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

Rewritings

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 respective 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). aesthetic experience of life, filling the gap The notion that music expresses anything between the epistemic and ethic with a is itself ideologically tied to romantic transcendental illusion, a bridge that expressionism, or “the drama of a sub- suspends two irreconcilable spaces bound jectivity in disagreement with itself” (Lyotard by the fantasy that clouds the contingency of 2009: 42). their connection. And when we subordinate Lyotard was swift to cite Cage and the arts to grand narrative, we categorize Boulez for the purpose of supporting the it according to the institutional reactions to it, most consistent of his arguments about a socially inscribed reaction that has little to music; these two composers were do with art as process. Composers must interested less in a kind of political expres- play against the convention they inherited in sion than in signifying “music” through the order to accomplish the undoing of master visceral pathway of its articulation. Cage, for narrative. Lyotard writes that composers one, constructed his own experiments deny convention in order to “emancipate with “silence” that removed the composer sound from the narrative function that is from composition, his apotheosis being assigned to it by the majority of modern 4’33”. And Boulez had his own variant western forms, the sonata, the symphony, of desubjectivation, which was to the symphonic poem. It is about making “overarticulate” music in order to extract timbres and clusters of timbres audible while what was once inaudible. If one sides with neutralizing the lyrics, emotive or heroic either Cage or Boulez, writes Lyotard (2009: expressionism to which the West has 42), one remains committed to a project “to generally subjected them” (2009: 40). liberate [sonic] matter from its conventional Lyotard is consequently attentive to formal envelope.” In regard to both how certain composers (usually John Cage composers, Lyotard wrote in Postmodern and Pierre Boulez) evacuate musical signi- Fables: “Be it by the art of disconnecting fiers at once of their political connotations timbres and letting them sound brashly, or by and their potential for categorization. In that of multiplying the constraints on how POLITICS resonance with William Echard’s compelling they are put into phrases so as to give birth, study of Neil Young, any such categories in as if by a forceps, to the sonorous matter of genre or style are ideological “schemata the gesture not spontaneously given by CULTURAL [ideas of competency] for the interpretation the phrasing” (1999: 219). Lyotard is, of and production of texts rather than ... course, referring to his idea of the phrase

properties of the texts themselves” (2005: regimen (1996: xii) as a binding force that 191 Mickey Vallee

constitutes a working body of knowledge trauma is doubly structured by way of articulated through the addressor of the repetition compulsion, which simultaneously phrase, the addressee of the articulation, the arranges the subject’s coordinates as well phrase-reference, and the phrase-sense. In as the subject’s inability to provide the the case of music, a composer who unlocks burden of proof as to what facilitated the the phrase regimen of music liberates repeated reminder of disfigurement prima sound from the source we most rationally facie. Repetition, for psychoanalysis, associate it with (that a “composition” compels the subject’s pursuit for operates from within the boundaries of a identification and closure, yet prevents the composite communicable sentiment, that subject’s direct encounter with the trauma rock-and-roll musicians are neurotics in the that facilitated his or her entry point as a throes of romance and anxiety), hence human being into the symbolic order. “sonorous matter” resists the categorical Repetition writes its own future, and the imperative to conceptualize artistic creation Freudian examines repetition as would an as the effect of a respective narrative’s operative in hopes of uncovering a cause to gestation period. Lyotard describes the the effect. Lyotard is interested less in what resistant act as unearthing the “mutic repetition comes to represent than in how beneath music” (1999: 226), taken literally repetition can emphasize singularity of the from the Latin mu- and mut as a event in each repetition. “nothingness [that] doesn’t let itself be Repetition is also a central aesthetic articulated ... a toothless cavity, a flabby feature in music (themes, motifs, refrains, muzzle,...the torpid instrument by which rhythmic patterns, etc.). But musical nothingness whispers its horror, sounding a repetition is composed of a different sort. To continuous bass. A night of sound rather begin, if we presume that the base material than a shadowy mouth. No matter how of music is what it sounds like (rather than clear the phrases of the clearest music might what its sounds “are”), then music disguises be, they bellow forth fright in secret” the billions of microrepetitions that con- (1999: 225). tribute to its production, since producing a This is one of Lyotard’s positions on musical tone requires the intense con- music: that particular composers have densation of air into thousands of oscillations destabilized musical conventions to eman- for a tone to resonate. Yet despite copious cipate sound from the tyranny of grand movement and vibration, music requires a narratives. His second stance is in regard to container, a rigid sounding apparatus, so repetition, still with Boulez and Cage in mind, that what is in so much flux can descend 9:2 July 2013

† that “in trying to have itself forgotten, it into the very heart of sonorous matter. [music] ﬁxes its forgetting, and thus repeats Music and sound oppose each other, its absence” (Lyotard 1991: 153). Lyotard’s but in what sense? Lyotard contends that statement is conducive to his general view sound is a measurable quantity of self-

POLITICS on repetition, which runs counter to the identiﬁcation, while music occupies a realm Freudian psychoanalytic view of its central of differentiation from the identical, a kind character as positioned within the of pure becoming or intense physical traumatized subject who remembers and concentration of time that reaches beyond CULTURAL works through material of his or her past. the Nietzschean plastic toward pure For Freud, repetition was foundational to energy (see Trifonova 2007: 137). There

192 neurosis. The Freudian subject disﬁgured by are means to measure sound, by the The REFRAINS of WESLEY WILLIS

logarithmic decibel scale to gauging compels repetition to escape its own oscillated mechanical waves. But music, on identification. the other hand, resists such obedience of More generally, Lyotard’s views on “identical repetition” (Lyotard 1991: 154), repetition deviate from the predominant one instead unfolding from within the perception of psychoanalytic discourse that perceives of differences in the framework of the repetition as a preventative psychic measure identical beyond matter. Musical repetition against one’s potential encounter with undoes our certainty in the rational units of trauma. Lyotard is instead absorbed by the time as an “ontology of being as non-being” new in repetition, that which annihilates the (Lyotard 1991: 155); since there is no original concept of transcendent identification. When repetition upon which the others are cast, we approach music in terms of its nuance the first utterance is as much a repetition of within repetition we are always on the verge its successor as the latter is a repetition of of an aesthetic new that resists symbol- the former. Music thus discloses itself as in ization. It is here where we put Lyotard in a nonlinear structure, resisting time as a conversation with D/G, because both category that emerges by way of attention to systems propose projects to dispose of the perceived motion/inertia binary through transcendence, and both use music as a and against which time is conventionally persistent point of reference in order to do so. measured. Nuance at once annihilates identification Deleuze and Guattari: associated with repetition along with the Deterritorializing the Refrain subject of identification, as does Lyotard’s In regard to the power of nuance in the concept of the differend, a total contradiction differend, here we have a striking (yet in a dual dialogue, a “case of conflict, momentary) similarity between Lyotard and between (at least) two parties, that cannot D/G. D/G proposed a spatial concep- be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of tualization of music that disassembled its judgment applicable to both arguments” linear narrative in favor of an emphasis on (1996: xi). The differend is unrepresentable its function in the ontological disturbance of because it is the taciturn that the noise of the territory, whereas Lyotard proposed a dialectic works over. In music, what gives likewise pragmatic prescription for music as pleasure in repetition is the nuance that an undoing of the grand narrative by way of makes the utterance utterly unlike what it the annihilation of identification through supposedly repeats, and so the nuance of nuance and its temporal dimension. In A sound is the pure presence of music, that Thousand Plateaus D/G posit a spatial which strips away the subject at the center of conception that music enacts a becoming- its consciousness because the nuance is minority (or a becoming-nomad or a precisely the unrepeatable, unrepresentable, becoming-molecular ), a topological wring that which resists synthesis, that which that transpires on the periphery of dominant resists narrativization. As Lyotard states: “To ideology. We can see already that the POLITICS refer to this nuance, the reason [there is no concept of becoming is similar to that of subject to refer to itself] is that sonorous Lyotard’s differend or, in music’s terms, matter which is this nuance is there only the nuance. D/G elaborate in the glossary CULTURAL to the extent that, then and there, the to A Thousand Plateaus that becoming subject is not there” (1991: 157). Nuance disassembles the conditions for identi- 193 Mickey Vallee

fication: “It indicates as rigorously as uniform substance but rather an unabridged possible a zone of proximity or copresence of idiosyncrasy. A refrain is not the affirmation a particle, the movement into which any of life. Paradoxically, then, the essential particle that enters the zone is drawn” (1987: building block of music for D/G is thus 272–73). nonmusical, like the measurements of sound In contradistinction to the Hegelian self- upon which music proceeds, as Lyotard consciousness that negates itself in terms observes. Music is always expressed in of a double transcendence made of polar relation to deterritorializing the refrain, of substances (a unity of opposites), the cutting up the refrain and removing it from its Deleuzian becoming is a becoming of positional security (its subjectivity, its dynamic marginality (Bousiou 2008: 234). identity). Thus the territorial aspect of their The becoming-minority is the space of the conception: music is never territory, music is simulacrum, or that which in the Platonic the deterritorialization of the refrain. transcendence of matter into form fails to Deterritorialization pertains equally to correspond with the hierarchy of that nonhuman, nonanimal, and nonsubstantial which something “represents.” Becoming- phenomena when a refrain discharges from minority is the substantiated exception to within the confines of its territory to become transcendence. The ideal category for something other than itself. D/G are radical becoming-woman for instance is the decontextualists, as context is one of many category of man. Nobody can become-man, conceptual systems that enslave the but becoming-woman is reserved as a privy transcendental subject in a territory. Much position for minority-consciousness. The like Lyotard’s conception of music as the becoming is never a clearly distinct entity but undoing of master narrative, D/G insist the deviation. that music is the deterritorialization of the Music is not illustrative for Deleuze; it is refrain, the undoing of the corporeal cage. the essential field of application for the kind Therefore, continuous variation is the key of conceptual creativity operationalized to D/G’s musical philosophy; a secret within philosophy. And so music is never language thus “places the public language’s representative of culture. Music is culture. system of variables in a state of variation” Music is affirmation. Just as becoming-minor (1987: 97). The refrain is the building block of or becoming-woman enacts a becoming music, a means of binding music but not that is immanent in form instead of music itself, a way of preventing music from transcendent identification between becoming. The question of music is thus: incompatible substances, becoming-music 9:2 July 2013

† circulates on the periphery of the “physical- Does it remain territorial and territorializing, or is ideological constraints of the gendered it carried away in a moving block that draws a body or ﬁxed musical genres” (Gilbert 2004: transversal across all coordinates—and all of the 126). And here, as with Lyotard, we witness intermediaries between the two? Music is

POLITICS a central role of repetition. precisely the adventure of the refrain: the way The refrain is the territorial structure music lapses back into a refrain ...; the way it lays upon which music is enunciated, but the hold of the refrain, makes it more and more sober, refrain is not music; it is the nonmusical reduced to a few notes, then takes it down a CULTURAL idiosyncrasy from which music unfolds. creative line that is so much richer, no origin or Music coincides more broadly with end of which is in sight. (Deleuze and Guattari

194 Deleuzian vitalism. It is not a comprehensive 1987: 302) The REFRAINS of WESLEY WILLIS

The three concepts of territory work key word here, whereby popular music “is an together: territorialization, reterritorialization, immense, monstrous body that does no and deterritorialization. Anything to do with more than bring forth, year after year, new the ﬁrst is not music. A deterritorializing variants, new sound organizations, that effect could create an expressive sound previously were unheard” (Lyotard and block that “becomes-Debussy” or The´ baud 1985: 13). Popular music is not of “becomes-composer” or assemblage, but at the people because it is not determined this point it reterritorializes according to a exactly who will like it, but it represents a new refrain. We always think of territories gamble in the hopes that many will like it, in relation to one another, to their own “a kind of ocean within which there will deterritorializations, to their reterritori- coalesce for a while an ear for hearing the alizations, the latter of which implies the music, bodies to dance to it, and voices to deterioration of the refrain, the turning of sing it. And then after a while, it will disappear music into an empty sort of repetition. to reappear later, but with another ear, There is a subtle kinship between another voice” (Lyotard and The´ baud deterritorialization and Lyotard’s critique of 1985: 13). capitalism: that capitalism is not capable of generating grand narratives because it is a Willis: “Suck a cheetah’s dick” system of equivalences between fragments, Wesley: If it wasn’t for me being a rock musician, but that the grand narrative of capitalism is I would have been locked up in a loony bin right paradoxically that of the revolution, which now! Do you ever want me to be locked up in a will overturn the contemporary unequal loony bin? distribution of wealth and power. Could the Crowd: Nooooo! ensuing revolution not be a suspended imago over the nations of otherwise Wesley: Do you ever want me to be taken to the fragmented individuals? In the United States, mental hospital and be locked up? where Lyotard saw this as most prevalent, Crowd: Nooooo! D/G wrote that “everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route Wesley: Well I’m so glad I’m a rock musician! of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the (Wesley Willis’s Joyrides, 36.24) underground, bands and gangs, successive lateral offshoots in immediate connection Whereas many musicians will proclaim their with an outside. ... The American singer Patti “true” reasons for entering the music Smith sings the bible of the American industry (that they were born with a love of dentist: Don’t go for the root, follow the music, that they had a calling, whatever), canal” (1987: 19). I decided to follow their Willis persistently provided the most honest advice in my bridge between poststructural answer for becoming a rock star: to make philosophy and a musician of a different sort. money and to be famous. Despite his Likewise, Lyotard offers some insight quaestuary intentions, Willis wrote and POLITICS regarding the American popular music performed music for more than a paying industry that aligns him with D/G’s philos- crowd; he wrote for the crowd of voices who ophy. He says that in the contemporary taunted him, the voices who called him a CULTURAL pop discourse ethnicity becomes a variant “jerk” and a “bum” and an “asshole” and that has no goal in terms of a listening whom he promptly castigated with lyrics like

identiﬁcation (it is but a variant). Variant is the “suck a dog’s dick!” and “drink a camel’s 195 Mickey Vallee

cum!” “He don’t like that song at all,” Willis hurting myself. I’ll be OK” (Wesley Willis’s remarks about his demon as he slowly enters Joyrides). As James Lien explains: “suck a tiger’s dick with Bonanza steak sauce” into a computer at a Kinko’s (Wesley Even with little distribution other than his own Willis: Daddy of Rock ‘n’ Roll). As a routine black travel bag that he takes on tour, it’s still clear rational solution to his own potential poverty that he’s better off ﬁnancially than he was before and homelessness, he lived off the music he he started playing music. In interviews (which wrote, recorded, and performed (he also usually consist of little more than Wesley shouting sold his artwork, intricate Bic pen sketches of slogans and butting heads with the interviewer), Chicago). His demons, “heartbreaker,” Wesley insists that it is rock music—along with his “nervewrecker,” “meansucker,” “trouble- medicine—which keeps the voices inside his head maker,” “dirty harry,” and “bad boy fool,” at bay, either when he’s onstage with the Fiasco appeared after his stepfather robbed him or blasting through the headphones of the at gunpoint. His psychotic episodes he portable CD player he keeps around his waist, even described as “hellrides,” but his music gave while onstage. “Music can take a hellride, and turn him “joyrides” or “harmony joyrides” as a it into a joyride,” he once said adamantly to a means of constraining his accusers. This was rather intimidated-looking Tabitha Soren. the undercurrent modality of his existence, (1996: 10) as encapsulated in the lyrics to “Chronic Schizophrenia”: Willis’s attention to detail was nothing short of punctilious. In a note discovered Riding them streets with no music sucks by his former roommate and best friend, Everywhere I go, I cruise the streets being called Carla Winterbottom, he’d written a an asshole comprehensive list of hell rides he went Plus, I’m being ridiculed and called a bum and through in a four-week period. She reads the called stupid note aloud: “He had 332 hell bus rides in four Chronic schizophrenia weeks with 16 hell El-Train rides with ‘evil Chronic schizophrenia ... (Willis, Greatest Hits, potty profanity warding me off’ [reading from track 5) his log]. Total for this year, 1606 hell bus rides” (Wesley Willis’s Joyrides, 28.00). His If there was anything he didn’t attention to detail was equally astute in his experience it was doubt in his own ability to drawings. We see in his drawings, for overcome the insults of his demons while instance, the exact number of bolts on maintaining poise and propriety to those buildings and numbers on the sides of trucks, 9:2 July 2013

† around him. An episode where he would on buses, and on license plates. punch himself in the head telling a demon to In Chicago, he networked with the shut up would always be followed up with Wicker Park music community and drew an apology to whomever was within in the art supply store, Genesis, where he

POLITICS proximity, and an equally polite explanation also sold his artwork. After Bob Fredericks that the “demons are making me upset” recorded Willis’s spontaneous poetic ravings (Wesley Willis’s Joyrides, 31.55). In one against Republicans, Willis started recording instance, at a Kinko’s, he turns to another his own material. Signed as a solo musician, CULTURAL customer, explaining: “My demon just cut he proceeded to record two albums with a my good time music off and that’s why I’m newly formed punk group, the Wesley Willis

196 Fiasco. Their short-lived career contributed The REFRAINS of WESLEY WILLIS

to his off-balance lifestyle, as the group these themes, Malott and Pen˜ a under his admitted to weaning him off his medication music suffer from an onset of acute myopia. to the point that he became violent. He Willis’s song “Chronic Schizophrenia” preferred to produce indie albums, summons for the authors the following performing by using a one-finger-touch remarks in regard to how Willis’s music preprogrammed backing band from one of “humanizes” individuals diagnosed with the his many Technics KN model synthesizers. disorder: Willis’s method of coping with his diagnosis was similar to the experiences of Our own experiences in dealing with the medical Judge Daniel Paul Schreber (2000), whose profession and other service providers for the memoirs were famously analyzed by Freud mentally ill reflects society’s attitude toward the (2003). Many of Schreber’s writings were mentally ill as burdens to society, as throwaways. executed with the sole intention of exiling They are not considered productive or useful the voices that bothered him day and night. citizens in an economic and political system where But the tendency for the Freudian reading people are not individuals but cogs in a wheel. to reduce his disorders to a failed Oedipus What matters is that they perform with efficiency complex testifies to the inadequacy of and without problems or “glitches” to the overall diagnosis. It is just such a diagnosis that workings of society. The lyrics in the song streamlines the excessive and irrational “Chronic Schizophrenia” personalize mentally ill behavior into critical rational discourse so people and send the message that they are real that it is tamed to make the “normates” people with real problems who hurt and feel (“the social figure through which people can pain and whose illness speaks of society’s represent themselves as definitive human imperfections. (Malott and Pen˜ a 2004: 113) beings”) more at ease (see Thomson 1997: 8–10). Willis, like Schreber, knew he had a The humanizing process ultimately problem. So did his community. But because abstracts the aesthetic potential of Willis and he found a community that supported him drains it of its character. Setting up a distance and cared for him, he was in little need of between “us” and “them” in an analytic routinized institutionalization. We are statement such as Malott and Pen˜ a’s places encouraged to see their problems as entirely Willis and other “schizophrenics” in the psychogenic because the psychiatric diagnostic straightjacket as much as any community holds the most control in other component of the psychiatric dis- diagnostics. course does, as their utilitarian compulsion The content analysis provided by Curry is to reduce a citizen to someone of use. Malott and Milagros Pen˜ a, for instance, Excess is dismissed as “absent” through a employs a strategy for dealing with Willis as rational content analysis, aligned with the a passing absurdity by coding the majority Kantian imperative to rationalize the of his songs as “absent.” Absent for them excessive into public discourse, something means the respective song does not fit into that useful citizens can debate with POLITICS any of the categories prescribed throughout furrowed brows against “society” (they their extensive and admirable taxonomy: are the ones who marked his music as love/romance, antilove/romance, sexist, “absent,” no?). CULTURAL antisexist, antiracist, homosexual ... and According to Richard Lloyd, Willis’s “absent.” Despite Willis having an immense meeting with the music scene was a fortu-

repository of songs that cover every one of itous arrangement, one attributed to the 197 Mickey Vallee

neighborhood Willis happened to find have contaminated our ability to listen at a himself in. Willis, Lloyd explains, new angle, an angle that would condition the possibility for placing someone like Willis is granted citizenship in the world of hipster as the text and not the representation. culture, but it is what Lauren Berlant [1997] might Pierre Schaeffer provides us with a call an “infantile citizenship,” secured by the compelling portrayal of discovering the new schizophrenia that renders him apparently in sound. His work on phonological transparent and therefore “real” for his audience. anamorphosis addresses the isolation of Willis embodies nostalgia for jaded culture sonic events as tonal particles split from their industry veterans like [Henry] Rollins or the Beastie original context of articulation. The split Boys for a time when bohemia could be between sound and source, a recontex- experienced as simple utopia, the fantasy of the tualization that R. Murray Schafer termed rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. Licensed by a mental illness schizophonia (1977: 137), offers a novel that made him “like a child” and therefore free to sense of musical signification. That is, articulate any sentiment, Willis could happily because we generally consider musical declare desires that bohemians typically let signification as fused directly to the gesture go unspoken: “I want to be famous and rich.” responsible for producing its sound, in a (2010: 95) schizophonic split the sound loses its phenomenal kinetic trace and is recon- Why Willis is not empowered enough to textualized as a sonorous object (Schaeffer grant citizenship for the hipster culture in his 2004: 80). The sonorous object slips world is beyond my understanding—nor between its own event and its repetition in am I certain whether any fully conscious the act of perceiving it. As it slips under its adult would want to be a citizen in a world own signification, the sonorous object’s that saw him as an infant, since Berlant’s essence remains elusively beyond our thesis (1997: 37–42) hinges on the image of grasp. Schaeffer’s prescription for critical the child at the level of national represen- listening is an act of reduced listening tation and not an individual. Willis thus is (ecoute reduite). Such a listening consists of reduced as a nostalgic representation for a an experience whereby the listener isolates community rather than as an active agent sound from context. For Schaeffer, the with a will of his own. Is Willis nostalgia for metamorphosis of the sonorous object what could have been great punk music? occurs by way of listening repeatedly to a Perhaps it is because we listen to Willis loop of sound, when its connotative with normate-conditioned ears rather than an significations gradually fall back and the 9:2 July 2013

† alternative aesthetic paradigm that we tend sound is reduced to the basic denotative to embrace his music as the representation features of the sound’s inner dynamics. We instead of the text. How do we uncover the could think of Schaeffer’s musical research new in such a blatantly substantial case of practice as a sort of “deterritorializing the

POLITICS Willis’s repetition? I suggest here a turn refrain,” activating through perception a toward phono-anamorphosis: perhaps schism between a sound and its connotative because Willis’s music is positioned adjacent specification, reterritorializing a denotation, to the norm, we use the norm as the trope and making itself referential and expressive CULTURAL through which certified human beings define in its own right. themselves. Perhaps the compulsive In Willis’s music, the moment arrives as

198 normate reiterations about love and rebellion an event-in-itself, unfastened from social The REFRAINS of WESLEY WILLIS

criticism, the irrational semiotic excess that their analysis of l’art brut (1987: 316), refuses to succumb to the categorical position the subject as one that returns to the imperative of idea, that which resists object it is terrified of in the renouncement of symbolization. His intention of composition fear, and subsists precisely within it, isn’t concealed behind pretense—he inserting itself into its celestial powers. For appears the least pretentious musician in the instance, Freud mentions that the turning industry. Willis is the subject of the ethic point with Schreber is when he turns into a without obligation to the dispositif of the woman, when he sees nature as a site of epistemic (the rules and conventions of production, the production of a new songwriting, of musicianship, of vocal- humanity within him. Desire for Schreber izations, etc.). This particular kind of avant- occurs outside the social mechanism of gardism (not the self-proclaimed discourse others, but not a generalized Other. All at of progress but the event as the potential for once, this stands equal to the subject that is actualizing the unforeseen) encloses the produced as a residuum alongside desiring- kernel of the unrepresentable that can only machines, exclaiming, “So that’s what it be uncovered by paying heed to the nuance was!”...the residual synthesis ... the that arises through repetition (the stuff of recording machine allows a distance toward differend). the subject in an epiphany of its own The psychoanalytic typology of nonbeing. repetition as the entwined cue/guise for the trauma that inaugurated the edification of Whose Voice? subjectivity is inadequate on the grounds The research thus presented services theory that it hinges on a constricted production of more than it does an emerging body of normate-consciousness. It also assumes work termed “madness studies.” In general, there to be a universal cognitive state that is madness studies, like disability studies, conditioned by universal brain activity that hesitates to ponder over the semiotic excess conforms with the standard asymmetry or aesthetics of subjectivity, as its repre- of normate cognition (another problem sentatives are motivated by proposing altogether). Willis’s songs evidence a alternative modes of treatment that are dialectic that is unrelated to the standard pop antimedicalized, antidiagnostic, anti- song, but not in such a way that warrants the psychiatrized, by way of reclaiming history label of “absent.” His nuances are simply and activist demonstration. I acknowledge incompatible with identification. The nuance that this article might have contributed to a compels the subject to return, not to the more profound understanding of Lyotard and state of a new thesis, but to a point where the D/G than to the much-needed work for the subject is annihilated. The task for thought unheard voices among the “mentally ill.” But is not to rationalize what is different but to I wonder, at the same time, whether bear witness to anterior inhumanisms. approaching madness by route of Willis’s excess is thus representation’s philosophical discussions of subjectivity is POLITICS failure, the “I” that annihilates the fictional really as elitist as it might seem. The purpose coordinates of the “ME,” the excess of the has been, yes, to elaborate on what Lyotard aesthetic that denies being the transcen- and D/G write about music, but it has CULTURAL dental illusion that binds the epistemic to equally been to determine that their own the ethic—it becomes instead the aesthetic insights into music might be better elucidated

that annexes the grand narrative. D/G, in if less emphasis were placed on the canon of 199 Mickey Vallee

experimental university-supported music of grand narrative. His music is an (Patti Smith included with Boulez and Cage— antidiagnostic resistance. normates unite!). Such privileged music Willis very explicitly resisted diagnosis producers seem obviously to construct (1) by using two means of cultural rational strategies to reveal the Kantian expression, art and music, to draw lines problematic of whether the aesthetic obliges of flight away from his demons; (2) by the ethic or vice versa. But perhaps shifting sustaining himself selling his art and music to the discourse at the level of subjectivity can anyone in his proximity; (3) by persistently contribute toward a profound change, just resisting categories of diagnosis (even in as Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1999: xvii) songs where he addresses schizophrenia, did when it contributed to shifts in nowhere does he refer to himself as a professional psychological attitudes toward “schizophrenic,” but instead refers to homosexuality. experiences he has had, such as “outbursts,” Willis’s music lends some remarkable “chronic schizophrenia” as diagnostics, perspectives on Lyotard’s insights regarding etc.); and (4) by locating a community of aesthetics and ethics, widening the scope individuals who equally resisted seeing him for a more inclusive discussion of music, through the trope of Western medicalization. culture, and society. For one, Willis reminds Perhaps it is the very bewilderment us that repetition of the nuance is not limited experienced when one meets Willis for the to the registers of high art. His narrative first time that sparks the terrifying moment breaks with the conventional coming-into- of uncertainty, facing a three-hundred- concept that privileges the categorical pound black schizophrenic whose first imperative, providing the opportunity to utterance to you is “Say Ra!” And you do, to elucidate how the rational discourse of which his reply is “Say Rawr!” And you do popular music is aligned with myopic refrains again, to which his rejoining gesture is to of the fearful neurotic. Willis’s music is set grab you by the back of the neck and head squarely in the sights of Lyotard’s project butt you with affection (this is literally how he because he propagates the intensities greeted people—myself included, in central to postmodern politics. As Lyotard Vancouver in 1995 after I performed on a writes: “These are the ‘people of inten- double bill with him). It is a bewildering sification,’ the ‘masters’ of today: outsiders, experience, one that Lyotard might have experimental painters, pop artists, hippies described as “a being taken aback amid the and yippies, parasites, the insane, inmates. always already said: stupor. A stupid passion An hour of their lives contains more intensity rises in the domestic dough. As though the 9:2 July 2013

† (and less intention) than a thousand words god were dropping the share he took in from a professional philosopher” (quoted in the common bake” (1997: 263). But perhaps Molon and Diederichsen 2007: 143). Fredericks, a friend of Willis’s, said it in a Willis’s music will remain haunted by more colloquial and community-oriented

POLITICS designations of absence only if we decide fashion: to appoint normate susceptibilities to its nuances. His music in fact denies the I was in India with the owner of Genesis in 1991. technical regime of normative musical He said: “Do you think that Wesley is a good CULTURAL mastery through the intensiﬁcation of a presence in the store?” And ... I said, “Yes, he is.” differend that repudiates all at once There’s a term called a “mast” [pronounced

200 repetition, identification, and the annals “must”] in India ... , which means a “God- The REFRAINS of WESLEY WILLIS intoxicated person.” Somebody who acts References abnormal, somebody who acts like they’re crazy, Berlant, Lauren. 1997. The Queen of America Goes to but they’re not crazy at all; they’re in fact so in Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. love with God, so in love with life, that they act Durham, NC: Duke University Press. imbalanced ... . And I think Wesley may be one of Bousiou, Pola. 2008. The Nomads of Mykonos: these type of people. And one of the criteria for Performing Liminalities in a “Queer” Space. New York: Berghahn Books. recognizing someone who is a “mast,” as Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the opposed to someone who’s mad, is the effect they Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. have on people around them. Usually, a mad Deleuze, Gilles, and Fe´lix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand person you want to keep away, and they have sort Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated of a disturbing effect, whereas Wesley had the by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of opposite. He could uplift people. He could make Minnesota Press. people feel good about themselves and people Echard, William. 2005. Neil Young and the Poetics of liked to be around him. In fact, it was a beneficial Energy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. presence for that store to have sort of a patron Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Schreber Case. Translated by saint in the store. (Wesley Willis’s Joyrides) Andrew Webber. London: Penguin Books. Gilbert, Jeremy. 2004. “Becoming-Music: The Rhizomatic Acknowledgments Moment of Improvisation.” In Deleuze and Music, edited by Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda, I wish to thank my colleagues at the 118–39. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. University of Lethbridge, particularly Kara Guattari, Fe´lix. 2005. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Granzow and Claudia Malacrida for their Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. New York: Continuum. insights on reconceptualizing schizophrenia; Lien, James. 1996. “Wesley Willis: Rock Now, Ask editor Peter W. Milne for his warmth and Questions Later.” CMJ New Music Monthly, cordiality during the editing process; the July 10. organizers of the “Rewriting Lyotard” Lloyd, Richard. 2010. Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in conference at the University of Alberta, the Postindustrial City. 2nd ed. London: Taylor and especially Heidi Bickis and Rob Shields, for Francis. accepting my initial paper; the anonymous Lyotard, Jean-François. 1991. The Inhuman: Reflections reviewers for reading my piece so closely on Time. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and and offering such perceptive comments (and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. I offer my sincerest apologies for leaving Lyotard, Jean-François. 1996. The Differend: Phrases in Theodor Adorno out of the discussion); Dispute. Translated by Georges Van den Abbeele. and the students of my “Deviance and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Conformity” class at the University of Lyotard, Jean-François. 1997. “Domus and the Lethbridge, who watched a documentary on Megalopolis.” Translated by Geoffrey Bennington Willis and offered characteristically insightful and Rachel Bowlby. In Rethinking Architecture: A observations on his life and personality. Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach, 256–65. London: Routledge.

Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois. 1999. Postmodern Fables. POLITICS Translated by Georges Van den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois. 2009. “Music and Post- modernity.” Translated by David Bennett. CULTURAL New Formations, no. 66: 37–45. 201 Mickey Vallee

Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, and Jean-Loup The´baud. 1985. Just Gaming. Translated by Wlad Godzich. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Malott, Curry, and Milagros Pen˜a. 2004. Punk Rockers’ Revolution: A Pedagogy of Race, Class, and Gender. Bern: Peter Lang. Schaeffer, Pierre. 2004. “Acousmatics.” Translated by Daniel W. Smith. In Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Daniel Warner, 76–81. New York: Continuum. Schafer, R. Murray. 1977. The Tuning of the World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Schreber, Daniel Paul. 2000. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Edited and translated by Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter. New York: New York Review of Books. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Trifonova, Temenuga. 2007. The Image in French Philosophy. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Discography (Wesley Willis CD Repository, www.derekerdman.com/ 2/wesley_willis.htm, has a full list).

Wesley Willis. Greatest Hits. Alternative Tentacles, 1996, compact disc. Wesley Willis. Mr. Magoo Goes to Jail Vol. 3. Typhoid Mary Records, 1997, compact disc. Wesley Willis. New York, New York. Wesley Willis Records, 1996, compact disc. Wesley Willis. Rock Power. Wesley Willis Records, 1995, compact disc.

Filmography 9:2 July 2013

† Wesley Willis: The Daddy of Rock ‘n’ Roll. DVD. Directed by Daniel Bitton. 2004; Oaks, PA: MVD Visual. Wesley Willis’s Joyrides. DVD. Directed by Chris Bagley. 2008; Oaks, PA: MVD Visual. POLITICS

Mickey Vallee is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada.

CULTURAL He mainly researches the intersections between music, media, and subjectivity. He has published on phonographs, mashups, and nostalgia, respectively, in the Journal of Historical Sociology, Popular Music and Society, and Tonya K. Davidson, ed., Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, 202 Desire, and Hope (2011). Law and Critique

A Vocal Assemblage of Truth and Reconciliation --Manuscript Draft--

Manuscript Number: LACQ-D-14-00039R1 Full Title: A Vocal Assemblage of Truth and Reconciliation Article Type: Manuscript Keywords: Affect, affective materiality, assemblage, transitional justice, Truth Commission, voice, vocal assemblage Corresponding Author: Mickey Vallee, Ph.D. University of Lethbridge CANADA Corresponding Author Secondary Information: Corresponding Author's Institution: University of Lethbridge

Corresponding Author's Secondary Institution: First Author: Mickey Vallee, Ph.D. First Author Secondary Information: Order of Authors: Mickey Vallee, Ph.D. Order of Authors Secondary Information: Funding Information: Abstract: The article proposes a new way of thinking through Truth Commissions (TCs) by discerning the manner in which they usher in new political configurations through voices and vocalizations. It contributes to our understanding of TCs by way of proposing a pragmatic ontology of bonds between the body, voice, and testimony by elucidating the central features that make them vocal assemblages, composed of five sub-institutional capacities: (1) they affect and are affected by bodies in a complex topological relation; (2) they are driven by an apology, which itself proffers a non- human body of transformation; (3) they potentiate reconciliation through spontaneous vocalizations; (4) they are ontogenetic openings that reassemble national pasts, presents, and futures; and (5) they are temporally experiential predecessors to political action. While victim testimony is taken as a historical crowning of the edifice for nations seeking to mend their past injustices, I contend that public reparation flourishes only if the state is open to the alternative orientations the voice proffers - that is, following recent observations of transitional justice, TCs have the potential to seek out alternative context-specific forms of justice in place of a universal law of reconciliation. By way of a brief discussion of Aboriginal artist KC Adams' diptych series, Perception, the article proposes that voices pose a nuanced figuration of auto-affection as a communicative possibility towards the (re)presentation and (re)invention of the (survivor) self. Response to Reviewers: In regards to Reviewer #1, the main issue stated was that the affective materiality of the voice faded into silence as the essay carried on. This was an unfortunate oversight on my part, which I have rectified by way of the following measures: 1. I have strengthened the presence of affective materiality and non-representational systems of thought 2. I have entirely eliminated the section on apology, having found it too much a distraction from the main argument 3. I have incorporated an analysis of Aboriginal artist KC Adams recent series of diptychs on survivor faces, with an emphasis on their qualities as vocal assemblages 4. I have left the section on voice in-tact, but as a warrant of the argument I make about the necessity to re-orient ourselves towards the affective materiality of the voice and towards affects of resistance

Powered by Editorial Manager® and ProduXion Manager® from Aries Systems Corporation The first reviewer also felt that the last section of the article needed some preparatory explanation, which I hope I have provided in the diptych analysis, as well as in the introduction, which is itself quite different from the previous submission.

Some other suggestions included my incorporation of the works of Alison Young and Andreas Philippopoulous-Mihalopoulos into my work. I can happily say that I immersed myself in these works and others like them, and was absolutely captivated by them. I only hope I've done them justice. I only briefly touch on the sources twice, but I hope the reviewer sees how much their work has tightened my own perspective, and to that reviewer I am personally grateful for having introduced me to them.

In relation, I have tightened up some definitions of (1) affect and (2) assemblage: affect I introduce using Gilles Deleuze's 1978 lecture on Spinoza. While making these revisions, I had another section devoted to Deleuze's reading of Spinoza, but found my own interpretations superfluous and excessive. I also contextualize affect within assemblage, but hope more or less to tease out the details of assemblage by demonstrating its presence in the diptych discussed in the essay's conclusion.

The reviewer was concerned about the sudden appearance of the visual. I have toned down reference to the visual, but I also highlight its role in regards to the auditory imagination. And, finally, the reviewer recommended the work of James Parker, which I found fascinating ... but I ultimately deleted a section referencing his fine work because my interpretation didn't necessarily fit the crux of my own argument. I do look forward to incorporating Parker's work into my own in the near future, though, and have already taken the steps to do so.

Please extend my appreciation to Reviewer #1 for having exposed me to some fascinating literature and for taking such an interest in my work.

-- In regards to Reviewer #2, I found their comments useful regarding the pragmatics of my essay. In particular, they were concerned with the lack of legal theorizing in regards to Truth Commissions. To rectify this issue, I incorporated the UN High Commission report on Truth Commissions and argued that the TC is a quasi-legal institution given that they have no direct power, but their their recommendations might contribute to pending legal charges against the accused.

I found their comment regarding the overriding focus on the voice very useful in reframing my argument, but I inadvertently tightened my focus on the voice as a result! I mean to arbitrary contrariness in this decision ... I just found that the "vocal assemblage" was a useful heuristic device for approaching the affective transformation of the new example I incorporated into the concluding section.

Their concern with my reliance on Ahmed's work was successfully addressed by my having eliminated those paragraphs entirely, substituted with an original analysis of KC Adams' photographs.

And, finally, their concern with my claim that "The archive is the emotional apparatus of the affective assemblage" was dealt with by my having deleted the claim :)

But this final claim has become the foundation for another essay.

Please extend my gratitude to the second reviewer for their encouraging and enthusiastic words, and for keeping me committed to tightening the argument of the essay.

A Vocal Assemblage of Truth and Reconciliation

Mickey Vallee

Assistant Professor of Sociology

University of Lethbridge

A888 University Hall, 4401 University Drive

Lethbridge, Alberta Canada (T1K 3M4)

Email: [email protected] Phone: 1+ 403 332 4431

Manuscript (excluding authors' names and affiliations)

A Vocal Assemblage of Truth and Reconciliation

Abstract

The article proposes a new way of thinking through Truth Commissions (TCs) by

discerning the manner in which they usher in new political configurations through voices

and vocalizations. It contributes to our understanding of TCs by way of proposing a

pragmatic ontology of bonds between the body, voice, and testimony by elucidating the

central features that make them vocal assemblages, composed of five sub-institutional

capacities: (1) they affect and are affected by bodies in a complex topological relation;

(2) they are driven by an apology, which itself proffers a non-human body of

transformation; (3) they potentiate reconciliation through spontaneous vocalizations; (4)

they are ontogenetic openings that reassemble national pasts, presents, and futures; and

(5) they are temporally experiential predecessors to political action. While victim

testimony is taken as a historical crowning of the edifice for nations seeking to mend

their past injustices, I contend that public reparation flourishes only if the state is open to

the alternative orientations the voice proffers – that is, following recent observations of

transitional justice, TCs have the potential to seek out alternative context-specific forms

of justice in place of a universal law of reconciliation. By way of a brief discussion of

Aboriginal artist KC Adams’ diptych series, Perception, the article proposes that voices

pose a nuanced figuration of auto-affection as a communicative possibility towards the

(re)presentation and (re)invention of the (survivor) self.

Keywords Affect, affective materiality, assemblage, transitional justice, Truth Commission, voice, vocal assemblage

The violence of vocal abstraction

Intended to disinter the stories of physical, sexual, and spiritual abuse suffered by First

Nations, Inuit, and Métis who’d attended Indian Residential Schools (IRS), the Canadian

Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has inscribed the voices of survivors and their families onto the public record in order to contribute towards the reconciliation of

Canada’s colonialist legacy. The Canadian TRC’s goals have been to (i) recognize the historical abuse, (ii) assure survivors a safe space wherein which their stories could be recorded, (iii) facilitate national and community TRC events across Canada, (iv) educate the public in regards to the IRS legacy, (v) preserve an archive of the IRS and the TRC for public use at the University of Manitoba, (vi) submit a report to the Canadian government on the full range of consequences for the IRS, and (vii) commemorate survivors in culturally appropriate ways. While the events have opened the nation to discourses of “healing” and “forgiveness,” there have been some ruptures in regards to the distributive compensation survivors received from the federal government. That is, as survivors went on record with statement-takers (statement-taking is considered the first of six core activities of truth commissions, according to the Office of the UN High

Commissioner for Human Rights’ Rule-of-Law Tools for Post-Conflict States), trauma would be extracted and equivocated into a dollar amount according to an Independent

Assessment Process. According to Robert Niezen (2013), the estimated average compensation stood in 2013 at approximately $94,134, calculated according to a triangulation of trauma impact factors: Acts Proven, Consequential Harm, and

Consequential Loss of Opportunity, each with its own criteria for measurement and, combined, ranging in an eventual compensation package from approximately $5000 to

$275,000. Niezen summarizes:

The lowest total of compensation points starts at 1-10, valued at $5,000 to

$10,000, and from there it goes up by ten point increments to 110-120, worth

$211,000 to $245,000, followed by a somewhat more open category, 121 or more,

valued at up to $275,000. To this can be added 5 to 15 per cent (rounded up to the

nearest whole number) for “aggravating factors,” such as verbal abuse, racist acts,

threats, intimidation, degradation, failure to provide care, sexual abuse,

accompanied by violence, abuse of a young or particularly vulnerable child, “use

of religious doctrine, paraphernalia, during, or in order to facilitate the abuse,”

and abuse “by an adult who had built a particular relationship of trust and caring

with the victim,” a category captured by one word at the end of the definition:

“betrayal.” (2013, p. 47)

Consequential Harm was measured in terms of how little the survivor could sleep, how much anxiety they experienced, the addictions they acquired, and so on, while Loss of

Opportunity was scrutinized against the survivor’s employment record. The situation leads to a problem whereby a survivor’s reliving of the past simply intensifies the trauma that brought them to testify in the first place. No wonder, given how effectively the violence of colonialism was inscribed upon the principles of the Canadian TRC, that Catherine Turner (2013) destines states of transitional justice generally towards deconstructive analysis. That is, ensconced in a series of binary oppositions between past/future, survivor/accused, law/lawlessness, forgiveness/contrition, public/private, and many others, transitional justice is a starkly polarizing term that searches for alternative non-punitive models of resolution in post-conflict and post-authoritarian societies. Turner laments that the global rise of transitional justice has not been sufficiently analyzed in such a way that would further elucidate the complexity of this otherwise globally renowned model of reconciliation. The emergence of transitional justice in general, and truth commissions in particular, summons the necessity to broaden the theorization of justice and jurisprudence in terms neither retributive nor distributive, but, rather, according to their spatial qualifications and affective rearrangements. Transitional justice awaits deconstructivist analysis, but more importantly it awaits its own transfiguration through vocal affects, through the recognition of vocal affects in the public, and ones whose points of general equivalence are not necessarily destined towards their equivocation into monetary distribution.

My purpose here is to circumvent discursive and epistemological categorization of traumatic colonial encounters by centralizing the voice as an agent of affective transformation. Thus, while answering Turner’s plea for more critical tropes of analysis, I propose an affective analysis of the TCs from the spatial rearrangements proffered by the voice and by vocalizations. Likewise, I propose a novel way of examining TCs as vocal assemblages, responsible less for discursive production than for affective orientations.

And while the idea that TCs do important work in social, political, and affective dimensions is not new, my perspective brings to this topic a deeper engagement with social theory and philosophical schools of thought, to bring transitional justice in general and TCs in particular within purview of their affective materiality.

While I ground my argument, generally, in the ‘affective turn’ (Clough and

Halley 2007), I favour current claims that affect is best accessed through its historically specific manifestations (Ahmed 2004, 2006; Agnew 2007; Clough 2007; Clough and

Halley 2007; Leys 2011; Bollmer 2014; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2014; Young

2014), which goes against the opposing rarefaction that affect is biological, neurological, and, as composed of ‘subindividual ... capacities’ (Clough 2004, p. 3), is best consigned to pre-social fields of human subjectivity (Connolly 2002; Massumi 2002; Shilling 2003;

Damasio 2004; Hansen 2004; Thrift 2007; McCormack 2007). This is not to discredit such neuro-social theoretical advancements (I am indeed in no professional position to assess the neurosciences), but rather to politicize affect, and to suggest that under TCs, affect is sub-institutionally sub-individual. TCs, in other words, are less discursive/epistemological than they are affective/ontological. Their resultant transformation demands not only the regeneration of national memory and its inclusion of citizenship through collective action, but furthermore reforms the way in which all members of a nation approach reconciliation in widely divergent ways.

First, a word on affect in support of the claim for its pre-symbolized yet political attributes: Specific to Gilles Deleuze (1978) and his conceptualization of affect, affect is divided into two non-representational modes of thought: affectio (affection) and affectus

(affect). The first, affectus, is a mode of thinking, but unlike an idea, affectus is non- representational. Affectus subsumes ideas as the stream of variation which ideas use as a resource for thinking through representations. But affectus is neither pre- nor a-political. Instead, political power is garnered through the administration of affective capacity of the central organizing body of government, where certain affects are encouraged

(affirmative- or joyful-affects) while others discouraged (negative- or sadness-affects).

Affectio, meanwhile, is a matter entirely opposed. Affectio (affection) is the state of the body as it is subject to the action of another body, as it becomes that which it no longer is. Simply, if affectus marks the potential for action in its negativistic or affirmative value, affectio is the degree to which one body is altered by the action of another. Every body is by law of the affectus always already modified through external forces, which tells us more about the affected body than the one facilitating the affection. Therefore: affectio deterritorializes affectus. Affects pose the following ethical question: what is the common notion to the affected and the affecting body? For Deleuze, this is a question that can only be answered by way of joyful affect, it is what constitutes his affirmative ethics, since negative affects limit attention to solitary passions and affirmative affects bring the perceiving subject into a new orientation towards the multiplicity of desires. There is a necessity of calling for the outside through orientations, and we are always at once oriented towards a space while oriented towards its transgression, despite the fictionalized aspect of the transgression.

My use of affect is aligned with those arguments most recently forwarded by

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2014). Generally speaking, Philippopoulous-

Mihalopoulos spatializes justice as an all-at-once demand for transformation in spatial relations while inducing a cry for a space beyond jurisdiction. Space demands its own

‘immanent transcendence,’ (Philippopoulous-Mihalopoulos 2014, p. 1) which, as an offspring of dwelling, the imagination provides through the very necessity of fictionalizing the outside as a possible alternative to dwelling. But there are never, objectively speaking, outsides, only their possibility through variegated ruptures in the spatial continuum. The question of the assemblage is always the question of the possibility of an outside, since the world always posits the possibility of escape. But the escape does not necessarily need to be thought through as a fundamental lack so much as an affirmation of that world. By principle of extension, then, and to facilitate a maximization of perceptibility, I read these interruptions as possibilities procured through the voice. The voice, in its material affectivity, should be taken as a cry to the porousness or a calling toward the porousness of the event.

With the best of intentions, the Canadian TRC upheld the principles establish by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ document on establishing truth commissions. It has become apparent, however, that many problems exist in the

TRC, but, more importantly, that celebrating the TRC as a moment of change is actually to do damage to the potential for change; the UN specifically states that rushing to reconciliation does damage to survivors and victims. Such that turning the voice into an axis of general equivalence does damage to the voice that must remember the past in meticulous and measurable detail. So while deconstructive analysis would reveal the biases of the Canadian TRC, and other TRC’s (like the recently inaugurated Australian

TRC for investigations into child sex abuse), I prefer to proceed with the affects of Truth

Commissions; though this paper does have a proper place for Derrida and auto-affection as post-sub-institutional enframing devices. My call for affect theory and political responsibility frames affect as a historical contingency, that institutions such as TCs are at once responsible for the dissemination and distribution of affect, but that affects are also always affects of resistance; to understand the affects of resistance, we must orient ourselves to the voice less as a final destination or a mode of inscription, and more as a zone of discoverability.

The injunctions of social transformation

While TCs have been taken as points of capture for the radical reconfiguration of subjectivity, I argue that subjectivity is less the appropriate destination to understand the transformative truth as an event than is the affective dimension which opens testimony.

Certainly, TCs require the fundamental redistribution of law and justice as reparation and transformation have come to stand as the commonsense replacement terms for discipline and punishment in order to describe nations in transition from trauma to reconciliation

(Mbembe 2008; Walker 2012). By encouraging citizens to assemble collectively, to testify, witness, and narrate their experiences into socially sanctioned means of advancing towards forgiveness, TCs are anything if culturally topological zones of transformation

(Shields 2013), zones wherein which cause-and-effect models are deeply problematized.

According to the Rule-of-Law Tools for Post-Conflict States, TC’s maintain a quasi-legal status as ‘officially sanctioned, temporary, non-judicial investigating’ units whose activities are inscribed on a ‘final public report’ (2006, p. 1). While they are not necessarily legal institutions, TCs gather information that may be used as a step towards a future trial and judicial liability (unless the commission has agreed to protect identities of the accused, as did the Canadian TRC). Instead of guidelines, the Rule-of-Law Tools establishes a set of best practices, which allows the opportunity to bring the voices of the victim and their stories into view of the public, and to recommend policy reforms to prevent the repetition of historical atrocity. It stipulates, however, that TCs should not be seen as determinants of transformation, forgiveness, or reconciliation, and that seeing them as such does damage to the process. Thus, every nation must to go into its own TC independently, every nation knows its own time for a TC, but it always depends on the historical and national context, usually based on three criteria:

1. There must be a political will and a transparency to the process that will not block

the inquiry into the nation’s history

2. The atrocity in question must fully be put to rest, lest anyone coming forward feel

threatened

3. Victims and the witnesses must be complicit with the proceedings, and must be

served by the proceedings (formal alternatives may also be sought)

Despite their apparent universal appeal, TCs are widely divergent in their procedures. And having gained an international distinction for transfiguring historic human rights violations into the non-punitive component of social justice between a nation and its citizens, they’ve come a long way from their beginnings. The first TC was established in 1974 (Commission of Inquiry into the Disappearance of People in Uganda) and was widely reputed for its corruption, but the current model of public reconciliation is more or less based upon the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

(1995-2002), which formed to mend the fissure between past violence under Apartheid and contemporary regeneration of the nation. Their procedure was one of discovery, and the involvement of the public was something born of the necessity of imagination. But there remains no official procedure for TCs: for instance, while it was crucial for South

Africa to reveal the identity of the perpetrators to the public, the Canadian TRC (2008-

2014) ensured the perpetrators would not be named, even in the transcribed testimony from victims (Niezen 2013). In the case of Australia, years of ambiguous non-apologies were aligned with a series of citizen-led coalitions (such as ‘sorry books’ and a national day of apology), followed finally by what many dubbed a ‘sincere apology’ from Prime

Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008. Indeed, every nation proceeds according to its specific historical context of human rights violations. However, one of the most consistent and dramatic technologies of TCs is located within its consistent claims for national reconstruction, a popular form of national reinvention proliferating throughout their manifestations. The Constitution of the South African Truth and Reconciliation

Commission clearly states:

This Constitution provides a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided

society characterized by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice, and a

future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful

coexistence and development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of

color, race, class, belief or sex. The pursuit of national unity, the well-being of all

South African citizens and peace require reconciliation between the people of

South Africa and the reconstruction of society.

The reconfiguration of temporal relations is critical to the success of TCs and creates a cyclical rhythm of them: when the past is framed in terms of conflict the future is a ‘standing reserve’ of harmonious social relations, which is itself a fantasy of the future that is the requisite for the discovery of past atrocity – its call to the outside. The future is a dimension of the possible that creates its own image. The future contains the set of tools that reframe the past in the present.

According to Kelly Oliver, reconstruction encourages heretofore displaced subjectivities to voice their historic positions in struggles for recognition, rendering the

TC as a sententious meeting ground for intersubjective differentiations, ‘reconstructing the addressability that makes witnessing subjectivity possible’ (Oliver 2010, p. 83).

Michal Givoni (2014) notes that such a notion of reconstruction inevitably comes from the theories of subjectivity proposed by Giorgi Agamben and Jean-Francois Lyotard

(namely homo sacer and the differend), who themselves argued that the verifiable details of history were less important in testimony of historical trauma than were the recognitions of those who occupies unutterable positions or ‘states of exception’

(Agamben 2005). In other words, Givoni claims, reconstruction does not simply allow a new story to be inserted into the narrative of a nation, but rather opens a newly spoken subjectivity in the discursive field of policy, polity, and possibility, ‘in humanitarian acts of testimony that took the more familiar form of speaking truth to power’ (2014, p. 134).

It is such a subject position that Patricia Clough (2009) terms enactive witnessing, the narration of memory that subsumes the very possibility of reconstruction; affect, Clough argues, is always locating the potential for ongoing reconstruction of the self in its attempt to re-narrativize trauma:

The movement from witnessing and affect to narrative and the analysis of

transference, therefore, can only be tentative, by no means linear or irreversible,

as it is marked by the disjuncture between affect and narration. At any time,

bodily irritation or affective capacity can flood the narration. The analysis of

transference is stalled, at least temporarily, emptied of potential for ongoing

interpretation and narration. Yet a flood of affect can also start up analysis again,

enliven again. To be with each other again. (Clough 2009, p. 156).

But subjectivity is far too state-imposed a destination for some scholars, who turn instead to the discursive productions of TCs themselves, such as testimony, to examine the ways in which language proffers alternative ethical models for radical recognition and reconstruction. Although Michael Humphrey (2000) had warned that such a public testimony (as it was publicly disseminated) is only efficient for those ‘culturally attuned’ to register testimony, it appears that testimony, as it has been recently theorized through historical case studies, is fostering radical alternatives to reconstruction that deny the nihilistic route of state imposed injunctions. Regarding political recognition for the purposes of reconstruction, Glen S. Coulthard recommends approaching testimony, especially in the context of political recognition, as a radical alternative for cultural traditions to be freed of psycho-social colonial domination (2007, p. 456). For instance,

Dorothy Driver (2005) pays particular attention to the Xhosa and Zulu term, ubuntu, a lexical addition to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that describes a primordial process of recognizing the value of being human simply through the intersubjective recognition of one another as existing through that recognition, something testifiers claimed White South Africans did not possess as a consequence of their colonial legacy; reconstruction in South Africa, itself driven by a majority of testimony by women

(Driver, 2005, p. 220), is thus recognized as this radical alternative to self-recognition and, thus reconstruction not in state-imposed terms.

If subjectivity is too final a destination, then, so too, for many, is transformation.

Why transformation must be coupled so closely with reconciliation is a puzzle to some scholars, who wonder where the clear beginning and end points of transformation may be located. Although transformation, generally speaking, is key to the worldview of Western civilization and modernity, in TCs it does not signify the movement from ‘one state’ to

‘another’ (as in pre- to post-trauma). Annelies Verdoolaege stresses the openness of the

South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was compelled to straddle a

‘deeply divided past of suffering and injustice and a future founded upon human rights, democracy and equality’ (2005, p. 186), which offered all survivors who testified a feeling of ‘belonging to both the transitional processes and the new nation, which was beneficial for the entire project of nation building’ (Verdoolaege 2009, p. 304). Claire

Moon’s extensive archival discussion of the South African Truth and Reconciliation

Commission as a performative space offered the opportunity to see ‘reconciliation as the prefigured closure of transition’ which co-constructs the past to uncover repressed truths, while using those truths to fund an ‘imaginary condition of co-existence’ in an immutable future (2006, p. 271). In either case, transformation becomes central to the idea of a TC, the narratives filling these commissions reinforcing the image of a benevolent state rectifying its past wrongs: Transformation from above, certainly, though demanded from below.

Affects of control: vocal distribution

As much as the voice is a political technology that beholds the confession, it remains radically indeterminate, and is, according to the model of assemblage, a zone of discoverability that no TC is necessarily prepared to contain or to discipline. That

Desmond Tutu, in the context of the South African Truth and Reconciliation

Commission, designated the ‘wail’ as the ‘defining sound of the TRC’ is no small measure of evidence for the affective labour required of and in truth commissions (Cole

2010, p. 79). A wail, scream, or sob signifies a pre-rational encounter between a subject and its unrecognizable form, a form which terrifies and induces vocalizations

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 188-190). Interviews that break the silence of Canada’s past hinge on their emotional situatedness, such as the interview here:

Nearly always, when I taped interviews with former students, they would begin to

cry as they recalled their experiences at the school. One man showed me physical

scars that he still bore. I began to feel that I was carrying their pain, as well as my

own, around with me ... For me too the ruined school began to take on its own

individual personality. Even in its derelict state it seemed menacing. I spent a lot

of time up on the hill, walking around the school grounds, looking at the decayed

building. It was if I wanted it to talk to me. (quoted in Hamilton 2011, p. 104)

The voice is thus simultaneously an opening, doubly bound by (1) the utterances that trace the outlines of subjectivation, but (2) a political tool for the reconfiguration of grassroots transformations of state-imposed temporal dimensions. Consistently, the voice is taken as an intertwining dimension of invisibility in the aesthetic, political, and ethical registers of contemporary subjectivity. Yet there is another dimension of the voice suggested by affect theory, that is, the voice as a zone of potential and incorporeal transformation, the haptic and sui generis affect of the voice, not just in the sense of the hearing/speaking subject but in the sense of a body which resonates its own voice as well as the voice of its others. This also points to the importance of orientation, of the way the body is directed towards the voice of others as well as the voice of the self in everyday life and in political injunctions. Certainly, we attend to the auditory spectrum in terms of our orientation towards it, our choices to attend to it, in opposition to the gaze which comes at the body from the outside; the voice is both inner and outer, neither the ear nor the mouth nor any one organ, but a capacity for orientating oneself towards the invisible.

Such a horizon is constitutive of the TC as well, as described by Niezen in his account of one of these spontaneous moments wherein which silence played a key role:

The witness, a small Inuit man with a long grey beard and ponytail, was

overwhelmed with grief as he sat before the microphone. He was comforted by a

woman, his ‘support person,’ who put her hand on his back and shoulder as he

spoke. Try as he might, he could not talk past the sobs and constriction of his

throat that took away control of his voice whenever he approached the topic of his

abuse as a child in school. He eventually stopped his testimony, pulled his chair

back from the table and wept deeply, his body heaving, while he received a long,

comforting embrace from his support person. When he had regained enough composure he got up to return to his seat. The audience was itself sympathetically

grief-stricken and silent. Commissioner Wilson moved her hands as though to

clap, as had been done after every presentation by every witness in every other

meeting to that point, but then stopped her hands in mid-motion. After a brief look

of confusion, she pulled back her chair and stood in a silent gesture of

acknowledgment of the witness. This gesture soon established a pattern. After the

next witness spoke, again no one applauded, but about half the audience stood. At

the conclusion of the third witness’s testimony, everyone in the room was silently

standing to honour them in a way that was now established as customary and that

continued throughout the meeting. (Niezen 2013, pp. 66- 7).

Thus, the voice is at once the final destination for the truth sought in a TC, yet it is its site of discoverability. TCs are taken generally as an opportunity for a voice silenced by an oppressive and violent history to vocalize truth. This goes for cases of disappeared or murdered victims, the tortured, and also for the displaced, such as the instance of indigenous peoples assimilated through colonial regimes, who suffer under what Guyarti

Spivak terms as ‘the ventriloquism of the speaking subaltern’ (Spivak 1996, p. 28). And so the question is: can those whose bodies have been oppressed speak without being mediated by the oppressive regime? In regards to TCs, it appears to be very difficult, since such commissions are formulated by the nation- state often thought of as responsible for the oppression to begin with. Indeed, the very silencing of the voice

(whether literal or through ventriloquism) can be read as part of assimilation. In Canada, for instance, First Peoples scholars are quick to point out the contradictions of the assimilation paradigm forwarded by the Canadian government as part of a strategy befitting, as Dale Antony Turner calls it, ‘white paper liberalism’, which ‘privileges the individual as the fundamental moral unit of a theory of justice’ measuring ‘notions of freedom and equality’ between those individuals (Turner 2006, p. 13). As vocal assemblages, TCs are in a position to produce instead of oppress the subaltern whose previously silenced voices speak in order to subsist discourse in an incitement to confess and bear witness to testimony. David R. Gaertner argues in his dissertation that ‘The repression of Aboriginal voice is not simply an unconscious side-effect of ideology, but rather an implicit part of the machinery of “civilization”’ (Gaertner 2012, p. 63). In other words, in keeping with the technologies of civilization, civilization requires the voice of its savage in order to maintain the mirror of its own regime: and so civilization might appear to have been monstrous in the past, but in willing to accept and move beyond monstrosity, becomes the apologistic figure of the benevolent master. Such a process doesn’t only give narrative to the nation itself in its efforts towards reconstruction and transformation, but by including testimony from the oppressed, incorporates them into the body politic. Part of the governmentality of TCs, especially since South Africa, has been to give voice to the ordinary citizen (Verdoolaege 2009, pp. 303-304). So long as the state and the citizens entered into a co-constructive narrative, we are, at one level, then, enticed into thinking of TCs as a site of witnessing as an affective mode of social control. A voice, in other words, belongs at once inside the individual and to the social group that receives the transmission of that voice, more or less, so such a position requires that we hear voices, to be a voice hearing community (Blackman 2010). Voice should be, politically speaking, a site of discoverability. But what might be discoverable is that the voice wishes to speak without being heard. The voice is doubly bound insofar as its words may be traced to subjectivity, but the fact that some actors are explicit in their demands for what happens to their voices suggests that the voice does not belong to any one actor in a TC. We might conceive of a voice, as Jacques Derrida did through his concept of auto-affection, as both inside and outside the experience of the body, eventually positioned through discourse, and must be taken as something discoverable with unintended outcomes. What this suggests is that an audience is obliged to listen, especially out of respect to the testifier who doesn’t want a witness. The voice as discovery of a truth implies less a subject position than an orientation towards desire for affective distribution; the following traces this process of assimilation into reconciliation and transformation, in that voices must be heard, that is:

‘A shared memory is said in TRC logic to be based on the sharing of words, or what may be called the incorporation into oneself of the other’s words’ (Driver 2005, p. 225).

Voices are thus channeled in appropriate directions in order for affects to be registered for the public record. Inasmuch as the voice, then, demarcates something ultimately discoverable, this discoverability is indeterminate, coming down to the choices people make on all sides regarding which voices speak, which voices are listened to, and which voices go on public record. We must take into account the educative tendencies of voice and voices, especially regarding the manner in which a multiplicity of repressed voices can, through such an institution as a TC, become historicized (in some ways dangerous, in other ways potent), as singular voice. There is something ethical in the voice, if we think of the voice as a zone of potential. TCs, Naomi Angel writes, ‘may be read as an exercise of state power, one that integrates marginalized voices, but not on their terms’ (Angel 2009, p. 9). Voice, in this context of testimony of those having suffered historical trauma, articulates something that is otherwise unspeakable, because, as Michael Humphrey writes, ‘Trauma resists voice because pain is language destroying’

(Humphrey 2000, p. 11).

Affects of resistance: vocal assemblage

Aboriginal artist KC Adams, whose work frequently considers the racist stereotypes that stigmatize Canadian First Peoples, Métis, and Inuit, has recently completed a public art exhibit of a series of diptychs entitled Perception (2015). They capture the affective transformation of voice and vocalizations, inspired by a Facebook post addressing the

Winnipeg Aboriginal population by the wife of the mayoral candidate for the city in

2014:

Lorrie Steeves is ... really tired of getting harrassed [sic] by the drunken native

guys in the skywalks. we need to get these people educated so they can go make

their own damn money instead of hanging out and harrassing [sic] the honest

people who are grinding away working hard for their money. We all donate

enough money to the government to keep thier [sic] sorry assess [sic] on welfare,

so shut the f**k up and don't ask me for another handout!

Each diptych from Perception (2015) is divided into two facial reactions: one on the left grimacing with the name of a racial slur inscribed on the top of the photograph, and one on the right a face full of fondness, the inscribed words here a series of self-descriptions (on the bottom of the image with the racial slur is the injunction Look again …). While photographing her subjects for the left image, Adams threw the worst of racial slurs at her subjects, intent on capturing the face as it bore the brunt of her vocalizations. The right image, meanwhile, depicts the same model bearing an opposing expression of joyous- affects, as Adams asked them to describe themselves. In the case of a diptych bearing

“wagon burner” on the left (Fig. 1), on the right reads “A mother, sister aunt, artist, publisher, consultant, social activist, pays taxes, and her roller derby name is May Q.

Sorry.” Perception invites a spatial configuration between indeterminate vocalizations, their emotional resonance, and the possibility for affective transformation. To revisit

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, and to align once again affect, assemblage, and the quasi-legality of the TC, Adams’ diptychs reproduce components elucidated under the

Canadian TRC, conserve their organization, and aestheticize their relations into new configurations that emphasize the transformative potentials of the voice and of vocalizations. Perception offers an urban imagination to TCs, one which combines all at once the voice with the voice’s silence.

Fig. 1 (“Wagon Burner?” From the series Perception by KC Adams, 2015)

In opposition to the vocal equivocation of trauma into monetary distribution,

Adams’ series centralizes an empowering moment of vocal affective transformation. Less are the diptychs visual and inscriptive than auditory and transitory, commanding one to listen as much as, if not more than, to see. That is, as a form of vocal assemblage, they bind the facial transformations of the survivor, the accused, the missing, and the public all in the same breath. And if the voice is at all consistent in its self-presence, it is so within the multiple inscriptions of subjectivity on the face. This, for Derrida, is of central importance in the voice: the ideal object, or the form that is given presence in sensation through its idealization, is brought to bear on the present by virtue of its revealing without breaking with the ordering of the visible. More than any other object, the voice is capable of passing into the infinite by its virtue as an object of pure form and presence — this happens with the advent of the phonē as the locus of the sonorous that slips through the certainties of meaning. Phonē is inseparable from its historical contingency, which requires idealizations in objects that are more or less ‘heard’ insidiously through the accidental vibrations of their movements: i.e. in sound. But the singularity of the

Derridean auto-affection misses its mark in the case of Adams’ Perception. When perceived through the prism of self and subjectivity, the voice perpetuates the mythology of its final destination towards inscription, the ‘absolute proximity’ as the hypothetical condition of auto-affection. It is not the subject that is the presence of meaning, but the affective materiality of the voice that conditions the possibility for meaning construction in a variegated, multi-faceted, and polyvalent assemblage (Schlichter 2011, pp. 36-7).

There is a phenomenological operation in speech that I ‘hear’ myself (je m’entendre, I understand and I hear, S/s).

If we are to appreciate how the survivor, the accused, the missing, and the public come into affective transformation, we must appreciate their distinct roles in the voice and vocalization as they interrelate in a vocal assemblage (see Fig. 2), wherein which bodies are knitted together by the interlocking of processes that link the patterns, thresholds, and triggers of the behaviour of the component bodies to the patterns, thresholds, and triggers of the behaviour of the emergent superordinate (and sometimes transversal) bodies. Affectio and affectus have already been explained, the former the potential for bodily alteration, the latter non-representational thought. The vertical axes, singularity and multiplicity, accounts for the manner in which affect accounts for the multiple expressed through the positions of the singular, and respects the fact that as much as bodies are more affectively open than physiologically closed (Blackman 2012, p. 2). It simultaneously respects the fact that, in Canada at least, the accused are unaccounted for, and the missing are equally multiplied.

Fig. 2 (The TC Vocal Assemblage)

[VOICE as HEARD] Affectio (potential for bodily Affectus (non-representational alteration) thought) Singularity Bearing witness to testimony Testimony to bearing witness (visible) The Public The Survivor Multiplicity Testimony as bearing witness Bearing witness as testimony (invisible) The Accused The Missing {VOICE as UNDERSTOOD}

The public bears witness to testimony through the face’s singular and visible

registration of the voice, the apex of enunciation that makes subjectivity a singular

event.

The survivor testifies to bearing witness through their singular self-naming (i.e.

‘May Q. Sorry’), where the past is reconfigured by using resources of the future to

speak to a new presence.

The accused testifies as bearing witness through the ubiquity of the racial slur, the

racializing agent that stands as a social fact against the de-humanization of the

subject.

The missing bears witness as testimony insofar as their witnessing is impossible

to incorporate directly into the present, unable to cross the threshold of multiplicity into singularity, but gives us the injunction of a “Look again …” in

the diptych.

The purpose of a vocal assemblage is to lodge within certain orientational / ontological coordinates the possibilities for affective transformation. My discussion of the components of a TC as a vocal assemblage is followed by an explication of its variegated orientations. TCs are vocal assemblages according to five particularities: (1) they affect and are affected by bodies in a complex topological relation; (2) they are driven by an apology, which itself proffers a non-human body of transformation; (3) they potentiate reconciliation through spontaneous vocalizations; (4) they are ontogenetic openings that reassemble national pasts, presents, and futures; and (5) they are temporally experiential predecessors to political action.

(1) They affect and are affected by bodies in a complex topological relation

Less are TCs spaces within which affect is disseminated than is movement and

gesture coagulated into bodies of motion and bodies of rest. TCs are vocal

assemblages insofar as they are affected by the occupation of bodies in a social

space that elucidates affective utterances in pursuit of social justice, and are not

delegated to any singular embodiment of the survivor, accused, or public; a vocal

assemblage is a topological site. In contradistinction to theories that account for

the body as a site of resistance to docility (such as the geneaological Foucault), or

a site of alienation from the specular image (such as the psychoanalytic idealist

Lacan), TCs tell us that the political body is best approached as a medium of consciousness which performs the role of an opening indeterminacy and connectivity. As long as the public remains bound to symbolic determinants such as the TC, it is from within such restraints, in as many ways before them, that practical faculties of creativity and openness emerge – as we saw with TCs, although we might entertain them as spaces of governmentality, they are ultimately sites of discoverability – they are, in other words, less negativistic than affirmative. Therefore, though a TC may determine consciousness of the nation state, it is a consciousness that is itself indeterminate because of the multi-sensory and navigational limitlessness of the bodies that are embodied within it.

Consciousness and the body, or affect and discourse, are as adhered to one another as marrow is to bone.

(2) They are driven by an apology, which itself proffers a non-human body of transformation

TCs are vocal assemblages insofar as the actual bodies inhabiting them and the virtual bodies circulating between them are driven by their interconnected relationship to the apology, which itself acts as an opening not a closure. If the TC is the site of a nation’s newly emerging consciousness, and consciousness must be conscious of something, then the ‘sense-experience’ of the victim answering to apology from the past is the indeterminate fiction that belongs to the nation in its experience of itself. Apology uses narration, voice, past, present, and future cooperative participants that perceive the emergence of Truth. Perception of the survivor, thus, is never objective, never subjective, never neutral. Perception is an engaged and living relationship with a thing (a victim with the past), such as historical trauma, as much attributable to the thing’s inherent truth for the survivor as it is attributable to the fiction played out within the coordinates of sensation. A survivor discloses their existence in relative autonomy to its context, but not in isolation from it, for in its discretion a survivor confesses the secrets of its immediate surroundings, so the closure of its immediate surroundings become the world within which Truth becomes discoverable. Because the connection between the victim and the community in TCs is as deeply intertwined as it is, interconnectivity is crucial for the perception of Truth to be fostered. The boundaries between speaking and listening, between apology and truth, are things so inherently connected with one another, their connections are not inherently logical but rather relationally expressive.

(3) They potentiate reconciliation through spontaneous vocalizations

Insofar as TCs are vocal assemblages, as the primary mediator for the (virtual and actual) bodies through which the TC interacts with itself, it is the site of potential for a creative regeneration of the accused; this means that as much as TCs are discursively bound, narrowcast and nationalist, they are sites wherein which the creative moment (the spontaneous improvisation) is the most highly valued and memorable one – where the accused is excused instead of reprimanded. The accused body that occupies TCs is an opening to transitional justice, not a closure to retributive justice. As much as we may think of TCs as state-sanctioned sites of social control that apologize without contrition, the new knowledge regarding alternative justices gained from their facilitation cannot be separated from the fact that they happened. So it is within the topological framework of the TC that the accused resides, taking its cues from the bodies in their proximity to their victims.

(4) They are ontogenetic openings that reassemble national pasts, presents, and futures

Insofar as TCs are vocal assemblages, any notion of incompleteness is insufficient to understanding the creation of a TC, and no matter the stage of a TC, even in its official closure and submitted reports, it is always onto-genetic – that is, as long as we attend to the manner in which the virtual is embodied in vocalizations, we are likely to discover new openings. A TC does not determine truth as though they were engaged in cause and effect – a TC opens the possibility to discovering realms of historical injustice that were previously undiscoverable. Rather, the role of the Commission is to act as an encasement of the discoverability and malleability of truth. The voice is a discoverable in these regards, and is always being recovered.

(5) They are temporally experiential predecessors to political action.

Insofar as the TC is a vocal assemblage, it is the site for the potential for action which has immediate political implications – its consciousness has a permanent fixture in experience, but the experience is itself temporal. It is a topology which does not leave the truth it generates. Witnesses inhabit multiple bodies at once, always-already aware of the position of the body in a flux of pre-possessive knowing. Thus, my final point, that bodies are not objects. They are only objects

inasmuch as they are the location of affect. They register themselves feeling, but

doubly entwined, sheathed in a mobile encasement of experience.

These principles combined provide us with the possibility of orientating towards those voices that are silent, an ontological position that facilitates the possibility of encroaching upon the voice’s discoverability. There is an apparent weakness in the notion of subjectivity regarding the accountability of turning towards some matter in order to constitute one’s stability, and turning away from other matter out of fear and intimidation; adhering to such a notion of subjectivity would indeed perpetuate the nihilistic view that TCs are state-governed bio-political injunctions that serve the interests of the nation state. Whereas giving witness to testimony that strengthens the nation is the inscription site of social norms, giving witness to testimony that disturbs and distresses gives TCs a status of outside (that is, it is outside of law, outside of jurisprudence, yet has an enormous implication in law, in transformation).

The voices of affective resistance do not preclude auto-affection, but rather, through a discovery of their own singular multiplicity, pose a more nuanced figuration of auto-affection as a communicative possibility towards the (re)presentation and

(re)invention of the (survivor) self. Such an image as the diptychs in Perception gather up and distribute the impossibilities of auto-affection by aligning past/present/future together, a turning back of time against itself towards a new assemblage that places the sovereign into a newly devised temporality. Voices open towards a zone wherein which auto-affection becomes a possibility of the impossible by virtue of those voices bearing witness to themselves, of arising from the contradictions of history in a calculable formula that allows for the further examination of and solutions towards those very contradictions. The contradictions of history in turn demand transformation for the conflicts that preclude political recognition, of the voices that shame others from above and the voices that name themselves from below. But they are also eternally entwined between a past contingency (the assimilation of First Peoples) and future possibility (anti- assimilative forms of self-determination), since all temporal dimensions belong to the blind spot of the future.

But the question inevitably arises: to whom is testimony directed? To testify is to witness, but testimony must simultaneously be its own witness and must proffer its own encounters. The voice is relational, it responds and it (re)produces, it does not confirm identity of the one who speaks; the voice does not speak emotions because the voice is immediately affective, transforming as it is registered; the voice registers, instead, as an intensity manifest in an affective resistance (Young 2014, p. 32). Such a moment constitutes the horizon of the discoverable. And such a horizon, in turn, is thus taken as the end of possibility, the end of life, the end of a pattern to establish a new pattern; but it also constitutes a type of pressure zone where listening is at its most strained and must release ... it turns towards itself. It is, thus, only as a vocal assemblage that the TC facilitates the affective transformation of social bodies into embodiments of social values.

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Rancid Aphrodisiac

Subjectivity, Desire, and Rock ‘n’ Roll

Mickey Vallee

9781441183620_txt_print.indd 3 28/08/2014 10:42 Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK

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First published 2015

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Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Printed and bound in the United States of America

9781441183620_txt_print.indd 4 28/08/2014 10:42 Contents

List of Illustrations vi Preface and Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: Felt, Not Perceived 1 1 “Te One with the Waggly Tail”: Event ‘n’ Emergence 27 2 Te Backdoor of Desire 55 3 Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without the Other 79 Conclusion: Afect and the Medium of the Real 107

Bibliography 131 Index 145

9781441183620_txt_print.indd 5 28/08/2014 10:42 1

“Te One with the Waggly Tail”

Event ‘n’ Emergence

I would like to begin with the moral regulation of the novelty song, especially its impossibly conformist standards against which Rock ‘n’ Roll retaliated. Te novelty song, I argue, should not be underestimated in terms of its power of subjectifcation, such as the impossible standards represented in Bob Merrill’s bland novelty song, “How Much Is Tat Doggie in the Window?” as sung by Patti Page in 1952.

How much is that doggie in the window (arf, arf) Te one with the waggly tail How much is that doggie in the window (arf, arf) I do hope that doggie’s for sale

I must take a trip to California And leave my poor sweetheart alone If he has a dog he won’t be lonesome And the doggie will have a good home

Refrain

I read in the papers there are robbers (arf, arf) With fashlights that shine in the dark My love needs a doggie to protect him And scare them away with one bark

Refrain

I don’t want a bunny or a kitty I don’t want a parrot that talks I don’t want a bowl of little fshies He can’t take a goldfsh for a walk

Refrain

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Te moral regulation implied by “Tat Doggie” is really quite distressing: Page’s voice ingratiates her sweetheart into a well-managed routine in the horizon of her impending absence by obliging “him” to the responsibility of a creature whose desperate need for attention, love, and regular exercise super- sedes any of his own potential injunctions to enjoy a brief period of autonomy from the courtly work of the relationship. Snugly sung in a medium waltz over an oscillating I-V7 pattern, Page’s voice articulates the moral coordinates of appropriate etiquette and the cult of domesticity. Even its technical production is aligned with domesticity, an argument forwarded by Doyle (2005: 144): Te specifc use of echo and reverb was to reinforce the cult of domesticity established in the early twentieth-century music industry, reinforced through the recording techniques refned in the 1950s. Only by becoming acquiescent to her own housetraining can the domestic properly administer her duty. Te law produces energies that are subversive to its imposition since it needs to be imposed on a regular basis in order for its representation to remain intact. What need is there to rebel if not against the blatant conformity of “Tat Doggie”? Indeed, how does the voice of Page maintain itself as a domestic? By domesticating her others through a displaced object of domestication: that doggie in the window. She sacrifces herself to the law, producing a subjectivity through power. (By power, I refer to stretching for an all-inclusive representation of subversive subjects, to align them with the ideal or provide them as an example of a wrongdoing.) In place of her absence, she is not supplying her sweetheart with the imaginary phallus, which would be his, but with a traumatic inauguration of the system of meaning itself (Lacan 2011); he will not become her missing phallus, become her object of desire, because she is literally giving him the answer to his question: What is it that you want of me? To behave, but especially to be emotionally satisfed by doing so. Tis is, according to Žižek (2008: 18) at least, the trope of civilization through which the intersubjective sexual utopia is strained: “And this brings us to civility,” he explains; “an act of civility is precisely to feign that I want to do what the other asks me to do, so that my compliance with the other’s wish does not exert pressure on her.” Is it little wonder that the fipside to this record was “My Jealous Eyes”?

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“Tat Doggie,” as the Other’s answer to the enigmatic question of desire, is decidedly not in the window; rather, it is the window to a predestination towards lack. “Tat Doggie” functions symbolically to disturb the illusory place of desire because there is indeed no answer that satisfes the question of desire. Instead, in the heteronormative doggie, desire is the veil that maintains the binary split between man and woman. Popular music history, in its most mainstream manifestations at least, has taught us that a woman must maintain her composure for the Ego of the singing man who adulates her in a series of enunciations that position her as his love object (McCusker and Pecknold 2004). And so Page’s direct answer of domestication takes what in other contexts stands as the object of desire (the phallic tail-wagging dog in “Hound Dog” or the curious master-obeying Jack Russell in His Master’s Voice) and disrupts the edifce of male fantasy. “How Much Is Tat Doggie in the Window?” is a pathetic attempt to please the Other of desire, which is why “Tat Doggie” is nothing less than the imaginary phallus as conceived by Judith Butler, a component of the taxonomy of heteronormative desire. Te phallus is metonymically linked with lack, because at once the Ego gives up the phallus in the Imaginary by recognizing that the feminine never possessed it, that it was never there, and that what constituted so much efort to win desire was something that was absent in the frst place. So Page purchases “Tat Doggie in the Window” as an abstract, a general equivalent on the market that, when assuming the role of the Imaginary phallus, provides his ultimate humiliation. Tis domesticating role of the Other provides precisely the domesticating gaze that the Rock ‘n’ Roll subject will evade at all costs. And it is why, I argue, that Rock ‘n’ Roll makes no plea to the Other. It fees impotently and blindly from the Other. Ultimately, perhaps, “Tat Doggie” represented a terrifying destination of being-towards-death that Rock ‘n’ Roll was to eventually thwart of in exaggerated steps of phallus-lacking machismo, a queer orientation. It represents a turning away towards the awry. Much like the man who awakens from his dream wherein which his dead son asks him why he is burning (Freud 1997: 353), it was not that “Tat Doggie” was too unbearable for music to wake up from its banal slumber, but rather how terrifying the banality of “Tat Doggie” was to demonstrate a most purely mechanistic function of music: to

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command through the injunction of the master signifer (Žižek 2004). “Tat Doggie” is a signifer without signifed. It was the traumatic encounter that made necessary the resurrection of the dog as the emblem of virility, which was itself eventually displaced by a the family friendly hound dog Elvis sang to on the Steve Allen show in 1956 (Humphries 2003). Ten again, perhaps it is too polemical to assert that Rock ‘n’ Roll started with “How Much Is Tat Doggie in the Window?”—that is, a straw dog. But is it not just as puerile to accredit any event as the inception of emergence? At what point does the emergence edify to mark the event identifable? When does the event break of from the emergence that determined it? Accrediting an emergence to an event is performing an Ouroboric coup on history—it can only be retroactive, rendered meaningful once one disengages from emergence, to recover the memory of an event from its historical echo. And despite the fact that Rock ‘n’ Roll did not commence with a singular historical instance, rock historians have disputed each other regarding its genesis, whether in the service of serious scholarship or fandom aside. As Garofalo (1997: 82) famously wrote, “Trying to pinpoint the beginning of rock and roll is like trying to isolate the frst drop of rain in a hurricane,” and so the debate about its beginning is really insignifcant. G. F. Wald (2008) in Shout Sister Shout! claims it is Sister Rosetta Tarpe’s “Strange Tings Happening Every Day” (1944); some say it was “Good Rockin’ Tonight” by Roy Brown (1947), as covered by Wynonie Harris; “Te Fat Man” by Fats Domino (1949); Goree Carter’s “Rock Awhile” (1949); “Rock the Joint” by Jimmy Preston (1949); “Rocket 88”—either Jackie Brenston’s original, recorded on 5 March 1951 with Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm, or Bill Haley’s cover, later in 1951; “Crazy Man, Crazy” by Bill Haley and His Comets (1953); Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” (recorded on 12 April 1954); Elvis Presley’s “Tat’s All Right” (recorded in July 1954), a cover of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s 1946 song of the same name. But let’s not toss the champagne out with the cork. When we correlate, for instance, event with emergence, numerous factors materialize in the history of Rock ‘n’ Roll (segregationist politics, misogyny, market capitalism, moral politics, consumerism, hyper-individualism), which were and continue to be components of the popular music industry and its major historical events.

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What we are interested in here is the emergence of a constellation of nodes that conditioned the emergence of a particular subjectivity—to re-emphasize, the current study is not necessarily invested in the “real experiences” of “real people” but takes the experiences of early Rock ‘n’ Roll as the set of conditions through which a type of subjectivity was fortifed. Events are easy enough to capture on record. But emergence is a sticky matter. We cannot reduce an historical emergence to the status of the individual, yet we cannot account for emergence by another method. Emergence is a transitory medium, a topological zone, twisted with potential and reifcation. To put it another way, the actual contrast here is between history and its own becoming. Te history books tell us Rock ‘n’ Roll was an historical event, but it was equally its own becoming. It is important to recognize that emergence encapsulates the idea of becoming, which, say, for a theorist like Deleuze, would imply the fow of forces and desires rid of their consequential shame. Events are like consequences of emergence; they tether emergence to the soil of historical events, much like, in the Lacanian quilting function of language, the S2 signifer threads the S1 signifer through the fabric of a signifying chain so as to retroactively constitute at once meaning and the barred subject (a concept that will be explored below). So becoming is against precisely this reifcation of the signifying chain, it is a prick of the virtual “becoming-it-itself” removed from the corporeal, ripped from the present and containing always past and potential (Žižek 2012: 8). If Rock ‘n’ Roll is a signifer, it begins with the conformity it rebelled against. Becoming-new is radically opposed to its historical context, yet is determined by that context. Tis is why it is tempting to interpret Rock ‘n’ Roll’s emergence from a Deleuzean perspective. Deleuze writes, for instance:

What history grasps in an event is the way it’s actualized in particular circum- stances; the event’s becoming is beyond the scope of history […] Becoming isn’t part of history; history amounts only to the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to “become,” that is, to create something new. (Deleuze 1995: 170–1; cited in Žižek 2012: 11)

In response, Žižek wonders if Deleuze in his interrogation of the emergence of the New through repetition is as novel a concept as the latter claims. Te new

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is only capable of emerging through the ongoing process of repetition—like knowing a serial killer is only such when he has killed three victims, quilting the third victim into the elevated signifcance of the (now-martyred) f rst. Te very concept of the past in a pure becoming is radically changed by how well one can shake of the shame of consequence. Te new will always be new because, by transcending its context, it radically changes its historical destination. Žižek’s Deleuzean question is thus: Can the Subject transcend historical conditions in the creation of non-historical synthesis events? Recall that Elvis Presley, for instance, in his infamous recording with Sam Phillips did not intend to sell Rhythm and Blues, nor that Phillips intended on selling Presley as a black and white crossover (despite his later claims). Yet, as Middleton (2006: 87) suggests: “Elvis was at least dimly aware of what was at stake: […] in his performances of, for example, ‘Hound Dog’ he purposely exaggerated what he took to be typical black gestures to the point of caricature—part of an in-built ironic stance that allies him with a specifcally blues comedy.” So who were these ostensibly transhistoric performers? Rock ‘n’ Roll performers such as Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard are the fgures of prototypical challenges to history (“Roll Over Beethoven” and many other Rock ‘n’ Roll songs were tackling this dialogue between youth and the parent generation, many of them disingenuously so). Occupying at once the margins and the mainstream, known for their moral reprehensibility yet cultural prominence, critiqued for their primitivist aesthetic yet lauded for their on-stage presence, these were fgures who challenged any pre-existing notion of a transparent subjectivity. Tey performed through multiple identities. Jerry Lee Lewis was born into a strictly Baptist family and could not bear the weight of sin he was obliged to serve. Little Richard’s sexual identity conficted with the heteronormative symbols that Rock ‘n’ Roll used as currency. Elvis Presley was “caught in a trap” of his own performance whereby his image overrode his multifarious interests. (Te common criticism, for instance, that Elvis “sold out” is laughable given the fact that Elvis was known to be open to a wide variety of music.) Tere is not one determinant or causation, but a symbiotic series of quasi-causes in the transhistorical events and fgures of Rock ‘n’ Roll. To reiterate: to fully appreciate the gaze from which Rock ‘n’ Roll fed means

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we have to begin with the most normative of situations, such as the novelty song. Where one is threatened with intense domestication with a vulnerable pet: a threat to the heteronormative desire for masculine autonomy. Such a domesticity needs to be resignifed as its obscene opposition: in total anarchic freedom. Less the pathetic pleasing of the Other, the Rock ‘n’ Roll subject is constituted by a terrifed and impotent escape from domesticity.

Te specular image of the idol

So how can we reconcile the Rock ‘n’ Roll event with the infnite permuta- tions of its general emergence? Rock ‘n’ Roll could designate just about any musical category: it could refer to Pat Boone, Doo-Wop, New Orleans blues ensembles, Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, later nostalgic acts, Led Zeppelin’s tribute song “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” and so on. How can we reduce the events of Rock ‘n’ Roll and their provocations to particular causes such as the sentencing of a feminine-subjectivity to the domestic domain and the enthusiastic dialectic between consumption and repression characteristic of the postwar years? Te contextual benchmarks that conditioned the emergence of Rock ‘n’ Roll have been well documented by Peterson (1990), who cites the major industrial shif that contributed to the emergence of Rock ‘n’ Roll as an attribute of the shif from the vertically integrated structure of Tin Pan Alley popular music (the dominant style of popular music from the early to mid-twentieth century) to a horizontally structured integration of rock and roll. Yet, numerous technological/industrial factors equally contributed to the rise of Rock ‘n’ Roll: poorly fnanced radio stations desperate for on-air content afer they were abandoned by the National Association of Broadcasters’ migration towards television; the development of the cost-efective 45-rpm record that was simpler to transport than the shellac 78-rpm records that preceded it; the transistor radio that let teenagers listen to the sexually provocative music their parents would have disapproved of; the top-40 radio format that came to eventually dominate the 1950s, which inadvertently desegregated the airwaves by placing otherwise culturally distinct genres next to one another (Latin American popular music, calypso, folk, and, of course, rock and roll). Customer satisfaction became key

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to the success of corporations by the 1950s in their adoption of the marketing philosophy, so understanding the psyche of the consumer was essential to developing a surplus-generating product. Te moral fabric of the individual in the postwar USA was a view of welfare as being a shameful handout along with a host of criteria for reproducing a good citizen and conforming, while those with money were encouraged to contravene the boundaries of the normal by way of the transgressive abilities of the dollar (Hunt 1999: 5–6). In other words, the confuence of factors constituted the event as both singular and multiple. Tat is, the very spatio-temporal dynamics of consumption in the USA had, by 1959, changed dramatically: frst, in regard to the rise in consumer goods (technology, careers, urban space); second, the rise in families in school with jobs and new needs; and third, a new bureaucracy, industry, and government. As technologies fostered more intimate connections between subjects and celebrities, the former consulted the latter for unlimited advice on domestic life. Exaggerated codes of behavior were imposed upon the new world by the likes of Dr Spock, Norman Vincent Peale, Dale Carnegie, and countless others, who constructed victims as heroes of the self-help rhetoric, the unique historical situation in the production of bureaucracy of education, in alienation, and in paranoia. So there was a progressive change, a protected and suburban orderliness under a constant anxiety that, thanks to the Cold War, everyone could be killed by a nuclear attack (quelled in elementary schools by the bizarre stream of duck-and-cover videos). Betty Crocker, as Cormack (2004: 61) observes, was the totem of domestic normalcy against a potential threat of complete annihilation. Pop literature acted as a bridge between the individual and the social spheres they may be unaware that they occupy—at the time, the self-help expert was an of-consulted fgure. Tese fgures of popular culture icon emerged as the new experts in an age of mass visual mediation. Such a fgure was not lost on Rock ‘n’ Roll. Te Rebel, for instance, emerged out of an increased urbanization of African-Americans moving from the deep south, out of individuals in fight to transcend their socioeconomic class, but its contingent commodifcation marked a decided change in postwar capitalism—even preceding musical genres like “hillbilly” and “race” music

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were designated by the production philosophy of the music industry instead of by the “kids” that found meaning in the music (the music industry’s more proftable construction of the consumer rather than the producer). Identifcation with the seller of the product was crucial for teenagers, who were looking for role models in James Dean and Marlon Brando. As Stewart Stern, the screenwriter for Rebel Without a Cause, indicated, teenagers sought for identifcation with a role model who could fll the void of emotionally negligent parents burying their pasts, and the Rebel fgure gave them a role model for this otherwise vacuous space. If the gaze of rebel image instantiated the desire of the Rebel, the return of his voice was the voice of the jouissance that stood to challenge order, the standard logic of deviance. Te sheer number of human and non-human actors in this historical period is simply startling, reminiscent of when the gaze became the central constitutive feature of power operating in consumer society. Tere is no difculty in demonstrating that the idea of the personhood of the image is alive in this new world. But how are traditional attitudes towards images—idolatry, fetishism, totemism—refunctioned in modern societies? Te idol is both despised and worshipped, reviled for being a nonentity, a slave, and feared as an alien with supernatural power. If idolatry is the most dramatic form of image-power known to visual culture, it is a remarkably ambivalent and ambiguous kind of force. As for the gender of the image, it is clear that the “default” position of images is feminine, “constructing spectatorship around an opposition between woman as image and man as the bearer of the look.” Te question of what images want, then, is inseparable from the question of what the feminine wants. Sound recording technologies, once inhabited by the contingencies of post-WWII technological change, materially instantiated the possibility of an ambiguous subject position that was as much the cause of anxiety as the content of the songs themselves that were produced, broadcast, and consumed. Te anxiety, the repeated pelvic drives, the proximity of the instru- ments, the sound of magnetic tape, this becoming-simulacrum of Rock ‘n’ Roll was precisely what gave it its measurable yet seemingly inarticulate shock. At a certain distance, its sounds were measurable, yet there were no physical traces of sound events beyond the magnetic impulses of their representations on tape and vinyl. Te material of magnetic impulse overrode the acoustic event

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of the previous generation. Recordings had become pure information, a zero point of possibility with an empty icon in its place: the rebel without a cause, the thought without the representation, the afect. Te icon is not a representation of the divine image but a type of invisibility, what John of Damascus identifed as the “type of that which has no type.” But the popular idol causes stock identities to play host to an uncanny and unbidden guest: the materiality of images themselves. Like a Halo, this is a material that comes afer the form, a visibility afer the fact, afer the completion of the image as an idol of our times. In the Rebel, the symbolic ideal, the external point of observation by the hegemonic white gaze of society is rejected, replaced, and dispensed with imaginary identifcations. Te idol stands as a contingency of history, yet transcends history. It is in the gaze that the objet a emerges as the cause of desire. For Lacan, the gaze becomes the object of the act of looking, or the object of the scopic drive. Te gaze is no longer on the side of the subject; it is the gaze of the Other. Lacan now conceives of an antinomic relation between the gaze and the eye: the eye which looks is that of the subject, while the gaze is on the side of the object, and there is no coincidence between the two, since “You never look at me from the place at which I see you” (Lacan 1998c: 103). When the subject looks at an object, the object is always already gazing back at the subject, but from a point at which the subject cannot see it. Tis split between the eye and the gaze is nothing other than the subjective division itself, expressed in the feld of vision. Te structural dimension of the gaze thereby guarantees that one’s innermost desire will be less the transgression of and more the implantation of the law, opening a space for the voice as well as for the gaze, which afords us the opportunity to extract from Lacanian structural theory as well as the feminist flm philosophy the reason for constructing the imaginary space of Rock ‘n’ Roll records as non-counter-hegemonic, but constructive of the very type of idealization of identity relations that the idol manifested. Te image here is entwined in multiple looks of control: the look at the viewer, the look of the subject, the object, entwined in a space that is hollowed out by the expectation of the interpretation the listener is supposed to impose upon its space. All of this rests with what negative space produces: the master signifer. In the

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case of the musical culture of Rock ‘n’ Roll, the fgure of the master signifer assumes the icon of the rebel. Rock ‘n’ Roll was less revolutionary than rebellious, turning convention in such a way so artifcially against itself as to expose the artifciality of conservative 1950s America: a time of great celebration for consumerism and democracy, yet one that denounced some of the most successful consumerist and democratic moments of American history, Rock ‘n’ Roll. As Reynolds (1992: 3) explains, “the rebel’s main grievance is that a particular patri- archal system doesn’t let his virility fourish freely, but instead ofers a life of mediocrity.” Everything in the milieu of Rock ‘n’ Roll followed this search for nomadic roaming. Especially important is how the text of music started to shif from the supremacy of the notated score to the rise in recorded performances, and conducive with the change in preferred medium was an entire series of changes regarding how the studio was being used at one end and how the music was being consumed at the other. In other words, the recording practices were changed from the conventional usages of recording studio practices. It sufces to mention that Rock ‘n’ Roll marks the initial emergence of sound recording as a practice in musical sculpture rather than an environment that captures a performance, which marked the musical phenomenon of the cover song: the musical equivalent of the simulacrum. One reason that the recording practices could be said to be postmodern is their blatant becoming-simulacrum. It is here that we would prefer the term simulacrum, because “copy” would imply that a musical recording serves a standard, deviates from it in order to reinforce its normative inscription—and does it not make sense to employ the term “cover” in such a situation where original Rhythm and Blues musicians, whose covers succeeded original performances in sales, were discarded by the courts as legitimate grounds for copyright infringement (Cusic 2005)? Te recording studio was not an environment within which a performance was captured but was an active agent in the sculpting of a record—there was no music “behind” the recording of it (Hodgson 2007). If the recording sessions from pre-WWII were actively made to recreate the sound of a live event, post-WWII recordings blatantly constructed an imaginary space of popular imagination (Blesser and Salter 2007).

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Although Rock ‘n’ Roll simultaneously announced something new at the obituary of a conservative past, we would be mistaken to call it revolutionary, then. Sometimes we forget that Elvis at Sun Records was a radically historical shif instantiated by a radically transhistorical moment – still, not necessarily revolutionary. Te only thing that can be experienced in a Hegelian transhistorical actualization is the potential of the transhistorical thing. What we see in Hegel is the antithesis to repetition: the Aufeben (meaning, crudely, to preserve yet to cease). Yet the Aufeben is simultaneously that which intervenes as the deus ex machine (God from Machine). So the reproach is twofold: the Hegelian theory is whole and unchangeable, yet subject to miraculous external interventions that facilitate change. Te shif, Žižek writes, is in the very reconciliation between image and eternity (being and becoming, identifcation and misidentifcation). Take, for instance, the dialectic between Aufeben and deus ex machine, as explicated by Žižek (2012: 14):

[…] the reversal of Aufebung intervenes as a kind of deux ex machina, always guaranteeing that the antagonism will be magically resolved, the opposites reconciled in a higher synthesis, the loss recuperated without a remainder, the wound healed without a scar remaining.

Such a large number of historical elements contributed as an emergence to the event of Rock ‘n’ Roll that it is difcult to isolate one as the determining factor. However, if we were to locate a consistency in regard to the newer afect of Rock ‘n’ Roll, we might pinpoint it on the fgure of the rebel, the one who evaded the gaze of enigmatic desire. Such a fgure is encapsulated in the celebrity fgure of the rebel. In visual culture, it is less difcult to locate the form of this fgure, but in Rock ‘n’ Roll it becomes more difcult, since the medium of dissemination was the more abstract commodity of the sound recording. I argue in the following section that the idol still permeates such a medium, only in more evasive and slippery ways that are best understood when aligned with the Lacanian graph of desire.

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Te Rebel quilt

A perennial paradox of youth in the 1950s involved their having been thrown into a society that was as ripe with the fruits of consumption as it was stringent to foreclose the traumas of preceding decades. Teens enjoyed newfound freedom in consumption, but their freedom ignited fears of their potential rebellion against authority. Numerous magazines provided advice columns for the potential delinquents regarding appropriate behavior in an ongoing process of moral regulation (Cohen 1997: 251–3). Without any signif- icant evidence regarding the rise of youth crime, editorials and journalists responded to the image of the rebel in popular culture as the potential threat to social stability. As Cohen (1997: 254) writes, “Villains and disrupters seemed to lurk everywhere, certainly in the proliferating artifacts of youth culture—music, comic books, movies, and much more.” Te cinema, one of many new venues for teenagers to congregate at, was replete with images that mainstream society perceived as a threat to the stability of family values, and the teenagers themselves were taken either as law-abiding or law-breaking. Te rebel represents a peculiar freedom. What is the sublime nature of the Rock ‘n’ Roll rebel in particular that grants him an ahistorical status? Tis is a question easily answered by the Lacanian graph of desire, which grants access not only to understanding the supremacy of idols (which I take to be master signifers) but also of the very mesh, labyrinth, or rhizome of master signifcation. As far as the graph represents an attempt to represent the alienated features of subjectivity as well as the dialectical possibilities for traversing fantasy or assuming alternative subjectivities seemingly evading the hypno- tizing gaze of the Other, Rock ‘n’ Roll instantiates the afect of traversing the fantasy towards the anarchic desire of freedom from constraint of the gaze of the Other. Terefore, I consider it apt to place the rebel fgure within the Lacanian graph of desire, if only because the exercise of locating the space of rebellion within the Rock ‘n’ Roll event resonates with a clearly structuralist inquiry: i.e., how is transcendence of the historical event determined by the grounded historical fgure? Te graph, in fact, serves as a useful reference point because it resembles the type of mesh I wish to elucidate in regard to the sonic

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anarchic power of Rock ‘n’ Roll. However, in its line of fight across the graph, it anticipates a new form of liberal subjectivity, as Žižek (2009) observes—one based on permissive transgression, not punitive obedience. Tis image of the law-breaking rebel found its afected amplifcation in Rock ‘n’ Roll articulated as a master signifer. Because of the Lacanian political drive of this argument, it is important to understand the central role that a signifer plays in regard to the social construction of the subjectivity of the rebel (and, in this case, subjectivities which evade the gaze of the Other). To begin, I claim that afect in Rock ‘n’ Roll is purely symbolic, especially in the context of the Lacanian maxim: the signifer is the subject for another signifer. Lacan’s materialist hierarchy of the signifer’s supremacy over the signifed accommodates his own discovery that subjects are manifest through the materiality of signifying processes: “Te signifer doesn’t just provide an envelope,” Lacan (1993: 238) writes, “a receptacle for meaning. It polarizes it, structures it, and brings it into existence. Without an exact knowledge of the order proper to the signifer and its properties, it’s impossible to understand anything whatsoever.” Such a prioritization of the signifer guarantees a material grounding to processes of signifcation in the constitution of subjec- tively experienced social reality—social reality as it is afectively imprinted upon the subject. Such a material grounding does not simply arrive with this prioritization, however, for meaning in signifcation is never direct; meaning requires anticipation of a fnal utterance that retroactively flls an initiating utterance with meaning, making repetition a central Lacanian psychoanalytic feature to the material ground of the subject. Lacan (1993: 240) asserts that a “signifying unit presupposes the completion of a certain circle that situates its diferent elements.” In terms of negotiability, the subject is tied into language by a technological apparatus (like the Descartean pineal gland) that bonds its meaning through language in retrospection. Te retrospective aspect of signifcation is the baptism into the symbolic that determines the autonomy of the nom/non-du-Père, a signifer which equates the fear of God:

Te fear of God isn’t a signifer that is found everywhere. Someone had to invent it and propose to men, as the remedy for a world made up of manifold terrors, that they fear a being who is, afer all, only able to exercise his cruelty through the evils that are there, multifariously present in human life. To have replaced

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these innumerable fears by the fear of a unique being who has no other means of manifesting his power than through what is feared behind these innumerable fears, is quite an accomplishment. (Lacan 1993: 243)

Tus, the foundation of signifcation in which we fnd the operative of power is the master signifer, known best in Lacanian psychoanalysis as the quilting point (though Fink prefers the term “button tie”). Signifcation is thus rhythmic and relational. But although we might jump to the conclusion that the quilting point in the “fear of God” is “God” (conducive with the nom/ non-du-Père), Lacan (1993: 244) asserts that the quilting point, that anchor through which the thread is woven, is fear, “with all these trans-signifcant connotations”:

Everything radiates out from and is organized around this signifer, similar to these little lines of force that an upholstery button forms on the surface of material. It’s the point of convergence that enables everything that happens in this discourse to be situated retroactively and prospectively.

Te questions here are obvious: what exactly is the substance of this type of dialectical anticipatory/retroactive movement of quilting and how is it facilitated? Tis is less an ontological question than a historical one, because it is a movement that marks a subject’s entrance into the symbolic order (which emerges alongside the institutions of the imaginary and the real, not afer the fact). Take Rebel Without a Cause, which furnishes the legitimacy of the master signifer. Te Rebel reached the status of the fgure of indisputable devotion when it was framed as a threat from within American borders (unlike the Red Scare, for instance). Whether the destruction of family values was truly imminent was, obviously, debatable. Te estranged and isolated youth that recoiled at conformity ofered teenagers a fgure with which they could identify, eventually having “transcended its original iconoclasm—in the rejection of the status quo—and was itself elevated to iconic status, becoming a revered object of devotion” (C. Springer 2007: 1). It is important to note, however, the retrospective designation that icon had on the signifcance of rebellion. Consider, for instance, that James Dean might have expressed the value of nonconformity for many youth in the 1950s, but that this expression

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was retrospectively quilted into his own image afer he died at a tragi- cally young age: “He became a posthumous symbol for the constellation of disafected youth, death by car crash, rebellion, and ambiguous sexuality, crystallizing their combination in an overpowering way that resulted in cultural enshrinement” (C. Springer 2007: 13). Te signifcance of rebellion was free-foating until it was quilted together by its death. Tus, Claudia Springer (2007: 16–17) writes:

What Dean’s name sells is “rebellion,” a vague concept that over time has lost any kind of political or social specifcity, if it ever had any. Rebels now come in all imaginable styles, and the term is used even by those who conform whole- heartedly to the status quo and, without any sense of irony, label their rejection of oppositional values as an act of rebellious defance. Even during James Dean’s lifetime, “rebellion” was a vague concept, creating an atmosphere in which a moody young actor who had no particular commitment to political activism could come to signify the ultimate rebel.

Te rebel was as much a guide to moral conduct for youth as was Dr Spock for mothers, as was Norman Vincent Peale for Christians, or Dale Carnegie for businessmen. Te screenwriter of Rebel Without a Cause, Stewart Stern, said in an interview that the rebel served a moral purpose, framed in:

[…] the phenomenon of what was called in those days juvenile delinquency, happening not in families that were economically deprived but in middle-class families that were emotionally deprived. Partly, people felt it had to do with the war, the fact that so many women were working for the frst time away from the home, that older brothers and fathers who would have been role models for the young weren’t there, and the tremendous drive for material “things.” When the kids saw that the material goods that were supposed to make their parents happy really didn’t, they began to doubt their parents’ authority. […] Te lesson of Rebel was that if the kids could not be acknowledged or understood by their parents, at least they could be acknowledged by each other. (Stern, cited in Szatmary 2007: 50)

Te title, Rebel Without a Cause, ofers us a unique view into a culture which sought the thrill of rebellion without the conscious knowledge of either rebellion’s target or its cause. Tis fts well with Ž ižek’s (2009: 457) observation regarding fear of the unknown known, the Freudian unconscious that

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determines the habits we are prohibited from knowing why we obey. Te absence of the cause in subject constitution is how the subject transcends the demands of the Big Other. Indeed, a feature of postwar capitalism was, in Žižek’s most graspable moment, to solicit the form of enjoyment devoid of its consequence, a kind of mass nostalgia for history without consequence—a series of products without their “malignant properties” intact: “cofee without cafeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol” (Žižek 2002: lxxvi). Te rebel is devoid of the social consequence of revolution, but serves as a hallmark for moral tales. Indeed, the rebel in Rock ‘n’ Roll would be out of touch with its own historical contingency in the Rhythm and Bluesmen of the 1940s. Given the amount of Rock ‘n’ Roll material that is explicitly about giving up the domains of domesticity in favor of fantasies of individual heroism, it is no surprise that the feel of the rebel is the feel of fight, the line of fight. Simon Reynolds’s (1996) classic study of “Sex Revolts” paints the rebel as a hopelessly wayward misogynist looking to break free of maternal domesticity. Te poetic content of the musical rebel is that which positions the woman as a dangerous victimizer: she is at once the devil that tempts him and the threat of his own domestication. Te rebel is radically counter the feminine, terrifed of it, in fact. Rebellion throws a ft against the structural agents of patriarchy for the sake of setting free the repressed libido. Te attitude of the evasive rebel has its historical roots in Rhythm and Blues. However, whereas the Rhythm and Blues tradition was notorious for its sexual references, such references in Rock ‘n’ Roll were etymologically annexed through its commodifcation in the 1950s. Trixie Smith boasts that “My Daddy Rocks Me With One Steady Roll” and bounces to the “Black Bottom Hop”; Big Joe Turner shouts out “Shake, Rattle and Roll” in commem- oration of the lover who makes him “roll his eyes” and “grit his teeth.” Even such an ambiguous term as “thing” was most certainly associated with erogenous zones:

Down in Georgia, got a dance that’s new, Ain’t nothin’ to it, it’s easy to do; Called Shake Tat Ting! … I’m getting sick and tired of telling you to shake that thing!

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Now, the old folks start doing it, the young folks, too But the old folks learn what the young ones start to do About shakin’ that thing Ah, shake that thing …

Why, there’s old uncle Jack, the jellyroll king, He’s got a hump in his back from shakin’ that thing, Yet, he still shakes that thing, For an old man, how he can shake that thing, And he never gets tired of tellin’ young folks: go on and shake that thing! …

Robert Springer (2007: 276) notes that the “thing” is:

[…] the hindquarters of the dancer who is the subject of the song; but, given the allusion to “jelly roll” (the blues euphemism for the male sexual organ or for sexual intercourse) and the predominant reference to men, the listener is given to understand that other sexual connotations may be at work. But what really makes the song work is the coy playfulness—ofen wordless—that Waters elicits through the sultriness of her voice. On the one hand, the double meanings behind the lyrics allow Waters to feign innocence, claiming to be singing merely about a dance; but her tone and the song’s rhythm leave no doubt as to covert references to sexual acts.

In other words, whatever “that thing,” “shake it,” “mama,” “c’mon,” “uh!,” “do it,” “rock me,” “down,” “hoochie coochie,” “squeeze my lemon,” or “mercy” meant for Rhythm and Blues was not necessarily as vivid under the guise of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Any such traces of the Blues genre’s massive storage of metonymies for sex was efciently euphemized (euthanized, emasculated) by an oligopoly of producers and singers—and what was not euphemized was condemned by the Press. Te culture wars of Rock ‘n’ Roll are renowned for having added a vital component of confict to its narrative of rebellion. Tere was the notion that music corrupted innocent youth; there was Variety’s infamous “Warning to the music business”; there were local authorities cancelling concerts they perceived as a threat due to the mixed race attendance; there were racists who attacked Nat King Cole on stage; and so on. It would be nearly impossible to conceive of Rock ‘n’ Roll without being caught amid the discourses of racial segregation, oppositional politics, and conservative backlash. Te question of whether Rock ‘n’ Roll history can be studied apart from

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ideologies of good taste and bawdy excess is indisputable. We know, for instance, that there were vehement political and religious oppositions to Rock ‘n’ Roll but, aside from rather vague descriptions about musical “feel” and “vibe,” we are at a disadvantage in knowing why the sound of Rock ‘n’ Roll bothered as many as it did. But it is only a disadvantage if we do not engage in a critical interpretation of a sound’s social and political power. I’ll cut to the chase: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s master signifcation of subjectivity was that of the rebel, something one could not easily identify except in its accompanying gestures, and something that quilted together a belief system about a certain kind of emancipation specifc to its historical contingency. But, even more, the explicit ideological terms of Rock ‘n’ Roll (dirty, lewd, degenerate, etc.) supported a more potent and onerous system to come. Te institutional ritual of Rock ‘n’ Roll, that of pushing the limits of the acceptable for consumption by the youth market, was a form of unconscious transgressions of the moral ideal. Te New York Times reported on 28 March 1956, that Dr Francis J. Braceland of the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut, condemned the music as a “communicable disease” and “another sign of adolescent rebellion” that impelled children “to do outlandish things.” Time in 1956 aligned the sounds of Rock ‘n’ Roll with “the stampede” that sounded like “shrieks like the jungle bird house at the zoo” with “spastically gyrating performers” who move to an “obsessive beat” that “pounds through” the audience “to such rhythmical movements as clapping in tempo and jumping and dancing in the aisles.” Without further elaboration, Herbert von Karajan was quoted in the New York Times on 27 October 1956: “Strange things happen in the blood stream when a musical resonance coincides with the beat of the human pulse.” Time magazine further elaborates in the same year:

Tere is no denying that Rock ‘n’ Roll evokes a physical response from even its most reluctant listeners, for that giant pulse matches the rhythmical operations of the human body, and the performers are all too willing to specify it. […] [T]he fans’ dances are far from intimate—the wiggling 12- and 13-year-olds (and up) barely touch hands and appear oblivious of one another. Psychologists feel that Rock ‘n’ Roll’s deepest appeal is to the teeners’ need to belong; the results bear passing resemblance to Hitler mass meetings.

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Youth in the 1950s were thus confronted with a society that at once celebrated consumption, was optimistic, yet curiously repressive regarding preceding decades of terror as well as by a potential threat from the Red Scare. It is in this context that the fgure of the rebel emerges as everything gone wrong with the era of conspicuous consumption. Te rebel was a sign of distinction that knew no law of obeying the Other, with the exception of the law to obey a transgression of the rules. Tis curious transgression constituted the master signifer of the rebel, and the rebel became the master signifer of Rock ‘n’ Roll, in its pulse and its meter and its rhythm—all elements which were indescribable. Tere was no reason for it, it seemed, evidenced by the popularity of Rebel Without a Cause, which provides us insight into the Žižekian idea of a consumer society obsessed with transgression without consequence; simply to perceive the hypocrisy of a parent culture looking to domesticate the youth was enough for the rebel to evade responsibility. Te code words for these evasions were in rhythmic utterances in Rock ‘n’ Roll, taken from Rhythm and Blues. Tis means that to understand how this transgression permeated the afect of Rock ‘n’ Roll, we need to develop a vocabulary of its rhythm that accounts for, at once, the specifcity of musical signifcation, along with the possibility of thinking the subject as a medium. It is for this reason I turn to Zuckerkandl in relation to Lacan. Tat there is “no Other of the Other” (Lacan 1960) is no surprise to the rebel. In fact, such an assertion is the rebel’s ontological necessity. Te rebel is a continuous icon throughout the history of Rock ‘n’ Roll and is particular to the notion of freedom under its guise. Te rebel is badgered outside of the boundaries of order for the big Other like a moth around a lightbulb, where pure becomings in pursuit of acts without obligation to identity detach from historical contingency yet are undeniably its consequence. Here I will attempt to move from the iconography of the rebel (the sacred value of religious status contained in an image that signifes beyond its psychic constituents—in it more than itself) to the iconicity of processes of signifcation in music that provided, in the Lacanian logic here, the call of the voice from the blind spot of the gaze (the Peircean indicative of signs that, while resembling signifer/ signifed, still signify on the paradoxical level that which prioritizes afective connotation). Te rebel is a central afective state of the social construction of

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delinquency in the 1950s: Rock ‘n’ Roll foreshadowed a neoliberal ideology of freedom through transgressive consumption and persistent questioning of the Other’s illegitimate basis of authority. Rock ‘n’ Roll’s afect is generated by a particular mode of signifcation, as contradictory as this statement might seem to proponents of afect who argue that it is non-symbolizable or at least representative of the rupture in signifcation systems. Music is at once structured and structuring (Shepherd 2012), and to straitjacket Lacanian psychoanalysis as strictly structural does a disservice to the nuances of his theory.

A rhythm that binds

Lacan’s quilting point resonates on a particularly rhythmic register. Pause, for a moment, on the semblance of Lacan’s central observations on the constitution of subjectivity against Zuckerkandl’s observation about the role of rhythm in music. Zuckerkandl’s perspicacity regarding rhythm, time, and repetition stands as perhaps the most distinctive in bridging subjectivity and music through a substance the subject at once fnds itself quilted within yet undone by. Although musical signifcation equilibrates by way of the tripartite assemblage of melody/harmony/rhythm, it is only the latter which afords the intratemporal gap between everyday phenomena and the musical event: rhythm is a force of an aleatoric deus ex machina for one isolated moment in time to meditate on the substance of other moments in time in an unfolding present. Te dynamic capacities of musical signifcation unfold through the auditory event of an element in context—in relation to a more Deleuzean perspective, rhythm is the temporal structuring of a feld by way of a question which binds moments that repeat one another. Time is less the sensation open by bodies traversing space, a conceptual actualization, but, rather, is that which is conceptualized through rhythmic measurements we tend to call time. Were those movements to change at the same pace, our measurement of time would not change. So measurements of time are relative, but they are not indications of time—they are measurements of bodies traversing in space. Measurements can assume a more abstract character, such as the

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measurements of past/present/future: “Certainly, this must be time: the future becoming the present, the present becoming the past. But what is time?” Zuckerkandl (1956: 155) asks. “What is in the future is not yet, what is in the past is not more; what remains?” Zuckerkandl responds that it is the present which remains, but its remains are in a curious state of non-being, as the event which is always-already no-more and not-yet. Much like Lacan’s quilting point enacting an afected and afecting status between two signifers beneath which signifeds exact their slippery qualities, for Zuckerkandl rhythm is afectively produced between two metrical events. Straddling the no-more and not-yet is but a sliver between two abysses: the principle of time equates the principle of uncertainty—since I cannot be in time, I can only be in between two non-beings, but time is where I exist. Time, not the measurement of it, is where my existence is not. Recall my earlier reference to Deleuze, Žižek, and the event: the becoming which is the new as the moment of eternity in time should be radically opposed to its historical context. Tis is done in order to “shake of shame” of historical consequence and rid the subject of its own fear of consequence to action—motion is to rest what time is to eternity. Temporality and duration have taken on the principal characteristic of life in the twentieth century. Te diference between time and rhythm is that the former is a rule-bound meter (such as 4/4 time, as in the case of Rock ‘n’ Roll), while the latter is the expressive property of the genre to which the example belongs (in the case of the strong backbeat, or the echo of time). Rhythm does not conform to meter in the case of poetry reading: “‘Time’ and rhythm here appear even to exclude each other: rhythm resists regular time; ‘time’ appears to sufocate rhythm” (Zuckerkandl 1956: 159). But we have another element to consider, which is duration. Meter as time is the straitjacket within which rhythm discovers its own freedoms. Zuckerkandl (1956: 160) asks how “this synthesis of law and freedom [is] to be understood” by way of a conformity between bodily gestures that produce measurements of/in time; it is the perception of the measurement of time in this case that we participate within the motions of sound as endured through measurements. Zuckerkandl (1956: 162) adds that we must be aware of meter as an “awareness of, and a sympathetic inner beating with, its meter.” Music occupies a measurement of time, never in time (although a piece may be

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played in time). Metrical accent is thus the technicality of musical process, but it is not the elasticity in which dynamic interest is generated. It is not being/non-being—it is getting exactly what you expect. Te infection of a beat within a measurement, however, does not demarcate the territory of a refrain—it is only that, a refrain. It is not yet music until we have understood its dynamic rhythmic character, that which evades the expectation of emphasis, which creates the line of fight out of the strata. Zuckerkandl ofers us the psychological explanation of perceiving tone events in repetition and succession, mainly that a succession of tone events begins to vary by virtue of the fact that we group those events into like units until we perceive not meter nor time but pulsation that locks the perceiver into a state of temporality as described above as suspension between two non-beings in presence (no-more and not-yet):

A piece of music is played; there is no accentuation. We count with the tones one-two-one […] Why did we say “one” here instead of “three”? What peculi- arity in our perception of the third beat makes us count thus and not otherwise? If the new beat did nothing but bring us a further fraction forward in time, the phenomenon would be incomprehensible. If we involuntarily and uncon- sciously count “one” to beat number 3, this expresses the fact that it is not so much further as back that this beat carries us—and back to the starting point. To be able to come back, one must frst have gone away; now we also understand why we count one-two, and not one-one. Here “two” does not mean simply “beat number 2,” but also “away from.” Te entire process is therefore an “away from–back to,” not a fux but a cycle […], a constantly repeated cycle, for the “one” that closes one cycle simultaneously begins another. (Zuckerkandl 1956: 167–8)

A rhythmic signifer hinges on it binding to metrically symmetrical punctuations. Te cyclical suspension of a pulse that oscillates through phrases in time constitutes the suspension of non-being that marks the experienced event in tone, harmony, and rhythm as a musical event: “Our sympathetic oscillation with the meter is a sympathetic oscillation with this wave” (Zuckerkandl 1956: 168). To count along with music, it is arguably contentious that one simply and consciously counts out loud, as if to remind oneself where the beat should return, where it has been, or where it should arrive. Tat would make for a bad

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performance, since the performer would be measuring time (meter) instead of becoming it (rhythm). Te cyclical time of music unfolds in a mesh. If we were interested in determining the precise moments where the beats land, we would not be doing a service to any music as music (nor its connections with the inner and external states of social life): “our interest is not in the dividing points but in what goes on between them,” Zuckerkandl (1956: 169) writes, concluding that “if we are no longer speaking of what divides time but of what connects the divisions, we are still speaking of meter at all and have not rather already begun to speak of rhythm.” It is within the mesh that one experiences what Shepherd and Wicke will later call the technology of articulation directly, not in any conscious awareness of the mesh itself. Zuckerkandl states:

We cannot draw boundary lines on a wave; one wave passes into another without a break. Te successive beats of a metrical series are all alike; no two waves are exactly alike. Meter is repetition of the identical; rhythm is return to the similar. Te machine runs metrically; man walks rhythmically. Meter becomes the symbol of divisive, analyzing reason, rhythm the symbol of the creative and unifying force of life. Te radical opposition between rhythm and meter is an expression of the basic confict of two principles, one fostering life, the other inimical to it. (Zuckerkandl 1956: 170)

If meter constitutes a capability to perceive diference in succeeding events, rhythm is the perceived motion in the dynamic feld of meter. And although tone and harmony are the organizational principles that are socially constructed in such a distance towards the musical event that marks its aesthetic characteristics (or what perhaps qualifes a musical event under the rubric of romantic aesthetics to determine its meaning), rhythm is taken as inherently imminent to human life, subversive to meaning, registered somatically as afect. Rhythm, Zuckerkandl maintains, is the feature of an oscillating wave that maintains the ability of a human subject to lose subjectivity, to become the trace of subjectivity, to become its echo—rhythm resonates in the echo of meter. Te waves build upon each other in intensity as each wave oscillates towards its own repetition, cumulating in a diachronically unfolding pattern of diference in attraction perceived on a metonymic chain of similarity. Zuckerkandl calls this an accomplishment every time a wave is complete and a new one begins. Te rhythmic wave has been heralded as Rock ‘n’ Roll’s almost singular

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accomplishment, and the persistence of this wave of rhythm is precisely what ofered an otherwise conservative and repressive society its much-anticipated shock. Te meter of the fnite and the rhythm of the infnite overlap one another in patterns of repetition in a seemingly endless unfolding. Te opposing characteristics of rhythmic units signify polarity and intensif- cation. By virtue of musical signifcation through the notion of the “medium,” rhythm positions a listener’s subjectivity as a point of consistency between the no-more and not-yet, whereby the latter tends to displace subjectivity by way of its routine anticipation through courses of diference, while the former’s signifcation rhythmically positions a listener by way of a syntagmatic chain of signifcation in attraction—memory. Tis between point is the positive afect, that which is closest within the subject to his own power (puissance), the quilting efect, to return to Lacan; the ideological base of the linguistic diference in Lacan and in Žižek is structurally homologous with the kernel of rhythmic identifcation in music. Indeed, if language and music share characteristics, if there is an essentialism among them, it is the shared similarity in the quilting efect that has the ideological quilting point on subjectivity. Zuckerkandl (1956: 224–5) explains the disappearance of linear logic in a musical event:

“Two,” then, follows “one”—in other words, if “two” is present, “one” is past. Is this pastness equivalent to non-existence? Could “two” be what it is if “one,” because it was no longer, were really non-existent? “Two” is not simply the beat that follows “one”; it is something quite diferent, namely, symmetrical complement, completion and fulfllment. Te whole course of “two” is in direct correspondence with “one,” it is this correspondence, in every instant of the existence of “two” “one” is also contained, as the partner in this relationship, the object of the symmetrical completion. If “one,” once past, were lost in non-existence, extinguished—as, according to the hourglass concept, past time is extinguished—“two” would be simply a second “one” and nothing more.

Subjectivity thus emerges as a medium. As every element unfolds in an ongoing conversation with other elements in a manner that creates a mesh out of the quilt, the quilt becomes a complex pattern that binds together more of a net over subjectivity than a thread through it; subjectivity, in this consid- eration, is a medium—it is, in other words, an ecological mode of being. Te

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dynamic quality of the musical event arises from the fact that every musical event is at once in conversation with its own virtual no-more and not-yet events that gather up into its own gestalt-like orientation. Te non-representational aspect of this is compelling, in that it constitutes a zone of human experience that is neither natural nor socially constructed. It is non-representational, in that the auditory events experienced through a musical process occupy the auditory feld, can be represented in visual space/time, but cannot be represented through the auditory feld—they are the auditory feld. Tis is an argument that Shepherd and Wicke (1997: 135) pick up with great fdelity to Zuckerkandl:

Auditory time and space (time–space) can only be articulated and is thus articulated (as a unifed feld) inalienably through the articulation of auditory events in relation to one another. Similarly, the virtual force feld of musical time and space—the social phenomenon made possible by the materially grounded phenomenon of auditory time–space—can only be articulated and is thus situated inalienably through the articulation […] of the musical present in relation to one another.

Using Zuckerkandl we can thus see that Lacan’s master signifer echoes in a musical dimension. In a similar manner to the quilting of two signifers that constitutes the inescapability of the symbolic order, there is a shared space between this perception and musical phenomena. Tis shared space, however, of meter does not constitute music, necessarily. Tat is, rhythm is the imaginary space of motion in meter’s dynamic feld, which covers over the subject in a multiply meshed quilt—it acts more as a medium.

Te terrors of the backbeat

Noise is subject to laws of rationalization. Te comparisons between the sounds of Rock ‘n’ Roll and its accompanying gestures are fused between its evasive backbeat and its irrational efect of excess: a ruthless concentration of noise. Noise is, on its own, nothing until it is subject to social representations of morality. Noise, as Kahn (1999) writes, is terrifying because it marks the potential for dynamic agency and change, in that it compels us to

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decide whether to resist or adapt—noise is unlike sound with respect to its subordination to representation. Tis highlights the importance in Deleuze’s argument, for instance, that in the terrifying void of pure diference, representation maintains its hegemonic sway as a symptom of the categorical imperative whereby a body is attributed a spiritual adherence to its model: noise is either tamed by Apollo or energized by Dionysus. Tus, noise is subject to the rationalization of music in either its discipline or its excess. Tis destination for noise has implications for simulacra in general, which, for Deleuze (2004: 334), is deployed through the edifce of moral consensus:

What is condemned in the fgure of simulacra is the state of free, oceanic difer- ences, of nomadic distributions and crowned anarchy, along with all that malice which challenges both the notion of the model and that of the copy. Later, the world of representation will more or less forget its moral origin and presup- positions. Tese will nevertheless continue to act in the distinction between the originary and the derived, the original and the sequel, the ground and the grounded, which animates the hierarchies of a representative theology by extending the complementarity between model and copy.

Hence, if noise is pure diference, sound is its ground for judgement. Chained within the monocentric confnes of the identical, noise, as it is framed by the sound through which it is experienced, proceeds towards a boundary that synthesizes into identifcation—so noise must develop into something held in judgement. Sound, then, becomes a general equivalent for representing, for distinguishing noise from music, reduced to the utilitarian task of patching the great divide between ethics and morality. But Deleuze’s limit is also his boundary. As much as he identifes the ideological fallacies of representation, he is not adequately convincing in regard to how the system of representation maintains its power. Lacan is far more useful for breaching the ideological coordinates of signifying systems. Afer his in-depth readings of the mirror stage and establishing the coordinates of the misrecognized/imaginary subject, he devoted signifcant attention to the autonomies of signifcation. Tis new phase in his philosophy was, as Liu (2010) recently argues, decidedly an interest in the symbolic order as a cybernetic system. How exactly is the symbolic order self-sufcient? What are its governing laws? If the Imaginary was constructed by a fundamental

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misrecognition that eventually determined the predestination of alienation, how was the subject routinely misplaced as a fundamentally fawed part of an entirely logical system? Te symbolic, Lacan would eventually conclude, obeys two fundamental laws: one governed by diference and one governed by memory. Te symbolic is essentially the limited function of the world that the Imaginary subject invests its ego within, though the subject does not recognize that the symbolic system through which expression is given is operative according to a prede- termined set of rules—if the mirror refects the potential coordination of jubilant excess as the determining condition for subject misrecognition, such a potential becomes lodged in a systemic chain that “speaks” through the subject. Te unconscious governs the subject, speaks through it, is made up of signifying material that has primacy over agency; it is the “discourse of the Other,” language, the symbolic order. Te symbolic is the limit of the human universe. It is at once the language that I use to express myself, but it is also the language that everyone else about me uses. With these others, we engage in the laws of the symbolic, which constitutes its very autonomy. It is this fact, that we speak about through the language that everyone uses, that makes up the stuf of the Big Other. We articulate our desire through it, and others are forced to do the same. Te circuit of discourse precedes us and will succeed us. It is the mistakes that our parents made that we inevitably return to, the primacy of the Signifer. We can never really grasp the full signifcance of this, because we are only capable of expressing bits and pieces of it at a time (a scale in C, a splash of red, a light on a certain dimmer, this sentence, punctuations of parole), but the system eludes us. It is greater than us. We are subjected to it. So the Ego is the imaginary function that the subject has in relation to its own image, while the subject is entirely determined through the symbolic order. Here is the politics of afect, the aspect of musical meaning that is not registered cognitively but rather somatically from the position of a body that is afected by the body of another. It is little wonder that Rock ‘n’ Roll was the notorious fabulist of the twentieth century, claiming innocence when it clearly was devious.

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