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| That's Bez, Happy Mondays' hype man, on the left. |
The purpose of this post is
both to help the students in my grad class, who are starting out the semester
with the “Becoming-Intense” chapter of Thousand Platueaus, and to draw
together a few random things that I’ve been thinking about recently.
So, first, Deleuze. In this
chapter, he and Guattari distinguish among three styles or regimes of
organization found in European cultures: series, structure, and becoming.
Series follows a mimetic logic (think Plato’s divided line, where each realm is
a successively lower-quality reflection of its immediately superior neighbor).[1]
Structure follows a representational logic (signifier/signified, or what
Rancière calls the aesthetic regime). Becoming, however, is affective—it transmits
relations of speed and slowness (“refrains”), not mimetically or
representationally, but contagiously.[2]
So structure/representation
is organized by inside/outside binaries: there’s the surface appearance, the
signifier, and the inner content, the signified. Structure assumes that every
form expresses or indicates a specific content; it’s concerned with the meaning of the content. Becoming,
however, doesn’t care at all about the meaning or content of something—it’s
logic is not representational. Instead, in becoming “there is a circulation of
impersonal affects, an alternate current that disrupts signifying projects as
well as subjective feelings” (233). So becoming communicates by transmitting
affects, and these affects do not express any inner content or meaning.
Expression is a feature of series/representation. So, affects can be unmoored
from their conventional connotations, and function in any number of ways. This
abstraction of affect from connotation is a key feature of that old thing
postmodernism; in the 90s it seemed like everyone was all excited that what we
would now call affects were abstracted from their original contexts, their
connotations and associations scrambled. So, for example, you’d see something
like the band Creed—Christian grunge-rock, or Christian punk rock, or Christian
death metal. Or think about Lisa Frank products: psychadelic aesthetics
unmoored from their roots in 60s counterculture and sold to tween girls.
Affects that used to be countercultural or even Satanic could be co-opted by
mainstream/Christian projects. More recently, there’s the use of The Clash’s
“London Calling” in NBC’s broadcasts of the Olympics (the song is about the
apocalypse), or a cruise line’s use of Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” to sell
wholesome, life-affirming family vacations (no mention of liquor, drugs, sex
machines, or getting it in the ear). So, affects circulate, but they don’t mean
anything.[3]
This abstraction and unmooring means that affects can transmit themselves in
ways that facilitate otherwise “unnatural participations” (242). Christian
death metal is an example here: Christians adopt affects developed in, by, and
for a genre strongly (if often facetiously) associated with Satanism.
Affects circulate without
meaning anything in particular. So, this is why objectivist neocon Paul Ryan
can claim progressive band Rage Against the Machine as his favorite musical
act. Ryan can completely disengage the band’s sound from the content of their
lyrics because that’s what the cultural milieu encourages him to do.
Ryan’s not anomalous here, he’s just doing what everyone else is doing. You
know, being postmodern and all. This “unnatural participation” of Ryan and Rage
is to be expected.
 | Notice how Flav is the only one in full red; he's often visually distinct as more playful than the rest of PE, which is portrayed as more militant and serious. |
If affect is the primary
mode in which music is experienced, then performers have to think carefully
about engaging audiences at this particular level. The importance of affect
thus opens up a new job or role in a band—the hype man. They hype man doesn’t
play an instrument, and apart from an occasional “hell yeah” or “yeeeahh
boyeee!” doesn’t really sing or rap either (these vocalizations are more
affective than meaningful, anyway). The hype man instead manages the band’s
affective performance, their kind, degree, intensity, and quality of “hype.”
They’re a key interface between the band and the audience, almost like an
affect synth. This, obviously, is where Flava Flav and Bez come in. They were
hype men for Public Enemy and the Happy Mondays, respectively—each hugely
important bands in 90s hip hop and Madchester scenes. For a few years now I’ve
been thinking about Flav and Bez as parallels or homologues—they’re
contemporaries, working in very different genres, but doing more or less the
same thing at the same historical moment…so, why? Why the hype man, and why
then? Well, I think it has something to do with affect, affective transmission,
and the 90s as the moment when this took on increasing prominence in pop music.
Obviously there’s a lot more to think about re: Flav, Bez, and the hypeman role
in general…
Anyway, there you have it:
Deleuze + Paul Ryan + Flav & Bez, all linked by a specific concept of
affect.
[1] “In the case
of a SERIES, I say a resembles b, b resembles c, etc.; all of these terms
conform in varying degrees to a single, eminent term, perfection, or quality as
the principle behind the series. This is what the theologians used to call an
analogy of PROPORTION” (234)
[2] We oppose
epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual
reproduction, sexual production. Bands, human or animal, proliferate by
contaigon, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes. Like hybrids, which are
in themselves sterile, born of a sexual union that will not reproduce itself,
but which begins over again every time, gaining that much more ground” (241)
[3] I’m reminded here of Andrew Goodwin’s “Sample and
Hold” essay, in which he remarks that timbre is the definitive feature
of late-80s pop music. Artists are distinguished not by technique, not by
artists’ aura, but by the way they sound, the affective qualities of their
overall “sound”.
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