Beyoncé, Gaga, Race, and Sexuality, or, 1+1 Doesn’t Always Equal 2

[This week I’m going to attempt a few “year-end” type posts. Being on semester break, now’s a god time for me to collect some thoughts that have been rattling around in my head all term, but I haven’t had time to put on “paper,” so to speak. I don’t know exactly how many there will be, as I’m pushing these out while I also catch up on other research.]

As music critics and fans compile their 2011 lists, there’s been a lot of reflection on the extent of Gaga’s and Beyoncé’s political/radical/feminist “cred.”  Is Gaga really feminist? Is Bey really feminist?  Most responses seem to fall into one side or the other of an overly simplified binary: either they are, or they aren’t.  One phenomenon I find particularly interesting is the tendency to laud Gaga’squeerness by comparing her positively to a supposedlyone-sidedly-heteronormative Beyoncé. I think this gesture is problematic for a number of reasons. These reasons, which I’ll discuss in (relative) detail below, also help illuminate some other key issues/problems/questions relating to race-gender politics and aesthetics both in Bey and Gaga’s work, and in contemporary pop music in general.

So, some reasons why it’s problematic to say that Gaga is laudibly “queer” whereas Beyoncé is unfortunately “heteronormative”:

1.    The argument/analysis is too reductive. Gaga is not thoroughly “queer” or “radical” in her politics, just as Beyoncé is not reducible to her normativity. Similarly, songs and performances don’t have one self-evident meaning; artworks “work” in all sorts of complex, often contradictory and completely unanticipatable/uncontrollable ways.

2.    This argument fits too well with the stereotype that all the queers are white, and all black people are heterosexist/heteronormative (or, that black sexuality is hyper-hetero). It’s a racist stereotype or implicit bias that assumes that blacks are dumb, regressive homophobes who just aren’t smart enough or “enlightened” enough to have progressive sexual politics; it also erases black queers.

a.    It also, I think, relies on an overly superficial “queer test”: being “queer” means being literally and overtly gay, lesbian, or otherwise recognizably non-hetero in overt displays of sexuality. But queerness isn’t limited to sexuality—that’s, uh, a significant point of a lot of queer theory—that “queerness” extends beyond sexual practice, because sexuality itself is a broader system of social organization. Just like gender or race, sexuality certainly includes, but is not limited to bodies and behaviors—sexuality organizes institutions, epistemes, aesthetic values, etc. If Beyoncé’s work is queer—which, I think some of it is—it is not in the “overt display of sexuality” way, but in the deeper, queer-theory way where “queerness” is a critique of heteronormativity as a broad-based system of social organization.

                                               i.     Some examples of this are:

1.    Single Ladies, which I discuss here.

2.    “Run the World”—if this is a sort of Rubin-esque structuralist critique of the fact that heteropatriarchy runs on girls—which I think it is, at least in part—then Bey’s attempts to re-claim girls’ work can be read as a queering of heteropatriarchy. If heteropatriarhcy is grounded in/structured by the “exchange in women,” upsetting this economy upsets heteropatriarchy, ergo queering it. In fact, for a woman to “run” a world—in this case, the world of entertainment—critiques heteropatriarchy, its gendered and sexualized norms, as well as its racialized ones (as I discuss in my post on the performance…)

3.    I’d love your thoughts on other examples.

b.    I think we also have to be careful in recognizing the ways that racialization occurs through queering, and queering occurs through racialization. This is Jasbir Puar’s point in Terrorist Assemblages, where she argues that Muslim “terrorists” are racialized as unruly, non-white bodies via their association with a specific kind of “queerness”—a queerness that is more anarchic, less “civilized” than the homonormativity displayed by “good” American gays and lesbians. So there can be ways that Beyoncé’s work uses race to intervene in discourses of sexuality and queerness. I’d like to flesh this point out more, sometime, in some future post.

3.    It is egregiously blind to race. I’ve listed some of the ways this argument fails to account for race in #2, but there’s one other significant way that the claim “Gaga is queer, Bey is hopelessly hetero” overlooks race. I think this one is important enough to deserve its own bullet point. Gaga has license to queer femininity—to make her body monstrous, either through monster-drag or king-drag—because she is white. In other words: her gender identity is not already qualified by non-whiteness. In the hegemonic, mainstream eye, Beyoncé’s blackness already qualifies her femininity. She often plays around with femininity by adopting stereotypically white feminine iconography, e.g., in “Why Don’t You Love Me?” (where she does the 60s housewife thing), or in “Video Phone” (where she does the 40s pinup/Betty Page thing). So it’s not that Bey just uncritically adopts normative het-fem identities/images. She just troubles femininity most obviously through race—which is not to say that she’s not also troubling its heteronormativity. If race and queerness are mutually intensifying, then Bey’s playing with femininity via race is also an experimentation with its sexuality. So, for example, in a climate where there’s a new “Why Can’t (Middle Class) Black WomenFind a (Good Black) Man/Get Married Already?” article every day, Beyoncé’s “Countdown”—i.e., in a culture that frames black heterosexuality as always already broken, Bey’s “Countdown,” which is about her long-term relationship with a successful black man, who also happens to be the father of her soon-to-be-delivered child, is actually pretty radical. If the homonormativity of whites is conditioned upon the always-already “queered” status of non-white/black sexuality (i.e., it’s fundamentally, irreparably broken, black people can’t ever maintain boring, white-bread hetero relations), then “Countdown’s” apparently square het story actually undermines white homonormativity.[i]

4.    It privileges the visual content of videos and lyrical content of songs over the, uh, actual musical content of songs. Musically, Gaga is much more traditional than Beyoncé, who’s one of the most musically experimental pop artists on the charts today. This musical “work” alters the meanings of the visual and lyrical content of their performances, so reading the visual and the lyrical in isolation from the musical gives us an incomplete, often mistaken gloss.

a.    I want to emphasize this point: Beyoncé’s music is very avant-garde. “Single Ladies” is basically a clap track, sound effects, and some singing on the top. It doesn’t sound or work like your standard pop mega-hit. It’s more Steve Reich than Celine Dion. Many have written about the musical innovation in “Countdown.” But in the popular imagination, Beyoncé is not represented as a musical “artist”—maybe a talented singer, but never as someone who is an experimental songwriter or performer. Yes, yes, she collaborates on her songwriting—but so does Gaga, so did Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones, so did Lenon and McCartney, so does John Zorn, and so does everybody else.  I’d say Bey is at least as musically innovative as Nicki Minaj, but Minaj gets more credit for being innovative, perhaps because she’s a rapper and not “just” a singer. We have a longstanding tendency to view female singers as mere puppets, as only voicing the words of others. Moreover, we tend to view female pop singers as making music for teen girls, and not as artists making music for adults to both think about and enjoy.

b.    I am continually shocked by otherwise intelligent and carefully-thinking critics and academics who just cannot admit that Beyoncé’s work may be critical—they seem to have some implicit biases that blind them to the possibility that commercial pop by a black female singer can be anything than conformist drivel. Throughout my work on this blog, and in more traditional academic venues, I’ve pointed out the moments in Bey’s and others’ works that trouble dominant interpretive frameworks and cannot be reduced to “mere conformism.” If you look carefully at the work, the evidence is there. But some implicit biases must be working to prevent people from actually seeing the evidence that is quite clearly there.

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[i] I wonder if the Beyoncé Knowles/Sasha Fierce split isn’t also relevant here, and worth examining further. In interviews about “I Am…Sasha Fierce,” Bey indicated that she herself is pretty “boring”—square, “white-bread” even. She invented Fierce as a character or persona through which to channel a more “extreme” performative identity/effect. So Bey might not at all be excessively sexual, excessively confrontational—she might just be, as Touré’s recent article suggests, the nicest little blonde girl ever. But that doesn’t sell when you’re a black female artist, because you’re always already read through the controlling images of your excessive sexuality. So Bey invents Fierce to intervene in “misinterpretations” of her performances of her “self.” But she doesn’t use Fierce to facilly reproduce stereotypes—she uses this character to exacerbate the misinterpretations, to make arguments ad absurdam that critique the very stereotypes she seems to traffic in.

Artistic Know-How, Aesthetics, and (Anti-)Humanism: Some Thoughts on Alexis Shotwell’s Knowing Otherwise

I’m making my way through Alexis Shotwell’s really well-written Knowing Otherwise, and I must say I generally agree with the project: in addition to being extremely well-written (it easily passes my “Can I read it on an airplane?” test), I think it’s generally correct in its discussion of race, gender, and non-propositional or “implicit” knowledges. I agree that race and gender exist, ontologically, and work, politically-materially, as forms of “implicit knowledge”—i.e., as bodily, affective, skill-based discourses that are either not propositional or not-yet-propositional.

But, we do have some fundamental differences and disagreements. Some of our differences result from our different backgrounds or approaches. I want to work through some of those differences and disagreements because it helps clarify what I think is valuable about Shotwell’s project, and what is distinctive and relevant about my own project. Some of our differences result from the backgrounds from which we approach these issues: Shotwell is primarily and above all a philosopher (she regards as “implicit” what is, I argue below, really what is implicit to philosophy) whereas I (am increasingly coming to realize that I) am just as much a musicologist as I am a philosopher.  I think there are kinds of knowledges that are implicit to philosophy but explicit in other epistemes. (E.g., experienced musicians will explicitly know things—like whether or not a note is in tune, how precisely to use vibratio right here, etc.—that are both skill-based and contingently and/or ontologically non-propositional.)The other difference lies in our theoretico-philosophical commitments, especially regarding aesthetics and politics. Shotwell’s chapter on aesthetics draws significantly on Marx and Marcuse—who are the objects of direct critique by my own preferred theorists, Rancière (who critiques Althusserian-style Marxism) and Foucault (who directly rejects Marcusean notions of power/resistance/liberation). Like these radical liberal political theorists, who think liberalism hasn’t made due on its promises, Shotwell argues for an expanded, revised humanism. I, on the other hand, reject liberal humanism, its ideals of authenticity, the overcoming of alienation, etc., and argue instead for an anti-humanist critique of liberalism. So, while we’re in a lot of agreement about race, gender, and their relations to non-propositional embodied knowledges, we approach this issue in very different ways and from seriously different starting points. This difference in trajectory means that we generally agree, but don’t completely agree: we approach each other very closely on some points, but this approach meets the above asymtotes (the “explicit” character of artistic practice, the liberal humanism issue), so that our projects, while in the same general galaxy, are in different solar systems, so to speak. So, below, I will tease out some of our points of convergence and divergency; in doing so, I will argue that it’s important to think about art (not just “the aesthetic”).

I guess I should also clarify that the “project” I’m referring to is my manuscript-in-progress, “Sound and Sensiblity: Theorizing Beyond the Visual”. 

1. Implict to philosophy

I want to take issue with Shotwell’s use of the term “implicit”. I want to emphasize that I take her intention to be as follows: In examining “implicit” knowledges, Shotwell is trying to complicate too-easy implicit/explicit binaries, and argue that conventionally propositional knowledge is deeply intertwined with conventionally non-propositional knowledge.[i] I agree with that argument. However, I think that the way she frames her discussion of her intended project gets her into trouble. She argues that “we understand things that cannot be or are not spoken, and we may suspect that this form of understanding is important…which I call ‘implicit undrestanding’” (ix). Here, as throughout her text, Shotwell identifies her intended object of analysis as “implicit understanding.” She defines “implicit” in terms of speakability or visibility: “things that cannot be or are not spoken” are implicit. Though I take her as wanting to question the speakable/unspeakable binary, Shotwell uses this distinction to define what counts as “implicit,” and what counts as “explicit.”[ii] “Speakable knowledge,” she argues, “should not define our knowing” (38), because there exist “implicit,” non-propositionalized or non-propositionalizable ways of knowing. Shotwell consistently frames implicit knowledge in terms of speech and visibility. Here’s a list of some of the ways she does this:

·      “We are influenced by common sense in all sorts of wordless ways” (33) “What might be important that there be some component of people’s understanding that is not in words?” (32)

·      “Gramsci’s notion of common sense is appealing in part because it gives a framework for thinking through how what is spoken hooks into what is not expressed in words but is still known. It opens a way for thinking about how the unspeakable can be mobilized for political ends” (32)

·      “interrogating our unspoken conception of the world is to bring some of that conception to the foreground. Looking at common sense…” (34)

·      “that which we could not say, or necessarily think, before the poem. Lorde says this is ‘poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt’. Poetry changes our presuppositions and background understanding…and both illuminates and forms that which was unseen“ (26). Note here the commutability between visibility (light) and speakability.

·      “They may be primarily based in unquestioned assumptions, and therefore it may require active work to bring a prejudice into view. In order to see a prejudice, it must cease to stand as a basic assumption” (16)

·      “sites where implicit understanding’s effects and calls are particularly visible, starting from them in order to talk about the political and epistemic salience of implicit understanding” (xxii)

From what I can tell, Shotwell gets this language of speech and visibility from her sources—mainly Gramsci and Lorde. I think her sources work against her here, because Shotwell is actually describing something more complex than what Gramsci and Lorde are. Their rhetoric of speakability and visibility suggests a too-simple implicit/explicit matrix, and Shotwell is actually trying to complicate this matrix. But, to do so, I think Shotwell needs to adopt different terms, different metaphors—those beyond the visible and the verbal. It would be more helpful and more productive to theorize from actually non-propositional forms of understanding. Shotwell’s reliance on metaphors of sight and speech force her to refer her theorization of extra-propositional understanding always back to the propositional. Though she argues that “it is possible to think about the implicit as a productive category—not simply a negation of propositionality” (25), she never defines it positively—it is always either “non-propositional” (with reference to propositional) or implicit (with reference to explicit) knowledge. (She does use the language of “skill,” “common sense,” and “sensuous knowledge,” but these, though positive, are still quite abstract terms.)

           

I don’t think the language/metaphorics of “speaking” and “seeing” provide that much assistance in examining and theorizing non-propositional knowledge, because words and vision are the two main frameworks for propositions we have.[iii] The language of speech and sight does not help us flesh out a positive account of implicit knowledges, or better, knowledges that are implicit to propositional epistemes. There are plenty of knowleges that are neither verbal nor visible, but are still quite explicit. In fact, I actually think Shotwell tends to frame aesthetic/sensuous knowledge as non-rational and wholly non-cognitive, which is, I think, wrong. She argues that 

The form of understanding bodied forth through aesthetic experience is epistemic—we know the world otherwise through this sensuous knowledge, and that knowing is beyond, beneath, and other than rational, cognitive, propositional knowledge (49; emphasis mine).

Though it might be primarily accessible as a skill, or in other non-verbal forms, the knowledge involved in making and interpreting, say, Mozart’s Magic Flute or Britney Spears’ Toxic, both pieces are actually quite logical and rational (e.g., the “grammar” of tonal harmony). Claiming that “the ‘work ‘of cultural production and consumption is thus mostly affective, presuppositional, and bodily” (42), Shotwell oversimplifies the epistemic work in making and interpreting art.  Cultural production/consumption is one of the places where the line between affective/propositional, presuppositional/intentional, bodily/cognitive is most obviously blurred. So while “the aesthetic” may be a sensuous form of knowing that is largely extra-propositional, the actual making and interpreting of art more clearly demonstrates the intermixture of propositional and extra-propositional modes of knowledge, and more effectively complicates implicit/explicit distinctions.

My point is this: “sensuous knowledge” is not some mysterious, non-rational, touchy-feely, squishy-bodily thing. Some people work very, very hard and think lots and lots about “sensuous knowledge.” It is my experience that artists are deeply, explicitly aware of their sensuous knowledges, even if they do not manifest this awareness in words or images. A dancer is explicitly aware of his or her body, its positions, movements, etc., but this awareness likely does not take the form of words or images—in fact, “conscious” verbal or visual awareness often breaks one’s fluency, one’s expertise, in this non-viz/verbal awareness. Similarly, fluency in the diatonic Western scale is not an implicit knowledge. It’s pretty explicit, especially to practicing musicians. It may be implicit to non-experts (e.g., your average music-consuming public) in the same way that grammar and syntax are “implicit” in much everyday language use—I use the rules and structures without reflecting on them. But this just means that these modes of musical or verbal organization are practically implicit to those using them, but are not in any way “hidden” or “invisible”—they’re easily discernible to those who take the time to examine them. There are kinds of knowleges that are both explicit and non-propositional; they are just not explicit to philosophy. 

So, in sum, I think Shotwell’s use of the metaphors of speech and sight don’t adequately capture her intentions in theorizing forms of knowing that blur traditional implicit/explicit or propositional/extra-propositional dichotomies. Metaphors taken from these more obviously sensuous forms of knowing—music, dance, performance—are better suited to this task because unlike speech and sight, which are generally experienced as “propositional” ways of thinking/expressing, music, dance, and performance more often and more obviously blur the implicit/explicit distinction Shotwell’s work, when at its best, attemps to critique (what she calls “heterodox” knowledge).

Before moving on, there’s one other difficulty I have with Shotwell’s framing of “implicit”: it’s not the form or type of knowledge that makes it “implicit”, but power that makes something implicit. So certain types of knowledge are “implicit’ not because of their form (skill, ontological nonpropositionality, etc.) or location (body, habitus), but because of their situation in respect to hegemonic power-knowledge formations. It is power (norms, hegemony) that has made non-visible, non-verbal knowledge apparently less explicit than the visual and the speakable. So yeah, I’m playing a Foucault card here, but I’m playing it because I think Foucault is right (on this point at least). SHotwell’s text does not explicitly state that it is the form that makes something either implicit or explicit, BUT, in identifying four different forms or types of implicit knowledge, the text does encourage the view that certain types of knowledge are inherently, by virture of their structure/form/composition, implicit. Further, her constant referencing of implicit knowledge as “corporeal,” and “embodied” suggests that knowledges located in the body are implicit, while traditionally cognitive knowledges are “explicit”. For example, in discussing Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, Shotwell says that: “A key aspect of Bourdieu’s account of the habitus as embodied is the notion that it is transmitted implicitly through a pedagogy that encodes practices in the body, thus rendering the practices it teaches significantly inaccessible” (13).  Here, it seems that knowledges are “significantly inaccessible” because they are “bodily.” But this is not the case: all knowledge is bodily, and we are alble to put some of this knowledge into conscious, verbal propositions with great facility and precision. In fact, to artists, even these extra-propositional bodily knowledges are quite easily accessible (for example, I can listen to the pitch and timbre of my oboe-playing, and, based on what I hear, make adjustments in my embouchure). These aesthetic/sensuous knowledges are not inaccessible because they’re embodied; “implicit” knowledges are inaccessible because hegemony makes them so. The dominance of visuality and verbality in Western philosophy makes aural and kinesthetic knowledges more difficulty to come by—only experts have the degree of fluency in sound and sensibility that most averagely-abled people have with the visual and the verbal.[iv]

 

I’m going to be more brief in discussing the next two points, as these are issues on which Shotwell and I simply disagree….and that’s OK. It just shows that our projects are different. I will argue my own position in this manuscript I’m working on, so you can look forward to reading the full case for my view there. For now, I’m not going to argue the difference in position, just point it out.

2. Humanism

While I take Shotwell to be critiquing traditional liberal humanism, I read her, especially in her use of Marx and Marcuse, as offering a radical humanism. So, for example, while she says she “will trouble these conceptions of harmony, full humanity, and full freedom” (49) that are used in traditional philosophical aesthetics (e.g., Kant), she uses Marxian aesthetics to critique traditional aesthetics’ failure to live up to/realize these ideals, not humanism itself as a project.[v] For Shotwell, the problem with humanism is that it has excluded women, non-whites, queers, and a host of others from “full humanity,” and has harmfully used this idea of “full humanity” as the only index of moral value. Thus, the point of her critique is to “expand the human relation [traditional aesthetics] describes” (68). In this text, one of the main elements of Shotwell’s expanded or revised humanism is the commitment to overcoming alienation. A just world is one which “allows people to maintain a non-alienated individuality” (68). What is valuable about the aesthetic, aka “sensuous knowledge,” is that 

its objectivity is not alienated. Sensuous expression is connected to—perhaps a prerequisite for—non-alienated species-being…Sensuous knowledge and activity marks a reversal of the estrangement produced by capital and its kind of objectification. In this sense, the realm of sensuous ness holds tremendous potential for working against the alienation of oppressive social relationships” (69).

I would argue that capitalism is not oppressive because it is alienating; rather, it’s oppressive b/c it treats specific groups with increased susceptibility to vulnerability and violence. But that’s a point to be argued elsewhere. For now, I just want to establish that SHotwell thinks alienation is a bad thing. Why is it bad? For her, alienation is bad because it brings one out of relation with oneself and with others.[vi] The opposite of alienation is “integration” and “intimate relation” (66). Shotwell’s revised humanism is “not centered on the ‘human’ simply conceived, but instead as a point in a field of interaction in which each point implies the whole” (68). So, she rejects exclusive definitions of ‘the human,’ but still adheres to a fundamentally humanist logic that privileges wholeness, coherence, intimacy and integration—“each point implies the whole.”

            Instead of humanism, I prefer models of power and selfhood/agency where alienation isn’t a loss or deficit. Such models include Afrofuturism, queer anti-humanism, posthuman feminism. Also, while Shotwell views sensuous knwoledges as sites of integration, my Rancierian approach treats sensuousness/the sensible as the locus of dissensus, “disagreement,” and disaggregation.

3. Power/Liberation

Shotwell provides a Marxist-Marcusean analysis of power and liberation. For example, she argues, with Marcuse, that “the aesthetic…manifests a non-repressive order” (5). I’m going to assume that Foucault’s critique of Marcuse—especially on this idea of “repression”—is well-known. I adopt a Rancierian-Foucaultian understanding of power and resistance.  I follow Foucault in rejecting Marcuse’s overly simplistic account of power as only or primarily “repressive” (or alienating), and “liberation” as the main form of resistance.[vii] Marx and Marcuse are radical liberals, b/c they maintain liberalism’s ideals while arguing it has not adequately yet achieved them; Foucault and Rancière are not liberals, because they critique the fundamental assumptions about power, humanity, indiv/society, the political function of reason/sensuousness, etc.

Sooo, I want to emphasize that I find Shotwell’s project really interesting and valuable. We just have some different fundamental commitments and approaches, so while we’re both interested in the role of “the sensible” and “the aesthetic” in race, gender, and sexuality (and, in my case, in art), our projects will in the end be actually quite different. While Shotwell stays well within philosophy (theorizing what is implicit to philosophy, theorizing through the visual and the verbal) and well within humanism, I step outside philosophy (to musicology, theorizing through sound) and well outside humanism.

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[i] Shotwell clarifies that “my primary analytic attempts to avoid a split between what we can and cannot say in a coherent sentence…I am trying to shift the terms of a conversation about the difference between propositional and nonpropositional knowledge in order to understand the ways these categories are themselves inadequate” (xi).

[ii] One thing I need to consider more carefully: It’s not the speaking, saying, or hearing of something that makes it explicit, but the character of being expressible in language (which does not have to be spoken, or take the form of something which could be said—ASL, Morse Code, C++, BASIC—these are all non-spoken languages). So why frame it in “speech”?

[iii] There’s a deeper question here: why frame what is propositionally knowable as what is visible or verbalizable? Is it because sight and speech are the two primary forms of propositional knowledge that we Westerners have developed? Even if speech isn’t fully reducible to propositional knowledge (e.g., it has poetic/literary effects), and sight isn’t exactly identitical to verbal-propositional knowledge, it could still be the case that sight and speech are analogous enough to propositional knowledge that they don’t really challenge or offer alternatives to it.

[iv] I also wonder if this focus on speech and sight is the result of Shotwell’s perspective as a philosopher. It is philosophers who primarily conceive of knowledge as propositional. It is philosophers who frame propositional knowledge as what can be put into language and spoken, just as it is philosophers who frame knowledge in terms of sight and vision. I think artists and art educators might have a different perspective on knowledge, and how to frame the implicit/explict distinction. Before I was a philosophy major, I studied music education—I was learning how to teach people ontologically nonpropositionalizable practical skills, like how to sightsing, or how to play the oboe. There wasn’t this sense of “OH, this is so odd and special b/c we can’t say it or put it into words”—these skills were, for us, the most mundane things ever. They weren’t mysterious. They weren’t difficult to “understand.”

[v] “Such a critique involves,” she argues, “a resistance to human exceptionalism, a resistance to views of the world as solely a resource for human industry, and a resistance to the easy nostalgia for pasts that really weren’t so liberated” (69).

[vi] “Appropriation of sensuous objects, and of the self as a sensuous object, is a human activity…an appropriation in the sense that the world is actively brought into relation with the self, who is also appropriated in the act of objectification—though in that case there is a kind of self-relation…The appropriation involved in objectification supersedes the logic of private property, where objectification is a process of alienation and inhumanity of the self and its objects. In this case, appropriation is the opposite of estrangement—it is an integrated, sensuous relation with the social world that emancipates the senses from the logic of the ‘life of private property, labour and capitalization.’ This kind of objective appropriation situates us in intimate relation with the world and others in it” (66)

[vii] I also critique the connection between realism and liberalism. Marcuse seeks to develop, in Shotwell’s account, a new realism. “Marcuse’s attention to the work of demystification can be read as a kind of magical realism, because of the alienating structures of capitalist production, within the world as it conventionally appears the realist cannot imagine another world. Turning into the world of the aesthetic dimension, a new realism comes forth” (54. Marcuse is still liberal, because he still views power as primarily repressive, and thinks we need to liberate ourselves from that power by having a more accurate, more correct realism…not the distortion of the performance principle. He thinks the performance principle distorts reality; the aesthetic dimension corrects for this distortion by liberating us from the performance principle. I, on the other hand, begin from distortion, undoing, etc., and want to think of “the aesthetic” or “the sensible” as departures from liberalism’s demand for realism.

Thoughts on "Xenomania" (or, Orientialism 2.0)

Earlier this week, Simon Reyonlds published a great little essay on what he calls “xenomania”—i.e., Western hipsters’ internet-enabled digi-crate digging for increasingly exotic-sounding “ethnic” pop and/or dance music. Now, I realize that its publication venue—one of the MTV sites—probably limits the nuance and political content Reynolds can include in the piece. I, however, am not limited by Viacom overlords, nor by maximum word-counts, so I want to complicate Reynold’s analysis of “xenomania.” I introduce 2 related complicating factors into his anaysis: race (i.e., US domestic race politics, which sometimes correlate in a general way to UK domestic race politics, at least insofar as “blackness” gets valued and perceived in pop music) and orientialism. “Xenomania” is a transnational phenomenon, and I want to bring some of the resources of transnational feminism to bear on his analysis.

The question Reynold’s article begs is this: Is “xenomania” just Orientialism + the internet, what we might call “Orientialism 2.0”? What makes xenomaniacal Orientalism different from Orientialism 1.0? (If we wanted to be more strictly political-economical about it, maybe we could also say this is “informational Orientialism” vs. “industrial Orientialism”?)

Reynold’s essay seems to suggest that what is distinctive about xenomaniacal appropriation is its medium, i.e., teh interwebs. His metaphors of “safari” and “exploration” suggest that the internet enables (Western) music fans to reproduce traditional colonial/Orientialist narratives of “discovery,” expropriation, and domestication:

“For the exotic beat-freaks and the global street pop enthusiasts alike, something of the thrill of the hunt has been restored, it’s just that the safari now takes you through the deeper recesses of YouTube or the hinterlands of the web, rather than to an out-of-the-way record store or a street market in some dodgy neighborhood.”

So at some level Reynold’s essay implies that xenomania is Orientialism + the internet. What the internet adds to regular old Orientialism is really what it takes away—physical distance.  According to Reynolds, the internet collapses geographic space, allowing Western hipsters unrestricted access to any sound, anywhere. 

           

“But the Internet’s effect on space has been just as profound. A new generation of listeners and musicians is emerging whose consciousness is post-geographical as well as post-historical. There’s a thirst for fresh musical stimuli that slips easily past geographical borders and cultural boundaries.”

But the point is that this music might circulate, as transnational capital, past geographical borders, but it reaffirms cultural boundaries.

How does it reaffirm cultural boundaries? Reynolds’s article points to a few ways, and feminist philosophy/transnational feminist theory points to a few more ways.

First, Reynolds. I want to hone in on two terms he uses “nomadic” and “foreign.” Reynolds gives us the following equation: “Infinite choice + infinitesimal cost = nomadic eclecticism as the default mode for today’s music fan” (emphasis mine). The problem is that “nomadism” is a privilege. You have to have a passport and papers (often from the “right” countries), to say nothing of cash, to be genuinely “nomadic.” As many feminist theorists have pointed out, this nomadic cosmopolitan ideal it is bad liberal multiculturalism, the eating seemingly infinite varieties of “theother” neatly set out on a buffet of “Third-World difference(s)"; this buffet, however, is located in one’s “Safe European (or at least Western) Home.” When subaltern subjects—either in the colony or in the metropole (or in the FTZ)—practice this sort of sampling, it’s called “migration” or “illegal immigration” or the refusal to assimilate. You see, when Western hipsters like Diplo cite and spin this shit, it is seen as evidence of their superior, refined musical judgment; when this music is performed and heard in its “home” contexts, it is seen as “different”—indeed, it is seen as less “developed” than Western pop music (in the same way that the so-called “underdeveloped” world is thought to be less “advanced” than post-industrial liberal democracies). In order for this music to make Western hipsters feel/seem “special,” its original contexts and performers/audiences need to stay distant (and thus different, exotic, and primitive.)[i]  So while geographic space may seem to be collapsed for Western “nomadic” subjects, it is not actually collapsed—it is only the music that gets to travel transnationally, not its indigenous composers, performers, and fans—they have to stay “different” (both geographically and temporally, i.e., as “primitive” and “undeveloped”) so that the Western hipster can consume their difference.[ii]

In fact, the reification of cultural difference is a necessary condition for this sort of “xeomaniacal” appropriation. Though Reynolds might claim that “nothing is foreign in an internet age”—maybe no thing is “foreign,” insofar as it can be imported and domesticated. However, there still need to be foreign cultures and foreign people—somebody still has to manifest/represent “Third World difference” in order that what is “domesticated” appears to be a recent addition (and not native or long-integrated into the culture).  Even in its domestication, it has to maintain the veneer of “Third-World difference.” Regular readers of this blog might suspect that I’m arguing that “xenomania” is a manifestation of what Shannon WInnubst calls “the biopolitics of cool,” and what I call “postmillennial black hipness.” This suspicion is correct. Winnubst’s concept is a more general one that covers a range of phenomena across contexts; my concept is more specifically focused on popular music. I’ve discussed the both the biopolitics of cool and its relation to postmillennial black hipness here, so I won’t re-hash it here.  Instead, I want to focus on race, specifically, the changing role of blackness in White hipsters’ musical preferences.

One thing that is new to xenomania is its function in indicating the changed status of “blackness” in postmillennial Western cultural vernaculars. As I discussed in my post on the biopolitics of cool,

Blackness, particularly the “gangsta” or “thug” masculine stereotype proffered by mainstream hip hop, has been so thoroughly co-opted that it’s just not different enough anymore.

Traditionally, white hipsters (e.g. Norman Mailer, in his “White Negro” essay) are dissatisfied with normative bourgeois life, and try to distinguish themselves from normal bourgeois whites by appropriating and domesticating stereotypical blackness (often in the form of stereotypical black masculinity).  White hipsters used their ability to domesticate (stereotypical) blackness as evidence of their exceptionalism vis-à-vis normative bourgeois whiteness, that is, as evidence of their avant-garde status. Traditionally, white musicians and music fans in the US and the UK treated stereotypical blackness as “the unknown that used to be the motor driving the vanguard sectors of Western pop” (Reynolds). So Reynolds is correct that the old “unknown” is all-too-known, and that the old sources of inspiration aren’t that inspiring anymore, because they’ve been thoroughly co-opted. So what is a white hipster to do, now that stereotypical blackness is exhausted? Turn to “Third-World” difference instead. This is where the internet comes back in: whereas 20^th-c whites could venture up into Harlem, or more likely, take an excursion into the “race music” section of the record store, postmillennial hipsters have it easier, because they don’t actually have to transgress any physical boundaries to hear “exotic” music. Reynolds writes,

If our own rock and pop traditions seem stagnant and stalled, their forward motion obstructed by the sheer accumulation of glorious history, it could be that one way to escape the dead end is to step sideways. Get yourself outside the Western narrative altogether and explore all the elsewheres now accessible like never before.

This is all true—he’s correctly identified the logic of hipness, and the fact that the internet makes old modes of appropriation easier. By overlooking the changing status/role of blackness (well, by overlooking race in general), Reynolds mistakenly identifies what is new about xenomania. The logic isn’t new—it’s as old as anything: orientialism, white hipness, “Love & Theft,” etc. Xenomania is a new variation on an old theme. And why the theme needed to be varied, and why this particular variation is currently so compelling—those are what is really interesting and helpful about Reynold’s notion of “xenomania.” But you can’t get at those without thinking about race, “Third-World difference,” and Orientialism.

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[i] The construction of these songs’ and genres’ “Third-World difference” obscures the actual hybridity and transnational character of these generes. Reynold’s own text points to the ways these “Third-World” genres are influenced by and make use of contemporary “First-World” aesthetics and technologies: “Whether they’re spawned in European cities or the ghettos of the Southern Hemisphere, what all these exotic dance genres share is impurity: they are bastard and creole children based in the soundclash of folk forms with Western styles like hip hop, house, and techno. Ethnic vibes (traditional instrumental textures such as accordions, unusual polyrhythms) mesh with American/European staples like the booming 808 bassline or the house synth-vamp. Rowdy chanted MC vocals influenced by gangsta rap and dancehall are offset by cheesily tuneful choruses invariably given the cheap gloss of AutoTune.”

[ii] So, contra Reynolds, I don’t think you can separate xenomania from retromania via a simple, too-neat dichotomy between space/geography and time/nostalgia. Postcolonial space signifies, in the West, both distant space and distant time. The “Third World” is third because it is at least two places behind the so-called “First” or “developed” world. It is both far away and backwards. Just as Enlightenment political philosophers treated “America” as the “past” of which Europe was the “present” (e.g., in considering whether “America” was “the state of nature”), xenomanical hipsters treat “Third-World” pop as the “past” that they then translate into the Western avant-garde (note the connotations of future-orientation here).