“SAY RAWR!” Lyotard, Deleuze/Guattari, and the Refrains of Wesley Willis

Rewritings “SAY RAWR!” Lyotard, Deleuze/Guattari, and the Refrains of Wesley Willis Mickey Vallee Abstract Jean-François Lyotard argued repeatedly that the biggest challenge a musician or composer faces is emancipating sound from the tyranny of grand narratives. They labor not in the service of expression but in the exploration of radical methods that constitute what Lyotard terms the “musical act”: a supervening decomposition of subjectivity through a sonic fold in space-time-sound. Thus composers work through and against musical customs to render audible what was once inaudible (or, simply, to render musical what was once noise). With varying degrees of exception, Lyotard’s musical theory is conducive to Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari’s assertion that music “deterritorializes the refrain.” In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that music enacts a becoming-minority that is, by its expressive deterritorializations, subversive to conventions of the categorical imperative. Music’s essential building block, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the nonmusical refrain. However, whereas Deleuze and Guattari diagnosed music’s radical becoming as an expressive deterritorialization, Lyotard considered music as a political act by virtue of its nonexpressive desubjectivation. Had Lyotard abandoned his own straw man of romantic expressionism and instead adopted a Deleuzean expressionist aesthetic, his prescriptions for the political/musical act might have spanned beyond the domain of the European composers who remained virtually his only musical reference point. The solely unfortunate aspect regarding each thinker is precisely this myopic reliance on European high art music to illustrate their res- pective concepts. My elucidation of Lyotard’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s musical philosophy will contend that other composers located in the historical discourse of “popular music” would serve the concepts under discussion with more efficacy. Specifically, the music of Wesley Willis executes such a political/musical act through deterritorializing refrains that are expressed directly through the profane repetitions of musical technology. 188 Cultural Politics, Volume 9, Issue 2, q 2013 Duke University Press DOI: 10.1215/17432197-2146102 The REFRAINS of WESLEY WILLIS Keywords Lyotard; Deleuze and Guattari; Wesley Willis; deterritorialization Rock music pays off Rock music takes me on a joyride Rock music keeps me off the hell city bus Rock music will always look out for me But I will not let my torture profanity demon shoot it down. —Wesley Willis on the Howard Stern Show, in Wesley Willis’s Joyrides his article approaches American about fast food, beating up superheroes, T popular music musician Wesley Willis bestiality, and devotions to his friends and (1963–2003) through the dual philosophical loved ones. But there is something in his lens of Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles music that rises above the master narrative Deleuze/Fe´ lix Guattari (D/G). To the extent of rock-and-roll or, rather, drives straight to that music—despite its prominence in the the radical core of the genre toward its most work of these writers—is frequently powerful agential property: its ability to deny sidelined in favor of literature, philosophy, the totalization of life in favor both of the and even cinema, this article contributes intensity of movement and of affect. The toward a much-needed musical engagement palpable content of lyrics such as “Suck a in the Lyotardian/Deleuzian/Guattarian polar bear’s funky ass!/Suck a racehorse’s bibliographies. cock with Heinz Tomato Ketchup!/Suck a I select Willis because he is a donkey’s shitty ass!/Suck a male camel’s misunderstood figure in the history of dick with Hoisin sauce!” (Willis, Mr. Magoo American popular music and because his Goes to Jail Vol. 3, track 14) is the joyride music lends some remarkable perspectives they produce, a joyride that kept Willis’s on Lyotard’s insights regarding aesthetics demons from taking him on a “hellride” and ethics, as well as D/G’s insights on (his term for an outburst). what they term the “deterritorialization of The article begins with a discussion of the refrain.” Diagnosed with chronic schizo- Lyotard and D/G, the former’s varied writings phrenia in 1989, Willis evaded diagnostic about music across his career and the latter’s discourses by immersing himself in art and frequent references to music in their music to confine his demons’ voices. He also A Thousand Plateaus. While I doubt that used his art and music to sustain a vigorous Lyotard or D/G will have much insight on career in the popular music industry as a the experience of a black schizophrenia- rock-and-roll musician. diagnosed musician from the 1990s Chicago Willis’s music thrives from within the alternative music scene, I contend that POLITICS conventions of musical production and reconceptualizing the terms and conditions consumption, exploring the rich resources of under which individuals diagnosed with a digitally interfaced technology, his various schizophrenia produce art and music Technic KN series keyboards autoplaying couldn’t be more pertinent to preventing the CULTURAL “rock beats” overtop of what would best be ongoing abuse those individuals likely suffer described as succinctly articulated rants from psychiatrization, institutionalization, 189 Mickey Vallee and medicalization (the “academicization” such an alignment of poststructural of this article notwithstanding). Although philosophers who share such intensely Lyotard and D/G were alive while Willis was similar yet disparate things to say on the topic producing his music, they were, perhaps of music, and their combined spatiotemporal without surprise, never to mention him. Both alternative to musical discourse may Lyotard and D/G preferred persistent accommodate a wider variety of music than reference to composers of a privileged social what current systems of analysis possibly status. Regardless, Willis provides insight allow. If Lyotard draws a radical rereading of into Lyotard’s overarching argument about musical temporality, D/G offer an equally music throughout several stages of his own radical reading of music’s spatial dynamics. work: that we ought to resist any urge to D/G address music as a becoming-minority streamline its semiotic excess into the realm that resists the transcendence of matter of critical rational discourse if we are to into form. Music is an idea that cannot understand the potential of its use as accommodate the imagination as it is resistance—its persistence is to illuminate represented in the world, so it comes to be the irrational. It is such an argument that one understood as the “inner world” of the must assemble from bits and pieces laid sublime, which, to D/G, is the line of flight, out over several stages of Lyotard’s the smooth, or the deterritorialization of the intellectual career as (1) a postmodernist refrain and the undoing of the corporeal (composers cultivated musical conventions enclosure. I simply follow the advice of D/G to emancipate sound from totalizing to travel the line toward an unexpected tyrannies of grand narrative); (2) a reader of choice: Willis. But first, we must determine Freud (repetition compulsion constitutes a the spatiotemporal coordinates of mask over trauma, indeed, but the life of critically listening to Willis with the repetition offers in every utterance the Lyotardian/Deleuzian/Guattarian trope. appearance of a nuance); (3) the inventor of the differend (concentrating more intensely Lyotard: Resistance through Repetition on the element of the nuance in musical Lyotard (2009) characterizes the history of repetition as the irrational power of Western music as the emancipation of aesthetics to resist rationalization into public sound from the tyranny of grand narratives, discourse); and (4) a lifelong devotee to a position that aligns him with his “post- Kantian aesthetics and ethics (the gap modern” legacy; this is where Lyotard between knowledge and morality is disagrees with Ju¨ rgen Habermas about the ultimately tied together by a free thread of function and utility of the aesthetic, where he 9:2 July 2013 † ideology, no more than a transcendental sees the power of the aesthetic residing in its illusion of wholeness that preserves the ability to fragment the unity of knowledge potential for totalization). All of this is to say and morality (a union he repeatedly argues is that the postmodern Lyotard the Freudian, the epistemological condition of totalization POLITICS the theorist of differend, and even the and tyranny). He writes that the entire ubiquitous Kantian Lyotard agree on edifice of a grand narrative in the aesthetic one principle in regard to music: it is at its must be commandeered, along with any most powerful when it is at its least notion of revolution that would overturn CULTURAL revolutionizing. them. To even address revolution would put I read D/G alongside Lyotard for the any sort of progressive politics in the horizon 190 following reason: it is exciting to acquire of enlightenment discourse: Lyotard The REFRAINS of WESLEY WILLIS contends that when the revolutions of 1968 44–45). For Lyotard, music has been at its didn’t instantiate the social upheaval they most productive when it has been its most had aimed for, ensuing social relations didn’t desubjectivizing, as when the composer lend themselves to the possibility of mass doesn’t preserve or establish traditions but revolution, but that history fractured into an produces entirely new affects, reflected by interminable multiplicity of micronarratives Francis Bacon’s famous statement about that facilitated the movements of the creativity: “There comes something which underrepresented. It remains in the your instinct seizes on as being for a moment Lyotardian edifice that any sort of compre- the thing which you could begin to develop” hensive historical revolution is itself a (quoted in Guattari 2005: 13). For Lyotard constituent of the narrative of progress. music is not so expressive (indeed, Investment in the narrative disturbs the expression is a slave to master narrative).

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