The Politics of the Cipher: Hip-Hop, Antiphony and Multiculturalism Bharath Ganesh University College London
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The politics of the cipher: hip-hop, antiphony and multiculturalism Bharath Ganesh University College London (UCL) Department of Geography Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2016 I, Bharath Ganesh, confirm that work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Abstract This project explores the incipient forms of multiculture present in the musical publics assembled by hip-hop music and culture based on ethnography of a university student group, S4HH (Students for Hip-hop). I position the cipher (a circle of people rapping together) as the diagram of the ethics and politics of hip-hop listening. The primary aesthetic feature of the cipher is antiphony or call-and-response musicality. However, affect in hip-hop musical publics goes beyond aesthetics; it catalyses ethical and political responses. My methods add detail on the varied socialites of listening to the literature on hip-hop studies. I develop antiphony as a unique event that shatters identity and cultivates ethical subjectivities that are constituted in cycles of affect and response between self and other. This argument is based on writings on antiphony from Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Paul Gilroy. This work helps operationalise the concepts ‘event’, ‘self’, ‘other’, ‘body’, and ‘community’ in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Luc Nancy for mapping the ethics and politics of antiphony in hip-hop listening. My study of antiphonal relations illuminates the ethics and politics of bodily response to the material distribution and circulation of affect in hip-hop spaces. I engage in a genealogical analysis of antiphonal aesthetics and the word ‘cipher’ to argue that the bodily capacities of response entrained in shared sites of listening help us consider multiculture in creolised and transnational modes. I argue that sharing hip-hop and our presence in the cipher cultivates a comportment and a passivity to difference grounded in an open-ended ethics that allows the other to transform the self. This study develops this antiphonal ethos, maps its material circuits and its imagined geographies, and speculates on the possibilities of an antiphonal multiculturalism. 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 4 Preface 5 Part 1: Hip-hop and the politics of alterity 14 1. Introduction: hip-hop and the ethical subject 15 2. Tracing antiphony in musical publics 44 Part 2: Antiphony and the ethical self 68 3. The aesthetics of antiphony 69 4. Towards a phenomenology of ethics 93 in the antiphonal relation Part 3: The politics of the cipher 110 5. Genealogy of ‘cipher’ 111 6. Ciphers in situ 142 Part 4: Hip-hop and the politics of ambivalent sound 177 7. Antiphonal atmospheres 178 8. Private listening, ambivalence, and potentiality 203 9. S4HH and shared listening 221 10. Listening and the politics of antiphony 234 11. Conclusion: antiphony, creolisation, 249 and multiculturalism Bibiography 262 3 Acknowledgements This research project would not have been possible without the generous support of the The Bonnart Trust in funding my studies at the UCL Department of Geography. The Department also provided two grants for skills development and conference travel that helped develop this thesis. My supervisor, Professor Jason Dittmer, provided consistent support and helped keep me on track by providing critical feedback. I would also like to thank Dr Tariq Jazeel for challenging me to push further and enhance the intellectual development of this project. During my fieldwork, Dr Hatem Bazian and Alisa Bierria at the Center for Race & Gender (CRG) at the University of California, Berkeley provided me with a platform for outreach to students and access to the graduate community at UC Berkeley. There, I attended a graduate seminar in the Department of Music with Professor Georgina Born that helped develop my methodology as I was conducting field work. A seminar at Tilburg University led by Professor Simon Critchley was important for the development of theory and turn to ethical subjectivity in this project. I thank the other students in the seminar for the conversations that eventually became crucial to my project. Finally, a seminar on Deleuze delivered by Professor Nathan Widder and Professor Paul Patton at Queen Mary, University of London was also very helpful in the development of the project. I want to thank my parents, Radhika and Ganesh, for their love, hard work, and unconditional willingness to support my education all these years. I want to thank Alden, David, and Kareem for introducing me to hip-hop beyond the radio; it is because of them that I started asking the questions that led to the completion of this project. I appreciate Avichal Agarwal’s assistance in filming for Hip-hop in the Park. Finally, I thank Eviane for her support and love through the years it took to complete this project. 4 Preface This thesis maps the modes of ethical and political dissent emergent in spaces assembled by hip-hop music and culture. Here, dissent is about the articulation of a multitude of other ethical and political values. The expression of these values affirms the unfinished nature of the ‘ethical’ and ‘political’ itself. Ethics and politics are rendered unfinished because they are expressed under erasure, always open to another revision. This is a consequence of antiphony or call-and-response, the core aesthetic of hip-hop culture. Antiphony shapes the sound and the social mediation of hip-hop. I focus on how lived experience in hip-hop spaces is a negotiation of alterity and difference. In antiphony, the listener is called to respond to the performer. In this response, the listener becomes part of the performance as well. I explain antiphony in depth in the following chapters. Here I hope it will suffice to introduce antiphony as a process that entrains an ecstatic mode of being, explained in detail in Chapter 4. This ecstatic comportment is one in which the body is copresent with difference and alterity, it extends itself towards that difference and responds to it. What is implied by ecstasy is the relation to the outside, of being outside of one’s normal place, of operating, as Edouard Glissant puts it, ‘in harmony and errantry’ (1997). Ethics and politics in antiphonal relations become experimental and improvisatory. From the movements, experiences, and comportments of bodies calling and responding, I build a notion of the becoming-ecstatic of the multicultural, of the multicultural thought otherwise predicated on an unfinished, processual ethics and politics. These findings are based on field work undertaken based on a student society in California called the Students for Hip-hop or S4HH. This group blends hip-hop culture into a form of activism by advocating for hip-hop’s place in academia and organising festivals and 5 events. I was interested in S4HH because they were a diverse group of listeners, some of whom are rappers and DJs and some of whom are looking for their first exposure to hip-hop culture. I represent this group as a musical public, where bodies come together to share in musical experience in a variety of ways. Some come to S4HH to debate rhyme schemes and production styles, others come because they want to find a group of friends to freestyle with. S4HH meets weekly through the academic year. The fact that S4HH is a student society rather than a hip-hop collective (for example) means that these findings cannot necessarily be representative of hip-hop culture in general. In fact, this presents two advantages. First, the musical public in question includes those with a range of experiences with hip-hop culture. This allows the examination of how bodies with different affordances in hip-hop spaces navigate antiphonal relations. With a hip-hop collective, I would instead be exploring antiphony as it affects artists as they produce their work. A student group presents an opportunity to study a space of leisure rather than work. Second, the university setting allows for the exploration of the globalisation of hip-hop music and culture as students come from all over California and the world. These intersections create forms of tension that are mediated in this musical public, allowing me to witness how hip-hop cultures might be developing as a consequence of this globalisation. By using these advantages, I demonstrate that hip-hop and the antiphony that structures its mediation offers an ethical and political model that entrains a body that enacts responses to difference through an experimental, improvisatory mode. It suggests that ethics and politics are emergent in the relation itself and better understood as a process of articulation, revision, and response. In this way, I try to probe the boundaries between hip-hop and the world outside, exploring how values formed outside are brought in and negotiated within hip-hop spaces. In this sense, hip-hop is an experimental space in which difference in itself becomes the subject of negotiation and mediation. It is logical that in hip-hop spaces we might find the outlines of 6 a comportment that is a starting point for theorising the multicultural as composed of bodies committed to polyvocal, heterglot community that is always a work in progress rather a community that somehow ‘arrives’ (see Derrida 2000 in Chapter 11). In this thesis, I explore the cipher as the example of this community par excellence. The cipher is the embodiment of antiphony, where a group of bodies forms a circle to a rhythm and members of the group rap, sing, or move to the beat. The cipher is an ancient form brought to North America by Africans that were forcibly displaced as slaves.