blah-feme

what fado remembers

One of the ways in which many commentators on fado have characterised it is as a cultural practice of remembering or, better, as a kind of collectivising memory work. But what is it that fado has forgotten or what kind of remembering does it enable? To ask this question, we need also to ask something about the places in which fado has moved and the actors that have enabled and used it. To ask these two question – where? and who? – is also to ask about the nature of the exchanges, encounters and representations that fado has enabled. With this in mind, then, I want to propose four observations.

•    My first proposition, then, is that fado, from its very conception, was always implicated in a kind of ‘inter-class emotionality’. In other words, it is a constitutive property of vernacular or ‘collectivising’ musics such as fado that their very ontological coherence is born of an encounter with another community: only when the epistemological frame of the ‘boundary’ is experienced both by insider and outsider, can that ontological boundary be drawn. Put another way, within the confines of Western European modernity, one must encounter difference in order to be able to draw up a sense of what is internally coherent in one’s own cultural practices. In this sense, those early inter-class encounters between working class exponents of early fado and the bourgeoisie are constitutive of fado’s musical ontology. In this context, then, fado’s memory work is a work of covering over the split class origins of the music.

•    Second, fado presents a coherent and persuasive set of narratives (a narrative cluster) around certain mythologised places. ‘Mouraria’, and ‘Alfama’, alongside other districts of Potugal’s capital and, of course, ‘Lisboa’ itself appear with stubborn regularity in fado lyrics. But to say hat fado is about the city is only true to the extent that one understands the preposition here in a number of ways: the city is certainly thematised in fado, but not ubiquitously; fado also performs or stages a certain acoustic field (doors and windows must be shut or open, the city must be allowed to, or prevented from, entering the privileged acoustic space of the casa, the boundary must be marked by both the discipline of guarding that boundary and by its contestant transgression. This two-way dialectic of passing and being prevented from passing is precisely how the city is represented (which is to say, disciplined, represented). Similarly, the manner in which fado will sometimes tumble into the open air (the regular concerts at the Castilo de São Jorge, for example) are also markers of changing reterritorialisations of the city by fado.

•    My third proposition is that fado’s imagined city is not cartographic in the strictest sense, but much more profoundly metonymic. The distinction I want to raw here is between a tendency in some urban song forms to engage in what might be termed an imaginary mapping of the city (where a protagonist can easily stumble form one landmark to another, even though such landmarks might be some distance form each other) and a tendency, most notable in fado (but also in the French chanson) to both valorise and fragment the cityscape: fado, for example, often presents Lisbon as a feminine (‘Maria Lisboa’, ‘Lisboa, menina e moça’, and so on) but in which small details, landmarks and markers of the city are thrown together in an order that in non-linear, making new structures of proximity that overlay the city. In ‘Lisboa, menina e moça’, for example, we encounter the following: ‘No Castelo, ponho um cotovelo / Em Alfama, descanso o olhar / E assim desfaço o novelo de azul e mar / À Ribeira encosto a cabeça / A almofada, da cama do Tejo’ in which the boy of a woman provides a new logic of proximity, a new order of places and spaces, but always with the notion of a kind of navigability at h heart of its logic. What this metonymic reordering of the city does is to turn the city, like Calvino’s Maurilia in Invisible Cities.  Just as the imaginary Maurilia represents an ideal, perfectly captured imagination of the city, so the metonymically transformed city of Lisbon is laid out as a kind of discursive space into which to pour regret, loss and the delicious jouissance of nostalgia.

•    My fourth proposition is that the manner in which fado reimagines the city is symptomatic of a broader trend in vernacular urban song to deal with modernity as a kind of forgetting. Friedrich Kittler has noted that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses on the past take on new metaphors and imageries of ‘loss’ in a kind of negative emblamatisation of new storage media such as phonography, photography and film. Where the new technologies produce the possibility of saving lost voices, lost performances, so also they produced an intensification of discourses on loss at those voices, performance, moments not captured. Indeed, as Bennett Hogg has noted, phonography takes on the function of a kind of ‘prosthetic’ memory.  And so, for fado, modernity comes to stand for the arrival of her lost object, the precious thing that can never be wholly put back together, the memento mori, the partial object of desire. In this sense, fado’s modernity is the call to remember.

Fado can thus be thought ethnographically and psychoanalytically as a kind of memory work and as such, it offers a striking case study in the public cultural work of  remembering and forgetting. Its reparative force, to use a term from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, is complex, by no means efficient and far from universally productive in therapeutic terms, but cultural practices inevitably take up complex relations with the jouissance of suffering and easing that suffering.

contested memory

Around the notion of memory, there circulates in the Western academy a set of discourses that have tended to emphasise cultural sameness. Memory studies have tended to draw on psychoanalytic approaches to, for example, trauma, melancholy and mourning, that seek to draw together into a relatively homogeneous field the complex and fractured experiences of different cultures, identities, subject positions and investments. Ethnographic approaches to memory, conversely, have tended to seek out and name cultural specificities and encounter memory as one of a number of cultural resources through which communities build a core narrative about their location, values and sense of who they are. What is interesting, of course, is that both discourses – the psychoanalytic and the ethnographic – are symptomatic of a relatively coherent institutional context in which one approach places memory as a coherent set of practices and residues centre stage whilst the other relativises memory as something which, whatever it might be, is absolutely not about shared experience, except within certain highly circumscribed inter-cultural situations. Coherent field or fractured field, universal condition or specific local practice: where the academy has consistently failed in its approaches to memory has been to find a middleground or a productively contested space in which to work through these incommensurabilities. It is, I would argue, in these very incommensurabilities that the academy reveals its deep structural ideological make up in which the same/different binarism cannot be negotiated save only in very few highly precarious attempts.

One particularly vexing case study in this regard is the case of what we have come to term World Music. Connell and Gibson have recently shown how ‘aural tourism’, borrowing the term from Cosgrove,  has transformed the ways in which cultures consume each other and, perhaps most importantly for us here, how such practices are ‘deterritorialising’ place and identity in ways that are both profound and wide-reaching. In the scholarships that have recently emerged around this notion of ‘aural tourism’, one is struck by the attention given in particular to the material conditions of World Music production, to what we used to call the class markers of such encounters. A staging of the ‘West’/exotic encounter here places white Western (usually ‘liberal’, well-educated) aficionados in the position of privileged  aristocratic consumer above the producers of musics from cultures other than their own – the liberal consensus on World Music thus points to what might be termed a hidden class structure (hidden in that the outer signs of that structure are invariably presented first and foremost as race, geopolitics or the clash of cultures).

The emphasis in particular on so-called ‘non-Western’ and ‘exotic’ territories as sights of World Music production is, I would like to suggest, a symptom of the ethical gridlock experienced by liberal scholarship with regard to music markets in the more general sense, but in particular with regards to its encounters with putatively less developed capitalist cultures (in, for example, parts of Africa, rural Asia or the Pacific rim). Indeed, as early as 1997, Warne characterised this tendency to seek out and consume World Music as being carried out ‘by well-meaning cultural tourists’ in search of ‘pre-capitalist authenticity’, or ‘signifiers of rootedness’.  The misty-eyed nostalgia that attends the encounter with these Other-cultures is not, therefore, ethically coherent unto itself, in that it partakes simultaneously of a critique of capitalism (as ‘false’, ‘insufficient’ or thoroughly compromised) whilst consuming, in a manner deeply indebted to the epistemological technologies of capitalism, the products of (seemingly) ‘authentic’ pre-capitalist cultures as fetishes, as commodities.

This doubled consciousness, then, is stuck in an almost immovable authenticity discourse such that the privileged (class) position of consumer is covered over by other hermeneutic strategies and practices: ethnographic characterisations of place, space and producer investment, audience practices and other forms of analysis interested in the specific textures of local practices are thus as much a part of these tendencies as are the aural tourists that sustain the marketised exoticisations of the Other. Both ethnograpoher and aural tourist share a need to hold musics of the Other in a specific place, in a local specificity and the noise with which most ethnographers decry marketisation is probably symptomatic of their unconscious recognition of their complicity in that same logic – so-called ruralism, for example, is an extreme example of this tendency in which local musics are held by the ethnographer in a hysterical state of defensive authenticity.

The authenticity markers of such practices are clear to see. To make a World Music, it seems, requires certain ingredients and a set of cultural technologies – first, take a culture from far away, ravaged by the worst excesses of colonial intervention, surviving (or even better, barely subsisting) ‘outside’ the global system of capital, and then stage an encounter. The global marketisation of these musics then usually means plugging the finest and most professionalised musical products of a culture into the global system of capital and presenting to us the fetishized reduction of that culture to anecdote, event, mythical encounter, in neat packages, in re-ordered territories of musical recordings all carefully marked and presented in the context of the putatively authentic field: in other words, marketisation is a process of representation. In this sense, the similarities between marketising and ethnographic approaches are structural in that both seek to intervene in specific cultural practices and give name to them.
In this context, the psychoanalytic approach to memory is no less problematic.

It is a truism to note that recent critiques of psychoanalysis have tended to overstate the position of the universal subject within it. Yet at its core, there is something resolutely top-down about the psychoanalytic theory of the subject. In this regard, holocaust studies, for example, has proved particularly susceptible to the fantasy of a universal, endlessly transferable suffering. There are clear and very understandable reasons why holocaust studies in particular should want to emphasise this shared experience of memory, drawing on notions of what James Young, with Paul Ricoeur and Pierre Nora, has termed ‘memory work’.  The need for the project of a public discourse on the holocaust is without question and the kinds of outcomes of that scholarship are absolutely in line with the needs of that project. However, in other contexts, the need to develop a critical discourse about the nature of public memory is equally pressing and most memory studies have singularly failed to develop a sufficiently nuanced theorisation of memory, choosing on the whole to cover over the political economy of mourning. In this sense, questions as to the specific natures of memory have been sidelined by a putative need to emphasise the coherence and singularity of memory work to the detriment of cultural difference. And where, moreover, cultural difference does play a part in such approaches, it is only as a kind of exemplar of the universalised subaltern.

We might now be in a position to move to the metanarrative in which the notion of memory as either local practice or universalising discourse can be problematised precisely around the question of representation and authenticity. Both approaches – the ethnographic and the universalising – have been unwilling to make place for the kinds of epistemological disturbance that most other critical discourses have long since made room for. Where, in either approach, is the recognition of fantasy as the ground of discourse? Where is the room for the kinds of tough auto-analysis that shook up the humanities in the 80s and 90s? Both approaches to the question of memory, then, are ripe for a profound rethinking. In what follows, I will attempt to develop, admittedly rather tentatively, a hybridising approach in which the same/different binarism is placed under extreme pressure.

on being superfluous

I grew up with the notion that being useful was what one wanted in life: superfluity was simply not good enough, the absolute end! Be useful, I was told, and you shall be happy! I remember, when I stumbled, as a callow and impressionable youth, onto the notion of the superfluous man or lišnij čelovek (лишний человек) in Russian nineteenth-century literature, the joy at discovering that forbidden purpose, the end of purpose itself in these men: Lermontov, Pushkin, Turgenev, they all speak of useless men, men without aim or need, men who sit around, languish, take up, perhaps, a gentleman’s post in the army for a short while, travel, write memoirs and take a lover or two. 

And so I read and read, devouring these men, insatiably wanting not only to understand them, but to become them. To be that, I thought, is what I really want: I wanted, that is, to be someone who lived without purpose or need, outside the demands of the awful gray misery of the work ethic.
At last, I thought, a way of being absolutely nothing. 

And so it was that I bought a long trench coat and started smoking French cigarettes; I developed a habit of sprawling in demonstrative melancholy in cafes with long and intricate works of Russian literature; I never went anywhere without my copy of Lermontov’s collected early poems or A Hero of our Time and was always close to my Turgenev and my Yevteshchenko; I stopped eating proper meals and took up a prodigious alcohol habit; I stayed up all hours listening to the Doors; smoked too much and went about the business of wasting time with a zeal and conviction of which only someone fully imbued with the protestant work ethic is capable. 

And yet, to be nothing, I found, was a very tricky business. One had to find ways of doing nothing which involved as little work as possible, whilst only ever spectacularly succeeding in doing nothing once one had made the appropriate and diligent preparations; and one could only spectacularly succeed in being nothing, once one had succeeded in doing nothing. 

It was actually quite complicated. You see, you had to find a way of setting the day up such that sprawling and procrastinating could become bearable. This was the trickiest part of the process: to be and do nothing meant having endless and unflinching patience. The discipline of this superfluity was extremely exacting. In response to the demands of my languishing, I developed a quite strict regimen: rise promptly at noon, avoid showering and contact with others at all cost, don elegantly ratty trench coat, toss long unkempt hair and strut out into the street with a sense of clarity and purpose afforded only to those who bathe in the glorious splendor of their superfluity. Take up residence at library, cafe, coffee shop or bar and begin the day’s languishing... Over the months and months, I started elaborating my regimen to take in certain rituals (kneel and you shall prey? Repeat and you shall be content). I experimented with kinds of walking, and attempted on several occasions to occupy space with a certain deliberateness. If I could feel my body occupying space, I thought, if I could remain consistently conscious of its fleshiness, its materiality, I could not get distracted by the ubiquitous toxicity of purpose and need... It was my ultimate desire in this to occupy space with an intention so focused, so purposeful, that could only come from an unswerving commitment to the project of nothingness. I found I could concentrate on occupying space for up to 4 minutes at a time and developed a way of setting up a posture that could block out any attempt from the outside world to shake me from my resolve: do not speak to me of time or of need, I am busy with the core of being, thank you very much. 

In the end, then, I became an exemplary layabout. The Stakhanovite heroism of my commitment to this regimen is one of my life’s greatest achievements. 

This year, I shall mostly be trying to recapture those heady days of nihil.

all about... him

He sits quietly, smiling, listening. How old he has become. He is small, frail, white-haired and quiet. I remember him as large, loud, with an infectious laugh that I could hear from my bedroom (all the way upstairs) as he and mum watched TV into the night. Now he is so quiet, so careful, so fragile. As I watch him sitting there, he catches my eye and roles his eyes. I smile back the smile of  shared knowledge. That complicity, that sharing of what we both know, that history of errors is powerful, but also as quiet, frail and brittle as he is. I have never really spoken much with him,  never really sat down and talked about anything other than polite nothings, harmless humorous quips or dead inanities about work . Perhaps it is because he is a man, or perhaps it is because he is that kind of man. Whatever the reason, we have never really shared much other than that long and delicate history that runs through all families.

When I was a child he always seemed so me to be so extraordinarily easy. Where mum was tense, edgy, cross and sparky, he was laid back, warm, friendly. That warmth is still here as I watch him, sipping at his wine, looking at my mother and my sister, listening intently to heir inane ramblings.

He notices me watching him again and grins, slightly flush.

After the meal, all the guests gone, he chunters, showing mild but loving irritation at my mother's fussing in the kitchen. I try to wash up, but am banished to the lounge. 'You've done enough' he says, placing a gentle hand on my shoulder. He was never the most tactile of men, but these moments were always common: punctuations by touch, meant to mark out the moment of their being spoken as if to ask gently and carefully, 'Can you listen now?'.

After all the fussing in the kitchen and question after question about where I keep this, that or the other bowl, cup or pan, we settle down in the lounge. He takes up his book and continues to read and mother tuts. He looks at me and smiles, roles his eyes, and puts down his book. He knows...

waiting

Expectation, like an itch, that sits and twitches with its own fecund materiality: when will it arrive, what will it be like, will I be able to make sense of it? There is always something in this waiting that is quite delicious, quite intoxicating: he will come and I will be full; it will come and I will be more; she will come and I will reach across the abyss and make a connection, be much, much, much more than just here, just waiting.

The intensity of expectation, its coarseness, its textured pulsing contingency is a symptom of its structural refusal of the foreclosure: to wait is to be open, to wait is to be ripe, ready, waiting waiting waiting as if for the end, the beginning, the middle.

Something will arrive into this scene that ends this.

But the ending is precisely what which I do not want.

delicate synchronicity

On the way home, I am cycling across a bridge over a small river near the People's Theatre. It is one of those chilly late spring evenings, clear, crisp and still. Someone is burning garden wood and the smoke drifts slowly across the bridge. Beautiful, beautiful. I am listening to my ipod as I cycle slowly across the bridge. I am listening to Swedish keyfiddle music - Daniel Petersen's arrangement of a Brudmarch. The melody begins unaccompanied for several stanzas and then the nyckelharpa starts, like a veil of rustles that slowly falls, encroaching quietly on the voice. The music hovers, swoons and drifts like smoke on a breeze. It all fits, all of it: there is no more delicate, more vulnerable moment than this brief glimpse of fragile synchronicity.

conjuring ... someone

The 'someone' of this title is suggestive in the context of my recent posts. Certainly the thoughts and feelings articulated there form a  framewok for some of what follows, but the question, it seems to me, is one which haunts us all: what does it mean to speak of someone in their absence, to write of them, to seek to make reference to them? It is no mere citationality, no 'simple' intertextuality.

To conjure someone up is to refuse citation's limpid omnidirectionality, to refute the mobility of the intertext; to conjure here would be to make flesh of the word, to transmute that brutal fixity of media that has dogged late Western modernity in a return to a kind of fitful tracing, a melancholy dance of meanings, traces, marks, humours. What are the traces and humours that we seek to intensify, to underline, mark out when we, to put it rather blandly, 'miss' someone? Voice certainly, but also the tiny metonyms of the blessed habitus in absentia: a smell, a fabric, a scarf, a handbag. The colour of the hair, a simple gesture, a posture – they can all take on an extraordinary intensity and stand in for the whole, or for other missing pieces of the habitus. These details, poised precariously, then, between metonym and synechdoche, are the stuff of melancholy recollection.

This is in some sense about a melancholy materialism, the yearning for the matter that has dissipated, but which holds impressive and palpable sway over the symbolic universie it has abandoned. In a certain sense, it becomes more vivid for a while, operates wih more efficiency precisiely for for being absent. To conjure in this sense, so antithetical to citation, so at odds with that comfortable textuality of citation, is to bypass the logic of symbolisation altogether. It is as if one were able to suspend the symbolic universe, crack it open with a supreme effort of will and MAKE IT SO, make it that you never left, never died, never abandoned.

This melancholy materialism is thus also constituted around a strangely comforting atavism, a deliberate weakening of the the division that seems to separate  presence and absence, perhaps our primary means of ordering our world and also the primary means by which symbolisation is put to work.

It is the angry and whistful anguish at that order's brutal division of absence and presence that drives the grief one feels at loss and which makes conjuring so important. To remember in this way, in this melancholy materialism of absence, is, in a very important and palpable sense, to experience the truth of leftism: it is born of a mourning, of sadness and melancholy, of wanting things to be as they were or as they might be.

This melancholy is the curse of the left but it is what feeds it, powers it, gives it life.