blah-feme

fragments and death... towards late bloging

To write in fragments: this is the mode du jour of the late blog style. It is a hysterical, overwrought and supercharged style, symptomatic of the anxiety that attends anything in its late phase. The late style stinks of death, wreaks of an institution in terminal decay, but also holding that end off, keeping it all alive with a supreme effort of will, a willfulness that is written across every prosaic spasm; the late modality, then, is a sysyphian modality.

My friends recently gave a beautiful and challenging talk at my university about the late and posthumous voice. What strikes me in this juxtaposition (late and posthumous) is just how unstable the juxtaposition is, and therefore how intriguing, how gloriously productive. Italian Germanist Massimo Cacciari's  Dallo Steinhof, translated into English as Posthumous People,  opens with Nietzsche’s famous Maxim: ‘It is only after death that we will enter our life and come alive, oh, very much alive, we posthumous people!’  Nietzsche’s textual self-projection into an abstracted reader-reception after his death touches on a ubiquitous process that had been under way in the Hapsburg lands since the 1850s and which continue right into our own predicament of the late modern – the careful reorganization of education around homogenized standards of reading and an immersion of students into and out of tradition: a kind of gentle dipping motion, like sheep in need of a good barrier against the pests and diseases of the vernacular.  Cacciari’s complex but beautiful account of the intellectual and artistic world of fin-de-siècle Vienna points in essence to the observation, metaphorically cast from the Steinhof (a hill above the metropolis on which stands the church of Sankt Leopold designed by Otto Wagner), that tradition and innovation are here ranged against each other, in productive but deadly conflict:

The symmetrical, repetitive rhythm is accentuated from the outside by a revetment of thin marble blocks. The iron clamps and bolts that keep them in place, rimmed with copper leaf borders, give a sense of motion to these walls, yet without any monumental emphasis and without any concession to ornament. Inside, the building’s perfect measure of basic forms is joined, without contrast, by the multicoloured clarity of light that streams through the stained glass windows. Here is the meeting, never realised so well, of the principles of tradition and quotation on the one hand and the Nervenleben [vitality] of the Secession Movement’s images and colour on the other.

In these two juxtapositions (late and posthumous and tradition and innovation), which refuse absolutely to coincide or resonate with each other, we can detect something of what seems to be at stake in the blogging moment (and it is a moment: this too will pass), a provocative and yet utterly hopeless questioning of the extent to which speaking and writing might have an intimate connection.

I do no want to emblamatize the writing/speaking binarism or link the two poles to a simple presence/absence oscillation. It is better, it seems to me, to think of medialities, the materializations that each allows and forbids: when one dose this, their relation is not binaristic, but differentiated along a line of medial fields (channels, ruts, dikes) and speaking and writing are close, very close, but not structurally summative, not able to grasp the full complexity of the late modern imagination of what it is possible to mean.

The late  and posthumous voices are thus fragments, parcels of symbolic material hat have broken off and  set adrift in a free from reign of  terror, of joy, of agony.

This is the logic of the fragment: to run free in chains, to play in strict discipline, to tarry and to leave, to conjure and to bury.

Late indeed; posthumous, certainly.

mourning for the neighbour

this post now forms part of a larger article that will be published shortly

When the music stops: distributed agency and listening after music

In the tradition of rhetorical hyperbole, I want to make an assertion: in the West we are, I suggest, living after music.

That is to say, our engagement with music, our consumptions of it and the ways in which we understand and distribute it have 'come to constitute' (in the sense of adding up to something bigger than the sum of its parts) a very radical shift in musical ontology. At one time, (and especially since the Enlightenment) there was a clear (material) relationship between both individual and collective authorships and agency: authors (whether numerous, collective, or working 'alone') could count on something like a public marking, a naming of their work (or labour), and where such namings tended to be more fluid (as in the case, for example, of traditional musics) there was, nonetheless, always the possibility of that naming, always, in tune writing, in collecting, in performing, a kind of staged agency that made itself felt as, in some sense, having purpose.

Music since the Enlightenment, then, might be said to have channelled something like a materialised subjectivity, an unfolding of praxis in time, a performance of passing, of changing or marking time. And that changing or marking is where the sense of agency was always grounded, always held in place according to an elaborated, but essentially Cartesian, fantasy. To mark or change, so that fantasy goes, was always to guarantee some kind of ill-fit of subject to object; from that mismatch comes the very possibility of the subject, his agency, his way in and out of the world. In short, that subject had always o constitute an excess to a mere flow of semiosis.

And so the stories always seemed to have gone; but when the key elements of that fantasy come under critical scrutiny (from biology, deconstruction, radical collectivisms, feminisms, cyber-romanticisms and other forms of acted-out political hostility to the enthroning of the subject), then the agency that always seemed to drive it, as that mismatch, that sticking out of and marking of time, turns into a kind of playful automatism. It would seem that  there are no longer any singular points of agency from which political and social action can flow. No longer are we able, without irony or without seeming to cast ourselves in the role of court jester, to hold onto that myth of subject-as-purpose.

And in the ways we listen, that shift is already very clearly articulated. Indeed, we are at a place now where what Anahid Kassabian has termed 'ubiquitous listening' has come to stand for this new symptom:

As we enter the second century of the disarticulation of performance and listening, new relations are developing that demand new models and approaches. It is easy to see that the industry is changing. It is perhaps harder to hear the changes in music, in listening and in subjectivity that all of this portends. Yet musics, technologies, science fiction, social relations and subjectivities have been fermenting these changes throughout the twentieth century. At least in the metropolis, listening to music is ubiquitous, and it forms the network backbone of a new, ubiquitous subjectivity.

Kassabian is making both a startling and yet demonstrable assertion, that the modes of listening and consumption that have dominated our imagination of music (or, rather, our imagination of those  modes of listening) are under radical (perhaps even malign?) erosion, and that erosion is both a symptom and trace of a way of being that is in some sense after the subject. It is particularly in the changes that mark our consumption of music that we are most clearly able to see these changes, and this is a quality that has been ascribed to music before, most notably by Jacques Attali. There is here, though, something particularly useful in the claims Kassabian is making – her point is not that music as a set of textual traces is necessarily to be privileged over material practices but that the ways in which we encounter texts, especially musical texts such as recordings, performances (even scores) helps us understand some of the ways in which our culture marks and maintains the line between text and context. In other words, although this is not the substantial point of this article for Kassabian, there is in the analysis of the distribution and consumption of musical texts the potential for something much more far-reaching than that analysis might at first seem to offer: it is not simply about mapping where goods flow to or what hey say about class, race, gender and so on. All that is fine, but it does not capture the nub of the issue at stake here.

I would say that, beyond the demographic and harder sociological analyses of musical consumption, it ought to be possible, as Kassabian also seems to be saying, to get to something of the texture of how we imagine ourselves in the world: if these forms of 'listening' (if that is the right term) mark something profound or even momentous in our imagination of subjectivity, then I think here are a few questions we would need to ask before proceeding to a characterisation of the new situation.

The question as to the ethics of this situation is, of course, particularly fraught: what are we to make of a situation in which the agency of musical labour becomes ever more routinely curtailed or even obliterated altogether? What sense is there to make here of the ever more distended and complex copyright battles, of the intensification of litigation in he light of he putative decline of such agencies? How, in that light, are we to understand the overwhelming popular distrust of corporate structures alongside a booming music industry? What, in short, are the prospects for a level of radical engagement if agency is now always already distributed?

These politico-ethical questions (forgive this clumsy hyphenated hybrid), centre around the hegemonic justaposition of political conscious action and, to adapt and elaborate Kassabian's term, ubiquitous unconscious inaction. This has always been the hegemonic logic of political theory, is sees to me: to link citizenship, democracy,  social and civic participation to some notion of individual and collective agency which, to shorthand it rather crudely, is always to be linked to a certain notion of action, and therefore to a certain model of the subject, a Cartesian subject (meant here of course in the broadest of terms). When agency fails, it is because citizens, agents, slump (or are made to slump) into a kind of generalised apathy, a ubiquitous sloping off into automatism, into unconscious half-dead state of blind and dull obedience.

This structure looks something like this where the symbol || represents a fundamental impossibility in the sequence.

← (exception)          ||          (ubiquity) →

action = agency = citizenship || slave = automatism = inaction

Here, then, citizenship is that which guards against slavery.Or, to put it in more abstract and pared-down terms:

exception ≠ ubiquity

and, therefore, ubiquitous listening must inevitably constitute a kind of slavery.

But what if, contrary to this broadly Cartesian logic of exception and sovereignty we are all so familiar with in Carl Schmidt, we were able to rethink agency and ubiquity as part  a continuous (or  connected) sphere of action? What if, in short, ubiquity were a kind of distributed agency?

This prospect is one which I have only just started to think though, but it does seem to me that there are a number of ways in which the notion of musical agency might help here. We would inevitably  begin with a thorough-going critique of the 'simple' notion of authorship: of course this has been done to death (so to speak) and I o not propose to waste time here revisiting that question so systematically rehearsed by he likes of Bathes, Foucault and Chartier. Suffice it to say, beyond that delicious moment in the 60s, that the patrilineality of the authorial economy is that which is also its undoing. I think the more interesting set of issue to rehearse here are those that centre around the pairing conscious/unconscious. If ubiquity can be said to work as a kind of unconscious (and I am not accepting that proposition as it stands, but just test-driving it here) then to bring ubiquity into the orbit of agency would be to question profoundly the status of the unconscious as in some sense anti-conscious. In other words, both the conscious and the unconscious as such could be seen to represent modalities of consciousness that are part of a continuum. One doesn't simply flip from one state to the other but is in constant engagement with both states (if, indeed here are only two).

In other words, thinking ubiquity and agency together means recasting the very terms on which we might be said to be subjects. The political unconscious, then is not an oxymoron, as Žižek and other Freudian leftists before him have shown quite elegantly, but an essential element of he ideological life of action. We similarly think this in terms of ubiquity as, in some sense, a crucial element of exception, as in some sense continuous with action, with citizenship with sovereignty.

In this sense, the ethics of ubiquitous listening begin to look very promising indeed: background and foreground listening can come to stand for moments in the polotical workshop of consciousness.

before the people, voice

[a raw version, unedited, of a paper delivered at Newcastle on November 25th, posted at Spurious's suggestion]

At the beginning of Voicing the Popular Richard Middleton asks of the British chartists’ 1848 proclamation “the voice of the people is the voice of God” the following question: ‘Where was this voce to be located, who owned it’? This question is what drives Middleton’s book and what, in classic Middletonian style, opens up an extraordinarily rich line of argument. My question today will be to ask, in manner indebted to Middleton, how the histories of the voice and the people are related. Is there a longue durée of the popular voice?

Is there any sense in which we might speak of that voice as having a history unto itself, as having a certain autochthonous agency, as engaging certain actions, as intervening even, in ways that are not imaginable in other contexts, other materialities, other medialities? Is the specificity of voice at all generalisable, available to the re-scaling of periods, epochs, trajectories? Is there a story to tell of the voice, a narrative that begins and unfolds. And, if such a narrative were tellable, if such a trajectory were traceable in the movement of history, is there anything we might recognise as a song of origins, beginnings?

For Virginia Woolf, beginnings are always about errors, and can only ever be the beginnings of a modernity that is sick; for Woolf,  that which is captured, taken down, made legible, is that which is modern, that which has fallen, been turned. In Anon, she speaks of a voice that emerges from the swamp, anonymous, empty. It is, in some sense, ready, prone and give itself up immediately to capture:

The voice that broke the silence of the forest was the voice of Anon. Some one heard the song and remembered it for it was later written down, beautifully, on parchment. Thus the singer had his audience, but the audience was so little interested in his name that he never thought to give it.

And so the story of literature itself begins, or so Virginia Woolf would have it: the voice in song breaks the ‘silence’ of the primordial forest, emerges, as it were, from the swamp and grounds literacy, (and, by implication, the origins of modernity itself); song is modernity’s beginning and its Other. For Woolf, then, the voice in song works to both found and ground writing (notation), to set it in motion; at the very moment when the voice breaks the ‘silence’ of prehistory, it has already fallen under the disciplinary sway of that scripture.

What is striking in Woolf’s modernist myth of vocality is its appeal to the voice in song as in some sense primordial or pre-linguistic: the discipline of that scribing, of making marks to record the apocryphal moment of modernity’s birth, is thus beholden to the moment of spontaneous oral abandon that precedes it and which works as its violent and disturbing Other – the violence of that discipline must batten down the spontaneity of that first abandon.

And it is not simply that the scriptural disciplining must attempt to overcome or overturn this Other (although it surely attempts to do this too): this pre-historical Other, the primordial birth pain of modernity, persists at the core of the Law of literacy, a persistence that Anglophone Lacanians like to term a “nugget of enjoyment”  and which, far from constituting just a potential undoing of modernity, is absolutely key to its continued operation, as something to which subjects can attach themselves, a materiality, a texture, a grit, mud, friction.

When, in Mrs Dalloway, the merest traces of that mythic voice is let loose into the urban cityscape of London, thousands of years after the apocryphal moment of Anon’s emergence from the forest, it is all the more intense, all the more debilitating for its acute incommensurateness with modernity into to which it is poured, and which it paradoxically grounds.

A sexless, ageless voice interrupts Peter Walsh’s misogynist ruminations on the ‘icy’ Clarissa  and the Woolfian articulation of the voice in song  as a kind of trace, a remainder out of place, as a staging of some first innocent jouissance; the woman singing felt it during that enchanted moment, so many years ago, when she walked, in May, with her lover. Her voice stages her expulsion from Eden, that moment when Law intervened in enjoyment. Woolf imagines Peter as someone caught up, ensnared in this nugget of enjoyment, this material that persists and persists, this grit, this friction. She has him imagine it as permanent, as formidably material beyond the reach of history:

Still remembering how once in some primeval May she had walked with her lover, this rusty pump, this battered old woman with one hand exposed for coppers, the other clutching her side, would still be there in ten million years, remembering how once she had walked in May, where the sea flows now, with whom it did not matter…

Other literary representations of the voice in song (Kafka’s 1914 short story, ‘Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk’, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Proust’s Memory of Things Past, Wackenroder’s essay ‘The Naked Saint’, Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot, and many others) situate the voice in song squarely outside the realm of history, of speech, of writing, as somehow always already struck out of the flow of discourse, an excess, but as a remainder, a stubborn stain, a mark, something that persists and yet, paradoxically, as something that has been and could again, any minute, be lost.

What also holds these disparate imaginations of the voice together is their commitment to an imagination of the voice in song as in some sense enchanted and enchanting (from the Lain root cantare, to sing and incantare, to incant). The enchantment, literally the ‘ensonging’, works for these disparate authors as a moment of epistemological uncertainty, but also, paradoxically, of raised or intensified consciousness: song interevenes in the flow of the everyday, changes things, puts the world out of sorts. In this sense, song might be said to have an agency all of its own; indeed we might say that the voice in song, for these authors, does cultural work.

It is here, then, that a certain story of voices (note my shift here into the plural) might be told; their longue durée might be traced in this notion of voices as doing cultural work, as , in some sense, agents, material incursions, textures, grits, frictions. The Woolfian narrative seeks to draw all voicings, especially those that enchant, transfix or undo, to a singular utterance before all utterances. Its singularity, its radicalising incursion into the silent forest, the radical impossibility of its recuperation is what gives it its force. Popular and traditional musics from Europe and North America abound with origin myths of the singular voice: born on the air, the first seduction, the first calling, the first turning, this interpellation before all interpellations – this voice above all is cherished as the site on which is built the edifice of the vernacular utterance. It is a voice that presents itself as always already lost, as the greatest of all losses, an unknown, silent and mythical voice, before all voices, the first sigh, the first murmur, the first quiver.

The point I want to make about the apocryphal voice here is that, despite its mythical reverie of origins, born out of an atavistic theology of singularities, it is historically quite specific, or, at least, shows itself to be sufficiently malleable to emerge again and again as constitutive of modernity itself: with each intensification of the technological rationalisation of the forces and means of production, this singularity emerges again to sing of loss, to recount the end of days.

Vernacular song traditions from around the advent of recording technology all engage in an intensified discourse of mourning for lost voices: in fado and flamenco traditions, for example, the advent of recording technology marks a particular shift in their conditions of dissemination and reception. For both traditions, certainly, this was the period of rapid urbanisation, and the period in which both musics appeared for the first time on the commercial urban stage: Fado’s revistas (reviews) & casas do fado and flamenco’s cafes cantantes and peñas flamencas.

The period in which the impact of commercial recording begins to make itself felt is also the period in which these traditions become fixed, held in place by the discipline of the new technologies: certainly, the earliest recordings are akin to field recordings, but the first commercial recordings (from the mid-1920s after the advent of electronic recording) already reference these earlier recordings as somehow magically charged mananciales de nobre (noble sources) fuentes de sueños duros, as if to suggest that the slightly later recordings were mere faded traces of an earlier ‘golden’ practice. The nostalgia industry gets to work extraordinarily quickly in this context. [Adorno: ‘Nadelkurven’]
In the early commercial recordings of fado and flamenco, moreover, record labels seem to be attempting first of all to ‘naturalise’ the technology of recording which would have been marked as undoubtedly ‘new’, as implicated in industrial processes ‘alien’ to the two traditions: We can see this ‘naturalisation as working in two distinct ways

•    naturalisation by referencing the pre-history (i.e. recording already belongs to this tradition)
•    naturalisation by utilising advances in that technology to elide the technology – commercial electronic recordings appear as early as 1927

Clearly then, these discourses on flamenco and fado are already touched by the dissemination of certain kinds of objects – recordings. Whilst these objects are not readily mappable onto the psychoanalytic object, they do change the symbolic dynamic in some striking ways. The playwright and folklorist Frederico Garcia Lorca referred to the gramophone as early as 1920 as a kind of tecnología mentira de la escritura [false technology of writing] and Adolfo Salazar, documenter of the famous 1922 concurso de cante hondo refers to the technology of recording as un arañar violente [violent scratching].

Clearly, for both commentators, recording technologies constitute an unwelcome intervention in flamenco practices. A strikingly similar discourse can be seen in the reception of the famous fadista of Lisbon Adelina Fernandes who, having signed to HMV’s Portuguese franchise by the late 1920s, her albums outselling anything else in their catalogue, was nonetheless ridiculed by puristas and connoisseurs as unspeakably commercial.

In both the flamenco and the fado context, furthermore, recorded objects seem to have created an ‘imaginary’ loss,  - the great voices of the tradition before recording are now lost forever since they cannot now be recorded: nostalgia, in this context, as a condition of this modernity, seems to have emerged here  as a response to the  very technologies that shape that modernity: this is a common trope in recent scholarship on trauma and in this context, it is the displacement enacted by recorded objects on the popular imagination of the locatedness of the tradition in specific places, specific cultural spaces that is crucial to my reading of this nostalgia work: recording technology intervenes in a these musical cultures’ imagination of themselves.

This loss out of capture, this reaching back into a lost space before capture was ever possible, is, in a crucial sense, then, constitutive of modernity. When Middleton asks who owns the voice of the people, he is asking about the very terms on which modernity constructs political agency. The terms of that agency, its complex mediation and distribution across a number of medialities and cultural fields, are inextricably linked to the necessity for a grit or friction in the system that gives traction.

In my crudest Lacanian terms, the apchryphal voice of Anon must always stay lost, and its evocations, however fulsome or ‘authentic’ must always remain enchanted, incomplete, since to capture it fully, would be to bind it too consistently into the symbolic order, and to smooth out all its surfaces, to seamlessly reintegrate it into the flow of discourse, to absorb it and leave nowhere for subjects to bind themselves to it. To invert a commonplace wisdom about collective agency, for a Lacanian, voice must always precede the people.

vernacular tantrums or how to think Madonna with the big Other

After a characteristically stimulating and challenging conversation with my lovely friend, mentor and colleague, DC, about the Big Other, I want to think about that Lacanian concept, not in and of itself, but in terms of how it might work (specifically, materially) with vernacular musics.

The juxtaposition is fraught (although Zizek has already been here to a certain extent) but it is one that intrigues me. That elusive concept has been formulated by Zizek after Lacan in the following manner:

The Lacanian "big Other" is usually conceived as the impersonal symbolic order, the structure that regulates symbolic exchanges; what is forgotten thereby is the crucial fact that the big Other (as opposed to the “small other” of the imaginary mirror-relationship) was first introduced to designate the radical alterity of the other person beyond our mirroring in it, beyond our recognition of it as our mirror-image. … In other words, our engagement, our commitment to the other and the other’s engagement towards us, make sense only against the background of this absolute unknowableness.

The striking reshaping of this concept here is what I want to try to work through here. If the big Other is not just about the 'linguistic community' of the subject, but also about a certain structure of meconasisance, then there is something at the heart of the subject's formation for Lacan and Zizek that is, in a sense, always already unknowable. The meconaissance of the big Other, then, the structuring of that encounter around radical misapprehension is what is useful here.

If we are to make hay with this concept, we ought, I think, to start with this notion of misrecognition or incomprehension: for postmodern thinkers, this is a no no - misapprehension suggests an erring from a righteous path, and that, therefore, an apprehension is possible, and that way, so they would have it, lies the terrible and deadly fantasy of universal ethics.

This PoMo dead end gets us no-where (to state the obvious). What is striking about the notion of misapprehension or misrecognition here is that it neither settles on a righteous path nor closes that path off - a pathway is still available to us, however tenative, however fantastical.

In this sense, then, the misapprehension at the heart of this elaboration of the bog Other is the name we might give to the structure of subject around a empty space (Zizek speaks of the Cartesian discourse of self as founded on the darkness of the void - Descartes needed to climb into the dark oven to think his subject). That space cannot be filled with specific content.

And this is where our problem starts. The question my colleague was raising, in terms specifically indebted to Zizek, was about whether the specifics of popular music's engagement of the big Other is radically different than that of, say, avant-garde art music. It's a strange question to ask in many ways, but it goes to the core of the problem of thinking about cultural difference with Lacan - is Lacan's theory (as such) immune to thinking cultural difference beyond the abstraction of a singular and generalisable encounter with the big Other. In other words, can the Freudian tradition offer anything new to say about thinking about cultural pluralism , relativism and agonsim?

My feeling is that it can, but getting to that formulation is not easy. Part of the problem, of course, is the very terms on which psychoanalysis allows us to think about listening - there is not fully-formed theory of listening in Lacan or Zizek, although they gesture towards it (this is point made recently by Dolar in his book A voice and nothing more).

Here's how it might start to go, then:

A theory of vernacular musics, and their relationship to the big Other, is a theory of listening to and making music that requires a strong formulation of ideology: strong in the sense that it refuses the playful flatness of postmodern idealism without falling foul of a seductive hierarchisation that merely replaces one kind of cultural elitism with another.

I propose to go about this by concentrating on the ways in which difference is posited, sustained and critiqued in musical practices. There are thus a number of propositions I need to make before proceeding:

1. the nature of musicking, to use Christopher Small’s terminology, is such that it cannot be neatly held in the space or work of a particular ideological trajectory - this is not to say that music is 'autonomous' or that it is some kind of romantic pre-cultural stuff that wells up from the soil. This is to say, rather, that we must be seduced by the notion that musical materials operate like language - musical forms spring from quite specific places and practices, certainly, but they do not do so indelibly marked by that place or practice

2. our technologies for thinking about music are woefully inadequate to this task - they rarely get beyond textual exegesis or contextual mapping

3. any theory of listening to or making music, nonetheless, must be cognisant of the counter-assertion, which must be held in place at the same time as that made in point 1 above, that the apparent ill-suitedness of musical materials to the articulation of explicitly ideological content is itself a symtom of an ideological situation - music's 'inarticulability' to use a term I take from the romantics, is a cipher of the persistence of an elite cultural turn

4. the incommensurateness of 1 and 3 above is a crucial starting point for any theory of vernacular musics that purports to want to understand the specificity of the vernacular at this historical juncture.

This is where we begin, then - the next few posts we be explicitly about this

philosophy in/of the vernacular

spurious and RiMi have brought me here. To this juncture so little thought but so often lived out for me in my work. How to think this place where philosophy might encounter the vernacular. It’s almost like trying to get theology to encounter Big Brother (no, not the man in the book, silly). They have brought me to this place kicking and screaming. RiMi started what I guess was always latent - the feeling that the vernacular has a space or place that can, in our culture at least, be pointed to, articulated, sensed. The question as to how to think this place, to bring philosophy to it, has also in some sense been in place a while. but with spurious, I begin to see how it might be done. They both think in ways that open up great vistas to me.

Rimi has recently written on this:

Much of the interpretative challenge for understanding twentieth-century popular music is to find ways of confronting this complex field of forces of power and identity with which "the people" can be figured as both servant and master. For if, in the broader politics, the claims of a popular hegemony have been made - "we are the masters now", to quote a member of the 1945 British Labour government - this is necessarily to reintroduce the question of representation (for who is this "we"?). If popular sovereignty has appeared only in mmediated form, sited in the reifying figures of Party, Nation, Leader, Class, Market (etc.), and equally cited through the foreclosures of musical style, cultural location, star-persona, and vocal positioning, this returns us o the Lacanian issue of the "voice of God" - a vehicle of invisible authority, claims to which might seem to install the people musically as heirs to an old foundational fraud.

His views are deftly laid out along a particular trajectory that for some will seem strange given his earlier work. Where did Lacan come from? Why the psychoanalytical coloration here? It is, to my mind, precisely this turn in RiMi to representation, or rather what might resist it and how, that I think is most useful here. His materialist work for the pate 80s and 90s is still in place and, indeed, much richer for its encounter with the historicity of the subject in Lacan and Zizek. What is most useful here, though, is the commitment, full and without waver, to thinking the vernacular, to daring to ask about how it is constituted, in whose name and, in the terms set up by this post, what epistemological structures sustain it.

The crucial terms of spurious's engagement are not dissimilar, although the philosophical commitment starts somewhere else, somewhere closer, perhaps to my own startign point - the Western philosophical tradition. It those pesky Germans that colour this starting point - Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hegel even. Yet imaging the question 'how are we supposed to think hip hop with Heidegger'; it’s like thinking popuklar mjsic with Adorno - that generation of Germans (actually several, of course) had no place in its epistemological landscape for the vernacular. Here of course is where Zizek also differs from the usual European traditions. He does not shrink from 'thinking popular culture with Lacan' for example.

Spurious, then, begins from this radicalised perspective, that to think the vernacular from that tradition is not only possible, but pressing. It will disturb both traditions, shake both up. But this is no simpering postmodernism, but a clear and structured programme.

Both refuse the silence of the LAMBs (long-awaited male believers), both refuse the neat territorialisation that haunts philosophy (at least what is left of it after the greyness of the analytics has smudged most of it out) and which keeps the popular in

Listening with Kafka: a barred exit

In 1914, three years after composer Gustav Mahler’s death, Kafka began work on a short prose fragment, which he completed some time in 1917 and to which Kafka’s editor Max Brod later gave the title ‘Auf der Galerie’.

Click here to see the fragment in German

Click here to read the fragment in English

I want to begin by addressin the fragmen's writerly-performative quality. The structuring of the text around two incompatible narratives works as a critical play on the epistemological groundedness of authoriality and subject positioning.

This critical pleasuring in the ambiguation of the authorial/narrating voice also engages at least two incompatible ‘types’ of masculinity: the ‘active’ (but, perhaps, deluded) masculine hero and the passive (but, perhaps, less deluded, less aggrandised) weeping observer.

The two paragraphs effect this duality through both narrative and indexical means: for Roland Barthes, the structure of narrative is usefully articulated through what he terms nuclei or ‘kernels’, events in the narrative that are crucial for that narrative’s cohesion – events that cannot be dispensed with if the narrative (or diegesis) is transposed from one medium to another; the index is a medium-specific operator that fleshes out the bones of the chain of nuclei through an accumulative action, grounding the diegesis in the medium of its telling.

What is significant here is the way in which Kafka attempts to subvert this functional duality (a duality articualted by Lukács as the difference between ‘Beschreiben’ and ‘Erzählen’, finding a useful complement in Jakobson’s ‘metaphor/metonomy’ duality ) by fundamentally integrating the telling of the diegesis into its writing: Kafka heaps writerly (medium-specific) indices onto the telling such that it is inseparable from its writing, inseparable from its qualitative grounding as a specific mediality.

This classically ‘modernist’ gesture – the intense medialisation of an apparently universally translatable ‘message’ – is also readable as a set of quite specific meditations on cultural agency, gender and the location of what David Schwarz has termed the ‘listening subject’.

The first paragraph plays out a hyperbolically ‘Freudian’ narrative of masculine agency. The father proxy in the ring must at all costs be vanquished by the young visitor in order to save (win) the suffering sexualised (consumptive) equestrienne from her brutalisation at the hands of the monstrous father.

The equestrienne stands as the cipher of Verkehr between the two men, a ‘transaction’ that helps mark the patrilineal and Oedipal ground of masculinity and the woman’s place in that transaction as Waaren (literally ‘goods’ or ware). The visitor is thus able to activate his masculinity by penetrating the membrane of the circle along a teleological vector; the trauma of this violent action is marked by a sudden (putative) silencing of the music with a shout of ‘Stop!’.

This shout, ‘durch die Fanfaren des immer sich anpassenden Orchesters’ (‘over the fanfares of the incessant accompanying orchestra’), rises above the degraded Alltagsmusik of the circus in order to figure the visitor as the bearer of a reproachful, ‘higher’, cultural counter-capital. Moreover, not only does the visitor traverse the boundary of the ring, but he ‘plunges’ into it: ‘stürzte in die Manege’ (literally ‘would tumble, fall or plunge’, continuing the conditional mood). This precipitous drop into the ring adds to the sense of trauma at the visitor’s incursion, which, within the Freudian logic that this paragraph sets up, is a hyperbolic (pathological) overstatement of the act of penetration.

The epistemological trajectory of this paragraph is underscored by the deployment of a range of figurations of sonic materials which draw on contemporaneous imaginations of the music/noise dualism. In this first paragraph, sound(/music) engages a complex array of tropes. On the one hand, it helps characterise the paragraph as ‘monstrous’ through the Orchestra’s cacophonous Brausen: incessant, it churns out stock fanfares, and the other noises generated my inhuman mechanisms – ventilators, steam hammers – are indexical expansions of the core image of a merely utilitarian (commercial) music.

On the other hand, sound functions as the sonic channelling of two opposing engagements of power – (i) the patriarchal monstrous brutilisation of the equestrienne marked by the Brausen and (ii) the traumatic ‘Stop!’ of the visitor – both marked by a character-giving utilisation of sound, accompaniment versus voice. In this duality of inside/outside, the first engagement of power is environmental in character, part of a circular, circumscribed ‘inner’ territory of degradation that locates the father proxy at that centre, wielding a range of masculine cultural resources that are simultaneously canonic (masculine strength, the driver of the action) and dissident (cruel, brutal).

Sound marks this territory by ‘accompanying’ the action, figuring it as a degrading sadomasochistic spectacle that can be ordered for its audience by the addition of sonic markers, like a perverse Hollywood narrative, accompanied by a ‘hidden’ post-Wagnerian orchestra.

The second engagement of power is a highly charged singular act of ‘sounding out’, carried on the voice, a mark of exemplary masculine subjectivity, but also the duplicitous bearer of a masculinity in crisis: vocal production can be seen at the fin de siècle as a supplement to the canonical mediacy (mediality) of writing where, as Sarah Webster Goodwin amongst others has shown, ‘voicing out’ draws attention to the sonorous body and is therefore dangerous in that it is grounded in the delicate body-physical, that privileged (and demeaned) site of the feminine in the nineteenth-century misogynistic imagination.

In Kafka this stands for an atavistic but ironic ‘recuperation’ of a model of masculinity lost in the great administration of the law, lost to the figure of the impresario mediator – voice as a last hope in the face of the brutalising anonymity of public masculinity, commercial culture, mechanised production.

But all this is not so.

Or so the next paragraph would seem to suggest. The sudden eruption of the indicative mood is traumatic: as Boa puts it, ‘the thudding syllables come as hammer blows to destroy the speculative edifice of a possible story’ and it is no accident that Boa should reach for the metaphor of hammer blows, resonating the ironic hyperbolic ‘Zarathustran’ masculinity of the first paragraph and thereby underlining the epistemological incongruity of the second with it.

This paragraph, by positing a second epistemologically dissonant version of events alongside the first, forces the narratee to rethink the reliability of the first paragraph fundamentally. It is thereby tempting to think of the story as presenting two realities, one false and one true, the first paragraph clearly a fiction, the second marked as ‘real’ by the indicative mood.

Yet this reading assumes a simple mapping of verbal mood to narrator reliability which, I suggest, is difficult to sustain in the light of Kafka’s use of language here: whereas the ‘truth’ of the first is questioned by the conditional mood and by the overblown heroism of the young visitor with its hyperbolic Freudian sexual circus, the second is called into question by the dream-like tone of the language: it is unfolded, almost as if in slow motion, in a long chain of clauses all of which relate back to a single grammatical subject - the adoring grandfather figure [‘der Direktor… vorsorglich sie auf den Apfelschimmel hebt… sich nicht entschliessen kann, das Peitschenzeichen zu geben… neben dem Pferd mit offenem Munde einherläuft…’].

This relay of clauses fixed to a single subject is a masterful writerly play on the German structuring of the clause around verb positioning, the closure of each link in the chain marked by the finite verb, heaping narrative action upon action to draw out the narrative line, and the narratee with it, towards an expected closure; but that closure is attenuated; the equestrienne takes her bow and, in the strange dislocated coda marked out from the rest of the paragraph by a hyphen, a characteristically dissident use of punctuation, the visitor to the gallery weeps ‘without knowing it’.

The beautiful strangeness of this ending, its pointed and studied ambiguity, brings one to rethink the simplicity of the unreality/reality dualism, and to call that binarism into question, to leave the boundary between the two porous.

As in the first paragraph, the content of the second is underscored by references to sonic materials, and, like in the first paragraph, those materials help flesh out a pointed juxtaposition of active and passive masculinities by recognising two kinds of sound – voice and accompaniment: however, it is the ringmaster that has ownership of the voice here, crying ‘English words of warning’, ‘exhorting’ the groom to be careful, and, like the visitor with his ‘Stop!’ of the first paragraph, he implores the orchestra to be silent.

The silencing of the orchestra here underscores the epistemological dissonance between the two paragraphs: in the first, the voice is owned by the visitor and engaged as a reproach to the banality and cruelty of the circus; in the second, the voice is commanded by the ringmaster, and is engaged to structure the audience’s (narratee’s) attention drawing it to his ‘kleine Enkelin’, the skilful equestrienne, by the silencing of the orchestra.

In the strange coda, moreover, the visitor sinks ‘in the final march as if into a heavy dream’, activating that commonplace trope of music as a place where subjectivity is lost, a place of dangerous and debilitating pleasures. The music operates here like a ‘sonorous envelope’.

There is a tendency in the post-Enlightenment Western European imagination of music to perceive it as a way of ‘transforming’ or temporarily suspending everyday modes of being, of moving beyond the mundane into a higher (or at least different) state of consciousness.

In Kafka, this tendency takes on an ironic or critical edge: the great post-Schopenhauerian articulation of music as a kind of narcotic is here blocked by the crossing and cancelling out of exit trajectories. One way leads to the ludicrous over-articulation of masculinity in the plunging thrusting ‘Stop!’ of the first paragraph by the (assumed) silencing of the music; the second leads to a debilitated, foreclosed masculinity, in which the music envelops the visitor and returns him to a womb-like state in which ‘crying without knowing it’ marks his infantilisation, an abject returning to the semiotic.

In both instances, the ‘way out’ is barred.