The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music

Out Sources: Philosophy, Culture, Politics Series Editors: Steven DeCaroli and Jason Read

“In this book, Robin James holds philosophy accountable to the pleasures and critical resources of Western popular musics, which many philosophers have disavowed. With verve and determination, she calls on aesthetics to answer these challenges with a vision of the raced and gendered body that allows us to think rigorously about political and social questions we engage as everyday cultural agents. Her discussions give the philosophy of music a salutary update.” —Monique Roelofs, Hampshire College Grounded in continental philosophy, The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music uses feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories to examine music, race, and gender as discourses that emerge and evolve with one another. In the first section, author Robin James asks why philosophers commonly use music to explain embodied social identity and inequality. She looks at late twentieth-century postcolonial theory, Rousseau’s early musical writings, and Kristeva’s reading of Mozart and Schoenberg to develop a theory of the “conjectural body,” arguing that this is the notion of embodiment that informs Western conceptions of raced, gendered, and resonating bodies. The second section addresses the ways in which norms about human bodily difference—such as gender and race—continue to ground serious and popular hierarchies well after twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and philosophy have deconstructed this binary. She argues that feminists ought and need to take “the popular” seriously, both as a domain of artistic and scholarly inquiry as well as a site of legitimate activism. The book concludes with an analysis of philosophy’s continued hostility toward feminism, real-life women, and popular culture. While the study of gender, race, and popular culture has become a fixture in many areas of the academy, philosophy and musicology continue to resist attempts to take these objects as objects of serious academic study. The Conjectural Body provides an intervention that will be valuable to faculty and graduate students in philosophy, women’s and gender studies, critical race and postcolonial theory, musicology, popular music studies, and cultural studies.

Robin James is assistant professor of philosophy at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. For orders and information please contact the publisher

Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 1-800-462-6420

90000 9 7 80 7 3 9 13 9 0 28

The Conjectural Body

“The Conjectural Body is a fantastic and groundbreaking book! While recent cultural theorists have exploited and appealed to music, they have failed to think through its complex implications for race and gender. Music is not a given; it is not merely exemplary of, or expressive of, a raced or gendered identity any more than race or gender are unproblematically or essentially given. Rather, race, gender, and music are coincident with one another. They all negotiate in complex ways the material/social divide that theorists like to impose upon the world. Such is the sophisticated, nuanced, and compelling argument of this book. This is a clearly written, timely book, as original as it is profound. Essential reading for cultural theorists of all stripes.”  —Tina Chanter, DePaul University

robin james

The Conjectural Body gender, race, and the philosophy of music

philosophy, culture, politics

james

Continental Philosophy • Music

The Conjectural Body Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music

Robin James

iii

v

Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction

vii xi xiii

Part 1: Conjecture and Resonating Bodies 1 2 3

On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies: On Political and Musical “Nature” in Rousseau’s Early Writings Conjecture and the Impossible Opera: From the Thought Specular to the Society of the Spectacle

1 3 29 63

Part 2: Fetishism, Abjection, and the Feminized Popular

89

4

91

5

“Smells Like Booty”: Pop Music and the Logic of Abjection “My Foot Feels the Need for Rhythm”: Nietzsche and the Feminized Popular

Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index About the Author

131 143 151 175 183 189

v

vii

Preface In mid-October 2007, the indie-music world was abuzz discussing Sasha FrereJones’s New Yorker article “A Paler Shade of White: How indie rock lost its soul.”1 Most of the discussion has, however, missed the article’s main claim by focusing on what Frere-Jones says to the exclusion of what the article actually does. At bottom, his article is not a critique of indie’s normative whiteness: it is a critique of indie rock’s aesthetic, posed in terms of racialized and gendered mind/body distinctions. While briefly touching on the paucity of actual black people in the indie rock scene, Frere-Jones is mainly interested in making a case for the claim that indie rock doesn’t “sound black” (he does not, however, go so far as to argue why it should do so in the first place). Although Anglo-American rock has, historically, been a mainly white genre, it is nonetheless the product of what FrereJones calls “miscegenation.” “As has been widely noted, the music that inspired some of the most commercially successful rock bands of the sixties and seventies—among them Led Zeppelin, Cream, and Grand Funk Railroad—was American blues and soul” (Frere-Jones, 1): Clapton drew from Robert Johnson, Jagger and Richards from Muddy Waters, Cobain from Leadbelly. As has been equally well documented, the racial and gender politics of this “miscegenation” are problematic: white British and American men identify with what they perceive to be economically underprivileged African-American men—i.e., “real” men, rebellious, tough, hard, virile—in an attempt to counteract both the feminization of the performance position (that of the musician as to-be-looked-at object; object, not subject, of scopophilic desire) and the general “feminization” of white masculinity in the post-industrial labor economy. It is the same stereotyped black “feel” to music admired by classic rockers that inspires Frere-Jones to lament the fact that indie rock has abandoned rock’s tradition of “miscegenation” or “appropriation”: I’ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the midix

x twentieth century? These are the volatile elements that launched rock and roll, in the nineteen-fifties, when Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the hips (Frere-Jones, 1).

Although Frere-Jones says that his problem with indie rock has to do with its racial politics—specifically, its “racial re-sorting,” moving from “miscegenation” to the one-drop rule, so to speak—the actual problems he identifies are aesthetic ones: white rock bands aren’t “retreating” from black musicians or audiences (one could argue that few attempts were even made to advance into these demographics), but from stereotypically “black” musical and corporeal styles. When “black influences had begun to recede” from indie rock, what went missing were “a strong sense of swing and a solid backbeat” (Frere-Jones, 3). These stereotypically “black” stylings were replaced with sounds and techniques Frere-Jones describes as “flat-footed,” “sylvan curlicues,” “mumble and moan,” and “allusive and oblique” (Frere-Jones, 3). Wishing that Wilco’s ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ had “a little more syncopation,” Frere-Jones condemns it for “embarrassing poetry,” “plodding rhythms,” and being “formless” (Frere-Jones, 3). Looking carefully at what, specifically, Frere-Jones finds lacking in contemporary indie-rock, we see that his claims are not primarily racial, but aesthetic: the most common “issue” he takes with indie rock is that it’s not danceable, but “flat-footed,” “formless,” and “plodding.”2 He almost comes to this realization in confessing that I’ve spent too many evenings at indie concerts waiting in vain for vigor, for rhythm, for a musical effect that could justify all the preciousness. How did rhythm come to be discounted in an art form that was born as a celebration of rhythm’s possibilities? Where is the impulse to reach out to an audience—to entertain? (Frere-Jones, 3).

Though he seems to be forgetting about a whole indie sub-genre (dancerock/bloghouse along the lines of DFA, Daft Punk, and Justice, to name some of the most well-known players), Frere-Jones claims that indie rock is undanceable, that it has reversed Elvis’s founding gesture of “mov[ing] popular music from the head to the hips” by “retreating inward and settling for the lassitude and monotony that so many indie acts seem to confuse with authenticity and significance” (Frere-Jones, 3). Introspective and unrhythmic, indie rock has, in Frere-Jones’s assessment, moved from the hips back to the “head”: it’s not body music; it’s mind music. Now, if Frere-Jones’s main criticism of indie rock is that it’s overly intellectualized music more appropriate for quiet introspection or perhaps modest headbobbing than for dancing and “entertainment,” why does he say that his problem is a racial one? Since his objections are, at bottom, aesthetic, why frame them in racial terms? Or rather, why does Frere-Jones mistake his aesthetic argument for a racial one? Perhaps because of commodity fetishism (the transaction of social relations through/in terms of relations among commodities), there is a tendency in con-

Preface

xi

temporary society to make aesthetic judgments in terms of identity categories. For example, Susan Cook’s article “Feminist Musicology and the Abject Popular” examines the feminization of popular music, or the idea that “I was a girl. My music sucked by definition.”3 As many feminist aestheticians have demonstrated, traditional aesthetics also couches its concepts and values in terms of social privilege: Christine Battersby’s critique of nineteenth-century notions of “genius” demonstrates that this term is normatively (if implicitly) masculine.4 So, in the West, there is a longstanding convention of grounding aesthetic claims in socio-political hierarchies. Frere-Jones’s argument falls well within this tradition of attempting to justify aesthetic judgments by grounding them in (supposedly accepted) relations of social privilege, by using mainstream racial politics in an attempt to ground an aesthetic argument. While this sort of category confusion usually occurs when using the language of aesthetics to make a claim that is ultimately about identity politics, Frere-Jones uses the language of identity politics (race) to make a claim about aesthetics. While he might be “flipping the script” to a certain extent, Frere-Jones’s claim is far from radical, for the uncritiqued, unthematized assumption upon which his entire argument turns is the very same one operating in both traditional aesthetics and more contemporary discourses: black = body, white = mind. Frere-Jones says “black” when he means “body” and physical pleasure (e.g., dancing, rhythm), and “white” when he means “mind” (thought, introspection, contemplation, klutziness, and all that is not “cool”). Perhaps the most overworn and overanalyzed Western racial stereotype, the association of blacks with embodiment and whites with intellect is, obviously, both empirically false and politically problematic. Both the racial claim that Frere-Jones says he’s making (indie rock is insufficiently “black”) and the aesthetic claim that he’s actually making (indie rock is too introspective and should be more danceable/rhythmic) are themselves questionable. Why should any particular genre or sub-genre appeal to racially diverse audiences? Isn’t the point of sub-genres and sub-cultures that they are not universally appealing? Why should blacks (or anyone) care about indie rock? Why should one particular genre be danceable and/or rhythmic? Should all music be danceable? Why shouldn’t one particular genre of music be contemplative? These questions, although interesting and worth investigating, are not pertinent to my main critique of Frere-Jones, i.e., that he makes aesthetic arguments in terms of racially stereotyped mind-body distinctions. I doubt he was conscious of his substitution of racial for aesthetic categories. But why was this so easy? What makes it possible for someone to make such a mistake? As I mentioned earlier, this is, in a sense, a variation on a longstanding Western tradition of mixing aesthetic values with identity politics—but it only pushes these questions back to earlier eras. These are the questions which this book investigates. Why are aesthetic values––and identity politics often expressed in terms of one another? Because these two discourses manifest themselves in, on, and through corporeal experience, the body is a productive place to begin thinking about this question.

xii

Preface

xiii

Acknowledgments I have received so much assistance, advice, and support in the process of writing and refining this manuscript that I can only hope to convey a small portion of my gratitude and appreciation in this acknowledgement section. First, I want to thank Tina Chanter for all her feedback, encouragement, and hard questions. She believed in what might be seen as an unconventional project and helped me see it through to fruition. Thanks also to Bill Martin, Rick Lee, Darrell Moore, Peg Birmingham, and Emmanuel Eze for the conversations from which many of the ideas in this text emerged. Portions of this work have been presented at various conferences, and I am very grateful for all the invaluable feedback. Various portions of chapter 4 were presented at the Eastern Division of the Society for Women in Philosophy, the Society for Social and Political Philosophy, and at an APA Central session sponsored by the American Society for Aesthetics. Chapter 5 began as an invited lecture to St. Xavier University’s Philosophy Club. The epilogue was presented at a meeting of the Radical Philosophy Association. Without the efforts and input of these session organizers, participants, and audiences, much of this book would look very different than it does now. Most of all I want to thank Christian Ryan, my husband (and the artist known as christian.ryan), for all his intellectual, technical, and personal support. I also acknowledge the writers of the songs whose lyrics I have cited in this text. First is Laura Logic, whose “Music is a Better Noise” appears in chapter 2. Next, there are the following songwriters: Diamonds From Sierra Leone Words and Music by John Barry, Don Black, Kanye West, Devon Harris, David Sheats, Andre Benjamin, and Antwan Patton Copyright © 2005 Chrysalis Music, Gnat Booty Music, EMI April Music Inc., Dungeon Rat Music, and EMI Unart Catalog Inc. All Rights for Gnatt Booty Music Controlled and Administered by Chrysalis Music All Rights for Dungeon Rat Music Controlled and Administered by EMI April Music Inc. All Rights Reserved Used by Permission Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation xi

xiii

Introduction Because of claims of transcendental order, on the one hand, and imputations of its ties to material existence, on the other, music serves as an ideal site for examining the always-gendered [and raced] struggle between mind and body that has characterized Western culture from its beginnings.1

It is not uncommon for philosophers to turn to music in their examinations of the body’s status as natural or constructed, and in turn this body’s role in discourses of social inequality. Why is this the case? What is to be gained in thinking about resonating bodies (i.e., music) in concert with raced and gendered bodies? Music, race, and gender straddle an oftentimes ambiguous line between what I call here “nature” (physical materiality) and “culture” (social norms), for society demands all three to account for certain concrete, physical, or physiological (empirical) phenomena, while at the same time admitting the influence of sociohistorical factors. Sound frequencies, the overtone series, the limitations of the human ear, organs, hormones, chromosomes, the shape and color of bodies— these supposedly natural phenomena make it easy to appeal to nature in defining music, race, or gender, and in making normative claims about them. Political philosophers tend to care about this aspect of the nature/culture debate because the supposed “naturalness” of bodily difference is frequently used to ground claims about socio-political equality and inequality (e.g., homosexuality is congenital, therefore gays and lesbians, because they did not “choose” to be a sexual minority, deserve special legal protections; there is no genetic basis for racial difference, therefore one should adopt a colorblind attitude toward racial difference, etc.).2 However, music, race, and gender are also complex social phenomena that can’t be accounted for in purely physical/physiological terms. Further, if we recognize that science and “nature” are themselves socially constructed discourses, are we merely presenting another variation on the metaphysical themes “reason conquers nature” and “the intelligible supersedes the physical?”3 If we are committed to avoiding metaphysical dichotomies and their complementary raced, gendered, and classed hierarchies, then how do we account for this intersection of physics/physiology and the social?

xiii

xiv

Introduction

In response to these questions, I follow, in this book, two related lines of inquiry: (1) the kind of embodiment that political philosophers use music to help them explain, and (2) the ways in which norms about human bodily difference (i.e., gender and race) continue to ground serious/popular hierarchies well after twentieth-to-twenty-first century art and philosophy have thoroughly deconstructed this binary. Each of the book’s five chapters addresses music, race, and gender as coincident and mutually determinative discourses that emerge and evolve with one another (and with other factors such as class, sexuality, nation) to articulate what it means to be a body and what is at stake in claiming its naturalness and/or constructedness. In order to fully understand the body and its conjectural status, resonating bodies, raced bodies, and gendered bodies must be examined together. The first chapter, “On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory,” argues that while most scholars in this area treat music as an example of race, racial embodiment, and racial politics, this “example” model inaccurately treats each area (race, music, and sometimes gender) as a distinct discourse. If what is at stake in defining what constitutes music and what constitutes race is fundamentally the same issue—the determination of the relationship between raced, colonized, or resonating bodies and the social forces which operate in, through, and on these bodies—then the relationship between raced and resonating bodies is not so much exemplary or representative as it is what I call “coincident.” While Angela Davis’ Blues Legacies and Black Feminism explicitly examines the coincidence of gender, race, and class as it is “expressed” in the music of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, it also implicitly begins to draw out the coincidence of gender, race, and class with the discourses and practices which came to constitute “the blues.” Thus, I turn to this text as an instance of how the “example” model is transformed into a coincidental or conjectural model of the relationships among race, class, gender, and music. I have adopted the term “coincidence” to describe the relationships among race, gender, and music because it is a more accurate metaphor than the widely used and critiqued language of intersectionality. Neither the “traffic” metaphor nor the “blending” model for intersectionality adequately captures the co-incidence (i.e., mutual constitution) of social identities. Because social identity categories (race, class, gender, etc.) never actually exist as separate or separable (e.g., as different roads that intersect or different color frequencies), we always use these categories conjecturally, to describe phenomena that never actually exist as such. Having argued for the importance of thinking music, race, and gender as coincident, I then move on in chapters 2 and 3 to develop a theory of their shared form of embodiment—what I call the “conjectural body.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s early writings and Julia Kristeva’s later work both look to music in their attempts to elaborate a theory of what I call “the conjectural body,” a body that is inseparably material and social. Just as Rousseau’s early musical writings repeatedly emphasize that any account of a “state of nature” is first and foremost a conjectural history constructed ex post facto, Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic insists that this “pre”-Oedipal, “pre”-symbolic state is thinkable as such only

Introduction

xv

once the work of the Oedipus complex and entry into language have been initiated. That is to say, Rousseau’s “state of nature” and Kristeva’s semiotic describe a retrospective, mythic primacy—an historicized materiality or a “second nature.” Because Rousseau and Kristeva have developed this account of embodiment with both music and politics in mind, it offers, as I discuss below, a productive place to begin thinking about the interrelationships among aesthetic hierarchies and relations of socio-political privilege. This notion of the conjectural has contemporary relevance for a number of reasons. Primary among these, particularly for feminist and critical race theory, is its critique or qualification of non-ideal theory, which argues that the heuristic use of conjecture has only ever (and perhaps necessarily) served hegemonic ideological purposes. In Charles Mills’s definitive essay on this topic, he argues that Western political and ethical theory is systematically incapable of accounting for gender, race, and class oppression because a general commitment to “rel[y] on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual”4 in turn entails the obfuscation or quasi-fetishistic recognition and disavowal of the “reality” of sexism, racism, and classism.5 Mills continually—and rightly—problematizes “the fact- and reality-avoidance” (Mills, “Ideal Theory,” 179) of mainstream Western political philosophy and ethical theory, claiming that it is disconnected from “the actual workings” (Mills, “Ideal Theory,” 178), “the actual origins and the actual history” (Mills, “Ideal Theory,” 181) of the phenomena it purports to examine. In order to genuinely address and remedy systems of oppression, Mills argues that scholars must begin from/with “empirical input and an awareness of how the real-life [world]…actually works” (Mills, “Ideal Theory,” 178). While I do want to emphasize that I find Mills’s insight here both correct and useful (indeed, I have argued that this insight is useful for feminist philosophy and feminist approaches to popular culture), I also think that there needs to be a more nuanced account of what, exactly, we understand “actual, real life” to be, one that cannot be mistaken for some naïve realism or naturalism (neither of which, I think, can be attributed to Mills). The structures of empirical material reality are significantly influenced by ideology, especially by ideologies so pervasive that they become material, a form of “second nature.” Rather than “abstracting away from realities crucial to our comprehension of the actual workings of injustice in human interactions and social institutions,” the theory of the conjectural body attends to precisely these realities by describing how the material and the social interact to produce material actualities that themselves normalize status-quo relations of privilege and power (Mills, “Ideal Theory,” 170). In other words, while I agree with Mills that it is important to start from “the actual,” it is equally important that “the actual” be historicized. Historicization does not seem to be inconsistent with Mills’s aims, and in fact seems largely compatible—if not implicit—with(in) them. Because the theory of the conjectural body allows us to call upon physical, empirical, and personal experience without thereby positing any essentializing claims about corporeality or the “natural” world, it focuses our attention on an actuality, but one that is historicized. Accordingly, theorizing the body conjecturally admits of the con-

xvi

Introduction

tingent, constructed, and contested character of “anatomy” while also allowing us to account for the real-life effects of this concept.6 In the final two chapters, I use this notion of conjectural embodiment to analyze the political dimension of certain problems in the philosophy of music. In the fourth chapter, I read Adorno’s writings on commodity music in light of Irigaray’s claim that women were the first and continue to be the most important commodities exchanged among men in order to examine the implications of Adorno’s consistent feminization of commodity music. I argue that because the discourse of (commodity) fetishism does not and cannot account for the “history” of what it takes to be “real” social relations, it must be supplemented by the notion of abjection. The model of commodity fetishism claims that the subject first experiences an “authentic” comportment to the world that is later perverted, but it cannot account, for example, for the fact that this supposedly authentic comportment is always a masculine one. Because the model of fetishism indicates a perversion from a normative state (real social relations; women’s lack of the phallus), it assumes a “state of nature.” Insofar as it assumes a normative state, fetishism does not account for how and why its norms came to be considered as such; thus, what is missing from fetishism—and what the notion of abjection provides—is the “behind-the-scenes” work, the establishment of norms (relations of privilege and marginalization), which sets the stage upon which fetishism (deviation from the norm) occurs. Abjection historicizes the “actuality” of fetishized relations. In other words, abjection helps us account for the fact that “fetishized” relations are consistently feminized and racially othered—“abnormal” relations are associated with social groups which have, prior to the moment of fetishization, already been deemed “abnormal” or “marginal.”7 Kristeva’s notion of abjection provides us with a conceptual structure and a vocabulary with which to think about precisely this “conjectural” moment. In the fifth chapter, I turn to the role of the body in Nietzsche’s music aesthetics: specifically, his argument for the superior value of popular music. Claiming that music is to be suffered physiologically, Nietzsche views the production and reception of music as the activity of resonating bodies. Nietzsche thus frames his critique of Wagner in terms of bodily comportment: instead of dancing, Wagner poses. Even more interesting for my purposes here is Nietzsche’s re-valuation of popular music as a feminized cultural discourse. Claiming that “music is a woman,” Nietzsche argues that the positive attributes of popular music (specifically, Italian Opera buffa) are those which are associated with stereotypical (white) femininity: superficiality, charm, beauty, entertainment, affect, accessibility, and simplicity.8 Nietzsche thus demonstrates one main way in which popular music is a feminist concern by showing how the critique of patriarchy is tied to the critique of serious/popular hierarchies (or, how the positive valuation of femininity and the positive valuation of popular music follow from one another). In so doing, Nietzsche bolsters my argument that “the popular” is a feminist issue. His endorsement of feminized popular music as a mode of bodily comportment also offers some suggestions for think-

Introduction

xvii

ing through current issues emerging from the coincidence of resonating, raced, and gendered bodies. While race and gender theory are so interested in examining the intersections of the material and the social that such projects might sometimes seem redundant, aesthetics and the philosophy of music in large part still need to be convinced that these are valid questions—even though it is an issue that has been raised many times, from Rousseau to prominent contemporary musicologists. Indeed, analytic philosophical aesthetics in the United States and the UK is a very conservative field wherein many prominent scholars remain unconvinced that race and gender are inherently philosophical topics of inquiry. So, when the American Society for Aesthetics’ website has as its Winter 2003 featured article Dennis Dutton’s “Let’s Naturalize Aesthetics,” and the 2000 edition of the British Journal of Aesthetics publishes an article that argues for the impossibility of the existence of a “great” female composer,9 it is clear that aesthetics can greatly benefit from the large volume of work done by those pursuing gender and race theory. Especially interesting is Dutton’s claim that “[t]he admiration of high technique, of feats of virtuosity, is a cross-cultural, universal value. It infects not only the arts, but potentially all human activity, e.g., sporting activities everywhere.”10 Arguing that virtuosity is a universal aesthetic value, Dutton claims that universality is grounded in some evolutionary advantage—the most virtuous is the most “fit” to survive.11 Positing explicitly naturalistic and implicitly biological claims, Dutton fails to interrogate the degree to which the pervasiveness of patriarchal cultures makes what are really, at bottom, patriarchal values (such as the “mine-is-bigger-than-yours” competitiveness involved in the admiration of virtuosity) seem to be culturally universal values. In other words, the admiration of virtuosity is not necessarily a component of every culture, but a component of patriarchy in its various manifestations throughout the globe. Indeed, care ethicists have argued that Western culture socializes females to value care and non-competitiveness; thus, even within Western culture “competition” and “virtuosity” are not universal, “natural” values.12 Not only is mainstream philosophical aesthetics resistant to the political analyses (so much so that Peter Kivy’s keynote lecture at the 2006 meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics repeatedly and resoundingly bemoaned attempts to “politically deconstruct” Beethoven’s oeuvre) that are widely accepted in musicology, literary theory, cultural studies, and even continental philosophy, but it seems that philosophers doing work in feminist and critical race/postcolonial aesthetics focus mainly on visual art and film (excepting a few works on black feminism and black vernacular musical forms). So, in other words, there is a huge vacuum of current philosophical work on race, gender, and music. This book seeks to fill (at least some of) that void. This book addresses another important issue for feminism, particularly for feminist aesthetics: the roles of class hierarchies and American feminism’s roots in Puritan social-reform movements in continuing the marginalization of “feminized” popular music and the (frequently raced and non-bourgeois) females

xviii

Introduction

who participate in its production and consumption.13 Offering popular music as a domain for feminist practice,14 I aim to counter the tendency within feminist theory to ignore or explicitly reject popular music—a domain in which many women are actively involved as creators, and in which women have overwhelming power as consumers—seeing it instead as an area in which women can make significant contributions to society in general, and feminist projects in particular. While feminist art theory and criticism have long recognized the aesthetic and social value of quilting, embroidery, weaving, and other such “female” or “feminine” activities which have conventionally been excluded from “serious” or “high” culture, there is resistance to and hesitation in making similar claims about the cultural value and revolutionary possibilities in commercial popular music. Most explicitly feminist work on music and women in music (excepting the fad of Madonna-studies, which gained popularity in the mid-late eighties) focuses on independent or non-mainstream music. Rarely does one encounter a positive feminist reading of pop and its fans; to like popular music is to be duped by the culture industry. However, to write off an artist’s or fan’s participation in popular music culture as false consciousness is just another version of the patriarchal tendency to deny women and underprivileged men the capacity to make rational, informed, valuable choices. It is my argument that these artists and fans are actively engaged in musical production, interpretation, and criticism, but that some feminisms’/feminists’ hostility to anything commercially oriented unduly prejudices them against discerning women’s significant agency in and contributions to commercial pop. The portrayal of the pop music fan as a passive victim of ideology incapable of thinking for herself (let alone making “informed” aesthetic judgments) is but another means of classifying as culturally insignificant activities performed by and for women. As Linda Scott argues, “If we hold sincerely to the belief that women have the ability (and the right) to think for themselves, to lead, to create, to work for change, then the repeated construction of an idiot reader [or listener] by these critiques is itself an antifeminist act” (Scott, 319). Like fashion, which is the topic of Scott’s Fresh Lipstick, popular music is an arena in which females have significant power as consumers and producers. However, as Scott notes, in feminist criticism, it is not uncommon to read that “the whole of postwar consumer culture was a conspiracy organized to the specific purpose of keeping women down” (Scott, 234). Thus, when women participate in consumer culture, their actions merely feed their own oppression—so the story goes. That participants are incapable of anything but uncritical adherence to authority, and that their activities are merely reproductive of dominant norms rather than being genuinely and originally creative are two highly problematic assumptions behind this “feminist” critique of popular music. However, feminists’ ignorance or downright derogation of female pop music artists and consumers arises from differences among groups of women and struggles for authority among these groups. Claiming that certain groups of women are frivolous, silly, and duped assumes and ensures the legitimacy of one’s own position and, mirroring the tactics and effects of patriarchal power relations, overlooks the actual contribu-

Introduction

xix

tions of numerous women. In the fourth chapter, I specifically address the ways in which pop music contributes to feminist aims. Like music, gender, and race themselves, the elements of my project exist at the interstices of various disciplines, and this book is an effort to address this interdisciplinarity in a specifically and explicitly philosophical fashion. My inquiry is philosophical both insofar as the texts from which it draws are, while at times interdisciplinary, well-situated within the domain of continental philosophy (deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and Marxism), and insofar as my approach is philosophical rather than historical, (ethno)musicological, sociological, or literary. This book is an argument for an expanded notion of philosophical inquiry, targeted to critics from both mainstream analytic philosophy and the more conservative strains of contemporary continental philosophy. Race, gender, and popular music offer up many interesting, complex, and difficult philosophical problems, just as they can help us illustrate many more wellestablished/accepted ones. Although the epilogue addresses these issues of disciplinary scope most directly, the whole book stands as evidence for this claim. In the first chapter, I examine the use of music in recent postcolonial theory in order to argue for the mutual determination or coincidence of resonating, raced, and gendered bodies. While many popular postcolonial theorists and musicologists use music as an example of social structures and relations, a close examination of Angela Davis’s study of Billie Holiday reveals that social identities and musical discourses are mutually constitutive. What counts as “music” is determined by various systems of racial privilege, and racial privilege is reinforced through discourses of musical value. Discourses of music, race, and gender emerge and evolve together as varying modes of articulating the relation between the material and the social. In other words, music, race, and gender are interlocking and interdependent manifestations of the nature/culture problem.

xx

Introduction

Introduction

Part 1 Conjecture and Resonating Bodies

xxi

xxii

Introduction

Part 1 Conjecture and Resonating Bodies

Chapter 1

On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory1 It is not uncommon for postcolonial and critical race theorists to use the musical practices typical to a given community in order to explain the concept and/or experience of race, culture, diaspora, etc. W.E.B. Du Bois opens each chapter of The Souls of Black Folk with an epigraph and a few measures of melody from various popular spirituals. Paul Gilroy’s use of the antiphonic (call-andresponse) structures common to many black musics as an illustration of his theory of the “Black Atlantic” is perhaps the most well-known manifestation of this trend. In this chapter I examine the use of music—specifically, contemporary popular musics associated with black culture (broadly construed)—as an example of some idea or experience pertaining to race or postcolonial theory. This technique works so well, and is thus employed so frequently, because the relationship between music and race is not just one of exemplarity; rather, in the West, the concepts of music and race/culture relate at a more fundamental level. Given the history of these concepts and their deployment in present experiences, both music and race share a problematic or a logic: both must answer the question of or give an account of the relationship between the “material” (what is physical, physiological, or “natural”) and the “social” (what is artificial, the product of human intervention or socialization). Music is not merely exemplary of racial and/or cultural difference, because what is at stake in defining what constitutes music and what constitutes race are fundamentally the same issue: the determination of the relationship between raced, colonized/colonizing, or resonating bodies and the social forces which operate in, through, and on these bodies. In both cases, a claim is made about bodies or material fact(icity) and the degree to which they are determined by and/or autonomous of social forces. Thus, insofar as discourses and experiences of music and race grapple with the same issue, their relationship is not one of exemplarity but what we might call, in keeping with the way many feminists understand the relationship between gender and race, one of “intersection.” They are all lived and thought together, in a kind of relationship I call “coincidence.” I choose this term over “intersection” because the idea of co-incidence, i.e., that an incidence of race 3

4

Chapter 1

discourse is at the same time one of gender discourse (and class, etc.), is a more accurate and productive metaphor for the relationship among social identity and music. When one speaks of an “intersection,” it is possible to portray this intersection as a specific point at which two or more separate phenomena come together, combine, and then—eventually—separate out again. However, even though the heuristic separation of these concepts seems more or less necessary, the phenomena or experiences described by terms like “race” and “gender” are not, in real, lived experience, separate. Unlike a traffic intersection, where separate roads momentarily overlap, these forms of embodiment intersect in their entirety—phenomenologically, they are never distinct, but complicit and coincident. The “intersection” of raced, gendered, and resonating bodies is a nexus out of which we tease relatively artificial and anachronistic (i.e., culturally mediated ideas of unmediated naturalness) categories to explain and understand our experience. The categories that supposedly “intersect” or “blend” never, in real life, exist in isolation from one another. Thus, every time we invoke one of these categories in isolation from the others (i.e., race or gender), we do so conjecturally. What precisely it means to think “conjecturally” is something I discuss extensively in the next chapter, but here, in my critique of intersectionality theory, I demonstrate the necessity and utility of such an approach. In what follows, I begin by giving an overview of the way popular music is used as example in some very influential texts in postcolonial theory and musicology: Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and Susan McClary’s Conventional Wisdom.

Serious versus Pop Most people would not contest the claim that distinctions between high and low culture (such as that between serious and popular music) are, if not completely, at least partially determined by or reflective of hierarchies of race, class, and gender privilege. As Aaron Fox notes, [t]he logics of value that appear to structure hierarchies of musical styles and performances and talents are in fact the same logics, in a symbolically condensed and projected form, that structure hierarchies of people in social groups: logics of race, class, gender, otherness, similarity, and ultimately, of the value of individual human beings and their communities.2

In both musical and sociopolitical discourses, privilege and marginalization are allotted according to, if not the same then mutually influential, distributions. For example, insofar as our culture marginalizes the agency and authority of teenage girls, it devalues music made by and for them (while at the same time making vast amounts of money from these girls and their supposed lack of agency and power). In chapter 4, I discuss the gendering of popular music, but for now I

On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory

5

limit my examination to the use of popular music in postcolonial and critical race theory. Some work in postcolonial theory and cultural studies maintains this serious/pop dichotomy but inverts the privilege: while “language” is always Euro, rational, and intellectual, “music” is the domain of those denied access to these privileges. Hence, “music” represents black, oral, communal, and embodied discourse.3 Here music is being explicitly raced, only to valorize an “authentic” minority culture (usually black) in the face of a homogenizing “white” Western high culture. As this view simply replaces what is considered authentic culture with specific folk or vernacular traditions, models based on this approach don’t help us think through the relationship between the material and the social; in fact, their continued appeal to a supposedly pure origin illustrates the problem quite well. Stuart Hall gives the following as an example of such appeals to “keeping it real”: “‘Good’ black popular culture can pass the test of authenticity—the reference to black experience and to black expressivity. These serve as the guarantees in the determination of which black popular culture is right-on, which is ours and which is not.”4 Within the domain of what is considered, for example, hip-hop, certain practices—usually those associated with masculinities privileged in the black community—are considered “authentic,” while others— usually those which carry connotations of marginalized forms of black identity—are trivialized in the usual “pop” ways: feminization, infantilization, commercialization, etc. Here, then, in distinctions drawn between musical practices, we find a contestation over the content of racial and ethnic identity. Thus, Hall notes, “[t]he essentializing moment,” that is, the appeal to some sort of “authentic” or inaccessible origin, “is weak because it naturalizes and dehistoricizes difference, mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological, and genetic” (Hall, 471). It is very easy to associate certain racial and/or ethnic groups with specific, usually folk-based musics: a quick survey of the radio dial and the way various stations market themselves tells us that hip hop is “black,” salsa is “Latin,” and rock is “white.” Even when critiquing essentialisms such as this, academia is fond of claiming that specific styles and genres are expressive or representative of aspects of racial identity and race politics. From Paul Gilroy to Susan McClary, these arguments are almost always formalistic: appealing to some quality of the lived experience of some minority group, these arguments pick out structural devices common to the musical tradition under examination and use these features to illustrate and argue for the value of ideas and practices characteristic of this racial/ethnic group. For example, both McClary and Gilroy note the antiphonic (call and response) structures of various blues-based genres and associate this with the “black Atlantic’s” counter-modern values and practices; the non-dominating power relationships and plural, fluid subjectivities characteristic of black vernacular musics are then contrasted with European notions of individuality, virtuosity, and sovereignty. This latter strategy is even adopted in Tricia Rose’s discussion of the aesthetics of hip hop.5

6

Chapter 1

Music (Whatever That Is) as an Example of Race In The Black Atlantic Gilroy argues that “Antiphony (call and response) is the principal formal feature of these [black diaspora] musical traditions,” and that this musical practice both reflects social structures present within the black Atlantic and offers a model for politics.6 According to Gilroy, there is a democratic, communitarian movement enshrined in the practice of antiphony which symbolizes and anticipates (but does not guarantee) new, nondominating social relationships. Lines between self and other are blurred and special forms of pleasure are created as a result of the meetings and conversations that are established between one fractured, incomplete, and unfinished racial self and others. Antiphony is the structure that hosts these essential encounters (BA, 78-79).

Given the importance of response, the structure of antiphony necessarily includes a moment of transformative mimesis wherein the listener(s) actively repeats and modulates “authoritative” or “canonical” material. Furthermore, the inherent and celebrated hybridity of many black vernacular forms (such as reggae, dub, hip hop and house) reflects or expresses more accurately than any other model the “fractured, incomplete, and unfinished” character of black identity. According to Gilroy, this fluid, hybrid identity presented in and through black popular musical practice is offered as a deconstruction of the essentialist/constructionist opposition which structures much of the discourse around black identity. Although music figures prominently in his inquiry, the analytical force of Gilroy’s text is focused on race and racial identity, leaving music as a relative given. While his project in The Black Atlantic is clearly a deconstructive one, his conception and deployment of “music” presents a very undeconstructed opposition between music and language similar to the oppositions in the “essentialist” discourses mentioned above. Given his commitment to deconstructing essentialisms, it is rather surprising that Gilroy assumes a rather Schopenhauerian notion of music as pure, immediately-given Idea. “Thinking about music—a nonrepresentational, non-conceptual form—raises aspects of embodied subjectivity that are not reducible to the cognitive and the ethical” (Gilroy, BA, 76). True, music is not necessarily engaged in the economy of signifiers and signifieds that governs much linguistic communication; however, it does not necessarily follow from this that music operates without ever engaging concepts (Cage’s 4:33 is almost an entirely conceptual piece of music), nor that the bodily/affective dimension of music is some sort of immediate communication lacking commerce with conceptual and representational phenomena. Gilroy seems to be drawing an all-too-easy opposition between language and music, representation and embodiment. By opposing embodied, affective music to representational, conceptual language, Gilroy plays into some of the essentialist assumptions and stereo-

On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory

7

types he aims to critique. This is so, I will argue, because Gilroy’s project fails to address the essentialist/constructionist problem in terms of music. The simple oppositions between concept and affect, language and music, are a serious flaw in Gilroy’s analysis. In Gilroy’s text, music is an expressive domain that has functioned as a political and ideological tool: [e]xamining the place of music in the black Atlantic world means surveying the self-understanding articulated by the musicians who have made it, the symbolic use to which their music is put by other black artists and writers, and the social relations which have produced and reproduced the unique expressive culture in which music comprises a central and even a foundational element (Gilroy, BA 74-75; emphasis mine).

Focusing on expressivity and instrumentality, Gilroy always views music as some sort of content—an idea, concept, or practice—whose meaning bears upon and participates in various social relations. Primarily, Gilroy is concerned with arguments claiming that music can express some “real” or “authentic” racial identity. Even though he is problematizing what it means for music to be “expressive” or “representative,” Gilroy’s questions interrogate what music is said to express and represent (i.e., blackness, racial identity), not whether and/or how music is expressive and/or representational. He distills his inquiry into black vernacular music and postcolonial theory down to this question: “What special analytical problems arise if a style, genre, or particular performance of music is identified as being expressive of the absolute essence of the group that produced it?” (Gilroy, BA, 75). Framed thus, the question addresses debates about race and racial identity, namely, the nature of the identity or identities expressed in and represented by black vernacular musical practices. In Gilroy’s deconstruction of the essentialist/constructionist binaries operative in postcolonial discourse, music is an example, a text to be read because it illustrates certain ideas. “It is not enough,” he argues, for critics to point out that representing authenticity always involves artifice. This may be true, but it is not helpful when trying to evaluate or compare cultural forms let alone in trying to make sense in their mutation. More important, this response also misses the opportunity to use music as a model that can break the deadlock between the two unsatisfactory positions that have dominated recent discussion of black cultural politics (Gilroy, BA, 99; emphasis mine).

Although I agree that essentialism and constructionism are ultimately “unsatisfactory positions,” Gilroy’s analysis presents a serious shortcoming insofar as he neither acknowledges nor examines the ways in which “authenticity” and “superficiality” function in the discourses surrounding music. He takes music as some sort of given, especially with regard to its status as material or social. The debate between essentialists and pluralists seems to exist, for Gilroy, exclusively at the level of race and its intersection with other identity categories, and is not

8

Chapter 1

operative in music. If “[m]usic and its rituals can be used to create a model whereby identity can be understood neither as a fixed essence nor as a vague and utterly contingent construction to be reinvented by the will and whim of aesthetics, symbolists, and language gamers” (Gilroy, BA, 102), then it would seem to indicate either that the essentialist/constructionist question is not a problem for music or that this problem has been resolved satisfactorily. In Gilroy’s text, when debates about authenticity and superficiality appear in relation to music, they proceed in terms of the music’s ability to authentically express—or inauthentically betray—a race or culture. Music can make claims toward, be reflective or expressive of, either the true essence of blackness or its impossibility.7 Thus, in Gilroy’s analysis of the relationship between (black vernacular) music and racial identity in the black diaspora, he fails to problematize music with the same complexity and subtlety he grants to the category of race. Even though the material/social—or, in Gilroy’s terms, the essentialist/pluralist—binary is inadequate for understanding raced, gendered, classed bodies, music does not offer us a simple, unproblematic, easily read model—for within musical discourses, aporia Gilroy locates between essentialism and pluralism is by no means clearly resolved. This aporia arises because, as Gilroy argues, “[w]hatever the radical constructionists may say, [race, gender, and music are] lived as a coherent (if not always stable) experiential sense of self” (BA, 102): even though these concepts are socio-historical, they are, because of their historicity, unavoidably material. Since music is a social fact just as much as are race and gender, it cannot provide a way out of the aporia between racial essentialism and radical constructionism. It is precisely the musical appurtenance of this aporia that Susan McClary examines in her discussion of the race-gender politics of blues-based rock music.

Race (Whatever That Is), Masculinity, and the Blues McClary, like Gilroy, attends to the role of antiphony in black vernacular music. As a musicologist, she offers a formal analysis of various performances by specific male and female performers. For example, she argues that in W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” as performed by Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong, “each four-bar section operates on the basis of a call/response mechanism, with two bars of call followed by two of instrumental ‘response.’”8 Within a very common blues structure, an antiphonic relationship is established between the vocalists and the band. “Each verse, each performance,” then, “reinscribes a particular model of social interaction” (McClary, CW, 41) which is different from the one between, say, the virtuosic violinist and either his accompanying orchestra or his fawning fans, for while the blues requires cooperation, the nineteenth-century violin concerto emphasizes individual virtuosity and independence.9 Unlike Gilroy, whose analysis takes up music as a seemingly unproblematic discourse, McClary acknowledges that “music” is not a given, but that analogies between

On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory

9

black vernacular musical practice and black identity must question what is meant by the term “music,” not just what music means, expresses, and/or represents. Though McClary’s analysis succeeds where Gilroy’s fails—that is, in addressing the relationship between structure and ideology in music—it fails precisely where Gilroy’s is at its strongest, namely, in critiquing racial and cultural essentialism. McClary finds the antiphonic structure exhibited by Smith’s and Armstrong’s “St. Louis Blues” to be characteristic of many blues-based musics, including jazz, gospel, soul, R&B, funk, hip hop, and rock. She argues that “many African and African American genres are characterized by the convention of call and response, in which soloists are legitimated by the sonic embrace of the group” (McClary CW, 23). McClary notes that in the Swan Silvertones’ 1959 performance of “Near the Cross,” lead vocalist Claude Jeter’s extreme virtuosity is “safely supported not only by the steady regularity of the backup ensemble but also by an audience that responds enthusiastically to each of his virtuosic moves, encouraging him on to greater and greater heights” (McClary CW, 24). Unlike the virtuoso solo artist in the European tradition (think Paganini and his violin, Clapton and his guitar), Jeter’s virtuosity is, according to McClary, part of a communal effort meant to engage chorus, audience, and soloist in the performative and spiritual aspects of music making. In McClary’s analysis, the musical conventions of mid-twentieth century gospel performances not only exemplify, but reaffirm and recreate the social conventions common to the performers’ and audience’s lifeworlds: “with each verse, each performance, it reinscribes a particular model of social interaction” (McClary CW, 41). Insofar as it accounts for the ways in which music not only exemplifies or expresses social structures but is a significant agent in their construction, transmission, and maintenance, McClary’s analysis proves more fruitful than Gilroy’s; however, her tendency to essentialize the difference between “European” and “African/African-American” is highly problematic. McClary’s text exhibits a seemingly over-simplistic opposition of European musical conventions and African/African-American musical conventions: while European music is an individual, intellectual activity meant to express and glorify the prowess of the performer and/or composer, African-American music is communal, corporeal, and oriented toward building relations via interactive performance (McClary CW, 22-24). As discussed previously, Jeter’s performance serves as a foil for conventions surrounding the solo in European tonal music, as well as in the largely white genre of rock. McClary argues: “[f]or the duration of [Jeter and the Slivertones’s] performance, we inhabit a world in which everyone participates, in which tradition balances with individual invention, in which self conjoins harmoniously with community, in which body, mind, and spirit collaborate, in which the possibility of a sustained present replaces tonality’s tendency to strain for and against closure” (McClary CW, 28). This claim illustrates the general framework of McClary’s analysis, which opposes Euro-American musical practices and values to African and African-American ones. As Uma Narayan notes, well-intentioned feminists, aiming to avoid gender essentialism,

10

Chapter 1

by insisting on the difference between “Western” and “Non-Western” cultures and the experiences of women within them, in fact essentialize at the cultural level.10 Instead of over-generalized claims about “women,” there exists an “essential” difference between “Western culture” and “non-Western cultures”: not only is each term in the pair over-generalized, but the fact of difference, the supposed binary opposition between “Western” and “non-Western” cultures itself, becomes essentialized (this is why Narayan refers to “Difference” as though it were a proper noun, Difference-in-itself).11 The notion that one or more absolute, irreducible differences exist between Western and non-Western cultures in turn requires that there exist inalienable, “essential” features by which “Western” and “non-Western” cultures are distinguished. The problem with this, Narayan argues, is that these essentialist claims—both about “Difference” itself and Western and non-Western cultures—are both empirically false and politically risky. Not only does this “insistence on Difference” harm both Western and non-Western women by misrepresenting them and the issues of most importance to them, it is easily adopted uncritically to further reactionary ends. In attending to the differences between Western art music and various AfricanAmerican vernacular forms, McClary’s analysis is a prime example of Narayan’s well-intentioned feminist, who, in attempting to avoid essentialism, unintentionally posits essentialist claims about Western art music and AfricanAmerican vernacular traditions. I have no doubt that McClary’s intentions were genuine; nevertheless, her tendency to place the conventions and values of black popular music in binary opposition to the conventions and values of European tonal music is a weakness in need of redress. While her analysis can be read as somewhat culturally essentialist, McClary is very effective in her use of the blues to critique notions of musical immediacy. While many postcolonial theorists use music as an example which “expresses” some aspect of black diasporic experience, there is little inquiry into how, precisely, music is “expressive.” At issue in the possibility of musical expression is the relationship between the material and the social. Is music the immediate expression of the performer’s most intimate thoughts and feelings, or is musical meaning rather the function of the musician’s use and manipulation of conventions? McClary argues that examining the history of the blues “can help academic music study out of a long-standing methodological impasse: I am drawing on blues as a clear example of a genre that succeeds magnificently in balancing convention and expression” (McClary, CW, 34). The blues, according to McClary, is an explicit and “clear example” of an accurate description of the relationship between structure and ideology, expression and convention. This example’s clarity lies in its foregrounding and attenuating the aporetic relationship between the material and the social: seemingly effortless and powerfully direct emotional expressions require a high degree of technical mastery. “Contrary to a popular belief that regards blues as some kind of unmediated expression of woe, the conventions underlying the blues secure it firmly within the realm of culture; a musician must have internalized its procedures in order to participate creatively within its ongoing conversation” (McClary, CW, 33). In

On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory

11

order to make or understand even—and especially—the simplest blues songs, it is essential to have a good working knowledge or well-developed intuition of standard blues structures, conventions, and practices—they must have become, as it were, “second nature.” One of the most significant social motivations to view the blues in terms of purity of form and authenticity of expression revolves around the intersection of masculinities, race, and nation. The British invasion (bands such as Cream, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Who, and, somewhat ironically, Queen) used the assumptions of a group of white, male, British art students about southern black bluesmen and their masculinity to develop the teenybop-oriented rock n’ roll into what is now known as “classic rock.” Prior to the 1960s, there existed a widespread English stereotype that regarded the composition and performance of music as a feminized and feminizing activity. For white, British, middleclass, heterosexual male audiences, the Delta bluesmen—specifically, the supposedly “raw” and independently “uncommercial” nature of their music and the apparently “authentic” character of their self-expression—offered a model of sufficiently “masculine” musicianship: they were both “real musicians” and “real men.” As McClary explains, “in contrast to what politicized art students regarded as the feminized sentimentality of pop music, blues seemed to offer an experience of sexuality that was unambiguously masculine. This was no mean consideration, for the English had regarded music-making as effeminizing for nearly 500 years” (McClary, CW, 55). The “unambiguously masculine” character of the Delta bluesmen’s sexuality derived in no small part from stereotypes about their race, class, and national identity. Their status as underprivileged and excluded from mainstream society made their works seem more “individualistic,” “rebellious,” and “authentic”; the character of their musical structures and musical expression was more “masculine” than the trivial, schlocky, commercially-oriented “teenybop” of, say, the early Beatles and other British pop acts. Furthermore, stereotypes about African-American men and their (hyper- but always hetero-) sexuality offered a model of masculinity too intense to be diluted by the fact of their engagement with a supposedly “effeminate” activity. These stereotypes about the masculinity expressed in and possessed by African-American bluesmen came to be integral to the sea change in rock style known as the British Invasion. What was most attractive to Cream guitarist Eric Clapton was the perceived “individuality,” of the bluesman, specifically, the perception that the bluesman worked outside the constraints of capitalist production. The rough, edgy, dirty sounds of a typical Delta Blues record contrast sharply with the highly produced sound of a pop record; hence, the “toughness” and “grittiness” of these songs reflect the values of a certain macho-rebel mythology. This myth, which McClary clearly demonstrates is false, was nonetheless powerful, for the perceived “rebellious” or “outsider” status of these working-class, African-American, (purportedly) heterosexual men made their music very attractive to the British art-school students who would come to form some of the most popular, influential, and nearly canonical rock bands of the twentieth century. The blues-based form which came to count as “classic rock” reflected

12

Chapter 1

these values, which the students saw in the music of Robert Johnson and his contemporaries, and many of these values were directly related to notions of African-American identity, heterosexuality and “authentic” masculinity. The intersection of class, race, nation, gender, and sexuality was essential in the definition of “rock” that emerged from this era and by and large remains with us today. McClary’s account is strongest precisely where Gilroy’s is at its weakest, because she attends to the ways which mythologies of “musical immediacy” are constructed in terms of stereotypes about race, masculinity, and nation. Insofar as it highlights the fact that race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality are not tangential to, but inherent in the constitution of musical structures as such, McClary’s analysis begins to move from using music as an example of social phenomena toward thinking about music, race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality as intersecting or coincident discourses which coalesce around and through the relationship between the material and the social.

Expression versus Intersection versus “Cooked” Coincidence What is interesting about models such as Gilroy’s and McClary’s, then, is their success—namely, the fact that musical structures can be so easily read in and appear to express constructions of race and gender. Music makes such an illuminative and insightful example of race and gender because all three discourses are organized around and in terms of an aporetic relationship between the material and the social. While Gilroy uses lyrics and performance practices to illustrate how “identity can be understood neither as a fixed essence nor as a vague and utterly contingent construction” (BA, 102), my argument is that music is no mere example of race or gender identity. While it is clear that there are multiple relationships between musical structures and social structures, I am wary of placing these two in a relationship of “expression.” If expression requires a subject (functioning both as the expressing agent and the object expressed), it is not proper to say that musical and social structures can be “expressive” of one another, for they do not pre-exist as independent objects or discourses prior to their “expressive” relationship. Unlike performativity, wherein the performing subject is produced in the very process of its performance, expressivity requires that there be someone or something already in existence that is made manifest or “expressed.”12 Music and race can be misinterpreted as “expressing” one another because they are in fact coincident: they co-create and mutually determine each other. The idea that music and society express and/or reflect one another is incorrect in the same way that “additive” models of identity are incorrect: both models view the component discourses as viably if not fundamentally separate/separable. It is also wrong to say that music and social identities “intersect”

On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory

13

or are “blended” with one another. While models of intersection or blending do remedy some of the problems with additive models of identity, they cannot capture the ways in which music, race, and gender begin fused together (not as separate components like streets or colors), and only become disarticulated in the course of post-experiential reflection. Music, race, and gender are experientially coincident and theoretically conjectural categories. At the end of this chapter I argue that “cooking”—both in the sense of a chemical concoction that can’t be broken back down into component parts (you can’t un-bake a cookie), and in the sense of adulteration or corruption (“cooking the books”)—is a better metaphor for describing the coincidence of music and social identity than those offered by intersectionality theorists and their critics.

Expression, the Additive Model, and the Traffic Metaphor It is possible to understand “intersection” as a strong formulation of additive theories of identity. Although it is now relatively dated, Linda Nicholson’s “coat-rack” metaphor is a very clear illustration of the additive model of identity.13 Physiology, the ever-present foundation, is like the rack upon which various coats can be hung, rearranged, and removed. While the composition of the coats might be subject to greater or lesser change, the sturdy rack remains as the unchanging structure and structuring of their arrangement. Not only does the rack remain substantively unchanged as it subsists despite the various recompositions of coats, the coats themselves are separate, distinct phenomena that are not altered by their interactions with other coats. Similarly, additive models throw lots of separate “coats” (race, gender, class, sexuality) together onto some physiological substratum and argue that these distinct elements unite to constitute the complex phenomenon at issue. What characterizes the additive model is its assumption that there are pre-existing categories (“coats”) such as race, class, gender, and sexuality which can be mixed together and individually distilled out of the mix. In order for music to “express” race or any other social identity, it must be seen as distinct and separable from it, a signifier that merely refers to or re-presents its signified. The use of the traffic intersection as a metaphor to explain intersectionality theory establishes it as a strong version of the additive model. At a traffic intersection, two separate, distinct, independent roads join together for a brief space which is thus opened for the combination and recombination of cars.14 Outside of this clearly demarcated space, the roads are independent of one another; the course of a road is not significantly determined by the course of the other road(s). Like the coat rack, the roads remain stable in their structure, while it is only the composition of the cars (coats) on them that change. The traffic model of intersection relies on a priori categories (roads, cars), and thus qualifies as an additive model of identity. Before their convergence, each of these categories exists in itself, “pure” and independent of the others. Such thinking runs con-

14

Chapter 1

trary to the intent of theorists invested in the intersection model, for the force of intersectionality theory is to think these phenomena together in a formative, mutually constitutive way. As Kimberlé Crenshaw explains, “[m]y objective…[was] that the intersection of racism and sexism factors into black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking separately at the race or gender dimensions of those experience.”15 While she sometimes speaks in terms of the “traffic” metaphor,16 the more general intent of her work is to attend to the ways in which one’s experience of “race” is constituted through one’s experience of “gender,” “class,” and “sexuality,” and vice versa. Crenshaw notes, The problem is not simply that both discourses [anti-racism and feminism] fail women of color by not acknowledging the “additional” issue of race or patriarchy but, rather, that the discourses are often inadequate even to the discrete tasks of articulating the full dimensions of racism or sexism (Crenshaw, 360).

By placing “additional” in scare quotes, Crenshaw indicates that the problem with feminist and anti-racist discourses is precisely that they view gender and race as distinct categories which are “added on” to one another. If the relationship of race and gender were additive, then there would be no problem using a combination of anti-racist and feminist discourses to fully describe the oppression of black (and all other) women. In spite of the possibility for misrepresentation and misinterpretation, it is the basic intention of intersectionality theory to provide a model for thinking about the mutually constitutive relationship between race, class, gender, and sexuality. Thus, instead of envisioning the intersection in terms of roads and cars, it is more accurate to describe this intersection as a nexus out of which we retroactively pick categories to explain and understand our experience—what I will later describe as a “cooked” coincidence. The coincident “intersection” sets up or prepares the terrain so that these paths or categories can be conjecturally and hypothetically sketched out. The categories do not pre-exist their intersection, for their intersection is what constitutes them as such. Accordingly, “race,” “gender,” “class,” and “sexuality,” are themselves conjectural categories, because even though they do not actually exist as distinct phenomena, it is sometimes, for the purposes of analysis, useful to name them individually. While Angela Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism explicitly examines the intersection of gender, race, and class as it is “expressed” in the music of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, it also implicitly begins to illustrate the coincidence of gender, race, and class with the discourses and practices which came to constitute “the blues.”17 Thus, I turn to this text as an instance of how the “example” model is transformed into a coincident model of the relationship between race, class, gender, and music. Furthermore, unlike the work of Christopher Hight, which I examine later in the chapter, the model of intersection which emerges from Davis’ analysis demonstrates the conjectural status of distinct identity categories (“race,” “gender,” etc.). After working through an

On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory

15

accurate and useful account of the interrelationship between music, race, and gender, I then return to critiques of intersectionality theory to develop a new metaphor for thinking about the kind of coincident, conjectural relationship that Davis posits between music and social identity.

Angela Davis: From Expression to Coincidence Angela Davis’ Blues Legacies and Black Feminism stands out for emphasizing the coincidence of race with gender and class in the production, performance, reception, even definition of “the blues.” Davis, however, focuses more on the ways Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Billie Holiday created powerfully expressive music that in turn produced empowerment and consciousness-raising. Davis frequently analyzes what the lyrics and vocal delivery of a particular song express. A typical claim of this type posits, “That their aesthetic representations of the politics of gender and sexuality are informed by and interwoven with their representations of race and class makes their work all the more provocative” (Davis, xv). For Davis’s project, what is important and provocative about the work of these classic blues divas is what their songs express or represent about the coincidence of race, class, and gender in early twentieth-century Black experience—that these singers portray experiences in such a way that their audiences become aware of these intersecting oppressions and the ways they are resisted by the characters in the songs. Female blues narrators evince a working-class black feminist consciousness because, for example, the lyrical expression— particularly the contrast between “proper” English and Black vernacular—in Bessie Smith’s “Sam Jones Blues,” reflects “the clash between two cultures’ perceptions of marriage and particularly women’s place within the institution” (Davis, 12). While mainstream white bourgeois culture perpetuates an image of marriage framed by sexual fidelity, bourgeois consumerism, female domesticity, and the family wage, Smith describes a situation which more accurately reflects the experiences of working-class black women. In this song, the narrator shoos off her estranged husband, repeatedly asserting her emotional and economic independence from him. Posing her analysis in terms of “the blues’ importance for redefining black women’s self-understanding” (38), Davis’s work, while intriguing and important, nevertheless continues to use music as an example of social problems and forces. Davis thinks that because classic female blues singers accurately portray the kinds of oppression faced by black working-class women, they empower those with similar experiences and raise the consciousness of those who do not. Missing still is an account of why this strong conjunction between “blues legacies” and “black feminisms” works so well. Davis’s chapter on the Harlem Renaissance (and the black aesthetic with which it is associated) deals more directly with the contestation over the definition of “the blues,” focusing mostly on how class hierarchies within the black intelligentsia of the time worked to exclude the blues—a popular form—from

16

Chapter 1

consideration as “serious black music” or “black art music.” In her genealogy of blues recording and its status as “race music,” Davis does offer an account of how whiteness and blackness come to be defined through and in terms of musical structures. “Before black music was commodified successfully by the recording industry the location of the blues within a largely African-American cultural environment was simply due to the social conditions of its creation” (Davis, 141). At the outset the blues were associated with African-American people and their cultural practices because the blues were practiced only in African-American communities: due to numerous layers of racial and socioeconomic segregation, blues performers spoke of and practiced within black, working-class communities. However, since blues recordings were marketed such that the segregated geography of the record store mirrored the segregated geography of American communities, the blues “was identified and culturally represented not only as music produced by black people but as music to be heard solely by black people” (Davis, 141). There was the unmarked “music” section, and then the “race records”; in this instance, what counts as “music”—the socalled universal language—is defined against certain conceptions of blackness. This universality is universal only to those with “taste.” Anything which offends this taste by being incompatible with or incomprehensible to it is rendered inherently less “musical,” for it appears as though the discriminating ear is making judgments only about “purely” musical qualities, not about the qualities of its performers and intended audience. The supposedly disinterested aesthetic judgment appears to concern the music in itself, paying no regard to the intersecting ideologies of race, class, and gender. Accordingly, argues Davis, this marketing strategy and its latent high/low distinction “implicitly instructed white ears to feel revolted by the blues and, moreover, to assume that this sense of revulsion was instinctive” (Davis, 141). Thus, we have an inherent or material aspect of whiteness that seems to be inevitably and necessarily repulsed by certain “purely musical” structures. Although Davis does not thematize it in these terms, her analysis illustrates an instance in which discourses of music and race coincide around the nature/culture problem. Normative claims about what constitutes the “purely musical” and what constitutes the “inherent nature” of whiteness are articulated through one another. On the other side, normative claims about corrupted (perhaps we could even say “degenerate”) music and the “inherent nature” of blackness are, through this same assertion, defined negatively. In analyzing the status accorded the blues by black intellectuals associated with the Harlem Renaissance, Davis illustrates a case in which struggles over racial identity (or rather, the racial identity of a certain elite class) manifest in the struggle to define and situate a specific set of musical pieces and practices called the blues, and vice versa. Moreover, this coincidence occurs precisely where normative claims about materiality or “nature” are made. Christopher Hight offers another account of the intersection of music and race. Focusing on the pre-tonal harmonic theory that dominated Western thinking (about music) from ancient times until the mid-eighteenth century, Hight

On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory

17

argues that harmony—namely, the idea that difference can be measured on a unified, mathematically proportional scale—was an ontological and epistemic model which influenced European thought about the “substance” or materiality of resonating and racialized bodies. However, because it describes an instance of linear causality rather than mutual articulation, Hight’s analysis manifests the “bad” version of intersectionality discussed earlier.

White Noise/Racial Harmony In his article “Stereo Types: The Operation of Sound in the Production of Racial Identity,” Hight examines harmony as a model or “measuring measure” which functioned in the development of music and race in the West.18 Using Jacques Attali’s notion of harmony as an epistemic system,19 Hight views harmony as “a global similitude that transcended all disciplines and senses and was thought directly to reflect the organization of divine nature” (Hight, 14); or in Attali’s words, harmony was “the isomorphism of all representations” (cited in Hight, 14). As an epistemic paradigm, harmony was a way of analyzing, describing, and, most importantly, positing normative claims about bodies. Its normative influence was great because musical harmony seemed to have a “sense of intuitive naturalness” (Hight, 15). However, as with any supposedly “natural” phenomenon, the criteria by which harmony is judged are neither neutral nor given. Thus, the author’s main argument is that the idea of harmony or “the harmonic system of representation” “provided a consensual and preconscious norm for ‘whiteness’” (Hight, 15), which “contributed to the conceptual organization of the colonial [and postcolonial] world” (Hight, 14). Harmony presents a specific claim about the empirical differences among bodies, be they resonating bodies or raced bodies. Just as the notion of musical harmony presupposes that all frequencies can be compared to one another on a scale because they ultimately share a common term or denominator, any harmonic model reduces all difference to a greater or lesser degree of some common measurement.20 What is significant about musical harmony is its reduction of all dimensions into one single dimension, as on the monochord. The monochord is a stringed instrument with only one string; it is perhaps more strictly “harmonic” than the circle of fifths, which is better described as an element of tonality or tonal harmony. On the monochord, the relations between pitches can be expressed in terms of the ratio comparing the length of string above the fret to the length of string below the fret where a specific pitch is sounded (e.g., third, fourth, fifth, etc.). If the string were long enough, one would find that at a specific point these pitches would be repeated at different octaves. Hence, all Western harmonic relationships can be expressed as fractions of one common denominator: the singular axis of the monochord. “For race scientists,” this reliance upon a single axis—and not on the us/them binarism common to much racist thinking—meant that “the black body

18

Chapter 1

could be measured upon the same scale as the white” (Hight 4). In postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and continental philosophy, difference-oriented models emphasizing same/other binaries are a quite popular method of analyzing and explaining relations of privilege and marginalization. While the difference paradigm might be quite appropriate to many contemporary racisms, Hight argues that the harmonic model—which presupposes sameness, a common denominator—is more appropriate for analyzing certain older (although not for that fact outmoded or absent from contemporary experience) Western racisms. (Indeed, hypodescent, the idea that “one drop” of non-white blood in one’s ancestry determines one’s racial identity as non-white, is a relatively contemporary version of this “harmonic” mode of measure.) As a measuring measure or mental model, harmony was the “specific configuration of the sensorium and of concepts” (Hight, 16) which facilitated the construction of a “harmonious” human race composed of a scale of increasingly consonant and dissonant specimens. As Hight explains, according to nineteenth-century physiognomist Mary Olmstead Stanton, bodies could be classified, ordered, and of course evaluated according to a rubric of increasing harmoniousness. White bodies (of course) evinced the most harmonious or consonant combination of elements. According to Hight, harmony functioned as the conceptual apparatus organizing discourses of music and race (among others). Hence, the ways in which resonating bodies were understood became patterns whereby racialized bodies—and the very possibility of their conceptualization as such—were classified, analyzed, and placed in relationship to one another. While presenting keen insights into the ways in which musical thought influences the discourse of race, Hight’s analysis doesn’t interrogate the ways in which the discourse of race influences musical thought and practice. Unlike Davis’ account, which describes multiple discourses in multilateral, multidirectional relations, Hight’s intersection consists in the flow of consecutive one-way streets. Indeed, Hight’s argument is that the discourse of harmony pre-existed the category of race and was the determinative context in which this latter notion developed. Insofar as notions of race outlived the epistemic prominence of harmony, it became a distinct, independent category in itself, but only after developing from a mutually-determinative relationship with this notion of “harmony.”21 Harmony fails as a model for thinking about the relationship between music and race (and gender) because pitch/frequency is a spectrum, a single axis whereupon things that may seem to blend into one another are in fact definitively separable and isolatable. There may be many different “shades” of A, such as A440 and A442 (or A441, or A 440.25, and so on), but every decent electronic tuner can pinpoint minute differences in frequency/pitch. Although his critique of intersectionality is motivated by the same concerns as mine, Michael Hames-García’s metaphor of color blending ultimately fails for the same reason that Hight’s analysis does: color, like sound, is a frequency spectrum. In the next section, I explain the strengths and weaknesses of Hames-García’s theory of blended colors, and then offer an alternative metaphor for imagining the coincident relationships among music, race, and gender, based on the two main

On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory

19

senses of the term “cooked” (molecularly reconfigured and fixed, on the one hand, and adulterated or corrupted on the other). This metaphor of “cooked coincidence” adequately captures both the mutually-constitutive status of music, race, and gender, and demonstrates how these three terms, when used individually, are “conjectural” categories.

“Cooked” Coincidence Michael Hames-García argues that social identities do not intersect, but instead blend like colors in a photograph.22 This blending, he argues, represents the way that “memberships in various social groups combine with and mutually constitute one another” (Hames-García, 103). While I certainly agree with Hames-García that social identities mutually constitute one another and that the idea of “intersection” doesn’t encourage an accurate representation of this mutual constitution, I don’t think his color-blending model does, either.23 When he says that colors “blend,” Hames-García means that the character, indeed, the “color” (or shade or tone) of a hue is dependent upon the other colors (and shades, etc.) that surround it and of which it is composed. “What,” for example, yellow looks like depends not only on its own shape and density but also on the shape and density of the red and the blue and their position in relation both to the yellow and to each other. Thus yellow next to red looks different from yellow next to blue (Hames-García, 103).

According to Hames-García, the various colors, hues, and tones in a photograph all produce one another as such, just as social identities all make one another in their coincidence. However, if you examine both the manufacture of photographs and the physics of colors in greater depth (that is, if you take the metaphor a bit more literally), Hames-García’s metaphor breaks down and doesn’t accurately represent social identities. Digital photographs printed from a computer are composed of various blends of red, yellow, blue, and black ink (assuming they’re printed on white photographic paper). Unlike race and gender, these primary colors (and black) do indeed exist as separate/separable phenomena. In fact, the very idea of blending, like intersecting, implies the coming together of two or more things that were necessarily separate and independent prior to their blending. Primary colors—red, blue, yellow—do actually exist in “pure” form. Even if we take light, rather than paint or ink as our color medium, we find that each color in the spectrum is relatively isolatable and separable from the others. (The fact that we can’t even perceive infrared or ultraviolet colors/frequencies without assistance is evidence of the separability of the colors.) So, even though light’s constituent colors are perceivable only after some mediation (a prism, raindroplets, etc.), they are nevertheless separable and—if not rigidly distinct— meaningfully separate.

20

Chapter 1

Separability and a priority are exactly what Hames-García thinks his blended color metaphor avoids. He explains: The crucial error here comes from asking how the two separate identities come to “intersect,” instead of starting from the presumption of mutual constitution. This is like assuming that one can have pure essences of blue and yellow and that green is nothing more than the combination of the properties of each. Besides the question of whether green might be something more than this, it begs the question of how to determine which yellow (or blue) represents the true yellow (or blue). Yellow (or blue) against a white background, or a black one? Brightly lit, or dimly? (Hames-García 104).

While Hames-García thinks that it is impossible to definitively determine a precise or “true” shade, hue, tone, or color, this is something commercial designers and artists do without a second thought, every single day, using Pantone products to help them determine the exact frequency of specific colors. Pantone, an American company, determines what is “truly” each specifically recognized shade of yellow, blue, green, chartreuse, meyer lemon, cobalt…whatever color one can imagine within the spectrum visible to humans.24 They pick out specific frequencies, and assign identification codes to them. Like sound, but unlike identity, color is a measurable, parseable spectrum that we access and interpret through various forms of culturally and technologically specific mediation (e.g., the diatonic scale, Pantone’s Color Cue device, the Dorian and Ionic modes, etc.).25 Green is not, as Hames-García argues, a “blend” of yellow and blue, but a point on the spectrum somewhere between them. Even though subtle differences in pitch and color may not be perceptible to the unassisted human ear or eye, the differences nevertheless do exist. Nothing on a spectrum is really ever “blended”; each shade, tone, and mix is perceptible as such because it is a precise, distinct frequency of light. Thus, Hames-García’s metaphor breaks down here because we can and do specify distinct colors with a clarity and definitiveness that defy accurate accounts of social identities. Ironically, then, HamesGarcía’s re-imagining of “intersection” as “blending” reduces all difference to a single axis (or continuum), and thus performs the very move it aims to critique. Social identities are not identifiable points on a continuum (as are color and pitch).26 Identity categories—race, gender, class, etc.—never actually exist in a “pure,” unblended form (either prior to or after their blending), and it is impossible to accurately depict or analyze any identity category in isolation from all the others. Relatively privileged groups—e.g., white women, working-class men, and men of color—have tended to be the ones that established identitybased political and theoretical programs; this is a point Hames-García makes, and I think he’s correct here.27 Because of their relative privilege (whiteness and/or maleness and/or bourgeois-ness), the founders of identity-based movements have found it easy to mistakenly view the identity around which they organize in isolation from all their other social identities. The middle-class white feminists at the vanguard of the early- and mid-twentieth-century women’s

On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory

21

movements were able to misperceive their gender in isolation from their race and their class because these latter two identities were, in their case, dominant, and thus “normal” and “invisible” (but nonetheless present). This is, however, a mistaken perception. Identity categories always exist in combination, because they do not persist independently of the lived experiences of real, existent people.28 The metaphor of “blending” does not evoke an image of “parts” that are in fact separable and extricable only heuristically, and then only at a (perhaps significant) cost. You can often extract elements out of something once it has been blended (if only through the magic of Photoshop). Mayonnaise will separate out again after it is mixed, just as one can pick, strain, or centrifuge out different ingredients in a batter or any other sort of blend. You can’t, however, unbake a cookie (or a cake, or a croissant, or any baked good). What I am suggesting is that we experience our embodied identities more as an inseparable whole (like baked cookies) than as a mixture of isolatable parts (as with blended batter, or paint, or ink). Our identities are “cooked” in both senses of the term: on the one hand, their “parts” have disappeared into them and cannot be separated out again, and, on the other, they are impure, contaminated, adulterated concoctions that are never, ever identical to one another. This “cooking” is the chemical/physical process of lived experience. We can never return to and examine a state or a self prior to and outside of history and experience, which would be analogous to the merely blended and uncooked cookie dough. The cooking/baking process induces chemical changes in the composition of the cookie dough, transforming it into a finished product wherein the ingredients’ molecular structures are reworked into new molecules whose composition and structure result from the interaction of all the ingredients of the dough and the oven’s heat with one another. The baked cookie’s “ingredients” mutually constitute one another as such. When we taste a cookie, we note the presence and interplay of what were formerly separate ingredients—butter or margarine, vanilla, white or brown sugar or molasses, flour, salt, other flavorings (like cocoa), nuts, chips, and so on. We can only taste these ingredients together, in their mutually-constituting interplay. This interaction is most evident in the texture of the cookie: sticky dough becomes a crisp, chewy, or cakey cookie. The texture results from the fusing and/or reconfiguration of the chemical structures of the ingredients: crisp cookies come from the interaction of sugar, eggs, and butter, whereas cakey cookies usually result from the use of shortening instead of butter. You can crumble a cookie, you can puree it, you can digest it, but even the digestion process doesn’t break the cookie back down into flour, butter, sugar, and eggs. In the same way that you can’t bake or digest the flour, butter, sugar, and eggs out of a cookie, you can’t separate out identity categories from one another without fundamentally misunderstanding and misrepresenting them. The coincidence of music, race, and gender (or of social identities generally) is more accurately described by this cooking metaphor than by metaphors of either intersecting or blending. Because we are always-already in a world, in a body, in a particular context and standpoint, our identities always come “pre-

22

Chapter 1

cooked.” The dough, where all the ingredients are separable and chemically untransformed, is equivalent to Rousseau’s state of nature—a prior state that is knowable only on the basis of inferences we make about it based on our experiences as “cooked.” In our world, the chemically untransformed ingredients— separable identity categories like race or gender—don’t actually exist. When we speak of them, we are, to a degree, misrepresenting our experiences. Social identities are thus “cooked” in the second sense: any reference to “race” as such or “gender” as such is always a greater or lesser misrepresentation of one’s mutually constitutive and coincident social identities. Every time we separate out social identities, we’re “cooking the books,” so to speak, highlighting some aspects of an identity while overlooking others. This second sense of “cooking” is fleshed out in the following comparison of the structure and perception of social identities to the structure and perception of process music.

“It’s Gonna Rain” Steve Reich’s theory of “process music,” particularly as exhibited in his early phase-shifting pieces, is a useful metaphor, or even analogue, for the phenomenology of social identities.29 There are (at least) two features of phaseshifting process music that also accurately characterize the lived experience of coincident social identities: (1) the absence of a macro-level formal structure that organizes micro-level events, and (2) the predominance of indeterminate, “irrational” relationships that we tend to perceive only when they briefly coalesce into “landmarks.” First, process music is characterized by its lack of predetermined, overarching structure. Process pieces do not have a predetermined form because the entire point of such a work is to let the process unfold of its own accord in order to see what sorts of “unexpected resulting patterns” (Schwartz, 387) emerge.30 A piece’s large-scale, general structure evolves or emerges from a sequence of micro-level events. There are no causal relationships in this series: each new sound event follows from neither the previous event nor some overarching plan. Rather, micro-level sound events generate a piece’s logic. In Reich’s terms, musical processes “determine all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound) details and the overall form simultaneously.”31 As K. Robert Schwartz explains, “in Reich, structure cannot be a framework which supports an unrelated façade of sounds; rather, sound and structure must be identical.” Take, for example, Reich’s first phasing piece, It’s Gonna Rain. In this piece, Reich loops a snippet of found sounds (an excerpt from San Francisco street preacher Brother Walter’s sermon on Noah and the sound of a pigeon flapping its wings in the background, which Reich recorded in Union Square in 1964), and records two identical tapes full of these loops. The tapes are placed on two identical players, and they begin in complete unison, repeating the vocal “It’s gonna rain!” over and over…until eventually, due to slight variances in the playback speed of the two recorders,

On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory

23

the two tapes move very gradually but increasingly out of synch. “As the process of phasing progresses,” Schwartz explains, “new and unexpected polyrhythmic configurations, resulting harmonic combinations, and melodic patterns evolve, since the two channels of tape constantly change their relationship to one another” (Schwartz, 384). Particularly in the Reich phasing pieces that utilize tape, the unpredictable and irregular behavior of the tape players makes it impossible to predict exactly how the “note-to-note details” will unfold—there is no logic or regularity to it (as, for example, in the phasing of windshield wipers). In other words, there is no overarching structure to a process piece because the micro-level evolution of the piece is, to a certain extent, random. The gradual increase of one track’s speed does not occur at a consistent rate; it has no measured or measurable tempo or meter. Because the rate of time-shifting of a phase piece is both inconsistent and very, very gradual, most of the piece consists in “irrational” relationships between the two tapes. That is to say, the shifting doesn’t occur at easily recognizable intervals: it doesn’t jump along by thirty-second note intervals (or eighthnote intervals, or any regular, measurable interval), but speeds up gradually and irregularly. A majority of the time, the two tapes are somewhere between recognizable time intervals; they sound out of synch, but this out-of-synchness is not metered. This is the main way a phase-shifting piece differs from a canon or a round: in these formats, the different voices or (in a fugue) subjects are separated by regular intervals (e.g., a measure or a beat). In a phase piece, most of the time the voices are between recognizable intervals; it doesn’t sound like a pattern, but like gobbledygook. There are, however, brief moments when the voices lock into a recognizable relationship. As Paul Epstein explains, During phasing the ear will identify certain discrete landmark situations—the splitting of a unison, the doubling of tempo at the midpoint. Even though it is apparent that these have been arrived at gradually, the ear identifies them within only a narrow margin of error, and this results in a feeling of abrupt change…In such cases the discontinuity is purely perceptual, the actual change being merely one of degree.32

Discrete social identities are like the “discrete landmark situations” in a phase piece. We see these “landmark situations” (i.e., separate social identities) as individual only because of our perceptual habituation to see them this way. There is a certain point at which we perceive “race” or “gender” as the most prominent feature of an experience, but that is only because this specific configuration of events has arrived at an arrangement we have pre-identified as a “landmark.” But, these landmarks aren’t really, experientially, landmarks. We tend to perceive them as determinate (indeed, Reich uses the term “rational”) points in an otherwise indeterminate (what Reich calls “irrational”) and undifferentiated block of sound. Most of a phasing piece consists of the indeterminate or “irrational” parts; the “rational” parts are transient. We should imagine social identities similarly: their relations to one another are indeterminate and “irrational.”

24

Chapter 1

With social identities, we tend to take these momentary, transient “landmarks” as representative of the entirety of experience, when, in fact, they are anything but representative. Social identities don’t come into clear focus—either individually or in their relationships to one another—because they are not separate or separable. Our bodies are not raced or gendered, i.e., our experience is not composed according to a predetermined logic of race, or gender, or any other social identity—all we are is the note-to-note details, the ground-level experiences where everything oozes about “irrationally” like primordial goo or undifferentiated stem cells. Bodily experience is “irrational” or un-decomposable because it, like process music, is not “composed” in the first place. A traditional composition arranges fixed entities (such as pitch, rhythm, etc.) in determinate, regular relations to one another. In process pieces, the relationships and patterns are generated by a piece’s performance. Our social identities are the “unexpected resulting patterns” (Schwartz, 387) from our repeated yet constantly evolving interaction with our social and material environments. We “compose” what we, upon reflection, understand as our social identities from the micro-level unfolding of our experiences in the particular bodies we have, inhabiting our specific contexts. Because each individual’s life unfolds a different sequence of “note-tonote” details, there will not be exact consistency among the “unexpected resulting patterns” that emerge from lived bodily experience. Because they impose regularity and consistency across instances and populations, broad categories like race or gender are thus “cooking” or overlooking/misrepresenting both the structure and the phenomenology of social identity. In the same way that the “landmarks” in a phase-shifting piece are only brief, unrepresentative moments in an otherwise irregular and illogical work, the separate ingredients that go into cookie batter are unrepresentative of the composition of a baked cookie. Corporeally, social identities behave analogously to process pieces: they don’t pre-exist and determine experience; rather, they are the “unexpected resulting patterns” that we reflectively abstract from experience. These patterns themselves vary from performance to performance, and even from moment to moment within the same performance. Most importantly for my purposes here, these patterns materialize from the interplay of elements that do not exist independently of, but are themselves generated by, the work’s unfolding. After this excursion into social identity and avant-garde art music, I now shift back to thinking about popular music.

High and Low, or Serious versus Pop 2.0 The nature/culture problem always seems to come back to a contestation of the domain of serious culture, or what is “proper” to a specific group, its practices, and its canon. In analyzing the role music has played in postcolonial theory, it is

On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory

25

imperative to focus on popular musics, or musics that are hierarchically opposed to some “serious” or “authentic” form of creativity and/or expression. Because the discourses of music, race, and gender mutually constitute one another, any claim about what, in music, is “real” and what is “fake” or superficial is always also a claim about what kinds of people are given the most epistemic credibility and social privilege. Noting that black intelligentsia associated with the Harlem Renaissance “tended to treat this music as a rather primitive folk art that needed to be elevated to the level of high art in order to take its place as a meaningful element of African-American culture” (Davis 149), and, accordingly, that their “effort to assert an African-American identity and race consciousness was ambiguous at best, pervaded by the contradictions emanating from an uncritical acceptance of elitist cultural values” (153), Davis points us to the primary implication of a claim (such as mine) which points to the racist, (hetero)sexist, classist, and Eurocentric foundations of traditional Western aesthetic values. In this particular instance, class, race, and gender intersect to produce a situation where the work of William Grant Still—a classically trained male composer living a relatively bourgeois lifestyle—is viewed as a more “authentic” example of “art” than the oeuvres of working-class blues women. If the criteria by which we distinguish art from kitsch (or even—in VH1’s terms—the “awesomely bad” from the downright insipid) reflect various intersecting systems of social, political, and economic privilege, how then do we make judgments about (in this instance) music which refrains from reinforcing problematic systems of privilege? Davis poses the question in these terms: “How can we interpret…with and against?” (163; emphasis mine). In “working with” what one might be tempted to condemn as superficial, unoriginal, or a sell-out, we find that commodity music is popular precisely because it is pleasurable to many people in a very real way. Music, because it intersects with ideologies and experiences of race, class, gender, and sexuality, is a technology of the self—that is, it educates our desires, physiological and psychical. Consequently, music’s strong ability to produce affect (either pleasure or disgust) arises from its coincidence with the various systems of privilege within which our identities are articulated and experienced; in other words, music works with race, gender, class, and sexuality to produce and reinforce both the boundaries of the self (i.e., identity), as well as the sociopolitical hierarchies through which this self emerges. When pronouncing judgments about a piece of music, one must be aware of exactly what it is one is judging: not the “music itself,” but a whole complex of phenomena that interact with and come to constitute—and be constituted by—musical structures. Further, when one makes a claim about music—about whether it is “good music” or “bad music,” “serious music” or “trivial music”—one is also making a judgment about what counts as “authentic” and what as “fake,” what is socially valued and what is socially marginalized. This is not to say that we should stop making musical judgments and rather adopt a sophomoric relativism. Every day we make, and, I think, inevitably

26

Chapter 1

make, judgments about “good” and “bad” music. However, as I have argued, it is somewhat misleading to call these “musical” judgments, for what is being evaluated is a whole set of coincident relations and phenomena, not just musical structures. Jason Lee Oakes argues that just as there is no positive content to “good music,” “[t]he category of ‘bad music’ is produced, then, in the interplay between discourse and musical sound…bad music could never be identified solely in reference to the sounds themselves.”33 Thus, when we do make judgments about music, it is important that we don’t do so in bad faith—“bad faith” meaning the attempt to pass off one’s judgments as “purely musical,” the failure to admit that the claims made about musical structures are also claims about identity and sociopolitical values. Race, ethnicity, and nationality, in their coincidence with gender, sexuality, and class, are not external factors that can be expressed by or represented in music; rather, via the contested relationship between what have been variously called essentialism and pluralism, expression and convention, the material and the social, these discourses coincide with those surrounding the study and practice of music such that, in their coincidence, the concepts and experiences of “race” and “music” crystallize into the configurations in which we find them today. Having argued for the “cooked” coincidence of resonating, raced, and gendered bodies and the conjectural status of social identity, I flesh out this idea of “conjecture” in the next chapter. My model of “cooked” coincidence requires us to think of a state seemingly impossible to think: i.e., a state in which “race,” “class,” and “gender” are both separate and not separate. Given the exigencies of epistemology and language, it is impossible not to make conceptual distinctions among them; we need the analytical distinctions between race, class, and gender in order to even think about the phenomena they are intended to (mis)represent. Similarly, in Rousseau’s inquiry into the origins of inequality he discovers he must make use of a term—nature—that is itself impossible to comprehend. He thus argues for a conjectural account of Nature, a necessary misrepresentation of a phenomenon of which we can never have certain knowledge, but one nonetheless essential for making sense of current political problems. Reading Rousseau’s claims about the necessarily conjectural account of the “state of Nature” alongside his early musical writings, I argue that, contrary to Derrida’s reading, Rousseau’s claim for the original unity of music and language is not a metaphysics of presence, but is precisely proof that immediate purities such as the state of nature are fictions. Thus, although we need a concept of “nature” and the body to understand our present condition and make political interventions in it, this account should not be a static essence used for reactionary normative appeals, but a flexible concept adaptable to changes in task and context. Or, put in the terms of non-ideal theory, we need to account for the body as a historicized materiality. When beginning one’s analyses from “the actual” rather than the “ideal,” we cannot overlook the complexity of what presents itself to us as, say, an “actual” body, and the extent to which “the actual” is a state that we distance ourselves from in our very examination of it. The more we discuss race, gender,

On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory

27

class, and sexuality, the more we rely on individuating terms that belie the conjecturally coincident nature of these phenomena.

28

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies: On Political and Musical “Nature” in Rousseau’s Early Writings

It is by means of the song, not by means of the chords, that sounds have expression, fire, life; it is the song alone that gives them the moral effects that produce all of music’s energy.1

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s early musical writings are more philosophically interesting and important than his well-known and overtly philosophical later work. Even though, as Rousseau says, “I would have quite a bad opinion of a People…who made more of their Musicians than of their Philosophers, and among whom it was necessary to speak of Music with more circumspection than of the gravest questions of morality,”2 Rousseau’s early political works were motivated by the philosophical problems that arose in his even earlier musical writings, namely, Western ideas of nature and the rights and values derived from this concept. Rousseau’s early writings, both political and musical, all begin from the claim that his interlocutors have a false conception of nature and that this incorrect view is then improperly used to justify or rationalize socio-political and aesthetic hierarchies. All his interlocutors attempt to legitimate culturally specific political and aesthetic systems by positing their preferred norms, values, and assumptions as “natural;” in other words, Rousseau finds all his interlocutors to be committing a naturalistic fallacy. Instead of disavowing “nature”’s role as a social norm, Rousseau’s theory of conjecture foregrounds this fact. According to Rousseau, the specifically human “nature” which differentiates us from all other animals, as well as the specifically musical “nature” which differentiates it from noise and from other forms of expression, are not physical or empirical, but moral—i.e., social norms. This chapter develops the notion of conjecture mentioned in chapter 1. I read the conjectural histories presented in Rousseau’s early political writings alongside his (in)famous quarrel with Jean-Philippe Rameau about the relationship between music and language, because the political philosophy taking place in the former is, if not motivated, at least strongly influenced by the latter. Consequently, in order to fully comprehend the theory of conjecture presented in the 29

30

Chapter 2

early political writings, we need to understand what’s going on in the musical writings that precede and coincide with them. Indeed, as I argue later in the chapter, it is precisely Derrida’s lack of consideration for the musical context of The Essay on the Origin of Languages that causes him to misinterpret the significance of Rousseau’s distinction between melody and harmony—a distinction which, I argue, can only be fully appreciated when considered alongside the then-contemporaneous development, from Baroque opera, of tonal harmony and purely instrumental or “absolute” music. Taken together, Rousseau’s early writings offer compelling arguments as to why and, more importantly, how to re-imagine materiality in an empirically and politically just way. In an era where there is burgeoning academic interest in fields that attempt to find biological, physiological, even genetic explanations for gender differences and human responses to and judgments about music (e.g., music cognition), it is necessary to argue and emphasize why the material/physiological body is produced by (and not external or resistant to) social norms.3 This “how,” then, serves as the inspiration for my notion of the “conjectural body,” for, like Rousseau, I believe it is necessary to maintain the material as a category of experience and analysis, but equally necessary to refrain from getting too caught up in its “naturalness” or “reality,” for such claims are both empirically false and can often be politically exclusionary and/or oppressive. Rousseau’s account of “nature” is valuable because it provides us with a way to imagine the material as the result of various socio-historical forces such as patriarchy and white supremacy, and a way to incorporate physiology into our analysis of the construction of the body as an object of knowledge and experience, yet avoid the pitfalls of biological foundationalism. While Rousseau’s later political works may rely upon a notion of nature tied to a metaphysics of presence (i.e., a nature that is neither historicized nor mediated), his early musical writings employ a thoroughly deconstructed, historicized account of nature. Similarly, even though his later writings are rife with patriarchal and Eurocentric assumptions and arguments, these early works are quite hospitable to feminist and postcolonial sensibilities. Ultimately, I think that Rousseau the musicologist is of greater relevance to contemporary political philosophy than Rousseau the political philosopher, because his early accounts of musical “nature” (which are on occasion tied to political analysis) are more robust and useful for progressive analyses of gender and race than are his later, more well known political writings. Indeed, I will argue that my early-Rousseau-inspired notion of conjecture is an important supplement to non-ideal theory, and not the sort of obfuscatory idealization or “ideal-as-idealized-model” that non-ideal theory rightly critiques. I thus examine the concept of nature elaborated in Rousseau’s musical writings (specifically, Letter on French Music, Examination of Rameau’s Two Principles, and Essay on the Origins of Languages) in order to understand how Rousseau thinks both the specifically musical and the specifically human in a way that both (1) forefronts material actuality in order to avoid obfuscatory idealization, and (2) situates that materiality as the product of complex histories—i.e., conjecturally.

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies

31

Since I have saved my detailed discussion of the relevance of my project to current debates about non-ideal theory for the end of the chapter, it will be helpful, I think, to briefly sketch out some of the details here, so that readers can have a more cogent sense of how and to what end the overarching argument of this chapter progresses. Given his well-known work on white supremacy and social contract theory, Charles Mills might seem to be an odd interlocutor for Rousseau. Indeed, Mills’s notion of non-ideal theory as a return from traditional political theories that idealize or abstract away from structural oppression to the “actuality” of racism, sexism, and classism seems to stand in direct opposition to a theory which emphasizes conjecture and conjectural history. According to Mills, the problem with ideal theory is its “reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual.”4 Taking the experiences of privileged groups as an “idealized model” of everyone’s experiences, ideal theory, Mills argues, “abstract[s] away from gender and race” (Mills, Ideal Theory, 173). Classical contract theory, both in its account of the “idealized” social contract and its “idealized” state of nature, is guilty of such abstraction away from the actuality of systematic oppression. In order to redress the racist, sexist, and classist foundations of much of Western political philosophy, Mills claims we must begin theorizing not from the ideal, but from the actual, namely, the actuality of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. While Mills rightly finds that the conjectural histories often deployed in Western politics do in fact obfuscate the actuality of oppression (indeed, I agree that Rousseau’s later political writings are “ideal” in the sense that Mills condemns), I argue that non-ideal analysis is not only consistent with, but requires, some notion of conjecture. Present actuality is not a mono-dimensional, self-evident state of affairs: present actuality is insofar as it has come to be through the interplay between the material and the social. A notion of conjecture is necessary to contextualize and fully appreciate the historical stakes of the all-too-present actuality of oppressive regimes such as white supremacy and patriarchy. As I argue later in the chapter, the obfuscatory move is not necessarily part of thinking conjecturally, because conjecture, as it is deployed, for example, in Rousseau’s early musical writings, can and in fact should begin with an honest assessment of “the actual” and the way it is ordered by relations of socio-political privilege. Based on this assessment of the actual, one then uses conjectural terms to put into play concepts like “the body” that are absolutely necessary for thinking rigorously and carefully about systems of domination and oppression. Since race and gender are primarily about bodily differences, anti-racist and feminist theories need the concept of the body. However, since obfuscatory ideologies such as white supremacy and patriarchy have significantly shaped even our most apparently neutral and objective means of thinking about materiality and corporeality (e.g., physics, physiology, genetics), our understanding of the actual must be one that is sensitive to the ideological history that has produced the real/material as such.5 When conjecture starts from idealized models, it is obfuscatory in the way Mills identifies; when conjecture offers a theory about how the actual came to be such, it is a powerful descriptive and diagnostic tool.

32

Chapter 2

In what follows, I will first discuss Rousseau’s conception of human nature and the “natural” origin of language as presented in the early political writings (i.e., the Discourses and the Essay on the Origin of Languages) that are contemporaneous with his musical writings. The distinction between northern and southern languages in Essay is motivated by, as I demonstrate in the next section, Rousseau’s attempts to distinguish between French (northern) and Italian (southern) opera. Because the French language supposedly originated out of sheer material need, it cannot properly express what is most human about human beings, i.e., sentiment and passion, the cultural life that exists above and beyond material need or satisfaction. I then move on to a detailed analysis of Rousseau’s critique of Rameau, which, like his critique of natural law theorists in the Second Discourse, demonstrates that what Rameau takes to be the “nature” of sound (i.e., the overtone series as a fact of physics) is in fact significantly culturally mediated. Having demonstrated that Rousseau’s early musical and political writings are motivated by the same attempt to re-imagine the concept of “nature” as an ideological device (but a device that is also necessary for ideology critique), I then turn to Derrida’s reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology. Reading Derrida with a full understanding of the musical context of Rousseau’s early work, it becomes clear that the two authors are largely in agreement and that Derrida’s concept of arche-writing can be used to complement Rousseau’s notion of conjecture and conjectural history. Finally, I consider of what musical arche-writing might consist and how twentieth-century avant-garde and popular works have, in their exploration of the relationship between music and noise, interrogated this notion of musical arche-writing.

Human Nature and the “Natural” Origin of Languages Rousseau’s notion of nature aims to rectify what he finds to be a common but serious misconception in both music theory and political philosophy. Commonly, and for Rousseau’s interlocutors, “nature” denotes an unadulterated, originary, pure state which is then conflated with objective material fact (i.e., biology, physiology, bodily needs, one’s relationship to the environment). Rousseau acknowledges that human beings are inalienably physical entities, but he claims that this physical nature is in no sense immediate, unadulterated, or objective; one’s specifically human nature is moral, sentimental, and social, just as what is musical about music arises from its relation to language, not some foundation in the supposedly universal and objective science of harmonics. This is not to say that the physical and moral aspects of humanity do not interact with and influence one another: indeed, the inextricability of “nature” from “society” is Rousseau’s main point both in the Essay and the Second Discourse.6 In this section, I examine his discussion of the “natural” origins of language/society in light of his analysis of human “nature” in order to demonstrate the foundational

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies

33

role that history and social context play in what Rousseau understands both “human nature” and the nature of music to be. History and society are inalienable elements of human nature and the nature of music, so much so that Rousseau excludes the solely physical and uni-dimensionally physiological (what is commonly thought of as “nature” or “natural”) from consideration as “natural.”

“We Are Deceived by the Appearance of Right”: Faux Nature in the First Discourse Rousseau’s First Discourse argues that the Arts and Sciences are necessarily inhibiting, but only for that fact are they also empowering.7 As mechanisms of perfectibility, it is only through these disciplines (both in the conventional and the Foucaultian senses) that the possibility of both freedom and enslavement is opened to humanity. Thus, as agents of civilization, “the Sciences, Letters, and Arts…spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which [civilized people] are laden, throttle in them the sentiment of that original freedom for which they seemed born, make them love their slavery, and fashion them into what is called civilized peoples” (D1, 6). Even though the arts and sciences are frequently used toward inhuman ends, the domestication and civilization of a human being is, at best, empowering, for it is only through education that one can most fully and effectively employ one’s “natural” talents. Just as, for Rousseau, pity must be awakened by imagination, one’s capacity to act as a free agent and effectively participate in the political sphere needs to be solicited and shaped by the educative aspects of culture.8 When subjects refuse to express their freedom, such learning becomes a passive assumption of the status quo and a poor representation of human nature. The “right” which, according to the epigraph, we misperceive to be the virtue of education, is not meant to produce docility and obedience, but to teach human beings to recognize and exercise their freedom to think and to act. One is not born with the capacity to think and act freely; custom and culture must intervene to develop these theoretical and practical faculties. Accordingly, Rousseau’s argument in the First Discourse is that the arts and sciences do not necessarily corrupt humanity, and that their genuine vocation is to evoke what is most distinctly and properly human in us. When properly educated, they allow us to give the most clear and uninhibited articulation to and expression of our “human nature”—i.e., free agency.9 If human nature can be brought to its most clear and uninhibited manifestation only through the disciplinary and educative forces of the arts and sciences, it is evident that Rousseau understands both human “nature” and its most “natural” means of expression to be artificial and socially mediated. As a preview to the conjectural histories he will offer in later writings, Rousseau elaborates the following description of pre-cultural humanity: “Before Art had fashioned our manners and taught our passions to speak in ready-made terms, our morals were rustic but natural; and differences in conduct conveyed differences of character

34

Chapter 2

at first glance” (D1, 7). Although this time appears to be one of transparency, one when “men found their security in how easily they saw through one another” (D1, 8; emphasis added), Rousseau’s claim is that we are deceived as to the appearance of the state of nature as a state of purity and clarity. This image of immediacy and purity is a false one. In order for humans to see one another as human, we must be able to make an imaginary identification with our fellow humans—i.e., to be able to imagine ourselves in the place of others. Thus requiring social interaction and all its accoutrements, the recognition operative in this supposedly pure and unadulterated time is far from immediate. The impossibility of purity and transparency implies that there is no state of nature in which one is fully present to oneself or others; in fact, the most complete and accurate representation or expression of oneself is the product of significant adaptation to cultural norms. Human nature—i.e., that which is properly and specifically human—is necessarily infused with and structured by culture. (We also see that Rousseau is not endorsing an ideal of originary immediacy and transparency— this fact will be important later in the chapter.)

Human Nature as Perfectibility Rousseau’s point is that the nature/culture dichotomy, as it appears in political philosophy and music theory, is an empirically inaccurate and politically motivated mode of analysis. It is unclear where, for Rousseau, the line between physical and moral, body and mind, exists—if there is in fact any demarcated separation between the two. Indeed, his claim that “although the language of gesture and that of the voice are equally natural, the first is easier and less dependent on convention” (EOL, 248; emphasis mine) indicates that Rousseau does not view nature and convention as exclusive. As the “original” language, gesture is not as strongly influenced by culture; however, Rousseau is careful to indicate that its status as the original form of language does not mean that it is untouched by civilization: what is “more” natural is “less dependent on convention.” Furthermore, Rousseau’s emphasis on the moral or social aspect of human nature is an attempt to develop a non-determinist understanding of nature. Society, morality, sentiment, politics—all these are things which are relative and changing. By locating “true” human nature here, Rousseau avoids the kind of biological determinism characteristic of many sexist, racist, and classist discourses (including his own later work). More precisely, Rousseau locates human nature in perfectibility, which is an ateleological capacity to exercise one’s freedom. Freedom is, for Rousseau, the possibility of acting and choosing either well or poorly, for if one necessarily made good decisions, one would be pre-determined to do so, and thus not free. Accordingly, perfectibility is more properly thought of as the opening from which human—i.e., free—thoughts and acts enter the world. Although it is the “origin” of human nature, this opening is not thereby found in physical nature;

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies

35

rather, it must be awakened by imagination and pity—by the capacity to imagine oneself in the position of one’s fellow human beings.10 Arising from one’s imaginary identification with others, perfectibility—human nature—is inalienably social. Indeed, stating that “conventional language belongs to man alone,” and that “[t]his is why man makes progress in good as well as in evil, and why animals do not” (EOL, 252), Rousseau identifies perfectibility—the specifically human capacity to excel or err—with convention. As perfectibility implies the capacity for improvement and corruption, it is far removed from any originary and pure “state of nature”; thus, the claim that society and perfectibility are elements of human “nature” seems rather paradoxical. Rousseau’s account of speech in the Essay on the Origin of Languages is helpful here, for it illustrates more precisely how he understands society to be “natural.” “Since speech is the first social institution,” argues Rousseau, “it owes its origin to natural causes alone” (EOL, 248). This “natural” cause which leads the first speaker to utter his or her first word is “the desire or the need to communicate to him his sentiments” (EOL, 248). If the desire to become social is the “natural” cause of language, then nature already contains within it some notion of sociability and civilization. Sheer, immediate human physiology is, for Rousseau, incapable of producing language because the bare body lacks both the motivation and capacity for speech. “If we had never had any but physical needs, we might very well never have spoken” (EOL, 251). Rousseau thus concludes that the “natural” origin of language must be moral (i.e., social), for the first language “already presupposes some social life and needs engendered by the passions” (EOL, 256). As I discuss later in the chapter, my reading of this passage (indeed, the entire Essay) differs significantly from Derrida’s, for I do not find a binary opposition between nature and culture in Rousseau’s text. Just as Kristeva argues that the semiotic appears only in and through symbolic aspects of language, Rousseau claims that the “natural” elements of language emerge in concert with its social and rational aspects; the fact of possessing a larynx, lips, and tongue is in no way determinative over whether or how one will speak. Furthermore, the passionate and extra-rational frequently appear in language. Rousseau’s argument is that this purely physiological aspect of humanity (its material cause, if you will), while perhaps “purely” natural, is alien to human (moral) nature. Rousseau never argues that the passions are absolutely separate from need, nor that culture/civilization does not at some point arise from biology; his point is, however, that (1) biological origin is not the only force shaping language, and (2) that the category of “the biological” and our understanding of it are themselves the products of language and society. While Rousseau will not deny that humans are significantly shaped by their biological existence, they are never simply biological (this is why, as I argue later, the pre-human history must be conjectural).

36

Chapter 2

Real Language, Passion, Sentiment Rousseau’s notion of human nature as moral-social is reflected in his geographical account of the origin of language. The various climates gave rise to different forms of human interaction, and it is out of this (living in relative isolation in the north, gathering around the well in the south) that language was born. In the north, where the first words were “aidez-moi,” language was born out of relatively physical need. However, this language, because it arose from sheer physical necessity, is not fully language; because French is a language of reason and precision, it is alienated from the expressive, affective aspects of language.11 While need may give rise to cries of “aidez-moi!,” these plaints are only a faux speech.12 Rousseau suggests that “if we had never had any but physical needs, we might very well never have spoken” (EOL, 251), and implies that the northern languages, arising from physical needs, lack the power to communicate affect and sentiment, and thus do not do the moral work that real language is supposed to do. True language emerges from the passions, from the desire to share one’s sentiments with one’s fellow humans.13 Beginning with the cry “aimezmoi!,” southern languages (e.g., Italian) do arise from need, but a need that is moral and which arises from contact with other people, not from brute physical lack. This moral origin is, for Rousseau, far from a pure or unadulterated condition. “Passionate language,” he claims, “already presupposes some social life and needs engendered by the passions” (EOL, 256). Melodic southern languages arose from desires which would appear only in the context of society: the desire for recognition and/or love.14 According to Rousseau, our sense for music, or “the power which music exercises over our souls” “is not the product of sounds;” rather, these sounds have “moral effects [which] also have moral causes” (EOL, 284). As the product of acculturation, discipline, and education, this “sense” is not physical stimulation, but the comprehension of specific stimuli within an interpretive matrix.15 Insofar as one must hear something as significant (either verbally or musically) in order to hear it at all, “it is not so much the ear that conveys pleasure to the heart as the heart that conveys it to the ear” (EOL, 290). Language and music move us not due to “the physical power of sounds,” but as a result of the ways in which we have learned to hear these sounds and the meanings we associate with them. “Each of us,” Rousseau argues, “is affected only by accents with which he is familiar; his nerves respond to them only insofar as his mind inclines them to it: he has to understand the language in which he is being addressed if he is to be set in motion by what he is told” (EOL, 289). “Language” here signifies not just the text of a song, but the “grammar of expectations”16 and musical syntax that allows music to convey complex ideas, affects, and associations. Because the origin of language/music is moral, or more precisely, social, there is no universal interpretation of sounds; in fact, we will not all hear the same frequencies as sounds. Untouched by language, “by itself a sound has no absolute character by which it might be recognized” (EOL, 291). Expression originates not in physio-

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies

37

logical stimulation, but in sentiment, in one’s moral and specifically human faculties—faculties which vary according to one’s socio-geopolitical situation. Hence, Rousseau asserts that [i]f the major impact of our sensations upon us is not due to moral causes, then why are we so sensitive to impressions which are meaningless to barbarians? Why is music that moves us but an empty noise to the ear of a Carib? Are his nerves of a different nature from ours? Why are they not excited in the same way, or why do the same excitations affect some people so strongly and others hardly at all? (EOL, 289).

Interestingly—and perhaps even astonishingly given the Eurocentrism that pervades even this short quotation—Rousseau does not use the perceived inability of non-Europeans to fully appreciate European art music as music as evidence of their physical difference and justification for their subordination. Instead, he assumes that every human shares a relatively similar physiological composition, and that differences in sound perception arise from varying social norms and cultural contexts. Anatomically, at birth our ears are all more or less identical. However, insofar as these ears are trained to recognize specific sounds, timbres, and pitches as significant, each society produces radically different organs. For example, the European ear, cultivated to a system which divides the octave into twelve semitones, recognizes only twelve different pitches; the South Asian ear, however, shaped by ragas which utilize a variety of quartertones, hears perfect pitches where the European ear hears only out-of-tune squawking.17 In a similar fashion, southern and northern climates give rise to different social systems, and out of these various systems arise two entirely separate languages—or rather, as Rousseau argues, a genuine language and a faux one (the more conventionally European one being the least genuine!).18 This distinction between northern and southern languages is informed by and parallels the distinction Rousseau draws between harmony and melody.

Melody and Harmony: Genuine and Faux Music “Physical observations,” Rousseau notes, “have occasioned every kind of absurdity in discussions of the fine arts” (EOL, 290). For Rousseau, the nature of music is its unique ability to express and elicit human passions.19 “[G]enuine Music,” he claims, is “one made to move, to imitate, to please, and to convey to the heart the sweetest impressions of harmony of song” (LFM, 148). Sounds considered only in terms of their frequencies, i.e., in their bare physicality, aren’t even potentially meaningful—they aren’t even categorizable or recognizable as “sounds.” Rousseau demonstrates this point with the claim that a musician “must render noise with song, that if he wished to make frogs croak he would have to make them sing” (EOL, 288). Common sense would seem to dictate that “noise” is some preexistent “raw material” which is then refined into

38

Chapter 2

song, so Rousseau’s claim that one must “render noise with song” has inverted the proper order: the historicized discourse of song is a prerequisite of the materiality of sound. As he repeatedly emphasizes in the preface to the Second Discourse, “nature”—in this case, “noise”—is a concept produced by a specific civilization and its particular epistemic and moral values.20 In order that there be unmusical noise, we must first recognize what counts as “musical.” Just as “nature” is a historicized concept, so is sound. Jean-Philippe Rameau’s empirical analysis of frequencies and their overtones attempts to understand music as a purely physical phenomenon. A science of harmony (i.e., of the intervallic relationships among diatonic pitches expressed in the overtone series), Rameau’s model locates musical meaning in the “nature” of sound, a sphere independent of cultural practice. Prior to the seventeenth century, Western music had no “autonomous” or purely musical means of organizing pieces: the compositional structure (what music theorists call form) of a piece was generally based on its lyrical text, or on an established dance form (rondo, tarantella, etc.). In the seventeenth century, however, European music theorists—notably Rameau and C.P.E. Bach—derived a system of musical organization from the acoustic properties of sound waves. Each tone is itself composed of “overtones,” or sub-frequencies within the main frequency. A pitch’s overtones appear in a sequence that reflects both their mathematical relationship to the main frequency (the main frequency doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled, and so on), and the strength of their audibility in the overarching tone/overtones sound. Rameau and like-minded theorists developed this sequence of frequency relationships into what we now know as “tonality”—the system of keys and chords that continues to dominate Western musical practice. The supposed merits of tonality were (1) its basis in the “nature” of sound itself, and thus its universality and irrefutability, and (2) its autonomy, or its ability to provide a logos or organizing principle that referred to nothing other than the properties of sound itself. After parodying the theorists who, like Rameau, think that “if we are to philosophize properly, we must go back to the physical causes” (EOL, 285), later in the Essay Rousseau argues that if “this were all there were to [music], [it] would be a natural science, not fine art” (286). Analyzing music in terms of the physical properties of sound, Rameau’s positivistic model focuses on the unmusical aspects of music, namely, its physical “nature.” Accordingly, Rousseau emphasizes “how far the musicians who account for the impact of sound solely in terms of the action of air and the excitation of nerve fibers are from understanding wherein the art consists” (EOL, 293).21 Because this science of harmony “separates song and speech” (EOL, 287), it cannot be an accurate theory for or description of Western music. In opposition to Rameau’s position, Rousseau argues that a musical system based on the physics of sound is not fully music, for it grounds music in only physical nature and does not account for the ways in which moral nature alwaysalready shapes the physical world into meaningful aspects of human experience. In other words, naturalistic accounts of music such as Rameau’s don’t account

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies

39

for the (ahem) heart and soul of music: the social practices which shape and are shaped by music. As we know from the Second Discourse, and as I will discuss at length in the next section, any knowledge we can have of physical nature is possible because it is highly mediated by social and epistemic convention. Thus, even the fact that we understand audio phenomena to be a source of meaning is a social custom. In order for us to “hear,” frequencies must be domesticated, shaped, or processed into forms we recognize as audible, consumable, comprehensible.

Harmony vs. Melody, or Formalism vs. Expressivism While music is, for Rousseau, grounded in human nature, it is far from a “natural” phenomenon unmediated by artifice, language, and cultural practice. Rousseau explains: It hardly seems that song is natural to man. Savage man never sings; mutes do not sing, they form unarticulated and hideous sounds, which need wrests from them. Children scream, cry, and do not at all sing. The first expressions of nature in them are only those of pain, and they learn to sing as they learn to speak: after our example. Melodious and appreciable song is only a possible and artificial imitation of the accents of the speaking voice; one cries out or one complains without singing, but one sings by imitating cries and complaints. And as of all imitations the most interesting is that of the human passions, of all the ways of imitating the most pleasant is singing (ETP, 287; all emphasis mine).

Music is not natural in the sense of belonging to physical nature or to the realm of the amour de soi. Utterances that follow from neither speech nor convention are just a-social, contextless sounds. These need-driven utterances are not song because they are not meaningful: song is “melodious and appreciable” only in the context of linguistic and socio-cultural convention. Sounds arising from physical need, then, are mere sounds, for there is no audience to render them as meaningful and thereby musical (or noisy).22 Such an audience is essential because song, like speech, engages with a set of rules and practices to which it conforms more or less precisely. One must learn these guidelines and traditions by imitating the example of others: like the infant who learns to speak by imitating his or her parents, a student learns counterpoint by copying the works of J. S. Bach (a common practice in Rousseau’s day that persists in modern universities). The significance of the song arises from the singer’s manipulation of these conventions—i.e., in adherence to and, more importantly, departure from common practice. “It is by means of the song, not by means of the chords [i.e., by means of the semantic system, not by means of any “natural” resonance or quasi-Pythagorean natural harmony], that sounds have expression, fire, life; it is the song alone that gives them the moral effects that produce all of Music’s energy. In a word, the physical part alone of the art is reduced to very little and

40

Chapter 2

harmony does not pass beyond that” (ETP, 279). The “physical” or supposedly “natural” part of music is not expressive. Harmony is merely physical, operating only at the level of sense perception. Perhaps the best example of harmony in this sense is the way one feels reverberations in one’s chest when standing too close to the speakers at a concert. Understanding “harmony” in this way, it is not only not music, but is not even recognizable as noise.23 Harmony, the physical aspect of music, can arouse only physical pleasure. Mere titillation of the senses, this pleasure is not moral because its stimulation is meaningless, i.e., it does not express anything. “[H]armony…lacking real beauties,” is, for Rousseau, only capable of portraying “conventional beauties, which would have almost no merit but the difficulty overcome” (LFM, 145). Refusing to account for the expressive content (i.e., words, concepts, etc.) of music, harmonic analysis is an empty formalism: evacuated of all meaningful and communicative content, purely harmonic—that is, non-programmatic instrumental music—and judgable and comprehensible only in terms of technical mastery or virtuosity in composition and/or performance. Rameau and his followers (those who view music in “purely scientific” and formalist terms) produce learned or “faux” music. Thus Rousseau accuses, “Instead of a good Music, they would devise a learned Music…They would believe they were making Music, and they would be making only noise” (LFM, 145). Music which expresses nothing but its structure is, for Rousseau, a learned and faux music—that is, noise. Here we see the influence of the First Discourse: learnedness or technical mastery is rejected as corrupting and degenerative, for it is deaf to the most musical aspects of music, namely, the power to create and arouse meaningful ideas and emotions. Just as, in the First Discourse, “[w]e are deceived by the appearance of right” (D1, 5), the Letter on French Music and The Essay on the Origin of Languages argue that we are deceived by the appearance of what constitutes the musical. Overly formalist or “learned” theories of music misperceive the “nature” of music as something distinct from language and culture, as something purely physical and lacking moral or social content. The more refined our understanding of the physics of sound, “the further that our music is perfected in appearance, the more it is ruined in actuality” (LFM, 162). In focusing narrowly on the scientific aspects of harmony, we forget that which makes music a meaningful, human endeavor. Melody, on the other hand, is capable of conveying meaning, of speaking to one’s soul, because it arouses our passions by tuning into that which is specifically human in the particular listener (i.e., it operates within and speaks to meaningful social contexts). Thus, Rousseau concludes with the remark that the imitation of the passions—i.e., of humanity’s moral nature—is more interesting and more meaningful than imitating cries that arise from physical need. “Aidez-moi!” draws our attention, but “aimez-moi!” holds it.

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies

41

Genuine Music Rameau wants to divorce music from its “subjective” powers of persuasion and its ability to arouse emotion and physical movement by locating it in the supposedly “objective” realm of intellection, theory, and science. Rousseau, on the other hand, believes that music’s uniqueness and force arise from its ability to elicit not only intellectual, but, more importantly, emotional and physical responses in listeners—all responses which are possible only within the context of social convention and cultural practice. Here we see that Rameau is the one committed to a model of immediate presence, and Rousseau’s aim is to demonstrate the fallacy of the notion of “music in itself” or the “purely musical.” According to Rousseau, “M. Rameau has all harmony derived from the resonance of the sounding body. And he is certain that every sound is accompanied by three other concomitant or accessory harmonic sounds, which with it form a perfect Major Third Chord” (ETP, 273). Claiming that harmony (consonance, the order of consonances, their expressive force) is grounded in physics and empirical nature, Rameau is articulating a primitive version of the overtone series.24 Even though the overtone series for a particular pitch continues infinitely, producing all 12 notes diatonic to the root, Rameau only identifies three harmonics: the octave, fifth, and third (the components of the major seventh chord). Rousseau, however, notes that “each principle sound produces many others which are not at all harmonics and do not at all enter into the Perfect Chord...there are an infinity of those [overtones] that can elude our senses, but whose resonance is demonstrated by induction and is not impossible to confirm by experiment” (ETP, 273). As one moves up the overtone series, one encounters intervals other than those of the octave, fifth, and third. Rameau’s inability to “hear” them, that is, his unwillingness to account for their existence (for the existence of pitches other than those identified by convention), leads him to misrepresent empirical nature. As Rameau “rejected them from Harmony, it is here that he began to substitute his rules for those of Nature” (ETP, 273). Rameau codified contemporary musical practice, and, grounding it in the science of harmonics, claimed the universality of this musical tradition. Thus, in a very ethnocentric move, he claims that this set of conventions and practices is the nature of music itself. Turning specifically to Rameau’s privileging of harmony and formal analysis of “objective” natural musical elements, Rousseau provides another proof that Rameau’s supposed universals are false. “[W]hat is,” for Rameau, “called song then takes on a beauty of convention which is not at all absolute, but relative to the harmonic system, and what is more highly esteemed than the song in this system” (ETP, 274). Rameau grounds musical beauty in a universal, absolute, first principle of harmony—a Schenkerian Ursatz, so to speak.25 According to Rameau, this particular harmonic progression is universal because it is inherent in the physical nature of music: the principles of tonal harmony (the functions of chords relative to one another) are derived from the science of acoustics.

42

Chapter 2

However, as Rousseau rightly objects, this “universality” is not, in fact, universal, for it is relative to convention. Yet again, Rousseau demonstrates that Rameau posits his limited perspective as a universal and objective perspective. Making an observation that will not arise again until the 1920s with the Second Viennese School, Rousseau calls Rameau’s bluff: drawing on ancient Greek and non-Western musical conventions and practices, Rousseau demonstrates that Rameau’s theories are far more normative than they are simply descriptive. Noting Western music’s arbitrary privileging of certain pitches, or ways of identifying intervals and pitches, Rousseau argues that the “peculiar prerogative” given to the intervals which make up the major triad, their supposed “naturalness,” is “only a property of calculation” (ETP, 273), that is, a privilege which does not arise from nature, but from convention. Rousseau explains, “It is, therefore, neither because the sounds that make up the perfect chord resonate with the fundamental sound, nor because they correspond to the aliquots of the entire String,…that they have been exclusively chosen to make up the perfect chord” (ETP, 273). More simply, Western music theory privileges the octave, major third, and fifth not because they are “inherent” within or natural to frequencies we recognize as sound, but because these are the most obvious to us, given our methods and instruments of analysis and their predispositions and limitations. Due to the specific characteristics of their musical instruments and philosophical systems, our Western forbearers the ancient Greeks found the fourth and the fifth most consonant, for these are the intervals produced when a single string is divided in half or in thirds. Furthermore, just as Rameau argued that the major triad is most consonant because it contains the most “naturally occurring” intervals, Pythagoras argued that the fourth and fifth were the most powerful and consonant intervals because these were the most “naturally occurring” intervals. As we can see, what counts as (most) natural has nothing at all to do with nature, but with the tools and methods with which we articulate the distinction between nature and artifice. Indeed, Rousseau’s strongest proof against the “naturalness” of Rameau’s system lies in the fact that the more famous theorist cannot account for other conventions like the minor mode (and its lowered third), the Neapolitan chord, voice leading, and various other widely used musical practices. 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 the dissonance, and the rules of Modulation? I instantly lose sight of nature, arbitrariness riddles every part, the pleasure of the ear itself is the work of habit” (ETP, 274; emphasis mine). Juxtaposing the ear (a physiological organ) and habit, Rousseau explicitly claims that seemingly “natural” phenomena like hearing are necessarily educated by “habit,” convention, and culture. To further explain his critique of Rameau’s naturalism, Rousseau turns to Rameau’s argument that every person has an innate sense of the octave, major third, and fifth, and can accurately recognize and produce them at will. “M. Rameau claims that an ignorant person will naturally intone the most perceptible fundamental sounds, as, for example, in the key of a do [the root] a sol [the

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies

43

fifth]” (ETP, 276). It is not so much the results of Rameau’s survey that Rousseau disputes, but his sample. Given Rameau’s Western European subjects, it is probably true that all had a relative sense of do-mi-sol intervallic relationships; even the most rural and poor populations were exposed to and educated by church hymns. Because people in Tokyo, Delhi, and Cairo practice music which does not necessarily utilize this system of harmony, the question remains: “What subjects has he used for this test?” (ETP, 276). Obviously, it is Parisians, or those from the province—that is, Westerners, “[p]eople who, without knowing music, have heard Harmony and Chords a hundred times, so that the impression of the harmonic intervals and the progression corresponding to the Parts in the most frequent passages had stayed in their ears, and were transmitted to their voices without even suspecting it” (ETP, 276). Even though many 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 capacity is the culmination of significant, if informal, ear training. As we walk through town and hear the bells toll the hour, as we watch television and listen to an unending glut of advertisements, as we listen to music on our commute to work, as we wander through the grocery store, as we perform even the most mundane tasks of daily life, we are literally bombarded with examples of octaves, thirds, fifths, and chords consisting in their combinations. This “voice,” then, the voice of singing speech (and, notably, the voice that Derrida wrongly puts forth as Rousseau’s index and epitome of “pure presence”) which appears to be “innate” and “natural” to human beings, is in fact the coincidence of various cultural forces, habits, and conventions. Rousseau’s argument here is that music is not a natural phenomenon so much as it is a social product and cultural force. He explains, “[M]ere noise says nothing to the mind, objects have to speak in order to make themselves heard” (EOL, 288). From a Rousseauian perspective, one could say that nature is not at all found in Rameau’s arguments, for this “nature” is theorizable only in hypothetical terms. 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 is that it is an inaccurate account of the physics of sound, an “ideal” that obfuscates empirical fact. Rousseau’s point in the Essay and the First Discourse is that it is impossible to make appeals to “nature” that are not already moral; this is why his histories are always emphatically conjectural. Rousseau’s claims about the always-already-social materiality of music set the groundwork for his—and my—notion of conjecture, which I develop in the later sections of this chapter.

Harmony, “Absolute Music,” and the Metaphysics of Presence I take a brief detour through Derrida’s reading of Rousseau’s Essay in Of Grammatology because clarifying how my Rousseau differs from his Rousseau

44

Chapter 2

is key to establishing the notion of conjecture that I’m borrowing (and developing) from Rousseau’s early musical and political writings. Insightful and rigorous in many respects, Derrida’s reading misses the force of Rousseau’s argument about the unity of music and speech. Taking this unity of speech and music as an expression of pure presence, the voice of Nature, or a kind of direct and immediate communication, Derrida aligns Rousseau with the metaphysics of presence. However, the radicality of Rousseau’s argument is precisely the inverse of this: privileging the alliance of speech and music over the seemingly “objective” science of harmony, Rousseau demonstrates that music is anything but “pure presence” or unmediated expression. Although his later political writings will abandon this position, Rousseau’s argument in all of his works up through the Essay is that the “State of Nature”—whether in music or in politics —is a social construction which reflects the values and structures of the theorist elaborating its characteristics. Accordingly, we see that Rousseau’s point is in fact virtually identical to Derrida’s: any time we speak of “nature” or “origin” or “pure presence,” we must do so conjecturally or, in Derridian terms, “under erasure.” Derrida concludes that “The Essay on the Origin of Languages opposes speech to writing as presence to absence and liberty to servitude” (G, 168). While this logic is indeed at work in the Essay, Derrida misunderstands where speech and writing, harmony and melody, fit into this scheme. Mapping melody (what Rousseau defines as mediation and social construction) onto speech and harmony (what Rousseau considers to be the mistakenly “pure” science of acoustics) onto writing, Derrida misunderstands Rousseau’s use of the terms harmony and melody. If speech represents full presence and self-reference, then it is harmony that functions as Western musical “speech,” for music can be selfreferential only insofar as it divorces itself from all extra-musical associations (text, words, program). In the West, this has been accomplished through the systemization of harmony, and through a formalism grounded in a faux naturalism or disingenuous objectivity—i.e., by Rameau’s project.26 Demonstrating that music is a function of language, and thus of culture, geography, and history, Rousseau believes that the “unity of the melody” (melody, for Rousseau, signifies the unity of music and language, as in the vocal line of a song) is anything but the voice of “pure presence.” Indeed, from a Rousseauian perspective, one could say that nature is not at all found in Rameau’s arguments, for this “nature” is theorizable only in hypothetical terms. What Rameau posits as a factual claim is in fact a moral claim. If “nature” is never knowable except through significant cultural mediation, why then keep giving detailed accounts of the State of Nature, as Rousseau does in both the discourses and in the Essay?

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies

45

Rousseau, Harmony, and Conjecture Rousseau's position on the "naturalness" of harmony is closely tied to his discussion of physical and moral inequality in the Second Discourse. Here, Rousseau claims that injustice occurs when socially constructed inequalities are naturalized—when, for example, one’s physical strength—something apparently “natural” and given—becomes a sign of one’s character.27 The problem with naturalizing differences—or any account of “nature” or the “natural”—is that the concept of nature itself is a retroactively constructed fiction. For political histories, this means that any account we give of humanity’s original state can only be given in language, from a starting point which is already structured by an epistemic regime: Rousseau makes the accusation that political theorists have “transferred to the state of Nature ideas they had taken from society” (D2, 132). Thus, if the State of Nature existed as anything but a myth, an accurate, unbiased account of it would be unavailable to us. For music theory, this means that what Rousseau understands by “harmony” is an organizing myth; the “purely musical” is a fictional concept arising from the perspective of a musical culture with a vested interest in the metaphysics of presence. Even though his first task in investigating the origin of inequality is to understand how humans were in the State of Nature, prior to socially instituted privilege and oppression, Rousseau repeatedly emphasizes that such understanding is impossible. He takes several different approaches to argue this point. First, he returns to a theme of the First Discourse: namely, the misleading and corrupting character of scientific knowledge. In attempting to gain objective, “scientific” evidence about the state of Nature, we actually further remove ourselves from it and, ironically, thwart our own aims. “[I]n a sense,” explains Rousseau, “it is 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 forms Rousseau’s second approach. All forms and means of knowing are possible because habitually-concretized filters allow us to make sense of the infinite data with which 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 the scientific books…only teach us to see men as they have made themselves” (D2, 127). Nature is unknowable because reflection upon this state returns our own image— one which we have sketched—to us. If we can never have certain knowledge of Nature, Rousseau acknowledges in his third approach to this problem, we can’t be sure that Nature is “real” and not, in fact, a figment of our imaginations. Nature is “a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never did exist, which probably never will exist” (D2, 125; emphasis mine). Devoting the entirety of the preface to deconstructing his contemporaries’ claims about the state of Nature as 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 Na-

46

Chapter 2

ture, he “shall form vague and almost imaginary conjectures on this subject” (D2, 134; emphasis mine). If nature is basically a retroactively constructed fiction used to explain and justify present conditions, then even if harmony is an empirical phenomenon, part of the physical world, it is not for that fact the origin of musical systems, nor is 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 and ideas about music. Accordingly, when Rousseau states that “harmony, having its principle in nature, is the same for all Nations” (LFM, 144), he is not claiming harmony is in fact “natural” or universally uniform; rather, his point is that if harmony were in fact universal—governed by consistent laws of physics—and if music were in fact “natural” phenomenon, then every society would recognize the same frequencies, intervals, consonances, and dissonances. Even a quick foray into the work of Pythagoras will demonstrate that this is not, in fact, the case. “If there is a natural melody derived from harmony,” Rousseau argues, it should be one for all men, since harmony, having its source in nature, is the same in all the countries of the world. But the songs and tunes of each nation have a character that belongs to them, because they all have an imitative melody derived from the accents of the language (ETP, 288).

Repeating his earlier point more succinctly, Rousseau illustrates that the “purely” musical is a fiction, for it is impossible to understand the particularity of music without taking into account its relationship with extra-musical phenomena, namely, words. Music does not exist as a “fact” of nature and the physics of sound, but as a production of a very specific set of social, political, environmental, and economic 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 of language Rousseau recounts in the first part of the Essay. Thus, to gain significant insight into musical compositions and practices, it is insufficient to investigate generalizing, universal questions such as those about its biology and physics. Rather than the positivist approach common to Rameau and many contemporary musicologists and philosophers of music, Rousseau’s genealogical approach assumes that every musical question is first a question of and for ethnomusicology. Music “in itself” is found among the specificities of musical practice both in relation to other forms of expression as well as among the various national music traditions—in, that is, music’s relationship with language, not in any sort of immediacy or pure presence of music’s essence. “[T]hus,” Rousseau explains, “it is from melody alone that the particular character of a National Music must be derived; all the more so as its

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies

47

character being produced principally by the language” (LFM, 144). Claiming that the chief influence on a song's character—its specificity both as a song and not a painting, and also as that song and no other—is the language in which it is sung, Rousseau demonstrates that musical specificity is a function of its relationship with language. Even though the Letter on French Music was Rousseau’s preliminary account of the relationship between music and language, his argument here is much more specific than in the Essay. Alluding to the fact that tonal harmony arose from the repetition of and our habituation to the practices of Baroque opera, Rousseau locates the possibility of meaningful instrumental—i.e., nontexted—music in song’s unification of speech and melody. He notes, “As vocal Music long preceded instrumental, the latter has always received from the former its melodic character and its meter” (LFM, 145-146). If, as Rousseau claims, vocal music is the first music, then music is always, from its origins, beholden to language. Rousseau is consistent with current understandings of Western music history, which hold that the roots of tonality are in chant and Baroque opera. Musical properties—e.g., meter—arise from linguistic practice, not from theoretical fact.28 For Rousseau, then, the most “natural” music is that in which prose, poetry, and music are relatively united.29 Furthermore, just as Rousseau claims that our knowledge of the “State of Nature” can only be conjectural, it is impossible to have these three elements in perfect correspondence. This is why Rousseau qualifies his claim with the statement that these three meters should concur “as perfectly as possible” (LFM, 145-146; emphasis added). In Italian, the prosodic, poetic, and musical meters are more closely related than in French; this is why Rousseau claims that Italian music is more properly musical than French. If music is never perfectly unified with language, then, Rousseau argues, composers must make use of artifice to bring the two into as close a correspondence as possible. The compositional practices this entails are just as varied as the languages within which they work; not only is the phenomenon of music (or rather, what counts as music) dependent on and shaped by linguistic and cultural conventions, but within each system musical practice will vary widely. French and German, while both “northern” European languages, are markedly different takes on Western European art music (the former leaning to the side of Neoclassicism and gallant style, the latter toward contrapuntal and harmonic complexity). Thus, according to Rousseau, “with whatever artfulness one sought to cover up the defects of such a Music, it would be impossible for it ever to please ears other than those of the natives of the country in which it was in use” (LFM, 146). Even among cultures which recognize the same kinds of sound-structures and practices as musical (e.g., France, Italy, and Germany), the significance, affectivity, and effectiveness of musical expression are tied up with its relationship to the vernacular and to the musical practices particular to that language/nation. This is why compositional technique renders pleasure only to those educated by and culturally acclimated to the tradition within which these techniques arose. The best music is the “one whose language is most suited to

48

Chapter 2

it” (LFM, 148); in other words, the best music is the one whose structures are most coherent with other social conventions. Locating musical pleasure in the coherence between words (i.e., social conventions) and music, Rousseau can easily account for the fact that I know no Italian, yet rather enjoy operas whose libretti are in Italian. Rousseau claims that melody is not part of a strictly representational economy in which there is, more or less, a correspondence between signifier and signified. His point here is that the representational content of the words in a libretto has little or no influence on their expressive capacity. Their affectivity and significance lie not so much in their symbolism, but in their “semiotic” force—that is, in accent, inflection, dynamics, and so on. However, through habit and standardization, the semiotic aspects of music themselves become representative of ideas and affects (e.g., the minor third as “sad” or “scary,” the Baroque Doctrine of Affects, etc.). Like any symbol, these semiotic symbols are meaningful only because we are habituated to associate them with specific emotions or ideas. We understand musical language—a language of “mere tones”—only because musical sounds are endowed with conceptual associations. There is no “natural” or inherent significance to any musical sound. Furthermore, a semiotic is not universal: it is expressive in a non-representational way, but its dynamic is capable of conveying meaning because it engages in a form of symbolism. Just as an opera makes sense, to a degree, via the musical content alone (the orchestra and the voice, but not the libretto), language can be comprehensible for its “saying” as well as its “said,” so to speak. Music only appeared to be more universal than verbal languages because musical systems were relatively standard across Western Europe. With this understanding of the “universality” of musical pleasure, we must understand Rousseau’s claim that the most natural music is the most pleasing music to be something other than an argument for a music which is fully present to itself. If musical pleasure is a function of the relationship between music and language, and if music is pleasing only because it exists as a function of cultural practice, then the most pleasurable, most musical music is necessarily dependent upon and enriched by extra-musical referents and influences. When music is “divided into vocal Music and instrumental Music,” Rousseau claims that “giving different characters to these two types” of music creates “a monstrous whole” (LFM, 147). Separating non-programmatic music from texted song and programmatic works, one could claim to establish a realm of “pure” music free from the influence of words or other extra-musical phenomena. This conception gives birth to a “monstrous whole,” for in attempting to abject words and cultural particularities from music as a means of establishing a proper or pure music, this view seeks to purge from music that which renders it significant and expressive—i.e., its very musicality. This solopsistic music refuses to acknowledge the ways in which its “inside” is constituted by supposedly external phenomena and is like a zombie: a walking, soulless corpse. Accordingly, Rousseau views formalist analyses—those which attempt to account for music “in itself” and on its own terms—as a waste of time, for they ignore the specifically musical elements of music and focus only on music’s

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies

49

physical and formal features. Rameauian formalism proceeds “by taking away the knowledge of the words,” whereby “the most important part of the melody is taken away, which is the expression; and all that can be decided by this route is whether the modulation is good and whether the song possesses naturalness and beauty” (LFM, 151). Describing a piece in terms of interval-calculus and chord progressions gives insight into its anatomy—its physical and formal characteristics—provided we remember that there is nothing thereby “natural” about anatomy, and that these empirical analyses are socially constructed and highly biased discourses. Formalist models can even evaluate the degree to which music will accord sensory pleasure (“naturalness and beauty”) within a certain context and within a specific population. Such an analysis is, however, deaf to the very musicality of music, for it ignores the ways in which music works to convey meaning and arouse the passions of its listeners. Thus, in contrast to harmonic formalism, Rousseau analyzes music in terms of melody. Melody is the relationship between music and words by virtue of which music is expressive. Rousseau uses “melody” not so much in its literal, technical sense—i.e., the primary voice in a homophonic texture—but as a metaphor for that within music which performs the work of expression. The most important part of melody is not a technical or formal device, but expressive force. Further, melody is the “contaminated” aspect of music: that which is infected by and beholden to extra-musical influences like words, narrative structures, concepts which refer to extra-musical phenomena, and so forth.

Flipping Derrida’s Script Given this understanding of absolute music, Rousseau’s identification of the coeval birth of music and speech, and his continued emphasis on the inseparability of music and language, it becomes clear that he is critiquing the notion of self-presence, not reinforcing it, as Derrida would have. Grammatology falsely attributes to Rousseau “a classical ideology according to which writing takes the status of a tragic fatality come to prey upon natural innocence, interrupting the golden age of the present and full speech” (G, 168). Although his later political works flagrantly contradict them, Rousseau’s early musical writings are, as I have demonstrated throughout this chapter, an urgent and polemic critique of the possibility of “present and full speech.” Even though Rousseau argues that some languages are more musical and expressive than others, he never claims that there is some sort of unmediated “voice of nature;” in fact, he manifestly states the opposite: “some sort of discourse must always complement the voice of nature” (EOL, 288). The voice of nature is not, for Rousseau, some sort of immediate and pure expression; as song, the voice of nature is the effect of the most perfect combinations of words and accompaniment (book and score, so to speak). Near the end of the Essay, Rousseau clearly locates the power of the “voice of Nature” in its moral—i.e., conventional—effects. “Music,” he argues, “restricted to the exclusively physical effect of the combinations of vibrations,

50

Chapter 2

came to be deprived of the moral effects it used to produce when it was doubly the voice of Nature” (EOL, 298). The voice of nature is characterized by the unity of the melody—that is, by a musicality that is thoroughly infused with linguistic conventions. Derrida’s main problem or mistake in his reading of Rousseau is what, precisely, Rousseau means by “unity” in his notion of the “unity of the melody.” After an extended discussion of the place of the Essay in Rousseau’s oeuvre, Derrida ultimately interprets it in terms of the later Rousseau (indeed, he begins the chapter with a discussion of Emile), who fails to heed his own caveats regarding claims made about “nature” and its purity.30 As I have shown in earlier parts of this chapter, in Western music, “pure presence,” a classical and metaphysical unity, is possible only when speech and song are separated, and music then becomes the science of harmony. Insofar as music is meaningless when separated from language, Rousseau’s discussion of melody is a prime illustration of supplementarity at work in écriture. The “extra-musical” is a constituent supplement to the specifically musical. This argument is not latent within the text and contrary to Rousseau’s intentions, as Derrida claims. Asking the usual deconstructive question “What does Rousseau say without saying, see without seeing?,” Derrida claims that Rousseau unintentionally and in contradiction to his main claims discovers “[t]hat substitution has always already begun; that imitation, principle of art, has always already interrupted natural plenitude; that, having to be a discourse, it has always already broached presence in difference” (G, 215). Derrida argues that “Rousseau never makes explicit the originality of the lack that makes necessary the addition of the supplement—the quantity and the differences of quantity that always already shape melody” (G, 214). If he had fully understood what Rousseau meant by the concepts “melody” and “harmony,” Derrida would have seen that Rousseau explicitly and intentionally demonstrates that music is necessarily mediated by language and other extramusical phenomena (geography, familial relations, etc.). Focusing on the unity of speech and language, Rousseau’s main endeavor in his early musical writings is to argue that there is no “objective” means of parsing frequencies into pitches, or of distinguishing music from noise: “by itself, a sound has no absolute character by which it might be recognized…nor is a given sound by nature anything within the harmonic system” (EOL, 291). Contrary to what Derrida finds, Rousseau’s claim is that harmony—the “nature” of sound—is always already lacking some inherent order/organization that necessarily determines what counts as a pitch, as out of tune, as musical, as mere sound, etc. This lack is why music must always be accompanied by speech—that is, by social forces, conventions, and values which function to filter through infinite amounts of empirical data and make sense out of our sense perceptions. Rousseau’s accounts of the coeval origin of music and language are conjectural histories—myths—used to speculate and hypothesize precisely how convention supplemented and domesticated “natural” phenomena, and thus offer a hypothesis as to why Western musical systems are the way they are. Derrida’s reading is further led astray by his failure to account for the conjectural status of

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies

51

Rousseau’s histories. According to Derrida, the genealogy of languages offered in the Essay “shows that the opposition north/south [is] rational and not natural, structural and not factual, relational and not substantial…No language is from the south or the north, no real element of the language has an absolute situation, only a differential one” (G, 216). Yes, precisely. This is what it means to be conjectural: because we can never theorize about the state of nature with any certainty, we can have knowledge of neither the origin of inequality, nor the origin of languages. The southerly scene “is described, though not declared, by Rousseau to be the origin of languages” (G, 216) because Rousseau knows it is impossible for him to have any definitive knowledge about nature or of how language then arose from it. Thus, Rousseau offers this dual-polar myth as a way to structure and make sense of, ultimately, his claim that French music is profoundly lacking and that Rameau is completely misguided as both a composer and a theorist.31 Rousseau’s claim that originally, historically, voice and song were unified is not an empirical claim, per se. This is a conjecture used to explain the present state of European music theory, a myth used to illustrate (1) the dependence of “pure” music on social convention, and (2) that music moves us not through some biological or physical cause, but in that it “speaks” to us— albeit through the work of writing, social convention, etc. The important thing for Rousseau—and for me—is that music’s effects are precisely affects: that music is interesting and meaningful because of the way it modulates and is modulated by power relations, i.e., the way it intersects with raced and gendered bodies. But that is a topic for discussion later in the book. Now, having illustrated the notion of conjecture and conjectural bodies in Rousseau’s early musical writings, I analyze Of Grammatology’s conception of “arche-writing” as an instance of considering actuality and embodiment conjecturally.

Arche-writing as Conjecture The Derridian notion of arche-writing is an illustration or example of conjecture, specifically, the role that the concept of conjecture plays in thinking the relationship between the material and the social. While Derrida focuses almost exclusively on linguistic arche-writing, he does mention that it is operative in other media: beyond the signifying face, the signified face itself...cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural “writing”...All this to describe not only the system of notation secondarily connected with these activities but the essence and the content of these activities themselves (G, 9).

What might Derrida mean by “musical writing”? How is the “essence and content” of music “writing” in the Derridian sense? How is music’s construction and expression linked to its materiality (materiality both in the sense of the concrete physical properties of sound, of instruments and recording technology, of

52

Chapter 2

the bodies of human beings who make music, and also the historico-material conditions of music’s development, e.g., philosophy, politics, economy, etc.)? Or, more specifically: (1) How are music’s formal conventions in a given tradition related to the physics of sound and the physiology of bodies producing these sounds, and (2) How is this relationship between structure and matter linked to the meaningful content one hears in music? The link between the material and the social is, as Derrida explains, found in “the literary element…tying the play of form to a determined substance of expression. If there is something in literature [or, more broadly, music] which does not allow itself to be reduced to voice [i.e., natural structure]…one cannot recapture it except by rigorously isolating the bond that links the play of form to the substance of graphic expression” (G, 59). Substituting the “musical” for “literary” element, we see that this elemental bond is the interaction of the how and the what—that is to say, the technique whereby form is elaborated, and the materiality or concreteness of the actual representations. A rather paradoxical notion, this bond, this link between two or more distinct phenomena, is elemental precisely because it is the source or origin of both form and matter. More precisely, it is the origin of and the condition of possibility for the material/social distinction. The specificity of music, then, lies in the manner or style in which the difference between musical form and musical expression is articulated. It is this “irreducibility” which Derrida calls “arche-writing,” the “writing” behind both speech and writing in the common sense, which makes the difference between the material and the social possible. Even though music is aural, and not (primarily) graphic expression, it is possible to discuss music in these terms because it, too, is already and fundamentally arche-writing. Opening the difference(s) between aural and visual, between ideality and materiality, between structure and ideology, “[t]his archewriting,” as Derrida explains, would be at work not only in the form and substance of graphic expression, but also in those of nongraphic expression. It would constitute not only the pattern uniting form to all substance, graphic or otherwise, but the movement of the sign-function linking a content to an expression (G, 60).

As a “movement,” arche-writing is the bi-directional journey from content to form and form to content; that is, arche-writing traverses both the way in which the content gives meaning to the means of expression and the way in which the means of expression invests the content with significance. At an even more elemental level, arche-writing is the conjectural history which accounts for the way in which the material emerges through the social and the way in which customs face resistance from concrete materiality. In specifically musical terms, archewriting is the process whereby certain ideas are shaped by their transposition into audio frequencies and resonating bodies, and is how certain sounds take on first their status as sounds, then their specific meanings. Arche-writing is the movement or relationship between content and form, materiality and sociality,

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies

53

because it is the very opening within language that renders these distinctions intelligible; paradoxically, however, it is a bond which ruptures, which introduces différance. As an agent of différance, arche-writing “cannot, as the condition of all linguistic [or musical] systems, form a part of the linguistic [or musical] system itself and be situated as an object in its field. (Which does not mean it has a real field elsewhere, another assignable site…” (G, 60). Being neither the extra-musical (i.e., existing “elsewhere, in another assignable site”) nor the purely musical (an object for musical analysis), arche-writing is instead the dynamic relationship between these two things. Musical arche-writing links the material and social aspects of music by introducing the possibility of their différance. To say that music represents or signifies the movement of différance would remain within the very logic (presence/absence) which the concept of différance critiques. Rather than expressing the “lack” from which signification and significance arises, musical meaning plays itself out in, through, and on the field opened by the movement of différance. Because “signification is formed only within the hollow of difference,” we are faced with, argues Derrida, “…the impossibility that a sign, the unity of a signifier and a signified, be produced within the plenitude of a present and absolute presence. That is why there is no full speech” (G, 69). Because différance is the shifting ground of the presence/absence, nature/culture, and signified/signifier distinctions, any representational matrix which construes meaning and value based on the relative “purity” or self-presence of form to content collapses. Indeed, the continued opposition between form and content or music and words is an eminently metaphysical gesture: as Derrida states, “It is precisely these concepts that permitted the exclusion of writing: image or representation, sensible and intelligible, nature and culture, nature and technics, etc. They are solidary with all metaphysical conceptuality and particularly with a naturalist, objectivist, and derivative determination of the difference between inside and outside” (G, 71). A words/music binary most definitely falls within Derrida’s “etc.,” for it presupposes this absolute and reified distinction between the “inside” and “outside” of music and musical meaning. Différance, on the other hand, does not set structure and ideology in opposition to one another, but is, as discussed earlier, the elemental bond between them. The dynamism of différance is the permeability of the membrane separating the “inside” from the “outside” of music, “musical” virtuosity from “extra-musical” content. The membrane maintains some separation between the two areas, while simultaneously allowing communication between them. Understanding musical arche-writing as the elemental bond of différance, one does not collapse the musical into the extra-musical, but attends to the ways in which the two are already affected and infected by one another. In the language of chapter 1, the musical and extra-musical are coincident with one another; indeed, this is an excellent example of the coincidence I described in the previous chapter, because the notion of musical arche-writing demonstrates that the coincident terms cannot precede it as independent entities. Given this conception of musical arche-writing, one can never experience music in its “purity” or “fullness,” for

54

Chapter 2

this would not even be heard as music, but as nonsense. Music is significant— both in the sense that the category “music” itself is meaningful, and in that music is expressive of a meaningful content—only insofar as difference/différance works in, through, and on it. Thus, in Derrida’s own terms we see that Rousseau’s insistence on the unity of music and language—or of matter and artifice—is not beholden to some metaphysics of presence, but instead deconstructs the music theory that claimed to express the voice of nature in its purity. If, as Derrida claims, “the signified is originally and essentially…trace, it is always already in the position of the signifier” (G, 73), then the symphony, perhaps the most absolute of musical forms, read in terms of the trace, illustrates the breakdown of representational logic into the movement of différance. For example, in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the “signified”—i.e., the musical idea expressed in the story of the “fate” narrative—is precisely the eighth-rest-eightheighth-eighth-quarter signifier. Unlike literature or visual arts, so-called “absolute” music, music that creates meaning only in reference to “purely” musical conventions/techniques/elements, illustrates how meaning arises from both the differences among signifiers and the ultimate deferral of reference to a (transcendental) signified (music that isn’t “about” anything but its own construction). That is to say, the propagation of differences defers any totalization: “The appearing and functioning of difference presupposes an originary synthesis not preceded by any absolute simplicity. Such would be the originary trace” (G, 62). According to Derrida, what permits such “articulation of signs among themselves within the same abstract order—a phonic or graphic text for example” (G, 62) is what he calls “the trace.” Rather than offering some unity of which music and words are elements or expressions, the trace is the very working-out of the differences between them, the différance which renders each meaningful.32 The trace is the condition for the possibility of the difference between music and words; however, it does not describe a state in which music and words were unified (e.g., ancient Greek poetry is not the perfect and originary synthesis of music and words). It is in terms of this idea of the trace that we should understand Rousseau’s “unity of the melody.” As a critic of the idea that ancient Greek theater presented the most perfect unity between words and music (Florentine Camerata, etc.), Rousseau’s claim about the unity of words and music is not an argument for some transparency and full presence; rather, it is an attempt to illustrate via conjectural history the ways in which musical and linguistic conventions articulate one another. Understanding the text as a fabric of differences and deferrals, we see that musical text-ture, which is both “graphic” (physical, programmatic, extramusical) and “phonic” (metaphysical, non-programmatic, purely musical), must be thought as coincident, because the very specificities of musical expressions and practices—what makes them musical and not, say, poetic or athletic—lie in the style or pattern of the performance in which these categories are articulated and displaced. In this sense, musical arche-writing is the fabric in which these relations among phone and graphe, sound and sense, musical and extra-musical, are woven. It is in the arche-writing of the trace, “in the temporalization of a

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies

55

lived experience which is neither in the world nor in ‘another world,’ which is not more sonorous than luminous, not more in time than in space, that differences appear among the elements or rather produce them” (G, 65). What better expression of the temporalization of lived experience than music? Musical writing, then, would be the specifically musical element(s) which is both “purely” musical and “purely” human, which is both musical (sonorous) and verbal (luminous, the light of reason), both temporal and spatial (what is frequency but the unfolding of a wave over a specific distance/space in a determinate period of time?): musical writing is the “elemental” bond among these various dimensions. Even though it is “elemental,” musical arche-writing is constituted as an object for us, for “grammatology,” only after the fact of its inscription. As Derrida explains, arche-writing “is a fortiori anterior to the distinction between regions of sensibility, anterior to sound as much as to light” (G, 65). Although it is the condition of difference between the graphic and the phonic, the extramusical and the purely musical, arche-writing is not an origin per se because it exists only in retrospect, only in reflection upon the text in which it is articulated. It is, in other words, conjectural because it can be articulated only in terms of the differences it makes possible. Inarticulable in terms of presence, “anterior” to signs, sight, and sound, the trace seems to be a sort of silence or invisibility. If “presence” is thought in terms of seeing/being seen or hearing/being heard, then one might be led to think of the trace as the absence of sight or sound; statements such as, “the unheard difference…is the condition of all other differences, of all other traces, and it is already a trace” (G, 65) appear to reinforce this interpretation. However, this interpretation of the trace remains within the presence/absence matrix which Derrida uses the concept to deconstruct. Thus, it is not that the trace is silent and/or invisible, but that its aural and visual manifestations must be heard and read “under erasure,” i.e., as the spacing in and of différance. In both the temporal space of deferral and the more general space of difference, “the strange movement of the trace proclaims as much as it recalls: différance defers-differs” (G, 66). Thus, while the trace is “unheard,” it is not purely silent, for while it defers vocalization, it also articulates differences. This movement is very similar to the gesture made in thinking something under erasure. Just as the trace is both a proclamation and a retraction, “[t]hat mark of deletion is not, however, a merely negative symbol…Under its strokes the presence of a transcendental signified is effaced while still remaining legible, is destroyed while making visible the very idea of the sign” (G, 23). While Derrida is committed to deconstructing the privilege of the absolute or transcendent signifier, he does not want to regress into a literalism, a “naïve objectivism” that fails to recognize the différantial nature of writing. Put differently, Derrida seeks to go beyond the alternative of immanence or transcendence (i.e., a literal or positivist truth and a metaphysical truth). Instead, Derrida proposes a transcendence of the transcendental, a hyper-transcendential “truth” which goes beyond—both ‘prior’ to and in excess of—the transcendental model of truth expressed within a metaphysics of presence. Derrida explains his engagement in this double move-

56

Chapter 2

ment of writing and erasure, proclamation and retraction, as follows (and I will quote at length): It is to escape falling back into this naïve objectivism that I refer here to a transcendentality that I elsewhere put into question. It is because I believe that there is a short-of and a beyond of transcendental criticism. To see to it that the beyond does not return to the within is to recognize in the contortion the necessity of a pathway. That pathway must leave a track in the text. Without that track, abandoned to the simple content of its conclusions, the ultra-transcendental text will so closely resemble the precritical text as to be indistinguishable from it. We must now form and meditate upon the law of this resemblance (G, 61).

This hyper-transcendental truth, then, is not so much found in the “simple content” of a text as it is in the style in which the text is written and read, specifically, in the pathway (or Spur) which the trace leaves throughout the text. This “pathway” or trace could, in some senses, be understood as the mark of erasure under and through which we read writing. Thus, while we cannot but think musical arche-writing in terms of distinctions such as materiality and sociality, the musical and the extra-musical, we must always be mindful that we are not looking to find the absolute separation of these things, but their elemental bond, the différance between/among them. As Derrida explains, “this trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside: spacing” (G, 70). Focusing on spacing over presence (or absence), one reads what the text does against what it explicitly says in order to make evident the warp and weft of différance.33 This notion of conjecture that I am developing from Rousseau can be understood as a sort of mark of erasure: it acknowledges experience and history, and by doing so it keeps us from falling into naïve objectivism or an equally naïve idealism (of what Mills would call the idea-as-idealized-model type, which I discuss at the end of the chapter), for it allows us to see how the “actual”—what we perceive to be the physical materiality of a sound wave or a strand of DNA—is crossed and constituted by both ideals and ideology (or, in other words, by history). When we hear music “under erasure” and listen for the way spacing functions within the musical text(ure), we can consider it in its bare material actuality while also accounting for the stakes and significance, both past and present, of claiming a specific state of affairs as “actuality.”

Spacing: Hearing Music “Under Erasure” Arche-writing as spacing cannot occur as such within the phenomenological experience as presence. It marks the dead time within the presence of the living present, within the general form of all presence. The dead time is at work (G, 68).

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies

57

In order to think of musical arche-writing, we must attend to musical “dead time,” to that in music which works under erasure. The most obvious “dead time,” in music is the rest; thus, I propose the rest as a metaphor or a model for thinking of musical arche-writing.34 Musical arche-writing is more properly a “rest” than either silence or noise that lacks “musicality,” because musical arche-writing must not be thought of as the absence of sound or music, for this model relies on the very presence-absence binary it is intended to deconstruct. Indeed, if “spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becomingunconscious of the subject” (G, 69), then the erased word or note is neither fully absent nor fully present—it is the elemental bond between these two phases. The rest could be seen as a musical version of the “Durchstreichung” (i.e., the mark of erasure): it indicates music (the rest is a musical symbol, a musical concept, is a “rest” proper only in the context of a musical work), but it tells us not to hear or read a musical sound in its presence, just as the X over a word indicates that we should understand it as related to, but prior to and in excess of what Derrida would call its “metaphysical” denotation(s). Functioning as the symbol of silence in music, the “silence” indicated by the rest does not occur as either presence or absence of music, but rather as music-under-erasure. Indeed, as John Cage demonstrates in 4’33”, a rest is never tranquil, and silence is full of both noise and music—or, more directly, that noise is music.35 In this piece, it is as if the notes on the staff were erased, and this very active “silence” is the archewriting that arises from the space revealed in erasure. This so-called silence can include everything from coughs, rustling programs, squeaky chairs, ventilation noises, street noises, the swish of fabric, to people practicing in rooms adjacent to the recital hall, uncomfortable “silence,” etc. Cage’s point, then, is that these sounds are not “mere noises,” but, because they would be there behind and in excess of any sounds the pianist could make, are also themselves part of the musical performance and piece. This rest, then, opens up the space in which the difference between “music” and “noise” will be delineated, where sound is classified as either musical or non-musical. All these phenomena occur prior to and in excess of any notion of music, Western or otherwise. Leading the listener to contemplate the distinction between music and noise, the metaphor of the rest indicates that it is more proper to think of musical arche-writing as the space between the “inside” and the “outside” of the musical, i.e., the différance between the purely- and the extra-musical. The “grammatological” inquiry would seek to find out how this space is mapped, how the “properly” and the “extra” musical come to be constituted as such. This quasigenealogical investigation is what Rousseau does in his conjectural history of the origin of music and language: how, he asks, did we begin to recognize sound as such, and then specific sounds as representative of specific expressions, objects, and ideas? It remains to be asked, however, what is at stake in musical “spacing.” Since musical spacing is the articulation of what counts as music and what doesn’t count as music, what is at issue here is precisely the separation of what are considered to be the “strictly” musical from the programmatic, political, or

58

Chapter 2

contextual factors. These are eminently political decisions, for the ways in which these distinctions play out depends upon who makes these decisions, i.e., whose values define what counts and what doesn’t count as music. The question of spacing then becomes: How are these inclusions and exclusions made, and what is at stake in them? One acquires a sense of spacing only through the training or normalization of one’s ear, in which one learns to hear rhythms and pitches as such, to hear “music” as music and “noise” as noise, etc. Thus, one thing at stake in these inclusions and exclusions is power: pitch and rhythm are “spaced” differently in different cultures and subcultures. What is at stake in the spacing of music is privilege, both the privilege of a certain notion of music, and that of a certain group of people. In a capitalist patriarchy, the distinction between the musical and the extra-musical, between “civilized” and “uncivilized” sounds, reflects gender and class hierarchies, among others (race, sexuality, education, ability, etc.). Essential Logic’s “Music is a Better Noise” illustrates how the articulation of the space between “music” and “noise” is an intentional but non-subjective agent of power inequities present within late-twentieth-century Western civilization. The musical and verbal arguments of this song claim that there is no qualitative distinction between music and noise, and that any distinctions we make between what counts as music and what doesn’t reflect an explicitly gendered and classed privileging of mind over body, culture over nature. As the lyrics interrogate the way some sounds are considered serious and others trivial, the music questions the smoothness, linearity, melody, and harmony—things that make music seem ‘natural’ and inevitable, and thus inherently different than noise. After a two-bar saxophone introduction, Laura Logic’s vocals begin with the statement, “Life to death, I want to hear those…violins.” This line is delivered in a voice deeper and differently accented than what Logic presents as her own voice throughout the rest of the song. Indeed, the line expressing a desire to hear literally the master of orchestral instruments (“Concertmaster” is the title of the first violinist) is presented in a much deeper and huskier voice than the rather wispy, high-pitched, “feminine” voice with which Logic delivers the rest of the song. The gendering of these voices reflects the typical gendering of “serious” and “popular” music. “Serious” or “intellectual” music is masculine, for all the same stereotypical reasons why masculinity is associated with thinking, reason, etc.; on the other hand, “noise” is associated with a feminine position, for the feminine is usually the representative of “nature” as opposed to culture, irrationality as opposed to reason, immaturity as opposed to enlightenment. Thus, this position that violins make the best music—i.e., Western “art” music—is the position against which Logic sets herself and her position that music is close to noise. The main argument of the song is that “Music is close, music is a better…noise/Than the rumbling catapults, than bumbling cranes.” As she enunciates “catapults” Logic makes a catapult-like noise with voice, which is sometimes accompanied by a guitar string plucked in the manner of a slingshot, and

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies

59

when she says “cranes,” her voice dips and rises, which is evocative of a wrecking ball swinging (dipping and rising) from a crane; this suggests that these “noises” are only arbitrarily separated out from “music.” Music is close to noise, but somehow a hierarchy has been constructed. This hierarchy has nothing to do with essential, natural, or structural qualities of either kind of sound. The rumbling of catapults and the bumbling of cranes are both sounds produced by humans with the aids of very complex and expensive instruments— just like a Steinway or a Loreé or a Stradivarius. One could argue that music is systematically organized sound, whereas these noises are random, but such a claim ignores the fact that the shooting of a slingshot and the operation of a crane are very precisely calculated activities. However, the latter are activities performed by rough-and-tumble youngsters or by equally rough but more well-worn construction workers—that is, by children and the working class, not by a welleducated and highly trained performer clad in formalwear. Excepting ageist and classist prejudices, the only distinction between the Beethoven and the Bobcat seems to be that music is organized as sound, while the rumbling and bumbling Logic mentions are the aural byproducts of other activities of which the telos is not acoustic. Even with this qualified position, two problems remain: 1) Cage’s 4’33” deconstructed the boundary between “music” and “acoustic byproducts” of “nonmusical” activity (the rustling of clothes and programs, the hum of the ventilation system, the sound of people walking on the floor above or practicing in the rooms below). If even these “secondary” sounds count as music, is there any way to distinguish between death metal and demolition crews? (Einsturzende Neubauten, indeed!) 2) If there is no structural difference between music and “noise,” and the difference is, as Logic suggests, only one of context, we seem to be faced with the musical version of the question: “What makes Duchamp’s urinal on the gallery floor at MoMA different from the ones in the men’s restroom?” In answer, the difference is completely ideological or contextual. This brief detour into British post-punk helps illustrate how musical archewriting—i.e., the ever-deferred difference between music and noise—is the social construction of the space between the “inside” and “outside” of music; accordingly, while it is “prior” to musical composition and performance per se, arche-writing appears as musical only after the fact of its articulation, for it is only in view of preexistent systems of privilege and the hierarchical categories based upon them that arche-writing can be identified as musical or nonmusical (be it language, painting, noise, etc.). Understood in terms of arche-writing, musical specificity is found in the ways in which différance unfolds the space between the inside and the outside of music, between nature and culture. Thinking about music in this way, one does not ask “What is music?” (the metaphysical question), but “How and why did the difference/différance between the inside

60

Chapter 2

and outside of music come to be articulated as such?” Musical arche-writing, then, is the elemental bond of sound and sense (noise and music), not one to the exclusion of the other. In less Derridian jargon, my point here is that what is most fundamentally real or natural about materiality is the constant negotiation between the material and the social, the context of which is necessary to see either the material or the social as such. Claims about materiality or “nature” are always, in this sense, logically anachronistic (i.e., if it is posited as existing before, logically, it is possible for it to exist) and hence conjectural.

Conclusions: Thoughts on Aesthetics and Politics Having thus demonstrated the naturalistic fallacy of Rameau’s attempts to posit one very idiosyncratic harmonic system (Western tonality) as the universal, irrefutable, and “natural” essence of music, Rousseau challenges what was then and for centuries to come the standard modus operandi of musicologists and music theorists: that is, analyzing and judging music based on “objective” factors like harmonic relationships, contrapuntal complexity, and other physical/empirical elements of “music in itself.” Understanding music as primarily a moral and social phenomenon, Rousseau, not unlike Derrida, offers us a means by which to account for the various and complex relations, values, and events which shape our musical judgments and thus influence the kinds of music a particular society or person practices. Unlike Milton Babbitt (the composer who authored the manifesto “Who Cares If You Listen?”), Rousseau thinks music is valuable, is musical, only insofar as it is registered as meaningful by a listener or group of listeners. Why, then, is Rousseau’s more “subjective” view of music a valuable theoretical tool? As I see it, there are at least two advantages to this Rousseauian perspective. First, it both acknowledges the existence of non-Western musical practices, as well as acting as a form of analysis that can be applied to them. In a way, it treats all musicology as “ethnomusicology,” for it asks of all musical practices the same quasi-anthropological questions that are traditionally the domain of ethnomusicology. Indeed, because we can no longer ground music in physical nature, Rousseau’s argument demands that we ask genealogical, moral, and political questions of Western music so that we may then begin to understand how and why we Westerners find this specific form of music meaningful—how and why, for example, J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor sounds spooky. It also demands that we historicize our epistemological, theoretical, and methodological modes at use in examining music both through traditional forms of empirical analysis and through more sociologically grounded analyses. This task has been undertaken, to a large extent, by “New Musicology,” a relatively recent movement which has taken up feminism, postcolonial theory, post-structuralism, critical theory, and postmodernism in reaction to the

Conjectural Histories, Conjectural Harmonies

61

positivism which dominates mainstream musicology and philosophical aesthetics. The second advantage I find in Rousseau’s understanding of music is that, in addition to the standard objections to the hierarchization of art music and pop music, Rousseau offers a further means of critique. If so-called “serious” music remains economically and/or intellectually inaccessible—if, to paraphrase Babbitt, no one listens—all its “objective” merit (technical mastery, complexity, etc.) is futile, for it has failed its “moral” mission to convey meaning and affect. As Plato well knew, music is a powerful means of channeling, educating, and arousing desires and ideas; however, if no one is there to listen to it, if no one practices it, it might as well be a language as dead as Plato’s Greek. Because music does not exist “in itself,” it is not valuable in itself; rather, music is a human activity which is important insofar as it expresses influences, creates, and dissolves relationships of meaning, knowledge, power, and desire. Since pop music impacts far more people (begrudgingly or enthusiastically) than so-called “serious” music, it is at least as meaningful and valuable a moral agent as its more scholarly and elite counterpart. As cited in the epigraph to this chapter, “It is by means of the song, not by means of the chords, that sounds have expression, fire, life; it is the song alone that gives them the moral effects that produce all of music’s energy” (ETP, 279; emphasis mine). Music should not be judged solely on its “objective” or “purely musical” qualities, but, more importantly, on its ability to effect listeners and performers—that is to say, on its ability to install itself as a meaningful element in human relations. Accordingly, this distinction between moral and physiological nature provides an eminently valuable means of understanding music, for it allows us to make musical judgments that more easily avoid ethnocentrism and elitism. It also, I believe, offers a firm grounding for political judgment, and this is where I would like to return to the question I left unanswered earlier in the chapter. If “nature” isn’t really pure, originary, or any of those other qualities we commonly associate with “natural,” why continue, as Rousseau does, to utilize nature as an analytical category? Why continue to produce elaborately detailed accounts of the State of Nature if we know that it probably didn’t ever exist, and even if it did, we would have no means of gaining anything resembling accurate knowledge of it? Why does Rousseau emphasize the importance of these obviously conjectural histories? This notion of conjecture that I develop from Rousseau and, in the next chapter, from Julia Kristeva, contributes to a non-ideal account of nature and human embodiment. When we speak of the materiality, particularly when the physical materiality under question is the raced, gendered human body, our notion of the material must be robust and complex enough to account for all the social work that makes/has made it possible for us to even perceive what we take to be materiality as such; in Derridian terms, we need a notion of the material that accommodates and acknowledges the work of arche-writing. While racist, sexist, and classist ideologies might encourage abstraction away from the empirical fact of oppression, in order to construct an ideal-as-descriptive-model,

62

Chapter 2

there is, particularly in the case of nature/human embodiment, going to have to be a robust and not strictly empirical notion of the material that is being described. As Rousseau has demonstrated, there are some 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 the demonstrably actual and toward the ideal or idealizing. In acknowledging that “a simple empiricism will not work as a cognitive strategy” “one has to be self-conscious about the concepts that ‘spontaneously’ occur to one, since many of these concepts will not arise naturally but as the result of social structures and hegemonic ideational patterns” (Mills, Ideal Theory, 175). Mills does suggest that some concepts like nature or the body will need quite a bit of unpacking or genealogical deconstruction in order to be put to effective feminist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist use. Mills does not, however, inquire further into this claim; this is what my notion of conjecture does. Rather than “abstracting away from realities crucial to our comprehension of the actual workings of injustice in human interactions and social institutions” (Mills, Ideal Theory, 170), my theory of the conjectural body attends to precisely these realities by describing how the material and the social interact to produce empirical actualities that themselves normalize status-quo relations of privilege and power—put simply, to how “nature” and “culture” interact to produce “real stuff” that normalizes social hierarchies. Rousseau’s early musical writings are a productive place to begin thinking about a historicized, non-ideal account of embodiment because, as I have shown, his whole disagreement with Rameau is grounded in Rousseau’s problematization of the way in which Rameau’s concept of nature is “the result of social structures and hegemonic ideational patterns.” Rousseau’s use of conjecture is problematic insofar as he bases his assessment of political actuality on an ideal-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 of non-ideal theory: because of Rameau’s Eurocentrism, he abstracts away from important empirical and cultural facts about the ways in which sound waves interact with human sensory faculties. With this understanding of why conjecture is an important aspect of theorizing raced, gendered, and resonating bodies, I turn to Kristeva’s notion of the thought specular as an initial step in my analysis of the intersection of gender, race, and music in the articulation of what counts as “structural” or “authentic” and what counts as “ideological” or “fake.” Attending to the “prehistory” of the nature/culture distinction, Kristeva focuses on the moment Rousseau claims can be known only conjecturally, and, through her notion of the thought specular and her use of it to analyze Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, fleshes out a vocabulary or a metaphorics with which to think and talk about this “conjectural” category we call nature or the body. Although it is ultimately flawed, her notion of irony offers an example of how to apply this notion of conjecture to contemporary problems in politics and aesthetics.

Part 2 Fetishism, Abjection, and the Feminized Popular

Chapter 3

Conjecture and the Impossible Opera: From the Thought Specular to the Society of the Spectacle

The visual arts do not dare confront this density of seductive fantasy that the image is afraid of making banal and that the thought specular—if it existed in this regard—would render unbearable. What would seduction passed through the sieve of thought specular be? I dream an impossible film: Don Juan by Eisenstein and Hitchcock, with music by Schoenberg. As you may remember, Schoenberg sought the solution to the debate he himself described as a false one between his Aron and his Moses: between the jubilation of idol worshipers seduced by the golden calf (followers of the image?) and the divine threat of exploding thunder, imageless. For this is indeed the problem of the thought specular: how to remain in idolatry (fantasy) while at the same time exhibiting symbolic truth (the imageless divine thunder). Imagine the result! Invisible! An empty theatre. But what terror, seduction, and lucidity!1

In discussing Schoenberg’s 12-tone opera Moses und Aron, this passage from Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt calls upon the primary and most widely debated issue of the opera: Moses’s intellectuality, and his obsession with truth and its conflict with Aron’s physicality, materialism, and penchant for “fantasy.” The opposition between the brothers represents Western philosophy’s struggle to both separate and reconcile the intelligible and the visible worlds. Schoenberg poses the problem in terms of idolatry: Is it really Aron, the builder of the golden calf, who misrecognizes the artificial as the “real,” or is not Moses’s rejection of fantasy in his worship of an abstract truth just as idolatrous as Aron’s ignorance of the material in his immersion in the social? Claiming that this dichotomy between fantasy and reality is “a false one,” Kristeva finds that to posit an absolute separation between the material and the social, or what she calls drive and meaning, is itself a form of idolatry. Psychoanalysis is, for Kristeva, a cure for such idolatry, because it is grounded in the theory of the coincidence of drive and meaning. Specifically, Kristevan psychoanalysis emphasizes this coincidence in her elaboration of the theory of the thought specular, a term which is itself a confrontation between the intelligible and the visible, the ideal and the material. 63

64

Chapter 3

In this chapter, I examine Kristeva’s conception of the thought specular as a means to further develop my theory of the conjectural body. While Rousseau poses the problem of conjecture in terms of the spacing between nature and culture, Kristeva uses psychoanalysis and the history of philosophy to demonstrate that what is at work behind the nature/culture distinction is a set of assumptions delineating a specific relationship between “reality” and “fantasy.” These assumptions act as prerequisites in determining where and how the distinctions between nature and culture, the material and the social, are drawn. As in her work on the semiotic and the abject, Kristeva here uses the thought specular to focus attention on the “prehistory” of the nature/culture distinction; accordingly, she demonstrates that this distinction is always-already a judgment about what should count as “original” and what should count as “fake.” Given Western philosophy’s tendency to attribute “reality” to thought and deception/error to physical phenomena, Kristeva’s analysis highlights the roles played by the body and embodied experience in the articulation of the relationships between the material and the social. Like Rousseau, Kristeva draws together resonating bodies with privileged and marginalized bodies in order to illuminate a theory of the conjectural body which, in Kristeva’s case, is named the “thought specular.” This thought specular, then, is the idea that the relationship between drive and meaning must be thought conjecturally. Kristeva offers an example of how to think conjecturally in her notion of irony. I argue, however, that her notion of irony is ultimately an unproductive and even risky use of the idea of conjecture, for, as is particularly evident in Kristeva’s writings, it institutes problematic serious/popular culture hierarchies, hierarchies indebted to the mind/body dualism the thought specular is meant to critique. Like a hipster wearing a trucker hat and a mullet, Kristeva’s deployment of ironic appropriation functions precisely because of hierarchies grounded in systems of social privilege. Looking to the “Fantasy and Cinema” section of Intimate Revolt, I focus my analysis on Kristeva’s comments on Mozart’s Don Giovanni and composer Arnold Schoenberg. My motivations for this are multiple. First, as is demonstrated in the epigraph of this chapter, Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron, along with many of his theoretical and philosophical writings, raise a question identical to Kristeva’s, namely: What is the relationship between intellect and body, the Musical Idea and the sounds through which it is manifested? Although I will, at times, examine Schoenberg’s compositions, I also treat Schoenberg as a philosopher. Almost as prolific in prose as in music, Schoenberg routinely took up imminently philosophical problems, such as the status and nature of “the new,” and frequently engaged the history of metaphysics in elaborating his notion of the Musical Idea [Gedanke] and its relationship to concrete aural phenomena. I thus engage Kristeva and Schoenberg as two philosophers developing complementary theories of the conjectural body. Second, I want to unpack the claims Kristeva makes in her allusions to and otherwise rather amateurish discussions of music, because I believe that the nuance these passages on music provide to her elaboration of the thought specular are significant, if inadequately articulated. Throughout her corpus, Kristeva calls

Conjecture and the Impossible Opera

65

upon music as an example to elaborate various concepts—the semiotic, maternal authority, foreignness, and race—which, in their diversity, all attempt to complicate the easily dichotomized relationship between “real” and “artificial,” structure and ideology.2 As I argued in the first chapter, music is so often exemplary because the issue of the relationship between the material and the social is fundamentally the question not only of subjectivity and its raced, gendered vicissitudes, but of music as well. Kristeva’s work highlights the coincidence of gender, race, class, and music in the idea of conjecture, and brings the nature/culture debate into the terms of perhaps its most significant contemporary manifestations: the way gender, race, class, and aesthetics converge to articulate various systems of “serious” and “popular” or “high/low” hierarchies. In spite of my tendency to read Kristeva sympathetically, this chapter is, ultimately, critical. While Kristeva does provide interesting and useful tools for reimagining the relationship between the material and the social, and the kinds of oppression which rely upon their separation, Kristeva all-too-frequently abandons her most radical ideas and returns to the systems which she at times vehemently critiques. Although the concept of the thought specular does, in some ways, offer a reworking of the nature/culture opposition, there are numerous points throughout the text in which Kristeva reproduces and reinforces the hierarchy between a more authentic form of expression—words, ideas—and a less reliable one—images, perceptions. These lapses into conservative positions are most evident in Kristeva’s condemnation of the “society of the spectacle” in favor of a culture of words, of avant-garde poetry, and also in her identification of women with feelings, emotions, and the physical. Some aspects of Kristevan theory are politically useful, yet the politics of Kristeva, the theorist, are ironically and dangerously neoconservative. Kristeva’s condemnation of “the society of the spectacle” is grounded in a serious/pop hierarchy. Chapter 4 will discuss why such hierarchies are problematic. Nevertheless, the more radical aspects of Kristeva’s thought, specifically, the theory of the thought specular, offer important contributions to our understanding of the body as conjectural.

Specular/Thought Specular Throughout the history of Western philosophy, the difference between the mind and the body is frequently explained through visual metaphors: Descartes uses the wax passage to demonstrate that the “mind’s eye” is more accurate than his physical eye; and in the Republic, Plato explains metaphysics in terms of his theory of the divided line, whose two main divisions are the “visible” (physical) and “intelligible” (metaphysical) realms. More important than this sight/thought distinction’s descriptive function is its normative one, for Western culture has always valued intellectual phenomena over those that are merely physical.

66

Chapter 3

Thought is more certain, more true, more real than the inherently deceptive realm of extension. Kristeva’s concept of the thought specular not only immediately juxtaposes these two categories that white Western culture has worked so hard to separate, it posits as normative the coincidence of the two spheres. Using this concept to demonstrate that the “mind’s eye,” the gaze of theoretical contemplation, is infused with a degree of corporeality even more radically “primal” than the faculty of sight, Kristeva renders ambiguous the border between psyche and soma.3 Although “[t]he separation between the two registers (acted drive/representation; sadomasochistic body/paternal eye prefiguring the symbolic) initiates at once the autonomy of the subject and access to thought and language,” Kristeva uses the thought specular to argue that “nothing guarantees that this separation will ever be clear and definitive in any of us” (IR, 71). The separation is unclear and lacks definition because, in the end, the two registers (mind/body, drive/representation, nature/culture, etc.) are not separate at all, but coincident. Fascinating and terrifying, “this knot of fear and seduction” (Kristeva, IR, 73) called the specular is Kristeva’s reworking of her concept of abjection. Both the specular and the abject function “even before the ‘mirror stage’” (Kristeva, IR, 70) to establish a preliminary, ambiguous, and unstable separation between “me” and “not-me.” “[T]he gaze by which I identify an object, a face: mine, that of another [the specular] offers me an identity that reassures me, for it delivers me from vacillations, unnamable fears, sounds prior to the name, to the image: pulsations, somatic wave, waves of colors, rhythms, tones” (Kristeva, IR, 73). Primarily a sort of identification with some form of parental authority (both the ideal, satisfying mother, and “the paternal eye, the eye of the law” (Kristeva, IR, 72), specul-ation, like abjection, aids me in distinguishing between my “proper” self and things within me which threaten to contaminate and destabilize that “self.” At this stage, however, the boundary between “me” and “not me” is quite tenuous. Like the abject, which is the eruption of “me” into “not me” (e.g., vomit), and vice versa, the specular is the farthest “frontier” (if it is proper to speak of borders at all) of the drive (what I call the material) into language (what I call the social): “Chronologically, in the development of the child, and logically, in the functioning of the adult, the specular remains the most advanced medium for the inscription of the drive” (Kristeva, IR, 72). The site where the drive erupts into and interrupts language, the specular is an intermediary between the internal, incommunicable drive and the ability to communicate my thoughts and desires to others (i.e., an intermediary between materiality and sociality). Blurring the boundary between inside and outside, the specular is the link which negotiates between what is most specifically and irreducibly me and the ideas and experiences I share with others. Understanding the specular as a “possible point of convergence where a series of always incomplete images converge, in which ‘I’ is finally constituted as identical to itself” (IR, 72), Kristeva ascribes to the specular many of the same tasks she claims are accomplished by abjection. As both the abject and the

Conjecture and the Impossible Opera

67

specular are “prior” to the existence of a self-identical subject, neither the abject nor the specular are relations to objects proper. The specular has nothing to do with seeing an object, or with an imagistic sign or a verbal word; rather, it “makes what is behind identification identifiable…: the drive, not symbolized, not caught in the object, neither in the sign nor in language” (IR, 74). By calling into question the Cartesian logic whereby I identify myself (preferably, my thoughts) as a subject against external phenomena which I identify as objects, the specular, like the abject, draws attention to the drives and corporeality that set the stage for my assumption of subjectivity. Primary among these tasks, however, is the first quasi-organization of undifferentiated drives/bodies into unstable constellations, which are in turn taken up in the mirror stage and used to constitute the boundaries of my self as distinct from the external world. Like the abject, which is, for Kristeva, primarily ambiguity, “The seductive and terrifying specular endlessly celebrates our identity uncertainties” (Kristeva, IR, 72). Through the specular, “I” establish the tenuous bounds of my “proper” identity. A “trompe-l’oeil” (Kristeva, IR, 73), the specular renders borders ambiguous just as much as it establishes them. Kristeva’s analysis of the thought specular, particularly in cinema, demonstrates “how…ever incomplete this apprenticeship of symbolism is in the precincts of the visible and the instinctual[, and] how language is striated by the image itself and suspended at instinctual pleasure” (Kristeva, IR, 71). One does not magically “outgrow” or shed one’s dependence on instinct, feeling, or sensation and leave the semiotic for the symbolic without looking back. Rather, the material and the social are always already immersed in relations of mutual cooperation and resistance. Like Rousseau, Kristeva claims that nature and civilization do not exist in a linear relationship (first nature, then civilization), but a coincident one. As a revision of Lacan’s mirror stage, the thought specular illustrates how “nature” or “instinct” appear not as effects of language, but as effects that resist the functionality of the very language that produces them. Even though “instinct” and “the body” are socially constructed categories, Kristeva’s argument is that they are not fully determined by cultural forces. Much like Foucault claims in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, where there is power, there is resistance: where the social works upon the material, the material thereby becomes a social force, and resists other forces which would determine it. What results from this process is not a clear point of separation between “nature” and “culture,” but a constant negotiation between what has come to be material and the social forces that are exerted upon it. Similarly, as Kristeva has discussed in earlier writings, one is never definitively “castrated,” because it is impossible to completely resolve one’s oedipal conflicts. Psychoanalytic healing can occur only because oedipal relations are constantly reevaluated and revised. Thus, insofar as the timing of oedipal conflicts is one of the primary differences in the development of masculinity and femininity, the instability of oedipal resolution implies, for Kristeva, the instability of binary gender categories. Much like Butler’s theory of gender perfor-

68

Chapter 3

mativity, the concept of gender which follows from the thought specular is one in which gender is the process of negotiating the mutual resistances of material and social forces. Whatever names one assigns the two categories— drive/meaning, body/mind, masculinity/femininity—the important thing here is that the division between the members of these pairs is never absolute, for it is a division created in the performance of speaking as a gendered subject. The two sides of this division are not mutually exclusive phases in which the entrance of one requires the exit of the other. The two spheres (semiotic/symbolic, material/social) intersect with and are infused by one another. In the Freudian unconscious, “drives and sensations became not reducible to language but tributaries of language, accessible to and through language” (Kristeva, IR, 50). Even though this level of the semiotic and the timeless is “prior” to language, it is available to us only through language. On this point Kristeva’s is very similar to Rousseau’s claim that “nature” is itself accessible only via language and its conventional, constructed categories. Nature (drives, the semiotic)—any supposedly “pure” or immediate physical state—exists qua conjecture. That is, although logically and chronologically “prior,” its reality and significance exist in the present. Thus, one is never “rid of” or “done with” a supposedly more infantile stage. Here, then, we have a subtle critique of Freud’s model of normative masculinity—a model that he himself concedes is, if ideal, by no means really normative—as well as the more general philosophic and social convention of masculinizing reason and infantilizing women (a concept which is key to the discussion of popular music in chapter 4). Emphasizing the more radical and revolutionary aspects of his writing on gender, Kristeva is critiquing a conservative reading of Freud. At his most conservative, one of the main differences Freud can be read to posit between the masculine and feminine oedipal configurations is that the castration complex (because it was the culmination of the oedipal stage) allowed boys to come to closure regarding their oedipal anxieties and, resolving the gender ambivalences present in the oedipal/pre-oedipal stages, to leave this phase behind and mature into adult men. Girls, however, were forever mired in these ambiguities and anxieties, for as this reading goes, the castration complex precedes the oedipal stage in girls (it is what makes a “normal”—i.e., masculine—oedipal configuration possible for girls), but they lack the tool necessary for bringing closure and definition to oedipal conflict. If we assume that in upsetting metaphysical dichotomies we upset heteronormative and mutually exclusive gender identity roles, then Kristeva demonstrates an alternative reading of Freud. If it is the case that one never fully exits the realm of drive, body, and murky, deceptive affect, one can never fully accede into a state of unquestioned symbolic mastery. Like the girl, who is marked by her “immaturity,” one is, according to Kristeva, always an “apprentice” to language. Thus, if everyone attains a degree of mastery or maturity, but is still, at bottom, an immature apprentice, each of us occupies both masculine and feminine positions, as well as positions which escape classification in this rubric. We are not clearly one gender or another, but are, as Kristeva says, “bisex-

Conjecture and the Impossible Opera

69

ual.” It could be said that Kristeva’s reading of Freud does not go far enough, for she still maintains the rather essentialist notions of “masculine maturity” and “feminine immaturity.” Her use of these concepts is, we should note, ironic. That is to say, she repeats these terms in order to demonstrate their absurdity. Using this distinction in her discussion of ambiguous borders and the necessary coincidence of body and mind, Kristeva points out that everyone exists at the intersection of linguistic mastery and preverbal babbling. If everyone bears traits of both “masculinity” (maturity, mastery), and “femininity” (immaturity, body), then this division is false. Furthermore, if one’s relation to language and gender is fundamentally ambiguous, a continued allegiance to the term “bisexual” is also inadequate, for this term implies the combination of two distinct terms similar to an additive model of difference (race + gender + class + …). Just as race and gender are not independent attributes accrued by an individual, the semiotic and the symbolic are not separate terms that can be mediated, but rather forces which, in their coincidence, mutually determine one another. Thus, if the specular is the intermediary between drive and language, it is such insofar as it is the node in and through which the semiotic and symbolic constitute one another as such.

Operatic “Lektonic” Traces The main function of the specular is not, in Kristeva’s argument, to demonstrate that the world of signs, symbols, and thoughts is not clearly and distinctly separate from the drives and bodily phenomena which both subtend and exceed it— this implies an additive rather than a coincident relationship between mind and body. Rather, its function is to demonstrate that in their coincidence they both subtend and exceed one another. “All specular is fascinating, because it bears the trace—in the visible—of this aggression, of this nonsymbolized, nonverbalized, and this nonrepresented drive” (Kristeva, IR, 74; emphasis mine). These nonrepresentable drives are “present” in the visible or the representable, but they appear precisely as traces (in the Derridian sense of the term). The specular, then, is the term Kristeva uses to describe the coincidence of the material and the social. As that which supplements and subtends representation or symbolism, the lektonic trace—a nonsymbolized, nonverbalized, nonrepresented drive—is both foreign to and dispersed within language proper. This coincidence of the drive’s exile and immanence in language is, according to Kristeva, what is operatic about the thought specular. In other words, all language is operatic: it is both the Word of Moses, and the sensuality of Aron—both libretto and score. Lektonic traces are not like the “music” that supplements the words of the libretto, for this in a way assumes that one’s response to language is intellectual and to music, affective. Since the specular identifies what is “behind” identification as these lektonic traces (Kristeva, IR, 74), Kristeva concludes that “in the

70

Chapter 3

end there is only a certain music—logic, the movement that associates, displaces, condenses, and thereby judges” (Kristeva, IR, 74; emphasis mine). Associating music first with logic, Kristeva implies that the affective dimension is not pre-logical or without logic, but is precisely the order (logos) of both conceptual and extra-conceptual aspects of language. Thus, just as the affective dimension of language is infused with conceptual and extra-conceptual logics, the intellectual aspect of language is grounded by and infused with the intuition and affect often associated with the non-conceptual responses we have to music. Like the semiotic, which Kristeva also characterizes by its “musicality,” lektonic traces offer a sort of proto-organization to drives and body that facilitates one’s ascension into language and subjectivity; however, because one never fully exits the valence of their influence, the lektonic/semiotic logic also disrupts and destabilizes the very codes and systems it aids in establishing. Executing “an unconscious judgment” (Kristeva, IR, 74), lektonic traces are agents of parsing, categorizing, discrimination, augmentation, diminution, and emphasis, both setting the stage for and rearranging the stage of language/the symbolic. As Kristeva explains, it is essentially a matter of introducing supplementary displacements and condensations to the raw image, associating tones, rhythms, colors, figures; in short putting into play what Freud called “the primary processes” (the “semiotic” in my terminology) underlying the symbolic, this primary seizure of drives always in excess in relation to the represented and the signified (IR, 74).

Such excess of the semiotic in relation to the symbolic demonstrates that the former is not exclusive of the latter, but the semiotic is reinforcing to and disruptive of the symbolic. On the one hand, the displacement and condensation elicited when these lektonic traces interrupt symbolism and representation give more nuance and expressive depth to the signifier. This is what opera—and song in general—does: combining our intellectual response to words and music, and our affective response to music and words, opera emphasizes the intersection of intellect and affect requisite for linguistic communication. One’s understanding of language is not purely intellectual, nor is one’s understanding of music exclusively affective. Kristeva’s analysis of the role and function of lektonic traces illustrates that all language is operatic, that is, is the combination of affect and intellect, drive and meaning. On the other hand, the “rearrangement” and disruption of the symbolic makes evident the contingency and constructedness of its code; more importantly (from a psychoanalytic perspective), it is through “these supplementary bits of information,” “‘lektonic [expressive] traces’” (Kristeva, IR, 74), that one can reconstruct and rework symbolic figures and organizations.

Das Verältnis zum Text

Conjecture and the Impossible Opera

71

Kristeva finds modern art to be similar to psychoanalysis in that both capitalize on the transformative and “revolutionary” capacities of lektonic traces. Just as the psychoanalyst looks for “supplementary bits of information” (e.g, slips of the tongue, negations, free associations, symptoms) in the speech and behavior of the analysand and uses these as catalysts and tools in the reworking of the analysand’s relation to drive and meaning, the modern artist, according to Kristeva, uses lektonic traces in order to reconfigure artistic codes and conventions. “That modern art—painting, sculpture, music—found its favored domain in the distribution of these lektonic traces (to the detriment of the image-sign of a referent) is something…Klee…Schoenberg, and Webern are there to remind us of” (Kristeva, IR, 74; trans. modified). Klee and Schoenberg worked together on Der Blaue Reiter, and Webern studied serial composition under Schoenberg. These men collaborated on various projects aimed at re-distributing lektonic traces—that is, at deconstructing the conventional affect-symbol associations, as well as the conventional “grammatical” and “syntactical” orders in, for example, tonal music. In both free atonalism and in serialism, Schoenberg explored new ways of organizing and distributing pitches; creating new “signs,” he also had to develop new ways of organizing these signs into meaningful wholes. Published in 1912 by Wassily Kandinsy and Franz Mark, Der Blaue Reiter was a manifesto of sorts dealing with the historical and theoretical foundations for expressionist painting and music. To this collection of treatises, Schoenberg contributed the essay Das Verhältnis zum Text, which dealt with the relationship between the “purely musical” part of a piece and its programmatic contents (text, concepts, representations, etc.)—between the “music” and the text the music supposedly expresses.4 Schoenberg seduces us with the argument that music and text are two highly distinct entities, only to thwart our expectations and claim that great art demonstrates the falsity of this dichotomy between symbol and sensation. Schoenberg begins with the remark that “The assumption that a piece of music must summon up images of one sort or another, and that if these are absent the piece of music has not been understood or is worthless, is as widespread as only the false and banal can be.”5 Here, Schoenberg reproaches the overly naïve and ignorant belief that music is meaningful because it expresses or represents some sort of idea, emotion, or object distinct from the “music itself.” As most people lack basic musical training, one stands “absolutely helpless...in the face of purely musical effect, and therefore prefers…music which is somehow connected with a text: about programme music, songs, operas, etc.” (Schoenberg, S&I, 142). Schoenberg’s point is valid: pieces with an ostensibly representational or expressive content are more easily accessible than those which either discourage or lack one altogether. Pierrot Lunaire is more accessible than the Five Pieces for Piano because the former piece was composed around a set of poems, while the latter is not “about” anything, except perhaps the compositional structure of the pieces. When using language to explain “what music has to say, purely in terms of music” (Schoenberg, S&I, 141), this attempt to “translate details of this lan-

72

Chapter 3

guage which the reason does not understand [i.e., music] into our terms” (Schoenberg, S&I, 142), the specifically musical character of music “is lost” (S&I, 142). That is, when one attempts to put musical phenomena and what they mean into words, what is lost in translation is precisely the musicality of the piece. Schoenberg seems to be claiming that music is irreducible to words or concepts—which, in many ways, it is. According to Schoenberg, it is impossible to translate music into rational/conceptual discourse, but within a texted piece, the linguistic and musical aspects are neither separable nor opposed. Although there is no need for an “outward correspondence” between lyrics and book (e.g., for the music to represent or express the concepts and images in the text as in programmatic music), an “inward correspondence” at the level of Musical Idea is inevitable (Schoenberg, S&I, 145). Even though Schoenberg would like to claim that music is irreducible to language, it is not, for that reason, absolutely distinct from it. Rather, Schoenberg is forced to conclude that “the work of art is like every other complete organism. It is homogeneous in its composition” insofar as an organism possesses various different “parts” which are, nevertheless, interdependent (Schoenberg, S&I, 144). For example, the brain and the heart are two vastly different functions with widely different purposes; the brain could not function without oxygen pumped to it by the heart, nor could the heart continue pumping if it did not receive signals from the brain indicating when to beat. Thus, because he assumes in the beginning of the essay that words and music are separate, Schoenberg uses the term “homogeneity” to describe the “organic” relationship between words and music; Schoenberg’s organic model indicates that he is describing a phenomenon relatively similar to Kristeva’s conception of the coincidence of the symbolic and “musical” aspects of language. Just as Schoenberg believes words and music are two indissociable parts of a greater whole, Kristeva argues that language, subjectivity, and the psyche consist in both drive and meaning. More than a decade before he would begin writing Moses und Aron, in this essay Schoenberg has already acknowledged the main conceptual flaw of the opera—that is, as Kristeva mentions in the epigraph to this paper, that the debate or dichotomy between the material and the social is, at bottom, false. It should be noted here that Schoenberg set up both his philosophical and compositional work for this conceptual flaw because he firmly believed in the existence of die Gedanke. The Musical Idea, not unlike a Platonic Idea, is the metaphysical “essence” of the piece which “inspires” the composer to realize it in concrete musical procedures. The Blaue Reiter itself is an attempt to theorize how all arts could be more like music, insofar as music is supposedly extraconceptual and does not need to rely upon the limitations of representation and representational thinking. Music is, for Schoenberg and his collaborators, pure Idea, prior to and unadulterated by the principles of reason, and thus cannot be captured in finite, rational, linguistic terms. In other words, the Musical Idea is much like the Word of God which Moses is called to translate into human terms. Mirroring the Moses/Aron and Word/Image hierarchies present in the opera, Schoenberg’s essay in the Blaue Reiter institutes a surface/depth hierarchy be-

Conjecture and the Impossible Opera

73

tween the “real content” of a Schubert song and the “surface of the mere thoughts expressed in words” (Schoenberg, S&I, 144). Musical Ideas participate in a “higher reality” (Schoenberg, S&I, 145) for which representational language, beholden to the limitations of symbolizing sensory phenomena, is inadequate. However, just as the failure of Moses und Aron indicates the failure or impossibility of the “purely musical Idea” or, in psychoanalytic terms, a musical “real,” Schoenberg’s claim about the organic or inner correspondence of words and music can be read deconstructively as an indication of the impossibility of maintaining any strict separation between image and “pure” Musical Idea. If, especially at the level of “inner correspondence,” the Musical Idea is organically related to non-musical material (concepts, words, images) as the brain is related to the heart, then, even at this most “inward” and metaphysical level, the Musical Idea is not some pure ding-an-sich, but is instead a thing that gains its significance and specificity from its participation in a heterogeneous system. Thus, if the “purely musical” quality, or “inwardness,” of the Idea is in fact part of an organic system, i.e., one in which parts are dependent and thoroughly interrelated, any sort of inner/outer bifurcation is clearly false. As I have shown, in both the musical and philosophical works where a nature/culture hierarchy is established, Schoenberg’s intentions are foiled: what is demonstrated in the pieces is the opposite of what Schoenberg intended to posit, namely, that any such hierarchical opposition is false, for “pure structure” or “pure Idea” are impossibilities. This tendency for Schoenberg’s intentions to escape him is noted by Kristeva in the epigraph to this chapter, and is also the subject of Adorno’s meditation on Moses und Aron titled “Sacred Fragment.”

Adorno: Fragment Like my analysis and Kristeva’s analysis, Adorno’s essay “Sacred Fragment” claims that Schoenberg, in the “failure” of his dodecaphonic opera, demonstrates the falsity of any hierarchical opposition between idea and image or between the material and the social.6 While for Schoenberg the impossibility presented by Moses und Aron was the reconciliation of the pure Musical Idea/Word of God with the inevitably representational nature of any sort of expression (even music), Adorno identifies the opera’s impossibility as arising from its injunction to present “objective” truth in the form of a subjectively willed creation. As he explains, “the impossibility we have in mind is historical: that of sacred art today and the idea of binding, canonical, all-inclusive work that Schoenberg aspired to” (Adorno, SF, 227). Sacred art presents Truths— universal, serious, indeed, canonical: “a cultic action is one which obeys a law that goes beyond the mental capacity of those involved in the cult, in accordance with the idea of something which is not just surmised, but is actually revealed in the language of truth” (Adorno, SF, 229). However, at the historical moment in which Schoenberg was attempting to compose Moses und Aron, the conditions

74

Chapter 3

necessary for the emergence and maintenance of “great art” and metaphysicotheological truths are not present. Primary among those conditions is, to use Nietzsche’s term, a certain willto-truth, i.e., the general consensus that such a thing as pure, objective, metaphysical Truth exists. Put differently, the condition for a binding, canonical work is the existence of some “whole” in view of which all the various individual parts have significance (this is also what, in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno deems necessary for “great art”). After Auschwitz—i.e., in a world where the specific human being has, in the age of the H-bomb and post-industrial capitalism, lost his or her specificity7—“[t]o assert that existence or being has a positive meaning constituted within itself and orientated towards the divine principle (if one is to put it like that), would be, like all the principles of truth, beauty, and goodness which philosophers have concocted, a pure mockery in face of the victims and the infinitude of their torment.”8 Mass annihilation and the mass production of the human/laborer render any attempt toward positive, canonical Truth meaningless; indeed, any faux claims to such Truth do the injustice of rendering human suffering meaningless. Lacking the objective, social, and ideological conditions necessary to present a sacred work as such, the only possibility left to Schoenberg is to pen an impossible opera: “by conjuring up the absolute, and hence making it dependent on the conjurer, Schoenberg ensured that the work could not be made real” (Adorno, SF, 227). As absolute Truth cannot exist objectively, the only way to make it appear in his opera is for Schoenberg to create it himself; ironically, however, just as Moses inevitably only presents an image of God’s Word, Schoenberg can only ever present a subjective rendition of trans-subjective “objectivity.” Thus, Adorno explains, “an immense gulf opens up between the transsubjective, transcendentally valid that is linked to the Torah, on the one hand, and the free aesthetic act which created the work on the other” (SF, 227). This gulf, this irresolvable tension, is what maintains the opera’s fragmentary status. As a fragment, Schoenberg’s composition “does the absolute the honour of not pretending that it is present, a traditional reality that cannot be lost, but instead, of feigning it as accessible only in the work, even if it thereby negates it” (Adorno, SF, 227). This supposedly “objective” Truth is but the fantasy of the composer—much in the same way that Pappagano and Pappagena are the products of Mozart’s imagination. By presenting objective Truth not only as a subjectively created work, but as something possible only under this circumstance, Schoenberg and his opera fragment unintentionally posit a conjectural account of the “real” or “pure” Truth. Attempting to make the form or structure of the opera—the pure Musical Idea—identical with its representational content, Schoenberg “feigns” the existence of divine, transcendent, pure “Truth”; however, the fact that such an idea can be present in the world only in the form of artifice thereby “negates” or demonstrates the impossibility of such a concept, and thus of the opera itself. Accordingly, Adorno argues that the significance of Moses und Aron lies in its fragmentary nature—i.e., the fact that the opera negates its very form and

Conjecture and the Impossible Opera

75

concept (or Schoenberg’s original intentions). “Important works of art” such as this one “are the ones that aim for an extreme: they are destroyed in the process and their broken outlines survive as the ciphers of a supreme, unnamable truth” (Adorno, SF, 227). This truth, however, is not that of the Torah or the Musical Idea, nor is it a truth about society. Rather, the “supreme” truth revealed by Moses und Aron is that the opera deconstructs itself and reveals the impossibility of the purely Musical Idea or objective, trans-historical truth. Thus, according to Adorno, “Moses and the Dance round the Golden Calf actually speak the same language in the opera” (SF, 241). In presenting the conflict between objective truth and subjective will as the clash between Moses’ Idea and Aron’s sensuality, “the tension between expression and construction…which is thematized in Moses und Aron” (Adorno, SF, 246) causes the opera to shatter into fragments— to deconstruct itself. In its fragmentary state, the opera reveals the impossibility of “pure structure” devoid of contamination by subjective intention or ideology.

Mille e tre: Thought vs. Seduction Because his compositions and his writings complicate the distinction between the “visible” and the “intelligible,” Schoenberg is, for Kristeva (albeit unintentionally), a thinker of the thought specular. There is another modality of the specular—the seductive specular—which Kristeva also explains in terms of a composer and his opera. In the case of the seductive specular, Kristeva utilizes the example of Mozart and his Don Giovanni. Returning to themes taken up in her discussion of the same opera in Tales of Love, Kristeva uses Don Juan’s defiance of law and his serial seductions to illustrate her concept of the seductive specular. The differences between Mozart’s and Schoenberg’s compositional styles—specifically, Mozart’s Classical tonality and Schoenberg’s break from its demands—allow us to better understand the difference between the seductive specular and the thought specular. Like the thought specular, the seductive specular deals with the intersection of semiotic and symbolic, drive and meaning. Specifically, seduction rises from the tension between “law and transgression, terror and fascination” (Kristeva, IR, 78). The specular is seductive when drive is no longer meaningless but its meaning is not yet reified by law/convention. Mozart’s Don Juan is the “emblem” of the seductive specular because he refuses to renounce his ties to the semiotic and to the “ideal mother” whose province it is.9 “Don Juan remains the ideal specular hero: a seducer, because he is a master who defies the fathers, and a connoisseur of women, who counts them one by one until mille e tre” (Kristeva, IR, 78; translation modified). Just as the seductive quality of Mozart’s music arises from the prolonged deferral of tonal resolution (the sense of closure and finality achieved by a perfect authentic cadence in the primary key and obligatory register of the opera), Don Juan’s seduction is the effect of the disso-

76

Chapter 3

nance between his behavior—prolonged resistance to monogamy and oedipal castration—and the demands of the patriarchal laws of his community. Refusing to identify with the oedipal father and join the fraternity of patriarchal authority, Don Juan’s allegiance remains with the “ideal mother.” “He transforms the silent passion for his mother…into a series of mistresses, and passion for his father not into self-deprecation…but into reciprocal murder” (Kristeva, IR, 78). The Don continually puts off the demands of monogamy (i.e., oedipal resolution through the acceptance of the castration complex) by taking a seemingly infinite series of lovers. His seduction—and Mozart’s—consists in his willful defiance of the law. He is not ignorant of the law; indeed, his pleasure —and the listener’s—arises from the dissonance created from the friction between his desires and the limitations the law attempts to place on them. Rather than cede to the demands of the statue (the ghost of the father of one of the Don’s conquests, whom Don Juan murdered earlier in the opera), which are the demands of the “paternal eye of the law” and of the symbolic order, Don Juan chooses to join the statue in hell.10 The seductive specular is a fantasy world, one which is incompatible with “reality” and its requirements. Because one of these requirements is masculinity and the behaviors/values associated with and attributed to it, the seductive specular carries connotations of immaturity and femininity. Insofar as one refuses to “grow up” and accept the responsibilities of civil society, one is immature. Similarly, this immaturity has historically been coded as feminine: insofar as one is irrational and/or undisciplined, one isn’t a “real man” (e.g., Plato’s Phaedo, where philosophy is defined as the soul’s mastery of bodily desires through the exercise of “manly” virtues). This mode of the specular is seductive, then, because it teases us with the fantasy of transgression without punishment. That is to say, the seducer is aware of the law, but willfully ignores it; remaining in relatively blissful ignorance, the seducer does not have to confront the horrific, untenable thought of any sort of ambiguity between law and transgression. In this opera, terror is always overcome by fascination, horror by seduction. This “density of seductive fantasy” (Kristeva, IR, 78) that Mozart has created opens out the distinction Kristeva makes between the seductive specular and the thought specular. The seductive specular ultimately comes down on the side of either law or transgression. The Don must decide whether to accept or reject the law, for the thing which is most forbidden is that he remain somewhere ambiguously between the two. One can either accept the law and resolve one’s oedipal conflicts via identification with proper masculine models, or else remain in transgression, a feminized, raced, and classed state of “immaturity.” The lack of ambiguity is why this type of specular is seductive, and not bound up in the fascination/horror matrix which characterizes the thought specular. Even though Don Juan was far more defiant of (and unsettling to) dominant mores than most heroes, Mozart was still bound to the demands of tonality; thus he had to put an end to the Don’s dissonance and resolve his conflict with the laws of monogamy and tonality. As I have already discussed, the thought specular, on the other

Conjecture and the Impossible Opera

77

hand, emphasizes the intersections of law and transgression, affect and intellect, “feminine immaturity” and “masculine rationality.” In her rethinking of the relationship between the seductive specular and the thought specular, Kristeva “dreams” of “Don Juan…with music by Schoenberg” (IR, 78), for Schoenberg took the Don’s task one step further and overthrew the obligations of tonality. In Kristeva’s terms, Schoenberg recognized that it was impossible to completely separate desire from law, drive from meaning. After a very difficult free atonal period, Schoenberg came to the conclusion that the greatest freedom and depth of expression were achieved not in the absence of the law, but at the coincidence of seduction with law. “As you may remember,” Kristeva explains, “Schoenberg sought the solution to the debate he himself described as false between his Aron and his Moses: between the jubilation of idol worshipers seduced by the golden calf (followers of the image?) and divine threat of exploding thunder [i.e., law], imageless” (IR, 78; emphasis mine, translation modified). Schoenberg’s solution was to write…an unfinished opera. Although he wrote a three-act libretto, Schoenberg spent years attempting to score the third act—a task which he ultimately found impossible (hence Kristeva calls it an “impossible film” [IR, 78]). Unlike Mozart, who ultimately brings an end to the conflict between seduction and obedience, Schoenberg cannot foreclose the “always ambivalent” relationship between “law and transgression” (Kristeva, IR, 78). Precisely how to go about facilitating this ambivalence “is indeed the problem of the thought specular: how to remain in idolatry (fantasy) while at the same time exhibiting symbolic truth (the imageless divine thunder)” (Kristeva, IR, 78; emphasis mine). Since one of the thought specular’s main functions is to question and make ambiguous the boundary between the visible and the intelligible, the elaboration and maintenance of the coincidence of these two realms is also part of its work. Kristeva claims that the best way to account for the coincidence of the intelligible and the visible is to approach both ironically: that is, to maintain what one could call a critical distance from oneself, from a work of art, from any phenomenon, in order that one have the vantage or perspective necessary to comprehend the ways in which the boundaries between the intelligible and the visible are articulated and called into question. The awareness of “the gap between sound and image…hold[s] the spectator—still plunged in fantasy— at a distance from fascination” (Kristeva, IR, 80; emphasis mine). The ambiguous and ever-changing border between the Word of God and the sensuousness of the golden calf (or, in more Derridian terms, between the spoken word and the written word) is at the heart of Kristevan irony. The ironic spectator utilizes these categories as if they were distinct, but is nevertheless cognizant of their coincidence. Even though one recognizes the relationship between the visible and the intelligible as much more complex than a simple binary opposition, one still employs the distinction between the two as an organizational structure. If Don Juan is the ideal seductive hero, then Schoenberg is the ideal representative of irony, for Moses und Aron is a prime example of an ironic regard for

78

Chapter 3

the dichotomization of body and mind. Schoenberg structured the opera around their polarity, i.e., the mutual exclusivity between the one who “speaks in images…to the heart,” and the one who “speaks in ideas…to the mind.”11 However, in the end, Aron remarks that when Moses’s imageless ideas and words destroyed Aron’s golden idol, “yet was the marvel an image, not more, when your word destroyed my image [Und doch war das Wunder nicht mehr als ein Bild: als dein Wort mein Bild zerstörte]” (M&A, II:v). The intelligible is never completely independent of the visible, for as Aron explained, the symbolic is at its most powerful precisely when the semiotic ruptures through it. Aron points out the irony in the fact that Moses’s Word (the Ten Commandments) is, both in the force of its meaning and in its inscription on the stone tablets, always also an image. While the idolatrous spectator idolizes either Word (meaning) or image (drive) each to the exclusion of the other, the ironic spectator understands that the two are irreducible yet inseparable. Furthermore, as irony “demystifies” the seduction to idolize either Word or image, “fear and its seduction explode in laughter and distance” (Kristeva, IR, 80). Through a recognition of the contingency and constructedness (albeit the retrospective necessity) of the visible/intelligible split, Kristeva demystifies the “evil” of metaphysics with irony. This ironic demystification, this recognition that the two dissonant strains need never be brought into harmony and that the gap between structure and ideology need never be closed, is the degree zero of Kristevan freedom. Like Rousseau, Kristeva’s vision of individual and political justice begins from a conjectural understanding of the body and its relation to intellectual and social forces. Thus, next I want to look at Kristeva’s notion of irony as a suggestion as to how to employ the notion of conjecture. To do this, I must first tease out her notion of freedom, the freedom Kristeva posits in contrast to the thrall and passivity characteristic of the society of the spectacle. As an active, contemplative stance in the face of mass culture, irony is central to, if not completely constitutive of, Kristeva’s notion of freedom. Further, as the opposite of the “society of the spectacle,” the practice of irony is, for Kristeva, the practical elaboration of her theory of the thought specular.

Irony: Specular Freedom In Intimate Revolt, Kristeva contrasts the idolatrous relationship with the society of the spectacle with an ironic, critical approach to the world that privileges not spectacle, but the thought specular. This contrast between idolatry and irony generally maps on to her contrast between an inferior “causal” freedom and a superior “disclosing” freedom. Although there are some merits to Kristeva’s account of “ironic” freedom, it ultimately relies upon problematic notions of “taste” and anti-commercialism, and thus (ironically) continues to privilege the masculine bourgeois norms that often coincide with these sentiments. After elaborating Kristeva’s distinction between the idolatrous and ironic specular and their relation to her theory of freedom, I flesh out the aforementioned argument

Conjecture and the Impossible Opera

79

that Kristeva’s actual discussions of high and popular culture do not take into account some of the most significant insights to be derived from her conception of the thought specular.

Idolatry and Irony Kristeva argues that “‘the society of the spectacle,’…by exhausting representation, being bored in representation, suffocating from its falseness in the ballet of those who govern us (and who trade planes for human rights, for example)” (IR, 79), prevents individuals from modifying codes in accordance with their own specificities—that is, from exercising freedom.12 Kristeva thinks that in a culture of mass-produced images with overdetermined meanings, one is relieved of the responsibility for creating and maintaining one’s own relation to meaning. “We rely on the pacifying virtue of the image…as compensation for anxiety and [as] cultural project” (Kristeva, IR, 79). That the image is capable of pacifying anxiety (namely, the identity anxieties that specular seduction elicits) is, in the West, due to the fact that the image and its coherence in the end guarantee a form of unity and stability. The mode of the specular at work in the society of the spectacle encourages conformity and the unquestioning acceptance of external authority. (In bemoaning the pervasive but all-too-passive relation to mass culture, Kristeva is here very close to Adorno’s critiques of fetishized commodity music. As I will discuss at length in chapter 4, one of the main characteristics of commodity music is the supposedly passive and unthinking response of the listener, which is to be contrasted with an active, intellectual response to “serious” music.) For Kristeva, this disempowering specular is idolatrous, while the empowering specular is ironic and demystifying. An idolatrous relation to the specular involves unthinking submission to the society of the spectacle, or, “being carried away in the maelstrom of our calculus thinking and by our consumerism.”13 Because the society of the spectacle encourages passivity and instrumental reason, “in a world more and more dominated by technology, freedom becomes the capacity to adapt to a ‘cause’ always outside the ‘self,’ and which is less and less a moral cause, and more and more an economic one” (Kristeva, TLDT, 31). Idolatry, then, is the “freedom” to conform more and more perfectly to socioeconomic norms, namely, to what Kristeva thinks is the “calculating logic that leads to unbridled consumerism” (Kristeva, TLDT, 30)—i.e., to the society of the specular. Irony, on the other hand, is the ability to negotiate what Kristeva established as the problem of the thought specular—i.e., how to remain in the realm of fantasy yet still hold on to a notion of truth. This is possible through a degree of ironic self-awareness which allows one to “b[e] protected from it [fantasy] while demonstrating it” (Kristeva, IR, 75). The reflective distance created by irony allows me to deploy drives and lektonic traces, but because I call upon

80

Chapter 3

them from the perspective of a thinking, speaking subject, it is impossible for me to regress into some “purely” semiotic or pre-symbolic state.14 In its “strident, discordant, ironic logic” (Kristeva, IR, 73), the thought specular’s demystification of the complex and ambiguous relationship between the mind and the body opens up a kind of reflective distance. “The fantasy is called on to find or recognize itself, to perpetuate or empty itself, based on the ability of the specular to distance itself from itself” (Kristeva, IR, 74). It is in this demystified/demystifying reflection—or irony—that Kristeva locates her conception of freedom. According to Kristeva, irony is a double vision, or images in which “fantasies are referred to as such; they exercise their power of fascination while at the same time mocking their fascinating specular” (IR, 74). Irony is what allows us to use fantasy without being swallowed up in it. In contrast to our supposedly passive relation to mass culture, Kristeva offers irony as a means of active engagement with the society of the spectacle. As it, like the thought specular, keeps the boundaries between visible and intelligible ever in question, ironic distance endows one with the capacity for revision and renewal. It is the freedom of beginning again. Specifically, the doubleness or coincidence of an ironic perspective is what maintains the agonism or “permanent conflictuality” (Kristeva, IR, 11) which is the condition for the possibility of revolt. In contrast to idolatrous “causal” freedom, irony’s “eternal questioning” (Kristeva, TLDT 30) leads to not instrumental, but critical and “disclosing” (Kristeva, TLDT 35) knowledge. Rather than idolatrous conformity, irony offers the possibility of revolutionary “self-beginning” (Kristeva, TLDT 29). While her ultimate employment of irony against pop culture (i.e., the society of the spectacle) is, as I discuss at length in the next chapter, highly problematic, I do wish to preserve the notion of an agonistic interpretation whose most important feature is the perpetual possibility of its recommencement. This, I believe, is key to thinking the conjectural body in a fruitful and successful fashion, for its emphasis on recommencement highlights both the hypothetical nature of conjecture as well as the fact that the theory of the conjectural body is intended to help describe and understand present experiences and thus must be re-fashioned and reconfigured to adequately account for everchanging and ever-contingent states of affairs.

Freedom For Kristeva, freedom is fundamentally “recommencement” (IR, 238); “the great infinitesimal emancipation [is] to be restarted unceasingly” (IR, 223). Due to the conflictual coincidence between law and transgression, or mind and body, freedom is not a form of independence from external (or internal) determination. Ironically, as Kristeva demonstrates, freedom arises only at the intersection of the social law and individual transgression: I can exercise my freedom only in response to and against codes, conventions, and other phenomena which in some

Conjecture and the Impossible Opera

81

way resist and confine me. This freedom in restriction, then, is the ability to change my position within power relationships—to begin again, not ex nihilo, but from the specificity of my location. Kristeva first explains this ironic notion of freedom in terms of psychoanalysis. Although “freedom is not a psychoanalytic concept” (Kristeva, IR, 223), strictly speaking, Kristeva believes that psychoanalysis offers “an invitation to anamnesis in the goal of a rebirth, that is, a psychical restructuring” (Kristeva, IR, 7). Psychoanalysis opens up the capacity of renewal, the ability to re-mobilize what has become stagnant and reified; accordingly, it does not seek to liberate subjects from constraint (e.g., from personal history, social conditions, etc.), but to allow subjects to reconfigure their relationships to those constraints. That is to say, psychoanalysis recognizes that subjects gain agency only through submission to law, convention, and regulation. For example, it is not that desire needs to be liberated from the ways language and social convention limit, construct, and channel it; rather “the freedom of desire [is] structured by language” (Kristeva, IR, 228). I can gain all the freedoms that arise from the ability to speak, think, and want only by agreeing to follow the “laws” of language, just as the jazz musician has the freedom to improvise only because he/she follows a relatively strict set of chord changes and phrasing patterns. Thus, as Kristeva explains, only “in the regenerative revolt against the old law (familial law, superego, ideals, oedipal or narcissistic limits, etc.) comes the singular autonomy of each, as well as a renewed link with the other” (Kristeva, IR, 7). Freedom in our relations with ourselves and in our relations with others occurs only in the context of restriction. If we are always indebted to some “old law,” argues Kristeva, freedom is not a kind of independence from external determinants. Thus, psychoanalysis indicates “that freedom is not, negatively, an ‘absence of constraint’ but that it is, positively, the possibility of self-beginning” (Kristeva, IR, 262). The negative notion of freedom is associated with freedom as “choice”: power is repressive, thus freedom is the state in which there are no limitations on my choices and my ability to choose. This negative notion of freedom is very similar to what Foucault characterizes as juridical power: power functions prohibitively, thus freedom is found in liberation from power. If we view power productively (e.g., functioning through disciplines that maximize the subject’s faculties), power is desirable, not something from which we should seek to liberate ourselves. Thus, in contrast to the negative conception of freedom-as-choice, Kristeva posits a positive form of freedom: freedom of self-beginning (e.g., Arendt’s notion of natality) is the ability to revise the very laws which restrict oneself. For Kristeva, the most valuable freedom is that of beginning, or that of beginning again, of “re-volt” and “re-naissance.” Each has the capacity to begin again, for every human being is, by virtue of the fact of being born as a unique being, a beginner. Because of “an emphasis on the specific beginning that is the birth of each human being, in his irreconcilable singularity, the simple fact of his singular birth [is] the guarantee of the singular freedom of his thought-will-judgment to come,

82

Chapter 3

to protect, to favor” (Kristeva, IR, 234). If every human being is irreducibly unique, then all people have the potential to modify the codes and conventions of the systems which restrict them in order to adapt these generalized systems to their own needs. It is not that one is free to adapt to a particular system (e.g., capitalism), but that one’s freedom lies in the ability to adapt that system to oneself. What appears to be one of the most immediate and intractable systems of constraint faced by the subject is his or her own facticity, physicality, and embodiment. Kristeva, however, claims that the body appears to us only through socially constructed systems of language, science, morality, and so on. Indeed, the point of her theory of the thought specular is to demonstrate that “the body” is always coincident with the intellect in all its forms, and thus is a fantasy which must be understood as the oversimplification that it is. Hence, if “the body” is not some pure, immediate, inaccessible fact, the “biological” limitations on one’s subjectivity are not, in fact, immutable or absolute. Because drives are intersected and interrupted by language, language can be used to modulate drive; this is the basic thesis of psychoanalytic healing. The capacity to create, give, and receive meaning arises from both biological and psychological development. As Kristeva explains, the aptitude of human beings to produce meaning—starting with a certain neurobiological maturation and the mythic event of the repression of the drive through murder-assimilation-identification with the father—is what seems to me, as a psychoanalyst, to constitute…this “higher side of man” that modulates and models the energetic urge into a dynamic of meaning with the other and in which the freedom of subjects is inscribed (IR, 234-235).

The freedom that arises with this mastery of meaning is the freedom to continually readjust and refashion the relationships between drives (“energetic urges”) and their meanings, both in terms of myself and in terms of my interactions with others. Physical existence, although it does impose very real limits on our spontaneity, is nevertheless open to renaissance. Juxtaposing restriction with license, determinism with creativity, Kristeva’s notion of freedom is, at heart, ironic: freedom is the very irony that because of these constraints—our bodies, society, language—one has the potential to exercise choice. In other words, the notion of freedom Kristeva presents us here is centered around the possibility of reconfiguring the relationship between what counts as “nature” and what as “culture,” but always in such a way as to keep them in a relationship open to further change.15 Freedom arises from the ironic relationship between law and transgression—or, in Adorno’s terms, between the transcendent truth of Schoenberg’s Musical Idea and the composer’s subjective, creative will. Irony renders the boundary between “law” and “transgression,” or psyche and soma, or any of the terms of any other supposedly binary pair, ambiguous. Kristeva claims that “it is possible to satisfy this taste for freedom, not only in private life or in church but

Conjecture and the Impossible Opera

83

in public life itself” (IR, 265; emphasis mine). By deconstructing the public/private opposition alongside her rereading of the concept of “taste,” a term with physiological, cognitive, and cultural connotations, Kristeva illustrates the coincidence of psyche and soma, public and private life, necessary for freedom. It is not the case that the private, the realm of the body (and, traditionally, of women), is that of necessity, while the public, the realm of the intellect (and, traditionally, of men), is the only sphere in which one can exercise freedom. It is the case, rather ironically, that freedom arises from the coincidence of public and private, mind and body, “necessity” and “spontaneity.”

Taste The work accomplished by Kristeva’s concept of the thought specular— namely, demonstrating and explaining the coincidence of the material and the social—is also performed by her reworked notion of “taste.” While Kant offers taste as an example of the universality of aesthetic judgments, Kristeva proposes taste as an alternative to the specular/speculative economy of metaphysics. While metaphysics seeks universal and absolute truths, taste is always “the taste for the singular life (style)” (Kristeva, IR, 52). Taste, connoting both the physical sensation and the aesthetic disposition, bridges the rift metaphysics has created between psyche and soma. “Taste becoming vision through style” is, according to Kristeva, “a parable of the intimate” (Kristeva, IR, 52); through style my irreducible specificity and singularity confronts the generalizations and conventions of language, politics, and any other phenomenon that involves interaction with other humans. Style arises “when memory tries to repeat the most intimate inner states in discourse[;…] thought is confronted with the autistic void…and seeks to modify language in order to make it include its singularity” (Kristeva, IR, 53). One’s taste opens rules and generalizations to modification by one’s particular style such that these conventions accommodate, to a greater or lesser degree, the specificities of one’s experiences. Since Kant, the phenomenon of taste has been associated with universalizing and “disinterested” aesthetic judgment. Claiming that “it is less judgment than a style…that is capable of revealing and communicating the secret intimacy of taste” (IR, 52), Kristeva reinterprets “taste;” for her, it is the apex of irreducible difference, the point at which the particular holds sway over the general. The ability to preserve this singularity in the face of dominant norms involves the capacity for the “creativity of thought—and language—which appears to be a simple stylistic feat but which in reality is the intimate itself as singular psychical life” (Kristeva, IR, 53). Creativity, the ability to exercise one’s freedom through the modification and modulation of convention, is Kristeva’s ultimate value. It is only through the exercise and assertion of my own creativity that I save myself from conformity and consumption in/by mass culture and the society of the spectacle. Ultimately, Kristeva’s use of “taste” to legitimate a condemnation of the “society of the spectacle” in favor of an historically European “culture of cri-

84

Chapter 3

tique” is problematic on many levels, not the least of which is the way in which it re-inscribes conventional metaphysical hierarchies in all their gendered, raced, and classed glory. However, I do believe that there are certain aspects of theory of the thought specular that are useful, valuable, and worth separating out from the problematic aspects. Specifically, the idea of “irony” is a useful description of what I have earlier called the coincident relationship between materiality and sociality. Kristeva’s notion of irony also captures and refines Rousseau’s notion of a “conjectural” account of the “state of Nature.” Is it not precisely ironic to write, as Rousseau did, several essays which make detailed claims about something—namely, the state of nature—that one has also specifically and systematically demonstrated is impossible to know (and is probably entirely fictional). Rousseau’s notion of conjecture emphasizes the coincidence of “nature” and “culture”; Kristeva’s concept of irony adds to this the element of change— specifically, the possibility—indeed, the fact—of the constant reconfiguration of the relationship between mind and body, materiality and sociality. The point of thinking the body conjecturally, then, is to understand how the material and the social work and have worked to create a concrete situation about which there is little that is inevitable or immutable.

Problems Although creativity is her highest value, Kristeva privileges certain kinds of creativity over others, and thereby establishes a hierarchy between “authentic” and “faux” creativity. Claiming that the thought specular can be found in “a certain cinema, an other cinema [than pop cinema],…[in c]inema—when it is great art” (IR, 69; emphasis mine), Kristeva argues that thought specular is productive of “great art”—a “better” kind of image than the banal/popular ones put forth by the film industry. Like Plato, she seems to be saying that some kinds of images or representations are better or more “authentic” than others; just as thoughts are more true representations of the Forms than shadows or objects, avant-garde art is supposedly a more clear depiction of or forum for fantasy.16 Kristeva has clearly established a hierarchy between “true” art and mere entertainment. One of the main characteristics of “great art” is that it requires active intellectual engagement; the society of the spectacle, however, demands of its consumers only passivity. According to Kristeva, even though “we inhabit a veritable paradise of fantasy today thanks to images in the media,” (IR, 66), we are not “stimulated to produce them and become imaginary creators in return…The so-called society of the spectacle, paradoxically, is hardly favorable to the analysis of fantasies or even to their formation” (Kristeva, IR, 66). The massproduced images and pop-culture icons which invade schools and even the doors of restroom stalls (in the forms of advertisements) are not adequate, for they do not, in Kristeva’s mind, entail any creativity or active relationship with the image. Here, Kristeva fails to take her own advice, instituting rigid oppositions

Conjecture and the Impossible Opera

85

where there are none: her condemnation of the society of the spectacle relies on an active/passive binary that she understands literally rather than ironically. Kristeva’s discussions of contemporary society sound strikingly similar to Moses’ condemnations of Aron and his followers as they reveled in sensory and material pleasure. She complains that an essential component of European culture—a culture fashioned by doubt and critique—is losing its moral and aesthetic impact. The moral and aesthetic dimension finds itself marginalized and exits only as a decorative alibi tolerated by the society of the spectacle, when it is not simply submerged, made impossible by entertainment culture, performance culture, show culture (IR, 4).

Arguing that contemporary society is one of ignorance and complacency in front of “images” of authority, Kristeva claims that the “society of the spectacle” robs humans of their freedom of their creative capacities and of their selfdetermination. Here she is taking the side of Plato, Descartes, and Moses by hierarchizing a “superficial” and an “authentic” image: avant-garde poetry is acceptable, for it points to some higher truth (namely, the capacity for revolt), whereas music videos are alienating, for they promote conformity. Suggesting that verbal expression is superior to visual communication, Kristeva offers her “cure” for the uncritical and passive appropriation of images which (she believes) plagues contemporary culture: Alongside and in addition to the culture of the image—its seduction, its swiftness, its brutality, and its frivolity—the culture of words, the narrative and the place it reserves for mediation, seems to me to offer a minimal variant of revolt. It is not much, but we may have reached a point of no return, from which we will have to re-turn to the little things, tiny revolts, in order to preserve the life of the mind and of the species (Kristeva, IR, 5).

Claiming that the verbal narrative of transference/counter-transference is some sort of “cure” for the society of the spectacle, Kristeva seems to be setting up the Moses/Aron binary of word/image, truth/opinion, metaphysical/physical. Describing words as “alongside” and “additional to” images, one must wonder whether she has forgotten her entire discussion of the necessary coincidence of the two registers. There are instances in her text where words are clearly privileged over deed. For example, Kristeva claims that “[w]e are inundated with images, some of which resonate with our fantasies and appease us but which, for lack of interpretive words, do not liberate us” (IR, 66). Passivity before the image, that is, the failure to translate image into words, is, according to Kristeva, the worst kind of domination. In typical psychoanalytic fashion, the soma is the territory where symptoms unfold, while speaking is the technique whereby one is cured. For Kristeva, “The role of language is essential for the formation of fantasies: without the possibility of telling them to someone (even if ‘I’ do not use this possibility), ‘my’ desires do not become fantasies but remain encrysted

86

Chapter 3

at a prepsychical level and risk spilling over into somaticization and acting-out” (IR, 68). Psychic health and freedom depend on the word, just as in the case of Moses and his tablets. Also, her emphasis on the talking part of the “talking cure” seems to overlook her discussions of the importance of Kleinian play therapy. Consistently throughout her most recent works, Kristeva privileges “serious culture”—be it critique, “avant garde” art, or the rational aspect of language— over and against the society of the spectacle. For all her theorization about the coincidence of drive and meaning, body and mind, her more practical discussions of aesthetics and politics re-inscribe the hierarchical binary between the two. As one of the semiotic’s main features is “to stir up the metaphysical dichotomies (body/soul, psychical/psychical)” (Kristeva, IR, 260), Kristeva views herself to be critiquing the metaphysical tradition. As she claims, “the semiotic seems to me to stir up the metaphysical dichotomies…Which is to say, my preoccupation with the sacred is ultimately an antimetaphysical preoccupation and only by derivation a feminist one” (Kristeva, IR, 260). However, I think her rather conservative position on women and popular culture further undermines her “antimetaphysical” project, for insofar as metaphysics and patriarchy developed in such a way that they mutually reinforce and rearticulate one another, bodily enjoyment has historically taken connotations of femininity and triviality, while “serious” endeavors have connoted masculinity and truth. I discuss this at length in the next chapter. However, insofar as Kristeva privileges “serious” culture and the European tradition of critique over and against the society of the spectacle, she repeats and reinforces patriarchal and metaphysical privilege. Perhaps most problematic about the convergence of Kristeva’s antiantimetaphysics and her treatment of women/femininity is her tendency to essentialize femininity. On the one hand, Kristeva seeks to rehabilitate the physical, visible, drive, etc., especially when she discusses the contribution of women to the overturning of metaphysics. “The arrival of women at the forefront of the social and ethical scene has had the result of revalorizing the sensory experience...The immense responsibility of women in regard to the survival of the species…goes hand in hand with this rehabilitation of the sensory” (Kristeva, IR, 5). Here Kristeva is associating women with the sensory, with intimacy, intuition, the body—all the usual stereotypes. Later on in the text, she identifies femininity with maternity, stating that there exists an “other logic of a feminine maternal that defies normative representation” (Kristeva, IR, 259). In a patriarchal culture, femininity and femaleness are non-normative. Beauvoir, among others, has clearly elaborated women’s position as the “other” in Western, i.e., metaphysical, thought. However much I might agree that her argument is correct in the context of contemporary society, its infusion with metaphysical and patriarchal values and structures makes Kristeva’s claim problematic on many levels. First, she posits a “logic of a feminine maternal” as though there were some essential and unchanging content to “femininity,” as well as to maternity (if, that is, Kristeva is not implying that the two are the same). Second, this feminine essence is essentially non-normative, and in every case occupies the position of

Conjecture and the Impossible Opera

87

the “other.” Unless we are necessarily in a patriarchal culture, woman—or better, “femininity”—is not necessarily abnormal, unrepresentable, deviant, or marginal. In associating women with the body, sensation, and emotion, Kristeva’s essentialism places her back within metaphysics (there is an “essence” shared by all women or some phenomenon labeled “feminine”). Her rehabilitation of the physical comes at the cost of essentialism. Thus, while her theoretical work can be fruitfully applied to analyzing particular aesthetic and political problems, her own thought on these matters is, at least in Intimate Revolt, highly problematic. Between the hierarchization of “word” and “image,” and a latent essentialism, Kristeva seems to contradict or forget the main points of her analysis of the thought specular. However, it may be the case that the terms in which she poses the problem of drive/meaning coincidence are themselves the cause of this problem. The term “thought specular” seems to connote more of a dualism than a true coincidence of the intelligible and the visible. The abject seems to be a more fruitful way of thinking this drive-meaning coincidence, because it places much stronger emphasis on the ambiguity of the me/not-me, of “quasi-psyche” and soma. It (the abject) is much more firmly grounded in the body, in visceral, physical reactions, and more clearly illustrates the ambiguity of the line separating psychic and physical phenomena, as well as the dynamic whereby society takes up various intersecting relations of privilege and marginalization to establish the boundary between “serious” and “pop” culture. Hence, in the next chapter I examine the construction of the category of “popular” music and its production, reception, and criticism in terms of abjection. Because it highlights both the impossibility of any “real,” and accounts for the fact that a variety of forces and relations intersect to determine what comes to count as “real” and what as “fake,” abjection offers a better model for thinking the conjectural body than either irony or fetishism.

88

Chapter 3

Conjecture and the Impossible Opera

89

Chapter 4

“Smells like Booty”: Pop Music and the Logic of Abjection

“Smells like Booty” is the title of a rock-pop mash-up—a track made by laying the vocals of one single over the instrumentals/beats of another. This track mashes Destiny’s Child’s vocal harmonies on “Bootylicious” with the guitar and rhythm section from Nirvana’s alt-rock classic “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”1 This mash-up in particular is more than just an ironic juxtaposition of two songs that would never be programmed on the same radio format; more importantly, it is “mashing up” the various social conventions, practices, and preconceptions we have about commodity music and “serious” music. “Smells Like Booty” pits well-groomed (indeed, “bootylicious”) female pop icons against a bunch of men whose publicists would like us to think they are too wrapped up in their music to get haircuts…or perhaps even bathe. By demonstrating that, at the level of composition and structure, a song that was meant to appeal to appearance-obsessed (and minority) teenage girls is basically identical to the canonical and “revolutionary” single from an iconic band consistently praised by music critics, this mash-up points out that the distinctions between pop and serious music, between music by and for pop fans and music by and for “serious” musicians, has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual music. Rather, these distinctions, this “spacing” between high and low art, arises from the coincidence—or, the “mashing up,” if you will—of musical practices alongside various other systems of privilege: race, class, sexuality, gender, etc. This chapter focuses on the “mashing up” or coincidence of musical values and social privilege. Because music and social identity are coincident, the notion of conjecture is a better way of thinking not only our relation to nature, as Rousseau argued, but to culture as well. Specifically, the idea of conjecture and the conjectural body helps illuminate the complex and often convoluted ways in which various popular musics are devalued. Going back to the preface, where Frere-Jones equivocates between musical practices and social identities, we see that social identities such as race and gender are often the very terms in and according to which music is evaluated. 91

92

Chapter 4

Although it has been nearly twenty years since “New Musicology” brought social identity to bear on the study of music, philosophers have paid insufficient attention to the role of social identity in music aesthetics. As I discussed in the first chapter, even theorists of social identity tend to view music as exemplary of social identity rather than coincident with it. In this chapter, I read Adorno through Irigaray to open out an analysis of the coincidence of resonating and raced/gendered bodies. Adorno couches his critique of commodity music in terms of hierarchical, heterosexual gender norms: commodity music is always feminized, and this feminization is, for Adorno, both evidence for and the source of “regressive listening.” Following Irigaray’s argument that women are, in fact, the logically and chronologically primary commodities, it becomes clear that the systematic trivialization of commodity music is linked to the devaluation of women and femininity in a patriarchal society. Following Irigaray, I argue that Western patriarchy’s devaluation of women and femininity is inextricable from Adorno’s modernist critique of commodification—indeed, commodification is a form of feminization, and vice versa. Thus, the discourse of commodity fetishism alone is a perhaps necessary, but decidedly insufficient approach to understanding Western music aesthetics. Musicologists have long recognized that there is nothing in the music itself, in its objective, observable properties, that consistently distinguishes between “serious” and “popular” music. One era’s pop is another era’s classic, one era’s authentic work is another era’s commodity: the same piece occupies both categories (Adorno himself makes this argument). The one thing that is consistent throughout all serious/pop or authentic/commercial hierarchies is the feminization of the devalued term. The discourse of fetishism cannot account for this consistent devaluation of femininity. The concept of abjection helps us do precisely that. In Kristevan psychoanalysis, abjection is prior to fetishism; I demonstrate below how abjection’s “behind-the-scenes” work establishes some social identities as more privileged and desirable than others, thereby setting the stage upon which music will be judged “authentic” or merely “commercial.” I begin this chapter by looking at Irigaray’s reading of the discussion of commodities in Marx’s Capital. I then apply this reading to Adorno’s writings on commodity music in order to highlight and examine his feminization of popular/commodity music. After arguing for the utility of Kristeva’s notion of abjection for explaining how and why the popular becomes feminized, I conclude the chapter by arguing that a re-valuation of popular and commercial music is both a necessarily feminist project, and a project necessary for an inclusive feminism.

“Smells like Booty”

93

Commodity Fetishism and the Feminized Popular: Irigaray, Adorno, and a Re-(e)valuation of “Regressive Listening” The economy—in both the narrow and the broad sense—that is in place in our societies thus requires that women lend themselves to alienation in consumption, and to exchanges in which they do not participate, and that men be exempt from being used and circulated like commodities.2

Luce Irigaray’s “Women on the Market” is an “analogical” reading of Capital, specifically, of the sections in chapter 1 which introduce the notion of the commodity and trace the workings of commodity fetishism. As she does not follow Marx’s text systematically, hers is basically a re-reading of more or less famous passages from Capital in which the concept “women” is substituted for the term “commodities”: “Marx’s analysis of commodities as the elementary form of capitalist wealth can thus be understood as an interpretation of the status of women in so-called patriarchal societies” (TS, 172). Irigaray’s point is that in Western patriarchal capitalist societies, women are commodities. Framing several of Adorno’s essays on commodity music in terms of Irigaray’s reworking of commodity fetishism illustrates the limitations of the discourse of fetishism in general. If we see the commodity as marked not only by class, but also by gender and other factors, the coincidence of aesthetics, gender, sexuality, class, and race demonstrates that the commodity is not just fetishized, but is also structured by processes of abjection. Most of my attention will be devoted to the piece “On the Fetish Character of Music and Regressive Listening,” as this essay offers some of the most explicit examples of the ways in which Adorno abjects the popular by ascribing stereotypically (white) feminine characteristics to commodity music. “The popular” and all that is associated with it is not just a fetishized commodity, but is also and primarily accorded the status of the abject—i.e., neither fully subject nor object, but most certainly the phenomenon on whose constitutive exclusion a particular set of social values and privilege rests. Both in Adorno’s writings and in the contemporary marketplace, women in popular music are commodities and alienated consumers, performing and buying the sounds and myths that record company executives think they should find pleasurable (i.e., buying into norms defined in terms of white heterosexual masculine bourgeois privilege). The standard philosophical understanding of alienated consumption assumes an absolute passivity on the part of the consumer—this passivity is precisely what it shares with stereotypical white femininity. This understanding is problematic because consumers—even and especially the teenage girls at whom the poppiest of pop music is aimed—do exercise some forms of discrimination, judgment, and self-determination. Moving beyond Adorno into more contemporary territory, I argue that insofar as feminists continue to hold the view that participating

94

Chapter 4

in the market economy is inherently regressive and disempowering, they will be unable to fully and accurately analyze questions of gender and popular music. Popular music is, in fact, a domain in which men are offered as commodities to be consumed by both women and other men. Complicated by both the “feminization” of male pop/rock/hip-hop stars (boy bands, glam rockers) and the need to constantly reinforce a hyperbolic übermasculinity, the commodification of male/masculine bodies needs to mask itself in order to be socially acceptable. Thus, taking popular music as an instance in which women are active participants in capitalist exchange and underprivileged masculinities offered as objects, I argue that although Irigaray’s diagnosis of the feminization of commodities is correct, it is not sufficient, for like Marx’s text that it mirrors, its exclusive emphasis on one system of privilege fails to account for the existence of coincident systems of privilege. Fetishism alone is an inadequate theoretical model for thinking about systems of aesthetic evaluation, particularly the relationship between “serious” music and abjected “pop.” There are several conceptual limitations in both the Marxian and psychoanalytical discourses of fetishism, the primary of which is the assumption that there is an “authentic”/inauthentic hierarchy. As a result of this hierarchy, fetishism also falls into active/passive binarisms (e.g., real vs. “regressive” listening) that, while privileging the intellectual over the embodied, do not accurately describe the various behaviors and experiences of those who perform and appreciate popular music. Blurring the boundary between (active) subject and (passive) object, the abject not only avoids oversimplified active/passive binaries, but, more importantly, it also illustrates how the “serious,” “authentic,” canonical, and “proper” body is constructed via the repeated rejection and expulsion of some internal threat. The greatness of Bach or Nirvana rests upon the triviality of Brittney or Beyoncé, so to speak.

Women = Commodities First, I want to unpack this claim that women are commodities. Reading Capital alongside Irigaray’s critique of it, I will, on occasion, go back to Marx’s text to clarify the first term in Irigaray’s analogical reading (commodity : Marx :: woman : Irigaray). Several key concepts are implicated in the notion of the commodity—use and exchange value, “the riddle presented by money” (emphasis mine), and, most importantly, commodity fetishism.3 By analyzing these concepts we gain a clearer understanding of what it means for “woman” to be a fetishized “commodity”—the commodity and the fetish par excellence.

Use and Exchange Value His debt to Hegel evident, Marx argues that the value of an object is measurable both in terms of quality—what it is useful for—and in terms of quantity—its worth relative to a common standard.4 The former measure he names

“Smells like Booty”

95

“use value,” the latter, “exchange value.” While a coat is useful for warmth, and 20 yards of linen are useful for making all kinds of garments, when considered in terms of their exchange values one coat can be said to be worth 20 yards of linen (MER, 308, 314). Objects in their materiality have use value; socially, i.e., abstracted from their physical characteristics, commodities have exchange value in their reference to some unitary standard. Similarly, “[a] commodity—a woman—is divided into two irreconcilable ‘bodies’: her ‘natural’ body and her socially valued, exchangeable body, which is a particularly mimetic expression of masculine values” (TS, 180). According to Irigaray, the female body is abstracted from its existence as an active material being and translated into terms that make it readily appropriable by phallogocentric science, religion, literature, and philosophy. Like the coat, which I ultimately buy in order to keep me warm and/or make me appear fashionable, women do have a “use value” to society. Unlike the coat, however, women’s “use value” is unacknowledged or dismissed, for the consumption of the products of “women’s work” is necessary to the reproduction of the labor force.5 One of the strengths of Marxist feminism is its attention to this issue. Laundry, cooking, childrearing—all those tasks typically delegated to the unpaid housewife, the overworked “supermom,” and the underpaid domestic servant—assure the daily renewal of the laborer, as well as the replacement of that worker with his or her child. Teachers train us to be good workers who always follow directions, and nurses rehabilitate the body so it can return to work. Women are the class of workers “whose reproductive use value (reproductive of children and of the labor force) and whose constitution as exchange value underwrite the symbolic order as such, without any compensation in kind going to them for that ‘work’” (TS, 173). Thus, even though teachers, nurses, and domestic servants are compensated, they are recompensed even less equitably than male laborers for the work they perform. Just as women and women’s work—the oikos, per se—have traditionally been relegated to the private sphere, an object’s gross materiality, its utility as a thing with specific qualities, is not admitted into the market economy proper. Accordingly, in the same way that the Modern subject emerges when Descartes supposedly thinks away his body and sense perceptions and makes recourse only to Reason, the commodity is first produced when an object is divested of all its tangible, useful properties and considered only in terms of its reference to some common denominator. “Women-as-commodities,” Irigaray explains, “are thus subject to a schism that divides them into categories of usefulness and exchange value; into matter-body and an envelope that is precious but impenetrable, ungraspable, and not susceptible to appropriation by women themselves; into private and social use” (TS, 176). The body and its care, and, more importantly, the specificity of the female body, cannot be brought into social relationships, for this would necessitate a reconfiguration of the normatively masculine Western subject and a reconsideration of what Marx considers “abstract human labor.”6 If it is only when we “leave out of consideration the use-value of commodities,”

96

Chapter 4

that they appear to share “one common property, that of being products of human labor” (MER, 305),7 then accounting for the utility of “women’s work” would also mark “abstract” human labor as concretely masculine. Abstract human labor is precisely what is expressed in a commodity’s exchange value. Not only is the particular quality of the object’s use-value overlooked, but the specific, embodied quality of the labor performed in the manufacture of the commodity is equally insignificant to its exchange value. All kinds of labor, from that of the songwriting team, performers, the recording engineer, the iTunes programmer, or even Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple, as of this writing) “are reduced to one and the same sort of labor, human labor in the abstract” (MER, 305). This “abstract human labor” is not in fact abstract or neutral— rather, it is a masculine, white, heterosexual, bourgeois standard: “real” work is a white middle-class man’s work—lawyer, manager, accountant, etc. Just as for Freud there is one sex/sex organ, there is in capitalism only one standard of value: the phallus. “It is thus not as ‘women’ that they are exchanged, but as women reduced to some common feature—their current price in gold, or in phalluses—and of which they would represent a plus or minus quantity. Not a plus or a minus of feminine qualities, obviously” (TS, 174). Women are “the commodity in which value is being expressed,” while it is men whose “value is being expressed” (MER, 314; emphasis mine). Importantly, Marx attributes to the former a “passive” function, and an “active” function to the latter (MER, 314). Viewing human labor in these abstract terms allows for the establishment of a (supposedly) meritocratic society among those who produce and exchange commodities, for it gives them a common currency in which to measure their achievements and through which to transact their social relations. A commodity economy “can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, only in so far as…the private useful labor of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others” (MER, 322; emphasis mine). The exchange of women and the consumption of women’s “use value” allows for a democratic society of men: relegating all the ‘base’ tasks to the private sphere and/or to “women’s work,” all men’s labor can be viewed as one and the same in kind (human labor in the abstract), even if it differs in “degree” (e.g., blue collar/white collar).8 Excluding all difference from the economy proper, the playing field is thus (supposedly) leveled, and the players all face (supposedly) equal opportunity in a (supposedly) meritocratic “free” market. All particularities are removed from consideration—the subject is “disinterested,” a “person” devoid of specificity. If the commodification of women makes the hom(m)osocial society of equals possible by allowing men to view themselves as owners of labor, what does it mean that, as Marx explains, labor itself becomes commodified?

Enigmas: Commodity Fetishism While an object considered in terms of use-value is transparent and concrete in its vulgarity (at least for Marx we might want to question this), a commodity

“Smells like Booty”

97

“abound[s] in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” and “man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature…so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent” (MER, 319-320). In the patriarchal and Eurocentric economy of the West, it is of prime importance to mark the transition from nature into culture: from “raw matter” or pure structure to something into which man has alienated himself/his labor and thereby tainted with ideology. Although an object is, in its use value, transparent, “mystery” appears when one sheds the trappings of nature: “The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use value” (MER, 320), but in their expression or reflection of a certain quantity of human agency and action—a subjectivity which transcends the mere quiddity of the useful object. “A super-natural, metaphysical origin is substituted for its material origin” (TS, 178). It is precisely this rejection and “veiling” of material (maternal) origin for which Irigaray takes Western philosophy to task. The standard critiques of commodity fetishism—both Adornian and feminist—find fault in the substitution of “illusion” for the “real,” and in the failure to recognize the impossibility or illusory nature of the real. As I will discuss later, metaphysics is not instituted at this moment of substitution; rather, metaphysics must have already been present in order to first forge the natural/metaphysical distinction. Accordingly, any critique of commodity fetishism which seeks to unveil or liberate matter/maternal origin from the domination of civilization still remains thoroughly bound by the norms and presuppositions of metaphysics. This complicity is particularly significant to feminist critiques of popular culture, fashion, and beauty norms, which deride the “alienation” and “artifice” supposedly found in these systems. Valuing “authenticity” and “naturalness” above all, these versions of feminist theory restate and reinstate the same binary, hierarchical system that attributes privilege according to the very material/social axis they critique as elemental to gender oppression. As Irigaray and other feminists assert, the distinction between metaphysical essences and material/maternal origin permits and is organized by the hom(m)osocial structure of patriarchy. That is to say, it both creates patriarchy and is subtended by it. In more Marxist terms, it is through the relations among commodities/women that men perceive and transact their social relations—the commodity economy is created and facilitated by patriarchy just as much as it creates and facilitates patriarchy. Both in the case of women (Freud) and of commodities (Marx), fetishism “is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (MER, 321). The commodity economy requires the pre-existent category “men” (as distinct from women/commodities), while also having the effect of clarifying and reinforcing gender categories. It is not for their paradoxical temporality, however, that Marx finds commodities enigmatic. Commodities are mysterious not because they are both cause and effect of metaphysical/patriarchal binaries, but because they are in-

98

Chapter 4

herently fetishistic, i.e., they misrepresent (or, as Irigaray might say, render unstable) the metaphysical opposition between real and ideal. As Marx explains, A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible [use-value] and imperceptible [exchange value] by the senses (MER, 320).

Operating along the rift between “perceptible” and “imperceptible,” the exchange of commodities reinforces the metaphysical hierarchy between visible and intelligible. “[T]his type of social system,” Irigaray explains, “can be interpreted as the practical realization of the meta-physical” (TS, 189). Fetishism is inaugurated when what is conjectural and contingent is mistaken for the real and necessary, or when what is a socially constructed network is passed off as an empirical fact about the relations among objects. To those who participate in the process of production and exchange, “their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them” (MER, 323). In other words, commodities are “mysterious” and “enigmatic” because they become the vehicles for the articulation and transaction of alienated social relations; we no longer relate to one another as subjects, but interact vicariously through the commerce of commodities. Indeed, Marx’s language here explicitly indicates that commodity fetishism is instituted when humans become passive objects and the commodities seem to take on the character of authority and agency. As I discuss later, this assumed passivity is one of the fundamental problems with the discourse of commodity fetishism. In its transfer of agency from human to commodity, commodity fetishism creates a society not of people, but of things (i.e., commodities). Indeed, Marx defines commodity fetishism as the phenomenon in which “the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products” (MER, 320). Just as the woman’s foot, for example, becomes a substitute onto which phallic investment is transferred, the relations among commodities become the “fetish” onto and through which social relations are invested. In a strange inversion, relations among commodities substitute for relations among people, and vice versa: commodity fetishism describes the situation in which there exist “material relations between persons and social relations between things” (MER, 321). It is from this substitution that the commodity derives an additional layer of mystery. From the moment at which the exchange of commodities allows for the equation of all forms of labor, there arises the question of “the enigmatical character of the product of labour” (MER, 320; emphasis mine). Like a commodity, whose existence as pure exchange value appears as “a supplement representing the commodity’s super-natural quality (an imprint that is purely social

“Smells like Booty”

99

in nature)” (TS, 179), labor, when considered as abstract human labor, possesses some mysterious metaphysical “essence” which allows society to express in the same quantitative terms kinds of labor which are qualitatively very different.9 This abstraction from the material to the social—that is, the fetishistic substitution of the “super-natural” for the concrete, the “intelligible” for the “visible”— is what Marx deems the “form” of the commodity. Accordingly, “the enigmatic character of the product of labor…comes, obviously, from that form [the form of the commodity] itself. Then where does the enigmatic character of women come from?...Obviously, from the ‘form’ of the needs/desires of man” (TS, 182). Associating the “enigmatical character” of commodities and alienated labor with the “enigma of woman” or “riddle of femininity,” Irigaray argues that women pose such mysteries to phallogocentric modes of inquiry (psychoanalysis, medicine, philosophy) because these modes of inquiry all reduce empirical, material qualities to one single, “abstract” human value. That is, by using abjection to establish an absolute, universal, disinterested subject of inquiry, phallogocentric modes of inquiry deny difference in the same way that Freud’s first fetishist denies the woman’s lack of the phallus. Emily Apter notes “Marx’s conception of the fetish as socioeconomic hieroglyphic and opaque verbal sign emerged…[as] curiously comparable with Freud’s sense of the strangeness of fetish consciousness: a state of mind divided between the reality of noncastration and the fear of it all the same. Both enigmas, in turn, seemed to arrange themselves around a ‘third term.’”10 This “third term” is the abject, frequently figured as femininity, the paradigmatic enigma. Thus it can be seen that this enigmatic place occupied by the feminine is perhaps the strongest link between Marxist and Freudian accounts of fetishism. The “riddle of femininity,” then, arises from this movement of commodification: “femininity” is the material quality (“use-value”) specific to women’s bodies which must be eliminated or abjected in the calculation of exchange values and the installation of social relations. The common denominator behind all exchange values is, according to Irigaray, the phallus, and everything that is not reducible to this “transcendental value” remains unknowable.11 “[I]ndeed,” Irigaray explains, “the enigma of ‘value’ lies in” the fact that women, uprooted from their “nature,”…no longer relate to each other except in terms of what they represent in men’s desire, and according to the “forms” that this imposes upon them…The value of a woman always escapes: black continent, hole in the symbolic, breach in discourse…It is only in the operation of exchange among women that something of this—something enigmatic, to be sure—can be felt (TS, 188; 175-176).

In another variation on the primary theme of her earlier works, Irigaray here expresses the idea that the commodification of women contributes to their silencing by phallogocentric discourse; due to the lack of a positive definition of woman/femininity in its various specificities (i.e., to her existence solely as ex-

100

Chapter 4

change value), “the woman question” appears as a void, “a hole in the symbolic, a breach in discourse”—the enigma par excellence. Riddlesome, evasive, mysterious, and lacking, woman/femininity is a representative of the phallus and its value—which is, after all, precisely what is expressed in her exchange value as a commodity. However, as a lack, hole, or void, her representation is inauthentic, unreliable, in a word, faux. Even though woman/femininity is the mirror in which men recognize themselves as subjects and the medium through which men locate and assert themselves in patriarchal power relations, she is never capable of providing man a completely accurate and “realistic” portrait of himself. In more Marxian—or rather, Adornian— terms, women, as fetishized commodities, cannot represent “true” or complex ideas: alienated from their own individuality, their mirror cannot provide any depth, but only the alienated superficial pleasures afforded by “light” or popular music/art/entertainment. Irigaray explains: “commodities thus share in the cult of the father, and never stop striving to resemble, to copy, the one who is his representative. It is from that resemblance, from that imitation of what represents paternal authority, that commodities draw their value—for men” (TS, 178). Value is computed according to a logic of representation, imitation, and mimesis. The more closely it resembles masculine and patriarchal ideals—e.g., rigor or virtuosity—the more value a phenomenon is accorded. Thus, Radiohead, an “intellectual” band, and the Ramones, a rebellious band, are considered better and more important than The Village People, who performed several classic pop tunes, or Cindy Lauper, who was also quite the rebel. Irigaray’s claim here is that patriarchy institutes a representational hierarchy according to which phenomena that appear in accordance with patriarchal values will be read as “normal” or “correct,” and phenomena whose appearance does not accord with/confirm these values will be read as distortions and misrepresentations. Following Irigaray’s reading of this representational hierarchy in Capital, we see that commodity fetishism, and the discourse of fetishism generally, operate via an “authentic”/“fake” hierarchy. This split between “real” and “illusory” can be found in Marx’s Capital. At its simplest, fetishism, “the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labor” (MER, 327), is the false substitution or misrecognition of something contingent and relational for something given and concrete. Similarly for Freud, fetishism is the misrecognition of a fact (e.g., women’s lack of a penis) and the consequent substitution of a counterfactual reality for “true” reality (the investment of a fetish object as a penissubstitute, for example). Thus, assumed within the logic of fetishism is a norm in light of which fetishistic behavior is a distortion or perversion; in Marx’s case, that norm is the existence of some clear, immediate relationship among kinds of labor and between laborers and their products. If this were not assumed as the norm, then the substitution of material for social relations would not be a perversion of some “normal” or “natural” state of affairs. Marx posits “service in kind and payments in kind” as “the particular and natural form of labour, and not, as in a society based on production of commodities, its general abstract form [or] the immediate social form of labour” (MER, 325; emphasis mine). In

“Smells like Booty”

101

feudalism, as in the case of Robinson Crusoe, Marx finds a “natural” relationship among labor, laborers, and products. Because nothing in these situations requires labor to assume the form or be understood in terms of value, everything appears as it is “naturally”: “the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relationships and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour” (MER, 325). Now, even though he is no proponent of feudalism and allows for the fact that the apparently “natural” immediacy of these social relations is constructed as “natural” and normative, Marx’s choice to use the concept of fetishism to describe commoditized social relations implicitly posits the apparent immediacy of feudal social relations as a norm. Thus, for Marx there exists some sort of normative and undistorted or unperverted state of economic and social relations.12 Marx’s tree metaphor confirms the normative character of this state. Discussing the transformation of a tree into a commodity—specifically, a table— Marx establishes a proper, normal orientation or state which the commodity form then perverts via fetishization. Marx explains that the commodified tree “not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘table-turning’ ever was” (MER, 320). Clearly, to stand on one’s feet (or roots, as it were) is healthy and normal—without extensive hydroponics, a tree can’t really grow with its roots in the air, nor can a human function particularly well standing on his or her head. Thus, once the commodity is produced and the table turned, the natural transforms into the “grotesque,” fetishized commodity. In this passage and throughout Capital, fetishism assumes the existence of and relies on some “normal” or healthy, unperverted and undistorted state, which is constructed specifically for the purpose of establishing it as the privileged term in a real/fake hierarchy. Especially characteristic of these hierarchies is, as Irigaray points out, their gendering: the feminized term (pleasure, enjoyment) is abjected in the name of the masculinized term (intellect, contemplation). I would like to briefly detour into Susan Cook’s article on “Feminist Musicology and the Abject Popular” in order to expound on this notion of gendered representational hierarchies and their manifestation in discussions of commercial popular music.13

“I Was a Girl, and My Music Sucked by Definition”14 We already know that “the commodity, like the sign, suffers from metaphysical dichotomies” (TS, 179); however, Cook’s analysis emphasizes that these dichotomies are always coincident with social hierarchies. “[F]ictional categories like ‘popular’ and ‘classical,’” Cook explains, are “almost always set up in inequitable relationships of power and prestige wherein ‘the popular’ gives ‘the classical’ its worth; the classical is worthwhile only if ‘the popular’ is worthless” (Cook, 142). The logic of Cook’s argument parallels Irigaray’s: “the popular,” commodity music, commodities, women—all these are stripped of

102

Chapter 4

their value in order that “the classical”—the authentic, high culture, the in-andfor-itself—is established as worthy of its canonical, universal position. Cook emphasizes that this popular/classical hierarchy is articulated through various processes of abjection, and that this hierarchy both reiterates and is reinforced by white, bourgeois, patriarchal gender relations. That is to say, she finds serious/pop hierarchies to be coincident with social privilege—each both creates and is subtended by the other. “The popular, as the lesser category, has been so thoroughly feminized,” not just because popular music is, in one of its many roles, a commodity, but also because it “carries with it a staggering cultural baggage, a trunk full of social codes that have been historically attached to womankind and underprivileged men” (Cook, 142). Ephemeral, commercial, accessible, subject to the immature and fickle tastes of teenagers, appropriate for (á la Destiny’s Child) “jelly-shaking” and headbanging rather than contemplation, popular music is characterized as being everything that “proper” music is not. The negation, void, or lack against which the singular pole of music is defined, “popular music…is ‘the abject,’ something that must be expelled by culture, left behind quite literally on the dung heap” (Cook, 142). Just as woman/femininity is an imperfect reflection through which man/patriarchy comes to recognize him/itself, the “popular” is that imperfect rendition via which “culture” or “high culture” articulates its position of superiority. This logic is at work not only in Adorno’s praise of Arnold Schoenberg over Tommy Dorsey (i.e., with what we typically think of as “classical” music), but is reproduced at multiple levels within the “classical” and the “popular” domains themselves. Just as Mahler is a more “serious” composer than either Bernstein or Gershwin, rock (a genre associated primarily with white men) is seen to have more musical integrity than disco (dance music with roots in black gay clubs).15 The abjection of the feminized popular from masculinized culture proper calls on gender hierarchies to support the devaluation of popular music and, in so doing, affirms and establishes binary gender and masculine privilege. It is essential that feminized, non-white, and non-bourgeois bodies and sounds do not enter into the domain of “culture” proper because “[w]omen…assure the possibility of the use and circulation of the symbolic without being recipients of it. Their nonaccess to the symbolic is what has established the social order” (TS, 189). The exclusion of women/femininity from the exchange of symbols and the exchange of commodities is constitutive of patriarchal culture; this process of constitutive exclusion is what Cook describes in terms of the abject. Similarly, Kristeva explains it as “[w]hat I permanently thrust aside in order to live…the place where I am not and permits me to be.”16 Since that which is expelled, excluded, or rejected is first a part of or contained within the agent of expulsion proper, the process of abjection entails, above all, the articulation of a very ambiguous boundary between subject and not-subject, phallus and not-phallus, “culture” and not-culture, etc. Indeed, as “a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself” (PoH, 1), abjection complicates distinctions as much as it sets them up. An expulsion or rejection of something internal, the process of abjection establishes

“Smells like Booty”

103

the very boundary (albeit a very permeable and tenuous one) between inside and outside, same and other: “It is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled” (PoH, 3). To use Cook’s and Kristeva’s example of the dung heap, feces are abject in the sense that they were once inside of and contained within a body, but, having been expelled, are now an element of that body that is external to it, a seemingly independent and distinct substance. According to Kristeva, it is through this (at first) very bodily process of rejection—and not, notably, through the visual techniques of the mirror stage—that the infant first gains a sense of his or her existence as a physically and psychically distinct being. Just as the body proper (propre) is established by rejecting those parts of itself which it deems undesirable or poisonous, “proper” culture is defined negatively through the abjection of certain forms of cultural production. “It is as if dividing lines were built up between society and a certain nature, as well as within the social aggregate, on the basis of the simple logic of excluding filth, which, promoted to the level of defilement, founded the ‘self and clean’ of each social group if not of each subject” (PoH, 65), argues Kristeva. Thus, patriarchal society is founded on the exclusion of that which is identified as “feminine” and European bourgeois culture receives its dominance and legitimacy via various exclusions of non-white and non-bourgeois others, just as “art” receives its status through the abjection of commercial, popular forms of creativity. Patriarchal society and its canonical art require the proliferation of commodities and commodity music while also desperately attempting to distance themselves from these supposedly vacuous and potentially alienating phenomena. Claiming that “[c]ulture, at least in its patriarchal form, thus effectively prohibits any return to red blood” (TS, 192), Irigaray, like Cook and Kristeva, uses a metaphorics of bodily fluids in order to describe the process of constitutive exclusion that is “abjection.” Corporeality, concrete material quality, “usevalue” all these things represented by “red blood” are, like blood, essential to the proper functioning of white heteropatriarchy; however, they must all be aspirated from proper culture in order that all (men) be sufficiently and equally “white.” This language, which equates color with the abject, illustrates how it is never just femininity that is abjected, but one or more specific forms of femininity marked by race, class, sexuality, and so on. Since “abjection itself is a composite judgment and affect” (PoH, 10), a particular coincidence of gender, race, age, and class modulates the process of abjection in ways unique to that specific configuration. For example, record label Black Swann’s choice of the more “refined” (read: lighter-skinned and bourgeois-mannered) Ethel Waters over the more accomplished (but darker-skinned and working-class) Bessie Smith to be their first star indicates that even within African-American musical cultures, feminization/femininity always works in coincidence with systems of race, class, and other privileges. In most discussions of commodity music, and in Irigaray’s reading of the feminized commodity, it is white, bourgeois femininity that serves as the model of the abject. Specifically, it is the passivity characteristic of stereotypical white femininity that is the main target of abjection in seri-

104

Chapter 4

ous/pop hierarchies. This passivity is what makes “regressive listening” regressive; it is mere indulgence in entertainment rather than active appreciation of art.

The Problem of Pleasure Pleasure—or rather, those pleasures marked as feminine, non-white, or lowclass—is abjected from patriarchal power relations and from the cultures that grow out of them. In this book, I deal mainly with the Western popular as received in Western nations. Obviously, every society has developed its own popular and its own specific set of relations to that popular (and to globalized American pop culture). However, in the West, just as contemplation and judgment should be objective and disinterested, pleasure is not a criterion by which one judges “serious” art—nor is it supposed to be admitted into philosophic thought. From Plato’s Symposium onward, painstaking effort has been made to separate the love of wisdom from those kinds of love involving and motivated by pleasure. Indeed, Freud argues that artistic production occurs through the sublimation of sexual libido. True, Kant does allow for one to experience intellectual pleasure in the play of imagination and understanding, but bodily pleasure—and the consideration of bodies in their specificity—is the primary hindrance to one’s capacity to make judgments of beauty (these judgments are, for Kant, necessarily universal). Put differently, the phallus (the intellect, the symbolic) can serve as a source of pleasure, but the penis cannot. As Irigaray explains, “Once the penis itself becomes merely a means to pleasure, pleasure among men, the phallus loses its power. Sexual pleasure, we are told, is best left to those creatures who are ill-suited for the seriousness of symbolic rules, namely, women” (TS, 193). As something which particularizes an otherwise unremarkable (and therefore “equal”) individual, pleasure cannot be admitted into the domain of “serious” culture. It, then, is allotted to femininity due to its association with the body, sexuality, and other forms of physicality (e.g., “enjoyment” in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity qua the enjoyment of food and the domestic space, both of which are products of “women’s work”). This dismissal of pleasure and trivialization of female consumption is another way to exclude women from the marketplace and the public sphere generally. The fact is that women do participate in the exchange of commodities as subjects; this high/low hierarchy is a mechanism that maintains the exclusivity of phallic/symbolic economies. As Cook remarks, “In the dismissive comments” frequently made about boy bands and Brittney, there exists “real fear of dealing with female desire and female consumption, of valuing women, and especially girls, as thinking, knowledgeable consumers and critics who have enormous power in the commercial and aesthetic marketplaces” (Cook, 143). Women are allowed to produce and exchange commodities, provided that these goods are given no cultural significance. Thus it is that “commodities speak. To be sure, mostly dialects and patois, languages hard for ‘subjects’ to understand” (TS, 179).17 Women may be allowed a degree of agency, but never full access to the highest domains of intellect and culture; they may speak, but only a derivative, immature, unrefined discourse.18 This trivialization is one of the most common

“Smells like Booty”

105

ways in which feminized/female cultural production is abjected from “real” or “serious” culture. Thus, in a rather circular fashion, because “the subject of abjection is eminently productive of culture” (PoH, 45), dominant discourses must constantly reinforce the abject status of these “cultural” products in order to legitimate their own privileged status. The abject is never merely passive or trivial. Kristeva emphasizes the active, resisting character of the abject: “from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master” (PoH, 2). Thinking popular music in terms of abjection highlights the ways marginalized practices and the groups identified with them (e.g., girls) constantly call into question social norms and create alternative spaces in which these people and practices are celebrated in their own right. If popular music is completely vacuous, why the need for the idea of the “guilty pleasure,” or, as Kristeva describes it, the abject’s “shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery” (PoH 2)? If society values the ways in which it socializes girls to act, why the constant derision of screaming and swooning fans? Why? Because these aesthetic and social values challenge the dominant white heteropatriarchy; because women, especially teenage girls “apparently put in the position of passive objects, are none the less felt to be wily powers, ‘baleful schemers’ from whom rightful beneficiaries must protect themselves” (PoH, 70). Indeed, Antigone—a teenage girl who is punished for behaving as society socializes her to behave—is, as “the criminal with good conscience” (PoH, 4), paradigmatic of the abject qua “what does not respect borders, positions, rules” (PoH, 4). Burying her brother is the duty that Antigone, occupying the social roles of woman and sister, is bound by convention and “divine law” to perform. However, this duty—in a way, her duty to fulfill her gender role as a female— contradicts the law of Thebes and challenges the sovereignty of the patriarchal figure, Creon. Centuries after Sophocles, teenage girls remain a threat to and primary target of abjection. “The claim of idol-music’s inherent invalidity is merely a front for what critics really consider invalid: young girls, the single least respected group among middle-class whites” (Nash, 148). By associating “clearly” commercial music with what are supposedly the most unrefined, uneducated, overly emotional and wantonly hormone-driven musical judgments, Euro-American culture carefully polices what is considered significant and worthy of cultural value. Among the various styles and genres of popular music, all readily available on iTunes (or BitTorrent), teen pop is categorically viewed as the most simplistic of music and, accordingly, the biggest sell-out. Rock, hip hop, bluegrass, electronica, dub, gospel, even musical theater and cabaret, are all generally considered to produce “authentic” pieces of artwork. Unlike music made by and for black and white teenage boys or poor urban and rural adults, music made by and for white girls—e.g., Adorno’s jitterbuggers, Miley Cyrus, etc.—is thought to be absolutely vacuous, even and especially when it isn’t.19 The way Adorno’s writings on commodity music perform this abjectionvia-feminization is particularly illuminative. While his misogyny is evident, an

106

Chapter 4

unthematized racial aspect of his criticism of jazz helps demonstrate how the feminization of popular music entails a specific fear/devaluation of white femininity.

Adorno Adorno’s essay “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” clearly exhibits the feminization of popular and commodity music; interestingly, this essay is one of the first products of his exile in the United States.20 His analysis of the commodification of both “serious” and “light” music explicitly but unintentionally makes evident the abjection of commodities and certain stereotypes of white bourgeois and working-class femininity. Needless to say, Adorno’s aims in associating girls and commodity music draw on the systematic devaluation of qualities considered “feminine” in order to emphasize the trivial nature of popular music. In light music, Adorno argues, “sight is lost of the totality in which bad individual immediacy was kept within bounds in great music” (FCM, 288); too intimate, too concerned with mere sensory pleasure, such music “is as nonsensical as if it had originated in a girls’ school” (FCM, 288, emphasis mine).21 Girls, including those privileged enough to go to private all-girls schools, represent for Adorno the most frivolous, immature, and illogical kind of humans, those utterly incapable of complex aesthetic judgments. Accordingly, “regressive” listening is an infantile approach to music: “for the American listener,” one’s taste for popular music “stems from [one’s] earliest musical experiences, the nursery rhymes, the hymns [one] sings in Sunday School, the little tunes [one] whistles on [one’s] way home from school.”22 Just as one who “throws like a girl”23 is accused of wimpy, weak, untrained athletic performance, one who listens “like a girl” stands accused of facile, infantile, uneducated musical taste.24 Uncompelling and superficial in nature, girls’ music is “trash served up for the ostensible or real needs of the masses” (FCM, 289). Articulating his own version of the public/private distinction, which identifies the feminized private sphere with consumption and the masculinized public domain with commerce and production, Adorno illustrates one of the main ways in which class and gender coincide in post-industrial Euro-American society. The needs of the masses are those identified with stereotypical white femininity: the masses are capable of only a passive relation to music grounded in irrational emotional responses to sensory stimuli.25 As Adorno argues, if the moments of sensual pleasure in the idea, the voice, the instrument are made into fetishes and torn away from any function which could give them meaning, they meet a response equally isolated, equally far from the meaning of the whole, and equally determined by success in the blind and irrational emotions which form the relationship to music into which those with no relationship enter (FCM, 283).

“Smells like Booty”

107

Commodity music meets what Adorno presumes consumers’ needs to be: passivity and superficiality. These feminized consumers of commodity music are incapable of active listening that synthesizes the various parts of the piece into a meaningful whole, so their pleasure is one of being acted upon by the most base and bodily (i.e., non-intellectual) aspects of music. Thus, as he claims in “On Popular Music,” the pop music fan can be classified as one of two types: “the ‘rhythmically obedient type,’ or the ‘emotional’ type” (OPM, 312), obedience and emotion being traits stereotypically dissociated from intellect and ascribed to femininity and marginalized masculinities. In the commodification and fetishization of music, the rational, dynamic masculine listener is put into a passive position lacking in intellectual activity, i.e., a feminized position: “The listener is converted, along his line of least resistance, into the acquiescent purchaser” (FCM, 279), for in pop music, “the composition hears for the listener” (OPM, 306). In the same way that Disney Princesses don’t or can’t rescue themselves, but need to be saved by a Prince Charming, consumers of commodity music need the piece to do all the work for them. Placed in this position of passive consumption, the listener “belongs to the product and not the product to him”; as the listener occupies the place of property, of the commodity, the listener assumes, for Adorno, a stereotypically “feminine” position. Moreover, as this femininity is passive, and sexually and intellectually immature in character, it is more a white, middle-class “Donna Reid” femininity than that of Sapphire or Carmen Miranda.26 In a later essay titled “Commodity Music Analysed,” Adorno articulates a position similar to Freud’s notion of feminine activity with passive aims.27 Identifying consumers of commodity music with “the adolescent girl who writes in her diary that she will now get a crush on a particular teacher” (CMA, 51), Adorno admits that popular music fans or jazz enthusiasts…are not the mindlessly fascinated people they are claimed to be, and which they see themselves as. A particular act of will is required to submit to an ordained pleasure. You decide to go wild with excitement, just as you decide to have “a good time”…For people to be transformed into insects they require as much energy as might well suffice to transform them into human beings (CMA, 50-52).

Adorno claims that “jitterbugs,” fans of specifically dance-oriented jazz music, like teenage girls, possess sub-human intellects.28 Even though teenage girls and jitterbugs aren’t completely passive, their only activity is, according to Adorno, to decide to place themselves in this passive, submissive, not-fully-human (indeed, “buggy” or defective) position. Similarly, a capitalist system forces the laborer to alienate his or her labor—that is, to perform tedious, arduous activity for another person, corporate or otherwise, and to transform him/herself into an object. With this claim about sub-human bodies, I turn to discuss Adorno and race. First, there is the oft-made claim that jazz is a black art form and Adorno’s un-

108

Chapter 4

ease with jazz is due at least partially to the fact of its origin in the AfricanAmerican community. This, however, couldn’t be more incorrect. Anything but a jazz connoisseur, Adorno drew his observations about this “jazz” thing not by keeping tabs on Charlie Parker’s every album, but by listening to the radio. What was being played on the radio? Swing: Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, name your (passably) white jazz orchestra leader. Indeed, Adorno always rails against jitterbugs, people listening not to free jazz or “hard bop” (a term obviously fraught with its own attempts to associate itself with some authentic phallic form of jazz), but to, as I mentioned earlier, specifically dance- and youth-oriented music. In fact, at the very same time that Adorno is railing against commercial jazz, black avant-garde jazz musicians (e.g., Monk and Gillespie) are developing bebop as, at least in part, a way to separate their work from what they also perceive as watered-down, mass-marketed—that is, white—swing.29 As Jeffrey Nealon notes, Adorno’s characterizations of “jazz” are more or less parallel to Amiri Baraka’s pro-bebop critique of “swing”: “the ‘swing’ that Baraka rails against is the ‘jazz’ that Adorno hates” insofar as “swing…[as] commodified whiteness…has been hermetically sealed and packaged for white listening audiences.”30 Just as vegetables are blanched to make them more tender and less bitter, swing is but another means to “blanche” bluesbased musical forms: gone are the vulgar lyrics, rough, chain-smoker voices, untrained instrumentalists, creased faces, and dark skin; in their place are smooth, almost syrupy timbres and big bands full of men in suits, and plenty of lindy-hoppers in saddle shoes and bobby-socks. Thus, as Eminem well knows, what is being commodified here is white youth culture—that’s why the “Elvis phenomenon” (putting a white face on “black” music and making mad profits from it) works in the first place. Although there is no explicitly racial language in Adorno’s critique of commodity music, it nevertheless elides stereotypically feminine passivity with the stereotypically white blandness of mainstream swing. Commercial jazz can’t perform the negation and rebellion characteristic of “authentic” art because it is too feminine and too white.31 For Adorno, white feminine blandness and passivity characterize not only commercial jazz, but commodity music as a whole. The thing that sets Adorno’s essay apart from a typical elitist and reactionary condemnation of popular culture is his claim that Western art (a.k.a. “classical”) music has become a fetishized commodity as well. Even listeners of ostensibly “serious” music are no longer concerned with the synthetic meaning of the whole piece, but with isolated elements: the cult of the composer, the virtuoso, the “work” as star, the voice, and the master violinists. According to Adorno, authentic enjoyment and understanding of music is impossible, for “the consumer is really worshipping the money that he himself has paid for the ticket to the Toscannini concert” (FCM, 282) or recording. It has become impossible to apprehend the specific quality of a piece or a performance, for, given their commodity form, all are reduced to expressions of a varying quantity of exchange value. Thus, argues Adorno, “Where they react at all, it no longer makes any difference whether it is to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or to a bikini” (FCM, 283). Again express-

“Smells like Booty”

109

ing frivolity, superficiality, alienation, and commodification with reference to femininity and female sexuality, Adorno chooses to compare commodity music to the (at that time) risqué display of the bikini-clad female body. He goes even further in the opening of “Commodity Music Analysed,” using the voyeuristic titillation of gazing at naked women as a metaphor for the kind of “regressive” listening characteristic of commodity music. Doubly emphasized by appearing in English and in italics, the second half of the first sentence of the essay reads: “Put three half-naked girls on a revolving stage. Then play the organ” (CMA, 37). Not only is Adorno assuming a heteronormative masculine subject/listening position (albeit one corrupted by its passive, fetishistic relation to music), it seems as though the listener’s position—whether regressive or intellectual—can exist only in relation to some abjected commodity and/or body.32 Indeed, when the C-Major theme from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is heard as a commodified piece “taken in isolation” from its purely musical context, “the second theme would be disrobed into insignificance” (OPM, 302, emphasis mine). In Adorno’s essays on popular music, serious music always stands in opposition to some representation of an alienated, non-intellectual relation to music/listening; this representation consistently takes the form of femininity, embodiment, and/or pleasure. If “classical” music is equally as meaningless as popular, the only “serious” music left is atonal or serial—that is, the difficult and distinctly unpleasurable music of the Second Viennese School, the style in which Adorno was trained and which he consistently champions. “If in nothing else,” explains Adorno, Schönberg’s music resembles popular songs in refusing to be enjoyed…Between incomprehensibility and inescapability, there is no third way; the situation has polarized itself into extremes which actually meet. There is no room between them for the “individual.”…The liquidation of the individual [i.e., use value, the intellectual or “purely” musical content of a piece] is the real signature of the new musical situation (FCM, 280-281).

Schoenberg represents the “incomprehensible,” commodity music the “inescapable”; there is no room for enjoyment because the former is inaccessible to all but the specialist, whereas the latter is meaningless in its ubiquity. It is impossible for all but a few to have an appropriate relationship to “serious” music because they do not possess the intellectual faculties or musical training necessary to comprehend atonal and serial music, and it is downright impossible to have any kind of authentic—i.e., intellectual—relationship with commodity music. As neither serious nor light music provide the majority of listeners with the opportunity to relate to music in any sort of intellectual fashion, it is impossible for individuality, Adorno’s prime value, to enter into the equation of musical “pleasure,” for individuality is a qualitative measure like use-value, derived from the specificity of one’s identity as a relatively self-present thinking thing. Commodities, however, exist only at the level of abstraction, so even the pleas-

110

Chapter 4

ure elicited by commodity music, however sensory it may be, speaks to the body only in the “abstract,” via generalized, standardized, and empty conventions. Thus, just as “serious” music should not be enjoyed, alienated consumption has prevented “light” music from being enjoyable. As two extremes in the impossibility of enjoyment, serious and popular music “meet” insofar as “the flight from the banal becomes definitive” (FCM, 281), and serious music exists only in its negative relation to popular genres. The logic of abjection between popular and serious proceeds uninterrupted through Adorno’s essay: pleasure, embodiment, and femininity are always rejected in order to establish the integrity of “serious” music and “active,” intellectual listening. Thus, looking carefully at the various ways in which Adorno abjects commodity music, we see that, despite his claims to the contrary, the distinctions he draws between “genuine” and “commodity” music are, in fact, judgments about relative complexity or superficiality. It is not, however, the music about which this judgment is being rendered, but the listener or the kind of listening. Adorno argues that the difference between popular and serious music can be grasped in more precise terms than those referring to musical levels such as “lowbrow and highbrow,” “simple and complex,” “naïve and sophisticated.” For example, the difference between the spheres cannot be adequately expressed in terms of complexity and simplicity. All works of the earlier Viennese classicism are, without exception, rhythmically simpler than stock arrangements of jazz…Standardization and nonstandardization are the key contrasting terms of difference (OPM, 305).

Even though “standardization” and “nonstandardization” appear to be judgments about the music, they are really descriptions of its reception. Indeed, music can be viewed as “standardized” only by analyzing its location in the social processes of production and consumption where musical structures become obviously inflected by various ideological practices. It is not the musical structures found within Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit,” but the ways in which they are situated with regard to performance and listening contexts that determines their status as “popular song” or “serious music.” Thus, while Adorno claims that music “itself” is neither trivial nor profound, careful study of his systematic abjection of commodity music demonstrates a clear hierarchization of “real” or “progressive” listening and “a system of response mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society” (OPM, 305).

“Smells like Booty”

111

The Limitations of Fetishism and the Excesses of “Regressive Listening” Considering commodity music both in Adorno’s writing and in general, we see that Irigaray’s analogical reading of Marx is an accurate description not only of the feminized fetish, but of femininity’s abject position in capitalist exchange, minus some nuances and details (particularly those pertaining to race).33 Moreover, it is not that femininity is offered only as an object, or as the only object. Rather, feminine/feminized voices do participate as producers and consumers, albeit of trivialized and “worthless” frivolities; further, male/masculine bodies are also offered as commodities, albeit faced with the constant chore of remasculinizing this otherwise “feminine” position. As Gayle Wald and Joanne Gottlieb put it, “the exaggerated masculinity of certain rock performances may attempt to recoup the gender discomfort that ensues when men openly display sexuality and assume a to-be-looked-at position among men.”34 Because the performer is a commodity, the performance position is a feminized one. In order for a male/masculine body to occupy this space, either his effeminacy must be ridiculed by “real men,” or the performer must constantly reassert a hyperbolic masculinity (e.g., Mick Jagger, Isaac Hayes, Tupac, or Dee Snyder, who can have long frizzy platinum locks, more eye shadow than Barbie, and hot pink football shoulder pads only if he incessantly rants about how he’s “not gonna take it anymore,” or how much he hates his mother/girlfriend/ex-wife).35 As these examples demonstrate, fetishized commodities, although intensely compelling, are regarded as a “perversion;” they are fascinating and desirable, yet terrifying and inadmissible. This pleasure has to be filed under the category “guilty” because the presumably “normal” (straight, white, masculine, middleclass) spectator would—if he didn’t know any better, that is—be participating in numerous activities society deems abnormal, taboo, undesirable, or at least improper for someone of his status. Many of the limitations of Irigaray’s and Adorno’s analyses of commodity fetishism are the result of limitations in the discourse of fetishism itself, namely, (1) its tendency to assume an absolute active/passive binary, and (2) its positing of a norm against which devalued, abnormal phenomena are situated as such. First, just as Irigaray claims that women serve only as objects/commodities and men absolutely cannot be objectified, Adorno assumes that the “regressive” listener, he or she who adores fetishized music, stands in a completely passive relation to music, unlike the lover of serious music, who is actively engaged in parsing the significance of “difficult” pieces. Secondly, the discourse of fetishism assumes the existence of some immediate or truly individual relation to looking and listening, as well as to the object of this gazing and audiation. The fetish is an incorrect view of some “real” situation (one’s masculinity), just as commodity fetishism is the substitution of product relations for social relations, thus affecting alienated or disingenuous relations among men. In order for the

112

Chapter 4

fetish to be a substitute for something, there must be some “normal” relation— e.g., use-value, immediate social relations, female “castration”—which the fetish masks. The primary limitation of the discourse of fetishism is that it unproblematically assumes dominant social norms as such, and cannot address why and how these norms came to be. It establishes as “real” a norm which, through coincident relations of privilege and marginalization, comes to be taken as “(second) nature.” Insofar as the discourse of fetishism has been primarily one of looking, my critique of fetishism is framed in terms of Lacan’s mirror stage and his concordant notion of the empty signifier. I will, however, take a brief detour from the visual into contemporary rap/hip hop in order to analyze both (1) the normative whiteness of the fetishizing subject and (2) the ways non-white artists rework commodification into a discourse of empowerment. I then turn to Kristeva’s reworking of the mirror stage in terms of abjection because it is, as Susan Cook’s article indicates, the most productive way of rethinking the way fetishism has come to presume and normalize whiteness and masculinity. Kristeva’s concept of the abject questions any strict opposition between activity and passivity, acknowledges the empty yet over-determined nature of the signifier in a more complex way than Lacan, and, most importantly, allows us to examine the cultural and conceptual work that occurs prior to (and sets the stage for) the idea of fetishism. Before I get into my critique of fetishism, a qualifier: Taken in view of his non-musical writings, Adorno’s adoption of the fetishized commodity as the basis of his analysis of popular music seems a bit out of character. In several of his treatises on philosophical method and critical theory, Adorno clearly posits a notion of fantasy as fundamental to philosophic analysis and to the “actuality” of philosophy and its projects. Critical theory, according to Adorno, does not claim to discover the “truth” about the “real” world; rather, it uses fantasy or invention to analyze relationships among concepts and categories that are themselves produced by these fantasies. Hence the “actuality” of philosophical processes and the objects of their analyses arises from the mediation and mutual resistance of social and material forces. Practicing philosophy thus entails, for Adorno, the recognition that “second nature is, in truth, first nature.”36 In his essay “The Idea of Nature-History,” Adorno traces the terms “nature” and “history” through their various treatments by then-contemporary philosophy, ultimately to demonstrate that these categories and their assumed binary relationship amount to what is a false problem. According to Adorno, we are to understand history “where it is most historical, as natural being, or if it were possible to comprehend nature as an historical being where it seems to rest most deeply in itself as nature” (INH, 117). Here it is clear that Adorno understands “nature” as fully mediated by history; materiality is ultimately sociality and vice versa. It is only in the idea (or philosophical analysis) of “natural history” that these are determinate, mutually exclusive categories. Given these remarks regarding the impossibility of any pure, unmediated “nature,” it seems that commodity fetishism—and its reliance on an unfetishized “natural” state—is out of place in and inconsistent with

“Smells like Booty”

113

Adorno’s own overarching philosophical project. This inconsistency might arise, I believe, out of his failure to interrogate the “idea” of gender—specifically, the privileged position of heterosexual masculinity in patriarchal capitalism—and the ways in which assumed gender hierarchies arise, to legitimate his critiques of commodity music. In other words, I’m hypothesizing that Adorno’s overt misogyny and latent assumption of normative patriarchy have impeded his ability to think clearly about the “feminized” attributes of commodities and fetishized commodity relations. From the perspective of psychoanalysis or deconstruction, this apparent inconsistency between Adorno’s work on commodity music and his non-musical writings is precisely one of those “slips” that reveal a new level of latent meaning in the text. Because he doesn’t recognize gender and masculine privilege as historical philosophico-political concepts, his use of gendered reasoning proceeds without the scrutiny to which he subjects his other analyses. This problem in Adorno’s work is symptomatic of the larger failure of fetishism as a critical discourse: both rely quite unreflectively on existent systems of social privilege, and neither can adequately reflect on or critique this reliance.

From Fetishism to Abjection The oversimplification and all-too-easy opposition of passivity and activity seem to be characteristic of Adorno’s understanding of Marxist fetishism. Psychoanalytic accounts of fetishism—when not themselves oversimplified— provide a more nuanced account of subject/object or active/passive relations. While Freudian fetishism oversimplifies the fetishist-fetish relationship in a fashion very similar to Adorno, Joan Copjec’s appropriation of Lacan opens up a reading of Marx that deconstructs fetishistic relations. The notion of fetishism relies upon an authentic/inauthentic opposition. Just as Saussurean models of language assume the existence of an accurate correspondence between signifier and signified, Marxist commodity fetishism assumes an “authentic” mode of social relations for which commodity fetishism is substituted.37 However, if we follow Lacan and understand the signifier to signify precisely the lack of any “real” or “authentic” signified, then this enigmatical and mysterious character of the commodity reveals the nonexistence of any true or immediate relation among exchangers/men. Hence the determinate negation of fetishism: precisely because the commodity is enigmatic in its metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties, it indicates the emptiness of the signifier and the “impossib[ility of the] real.”38

Freud

In Freud’s 1927 essay Fetishism, the fetishist is not a passive spectator.39 Here Freud describes the fetish as a “penis-substitute” (199); in more Marxist terms, the fetish substitutes for actual “phallic” relations among men. If the fet-

114

Chapter 4

ish is a substitute, the fetishist must be substituting it for something else. It is important to note that, for Freud, the fetish “is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but was afterwards lost…The fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) phallus which the little boy once believed in and does not wish to forego” (Freud, 199). The fetish is a faux phallus for the woman/mother. Recognizing, and for this fact admitting, that the mother lacks the phallus and its accoutrements, the male child invests an object—a foot, a “glance” at the nose— as he would the phallus, and is thus able to deny the mother’s deficiencies. Freudian fetishism, in falsely attributing a phallus to women and thus assimilating them into normative masculinity/maleness, is akin to the fetishization of commodities insofar as a commodity’s value is measured in terms of phalluses. In both instances, the phallus is the thing in terms of which everything is measured and expressed. Just as the commodity form is necessary to capitalism because it enables society to, on the one hand, view all labor as equivalent, yet also exploit the surpluses created by the differences among various types of labor, Freudian fetishism allows the fetishist to unconsciously admit yet consciously deny differences among bodies and in levels of access to power and privilege. Accordingly, the commodity’s exchange value (value in terms of phalluses) is the intentionally mistaken attribution of phallic value to women or the feminized commodity. Given Freud’s gendered language when discussing the fetishist (“boy,” not “child”), we must wonder, what about the little girl? By leaving the little girl out of the discussion of fetishism (as though girls never developed fetishes, when, in fact, Adorno attributes fetishistic listening to a primarily feminine/feminized subject), is Freud also associating femininity with a passive position? This is possible; however, because at this stage the little girl is, according to Freud, basically a little boy, one can assume that the boy’s experience speaks also for that of the “girl.” Not that this conflation isn’t in itself problematic (Irigaray discusses this at length in Speculum): indeed, the implication is that girls can engage in the fetishistic “exchange” or “substitution” of phalluses only when passing as boys. Girls, because they experience a different relation to the castration complex and to the phallus, are not capable of the activity of fetishism so long as they function as girls. Thus, contrary to Adorno’s position, which feminizes the fetishist by characterizing fetishistic listening as passive, the Freudian account views the act of fetishization as far from passive (indeed, Freud describes the fetishist as one who “refused” and “rebels” (Freud, 199)), and as engaged in “a very energetic action” (Freud, 201). For Freud, the fetish is feminized and objectified, not the fetishist; this stands in neat opposition to Adorno’s discussions of commodity fetishism, because Freud feminizes the listeners of commodity music, not the art object or cultural artifact. However, even though Freud’s account of the fetishist or “regressive listener” is more nuanced than Adorno’s, it still reproduces a troublesome and overly simplistic reliance upon some “normal” or original state that is then perverted.

“Smells like Booty”

115

Copjec, Bhabha, and hooks For Freud as for Adorno, fetishism is primarily a relation to an aesthetic impression: viewing female anatomy, listening to “girl’s music.” Indeed, for Freud, fetishism is a function of gazing.40 Consequently, film theory has picked up this notion of fetishism and thought it alongside notions of voyeurism and Lacan’s mirror stage. The common conception of fetishism operating in feminist film theory is that, as Ann Kaplan explains, “the camera (unconsciously) fetishizes the female form, rendering it phallus-like so as to mitigate woman’s threat.”41 Here we see the repetition of the Freudian notion that the fetish always occupies the place of the feminine/female body, and the fetishist is always a masculine subject position. The gazing, fetishizing subject is always masculine, and the gazed-upon fetish is always feminine. This basically reproduces the Freudian conception of fetishism. There is, however, a tendency within recent feminist film theory to question the strict separation of “active” and “passive”—i.e., the subject and object of the gaze. Addressing the role of the gaze (fetishistic and otherwise) in film theory, Joan Copjec’s article “The Orthopsychic Subject” argues that while the concept of the gaze is central to film theory, the particular kind of gaze is—wrongly, according to Copjec—assumed to be “panoptic.”42 The gazing subject is, even in his or her “own activity,” determined by the gaze of external authority. “The panoptic gaze,” Copjec explains, obliges the woman to monitor herself with a patriarchal eye. This structure thereby guarantees that even her innermost desire will always be not a transgression but rather an implantation of the law, that even the “process of theorizing her own untenable situation” can only reflect back to her “as in a mirror” her subjugation to the gaze (288).

The subject of the panoptic gaze (i.e., subject in the sense of “subjectivized”) is thoroughly determined by socio-symbolic conventions or laws. Accordingly, it is easy to understand the panoptic subject as passive in relation to absolute laws. In panopticism, everything is visible, thus knowable, thus controllable.43 Resistance is absent from the panoptic gaze because this gaze is all-encompassing, mono-directional, and assumes a singular, uni-dimensional spectator. Further, this paradigm assumes that the spectator (movie-goer) exists as the single “Renaissance-vanishing-point” perspective: rather like the Kantian transcendental ego, the panoptic film spectator is the passive locus whereupon all screen images converge. Panoptic gazing is a one-way street: images from the screen are received and absorbed by the spectator. Copjec contrasts the panoptic gaze with the “orthopsychic” gaze, arguing that the latter, as described in Lacan’s understanding of “photo-graphy,” is a better representation of film-viewing because it illustrates a bi-directional process of “gazing.” According to Lacan, “‘I am not simply that punctiform being located at the geometrical point from which the perspective is grasped’” (cited in

116

Chapter 4

Copjec, 298), for my recognition of myself as this singular “transcendental” vanishing-point is fundamentally a misrecognition of my position in relation to vision and to other things and people. Not only is the film viewer receiving images from the screen, this viewer is also interpreting (via misrecognition) those images—in a way, the viewer is inserting his or her very specific self onto and/or in relation to the screen. That is to say, there is not only photoscopic activity, but also the work of graphing or interpreting the images one sees. Thus, explains Copjec, “the process is conceived no longer as a purely positive one but rather as internally dialectic. Lacan does not take the single triangle drawn by geometric perspective as an accurate description of its own operation. Instead, he re-diagrams this operation using two interpenetrating triangles” (Copjec 299). As the image of two interpenetrating lines of sight indicates, the gaze, for Copjec, is never monological or unidirectional. Because the signifier/object of gaze is devoid of meaning (or rather, is “enigmatic”), it destabilizes the certainty of the gazer, and forces him or her to doubt the credulity of his or her perceptions and interpretations. If the object/signifier is not transparent—if the object does not give itself completely (because there is nothing to give, no “natural reserve” of content)—the gazer must ask, “What is being concealed from me? What in this graphic space does not show, does not stop writing itself?” (Copjec 300).44 In the case of fetishism, what is being concealed is precisely the roles of normative whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality. More precisely, what fetishism conceals is initial abjection, which determines what counts as “real” (the phallus/penis) and what as “illusion” (female genitalia). To put this point back in Copjec’s terms, fetishism’s gaze is spoken of as though it is panoptic, when it is in fact orthopsychic. Marx, Freud, and Adorno assume the to-be-looked-at object as a given, and consider neither that this scopic object is constituted through abjection, nor how this abjection (specifically, the abjection of femininity) “looks back” at and impacts the fetishistic gaze. Arguing for an analysis of stereotypes as fetishes, Homi Bhabha similarly problematizes the unidirectional looking relations that characterize traditional notions of fetishism. Bhabha claims that “The stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that, in denying the play of difference…constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject in significations of psychic and social relations.”45 As there is no “authentic” reality that fetishes/stereotypes either represent or misrepresent, the fetishistic logic of privileging (the phallus, whiteness) and marginalization (female genitalia, dark skin) is revealed to be not a function of truth, but a strategy for the reproduction and distribution of power. Accordingly, the main problem with stereotypes is not that they misrepresent some “fact” (e.g., “Asians are good at math, science, and the piano.”), but that, given their presumption of a panoptic gaze, they attempt to deny agency to those subject to their judgment. Stereotyping installs certain people in the position of “viewer” and others as the “viewed” by preserving a strict dichotomy between subject and object: there is the active gazer, who exerts his (or “her”) purview on things. Stereotypes actively conceal the fact that

“Smells like Booty”

117

their objects return the gaze—indeed, what they disavow is the very agency and subjectivity of their objects. This problem of representation that Bhabha identifies is the same as that raised by Copjec—that is, that the gaze is never singular or static, but rather, “In the objectification of the scopic drive there is always the threatened return of the look” (LC, 81). In Copjec’s terms, there is never only one triangle, but a second (in this instance, the gaze of the racialized other) always menaces the first from “behind the scenes.” This keeping something behind the scenes is not just the simultaneous admittance and denial of some fact; rather, it is the systematic exclusion of some term whereby what counts as fact and what counts as fiction are legitimated. In other words, it is not merely fetishism of the stereotyped identity; it is the abjection of it. This “screen-behind-the-mirror,” which refracts, distorts, and disturbs one’s gaze, destabilizes the gazer because what he wants to be a perfect reflection of himself is, in fact, not. This is precisely Irigaray’s point in her discussion of the mirroring function of the feminized commodity: because the gaze is objectifying a woman, one who can in fact ‘return the look,’ 1) the gaze of the masculine viewer is always necessarily threatened by the return of the look, and this gaze, because it is mirrored in a body which is in fact different from his own, never returns an undistorted image; and 2) her attempts at looking must be systematically trivialized and proven to lack the rigor of “real” looking/listening/judging. That is to say, “girls’ music” must “suck by definition” in order to contain this threat of the returned gaze. If feminine/feminized gazing is not a “real” looking/listening/judging, then it cannot threaten the stability and reliability of the transcendental ego’s “renaissance-vanishing-point.” Accordingly, the fact of the existence of these trivialized and marginalized forms of aesthetic production and judgment indicates that this “screen behind the mirror” must also exist: if it wasn’t a threat, why go to such lengths to protect oneself from it? The abjection of the popular indicates the excesses of fetishistic appropriation of cultural products—namely, the activity, agency, and resistance hovering behind the mirror/veil that challenges the sovereignty of the gazer. bell hooks’s notion of the “oppositional gaze” highlights the roles gender, race, and class have in both (1) facilitating the “misrecognition” of the self (i.e., the failure to identify with the screen image) that fractures the Renaissancevanishing-point perspective, and (2) the “return of the look,” the development of alternate interpretations that resist the dominant aesthetic and social norms. Noting that “When most black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television, they did so fully aware that mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy,”46 hooks argues that the misrepresentation and/or utter absence of black female characters in mainstream cinema has caused black women to approach films from a highly critical perspective. As it was difficult or impossible to identify with any of the characters in the film, hooks argues, black female spectators were less likely to suspend their disbelief and adopt the film’s perspectives and presumptions—in particular, the perspective of the “male gaze,” wherein white

118

Chapter 4

females are offered as sexualized objects for the “visual pleasure” of white and black male spectators.47 “Looking at films with an oppositional gaze,” hooks explains, black women were able to critically assess the cinema’s construction of white womanhood as object of phallocentric gaze and choose not to identify with either the victim or the perpetrator. Black female spectators, who refused to identify with white womanhood, who would not take on the phallocentric gaze of desire and possession, created a critical space where the binary opposition [Laura] Mulvey posits of “woman as image, man as bearer of the look” was continually deconstructed (OG, 213).

Since black women are situated outside the white scopophilic politics of Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze, their spectatorship fractures the Renaissancevanishing-point perspective of Mulvey’s theory and opens up the numerous screens behind the mirror of dominant constructions of gendered looking relations. Due to their exclusion from and consequent inability to seamlessly identify with Hollywood films, the black women hooks discusses already recognize and practice a form of active (i.e., non-passive, non-“fetishized”) spectatorship. For hooks, it is precisely this attempted objectification or silencing that incites the desire to “return the look.” Remarking that “the politics of slavery, of racialized power relations, were such that the slaves were denied their right to the gaze” (OG, 207), hooks claims, with a nod to Foucault, that in spite (and perhaps, to a certain extent, because) of this prohibition, “I knew that the slaves had looked. That all attempts to repress our/black people’s right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze” (OG, 208). Even though the slaves, objectified and commodified, existed in “the worst circumstances of domination,” they nonetheless retained the capacity (if not always the concrete means for realization) of subjective agency: “the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it opens up the possibility of agency” (OG, 208). Indeed, to claim that people in positions under domination (e.g., commodification) are utterly passive objects incapable of any agency further oppresses them insofar as this claim refuses to recognize any agency at all—rather infantilizing, it seems. Attending to the ways in which race intersects with gender, hooks’ notion of the oppositional gaze complements Copjec’s attempts to re-think the dynamics of psychoanalytic film theory. Both theorists point to the ways in which the feminized, non-white “object” is anything but passive or silent, and to the fact that monological accounts of gazing only further marginalize those put in the position of “object” by failing to recognize the ways in which they transform and resist the power exerted on and through them. With this in mind, I examine JayZ’s claim of self-commodification as an instance of oppositional “looking.” Given his position as a racially (and formerly socioeconomically) underprivileged man, I argue that his self-commodification is a transformative mimesis: he

“Smells like Booty”

119

adopts an apparently disempowering position as a means of agency in resisting the forces that marginalize him.

Behind the Screen Shines a Roc Kanye West’s “Diamonds (Are from Sierra Leone)” offers an instance in which commodification, from the position of a multiply underprivileged masculinity, becomes a source of agency and empowerment.48 Two thirds of the way through the song, Jay-Z makes the following remark: “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man/So lemme handle my business, damn.” His claim here is that he is not a subject, a man, who engages in certain sorts of social and economic relations (i.e., business), but that he, Jay-Z (who bears some unarticulated relationship to Sean Carter, the person who claims Jay-Z as a stage name), is a business, an object or type of socioeconomic relationship. However, this apparent self-objectification does not prevent Jay-Z/Sean Carter (?) from conducting his own “business” (from exercising agency). Moreover, given the context of the song—which alludes to chattel slavery and discusses at length the exploitation of child laborers in African diamond mines—this instance of commodified Black masculinity seems distinctively empowering. In spite of all the “keep it real” rhetoric of and debates about authenticity in hip hop, we have someone glorifying the fact that he, as Jay-Z, artist and president of Def Jam records, isn’t an agent conducting “business” (a businessman), but is himself a commodity.49 In this song, the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality within the aesthetic and economic marketplaces encompassed by hip hop help to illustrate the subversive repetition of the norms of capitalism, specifically, the subjectobject relation and the notion of commodity fetishism. First, the sample off which West builds the track offers an index of the conventional attitudes of/toward commodity fetishism. The female vocalist (Shirley Bassey) lusts after diamonds (not human companionship) because they are “everlasting” and reliable in a way human relationships cannot be.50 This is orthodox commodity fetishism: relations among commodities substitute for real social relations, thus rendering the fetishist passive. Now, the first hint of West’s and Jay’s intent to subvert this clichéd narrative arrives near the beginning of the song when West indicates that, while following our chanteuse’s advice to “hold one up,” the kind of diamonds he intends to “throw in the sky” are not rocks of compressed carbon, but the “jewels” of Rock-A-Fella records (which is, not coincidentally, West’s label, founded and at that time run by Jay-Z). Claims for the timelessness of hip hop also suggest that these artists are as aesthetically and culturally significant as, say, Mozart. Then, the more radical subversion: namely, Jay-Z’s deconstruction of the subjectobject relationship characteristic of capitalism and capitalist relations. Rejecting the role of “businessman,” Jay argues that he is not a “subject” or “man” overand-against or separate from his “business.” The distinction between human and thing, property owner and property, is rendered ambiguous by his claim that he, Jay/Sean is a business, man. He is a subject insofar as he is always-also an ob-

120

Chapter 4

ject: or rather, given his situation within systems of race and class privilege in the U.S., he is, to an extent, always already “objectified”—his agency and subjectivity necessarily exist in the context of this objectification.51 Subverting the conventional logic that objectification is bad and an impediment to if not the opposite of agency, freedom, and humanity, Jay’s lyric contrasts this so-called objectification with two other examples of concrete oppression described in West’s portion of the piece. Indeed, Jay argues that his form of objectification isn’t disempowering, as was the objectification that produces systematic social and economic marginalization of African Americans (such as the legacy of slavery in the United States, the intersection of race and class that would lead “the black person’s soul to rock that gold”) or the objectification of those “shorties” in Sierra Leone. Indeed, his self-commodification seems to be celebrated as one of his many hard-fought battles for success, and as distinctly different from the literal commodification of African Americans as slaves. Perhaps the reason why this self-objectification on Jay-Z’s part is meaningful is because of the vicissitudes of underclass Black masculinity in the latetwentieth- and early-twenty-first-century United States. Indeed, insofar as discourses of hip-hop authenticity tend to essentialize African-American male experience and to market a false image of “ghetto life” to middle-class whites, this explicitly “commercial” confession could be read as a radical statement of selfdetermination: I, Sean Carter, create the brand “Jay-Z” as a vehicle for creativity, self-advancement, experimentation, leadership, and entrepreneurship. People expected me, “some dumb rapper from the streets” to fail at this business venture, but the fact is, I’ve been doing this all my life, and I’ve had to overcome more challenges than, say, many Ivy League MBAs.52 So, West’s and Jay’s celebration of themselves as a business—their selfcommodification, if you will—is not, given the intersection of race, class, gender, and history, the all-kinds-of-“bad” we well-meaning white liberals and continental thinkers are supposed to believe it is. You could say they are “signifying” on the idea of commodification, subversively repeating the invisible whiteness of capitalism. They take its traditional connotations of “alienation,” “objectification,” and disempowerment and turn them on their heads, transforming these notions into something “ill.” This example illustrates that perhaps commodity fetishism is only “disempowering” if one assumes the subject is, at the outset, privileged; underprivileged artists like Jay-Z adopt this supposedly “regressive” position as a site of resistance, opposition, and empowerment.

Regressive Listening/Toward Abjection Reading Copjec’s notion of the doubled, “conflicted” (Copjec, 302) orthopsychic gaze in terms of Kristeva’s concept of abjection helps clarify how socalled “regressive listening” and Jay-Z’s self-commodification are overdetermined by discourses of race, gender, and sexuality. Copjec and Kristeva demonstrate that the emptiness of the classical and the ultimate contingency of

“Smells like Booty”

121

any “norm” are the very conditions of an active, rather than “regressive,” listening. When the signifier—the work, the phallus (signifier of masculine privilege)—is understood to be hollow, void of any “real” or authentic content, “the image, the entire visual field, takes on a terrifying alterity. It loses its ‘belong-tome aspect’ and suddenly assumes the function of a screen” (Copjec, 300). No longer a property or a commodity I can appropriate or exchange, and thus, as Irigaray argues, no longer a “mirror” through which subjects recognize themselves as brokers in the phallus market, the piece/film no longer indicates me (the masculine subject) as the transcendental telos of the Renaissance-vanishingpoint perspective, but calls the stability of this viewpoint into question by introducing uncertainty, doubt, and excess into the scene (or, shall we say, screen). Just as Lacan claims that the mirror stage is both reassuring (it provides the gazer with a precocious sense of agency) and disquieting (the gazer is not, in fact, as adept and agile as the mirror image would indicate), we can see that the fetishistic gaze is also crossed by this double movement. So while Adorno would argue that the fetishist is only impeded by his or her fascination with feminized cultural products, Copjec’s and Lacan’s work indicates that the “regressive” listening is also affirmative and enabling. If looking/listening is “a conflictual place” (Copjec, 302) for “all the subject’s visions and revisions” (Copjec, 303), fetishism proves to inadequately account for this gazing and listening that escapes easy subsumption under active/passive binaries. Fetishism, insofar as it separates out viewer from viewed, high from low, authentic from fetishistic listening, fails to account for the complex relations we have with cultural products. For example, this failure to account for the way in which commodities can, in fact, speak—albeit in a trivialized, “unrefined” fashion—is due to the tendency within the discourse of fetishism to posit an absolute separation between active viewer and passive object of the gaze. Accordingly, even claiming that “women are fetishized commodities” does not adequately attend to the problem of the feminization of the fetish/commodity and why certain forms of expression—as well as femininity itself—are systematically abjected through associations with a trivialized popular. Why? Because women do in fact speak, because “low” art is, in fact, meaningful. Further, the thesis that women are objects of fetishization fails to recognize that women are regarded, objectified, and subjectivized differentially according to race, class, sexuality, and any variety of other factors. Copjec’s account of Lacan, in admitting of the impossibility of some authentic “real,” does allow for the fact that feminized people and products do “say” meaningful and powerful things. Because, for Lacan, the signifier does not correspond to or “represent” an existent signified, the listener is always presented with both a void and excess of meaning; because there is no “real” meaning to which one’s interpretation must correspond, there are also an infinite number of possible interpretations. To put it in more Hegelian-Adornian terms, the void is immediately the excess of meaning. That is to say, “Where the Fou-

122

Chapter 4

cauldian and the film-theoretical positions always tend to trap the subject in representation[,…]to conceive of language as constructing the prison walls of the subject’s being, Lacan argues that the subject sees these walls as trompe l’oeil, and is thus constructed by something beyond them” (Copjec, 300). Because there is no necessary or determined signified, a signifying work (music, film) presents the listener with a multitude of potential responses and interpretations. Politically, the determined signified, the “trompe l’oeil,” is normative white hetero-patriarchy—but more on this in the next section. No longer bound by a strict signifier-signified correspondence, the listener stands in an active relation to musical works, for it is in the very relations of listening that the “signified” is realized. If every signifier is the signifier of a lack, Copjec argues that “this point at which something appears to be missing from representation, some meaning left unrevealed, is the point of the Lacanian gaze. It marks the absence of a signified; it is an unoccupiable point, not, as film theory claims, because it figures an unrealizable ideal but because it indicates an impossible real” (Copjec, 300; emphasis mine). No authentic, immediate representation is possible; thus the “beyond” of the Lacanian gaze is not that of a transcendent metaphysical immediacy, but one of conjecture, namely, the realization that access to this “real” is itself a myth produced by the symbolic. The aspiration toward an “unrealizable ideal” of the pure, intellectual, disinterested relation to cultural products is transposed into the recognition that notions such as the “classical,” and the universal judgments of beauty that are accorded to canonical works, are myths—myths which are tenable only when the “classical” is articulated against an abjected “popular.”

Kristeva: Abjection and the “Impossible Real” Copjec’s re-examination of fetishism’s gaze points to serious shortcomings in the discourse of fetishism, most notably its failure to account for the contingency and constructedness of what it assumes as “true” or “normal.” While Copjec’s analysis remains within the reworked terms of fetishism, it is my claim that this “new” fetishism is best understood in light of what is both assumed by and in excess of it: abjection. Using Copjec’s notion of the “impossible real” as my point of departure, I read Kristeva’s Powers of Horror as a means to explore in more detail the reasons why abjection’s emphasis on the impossibility of the real and the coincidence of social identities make it an essential companion to the discourse of fetishism. Because abjection provides a more explicit conceptual structure for thinking the conjectural status of gendered, raced, and resonating bodies, it helps us articulate the ways in which coincident systems of privilege and marginalization come to establish and legitimate fetishism’s “norm” as normal. Abjection is in many ways Kristeva’s term for the intellectual tactic Rousseau labels conjecture. Just as conjecture is used to describe the state of nature,

“Smells like Booty”

123

abjection is used to mark humanity off from animality, on the one hand, and the speaking subject off from maternity/femininity on the other. Something “becomes abject only if it is a border between two distinct entities or territories. A boundary between nature and culture, between the human and the non-human” (PoH, 75). In other words, the tale of abjection is a tale of the origin—or rather, the onset—of language in the speaking being and in society. Kristeva’s account of the abject is, in its own way, an essay on the origin of language. Kristeva examines the work of anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglass alongside the more ontogenic writings of Freud (e.g., Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism) in order to get behind the various narratives of the origin of the split between nature and culture and demonstrate that this division is possible and thinkable only from the perspective of language/culture. Like Rousseau, Kristeva argues that her analysis of the origin and economy of language in the subject “does not unfold without a share of fiction, the nucleus of which, drawn from actuality and the subjective experience of the one who writes, is projected upon data collected from the life of other cultures, less to justify itself than to throw light on them by means of an interpretation to which they obviously offer resistance” (PoH, 68). Abjection is a reworking of the psychoanalytic Oedipal narrative which, in shifting emphasis from Oedipus Rex to Oedipus at Colonus, also shifts the emphasis in the psychoanalytic account of the origin of the speaking being from disavowal (the operation by which fetishism proceeds) to exclusion (the operation by which abjection proceeds). While Oedipus Rex revolves around Oedipus’s denial or disavowal of the truth of his parentage and the fact that he is the source of Thebes’s contamination, in this second play, “there is, first of all, a spatial exclusion. Oedipus must exile himself” (PoH, 84). Thus, while the first play ends with Oedipus ending his disavowal of the “facts” and blinding himself to symbolize the force of this enlightenment, the second one offers exile and excision of the abnormal and undisciplined as a solution to the situation. According to Kristeva, what Sophocles presents in Oedipus at Colonus is not a model of the disavowal and then recognition of castration (i.e., a model of fetishism), but the workings of a spatial model whereby the very boundary between what counts as actual and what counts as false/wrong is negotiated. In other words, Oedipus at Colonus illustrates that the transition into civil society and into language occurs through “building the wall, reinforcing the boundary that wards off opprobrium, which, because of this very fact, is not disavowed but shown to be alien” (PoH, 84). It is not fetishism, with its focus on the disavowal of castration, but abjection, which attends to the spacing between proper and improper that best describes the subject’s origin as such.

Abjection, Conjecture, and the “Screen Behind the Mirror”

124

Chapter 4

Kristeva’s discussion of the origin of language highlights several specific differences between abjection and fetishism. Even though language “is based on fetishist denial (‘I know that, but just the same,’ ‘the sign is not the thing, but just the same’)” (PoH, 37), fetishism already assumes the existence of a selfpresent subject for whom objects appear and are experienced as such. Indeed, the ability to calculate equivalences implied in the “just the same” —a judgment common to both psychoanalytic and Marxist notions of fetishism—requires two assumptions that the process of abjection does not: first, that there is a clear distinction between a subject and the objects to which it relates, and second, that there is some object and its supposed ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ available for misrecognition. At work in the claim that some one thing is “just the same” as another is the assumption that there are at least two entities that are distinct from each other and from me; in order for one to deny the distinction between the fetish and that for which it substitutes, this distinction must first be in existence. Furthermore, in order for the fetishist to judge these objects to be equivalent, he or she is assuming that they contain content about which a truth claim can be made; what is denied is that the “truth” or “reality” or “use-value” of these objects is, in fact, unique. So, while language might require the denial of difference between signifier and signified, more fundamental to the possibility of signification is the construction of the myth of the signified, the myth that behind the sign is a true, actual, existent reality available for representation—e.g., “use value” or the state of nature. While Rousseau would call this activity myth-making or conjecture, Kristeva describes this gesture as a “hallucination” of origin (or of the real) brought on by the fear experienced in the face of the impossibility and lack made evident through abjection. Horrified that neither truth nor origin is pure and/or definable, the abject constructs for him or her self “indexing value, pointing to something else, some non-thing, something unknowable. The phobic object is in that sense the hallucination of nothing…[or] the impossible object (the maternal phallus, which is not)” (PoH, 41). This hallucination, then, is of the truth or origin of present experience in some immaterial, inscrutable, and most importantly, normative sphere—a state which in some fashion rationalizes and/or justifies existing social, political, and ideological structures. Because the hallucination is not just the misplacement, misidentification, or misjudgment of some existing phenomenon, but is in fact the creation of its object, Kristeva emphasizes that the object of this brand of hallucination is impossible—i.e., is nothing. The privileged example of this impossible object is the maternal phallus, which symbolizes two related ideas: maternal phallus as the non-civilized state of nature (often described as a matriarchy, where either Mother Earth or human mothers rule), or maternal phallus as the fetishized penis/phallus of the mother. The impossibility of the abject is thus tied to its association with the “enigma” or inscrutability of femininity. Though a slippery elision of the impossibility of nature/“the real” with the impossibility of comprehending the enigma of femininity, “the feminine body, the maternal body, in its most un-signifiable,

“Smells like Booty”

125

un-symbolizible aspect, shores up, in the individual, the fantasy of the loss in which he is engulfed or becomes inebriated, for want of the ability to name an object of desire” (PoH, 20). Nature is abjected; it is the constitutive exclusion whereby the boundaries of what is knowable and unknowable are founded. Thus, in a patriarchal system, things associated with femininity will fall into the category of the unknowable, for epistemic structures are not developed for this purpose (and indeed are meant to keep “femininity” out of the domain of knowledge proper). Further, in a system that privileges logos, things that are not subsumable under or controlled by it will either become threatening or intoxicating in the mystery they seem to present the thinker. This fictional state of natural/maternal authority is impossible because abjection, although prior to fetishism, never occurs in a space outside culture and language. “Completely within the being of language,” (PoH, 45) abjection, the “founding division [which] is the establishment of the subject/object division,” occurs “from within the discreteness of the phonemic chain up to and including logical and ideological constructs” (PoH, 46). The foundation of the subject/object structure, the division between nature and culture, is already within the domain of language, convention, and ideology. Just as Rousseau argued in the Second Discourse, any notion of “nature,” up to and especially including the very existence of “nature” as a concept, always results from and thus reflects the predispositions and incorrigible positions of the discourses in and among which it is situated. Kristeva’s account of abjection posits the same relationship between “nature” and society. “Sense does not emerge out of non-sense [nature, irrationality],” she argues. “On the contrary, non-sense runs through signs and sense, and the resulting manipulation of words is not an intellectual play but, without any laughter, a desperate attempt to hold on to the ultimate obstacles of a pure signifier that has been abandoned by the paternal metaphor” (PoH, 50). This “desperate attempt” takes the form of the aforementioned phobic hallucinations. While Kristeva begins her analysis of the abject with the discussion of the abjection of self, i.e., the abjection experienced by and/or “within” a single subject, she notes that it commonly appears at the socio-cultural level. For example, this form of abjection is “an artist who practices his art as a ‘business.’ Corruption is its most common, most obvious appearance. That is the socialized appearance of the abject” (PoH, 16). The rejection/trivialization of commodity art as corrupt, inauthentic, or ‘untrue’ is one of the most frequent manifestations of this socio-cultural abjection. However, what abjection’s foundation in emptiness and impossibility reveals is that all art is always-already corrupt, in the sense of lacking any true or authentic position from which art can “fall.”53 Insofar as the “subject” undergoing the process of abjection “finds the impossible within; it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being” (PoH, 5; emphasis mine), it is evident that the idea of some pure, true, uncorrupted state is a myth—is an impossibility.

126

Chapter 4

As I have mentioned earlier, Kristeva agrees with Rousseau that any description of the State of Nature or the “nature” of humanity (even a single human being) is necessarily conjectural. “A descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct [i.e., language] amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless ‘primacy’ constituted by primal repression [i.e., abjection]” (PoH, 18). Like Rousseau, who claims that it is impossible to know “nature” because the concept of nature is a myth created by society in order to justify its present state, Kristeva argues that any prelinguistic state is an “empty set,” i.e., a state whose truth can never be known because it is above all a retroactively instituted fiction that thus has no so-called “truth.” Kristeva explains: “all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded” (PoH, 5). This is to be contrasted with abjection’s “more or less fetishized product, the ‘object of want’” (PoH, 5). Abjection is the process whereby lack is established, the process through which separations and distinctions begin to be made, and thus is the creation of the loss of/want for any sort of pure, unmediated state. While abjection founds the initial same/other and subject/object boundaries and thereby brings into being subjects and objects, fetishism requires an already existent object to be fetishized. Fetishism requires complete immersion in the systems of meaning and convention—how else would the little boy know that his mother lacks a phallus, and that a phallus is something worth having? In the case of abjection, however, “even before things for him are—hence before they are signifiable—he drives them out…and constitutes his own territory, edged by the abject” (PoH, 6). The function of “exclusion” by which abjection operates is specifically not “negation,” “denial,” or “repudiation,” which (especially denial) are associated with fetishism. Repression, negation, denial—and thus fetishism—all require some thing or object to be denied, repressed, and/or negated. According to Kristeva, abjection “challenges the theory of the unconscious” because the latter “presupposes a repression of contents” (PoH, 7). In other words, the claim that something is repressed in the unconscious assumes that there exists some latent truth that is prevented from manifesting itself completely. Fetishism, which is grounded in denial, thus also makes this assumption of a hidden or veiled truth, which it is then the analyst’s job to uncover. Abjection, as the process whereby what will count as “true” is separated out from what will count as “false,” does not call upon some hidden truth or “real.” Kristeva repeatedly emphasizes that abjection is a sort of “primal repression,” that is, a form of psychic splitting prerequisite for actions like repression and denial. What lies at the core of abjection, the proto-object from which the pre-subject rids itself, is “emptiness” (PoH 6); thus, abjection is an attempt “to tear the veil of infinity but also to set up its object as inoperative. As jettisoned” (PoH 9, emphasis mine). This inoperative object is what Copjec describes as the “impossible real.” Kristeva uses the notion of abjection to demonstrate the fallacy of accounts that, like the psychoanalytic Oedipal narrative, claim to describe the transition from some pure, unmediated natural state to self-consciousness and civilization.

“Smells like Booty”

127

“No sooner sketched out,” argues Kristeva, than “such a thesis is exploded by its contradictions and flimisiness” (PoH 32). Rather than a clearly demarcated boundary between nature and culture, Kristeva argues that we “find a whole gradation within modalities of separation…a gradation constituting, in Lacan’s brilliant formulation, the object relations, insofar as it is always a means of masking, of parrying the fundamental fund of anguish” (PoH 32). The boundary between nature and culture is a “gradation” because, as the ambiguity of abjection indicates, nature is the effect or product of culture, a concept meant to abscond the fact that “nature” is itself a fiction, a lack.

Abjection Before Fetishism Since “abjection itself is a composite judgment and affect” (PoH, 10), it allows us to account for the coincidence of various social and material forces. Even though commodity fetishism can be opened up to display the ways, for example, capitalism and patriarchy work together, fetishism’s focus on exchange (“just the same”) encourages an analysis in which coincident systems of privilege are reduced to or subsumed under a single process—e.g., class, relations of production, gender. Indeed, as I discussed earlier, Irigaray’s analogical reading of Capital precluded her from discussing the relationships between gender, race, and class (the latter of which is present in other chapters of the same text). Because abjection is, among many things, a process whereby distinctions are drawn and boundaries are made, it highlights the ways in which, for example, class hierarchies and serious/pop distinctions are articulated through concurrent contestations in discourses of gender, race, sexuality, age, etc. The conflict and concurrence of the negotiations through which systems of privilege and marginalization are articulated and maintained determine what, during the process of abjection, counts as taboo or “dirty,” and what will be allowed to constitute the realm of the “proper.” For instance, as capitalism developed out of other forms of political and economic organization, those behaviors that came to be considered “savvy business”—competitiveness, assertiveness, rationality, selfinterest—accrued such value because capitalism developed within and alongside patriarchal systems of power and privilege. Similarly, those behaviors and attitudes considered “masculine” in the West were determined by capitalist structures; providing for one’s family, being competitive, doing “real” work (i.e., working in the public sphere, not the private, where women and non-white, nonbourgeois and homosexual men work), among others, came to be considered “masculine” because these were behaviors that contributed to success (read: privilege) in a capitalist system. Thus, while fetishism’s operation of recognition/denial relies upon an already-established determination of what counts as “real” (genuine social relations; male anatomy) and what as “fake” (material relations mistaken as social relations; maternal phallus), abjection is the process whereby coincident social and material forces parse out what accedes to the status of “true” and what is rejected as taboo.54

128

Chapter 4

The discourse of commodity fetishism does not have the analytical resources necessary to examine how it is informed by and coincident with discourses of gender and race. As I have just demonstrated, commodity fetishism deploys real/fake and active/passive hierarchies; while these hierarchies are structured by white, masculine privilege, the discourse of commodity fetishism is unable to account for this in its own language. True, class is frequently identified as the determining factor—bourgeois music is “serious,” whereas that performed for and by the working classes is “pop.” However, class alone is insufficient for explaining the logic whereby the “status” of musical works and listeners is determined. Not only does this class-only model overlook the coincidence of social identities (i.e., the fact that class never appears isolated from race, gender, sexuality, etc.), it is particularly inadequate to a historical moment wherein “classical” music has become commodified and certain forms of rock, hip hop, and country music have become canonized. In the same way that it is overly simplistic to posit one primary social identity (e.g., class) onto which all others are then mapped, it is equally incorrect to think that social hierarchies pre-exist aesthetic hierarchies, and that the latter merely express or reflect the former. Aesthetic values are one example among many coincident relations of power and privilege that, in their coincidence, co-produce one another. Thus, discourses including (but not limited to) patriarchy, heterosexism, white racism, colonialism, and ageism work in concert with capitalism and the arbiters of musical “expertise” to establish certain musical practices as belonging to the privileged, and certain others—e.g., those most closely identified with profit and embodiment—as those of the masses. “Artistic experience,” argues Kristeva, “is rooted in the abject it utters and by the same token purifies” (PoH 17). Hierarchies are established through abjection: in the same movement, two supposedly exclusive terms are both articulated and invested with social privilege on the one hand or disgust on the other. For Kristeva, abjection is the co-articulation of social privilege and aesthetic values; indeed, insofar as abjection separates out the “clean” from the “disgusting,” its work is aesthetic (i.e., disgust is related to the gustatory is related to taste). These aesthetic categories—disgust and the clean/proper—do not and cannot pre-exist the process of abjection, if only for the fact that their functioning requires the separation accomplished in abjection (between subject and object, inside and outside). I need to be able to distinguish something as “other” in order to invest it with a taboo, just as my disgust requires an object. Thus, because this process of abjection describes the coincidence of the aesthetic with the social, it provides a more accurate account of the interactions among social identities and aesthetic values than the discourse of fetishism, which assumes existent social hierarchies and (both consciously and unconsciously) maps aesthetics onto them. I’m not arguing that commodity fetishism doesn’t happen. Rather, my claim is that abjection is a prerequisite to fetishism: you can’t substitute a “fake” for a “real” thing until the process of abjection has delimited what counts as “real” in the first place. Fetishism alone doesn’t give us a complete or fully

“Smells like Booty”

129

accurate account of the aesthetic’s social dimension, or, more narrowly even, of commodity music. Fetishism must be supplemented by abjection. Because the forms of abjection discussed above have centered around the exclusion and devaluation of the “feminized popular,” it seems to follow that a re-valuation of traditionally denigrated feminine identities would also require a re-valuation of mass culture and commercial art. In the next section, I argue that, in spite of many feminists’ anti-capitalist leanings, the devaluation of commercial popular music as such both (1) marginalizes and trivializes the accomplishments of many women in one of the few domains in which women have had significant cultural impact, and (2) often institutes hierarchies among women based on age, race, class, and educational attainment.

Pop as Feminist Project To revalue “regressive listening,” we must take seriously the merits of the cultural products marginalized by their classification as an abjected, feminized, trivialized popular. Modes of listening that acknowledge the value of enjoyment, of physical as well as intellectual engagement with music, must be recognized and respected.55 Insofar as all music is devoid of any “real” (in the Lacanian sense) or “purely musical” content, it lacks any “use-value” (in the Marxist sense). A significant part of art’s value is its social value (or what Marx would call its “exchange value”).56 To somewhat flip Adorno’s script, it is in this sense that all music is “commodity” music. Instead of following Adorno’s lead and viewing this as a tragic “regression” in listening (or, a resignation to the impossibility of active listening), it is my contention that, within and because of fetishized commodity relations, people do exercise agency and creativity in their relations to commodities and to one another. It’s not a loss, but a positive thing that we transact our social relations through and in terms of art, or that art is one modality of the social. For feminists, then, our task is to constantly interrogate what the supposed presence of art’s “impossible real” is attempting to cover over, and why.57 The re(e)valuation of commodity music and “regressive” listening is a feminist project not only because women dominate both the performance and consumption of popular music, but also because of the historic feminization of “the popular.” The devaluation of popular music—music made by and for feminized, abjected subjects—both reflects and reinforces the systematic devaluation of girls and those things considered girl-like. As Ilana Nash argues, “The claim of idol music’s inherent invalidity is merely a front for what critics really consider invalid: young girls, the single least respected group among middleclass whites.”58 Enjoying and advocating the pleasures of pop music is part of a feminist consciousness because “it asserts the values of an oppressed group and demands that girls’ subjectivities be heard” (Nash, 148). Thus, while feminists

130

Chapter 4

such as Irigaray might want to condemn the exchange of commodities as part and parcel of the capitalist patriarchy, we should be careful not to thereby condemn those people and cultural products which have been situated within capitalism as commodities. For example, we would avoid “idiot reader” constructions, such as those assumed in Kristeva’s critique of the “society of the spectacle,” whose very articulation attempts to render passive and powerless artists and consumers who are generally quite engaged in cultural production and criticism. As I have shown in my reading of West and Jay-Z, commodification is not necessarily disempowering—in fact, it may seem to be so only from the perspective of a relatively privileged subject. Following Copjec, we see that the ideal of the autonomous, self-determining, “panoptic” subject is nothing but a myth—a myth produced by and in support of the privileged white heteromasculine bourgeois subject. Anti-racist, anti-homophobic feminisms committed to economic justice cannot perpetuate the assumption that commodification and mass culture are inauthentic and disempowering, because this view is inconsistent with the philosophical and political commitments of such feminisms. In the epilogue, I flesh out in further detail why feminist philosophers need to concern themselves with popular culture. In the following chapter, I turn to Sarah Kofman’s reading of Nietzsche, which suggests an argument for the philosophical value of popular music.

Chapter 5

“My Foot Feels the Need for Rhythm”: Nietzsche and the Feminized Popular1

Like Rousseau, Nietzsche is concerned with the relationship between music and language, and uses a notion of conjecture to critique a prevalent musician’s false idea of musical immediacy. While Nietzsche’s rejection of Wagner is closely tied to his deconstruction of singular Truth and Western metaphysics, what particularly interests me in Nietzsche’s music aesthetics is his use of the body as a basis for the re-valuation of a specifically feminized popular music. Because, for Nietzsche, music is primarily a corporeal, affective discourse—in other words, because music both is and is about resonating bodies—rhythmic, accessible music whose telos is “dancing” is superior, both physiologically and aesthetically, to complex, indecipherable music whose telos is “posing.”2 That is to say, Nietzsche argues for the value of music that entertains (dances) above music that makes a philosophical claim (strikes a pose). Often directly associated with the figure of woman and/or femininity, stereotypically feminine traits such as superficiality, charm, affect, embodied response (indeed, dancing), and pleasure as an end in itself are what Nietzsche values most in music. Not only does Nietzsche provide us with an interesting historical example of an aesthetic that explicitly values feminized popular music (such as Opera Buffa), his work also suggests some productive avenues for addressing contemporary popular music. In this chapter, I take up Sarah Kofman’s reading of Nietzsche in Nietzsche and Metaphor in order to further examine the role of the body in Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner. Wagner’s music is to be faulted because it is more interested in striking poses (i.e., making Truth claims) than in dancing; in other words, Wagner’s music is motivated by a specious will-to-truth, while superficial, light dance music realizes, like “woman,” that Truth is itself an error. Accordingly, after my discussion of Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner, I then examine his argument for the positive valuation of Italian opera (Opera Buffa, or comic opera) over German opera (Muskidrama, Die Gesamtkunstwerk). Nietzsche’s advocacy of popular music is intimately tied to the conceptual work accomplished by his metaphorical use of “woman” and “femininity”; Nietzsche is not just asserting 131

132

Chapter 5

the aesthetic value of popular music in general, but a specifically feminized popular. I conclude the chapter with some reflections on contemporary issues emerging from the coincidence of music and social identity.

Resonating Bodies: The Case of Wagner Nietzsche’s main objection to Wagner’s music (apart from his other ideological differences with the composer) is that Wagner is more of a rhetorician than a musician, and that he subordinates an opera’s music to its libretto. In other words, Nietzsche faults Wagner for believing that music can express or represent an idea. As Kofman argues in Nietzsche and Metaphor, "This is what Nietzsche will later condemn in the music of Wagner: as a musician he was a rhetorician, making the music serve the text and seeking above all to be ‘expressive,’ to give a commentary on an idea using a thousand symbols” (NM, 10). For Nietzsche, music is not expressive in a representational manner: it does not “re-present” the ideas of the libretto in the same way that words and concepts do not re-present material objects and events. Nietzsche rejects Wagner’s music aesthetics as one aspect of the broader “will-to-truth” that he critiques throughout his oeuvre; thus, just as truth arises from error, the “original” exists only as an after-effect of the “copy.” In the same way that feminists argue that gender is performative—i.e., it neither subtends nor pre-exists behavior, but is created through this behavior—Nietzsche’s theory of music is performative. It is only through the process of expression that any expressed content arises. Nietzsche argues that music should be, above all else, musical (rather than, say, philosophical); moreover, music should be judged on how it is performed and on the affective responses it generates, not on the content it “expresses.” Claiming that “My objections to the music of Wagner are physiological objections,” and that “aesthetics is nothing but a kind of applied physiology,” Nietzsche frames his critique of Wagner’s expressivism in terms of two opposed types of bodily comportment: posing (striking a pose, positing a claim) and dancing (performing, being entertained).3

Wagner: The Poser is a Poseur Asking, “What is it that my whole body really expects of music?”, Nietzsche establishes the body as the measure of musical merit.4 Whether music is “good” or “bad” is determined by one’s physiological response to it. According to Nietzsche, “Wagner makes music sick,” because he is more interested in positing philosophical claims, i.e., in posing, than in writing music.5 “[I]f it was Wagner’s theory that ‘the drama is the end, the music is always a mere means,’” Nietzsche claims that “his practice was always, from beginning to end, ‘the pose is the end; the drama, also the music, is always merely a means to that’” (GS,

“My Foot Feels the Need for Rhythm”

133

sec. 368).6 To strike a pose is to make a philosophical claim; it is a statement wherein “the desire for being prompted creation” (GS, section 370). Wagner thought he could write operas that represented The Truth behind existence; that is to say, he desired fixed, stable, permanent truths, Being in all its metaphysical rigidity. The poses his works struck supposedly “expressed” this “Truth.” A performative music, on the other hand, would be motivated by “the desire for destruction, for change, for future, for becoming” (GS, section 370). Genuine music, in Nietzsche’s view, can’t stay still—it has to move around, to dance. Nietzsche explains, I no longer breathe easily once this [Wagnerian] music begins to affect me; that my foot soon resents it and rebels; my foot feels the need for rhythm, dance, march; it demands of music first of all those delights which are found in good walking, striding, leaping, and dancing. But does not my stomach protest, too? my heart? my circulation? my intestines? Do I not become hoarse as I listen?” (GS, section 268; emphasis mine).

Given Romantic notions of genius and creativity, one would think that the most “serious” and important objections to a composer’s work would pertain to matters of artistry, virtuosity, creativity, and execution—matters which are usually considered feats of the intellect. One might find Wagner’s harmonies innovative and challenging, his instrumentation original, and the vision and virtuosity required for completing such massive works super-human. Nietzsche’s critique here is, on the contrary, physiological. Grounded in music’s affective character, this analysis takes issue with the real corporeal affects and effects of Wagner’s music and the ideas within it. In attempting to realize metaphysical concepts in music, Wagner has created pieces which are, judged on the basis of affect, bad. Not only does he forget the body, his music corrupts and atrophies it—it is, in Nietzsche’s terms, fundamentally undanceable. Indeed, it is nowadays common knowledge that prolonged periods of inactivity (such as long plane trips) can lead to serious health problems (such as blood clots). In subordinating the actual performance of music to the staking of a (in Nietzsche’s mind, specious) philosophical claim, Wagner ceases to be a musician: privileging the pose over the dance, Wagner is a musical poseur.

Cold Baths: Swimming and Dancing Nietzsche further elaborates his “applied physiology” by contrasting dancing, which characterizes well-structured and pleasurable music, with swimming, which he says is characteristic of badly-composed music. Swimming is the movement exhibited by extended tonality and infinite melody (aspects we might admire for their harmonic innovation and technical complexity), whereas dancing is appropriate to the light, measured, regularly cadential pieces characteristic

134

Chapter 5

of classical tonality and the popular dance music from which this originated. Like Tristan und Isolde, in which the listener spends nearly the whole first act floating along unending sequences of leitmotifs while wading through thick, dense harmonic progressions, before being firmly grounded by a root-position tonic, swimming is an activity where participants must find their way through an amorphous mass.7 What is called “infinite melody,” argues Nietzsche, can be clarified by an illustration. One walks into the sea, gradually loses one’s secure footing, and finally surrenders oneself to the elements without reservation: one must swim. In older music, what one had to do in the dainty, or solemn, or fiery back and forth, quicker and slower, was something quite different, namely, to dance…Richard Wagner wanted a different kind of movement; he overthrew the physiological presupposition of previous music. Swimming, floating—no longer walking and dancing (NCW, 666).

In the baroque and early classical periods (the infancy of tonality), instrumental music was structured according to renaissance dance forms such as the minuet, chaconne, tarantella, and many others. As these dances were forms of popular entertainment, in order for this music to be danceable to the general public it must be accessible. Hence, regular phrases and periods, regular cadences, balance, and measure were all required.8 To be creative within such strict formal demands necessitated, according to Nietzsche, a much greater degree of talent and intelligence than that demonstrated by composers of more “complex” music.9 Thus, there exists a distinction between [b]eing profound and seeming profound.—Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water (GS, section 173).

Wagner, who writes in a harmonically complex and texturally dense style, believes that he is more profound than, say, Mozart, who wrote in short, clear, phrases and brilliant, relatively transparent textures. Although empirically more simple, works that are accessible, danceable, and entertaining evince a greater degree of artistry, for their composers had to possess the intellectual and technical acuity to clearly, concisely, and precisely realize their ideas. This is why “we are dissatisfied with the operatic composer who cannot find melodies for the highest sentiments but only a sentimental ‘natural’ stammering and screaming” (GS, section 80; emphasis mine). It’s not easy, after all, to write a catchy hook or a hit track. In contrast to the “crowd’s” desire for nonexistent “profundity,” Nietzsche voices a preference for “quick baths” over swimming, and the superiority of “light,” superficial music over Wagner’s seriousness. He explains:

“My Foot Feels the Need for Rhythm”

135

I approach deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again. That one does not get to the depths that way, not deep enough down, is the superstition of those afraid of the water, the enemies of cold water; they speak without experience. The freezing cold makes one swift. And to ask this incidentally: does a matter necessarily remain ununderstood and unfathomed merely because it has been touched only in flight, glanced at, in a flash? (GS, section 381).

Used to describe the experience of extended tonality and infinite melody, swimming evinces a lack of foundation, regularity, and measure, for it is mired in inaccessible depths; dancing, on the other hand, is like a cold bath, for it requires nimble, precise movement and aims for only the most “superficial” engagement. Nietzsche’s privileging of “cold baths” and “light” music follows from his critique of Wagner’s expressivism. “Would it not be rather probable,” Nietzsche argues, “that precisely the most superficial and external aspect of existence—what is most apparent, its skin and sensualization—would be grasped first—and might even be the only thing that allowed itself to be grasped?” (GS, section 373). The point of music is its affective pleasure, “skin and sensualization.” If one is quickly in and quickly out of the water, there is no time to strike poses or to get carried away. “[L]ong before there were any philosophers,” Nietzsche explains, “music was credited with the power of discharging the emotions” (GS, section 84)—e.g., the theories of Pythagoras. Music should be judged on its ability to produce and shape affect, i.e., as a performance, not an expression. Accordingly, Nietzsche argues that “applied physiologists” should be more concerned with “what is beautiful in it” than with “what is proved in it” (GS, section 81). Importantly, beauty is often seen as a superficial, passive sort of pleasure; Kant, for example, considers the beautiful to be less aesthetically valuable than the sublime for just these reasons. Beauty, superficiality, supposed passivity, corporeality, and “mere” pleasure are also strongly associated with stereotypical femininity, both in Kantian aesthetics and in Western culture generally.10 In the next section, I examine Nietzsche’s re-valuation of pop music’s “superficiality” and affectivity in the context of his use of the metaphors “woman” and “femininity.” Because the feminine is denigrated and devalued by European philosophy for the same reasons and in the same way that popular music is, Nietzsche’s music aesthetics advocates popular music precisely because it is a feminized cultural discourse.

Pop Is the Tops According to Schopenhauer, music was valuable precisely because it could illustrate or express the Truth (i.e., the Ideas) with less interference/mediation than any other art form. Consequently, Nietzsche characterizes German opera as

136

Chapter 5

primarily expressive and motivated by conventional Romantic theories of aesthetic value: virtuosity, innovation and originality, profundity, and so on. Nietzsche privileges Italian opera (Opera Buffa, or comic opera) over the German tradition precisely because the former makes no claims to be concerned with anything other than beauty and entertainment. Rather than attempt to express profound truths or demonstrate virtuosic mastery, Italian opera is motivated by “delight masks and the good conscience in using any kind of mask” (GS, section 77). Italian opera aims after exuberant enjoyment of art as art (and not as philosophy): the point is to construct a beautiful mask, to perform, not to express or reveal some profound reality.

Opera Buffa vs. Die Gesamtkunstwerk As Nietzsche sees it, Italian operas, are the self-proclaimed heirs of the Greek theatrical tradition, and thus evince a fundamental unnaturalness and artificiality. In Nietzsche’s analysis, the ancient Greeks endured the unnaturalness of dramatic verse with rapture…Thanks to the Greeks, all of us have now become accustomed to unnatural stage convention just as we tolerate, and tolerate gladly, thanks to the Italians, that other unnatural convention: passion that sings (GS, section 80; first emphasis mine).

The primary accomplishment of Greek tragedy was its invention of a highly artificial and counterintuitive (at least for native speakers of non-tonal European languages) forms of expression: singing, recitative, and carefully-crafted oratory. In other words, they invented non-re-presentational performance. From this, we have developed a need we cannot satisfy in reality: to hear people in the most difficult situations speak well and at length…where life approaches abysses and men in reality usually lose their heads and certainly linguistic felicity. This kind of deviation from nature is perhaps the most agreeable repast for human pride: for its sake man loves art as the expression of a lofty, heroic unnaturalness and convention…The Athenian went to the theater in order to hear beautiful speeches (GS, section 80).

In Nietzsche’s mind, the end of Greek tragedy was to convey not truths, but affect and pleasure. If the Greeks had been strictly concerned with mimesis, then the chorus would never have played such a large role in the action or narration of their theater pieces, for nothing like either of these phenomena exists in the everyday world. Hence, this ancient Greek art was judged not by its “profundity” or “realism,” but by precisely its unnaturalness. “Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity…Are we not, precisely in this respect, Greeks?” (NCW, 683). In eliding the Italian tradition with that of the ancient Greeks, Nietzsche argues that the former manifests the same recognition of and delight in unnaturalness as Nietzsche purports to find in the latter.11 Genealogical facts aside, the crux of Nietzsche’s argument is that all opera is in principle unnatural:

“My Foot Feels the Need for Rhythm”

137

although they are caricatures of reality, the characters in an opera don’t behave as real people. In instances of great passion, emotion, and profundity, how often do you break out into song? The very principle of opera—thinking and communicating in song—is contrary to lived experience; it is fundamentally artificial. Thus, it should be obvious that opera is not capable of providing an accurate representation of human existence. The point of the songs is their beauty, their affective dimension, not their content. Thus, Nietzsche argues that, with just a little more impertinence, Rossini would have had everybody sing nothing but la-la-la-la—and that would have made good, rational sense. Confronted with the characters in an opera, we are not supposed to take their word for it, but the sound! That is the difference, that is the beautiful unnaturalness for whose sake one goes to the opera (GS, section 80; emphasis mine).

If music is incapable of expressing content, and if its primary aim is enjoyment and entertainment, then it doesn’t matter what is sung, only how beautifully it is sung. In this sense, then, Italian opera never poses—it only dances. Indeed, the argument, the “good, rational sense” of the Italian opera is precisely its unabashed, celebratory vulgarity, its privileging of delight and beauty above all else. Most importantly for my purposes here, it is precisely Italian opera’s vulgarity—its accessibility and its emphasis on entertainment—that Nietzsche values.12 Like Italian opera, woman/femininity is also associated with masks, superficiality, and artifice throughout Nietzsche’s work. For example, Nietzsche says that women “consider the superficiality of existence its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them merely a veil over this ‘truth’” (GS, section 64). Nietzsche claims that “music is a woman” (NCW, 668) because what he values in music—beauty, corporeal affect, entertainment, superficiality—is identical to what is represented by his metaphors of women and femininity (particularly in the works where he extensively discusses music). Nietzsche’s music aesthetics champions popular music because it is a feminized cultural discourse.

The Feminized Popular Nietzsche’s use of “femininity” and “woman” is inconsistent; Derrida, Kofman, and others have extensively treated this idea. However, for my purposes in this book I focus on his use of femininity/woman only insofar as it pertains to his critique of “serious” music.13 Calling upon ancient associations between femininity and popular music—music, for example, performed by female flute players, which serves to bracket the discussion of love in Plato’s Symposium—Nietzsche exploits European culture’s trivialization of music by, for, or “like” women (i.e., reflects stereotypical notions of femininity), to elaborate his notion of “active,” affirmative musical practice.14

138

Chapter 5

As I have discussed in the previous chapter, “girls’ music” is devalued because it is assumed to be overly simplistic, sentimental, and evocative of bodily response. Nietzsche, similar to some second- and third-wave feminisms, embraces these stereotypically “feminine” traits as a sign of excellence and enjoyment. Arguing that “We say the strongest things simply” (GS, section 226), Nietzsche claims that simplicity and accessibility are signs of willpower, discipline, and genius. Those who write overly complex, overwrought pieces are incapable of imposing upon themselves and/or following strict stylistic rules. It could be argued that Nietzsche is merely inverting privilege: “genius” is signaled not by complexity, but by simplicity. However, intellectual and creative strength are not themselves sufficient to qualify a piece as genuinely worthy of musical merit. For Nietzsche, the best music, the most preferable music, is also accessible, affective, and enjoyable to the body as well as the mind. Anticipating, in a way, George Clinton’s well-known pronouncement “free your ass and your mind will follow,” Nietzsche locates the transformative, “active” character of music in its ability to work on and through the body: One has to suffer the fate of music as of an open wound.—Of what do I suffer when I suffer the fate of music? That music has been done out of its worldtransfiguring, Yes-saying character, so that it is music of decadence and no longer the flute of Dionysus (EH, 317; emphasis mine).

From the beginning of this passage, Nietzsche posits the problem of music as a physiological problem—a wound in need of treatment. The nature of this wound? The excision of active, affirmative qualities from music. Moreover, the symptom of this wound is that it is no longer like the “flute of Dionysus.” In both Greek mythology and Nietzsche’s own writings, Dionysus is associated either directly with women (e.g., the maenads) or with stereotypically feminine characteristics such as embodiment and irrationality (the foil to Apollo’s “masculine” rationality). While the instrument associated with the god Apollo (and also the Apollonian) was the kithara, a harp-like instrument primarily used to accompany texted song, the instrument of Dionysus was the flute-like aulos, which obviously could not be played while singing and was often used to accompany dance. Unlike its counterpart, associated with words, language, and rationality, the flute of Dionysus was used to move the body and incite frenzy— all characteristics stereotypical of “femininity.” What Nietzsche finds problematic about European art music is that these so-called “feminine” traits— embodiment, enthusiasm, simplicity, accessibility—are absent.15 Like the “serious,” reactive will-to-truth subject to critique in the Genealogy, a “serious” attitude toward music perverts it, ignoring music’s distinctive qualities while positing an impossible expressivity as its telos. As is suggested in Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche in Spurs, Nietzsche advocates that we all approach art as “women” do—skeptical of the notion of truth, and thus resistant to claims that art represents either a visible or intelligible real.16 According to Derrida, Nietzsche derives women’s attitude toward art (dis-

“My Foot Feels the Need for Rhythm”

139

tinct from a “feminine” perspective) from women’s experiences with patriarchal culture in general. The utter failure of patriarchal discourses to represent women (both in the political and symbolic senses) gives them grounds to doubt the legitimacy and accuracy of the other “truths” it purportedly proffers: to be a “woman” in Western patriarchal culture is to know its claim to the “truth” of woman/women is obviously incorrect, and thus to suspect that this might not be its only error. As Derrida explains, “she is woman precisely because she herself does not believe in truth itself, because she does not believe in what she is, in what she is believed to be, in what she thus is not” (Derrida, Spurs, 53). This description of the relationship of women spectators to patriarchal culture is in some ways similar to bell hooks’s notion of the “oppositional gaze.” I do not mean to suggest that “women” in general or Nietzsche’s or Derrida’s “woman” occupy the same relation to looking as black women do; however, all these theorists elaborate conclusions that touch on the same general idea—namely, that women’s positions of exclusion from mainstream society give them potentially radical perspectives on what their society takes as “given” or “normal.” Because black female filmgoers saw neither themselves nor their experiences accurately represented (when present at all) in mainstream cinema, hooks argues that they were less likely to suspend their disbelief, swept away by the film, assume that it is a plausible reflection of reality.17 The source of these inaccuracies—within both mainstream cinema and feminist film theory—is an ignorance of the ways in which concepts and experiences of aesthetic pleasure coincide with concepts and experiences of race, gender, class, and sexuality. (Indeed, it is not only Mulvey’s account that fails to recognize the coincidence of gender with race and class, but Nietzsche’s and Derrida’s as well.) Nietzsche’s music aesthetics values everything traditional European aesthetics devalues: affective pleasure, entertainment, superficiality, accessibility, simplicity, beauty for its own sake, and, of course, femininity. Practicing aesthetics as “applied physiology,” Nietzsche locates embodiment and physiological response as the basis of his musical and philosophical evaluations. Insofar as one’s body must be trained to respond to music according to accepted cultural practices and values,18 Nietzsche’s re-valuation of the popular requires a revaluation of femininity. It stands to reason that much of the music produced by a normatively masculine culture would both produce and be produced by dominant masculinity (indeed, the entirety of this book would stand as evidence for this claim). So, to unreflectively engage in aesthetics as “applied physiology,” one would be applying standards and assumptions of normative masculine bodily comportment to music. As Christine Battersby and others have argued, this is, essentially, what Western aesthetics has done for much of its history.19 Nietzsche’s turn away from intellect-centered aesthetics (such as Kant’s) to a corporeal aesthetics indicates a change in aesthetic values themselves (and not just in epistemology or methodology) only because he is, in the same move, decentering normative masculinity and adopting a stereotypically feminized (and de-valued) bodily comportment. That is to say, Nietzsche’s popular is a specifi-

140

Chapter 5

cally and intentionally feminized one (and that’s a good thing, both for him and for us).

The Conjectural Body and the Feminized Popular In this book, I have argued that race, gender, and music do not exist independently and a priori of their coincidence, and it follows that these terms themselves are “conjectures” about nonexistent but theoretically and politically useful concepts. While previous chapters have focused on arguing for this claim, I now want to think about some general practical concerns regarding my theory of the conjectural body. Using the disciplined, educated, and acculturated body as our measure, we are able to make more honest and accurate aesthetic judgments as well as political decisions. Recognizing that our aesthetic judgments arise within complex socio-political systems of privilege, one might be tempted to abandon any and all such evaluations. This is, however, impossible: we do and should make judgments about music. Similarly, we do and should act as though we have bodies marked by gender, race, class, and sexuality. Recognizing the complex coincidence and mutual constitution of resonating, raced, and gendered bodies, the theory of the conjectural body provides a framework for describing and analyzing music as a necessarily political and embodied phenomenon. Aesthetic knowledge is not a solely cognitive or intellectual exercise—it is one of the nonthematized physiological knowledges that constitute one’s corporeal schema, or what Linda Alcoff calls “interpretive horizon.” According to Alcoff, one’s interpretive horizon is the “unconscious physical shorthand” that “integrates and unifies our movements.”20 While Alcoff argues that one’s interpretive horizon is shaped by one’s social identity (i.e., by race and gender, among other things), my theory of the conjectural body indicates that this “unconscious physical shorthand” also includes aesthetics, e.g., one’s sense of or for music. In the same way that gender and race are embodied discourses, aesthetic perception and preference are part of (and thus inform) our bodily comportment. The work of aesthetic discernment and judgment occurs on, in, and through our bodies—this is what Nietzsche recognized in his claim that aesthetics is applied physiology. If we judge music in terms of its effects and affects on the body, then the determination that “this is good” or “this is bad music” is not the positing of a claim about the piece in itself. Rather, to confer aesthetic value on a work is to recognize its significance for people whose desires are educated in a particular way, such that the work registers as meaningful for them—or for oneself. Insofar as “good” music is usually evocative of pleasure (which does not necessarily correspond to “beauty”: Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation are grating and “noisy,” but are intensely pleasurable for many listeners) and “bad” music elicits contempt, disgust, and even abject hatred or fear, the education and discipline of one’s body (e.g., perceptual faculties; the

“My Foot Feels the Need for Rhythm”

141

ability to recognize pitch) and its desires (tastes) is a logical foundation for aesthetic evaluation—if only for the simple fact that it seems to already serve as this basis. Aesthetic judgments have always assessed modes of embodiment; the theory of the conjectural body just makes this explicit. Jay-Z’s 2009 track “DOA (Death of Autotune)” overtly takes music to be a form of bodily comportment and assesses the use of Autotune as a mode or style of bodily comportment (and not as a musical phenomenon).21 Specifically, Jay argues that Autotune is to be rejected because it is soft, easy, popular, and nonconfrontational, whereas “real” hip hop is hard, violent, and masculine. Gendered language and imagery abound in DOA. Feminized terms (Autotune, melody, tight pants) are contrasted with masculinized terms (violence, male anatomy, “hardness” as bodily comportment and “hardness” as in un-melodic difficult listening). Autotune is consistently feminized throughout the track, and is set in contrast to Jay’s macho sound and stylings. Jay characterizes users of Autotune as both dressing and sounding like women, as though Autotune itself engendered feminine bodily comportment. According to Jay, users of Autotune dress and sound like women because they lack male genitals (thus, no need to tuck, and no deep voice).22 The use of Autotune is evidence of not only a feminine voice, but a lack of properly masculine aggression. Jay is equating Autotune with the lack of “balls” in both the literal and metaphorical senses. To use Autotune is to be soft, easy, light, and trendy; it is the opposite of masculine aggression, toughness, difficulty, virtuosity, and expertise. Thus, sounding something like an uncanny latter-day Adorno, Jay feminizes commercially successful pop music by opposing it to “hard” masculine/macho corporeal styles. He also argues that chart-topping popular music is “easy” in a number of senses: easy to digest, easy to listen to, easy to make, etc. As such, these #1 records aren’t properly masculine—they need to grow some “balls” and become a little more difficult to make and digest. Jay’s consistent devaluation of femininity and, indeed, a feminized popular music, is thoroughly problematic. However, DOA remains interesting because it takes aesthetics as a matter of bodily comportment and evaluates musical practices as forms of gendered embodiment. It is an instance of aesthetics as “applied physiology.” If the conjectural body is imagined as the basis for or instrument of aesthetic judgment, it is difficult, if not impossible, to maintain serious/popular hierarchies and the stereotypical passivization of the latter’s consumers and producers. First, if it is the conjectural body that informs aesthetic judgment, then the mind-body dualism that makes possible such fictions as “disinterested contemplation” or “mere sensory titillation” is untenable. In this case, then, each and every act of aesthetic creation and judgment arises from this coincidence of what we conjecturally term “mind” and “body.” Consequently, devaluing and dismissing someone’s creation of or response to music as “unthinking” or “passive” is no longer an option, for this conjectural understanding of the body demonstrates that acculturation, education, and indeed thought are internal to physical and/or emotional responses to music. All aesthetic activity is precisely that—

142

Chapter 5

an act, an instance of agency. Insofar as it reconfigures conventional notions of aesthetic agency, the theory of the conjectural body might serve as a useful resource in examining the nature of “creativity” and “authorship” in the era of the readymade, mixtapes, sampling, mash-ups, and even video game mod(ifying) culture. I have offered just a few suggestions as to how my theory of the conjectural body could be applied to issues both political and aesthetic, for it is this pragmatic dimension that motivates the theory in the first place. While it is undeniable that “race” and “gender” have no purely empirical foundation (e.g., there is no race gene), and that “music” has no necessary basis in the physics of sound, it is also irrefutable that, empirically, raced bodies, gendered bodies, and resonating bodies do exist as the effects of social policy, individual identity/subjectivity, convention, and the everyday relations among humans. If I want to engage problems concerning raced, gendered, and resonating bodies, I must engage these terms. The theory of the conjectural body presented in this book allows me to do precisely that: to engage these terms in ways which (1) allow for an accurate representation of their complexly coincident relationship, and (2) engage the social to both historicize the material and to check our ideological blind spots. A concept both theoretically accurate and politically expedient, the conjectural body is an important instrument for understanding, experiencing, and acting upon the intersection of raced, gendered, and resonating bodies.

Epilogue

“Gimme [no] More” of the Flute-Girls: On the Intersecting Marginalization of Women and Pop Culture in Philosophy

I next propose that the flute-girl who came in just now be dismissed: let her pipe to herself or, if she likes, to the women-folk within, but let us seek our entertainment today in conversation (Plato, Symposium 176e).1

In the autumn of 2007, The Chronicle of Higher Education published one article about the severe paucity of women of color among the ranks of tenure-track and tenured philosophers2 and one article about philosophy’s problematic relationship with popular culture.3 Also around this time, Britney Spears’s “comeback” single “Gimme More” was released.4 I would like to suggest that the two aforementioned “problems” are related. In the United States, philosophy is, as a discipline, largely unwilling to take pop culture as a source/domain of serious philosophical interrogation for many of the same reasons that it is largely unwilling to take women and people of color (particularly women of color) as capable of “serious” philosophical analysis. Many of the points I raise in this essay are new to philosophy, even if old and taken for granted in other disciplines in academe. However, that these twenty-plus-year-old arguments—while fundamental to feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, and the various other disciplines in which they were developed (e.g., musicology, art history)—continue to remain so far outside the philosophical mainstream is itself evidence of philosophy’s active (if largely structural and unconscious) resistance to and/or ignorance of these ideas. Just as feminist art historians have argued that there are “no great women artists” because the definition of art and artistry precludes women/femininity from consideration as such, the problem here lies with the definition of philosophy and philosophical activity itself. I focus my analysis specifically on the United States because its racial and cultural politics has been and continues to be overdetermined by a black/white binary wherein white culture appropriates aspects of black cultural production in an attempt to “reinvigorate” or “rejuvenate” what are perceived to be staid or 143

144

Epilogue

inaccessible/unaffective forms.5 This logic is reproduced in Stephen Asma’s review of the “Philosophy and Popular Culture” book series insofar as pop culture is considered to be the “sugar” or “spice” that invigorates philosophical problems, making them palatable for non-specialists. Asma notes that, for the books in the series, “the show or band” to which a volume is devoted “is not an intellectual end in itself…the goal is to give us a better understanding of…philosophy.” Assuming (wrongly) that pop culture has no properly philosophical content, both Asma and William Irwin, the editor of the book series, think that pop culture’s only possible contribution to philosophy is to capture people’s interest. In his collection of essays on philosophy and popular culture, Irwin describes both this book and the Blackwell series as “a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down…We need to start with popular culture and use it to bring people to philosophy,”6 and says that his books are like “training wheels on a bicycle,”7 the bicycle being “properly” philosophical texts (like Descartes’s Meditations). If philosophy suffers from a terrible image problem—being dull, dry, staid, stodgy, more like Thales than the Thracian maid who laughed at him—then using pop culture to unpack “important” philosophical claims and problems is a good marketing tool. The book series is presented as using pop culture only as a particularly exciting example of some “bigger” or “more difficult” philosophical issue. Accordingly, pop culture stands as philosophy’s exotic “other”—like the flute-girls at Agathon’s party, who are amusing but must be dismissed before the “real” heart of Plato’s Symposium can begin.8 Tellingly, Irwin sexualizes pop culture by wondering if pop culture’s ability to make philosophy more accessible and attractive proves it “too dangerous a liaison.”9 Just as Carmen’s exotic feminine seductiveness overwhelmed and destroyed Don Jose, pop culture’s “seductiveness” threatens, in Irwin’s mind, to obliterate any possibility of “serious” philosophical reflection. Why is pop culture’s “threat” to philosophy consistently posed in terms of the supposed “threat” that female sexuality, especially the sexuality of non-White women, poses to patriarchy? And what if (as I have shown in the latter parts of chapter 4) pop culture actually proffered some interesting philosophical content of its own? Before I attend to the question of pop culture’s philosophical content, I must address the objection that, with all my discussion of “exoticism,” “the other,” race, and gender, I am engaging “cultural studies” and not “real philosophy,” as this hierarchical distinction is a key aspect of Asma’s article and Irwin’s introduction to (and essay in) his collection. While Asma admits that “good scholarship was, and still is, done under the assumption that, say, the blues (to pick a random example) is as important for academic study as chamber music,” it is unclear whether he considers this otherwise “good scholarship” to be “philosophical.” In a rather patronizing tone, Asma characterizes cultural studies as “decoding the semiotics of the pop narratives” by “engaging the margins,” “‘negotiat[ing] boundaries’ or ‘problematiz[ing] discourses,’” and opposes this to “something much more refreshing and radical:…giv[ing] arguments,” i.e., doing “real” philosophy. Now, I think it is largely uncontroversial to claim that all good scholarship makes an argument of some sort, whether it is natural scien-

“Gimme [no] More” of the Flute-Girls

145

tists providing theoretical and empirical evidence to make a case for a particular hypothesis, or musicologists offering theoretical and empirical evidence to make a case for the significance of a particular interpretation of a piece of music. Philosophers also, in the course of their argumentation, engage margins, negotiate boundaries, and problematize discourses: Kant engaged the margins of what is knowable, Hegel’s dialectical methodology involved a lot of boundary negotiation, and Plato problematized ethics, metaphysics, and ontology. Asma’s distinction between cultural studies and philosophy is not so much about methodology as it is about content. Cultural studies, unlike philosophy, “emphasi[zes] identity politics” and “cultural studies…wants the humanities to throw out all criteria of ‘high’ and ‘low’…but without [developing] a new language of merit for the arts” (Asma, 2). Feminist philosophers have long addressed the problem that “some analytic [and continental] philosophers discard feminist and multicultural thought as mere ‘politics’” (Nye, 102), for philosophy is supposed to address the universal, the absolute, the abstract, the generalizable; and politics are certainly local, relative, and concrete, and engage the personal in its intersection with the political.10 What critics like Asma do not recognize is that political issues, particularly those relating to identity, are the foundation upon which philosophical concepts, techniques, and values, are drawn. There is so much excellent work on the way philosophical concepts manifest various forms of “identity” privilege that it would be impossible to list even a small sample of them; I am thinking here of works such as Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract, wherein he argues that Western political philosophy is an “epistemology of ignorance” grounded in the functional misperception of non-whites as non-human. Identity is a philosophical issue; however, because feminist and postcolonial scholars often have to look outside of philosophy for their source material (as philosophy continues to exclude/marginalize such issues), a “divide…continues to exist between materials that have inspired feminist philosophers to new insights” (Nye, 102)—e.g., “stories, music, conversation” (Nye, 105) or “poetry, history, personal narrative” (Nye, 106)—and “the currently established canon of philosophy” (Nye, 102). Feminist, critical race, and postcolonial philosophers use popular culture because philosophy continues to marginalize issues of race and gender, so these “popular” texts are, in these instances, more philosophically interesting than the philosophical canon itself. For example, Angela Davis looks to twentieth-century black female blues singers, and bell hooks analyzes popular film and music, in order to make claims about epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and political theory. Perhaps part of the reason why philosophy can’t seem to recognize that pop culture, at its best, can and does include philosophical content is that it dismisses these black feminist works such as hooks’s and Davis’s as “not philosophy.” Because many of the most sustained and significant philosophical considerations of popular culture appear in explicitly feminist, critical race, and/or postcolonial analyses, pop culture is doubly excluded from philosophy.

146

Epilogue

The feminization and racialization of popular culture is, at least in other disciplines, well established. From Susan Cook’s 2001 article in Women & Music on “feminist musicology and the abject popular,” to Andreas Huyssen’s 1986 “Mass Culture as Woman,” scholars have identified and analyzed the intersection of serious/pop culture hierarchies with contemporary and historical gender (and race, to some extent) hierarchies.11 The same values and logics utilized to socially, politically, and economically marginalize women and non-whites are at work in the philosophic ghettoization of popular/mass culture. Cook’s article focuses on the exclusionary logic at work in Western political and aesthetic hierarchies, i.e., the logic of abjection, of the constitutive outside. Abjection is the process whereby identity is delimited through an excision or expulsion: “I” clarify the boundaries of my own “self” by articulating what I am not. “Serious” culture and “classical” music are, according to Cook, defined through this process of abjection: the categories “‘popular’ and ‘classical’…are set into tension with one another. They…are almost always set up in inequitable relationships of power and prestige wherein ‘the popular’ gives ‘the classical’ its worth; the ‘classical’ is worthwhile only if the ‘popular’ is worthless” (Cook, 3). Similarly, masculine privilege is maintained by the continual abjection of femininity from the domain of “proper” culture. Femininity and pop culture are not merely analogous in their abjection from “serious” Western culture, but, as Cook and Huyssen argue, there is a causal relationship between the terms such that pop culture is abjected because it is feminized. Huyssen notes that “the political, psychological, and aesthetic discourse around the turn of the [twentieth] century consistently and obsessively genders mass culture and the masses as feminine, while high culture, whether traditional or modern, clearly remains the privileged realm of male activities” (Huyssen, 47). Cook’s analysis demonstrates that this process of feminization continues into the twenty-first century, e.g., in the gendered privileging of “classic” rock over “lite” rock. Popular culture was and is devalued through and in terms of its feminization; Western politics and culture privilege males and masculinity, so one of the most effective ways of justifying something’s lack of value is to associate it with femininity—which, as Irigaray and others have persuasively argued, is the constitutive outside of Western culture in general and Western philosophy in particular. Mainstream analytic and continental philosophy in the United States is, as a practice, normatively masculine: aggressiveness, competitiveness, assertiveness, withstanding oftentimes cruel and mocking criticism, the ability to dole out such criticism in a cool and offhand manner, apathetic scornfulness or scornful disregard for one physical appearance are just some of the behaviors and attitudes that are both stereotypically masculine and continually rewarded within the discipline. Art historians Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock famously argued “The sex of the artist matters. It conditions the way art is seen and discussed.”12 Even though the essay that begins with these lines appears in Blackwell’s anthology on philosophical aesthetics, the mainstream philosophical community has yet to apply this dictum to its own ranks and perceptions. The sex and race of the philosopher matter. They condition the way philosophy is read and discussed. A

“Gimme [no] More” of the Flute-Girls

147

person must already be viewed as a philosopher in order for his or her work to be considered properly “philosophical.” Sally Haslanger details how, as a graduate student, she was assigned an historical, not theoretical, presentation in her logic seminar because of the instructor’s unthematized assumption that women don’t do “real” philosophical work.13 If we take Parker and Pollock’s mainly institutional theory of art (i.e., that “art” is what the artworld—galleries, museums, critics, art faculty—say is art) and apply it to philosophy, then we see that “philosophy” is whatever philosophical institutions—journals, graduate programs, philosophy faculty, book editors and reviewers, conference program committees—say is “philosophy.” Thus the perception of the writer or speaker as a philosopher is a necessary precondition for his or her work to be considered “philosophy,” and not vice versa. If this is the case, then no matter what topic women work on, the normatively masculine image and behavior expected of (and by) “philosophers” will impede their work being taken seriously as philosophy. “In the dismissive comments made by my adult colleagues” about “girls’ music” and her work on it, Cook notes a distaste for femininity and a refusal to take women’s tastes, interests, and knowledges seriously: “I sense a real fear of dealing with female desire and female consumption, of valuing women, and especially girls, as thinking, knowledgeable consumers and critics who have enormous power in the commercial and aesthetic marketplaces” (Cook, 3). Popular music is a domain in which women’s and girls’ tastes are privileged, and in which there are many successful, powerful women; however, oddly enough, this field is dismissed by men and women alike as frivolous and unimportant. Might the same be going on in philosophy? Might women’s achievements be devalued and discounted as also frivolous? Although Asma seems to think that “cultural theorists” like me want to resort to relativism and the complete elimination of all high/low distinctions, I am not at all advocating that we stop evaluating either art or philosophy in terms of quality or disciplinary relevance. The point is not to eliminate all distinctions, but to demonstrate how judgments about what is and isn’t “art” or “philosophy” aren’t actually made about or with reference (primarily) to the art object(s) or philosophical texts/claims, but rather, about and with respect to identity categories of their makers and audience. As Huyssen explains, “the problem is not the desire to differentiate between forms of high art and depraved forms of mass culture…The problem is rather the persistent gendering as feminine of that which is devalued” (53). I argue, with Cook and Huyssen, that Irwin’s difficulty in identifying the axis around which serious/pop hierarchies turn lies in his refusal to consider race and gender politics. Even if “today’s lowbrow can be tomorrow’s highbrow,”14 whatever is lowbrow is consistently associated with femininity and/or non-Whites, and whatever is highbrow is identified with and accepted by middle-class whites (especially men). I am not advocating that we abandon aesthetic judgment in the name of political relativism. It’s important to make value judgments about art and philosophy; it is unrealistic to expect people not to make such judgments. At a very

148

Epilogue

basic level, we need a working definition of what “is” and “isn’t” philosophy in order to assess student work and grade papers. However, it is key that these judgments are made about art or about philosophy, and not primarily about and in terms of socio-political hierarchies revolving around privileged and underprivileged identities. This is not to say that identity politics, and politics in general, shouldn’t play a role in art and philosophy or our judgments about them; because aspects of a judgment are often overlooked or outright denied, we just need to make sure that we say, outright, what we actually mean. The desired clarity about the actual object of one’s judgment might be difficult to achieve if, as I have suggested above, the very categories of “art” and “philosophy” have conventionally been defined in gendered and raced terms. It is nevertheless important to disentangle these intersections because failing to do so would perpetuate the exclusion of women and women of color from being considered as “real” philosophers, and popular culture from the domain of “real” philosophical analysis. All of these exclusions impoverish philosophy intellectually, and reinforce the perception that it is “irrelevant” to the “real world.” I close with two hypotheses intended to generate further reflection and discussion. First, philosophy’s hostility to popular culture might stem from the discipline’s general devaluation of applied philosophy. Feminists have long noted the “feminization” of applied philosophy, i.e., the stereotype that applied philosophy isn’t as rigorous as more “purely” philosophical questions. Not only is this feminization problematic, but it is further incorrect to conceive of pop culture as something to which philosophy is “applied” in a unidirectional fashion, just as it is wrong to assume that “applied” philosophy shouldn’t or doesn’t use real-world cases to reflect back upon theory. Many philosophers of gender and race have used pop culture to reflect back upon philosophy in rigorous and significant ways, and others argue that many of philosophy’s problems lie in its refusal to begin from “real-world” situations. Secondly, it might well be that philosophy’s proud detachment from everyday life is tied up in a unique form of masculinity. This form of masculinity is discussed on the Feminist Philosophers blog,15 where Calypso9999 remarks that philosophers not only as a group are often amazingly socially inept but they almost seem to pride themselves on it. This can include adherence to what Janice Moulton described early on as “the adversary method” to the point of downright rudeness in social contexts, but it goes beyond this…And of course ever since Socrates got away with dressing badly and offending people and not following social conventions, we have been taught to think that these are all good things and marks of being a unique and creative, original, deep thinker.

Amy follows Calypso9999’s remarks, wondering why such behavior would be more likely to turn women than men off? It can’t only be that male philosophers tend to be rude and lacking in social skills…I suspect the rudeness of male philosophers is not mere lack of social skill or unconventionality. Rather, it is frequently a passive-aggressive expression of hos-

“Gimme [no] More” of the Flute-Girls

149

tility, combativeness, or machismo. There may be many men (especially nerdy types who were frequently teased in school), who would positively relish the chance to be rewarded for acting that way. Women may be less likely to want to act that way themselves or to be around other people who do act that way.

These remarks suggest that being completely unhip and out of touch with the everyday world constitutes a special brand of philosophical masculinity that dates back to Thales and Socrates. In the second volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault shows us how the ancient Greeks conceived of philosophy (the practice of virtue, i.e., moderation and self-mastery) as “being a man with respect to oneself.”16 If this sort of masculine gender identity is tied into a rejection of pop culture, then it seems clear that philosophy’s gender problem is tied into its problem with pop culture. So, what to do? I would unhesitatingly go so far as to suggest that the solution to both the pop culture problem and the “women” problem comes down to de-centering this aforementioned “passive-aggressive expression of hostility, combativeness, or machismo” as a normal mode of professional comportment and creating a context wherein one’s disdain for and active detachment from pop culture are not means whereby one performs and reaffirms one’s gender identity. Put differently, one of the reasons that philosophy, a discipline composed primarily of males (statistics show that the number of philosophy Ph.D.s awarded to women continually hovers around 30 percent annually), remains consistently hostile to pop culture is because it is no mere matter of disciplinary definition, but rather concerns the gender identity of the philosophers themselves.17 What would be changed in a revaluation of pop culture would not be the definition of philosophy, but philosophers’ understanding of the gendering of philosophical practice, and how this impacts/relates to their own personal gender identity. Honest reflection on the gendering of philosophical practice would in turn illuminate some of the structural barriers that have both prevented women from advancing in philosophy and turned them off from considering careers in philosophy in the first place. Just as the two “problems” are interrelated, so are the solutions.

Notes Preface 1. Sasha Frere-Jones. “A Paler Shade of White,” The New Yorker, 2007. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2007/10/22/071022crmu_music_frerejon es?currentPage=4 (22 October 2007). 2. I realize that I am making a fine—and perhaps largely heuristic—distinction between racial claims and aesthetic claims, insofar as aesthetic claims are and always have been, at least in the West, tied into systems of race, class, and gender privilege. My point in making this distinction between a racial claim and an aesthetic claim stands here insofar as it points to a difference in the object of the respective claims. Here I use “racial claim” to indicate an evaluation of features/qualities/objects that conventionally denote racial difference (e.g., skin color, eye shape, bodily comportment, language, cultural practice, etc.). An aesthetic claim is made in reference to an object’s technical, stylistic, and/or expressive properties as an art object (e.g., beauty, virtuosic execution, affectivity, etc.). “This song does not use syncopation” is an aesthetic claim; “White people can’t dance because they are white” is a racial claim. 3. Cook, Susan, “Feminist Musicology and the Abject Popular,” in Women and Music, Volume 5 (2001). 4. Battersby, Christine, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

Introduction 1. McClary, Susan “Reshaping a discipline: Musicology and Feminism in the 1990s,” Feminist Studies. v. 19, n. 2, (31 July 1993): 399. 2. If, as Jacques Rancière argues, politics is fundamentally a “distribution of the sensible”—i.e., a way of determining “what can be seen and what can be said about it” and thereby apportioning “who has the ability to see and the talent to speak” (Rancière 2004, 13), then this nature/culture debate can be understood as an axis around which a particular form of sensibility (human embodiment) has been distributed in the modern and postmodern West. The “naturalness” or “constructedness” of, for example, racial and gender identity are quite often invoked in arguments concerning the relationship of a particular group to power and privilege, of a group’s participation in the category of “humanity” and its subsequent access to “human rights.” 3. I use “metaphysical” and “metaphysics” throughout the book in the continental sense of these terms, which largely echoes Derrida’s use of them. In this usage, they refer 151

152

Notes

to the metaphysics of presence that characterizes much mainstream Western philosophy up through the late nineteenth century. The metaphysics of presence holds what Plato calls the “visible” and the “intelligible” (or what Descartes calls “extension” and “thought”) as binary opposites, and always privileges the latter as holding more truth and reality than the former. 4. Mills, Charles, “Ideal Theory as Ideology” in Hypatia 20.3 (2005):165-184; 169. 5. “The idealized model is being represented as capturing the actual reality, and in both cases this misrepresentation has been disastrous for an adequate understanding of the real structures of oppression and exclusion that characterize the social and political order. The opting for ‘ideal’ theory has served to rationalize the status quo” (Mills, “Ideal Theory,” 181). 6. My theory of conjecture and the conjectural body is sympathetic to the notion of “postpositivist realism” developed from Santaya Mohanty’s work in the late 1990s/early 2000s, but differs from it in one significant way. Postpositivist realists are ultimately concerned with theory-dependent but empirically-verifiable phenomena. Mohanty argues that “realism about [for example] identity requires that we see identities as complex theories about (and explanations of) the social world, and the only way to evaluate such theories is to look at how well they work as explanations” (Mohanty, 65). In other words, postpositivists empirically test their theories in a fashion similar to the way that scientists test their hypotheses: by seeing how well they describe instances of the phenomena they claim to represent. As Paula Moya explains, for postpositivist realist accounts of social identity “the issue is at least partly an empirical one: the different identity claims cannot be examined, tested, and judged without reference to existing social and economic structures” (Moya, “Introduction,” 11). So, while postpositivism gauges what we can know in terms of its coherence with what we experience and observe, my theory of conjecture aims at the empirically un-verifiable, those “myths” or “ideologies” that become materialized in experience but are never available for observation in and of themselves (e.g., unmediated materiality, the state of nature, race or gender in isolation from one another, etc.). In some senses the postpositivists and I are approaching the same problems and concerns from opposite directions, and we often arrive at similar (but not identical) ends. For example, Michael Hames-García’s postpositivist critique of intersectionality theory is, as I argue in chapter 1, subject to the very same limitations that he locates in conventional accounts of intersectionality. So, while I am sympathetic to his critique, I don’t think it actually accomplishes what it sets out to do, largely because it lacks an account of the “conjectural” status of individual social identity categories. 7. If the “artistic experience,” as Kristeva argues, “is rooted in the abject it utters and by the same token purifies” (Kristeva “Powers,” 17), then “serious” art is not a normal, natural structure perverted by or lacking in “trivial” art, but is instead a product of its intersection with ideological forces. Excising embodiment, femininity, race and class diversity, and commercial interest from “serious” music, Western culture establishes a domain of intellectual, masculine, white, bourgeois, “disinterested” high culture. Thus, Western culture allows for and in fact encourages the existence of commercial/popular music, but, as in Kristeva’s paraphrase of the Philebus, we “leav[e] the doors wide open with impurity, provided the eyes of the mind remain focused on truth. In such a case, pleasure, having become pure and true through the harmony of color and form as in the case of accurate and beautiful geometric form, has nothing in common, as the philosopher says, with ‘the pleasure of scratching’ (Philebus, 51)” (Kristeva, “Powers,” 27). 8. Nietzsche, Friedrich, “Nietzsche Contra Wagner,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 668.

Notes

153

9. See Grahm, “Women in Music.” Grahm argues that the “probability of women composers is very low” because historical evidence demonstrates the fact of the near complete exclusion of women from any list of “important” composers of Western art music (112). “If experience is any guide,” he explains, “women do not make composers. Even when we allow, rightly, for certain distortions in history, there still seems to be a major difference between men and women in this respect” (Grahm, 113). He glosses over arguments which demonstrate the gendering of the compositional art (a “serious” endeavor, as opposed to “craft”) and which illustrate the inherent limitations and biases of the Western musical “canon.” Grahm then states, “suppose it should turn out that only men can compose significant music. Should this depress women who are concerned for their own respect and standing? It should do so only if the composition of music is regarded as evidence of inherent superiority, and moreover superiority which warrants different treatment in terms of moral assessment and political discrimination” (Grahm, 112). In not so many words, Grahm’s question here is basically, “So what if women can’t make serious music?”—a question which trivializes both the issue and women’s artistic capacity. Grahm’s exact words are “only men can compose serious music”—thus, women can only create trivial fluff. Even more worthy of our outrage is the flippant “who cares?” attitude with which Grahm treats the issue. We should care, precisely because there is no easy separation between aesthetics, politics, and moral philosophy. Indeed, even Kant uses the distinction between sublimity (associated with masculine qualities) and beauty (associated with feminine qualities) to reinforce various claims about the moral immaturity of women (Battersby, “Stages on Kant’s Way”). 10. Dennis Dutton. “Let’s Naturalize Aesthetics” http://www.aesthetics-online .org/ideas/dutton.html (3 December 2003). 11. “In the case of the admiration of technique, the universality of this phenomenon has as much of an evolutionary basis as the general liking for fatty and sweet foods. Skilldeveloping, skill-admiring peoples survived better than competitors in the Pleistocene” (Dutton, 2). Comparing the admiration of virtuosity to our bodies’ preference for highcalorie foods, Dutton implies that this “mine-is-bigger-than-yours” competitiveness is biologically advantageous to human survival, as is the taste for calorie-dense foods (given, of course, that it is only in the twentieth-century West that the scarcity of food is not a general social concern). 12. The gendering of competition and care is of particular interest to feminists concerned with business ethics. If, in a capitalist society, competition is a highly valued virtue and component of success, and women are generally not socialized to value competition, then success in business and success in femininity seem to be mutually exclusive enterprises. For example, Robbin Derry argues that “[w]omen in male-dominated fields, including most professional-level corporate jobs, are rewarded for their ability to assimilate and adopt the male norms. Unique skills that draw on women’s experiences or strengths are for the most part neither recognized nor welcomed. In this type of environment how is it possible for women to be themselves?” (Derry, 14). Her argument here is that the behaviors rewarded by capitalism are those most often encouraged in males, and the behaviors females are usually socialized to exhibit are not rewarded by business. Thus, women are faced with a choice: act consistent with the ways they are otherwise used to and rewarded for, behaving as women (and thus fail at business), or act in accordance with the conventions of capitalist enterprise, and also be chastised for failing as a woman. 13. In Fresh Lipstick, Linda Scott argues that the roots of American women’s movements in the Yankee Protestant aristocracy (specifically, Quaker social reform

154

Notes

movements) are the source of problematic assumptions about the body, popular culture, and (post) industrial economies. Her argument that “the sectarian origins of American feminism are perhaps most blatantly visible in its critique of pictures” (Scott, 3) is most pertinent to my concerns in this book: just as the “iconophobia of feminism” (ibid.) results from Quaker/Puritan/Protestant prohibitions of “graven images,” personal indulgence, and ornamentation, similar attitudes toward entertainment, the theater, and music have combined with more recent bourgeois condemnations of mass (working-class) culture to unduly if unconsciously prejudice many feminisms and feminists against popular, commercial-oriented music. Scott, Linda, Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism (New York: Macmillan) 2005. 14. I do not mean to argue that all popular music is necessarily feminist in nature— indeed, it frequently isn’t. However, the activities of females in creating their own relationship to it and within its context do not necessarily reproduce the sometimes problematic assumptions and discourses contained within many aspects of popular music. Realism and belief are not the only possible attitudes spectators and artists can adopt toward artworks. Many women and girls already engage popular music critically, creatively, ironically…and in numerous other ways which are anything but passive.

Chapter One 1. A version of this chapter appeared as “On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory,” in Philosophia Africana, Vol. 8, No. 2 (August, 2005): 171-188. 2. Fox, Aaron A, “White Trash Alchemies of the Abject Sublime: Country as ‘Bad’ Music” in Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, edited by Christopher Washbourne and Maiken Derno (New York: Routledge, 2004); 57. 3. While Kodwo Eshun’s Afrofuturism rejects the “humanism” implicit in such revaluations of black/African diasporic culture, it nevertheless maintains the same essentialist and hierarchical tendencies for which Hall and Gilroy criticize the “humanist” position described in the body of the text. Instead of inverting the mind/body hierarchy to privilege blacks’ stereotypical association with embodiment, Eshun reconfigures the “white : technology/alienation :: black : ‘nature’/keepin’-it-real” matrix by emphasizing the fundamental role technology plays and has played in the development of “black” music. To Eshun, what is “essential” to black culture is its mediation by and exploitation of technology. Accordingly, he maintains the privilege of technology, progress, and intellectual complexity, but identifies it with the African diaspora rather than with European high culture. “Rejecting today’s ubiquitous emphasis on black sound’s necessary ethical allegiance to the street,” he argues instead for “AfroDiasporic Futurism…where postwar alienation breaks down into the 21st C alien” (Eshun, 00[-003]). While I am highly sympathetic to his critiques of the “humanist” ideal, which motivates a search for “the real,” his completely constructionist view of the body—“hyperembodiment via the Technics SL 1200” (Eshun, 00[-002])—is, as I have argued throughout this book, inadequate for analyzing the relationship between race and music, as well as between structure and ideology. See Eshun, Kodwo, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet Books) 1998. 4. Hall, Stuart, “What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture?” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge) 1996. 468-478; 471. This is not Hall’s own position, but a summary of a position he problematizes.

Notes

155

5. See Chapter 3 of Rose, Tricia, Black Noise: Rap music and black culture in contemporary America (Middletown, Conn.: Weslyan University Press) 1994. 6. Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press) 1993. Hereafter referred to as BA. 7. According to Gilroy, music functions as a crucial term in the debate “between those who see the music as the primary means to explore critically and reproduce politically the necessary ethnic essence of blackness and those who would dispute the existence of any such unifying, organic phenomenon” (BA, 100). 8. McClary, Susan, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press) 2000; 39. Hereafter referred to as CW. 9. McClary’s analysis is also helpful in recognizing the fact that the development of the blues and other forms of stereotypically “black” music is intertwined with their commodification: “it is important to keep in mind,” she argues, “that recording and its commercial distributing networks did not merely preserve [the blues]; it also actively shaped the blues as we know it” (McClary, CW, 37). 10. “This feminist injunction to attend to ‘differences among women’ sometimes takes questionable forms. I will argue that feminist efforts to avoid gender essentialism sometimes result in pictures of cultural differences among women that constitute what I will call ‘cultural essentialism.’” Narayan, Uma, “Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist Critique of Cultural Essentialism,” in Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World, edited by Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) 2000, pp. 80-100; 81. 11. According to Narayan, this “insistence on Difference” is problematic because its logic mirrors that of “the colonial encounter[, which] depended on an ‘insistence on Difference’; on sharp, virtually absolute, contrasts between ‘Western culture’ and ‘Other cultures’” (Narayan, 83). 12. For an extended discussion on the difference between performative and expressive models of gender, see Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge) 1990. 13. Nicholson, Linda, “Interpreting ‘Gender.’” In Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: The Big Questions, edited by Naomi Zack, Laurie Shrage, and Crispin Sartwell (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers) 1998, pp. 187-211. 14. This is true of many if not almost all streets. The one street I can think of that actually illustrates my “coincidence” model is the main road near my house in North Carolina. It is simultaneously Idlewild Road, Rama Road, Sardis Road, Fairview Road, and Tyvola Road—the same street, but with different names in different parts of town (and you can bet that the different names correspond to different socioeconomic situations). All these “Roads” coincide on the same street, but the distinct(ive) names refer to different modes or ways in which the street is experienced. There’s the posh new urbanism of Fairview Road, the McMansions of Sardis Road, and the barrios of Idlewild Road. What we call the street depends on our location on it, our experiences of it, and our purposes in describing it. The same is true of social identity: race, gender, class, sexuality all exist together as a lived corporeal experience, but how we refer to this experience depends on our social location, what we are presently undergoing, and what we are trying to communicate about it. http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode =&q=sardis+and+fairview+charlotte+nc&sll=37.0625,5.677068&sspn=31.509065,56.60 1563&ie=UTF8&cd=1&ll=35.155547,80.795045&spn=0.00793,0.013819&t=h&z=16 &iwloc=A 15. Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” in Critical Race Theory, edited by

156

Notes

Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Kendall Thomas, Garry Pellar (New York: The New Press) 1995, pp. 357-383; 358. 16. For example, as Crenshaw notes, “where systems of race, gender, and class domination converge” (CRT, 358). 17. Davis, Angela. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. p. xv. 18. Hight, Christopher. “Stereo Types: The Operation of Sound in the Production of Racial Identity,” Leonardo, v. 36; no. 1 (2003): 13-17. 19. See Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 20. “[B]ased on proportional ratios between units’ places on a single axis of variation (pitch),” the harmonic view of the world privileges those things which exhibit “an organic unity of these increments in both pitch and time, and a rich mathematics of their combinations in whole units” (Hight, 2). 21. Indeed, as Plato’s Symposium demonstrates, even early attempts to think about social relations in terms of the then-nascent science of musical harmony were done in an attempt to keep various unequal social groups in their respective places. See Eryximachus’s speech (186a-189a), where he discusses the harmony of the body and the soul: love is the practice of making sure the body (and, by extension, the common, or the vulgar element, as described in Diotima’s speech) has/governs what is proper to it, and the mind (the “divine” or philosophical element) has/governs what is proper to it. Jacques Rancière discusses this general notion in several places, notably the beginning of Disagreement. 22. “Group memberships do not simply intersect; they blend, constantly and differently, expanding one another and mutually constituting one another’s meanings.” HamesGarcía, Michael. “‘Who Are Our Own People?’: Challenges for a Theory of Social Identity,” in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, edited by Paula Moya and Michael Hames-García (Berkeley: University of California Press) 2000, pp. 102-132; 104. 23. “Politically salient aspects of the self, such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class, link and imbricate themselves in fundamental ways. These various categories of social identity do not, therefore, comprise essentially separate ‘axes’ that occasionally ‘intersect.’ They do not simply intersect but blend, constantly and differentially, like the colors of a photograph. They expand one another and mutually constitute each others’ meanings. In other worlds, the subjective experience of any social group membership depends fundamentally on relations to memberships in other social groups” (HamesGarcía, 104). I agree with everything Hames-García says here except his claim that social identities “blend.” So, I’m ultimately very sympathetic with Hames-García’s project and think his understanding of the relationship among social identities is right—I just don’t think his metaphor captures what he claims it does. 24. For more information on the Pantone Color Cue, see: http://www.pantone.com /pages/pantone/pantone.aspx?pg=19295&ca=10 25. Pantone’s Color Cue is a light frequency reader or meter. The user of the color cue aims it at an object, and the device reads the frequency of light (i.e., color) it emits, and then compares this to a database of Pantone color-codes in order to “name that color.” An image and description of the color cue can be found at this web address: http://www.pantone.com/pages/products/product.aspx?pid=31&ca=7&s=0. 26. While chromosomal sex may seem the most easily and “scientifically” definable (i.e., as either XX female or XY male), not only has recent feminist scholarship questioned the adequacy and accuracy of binary chromosomal sex categories, but chromoso-

Notes

157

mal sex is itself inadequate to the task of fully and accurately capturing the gendered aspects of our social identities. 27. “This multiplicity of the self becomes restricted so that any one person’s ‘identity’ is reduced to and understood exclusively in terms of that aspect of his or her self with the most political salience…in terms of the most dominant construction of that identity” (Hames-García, 104). 28. Identity groups or classes pre-exist the self in the sense that the category “women” existed for millennia before I was born as one. However, I’m interested in the individual’s experience of social identity, because these groups are composed of individuals with multiple coincident social identities. The groups don’t persist above and beyond the individuals (except as stereotypes). Certainly metadiscourses of, say, race and gender exist beyond and across individuals’ lived experiences, but even in these metadiscourses it is neither possible nor desirable to separate out one identity category from another. As Crenshaw explains, “The problem is not simply that both [feminist and antiracist] discourses fail women of color by not acknowledging the ‘additional’ issue of race or of patriarchy but, rather, that the discourses are often inadequate to the discrete tasks of articulating the full dimensions of racism and sexism” (Crenshaw, 360). 29. Reich’s phase pieces (It’s Gonna Rain, Come Out, Piano Phase, etc.) are a subset of the broader category of “process music.” Because I discuss features unique to phase-shifting compositions, I have narrowed my argument accordingly. However, the first set of features I examine (the macro form being generated by or identical to the micro form) is characteristic of process music generally, not just phase-shifting pieces. 30. Schwartz, K. Robert. “Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process pt. 1” in Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 19; No. ½ (Autumn 1980—Summer 1981): 373-392; 379. 31. Reich, Steve. “Music as a Gradual Process” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004) 304-306; 304. 32. Epstein, Paul. “Pattern Structure and Process in Steve Reich’s ‘Piano Phase,’” The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1986): 494-502; 498. 33. Oakes, Jason Lee, “Pop Music, Racial Imagination, and the Sounds of Cheese: Notes on the Loser’s Lounge” in Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, edited by Christopher Washbourne and Maiken Derno (New York: Routledge) 2004, pp. 62-82; 62.

Chapter Two 1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, “Examination of Two Principles Advanced by M. Rameau in His Brochure Entitled: ‘Errors on Music in the Encyclopedia’” in Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music: The Collected Writings of Rousseau, v. 7, translated and edited by John T. Scott (Hanover, Maryland: University Press of New England) 1998, pp. 271-288; 279, emphasis mine. Hereafter referred to as ETP. 2. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, “Letter on French Music,” in Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music: The Collected Writings of Rousseau, v. 7, translated and edited by John T. Scott (Hanover, Maryland: The University Press of New England) 1998. pp. 141-17l; 141. Hereafter referred to as LFM. 3. For genealogies of “genetic sex” and “sex hormones,” see Fausto-Sterling, Anne, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books) 2000. 4. Mills, Charles, “Ideal Theory as Ideology” in Hypatia 20.3 (2005):165-184; 168.

158

Notes

5. To put my argument in Mills’s jargon, I think that while conjecture has been poorly deployed in the service of ideal-as-idealized-models, it is, when used properly, an important kind of ideal-as-descriptive-model. Mills explains the difference between the two compound terms as follows: an “ideal-as-idealized model [is]…an idealized model, an exemplar, of what an ideal P should be like” whereas an “ideal-as-descriptive-model, the model of the actual workings of [x] will be quite different from ideal-as-idealized model, and will need to start with an actual investigation of [x’s] properties; one cannot just conceptualize them in terms of a minor deviation from the ideal, ideal-as-idealizedmodel” (Mills, Ideal Theory, 167). 6. I am using “moral” and “social” interchangeably, for, as Michael O’Dea explains, “human culture, or what Rousseau tends to call ‘the moral,’ that which relates to mores or les moeurs, [is]a term that encompasses all of human custom, everything that humans have created, in contradistinction to Nature, the domain of what is given at the onset” O’Dea, Michael, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Music, Illusion, and Desire (New York: Pallgrave Macmillan) 1995. P. 29. 7. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts or First Discourse” in The Discourses and other early political writings, edited by Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 1997, 4-28. Hereafter referred to as D1. 8. “The social affections develop in us only with our knowledge. Pity, although natural to man’s heart, would remain eternally inactive without imagination to set it in motion” (EOL, 267). Even though the potential for social and moral sentiment is present in physiological nature, these do not become actual until acted upon by extra-natural (i.e., mental, non-physical) forces. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, “Essay on the Origin of Languages” in The Discourses and other early political writings, edited by Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 1997, 247-299. Hereafter referred to as EOL. 9. In a rather precociously Schoenbergian moment, Rousseau critiques a French recitative because the demands of tonality—namely, for ending in the same key and register in which one begins—don’t allow for the expression of character development and dynamism. “This verse is in the same key, almost on the same chord as the preceding. No alternation that might indicate the prodigious change taking place in Armide’s soul and in her speech. The tonic, it is true, becomes dominant by a movement of the Bass. But Heavens! It is indeed a question of tonic and dominant at a time when all harmonic connection should be interrupted, when everything should portray disorder and agitation…Who would believe that the Musician has left all this agitation in the same key, without the slightest intellectual transition, without the slightest harmonic distinction” (LFM, 170-172). Just like Schoenberg, who abandoned tonality because he found it too limiting and unable to express the depths of human emotion and experience, Rousseau argues that it is fundamentally perverse and unmusical to privilege form and conformity to convention over the demands of expression. “[P]erfect cadences,” the adherence to tonal norms, “are always the death of expression” (LFM, 172). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, “Letter on French Music,” in Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music: The Collected Writings of Rousseau, v. 7, translated and edited by John T. Scott (Hanover, Maryland: The University Press of New England) 1998, 141-147. Hereafter referred to as LFM. 10. Imagination and pity, “the social affections[,] develop in us only with our knowledge…Pity, although natural to man’s heart, would remain eternally inactive without imagination to set it in motion” (EOL, 267). Self-awareness and reflection is required for the emergence of pity. In other words, I must have some notion of myself as a self in order to imagine myself in the place of another distinct individual. In psychoanalytic terms, this identification can happen only after the oedipal crisis—i.e., when the child

Notes

159

recognizes him or herself as a distinct, independent entity from the mother and from other objects. Thus, when calling pity “natural,” Rousseau clearly does not mean in some originary, immediate sense. 11. Rousseau claims that “I believe our language [French] to be little suited to Poetry, and not at all so to Music” (LFM, 141), for “the French language seems to me that of Philosophers and the Wise: it seems to be made for the organ of truth and reason” (LFM, 142). Truth and reason are, for Rousseau, exclusive of musicality and musical expression—even expression in general. 12. Rousseau claims that music associated with a language “composed only of mixed sounds, of mute, indistinct, or nasal syllables, few sonorous vowels, many consonants and articulations” (LFM, 144)—namely, a northern language such as French—is capable of arousing only “fake pleasures” (LFM, 144). This music cannot produce genuine pleasure because it is not grounded in a genuine language. 13. In Of Grammatology, Derrida makes a similar argument. Claiming that “the opposition of passion and need” is operative not in the distinction between different languages, but in the origin of language itself, “the emergence of language from nonlanguage”; he argues that “[w]hether from that north of south, all language in general springs forth when passionate desire exceeds physical need” (Derrida, Grammatology, 217). While I argue that the “language” arising of need is not fully a language, Derrida’s reading proposes that both “northern” and “southern” languages arose from passion, but then one strayed from its origin and oriented itself more toward need, while the other remained faithful to its original trajectory. “[O]nce languages are constituted,” he explains, “the polarity need/passion...remain[s] operative within each linguistic system: languages are more or less close to pure passion, that is to say more or less distant from pure need, more or less close to pure language or nonlanguage” (Derrida, Grammatology, 217). Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press) 1997. Hereafter referred to as G. 14. While there is always a kind of “private” language, a language of the family, Rousseau argues that language in itself is not actual until it becomes public, common, and shared. I will grant that “private language” isn’t fully language (students’ questions about my grading-shorthand and editorial comments are proof enough), but Rousseau’s conflation of the family with nature and his exclusion of the numerous social relations within the family from the domain of public life is obviously both empirically and politically problematic. The family’s repeated placement as pre-cultural further evinces the fact that the bourgeois family is the precise locus for the (re)production of social norms (gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, etc.). Because it is socially constructed, the family structure gains normative force only if it is viewed as necessary, inevitable, and “right.” Grounding the structure in a priori nature, immune to transient cultural forces, achieves precisely this normative authority. Describing the last stage of pre-civilization in terms of the relations of genders and generations we understand as a family unit, Rousseau falls prey to the anachronistic analysis of “Nature” via categories produced by particular social forces. In other words, he is using ideas developed by his specific cultural milieu to anachronistically define “nature”—the very thing for which he chides “state of nature” theorists in the Second Discourse. If there is a State of Nature, the family is most certainly not in it; if we understand the family as a metaphor for this “private non-language” immediately prior to proper speech, the social quality of the family further evinces Rousseau’s claim that “nature” is always already infused with and structured by social forces. 15. Perhaps this sense is best understood in terms of the French verb entendre, which connotes both audiation and, more importantly, understanding.

160

Notes

16. See McClary, Feminine Endings. 17. This same logic is at work in Rousseau’s discussion of the articulation and recognition of linguistic sounds. “I have no doubt that many more [vowel sounds] would be found if habit had made the ear more sensitive [to perceive] and the mouth better trained [to produce] the various manifestations of which they are capable...To the extent that one has made oneself more or less sensitive to them by dint of habit, one can single out more or fewer of these nuances and mark each with its own distinctive character, and this habit depends on the kinds of vocalizations common in the language to which the organ imperceptibly forms” (EOL, 260). 18. Rosseau’s romanticization of “southern” and non-European forms of expression seems to be entirely consistent with—if perhaps an early instance of—the racialized and gendered notion of aesthetic receptivity. White culture perceives itself to be too staid and alienated to experience “genuine” aesthetic pleasure, and looks to stereotypically primitivized and exoticized non-White vernacular cultures as sources of rejuvenated receptivity. See Gooding-Williams, Look, a Negro! and McClary, Conventional Wisdom. 19. That music both expresses and affects passions itself demonstrates that Rousseau understands music to be necessarily and “congenitally,” if you will, subject to the influence of extramusical phenomena. Music and the passions exhibit a mutuallydeterminative relationship: music is determined by the passions it expresses, but these passions, affected, aroused, and influenced by music, are far from natural, for they are subject to socio-cultural shaping. 20. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men or Second Discourse,” in The Discourses and other early political writings, edited by Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 1997, 111-189. Hereafter referred to as D2. 21. The purely physical analysis of music in terms of frequencies and their relations tells us nothing, in particular, about music. Indeed, Rousseau notes, “[t]he analysis of sound has revealed the same relations as the analysis of light. Straight away, people enthusiastically seized upon this analogy without regard for experience or reason. The systematizing spirit has jumbled everything and, since it proved impossible to paint for the ears, it was decided to sing for the eyes” (EOL, 290). It is possible to understand both sound and light in terms of frequencies; however, knowledge of frequencies and their relations does not translate into insight in plastic or musical arts, for described purely in terms of their ‘physical’ properties, music and painting are basically identical …something experience proves false. Accordingly, Rousseau posits not physics but experience—that is, knowledge about and from everyday interactions with the world and with society—as the basis of aesthetic judgment and value. 22. Similarly, “aidez-moi!” is a cry, but it is not yet proper speech, for it arises from physical need, and not from the habit of seeing a particular person at the watering hole. 23. Indeed, the “harmonic function” of a particular chord or mode (i.e., its syntactical function as dominant, subdominant, Neapolitan, an inversion, tonic, etc., which is somewhat similar to the way we describe syntactic function in terms of noun, verb, object) derives not from some specific empirical quality of its resonating frequencies, but from the associations which have accrued to them from the early Classical period (many of which arise out of Baroque opera’s “Doctrine of Affects,” in which certain chords and modes are said to most appropriately represent/affect specific passions and moods). Even the titillation we experience when listening to Bach’s Toccata in D minor, and the way that even the smallest children seem to know that a sudden shift to minor in a movie soundtrack indicates that something awful is about to happen, are due to our acculturated expectations, not to some property inherent to the minor mode. This is what Rousseau

Notes

161

means in the claim that “nor is a given sound by nature anything within the harmonic system” (EOL, 291). 24. When a piano hammer strikes its string, it sounds not only a primary pitch (the one we recognize, e.g., middle C), but an infinite number of overtones (C octave, G, C, G, E,…and so on). 25. The canonical works of Heinrich Schenker note that every piece written in more or less classical tonality shares a fundamental tonic-secondary dominant-dominant-tonic progression. This progression is the “Ursatz” or fundamental line that gives sense and structure to the piece. Found in every work of classical tonality, this Ursatz functions, in Schenkerian analysis, like the Platonic “Form” music: it is the ideal in which each individual piece participates. 26. In musicology and music aesthetics, there exists an historically significant argument that programmatic music (especially texted song) is a bastardization of music in its pure presence, unmediated by culture and words. In order for music to be “pure” and “absolute,” it must refrain from commerce with concepts, and, more importantly, words. According to Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, music can express the inner nature of the world in an exceedingly universal and accurate fashion, but only insofar as it remains within its own system and does not utilize words or concepts which refer to external phenomena. “[M]usic,” as he says, “expresses in an exceedingly universal language, in a homogeneous material, that is, in mere tones, and with the greatest distinctness and truth, the inner being, the in-itself of the world” (WWRI, 264). Music is capable of presenting the metaphysical essence of the world because it exhibits the same self-referential logic of presence as does the Ding an Sich or the Platonic Idea; just as these concepts exhibit a pure presence, music’s homogeneity allows it to remain fully self-referential and self-present. How can music be expressive and meaningful as a self-referential discourse? By speaking “in mere tones” and not relying on words or ideas for structure and significance. Again looking to Schopenhauer as a representative of this position, we see that he clearly divorces music from words. “If,” he argues, “music tries to stick too closely to the words, and to mould itself according to the events, it is endavoring to speak a language not its own” (WWRI, 262). In order to understand music in and on its own terms, music theorists needed to demonstrate music's independence of socio-cultural factors. (Or, rather, in order to “prove” Western music’s superiority without reference to other more politically contentious issues, Western music theorists needed to show that music was a discourse independent of external influence.) If music was “purely” musical, it could not be infected by or dependent on extramusical phenomena; if music was “absolute,” it had to be universally significant and its significance could not be culturally relative. Thus began the search for the “essence” or the nature of music. The most irrefutable way to establish music’s absoluteness was to endow it with an unchanging essence—to claim that it was “natural” and not a social construction. This was precisely Rameau's aim. 27. In the Second Discourse, Rousseau argues that “[s]till less does it make sense to inquire whether there might not be some essential connection between the two inequalities; for that would be to ask in different terms whether those who command are necessarily better than those who obey, and whether strength of Body or of Mind wisdom or virtue, are always found in the same individuals, in proportion to their Power, or their Wealth: A question which it may perhaps be good for Slaves to debate within hearing of their Masters, but not benefiting rational and free Men who seek the truth” (D2, 131). Rousseau does not always take care to follow his own advice. His obvious sexism and

162

Notes

Eurocentrism manifest Rousseau’s own transformation of physical differences into moral judgments about intelligence, character, etc. 28. For example, common musical meters/rhythms arose from poetic meter. “[T]he different meters in vocal Music could have arisen only from the different manners in which discourse can be scanned and the shorts and longs can be placed with regard to one another” (LFM, 145-146). 29. Rousseau argues that “although one might very well distinguish the measure of the prosody, the meter of the verse, and the meter of the song in the musical rhythm, it must not be doubted that the most pleasant Music, or at least the most rhythmic, would be that in which these three meters concurred as perfectly as possible” (LFM, 146). 30. See Of Grammatology 171-192. Derrida gives most credence to the position that the Essay was originally written as a footnote to the Second Discourse, but was repeatedly revised and expanded. Given the strong parallels between Italian and southern languages, and French and northern languages, the Letter on French Music is surprisingly absent from his attempts to contextualize the Essay within Rousseau’s oeuvre. The genealogy of northern and southern languages presented in the Essay is most obviously Rousseau’s attempt to offer a conjectural history that would justify and explain the distinctions the Letter makes between Italian (a more musical language) and French (an utterly unmusical language). 31. The north/south polarity maps onto the Letter’s distinction between French and Italian, respectively. Thus, Derrida is incorrect in his claim that “the polar opposition does not divide a set of already existing languages” (G, 216). 32. Derrida states that “without a trace retaining the other as the other in the same, no difference would do its work and no meaning would appear” (G, 62). 33. “Yet we must not confound the meaning of the architecture with the declared intention of the work” (G, 195). Distinguishing between the “meaning of the architecture” and the “declared intention of the work,” Derrida implies that a text can do something other than what it says it does: the architecture or form of a text can elicit meanings supplementary to the explicitly stated themes of the work. The question of architecture is thus described as that of “the space of its [the text’s] structure.” Deconstruction, the reading of the text against the book, is thus a matter of spacing. 34. I am not arguing that the rest is or is an example of musical arche-writing, for the rest is an intrinsic part of music as musical notation. Rather, I use it as a metaphor or conceptual structure through which to elaborate a notion of musical arche-writing. 35. This is also Jacques Attali’s claim in “Noise.” See Attali, Jacques, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press) 1987.

Chapter Three 1. Kristeva, IR, 77-78. I have modified this translation in two places. First, I have changed “Schönberg” to Schoenberg, because once Schoenberg emigrated to the United States in 1936, he legally changed the spelling of his name (changing the umlaut to an additional e) so that his new American neighbors and colleagues would have an easier time spelling and pronouncing his name. Secondly, I have changed “Aaron” to Aron, as it appears in the title to the opera, and in the French edition of Intimate Revolt. See Kristeva, Julia, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, Volume 2, translated by Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press) 2002./La révolte in-

Notes

163

time: Poufoirs et limites de la psychoanalyse II (Paris: Fayard) 1997. Hereafter referred to as IR. 2. For a discussion on the role of music in Kristeva’s Tales of Love, see James, “The Musical Semiotic: Kristeva, Don Giovanni, and Feminist Revolt.” Philosophy Today SPEP Supplement (2002): 113-119. 3. As the specular represents the coincidence of body and mind, “[w]hat I see has nothing to do with the specular that fascinates me” (IR, 73). That is to say, the specular engages the physical at a far more fundamental level than the highly complex process of sense perception. 4. Kandinsky, Wassily and Marc, Franz, Der Blaue Reiter (Munich: Piper Verlag GmbH) 1965. 5. Schoenberg, Arnold, Style and Idea: Selected Writings, edited by Leonard Stein, translated by Leo Black (Berkeley: University of California Press) 1975, 141. Hereafter referred to as S&I. 6. Adorno, Theodor W., “Sacred Fragment.” in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, translated by Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso) 1998, 225-248. Hereafter referred to as SF. 7. “What meets its end in the camps, therefore, is really no longer the ego or the self but…only the specimen; the body, or, as Brecht put it, the torturable entity, which can be happy if it has time to escape that fate by suicide. One might say, therefore, that genocide, the eradication of humanity, and the concentration of people in a totality in which everything is subsumed under the principle of self-preservation, are the same thing; indeed, that genocide is absolute integration” (MCP, 108). 8. Adorno, Theodor W., Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press) 2001, 101-102. 9. “The ultimate seduction, if it existed, would be the ideal mother, the one who holds up the ideal mirror in which ‘I’ see myself, sure and autonomous, finally rid of the narcissistic throes of the mirror stage and the paradises. It is the paternal eye—the eye of the law—that takes over for the ideal mother and replaces her destabilizing education by a call to order” (Kristeva, IR, 72). 10. For more on Kristeva’s reading of Don Giovanni and its implications for feminist theory, see James, “The Musical Semiotic.” 11. Schoenberg, Arnold, Moses und Aron, on Moses und Aron/Chamber Symphony Op. 2, no. 38, BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez (London: Sony) 1993, III:i. Hereafter referred to as M&A. 12. In his essay “This is My Fault,” Schoenberg states, “I will gladly admit that your tonal and modal products are as expressionless as a poker-face” (S&I, 147). 13. Kristeva, Julia, “Thinking about liberty in dark times,” The Holberg Prize Seminar 2004. http://www.holbergprisen.no/images/materiell/2004_kristeva_english.pdf (19 June 2009): 32. Hereafter referred to as TLDT. 14. Indeed, Rousseau’s discussions of conjectural history and the “state of nature” in the early musical writings and the first and second Discourses, are accompanied by this unstated “wink, wink” that indicates his claims about nature are ironic. He is aware that any attempt to describe a “state of nature” is futile, yet he does it anyway in order to think through political problems such as inequality. 15. Although it is beyond the context of this book, it seems that Kristeva’s notion of freedom shares important features with the notion of freedom Beauvoir elaborates in her Ethics of Ambiguity.

164

Notes

16. Ironically, Kristeva locates the “avant-garde” at the beginning of the twentieth century with Schoenberg and Klee—i.e., with movements which, although not popular, are hardly considered avant-garde nowadays.

Chapter Four 1. See 2 Many DJs, “Smells Like Booty (Soulwax Remix),” Destiny’s Child vs. Nirvana. 2 Many DJs! Pt. 1. Soulwax Records, 2002. 2. Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 172. Hereafter referred to as TS. 3. Just as Marx discusses the money form and the commodity form in terms of “riddles” and “enigmas,” Freud uses this same language to describe femininity and feminine sexuality. Sarah Kofman has extensively analyzed the trope of the feminine enigma in Freud’s writings. Marx, Karl, Capital, v.1 from The Marx and Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 313. Hereafter referred to as MER. 4. “Every useful thing, as iron, paper, &c., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity” (MER, 303). 5. Interestingly, this technique of acknowledgement/denial is, according to Freud, the procedure whereby fetish-objects are invested. Even though the fetish object serves as a substitute enabling the illusory denial of female “castration,” the very practice of fetishism is an implicit acknowledgement that women do in fact lack the phallus—otherwise, why bother? 6. “[P]articipation in society requires that the body submit itself to a specularization, a speculation, that transforms it into a value-bearing object, a standardized sign, an exchangeable signifier, a ‘likeness’ with reference to an authoritative model” (TS, 180). 7. One could argue that the specificity of the female body is brought into the marketplace under the auspices of what Sandra Bartky terms “the fashion-beauty complex”: billions of dollars rest upon the sale of cosmetic products and services made specifically for the feminization of female bodies. However, even in this scheme the feminine/female body is brought into the economy as the abject. The fashion-beauty complex markets unattainable beauty norms to which no actual body could conform, thus creating an endless demand for their products. Female and feminine bodies are assumed to be imperfect and assumed to always be in need of some more or less extreme form of make-over. Thus, the place of the females and femininity is that of the unacceptable, the taboo, the imperfect, the not-fully-human…the abject. 8. As Marx explains, “the equalization of the most different kinds of labour can be the result only of an abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common denominator, viz., expenditure of human labour-power or human labour in the abstract [i.e.,]…the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other particular kinds of labour” (MER, 322). 9. This is the same logic at work in Descartes’ wax passage: Descartes is able to equate/compare the two empirical manifestations of wax because he, qua thinking thing, perceives the concept of waxness with his mind’s eye. 10. Apter, Emily, Feminizing the Fetish (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1991), 1. 11. “[W]oman derives her price from her relation to the male sex, constituted as a transcendental value: the phallus” (TS, 188).

Notes

165

12. Ewa Ziarek reads Marx along similar lines. “For Marx,” she argues, “‘there is nothing mysterious’ (Marx, 163) about the ‘plain, homey, natural form’ of use value (138), even though this form is already an effect of the social negation of nature by concrete labor” (Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska, “The Abstract Soul of the Commodity and the Monstrous Body of the Sphinx: Commodification, Aesthetics, and the Impasses of Social Construction” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 16: 2 (2005): 90). 13. Cook, Susan, “Feminist Musicology and the Abject Popular,” Women and Music, v. 5 (2001), p. 140. 14. Cook, 143. 15. Thomas, Anthony, “The House the Kids Built: The Gay Black Imprint on American Dance Music,” in The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, ed. Delroy Constantine-Simms (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2001), 328. 16. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3. Hereafter referred to as PoH. 17. Irigaray continues, stating that “[t]he important thing is that they be preoccupied with their respective values, that their remarks confirm the exchangers’ plans for them” (TS, 179). Women are preoccupied with, as Sandra Bartky would put it, the “disciplines” of feminine beauty: dieting, hair, makeup, etc. Besides the obvious objection that concern for one’s appearance does not therefore make one a “bad feminist,” Irigaray here fails to note that these “disciplines” can be turned against the patriarchal norms of which they are usually the agents. Here, Irigaray claims that the teenage girls who coo and scream at Justin and Christina are speaking the lines scripted for them by their “exchangers.” Obviously, Christina and Brittney are merely reciting the music of others; however, early Madonna was not terribly different, yet she managed to be a thorn in the side of patriarchal morality…at least for awhile. 18. Although beyond the scope of this paper, it would be interesting to consider Irigaray’s claim here in light of Fanon’s and other postcolonial theorists’ analyses of language and colonial identity. 19. A similar, although not identical, trivialization of “lite rock”—music marketed primarily to middle-aged women—can be interpreted as the continuation of the abjection of music associated with teenage girls. As “lite rock” stations usually play a mix of older pop tunes (i.e., popular songs from when these middle-aged women would have been teenage girls) and pop music made specifically for adults, the trivialization of lite rock can be viewed as the abjection of both the figure of the teenage girl, as well as of the mother. 20. Adorno, Theodor W., “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening,” in Cultural Resistance Reader, ed. Stephen Duncombe (London: Verso, 2002), 277-303. Hereafter referred to as FCM. 21. Although there were a few relatively well known composers who were at one time employed at girls’ schools (Antonio Vivaldi, Ralph Vaughn Williams), given the time at which Adorno wrote this essay there is a good chance that he is referring to British composer Gustav Holst, who is quite well renowned for being one of the first composers to write “serious” music for wind band (i.e., it was written for band first, and is not an arrangement of a piece that was primarily intended for orchestra); indeed, his two most famous pieces, the First Suite in Eb and the Second Suite in F, are the cornerstones of wind ensemble literature. So, when Adorno speaks of music originating in “girls’ schools,” he could be implicitly commenting on the “frivolous” or “inferior” character of wind band—and its strong working-class connotations, especially in Britain and North America—in relation to the more “elite” and “erudite” orchestral tradition. Cook briefly

166

Notes

discusses this “feminization” of band and wind ensemble, claiming that “within the ‘classical’ you uncover the further delineation of populars that can similarly be dismissed or discounted. Thus, for example, the symphonic wind ensemble, with its connections to the marching band (extraordinarily ‘popular’ and woefully understudied), is the less valuable ‘popular’ to the symphony orchestra” (2). For more information on both Holst and the history of the symphonic wind ensemble, see Battisti, Frank. The Winds of Change: The Evolution of the Contemporary American Wind Band/Ensemble and its Conductor. Meredith Music, 2002. I am grateful to Emily Power for her assistance with my questions on this topic. 22. Adorno, Theodor W., “On Popular Music,” in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith (London: Routledge, 1990), 307. Hereafter referred to as OPM. 23. Young, Iris Marion, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 24. Indeed, in a patriarchal society which devalues female sexuality, except when viewed as a lack thereof—e.g., in terms of “girlish innocence” and virginity (indeed, as Brittney Spears’ “Oops, I Did It Again” video demonstrates, girls are most sexually attractive when emphasizing their youth and immaturity)—there continues the belief that “teen-idol music was intrinsically bad and that our consumption of it proved our ‘immaturity’: just as it supposedly signaled our unreadiness for real males, so it supposedly signaled our unreadiness for real music” (Nash, 146). This unconscious correlation between immature sexuality and immature musical tastes is evident in Spears’ re-tooling of her “Oops” single in her 2004 “Onyx Hotel Tour”: here, where all the visuals, costumes, and stage settings emphasized frequent and implicitly “kinky” sex, Spears’ sang “Oops” as though it were a jazz standard, big band backing and all. Her supposed sexual maturity necessitates—at least in the eyes of her manager—an apparent maturation in her musical tastes and range. 25. See the third chapter of Andreas Huyssen’s After The Great Divide for more on the feminization of mass culture and “the masses” generally. 26. See Freud, Sigmund, “Femininity,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. James Stratchey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.) 1990, 139-168. 27. Adorno, Theodor W., “Commodity Music Analysed,” in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1998), 45. Hereafter referred to as CMA. 28. This tendency to compare pop fans to insects is not idiosyncratic to Adorno, or to the jitterbug era. Indeed, Ilana Nash cites the following excerpt from the newspaper article “If Only I knew Shaun Cassidy’s Favorite Color, My Life Would Be Complete”: The foolish little hearts of Sharon, 13, and Linda, 12, were beating at a furious pace. It was Shaun Cassidy time at the Capital Centre…The Centre was being over-run by a little army of girls in their early teens carrying “I love Shaun” signs and quite prepared to keel over dead at the sight of The Promised One. I could only think of acne and orthodontic braces. There were blank stares in their vacant eyes, and their lungs were full of incredible power and range, like 10 million crazed locusts settled in a patch (149, emphasis mine). Perhaps it is because insects are usually irritating and all possess very, very miniscule brains that we as a society tend to dehumanize girls by associating them with insects. 29. See Monson, Ingrid, “The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse,” in The Journal of the American Musi-

Notes

167

cological Society, Vol. 48, No. 3, 1995. Histories (Autumn, 1995), pp. 396-422. Here Monson explains that “For a time, then, swing and bebop musicians were united in their disdain for the ‘traditionalists.’ As bebop became more controversial, however, battle lines were drawn between swing and bebop musicians as well…Young ‘modern’ musicians sought not only to change the sound of jazz, but to reject the legacy of the minstrel mask by emphasizing ‘art’ instead of ‘entertainment.’ Louis Armstrong’s ‘plantation image,’ as Dizzie Gillespie called it, with a ‘handkerchief over his head, grinning in the face of white racism,’ was a performance presentation rejected by a new generation of musicians” (Monson, 407). For the inventors of bebop, swing represented selling out to whites, and assuming a passive—feminine—position in relation to the music marketplace. Bebop was thus a way to reclaim both masculinity and racial identity. 30. Nealon, Jeffrey, “Maxima Immoralia?: Speed and Slowness in Adorno,” in Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique, ed. Jeffery Nealon (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2002), 136. 31. For more on the relationship between feminization and “white skeptical melancholy” in mid-twentieth century American popular music, see Gooding-Williams 2005. For more on twentieth-century anxieties over white femininity and mass culture, see James, Robin, 2008. “Robo-Diva R&B” in The Journal of Popular Music Studies, v. 20, no. 4, pp. 402-423. 32. One may object to the claim that Adorno adopts a white, heterosexual, masculine listening position with the counter-claim that it is in fact capitalism itself which adopts this subject position as its norm. Clearly, this is true of capitalism (indeed, this is Irigaray’s main thesis in her reading of Marx); however, Adorno’s obviously misogynistic remarks about the female body evince a viewpoint which is actively sexist, not just passively reflecting the norms of the system which it is analyzing. 33. What is missing from Irigaray’s reading of Marx is, among other things, class— even though she does make a point to note the class differences among women elsewhere in This Sex. It seems that this oversight could be due to the analogical form exhibited by her critique of Marx: as Marx’s monothematic and reductive account subsumes all forms of oppression under class, Irigaray’s substitution of “woman” for “commodity” necessarily follows the same monological trajectory as Marx’s, only now privileging gender/sex. That is to say, the fault isn’t so much Irigaray’s as it is that of the argument she is miming (we might, however, fault her for not inserting a cautionary footnote admitting the flaw arising from this analogical technique). One could also argue that an adequate understanding of both patriarchy and capitalism cannot be achieved without analyzing the ways in which they have come to reinforce one another. For example, traditionally masculine values—individuality, competition, reason, and rational self-interest—are also those values and assumptions which undergird capitalism. 34. Wald, Gayle and Gottleib, Joanne, “Smells like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrls, revolution, and women in independent rock” in Critical Matrix, Vol. 7, No. 2 (December 31, 1993), 9. 35. Susan McClary makes a similar point about the status of music itself. “The charge that musicians or devotees of music are ‘effeminate’ goes back as far as recorded documentation about music, and music’s association with the body (in dance or for sensuous pleasure) and with subjectivity has led to its being relegated in many historical periods to what was understood as a ‘feminine’ realm. Male musicians have retaliated in a number of ways: by defining music as the most ideal (that is, the least physical) of arts; by insisting emphatically on its ‘rational’ dimension; by laying claim to such presumably

168

Notes

masculine virtues as objectivity, universality, and transcendence; by prohibiting actual female participation altogether’ (FE, 17). 36. Adorno, Theodor W, “The Idea of Natural History” (1932), in Telos, No. 60, (Summer 1984), 111-124; 124. Hereafter referred to as INH. 37. Even though Marx might be interpreted as acceding the possibility that this state of “real” social relations comes to be constructed as real via various social processes, this by no means decreases the normative force this potentially “second” nature serves in his text. 38. Copjec, Joan, “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan,” in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 287-305; 300. 39. Freud, Sigmund, “Fetishism,” in Collected Papers v.5, ed. James Stratchey, (New York: Basic Book Publishers, Inc.), 1959. 40. Emily Apter, in her book Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), emphasizes the visual character of both Freudian and Marxist accounts of fetishism. Arguing that “one might want to soften this rigid distinction [which Mulvey makes] between fetishist and voyeur by saying that the fetishist does indeed refuse to look, but in refusing to look, he stares,” Apter brings together the psychoanalytic and dialectical materialist versions of fetishism by reading them in terms of Freudian negation, which is much like Marx’s determinate negation (xii). In other words, the refusal to look is actually an intense gazing—a stare. 41. Kaplan, E. Anne, “Is the Gaze Male?,” in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 119-135; 127. 42. Copjec, 288 43. “Nonknowledge or invisibility is…registered as the wavering and negotiations between two certainties…the panoptic argument is ultimately resistant to resistance, unable to conceive of a discourse that would reuse rather than refuel power” (Copjec, 290). 44. bell hooks makes a similar point in “Black Female Spectators,” her response to Mulvey and feminist film theory in general. Arguing that black women, due to their exclusion from and consequent inability to seamlessly identify with Hollywood films, already recognize and practice a form of active (i.e., non-passive, non “fetishized”) spectatorship. Consequently, hooks remarks, feminist film theory’s claim that film objectifies and fetishizes women fails to recognize that not all women relate to the screen in the same way, or in a necessarily passive and objectified way. 45. Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 75. Hereafter referred to as LC. 46. hooks, bell, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Postcolonial Feminist Theory, ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, (New York: Routledge, 2003), 207221; 208. Hereafter referred to as OG. 47. “As spectators, black men could repudiate the reproduction of racism in cinema and television, the negation of black presence, even as they could feel as though they were rebelling against white supremacy by daring to look, by engaging phallocentric politics of spectatorship…In their role as spectators, black men could enter an imaginative space of phallocentric power that mediated racial negation” (hooks, 209). 48. West, Kanye, “Diamonds (Are From Sierra Leone)” on Late Registration (New York: Roc-A-Fella Records), 2005. 49. In his 2009 song “Magnificent,” Rick Ross raps a claim similar to Jay-Z’s: “I’m a CEO which means that I profit offa me.” This empowering self-commodification is thus not isolated to one black male rapper, and there is, I think, good reason to see this as a

Notes

169

not-uncommon view in contemporary mainstream hip-hop. Indeed, this view of selfcommodification may be understood as a compliment to Afrofuturist robot mythologies. Equating robots and black chattel slaves, Afrofuturism privileges robot identity as a site of resistance and empowerment. For Ross’s “Magnificent,” see http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wPSRqb0p2nk. For more on Afrofuturism, see James, 2008. 50. She—and this gendering is absolutely important—is somehow slave to the object, rendered passive in the face of the economic and political power represented by the diamond. Let us not forget that this she is also a white “she”: not only does diamond production continue to bear the legacy of colonialism (as West’s title points out), but the song itself is from a James Bond film (rich British man, conquering evildoers and women in exotic, barely postcolonial locations) and Marilyn Monroe (diamonds are a girl’s best friend). Of course, Shirley Bassey (the vocalist) is black: however, it is possible to read this situation as an erasure of race. hooks argues that mainstream cinema posits the white female as the object of sexual desire, as is indeed the case in this Bond film. West’s video reinforces the presumed whiteness of the covetous female by showing a very WASPy woman who, on the occasion of having her fiancée put her diamond ring on her finger (interestingly, in being the object of action), is immediately covered in the “blood” of the blood diamonds: indeed, her white hand begins to turn black. Just as WASPette’s pleasure in her diamond engagement masks the arduous labor of black Africans, the film and the original song seem to rely upon the forgetting of Bassey’s concrete labor as a black woman, for she appears to us as a disembodied voice. Bassey’s “disappearance” only reconfirms hooks’s point that black women are absent from conventional film narratives, and that the feminine object of desire is always presumed to be white. 51. I am reminded of Fanon’s discussion of third-person consciousness in Black Skins, White Masks. Here, he claims that his existence as a “man,” a subject, is alwaysalready fragmented by his awareness of the ways in which stereotypes fix him as a thing, an object. His interaction with the world and with others requires a self-objectification, namely, this third-person consciousness wherein he takes himself as the object of his own observations, viewing himself in the third person through the terms/stereotypes constructed by dominant (white French) culture. While this forced self-objectification is certainly negative in some aspects, Fanon’s passionate writing and fervent calls for action and revolution indicate that it is hardly an absolute negation of agency. 52. This is of course a very, very important issue, and the role of black femininity in relation to black masculinity in Jay-Z’s work deserves extended consideration. While, on the one hand, Jay is contesting essentialist versions of black masculinity, his work maintains a problematic relation to femininity and women. Not only does the “Big Pimpin’” yacht overflow with objectified, bikini-clad black women, but it is possible, in light of hooks’s essay, to read his subversive repetition of capitalism to not quite subvert its tendency to commodify and objectify femininity. hooks argues that black male filmgoers can adopt the (white) patriarchal gaze which situates white femininity as the object of sexual desire (for, indeed, this is precisely the move which the lynching narrative assumes, namely, that everyone desires white women). So, even though Jay’s videos clearly situate black women (with their “apple bottoms” and curves clearly not celebrated in stereotypes of white female beauty) as objects of desire, it is possible that his repetition of the norms of capitalism isn’t subversive enough in its failure to address the structural marginalization of various femininities. 53. Even a cursory glance at Schoenberg’s published letters will reveal that Adorno’s prized example of authentic artistic production did, to a certain extent, practice

170

Notes

art as a business. Many of the early letters are basically pleas to publishers for more work and/or expressions of his dire financial situation. 54. Anna Carastathis notes that Marx, in Capital’s discussion of commodity fetishism, assumes and cannot account for normative whiteness. “Though this is subterraneous in Marx’s text, what overdetermines the slaves’ enslavement is ‘race.’ As he writes elsewhere, ‘[a] Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital’ (‘WLC’). But, the fact that a Negro is a slave, under certain conditions, is surely not incidental. The question, why a Negro? Does not occur to Marx” (Carastathis, 126). Carastathis’s analysis suggests that Marxian fetishism cannot account for the fact that white privilege has established a situation wherein only black bodies can be exchanged as chattel. Carastathis, Anna, “A Phenomenology of Fetishism: Alienated Production and the Appearance of ‘Race’” in International Studies in Philosophy, XXXIX/2 (2007), 17-36. 55. Interestingly, Zotan Kodaly’s theories of kinaesthetics (teaching musical concepts through movement) have been widely taken up by music educators, especially those at the elementary level; however, his emphasis on embodied response to music has, not unexpectedly, been deemed appropriate only for elementary-schoolers—i.e., children with immature capacities of aesthetic evaluation—while undergraduates are taught to appreciate music in terms of various theories of harmony, counterpoint, and pitch-class set (i.e., in terms of theory and intellect). A feminist music theory and music education should emphasize the importance of embodied responses to music for all ages, and precisely because no one is capable of authentic, disinterested aesthetic judgments. 56. Arthur Danto’s theory of “the artworld” would seem to confirm this claim that art’s value is primarily social. A version of what analytic aestheticians would call the institutional theory of art, the artworld refers to all the stakeholders in the production, sale, and reception of art, as well as the education of artists and art audiences. Focusing mainly on relations among stakeholders, this theory foregrounds the role of the social in art/aesthetics. 57. Perhaps because of theory’s general tendency to privilege the visual over the auditory, feminist art criticism has long been aware of classical/popular or art/craft hierarchies and the various ways in which the latter members of each pair are feminized. However, it has been my experience that both academics and society at large are more willing to recognize the artistry of “women’s work” than to admit of the musical value of pop as anything other than a “guilty pleasure.” 58. Nash, Ilana, “Hysterical Scream or Rebel Yell?: The Politics of Teen-Idol Fandom,” in Disco Divas: Women and Popular Culture in the 1970s, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 133-154; 148.

Chapter Five 1. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books) 1974, section 268. Hereafter referred to as GS. 2. “One has to suffer the fate of music as of an open wound” Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books) 1989, 317. Hereafter referred to as EH. 3. GS, 268

Notes

171

4. Nietzsche, Friedrich, “Nietzsche Contra Wagner,” in The Portable Nietzsche, translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books) 1954, 664, emphasis mine. Hereafter referred to as NCW. 5. NCW, 664. 6. This also appears in NCW 665. 7. “Infinite melody seeks deliberately to break all evenness of time and force and even scorns it occasionally…such music leans more and more heavily on a wholly naturalistic [i.e., realist] style of acting in gestures, which is no longer dominated by any law of plasticity and wants effect, nothing more. Espressivo at any price, and music in the service, the slavery, of poses—that is the end” (NCW, 666-667). 8. In a sense, Nietzsche is arguing for the primacy of rhythm over harmony. While a very radical claim for the late-nineteenth-century Western art music scene, this tension between rhythm and harmony as organizational principles fueled many of the early debates about the status of hip hop as music. See chapter 3 of Rose, Tricia, Black Noise: Rap music and black culture in contemporary America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press) 1994. 9. Indeed, this is a prime example of the force of will required to “give style” (GS, 290). 10. See Battersby, Christine, “Stages on Kant’s Way: Aesthetics, Morality and the Gendered Sublime.” in Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: The Big Questions, edited by Naomi Zack, Laurie Shrage, and Crispin Sartwell (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell) 1998, 227243. 11. The historical accuracy of Nietzsche’s account is of no real importance, if anything because little evidence of ancient Greek musical practices has been preserved for contemporary musicological examination. 12. Since “[w]hat is and remains popular is the mask,” Nietzsche concludes that it is “the vulgar element in everything that gives pleasure in Southern Europe—whether it be Italian opera (for example, Rossini and Bellini) or the Spanish novel of adventure” (GS, section 77; emphasis mine). Nietzsche’s privileging of southern European musical cultures over northern European ones could be interpreted as another instance of white romanticization of somewhat exoticized, somewhat less wholly white cultural traditions. In the same way that Clapton romanticized Robert Johnson, Nietzsche thinks that these southern European musics are more emotionally and affectively effective. While Robert Gooding-Williams’s Look! A Negro does address Nietzsche’s gendering of receptivity, it does not discuss the ways in which whiteness (and, in this instance, white attempts at culturally appropriating non-white vernacular musics) also operates in Nietzsche’s aesthetics. 13. Nietzsche is not always consistent in his use of femininity as a metaphor for good music. In the theater—i.e., in Wagner’s music—“one is common people, audience, herd, female, pharisee, voting cattle, democrat, neighbor, fellow man” (GS, section 368). Here, femininity is equated with “bad” music. However, this is, by and large, an exception to the more common association of femininity with “active” or “good” music. 14. See Battersby, Christine, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) 1989. Hereafter referred to as GG. In GG, Christine Battersby argues that Nietzsche’s privileging of the feminine works specifically to marginalize females in the same fashion as other Romantic notions of the “virility school of creativity.” In Romantic conceptions of genius, Battersby rightly argues, stereotypically “feminine” characteristics are, when found in particularly gifted men (i.e., strong enough to maintain their masculinity in spite of various “feminine” characteris-

172

Notes

tics), accorded the cultural value of “genius.” While “femininity” is thus praised as the font of creativity and ingenuity, it is only so when found in males; when females exhibit these traits, they are only fulfilling their nature, and are thus in no way exceptional. Citing various passages in which Nietzsche excludes women from the sphere of cultural production, Battersby argues: “since it was not the ‘feminine’ that was consistently downgraded in the nineteenth century, but rather the ‘female,’ there is nothing ‘unprecedented’ about Nietzsche’s simultaneous revaluation of the feminine and his attempt to exclude females from power” (GG, 123). It is incontestable that some of Nietzsche’s comments on women are misogynist (or, as Derrida would say, some of “Nietzsche’s women” are “castrating” or “castrated”). However, even though Nietzsche does suggest that women are only dilettantes (“she dabbles in writing, she dabbles in art” [GG, 122]) in the arena of culture, Battersby misses Nietzsche’s critique of “serious” culture/Kultur. As I have demonstrated above, Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics implies a rejection of the serious/popular culture hierarchy, for the existence of “serious” culture relies on the false presumption of a “truth” that is most accurately presented by “authentic” works. Understanding Nietzsche’s overall regard for “art” and “culture,” statements such as the following seem less a claim against the frivolity of women and more a claim about the superfluity of high culture and its worship of the Werke: “Admitting exceptions—they prove the rule—woman attains perfection in everything that is not a work: in letters, in memoirs, even in the most delicate handiwork, in short in everything that is not a métier” (GG, 121, citing Will to Power section 817). As a proponent of cold baths, Nietzsche describes himself as a “dabbler”; indeed, many of his works are aphoristic and lack the systematicity generally ascribed to “profound” philosophical thought. Now, one could still argue that Nietzsche allows “superficiality” in males, but, like the Romantics, objects to the appearance of these “feminine” qualities in the work of actual women—that, as Battersby argues, he “aims to write like a woman. But he does not write as a woman. Nor will he even allow women to write as women” (GG, 125). I partially agree with Battersby that this may, indeed, be the case. I disagree insofar as I read with Derrida several Nietzsches, some of which contradict each other. Thus, it is entirely possible that Nietzsche deconstructs the notion of “high culture,” except in cases where he uses it to exclude females from consideration as important producers of culture. If we follow his critique of serious culture, we are not thereby beholden to his conclusions about women’s place (or lack of place) in art—in fact, our agreement with him on this former point necessitates our departure from him on the latter. 15. Nietzsche is very close to Frere-Jones’ assessment of indie rock that is discussed in the preface: the former indicts Western art music for lacking in femininity, while the latter mourns the lack of “blackness” in white indie rock. 16. Derrida, Jacques, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, translated by Barbra Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1979. 17. Most black women, argues hooks, are “adamant that they never went to movies expecting to see compelling representations of black femaleness” because mainstream American cinema is a “context that constructs our presence as absence, that denies the ‘body’ of the black female so as to perpetuate white supremacy and with it a phallocentric spectatorship where the woman to be looked at and desired is ‘white’” (hooks, 210). See hooks, bell, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” in Postcolonial Feminist Theory, edited by Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (New York: Routledge, 2003), 207-221. 18. Elementary general music teachers spend years teaching first and second graders how to find a downbeat—this is not something that is innate or instinctual. Similarly, one must already know that the minor mode is culturally associated with negative emotions

Notes

173

and be familiar with the structure of military marches (use of cut time, first strain, second strain, trio, etc.) in order to comprehend the bellicose mendacity conveyed in John Williams’ Imperial March (Darth Vader’s theme music from The Empire Strikes Back). 19. See Battersby, GG and Stages on Kant’s Way, McClary Feminine Endings and Conventional Wisdom, Nash Hysterical Scream, Cook R-E-S-P-E-C-T. 20. Alcoff, Linda, Visible Identities (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2006, 184. 21. Jay-Z, “DOA (Death of Autotune)” on Blueprint III (New York: Island/Def Jam), 2009. 22. Due to copyright issues, I have not been permitted to print the actual lyrics from DOA and “Swagga Like Us.” To see this passage complete with the specific citations from the relevant songs, please see my blog, www.its-her-factory.blogspot.com. Search for tag “Conjectural Body” to easily find the post. TI, “Swagga Like Us” on Paper Trail (Atlanta, Georgia: Grand Hustle), 2008.

Epilogue 1. Plato, “Symposium” in Plato III, Trans. W.R.M. Lamb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 2. Wilson, Robin, “Black Women Seek a Role in Philosophy” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 28, 2007, http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i05/05b00401.htm (19 June 2009). 3. Asma, Steven,“Looking Up From the Gutter: Philosophy and Popular Culture” in The Chronicle for Higher Education, September 12, 2007,http://chronicle.com/weekly/ v54/i07/07b01401.htm (19 June 2009). 4. Spears, Britney, “Gimme More” on Blackout. New York: Jive Records, 2007. 5. See Gooding-Williams, Robert. Look! A Negro. (New York: Routledge, 2006). I’m not arguing that this neo-colonial structure still operates in the contemporary U. S. cultural landscape. I am, however, suggesting that it no longer operates around an exclusively or primarily black/white binary; the contemporary structure could be more of a white/non-white binary, or a non-binary yet still hierarchical structure including whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, poor whites, and various other non-dominant groups. 6. Irwin, William, Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 54. 7. Irwin, Philosophy, 54. 8. “I next propose that the flute-girl who came in just now be dismissed: let her pipe to herself or, if she likes, to the women-folk within, but let us seek our entertainment today in conversation” (Plato, Symposium, 176e). 9. Irwin, Philosophy, 49. 10. Nye, Andrea, “It’s Not Philosophy,” in Decentering the Center, ed. Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 101-109. 11. Cook, Susan, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T (find out what it means to me): feminist musicology and the abject popular” in Women and Music (2001); Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 12. Parker, Rozsika and Pollock, Griselda, “Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts” in Aesthetics: The Big Questions, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1998), 44.

174

Notes

13. Haslanger, Sally. “Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone)” unpublished paper circulated widely on the internet: http://www.mit .edu/~shaslang/papers/HaslangerCICP.pdf (19 June 2009). 14. Irwin, Philosophy, 42 15. “Totally Blatant Sexism in Philosophy,” on Feminist Philosophers Blog, http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2007/11/29/totally-blatant-sexism-in-philosophy (19 June 2009). 16. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), p. 82. 17. For data about women in the profession, see https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence /display/philequity/Current+Data.

Bibliography

2 Many DJs. “Smells Like Booty (Soulwax Remix),” Destiny’s Child vs. Nirvana. 2 Many DJs! Pt. 1. Brussels: PIAS Records, 2002. Abbate, Carloyn. “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women.” Pp. 225-258 in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, edited by Ruth Solie.Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Adorno, Theodor W. “Commodity Music Analysed.” Pp. 37-52 in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, translated by Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso, 1998. ———. “The Idea of Natural History” (1932), in Telos, No. 60, (Summer 1984), 111-124; 124. ———. Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. ———. “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening.” Pp. 277-303 in The Cultural Resistance Reader, edited by Stephen Duncombe. London: Verso, 2002. ———. “On Popular Music.” Pp. 256-267 in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. London: Routledge, 1990. ———. “Sacred Fragment.” Pp. 225-248 in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. by Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso, 1998. Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Hormheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1994. Alcoff, Linda. Visible Identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Du Bois and the Illusion of Race.” Pp. 28-42 in Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: The Big Questions, edited by Naomi Zack, Laurie Shrage, and Crispin Sartwell. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Apter, Emily. Feminizing the Fetish. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Asma, Steven.“Looking up from the Gutter: Philosophy and Popular Culture” in The Chronicle for Higher Education, September 12, 2007, http://chronicle.com/weekly /v54/i07/07b01401.htm (19 June 2009). Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Bartky, Sandra. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge, 1991. Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

175

176

Bibliography

———. “Stages on Kant’s Way: Aesthetics, Morality and the Gendered Sublime.” Pp. 227243 in Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: The Big Questions, edited by Naomi Zack, Laurie Shrage, and Crispin Sartwell. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Brand, Julianne. Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformation of Twentieth Century Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. “The body politics of Julia Kristeva.” Hypatia, 3(3) (1989): 104-118. ———. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990. Carastathis, Anna. “A Phenomenology of Fetishism: Alienated Production and the Appearance of ‘Race’” in International Studies in Philosophy. XXXIX/2 (2007): 17-36. Clément, Catherine. Opera, the undoing of women. Trans. Betsey Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Cook, Susan. “Feminist Musicology and the Abject Popular.” Women and Music, Volume 5 (2001). Copjec, Joan. “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan.” Pp. 287305 in Feminism and Film, edited by E. Ann Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Pp. 357-383 in Critical Race Theory, edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Kendall Thomas, Garry Pellar. New York: The New Press, 1995. Curtis, Liane. “On Teaching and Learning: The Sexual Politics of Teaching Mozart’s Don Giovanni.” NWSA Journal. Vol. 12, No. 1 (March 31, 2000): 119. Cusick, Suzanne. “‘Eve…Blowing in our Ears?’ Toward a History of Music Scholarship on Women in the Twentieth Century.” Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. Vol. 5 (December 31, 2001): 125. Cutler, Chris. “Plunderphonia.” Pp. 138-156 in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner. New York: Continuum Books, 2004. Dahlhaus, Carl. “Trivial Music and Aesthetic Judgment.” Translated by Uli Sailer. Pp. 333362 in Bad Music, edited by Christopher Washbourne and Maiken Derno. New York: Routledge, 2004. Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. Deleuze, Gilles. “Active and Reactive” Pp. 80-106 in The New Nietzsche, edited by David Allison. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. ———. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Trans. Barbra Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Derry, Robbin. “Feminism: How Does It Play in the Corporate Theatre?” Pp. 11-29 in Women’s Studies and Business Ethics, edited by Andrea Larson and R. Edward Freeman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. DJ Dangermouse. The Grey Album. (2004) Available for download at: http://www.illegalart.org/audio/grey.html. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Signet Classics, 1995. Dutton, Dennis. “Let’s Naturalize Aesthetics.” http://www.aesthetics-online.org/ideas/dutton .html (3 December 2003). Epstein, Paul. “Pattern Structure and Process in Steve Reich’s ‘Piano Phase,’” The Musical Quarterly Vol. 7, No. 4 (1986): 494-502.

Bibliography

177

Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books, 1998. Essential Logic. “Music is a Better Noise,” on Fanfare in the Garden. Seattle, Washington: Kill Rock Stars, 2003. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. ———. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. Fox, Aaron A. “White Trash Alchemies of the Abject Sublime: Country as ‘Bad’ Music.” Pp. 39-61 in Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, edited by Christopher Washbourne and Maiken Derno. New York: Routledge, 2004. Frere-Jones, Sasha. “A Paler Shade of White,” The New Yorker, 2007. http://www.new yorer.com/arts/critics/musical/2007/10/22/071022crmu_music_frerejones?currentPage=4 (22 October 2007). Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishsim.” Collected Papers v. 5, ed. James Stratchey. New York: Basic Book Publishers, Inc., 1959. ———. “Femininity.” Pp. 139-168 in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. James Stratchey. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1990. Frith, Simon. “Afterthoughts.” Pp. 359-364 in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. London: Routledge, 1990. Frith, Simon and McRobbie, Angela. “Rock and Sexuality.” Pp. 317-332 in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. London: Routledge, 1990. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. ———. “The Dialectics of Diaspora Identification.” Pp. 490-502 in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, edited by Less Back. London: Routledge, 2000. Goehr, Lydia. The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Gooding-Williams, Robert. Look, A Negro! New York: Routledge, 2005. Grahm, Gordon. “Women in Music.” British Journal of Aesthetics. Vol. 40, No. 1, January 2000. Hall, Stuart. “What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture?” Pp. 468-478 in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London: Routledge, 1996. Hames-García, Michael. “‘Who Are Our Own People?’: Challenges for a Theory of Social Identity.” Pp. 102-132 in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, edited by Paula Moya and Michael Hames-García. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Haslanger, Sally. “Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not by Reason (Alone)” unpublished paper circulated widely on the internet: http://www.mit.edu/~shas lang/papers/HaslangerCICP.pdf (19 June 2009). Hight, Christopher. “Stereo Types: The Operation of Sound in the Production of Racial Identity,” Leonardo, v. 36, no. 1 (2003): 13-17. hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” Pp. 207-221 in Postcolonial Feminist Theory, edited by Reina Lewis and Sara Mills. New York: Routledge, 2003. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

178

Bibliography

Hymmel, Laura. “Female pop flop.” In Off Our Backs: A Women’s Newsjournal. Vol. 1, No. 4 (25 April 1970): 12. Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993. ———. Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. ———. Sexes and Genealogies. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. ———. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. ———. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Irwin, William, Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). James, Robin. “The Musical Semiotic: Kristeva, Don Giovanni, and Feminist Revolt.” Philosophy Today SPEP Supplement (2002): 113-119. ———. “On Popular Music in Postcolonial Theory.” Philosophia Africana, Vol. 8, No. 2 (August, 2005): 171-188. ———. “Robo-Diva R&B.” The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2008): 402-423. Jay-Z. “DOA (Death of Autotune)” on Blueprint III. New York: Island/Def Jam, 2009. Kandinsky, Wassily and Marc, Franz. Der Blaue Reiter. Munich: Piper Verlag GmbH, 1965. Kaplan, E. Anne. “Is the Gaze Male?” Pp. 119-135 in Feminism and Film, edited by E. Ann Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kramer, Lawrence. Classical Music and PostModern Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Kristeva, Julia. Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 2. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. 2002./La révolte intime: Poufoirs et limites de la psychoanalyse II. Paris: Fayard, 1997. ———. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. ———. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Walker. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. ———. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. ———. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. ———. “Thinking about liberty in dark times.” The Holberg Prize Seminar 2004. http://www.holbergprisen.no/images/materiell/2004_kristeva_english.pdf (19 June 2009). Kofman, Sarah. The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. ———. Nietzsche and Metaphor. trans. Duncan Large. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1983. ———. Le respect des femmes. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1982. M. “Pop Muzik,” on New York, London, Paris, Munich. New York: Sire Records, 1979. Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol.1 from The Marx and Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978. McClary, Susan. Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ———. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

Bibliography

179

———. “Reshaping a discipline: Musicology and Feminism in the 1990s,” Feminist Studies. Vol. 19, No. 2, (31 July 1993): 399. ———. “Start Making Sense! Musicology Wrestles with Rock.” Pp. 237-249 in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. London: Routledge, 1990. Mills, Charles. “Ideal Theory as Ideology” in Hypatia 20.3 (2005): 165-184. ———. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997. Mohanty, Sataya P. “The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity: On Beloved and the Postcolonial Condition.” Pp. 29-66 in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, edited by Paula Moya and Michael Hames-García. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Monson, Ingrid. “The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse” in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 48, No. 3, Music Anthropologies and Music Histories. (Autumn 1995): 396-422. Moya, Paula. “Introduction: Reclaiming Identity.” Pp. 1-28 in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, edited by Paula Moya and Michael Hames-García. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Murphy, Kylie. “‘I’m Sorry—I’m Not Really Sorry’: Courtney Love and Notions of Authenticity.” Hecate. Vol. 27, No. 1 (31 May 2001):139. Narayan, Uma. “Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist Critique of Cultural Essentialism.” Pp. 80-100 in Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World, edited by Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Nash, Ilana. “Hysterical Scream or Rebel Yell?: The Politics of Teen-Idol Fandom.” Pp. 133154 in Disco Divas: Women and Popular Culture in the 1970s, edited by Sherrie A. Inness. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Nealon, Jeffery. “Maxima Immoralia?: Speed and Slowness in Adorno” in Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique, ed. Jeffery Nealon (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2002), 131-144. Nicholson, Linda. “Interpreting ‘Gender.’” Pp.187-211 in Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: The Big Questions, edited by Naomi Zack, Laurie Shrage, and Crispin Sartwell. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Birth of Tragedy/The Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. ———. The Gay Science. trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. ———. “Nietzsche Contra Wagner,” in The Portable Nietzsche, translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books, 1954. ———. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. ———. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Nye, Andrea. “It’s Not Philosophy.” Pp. 101-109 in Decentering the Center, ed. Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). O’Dea, Michael. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Music, Illusion, and Desire. New York: Pallgrave Macmillan, 1995. Oakes, Jason Lee. “Pop Music, Racial Imagination, and the Sounds of Cheese: Notes on the Loser’s Lounge.” Pp. 62-82 in Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, edited by Christopher Washbourne and Maiken Derno. New York: Routledge, 2004. Oliver, Kelly. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the doublebind. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

180

Bibliography

———. “Revolutionary Horror: Nietzsche and Kristeva on the Politics of Poetry.” Social Theory and Practice, 1989, 15(3): 305-320. Parker, Rozsika and Pollock, Griselda. “Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts” in Aesthetics: The Big Questions, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1998). Reich, Steve. “Music as a Gradual Process.” Pp. 304-306 in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner. New York: Continuum, 2004. Reynolds, Simon. “New Pop and Its Aftermath.” Pp. 466-471 in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. London: Routledge, 1990. Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap music and black culture in contemporary America. Middletown, Conn.: Weslyan University Press, 1994. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts or First Discourse.” Pp. 4-28 in The Discourses and other early political writings, edited by Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men or Second Discourse.” Pp. 111-189 in The Discourses and other early political writings, edited by Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. “Essay on the Origin of Languages.” Pp. 247-299 in The Discourses and other early political writings, edited by Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. “Examination of Two Principles Advanced by M. Rameau in His Brochure Entitled: ‘Errors on Music in the Encyclopedia.’” Pp. 271-288 in Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music: The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 7, translated and edited by John T. Scott. Hanover, Maryland: University Press of New England, 1998. ———. “Letter on French Music.” Pp. 141-147 in Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music: The Collected Writings of Rousseau, v. 7, translated and edited by John T. Scott. Hanover, Maryland: The University Press of New England, 1998. Schoenberg, Arnold. Moses und Aron. On Moses und Aron/Chamber Symphony Op. 2, no. 38, BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez. London: Sony, 1993. ———. Style and Idea: Selected Writings. Ed. Leonard Stein. Trans. Leo Black. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1. Trans. E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1969. Schwartz, K. Robert. “Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process pt. 1.” In Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 19, No. ½ (Autumn 1980—Summer 1981): 373-392. Scott, Linda. Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism. New York: Macmillan, 2005. Thomas, Anthony. “The House the Kids Built: The Gay Black Imprint on American Dance Music.” Pp. 327-336 in The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, edited by Delroy Constantine-Simms. Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2001. Wald, Gayle and Gottleib, Joanne. “Smells like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrls, revolution, and women in independent rock.” Critical Matrix, Vol. 7, No. 2 (31 December 1993). West, Kanye. “Diamonds (Are from Sierra Leone)” on Late Registration. New York: Roc-AFella Records, 2005. White, Pamela C. Schoenberg and the God Idea: The Opera Moses und Aron. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985.

Bibliography

181

Wilson, Robin. “Black Women Seek a Role in Philosophy” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 28, 2007,http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i05/05b00401.htm (19 June 2009). Young, Iris Marion. On Female Body Experience: “Throwing like a Girl” and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska. “The Abstract Soul of the Commodity and the Monstrous Body of the Sphinx: Commodification, Aesthetics, and the Impasses of Social Construction.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. 16:2, 2005.

Index 4:33, 6, 57, 59. See also Cage, John

Autotune, 141

abject, ix, xvi, 48, 64, 66-67, 87, 92-94, 99, 101-106, 109-13, 116-17, 11929, 140, 146, 152n7, 164n7, 165n19 Adorno, Theodor W., xvi, 73-75, 79, 82, 92-93, 102, 105-16, 121, 129, 141, 165n21, 166n28, 167n32, 169n53 aesthetics, xviii-ix, xv-xviii, 15-16, 25, 29, 60-62, 65, 74, 83-87, 92-94, 104-6, 115, 117, 119, 128, 131-32, 135-37, 139, 140-42, 145-47, 151n2, 153n9, 160n18, 160n21, 161n26, 170n55, 170n56, 171n12 African-American, xvii, 9-12, 16, 25, 103, 108, 120 Alcoff, Linda, 140 alienation, 36, 85, 93, 97-98, 100, 103, 109-111, 120, 123; alienated labor, 97-99, 107, 154n3, 160n18 Antigone, 105 Antiphony, 6, 8 art, iii, xvi-xviii, 33, 72, 77, 100, 128, 133-136, 138, 151n2, 153n9, 154n19, 167n35, 169n53, 170n56, 170n57, 172n14; fine art, 10, 16, 24-26, 37-38, 47, 58, 61, 65, 7375, 84-87, 103-4, 108, 145-48, 152n7, 152n7, 167n29; visual art, xvii, 20-21, 54, 63, 70-71, 143, 146-48, 161n21 Attali, Jacques, 17-18, 162n35 authenticity, iii, xvi, 5, 7-8, 11-12, 25, 62, 65, 84-85, 92, 94, 96, 100-1, 105, 108-9, 113, 116, 119-22, 125, 130, 169n53, 170n55, 172n14

Battersby, Christine, ix, 139, 17172n14 Beyoncé, 91, 94 Bhabha, Homi, 115-17 black, vii-ix, 3, 5-12, 14-17, 25, 36, 102-103, 105, 107-8, 117-20, 139, 143, 145, 154n3, 155n7, 155n9, 168n47, 168n49, 169n50, 170n54, 172n15, 173n5; black Atlantic, 3, 6-8; black feminism, xvii, 15-16, 25, 117-18, 145, 168n44, 160n52, 172n17. See also AfricanAmerican Blaue Reiter, 70-73. See also Schoenberg, Arnold blues, vii, xiv, 8-12, 14-17, 25, 108, 155n9 body, viii, xiii-xvi, 3, 8, 17-18, 21-22, 24, 26, 30-31, 33-34, 51-52, 58, 6062, 64, 70, 82, 86-87, 94-95, 103, 109, 111, 115, 117, 131-33, 137-42, 154n13, 164n6, 164n7, 167n32, 170n54, 172n17, 153n11, 155n14; conjectural body, xiv-xvi, 26, 30, 51, 60-62, 64-65, 67, 80-84, 87, 9192, 140-42, 152n6; resonating body, 3-4, 17, 41, 51-52, 64, 131133, 142, 167n35; vs. mind, vii-ix, xiii-xiv, 8-9, 64-66, 68-70, 77-78, 80-84, 86, 95, 104, 109-10, 113, 124, 133, 137-38, 154n2, 156n21, 163n3

 

Cage, John, 57, 59. See also 4:33 Carter, Sean.See Jay-Z

183  

184 coincidence, xiv, xvii, xix, 3-4, 12-26, 30, 43, 53-54, 63, 65-67, 69, 72, 77, 80-87, 91-94, 101-3, 112, 122, 12728, 132, 139-42, 155n14, 157n28, 163n3 color theory, xiv, 19-21, 156n23, 156n24, 156n25 conjecture, xiv-xvi, 4, 13-15, 19, 26, 29-33, 43-47, 50-57, 60-62, 64-65, 68, 74, 78, 80, 84, 87, 91, 98, 12125, 131, 140-42, 152n6, 158n5, 162n30, 163n14. See also body Cook, Susan, ix, 101-104, 112, 146-47, 165n21 Copjec, Joan, 113, 115-18, 120-22, 126, 130. See also orthopsychic subject corporeal. See body Crenshaw, Kimberlé William, 14, 157n28 dance: music, viii, ix, 38, 102, 107-8, 167n35; in Nietzsche, 131, 133-34, 137-38 Davis, Angela, xiv, xix, 14-19, 25, 145 Derrida, Jacques, 26, 30, 32, 35, 43-44, 49-61, 137-39, 151n3, 159n13, 162n30, 162n31, 162n33, 172n14. See also titles of specific works Destiny’s Child, See Beyoncé diaspora, 3, 6-10 diffèrance, 52-56, 59. See also Derrida, Jacques Don Giovanni, 64, 74-77 Du Bois, W.E.B., 3 écriture, 50-61, 162n34 essentialism, xv, 5-10, 26, 59, 69, 8687, 120, 154n3, 155n10, 169n32 Essential Logic, 58-59 Europe, 9-10, 17, 37-38, 103, 105-106, 136-39, 155n3, 171n12; Eurocentrism, 5, 25, 30, 37, 42-43, 47-48, 51, 62, 83-84, 86, 97, 162n27 expression, 5-14, 26, 39-41 fake, 25, 62, 64, 87, 100-101, 127-128, 159n12. See also authenticity femininity, xvii, 58, 67-69, 76, 86-87, 92-93, 96, 99-100, 102-4, 106-11, 114-17, 121, 123-25, 129-30, 131, 135-42, 144, 146-47, 153n9, 164n3,

Index  

  164n7, 165n17, 167n29, 167n35, 169n50, 171n14 feminism, xiv, xvi-xix, 3, 9-10, 14-18, 20, 86-87, 92-93, 97, 101, 115, 12930, 132, 138-43, 145-46, 148, 153n12, 154n13, 154n14, 155n10, 156n26, 157n28, 165n17, 168n44, 170n55, 170n57 feminized popular. See popular, feminized fetishism: commodity fetishism, viii, xvi, 79, 106-13, 119-21, 164n5, 168n40, 168n44, 170n44; in Freud, xv, 113-17, 164n5, 168n40; vs. abjection, xvi, 87, 122-30 Foucault, Michel, 33, 69, 81, 118, 149 freedom, 33-34; in Kristeva, 76-83, 8586, 163n15 Frere-Jones, Sasha, xviii-ix, 172n15 Freud, Sigmund, 68-70, 96-97, 99-100, 104, 107, 113-16, 123, 164n3, 164n5, 168n40 gender, xiv-xviii, 3-4, 8-26, 30-31, 65, 68-69, 75-76, 86-87, 97, 101, 11314, 117-18, 127, 139-42, 151n2, 153n12, 155n10; and bodies, xvi, 8, 12-24, 51, 62, 122, 132, 152n6, 155n14, 157n26, 159n14; and contemporary philosophy, xvii, 143148; and music, vii, xiii, xvi-xix, 812, 24-26, 58, 92-94, 101-11, 11920, 141-42, 153n9, 160n18, 169n50, 171n12; and race, vii, xiii, xiv-xv, 8-26, 91, 127, 156n23, 157n28, 167n33, 169n50, 171n12 Gilroy, Paul, 3-9, 12, 154n2, 155n7. See also black Atlantic Of Grammatology, 26, 49-60, 159n13. See also Derrida, Jacques Hall, Stuart, 5 Hames-García, Michael, 19-21, 152n6, 156n23 Harmony: in Attali, 17-19, 156n21; in Rousseau, 30, 37-50; tonality/tonal harmony, 9-10, 17, 30, 38-43, 47, 60, 71, 75-77, 133-35, 158n9, 161n25 high/low distinction, xvii-xviii, 4-5, 912, 15-16, 24-26, 58, 61, 64-65, 73, 79, 86, 91, 101-10, 121, 125, 129-

Index 30, 141, 145-47, 152n7, 153n9, 154n3, 165n21, 172n14. See also feminized popular, popular music Hight, Christopher, 16-18 hip hop, 94, 105, 112, 119-20, 128, 141, 171n8. See also names of specific artists Holiday, Billie, xiv, xix, 14-15 hooks, bell, 115, 117-118, 139, 145, 168n44, 169n50, 169n52, 172n17 Huyssen, Andreas, 146-147

material vs. social, xiii-xv, xvii, xix, 78, 10-12, 16, 24-26, 30-32, 37-38, 43-49, 51-53, 56-62, 68-68, 72-73, 83-85, 95, 97, 99-100, 112, 127, 142, 152n6, 158n6, 158n8, 161n26. See also body, conjecture McClary, Susan, 5, 8-12, 155n9, 167n35 melody, 30, 37-40, 44-51, 54, 58, 133135, 141, 171n7 metaphysics, xiii, 26, 30-51, 53-55, 57, 59, 64-65, 78, 83, 86-87, 97, 131, 133, 145, 151n3, 161n26, 172n14 Mills, Charles, xv, 31, 56, 62, 145, 158n5 mirror stage, 66-67, 103, 112, 115-27, 163n9 Moses und Aron, 62-65, 69, 72-75, 7778, 85-86 Mozart, Wolfgang, 63, 74-77, 119, 134. See also titles of specific works Mulvey, Laura, 118, 120-21, 139, 168n40, 168n44 music, vii-ix, xiii-xiv, xiv-xix, 3-19, 21-26, 29-34, 36-65, 68-78, 79, 85, 131-42, 144-45, 154n3, 155n7, 155n9, 156n21, 158n9, 161n25, 162n28, 162n34, 163n14, 170n55, 172n18; absolute music, 30, 43-51, 54, 63-64, 70-75, 77-78, 109, 129, 160n19, 160n21, 161n26, 170n2, 171n7, 171n8, 171n11; art music, 4-5, 9-10, 15-16, 37-38, 47, 58, 61, 101-2, 108-11, 120, 122, 128, 138, 144, 146, 152n7, 153n9, 171n8, 172n15, 165n21; and language, 6-8, 31-32, 36-55, 69-73, 77-78, 159n11, 159n12, 161n26, 162n30; popular music, vii-ix, xiv, xvi-xviii, xix, 3-5, 11-12, 15-16, 24-26, 58, 65, 79, 91-94, 100-13, 117-22, 127130, 131, 133-43, 146-47, 154n13, 154n14, 165n17, 165n19, 166n24, 166n28, 167n29, 167n35, 155n57, 171n12, 171n13, 172n15; process music, 22-24, 157n29

intersectionality, xiv, 3-4, 7, 11-24, 26, 51, 62, 68-70, 75-76, 80, 87, 11820, 142-43, 145-46, 148, 152n6, 156n7; traffic metaphor, 13-15; vs. coincidence, 12-13, 19-24, 26, 156n23. See also coincidence Irigaray, Luce, xvi, 92-95, 97-101, 1034, 111, 114, 117, 121, 127, 129, 146, 165n17, 165n18, 167n32, 167n33 irony, 62, 64, 77-85, 87 Jay-Z, 118-120, 130, 141, 168n49, 169n52 Knowles, Beyoncé. See Beyoncé Kofman, Sara, 130-132, 137, 164n3 Kristeva, Julia, xiv, 61-73, 75-87, 92, 102-103, 105, 112, 120, 122-28, 130; and feminism, 65, 68-69, 76, 86-87, 103, 122-23, 125, 152n7, 163n15; and music, xv, 63-64, 6973, 75-78, 162n1, 164n16; and semiotic, xiv-xv, 35, 48, 64-65, 6770, 75, 78, 80, 86. See also abject, specular, society of the spectacle Lacan, Jacques, 67, 112-13, 115-19, 121-22, 127-29. See also mirror stage Marx, Karl, 92-101, 111, 113, 116, 124, 129, 164n3, 165n12, 167n32, 167n33, 167n37, 168n40, 170n54 masculinity, vii, ix, xvi, 5, 8-12, 58, 6769, 76, 78, 86, 93-96, 100-102, 106107, 109, 111-17, 119-21, 127-28, 130, 138-39, 141, 146-49, 152n7, 153n9, 167n29, 167n32, 167n33, 168n35, 169n52, 171n14

 

185

Naryan, Uma, 9-10, 155n11 nature: in Rousseau, 26, 29-47, 49-51, 53-54, 60-61, 158n6, 158n8, 159n14, 161n23, 161n26; state of, xiv-xvi, 22, 31, 34-35, 44-45, 47,

 

 

186 51, 60, 84, 122, 124, 152n6 , 163n14; vs. culture, xiii, xv-xvi, xix, 6-8, 11, 16, 24, 26, 53, 58-62, 64-65, 73, 82, 84, 91, 97-99, 103, 112, 122-27, 138, 151n2, 152n6, 154n3, 165n12, 168n37 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xvi-xvii, 74, 13042, 171n11; and the feminine, xvixvii, 131, 135, 137-40, 171n14; and music, xvi-xvii, 131-42, 171n8, 171n12, 172n15; and Wagner, 132135, 171n13. See also dance noise, 17-19, 29, 32, 37-38, 40, 43, 50, 57-60 non-ideal theory, xv-xvi, 26, 30-31, 60, 62. See also Mills, Charles Oedipus complex, xv, 67-69, 75-76, 81, 123, 126-27, 158n10 opera, xvi, 30, 32, 47-48, 161n23; in Kristeva, 63-64, 69-72, 75-78, 162n1; in Nietzsche, 131-37, 171n12. See also titles of specific operas orthopsychic subject, 115-22 Parker, Rozsika and Pollock, Griselda, 146-47 passivity, xviii, 78-80, 84-85, 93-94, 96, 98, 103, 105-9, 111-14, 118-19, 121, 128, 130, 135, 141, 154n14, 167n29, 167n32, 168n44, 169n50 patriarchy, xvi-xix, 14, 30-31, 58, 86, 92-93, 97, 100, 102-105, 113, 115, 122, 125, 127-29, 157n28, 165n17, 166n24, 167n33, 169n52 philosophy as a discipline, xvii, 129-30, 143-49 physical, ix, xiii, xv-xvi, 3, 13, 21, 26, 30-43, 45-47, 49, 51-52, 54, 56, 6061, 63-65, 68, 82-83, 86-87, 95, 103-4, 129, 131-35, 138-42, 146, 158n8, 159n13, 160n21, 161n22, 162n27, 163n3, 167n35 Plato, 61, 65, 72, 76, 84-85, 104, 137, 143-45, 152n2, 156n21, 161n26 pleasure, ix, 6, 25, 36, 40, 42, 47-49, 67, 76, 85, 100-1, 104-7, 109-11, 118, 129, 131, 135-36, 139-40, 152n7, 159n12, 160n18, 167n35, 169n50, 170n57, 171n12

Index  

  popular: culture, xv, 5, 80, 104, 108, 130, 143-149; feminized, xvi-xviii, 5, 11-12, 25, 58, 76, 92, 101-11, 113-19, 128-31, 137-49, 143-49, 154n13, 154n14, 165n19, 170n57, 166n28, 171n12; music, vii-viii, xvi-xix, 3-5, 7, 11-12, 15-16, 2426, 61, 68, 91-94, 100-11, 119-22, 128-32, 134-35, 137-42, 143, 14647, 154n14, 165n19, 166n28, 171n12; vs. serious, xiv, xvi, xviii, 3-5, 15-16, 24-26, 58, 61, 64-65, 78, 80, 84, 86-87, 91-92, 94, 10113, 127-30, 134-37, 143-49, 152n7, 164n16, 166n21, 171n14. See also high/low distinction postcolonial theory, xiv, 3-12, 17-19, 24, 60, 165n18 psychoanalysis, xv, xix, 63, 65-70, 7587, 97, 99-100, 104-5, 112-29, 158n12, 168n40. See also names of specific concepts and theorists race, vii-ix, xiii-xiv, xix, 3-26, 30-31, 65, 103, 107-108, 111, 121-22, 12729, 139-48, 151n2, 152n7, 154n3, 170n54; and gender, 3-5, 11-17, 1826, 69, 76, 91-94, 117-20, 152n6, 155n14, 157n28, 159n14, 169n50. See also names of specific concepts and theorists Rainey, Ma, xiv, 14-15 Rameau, Jean-Philipe, 29-30, 32, 38, 40-44, 46, 49, 51, 60, 62, 161n26 Real, impossible, 63-65, 67, 74, 77 87, 113, 121-127, 129; Lacanian, 73, 129, 138; vs. fake, vii, 5, 7, 11, 25, 30, 36, 40, 62, 65, 94, 96-101, 1045, 110-13, 116-17, 120-21, 127-28, 136, 141, 144, 147-48, 154n3. See also authenticity. Reich, Steve, 22-24 rhythm, viii-ix, 23-24, 58, 66, 70, 107, 110, 131, 133, 162n28, 162n29, 171n8 rock music, vii-ix, 128, 165n19; and British invasion, 11-12; and gender, vii-ix, 8, 11-12, 91, 94, 102, 105, 111; indie rock, vii-ix, 172n15; and race, vii-ix, 5, 8, 11-12, 91, 102, 105, rockism, 146; See also names of specific artists

Index Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xiv-xv, xvii, 22, 26, 29-51, 54, 56-57, 60-62, 64, 67-68, 77, 84, 91, 122-26, 131, 158n6, 158n9, 158n10, 159n14, 160n17, 160n19, 160n21, 160n23, 161n27, 162n30, 163n14

society of the spectacle, 63, 65, 78-80, 83-86, 130 surface, superficiality, xvi, 7-8, 25, 72, 85, 100, 106-7, 109-10, 131, 134137, 139, 172n14 symbolic: in Kristeva, 35, 63, 66-70, 72, 75-78; Lacanian, 95, 99, 102, 104, 115, 122, 126

Schoenberg, Arnold, 62, 63-64, 71-75, 77, 82, 102, 109, 140, 158n9, 164n16, 169n53. See also names of specific works semiotic. See Kristeva, Julia sex, 14, 68-69, 96, 144, 146, 156n26, 167n33, 169n50, 169n52; sexism, xv, 14, 31, 34, 60, 118, 161n27 sexuality, xiii-xiv, 11-12, 68-69, 91-93, 96, 103-104, 107, 109, 111, 113, 116, 119-21, 127-28, 139-40, 144, 164n3, 166n24, 167n32 Smith, Bessie, xiv, 8-9, 14-15, 104 social construction, xiii-xiv, xvi, 6-12, 29-37, 39-46, 48-53, 56, 59-69, 7273, 78, 81-84, 91, 94-95, 97-101, 111-13, 122, 127, 129, 158n6, 158n10, 159n14, 161n26, 170n26. See also nature social identity, ix, xiv, 4, 13, 15, 19-24, 91-92, 122, 128, 132, 140, 142, 152n6, 155n14, 156n23, 157n26, 157n28. See also gender, race sound, xiii, 17-18, 20, 22, 26, 29, 32, 36-43, 46-48, 50-52, 54-62, 66, 77, 102, 137, 142, 159n12, 160n17, 160n21, 161n23 spacing, 56-60, 64, 91, 123, 162n33 Spears, Britney, 143, 166n24 specular, 62-69, 75-80, 82-84, 87, 163n3

 

187

taste, 16, 78, 82-84, 106, 128, 141, 147, 166n24 trace: in Derrida, 54-56; in Kristeva, 69-71, 79 use and exchange value, 94-100, 103, 108-9, 112, 114, 124, 129, 165n12 Wagner, Richard, xvi, 131-135, 171n13 West, Kanye, 119-120, 130 whiteness, vii-ix, xvi, 5, 9, 11, 15-18, 20, 31, 66, 93, 96, 102-103, 105-8, 111-12, 116-118, 120, 122, 128-30, 143, 147, 151n2, 152n7, 154n3, 160n18, 167n29, 167n31, 167n32, 168n47, 169n50, 169n51, 169n52, 170n54, 171n12, 172n15, 173n5 woman, xiv, xvi, xviii, xix, 10, 14-15, 20, 25, 65, 68, 75, 83, 86-87, 92102, 104-5, 109, 111, 114-15, 11718, 121, 127, 129, 131, 135, 13739, 141, 143-44, 146-49, 153n9, 153n12, 153n13, 154n14, 157n28, 164n5, 165n17, 165n19, 167n33, 169n50, 169n52, 170n57, 172n14 writing, arche-writing. See écriture

 

 

About the Author Robin James is an assistant professor in the philosophy department at UNC Charlotte. After studying music theory, music history, and philosophy at Miami University, she received her Ph.D. in philosophy from DePaul University, where she studied continental philosophy with an emphasis on feminist theory, critical race/postcolonial theory, and aesthetics/philosophy of music. Broadly, her research examines various intersections of aesthetics and politics; more narrowly, much of her work focuses on the race-gender politics of contemporary American popular music. She has written about the role of race and gender in discourses of aesthetic taste, aesthetic receptivity, and the more contemporary but related notions of white hipness, postmillennial black hipness, and Afrofuturist black feminism. Her work has appeared in journals such as Hypatia, Contemporary Aesthetics, Philosophy Today, and The Journal of Popular Music Studies. She is currently working on a project that reads Jacques Rancière’s work on politics and aesthetics in light of critical-race feminist theories, and another project on Afrofuturism and queer theory. James teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in feminist theory, critical race and postcolonial theory, continental philosophy, and popular music studies. Informal scholarly(ish) writings on popular music, philosophy, and social identity can be found on her blog, “It’s Her Factory”: www.its-her-factory.blogspot.com.

189