Music as the Other of Philosophy and Proxy for Philosophy’s Others: Some Initial Thoughts On Grosz

I’m fairly new to Elizabeth Grosz's work, and these are just some initial thoughts as I prepare for Monday’s grad class. Feedback is, as always, welcome. All references are to Chaos, Territory, Art.

While Grosz claims she is not orientalizingly romanticizing the role of sound in Aboriginal practices, I wonder if she isn’t in fact exoticizing and romanticizing music as the  “other” of philosophy. I’m inclined to read her text as using indigenous Australian rituals as illustrations of or gestures to a sort of deep, fundamental and foundational relationship to primordial forces. Their “singing” puts/keeps them in touch with the “vibrations” that constitute and underlie life, the earth, bodies, etc. Because they sing, Aborigines have access to a quality or mode of experience that philosophers do not. So, for example, Grosz argues that

among…the traditional indigenous groups inhabiting the central western desert in Australia, there is an explicit awareness of the interplay between the constitution of a territory and the eruption of the refrain and its impulse to becoming-music, as if humans did maintain an unbroken connection with the territoriality of the animal, and based their own on the extent to which the human can become-animal…It is because there is a direct connection between the forces and features of the earth and those that produce the body, it is because the earth is already directly inscribed contrapuntally in the body, that the body can sing the earth and all its features” (49)

I’m having a number of problems with this passage. (1) “Singing” means both a vibratory relational practice that is not at all the same as what we conventionally mean by musical singing, and what we Westerners mean by musical singing. Her account of Aboriginal singing slips between the two senses of this term. I’m no Australian ethnomusicologist, but I’ll bet that indigenous Australian culture doesn’t traditionally conceive of “singing” and “song” in the way that European culture does (e.g., as a defined work of art, as a secular ritual, an object for consumption and enjoyment, etc.). In order to call what Aborigines do “singing,” Grosz has to call on the traditional European meaning—they’re performing ritualized vocal incantations, which is more or less what we mean by singing. “Singing” and “music” are European concepts that may or may not map onto parallel concepts in non-western cultures. However, it is as “singing” (ritualized vocal incantation) that these Aboriginal practices become metaphors for “Signing,” the experience of cosmic co-vibration. It seems to me that Grosz is applying a roughly European concept of “singing” to non-European practices, so that she can develop a theory of “singing” that abstracts from the traditional European sense of “singing.” So while this account may not necessarily be classically orientalist, it definitely instrumentalizes indigenous Australian culture, reducing it to and putting it in service of Western philosophy.

(2) Even if it’s not necessarily the Aborigines who are closer to primordial vibrations, “song” is (and not just song, their song practices). Grosz definitely romanticizes song/music/counterpoint:

Lest this be construed as a romantic ‘orientalism,’ a story that refs only to a romanticized native other, it needs to be made clear that the occupation of territory, whether the consequence of war or stewardship, requires a kind of binding of bodily forces to the natural forces of a territory that music best accomplishes: music has led troops into countless wars and has stirred numerous past and present patriotic, as well as resistant, hearts (50-1).

Music is the most exotic thing here; it, like Whoppi Goldbeg in Ghost is the “magical Negro,” the thing that connects bodies, vibrations, and (super)natural forces. In traditional European/Western aesthetics, femininity, blackness, and the orient are what connect alienated whites back to the earth, to their bodies, etc.

In Grosz’s text, music replaces blackness and/or femininity as the romanticized “other” that represents/facilitates bodily affect, liberation, connection, etc. For example, she states that

The becoming-music of the refrain is also the becoming-excessive or the becoming-cosmic of sound, the freeing of sound from any origin or destination and its elaboration as pure movement—movement without subject or goal, aim or end” (58).

Here, music is what deterritorializes and “frees” sound to realize its potential as “pure movement.” Or, music is what gets sound out of its stodgy status quo and revitalizes it with movement. Grosz uses “song” to describe the organization of matter into bodies, their environments (I use this term loosely), and the relations among the two.

Every people sings the earth and their own bodies into existence only by identifying those earthly elements that tie into or counterpoint their bodies and bodily needs: the earth, however rarefied and abstracted, still marks every body and is the condition for every body’s artistic capacities. It is because the earth frames and engulfs the body that the body can sing the earth and the stories of its origin” (51).

So music describes the states prior to or in excess of subject/object distinctions, Enlightenment rationality, and Western philosophy generally. Prior to and beyond traditional Western philosophical systems, “music sounds what has not and cannot be heard otherwise” (57)—i.e., it gives us access to what philosophy obscures.

            So, Grosz is really just re-hashing the discourse of aesthetic receptivity (white guys/philosophers are alienated from their capacity to be sensitive to art, embodiment, etc., so they have to appropriate femininity and/or non-whiteness to re-connect to the things whiteness and masculinity deny them), but putting music, song, and sound in the place or function traditionally reserved for femininity and blackness. In this light, we can re-read Grosz’s claim that “music is always minoritarian, a block of becoming, which is also a mode of giving voice to social minorities—a becoming-woman, a becoming-child, and a becoming-animal that cannot speak or articulate itself as such” (57). Music can be so easily substituted for femininity and blackness because, at least in Western philosophy, it is itself feminized and racialized as non-white. So subbing out obviously racist and sexist categories and replacing them with music doesn’t make the conceptual move any less misogynist or racist—music is only apparently, superficially race- and gender-neutral. So Grosz’s claim that she’s not being orientalist is actually incorrect.

            And, just one more thing: It’s clear that Grosz (and Deleuze, and other Deleuzians) use “music” as an alternative to “sight.” I put these in scare quotes because I’m talking about these concepts as organizing metaphors we use to theorize. Traditionally, philosophy is viz-centric: it theorizes from, through, and in terms of a very specific understanding of what vision is and how it works, which is generally an empirically inaccurate account of the physiology of sight and the physics of light. (Or rather, empirically innacurate by 21^st century science, but more or less in line with Enlightenment science.) I call this the “viz episteme.” But it seems to me that in the same way the viz episteme misrepresents the physiology of sight and the physics of light, this Groszian/Deleuzian musical/sonic episteme misrepresents the physiology of hearing and the physics of sound…to say nothing of actual music.

            It is clear that Grosz doesn’t care much at all for actual musical practices, and is not concerned with theorizing from them. “Music” is a metaphor for an epistemic/organizational practice, not a cultural-historical tradition. More specifically, “music is…the rendering sonorous of forces, ultimately the forces of chaos itself, that are themselves nonsonorous” (57). So Grosz is using musical terms and concepts—like counterpoint and singing, but also harmony, melody, and rhythm—as metaphors for theorizing metaphysical and ontological concepts/processes. HOWEVER. Grosz uses culturally and historically specific musical terms without reflecting on their specificity. In so doing, she brings along a lot of conceptual/philosophical baggage, effectively naturalizing the metaphysical, ontological, epistemological, ethical/aesthetic assumptions built into these musical concepts. Ironically, these assumptions include the very visual episteme Grosz is trying to move away from. Conventional Western musical concepts were codified between the 17^th-19^th century, and are part of the viz episteme. If Grosz is trying to use “music” to re-think traditional philosophical accounts of metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, etc., then this unreflective use of musical concepts is self-defeating. Even though she’s not trying to talk about music music (i.e., music as a cultural-historical practice), her use of musical terms and concepts brings all the cultural-historical baggage that informs Western musical practice into her more abstract, philosophical concept “music.” It’s sort of like how mainstream attempts to appropriate femininity and blackness actually appropriate white patriarchial stereotypes about women and blacks—so there’s no real interaction with “others,” just a feedback loop between the hegemon and hegemonic framings of “the other.”

Unnatural Participations: Thoughts on Deleuze & Affect, Paul Ryan, Flava Flav, and Bez

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.

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[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”.

The Pleasure Principle Meets the Performance Principle: Gary Numan, Marcuse, and Neoliberalism

So I think Gary Numan’s work—I’m thinking Tubeway Army & Pleasure Principle stuff—is a really helpful example of the ways neoliberalism and “global/info” capital reworks the structuring binaries of classical liberalism and commodity capitalism. Binaries like public/private, authentic/alienated, use/exchange—these all ground classical liberalism and commodity capitalism. Marx, for example, relies on all of them (public/private in “On the Jewish Question,” authentic/alienated and use/exchange in German Ideology & Capital); public, authentic, and use value are positively valued, private, alienated, and exchange value are problematized. Numan’s work shows that by the late 70s, at least in US and UK youth cultures, these binaries weren’t as meaningful as they once were. Or at least they weren’t particularly significant to the structures of subjectivity by which late Boomers and early Gen Xers were interpellated. Kids those days, or at least the kids who liked Numan’s work (which obviously weren’t all children or teens), didn’t find conventionally drawn public/private, authentic/alienated, and use/exchange binaries compelling ways of describing or evaluating their experiences. Or, classical liberalism, and even radical critiques of classical liberalism (like Marx), didn’t seem to provide the kind of resistance or alternative to Reaganomics and Thatcherism that some of these kids wanted/needed/got excited about. In the discussion after my panel at this year’s philoSOPHIA conference, I kept inarticulately gesturing to this, saying something like “Yeah, nobody cares about alienation anymore, GARY NUMAN DUH.”[i] I want to take the time to explain that argument here.  It’s worth further exploration because, as I’ll discuss at the end, this move away from alienation and classically liberal aesthetics deeply affects pop music aesthetics, especially the role of (stereotypical) blackness and black music in the white musical mainstream and avant-garde.

The clearest, easiest way into this argument is by contrasting Numan’s album The Pleasure Principle with Marcuse’s psychoanalytic/Marxist work Eros & Civilization, where he develops his idea of “the performance principle” in contrast to the Freudian notion of “eros” or pleasure/desire/life.

Marcuse

In short, Marcuse thinks that Enlightenment (instrumental) rationality forces us to repress desire and pleasure, to sublimate our erotic energies into the production of “civilized” (docile) bodies and surplus value. As Marcuse puts it:

reason was defined as an instrument of constraint, of instinctual suppression; the domain of the instincts, sensuousness, was considered as eternally hostile and detrimental to reason. The categories in which philosophy has comprehended the human existence have retained the connection between reason and suppression: whatever belongs to the sphere of sensuousness, pleasure, impulse has the connotation of being antagonistic to reason—something that has to be subjugated, constrained” (159).

We can’t enjoy, we have to perform, in a really Weberian-protestant-work-ethic kinda way. We do this by repressing our libidinal, erotic energies—what pleases us, what we enjoy, our desires—and channeling them instead into alienated labor. Marcuse calls this repression “the performance principle.” It is “the violent and exploitative productivity which made man into an instrument of labor” (199).

Pleasure is the opposite of performance; pleasure—or Eros—liberates us from the repression commanded by the performance principle. According to Marcuse, “liberation is the work of Eros” (166) because it sutures alienation and re-unites us with ourselves, our desires, our pleasures and our capacity to play (to engage in non-teleological, non-goal or performance-oriented action). If we liberate Eros, we can create a society in which “wants and needs can be satisfied without alienated labor. Then, man is free to ‘play’ with his faculties and potentialities and with those of nature, and only by ‘playing’ with them is he free” (188; emphasis mine). The performance principle is a problem because it alienates us from ourselves; we are liberated when we are not alienated, especially when we are not alienated from our capacity for non-teleological activity. Liberation is “a non-repressive erotic attitude toward reality” (167) organized not by rational teleology, the demands of production and performance, but by “the order of gratification which the free Eros creates” (164). So there’s this idea that we can only be truly, genuinely, fully “gratified” or “fulfilled” when we are not alienated. “Liberation” is “the reunion of what has become separated,” specifically, the “separation from the libidinous object (or subject)” (170).  As this citation clearly demonstrates, the traditional binaries of subject/object, authentic/alienated, etc., are key to Marcuse’s theory of oppression and liberation: we are oppressed when we are objectified (or when we objectify ourselves in alienated labor), we are liberated when “the opposition between man and nature, subject and object, is overcome” (166). Even though he’s arguing for the “reunion” and “overcoming” of the binary, this liberatory ideal opposes wholeness and authenticity to alienated repression.

Numan

The title of Gary Numan’s 1979 album The Pleasure Principle obviously resonates with Marcuse’s psychoanalytic framework. However, Numan’s Pleasure Principle is actually very different from Marcuse’s Eros, both as a text and, more importantly, as a concept or ideal.

I want to take the iconic Cars as my primary example, both because many people are already somewhat familiar with it, and because I think its popularity indicates, well, its popularity—it resonated with people, it made sense to them, it touched on some common experience, affect, etc.

Both the lyrical content and the musical form suggest that alienation is not something that must necessarily be overcome. This claim is perhaps most strongly evident in the song’s video.

Musical Form:

            Traditional pop songs, and tonal music, are organized as the conquest of difference. There’s a main theme or key, which is challenged by different harmonic or melodic material (like a verse or a bridge or a break), and these challenges are resolved. This resolution is what lets listeners sense the song’s impending end—many people without formal musical training can tell when a song is nearly over. Delueze would say that traditional Western pop is a story of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. “Cars,” however, doesn’t play the de/re-territorialization game. It has two sections—a 4x6-bar “verse” and a 4x4 “bridge”—which are not set in opposition to one another.  There’s no verse/chorus/verse pattern, no climax and denouement, just a sort of homeostasis. Unlike trad pop structures, it’s not a story of difference, conquest, and reintegration. Musical pleasure is not a matter of climaxes and money shots, but of appreciating carefully-crafted effects. The song is a curated sonic ecology (this sort of reminds me of Andrew Goodwin’s point in his “Digital Reproduction” essay in On Record that it’s all timbre now…). Hwu Halam has done some work on neoliberalism and the curated sonic ecology made possible by personal audio players. The car, as the lyrics indicate, is a pre-Walkman example of this “bubble.”

Lyrical Content:

            The interior of a car is a carefully-curated environment; the point of a car is to isolate oneself in a “bubble” suited to one’s own preferences. You don’t need to deal with the weather, the sounds, smells, or bodies of the “outside” world that pedestrians, bike/motorbike, and public transit riders have to negotiate. This is what the song’s lyrical content demonstrates. The first verse is all about the bubble and the carefully curated ecology:

           

Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It's the only way to live in cars.
Here in my car
I can only receive
I can listen to you
It keeps me stable for days in cars.

The second verse troubles the safety and apparent perfection of the car-ecology, but not very strongly. For example, it’s unclear if he’s leaving his car, or leaving in his car.

Here in my car
Where the image breaks down
Will you visit me please
If I open my door in cars
Here in my car
You know I've started to think
About leaving tonight
Although nothing seems right in cars.

So, “Cars” is about the pleasure of inhabiting a self-curated bubble. Pleasure isn’t found in the overcoming of alienation, in the reappropriation of labor and desire from the commodity, but in navigating the world of commodities.

Finally, the video:

The video shows fragmented male body parts—mainly hands playing instruments—that are disconnected from the performers’ faces, or the rest of their bodies. As Laura Mulvey famously pointed out, this sort of fragmentation is traditionally reserved for female bodies. Male bodies get to be full subjects, not objects in the development of male subjects or for the pleasure of male gazers.  This fragmentation of male bodies—separating the laboring hands from the face and the voice—would be very problematic in classically liberal accounts of subjectivity. The laboring hands are alienated from the self as such. The video suggests that this separation is not a problem in Numan’s world. In fact, the fragmentation, especially the video effects used to produce it, are seen as evidence of his “futuristic” aesthetic. So what was once negatively regarded as a sign of alienation is now a positively regarded as a sign of avant-garde-ness.

Neoliberalism and the end of “alienation”

These are more or less underdeveloped thoughts---stuff for the manuscript in process.

1. Neoliberalism undoes the structuring binaries of classical liberalism: inside/outside, subject/object, public/private, etc. As Jason Read explains, 

What is lost in neoliberalism is the critical distance opened up between different spheres and representations of subjectivity, not only the difference between work and the market, as in Marxism, but also the difference between the citizen and the economic subject, as in classical liberalism. All of these differences are effaced as one relation; that of economic self-interest, or competition, replaces the multiple spaces and relations of worker, citizen, and economic subject of consumption...it is without an outside. It does not encounter any tension with a competing logic of worker or citizen, with a different articulation of subjectivity. States, corporations, individuals are all governed by the same logic, that of interest and competition” (Read 35).[ii]

 

There’s a lot to unpack in this quote. First, Read argues that “differences are effaced as one relation.” This is his way of framing what I’ve called the undoing of structuring binaries, like public (citizen) and private (worker). Instead of a subject structured by these binaries, neoliberalism works with a subject organized on a qualitative gradient of intensity, what Read calls “interest and competition.” Classically liberal subjects are fulfilled when they persist through challenges to their wholeness and coherence. Individual maturity and aesthetic pleasure are organized as conquest narratives, or, as Jeffery Nealon puts it, as “opportunities for confronting, overcoming, purchasing, or otherwise consuming some ‘other’” (82); bell hooks calls this “eating the other.” It’s a model of consumption or assimilation: I ought to incorporate the other into me (e.g., resolve dissonances back to consonance). Neoliberal subjects are fulfilled when they have turned themselves up to eleven, so to speak—i.e., when they have maximalized all aspects of their existence. It’s not about consuming an other, an object, a commodity, but “intensifying new versions of familiar things” (Nealon 81). So, Numan’s curated sensory ecology fits with this latter, neoliberal account of subjectivity and aesthetic pleasure. In his car, he has carefully curated the sensory environment to maximalize his enjoyment of the car, the stereo, and himself. “Cars” is not so much about the car qua consumer commodity, but about Numan’s narrator and his aesthetic experience in the car. Numan’s narrator is not alienated in the car, either as laborer or as fetishizing consumer.

2. This is because commodities—structured by use/exchange, inside/outside binaries—are not very significant factors in neoliberalism. As Nealon explains, neoliberalism replaces the traditional M-C-M logic of exchange (money-capital-money) with the M-M “logic of intensity.” In this model, “money is directly intensified—made greater or smaller—rather than being transformed into a different state through the mediating work of investment, labour, commodity prouction or exchange” (79).. Alienation is a function of commodification of labor: I take my own labor as an object that I exchange, not something that I use or realize the direct products of its use. However, if capital and commodities no longer mediate transactions—if “no actual goods or services are required to represent or serve as a placeholder for the abstract value of invested money” (Nealon 79), then alienation isn’t a factor in or consequence of the M-M relationship. Neoliberal subjects don’t care about alienation because they don’t necessarily experience it; they do not have to commoditize their labor, they have to treat themselves like money (there’s that phrase, “I’m so money,” right? Or, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”)

3. In Anglo-American pop music, alienation used to be the problem that blackness and femininity solved. White masculinity was alienated from its bodily powers of affect and receptivity, and appropriating stereotypical blackness and/or femininity is what overcame this lack. But if neoliberal subjects don’t experience this alienation-induced lack, then this shift in the logic of subjectivity (from exchange to competition) entails a change in the logic of hipness, a change in mainstream culture’s relation to blackness, and to other non-white masculinities and femininities. Shannon Winnubst’s work on the biopolitics of cool gets at some of this, but it’s not specific to pop music. My stuff on postmillennial hipness does address the shifting role of blackness, black masculinity, and non-white femininities, but it doesn’t directly tie these racial shifts to neoliberalism. And that’s what I’m suggesting here: that the mainstreaming of certain styles/stereotypes of blackness is related to the increasing influence of neoliberalism and the logic of intensity. Howso?

            a. First, Afro-American musical practices already fit, or can easily be adapted to, the logic of intensity. In the late 20^th century, musicologists and cultural theorists often used an oversimplified “harmony v repetition” opposition to contrast Western tonality with Afro-diasporic systems of musical organization. Tonal harmony follows the classically liberal conquest narrative—dissonances are introduced and resolved. Hip hop, house, and techno (and their various permutations) often rely on loops and ateleological song structures grounded in rhythmic and timbral intensity instead of harmonic development. As DJ Spooky has noted, black music is now mainstream pop music, both in the US and especially in Europe, where house and techno have been even more influential than in Chicago and Detroit. While it might be heartwarming to suggest that the mainstreaming of black musics is due to some sort of lessening in racism and increase in inclusivity, I don’t think that’s the case (if only because I think it’s foolish to claim that racism has decreased—it’s different, sure, but not less or better). Actually, I think hegemony was interested in black musics—hip hop, house, techno—because they worked better with the neoliberal logic of intensity than trad Western tonal harmony. 

            b. White hipsters are responding to the mainstreaming of black music by a return to classically liberal ideals of authenticity, wholeness, disalienation, etc. That’s what all this precious return to the 19^th century, return to twee-folky-preciousness, handlebar moustaches and soda fountains, return to craft-made, hand-made, artisan, etc. is. This is not an effective response to the logic of intensity. Or rather, it’s not a critique of the logic of intensity, but an attempt to appear to escape from it.  These white hipsters are in fact participating in the careful curating of the self—the neoliberal entrepreneurial logic of self-cultivation. However, by curating old-skool liberal humanist aesthetic values and practices, they make classically liberal values seem like critiques of neoliberalism. Authenticity is a refuge or bonus for those privileged enough to have their “human capital” already recognized by others, already recognized as sufficiently maximal. Neoliberalism doesn’t give a crap about authenticity or alienation—those are questions raised by the “C” that has dropped out of neoliberalism’s “M-M” algorithm. Think of it this way: the alienation and authenticity would affect the “C” variable; now that this variable is out of the equation, alienation and authenticity don’t factor into anything anymore. They’re vestigial.

            c. So what’s a better response? Around the same time as Numan, you had the development of industrial music in the UK. Cabaret Voltaire, The Normal, Throbbing Gristle…they’re all responding to de-industrialization…As is hip hop over in the Bronx, and No Wave in the Downtown scene, house over in abandoned warehouses in Chicago, or techno in abandoned industrial spaces in Detroit. I want to focus on UK industrial here because I think there’s a useful contrast between these late 70s industrial bands and the previous generation’s metal bands. Metal bands like Black Sabbath were responding to the industrial economy: “Iron Man” has to be situated alongside the factories in Birmingham. But a quick generation later, young men in the industrial centers of England (Manchester, Sheffield, etc.) aren’t rebelling against wage slave-dom, because the factories have closed. Neoliberal economic restructuring has left them to die—that’s what industrial was a response to—the fact that one was already part of the car crash set, whether one liked it or not. These genres also scramble traditional love-and-theft logics of cultural appropriation—whites aren’t treating the blues as a suture for their alienation…instead you get black kids sampling Kraftwerk, or black kids plundering the soul and funk archives, etc.

            d. Basically, the shift from exchange to competition is a change in whiteness; this shift in whiteness impacts all racial categories and relations. I need to think more about this.

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[i] The utter failure of this claim to resonate with the audience was a real “lightbulb” moment for me. It made me realize that I’m working, at least in part, from a really different archive than, uh, philosophers do. That archive is, of course, pop music. I suddenly realized that not everybody knew as much about post-punk and new wave as we all knew about Marx or Kristeva.

[ii] Read, Jason. “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the PRoduction of Subjectivity” in Foucault Studies, No 6 pp. 25-36 February 2009.

Falling Skies, The Skitter Rebellion, and White Feminism

Because I limit my TV more or less to science fiction, Shameless, and anything with Lance Reddick in it, I’ve been following Falling Skies. Basically, it’s a post-apocalyptic alien-invasion/human genocide series. It can be overly maudlin at times, with its attempts at ET-style warm-fuzzy-innocent-kids-as-moral-compass crap (srsly, Torchwood did the aliens-&-kids thing much better...speaking of another scifi show w/ER alumnus), but this second season has definitely improved on the first, and even been genuinely interesting at times.

I want to focus on one specific element of the show—the “Skitter rebellion”—because I think it may be a useful example to use in teaching feminist theory. (As in, I’m probably going to use this blog post in class next Spring.)

So, the Skitters are the main aliens humans interact with—they’re like the redshirts a different species of aliens use to do their dirty work. Skitters are multi-legged insect-like creatures. They are tasked with managing, containing, and killing adult humans, and capturing and enslaving human children. Basically, they are the brawn behind the human genocide and the continued oppression of survivors. Skitters kill humans and kidnap their children. So, humans rightly perceive them as a threat. Throughout the first season, Skitters are the main threat humans face.

But then in the second season we learn both (1) the Skitters are not the ones giving orders, and (2) the Skitters did not consent to this project, they themselves are enslaved to the “alien overlords.” In the “Love and Other Acts of Kindness” episode (which io9 nicely recaps here), Red Eye, the William Wallace of Skitters, tells the protagonist, Tom Mason (Noah Wyle’s character) that ze is part of a Skitter resistance movement, and asks Tom and his human resistance group to partner with the rebel Skitters.

And this is where it gets interesting. Tom, the audience surrogate, obviously has a lot of difficulty trusting this Skitter: this Skitter hirself, and this Skitter’s comrades, have killed tons of humans—people both Tom and the audience are emotionally invested in. Why would we trust someone who oppresses us? (Red Eye even does a quasi-Eichmann, saying he had to kill a bunch of humans b/c he could not disobey orders.) This Skitter in particular, and Skitters in general, hurt us. Both intellectually and emotionally we know that Skitters are our oppressors. Why should we trust our oppressors? Sure, they’re oppressed too, by the same people who are oppressing us, but that doesn’t cancel out the very real harm they continue to do to us.

As I was watching this episode, I immediately thought of the relationships among white feminists and women of color. Why should we trust our oppressors? Why should women of color trust white feminists, who, in their (sometimes unintentional) complicity with white hegemony, oppress people of color? White women, and white feminists, have done and continue to do a lot of harm to women of color. Who are we to think they’ll just trust us, be anything other than suspicious of us? White feminists are Red Eye, and women of color are Tom Mason. White feminists, like the Skitters, may be forced to comply with white patriarchy, but this doesn’t mean they are not responsible for their complicity in it. Just because you are oppressed doesn’t make you innocent or infallible.

Because Tom is a white guy, and the audience surrogate, I think this episode might be a really good “lightbulb” for white students in women’s studies classes. It might be a way to make them “get” the black/WOC/transnational feminist critiques of white feminism in a concrete, non-abstract way.

And, as a tangent: I wish this show would stop trying to re-nuclear-familize a human group that’s cohered through different sorts of affinities than kinship, marriage, blood, etc. Almost everyone on the show is the sole survivor of their traditional family—except the Masons, a father and his three sons. I wish the show would explore the non-nuclear-family relationships people forge, and not keep re-centering father-son dynamics (in a sometimes really Oedipal way).