourself to sleep/You’re dead from the neck up.” For The Clash, punk negativity is a fundamentally relational project. It engages other people.
I’ll have much more to say about The Clash in subsequent posts. I may not convince you that they’re the only band that matters, but, I do think they offer a meaningful and insightful intervention into these debates on queer futurity/anti-futurity, and help flesh out Halberstam’s very productive and important notion of “political negativity.”
* “London’s Burning” is the title of a song on The Clash’s eponymous first album. It is also a reference to the iconic film about vogueing, “Paris is Burning.” The title is meant to play on the punk resonances of the former reference and the queer resonances of the latter reference.
All citations from: Halberstam, Judith. “The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies” in Graduate Journal of Social Science, 2—8, Vol. 5 Issue 2, 140-156.
While Edelman frames his polemic against futurity with epigraphs by Jacques Lacan and Virginia Woolf, he omits the more obvious reference that his title conjures up and that echoes through recent queer anti-social aesthetic production, namely ‘God Save the Queen’ as sung by The Sex Pistols. While The Sex Pistols use the refrain ‘no future’ to reject a formulaic union of nation, monarchy, and fantasy, Edleman tends to cast material political concerns as crude and pedestrian, as already a part of the conjuring of futurity that his project must foreclose. Indeed, Edelman turns to the unnervingly tidy and precise theoretical contractions of futurity in Lacan because, like Lacan and Woolf, and unlike the punks, he strives to exert a kind of obsessive control over the reception of his own discourse. Twisting and turning back on itself, reveling in the power of inversion, Edleman’s syntax itself closes down the anarchy of signification (142).
Edelman’s style refuses punk’s DIY ethos and aesthetic of failure. His negativity is highly virtuosic and very, very tidy—perhaps in this sense a little more Joy Division than Sex Pistols. The comparison to Joy Division—a band named after a group of SS officers who raped Jewish women—is even more apt when we consider Halberstam’s claim that Edelman’s “apolitical anti-social agenda…cuts both ways and while it mitigates against liberal fantasies of progressive enlightenment and community cohesion, it also coincides uncomfortably with a fascist sensibility” (143). So, perhaps Halberstam isn’t entirely correct in her diagnosis of Edelman as anti-punk. This “facist sensibility” was a prominent feature of certain punk bands and subcultures (especially in Britain)…Joy Division’s dark minimalism certainly qualifies as a “facist aesthetic,” and, on the more working-class skinhead side of this “fascist sensibility,” there’s a reason why the Dead Kennedys wrote a song titled “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” Thus, while Edelman may not ultimately follow the ethos or aesthetic of the punks he (perhaps unintentionally?) references, this does not mean that he falls totally outside of punk. In later posts, I will argue that there are good reasons for situating him with post-punk rather than “punk” proper; I’m sure some of you might even argue that Joy Division is in fact post-punk.
But, back to Halberstam and the Sex Pistols. Halberstam uses “God Save the Queen” to rework Edelman’s notion of negativity into a more “properly” punk one. First, the Sex Pistols’ track, and then, an extended quote from Halberstam:
So what does or who would constitute the politics of ‘no future’ and by implication the politics of negativity? The Sex Pistols, we may recall, made the phrase ‘no future’ into a rallying call for Britain’s dispossessed. In their debut song, written as an anti-celebratory gesture for the Queen’s silver jubilee, The Sex Pistols turned the National Anthem into a snarling rejection of the tradition of the monarchy, the national investment in its continuation and the stakes that the whole event betrayed in futurity itself, where futurity signifies the nation, the divisions of class and race upon which the notion of national belonging depends and the activity of celebrating the ideological system which gives meaning to the nation and takes meaning away from the poor, the unemployed, the promiscuous, the non-citizen, the racialized immigrant, the queer: ‘God Save the Queen/She ain’t no human being/There is no future/In England’s dreaming…Oh God save history/God save yoru mad parade/Oh Lord God have mercy/All crimes are paid. When there’s no future/How can there be sin/We’re the flowers in the dustbin/We’re the poison in your human machine/We’re the future in your future…God save the queen/We mean it man/And there is no future/In England’s dreaming…No future no future/No future for you/No future no future/No future for me.’ No future for Edelman means routing our desires around the eternal sunshine of the spotless child and finding the shady side of political imaginaries in the proudly sterile and antireproductive logics of queer relation. It also seems to mean something (too much) about Lacan’s symbolic and not enough about the powerful negativity of punk politics. When The Sex Pistols spit in the face of English provincialism and called themselves ‘the flowers in the dustbin,’ when they associated themselves with the trash and debris of polite society, they launched their poison into the human. Negativity might well constitute an anti-politics but it should not register as apolitical (147-8).
According to Halberstam, what punk has and Edelman lacks is a notion of “political negativity”—or, what I’m calling “anti-utopian relationality.” Political negativity values traditional punk’s DIY ethos and aesthetic of failure—or, as Halberstam puts it, the “promise of self-shattering, loss of mastery and meaning, [and] unregulated speech and desire” (152). I have spoken of this aesthetic of failure in previous posts (on Munoz and !!!, but also my post on James Chance and white awkwardness), and I think it is something common to BOTH punk and post-punk music. I will argue in a later post that political negativity is perhaps most prominent in post-punk and No Wave. These are both genres that exhibit the combination Halberstam describes as “funky, nasty, over the top and thoroughly accessible” (154). Political negativity can also be found in “classic” punk. In what follows, I compare the Sex Pistols’ aforementioned “God Save the Queen” to The Clash’s “All the Young Punks,” and demonstrate that the latter track imagines exactly the sort of anti-utopian relationality Halberstam argues for.
According to Halberstam, “a truly political negativity,” is not only “one that promises, this time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock and annihilate, and, to quote Jamaica Kincaid, to make everyone a little less happy” (154), it is also a relational, collective endeavor. This relationality is absent in the Sex Pistols’ track, but quite central to The Clash’s. “All the Young Punks” is the last track on The Clash’s second album, “Give ‘Em Enough Rope.” The song’s lyrics craft the myth of the band’s origins, and situate its beginnings in terms of punk ideological commitments to, among other things, a DIY ethos and to the formerly working-class youth now structurally unemployed in Britain’s de/post-industrialized economy. Here’s the song:
The track’s anti-utopianism or anti-futurity is most evident in its chorus: “Face front, you got the future shining like a piece of gold/but I swear as we get closer, it looks more like a lump of coal.” In this respect, then, The Clash share the Sex Pistols’ sentiment that there is no future for England’s working class. However, where the Sex Pistols prescribe anarchy and “destroy[ing] passerby,” The Clash advocate a different sort of punk negativity, one grounded more in irony than in aggression. The chorus concludes with the lines: “All the young punks, laugh at life it ain’t much to cry for/All the young punks/living now cause there ain’t much to cry for/All you young punks/laugh at life cause it ain’t much to cry for/All you young cunts/live it now cause there ain’t much to die for”. “Laughing” and “living” are not necessarily positive, feel-good emotions. For example, Strummer “laughs” at the fact that he was fired from and thus no longer has to “waste his youth” in a boring factory job. Most importantly, though, this song is about being in a punk band. The song begins with a version of how the band’s guitarist and bassist met and recruited its singer:
Hanging about down on Market Street/Spent a lot of time on my feet
When I saw some passing Yobbers/Waiting just to speak
Well I knew how to sing, you know, and they knew how to pose
One of them had a Less Paul all attack machine
Importantly, being in this band, being a punk, is seen as the antidote to “working for the clampdown”—i.e., living a life where: “You gotta drag yourself to work/work yourself to sleep/You’re dead from the neck up.” For The Clash, punk negativity is a fundamentally relational project. It engages other people.
I’ll have much more to say about The Clash in subsequent posts. I may not convince you that they’re the only band that matters, but, I do think they offer a meaningful and insightful intervention into these debates on queer futurity/anti-futurity, and help flesh out Halberstam’s very productive and important notion of “political negativity.”
* “London’s Burning” is the title of a song on The Clash’s eponymous first album. It is also a reference to the iconic film about vogueing, “Paris is Burning.” The title is meant to play on the punk resonances of the former reference and the queer resonances of the latter reference.
All citations from: Halberstam, Judith. “The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies” in Graduate Journal of Social Science, 2—8, Vol. 5 Issue 2, 140-156.
09 November 2010
Contort Yourself: A follow-up to Shannon Sullivan’s SPEP paper on experiencing white identity as a “joyful passion”
SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) was last weekend, and Shannon Sullivan gave a paper on Nietzsche, Spinoza, and white identity. The paper was bold and provocative (and evidence why people need tenure), and the discussion was heated and productive…so, you know, everything a great conference paper should be. (I guess I should also admit that Shannon was my Intro to Philosophy teacher back when she was at Miami.) Leigh Jonhson’s comments posed some very important and insightful questions to and reworkings of Shannon’s initial remarks. That said, I’ve been thinking more about this paper—which I will summarize more thoroughly below—and I think there’s an important way that musicians help us identify and think through one specific problem with Shannon’s paper…which happened to be one of the main problems that the comments and questions, both from Leigh and from the audience, addressed. I’m interested in this problem for several reasons: as a reader of Nietzsche, as someone interested in race and race theory, and, most importantly, in someone who wants to argue for the philosophical value of popular music. Below, I’ll show how James Chance’s iconic No Wave piece “Contort Yourself” addresses precisely the philosophical problem raised in/by the discussion of Shannon’s paper.
SO, Shannon reads Spinoza and Nietzsche, and locates within them a notion of what she calls “joyful passions.” I’m gonna stick to Nietzsche here, because I’ve published on him, and I’ve barely read any Spinoza. Based on the quotes in Shannon’s paper, she seemed to be reading mainly Nietzsche’s Gay Science and Genealogy of Morals….which makes sense, given the focus on “joyful passions.” Briefly (and I hope this summary does justice to Shannon’s paper; if not, please let me know and I’ll happily amend it), Shannon argues that anti-racist whites tend to hold feelings of shame and guilt as the most appropriate affective responses to white privilege and racism. These “negative” passions are much like the “bad conscience,” ressentiment, or “reactive” attitude Nietzsche critiques in both these texts. This makes sense: “good white liberals” want to respond “morally” to racism. The problem, from a Nietzschean perspective, is that European morality can only provide solutions that de-value lived experience, embodiment, health, human flourishing, and, importantly, femininity and “Southern” values (for more on that last point, may I suggest Chapter 5 of my recent book?). That is to say, shame and guilt are, to use Deleuze’s term, “reactive” responses to white racism/privilege: they are melancholic responses that refuse to let go of or “get over”—or, as Nietzsche would say, “digest”—the fact of one’s implication in racist and normatively white institutions. Now, Nietzsche fully admits that “reactive” attitudes have had their place, and are not entirely harmful; they brought us modern science and philosophy, after all. Problems happen when reactive attitudes are the only positions and perspectives one adopts. According to Nietzsche, active, affirmative attitudes are preferable to reactive, negative ones. One should have a “joyful wisdom” (froeliche Wissenschaft, or Gay Science). To be “joyful” means to affirm (or, in modern parlance, “own”) even the most painful, regretful, shameful moments of one’s life. Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return is key here. Nietzsche proposes it as a sort of maxim for the practice of “joyful” wisdom: act in a way that if you had to re-live each moment of your life over and over to infinity, would always choose/affirm your experiences (rather than regret them, disavow them, feel shame or guilt for them, etc.). For Nietzsche, it’s not that we have to like or feel pleasure in the experiences we affirm; it is entirely possible to affirm a negative or ambivalent experience (e.g., one might think: “Dating that one person in college might not have been the best idea, but I learned and grew from it, so, in the end, it’s for the best. I’m not ashamed of it, it’s part of me, and shaped me into the person I am today. If I had the choice, I would do it again.”). According to Nietzsche, to be “joyful” is to affirm the eternal return, to own up to (which is the first step in taking responsibility for) one’s past, present, and future. Importantly, this Nietzschean “joy” is not pride. I’m not particularly proud of owning all those New Kids on the Block posters back in the 1990s, but, you know, it was something that located me in a specific cultural moment and made me, me. The important thing for Nietzsche is that we affirm even those things that we’re otherwise sort of ambivalent about, like my NKOTB fandom, my relationship history, or, to be a bit more serious, my implication in systems of normative whiteness, masculinity, heteronormativity, and able-bodied-ness. As many have noted, shame and guilt are blocking emotions: they more often encourage helplessness and resignation than inspire action. Affirming my implication in these systems of privilege is a necessary step in moving beyond feeling bad about it to taking responsibility for it. Shame implies one should have known better, but didn’t. Guilt implies one is always-already faulty no matter what one does. Affirmation—or, to use Shannon’s word, “joy”—implies that I own my experiences, and can and ought to take some responsibility for them (this is more or less the first step in every 12-step program).
I think many of the problems addressed in the comments could be resolved by the more nuanced reading of “joy” that I’ve just offered above. I agree with the commenters that we don’t really what white people feeling joy qua happiness or pride in their white identity. I also agree with Shannon that white guilt and shame are also undesirable. However, if we reconceive of “joy” not as the opposite of sadness but as a synonym for affirming the eternal return, a more desirable, intermediate position emerges.
Shannon’s paper tended to frame “joy” and “shame/guilt” as the only two types of passions possible, and most of the comments continued in this vein. One was either happy or sad. This is a false dichotomy. There are intermediate passions between joy and shame/guilt. Here, I want to think about awkwardness. To be awkward is to be somewhat disoriented, to lack a degree of fluency, control, and command. If whiteness is an orienting and centering discourse that makes white bodies and white subjectivities feel fluent, competent, and coherent in white-dominant contexts (Leigh suggested something along these lines in her comments), then awkwardness is one consequence of the de-centering of whiteness. Anti-racist whites should be invested in the de-centering of whiteness (i.e., working against the normative force of whiteness). In so doing, these anti-racist whites will be making a world in which they will feel increasingly awkward. If hegemonic whiteness as such orients white identity (it also orients non-white identities too, but, as Fanon clearly shows, it orients them as always-already awkward, not, as in the case of whites, as fluent and competent), then whites will feel dis-oriented in contexts where whiteness is less than hegemonic. The Nietzschean point here is that whites should affirm this awkwardness as such: “Yes, I feel incompetent and clumsy, but I chose this situation, and value it as evidence of whiteness’s decreasingly hegemonic status.” “Good liberal whites” and white supremacists would not affirm such awkwardness; rather, they would likely feel shame and indignance, respectively. I want to argue that the attitude that is both the most saliently anti-racist and solidly Nietzschean is affirmation of awkwardness; this attitude is an intermediary between both “sad” and “joyful” passions as presented in Shannon’s paper and taken up in the discussion of it.
It is precisely this affirmation of awkwardness that we see in No Wave. No Wave was a post-punk noise genre that emerged in New York’s “Downtown” art scene in the late 1970s/early 1980s. No Wave follows from Gang of Four’s, the Au Pairs, and A Certain Ratio’s punk funk, and is characterized by songs that are herky-jerky, jagged, sloppy, and, well, awkward. It’s dance music that is a sonic script for white people’s stereotypical awkwardness on the dance floor. No Wave artists often spoke directly to/about issues of race, and, notably, to their own whiteness. After the breakup of the Contortions, James Chance led a band called “James White and the Blacks” (the name of course being both a send-up of James Brown and the JBs, and a commentary on the racial politics of American popular music). With this band, Chance wrote a song called “Almost Black pt. 1,” whose lyrics sarcastically comment on the tendency for white male rock stars to appropriate stereotypical black masculinity (see my article in Contemporary Aesthetics for more on this track and its racial politics). So, it’s fair to say that Chance was acutely aware of and interested in examining whiteness and white identity.
Chance’s No Wave aesthetic affirms awkwardness. Given my argument in the preceding paragraph, we can say that he’s affirming the awkwardness of a de-centered whiteness. Chance knows he’s white; his whiteness is not invisible to him. The very act of naming whiteness as such can de-center it. Insofar as whiteness’s hegemonic (and thus centering and orienting) force is grounded in its invisibility, mere awareness of one’s whiteness can have dis-orienting affects. We hear this disorientation in Chance’s appropriation of African-American musical styles such as jazz, disco, and rock. He stumbles, mumbles, and squeaks all through his cover of Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough. Unlike most white musicians, who seamlessly appropriate black music and take pleasure in this racist/colonial project, Chance crafts tracks that prevent us from taking a direct, immediate pleasure in them, and in their appropriations of blackness. Chance’s tracks are, well, awkward. And he affirms this awkwardness. He does this most obviously in 1979’s “Contort Yourself”:
The lyrics make it clear that Chance is affirming the awkwardness that is specifically the consequence of de-centering hegemonic norms. Contortion is the effect of un-learning received wisdom, or, as chance puts it, to contort oneself is to “Try being stupid/instead of smart/Once you take out the garbage that’s in your brain.” It is clear that contortion is awkward, i.e., an intermediary between positive and negative affect: “It’s better than pleasure/it hurts more than pain.” Most importantly, this awkwardness is performatively re-affirmed at least five times in the break, where Chance sings: “Contort Yourself One Time!/Contort Yourself Two Times!/Contort Yourself Three Times!/Contort Yourself Four Times!/Contort Yourself Five Times!/AAAAAAAAAAAA.” This repeated command to “contort yourself” can be read as a Nietzschean affirmation: Chance would contort himself over and over again.
So, “Contort Yourself” presents us with a clear thesis on how anti-racist white people should affectively “feel” about their whiteness. To disavow one’s white privilege in a white supremacist state is to, well, contort oneself. White people committed to the de-centering of whiteness will constantly contort themselves while taking out all the hegemonic garbage that’s in our brains. And we should do it over and over and over again. We should affirm our awkwardness.
I will say, though, that I take no small pleasure in pointing out how a 30-year old pop song helps us think through some pressing philosophical problems better than, well, philosophy “proper” does. Real, rigorous philosophy happens in pop music; we philosophers just have to unlearn all our discipline’s prejudices about “real philosophy” and “try being stupid instead of smart.” Then maybe we can learn something.
SO, Shannon reads Spinoza and Nietzsche, and locates within them a notion of what she calls “joyful passions.” I’m gonna stick to Nietzsche here, because I’ve published on him, and I’ve barely read any Spinoza. Based on the quotes in Shannon’s paper, she seemed to be reading mainly Nietzsche’s Gay Science and Genealogy of Morals….which makes sense, given the focus on “joyful passions.” Briefly (and I hope this summary does justice to Shannon’s paper; if not, please let me know and I’ll happily amend it), Shannon argues that anti-racist whites tend to hold feelings of shame and guilt as the most appropriate affective responses to white privilege and racism. These “negative” passions are much like the “bad conscience,” ressentiment, or “reactive” attitude Nietzsche critiques in both these texts. This makes sense: “good white liberals” want to respond “morally” to racism. The problem, from a Nietzschean perspective, is that European morality can only provide solutions that de-value lived experience, embodiment, health, human flourishing, and, importantly, femininity and “Southern” values (for more on that last point, may I suggest Chapter 5 of my recent book?). That is to say, shame and guilt are, to use Deleuze’s term, “reactive” responses to white racism/privilege: they are melancholic responses that refuse to let go of or “get over”—or, as Nietzsche would say, “digest”—the fact of one’s implication in racist and normatively white institutions. Now, Nietzsche fully admits that “reactive” attitudes have had their place, and are not entirely harmful; they brought us modern science and philosophy, after all. Problems happen when reactive attitudes are the only positions and perspectives one adopts. According to Nietzsche, active, affirmative attitudes are preferable to reactive, negative ones. One should have a “joyful wisdom” (froeliche Wissenschaft, or Gay Science). To be “joyful” means to affirm (or, in modern parlance, “own”) even the most painful, regretful, shameful moments of one’s life. Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return is key here. Nietzsche proposes it as a sort of maxim for the practice of “joyful” wisdom: act in a way that if you had to re-live each moment of your life over and over to infinity, would always choose/affirm your experiences (rather than regret them, disavow them, feel shame or guilt for them, etc.). For Nietzsche, it’s not that we have to like or feel pleasure in the experiences we affirm; it is entirely possible to affirm a negative or ambivalent experience (e.g., one might think: “Dating that one person in college might not have been the best idea, but I learned and grew from it, so, in the end, it’s for the best. I’m not ashamed of it, it’s part of me, and shaped me into the person I am today. If I had the choice, I would do it again.”). According to Nietzsche, to be “joyful” is to affirm the eternal return, to own up to (which is the first step in taking responsibility for) one’s past, present, and future. Importantly, this Nietzschean “joy” is not pride. I’m not particularly proud of owning all those New Kids on the Block posters back in the 1990s, but, you know, it was something that located me in a specific cultural moment and made me, me. The important thing for Nietzsche is that we affirm even those things that we’re otherwise sort of ambivalent about, like my NKOTB fandom, my relationship history, or, to be a bit more serious, my implication in systems of normative whiteness, masculinity, heteronormativity, and able-bodied-ness. As many have noted, shame and guilt are blocking emotions: they more often encourage helplessness and resignation than inspire action. Affirming my implication in these systems of privilege is a necessary step in moving beyond feeling bad about it to taking responsibility for it. Shame implies one should have known better, but didn’t. Guilt implies one is always-already faulty no matter what one does. Affirmation—or, to use Shannon’s word, “joy”—implies that I own my experiences, and can and ought to take some responsibility for them (this is more or less the first step in every 12-step program).
I think many of the problems addressed in the comments could be resolved by the more nuanced reading of “joy” that I’ve just offered above. I agree with the commenters that we don’t really what white people feeling joy qua happiness or pride in their white identity. I also agree with Shannon that white guilt and shame are also undesirable. However, if we reconceive of “joy” not as the opposite of sadness but as a synonym for affirming the eternal return, a more desirable, intermediate position emerges.
Shannon’s paper tended to frame “joy” and “shame/guilt” as the only two types of passions possible, and most of the comments continued in this vein. One was either happy or sad. This is a false dichotomy. There are intermediate passions between joy and shame/guilt. Here, I want to think about awkwardness. To be awkward is to be somewhat disoriented, to lack a degree of fluency, control, and command. If whiteness is an orienting and centering discourse that makes white bodies and white subjectivities feel fluent, competent, and coherent in white-dominant contexts (Leigh suggested something along these lines in her comments), then awkwardness is one consequence of the de-centering of whiteness. Anti-racist whites should be invested in the de-centering of whiteness (i.e., working against the normative force of whiteness). In so doing, these anti-racist whites will be making a world in which they will feel increasingly awkward. If hegemonic whiteness as such orients white identity (it also orients non-white identities too, but, as Fanon clearly shows, it orients them as always-already awkward, not, as in the case of whites, as fluent and competent), then whites will feel dis-oriented in contexts where whiteness is less than hegemonic. The Nietzschean point here is that whites should affirm this awkwardness as such: “Yes, I feel incompetent and clumsy, but I chose this situation, and value it as evidence of whiteness’s decreasingly hegemonic status.” “Good liberal whites” and white supremacists would not affirm such awkwardness; rather, they would likely feel shame and indignance, respectively. I want to argue that the attitude that is both the most saliently anti-racist and solidly Nietzschean is affirmation of awkwardness; this attitude is an intermediary between both “sad” and “joyful” passions as presented in Shannon’s paper and taken up in the discussion of it.
It is precisely this affirmation of awkwardness that we see in No Wave. No Wave was a post-punk noise genre that emerged in New York’s “Downtown” art scene in the late 1970s/early 1980s. No Wave follows from Gang of Four’s, the Au Pairs, and A Certain Ratio’s punk funk, and is characterized by songs that are herky-jerky, jagged, sloppy, and, well, awkward. It’s dance music that is a sonic script for white people’s stereotypical awkwardness on the dance floor. No Wave artists often spoke directly to/about issues of race, and, notably, to their own whiteness. After the breakup of the Contortions, James Chance led a band called “James White and the Blacks” (the name of course being both a send-up of James Brown and the JBs, and a commentary on the racial politics of American popular music). With this band, Chance wrote a song called “Almost Black pt. 1,” whose lyrics sarcastically comment on the tendency for white male rock stars to appropriate stereotypical black masculinity (see my article in Contemporary Aesthetics for more on this track and its racial politics). So, it’s fair to say that Chance was acutely aware of and interested in examining whiteness and white identity.
Chance’s No Wave aesthetic affirms awkwardness. Given my argument in the preceding paragraph, we can say that he’s affirming the awkwardness of a de-centered whiteness. Chance knows he’s white; his whiteness is not invisible to him. The very act of naming whiteness as such can de-center it. Insofar as whiteness’s hegemonic (and thus centering and orienting) force is grounded in its invisibility, mere awareness of one’s whiteness can have dis-orienting affects. We hear this disorientation in Chance’s appropriation of African-American musical styles such as jazz, disco, and rock. He stumbles, mumbles, and squeaks all through his cover of Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough. Unlike most white musicians, who seamlessly appropriate black music and take pleasure in this racist/colonial project, Chance crafts tracks that prevent us from taking a direct, immediate pleasure in them, and in their appropriations of blackness. Chance’s tracks are, well, awkward. And he affirms this awkwardness. He does this most obviously in 1979’s “Contort Yourself”:
The lyrics make it clear that Chance is affirming the awkwardness that is specifically the consequence of de-centering hegemonic norms. Contortion is the effect of un-learning received wisdom, or, as chance puts it, to contort oneself is to “Try being stupid/instead of smart/Once you take out the garbage that’s in your brain.” It is clear that contortion is awkward, i.e., an intermediary between positive and negative affect: “It’s better than pleasure/it hurts more than pain.” Most importantly, this awkwardness is performatively re-affirmed at least five times in the break, where Chance sings: “Contort Yourself One Time!/Contort Yourself Two Times!/Contort Yourself Three Times!/Contort Yourself Four Times!/Contort Yourself Five Times!/AAAAAAAAAAAA.” This repeated command to “contort yourself” can be read as a Nietzschean affirmation: Chance would contort himself over and over again.
So, “Contort Yourself” presents us with a clear thesis on how anti-racist white people should affectively “feel” about their whiteness. To disavow one’s white privilege in a white supremacist state is to, well, contort oneself. White people committed to the de-centering of whiteness will constantly contort themselves while taking out all the hegemonic garbage that’s in our brains. And we should do it over and over and over again. We should affirm our awkwardness.
I will say, though, that I take no small pleasure in pointing out how a 30-year old pop song helps us think through some pressing philosophical problems better than, well, philosophy “proper” does. Real, rigorous philosophy happens in pop music; we philosophers just have to unlearn all our discipline’s prejudices about “real philosophy” and “try being stupid instead of smart.” Then maybe we can learn something.
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