evening redness

I was so very excited to teach this class, and it has gone very well to date. It does tend toward the “Shit only Ben knows” thing with great frequency, but it’s worked out because the class, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, seemed to put a lot of faith in the idea that “it must be going somewhere.” I think we are all on the same page now, but there were a few moments early on when we were using terms that we had not yet defined (because we were too busy defining other terms) and thus were a bit confused. If you have read Ken Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto you know what I mean. He starts using “vector” in the first chapter, but does not fully define the term until the next to last chapter. Yes, you could skip right to that chapter, but then you won’t know what “class” and “representation” mean. And don’t get me started about “world,” a term you might not even recognize as a term until you get to the last section of the book. In the end, you get it all at once, and that’s often how I teach. I believe that it’s my job to simply put all of the concepts into play. If I do so well, the students will be able to put them together, sometimes in the manner I might, more often in far more exciting ways.

Oh, and you know what else don’t get me started on? The amount of shit I had to go through with the CU Library to get some of these albums on reserve. THEY’RE FREE ONLINE PEOPLE AND THEY HAVE NO REGULAR RELEASE!!!!

In any case, here’s the description:

Benjamin J Robertson
Course Description
ENGL 3116-001 TOPICS IN ADVANCED THEORY
Music, Networks & Digital Media
MWF 11:00-11:50, VAC 1B88

Films such as American Grafitti, Apocalypse Now, Forest Gump, and numerous others that follow from the 1960s use music, whether in an ironic or straight fashion, as soundtrack. On one had, that point is obvious, tautological. On the other hand, it is an idea worth investigating in the digital age. The premise of this course is that music no longer operates as a soundtrack, as a meaningful commentary or complement to events (fictional or real). Whereas the 1960s (drawing or earlier traditions of folk and blues) gave the United States and the world the idea that music could create or reinforce the meaning of political movements, cultural moments, or individual experiences, the late 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century demonstrate that the most important aspect of music is no longer its involvement with semantic meaning, but rather its encoding: whether we can play it through an iPod or a Zune, whether it can exist online, whether it can be tracked through p2p networks, whether Apple will allow it into the iTunes store (and how much it will cost according there according to the level of security attached to it). This class will consider these issues and others through readings in music and political economy, music and digital technology, etc. Additionally, we will consider several musical texts produced in the last ten years that explicitly involve themselves with and question processes of encoding and networking.

Partial reading list

• Jacques Attali: Noise: The Political Economy of Music
• McKenzie Wark: A Hacker Manifesto
• Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid: Rhythm Science
• —., ed. Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture
• Jonathan Sterne: “The mp3 as Cultural Artifact”
• Eric Harvey: “The Social History of the mp3”

Partial listening list

• Girl Talk: Feed the Animals
• The Kleptones: A Night at the Hip-Hopera
• djbc: The Beastles and Glassbreaks
• Danger Mouse: The Grey Album
• Negativland: No Business
• Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back
• The Beastie Boys: Paul’s Boutique

Text list

Schedule

This is a paper I wrote for a special issue of a journal. It was deemed inappropriate for the issue’s theme. I thought that I might resurrect it, but it seems rather dated at this point–at least in certain of its references; I stand by the overall argument. It’s also a bit strange, at least to me (and no less now than when I wrote it). No doubt it will come back in a somewhat different form in Material Science Fictions, but here it is for now.

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West can be read as an investigation of the problematic establishment of US jurisprudence upon no other authority but its own. As such, the novel recognizes both the Enlightenment-driven necessity of removing nature and religion as a nominal source of foundation for the state and the potential consequences of this removal. If power was to begin and end with the citizens of the nation, then there could be no appeal to any abstractions in the constitution (the process, not the document) of that nation. However, the self-grounding of power claimed in Article VI of the US Constitution (the document, not the process) exposes the truth that power and authority have never had any foundation in abstract ideas. Thus McCarthy’s great character Judge Holden can claim that “Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views” (250). Otherwise put, all of the rationality, all of the morality, all of the human-constructed words that stand behind and comprise the Constitution (both the process and the document) of the United States, matter not at all in the face of material force. In the society of the early twenty-first century, this fact has taken on new importance as our interactions with our environments—our acts of “doing”—are increasingly prescribed by the material force of code.

“To do” is, obviously, predicated on an ability “to do.” As implied above, such ability should not be understood strictly as a function of the user using it. Any consideration of “to do” must include an analysis of the effects of environment, broadly understood, on the user’s ability to use her ability. Regardless of will, there are some things that will always remain outside of anyone’s ability to do, outside of what natural law allows, not because of a lack of pure ability on the part of the user, but because of the inhospitable affordances inherent to the interaction of user and used. For example, even the best runners in the world cannot exert their abilities to do to the same extent when they run on sand as they can when they run on a level, all-weather track. Sand does not afford speed in the same manner that the track does. Only when runner and surface meet (to simplify a complex interaction for the sake of explanation) does “running,” fast or slow, obtain. Similarly, no artist, however great, can create art in the absence of a suitable medium or stylus.

These examples of the function of natural law demonstrate that any ability to do involves a relationship between bodies, between individuals, between things. Moreover, they demonstrate the limits of human power in certain environments or contexts. As the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey reminds us, such limitations are a fundamental fact of existence and overcoming them always involves a process of discovering new ways of interacting with things. The ape’s use of the bone as a weapon constitutes an evolution in the interaction of individual and thing and is, mythically speaking, the first human/machine interface. Furthermore, this use afforded its user greater power and subsequently engendered new relationships between him and his peers as well as between those peers and their environments. Whether we understand the advent of the human/machine interface to be a benefit or a curse for humankind, we cannot deny its continuing effects on the structure of human existence. Moreover, we cannot deny that the material interactions it enacts and affords (or constrains) have greater consequences for future actions than any rule subsequently constructed to regulate them. Historically, the very existence of such rules implies the primacy of that which they rule.

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Okay, so that’s a totally clichéd academic title: Strange Phrase: The Things I Will Discuss to Explain the Strange phrase. Anyway. . .

I won’t pretend to be an expert on occasional poetry, but I will bet that Pope did not perform “The Rape of the Lock” past his prime to a bunch of aging baby-boomers who want to party like its 1712. I’m thinking of anecdotal accounts friends once gave me upon seeing Modern English circa 1997. Of course they wrote and performed other songs besides “I’ll Stop the World (and Melt with You)”, but really, who wants to hear them? Also recall Homer Simpson on Bachmann Turner Overdrive: “They were Canada’s answer to CCR. Their big hit was TCB.” When he sees them perform not only can he not wait for “Taking Care of Business,” but he can’t even wait for “the workin’ overtime part.” But I digress, as neither of these examples get to exactly what I mean to discuss.

While we might dismiss the occasional as too rooted in a particular context and therefore not amenable to its own legacy, I would argue that this situatedness makes the occasional all the more important and, presently, all the more rare (which is to say impossible). According to Wikipedia, “Goethe declared that ‘Occasional Poetry is the highest kind.'” Likewise, Hegel had the following to say about it (I can’t believe I am about to agree with Hegel):

Poetry’s living connection with the real world and its occurrences in public and private affairs is revealed most amply in the so-called pièces d’occasion. If this description were given a wider sense, we could use it as a name for nearly all poetic works: but if we take it in the proper and narrower sense we have to restrict it to productions owing their origin to some single present event and expressly devoted to its exaltation, embellishment, commemoration, etc. But by such entanglement with life poetry seems again to fall into a position of dependence, and for this reason it has often been proposed to assign the whole sphere of pièces d’occasion an inferior value although to some extent, especially in lyric poetry, the most famous works belong to this class.

The occasional speaks to a specific moment, to something that had a specific historicity, a particularity, perhaps a singularity. It resists appropriation into a culture of sameness, or at least did. Well, perhaps it never did and I am merely romanticizing what the occasional was. Perhaps better to say that what the occasional could be is a fleeting moment in which representation touches materiality. If considered in an historical manner, the occasional thereby might offer some understanding of its occasion. That is most likely wishful thinking, but I throw it out there.

What the Modern English and Homer Simpson examples begin to demonstrate is the fact that the present United States can in no way deal with occasionality. I see this inability in student essays which rush to declare whatever they are about to be the “greatest poem/modernist poem/novel/postmodernist novel/song/album/etc. OF ALL TIME!” Everything has to be eternal, capable of transmitting meaning to everyone, everywhere, everywhen in the same manner, transparently and without regard to historical notions of reading, epistemology, etc. When we are confronted with something new, we try to make it something old. I think that this desire is a function of nostalgia, which dovetails with the fact that we don’t give a damn about anything Tony Basil has done since “Hey Mickey.”

To be a bit more academic about this issue, let’s just say it’s very much related to Jameson’s lament that postmodernism is bound up with a culture that can no longer think historically.

With that, a screed about contemporary music or, rather, a contemporary song and what it means in terms of contemporary culture.

While I do have some idea what happens in the world of music, I have no idea whether the things I know about are actually part of some kind of social vocabulary. I know Beyonce made one of the best music videos of all time, but I have no idea what the song sounds like. That said, I may be making mountains of molehills here.

That said, I have some issues with Jay-Z’s “Young Forever.” Before I begin, let me say that if Jay-Z wants to use the lyrics and music from an older song to make a million dollars, more power to him. I don’t care and would like to see copyright open up a bit for more of this kind of work (although, given the fact that his use of the song in question is almost certainly controlled by a mechanical license for covering the song and not sampling it, the issue of copyright is not really an issue here).

Nonetheless, because the 80s are on my mind constantly, and because I trace many contemporary cultural and political problems in the United States to that period, I take issue with the manner in which Jay-Z appropriates Alphaville’s 1984 song “Forever Young,” which, thank god, has no relation to the Rod Stewart song of the same name.

Here’s Alphaville:

What strikes me most about this song and video (or, rather, the combination of the two) is the utter lack of nostalgia. To contemporary ears, the title “Forever Young” reads as an ode to a better time, the right now/present when we are as beautiful, fit, and carefree as we will ever be. As I will argue below, Jay-Z seriously (perhaps willfully) misreads the song as such. Of course, it’s not surprising that he does so. A great deal of rock and popular music celebrates youth for one reason or another, and I know more than one person who thinks that The Ramones’ cover of Tom Waits’ “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” is some kind of punk rock anthem to youth and its fuck-all attitude. (It’s actually a late song that, like Twain’s Huck Finn, is performed by an older person/group who only understands what he/they had in his/their youth by virtue of no longer being youthful. That self-awareness is the price of maturity and exactly what destroys innocence).

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I was slated to teach ENGL 2000: Literary Analysis (the basic how-to-read class required for all English majors at CU), but the low enrollment snake bit me and I am now teaching Modern and Contemporary Literature (a non-major class focused on, well, modern and contemporary literature).

For the past two semesters I have taught the class on the 1980s, the decade I am most concerned with in Corruption and Sameness. However, I get rather bored teaching the same class over and over. I varied the texts a bit from Spring 09 to Fall 09, but even so, I can’t get away from Blood Meridian and Watchmen and I can only teach them so often before they start to get stale to me, so I am mixing it up in Spring 10 with a class on the 70s: ENGL 3060-023 & -028: Modern and Contemporary Literature: The 70s: Paranoia, Technology, & Decline. Here is the reading schedule:

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From Lawrence Lessig, a video slideshow about what he calls “institutional corruption.” He defines this term as a systemic issue endemic to public institutions in which influence, within an “economy of influence,” is brought to bear on certain policy decisions in such a way as to erode both the ability of the institution to effectively conduct its affairs and the public’s confidence in the institution itself.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past 3 or 4 years about the notion of corruption, stemming in part from my reading of the film Syriana and the Robert Baer book, See No Evil upon which the film is based; Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day; other films and novels; and the state of American culture in the early 21st century and since the 1980s. My last post, on the opening credits to Watchmen, is part of this thinking, even though I do not mention “corruption” anywhere in it.

Any reader of Aristotle knows that “corruption” is associated with change, as it is in On generation and corruption. However, my own thinking, which has far more to do with corruption in political and cultural contexts than it does with what happens to milk when you add lemon juice to it, leads me to understand corruption as a force, or better a mentality (in the mold of Foucault’s governmentality), committed to resisting change. As Lessig discusses in the video, the three parties to the institutional corruption affecting Congress (members, lobbyists, and interests) require that the system remains in place so they may continue to benefit from it.

There is a scene in Syriana in which Christopher Plummer’s character (the oh-so-appropriately named Dean Whiting) meets with a Middle Eastern prince from the fictional country “Syriana” (“Syriana” is a sort of mashup of Arabic sounding words and is a fictional country the US wishes to establish in the Middle East; it will be completely receptive to US interests and give up its oil for pennies on the dollar, so long as those in power get their’s). Whiting asks the prince if he would like the Emirship (kingship), which would come presumably at the expense of his older, better-educated, liberal brother. The younger prince does get to be Emir; his brother is assassinated. Recalling the earlier scene, in which the two men (and a third, unidentified international middleman) sit around and smoke expensive cigars and drink expensive cognac on a very expensive yacht after a lavish birthday party for the prince (he complains he did not get enough), the conclusion seems obvious: these dealings, this corruption, is solely for the present. That is, what these men do is for the benefit of the here and now.

Of course, that seems obvious, as Lessig makes clear that people go into politics now to be come rich rather than to save the world. Thus politics (and the corruption that comes with it) are about the present at the expense of the future. But I think this presentism is more radical than it at first appears. Consider the title of Thomas Frank’s book: The Wrecking Crew. It reminds me of what I once heard Manuel DeLanda say during a lecture: that the job of any present administration is to fuck up the country so badly that the future administrations will not be able to fix it.

The goal is assure sameness. That is the point of corruption. This sameness, however, is not about simultaneity, nor is about simple ubiquity. Rather it is about extending the present into the future, making sure that there is no future proper in the sense of a “to come”, in the sense of something new that threatens the status quo. This sameness, which is born of corruption, is something far more worrisome.