Still the show remains pretty great, and this change of focus does prove something I’ve been saying about 9/11 conspiracy theories for some time. As far as I can tell, it’s not, in the technical sense, true, that Bush did 9/11, but it might as well be: bombing Americans (not to mention non-Americans, of course) and setting up terrorist attacks are totally the sorts of things the US state does. But the fact that having conspired to bring about 9/11 wouldn’t actually be all that different in kind from events that the US government doesn’t bother to hide suggests that even if 9/11 truthers could prove their theories, most people would respond the way they do to these widely known events: with indifference. The widespread acceptance of stories that depend on fictional analogs of 9/11 conspiracy theories, it seems to me, confirms this; we already believe 9/11 conspiracy theories on some level, and we don’t care.

(Interestingly, another recent TV show that pays lip service towards Occupy’s 99% vs 1% rhetoric also draws on conspiracy theory themes. The villains in Arrow are a conspiracy of gentrifiers, led by a businessman and philanthropist who, following the murder of his family by criminals, becomes a costumed vigilante and and plans to wipe out crime by destroying a poor area of town through a natural disaster, in order to rebuild it. That is, Arrow does Revenge‘s “Bush did 9/11″ plot one better, with a storyline that is basically “Batman did Katrina.”)

In switching to a broader terrorist conspiracy storyline, the second season of the show also increases the complexity of the plots. I increasingly found myself having to stop and think about who’s on which side now, and why exactly it is that they’re deceiving whoever they happen to be deceiving that week.  What I like, though, is that tracing the machinations of these plots always ends up with a curiously layered and hypothecated structure. A plot is put into motion to block some scheme from an opponent, but it turns out this scheme itself was only devised to stymie some imagined conspiracy of some further cabal, and so on. This is conspiracy theory as a burlesque of agency: conspiracy theories depend on the belief in all-powerful conspirators pulling the strings, but their structure of unmasking means that any agent we know about can never by the real agent, but only the puppet (the structure of conspiracy theories, that is, is the structure of the ambiguity in the word “actor”, meaning both one who actually does something, and one who theatrically pretends to do something). Revenge‘s charm is that, through the form of melodrama, it ties this conspiratorial structure of agency to a particular structure of affects. Everyone on the show is characterized by a remorselessness, a purely instrumental means-end reasoning which is itself an affect, an affect which erases the emotions that are nominally supposed to be motivating them: Emily’s desire to restore her father’s good name, or Victoria’s loyalty to her family. Again, what appears to be simple purposive behaviour (driven, even, by “natural” instincts, family and love) turns round on itself to become an indefinite deferral of motive.

Thinking about what this melodramatic structure might tell us about agency makes me think about recent calls for more centralized organization on the left. To be honest, I have difficulty taking these seriously (they seem to be such obvious compensatory mechanisms, theoretical defences against facing up to the actual failures of the left); I was tempted to describe them as “end-of-the-pier Leninism.” But then I thought perhaps end-of-the-pier Leninism is just what we need: a vaudeville Leninism that is self conscious about the entanglement of politics in melodrama and works through what that means for the possibilities of left-wing political agency (in this, Libby Anker’s recent article on “Left Melodrama” might be a useful starting point).

Related posts:

1. On Shia LaBoeuf and the Big Other I saw Eagle Eye on the plane back from England; it’s not as good as Singh is Kinng, which I also watched, but it’s not bad (except for Shia LaBoeuf’s acting; he’s like an ugly Keanu Reeves). I thought there was something kind of interesting about the central premise, which...
2. The Big Brother Truth Move­ment One shouldn’t go around believing in them, of course, but I think there’s something to be said for the construction of conspiracy theories as a mode of political analysis; trying to come up with an entertaining conspiralogical explanation for events is a nice way of exploring the various interests and...
3. “There is no big lie” I didn’t watch Mad Men when it first started, which in hindsight is surprising, as I’m a big fan of both the advertising industry and the style of high Fordism. However, all the buzz I heard at the time amounted to a shocked “OMG THEY SMOKE AND ARE SEXIST,” and...

What makes the film interesting, though, is that it doesn’t just make this analogy the basis of a simple criticism: it takes this analogy seriously, or at least plays with it at length. It’s Faith, steeped in the dubious transcendence of church youth groups, who describes spring break as “the most spiritual place” she’s ever been, but the film-making seems to back this up. The bright colours, the visual and temporal distortions, skips and, repetitions, suggest  (the fantasy of) a spring break outside mundane time. This interesting review suggests the film is a “music video,” but I’m not sure that’s quite right. Rather, the film produces visually the affective structure of a dubstep track (or specifically of its theme tune, “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites,” by some distance the best brostep track); sharply switching between an ethereal straining at the limits of reality and a brutal pulverising of it produces a kind of transcendence, or an aesthetic effect that hints towards transcendence, at least.

It’s in this combination of the highest and the lowest that the film takes the hedonism of the American dream seriously, seriously enough to consider its costs: to take these costs seriously is not just to make them the basis of a criticism, but to ask whether or not they might be worth it. When they arrive on spring break, the four women all say (as we all say on holiday) that they wish it could last forever, but they find that permanent transcendence is difficult to sustain. When Faith and later Cotty (Rachel Korine) leave, it’s not without regret – as Alien puts it, “if you go home, you’ll be at home.” Spring break is a place that’s not home, a utopia, and the question the film is interested in is, could human beings withstand utopia? And, if they couldn’t, should that lead us to reject utopia, or humanity? This is also the question asked by Platanov’s Happy Moscow, but the utopia Platanov is considering is the one proposed by Soviet communism, which we may feel some sympathy for (or at least the pathos of distance). Spring Breakers examines the utopia buried within capitalist hedonism, an uglier and at best ambivalent one.

That is, the film expresses what Tamás calls a “Faustian-demonic” view of capitalism, in which “the road to the end of capitalism (and beyond) leads through the completion of capitalism, a system of economic and intellectual growth, imagination, waste, anarchy, destruction, destitution.” Tamás explains this view mostly in reference to the “encomium” to capitalism in the Communist Manifesto, which is arguably not all that demonic, at least to the extent that it takes for granted that whatever the travails of capitalism we will get out the other side. That kind of optimism seems impossible to sustain today (there’s an argument that Marx gave it up after 1848), which leaves us looking for the outlines of a future past capitalism in the entrails of capitalism. If capitalism unleashes energies which are not so much productive as reconstructive, rebuilding us as something completely other, what kind of future is it building for this future-us, and will we survive it? Is our survival as humans even a relevant question, or is capitalism’s demonic virtue precisely in its destruction of the human? As Lyotard puts it:

Death is not an alternative to it, it is part of it, it attests to the fact that there is jouissance in it, the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me - enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of their suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening. (Libidinal Economy, 109-10)

The linking of enjoyment and destruction shows the particular kind of transcendence being explored in the film: a hedonism which transcends the human condition by destroying it is the transcendence of the death drive. The death drive is that within us which transcends organic humanity, what keeps going beyond the limits of mere life. It’s what’s so uncanny and horrifying in Alien’s call for “spring break forever,” and it’s what’s lacking in the last shot we see of Cotty, slumped in a seat on a bus taking her back home (I assumed while watching the film that she was asleep, but it occurs to me now she could just as well be dead – from the point of view of the death drive, there’s no difference). And we see it in the last shot of the film, as Brit (Ashley Benson) and Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) drive away, somewhere. Their indecipherable expressions pose again the central question of the film, what it means and what it takes to survive transcendence: certainly something “keeps on” going in their commitment to the hedonism of spring break, but what is it, exactly, that has survived the remorseless pleasures of capitalism?

Mentioning Lyotard also points to the problematic gender politics of the film. It’s not “the perviest movie ever made”; it’s not even the perviest movie Vanessa Hudgens has ever made, but the fact that Zack Snyder and Michael Bay have really raised the bar for Hollywood perviness shouldn’t let other people off the hook. But the film does spend an awful lot of time sexualizing women’s bodies, and this isn’t just something that can be traded off against the potential thematic justification of this imagery; the instrumentalization of women’s bodies is integral to the point the film is making. The abjection and reconfiguration of the human body under capital is understood by the film in terms, specifically, of female bodies, and in this it is the heir to a long modernist theoretical tradition. Lyotard follows the passage quoted above with a depiction of the worker’s body in terms of “the prostitute’s vagina or mouth”; Benjamin discusses the late nineteenth century libidinal integration of body and machine in the image of the female cyclist with “the grim sadistic touch which made this ideal image of elegance so incomparably provocative to the male world in those days” (Arcades, B1, 2); we could even go back to the earliest days of mechanized capitalism in which male workers opposed mechanization because they considered working with machines effeminate, emasculating. Because feminizing, and through this aestheticizing, the place of the body in capitalism is a tradition and a trope, it may serve to obscure a problem with the Faustian vision of capitalism: that these demonic costs are not born by all equally. In one sense certainly Spring Breakers depicts this, but it also seems unaware of it, of the symbolic weight it is putting, willingly or unwillingly, on the bodies of young women.

If the film is unaware of the distribution of costs along lines of gender, it may be more aware of them in the case of race. At least, the film is hyper-aware of race, although it’s not always clear exactly what work race is doing in the film (it’s also complicated by the fact that Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens aren’t white, but they aren’t Black either, and in America’s usually binary racial metrics that leaves a question mark over the race of the characters they play). The shift that takes place partway through the film between controlled party hedonism and a more clearly destructive hedonism is marked by a move from overwhelmingly  white beach parties to mixed but largely Black back streets, and it’s hard not to read Faith’s increasing discomfort and claims that she “didn’t sign up for this” as her having, specifically, not signed up to be around a bunch of Black people. But the dependence of this white partying on Black labour is at least suggested by the film, with Brit and Candy constructing the bad-girl personas they use in the robbery that funds their spring break through racialized speech patterns and the party itself fuelled by – again racialized – hip-hop music (while the more direct dependence on racialized labour goes unremarked – the hotels in which these parties take place are presumably largely staffed by people of colour, as are significant portions of the supply lines bringing the drugs too these parties). The film ends with the two remaining spring breakers shooting an island full of Black people; perhaps this is where the film’s ambivalence over the costs of transcendence explodes, splitting the machinic transformation of the body into two, as the glorious body confronts the abjected body. But who is abjected and who is glorious? The film’s scrambling of the two, or maybe just throwing them together like a dubstep drop, is messy and frustrating, but also a fascinating visualization of the terrifying possibilities that constitute our hopes in late capitalism.

Related posts:

1. Rig­or­ously struggle against bour­geois in­di­vid­u­alism I heard yesterday, with this post half-completed for a couple of months, that Antonioni had died. LA is beautiful. I’m not sure if that’s the point Antonioni is trying to make in Zabriskie Point, but he makes it anyway. And Death Valley, as it appears in the film, is beautiful...
2. The idiocy of anti-​communism Maybe it’s just distance giving me more perspective, but I don’t remember that Start The Week used to be quite so offensively gliberal. A friend pointed me to last week’s edition, in which Simon Sebag Montefiore and Robert Service discuss whether or not Stalin was literally a pirate, and all...
3. Robots in gen­dered cap­i­talist re­la­tions I think it’s pretty clear that the Transformers films are pathological, but it’s difficult to determine whether the pathology lies in society, the film industry, or in the individual psychology of Michael Bay. Maybe there’s plenty of blame to go round, we can blame the film industry for allowing a...

Of course, I could just print out the pages of my blog, and bind them between hard covers, W. says. That would be enough. But how could my blog be contained between hard covers? My blog is infinite, W. says. It’s an example of the bad infinite, as Hegel would call it. The spurious infinite… It just goes on and on…

In Exodus, the final part of Lars Iyer’s trilogy, the constant interlocuter W. raises a question that occurred to me when I first heard that Iyer was writing a book based on his blog. Endlessness was such a significant feature of the experience of reading Spurious: if you didn’t read it even for a couple of days, you would find a great backlog of posts had piled up, of unpredictable length and genre. This isn’t an experience that can be replicated in a book, and even less in a trilogy, which seems to materialize the beginning/middle/end structure. As I was reading Exodus, though, I started to think that Iyer’s books do, in fact, have a three part structure, although, in keeping with Lars and W.’s preoccupation with the apocalypse, this structure is more like end/end/end. In Spurious, for all their talk of the messianism, it’s not clear if Lars or W. actually believe in the apocalypse; it’s a redemption they hope for in a vague and distant way. In Dogma, on the other hand, the apocalypse seems uncomfortably close: everything really might be about to fall apart. There’s something obscurely troubling in the scene where the previously assured W. breaks down in the face of American public transport:

A city without a train station!, W. says. He can barely imagine it. A city without trains!

On the big TV screen, they’re showing a documentary on airplane crashes, with footage of one crash after another. Screeching brakes. Metal crunching. Screams.

W.’s becoming hysterical.—‘Why don’t they tell us anything?’, he cries. ‘Are we cattle?’

I sit him on the floor and tell him Hindu stories to calm him down. I tell him how Ganesha came to have the head of an elephant, and Daksha the head of a goat. I tell him of the sage who temporarily substituted a horse’s head for his own, knowing that the secret wisdom he was about to gain would shatter it into a million pieces. (‘That’s what would happen to you if you ever had an idea’, W. says.) And I tell him how Dadhyanc’s head was lopped off for revealing the secret of the sacrifice to human beings.

‘Hinduism is a bloody religion’, W. says.

This is resolved in Exodus, not by either the arrival or the denial of the apocalypse, but the recognition that the apocalypse has already happened, and is continuing to happen:

The destruction of the world was the world: that’s what suddenly became clear to him, in his dream, W. says. The end of the world was already present in every detail of the world. The eschaton was already here; the apocalypse was already happening.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but there seems to be a certain – not comfort, but hint of redemptive possibility in this recognition of the omnipresence of the apocalypse; can we make a life by learning to live with (or in) the end of the world? Perhaps this is the secret of Lars’s idiocy: “I know what’s to come, and I’ve prioritised rightly. I live each day as though it were the day after the last.” In Exodus, W. mentions the cabbalistic theory of the minimalism of messianism:

A rabbi, a real cabbalist, once said that in order to establish the reign of peace it is not necessary to destroy everything nor to begin a completely new world. It is sufficient to displace this cup or this brush or this stone just a little, and thereby everything.

Benjamin, however, tells this story in a different, and to my mind more striking way:

The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.

And it is perhaps the this-worldy character of messianism that we discover through the course of Spurious, Dogma, and Exodus (the last in particular seems more richly affective, with its descriptions of “time piling up like a great snowdrift” or the squats of Hulme).

“Everything is made of meat,” says the schoolteacher in Beasts of the Southern Wild, explaining to her charges her own take on the worldly omnipresence of the apocalypse. The film shares, I think, something of the cosmology of Iyer’s trilogy. The apocalypse is both on its way and always already here, deep within the fabric of the world that the film’s protagonist, Hushpuppy, listens to with a stillness and concentration: to a world that is “talking to each other in a way I don’t understand.” But the immanence of the apocalypse doesn’t rule out a future. Hushpuppy is meticulously documenting her life, she says, “for the scientists in the future.” And Hushpuppy’s identification of the future with a science that exists at an indistinct temporal distance perhaps explains something that isn’t really examined in the Spurious books: why do Lars and W. have this stubborn attachment to thought? Perhaps it’s an attachment to the day after the last day, when it would finally be possible to think. Until then all we have is the world.

7.00 AM. All around us, on the grass, the Plymouth postgraduates are sleeping. All of God’s children are asleep. What are they dreaming of?, we wonder. Of wide, high Dartmoor, W. hopes. Of cider made from the apples of the moor. Of songs of peace and gentleness sung on the moor. And of Plymouth Sound, seen all the way from the moor, glinting like utopia. (Exodus)

Related posts:

1. “Like beau­tiful robots dancing alone” The steampunk genre is all about historical discontinuity, about universes where some event happened at the wrong time or in the wrong way, the invention of computers in the 19th century, or a post-WWII British space program displacing NASA. Something similar might explain Girls Aloud; they certainly don’t sound like...
2. Up to the minute film crit­i­cism The Terminator (1984) and Terminator: Salvation (2009) make great bookends to neoliberalism. Terminator is about the rise of neoliberalism: a woman is hunted down by a representative of the future, a future manifest in a machine hidden within human flesh. This future seems unstoppable until, in the final scenes the fleshly machine is...
3. Googie apoc­a­lypse As I have my finger on the pulse of pop culture, I watched Wall-E on ABC Family yesterday, and I’m glad I did; with the 50s aesthetic and the social system based on laziness, it’s pretty much the film version of this blog. There’s an interesting aesthetic choice, which it...

Of course, you’ve read all the think pieces, you’re saying “But Psy isn’t a one-hit wonder, he’s a respected satirist in his native Korea.” Which, maybe, but a one-hit wonder is more a matter of context than the career of an artist or the quality of a song, and the transfiguration of song into meme probably assists this process: witness the case of Carly Rae Jepsen, a respected artist in her native Canada. “Call Me Maybe” is extraordinary (I’ve heard it god knows how many times, and I’m still amazed every time; what is it that is so seductive about the way those strings cut off a fraction of a second before they would naturally decay?), but, even more extraordinary, most of the other tracks on her album are close to being as good. I think my favorite non-Call-Me-Maybe track is  “Tiny Little Bows,” which could be a parallel universe track from Kylie’s filter house phase; I was tragically slow to realize the early-Britney brilliance of “Your Heart is a Muscle” (it was the stop-start synths in the post chorus which finally converted me). This is rather slim evidence on which to manufacture a trend, but I wonder if Jepsen’s butterflies-in-the-stomach flutteriness is part of a pendulum swing against the abject obliterativeness of the kind of rave-pop that’s been popular for the last few years. You can perhaps see this a bit in the euphoric fizziness of my favourite bit of rave-pop from 2012, “Light Me Up” by Parade; hopefully they’ll release some more records in 2013. More significantly, Ke$ha managed to smuggle heart-in-mouth flutteriness in apocalypse-pop’s clothing in “Die Young,” the lead single to an album that wasn’t the “cock pop” she’d claimed the record was going, more “crush pop.” For reference, see the enormously adorable lyric video for the album’s crushiest song, “C’Mon.”

Ke$ha – C'mon (video)

Something else which, if not a reaction to, is at least a contrast to banging rave-pop is something that I think I’ve seen called Goth R&B; that seems like a good name, anyway, for various recent R&B, or R&B-influenced, artists who combine a certain excess of emotional intensity with a cold and controlled production. I first encountered the term as a description of Melanie Fiona’s “4AM,” which I love for the way the slight vocal processing on the swelling vocals of the chorus alienates what would otherwise be a too-intense emotion (it also reminds me of Riskay’s 2008 classic “Smell Yo Dick,” a track which is way more affecting than the title suggests). “4AM” is the only track from Melanie Fiona which fits this goth R&B tag, from an album which is curiously divided between incredibly generic and really quite unexpected tracks, like “Bones.”  The artist who has developed this Coldness and R&B aesthetic most fully is Dawn Richard, in two great EPs, Armor On and Whiteout, which use some of the same dance resources as the big rave&B hits to create a very different mood; my favourite tracks are “Black Lipstick” and “Miles,” respectively. You could probably also include JoJo’s recent records here, particularly “Demonstrate,” which manages to compress much more erotic yearning than I would have expected into the banal-seeming word, “demonstrate” (this may be off her forthcoming album? Following the difficulties she’s having actually releasing music is a full-time job); her (musically excellent and diacritically accurate) mixtape seems to be moving in a different direction, though. Arguably Cassie has been making this kind of music for her entire career, although I think there’s a subtle difference between Dawn Richard’s exquisite control of emotional expression and Cassie’s expression of willed emotional blankness. Cassie released one excellent track, “King of Hearts,” and another track on which she was excellent alongside a bafflingly out of place swaggering Jeezy verse. Expanding consideration to this kind of willed affectless, though, includes some other tracks from this year: Charli XCX’s “You’re the One” (which for my money isn’t anything like as good as her more obvious 80s revival track from last year, “Nuclear Seasons”), and Sky Ferreira’s wonderfully indifferent “Everything is Embarrasing”; “maybe if you tried then I would not bother” is the new “should’ve known, should’ve cared.” Nothing else on the follow-up EP was as good, and indeed the EP featured a re-edited version of “Everything is Embarrassing”  which subtly made it shit, overstuffed and fussy, rather than minimal.

Solange – Losing You (video)

Both Charli XCX and Sky Ferreira worked with Dev Hynes, as did Solange, who might also fit into this goth R&B category I’m manufacturing, or its close relative, Tumblr&B (despite sometimes valiant efforts, I’m not sure how easy it is to draw a sharp line between the two). “Losing You” is great, a beautifully simplistic melodic line, augmented with just enough producerly flourishes to draw out the full perception of its ennui. The full EP from which it’s drawn shows Dev Hynes songwriting and production at greater length, and does make me more sympathetic to people who have criticized his songs as unfinished: there’s a fine line between being simple and being slapdash; “Losing You” is absolutely the right side of that line, but “Some Things Never Seem to Fucking Work” relies slightly too much on a great title and not quite enough on actually writing a song (splitting “wo-ork” over two notes as it is in the chorus is an obvious crutch for not having a tune which surely wouldn’t have survived a second draft of the song), and none of the other tracks are as masterfully tightly put together as “Losing You,” though “Lovers in the Parking Lot” comes close (and also gets bonus points with me for reminding me of “Parking Lot” by Nivea).

If  Solange’s evident interest in the opinions of indie hipsters marks her as part of the Tumblr&B trend, Frank Ocean seems to end up there more because of the interest indie hipsters have in him (which ambivalence, not to mention the reliance on the dubiously coherent category of the hipster, marks the difficulty in trying to make Tumblr&B into a clear enough category to really say anything about). I don’t think Channel Orange is quite as good an album as Nostalgia, Ultra was, but clearly Ocean knows how to write a song: “Pyramids,” ”Thinkin Bout You,” “Pilot Jones,” and “Pink Matter” with a lovely rap from André 3000 (he also knows how to write a really terrible song: “Super Rich Kids,” which has a tune as boring as its lyrics are clichéd). Depending on how you parcel it up, Miguel may be Tumbr&B (because indie kids on Tumblr like him) or real R&B (because urban radio likes him); anyway, “Adorn” is great, primarily because of its beat constructed out of throbs, squishes, and pops. Probably the most uncontested members of the Tumblr&B category would be The Weeknd and How to Dress Well, neither of whom I have any interest in.

Usher presumably counts as proper R&B, and released a pretty excellent album; most of the critical attention seems to have been paid to “Climax” (written in part, I’ve just noticed, by Ariel Reichshaid, who worked with Charli XCX and Sky Ferrera, so maybe Usher is Tumblr&B after all) and “Scream,” a rave&B track that really benefits from Usher’s vocals. I’d like to draw attention, though, to “I Care For U” and “I. F. U.” which are both part of what I think is an underground trend in late-90s-Timbaland-revivalism.This is also on display in Justin Bieber’s album, specifically on the track “Out of Town Girl,” which I suppose makes sense as part of his ongoing plan to be Justin Timberlake. I hadn’t previously been a particular fan of Bieber, but the best track on Believe is one of the best tracks of the year. “As Long as You Love Me,” which uses the youthfulness of Bieber’s voice to project a frail but resilient beauty in the face of the sublime storm conjured up by brostep drops. You could perhaps view this divergence of brostep sounds away from full-on banging tunes as a similar move to that made by Dawn Richard in relation to dance-influenced R&B. I do like dumb brostep drops a lot, but I think I like this modulation of brostep even more, so I hope there’s more of it in 2013.

Watch video

A surprising number of bands from my youth released fine new albums in 2012. Orbital released a record which is more restrained than I would have expected, but beautiful; even better is Words and Music by Saint Etienne, one of the best albums of the year. Saint Etienne have perfected their sound to such an extent it seems effortless, which makes the evident enthusiasm of the record all the more engaging: it thematizes Saint Etienne’s theory of the value of pop in a perhaps more explicit way than their previous records, which could be too on the nose but to me seems like a perfect adequacy of content to form. “I’ve Got Your Music” and “Last Days of Disco” are particularly good. Less enthusiasm in the Pet Shop Boys Elysium; the title is presumably ironic, as the Pet Shop Boys may be over the hill, but they haven’t gone to a better place. It’s a slight and weary record about anxieties about ageing and withering away, most obviously on “Invisible.” It’s an interesting record, but not one I love; the last track, “Requiem in Denim and Leopardskin,” at least suggests a certain rapprochement with the slipping away of time. I kind of want to include Jessie Ware’s Devotion here, because although she’s not an artist of my youth, she does seem to be extending Katy B’s project of reviving the tasteful side of 90s dance pop; indeed, there are points where the record goes FULL M PEOPLE in its dinner-party soundtrack mode, like “Night Light,” and “Wildest Moments” is lovely, but comes a little too close to sounding like it was designed to play under a BBC Olympics montage. “110%” is also very mid-90s tasteful, but in a Nellee Hooper way which is more to my personal taste.

2012 was the year of female rappers! IDK, this kind of declaration always seems a bit problematic, driven by the “three examples is a trend” school of journalism. But maybe it’s true that a bit more space is opening up for women in rap to be more diverse? There are some well-worn scripts for women in rap: either sexy, or gangster, or, very occasionally, both; the successful female MCs of the past have managed to be great while navigating these stereotypes, while female MCs now maybe have more opportunities outside these stereotypes. I’m thinking especially of Angel Haze, whose Reservation EP is introspective and painful with hard-won wisdom, as well as being boastful and banging; and also the terribly-named 3D Na’Tee, who illustrates the kind of diversity women in rap have traditionally struggled to have recognized, as well as explaining the situation explicitly on “Hi Industry,” while also turning in a fluttery and gorgeous record with Keri Hilson. I wonder if you could say something similar about the diversity of Nicki Minaj’s output; some people have considered this a result of the intensified pressure on artists to chase ever smaller and more fragmented demographics, which it may be, but, then, Minaj has always been interested in being a pop artist at the same time she’s a hip-hop artist (listen to the career plans she lays out on her mixtapes). And, particularly with the added tracks on the Re-up EP, Roman Reloaded is a great record: “Roman Holiday,” “Beez in the Trap,” “Starships,” “Pound the Alarm,” “Gun Shot,” “Freedom,” “The Boys,” “Va Va Voom”; pop and hip-hop tracks which add up to “those few seconds, [when] 8,000 fans – tweens in tutus there with their dads, teenage girls in puffa jackets who had made the pilgrimage all the way from Somerset, jagged-haired hipsters on day release from East London – raised their voices to sing lustily, meaning every word: ‘Dick in your face. Put my dick in your faa-aaa-aaace.’” In other hip-hop news, Killer Mike released a great album (I’d previously managed to miss his transformation from the leering goof on “A.D.I.D.A.S.” to a really sharp political artist), The Guardian published such an awful article on Kendrick Lamar’s album (“Zap! Pow! Rap Isn’t Just for Kids,” basically) I, probably unfairly, still haven’t got round to listening to it; and I’ve just remembered that Nas released an album, which I definitely listened to a couple of times and can now remember nothing about, not even what it’s called, so it must have been pretty fucking boring.

And then there was Kitty Pryde, the rap-game Taylor Swift, which leads me to what I’m increasingly thinking is 2012′s best album, Taylor Swift’s Red. I’m going to chalk it up to Swift’s commendable orneriness that, just as I was writing something about Swift’s defensive use of language, she releases an album that largely drops the defensiveness, although not through finding safety but through giving up on the need for reassurance. There’s an interesting comparison between “Holy Ground” on the new album and “Our Song,” from her first. “Our Song” charms with its worldly love story, in which “our song” is made up of the mundane sounds of a relationship, but there’s an odd transcendent moment, in which these fragments of life are held together by God (“and when I got home / before I said amen / asking God  if he / could play it again”). “Holy Ground” flirts with a similar religious theme (“that was the first day / and darling it was good”) but pointedly refuses transcendence (“and right there where we stood / was holy ground”). That seems to be the theme of the album: an embrace of the bodily ecstatic along with an awareness of the risk of dissolution that accompanies this oceanic feeling. This is reflected lyrically and musically on the gorgeous “Treacherous” (“I can’t decide if it’s a choice / Getting swept away / … / And all we are is skin and bone”) which twinkles on the edge of dissolution until words (and identity) run out as the music swells and Swift stammers “I I I / I I I.” It’s also one explanation of Swift’s pop turn, justifying the move to a more affectively manipulative musical palette. I did worry about where Swift would go after Speak Now, that her defensiveness might curdle into unpleasantness; by embracing the risk of materiality, on Red Swift also opens herself up to the possibility of the new (“and every time I don’t / I almost do”).

Watch video

Related posts:

1. So, the di­rector of the forth­coming t.A.T.u. film used to work on Coro­na­tion Street. Perfect. It’s a good Fall for music: I like the Sugababes album (though it does seem a little mean of them to have stolen Mutya’s idea of making a northern soul record), and I’m obviously eagerly anticipating the new Britney and Girls Aloud records that are on their way. Meanwhile, the...
2. “I just need an ice-pick” In other music news, the new J Stalin album, Prenuptial Agreement, is AMAZING. It’s the best hip-hop record I’ve heard in a long time, probably since The College Dropout. It’s great enough that there’s a rapper called J Stalin; it’s really icing on the cake that he produces tracks as...
3. Everybody’s all Chris Ish­er­wood about me Damn, the new Girls Aloud record is out, and I still have a post to write about Britney’s album. With “What You Crying For” and “I’m Falling,” Tangled Up gives Blackout some unexpected competition for “Best early-90s hardcore record of 2007.” Well, I suppose it’s not totally unexpected from Girls...

Thinking about this reminded me of Austin’s essay, “Three Ways of Spilling Ink,” in which he considers various different ideas that cluster around intentionality. The three accidental ways of spilling ink of the title are unintentional, careless, and purposeless, which correspond to three ways we might characterize an action: intentional, deliberate, or on purpose. Austin uses “intentional” to refer to the same distinction I was using above, between actions that are the result of some kind of conscious choice and purely natural or chance movements. “Deliberate” adds to this by delineating those actions which are not just the result of choice, but of some special level of care. “On purpose,” finally, refers to actions described in terms of some result that the agent specifically had in mind. I think these latter two ideas are closer to what people are talking about when they discuss Farrah Abraham, but I’m still not sure of their utility. The question of deliberateness, or technique, can be an interesting one to discuss, but surely the question of how a work produces the effects it does is secondary to the consideration of what those effects are. The question of purposiveness, on the other hand, is complicated by the fact that it is always relative to the way we describe an action: if I reach out to pick up a cup of water and in the process spill some ink, one and the same action is on purpose under the former description, but not under the latter. In the case of creative works, the range of descriptions we can apply is huge; almost certainly, some of these descriptions are and some are not ones under which we could say the work is “on purpose,” but why should this be relevant in deciding which descriptions tell us most about the work?

Take the case of My Teenage Dream Ended. The album was released alongside an autobiographical book of the same name, also by Abraham, so presumably part of the purpose of the album is to in some way express the experiences Abraham narrates in the book; but was the purpose of this particular sound to express that particular emotion? It’s hard to know, but also hard to see why that’s relevant. What the album does do is express a certain set of affects, and it finds a cluster of forms that are particularly appropriate to these affects. That’s what makes the record so great: it takes the materials of contemporary pop music and through them expresses aspects of contemporary experience in ways which are unexpected but also perfectly accurate: the pop-rave synths and paranoia of “After Prom,” or the alienated emotion and X Factor contestant pianos of “With Out This Ring….” and of course the omnipresent autotuned cut-ups of fragmentary inarticulacy.

I wonder if something similar isn’t happening in Rihanna’s Unapologetic. A product of a slicker pop machine, it’s not as abrasive as Abraham’s record, but it’s still quite a tough listen in the enthusiasm with which it inhabits a number of pop trends (the dubstep drop, the Guetta soar). You could attribute this, of course, to the iron logic of the music industry: Rihanna is a pop star, the argument would go, and so the content of her records is determined by producers and managers, her own agency drops out. But here we would be getting caught up again in an unexamined notion of intentionality, in which artists are either wholly autonomous or utter puppets (it’s probably not a coincidence that this dichotomous characterization of agency is most likely to be applied to women, or feminized pop stars). If agency is something other than absolute autonomy, the structures of the music industry are a condition of possibility for the particular agency at work in Rihanna’s records; and what better way to speak about that condition than to inhabit the aesthetic forms bequeathed by the industry?

Related posts:

1. So, the di­rector of the forth­coming t.A.T.u. film used to work on Coro­na­tion Street. Perfect. It’s a good Fall for music: I like the Sugababes album (though it does seem a little mean of them to have stolen Mutya’s idea of making a northern soul record), and I’m obviously eagerly anticipating the new Britney and Girls Aloud records that are on their way. Meanwhile, the...
2. Everybody’s all Chris Ish­er­wood about me Damn, the new Girls Aloud record is out, and I still have a post to write about Britney’s album. With “What You Crying For” and “I’m Falling,” Tangled Up gives Blackout some unexpected competition for “Best early-90s hardcore record of 2007.” Well, I suppose it’s not totally unexpected from Girls...
3. “I just need an ice-pick” In other music news, the new J Stalin album, Prenuptial Agreement, is AMAZING. It’s the best hip-hop record I’ve heard in a long time, probably since The College Dropout. It’s great enough that there’s a rapper called J Stalin; it’s really icing on the cake that he produces tracks as...

It is essential that we ask why it is that neo-anarchist ideas are so dominant amongst young people, and especially undergraduates. The blunt answer is that, although anarchist tactics are the most ineffective in attempting to defeat capital, capital has destroyed all the tactics that were effective, leaving this rump to propagate itself within the movement.

What this risks missing is that a tactic that has been destroyed by capital is, a fortiori, a completely ineffective tactic. I’m reminded of Marx’s discussion of attempts to find historical proofs of the possibility of communism:

Whereas the still immature communism seeks an historical proof for itself – a proof in the realm of what already exists – among disconnected historical phenomena opposed to private property, tearing single phases from the historical process and focusing attention on them as proofs of its historical pedigree (a hobby-horse ridden hard especially by Cabet, Villegardelle, etc.). By so doing it simply makes clear that by far the greater part of this process contradicts its own claim, and that, if it has ever existed, precisely its being in the past refutes its pretension to reality.

Or, in a more philosophical register, Hegel on the rationality of the actual:

 The actuality of the rational stands opposed by the popular fancy that Ideas and ideals are nothing but chimeras, and philosophy a mere system of such phantasms. It is also opposed by the very different fancy that Ideas and ideals are something far too excellent to have actuality, or something too impotent to procure it for themselves. This divorce between idea and reality is especially dear to the analytic understanding which looks upon its own abstractions, dreams though they are, as something true and real, and prides itself on the imperative ‘ought’, which it takes especial pleasure in prescribing even on the field of politics. As if the world had waited on it to learn how it ought to be, and was not!

Now, Mark is certainly aware of the point Marx and Hegel are making, and is specifically not calling for a simple return to already defeated forms of organization (indeed, he notes the desire to do this as one of the main problems facing the left), but treating the persistence of anarchist-inspired organizing structures as a mere faut de mieux precludes consideration of ways in which they were developed in response to the conditions which destroyed previous forms of resistance to capitalism. You make a revolution against the capitalism you have, and the organizational forms that are available and effective depend in some way on the way in which capitalism is organized. I say “in some way” to avoid drawing too close a connection between the two, either positively or negatively; the position which sees horizontal organization as a mere assimilation to the structures of capitalism moves too quickly (I might have more to say about this if I get round to writing something on Jodi Dean’s The Communist Horizon), while the tendency of post-workerist theory to derive political organization from technical organization is too mechanical.

One place you might look to in thinking about this relation between the structure of capitalism and the organization of resistance would be hegemony theory; unfortunately, it is precisely this question which hegemony theory is incapable of answering. The purpose of the concept of hegemony is to provide a political supplement to Marxism: an account of how political groupings can be articulated to wield power. The problem, though, is that hegemony theory provides us with no account of why particular groups arise, or find themselves in positions of particular strength or weakness. Hegemony theory analyses political articulation at the cost of taking the elements of these articulations as givens (thus the “contingency” which is so important to hegemony theory is a kind of brute contingency: a simply inexplicability). This is not just an oversight, but derives from the central structure of hegemony theory, from the idea of a political supplement. The need to introduce hegemony to account for the role of agency in politics only arises if you assume that politics is sharply distinguished from  the economy as a realm of determinism. But we can reject this dichotomy, and Marx gives us good reasons why we should. What we need is not a political supplement to materialism, but a materialist theory of politics.

Related posts:

1. Chantal Mouffe: Stickle-​brick pol­i­tics Chantal Mouffe is quite interesting on the museum as a political space; it’s nice to see her descend from the heaven of the political to say something about some specific politics. But consider: Similar considerations could be made with respect to the role of the state, which, after years of...
2. Im­ma­ture Chris­tianity In the wake of the discussion of Radical Orthodoxy some time ago, I’ve finally got round to listening to this CBS program about Milbank and Pickstock, two of the movement’s founders. It’s an extraordinarily good radio show – I can’t imagine the militantly middlebrow Radio 4, or it’s repetition-as-farce NPR,...
3. No on 90 California is, politically, an odd place. It has a reputation as one of the “bluest” states (which, in America’s curious chromo-semantics means “left wing”); but it’s also a home of libertarianism, which coexists with the left in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. This combination makes California an interesting testing-ground for...

Feminist blogging makes the question of postmodern theories of meaning particularly relevant again because it draws attention to the importance of language to the feminist movement. In most discussions of feminism and postmodernism in the 90s, the main criticism of postmodernism tended to be that postmodernism rejects the idea of the subject, and thereby prevents us from understanding women’s agency, but, as Butler suggests, what supports this concern about the subject is a particular view of language, specifically the idea that it is possible to exercise agency through the employment of language, and that postmodernism promotes a radical instability of language which renders this agency impossible. The power of language has always been important to feminism, perhaps because language has been one area in which women whose capacity to act was constrained was constrained were nonetheless able to exercise a modicum of agency and thereby marshal their forces for further action: think of Wollstencraft’s and de Gouge’s writings on the rights of women, or the 60s “rap sessions” in which talk between women grew into consciousness raising and radical organizing. In these cases, though, there may be a tendency for language to recede into the background, because it can be thought of as (merely) preparation for “real” action.

Things may be different with feminist blogs, leading to a reversed visibility of the importance of language, as a medium for agency, to feminism. This is not because feminist blogs have no connection to action off the internet, but because these connections are less visible, less likely to dominate our field of view, and so are more likely to let the importance of language appear in its own right. Bloggers in general are known for taking pride in their writing, but I think among feminist blogs this often particularly takes the form of a particular pride in the strategic use of language to accomplish political effects, which might be the logical evisceration of an opponents arguments, or the snarky dismissal of the unthought affective structures of misogyny (and I’m also reminded of the recent debate on “ladyblogs,” which turned largely on questions of the political effects of the writing style adopted by various blogs). Because of the visible importance of linguistic agency to feminist blogs, then, we might expect to see some of the same anxieties around postmodernism in feminist blogging that Butler identified in academic feminism of the 80s. One possible site of this anxiety is the lyrics of Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift’s music, her persona, but especially her lyrics, have been much discussed from a feminist perspective. When Swift is criticized on feminist grounds, the criticism is usually that the stories she tells in her songs endorse, or reinforce, patriarchal norms such as women’s subordination to men (“I talked to your dad / go pick out a white dress”) or the immorality of female sexuality (“She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress”). I’m not really going to address the substance of these debates, but instead I want to point out that they are bound up with a certain understanding of language, and to show how Swift undermines the view of language in terms of which she is often criticized. To criticize the effects of Swift’s lyrics suggests a fairly direct model of language: the lyrics put forward a certain description of how women are or ought to be, which is transmitted to, and taken up by, the audience. This criticism needn’t be made in terms of Swift’s intentions, but depends on her words having a definite meaning which, at least in the usual case, is transmitted unchanged to those who hear it. This view of language is reinforced by Swift’s own stylistic choices, inasmuch as most of her songs adopt a narrative structure, and we tend to interpret narrative (particularly a narrative presented by a woman) as a sign of authenticity; at its most reductive, this would assume that Swift’s songs tell us the literal truth about the actual person Taylor Swift, while a more sophisticated version would assume some continuity of the persona portrayed in her various songs, or at least that within one song the character being performed is more-or-less telling us the truth.

This is not, however, an interpretation that Swift’s lyrics support; her songs have continually shown a concern with and a performance of the unreliability of narrative. As Alex Macpherson points out, the first lines of her first single announce as much (“He said the way my blue eyes shine / put those Georgia stars to shame that night / I said that’s a lie”), but it becomes a particular concern on her third album. Indeed, I don’t think it would be inaccurate to say that Speak Now is an album about the unreliability of language, the power language can provide and the risks involved in attempting to master it. We can hear this in the anxiety of the title, and, in a different way, in the opening lines of “Mean.” Swift is attacking a critic for the way he has chosen to use the power of his own words: “You / with your words like knives / and swords and weapons that you use against me.” Here Swift is performing her own innocence of the power of language; while her antagonist wields language with the cruel precision of a fencer, Swift assures us she is defenseless, inarticulate, piling up the ungainly tautology of “knives and swords and weapons.” But of course this performance is so extravagantly performative that it immediately undermines its own claims, a contradiction the song seems joyously unconcerned about. While its fun to watch Swift slice pieces off this jerk of a critic, though there’s also something uncomfortably brittle about the song, as if Swift feels compelled to exert this level of control over language and is aware that that she can never be assured of success, that her language may fail her, leaving her to be impaled by the knives of critics (I’m reminded, perhaps incongruously, of Subashini’s suggestion that awkwardness for a woman is always the risk of bleeding all over the place).

The melancholy which attends the power of language is on display more clearly in “Better Than Revenge.” Swift starts to undermine herself right from the title, which suggests that the song will describe something better than revenge, but as we listen we soon hear that this “thing” is nothing. And that seems to be the point, as Swift engages in an enthusiastic tearing down of her rival in which the joy she gets from the superiority of her verbal barbs surpasses anything she got from the boy they’re nominally fighting over: “you might have him but I always get the last word.” The identity of the “I” wielding this verbal dexterity is drawn into question, though, because the song features a second Taylor, a distorted whisper that at first repeats, but begins to engage in dialog with, the main vocal line, goading the singer into ever greater efforts at revenge. But the kicker comes at the end of the song: after all these verbal efforts aimed at getting the last word, Swift’s “last word,” the last words of the song, are “she took him faster than you could say sabotage”; a restatement of loss rather than a declaration of triumph.

Taylor Swift – Back to December (video)

Many of Swift’s songs are about a loss that has already happened, they tell a story built around an absence, and this is another way  she wrongfoots our assumptions about narrative. If narratives are authentic, they are authentic because of the narrator’s presence, or rather simultaneous copresence, in that the person who is here telling you the story was also there where the story took place: “I know, because I was there.” Swift loves to dramatize the the way a song always violates this implied guarantee of authenticity. “Back to December” is a song about absence, indeed the lyrics form a list of absences; but it seems to be structured as a direct address, face-to-face and here-and-now: “this is me swallowing my pride / standing in front of you saying I’m sorry.” Except, of course, this is a song, and Taylor certainly isn’t standing in front of the person it’s supposedly addressed to every time it’s performed; and the song knows this, as the last verse reveals the authentic declaration that makes up the rest of the song is a rehearsal, and the question of whether the intended recipient will ever hear it is suspended. This distance and delay is made even clearer in the video, where Taylor’s “standing in front of you saying” takes the form of writing a letter, which she hides in the guy’s jacket; in this case, the time between the enunciation and the delivery of the message is completely indefinite – who knows when, if ever, the message will be read?

This uncertainty about the receipt of a message – that we never know by whom or even if it will be received – is inherent to writing, and philosophers have traditionally taken this as evidence of something troubling or defective about written language. If language is about transmitting meaning from the mind of one person to another, the physical copresence implied by spoken language can act as a guarantee that this transmission will not go awry; with written language, there is no such guarantee, and it is at best a matter of luck if writing communicates anything; written language is a derivative and at best partially successful copy of speech. Derrida, however, disagrees with this view of language, which he calls “phonocentrism” because it insists that speech has priority as the proper form of language. Derrida argues that the problems identified in written language (failure to communicate through misunderstanding, theatricality, irony) are features of all language, and so apply just as much to speech as writing. Indeed, if spoken language really was transparently communicative, it wouldn’t need the “guarantee” that is supposedly provided by the presence of the speaker; the argument for the priority of speech over writing undermines itself, which Derrida takes as evidence that the phonocentric theory of language is an attempt to contain the fundamental uncertainty of language by pretending it can be dismissed as a derivative feature of writing.

“Speak Now” is such a perfectly Derridean title because it exemplifies the link between speech and presence that Derrida sees in phonocentrism: speech, on the phonocentric model, must always happen now, in the present to someone who is present. In this respect, the song lives up to its title, because it tells the story of an act of speech that doesn’t take place, and it tells this story through instances of speech that aren’t happening now. Early in the song, Swift imagines what she will say, and at the end of the song she reports what was said, but the moment of speech itself doesn’t appear in the song. It’s important, of course, that this ambiguously present piece of speech happens (or doesn’t) at a wedding, a location where the power of language is apparently at its strongest. Marriage vows are “speech acts,” words which directly produce effects. Or which, as Derrida and Swift know, sometimes don’t: a speech act only works in the proper context (in a church rather than on a stage or in a song, say), but it can also always be detached from that context, so the possibility of failure is built into the concept of a speech act. In this more complete and explicit recognition of the way language is haunted by failure, “Speak Now” is a revision of Swift’s earlier “Love Story.” ”Love Story” previews the temporal device Swift will employ in “Speak Now,” in which the song ends with her reporting her earlier words being spoken back to her, but “Love Story” (while it is hyper-aware of its own fictionality; the clue is in the title) sees this repetition as producing a more straightforwardly happy ending: Taylor’s problem can, in the end, be solved by saying the right words, resolved with a felicitous speech act, if she just says “yes.” “Speak Now” has a happy ending of a sort, but a much more tenuous one: disaster (for Taylor; not, presumably, for her rival) is averted by the failure of a performative, but nothing is assured.

We see another precarious return to an older theme on Speak Now‘s (appropriately) final track, “Long Live.” On Swift’s first album, “Mary’s Song (Oh My My My)” is built around Swift retelling us a story told to her by the Mary of the title looking back on her relationship (perhaps Swift chose this structure to allow herself to narrate an adult relationship while still appearing in the song as a sixteen year old, as she was at the time). The song ends with this fictional Mary imagining her future (“I’ll be 87 you’ll be 89″), in which, she assures Taylor and us, she will continue to feel the same love she describes in the song. “Long Live” repeats this prospective retrospection, but this imagined future has become something more uncanny than reassuring, a future in which Taylor is dead and listener is enjoined to “tell [her] name” to their own children, to “tell them how the crowd went wild,” that is, to allow Swift’s music to speak for her after her death. Swift is confronting the ultimate instability inherent in language, vocalizing the ability of language to survive even her own absence. The priority assumed by classical theories of language is reversed here, and it is no longer the speaker authorizes and so deploys language, but rather language which provides whatever fleeting scraps of persistence Swift can grasp at.

But isn’t this, you might ask, an extended exercise in letting Taylor Swift off the hook? I’ve written a lot, here, about how Swift never means exactly what she seems to mean because no-one, no language, can ever mean precisely that, but isn’t that just a complicated way of refusing to hold her responsible for the effects of her language? Perhaps, but I’m not so sure; I think, rather, that these complexities of unstable meanings and anxious, partial disavowals themselves need to be taken into account in understanding the effects of language, and so also considering them is a precondition for any critique. The fundamental honesty of Speak Now is that Swift never disavows the desire to control language and so to control her own destiny through language, but it begins to raise the possibility of the failure of this desire, and what this failure might cost. Swift is taking a genuine risk in exposing her desire in this way, and her critics owe her the honesty to take this same risk themselves.

Related posts:

1. Mag­nif­i­cent blond beast The title track of Young Sweezy’s new album is an entertaining tune, and perhaps the most entertaining thing about it is the structures and themes it takes up and twists from “Love Story.” In both tracks, Swift is vocalizing a fantasy about a relationship, a fantasy which she repeats back...
2. Non-​speaking beings W. is impressed by my stammer.—‘You stammer and stutter’, says W., ‘and you swallow half your words. What’s wrong with you?’ Every time I see him, he says, it gets a little worse. The simplest words are beginning to defeat me, W. says. Maybe it’s mini-strokes, W. speculates. That would...
3. “Thinking guides and sus­tains every gesture of the hand” Watch: In My Language Extraordinary video about language, the construction of a world, thinking and personhood. Lots to think about (and more on the filmmaker’s blog), for instance: Many people have assumed that, when I talk about this being my language, that means that each part of the video must...

I think Facebook and Google have, when asked about their real name policies, actually been telling at least a partial truth; they are interested, they say, in the idea that requiring people to use their legal names will change the way they behave on the site. This is supposed to be an unobjectionable attempt to get people to behave “better,” but isn’t the idea of behavioral modification by social media terms of service actually rather creepy? The data that Facebook collects is the site of most concerns about the site, but, while there clearly are cases where the information held by social networks, and its indiscriminate release, puts people in danger, most of the free-floating paranoia about social networks and privacy strikes me as overblown. However the reasoning behind the real name policy points to a different concern, which is not about what Facebook knows but about what we know, that is, how we might internalize our awareness that Facebook is watching in ways that change our behavior. In light of this concern, the description of social networks as “panoptic” is actually rather accurate. The point of the panopticon is not that someone is always watching; the panopticon could work even if no-one actually observing through it, because it functions by leaving inmates unsure as to whether or not anyone is watching, and thereby causing them to internalize the hypothetical inspection and judgment of the observer (more generally, the Foucauldian idea of power/knowledge isn’t about what people know, but about the ways in which particular ways of producing knowledge always involve particular organizations of power).

Anyway, the point of this post is to announce that I’ve set up a Facebook page for this blog. I notice through my own panoptic surveillance of how people arrive at this blog that some people are sharing posts on Facebook, and it occurs to me that those of you who use it might like to get updates about new posts via Facebook; if you “like” this blog’s Facebook page, you should start seeing updates from the blog in your news feed. I’ve also, slightly more problematically, added “like” buttons (and also “tweet” buttons) to each post. This does allow Facebook and Twitter to monitor your use of this blog, even if you’re not signed up with them; given the ubiquity of these buttons on other websites, I assume if you object to that you will already have taken steps to prevent it, but let me know if you’re particularly against the idea of these buttons showing up on this blog and I may change my mind.

Related posts:

1. What is Google taking when it takes our data? The internet is having one of its periodic freak-outs about a privacy policy change. Gawker posted a ridiculous, trolling article, which made its way onto Tumblr, and now is showing up in the Washington Post and on Democracy Now. The sentence causing all the concern is: In a radical privacy...
2. The dis­ap­pearing pro­le­tariat Poetic as it is, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” is surely quite false, both as an empirical description of history and as a summary of Marx’s broader theory. For the same reason in both cases, in fact. It’s not true that, throughout...
3. Ul­tra­left re­formists The curious thing about communism is how blandly realistic it is. It’s a straightforward reformist demand: “yes, go ahead and reform capitalism, but the only conceivable change at this point is towards communism.” Consider the demands for a social wage: it’s the only form of payment that makes any kind...

While The West Wing exhibits the cynicism of idealism, there is also a naivete of cynicism. Cynicism operates by revealing that, behind people’s actions lie their true, hidden, motives; but this just reproduces naivete at one remove, with a simple faith in the reality of these underlying motives. What I like about Political Animals is that it challenges this naive cynicism. In Political Animals, cynicism is omnidirectional: people use politics in the service of their desire for sex, use sex in the service of their political ambitions, tell the truth to manipulate people and lie as a result of commitment to journalistic ethics, frequently all at the same time. In Political Animals, that is, there is no “real” motive hiding behind actions, just indefinite layers of deception. In other words, Political Animals is politics as drag performance, where “motivations” are adopted and shed like costumes.

Political Animals follows the career of a female politician, who was First Lady to a serially unfaithful president and is now Secretary of State in the administration of a president she lost a primary campaign to; that is, it is Hilary Clinton’s life thinly reimagined as soap opera. In this, it’s an interesting counterpart to The West Wing, which functioned largely as an imaginary compensation for the Clinton administration, a chance for liberals to rectify through fantasy the damage done by Clinton’s personal sleaziness and political compromise (that is to say, The West Wing was fundamentally silly in just the way The Newsroom was slated for being). Political Animals is just the opposite, glorying in the venality and triangulation of its ersatz Clinton family as the foundation for its distinctively soapy interpretation of politics.

A number of reviewers have criticized Political Animals for its melodramatic soap style, lamenting its distance from the quality drama of The West Wing (admittedly, this may be USA’s fault for the way they promoted the show, which I assume was chosen because of the emerging norm for basic cable profanity, that if you’re an AMC-style quality drama you get to say “shit”; the characters in Political Animals say “shit” an awful lot, presumably as its the only curse they are allowed to use). This criticism is quite wrong, however, because, in its exaggeratedly amoral performances, Political Animals has a much more sophisticated analysis of politics than the liberal proceduralism of The West Wing. In focussing on the superficiality of politics (its dependence on the manipulation of poses, costumes, appearances), Political Animals shares its analysis of politics with Marx’s discussion of the consumate politics of Louis Napoleon:

An old, crafty roué, [Bonaparte] conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery. At a moment when the bourgeoisie itself played the most complete comedy, but in the most serious manner in the world, without infringing any of the pedantic conditions of French dramatic etiquette, and was itself half deceived, half convinced of the solemnity of its own performance of state, the adventurer, who took the comedy as plain comedy, was bound to win.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is a useful corrective to readings of Marx which see him as proposing that politics is “superficial” in the sense of epiphenomenal or ineffective, because it shows just the opposite: the “superficiality” of the politics involved in Napoleon III’s rise to power, that is, the role played by appearance, costume, and performance, is what allowed him to take control of France with the most dramatic consequences, namely, the defeat of the revolution for twenty years. Nonetheless, this hasn’t stopped people attempting to read the Eighteenth Brumaire as a vulgar materialist work about objective class fractions or something (perhaps misled by Engels’ introduction). Andrew Parker takes the Eighteenth Brumaire as his text in a discussion of Marxism’s resistance to thinking about sexuality (in the Fear of a Queer Planet connection), arguing that Marx betrays a heteronormative preference for the productivity of material/economic relations over the apparently sterile performativity of theatrical models of politics. But the text doesn’t pit materiality against appearance, but rather is concerned with analyzing different manipulations of and interactions with appearance (from the bourgeois republicans who are under the spell of appearances, to Louis Napoleon who fakes his own spells in order to create new appearances).

In any case, the relationship between economics, appearance, gender, and sexuality is more complicated than Parker acknowledges, because some of the main advocates in the history of political theory of a performative politics have connected this with a distinctively masculinist heteronormativity (especially Machiavelli, but also Arendt); for these theorists, performativity is performance or effectivity, the succesful insertion of the agent’s will into the world through the manipulation of appearance. This is not, however, the kind of performativity we find in Political Animals, and the choice of the Clintons as models is rather perfect in showing why not: Bill’s priapism is not, as it would be in Machiavelli, a mark of his political potency, but a liability which has to be constantly managed and tended to, an object of parody and an occasion for burlesque.

Related posts:

1. You can’t solve a problem with a ter­mi­no­log­ical dis­tinc­tion I’ve long been suspicious of anyone who attempts to give some kind of theoretical significance to a supposed distinction between “politics” and “the political.” Partly this is just linguistic; if you use “politics” as a noun you’re going want to use its adjectival form, “political,” at some point, and pretending...
2. “An im­pe­ri­alism that spreads out and puffs up” The world of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire is in no way the world of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in which we were “compelled to face with sober senses” overwhelming objective developments taking place or unfolding before our very eyes. This world is replaced in short order…by a world inaccessible...
3. Arendt in the West Wing On the way out after a talk on Arendt last week, a friend turned to me and said, “so, I guess you’re pretty pissed off.” And indeed I was; I’m not especially knowledgeable or enthusiastic about Arendt, but she’s certainly more interesting than her American epigones (but I repeat myself;...

Snow White and the Huntsman

Narrative incoherence, if it’s done right, can replicate the experience of watching a film as a child, or at least the experience I had of watching films as a child. Part of this was technological – before VCRs, films often had to be pieced together from whichever sections you happened to catch over a number of TV broadcasts. But more generally, as a child you don’t expect films to make sense because you live in a world that frequently doesn’t make sense: you are constantly expected to integrate new and strange happenings, perhaps while overhearing a few snippets of conversations between adults who seem to understand the world according to a logic you can’t grasp. So why, as a child, wouldn’t you experience films the same way, assuming a coherence without bothering to verify that it is actually there? Sometimes, a film’s high-handed lack of interest in persuading you of its narrative coherence can create the impression of a fairy-tale structure, in which the lack of logic becomes the sign that there is a deeper logic just out of your grip.

Unfortunately, in Snow White and the Huntsman, the film really does have an underlying logic, and this is one of the not-good things about the film that genuinely is not good: as Subashini points out, it is a racist and sexist logic of blood, lineage, and purity. The adversaries are pure others with no recognizable interiority at all: when the king runs his sword through them, they do not die like human beings but simply shatter into shards of inanimate matter. Snow White’s heroism is confirmed by her position in this lineage: she is a pure member of it, the daughter of the legitimate king and queen rather than the usurper; she is personally pure in a way that is not really explained but is repeatedly asserted by everyone in the film; and this purity makes her fecund, capable of continuing the lineage and reinvigorating the land that serves as her second body, while the usurper queen is barren and incapable of generating new life, merely perpetuating her own. Admittedly, the film does give the evil queen some time to attempt to justify her rejection of motherhood and niceness, so you can spend some time enjoying Charlize Theron’s glorious self-consciously evil performance before being reminded that the film really, really wants you to hate her.

Yet for all the film’s condemnation of the evil queen’s selfish barenness and its visual hagiography of Snow White’s white purity, it also includes a visual richness and excess which, along with its lack of interest in the teleological causality of narrative, undermines this reproductive  economy, and in this context the film’s theme song is kind of perfect (if not actually “good”). I don’t usually like Florence + The Machine, but the ludicrously overblown and goth-ish theatricality of this track is a fitting summation of what’s good, or could almost have been good, about the film.

Florence + The Machine – Breath of Life (video)

Related posts:

1. You may not be in­ter­ested in com­mu­nica­tive capitalism… …but communicative capitalism is interested in you.I was a bit surprised to see that Meryl Streep has been nominated for an oscar for her impersonation of Glenn Close doing Cruella DeVille. The whole premise of The Devil Wears Prada doesn’t really make any sense – surely PA to a magazine...
2. Tragedy of in­tel­li­gence I saw Burn After Reading a few weeks ago, but I hadn’t planned on writing about it. It’s a funny, smart, film, but pretty straightforward. Or so I thought, until I read some reviews. The New Yorker and Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian lead the field, I think, with their...
3. Voyous défoncés According to IMDB, Amnesty International was “highly critical” of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay; aside from being an amusing example of taking a film too literally, it’s an illustration of the way a certain sort of liberalism requires authoritarianism to define itself against. This is particularly a problem...