The problem with MIA’s new video is not, as Anna Pickard claims, that it is “too shocking,” it is that it is not shocking enough. The video’s big “reveal,” that the state’s violence is directed at the redheaded, turns any possible shock into pure silliness. Now, I imagine someone will say that I’m missing the point here, that prejudice directed against redheads is really no more silly than prejudice directed against black people or Muslims, and that by showing us this, the film makes a serious point about the arbitrariness of racism. This is wrong: racism is indeed unfounded and constructed and arbitrary, but it is not silly. The mistake here lies in thinking that, because racism is based on a social construction rather than a biological reality, it is therefore unreal, a mere error or fiction with only a mental existence in the psyche of racists. But in fact there is little more real than social constructions, because they create, and exist through, a material reality of practices and distributions of people and things. By eliding this materiality, and suggesting that an alternative racial reality could be produced simply by an arbitrary switch of what signifiers are racialized, the MIA video flatters its liberal audience, reinforcing the belief that racism a matter of ignorance or error that can be avoided by the sufficiently enlightened.

Worse, perhaps, the video ends up letting the actual racism and violence of the US state off the hook. The first half of the video presents us with a mystery: who are these police, and why are they raiding this building? The moment when we see the bus full of red-haired young men functions as an explanation, an explanation which immediately places us in an alternative reality in which the US features a number of signs of oppression that suggest places out side the US: Northern Ireland (murals) or Palestine (kids in keffiyehs throwing rocks). The problem is, that this, it seems to me, strongly suggests that we should see the first half of the video as also part of this alternative reality; but police raids of this sort are of course no “alternative” at all to actually existing US reality.

I don’t think I’ve written much about MIA before, not just because I don’t like her records very much, but because I’m rather uncomfortable with the fact that I don’t like her records. Oh, I can come up with any number of plausible reasons why, but they all seem to have a borrowed kettle quality to them: I have too many reasons for not liking her, none of which are finally quite persuasive. I don’t like the superficiality of her gestures towards politics, but why is this a problem when I’m so happy to take as interesting the surface features of other artists, from Lady GaGa to tATu? Is it that I’m happy to let the girls talk about fripperies like gender and aesthetics, but politics is SRS BSNS that should be left to the men? Perhaps I judge MIA differently because she presents herself as serious about politics; but, again, why do I let my interpretation of her work be determined by  MIA’s interest in politics when I’m more than happy to ignore Britney’s lack of interest? This suggests, I think, a potential problem with popism’s otherwise admirable commitment to the death of the author, which is that it tends to work better when the interpretation of the record is wholly disconnected from the artist’s self-understanding. The problem is that this requires the artist to be ignorant: the female (usually; feminized, in pop, almost always) pop star is forced into the position of the subject not supposed to know.

Or another thing; I dislike the appropriations involved in MIA’s presentation of herself as speaking from a generic third-world position (this is most annoying in the uncredited “baile funk” tracks on Piracy Funds Terrorism, which may be Diplo’s fault rather than MIA’s, and the cringeworthy line about how she “puts people on the map who’ve never seen a map,” which is MIA’s fault); but, for all that I could make arguments about self-made native informants, she surely does have an experience as someone growing up in Sri Lanka and working in the western music industry that qualifies her to say something about the third world; why is it that I somehow want to deny this?

I find myself in the odd position of not being able to trust my judgment about MIA; but I’m pretty sure “Born Free” isn’t as good a record as “Jimmy.”

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Michaels puts forward a common but quite false presentation of neoliberalism as being unconcerned by economic inequality. But neoliberalism is not a simple anti-government position, but rather an advocacy of government intervention to create a very particular sort of marketized society, and a certain concern with the management and amelioration of inequality is central to that program of marketization, from New Labour to the IMF (some examples of which are discussed in this post on the neoliberalism of “Red Toryism”). Of course neoliberalism cannot in fact abolish economic inequality, but this is not because neoliberals have no desire to do so. The problem is that neoliberalism has no interest in promoting class struggle and the destruction of capitalism, the only things that can in fact abolish economic equality, by abolishing “the economic” altogether; but Michaels, because of the way he understands economic inequality, is just as hostile to these things.

The problem is that Michaels views economic inequality as transparent, as a simple matter of numerical difference (differences of wealth or earnings) that can be directly read off economic statistics. What this misses is the existence of a structure that underlies and produces these differences, and this structure (that is to say, class) is never directly visible; one will search in vain for a numerical boundary that differentiates capitalists from workers. As a recent post on LBO-Talk put it:

Class Struggle as visible Class Struggle never occurs…. The visible struggle is always about something else; that is why it takes analysis to identify what the struggle is, who are the participants, etc.

The upshot of views such as Michaels’s, which reduce the approved grounds of political struggle to visible economic difference, is that they locate the solution in a technocratic and narrowly economic rationality, a manipulation of the distribution of goods and the structure of incentives intended to produce more economically equal outcomes. But this kind of technocratic economic rationality is exactly what neoliberalism is. Far from opposing neoliberalism, Michaels is advocating it.

A genuine alternative to neoliberalism requires that we understand the ways in which the underlying abstract structures of capitalism become visible; these include the visible positivities that usually get called “class” (wage bracket, occupation, social mores), but there are other identity categories that are equally objectifications of capitalism’s logic, and race and gender are foremost among them. Michaels’s assumption that race and gender are mere epiphenomena, while class is a directly visible economic reality, rejects a materialist analysis of race, gender, and class. The difficulty lies in discovering a form of political action which recognizes the forms of appearance of capitalism while also attacking the invisible ground of this appearance. A politics directed solely against these appearances is, as Michaels correctly points out, merely part of the ideological legitimization of capitalism, but, as k-punk points out and contra Michaels’s neoliberal economism, “a protest against capitalism seems designed to fail.” How, then, do we engage in concrete political action against the abstraction that is capitalism?

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Your old-school Marxist (and that is who Žižek is channeling in this instance) accepts the identity politics formulation of struggles around race and gender and, recognizing the limitations of identity politics, supposes that class is somehow different. But as this horrible example of class identity politics makes clear, there’s nothing preventing class being assimilated to an identity politics framework, too. The way to avoid the problems of identity politics is not to privelege class. Quite the contrary, making this distinction between class and other organizations of oppression prevents us from understanding any of them. Poulantzas criticizes Foucault for failing to ground his theory of power in class, but Foucault is right here and Poulantzas is wrong; Poulantzas mistakes a form of appearence of economic power, class, for the power itself. The question facing a Marxist theory of power is to figure out how abstract materialities appear as particular stratifications and identifications.

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I was reminded of this recently while listening to Janelle Monaé, who addresses the connection between robots and slaves from a rather more subversive angle, in an album based around an extended analogy treating Black people in the US as cyborgs (including the track from which the title of this post is taken). It’s a neat reversal of the racist trope that Black people are more “natural” than Europeans (shading into animalistic, subhuman). Because there’s clearly a sense in which African Americans are artificial, constructed by the explicit intervention of the slave trade; Monaé is great in turning this artificiality into a kind of futuristic transhumanism. On a first listen to the record, I was rather disappointed that this conceptual futurism isn’t accompanied by musical invention. But I’ve warmed to the record, which is a kind of eerily precise re-creation of an earlier Black futurism, in much the same way as some Outkast stuff is (and, indeed, Andre 3000 is involved in some way, although I’m not exactly clear on his role). It’s appropriately… artificial.

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