it's her factory

What’s your take on Roman Zolanski? Misogynist? Genius?

2012-01-25T19:16:00.000-05:00

“StupidHoe” is not just stupid

I’mstill thinking through all that’s going on in Nicki Minaj’s “Stupid Hoe”single/video. It’s complicated. It’s REALLY complicated. I don’t think anyonecan rigorously analyze the piece and give a uniformly, one-sidedly condemnatoryor exculpatory account of it. Is itmisogynist? Yes. Is it feminist? Yes. Like I said, it’s complicated. It resistseasy resolution into a clearly-defined meaning that fits neatly into pre-madeboxes like “misogynist” or “feminist”.

Manyin the mainstream feminist blogosphere are chiding Minaj for being, in bellhooks’s terms, “a dick in drag,” i.e., a woman as patriarch. But this readoverlooks and under-hears the song’s and video’s nuances. So, in this post, Ijust want to consider—not really come to conclusions about, just consider—someof these nuances. I want to open the work to further, more carefulconsideration. I’m not going to say it is either misogynist or feminist,because it’s both and neither.

Whatfollows are three somewhat separate “Stupid Hoe”-related discussions: First, ananalysis of the gender politics/discourses in the track. Second, an argumentagainst those who say “Well and good, but this is a song for children, whowon’t understand that nuanced analysis you just did. So, what about thechildren?” Third, just an initial, underdeveloped list of things to consider inthe video

Gender Scrambling, or theRole of Roman

Thissong isn’t facile misogyny spit out of a brightly-lipsticked mouth because gender is completely scrambled. Becauseof this scrambling, it is unclear if “women” are actually the referent of“hoes.”

It’snot Nicki (or Onika) who is the rapper here: the MC here is Roman Zolanski,Nicki’s gay male twin sister. Yeah:gay male twin sister. Roman is a man, but he’s also Minaj’s sister. Maybethey’re “fraternal” twins, as they say? But Roman also looks pretty identicalto Nicki. Regardless, Roman’s gender identity is not at all clear: he’s a maletwin sister of a female MC. Roman may not even be cis-male (as Nicki’s twinsister, maybe Roman is her FTM twin?). He’s like Minaj’s “Sasha Fierce,” excepthe’s a dude, sorta. Roman is Minaj’s aggressive (AG, maybe?) side, so it is nosurprise that Minaj would choose his voice for a diss track. But the underlyingpoint here is that the MC voicing this track has a really complicated genderidentity: he’s neither clearly male or female, cis or trans, etc. In “Roman’sRevenge” (which is a play on the old-school classic, “Roxanne’s Revenge,” oneof the first tracks by a female MC), Roman says “I’m a bad bitch, I’m acunt”—so it’s entirely possible Roman is the “stupid hoe,” or atleast one of the stupid hoes.

Minajrepeats the line “these bitches is my sons.” So maybe words that are generallytaken to refer to females are being used, in this track, to refer to men? IfRoman is her “sister,” “hoes” could certainly refer to quote-unquote men.

“Stupidhoes” could be her way of calling out what used to be termed “Uncle Toms”—i.e.,black men who play into white stereotypes, desires, ideas, etc. This is reallyclear in the couplet:

Look Bubbles, go back to your habitat, MJ gone andI ain’t havin that

How you gonna be the stunt double to the n*ggamonkey?

“Bubbles”was Michael Jackson’s pet monkey, made famous in the Jeff Koons's sculpture ofthe pair. However, here the “n*igga monkey” is not Bubbles, but Jackson.So here Roman is dissing Michael Jackson, and probably other black men whosimilarly buy into whiteness/white ideals/etc. in an uncritical way. It couldalso be entirely possible that Roman is one of these “stupid hoes,” preciselybecause he engages in simplistic, gender-based dissing—which is a sort ofstereotype of un-gender-reconstructed, “thuggish” or otherwise “primitive”black attitudes to gender that many, many white people and white hip hopaudiences continue to assume and desire. So, if Roman is indeed one of these“stupid hoes” precisely for engaging in all-too-standard misogynist dissing,then the track actually critiques its superficial meaning.

So,what is clear is that gender is so scrambled in this track that the referent of“hoes” is not necessarily women, probably actually men, at least at times, andgenerally not assigned to one gender or another.

Sowe shouldn’t be so pedantic and literal about her word useage here. She’splaying with words, making them signify beyond their usual associations. Forexample, it is also in “Roman’s Revenge” where her repeated claims that she, orrather Roman, is “like a dungeon dragon” reminds us that Roman is a speculativeMC, a fiction, and that we should not “mistake anti-socialsurrealism for social realism.” To be the “female Weezy” is, after all, to be afemale alien, Martian, and above all, to not be a human being.[1]

“But what about the kids?”

Thisis always a response to my attempts to give nuanced readings of popsongs as art. People always say, “But the audience for this is/includeschildren, who won’t understand all the nuance you’re trying to read into thisvideo. So, while it might not actually be misogynist/harmful/whatever, the kidswon’t understand the critique embedded in the video and they’ll just receivethe damaging, hegemonic version of it”.

Thisargument is so incredibly demeaning to both children and pop stars—who areoften female pop stars. Here’s why:

1. Kids are fans. They have the time and energy to accumulate detailedknowledge of an artist’s repertoire. They’re the ones who already know all thereferences, the interconnections among songs, etc. They spend a lot of timeinterpreting, re-interpreting, and reworking songs. Fans make their own videore-edits, for example. So don’t assume kids are just passive receptacles ontowhich ideology copies itself exactly, without disruption or resistance. Kidsoften fail to be perfectly interpellated.

2. This is the more important argument against this critique: This critiquedemands that any musician who makes popular/commercial music make only the mostsimple, literal, easily understandable work they can. In other words, thiscritique demands that musicians not be artists, that they not use subtlereferences, irony, sarcasm, and other complex means of signification. Itdemands that artists directly, literally say what they mean—that art be direct,didactic expression. If we demand that pop/commercial music always be kid-safe,then we require artists in this genre to restrict their creativity to onlythe most simplistic, easily-interpretable forms. Interestingly, commercialpop is one of the few areas in Western culture generally where women havesignificant cultural and monetary capital—here, women are bothaesthetically and commercially influential. This argument trivializes women’saesthetic accomplishments, saying that this genre isn’t one where “real art”ought to happen, because it should be restricted “just” for quote-unquote“kids,” who are actually smarter than this argument presents them as being. SO,this argument demands that women limit their artistic abilities for the sakeof some mythical ‘Child’”. It demands that one of the few areas in whichwomen are creatively and commercially important limit itself, that it notbe innovative, that women not be innovative. That’s actuallydeeply misogynist, if not in explicit intent then at least in impliciteffect. Do we really want to say that this area of significant femaleaccomplishment should not be considered/practiced as art, just because somechildren might be listening? We certainly don’t demand that Mozart, Wagner, orany other really racist, misogynist classical composer’s works be edited forchildren’s sake. SO why is it only women (often, women of color) who we seek tocensor or limit in this way? Or, right, as in the pro-life movement, the objectiveisn’t saving children, it’s oppressing women, limiting their self-determinationand their opportunities for self-advancement.

Some initial remarks onthe video itself:

1. Minaj is referenceing several female pop stars’ videos: Shakira (withthe cage), Beyonce (with the dancers), Rihanna (with the Versailles-likebackground, as in “Umbrella”), and Katy Perry. There is perhaps a Gagareference, too (the big Manga eyes).

2. Is she appropriating Ganguro appropriations of perceivedblackness/American-ness (e.g., around the 1:00 mark)?

[1] When Minaj/Roman claims tobe “The Female Weezy,” this complicates things even further. We have to thinkabout her relationship to Lil Wayne, Young Money/Cash Money Crew, etc. In Y.U.Mad, Nicki, Weezy, and Birdman, who is more or less Weezy’s bigbrother/father-type figure, all appear in the same track, and Minaj isdressed as a blond Wayne. Here she really is the “female Weezy,” and,in this track, Birdman talks about beign a “stuntman,” which Roman then riffson in “Stupid Hoe.” So Minaj is showing her filiation to both Weezy andBirdman, as Weezy’s older male family type figure. So the question we have toask is: Is Weezy Nicki/Roman’s “twin brother,” in the same way that Roman isNicki’s “twin sister”?

The Role of Music in Rousseau’s Non-Ideal Domination Contract--Or, why you should read my book

2012-01-20T20:10:00.000-05:00

I’ve been reading CarolePateman’s and Charles Mills’s Contract & Domination, prepping it toteach later this term in my graduate Feminist Theory class. Here, I want totalk about Mills’s discussion of the early, Discourses-era Rousseau,because I think the analysis of Rousseau’s early musical writings that I do inchapter 2 of The Conjectural Body helps explain how and why Rousseauarrived at this (non-ideal) version of the contract, and how and why he willlater overlook it in The Social Contract.

Mills reads, as I do, twoRousseaus: an early, more politically radical one, and a later, moreclassically liberal one. Mills argues that the early Rousseau is the onlyinstance, in classical contract theory, of a non-ideal theorization of contractas domination. He explains:

Rousseau’sfamous contract is of course the second one, the agreement described in TheSocial Contract…in Rousseau’s earlier Discourse on Inequality, healso describes, albeit very briefly, a fraudulent contract imposed on the poorby the rich under the pretext of guaranteeing the rights of all. Thus he is theonly theorist in the classical tradition to expressly use the contract idea tomap and theorize injustice…It is clearly an exercise in non-idealtheory. (115).

What causes Rousseau to“see” and account for domination in his early writings, but gloss over themlater on? As I argue in the book, when he’s thinking about politics alongsideand through music, he pays attention to those non-ideal details that would leadone to conclude that the “state of nature” is neither natural, nor a “neutral”starting point free of inequality. When he stops thinking about music, and justtheorizes about politics, he forgets his ties to non-ideal histories andmaterialities. So, the difference between non-ideal, domination-contract recognizing Rousseau andideal-theorizing, domination-contract making Rousseau is music.His understanding of music is really deep, thorough, and careful. It is hisrigorous understanding of the cultural specificity of musical practices—arrivedat through his infamous and furiously heated debates with composer/theoristJean-Phillipe Rameau—that forces him to recognize the fact that “nature”or “the original position” or whatever you want to call it is always-alreadystructured by social values, assumptions, etc. He knows that in music,there is no neutral, universal starting-point.

Rousseau’s always fairly“ideal” about politics; it’s his understanding of music that isnon-ideal. He only modifies his politics when he has music on the brain. Or,he’s a more responsible political theorist when he’s working on/through music.Because I’ve already made this argument in my book, I”ve decided to paste someselected passages—that you can and should read in context!—to give you all apreview of how and why music is so important for understandingRousseau’s “non-ideal” domination contract. These are excerpts, so they’resomewhat disjointed.

(1): When thinking aboutmusic, Rousseau is aware of Eurocentrism, and tries to avoid it:

Rousseau asserts that

[i]f the major impact of oursensations upon us is not due to moral causes, then why are we so sensitive toimpressions which are meaningless to barbarians? Why is music that moves us butan empty noise to the ear of a Carib? Are his nerves of a different nature fromours? Why are they not excited in the same way, or why do the same excitationsaffect some people so strongly and others hardly at all? (EOL, 289).

Interestingly—and perhaps evenastonishingly given the Eurocentrism that pervades even this shortquotation—Rousseau does not use theperceived inability of non-Europeans to fully appreciate European art music asmusic as evidence of their physical difference and justification for theirsubordination. Instead, he assumes that every human shares a relatively similarphysiological composition, and that differences in sound perception arise fromvarying social norms and cultural contexts. Anatomically, at birth our ears areall more or less identical. However, insofar as these ears are trainedto recognize specific sounds, timbres, and pitches as significant, each societyproduces radically different organs. For example, the European ear, cultivatedto a system which divides the octave into twelve semitones, recognizes onlytwelve different pitches; the South Asian ear, however, shaped by ragas whichutilize a variety of quartertones, hears perfect pitches where the European earhears only out-of-tune squawking.¹⁷

(2) When talking aboutmusic, Rousseau recognizes that Europeans’ accounts of “the State of Nature”are really just insidious attempts to naturalize/normalize/universalizeEuropean cultural assumptions, values, etc. Or, Rousseau understands that whatEuropeans say is the “original position” is not at all “original,” but deeplystructured by pre-existing discourses and relationships.

Making anobservation that will not arise again until the 1920s with the Second VienneseSchool, Rousseau calls Rameau’s bluff: drawing on ancient Greek and non-Westernmusical conventions and practices, Rousseau demonstrates that Rameau’s theoriesare far more normative than they are simply descriptive. Noting Westernmusic’s arbitrary privileging of certain pitches, or ways of identifyingintervals and pitches, Rousseau argues that the “peculiar prerogative” given to the intervals which make up themajor triad, their supposed “naturalness,” is “only a property of calculation”(ETP, 273), that is, a privilege which does not arise from nature, but fromconvention. Rousseau explains, “It is, therefore, neither because the soundsthat make up the perfect chord resonate with the fundamental sound, nor becausethey correspond to the aliquots of the entire String,…that they have beenexclusively chosen to make up the perfect chord” (ETP, 273). More simply,Western music theory privileges the octave, major third, and fifth not becausethey are “inherent” within or natural to frequencies we recognize as sound, butbecause these are the most obvious to us, given our methods and instruments ofanalysis and their predispositions and limitations. ..

Indeed,Rousseau’s strongest proof against the “naturalness” of Rameau’s system lies inthe fact that the more famous theorist cannot account for other conventions like the minor mode (and its lowered third), theNeapolitan chord, voice leading, and various other widely used musicalpractices. As Rousseau notes, “I have spoken only of the Major Perfect Chord.What shall be done when one must show the generation of the Minor Mode, of thedissonance, and the rules of Modulation? I instantly lose sight of nature,arbitrariness riddles every part, the pleasure of the ear itself is the work ofhabit” (ETP, 274; emphasis mine). Juxtaposing the ear (aphysiological organ) and habit, Rousseau explicitly claims that seemingly “natural”phenomena like hearing are necessarily educated by “habit,” convention, andculture.

To furtherexplain his critique of Rameau’s naturalism, Rousseau turns to Rameau’sargument that every person has an innate sense of the octave, major third, andfifth, and can accurately recognize and produce them at will. “M. Rameau claimsthat an ignorant person will naturally intone the most perceptible fundamentalsounds, as, for example, in the key of a do [the root] a sol [thefifth]” (ETP, 276). It is not so much the results of Rameau’s survey that Rousseaudisputes, but his sample. Given Rameau’s Western European subjects, itis probably true that all had a relative sense of do-mi-sol intervallicrelationships; even the most rural and poor populations were exposed to andeducated by church hymns. Because people in Tokyo, Delhi, and Cairo practicemusic which does not necessarily utilize this system of harmony, the questionremains: “What subjects has he used for this test?” (ETP, 276). Obviously, itis Parisians, or those from the province—that is, Westerners, “[p]eople who,without knowing music, have heard Harmony and Chords a hundred times, so thatthe impression of the harmonic intervals and the progression corresponding tothe Parts in the most frequent passages had stayed in their ears, and weretransmitted to their voices without even suspecting it” (ETP, 276). Even thoughmany of us may be able to sing a sol-do interval like it was “second nature”—indeed,most without even knowing what a fifth-relationship even is—this vocal capacityis the culmination of significant, if informal, ear training. As we walkthrough town and hear the bells toll the hour, as we watch television andlisten to an unending glut of advertisements, as we listen to music on ourcommute to work, as we wander through the grocery store, as we perform even themost mundane tasks of daily life, we are literally bombarded with examples ofoctaves, thirds, fifths, and chords consisting in their combinations. This “voice,”then, the voice of singing speech (and, notably, the voice that Derrida wronglyputs forth as Rousseau’s index and epitome of “pure presence”) which appears tobe “innate” and “natural” to human beings, is in fact the coincidence ofvarious cultural forces, habits, and conventions. Rousseau’s argument here isthat music is not a natural phenomenon so much as it is a social product andcultural force. He explains, “[M]ere noise says nothing to the mind, objectshave to speak in order to make themselves heard” (EOL, 288).

From aRousseauian perspective, one could say that nature is not at all found inRameau’s arguments, for this “nature” is theorizable only in hypotheticalterms. What Rameau posits as a factual claim is in fact a moral claim—indeed,as I discussed above, one of Rousseau’s main objections to Rameau’s theory isthat it is an inaccurate account of the physics of sound, an “ideal” thatobfuscates empirical fact. Rousseau’s point in the Essay and the FirstDiscourse is that it is impossible to make appeals to “nature” that are notalready moral; this is why his histories are always emphatically conjectural.Rousseau’s claims about the always-already-social materiality of music set thegroundwork for his—and my—notion of conjecture, which I develop in the latersections of this chapter.

(3) Putting the musicalwriting in context of the Discourse on Inequality

Eventhough his first task in investigating the origin of inequality is to understandhow humans were in the State of Nature, prior to socially instituted privilegeand oppression, Rousseau repeatedly emphasizes that such understanding isimpossible. He takes several different approaches to argue this point. First,he returns to a theme of the First Discourse: namely, the misleading andcorrupting character of scientific knowledge. In attempting to gain objective, “scientific”evidence about the state of Nature, we actually further remove ourselves fromit and, ironically, thwart our own aims. “[I]n a sense,” explains Rousseau, “itis by dint of studying man that we have made it impossible for us to know him”(D2, 124). This irony results from the fact that there is no neutral, objective,unbiased epistemic model with which to approach Nature, a claim which formsRousseau’s second approach. All forms and means of knowing are possible becausehabitually-concretized filters allow us to make sense of the infinite data withwhich we are presented; these filters reflect the biases, presuppositions,limitations, strengths, and idiosyncrasies of their situation. Accordingly,Rousseau claims that there is no view from nowhere, but that “all thescientific books…only teach us to see men as they have made themselves” (D2,127). Nature is unknowable because reflection upon this state returns our ownimage—one which we havesketched—to us. If we can never have certain knowledge of Nature,Rousseau acknowledges in his third approach to this problem, we can’t be surethat Nature is “real” and not, in fact, a figment of our imaginations. Natureis “a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never did exist, whichprobably never will exist” (D2, 125; emphasis mine). Devoting the entirety ofthe preface to deconstructing his contemporaries’ claims about the state of Natureas one of originary purity and pure presence, Rousseau clearly believes that “nature”is at best a myth. This is why he offers the caveat that,regarding Nature, he “shall form vague and almost imaginary conjectureson this subject” (D2, 134; emphasis mine).

If natureis basically a retroactively constructed fiction used to explain and justifypresent conditions, then even if harmony is an empirical phenomenon, part ofthe physical world, it is not for that fact the origin of musical systems, noris it useful as a normative or regulative standard (for the science of harmony,like any science, reflects the values of its creator and his or her society).It “only teach[es] us to see men as they have made themselves” (D2, 127).Studying harmony—i.e., the purely musical—tells us nothing about music, per se,but only about us, our society, and our socially constructed relations to andideas about music.

Accordingly,when Rousseau states that “harmony, having its principle in nature, is the samefor all Nations” (LFM, 144), he is not claiming harmony is in fact “natural” oruniversally uniform; rather, his point is that if harmony were in factuniversal—governed by consistent laws of physics—and if music were infact “natural” phenomenon, then every society would recognize the same frequencies,intervals, consonances, and dissonances. Even a quick foray into the work of Pythagoraswill demonstrate that this is not, in fact, the case. “If there is a natural melody derived from harmony,” Rousseau argues,

itshould be one for all men, since harmony, having its source in nature, is thesame in all the countries of the world. But the songs and tunes of each nationhave a character that belongs to them, because they all have an imitative melodyderived from the accents of the language (ETP, 288).

Repeating his earlier point moresuccinctly, Rousseau illustrates that the “purely” musical is a fiction, for itis impossible to understand the particularity of music without taking intoaccount its relationship with extra-musical phenomena, namely, words. Musicdoes not exist as a “fact” of nature and the physics of sound, but as aproduction of a very specific set of social, political, environmental, andeconomic relations. Because it does not and cannot exist in some rarefied, “pure”form completely unadulterated by language and convention, any account of “harmony”that one might attempt to give is just as conjectural as the genealogy oflanguage Rousseau recounts in the first part of the Essay.

(4) Look, and I even relateit to Mills and Non-Ideal Theory!

Thisnotion of conjecture that I develop from Rousseau and, in the next chapter, fromJulia Kristeva, contributes to a non-ideal account of nature and humanembodiment. When we speak of the materiality, particularly when the physicalmateriality under question is the raced, gendered human body, our notion of thematerial must be robust and complex enough to account for all the social workthat makes/has made it possible for us to even perceive what we take to bemateriality as such; in Derridian terms, we need a notion of the material thataccommodates and acknowledges the work of arche-writing.While racist, sexist, and classist ideologies might encourage abstraction awayfrom the empirical fact of oppression, in order to construct anideal-as-descriptive-model, there is, particularly in the case of nature/humanembodiment, going to have to be a robust and not strictly empirical notion ofthe material that is being described. As Rousseau has demonstrated, there aresome phenomena, such as nature or the body, that, in order “to start with an actual investigation of [phenomenon X’s]properties” (Mills, Ideal Theory,167; emphasis mine), we are going to have to move somewhat away from thedemonstrably actual and toward the ideal or idealizing. In acknowledging that “asimple empiricism will not work as a cognitive strategy” “one has to beself-conscious about the concepts that ‘spontaneously’ occur to one, since manyof these concepts will not arise naturally but as the result of socialstructures and hegemonic ideational patterns” (Mills, Ideal Theory, 175). Mills does suggest that some concepts likenature or the body will need quite a bit of unpacking or genealogicaldeconstruction in order to be put to effective feminist, anti-racist, andanti-capitalist use. Mills does not, however, inquire further into this claim;this is what my notion of conjecture does. Rather than “abstracting away fromrealities crucial to our comprehension of the actual workings of injustice inhuman interactions and social institutions” (Mills, Ideal Theory, 170), my theory of the conjectural body attends toprecisely these realities by describing how the material and the socialinteract to produce empirical actualities that themselves normalize status-quorelations of privilege and power—put simply, to how “nature” and “culture”interact to produce “real stuff” that normalizes social hierarchies. Rousseau’searly musical writings are a productive place to begin thinking about ahistoricized, non-ideal account of embodiment because, as I have shown, hiswhole disagreement with Rameau is grounded in Rousseau’s problematization ofthe way in which Rameau’s concept of nature is “the result of social structuresand hegemonic ideational patterns.” Rousseau’s use of conjecture is problematicinsofar as he bases his assessment of political actuality on anideal-as-idealized-model; importantly, when he conjectures about musical “nature,”his understanding of musical actuality is grounded in an ideal-as-descriptive model.Indeed, it is possible to read Rousseau’s critique of Rameau in terms ofnon-ideal theory: because of Rameau’s Eurocentrism, he abstracts away fromimportant empirical and cultural facts about the ways in which sound wavesinteract with human sensory faculties.

So, in sum, if we want tomine Rousseau as a source for non-ideal theory, we need to understand his musicalwork. This is also a case for increased attention to music in criticalpolitical philosophy.

Mainstream Feminism’s Demand for Realism: On “Fotoshop by Adobé,” aesthetics, and posthuman feminism

2012-01-13T19:09:00.000-05:00

This videohas been making its rounds on feminist social media:

Fotoshopby Adobé from JesseRosten on Vimeo.

The videocritiques, via parody, the standard practice of ‘shopping female images, bothin the mainstream media, and in individuals’ own “private” photos of themselves(full disclosure: my partner ‘shopped our wedding photos, and that was in2005). The underlying assumption in this video is that image alteration is aproblem—at bottom, it’s deception, a moral wrong. It assumes that the only “good”images are realistic ones.

But whyshould photos be realistic?

In this post,I want to complicate and ultimately critique the mainstream feminist view thatimage alteration is a moral and political flaw. In other words, I thinkmainstream feminism’s demand for realism relies on overly simplistic (and thusinaccurate) understandings of (1) how images work; (2) how people perceive images;(3) the role of fantasy in individual and in public life; and (4) the “naturalness”of “human” bodies. I’ll discuss each of these points in order.

(1):Photography as Art, or How Images Work and (2) How People Perceive Images

The “Fotoshopby Adobé” (FBA) video assumes that images have a moral obligation to accuratelyportray how women’s bodies really are in real life. The demand is for 1-1re-presentation of a body in a picture. This demand rests on a completemisunderstanding of how images work, how they are made, etc. In other words,the creators and fans of the FAB video demandthat images not be art (I use “art” here in the loose sense, to includethings like craft and entertainment, not just “fine art”). That’s an impossibledemand. It’s also based on a very, very old understanding of how images work,one that existed before the invention of concepts like “art,” “fiction,” and “fantasy.”

The 1-1re-presentation they demand is an unrealizable ideal. Even the weaker claim, “moreor less realistic” re-presentation is itself a fiction. No photo, evenphotojournalism, represents the complete, unbiased,truth-the-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth. Some things are in the frame,some things are left out of focus. All photography is, to a certain extent, alie. Every photo is an interpretation. No photo is objective. And no photo, nomatter how high the resolution is, is an unmediated re-presentation of an IRLsituation. Photography, and image-making in general, is a form of mediation. Sightitself is highly mediated, even when we’re “just” using our eyes and our brains.So, the demand for “objective accuracy” denies the mediating factors inimage-making in general, and in photography in particular. Basically, thisdemand for “realism” wants the image todisavow its image-ness, and just be a mirror of “reality.”

If you thinkthis sounds a lot like Plato’s criticism of the poets, you’re right, it is!Plato didn’t like the poets because they mis-represented reality; they wereliars, b/c their work deceived people. Plato couldn’t distinguish betweenfiction and deception. Thus, because no image can be completely realistic, hecondemned all images for being deceptive. Two plus millennia later, we oftenand relatively easily distinguish between fiction and deception, and have plentyof room in our culture for fiction, art, etc. So, I think the mainstreamfeminist demand that images be “realistic” is out of synch with broadercultural norms that tolerate, uh, art. We should be careful not to, in the words of Kodwo Eshun, "mistake anti-social surrealism for social realism."People don’t actually expect images tobe realistic. We know they’re mediated, produced, faked, etc. In fact, feministwork in media studies is part of what contributes to the wide spread of thisknowledge. The site “Photoshop Disasters” exists because people know that images are shopped, and they’re notaccurate. The site makes fun of bad shop jobs that don’t successfully “fake”it.

So I don’tthink the solution is getting rid of shopping. Image alteration is itselfneither good nor bad, neither feminist nor anti-feminist. I think instead weneed to make people even more familiar with image alteration, so they can spotit when they see it…in the same way that we teach students in our “Women &the Media” type classes to pay attention to camera angles, lighting,cinematography, etc. We shouldn’t get rid of art, or demand that images not be,uh, images. We just need to better image literacy. This guide from Lifehackeris a good start.

(3) The roleof fantasy in individual and public life

Themainstream feminist pro-FBA position holds either (a) that all ideals are normative (i.e., things ought to conform to the ideal), or (b) weshould renounce all fantasy and the reality principle should rule. I, on theother hand, think we need non-regulatory ideals, fantasy, un-reality,surrealism, etc. In fact, the only way feminism can be broadly compelling is ifit meaningfully engages our fantasies, or ideals, our imaginations, etc.Feminism needs room for fiction, fantasy, speculation, and other non-literalforms of expression.

Regarding(a), that all ideals are normative: Not all ideals imply an ought. [Eventheorists who problematize normative ideals recognize that there are other,non-normative kinds of ideals.] Perhaps I like swimming and in an ideal world Iwould have gills so I could swim more. But this ideal doesn’t imply that I orany other human have gills. It’s just a nice idea. Superheroes offer usidealized versions of character, bodily ability, gendered bodily appearance, etc.,but these are not normative ideals. If superhero stories tell us anything, it’sthat being the ideal actually sucks, because ideal instances aren’t normal(most people are far from ideal); the best superhero stories show us theproblems with the normativity of these ideals. So I can have ideals aboutbeauty and bodily aesthetics that aren’t normative; admiration doesn’t automaticallytranslate into normativity (so, to be technical, this is pretty much rejectingKant’s idea about the subjective universality of beauty).

Regarding(b): we should renounce all fantasy and the reality principle should rule. Whileon the one hand I think this is a straw-man version of the mainstream feministargument—i.e., I don’t think those who hold this position actually intend tomake this claim, or realize that it is the logical implication of theirposition—on the other hand it is thelogical implication of their claim. When you launch a “campaign for real beauty”(which I know is a corporate schill, but many mainstream feministsunproblematically embrace it), you imply that we ought only see/admire “real”images of “real” women. There is no room, in this campaign, for “unreal” or “fantasy”beauties, for speculative or imaginative female embodiment. In fact, the demandthat everything be “real” imposes its own normativity. It has to lay outcriteria for what counts as “real”: you gotta, for example, have pores orwrinkles, or be of a specific body proportion/size, etc. Rather than critiquingbeauty norms about “real femininity,” it just lays out a new set of norms aboutwhat counts as a “real” woman. Aren’t ads that explicitly claim to present “RealBeauty” more normative than fashion shoots staged, contrived, highly stylizedscenes? At least the latter don’t make any claims to what counts as “real.”They’re pretty fake, actually.

And it’s thefakeness and, well, weirdness that I love about obviously photoshopped ads. Take,for example, the infamous Ralph Lauren images:

These areobviously altered pictures: these women’s hip bones are as wide as their cheekbones! These images are positively surreal. The website Photoshop Disasterswouldn’t be successful if people weren’t able to discern wildly (and sometimeseven subtly) “un-realistic” images being passed off as “realistic” ones. Thepoint with a lot of fashion photography and advertising is that it’s notintended to be real in the first place: the fashion and advertising industrieshook us by selling us fantasies. Weknow we will never get a plate of food that ever looks as juicy, fresh, anddelicious as the one we see in the advertisement. I also know that even if Ibuy Cover Girl foundation, I’ll never really look as great as Ellen DeGenerisdoes in those ads, because even Ellen doesn’t look like that IRL. But thatdoesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t have slick, or even wild and crazy ads,fashion spreads, etc.

(4) The “naturalness”of “human” bodies

TheFBA/mainstream feminist view on the “reality” of images normalizes certainforms of “human” embodiment. It relies on the naturalistic fallacy—i.e., theview that “natural” = “good.” For example, the video critiques shopped makeupads with the line: “My skin feels like plastic!” The assumption here is thatplastic is bad. But natural isn’t always good, and artificial isn’t always bad.Death and cyanide are natural, just as medicine and feminist theory areartificial. These mainstream feminist critiques of image alteration assume ahumanist perspective that is both logically problematic (as I just mentioned)and often ableist and transphobic. This humanism posits a norm for what countsas “real” human female embodiment. It has a rigid conception of what counts as “real”human female embodiment, and marginalizes women (and men, and trans/genderqueerpeople) who practice alternative forms of embodiment, and who often rely onartifice to maintain their bodies. What’s so bad about plastic skin? Prostheticlimbs have plastic “skin”. What’s so bad about artificially crafting your idealface with makeup, or even surgery? Transwomen and transmen do this.

Even moreproblematic is the way this position overlooks the fundamental artificiality ofevery human body. Body ornamentation and alteration is as old as humancivilization itself. In fact, we wouldn’thave “bodies” without alteration, ornamentation, and artifice. Feminist andqueer theory shows us that bodies don’t just naturally exist in some pure,unaltered state. “The body” is itself a socially constructed idea, and we onlycome to know, experience, and understand our bodies both as bodies, and asgendered bodies, through lots of training and artifice. [I make this point inthe early chapters of my book.] Culture shapes bodies into bodies. All bodiesare artificial, because they emerge, grow, and live in socio-historicalsituations. This is the point of posthuman feminism. “Natural” bodies don’texist; if they were “natural” they wouldn’t be recognizable/legible as “human”bodies.

In sum, Ifind these mainstream feminist critiques of image alteration bothphilosophically and politically problematic. The demand for humanist realismboth ignores the phenomenon of “art” and installs norms for what counts as “real”human embodiment. I actually think this mainstream feminist critique of imagealteration is a very, very conservativeposition. It demands that we not imagine otherwise, that we not entertainwild possibilities, that we only stick to what everyone agrees is “real” (whichis, of course, an agreement that doesn’t include everyone, and misrepresentsthe “reality” of a select privileged class as universal reality). It is, in other words, what Ranciere calls “consensusdemocracy,” or what other thinkers call “neoliberalism.”

So, not onlydo I think we need more image alteration, we need more body alteration. Art isgood. Fiction is good. Speculative fiction is great. Speculative embodimentwould be super! Well, all lived embodiment is speculative, it’s just that someforms of speculation appear more wildly counter-factual than others, givennorms about what constitutes the “fact” of human embodiment. Instead of using body alteration to reaffirmnorms for “natural human embodiment,” we should use makeup, surgery, clothes,exercise, etc., to appear more “fake.”

The Traffic In Men?

2012-01-11T14:44:00.000-05:00

This week, my graduatefeminist theory class read Gayle Rubin’s classic article “The Traffic In Women.” We considered whether and how men could be trafficked—i.e., how menmight be used as the medium for relations among other men. Rubin argues thatmen are certainly trafficked, but never as men: they might be traffickedas black, as proletariat, etc., but, at least in Rubin’s view, men never useother men’s maleness or masculinity as the media through whichthey transact their relations amongst themselves. In Rubin’s framework, it is asmen that one transacts others: as a man, one is endowed with agency andsubjectivity. If a man is to be the object of trafficking, he cannot be regardedas a man. So, in Rubin’s view, men are transacted, but never as men,because it is as a man that one is situated, vis-à-vis others, as atrader and not chattel.Trading women as women is what makes men, men.

Obviously Rubin’s originalanalysis is a very blunt instrument. It can’t account for the fact that evenwhen men are traded as, for example, members of a certain race, class,religion, subculture, or alternative embodiment, their gender never just goesaway. In fact, the trafficking in blackness that we see in American pop musicaesthetics is a trafficking in black masculinity; similarly, blackathletes are trafficked as black men. White/Western men traffic non-white,non-Western men, as men whose masculinity is qualified by their raceand/or nationality. White Western traffic in “abnormal” masculinities:e.g., Puar’s “queer terrorist masculinities”.

But what about men beingtrafficked as men in order to facilitate relations among women?Does this ever happen? Rubin seems to dismiss this possibility outright: ifpatriarchal sex/gender systems are predicated (in large part) on “the exchangeof women,” how could patriarchy tolerate such a role reversal?

Well, it happens, and while capitaltolerates it (b/c it’s all just exchange value in the end), culture doesnot. The best example of women’s “exchange of men” as men is the teen pop idol:Justin Bieber, The Jonas Brothers, N’Synch, NOKTB, WHAM!, Shaun Cassidy, TheBeatles, etc. Teen girls use the myth, image, fantasy, construction, etc., oftheir chosen Idol as the means and medium to transact relationships with otherfemale fans. This goes beyond basic commodity fetishism—it’s not just differentgroups of girls establishing their identities vis-à-vis the idols they identifywith (e.g., the popular/mainstream girls like Beiber, the b-girls like SouljaBoy, etc.). Rather, fan communities coalesce around these “idols,” and it is inthese fan communities that girls develop friendships; they go to shows withother fans, they trade pictures, articles, interviews, remixes, they brag aboutthe exclusive schwag they bought, etc. The ostensible content of thesefangirls’ activities is focused on the teen idol, but the real point is the,uh, female homosociality. Judith Jack Halberstam gestures towards this idea inher reading of riot grrrl. Halberstam argues:

Thephenomenon of boy bands, for me, raises a number of questions not simply aboutthe performance of masculinity but also about what [Gayle] Wald refers to asthe threatening aspect of the ‘ecstatic responses that they elicit’. After all, while music critics love todismiss fandom as a passive teenybopper subculture, there is something all toopowerful about a nearly hysterical audience of teen girls screaming and cryingtogether; this activity may well have asmuch to say about the desire between the screamers as it says about theirdesire for the mythic boys”(Halberstam 2005, 177; emphasis mine).

Pretty much anyone who is nota teenage girl heavily polices the exchange of men. Teen Idol music ismore or less unquestionably, obviously, and uniformly derided as the worstmusical, lyrical, aesthetic, and cultural phenomenon ever. It isconsidered the quintessence of triviality, badness, etc. It’s supposedlyobvious that teen idol music is worse than smooth jazz, worse than Kenny G,worse than muzak. But, musically, it’s not actually that bad. Often, the songsare quite catchy and well-crafted, and the idols themselves are quite goodvocalists (e.g. Biebs’s raw talent, his “discovery” via YouTube). So why theobvious, impenetrable, commonsense derision, derogation, and disgust towardteen idol music? Halberstam has it: there is absolutely no way that hegemonycan let strong, powerful expressions of female desire articulated on women’sown terms, to say nothing of female homosociality, stand as acceptable. Withteen idol music, women use men, as men,to transact relations among themselves, aswomen. [Ilana Nash's article in this book is a great explanation of how this works.] This is the opposite ofpatriarchy. As Halberstam suggests, it’s likely in opposition to hetero-patriarchy. So, heteropatriarchycompromises with capital: teen idol music and fan cultures can exist as profit-makingenterprises, but any power, credibility, traction, or relevance they mightactually have has to be so thoroughly andcompletely discounted that the threat of female homosociality/the trafficin men is completely neutralized and domesticated.

So if you think teen pop istransparently, obviously, irrefutably shit, thenpatriarchy wins. That’s exactly what it wants you to think. Because inthinking this, you deny women’s agency, women’s desires, and women’s attemptsto relations among themselves. [Sure, you could object that this happens viathe objectification of a boy/dude, but, following Beauvoir, I’m going to arguethat objectification isn’t inherently morally flawed. Because we areinterdependent, we use others as means. The problem arises when we use othersonly as means, and the objectification is systematic.] So for all those whobemoan the lack of “political” music these days, know this: some of the mostpolitically radical and threatening music out there comes in the form of “Baby,baby, baby-OOOOOOh.” If it wasn’t so dangerous, why would hegemony be sostrongly invested in convincing us it shouldn’t be taken seriously?

"The Protestor" Is No "Basic Bitch": The Politics and Aesthetics of Stereotypical Blackness in 2011

2012-01-06T15:15:00.001-05:00

I want to take a minute toreflect on the representations of race, specifically, the representations ofAfrican-American blackness, in US pop culture in 2011. In several blog posts,and a few of my published works, I’ve argued that stereotypical ghetto-blackmasculinity (e.g., the “thug” or “gangsta” identity that is most commonlytrafficked in mainstream US hip hop) has become so thoroughly co-opted that itno longer functions as a symbol of resistance, oppositionality, radicalpolitics or aesthetics, etc—representationally, affectively, aesthetically,“thug life” is no longer something that immediately strikes fear into thehearts of 21^st-C bourgeois parents, politicians, or culturewarriors. To be absolutely clear: I’m not saying that things have gotten betterfor actual African Americans, or that anti-black racism has in any way beenameliorated (in fact, I think these shifts make anti-black racism moreinsidious, more difficult to identify, and more firmly entrenched). Representationsof a certain kind of blackness have been co-opted in ways that don’t actuallybenefit African-Americans as a whole, or anti-racist projects in general. The“cultural value” or symbolism of a certain “controlling image” of blackmasculinity has shifted; we’ve left the classic “Love & Theft” logic of 20^thcwhite hipness for a new, postmillennial economy of racial culturalvalue/semiotics.

There’s some pretty solidevidence for this argument about the shifting racial-representational economiesin the mainstream media in 2011. In this post, I want to briefly survey a fewdifferent indices of this shift to what I call elsewhere “postmillennial blackhipness.”

Radical Third-World Woman of Color is the “New Black”

Theappeal of “black” culture for (bourgeois) white (male) audiences was itsapparent oppositionality; now that this very stereotypically “oppositional’black masculinity has been thoroughly co-opted by the culture industry, whitehipsters need to find new symbols with which to demonstrate their radicalchic—I mean, “cred.” I discuss this extensively in my article on Kanye West andShepard Fairey. What’s notable about the cultural/political milieu of 2011 isthe way this same logic of postmillennial hipness got seriously mainstreamedin/by mainstream media comparisons between OWS and the Arab Spring. OWSprotestors, who are overwhelmingly white (and majority male), were compared,and sometimes compared themselves, not to African-American civil rightsmovements, but to various recent Middle-Eastern (who I’m assuming are not uniformly“Arab” in ethnicity…) and North African anti-government movements. This isepitomized in Time magazine’s cover illustration of its’ Person of theYear, “The Protestor”—an image rendered, notably, by Fairey, in the style ofhis other postmillennial portraits of radicalized non-Western women of color(which I discuss in the article above).

Theimage conflates white, overwhelmingly male American OWS protestors withpurportedly “Arab” protestors and revolutionaries (let’s not forget how bloodythings got in, for example, Libya and Syria), via an image that calls on the“controlling image” of the radicalized “Third-World” woman of color.Though the cover is based on a photo of an American OWS protestor (which is notto say that she’s necessarily white, or necessarily native-born), the imageturns on the slippage between the OWS protestor’s anti-teargas protection (thebandana and hat covering almost her entire face) and Western images of “theMuslim veil.” It is also interesting that, given the overwhelmingmajority of protestors, both in the US and worldwide, have been men,Fairey and Time chose to portray “the protestor” as a woman. Thischoice again, I think, rides on the easy homology between the anti-teargasarmor this specific woman wore, and “the Muslim veil.” The easiest way tosignify “Third-World difference” (to use Cherie Moraga’s term) is via thebodies/images of women.

Aboveall, though, the takeaway from this image is the fact that there exists ageneral commonsense notion that the epitome of radical, oppositional,counter-hegemonic, anti-establishment politics/practices/identities is not ablack man, but a non-Western (preferably Muslim) woman. It’s as if thevery image, the very idea of a “Third-World” woman self-evidently standsopposed to everything conventionally “American,” hegemonic, etc. It is as ifbeing a purportedly Muslim woman is itself a form of “protest.” What this viewoverlooks is the fact that the very idea of ‘Third-World difference,’ thevery notion of the ‘radical’ or ‘oppositional’ non-Western woman is itself athoroughly Western, hegemonic, patriarchal idea. This image of theradicalized non-Western woman of color is not opposed to Western hegemony—it is Western het-patriarchy’s ownfantasy. This cover is the equivalent of Brendan Frasier and friendsdestroying business machines to the tune of “Fuck Tha Police”: it is whited00ds appropriation of their own stereotypes about non-whites in order todemonstrate their elite status among white d00ds. As an LATimes blogger notedin a critique of this cover, “Questioning authority never looked more corporateor conventional”.

Drake and Black “Skeptical Melancholy”

PhilosopherRobert Gooding-Williams has argued that the other side of the “black people aremore strongly and immediately connected to their bodies” stereotype is theallocation of “skeptical melancholy”—i.e., doubtable connection to one’s body,or the inability to get out of one’s “mind” and have contact with one’sbody—solely to whites (or rather, solely to white men). He defines“skeptical melancholy” as, for example, “loss of intimacy with existence” (50),or as “ the privately felt melancholy of a skeptic, doubtful of his existenceand dissociated from his body” (54). So, for example, Descartes says “I thinktherefore I am”: he is certain that he exists as a thinking thing, buttry as he might, he can’t be certain that he has a body. He has to remainskeptical about his embodied existence. Such skepticism is melancholic in theFreudian sense because the body is perceived as a “lost” object. For Freud,“melancholia” is the inability to “get over” loss. In the second Meditation,Descartes first thinks he is most certain of his corporeal existence, only tothen realize that he cannot be certain of his corporeal existence. Corporealityis literally “lost” in Descartes’ own argument. White corporeal skepticism ismelancholic because, as Gooding-Williams argues, whites wish for and longafter immediate bodily pleasure and sensation…and that’s why they attemptto appropriate stereotypical blackness, to re-connect them, like blacks, tocorporeality, pleasure, etc. A consequence of this distribution of corporealimmediacy to blacks and skeptical melancholy to whites is that, asGooding-Williams argues, blacks never get to make what are perceived to belegitimate claims to intellectual skepticism. As Gooding-Williams explains,“the skeptic cannot be black, for then he would not want for theblackness that supplies intimacy” (54). There is no room, in the logic oftraditional white hipness, for black skeptical melancholy; it is, to useGooding-Williams’s terms, “a Jim Crow version of the human capacity forskepticism” (54). Certainly blackpeople continually exhibit intellectual skepticism, and, believe it or not,some black people are quite disconnected from and awkward in their bodies. But the popular imagination erases those twoquite salient facts so that whites can keep on remedying their own issues byappropriating their mistaken stereotypes of black embodiment.

Thereis no room in the popular imagination for black skeptical melancholy, that is,until Drake. This is key: Whether or not Drake actually expresses or discussesskeptical melancholy (in the above-defined sense), it is a common view amongwhite critics and fans that he does. Again: I’m not talking about Drake’sactual work, his own ideas or experiences. I’m talking about the way Drizzy’swork is received and interpreted by mainstream white audiences…which mayor may not be accurate, nuanced interpretations of his work. (I would like tospend some time slogging through the songs and the videos to see if they giveus any ground for this interpretation, but that’s for another post.) A reallysolid and telling example of this interpretation is this article from Jon Parelesin The New York Times. Calling on all the standard characterizations of“skeptical melancholy” that we see in the Gooding-Williams chapter (lack oftrust, suspicion, floating voice, “impersonal” lack of connection, digitalinstruments implying lack of immediacy/authenticity, isolation, etc.), Parelessays:

Therapper Drake doesn’t trust himself. He’s proud of his success, ambitious abouthis music, thoroughly messed up about women and suspicious of all his newfoundprerogatives. His voice floats amid anxious, impersonal keyboards andcomputerized drums; he sounds as isolated as he feels “with fame on my mind andmy girl on my nerves.”

So here we have a white rockcritic arguing that what’s great about Drake is that he’s disconnected fromembodied connection (to music, to himself, to the women he courts), andtraditionally “skeptical” in several ways (lack of trust, suspicion,isolation). According to Pareles’s interpretation, Drizzy is famous, he soldout, he’s not “authentically” connected to himself, to women, to his music,etc. In fact, “with fame on my mind and my girl on my nerves,” he’s moreaffectively wrapped up in his own thoughts/worries than he is affectivelyconnected to his sex drive. Here we have a white person locating, in Drizzy’swork, a form of black skeptical melancholy. Importantly, while white hipnessframes blackness as the “cure” to white skeptical melancholy that then allows“rehabilitated” white d00ds pop culture success, Pareles’s interpretation ofDrake couches black skeptical melancholy as the result of excessive popsuccess. This is a near total inversion of the logic of traditional whitehipness. What this inversion shows us is that, in the popular/mainstream/whiteimagination, blackness = pop culture success = alienation—i.e., stereotypical“blackness” no longer represents the ‘cure’ to skeptical melancholy.[1]The content and function of stereotypical black masculinity in pop music hasfundamentally shifted. …Which is why “resistance” and “oppositionality” getexpressed in terms of “Third-World feminine difference,” as we saw above. Thischange in the content and function of stereotypical blackness in pop music alsohas implications for the reception and interpretation of work by white femalerappers.

White Girls, Rapping, and the (Black Masculine)“Soul” of Hip Hop

Incontemporary American pop music, stereotypical black masculinity isn’t what itonce was. Or rather: the stereotype of the “thug” is still more or less thesame, but the relative value of this stereotype to whites has changed. Mainstreamwhites still eat it up; hipsters, however, in order to demonstrate their elitestatus among whites, need to repudiate mainstream white’s taste for“thug life.” This opens the door for white women to be given credence asoppositional, rebellious subjects.I think there are two layers here: (1) Twee white women, like Zoe Deschanel andEllie Goulding, who effect a very traditional white femininity; and (2) Whitefemale rappers, who appropriate stereotypical blackness, both in the form ofblack masculinity and black femininity. [This is also a good place to ask aboutthe absence of queerness…] So, regarding (1): If traditional white hipness isno longer “hip,” but mainstreamed, then this means that stereotypical “thug”black masculinity is the very mainstream against which white hipsters aredistinguishing themselves. What’s the traditional opposite of hard blackmasculinity? Twee white femininity. Regarding (2), which I think is morecomplicated and more interesting: While mainstream white audiences might nottolerate the dissociation of “hip hop” and “black masculine cool,” hipsters arelooking to do precisely this. The distinction between white mainstream andwhite hipster audiences is what is missing from Toure’s recent article,[2]again in the Times, about white female rappers. Considering whether popmusic audiences are ready to give white women credence as rappers, Toure arguesthat

Thereis nothing about the skills required to be an M.C. that makes it impossible forwhite women to rhyme. It’s not that their mouths can’t do it. The true barrierto entry is that there is an essence at the center of hip-hop that white womenhave an extraordinarily hard time exuding or even copying. For many Americans,black male rappers are entrancing because they give off a sense of blackmasculine power — that sense of strength, ego and menace that derives frombeing part of the street — or because of the seductive display of black malecool.

He’s correct that the matteris not aesthetic, but political: white women have a hard time believablyperforming stereotypical “thug” black masculinity, and one might argue, blackmasculinity generally. However, “black male cool” is no longer seductive tohipsters and other culturally ‘elite’ whites. So, white women’s perceivedinability to embody/perform “black male cool” might make them particularlyappealing to white hipster audiences. Hence the recent trendiness ofKreayshawn. Toure notes as much in his analysis of her track “Gucci, Gucci”

Thesong basically attacks a central tenet of hip-hop: Many rappers embracelabelism as part of their celebration of upward mobility as well as apostmodern sentiment that you are the brands you wear. Her rejection of thatreeks of white-girl privilege. But similarly privileged people may find hermessage refreshing.

The last line here is key:similarly privileged people do find her message ‘refreshing.’ Well,“refreshing” isn’t exactly the best word here. Rather, white hipsters use thefact that they appreciate the work of white female MCs as evidence of their“enlightened” approach to both music and race/gender politics. Such a“similarly privileged person” might say to him or herself: “Look, I’m soprogressive, both aestheticially w/respect to hip hop, and politically withrespect to gender and race, that I can find the work of white female MCstotally legit. Look how transgressive I am.” This move, this attempt toprove one’s elite status above other hip-hop-loving whites, is part of therecent buzz over Kreayshawn. It is also further evidence that the race/genderpolitics of hip hop are really complicated, not uniform, and not monological. “Blackmasculine cool” is the mainstream (even though black men continue to bepolitically, socially, and economically disadvantaged); it is no longer scionof resistance, oppositionality, counter-hegemony, etc. Because “black masculinecool” has been co-opted by the mainstream, white hipsters turn to differentsymbols of “difference”—such as Third-World women of color, white femalerappers, or skeptically melancholy (i.e., not cool) black men (who are subtlyforeign, too).

So, just as racial-politicallandscapes change and blacks are now positioned as “border populations” againstnewly racialized “brown” peoples from Latin America and South Asia, racial-aestheticparadigms are shifting. Stereotypical blackness is no longer the quintessentialsymbol of oppositionality because, at least in pop music if nowhere else,stereotypical blackness has been thoroughly co-opted into the mainstream. Recognizingthis helps us make more sense of a lot of 2011 cultural politics and culturalcriticism.

[1] I wonder ifrock’s continued reliance on precisely this “traditional” stereotype ofblackness is part of what keeps it relatively marginal in the pop charts (JonCaramancia, the NYT’s other rock critic named Jon, laments this here). Which isto say: rock offers a certain brand or flavor of “rebelliousness” or“oppositionality”—one that is framed in very mid-20^th century ways,i.e., through the traditional logic of white hipness. So perhaps rock’s lack ofgeneral relevance is not so much aesthetic as it is racial-political: it tradesin passé or obsolete “controlling images” of blackness that don’t satisfycontemporary white audiences’ appetite for “eating the other.”

[2] Two otherproblems with TOure’s article: (1) it’s sorta horribly gender-normative. Hecompares white female rappers to butches/FTM Xdressers, as though such thingsare patently absurd. (2) He says that the “soul” of hip hop lies in blackmasculinity. “Hip-hop…remains unbreakably connected to the spirit of blackmasculinity ,” he claims. Sure, there are strong cultural associations btw hiphop and a certain flavor of black masculinity, but (a) this is not theuniversal, homogeneous “spirit” of black masculinity, and (b) ladies have beenthere from the first (Roxanne, what?), so hip hop is not “unbreakably”connected to black masculinity.

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

2011-12-26T13:28:00.000-05:00

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

As music critics and fanscompile their 2011 lists, there’s been a lot of reflection on the extent ofGaga’s and Beyoncé’s political/radical/feminist “cred.” Is Gaga really feminist? Is Bey reallyfeminist? Most responses seem tofall into one side or the other of an overly simplified binary: either theyare, or they aren’t. Onephenomenon 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 anumber of reasons. These reasons, which I’ll discuss in (relative) detailbelow, also help illuminate some other key issues/problems/questions relatingto race-gender politics and aesthetics both in Bey and Gaga’s work, and incontemporary pop music in general.

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

1. Theargument/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 completelyunanticipatable/uncontrollable ways.

2. This argumentfits too well with the stereotype that all the queers are white, and all blackpeople 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 tohave progressive sexual politics; it also erases black queers.

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

i. Some examples of this are:

1. Single Ladies,which I discuss here.

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

3. I’d love yourthoughts on other examples.

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

3. It isegregiously blind to race. I’ve listed some of the ways this argument fails toaccount 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 isimportant enough to deserve its own bullet point. Gaga has license to queerfemininity—to make her body monstrous, either through monster-drag orking-drag—because she is white. Inother words: her gender identity is not already qualified bynon-whiteness. In the hegemonic, mainstream eye, Beyoncé’s blackness alreadyqualifies her femininity. She often plays around with femininity byadopting stereotypically white feminine iconography, e.g., in “Why Don’tYou 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 justuncritically adopts normative het-fem identities/images. She just troublesfemininity most obviously through race—which is not to say that she’s not also troubling its heteronormativity. Ifrace and queerness are mutually intensifying, then Bey’s playing withfemininity via race is also an experimentation with its sexuality. So, forexample, 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 alwaysalready broken, Bey’s “Countdown,” which is about her long-termrelationship with a successful black man, who also happens to be the father ofher soon-to-be-delivered child, is actually pretty radical. If the homonormativity of whites isconditioned upon the always-already “queered” status of non-white/blacksexuality (i.e., it’s fundamentally, irreparably broken, black people can’tever maintain boring, white-bread hetero relations), then “Countdown’s”apparently square het story actually undermines white homonormativity.[i]

4. It privilegesthe visual content of videos and lyrical content of songs over the, uh, actualmusical content of songs. Musically, Gaga is much more traditional thanBeyoncé, who’s one of the most musically experimental pop artists on thecharts today. This musical “work” alters the meanings of the visual and lyricalcontent of their performances, so reading the visual and the lyrical inisolation from the musical gives us an incomplete, often mistakengloss.

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

b. I am continuallyshocked by otherwise intelligent and carefully-thinking critics and academicswho just cannot admit that Beyoncé’s work may be critical—they seem tohave some implicit biases that blind them to the possibility that commercialpop by a black female singer can be anything than conformist drivel. Throughoutmy work on this blog, and in more traditional academic venues, I’ve pointed outthe moments in Bey’s and others’ works that trouble dominant interpretive frameworksand 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 preventpeople from actually seeing the evidence that is quite clearly there.

[i] I wonder if the Beyoncé Knowles/Sasha Fierce splitisn’t also relevant here, and worth examining further. In interviews about “IAm…Sasha Fierce,” Bey indicated that she herself is pretty “boring”—square,“white-bread” even. She invented Fierce as a character or persona through whichto channel a more “extreme” performative identity/effect. So Bey might not atall be excessively sexual, excessively confrontational—she might just be, asTouré’s recent article suggests, the nicest little blonde girl ever. But thatdoesn’t sell when you’re a black female artist, because you’re always alreadyread through the controlling images of your excessive sexuality. So Bey inventsFierce to intervene in “misinterpretations” of her performances of her “self.”But she doesn’t use Fierce to facilly reproduce stereotypes—she uses thischaracter to exacerbate the misinterpretations, to make arguments adabsurdam 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

2011-12-22T19:25:00.000-05:00

I’m making my way throughAlexis Shotwell’s really well-written Knowing Otherwise, and I must sayI 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’sgenerally correct in its discussion of race, gender, and non-propositional or“implicit” knowledges. I agree that race and gender exist, ontologically, andwork, politically-materially, as forms of “implicit knowledge”—i.e., as bodily,affective, skill-based discourses that are either not propositional ornot-yet-propositional.

But, we do have somefundamental differences and disagreements. Some of our differences result fromour different backgrounds or approaches. I want to work through some of thosedifferences and disagreements because it helps clarify what I think is valuableabout Shotwell’s project, and what is distinctive and relevant about my own project.Some of our differences result from the backgrounds from which we approachthese 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 amusicologist as I am a philosopher. I think there are kinds of knowledges that are implicit tophilosophy but explicit in other epistemes. (E.g., experiencedmusicians will explicitly know things—like whether or not a note is intune, how precisely to use vibratio right here, etc.—that are both skill-basedand contingently and/or ontologically non-propositional.)The other differencelies in our theoretico-philosophical commitments, especially regarding aestheticsand politics. Shotwell’s chapter on aesthetics draws significantly on Marx andMarcuse—who are the objects of direct critique by my own preferred theorists,Rancière (who critiques Althusserian-style Marxism) and Foucault (who directlyrejects Marcusean notions of power/resistance/liberation). Like these radicalliberal political theorists, who think liberalism hasn’t made due on itspromises, Shotwell argues for an expanded, revised humanism. I, on the otherhand, reject liberal humanism, its ideals of authenticity, the overcoming ofalienation, etc., and argue instead for an anti-humanist critique ofliberalism. So, while we’re in a lot of agreement about race, gender, and theirrelations to non-propositional embodied knowledges, we approach this issue invery different ways and from seriously different starting points. Thisdifference in trajectory means that we generally agree, but don’t completelyagree: we approach each other very closely on some points, but this approachmeets the above asymtotes (the “explicit” character of artistic practice, theliberal humanism issue), so that our projects, while in the same generalgalaxy, are in different solar systems, so to speak. So, below, I will teaseout some of our points of convergence and divergency; in doing so, I will arguethat it’s important to think about art (not just “the aesthetic”).

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

1. Implict to philosophy

I want to take issue withShotwell’s use of the term “implicit”. I want to emphasize that I take her intentionto be as follows: In examining “implicit” knowledges, Shotwell is trying tocomplicate too-easy implicit/explicit binaries, and argue that conventionallypropositional knowledge is deeply intertwined with conventionallynon-propositional knowledge.[i] I agree withthat argument. However, I think that the way she frames her discussionof her intended project gets her into trouble. She argues that “we understandthings that cannot be or are not spoken, and we may suspect that this form ofunderstanding 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 orvisibility: “things that cannot be or are not spoken” are implicit. Though I take her as wanting to questionthe speakable/unspeakable binary, Shotwell uses this distinction to define whatcounts as “implicit,” and what counts as “explicit.”[ii]“Speakable knowledge,” she argues, “should not define our knowing” (38), becausethere exist “implicit,” non-propositionalized or non-propositionalizable waysof knowing. Shotwell consistently frames implicit knowledge in terms ofspeech and visibility. Here’s a list of some of the ways she does this:

· “We areinfluenced by common sense in all sorts of wordless ways” (33) “Whatmight be important that there be some component of people’s understanding that isnot in words?” (32)

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

· “interrogatingour unspoken conception of the world is to bring some of that conceptionto 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 thepoem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt’. Poetrychanges 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 beprimarily based in unquestioned assumptions, and therefore it may requireactive work to bring a prejudice into view.In order to see a prejudice, it mustcease to stand as a basic assumption” (16)

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

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

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

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

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

My point is this: “sensuousknowledge” is not some mysterious, non-rational, touchy-feely, squishy-bodilything. Some people work very, very hard and think lots and lots about “sensuousknowledge.” It is my experience that artists are deeply, explicitly awareof their sensuous knowledges, even ifthey do not manifest this awareness in words or images. A dancer isexplicitly aware of his or her body, its positions, movements, etc., but thisawareness 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 thisnon-viz/verbal awareness. Similarly, fluency in the diatonic Western scale isnot an implicit knowledge. It’s pretty explicit, especially topracticing musicians. It may be implicit to non-experts (e.g., your averagemusic-consuming public) in the same way that grammar and syntax are “implicit”in much everyday language use—I use the rules and structures without reflectingon them. But this just means that these modes of musical or verbal organizationare 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 examinethem. There are kinds of knowleges that are both explicit and non-propositional;they are just not explicit to philosophy.

So, in sum, I thinkShotwell’s use of the metaphors of speech and sight don’tadequately capture her intentions in theorizing forms of knowing that blurtraditional implicit/explicit or propositional/extra-propositional dichotomies.Metaphors taken from these more obviously sensuous forms ofknowing—music, dance, performance—are better suited to this task because unlikespeech and sight, which are generally experienced as “propositional” ways ofthinking/expressing, music, dance, and performance more often and moreobviously blur the implicit/explicit distinction Shotwell’s work, when atits best, attemps to critique (what she calls “heterodox” knowledge).

Before moving on, there’sone other difficulty I have with Shotwell’s framing of “implicit”: it’s not theform or type of knowledge that makes it “implicit”, but power that makessomething implicit. So certain types of knowledge are “implicit’ not because oftheir form (skill, ontological nonpropositionality, etc.) or location (body,habitus), but because of their situation in respect to hegemonicpower-knowledge formations. It is power (norms, hegemony) that has madenon-visible, non-verbal knowledge apparently less explicit than thevisual and the speakable. So yeah, I’m playing a Foucault card here, but I’mplaying 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 makessomething either implicit or explicit, BUT, in identifying four different formsor types of implicit knowledge, the text does encourage the viewthat certain types of knowledge are inherently, by virture of theirstructure/form/composition, implicit. Further, her constant referencing ofimplicit knowledge as “corporeal,” and “embodied” suggests that knowledgeslocated 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 asembodied is the notion that it is transmitted implicitly through a pedagogythat encodes practices in the body, thus rendering the practices it teachessignificantly inaccessible” (13). Here, it seems that knowledges are “significantly inaccessible” becausethey are “bodily.” But this is not the case: all knowledge is bodily, and weare alble to put some of this knowledge into conscious, verbal propositionswith great facility and precision. In fact, to artists, even theseextra-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 Ihear, make adjustments in my embouchure). These aesthetic/sensuous knowledgesare not inaccessible because they’re embodied; “implicit” knowledges areinaccessible because hegemony makes them so. The dominance of visuality andverbality in Western philosophy makes aural and kinesthetic knowledges moredifficulty to come by—only experts have the degree of fluency in sound andsensibility that most averagely-abled people have with the visual and theverbal.[iv]

I’mgoing to be more brief in discussing the next two points, as these are issueson which Shotwell and I simply disagree….and that’s OK. It just shows that ourprojects are different. I will argue my own position in this manuscript I’mworking 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 becritiquing traditional liberal humanism, I read her, especially in her use ofMarx and Marcuse, as offering a radical humanism. So, for example, while shesays she “will trouble these conceptions of harmony, full humanity, and fullfreedom” (49) that are used in traditional philosophical aesthetics (e.g.,Kant), she uses Marxian aesthetics to critique traditional aesthetics’ failureto 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 hasharmfully 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 [traditionalaesthetics] describes” (68). In this text, one of the main elements ofShotwell’s expanded or revised humanism is the commitment to overcomingalienation. A just world is one which “allows people to maintain anon-alienated individuality” (68). What is valuable about the aesthetic, aka“sensuous knowledge,” is that

itsobjectivity is not alienated. Sensuous expression is connected to—perhaps aprerequisite for—non-alienated species-being…Sensuous knowledge and activitymarks a reversal of the estrangement produced by capital and its kind ofobjectification. In this sense, the realm of sensuous ness holds tremendouspotential for working against the alienation of oppressive socialrelationships” (69).

I would argue thatcapitalism is not oppressive because it is alienating; rather, it’s oppressiveb/c it treats specific groups with increased susceptibility to vulnerabilityand violence. But that’s a point to be argued elsewhere. For now, I just wantto establish that SHotwell thinks alienation is a bad thing. Why is it bad? Forher, alienation is bad because it brings one out of relation with oneself andwith others.[vi]The opposite of alienation is “integration” and “intimate relation” (66). Shotwell’srevised humanism is “not centered on the ‘human’ simply conceived, but insteadas 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 adheresto a fundamentally humanist logic that privileges wholeness, coherence,intimacy and integration—“each point implies the whole.”

Insteadof humanism, I prefer models of power and selfhood/agency where alienationisn’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 aMarxist-Marcusean analysis of power and liberation. For example, she argues,with Marcuse, that “the aesthetic…manifests a non-repressive order” (5). I’mgoing to assume that Foucault’s critique of Marcuse—especially on this idea of“repression”—is well-known. I adopt a Rancierian-Foucaultian understanding ofpower and resistance. I followFoucault in rejecting Marcuse’s overly simplistic account of power as only orprimarily “repressive” (or alienating), and “liberation” as the main form ofresistance.[vii]Marx and Marcuse are radical liberals, b/c they maintain liberalism’s ideals while arguing it has notadequately 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 emphasizethat I find Shotwell’s project really interesting and valuable. We just havesome different fundamental commitments and approaches, so while we’re bothinterested 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 beactually quite different. While Shotwell stays well within philosophy(theorizing what is implicit to philosophy, theorizing through the visual andthe verbal) and well within humanism, I step outside philosophy (to musicology,theorizing through sound) and well outside humanism.

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

[ii] One thing I need to consider more carefully: It’s notthe speaking, saying, or hearing of something that makes it explicit, but thecharacter 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 ispropositionally knowable as what is visible or verbalizable? Is it becausesight and speech are the two primary forms of propositional knowledge that weWesterners have developed? Even if speech isn’t fully reducible topropositional knowledge (e.g., it has poetic/literary effects), and sight isn’texactly identitical to verbal-propositional knowledge, it could still be thecase that sight and speech are analogous enough to propositional knowledge thatthey don’t really challenge or offer alternatives to it.

[iv] I also wonder if this focus on speech and sight isthe result of Shotwell’s perspective as a philosopher. It isphilosophers who primarily conceive of knowledge as propositional. It isphilosophers who frame propositional knowledge as what can be put into languageand spoken, just as it is philosophers who frame knowledge in terms of sightand vision. I think artists and art educators might have a differentperspective on knowledge, and how to frame the implicit/explict distinction.Before I was a philosophy major, I studied music education—I was learning howto teach people ontologically nonpropositionalizable practical skills, like howto sightsing, or how to play the oboe. There wasn’t this sense of “OH, this isso 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’tdifficult to “understand.”

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

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

[vii] I also critique the connection between realism andliberalism. 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 magicalrealism, because of the alienating structures of capitalist production,within the world as it conventionally appears the realist cannot imagineanother world. Turning into the world of the aesthetic dimension, a newrealism comes forth” (54. Marcuse is still liberal, because he still viewspower as primarily repressive, and thinks we need to liberate ourselves fromthat power by having a more accurate, more correct realism…not thedistortion of the performance principle. He thinks the performance principledistorts reality; the aesthetic dimension corrects for this distortion byliberating us from the performance principle. I, on the other hand, begin fromdistortion, undoing, etc., and want to think of “the aesthetic” or “thesensible” as departures from liberalism’s demand for realism.

Thoughts on "Xenomania" (or, Orientialism 2.0)

2011-12-03T19:06:00.001-05:00

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

The question Reynold’sarticle 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 wewanted to be more strictly political-economical about it, maybe we could alsosay this is “informational Orientialism” vs. “industrial Orientialism”?)

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

“Forthe exotic beat-freaks and the global street pop enthusiasts alike, somethingof the thrill of the hunt has been restored, it’s just that the safari nowtakes you through the deeper recesses of YouTube or the hinterlands of theweb, rather than to an out-of-the-way record store or a street market in somedodgy neighborhood.”

So at some level Reynold’sessay implies that xenomania is Orientialism + the internet. What the internetadds to regular old Orientialism is really what it takes away—physicaldistance. According to Reynolds,the internet collapses geographic space, allowing Western hipsters unrestrictedaccess to any sound, anywhere.

“Butthe Internet’s effect on space has been just as profound. A new generation oflisteners and musicians is emerging whose consciousness is post-geographical aswell as post-historical. There’s a thirst for fresh musical stimuli thatslips easily past geographical borders and cultural boundaries.”

But the point is that thismusic might circulate, as transnational capital, past geographical borders, butit reaffirms cultural boundaries.

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

First, Reynolds. I want tohone in on two terms he uses “nomadic” and “foreign.” Reynolds gives us thefollowing equation: “Infinite choice + infinitesimal cost = nomadic eclecticism as thedefault 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 fromthe “right” countries), to say nothing of cash, to be genuinely “nomadic.” Asmany feminist theorists have pointed out, this nomadic cosmopolitan ideal it isbad 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.” Whensubaltern subjects—either in the colony or in the metropole (or in theFTZ)—practice this sort of sampling, it’s called “migration” or “illegalimmigration” 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” thanWestern pop music (in the same way that the so-called “underdeveloped” world isthought to be less “advanced” than post-industrial liberal democracies). Inorder for this music to make Western hipsters feel/seem “special,” its originalcontexts and performers/audiences need tostay distant (and thus different, exotic, and primitive.)[i] So while geographic space may seemto be collapsed for Western “nomadic” subjects, it is not actuallycollapsed—it is only the music that gets to travel transnationally, notits indigenous composers, performers, and fans—they have to stay “different” (both geographically andtemporally, i.e., as “primitive” and “undeveloped”) so that the Westernhipster can consume their difference.[ii]

In fact, the reification of cultural difference is anecessary condition for this sort of “xeomaniacal” appropriation. ThoughReynolds might claim that “nothing is foreign in an internet age”—maybe no thingis “foreign,” insofar as it can be imported and domesticated. However, therestill need to be foreign cultures and foreign people—somebodystill has to manifest/represent “Third World difference” in order that what is“domesticated” appears to be a recent addition (and not native orlong-integrated into the culture). Even in its domestication, it has to maintain the veneer of “Third-Worlddifference.” Regular readers of this blog might suspect that I’m arguing that“xenomania” is a manifestation of what Shannon WInnubst calls “the biopoliticsof cool,” and what I call “postmillennial black hipness.” This suspicion iscorrect. Winnubst’s concept is a more general one that covers a range ofphenomena across contexts; my concept is more specifically focused on popularmusic. I’ve discussed the both the biopolitics of cool and its relation topostmillennial 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’ musicalpreferences.

One thing that is new to xenomania is its function inindicating the changed status of “blackness” in postmillennial Western culturalvernaculars. 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 thoroughlyco-opted that it’s just not different enough anymore.

Traditionally,white hipsters (e.g. Norman Mailer, in his “White Negro” essay) aredissatisfied with normative bourgeois life, and try to distinguish themselvesfrom normal bourgeois whites by appropriating and domesticating stereotypicalblackness (often in the form of stereotypical black masculinity). White hipsters used their ability todomesticate (stereotypical) blackness as evidence of their exceptionalism vis-à-visnormative bourgeois whiteness, that is, as evidence of their avant-gardestatus. Traditionally, white musicians and music fans in the US and the UKtreated stereotypical blackness as “the unknown that used to be the motordriving the vanguard sectors of Western pop” (Reynolds). So Reynolds is correctthat the old “unknown” is all-too-known, and that the old sources ofinspiration aren’t that inspiring anymore, because they’ve been thoroughlyco-opted. So what is a white hipster to do, now that stereotypical blackness isexhausted? Turn to “Third-World” difference instead. This is where the internetcomes 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 recordstore, postmillennial hipsters have it easier, because they don’t actually haveto transgress any physical boundaries to hear “exotic” music. Reynolds writes,

Ifour own rock and pop traditions seem stagnant and stalled, their forward motionobstructed by the sheer accumulation of glorious history, it could be that oneway to escape the dead end is to step sideways. Get yourself outside theWestern narrative altogether and explore all the elsewheres now accessible likenever before.

This is all true—he’scorrectly identified the logic of hipness, and the fact that the internet makesold modes of appropriation easier. By overlooking the changing status/role ofblackness (well, by overlooking race in general), Reynolds mistakenly identifieswhat is new about xenomania. The logic isn’t new—it’s as old asanything: orientialism, white hipness, “Love & Theft,” etc. Xenomania is anew 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 andhelpful about Reynold’s notion of “xenomania.” But you can’t get at thosewithout thinking about race, “Third-World difference,” and Orientialism.

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

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

“Countdown”: Beyoncé’s Feminist Reversal of the “Catalog Song”

2011-11-26T19:41:00.001-05:00

In this post I argue thatBeyonce’s “Countdown”—both as a song and as a video—critiques a canonical, butquite misogynist, style of song.

The “catalog song” is acenturies-old format: a dude ticks off a list of all the women he has seduced.Mozart’s Don Giovanni does this in what is famously called “The Catalog Aria”:here, Don Juan’s servant runs down the list he’s kept of all the women hismaster has bedded—over a thousand (“mille e tre,” or 1,003) in Spain alone!More recently, Lloyd and Lil Wayne seduce “Girls Around The World.” YoungMoney”s (Weezy et al) “Every Girl” is a more standard catalog song, because itenumerates each and every sort of woman the rappers have, can, or desire to havesex with.

“I like a long-haired thickredbone,” says Weezy, as women in various “ethnic” costumes emerge from hislimo. The chorus is even less specific: “We like her, and we like her too”—it’sas though any and every woman will do. I mean, Weezy does say “I wish I couldfuck every girl in the world.” The video particularly exoticizes mixed- andambiguously-raced women (e.g., the “Blackanese” woman identified around 1:53).They also catalog women by sexuality, occupation, and even credit score!

Calvin Harris’s “I Get AllThe Girls” is another example of a classic catalog song. Watch the videocarefully, because Beyoncé’s video will make specific reference to it. http://youtu.be/Q-tAlG5iJ4Y (Sorry, Icouldn’t find a version that allowed embedding).

Note the use of bright, boldcolored leotards to distinguish all the different “types” of girls Harris gets.Note also the way the dancers put their hand on their abdomens to represent the“carrying a little bit of weight girls.”

What all these traditionalcatalog songs have in common is they compile a list of women. They “count up” women as a way ofreflecting positively on the accomplishment of the male singers. In thisaccounting, women are the instruments by which men demonstrate theirmasculinity, or, as we see in the Young Money video, by which they create andreaffirm homosocial bonds among men (or, to riff on Andy Samberg and JustinTimberlake, “It’s not gay if it’s a three- or four- orevery-girl-in-the-world-way”).

Beyoncé’s“Countdown,” by counting down rather than up, reverses thelogic of the catalog narrative. The countdown itself reads: "My babyis a ten / We dressing to the nine / He pick me up at eight / Make me feel solucky seven / He kiss me in his six / We be making love in five / Still the oneI do this four / I’m trying to make a three / From that two / He still the one."

Ifyou listen to the content of the lyrics, she uses the “countdown” to describethe various ways she and her “boo” have a committed, non-instrumentalrelationship. And, for all the song’s focus on Beyoncé’s male partner, sheconstantly returns to the lyric “If you leave me you’re out of your mind.” Soshe’s not talking about her BF to boost her own self-worth, or our perceptionsof her worth, femininity, etc. In fact, she gives us a strikingly even-handeddepiction of a seemingly egalitarian relationship. First, she says “There's upsand downs in this love/Got a lot to learn in this love/Through the good and thebad, still got love.” This is not idealized, fairy-tale romance; rather, it’sthe frank assessment of someone who’s been in a decade-long relationship. Then,later in the song, Beyoncé states that “Yup, I put it on him, it ain't nothingthat I can't do/Yup, I buy my own, if he deserve it, buy his shit too.”Reminding us of her financial independence, Beyoncé clarifies that she’s withthis man because she wants to be, not because she has to be; infact, she suggests that interdependence isn’t necessarily a bad thing. She’sneither fully dependent, nor fully independent of her male partner. They’re,uh, partners. They rely on one another and put up with one another’s shit. Andif you still are so excited about this person want to write a song about himafter you’ve been dealing with his shit for ten years, y’all must really have astrong relationship—and that itself is quite an accomplishment. Long-termrelationships require work. In fact, it’s probably harder to stay withone person for a decade than it is to sleep with over a thousand people in afew months. So, the song’s lyrics and its “hook’ (the countdown itself) reversehe traditional male cataloging of female conquests. Here, we have Beyoncécounting down all the often complicated reasons why she loves her partner often years.

Imentioned earlier that the video also critiques Harris’s catalogue of “all thegirls” he gets. Bey’s video uses the same bright color palette to differentiateamong leotard-wearing female dancers. However, while Harris’s video hasplatoons of female dancers (who are actually pretty white and East Asian…) donthis “rainbow” of colors, “Countdown” positions Beyoncé as the wearer ofthe entire spectrum of colors—this points to her internal complexity.She might be in love and interdependent with this dude, but this doesn’tprevent her from being a complex, contradictory, fully-realized subject. And,in this video, she does indeed “carry a bit of weight”—her increasingly large“baby bump” is featured throughout the video. In the same way that she refusesreduction to “wife” or “girlfriend,” Beyoncé’s working through her pregnancy(she released an album, several videos, and performed at the MTV VMAs) refutesattempts to reduce her to “mother.” In fact, you can’t reduce her to any onerole, any one “type”: she’s not just a black girl, or a “carry a bit of weight”girl, or a thick girl, or a pretty girl, or a southern girl, or a girl fromTexas, or whatever. And this reduction to “type” is what makes traditionalcataloguing possible—women aren’t valued for their individuated “use value,”but only as a (stereo)type.

So,there are a number of ways “Countdown” critiques traditional “catalog” songs:(1) by counting down rather than up, it reverses the logic; (2) by focusing onmature, long-term, egalitarian relationships; (3) by centering a woman’sperspective; (4) by enumerating the internal complexity of female subjectivityrather than listing flat, undeveloped female stereotypes. I know this song hasgotten a lot of critical acclaim for its innovative composition, but we alsoneed to recognize its—and Beyoncé’s—musicological and feminist innovations,too.

Sovereign Harmony and Biopolitical Frequency: Or, what Attali and LMFAO can teach us about neoliberalism

2011-11-15T19:48:00.001-05:00

“Everymajor social rupture has been preceded by an essential mutation in the codes ofmusic, in its mode of audition, and in its economy” (Attali, Noise 10).[1]

So I’ve been thinking moreabout this idea of “transmission,” and I’ve come to the following question: If,as people like Rancière and Attali assert, liberal/sovereign/juridical regimesidealize the notion of “harmony,” is “transmission” or “frequency” aparticularly neoliberal/biopolitical ideal or paradigm? This question issomewhat Attali-an itself, and I want to attempt an Attali-esque response. By“Attali-an,” I mean that the question follows Jacques Attali’s claim in theepigraph, i.e., that we can read the “codes of society” (norms, epistemes,modes of power, hegemonies, etc.) in the “codes of music” (organization,epistemology, political economy, aesthetics).[2]“The code of music,” heargues, “simulates the accepted rules of society” (Attali 29). So here I want to think about “harmony” and“transmission” as both modes of social organization, and modes of musicalorganization. I’m trying out theargument that harmony:liberalism::transmission:neoliberal biopolitics (emphasison “trying out”—I’m not entirely sure it works. But it’s worth considering).

Back to the question: First,what do I mean by “idealizing the notion of ‘harmony’”? I’m thinking of harmonyas a mode of measurement or distribution. A “harmonic” distribution is oneconcerned with balance: everything is in its right place. These placesmight not be “equal,” but everything is in the place appropriate to it: peoplewith copper in their soul do menial labor, and people with gold in their soulare philosopher kings, for example. Plato explicitly calls this “harmony”—e.g.,in Eryximachus’s speech in the Symposium. Rancière calls this a“metapolitical” distribution of sensibility. In music, we might think of thosearguments over temperament as fitting this notion of “harmony.” The argumentsover temperament were really about how best to distribute or divide the octaveinto whole- and half-steps for a total of 12 pitches. Jacques Attali alsoexplicitly identifies “harmony” as a paradigm for classical liberal politicalphilosophy. “The entirehistory of tonal music, like that of classical political economy, amounts to anattempt to make people believe in…the faith that there is harmony in order”(Attali 46). This idea of order is one of “equilibrium” (Attali 59).Equilibrium is not, importantly, mathematical equality. Equilibrium is nottreating everyone the same: it is putting everyone and everything inhierarchical order.[3]This hierarchical order positions apparently “different” phenomena in relationto the central, hegemonic term (i.e., tonality organizes all pitchesfunctionally/hierarchically in relation to the tonic). As Attali explains:

An ideology of scientific harmony thusimposes itself, the mask of a hierarchical organization from which dissonances(conflicts and struggles) are forbidden, unless they are merely marginal andhighlight the quality of the channeling order” (Attali 61).

As inpolitical liberalism, difference is tolerated if and only if it can beassimilated or expressed in terms of the centered, controlling, hegemonic term.So, racial difference is “OK” as long as its diversity doesn’t decenterwhiteness, and in fact serves whiteness and white people. So in the same waythat liberal multiculturalism claims to be “harmony between divergentinterests,” (Attali, 65), but is actually completely intolerant to actualdifference, “harmonic” regimes generally accept only that which can be mappedhierarchically in relation to the centered/hegemonic term. It is a“combinatorics” (Attali 65) that can only “combine” that which has already beenplaced in terms of the “common denominator.”

Interestingly,Attali notes that “harmony” eventually “gives way to statistics,macroeconomics, and probability” (65). An economist in the Mitterandadministration, Attali explains this new form of organization, administration,and analysis not in the political terms of liberalism, but in economicterms. So, while Foucault focuses on thekind of power manifested in the use statistics and the human sciences toadminister populations, Attali focuses directly on the instruments used to perform this administration. He describes “theprobalist transcending of combinatorics,” (83), i.e., the neoliberal sublationof classical liberal “harmony.” In this new actuarial regime of probability andstatistics, “power establish[es], on the basis of a technocratic language, amore efficient channelization of the productions of the imaginary forming theelements of a code of cybernetic repetition, a society without signification—arepetitive society” (Attali, 83). Statistics are used to “cut the fat,” the“fat” here being represented content. Power no longer has to produce spectacle(as in sovereignty), nor does it have to concern itself with producing “truths”for us to discover about ourselves (as in discipline). Foregoing mediationthrough content, power can get straight down to the business of reproducing itsformal relations, i.e., its structural and institutional networks.

I think thatthe regime Attali labels “repetition” is actually a regime of biopoliticaladministration. It’s not the regime of mechanical reproduction, but the orderof the bell curve and the elimination of risk/aleatory instances. So, theelimination of randomness may make it seem like everything is merely aclone or repetition of everything else, but what Attali means by “repetition”is not what we commonly think of as “repetition” (copying, looping, etc.).Attali’s not actually talking about mass production; he’s talking aboutbiopolitics. What he means by “repetition” is “the existence of anall-encompassing truth, of a society that desires to make its simple management the matrix of its meaning…the statistical organization of repetition”(Attali 113/4; emphasis mine). Attalian repetition is not copying; it’s statisticalmanagement. But what do statistics“manage”? Outliers, whatever can’t be controlled for, whatever breaks thecurve—what Foucaultians call “aleatory events.” “the administrator in arepetitive society” is tasked with “managing chance” (Attali 114). Of course,Attali connects this “management of chance” to mid-century avant-gardecomposers, like Glass (whom he cites) and Cage. Though the latter explicitlyfocused his work on chance and aleatory processes, Attali notes that “even ifin appearance everything is a possibility for him, on average his behaviorobeys specifiable, abstract, ineluctable functional laws” (115). For example,his I Ching pieces will never include a compositional event or structurenot already laid out by the matrix Cage made for the piece.[4]Attali explains:

Insteadof toying with the limited nomenclature of the harmonic grid, he outlinesprocesses of composition, experiments with the arrangement of free sounds…instrumentsno longer serve to produce the desired sound forms, conceived in thought beforewritten down, but to monitor unexpectedforms” (Attali 115; emphasis mine).

This“monitoring unexpected forms” sounds a lot like what Foucault identifies as thebiopolitical management of risk. Attali even connects this form of statisticalmanagement of the aleatory to the management of life (i.e., to biopolitics as“the power over life” or the optimization of life for some, and the leaving ofothers to die). In the regime of “repetition,”

Sciencewould no longer be the study of conflicts between representations, but ratherthe analysis of processes of repetition.After music, the biological sciences were the first to tackle this problem; thestudy of the conditions of thereplication of life has led to a new scientific paradigm which, as we willsee, goes to the essence of the problems surrounding Western technology’stransition from representation to repetition. Biology replaces mechanics”(Attali 89).

The study ofrepresentations is the will to truth—the confessional logic that aims to findthe “truth” of one’s desire, identity, etc. The analysis of repetition, on theother hand, studies “the conditions of the replication of life,” or, in moreFoucaultian terms, how a population reproduces itself. The shift from mechanics to biology is the shift from asking“How do things work?” to “What are the conditions of life itself? How does lifemake more life?” In biopolitics, power takes life as its object; thus, sciencetoo must take life as its object. Foucault is well-known for noticing this.Attali also notes this same shift: from spectacle to relations,from truth to statistical organization, from prohibition and discipline toadministration, from punishment to the management of risk. What Attalicontributes to the theorization of biopolitics is this: his explanation of theshift from sovereignty and panopticism to superpanopticism in terms of changingparadigms of musical organization,and his musical examples are clear and productive models for theorizinghow biopolitical administration relates to gender, sexuality, and race—in fact,more clear than most of the models commonly used by feminist, queer, andcritical race theorists.

So, now, I want to explain “harmony” to “frequency” as systems ofmusical organization. The differences between the two epistemes are evident inthe difference between LMFAO’s compositional practices and traditional, tonalpopular song structures. Traditional pop songs use tonal harmony to create ateleological narrative-like structure where exposition leads to rising action,climax, and denoument/resolution. The song progresses through lots of chordchanges; these chord changes build tension, which is then released at the “bighit”. Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You” displays this nicely.

2:16-2:34 is a microcosm of the song’s entire harmonic development.There is a slow build to a climax, which is represented by the full-on flaresfrom the floodlights in the background. In fact, you can literally seethe harmonic development in the use of these light banks. The verses don’t usethe lights at all—they are set in various domestic scenes; the verses functiononly to develop the harmonic narrative. The lights make their first appearancesin the choruses, which are sort of mini-climaxes, each failing to achieve fullresolution, frustrating our desire for resolution, and thus making us crave iteven more intensely. The 2:16-2:34 “microcosm” occurs in the song’s break, andthis is the uber-climax: there’s the hit, which propels us to that moment offull resolution at the end of the song (the “you” at 3:26). Here, the lightsflare at their greatest intensity, so we know this is the “money shot,” atleast harmonically speaking. The point in rehearsing this example is to showhow in traditional pop song structures, harmonic progressions provide the“energy” or “drive” that gives the song a sense of forward motion. Harmony isused to build tension and to pleasurably relase the tension at the song’s “bighit.”

LMFAO don’t use harmonic development to build tension. There is somevery basic reliance on tonal functions (e.g., sol-do relationships), but themain tension in the song is built and released through what Daniel Barrow hascalled “The Soar,”[5]and which I have written about here. Theyuse rhythmic and timbral intensities to build and release tension, topropel the song forward toward its “money shot.” Let’s consider how they userhythmic and timbral intensities to structure their two recent singles, “PartyRock Anthem” and “Sexy and I Know It”.

“Party Rock Anthem” is probably their most well-known track, so I’llstart with it:

The music starts at 1:25 witha drum track. At 1:40, some treble synths come in. The drum loop and the synthloop, along with another loop introduced in the first verse, are the basis forthe entire song; the repetition of these elements (and not the progressionamong chords) gives it its structure. The intro is a mini-build to the firstverse. The song starts with a drum track, and then shifts to a synth loop; at1:54, they add vocals to the synth loop. At 2:09, they repeat from 1:54, butthis time with a clap track. At 2:13, they add a synth sound that “soars”upward in pitch, sort of like the sound of a plane taking off. This is wherethe main build begins. We build to 2:22, at which point there is a pause, andthen the main hit at 2:23, which is the start of the first verse. Here newlyrics and a new synth loop are introduced, and the drum track from thebeginning returns. This build to the first verse is achieved by increasingtimbral (the plane-launch synth) and rhythmic (handclap) intensity. The hititself is marked by a change in timbre, melody, and rhythm. This same strategyis used in the build to the main climax in the break. For the sake of brevity,I’ll break this down into bullet points:

3:10-3:25 first repetition of chorus—this establishesthe “base” from which the big build launches, or intensity = 0

3:25-3;40 second repetition of chorus—repetition effectsa slight sense of tension, but not a lot

3:40 break

3:40-3:49 tworepetitions of main melodic motive (in the treble synth) at “low” pitch

3:49-3:56 tworepetitions of main melodic motive at higher pitch—both repetition and raise inpitch increases intensity/builds tension; “shuffilin, shuffilin” vocal at endof last phrase creates sense of “incomplete” resolution, which also buildstension

3:56-4:10 repetitionof 3:40-3:56—repetition builds more tension

4:11 shiftin instrumentals, entrance of male vocals. The inst. track is the basis onwhich the big “soar” happens

4:11-4:18 rappinga la the verses before 3:10, antecedent phrase to 4:18-25

4:18-4:25 rappinga la verses, consequent phrase to 4:11-18, but with addition of theinstrumentals that will be used in the big build; this is more or less the “pivot”phrase into the big “soar”

Build really starts at 4:25,when the female vocals enter, along with hand claps.

4:25-4:33 firstrepetition of female vocals (two repetitions of the same line, “get up get downput your hands up to the sound,” each repetition coinciding with the mainmelodic motive in the synth); also, introduction of handclaps on each beat. Basicrate of repetition and intensity is established (e.g., quarter notes).

4:33-4:41 secondrepetition of female vocals, this time with a bass drum hit at the beginning ofevery other measure in the antecedent phrase; the consequent phrase doubletimesthe “put your hands up to the sound”. SO, intensity is built rhythmically byupping the number of repetitions in a given amount of time.

4:41-4:47 doubletimes “get up, get up” in vocals, alsoadds descant synth from 3:40; adds ascending mid-voice synth in consequentphrase

4:47-4:55 this is the real build, the “soar” so tospeak. There is:

· thecontinuation of the pitch and volume crechendo in that ascending synth from theprevious section

· theexponential double-timing of the snare synth: eightnotes, to sixteenths, tothirty-secnds, to a roll

· repeated“woo”s on the quarter notes

· continuationof the main high-pitched synth hook, but bled “into the red”

4:55 climax

anddeflation-- that ascending synth now descends; repetitions happen, but elements/layerseither stay the same or drop out, rather than being added; distance introducedbetween repetitions rather than shortened.

Their song “Sexy and I KnowIt” uses the same strategy to build and climax, only this time the climaxhappens much earlier in the track:

0:30-0:36 first repetition of chorus, withantecedent and consequent phrases

0:37-0:43 second repetition

0:44-0:50 beginning of build; introduction ofeight-note snares, and in last

few seconds,the synth hook is distorted a little, and a sort of “air” or “static” sound isintroduced, which is carried over into:

0:51-0:54, where the snares go into 16thnotes, andpitches/sound quality of

melodic elements pushed further into red

0:55-0:57 vocals repeat short line “know it, knowit”

0:58-10:59 pause,statement of lyrical hook “I’m sexy and I know it<’ after which is the main“hit,” the climax (something similar happens at 1:43)

Both of these tracks “tweak” and modify the timbre, both of specificsynth sounds and by changing among different synth sounds. They layer more andmore sounds on top of one another, and they intensify rhythms and therepetition of phrases in the lyrics. They build tension by increasing the“intensity” of timbres, rhythms, and repetitions, bringing these to anasymtope, dropping everything into a moment of silence, and then resolvingeverything with a big “hit.” This is not “development” to climax, but asymptoticintensification. As composers and producers, LMFAO rely on a paradigm of“frequency,” i.e., of “intensification or de-intensification.” This paradigmmeasures or “register[s] larger or smaller numbers of events in a given time”(Puar, Terrorist Assemblages xxi).[6] Instead of progressingthrough hierarchically-organized functions (i.e., chords), LMFAO organize theirsong using techniques whereby “relationships between speed (how fast or slowtime feels) pace (thetempo, rate, or intervals of registering events within time), and duration (thelength of time within which these events are registered) alter or are altered”(Puar xxi). I’m citing from Jasbir Puar’s discussion of superpanoptic“assemblages” because I want to make absolutely clear the parallels betweenLMFAO’s style of musical organization and her understanding of the organizationof race and sexuality as assemblages. If assemblages are characteristically“superpanoptic” because they are grounded in biopolitical regimes of“frequencies” and “intensifications,” and if LMFAO’s compositional strategies aregrounded in the very same notions of “frequency” and “intensity,” then itfollows that these compositional strategies are themselves characteristicallysuperpanoptic. Or, more simply: “the soar”—the use of rhythmic and timbralintensity to build a song’s arc—is part of the broader “biopolitical” episteme.

I analyze music to point out the key features of “harmony” and“frequency” as regimes of power or political organization. Listening to themplay out as systems of musical organization clarifies, IMHO, how exactly theywork, and are distinct, as regimes of power-knowledge. Here is a reallyunder-developed list of some things this harmony/frequency distinction helps usdo/theorize/understand:

1       Frequencydoesn’t need hierarchies, but harmony does.
2.    Limitingagent or type of relationship structure:
a.   Inharmony, the hierarchy is the limiting agent: everything is arrangedhierarchically around the tonic, which is the “centered” or “hegemonic” term,the centripetal point or common denominator in terms of which everything isexpressed. So, hierarchy is the form relationships take in “harmonic” orders.
b.   Infrequency, signals limit other signals. This is how analog synths work. This ishow digital synths work (e.g., the signal from the trackpad, and also thelimits of the trackpad, determine the range of alterations/effects that can beperformed to a pitch, loop, etc.). There is not necessarily one central signal.So, the relationships are more obviously “networked.”
                                         i.    But you can’t do anything that’s noton the sine wave/bell curve. The other limit is the literal mathematical limit:the asymtope. You can take the cowbell or handclap track and doubletime,quadrupletime, octuple time, whatever time it, following Zeno’s paradox down tothe mathematical limit. SO, relationships can approach, but never reach zero.Perhaps this is a way of expressing the idea that one is never outside orwithout power.
3     20^thcentury music is all about management of the aleatory.
a.   Cageand chance.
b.   Tweakingand modulation as management of deviance: Cage’sprepared pianos, Moog’s synthesizers, Flash’s scratching, Korg’s KAOS pads,Cher’s and T-Pain’s AutoTuning, etc. So its not about achieving balanceaccording to one measure/scale, but of producing acceptable, comprehensible“deviances” from whatever norm one is referencing (re: pitch, timbre, voiceleading, etc.).
c.   IMHOShannon Winnubsts’ work on the biopolitics of cool works out this idea of “acceptabledeviances.” To be “cool” one needs to be just deviant enough to be avant-garde,but not too deviant (i.e., not kooky or weird).
4 Conditionsof replication:
a.   millennialand post-millennial music technology, IP law, and industry practices are allabout the management and replication of data/data profiles.
b.   Ithink we also need to think about the story in the “Party Rock” video—it’sbased on zombie narratives (Walking Dead, 28 Days Later), and turns on the ideathat a song’s hook can “infect” people like a virus, turning everyone into “shufflin”drones (sorta like Thriller, in a way). So there’s something about “infection”to be theorized—Puar does some of this with her idea of “contagion.”
5    Valuejudgments (aesthetics, ethics):
a.   Sothe fine art/craft distinction is a hierarchical one, as is the serious/popone. This is a “harmonic” model of aesthetic judgment.
b.   Howwould we make aesthetic judgments about “intensities”? Or “frequencies”? Do weneed to think in terms of muting and intensification? In terms of degree ofmodulation? Is this perhaps what theorists of “remix culture” are trying to getat?

SOOO, yeah,that’s a LOT of stuff I just threw at you. It’s all very, VERY ROUGH. I need tothink through all this a lot more carefully, and if you have any thoughts orcomments, I’d really appreciate them! I have the sense I may be on tosomething, but then I may well not be.

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=OHe7AAAAIAAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

[2] By reading Attaliwith/through Foucault, I’m arguing that perhaps there’s more to Attali thanothers, such as Steven Shaviro, suggest: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=397

[3] “Difference is theprinciple for order” (Attali 62)

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Changes

[5] http://thequietus.com/articles/06073-a-plague-of-soars-warps-in-the-fabric-of-pop

[6]http://books.google.com/books?id=_v8tbxwv7y0C&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Come to my talk in Charlotte on Tuesday November 8th!

2011-11-02T17:14:00.001-04:00

Tuesday November 8th I'll be giving a talk about my book, The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music, as part of UNC Charlotte's "Personally Speaking" series. It will take place at the new Uptown Campus at 9th and Brevard (by the Breakfast Club).

I will start off by using my discussion of Joe Calderone's performance at the VMAs to illustrate the interrelationships among gender, race, and music that I discuss in the book. Then, I'll talk about the "shared logic" enlightenment philosophers attributed to gender, race, and music, and how this shared logic facilitates the framing of aesthetic judgments about music in raced and gendered terms. Finally, I will argue that our disgust at pop music is actually disgust at femininity (and not at any objective property of a song or genre), and that we--especially we NPR listening, indie rock loving white liberals--have an ethical obligation to question our assumptions that pop music is bad, that commercialization is bad, and that only "independent" and/or "difficult" music has aesthetic and/or political value.

It starts at 6pm with a reception; my talk is at 6:30, and there's another reception after my talk. If you are in Charlotte, I would love to see you there!

From Identity to Profile: Superpanopticism, Race as Technology, and hopefully some clarification for my transnational feminism class

2011-11-01T16:21:00.000-04:00

For the past two weeks, my transnational feminism class has been working our way through Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. We've only begun to scratch the surface of this text, and I think many of felt things got more complicated, not more clear, the more we worked. So, to help bring what I hope is at least a modicum of clarity to our discussions, I decided to post a section from my manuscript-in-progress which directly deals with Puar's concept of "profile" and its relation to superpanopticism/biopolitical administration.

I want to again emphasize that this a work in progress. :)

Superpanopticism is not interested in individualsubjects as such, but in populations, in aggregates. Without much of aninvestment in individualized and individuated subjects, superpanopticism has littleuse for identities—it does not needto make inferences about the qualities and capacities of subjects, which is how social identities work. Rather,superpanopticism needs to survey, monitor, and adjust averages across a population or a group. Its profilingstrategies use race, gender, and sexuality as technologies. Specifically, these technologies distribute state and“institutional support,” doling out resources so that averages can bemaintained and aleatory, statistically deviant “events” can be minimized. Thosefitting some profiles are incited to live, and others, who fit differentprofiles, are left to die. Puar thus develops a concept of “the profile” as asuperpanoptic alternative to juridical and disciplinary/panoptic notions of“identity.” In this section, I will explain Puar’s concept of “profile” bycomparing it to Falguni Sheth’s concept of race-as-technology. I will thenconnect the prfile to Puar’s notion of “assemblage” in order to show how Puardevelops her case for the need to theorize beyond the visual.

Reflectiveof their shared debt to (and criticism of) Foucault, Puar’s conception of raceis similar in many ways to philosopher Falguni Sheth’s. Sheth argues that raceis not (just) a “what”—an identity—but (more importantly) a “how”—a technology.As Sheth explains, in shifting the question from what race is to what it does,

race is no longerdescriptive, but causal: it facilitates and produces certain relationshipsbetween individuals, between groups, and between political subjects andsovereign power. The function ofrace, then, is similar to the function of technology: Technology, commonlyconsidered as equipment, facilitates the production of certain ‘goods’…racebecomes an instrument that produces certain political and social outcomes thatare needed to cohere society” (Sheth, 22).

Asa technology, race (or gender, or sexuality) is more than a property of bodies;it is a system for organizing society. For example, the popularization of theautomobile significantly shaped post-WWII urban development in the UnitedStates. The car made certain kinds of relationships among individuals andgroups easier to establish and maintain. It also encouraged the use of thedriver’s license as a near mandatory form of individual identification, andencourages specific relationships between individuals and the state. As atechnology like the car, race encourages and discourages certain kinds ofrelationships among individuals and groups, and among individuals, groups, andthe state. Race is used to dole out exposure to environmental hazards,likelihood (and severity) of encounters with law enforcement, reproductiveautonomy, even perceived queerness. To perform this distributive function, racecan’t be tethered to human bodies—it needs to be perceived in non-human things,like locations, clothing, musical styles, or, as I have argued elsewhere, evendog breeds. Thus, as Puar argues, “the terms of whiteness,” for example,“cannot remain solely in the realm of racial identification or phenotype”(200). Like Sheth, Puar thinks that race is not just a visible, substantiveproperty of bodies. “Race and sex,” Puar argues, “are to be increasinglythought outside the parameters of identity, as assemblages, as events” (211). Somethinghappens in and/or through an event(even in the most general, least technical sense of the term).[1]As an assemblage or event, race has a function, it does something.[2]According to Puar, race and sex can, accomplish, among other ends, “renderbodies transparent or opaque, secure or insecure, risky or at risk,risk-enabled or risk-disabled, the living or the dead” (160). In other words,Puar thinks race and sex are, to use Sheth’s words “instruments that producecertain political and social outcomes that are needed to cohere society.” Iwill return to the idea of assemblage later in this section. For now, it’ssufficient to note that Puar and Sheth eschew the visible-social-identity modelin favor of the technology model.

Puar argues that superpanopticism favors onetechnological medium—the profile. It is helpful, if perhaps a bit blunt, tocontrast profiles with images. Social identities follow the representationallogic of images: a sign refers to some signified content. One’s race or gendercan symbolize one’s cognitive capacities, sexual appetitiveness, or even tastein music. Profiles, on the otherhand, summarize or systematize relations among data; in this respect, a profileis more like a mathematical equation than a picture. As Puar explains, “theprofile, as a type of composite, also works…as a mechanism of informationcollection and analysis that tabulates marketing information, demographics,consumer habits, computer usage, etc.” (192). Profiles bring together manystrongly and loosely-related “facts” or bits of information. Unlike images,which re-present content, profiles show relationships among more-or-less disparate data points.So, while identities use surface/depthlogics to ground inferences about the “inner content” of a person in his or hervisible appearance, profiles use network logics to describe a person’sposition in relation to others. “Theprofile establishes the individual as imbricated in manifold populations” (Puar162). Profilesare accounts of the form or structure of relationships, which can be measured“in terms of speed, pace, repetition, and informational flows” (Puar 201).Thus, “what is at stake” in profiling “is the repetition and relay ofubiquitous images,” which are formal, structural factors, “not theirsymbolic or representational meaning” (Puar 201). Profiles use relationshipsamong bits of information (e.g., how frequently one visits a website, how muchand how often one buys a particular product) to gauge individuals’ situation inrelation to others, and relations among various groups.

Instruments for measuring, analyzing, andcalculating information, profiles do not use visible body features likephenotype or gendered bodily comportment. Thus, Puar argues that we “profile”people not through surveillance, but through the monitoring of our “sense of”or “feel for” a person (or, more informally, their “vibe”). “A patrolling of affectchanges the terms of ‘what kind of person’ would be a terrorist or smuggler,recognizing that the terrorist…could look like anyone and do just likeeveryone else, but might seem something else” (197). This “seeming” isan assessment not of identity or actions, but of one’s “fit” with a particularprofile. Puar describes this assessment as a “see[ing] through” the body (199).Profiling is not a visual assessment of what the body’s outward appearancemeans or represents. With profiling, “the visual is expanded through a certainkind of transparency, not only by looking at the body, but by looking throughit” (199). So, Puar argues that profiling and panopticism operate literallybeyond the visual—they “expand” the visual beyond its traditional, representationalmode. To “see” the body is to use its visible appearance as an outward sign orsymbol of its inner content. To “see through” the body is to remix orre-order the body and its constituent parts. As a “surveillance event,”profiling “is a rematerialization of the body, a slaying of the body acrossmultiple registers that adumbrates the terms of intimacy, intensity, andinteriority” (199). The profile need only adumbrate or hint at interiority,because it is more interested in the relations among parts than in what theseparts are or what they mean. This emphasis on relations among parts is whyprofiles remix rather than represent. As in music production,profiling remixes by cutting and reordering parts: “the subject is divided upinto subhuman particles of knowledge that nevertheless exceed the boundaries ofthe body, yet it is also multiply splayed through, across, and betweenintersecting and overlapping populations” (Puar 12). Profiles describe therelations among individuals as members of defined groups—be they members of aspecific race, or consumers of a specific brand of commodity. In fact,profiling tracks membership in either group—race or brand-affiliation—in termsof the other. “The profile disperses control through circuits catching multipleinterpenetrating sites of anxiety” (198). So, as a technology, profiles areused to monitor and maintain population-wide averages, and to predict andpreempt deviant events. They work on and through relationships, whereasidentities work on and through visible body appearance.

Profilingmay be a technology of surveillance, but it is not one that uses sight, atleast in any standard sense of the term. Traditionally, vision perceivesimages, appearances, and representations—a subject perceives an object. Puarargues that superpanopticism follows a different “economy of sight,” onewithout either “subjects” or “objects.” Instead, we have “assemblage[s] ofsubindividual capacities” that are “visualized” in the way that data isvisualized in a new media environment. The point is not to see objects, but relationships among types of info.

Here's a word cloud of this blog made using the web app "Wordle":

[1] Puar’s discussion of torture is clear evidence of her “technological”conception of race, gender, and sexuality. Speaking not about femininity, but about “the force offeminizing,” Puar attributes the following effects to this force: “strippingaway,” “faggotizing,” “robbing,” “fortification,” “rescripting,” “regendering,”and “interplay” with technologies of “racial, imperial, and economic matricesof power” (100).

[2] “This shift forces us to ask not only what terrorist corporealitiesmean or signify, but more insistently, whatdo they do?” (Puar, 204; emphasis mine).

"Gucci Gucci": Thoughts on "The Biopolitics of Cool"

2011-10-25T19:45:00.000-04:00

Shannon Winnubst gave a great paper this past Friday atSPEP. I want to talk about andexpand on it here because I take Winnubst and I to be pointing in the samedirection, at similar phenomena, but from different starting points. Whereasshe starts from politics, I start from aesthetics. Though our approaches aredifferent, I think we’re interested in similar phenomena: what she calls “cool”and what I call “hipness” and “postmillennial black hipness.” In this post Iwant to lay out, as best I can based on my notes, what I take WInnubst to bedoing, and then complicate it with some of my work on aesthetics. All errors in this account, are, ofcourse, my own.

The Biopolitics of Cool

Titled “The Biopolitics ofCool,” Winnubst’s paper is an analysis of the way “difference” and “diversity”plays in neoliberalism. If “tolerance” is the classically liberal approach todifference, then “cool” is the neoliberal approach to difference. If liberalismclaims to be “tolerant” of differences (but actually isn’t) and encouragesassimilation, neoliberalism “celebrates difference” (Winnubst’s term) in a sortof United-Colors-of-Benneton-y way. Classical liberalism tries to overlookdifference: there is colorblindness, gender-blindness, melting-potassimilationism, etc. Classical liberalism nominally acknowledges “difference”only to do away with it. Neoliberalism, on the other hand, needsdifferences, it has an insatiable appetite for more and more novel differences.As Winnubst (more or less) said in her paper, “difference,” in neoliberalism,“becomes a manifestation of cool rather than a repressed other.”

But what is neoliberalism?Neoliberalism is millennial and postmillennial reworkings of classicalliberalism: it “lays on top of liberalism,” as Winnubst argues. Though it still privileges theindividual self, neoliberalism doesn’t treat the “self” as having a deep,unique “truth” (a soul, so to speak, or what Winnubst calls “interiority”).Rather, in neoliberalism, the “self” is not something pre-existant, butsomething that we must continually make and improve. We have tobecome “entrepreneurs of the self”: we have to “invest” in ourselves (viaeducation, plastic surgery, the right wardrobe, downtime, etc.) in order to beever-better, ever-perfectible individuals. Individualism is no longer aboutbeing “who you are” but becoming the bestyou can be (isn’t that like the Army slogan or something?). In my notes, my shorthand version ofShannon’s claim here is “Not who are you, but how good are you at what you do?”There is perhaps a way in which the classically liberal indivdual self is a“use value,” and the neoliberal individual self is an “exchange value”:concrete differences matter in the former, but in the latter, all particularityis reduced or evacuated to one common denominator (e.g., “the market”).

So, in classical liberalism,Otherness posed a threat to the “one, true self.” In neoliberalism, the selfactually feeds on difference: eating the other, to use bell hooks’famous phrase, is an integral part ofentrepreneurial self-fashioning. Winnubst takes this hooks-ian phrase inits full, complete sense: power dynamics matter. “Difference” is part ofhegemonic subjects’ diet: “eating the other” is really “eating the Other,”capital O, i.e., eating the subaltern. By eating the other, the neoliberalindividual demonstrates its success: “I, too, can do the hot new thing, and Ican do it both better than you, and better than those people with whom it’soriginally associated.”

“Coolness” is the index ofsuccessful self-fashioning: those who do not attentively and innovativelycapitalize (on) themselves do not appear “cool,” whereas those who do takeenterprising risks seem “cool.” Winnubstsaid something pretty close to:“Aesthetics displaces ethics as the finalarbiter of value.” So “coolness”is an aesthetic judgment. And this is where I come in, really, because I’vedone lots of work on the aesthetic concept of “hipness.” In this post I want toargue that my work on hipness can help answer some of the questions raised byWinnubst’s paper, and in the Q&A after it. These questions include:

1. Though coolnessis presented as something available to all, is it really? Who gets to be cool?

2. How exactly does“coolness” make use of difference?

3. How is the“celebration” of difference really the reification of difference? Or, how doesthe neoliberal “celebration” of difference—the supposed valuation andadmiration of “otherness”—really deepen the “othering” of the “Other”?

4. Relatedly, howdoes neoliberal “coolness” make use of changing racial dynamics in the US(e.g., the use of blacks as a border-population against newly-racialized“brown” groups like Muslims)? In other words, what is neoliberal about “coolness” (b/c “cool” has beenaround at least since the early 20^th century…)?

From “Cool” to “Postmillenial Hipness”

I’ve written a lotabout both traditional hipness, and what I call “postmillennial hipness.” It’sall available on the interwebs for you to read, so I’m not going to summarizeit here beyond what is necessary for my argument.

Hipness is a logic, a “form”whose content can vary to meet changing historical circumstances. Hipness is the appropriation, by hegemonicsubjects, of some feature(s) of stereotypical subalternity, for the purpose ofestablishing one’s elite status among hegemonic subjects. So, whitesappropriate blackness in order to demonstrate their elite status amongwhites—“I’m more tolerant/open/avant-garde than those rednecks who like countrymusic, because I looooove Brazilian dance music, French rap performed by NorthAfrican kids, and read Angela Davis. She was in jail you know.” Nowadays, wesee black male rappers appropriating whiteness, queerness, and even non-Westernfemininities of color in order to demonstrate their elite status among blackmale superstars—“I’m Christopher Columbus, y’all just da pilgrims,” as Kanyesays in “Swagga Like Us.” So, to put this in Winnubst’s terms, the neoliberalself wants to achieve this “elite status”—that’s the “success” that theentrepreneurial subject strives toward.

Based on my work on hipness,I would say pretty conclusively that not everyone can be cool. Coolness is not equal-opportunity: youcan’t pull up your bootstraps, work extra-hard, and pull a come-from-behindwin. There are two reasons for this: (1) Hipness is always about establishing asort of hyper-eliteness. The point is to demonstrate one’s success above andbeyond other relatively privileged, aka “successful” individuals. Hipness isonly available to already-privileged groups; it seems that “coolness” issimilarly rationed. (2) In order for the hipster to seem “avant-garde,”somebody has to stay “primitive.” Hipsters appropriate “otherness” or “difference”—and even if that onespecific mark of “difference” is eventually co-opted, something else has to bethe next new, “different” thing. Somebody somewhere has to be “the other” whois “eaten.” So, if Urban Outfitters is shilling “Navajo” prints as the “it”look of the season, this requires actual Navajo (and Native Americans moregenerally) to be stuck as representatives of the primitive, the non-industrial,the natural, the hand-crafted…or whatever flavor of “different” one wants themto signify. The whole point is that when actual Navajo wear Navajo designs,this is seen as evidence of their “traditional” and “backward” ways, but whenwhite hipsters wear Navajo designs, this is seen as evidence of theirsuccessful risk-taking and entrepreneurship. The structural inequality hasto be there in order for the white hipster to think s/he is doing something“risky” or “weird.” The Navajocan’t be “just like us neoliberals,” because then “Navajo” wouldn’t be a signof “difference,” and an opportunity for whites to demonstrate their “coolness.”

The structural inequalityhas to be there, but who gets stuck in the position of subaltern“difference,” and who gets included (even partially or provisionally) in “weneoliberals” can vary according to changing historico-political circumstances.That’s what I’m getting at in my work on “postmillennial black hipness”.Traditionally, hipness is about whites appropriating stereotypical blackness asa means to demonstrate their elite status among whites. However, as I mentionedearlier, blacks are increasingly appropriating even “more subaltern”subalternity as a means to demonstrate their elite status with respect toincreasingly mainstream ideas/stereotypes of blackness and black masculinity. Blackness, particularly the “gangsta” or“thug” masculine stereotype proffered by mainstream hip hop, has been sothoroughly co-opted that it’s just not different enough anymore. Someblacks get to be neo-liberal hipsters. But only at the expense of other groups(black women, non-Western women of color, LGBTQI subjects, racially “brown”people, mixed-race people, etc.).

Postmillenial mainstream hiphop shows us that actually, black (male) rappers are THE entrepreneurs par excellence. The discourse of entrepreneurshipis all over mainstream hip hop. Sean Combs (variously Puffy, Diddy,etc.) fashions himself more of an entrepreneur than an actual music-maker; hehas Sean Jean, Ciroc, Bad Boy, etc. Jay-Z says in Kanye West’s “Diamonds arefrom Sierra Leonne”: “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man,” and he hasRoccaWear, Roc-A-Fella, the 40/40 club, the Nets, etc. He and his wife have aduet titled “Upgrade You”—if that isn’t the entrepreneurship of the self (or ofthe romantic relationship), I don’t know what is. 50 Cent tells us to “Get Richor Die Tryin’.” In the early part of the millennium, “bling rap” replacedoh-so-20^th-c “gangsta rap” as both the mainstream within hip hop,and mainstream top-40 pop generally. In fact, white female rapper Kreayshawnuses the language of luxury goods and the booty of enterprise to establish her exceptionalismvis-à-vis manstream blackness. “Gucci Gucci, Louie Louie, Fendi Fendi, Prada”doesn’t signify Park Avenue or Champs Elysee or any other traditionally domainof the well-heeled white entrepreneurial class anymore; they are such clearmarkers of blackness that Kreayshawn can appropriate blackness merely bychecking these references in the refrain of her song. However, herappropriation of mainstream hip hop terms (Kanye West is “The Louis Vuitton Don”)is not a claim for inclusion within the mainstream, but superiority over themainstream: “basic bitches wear that shit,” she reminds us. The point here isthat “basic bitches” are black; blackness is a norm herethat one needs to mark one’s difference from. But I digress. Entrepreneurship is everywhere inmainstream hip hop. “The thug” has been replaced by “the entrepreneur,” andthis discourse of hip hop entrepreneurship is so pervasive that entrepreneurship is itself the primary form or style of blackmasculinity currently available in both black and population-wide (i.e., white)mainstreams.

So, some blacks get to be neoliberals. Though the discourse of entrepreneurshipand neoliberal self-fashioning is central to mainstream hip hop, it is also thecase that African-Americans are still poorly represented among CEOs and startupfounders (i.e., actual entrepreneurs outside of the entertainment industry).Because some blacks get to be neoliberals, blackness is no longer “differentenough” for whites to get much from appropriating it. In fact, I think youcould pretty solidly argue that some blacks have been accepted into the fold ofneoliberal self-entrepreneurship because hegemony has more intense interests inestablishing the “difference” of other groups—“Muslims,” “immigrants,”“queers,” etc. (This is similar to Falguni Sheth’s reading of African-Americansas a “border population”.) In the same way that homonational gays and lesbiansget provisionally folded into the nation so that the nation can then demonstratethe “difference” of “primitive” Muslim cultures that still stone gays, blacksget provisionally folded into the neoliberal mainstream so that the whiteentrepreneur class can solidify the “difference” of “primitive” ornon-enterprising” groups like indigenous peoples, “Third World women,” andqueers.

There are (at least) tworemaining issues that are related to this discussion (and that I am especiallyinterested in), but I don’t have the space to discuss here:

1. There’ssomething about “the sublime” here. Coolness and hipness are in some waysstructurally similar to the Kantian sublime: all turn on the ability of thesubject to domesticate difference, to overcome the challenge posed by some formof radical alterity. Sure, you can try to eat the other, but can you reallydigest it? Or is it too spicy, so to speak? Kantian sublimity is aboutdemonstrating the integrity and unity of the self in opposition to otherness;the neoliberal self isn’t unified, integrated, or whole. Similarly, Kantian sublimityis about the transcendence of the self: the mountain may be physicallyoverwhelming, but I have reason, which cannot be overwhelmed by the merelyphysical. Plus, my transcendental ego unifies both the moment of fear and themoment of triumph. The neoliberal self, as Winnubst emphasizes, has nointeriority, and no transcendence.

2. Commodityfetishism seems to be moot. Commodity fetishism is only objectionable if youcare about use values. The neoliberal self is necessarily and optimallyinfinitely (ex)changeable.

Those issues bear furtherconsideration. But I’m sure there are other issues that also bear furtherconsideration—and we can discuss those in the comments.

By conclusion I just want toemphasize that I find Winnubst’s project really, really interesting. I thinkshe’s definitely on to something---and not just because I think I’m on to thesame thing. I appreciate how her “political” approach brings new dimensions tomy own “aesthetics” approach. If it’s true that “postmillennial hipness” is notjust a shift due to the mainstreaming of a specific style of black masculinity,but also a shift due to the mainstreaming of neoliberalism, I need to thinkabout the relationship between these two things—the mainstreaming of the ghettoentrepreneur and the rise of neoliberalism. I hope to have some mutually productive conversations withShannon, and with the fabulous readers of this blog.

Video Podcast Introducing Foucault

2011-10-22T14:14:00.001-04:00

I teach a lot of texts that presume, use, build on, or critique Foucault's concepts of juridical, disciplinary, and biopolitical power. So, instead of taking up class time re-hashing the same lecture, I decided to make a video podcast that I could drop to the course management site, where students could watch (or re-watch) it on their own time.

It's really a very elementary introduction, meant to introduce and explain some basic concepts.

My GA, Melissa Wilson, has just completed the editing and viz effects, so the podcast is complete!

Of course, YouTube picks the frame where I'm making some dumb expression to be the one it displays...

Let me know what you think! Use it in your classes, if you want.

Ada Lovelace Day: Delia Who?

2011-10-07T11:56:00.001-04:00

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. In honor of the first person to write what would later be known as a "computer program," I want to think about women and music technology. Many readers of this blog probably already know who Delia Derbyshire is, but I want to spend this year's Ada Lovelace Day commemorating one of the earliest and most important female electroacoustic musicians.

Derbyshire worked in the BBC Radio Workshop in the mid 20th century. She is most famous for arranging the original Dr. Who theme. Though she did not compose the melody, she's the reason it sounds futuristic and, if you will, "timey-wimey." Here it is the first of a seven-part documentary about Derbyshire, all available on YouTube:

Derbyshire was also a prolific composer and innovative sound-maker/audio technologist. Here is her piece "Blue Veils and Golden Sand."

I highly encourage you to go to the website dedicated to her and her work (linked above in her name), and to watch the YouTube documentary. Derbyshire isn't just important to the history of female musicians, but to the development of electronic/electroacoustic music in general.

I'm consciously choosing to link to her work, and not necessarily to her image, because we have a tendency to reduce accomplished women to their biography--focus on their lives rather than their work. So let's think about Derbyshire's work, and its importance.

The Other Important Musical Release in 1991, or, McClary’s Feminine Endings is 20 years old, but there’s still no feminist philosophy of music

2011-10-04T18:10:00.000-04:00

Feministmusicology as we know it is only 20 years old. Susan McClary’s landmark bookFeminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality was released in 1991—the sameyear that Nirvana broke on pop radio. While the latter release is being widelycommemorated, there’s not much noise being made outside of feminist musicologyabout the former anniversary. I’d speculate that this is due to the fact thatfeminist musicology has not made much of an impact outside of musicology—notunlike feminist philosophy, it is still struggling to be taken seriously withinthe broader discipline of musicology. Feminist film theory—especially thepsychoanalytic stuff—has been widely and deeply influential on feminist theorygenerally, and in feminist philosophy more narrowly. Similarly, feminist arthistorians have been influential in feminist philosophical aesthetics, and infeminist theory generally. But feminist musicology, while itself ofteninterdisciplinary, has not really been taken up by scholars outside musicologyand popular music studies. Notably, there is, as far as I can tell, no feminist philosophy of music, atleast in the Anglophone world (by which I mean both “analytic” philosophy, and“continental philosophy” as practiced in the English-speaking world). Sure,there’s me, but one person does not a subfield make. But why aren’t there morefeminist philosophers of music?

As far as Ican tell, there are a number of reasons for this, most of them political.Philosophy and music are the most conservative fields in the humanities. If you look here, you will see that MusicTheory and Composition is the only humanities field that awards even fewerdoctoral degrees to women than philosophy’s measly ~30%. (General history isright there with philosophy hovering around 30%.). So, (1) music and philosophydon’t have many female PhDs, so with few women, there is less overall interestin or focus on women, gender, and related issues like sexuality. Not to saythat all women do feminist work, but most feminist work is done by women.

Second (2),philosophy as a whole continues to marginalize feminist philosophy, and this isespecially true in philosophical aesthetics. There has been some progress, bothin the field as a whole and in aesthetics, since I began my doctoral programback in 2000, but looking at the American Society for Aesthetics’ 2011 program,you will find panels that demonstrate the influence of feminist work inaesthetics (e.g., the panels on beauty and on cooking), but there is only onepaper about “sex” (and presumably gender—and it’s by none other than the fabulous Sherri Irvin),and there are no other papers or panels that label themselves as explicitlyabout feminism, gender, sexuality, or race. It seems like there is implicitfeminist content, but why can’t that content be labeled as such? Looking morespecifically at the panels on music, none are even remotely political at all;there’s not even that “implicit” influence of feminism. The only explicitly“political” panel is about the environment—so it’s interesting thatenvironmental issues are deemed “appropriate” for philosophical aesthetics, butidentity issues are not. Music, as it is taught and studied in colleges anduniversities, still focuses overwhelmingly on the Western art tradition—so evenat the beginning of the pipeline, music undergraduates tend to be those who areat least aesthetically more conservative, if not also politically moreconservative as well. Sure, there is a robust field of popular music studies,but this often doesn’t include the detailed technical and music-theoreticalwork that music students are required to do. So because music and philosophyare such conservative fields that marginalize work in feminism, theirdisapproval of or disregard for feminism is mutually-reinforcing. This leads tothe third (3) reason: music students who are interested in gender either stayin music and do feminist musicology, or they go into popular music studies viaa literature, WGSS, or cultural studies program. They don’t go intophilosophy…well, unless they’re me. Ihave benefited enormously from the “philosophical” work by feminist and queermusicologists and popular music studies scholars. But I want there to be room in philosophy for feminist work on andapproaches to music.

In additionto political reasons, there are content-based reasons why there is no feministphilosophy of music. I would argue that it is indisputable (I know that’s astrong claim, but I am confident in making it) that there are political reasonswhy the ‘preferred’ issues in phil of music are ‘preferred’—but that’s anargument for another time. Here, I just want to focus on the absolute absenceof critical political work in the philosophy of music. The StanfordEncycolopedia of Philosophy entry on “Philosophy of Music” focuses on threemain issues in the subfield: ontology, emotions, and value. I find it strikingthat, given the quantity quality of the impact that feminist work on emotionsand value/ethics have had on the larger discipline, the philosophy of music still actively ignores feminist work inphilosophy, let alone feminist musicology. A fifth (5) reason, alsocontent-based, for the non-existence of feminist philosophy of music, is thesubfield’s tendency to privilege “art” musics over popular music. Sure, thereis some discussion of jazz, and even the blues and rock. But nowhere, and Imean nowhere, would anyone even think of talking about “pop” music—BritneySpears, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, you know, music by women. (For more on this—and Imean a lot more on this—see chapter 6 of my book.) Angela Davis, of course, hasa great book on female blues singers, but this book has had little to no impactin philosophy, and when it is taken up it is mostly used as a black feministtext, not a text on music. But it is both. But we philosophers of music can’tseem to get that it is both about music and about black feminism, because wethink that in philosophy those things just don’t work together. Which is wrong!Philosophers of race do attend to the musical—but often not in conjunction withgender. I am aware of only one other philosopher, Devonya Havis at Cannissius,who combines an interest in gender with an interest in “the musical” broadlyconstrued. As much as I love and amexcited by her work, her interests are not really in the philosophy of music somuch as they are in black feminism, and social/political. And this is great,this work needs to be done, but it alsoneeds to be done by philosophers of music.

Sometimes Ifeel as though philosophers of music are just too sensitive about the implicitfeminization of music—remember, Plato has to kick out the flute girls beforethe actual philosophical discussion in the Symposiumcan begin. This sensitivity breeds defensiveness—we have to “prove” thatphil of music is “real” philosophy by only engaging in the most mainstream,most conservative types of philosophy—rather than openness to experimentationand innovation. But I also want to acknowledge that a majority of the“avoidance” of feminism (and social identity generally) by philosophers ofmusic does not take the form of active bias—though some of it does. Mainly, theavoidance is of a seemingly more “benign” type—e.g., that’s not what will getme published in the JAAC, there’s just no literature on that, no encouragementfrom profs or advisers to think about these issues, etc.

There should be more feminist philosophers ofmusic; there should be lots of different kinds of feminist philosophers ofmusic. I hope I’m not the only one.It gets lonely. I would love to be more than an AOS of 1.

But back toMcClary. What can 1991’s Feminine Endings offer feminist philosophers of music?

Here’s alist, which is not necessarily exhaustive:

1. Theidea that Western music is always-already political. It is NEVER NOT aboutgender, or race, or sexuality. Gender is a system for organizing relationshipsamong people, among types of food (think Carol Adams here), among styles ofclothes, and among genres of music, types of cadences, listening andperformance practices, etc. The same with race, and the same with sexuality: assystems of organization, they manifest themselves in our musical theories,practices, habits, and values.

2. Thatmusic itself is “feminized.” Those flute-girls, again.

3. Thatwe need to consider the conditions for the possibility of musical pleasure, andthat these conditions also include things like sexual politics.

4. Thatit’s OK to write “risky” work, work that many in the discipline might justoutright reject.

I hope thatthe comments can be a space for talking about feminist phil of music. If otherphilosophers are out there working on gender and/or race and/or sexuality andmusic, I want to know you and your work!Let’s put together a panel for the ASA.

Transmission: Sound, Affect, and Joy Division/New Order

2011-09-27T18:25:00.000-04:00

This post is a very, very initial attempt to sketch a theory of “transmission.” I develop this idea of transmission in conversation with Jasbir Puar, Joy Division, and Bauhaus. Transmission is an sound-based concept, an attempt to theorize from “the sonic” (as problematic a term as that may be). Transmission is an alternative to forms or modes of relationality that are grounded in the visual (e.g., intersection(ality)). Transmission is a way of understanding how we learn what might be called “affects” or “interpretive horizons” or “corporeal schemas.”

Again, this is a first sketch. I may well post a revision later. BUT, I do want to get this out before I have to leave this project for a bit to focus on another one. Because it is so raw, I welcome your feedback, questions, and suggestions.

Puar

Though her book Terrorist Assemblages is, eponymously, about “assemblage,” I want to re-read Jasbir Puar’s account of assemblages as a theory of transmission. “Transmission” is my term for the modes of relation “characterized by tendencies and degrees, adjusted through tweaking and modulation rather than norming” (116; emphasis mine). Norming is accomplished via the positive and negative reinforcement of normal and abnormal behaviors, respectively. As Butler has famously and clearly established, norms require and compel repetition: norms are “normative” because we are compelled to repeat them. Tweaking and modulation assume patterns of repetition; they don’t compel repetition so much as alter the frequency or contours of that repetition. When one modulates a pitch, one alters the frequency of sound emitted; quite literally, sound waves are either faster or slower, and the peaks and valleys of the pitch sine wave pass more or less quickly (it’s called a “frequency” because it’s a measure of how “frequently” a single peak-valley pattern occurs in a given amount of time). One can tweak a sound in a number of ways--synthesizers allow for all sorts of “effects” to be put on a sound: you can arpeggiate it, bend the pitch, compress it...the options are seemingly limitless. So again, “disciplinary” regimes require and compel repetition. For example, repeated exposure to tonal harmony and the diatonic scale discipline (and thus “normalize”) one’s ears to hear Western systems of musical organization as intuitively meaningful. Tweaking and modulation, on the other hand, intervene in established patterns of repetition produce a specific audio profile. In tonality, “modulation” is more or less a key change, a shift from one harmonic profile (e.g., A major) to another (like E major). (Hence perhaps Andrew Goodwin’s comment in his essay in On Record that timber is more important than functional tonality. Timbre is an audio profile--it’s how a sound “feels,” its “grain.”) Profiles measure things like frequency and intensity; to the recursiveness of repetition, the sort of 2D-linear folding back upon oneself (like a da capo), profiles add the exponentiality of 3D (depth) and even 4D (time). More simply, profiles aren’t linear measures of repetition, they are multi-dimensional accounts of intensity. Hence the gesture to 4D art: time-based media are not just spatial, but spatio-temporal.

Puar argues that transmissions are perceived at the level of affect. Profiles are perceived and measured affectively (not by how one looks, but by how one “seems”). Affects are what gets tweaked or modulated, and tweaking and modulation is accomplished via affective transmission. As Puar explains,

a focus on affect reveals how actual bodies can be in multiple places and temporalities simultaneously, not (only) tethered through nostalgia or memory but folded and braided into intensifications...To extend Axel’s formulation, the homeland is not represented only as a demographic, a geographical place, nor primarily though history, memory, or even trauma, but is cohered through sensation, vibrations, echoes, speed, feedback loops, recursive folds and feelings” (171; emphasis mine).

Nostalgia and memory are merely linear--they are two dimensional accounts of time (past-present-future on a single continuum). A braided intensification, however, is exponential rather than linear (I realize I’m using “exponential” somewhat loosely here, but bear with me...). Braided intensification is multidimensional, spatio-temporal, at least 4D. Affects are both emitted and perceived in many registers at once; they are transmitted as intensities, “vibrations, [and] echoes.” So here Puar suggests we think of affective transmission like we think of the transmission of sound frequencies. Notably, these things that get transmitted--vibrations, echoes, feedback loops, etc.--are formal properties. They are not meanings or content, but compositional features of a transmission: the rate at which something occurs, its volume or intensity, etc. Transmission is about formal relationships, not about content or meaning.

This emphasis on formal patterns is another thing that distinguishes “transmission” from “the visual.” I don’t have time to fully establish this claim here (so you’ll just have to believe me for now, and wait for me to publish the full argument), but I think I am warranted in claiming that we Westerners generally (emphasis on generally, I realize there are exceptions) frame/understand/conceive of “the visual” in terms of a signifier-signified “representational” logic: the appearance “represents” some inner “meaning” or “content.” This logic that I’m calling “visual” is what Ranciere would call the “aesthetic regime of the arts;” a Greenbergian Modernism isn’t too different--it just collapses content into form (the form is the content). Not only is transmission about affect, the “seeming” Puar opposes to “seeing,” it is further distinguished from the visual by its emphasis on form/patterns/profile rather than content. (One more thing to think about elsewhere/later: “receiving” is the compliment to “transmitting”-- interesting that “receptivity” is the capacity to be affected, isn’t it?).

So, in sum, I read Puar as suggesting a notion of “transmision” that includes the following features:

1. seeming rather than seeing
2. intensification rather than linear increase
3. 4D rather than 2D
4. Form rather than content
5. Modulation and tweaking rather than normalizing

Transmitting “Transmission’s” Affect

Both Joy Division’s original song “Transmission,” and Bauhaus/Peter Murphy’s cover of “Transmission” demonstrate a general logic of “transmission.” As the practice of covering a song suggests, this logic of transmission is a form of tweaking or modulation. I am particularly interested in (and not completely finished thinking through) what Bauhaus/Murphy appropriate from Joy Division. In order to cover the song, Murphy deems it necessary to also dance and comport himself like Ian Curtis (Joy Division’s frontman). So, in Murphy’s cover, the “music” and the “affect” are intertwined: Murphy’s cover suggests that the dancing, Curtis’s “seeming” or affective profile, are part and parcel of the song itself, and covering the song means performing both the music and the affective profile.

“Transmission” is Joy Division’s first single on Factory. Joy Division’s original version, like Puar’s text, considers “transmission” to be an alternative to the visual. Its lyrical content defines “transmission” as a specific mode of non-visual communication or comportment.

The first verse explicitly contrasts the transmission of sound with vision:

    Listen to the silence, let it ring on
    Eyes dark, grey lenses, frightened of the sun
    We would have a fine time living in the night
    Left to blind destruction, waiting for our sight

What does one do when left to blind destruction, waiting for sight? According to the chorus, the appropriate course of action is: “dance, dance, dance, dance dance to the radio” in the absence of vision. (It seems that initial invocation of silence isn’t to be taken too seriously--maybe people are silent, but the radio seems to be working just fine.) Transmission is not sight or seeing--it has somethign todo with listening and with dancing, with the interaction between sound and bodily affect/comportment. A later verse declares that “No language, just sound, that’s all we need now.” This contrast between language and sound suggests that “sound” is not about content or meaning, because that’s what language is (i.e., sounds attached to specific meanings). So the verses are all about sound and listening as opposed to seeing, and the choruses are all about dancing. So the lyrics of the song privilege sound and sensibility (i.e., bodiy comportment, dancing) over the visual. (The instrumental track reinforces the idea that transmission is about form rather than content. The bass and guitar lines are mainly repeated sequences of the same pitch; the song is not about chord progressions, but about the rate at which a single note is repeated.) While the verse attends to sound, the chorus points us toward affect. It is this affect that Curtis, the lead singer, demonstrates in his own iconic dancing. Let’s look at several Joy Division performances:

Here is their Peel Sessions performance of “Transmission”:

Pay particular attention to Ian Curtis’s iconic dancing; it’s most evident from 1:57 on. There are better examples of it in this video at 1:38, 2:58 and 3:15:

You can also see it here, in their performance of “She’s Lost Control”:

It is precisely this affective dimension of the song that gets “transmitted” to/in Peter Murphy’s cover of “Transmission.” Murphy performs this both solo, and with his band Bahuaus. Murphy and Curtis were roughly contemporaries back in the 70s. Though Curtis’s dancing is now iconic, Murphy was actually trained as a dancer. So given both the (in)famous character of Curtis’s rather signature dancing style, and Murphy’s tendency to pay attention to dancing, it is not surprising that Murphy would pick up on Curtis’s dancing. But what I would argue is that it is precisely Curtis’s dancing that is the thing being “covered” here; one cannot properly cover the song without also doing the dance.

Murphy often covers the song, and he pretty much always makes the dance a part of the performance. Here are a ton of examples:

This one is probably the best quality, both in terms of frequency of dance performance, and pure audio quality:

This one is also pretty high-quality, though he doesn’t start dancing until about 0:43:

Here is a closer-up focus on Murphy:

Here, look at 0:22-25. This one is pretty close-up and clear:

Here is another one; the dancing is mainly at the beginning:

I think it’s important to include all these examples of all these different performances because it establishes that Murphy includes the dance as a part of the general performance of the song--it’s just as much a part of the song as the lyrics and the singing, or the bass riff. Murphy’s performance of “Transmission” treats Curtis’s dancing as an integral part of the song itself--the sound of the song includes the affective profile of Curtis’s dancing. The music and the affective profile are in a relationship of “braided intensification”: they exponentially augment each other, working together to create that “sense” of Joy-Division-ness. So we can say that the sound and the affect are in a relationship of mutual “transmission,” both in the original, and as it is in turn “transmitted” to Murphy. Receiving it as a “transmission,” and then transmitting it back out again, Murphy doesn’t repeat either the music or the dancing--he tweaks and modifies it.

This tweaking and modulation is even more evident in Ministry’s “Blue Monday”-inspired song “Everyday is Halloween.” “Blue Monday” is, of course, the monumental, iconic, historical, very very very important 1983 single from New Order. New Order is, of course, the surviving members of Joy Division--everyone minus Curtis, who committed suicide. I’m not going to embed the videos for these two songs; you can find “Blue Monday” here, and “Everyday is Halloween” here. Ministry’s song is identifiably inspired by “Blue Monday,” but not as directly related as a cover would be. In fact, the greater distance between the two songs is evidence of tweaking and modulation--Ministry reworked “Blue Monday” in their own terms, put it in a new context or “profile.” But the relationships are pretty obvious. The rhythm sections (drum machines, drums, and bass riffs) are really actually quite similar, especially the sixteenth-note patterns in the drum machines in both songs. The arpeggiated bass lines are also noticeably similar. It’s pretty evident to even a not very careful listener that the Ministry song is inspired by “Blue Monday”--it’s not the same song, it’s not a cover, and it’s not even a remix. “Everyday is Halloween” is the Chicago goth version of Manchester post-punk. This point is perhaps most clear by Ministry singer Al Jourgensen’s fake British accent--something that is mainly absent from the rest of the Ministry discography, but very evident on this track. Here too bodily affect--this time in the form of accent--is braided together with other, more strictly, musical elements of a song. It is both affect and sound that get transmitted from New Order to Ministry. (There is a similar sort of “transmission” in early Green Day songs--Billie Joe Armstrong sings with a Rotten/Strummer-like fake British accent.)

So, in sum, these various “transmissions” of Joy Division/New Order help clarify what sort of relationship a “transmission” is. It is one of “braided intensification” between sound and affect--or, more generally, of “braided intensification” across sensory/perceptory registers. It is a relationship of tweaking and modulation; it’s not norming, but is rather deviation (or, as Ministry might suggest, it’s a sort of deviance that shows how effed-up everyone else is-- “I’m not the one who’s so absurd,” remember.) Transmission is also a relationship about form above (and perhaps in exclusion of) meaning or content. This privileging of form over content is often realized as an emhasis on “seeming” rather than “signifying.” In order to “seem” like Joy Division/New Order, one must perform not only their music, but their affective profile (dancing, accent). However, one can’t just repeat it; one is obliged to modify it, to “modulate” it.

Again, this is very, very rough, and I will certainly need to revise it and flesh it out. To that end, I very much welcome your feedback!

Melismas Like Jagger: on the race/gender politics of Maroon 5's "Moves Like Jagger"

2011-09-16T13:25:00.003-04:00

Consistent readers of this blog know that I’ve been somewhat interested in the politics of melisma in contemporary pop music. I have a piece on Avril Levigne’s use of melisma to signify both “blackness” and sexual availability you can read here. Today, though I want to think about melisma in a different context: Adam Levine and Christina Aguilera’s use of melisma in Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger.” I will argue that their different melismatic styles are meant to reflect and reinforce race- and gender- based differences. I will ultimately argue that the “moves” Levine/Maroon 5 appropriate from Jagger are less corporeal/sexual “moves,” and more an approach to racial/musical appropriation.

In Maroon 5’s song, Levine and Aguilera each use very different styles of melismatic ornamentation. But let’s listen to the song first:

Levine uses ornamentation very sparingly: he only melismas on “mo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-oves.” That’s a one-syllable word stretched into 9 syllables. However, unlike with Aguilera’s vocal work, Levine’s (relative to CA’s performance, excessively) deliberate approach allows him to clearly articulate each and every separate note. This clear articulation and deliberate pacing creates the sense of mastery: Levine is in complete control of the melisma—it’s not some runaway foray into potentially infinite noodling. The melisma ends on a repeated note—the last “o-oves” are both on the same pitch—thus creating a definitive end (even, perhaps, “resolution,” that prized tonal gesture) to Levine’s dalliance with ornamentation.

Aguilera, a gifted vocalist whose work in the 90s and early 2000s is full of difficult, complex melismas, doesn’t really make much use of extended ornamentation. In this track, her ornaments are very compressed: she may run through more than a few notes, but she does so very, very quickly. For example, the runs on “keep it” and “this” from 3:26-30 are extremely fast: she goes through a lot of notes really quickly. It’s also worth noting that she’s referencing her “secret,” the radio-friendly euphemism for her “sexual virtue.” Her ornamentation goes by so quickly it’s easy to overlook its complexity. (The only time Aguilera echoes Levine’s words (3:51-2), her embelisment is more like his—a deliberate splitting of the word into two syllabus—and less like hers—definitely not melismatic.) Technically, then, Aguilera’s vocal technique is more masterful than Levine’s: her melismas are harder, faster, and stronger than his. But they are read as evidence of less mastery because they are feminized. Slippery, hard to perceive, these quick, complex melismas are feminized in the same way that Carmen’s chromaticism is feminized in Bizet’s opera (see McClary’s famous analysis of Carmen in Feminine Endings). Remember, melismas are appropriate in referencing women’s sexuality (one’s “secret”), so melismas must mean ladybits, femininity, etc.

In my earlier post on (Avril) Levinge (too much homophony with Avril Levigne and Adam Levine…), I argued that in contemporary pop music, melisma signifies “blackness.” It’s associated with R&B, and especially with female singers who are (or read primarily as) black—Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, etc. So if melisma usually reads “black”, does “Moves Like Jagger”’s gendered division of melismatic labor keep with this standard racialization, or does the gender play destabilize the standard racialization of melisma?

It all turns on Jagger’s moves—literally (with the bendy melodic line of a melisma) and figuratively. Mick Jagger is infamous for appropriating stereotypical black masculinity: its supposed authenticity, toughness, and above all, hypersexuality. To have “moves like Jagger” is to have his black-hypersexuality-filtered-and-domesticated-through-whiteness. However, in the video, Levine doesn’t actually move his body in the style of Jagger—it’s white female women who don Jagger-esque costumes and mimic his dancing and body comportment. Levine refrains from actually really showing ANY “moves” at all—he mostly doesn’t dance. In fact, he stands there, tattooed, shirtless, and in black pants looking more like Iggy Pop or Peter Murphy than like Mick Jagger. But, that women perform Jagger’s moves, added to the fact that melisma is generally feminized in the track via its association with Aguilera, Levine’s claim to have “moves like Jagger” is primarily, or most directly, a claim to have mastered femininity. Interestingly, this claim about gender (AL’s masculinity can appropriate and domesticate feminized ornament and feminized receptivity generally) covers over the deeply racial politics of Jagger’s own moves. By making it seem like Jagger’s moves are mainly about gender, Maroon 5’s song burries the fact that, in their original context, they were highly and overtly racialized. More insidiously, the Maroon 5 song incourages us to ignore the fact that their use of “Jagger”-as-metaphor (well, as simile, technically) is still about race, too. Levine gets the lyric “moves like Jagger” from the overworn hip hop meme that rhymes “swagger” with “Jagger”. So while a lot of black male rappers are appropriating Jagger’s appropriation of blackness (in a move I call “postmillennial black hipness”), Levine is appropriating and domesticating this move made by black male rappers. To say he has “moves like Jagger” is to both appropriate the newly-trendy Jagger reference, and to domesticate it for mainstream white audiences: Levine changes the obviously more rhyme-appropriate “swagger” for “moves,” thus replacing a word with obvious connotations of black masculinity (swagger) for a more neutral, even old-fashioned term (moves). Like Mick and Keith back in the good-ol’ 60s, Levine is appropriating black masculinity as a means of demonstrating his sexual potency/power over women. This is the actual ”move” that Levine gets from Jagger: it’s not his dancing, or his attitude, or even his “swagger,” it’s his musical/racial appropriation.

Eventually I want to compare this use of melisma—which is quite disfavored these days among top-40 vocalists—to the “stutter”. The “stutter” is like melisma because it is an approach to vowel sounds: while melismas noodle around on pitches over extended vowel vocalizations, “the stutter” is the effect created when a producer either stops-and-starts a long vowel vocalization or cuts and loops a quick vowel vocalization. Unlike conventional stuttering, which usually pertains to consonant sounds, "the stutter" is an approach to ornamenting vowel vocalizations. I can think of a small number of examples of black artists using “the stutter” (e.g., the BE Peas), this is mainly something found in the work of white female pop singers. So, I think there is potentially something interesting in comparing the stutter to melisma, not just technically, but at the level of race/gender politics. But that will have to wait, b/c I’m off to the California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race next weekend.