Do politics exist?

A not-so-favorable review of the Dylan movie, I'm Not There (previously discussed, and contra others).  Most provocative excerpt being this:

It was during a recreation of the London concert at which a betrayed folk fan screamed “Judas!” at Dylan that I realized the best analogy for I’m Not There is Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Only Gibson’s film is equal in its commitment to surreal reverence and literalism. The truly unbearable aspect of the Passion was not its primeval anti-Semitism or pornographic bloodshed; it was its predictability. Despite being a story that so many know down to its barest details (in four separate versions), Gibson retold it with grinding exactitude. Even Gibson’s recourse to dead languages had no effect on the film’s sense of inevitability. The horror that dawned on me when I realized that I knew – and that everyone who had read the Gospel of Matthew (or Ginsberg’s “Howl”) knew – the Aramaic for “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (“Eli, eli, lamma sabacthani?”) was the same horror that gripped me when I realized I’m Not There couldn’t resist a recreation of the “Dylan-goes-electric” 1965 Newport folk festival, replete with the apocryphal story of Pete Seeger attempting to take an axe to the electric cords because he couldn’t hear Dylan explaining that he wasn’t going to work on Maggie’s farm anymore.

Meanwhile the real beef on Saval's part appears to be two-fold:

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New Journal

Worthy of your reading time: Radical Musicology:

The journal espouses no particular theoretical line, ideology or programme. However, responding to a perception that the projects going under the names of ‘new’ and ‘critical’ musicology have been succeeded by a certain disciplinary retrenchment or even counter-reaction, we aim to encourage work which explicitly or implicitly interrogates existing paradigms, and which acknowledges that musicological work will always have a political dimension. The politics we favour might be summarised as a desire to democratise the field of the permissible.

ha!

Gravitas...

(UPDATE: Sorry - should have explained what exactly this is for readers lucky enough not to live with (rather slim) possibility that the likes of this guy will soon be your head of state... From NPR:

Republican presidential contender Sen. John McCain (AZ) joked about bombing Iran this week during a campaign appearance in Murrells Inlet, S.C.

McCain was asked by an audience member about possible U.S. military action in Iran.

"How many times do we have to prove that these people are blowing up people now, never mind if they get a nuclear weapon. When do we send them an airmail message to Tehran?" a man in the crowd asked.

In response, McCain said, "That old, eh, that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran" — which elicited laughter from the crowd. McCain then chuckled before briefly singing — to the tune of the chorus of the Beach Boys' classic "Barbara Ann" — "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, anyway, ah ...."

The audience responded with more laughter.)

rev tim haggard: music saturday

A song I listened to recently put me in mind of Reverend Tim Haggard's situation.

The song is by the band 'Garbage.'

The title of the song is "Sex is not the enemy"

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turning: the voice that tickles

[A guest post by blah-feme.]

What do you want of me, siren?  Why do you turn me so, why do I stop and listen?  How am I to remain after your song?  What am I after you fall silent again?  Where will I have moved to?  The siting (and citing) of the voice in song with the feminine has a long and continuous history, and it marks a certain texture of the Western episteme, a certain materiality that is formidable.  To turn to that voice is not to be hailed in the Althusserian moment of becoming-again, but to wonder.  It is to raise a question, to pose the nature of agency, of self, of the ground of the resources of subjectivity as we think it has arrived to us.

If there is one thing that makes thinking about voices, especially the voice in song, infuriatingly complex, it is its parallax function:  the singing voice shortcircuits the mythological composure of he-who-speaks and invokes the troublesome knave-who-feigns.  This Narrenschiff, this ship of singing jesters, has long since set its course for the heart of Arcadia, and threatens to bring the most impudent thuggery to its heart.  Sing and you shall lose who you are and, what is worse, listen to that song and you are forever lost.   Proust was one who saw this with extraordinary clarity, in this much-quoted passage from The Fugitive:

My mind ...was entirely occupied with following the successive phrases of O sole mio, singing them to myself with the singer, anticipating each surge of melody, soaring aloft with it, sinking down with it once more... Each note that the singer's voice uttered with a force and ostentation that were almost muscular stabbed me to the heart ... This I remained motionless, my will dissolved.

This sirencic trope of song as seduction is very old and always remarkable for its fidelity to the structure of the parallax: 

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Voice, voice, voice (grit, mud, friction)

The following is a guest post by blahfeme, author of the weblog, blah-feme.

Voicing, finding one’s own voice, passive, active, middle voices, voice leading, voice-overs, voice training, to voice as if to say… around that word, vox, voz, Stimme, голос, φωνή, λαλιά, a number of highly territorialised and powerful tropes orbit:  the voice marks an origin, a departure, a making sound out of silence, a movement, a breath of discourse–it’s life.  A becoming and an authority.  Voices do not sing–to sing is to transform the voice into the singing voice, a voice other than itself, something always already at odds with itself–to set that voice into song, to take the prosaic shortness of vowels and lengthen them, set them onto a more determinate pitch structure, order that production differently, structure stress differently, make voicing into singing, is to bring voice into an unsettling relationship with itself, and to disturb something we have tried to keep hidden for a long time:  our voices, voicing, what we say… it is all, in the end, susceptible to the capricious terminality of material.

The terms on which the singing voice might be said to do cultural work are extremely difficult to catalogue, since post-reformation European and North American cultures at least have tended to deal more readily in imageries, tropes and topoi that are available to visual shorthanding.  The voice might thus be said to pose something of a representational problem; its sonic materiality that never settles cannot be held still.  This fidgety voice, a material capriciousness, seems always somehow just out of reach, beyond those things that we are able to say, and yet saying them nonetheless.  This point is made by Chion:

The voice is elusive.  Once you have eliminated everything that is not the voice itself–the body that houses it, the words it carries, the notes it sings, the traits by which it defines a speaking person, and the timbres that colour it, what’s left?  (The Voice in Cinema, 1)

It might therefore be worth trying to grasp this problem as one that can be addressed not simply in terms of what we ‘do’ with the voice, but in terms also of what it does to us–in what ways does it intervene in the formation of our ego ideal, how does it articulate, thematise or otherwise engage gender, race, class and so on?  Mladen Dolar has recently made a striking intervention in this problematic, and settles on a conception of voice as in some sense the sinthome of the Western episteme.  In this passage, he addresses Georgio Agamben’s Homo sacer and gets to the core of that epistemic problem that haunts our speaking:

… the voice is not simply an element external to speech, but persists at its core, making it possible and constantly haunting it by the impossibility of symbolizing it.  And even more: the voice is not some remnant of a previous precultural state, or some happy primordial fusion when we were not yet plagued by language and its calamities; rather, it is the production of logos itself, sustaining and troubling at the same time.  (Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 106.)

What is a stake for Dolar here is the very ground on which the split, as recognised by Derrida, between logos or word and phone, is built.  That rupture, a symptom for Dolar of the operation of culture (‘the production of logos’) on the voice, makes access to the voice extremely difficult, as if it were in some sense always spectral, always in some sense beyond the fixing operation of symbolization.

Dolar’s extraordinary insights nonetheless leave something out (and he would no doubt, as a Lacanian, be the first to admit as such since that orientation is all about marking the abyss, the missing, the lack, the sinthome).  To slightly over-characterise Dolar, there is in his book a certain disdain for the aesthetic pleasuring in the voice, a disdain which flows from the need to sustain a critical relationship with his field (this is a point also made by Pinocchio Theory in his recent review of Dolar’s book).  I want to suggest here that, although that critical relationship is crucial to the appropriate operation of Dolar’s strategy, it can also, if left unattended to, operate as a kind of dead-end political Puritanism, at its worst a kind of disavowal of the pleasuring that forms a part of any coherent political theory of the voice, especially as we encounter it in song.  In a sense, then, the question as to how the voice does cultural work is a question about the relationship between ideology and enjoyment.

When that voice takes flight in song, the volume of that encounter between ideology and pleasure is cranked right up.  Voice in this way would thus, in this extended Dolarian sense, represent not merely an impasse or a place of traumatic breaking (as Žižek makes it clear in his Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, the mother in Hitchcok’s The Birds, on seeing her neighbour’s corpse with bloody eyes, runs from the room and cannot make any sound… the horror sticks in her throat); it would also allow for a place of joy, for ecstatic derangement, for being other than instrumental to the symbolic machine.  To enjoy voice is to become a noise maker, to become, in the eyes of those that speak from their gilded place of symbolic composure, a thug. Before my ASBO is served, then, let’s wreak some havoc.

Imagine three voices in song (I am thinking here of voices in the singular, in solo, of course, although choruses, choirs, ensembles of voices, each bring their own set of dynamics that I will think about elsewhere). 

The first, a voice that does not hover very far off the ground–a voice that seeks to stage a certain imagination of authenticity:  I think here of the quiet rustle of José González or Devendra Banhart.  These are voices that perform a certain easiness, a composure that is not, in the end, about intimacy but, on the contrary, about the spectacular.  Logos gives way to the pleasure of that staging without ever finding its ground - voice here resonates with the double-bind of singing - on the obne hand it is the simple voice of unmediated song, of song as spontaneity and, on the other, it is voice that is disciplined, held in a small territory in order to project the fantasy of immediacy.

The second is a voice that refuses the dance of authenticity, refutes the organic voice and reaches fo the flattened, open-ended hydrid voice, a voice without origin, a voice without subject. It is the voice of the machine, the voice without inflection, without meat. I think here of Kraftwerk, of Bjork of 'pluto', of the end of the organic dream of voice as the speaking of labour.

The third is a voice in flight, a voice that startles with its ephemeral shimmer, its staged-ness, its artiface - here 'trained' voices predominate - opera, Lied, but also certain forms of country, rock and jazz - they are voices that embrace their constructedness, their taking flight in technics, in their agility, their lightness, their airy openness, their purity.

Here then are at least three of the voice-tropes that operate in Western song, in a song, that is, which has consistently sought since the Reformation to rehearse what Lacan has termed the 'social psychosis' of the Western episteme. Song, that supplement to speech, that double supplement of writing, a symptom of the hardness and fixity of media, of the late modern predicament, of alienation from labour; that song is also a staging, a showing, a narrating of the predicament, its dramaturgy.

Richard Middleton has recently gestured at this possibility in his new book Voicing the Popular (Routledge, 2006) in which he understands song as offering a privileged site for understanding a certain vernacular history of the family, of labour, gender and of 'subjectivity'.  I would go further – what this voice in song does is disturb the fantastical ground on which family, gender, labour, authenticity, even, can be thought – it stages whilst drawing attention to that staging, it narrates whilst radically materialising narrative forms and conventions, it speaks whilst pointing at the breath hat makes speech possible: in this sense, voice is the hardest of all materials.

George Bush singing "Sunday Bloody Sunday"

Thanks to onegoodmove andthepartyparty.

Variations on a theme: La complainte du partisan

(The following is a guest by John Barner, author of the weblog Slow Learner.)

On February fifteenth of this year, the partisan lost a friend.

Anna Marly (formerly Anna Betoulinsky) died at the age of 88, leaving behind a legacy that included two variations on the theme of the partisan. The Chant des Partisans (1943), was initially written by Marly in her native Russian and was translated, with Joseph Kessel and Maurice Druon, into French.  At the same time, Resistance fighter Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie penned the lyrics to another song, to a tune of Marly’s, entitled La complainte du partisan (1943).  Armed only with her voice and a guitar, Marly would travel around London to perform the songs either for BBC radio broadcasts (heard by comrades via pirate radio in France) or small audiences.  The former has risen to anthem status in France, while the latter is perhaps best known for its inclusion (in a modified form) on Leonard Cohen’s Songs from a Room (1969).  In his theorizing of the partisan, Carl Schmitt notes that a historian “finds examples and parallels in history for all historical situations”¹.  Given that I have spent a significant portion of my life as a musician and songwriter, I have written the following while searching, in a way, for a lyrical parallel in the example of Marly’s songs—a voice, perhaps, that embodies (or is embodied by) Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan.

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The Echo of the Subject

I've been looking around for an online version of Lacoue-Labarthe's essay, "The Echo of the Subject," in Typography:  Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics.  It would be a useful and provocative starting-place, I think, to assist in weaving certain themes together.  But maybe, in the end, it's better not to blog about such things, or at such length as would be necessary.  I'll settle for quoting just the very beginning, to give a taste.  (Let it be said that I'm not at all sure this is a great idea, however.  Maybe it's still a good idea, if it encourages some people to read further, or at the very least:  "it's pretty bad but nothing terrible.")

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W(h)ither the Philosophy of Pop?

"Do you realize how ridiculous you must sound when you bring into the classroom, the place where should be taught universal truths, this [spluttering]…this rubbish. This is little more than a propoganda campaign for MTV. Pop caters to the lowest common denominator; the energy of pop is too often the testosterone-fueled energy of male adolescence; the languages of pop are impenetrable, ephemeral jargons; it locks into stereotypical patterns which relate purely to physiological artefacts and thus have no significance whatever to philosophy. Man will always have need of entertainment; this is not, however, philosophy; or even philosophically interesting. There is no philosophy, nor politics, in pop."
               -Grayson Darkling-Furniss 

"All art...is...essentailly poetry [Dichtung]"
                -Martin Heidegger

Having heard the phrases, "pop philosophy" or, "the philosophy of pop" resonate in certain corners of the 'sphere, having read this generous transcription by Robin; (from whence the quote above); or this post in particular by K-Punk (since followed up by many others); or, going even further back, this good interview by Infinite Thought...well here a mammoth post, with generous (but hopefully not ponderous!) excerpting from an article by Mark Greif follows...

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Not Music

From an interview with Helmut Lachenmann:

"LACHENMANN: Yes. Tonality was something that wasn't rejected, but had to be overcome. We have to find new antennae in ourselves, to listen more, and this is a wonderful adventure of discovery. For me, my music has as much beauty as any conventional music, maybe more. Beauty is a precious idea. I want to liberate this term from the standardized categories. I'll give you a little example. I used to teach children, and I presented them the music of Stockhausen, etc. They said that it wasn't beautiful, they didn't like it. I asked them what they liked, what they thought was beautiful, and they first hesitantly named some pop music. The next week, I went there and brought two pictures with me. One was an attractive photograph of the movie star Sophia Loren. The other was a drawing by Albrecht Dürer, who had drawn a picture of his mother: very old, with a long nose, and bitter looking face. She had a hard life, and her face was full of wrinkles. I showed the two pictures and asked "Who is more beautiful?" They were totally confused, and then came the wonderful answer I'll never forget - it was the highlight of my life. A girl said "I think the ugly one is more beautiful". This is the dialectical way. Looking at this picture, one feels the precise observation of her son. Not to make it more beautiful, not idealized, just showing it. It was full of intensity. To me, as important as beauty is the word intensity. I search for this in music."

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Katrina Related Remix

Louisiana 1927

Hell on Earth (NPR)

George Bush Don't Like Black People

Cornel West

The Militarization of New Orleans

"He [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks.  They key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."  -H.R. Halderman, cited in Lockdown America by Christian Parenti

Ottawa Citizen

Notes on Universal Experience and Difference

Project Censored

Reporters Gone Wild

Crooks

New Orleans to be rebuilt without "underclass"

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I'm no f&cking Buddhist, says Bjork & Zizek

Link: Revenge of Global Finance, by Slavoj Zizek.

I like this article from Zizek. Watching the stupid film I turned after Yoda's 'let go of everything' speech to someone or rather, and said to a friend: "fucking Buddhist". I like the "fucking" here, for it in itself announces a passionate dislike - itself an attachment, and one I refuse to let go of despite seeing my amigos one by one succumbing to the true Dark side. In this very attachment I announce my desire for the Other, my desire to refuse this capitalist supplement of meditating after a hard day's work. Instead I have a Guinness and blog (pardon the self-referentiality at this exact moment).

But I'm a copycat here: Bjork said it first, no doubt because many confused her as such.
"I’m no fucking buddhist, but this is enlightenment" (from "Alarm Call").

Zizek's `most interesting' point, I think, is that the reason the Revenge of the Sith seemed so bland, so narratively inferior, is because Anakin's transformation into Darth Vader was not, as it should have been, because he became Evil precisely because of his zealousness to battle Evil, but simply because he was weak-willed. Boring, especially if Lucas really wanted to make a political point... (though I'd say Bush's handlers are Evil from the get-go, not that they are perverted in their very quest for `rooting out' Evil - or if so, they were perverted a long, long time ago...). Anyway, this explains why it lacked "the proper tragic grandeur... Anakin should have become a monster out of his very excessive attachment with seeing Evil everywhere and fighting it".

ADDENDUM (for those not familiar with Zizek's understanding of Christianity, i.e., for those who aren't aware that he is, in fact, an atheist):

Part of the logic in the background of this article is that to be an atheist (as Zizek is), one must pass through the Christian experience.

Christianity is the only religion where God dies. When Christ dies on the Cross, God dies too. God only remains, then, through the faith of Christians (in the Holy Spirit, the community of believers). Obviously, then, Christians are likely to waver in their faith. This can lead to extreme violence towards others in the desperate attempt to `shore up' one's wavering faith.

It can also lead to atheism. We can only be atheist because of Christianity. If we just reject the Christian legacy tout court, we are only presupposing a dumb pagan or Buddhist God from which we cannot find a path to atheism.

There is, then, nothing more regressive than denying `our' Christian legacy.

(Of course, if you get this confused with the neocon agenda, I shall have to bonk you over the head.)