cheese it, the cops!

our aesthetic/sexual identities: a sketch

obviously, i've been working on a chart of the interplay of gender, orientation, and aesthetics. in a positive moment in my aesthetic critique of girls and gay men, i said we love y'all anyway, in part because of the differences. now let me try to say a bit more about why, and how i'm thinking about this.

first you get the disclaimer: everything is at an absurdly general level; like, for example, david halperin, i'm trying to describe a cultural imaginary; no person occupies any point in the taxonomy with perfect centrality - and that goes for male and female as well as gay and straight and the various clusters of taste. also every interstice is occupied. i'm identifying an aesthetic coalition of straight women and gay men, and i'm saying that this alliance accounts for a lot of the way things look and sound in popular culture; i suppose one could sum it up like this: a celebration of artifice, an apotheosis of appearance, an orientation toward spectacle. but then just to portray the other side, where i was trying to pair lesbians and straight men, as the wholesale outlet of reality or sincerity or something would just be begging the question in favor of what i'm calling 'our side'. because, true, the appearance/reality split itself needs all sorts of examination. but one way it needs it is precisely as a gendered and orientated pair. it's a complementary system, a yin yang. you can't have one without the other. but i could also say: we're classical, you're baroque. you're rococo, we're neo-classical. you're impressionist, we're cubist. you're pop, we're minimalist.

look i think all these things arise in a system of complements, but then you've got to put them in action in time, like art movements, which they also literally are; they merge and diverge, divide within and coalesce across; the situation at a given time is complex and it's in the middle of reconfiguration. without touching the biology or genetics at all, the way male and female and straight and gay function makes them, i think obviously, interdependent and unstable. the center can be seen in all the sexual and erotic and aesthetic pairings, all the ways people in different groups are drawn to each other and repelled by each other, all the places and ways they merge and segregate themselves from each other, and each other from themselves: psychologically, linguistically, musically, visually, sexually.

the distinction between straight women and straight men - the immense venus/mars differences that supposedly make us incomprehensible to each other  - are of course also the center of heterosexual erotics. right? we want to be incomprehensible to each other, and hence be ourselves. this really is actually symbolized in the yin yang, for example: it's a fucking cosmology of difference. and within heterosexuality, the differences become more and more intense because they are the center of the erotic lives of both sorts of people: men get manlier and drive trucks and watch sports, women get girlier and wear frills and makeup and stuff. they drink chardonnay and gossip or whatever. yo we despise that. we can't stand that shit. but what it means to be heterosexual is to emphasize the differentiation and want precisely people who drink creamy lattes and have closets full of incomprehensible grooming products. we are conniving to make ourselves so different that we can't communicate, and so different that we can't not want, can't not be for one another what the other lacks. then again, precisely because of wanting, we are drawn into proximity. we get to know each other. we want to be friends. we are frustrated that we can't communicate. we try. we oscillate toward similarity, and of course we are massively the same as embodied human beings and as part of the same culture or system of identities, even if our bodies and cultures are a bit different too. we try to approach our heterosexual relationships homosocially.

but and so, i don't think there's any objective normative weight in the eroticization of difference: sameness can also be eroticized (and every nuance in between). so we might call that homonormativity or, you know, yinyin or yangyang. well, guess what: heterosexual men and women are the same in that we are heterosexuals, and gay men and women are both gay. so this dimension is not just in play within gay and lesbian groups. now, as, say, lesbians emerge into a kind of erotic solidarity, straight men are migrating to similar symbol systems and erotic configurations, and vice versa: or as the hets push out they enter into an erotics of identification with the homos of the other gender, scattering outliers throughout the journey. one thing i'm trying not to do here is make the het categories fundamental; or to define the homo categories as parasitic on the het categories: i do think in their contemporary configuration they are mutually simultaneously caused, and inconceivable except as a whole system.

the thing is almost an erotic vortex or tornado, in which people are pulled in all sorts of directions by identifications and by disidentifications or disavowals. so the fact that i'm not female, and that i signal that with an entire repertoire - the way i move, the way i dress or groom, the way i adorn my environment, and so on - just is also the fact that i'm male: a complete aesthetic arsenal, but one that only makes sense in relation to its complements. and then the fact that i'm straight: well, that makes use of the same stuff. and so does the fact that you're not a straight woman. and then, with a tilde, that you're not a lesbian; then, that you're a gay man; then, with a tilde, that i'm a straight man, and so on, on each whirl picking up more debris, the whole thing changing shape as it spins.

pretty soon, you have, for example, the diva thing and all its doubly complex longings for the same and for the different. look one thing a diva is likely to be is a sex symbol among heterosexual men: the diva manifests various flavors of extreme femininity. and gay and straight men end up appreciating beyonce from different angles, but certainly erotically both ways round. if, say, lesbians at a certain point distinguish themselves from straight women by identifying with masculinity, then part of masculintiy is precisely eroticizing femininity: voila, lipstick. or if gay men are disavowing heterosexuality by disavowing masculinity or identifying as feminine, then part of being feminine is eroticizing masculinity: pretty soon you've got muscle-bound dudes with mustaches everywhere, more masculine than me by a ways.

but then these pairs might also put the eroticization of differences at an ironic distance, might put them in play, might be too conscious of them to regard them as natural, might see them as erotic resources rather than unbridgeable gaps. and that might be something you could teach us: to stop regarding our own sexuality as natural etc, or to not regard it as only natural, to see that it too is at least in part a performance, and put us in a position where performances of straightmaleness could be critiqued by straight males from different angles, or to see even paradigmatic enactments of masculinity as vulenrable to aesthetic and other sorts of critique. a muscley straight guy with a mustache might re-think his look and come to think of it as intentional. meanwhile, the hets are yearning across the gap and trying to keep the other side's interest or loyalty, and you've got straight women in business suits and metrosexuals. even in a very simplified picture of sameness difference/sameness sameness, there is a constantly volatile swirl of possibilities within all the groups and between them. 

there are many oppressions in this unfolding situation, long histories of oppressions that are also eroticized, as dominance and submission, for example. alright? but still we do not want to be without the thing, because then we'd stop wanting, and also become incomprehensible to ourselves. and there are also many liberations, many zones of liberation, many stonewalls. all sorts of loves and all sorts of beauties are opened up as possibilities in the midst of the storm; it's the longings opening up within and across that make the beauty possible or give rise to it or even are it. the het male beauty of a michael jordan or a v-8 engine, the gay beauty of a judy garland or the exact right outfit. and it would not be crazy to look at these as both homo as well as hetero-erotic, as expressing solidarity and difference at once, or the erotics of identification and the erotics of distinction. there might even be transpositions over time as an expressions of yearnings-across.

what you actually want to do with these identities is not destroy or overcome them: no one really has that power even if they are sheer or mere cultural constructions. what you want to do is play with them. we need to try to reduce some of the weight, or some of the power of these systems to configure hatreds even as we try to hold on to the ways they configure loves: hatreds of the same and hatreds of the different. for these are also systems of exclusion, of course, or that's just to say the same thing again. what you want to try to do is increase the pleasure of them and decrease the pain, and i say the best place to focus and celebrate is the art, taking art at its broadest possible sweep, from body presentation to food to music to scent to interior design to cityscape. this is where the play of differences is relatively harmless, but profound. you can't have the identities without exclusions or at least judgments of taste that more or less condemn what is in contrast. but a question is: to what extent can you have these judgments without contemplating destruction? we often actually do pretty well at that, and straight guys in particular need to do it better without abandoning ourselves.

so one thing i am not going to do is just try to disown my male straightness. rather i am actually going to celebrate its aesthetic. we have given a lot of great stuff to the world, and we are, in our own way, extremely aesthetically oriented, or if you could take the oppression out, what you'd have left would be all kinds of interesting symbols and gestures, including all these signifiers of sincerity and authenticity and simplicity, hard work and self-discipline. you might think those are oppressive ideas; you don't actually want to be without them though. that's how we want to be seen, how we dress, how we want to think, how we want to talk.

i think the oppression has been taken out of this aesthetic repertoire at least to this extent: gay male/straight female aesthetics dominates our culture, even if it's still for the most part (apparently! straight men might always be gay men passing) straight men in congress or the board room. now, i say that our various aesthetic expressions and principles constitute a contribution and that you love us for it. and we don't want to lose it partly because of course you do want it. need it, i believe. and of course these categories play out in the tornado in a complex and equivocal way: we become self-deluded in our dedication to the simple truth, and y'all come out of the closet or delight to dress fashionably as an expression of the truth that should not be hidden. bruce springsteen - dressed simply, workin hard all night - might be as much of a gender/orientation re-enactor as rupaul, but might be less conscious of it.

and then i will say, albeit with some grudgingness because i do have the aesthetics i do have, that y'all have made all sorts of contributions too. and even if they were correctly described as frivolity or play or appearance or pop or hedonism or melodrama or spectacle: well, who the hell wants to live without those things in the world, right? anyway, even if i tried to withdraw from them, the withdrawal is defined by their presence. but i don't withdraw: i distinguish myself from them and i eroticize them, see? but looking at it the other way round: hedonism is not sufficient for anyone's liberation. liberation requires hard work, and you want to liberate yourself into something true or meaningful. on the other hand, folks like me seem to be somewhat pleasure or play-deprived. you need anger, but we're perhaps too angry. sheer insulation or ever-growing polarization are unfortunate, but they also intensify the yearnings that end up in new syntheses.

in short, we should really love each other. secretly or not, we do. we certainly need each other and depend on each other and want each other. we should stay different and we should yearn and try to appreciate. we should slum in each other's bars from time to time, and smile, etc. right? i think if you let these things play with you and play with them, the system might become more liquid or improvisational or multi-dimensional. but really who knows? it might even get more extremely differentiated or simplified, which could be interesting too if it doesn't freeze. but you want to start thinking of the gender/sexuality square as an immense set of aesthetic resources, which are also ways to be. 

so, y'all think you can dance. could jerome robbins or rudolf nureyev improvise a great dance while you were trying to kick his ass? didn't have the stones, baby. but my people can do that. and we go a step further too: we dance while we kick your ass. we kick your ass by dancing.

oh yeah i forgot about race! oh well.

i hate it when you lecture me

speaking of my personal cult of iiird tyme out, ii'll be giving talks on bluegrass and on realism in pictorial arts at east tennessee state u on sep 26 and 27. maybe i can put the texts and even the powerpoints up on google docs? actually, the bluegrass thing, thur sep 27 in ball hall at 6 (wait. 6? won't everybody be eating? bring pizza?) will be on hippie grass like muleskinner (embedded below), as well as the seldom scene, newgrass/"progressive bluegrass", the dc bluegrass scene etc.

buchanan

i went back and actually watched the full 1992 buchanan speech, embedded below. everyone might think the republican party is moving right, but this speech would be unimaginable this year. he just goes straight at gay rights, for example. it's quite disturbing from this angle. it's also remarkably gracious to bush, a model of the heal-the-party genre.

however, it is a remarkable text and a remarkable performance. this was one of the few times in this era that the speechwriter emerged from behind the curtain. certainly buchanan had minted priceless phrases for agnew and nixon. here he issues an incredible string of alliterative aphorisms. and he wrote them all himself: that's why he delivers them with such ownership and conviction. i'm sure obama is capable of writing a speech; i don't know how frequently he does. they certainly have that collaborative feel these days: written by committee, though no doubt a better committee than romney's. we'll see next week.

to a large extent, the american presidency is an expressive office, and to a large extent the expression consists of words, though of course it is multi-dimensional. but the words are too rarely his own, so the role and the person come apart in a disturbing way: a form of pervasive inauthenticity.

revolutionary grrrrlz

don't know how i let pussy riot slip through the cracks. it is remarkable that for better and worse, punk music still harbors a preternatural political power.

The tragedy of cheap beer fortunes and the right wing in American folk art

In which Crusader AXE confuses John McCain with Henry Plantagenet (the fifth of that name) and enlists Blind Faith and Warren Zevon to make some kind of obscure point with pianofortes and lutes and stuff...

romney and trump

trump endorses romney: whatever. in accepting the endorsement, however, romney described the trump hotel in lv as 'magnificent' (start this at about 2 minutes).

surely we can't elect a president who associates himself with the trump aesthetic, any more than you'd vote for a candidate who likes andrew lloyd webber. i mean, there are limits. character matters. there has never been a more repulsive style than trump's, a more crass, banal, and tasteless display of conspicuous consumption. the thing in nyc is grotesque enough. i hope when these things are in ruins, they will be remembered as emblems of the era in which we celebrated by a degraded aesthetic our own economic degradation. the only signifier is gold.

where is william jennings bryan when you need him? yo mitt, you shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold.

the reactionary mind

watching up w/chris hayes and seeing corey robin, author of the reactionary mind: conservativism from edmund burke to sarah palin. see the problem with robin's frame, also pointed out by mark lilla in the nyrb this month, is that the definition of conservatism as the defense of privilege and hence reactionary in the face of movements for emancipation, obviously begs all the normative questions. then the only remaining mystery is that conservatism can sell itself as a popular philosophy at all, and the fiendish manipulations by which it does that become an object of study, along with the false consciousness of the reagan democrats or whatever. 

rather we should see the left/right spectrum as a contest between different cultural coalitions, led by elites in a contest for power. what? are columbia or harvard profs the representatives of the downtrodden in a democratic movement of emancipation? the idea that the left is emancipatory and the right oppressive is just a reproduction of the rhetoric of the left circa 1848; it doesn't look like what's there. where in reality is the non-hierarchical left? not in american liberalism, e.g., or in marxist communism. what robin's thesis gets half-right, however, is that the left and right take shape in response to one another. but as lilla said we could really use a taxonomy of the right. because the fact that robin's thesis takes the left/right split as fundamental and coherent in itself disqualifies it as social science. add that he accepts the account of the taxonomy itself of one of the positions, and you have something that by definition is a mere polemic, not a 'study' of the 'conservative mind.'

just take a hyper-primitive idea of progress and reaction: changing things vs keeping things the same; moving into the future as against stopping time, as though that were among the choices. well, the average working-class person might have various stakes either way. no one can just endorse change or no change, and for example various government programs for the amelioration of this or that might effect you one way or another. working people too can get entwined in the coils of the state or rightly regard it with extreme suspicion. the managerial expertise of professors might not be so obviously attractive after all even on a sober analysis of one's own interests.

at any rate, you can't start with interests as only economic interests, and these are bound up at every node with religious interests, moral interests, psychological predilections, individual autonomies, regional interests, racial interests, aesthetic interests, social affiliations, and so on. that there would be the precise failure of the left: reduction to the economic, while regarding everything else as mere ideology or superstructure. rather, you had better listen to people's account of their own interests, and the role of religion in the inner city or in deeply rural zones of america makes answering that a religious question. appeal to managerial expertise or cold-war style militarism or constitutional fundamentalism is an aesthetic as well as an economic issue, etc. we need to be pluralists about real values and hence real interests.   

i would start by dividing the poltical spectrum along the lines of domination and resistance to domination. of course, what resistance is at a given moment also depends on the shape of the dominant ideology, which might be right or left.

say yes to the caucus

don't tell anyone, but i love the way the major-party candidates for president are chosen: this whole iowa/new hampshire thing is charming and antique.

raising cain

i have to say that that cain cigarette ad is the best i've seen since gravel. it makes fun of political advertising, and actually gives a little slice of human reality, which traditionally must be completely expunged in political discourse. you empty focus-group fuckers just got smacked by something real. that smile is priceless.

 

 

i'll be delivering some version of 'political aesthetics' - complete with immortal tech videos - at notre dame [corrected date and time] at 4 next friday (april 8). annenberg auditorium of the snite museum of art.

i think we'd all soon tire of a trump administration, among other things because it would be the most colossally tasteless - the most grindingly gauche - administration in history. that's saying something, because nixon and reagan, for example, favored simulations of a european royal court: they went all rococo and shit. but that trump tower thing on central park is just the most nouveau-riche blingbling goldmustbebeautifulbecauseit'sexpensive eyesore in nyc. well we are a gauche people in a gauche era; still i feel there are some limits. i can't find an image that really does it justice, but i like the globe out front, suggesting that donald girdles the earth.

nixon's praetorian-guard uniform:

 

 

 

political aesthetics is out!

  me and the great god molotch, next week at the u of maryland college park, where i went to college.

Jamaican Deejay Playlist

Highlights of the vast territory of Jamaican deejay music from the rock steady period (circa 1968) until the digital era (early 80s), when the deejay became even more prevalent. A deejay in Jamaican music is what hip hop refers to as a rapper; the role developed from sound-system selectors chattering over records. I include two cuts in the "singjay" style, by Mikey Dread and the astounding Eek-A-Mouse.

Count Machuki, "Dance Beat"
Count Machuki, "Warfare"
King Stitt, "Fire Corner"
King Stitt, "Rockers Corner"
King Stitt, "Herbman Shuffle"
Prince Francis, "Mojo Rock Steady"
U-Roy, "Wake the Town"
U-Roy, "Version Galore"
U-Roy, "Wear You to the Ball"
U-Roy, "OK Corral"
U-Roy, "Night Nurse"
U-Roy and the Melodians, "Rock Away"
Dennis Alcapone, "Go Lizzy Go"
Dennis Alcapone, "Guns Don't Argue"
Dennis Alcapone, "Rocking to Ethiopia"
Dennis Alcapone, "Jungle of Crime"
Dennis Alcapone, "My Voice is Insured for Half a Million Dollars"
I-Roy, "Black Cinderella"
I-Roy, "Don't Get Weary Joe Frazier"
I-Roy, "Holy Satta"
I-Roy, "Welding"
Big Youth, "Screaming Target"
Big Youth, "Every Nigger is a Star"
Big Youth, "Be Careful"
Big Youth, "S.90 Skank"
[Glen Brown and] Big Youth, "Opportunity Rock"
[Hugh Blackwood and] Dr. Alimantado, "Reggae Music"
U Brown, "New to the Nation"
U Brown, "Stop Them Jah"
Trinity, "Three Piece Suit"
Charlie Chaplin, "Chaplin Chant"
Mikey Dread, "Roots and Culture"
Eek-a-Mouse, "Border Patrol"

dub playlist

Dub Playlist (2 Discs)

The attributions are all very confusing. Some of the songs are attributed to the original singers who issued the singles; some are attributed to the producers who originally made the song; and some are attributed to the dub engineer (Tubby, Scientist, Philip Smart, Jammy). The question of who is the artist of this material, pointedly, has no clear answer. That in itself shows you what happens to intellectual property in postmodernism. Adrian Sherwood and Mad Prof (Neil Fraser) are British producers of the early eighties (to the present) who took up the mantle and innovated digital techniques.

King Tubby, "Tubby on the Throne"
Dub Syndicate (Adrian Sherwood), "Empires Falling"
King Tubby, "Dubbing My Way"
Augustus Pablo, "King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown"
Scientist, "De Materialize"
Wackie's, "Addis Ababa Dub" (from African Roots, volume 1)
Scientist, "Red Shift"
Lee "Scratch" Perry, "Super Ape"
Keith Hudson, "Black Heart"
Lee Perry, "Zion Dub"
Augustus Pablo, "Satta Dub"
Mad Professor, "Systematic Dub"
Augustus Pablo, "Vibrate On (Version)"
Yabby You, "Chant Jah Victory"
Yabby You, "Jah Victory Dub"
Errol Thompson, "Extraordinary Version"
Philip Smart, "Cool This Dub"
Dub Syndicate "Hard and Tuff"
Prince Jammy, "Dub There"
Augustus "Gussie" Clarke, "Murderer"
Lee Perry, "Noah Sugar Pan"
Augustus "Gussie" Clarke, "Black Foundation"
King Tubby, "King Tubby's Badness Dub"
Lloyd's All-Stars, "Dread Dub"
Glen Brown, "Realise (Version)"
Wackie's, "Wackie Rock Tune" (from African Roots, volume 1)
Dub Syndicate, "Tremolo Dub"
Mad Professor,  "Masquerade Dub"
Keith Hudson, "Michael Talbot Affair"
Glen Brown, "Tel Aviv Drums"

black nationalism 4: roots and dub

ok sorry about that video yesterday. replacement is coming. just learning the equipment. sorry to lose nice ratings, etc. but this is more acceptable, both the talk and its audio.

i am having a helluva time doing youtube videos. but i do have a couple hundred subscribers! anyway, i'm trying out a new like 40 buck polaroid video cam. it keeps freezing my imovie etc, so anyway i'm sorry about the annoying form of the titles, which believe it or not was the only thing i could make work.

christ. anyway, political aesthetics (2010, cornell university press) will feature four "case studies": national socialism, punk, black nationalist aesthetics, and american republican neo-classicism. i'm gonna do a sub-series on each. here is the first installment of the first installment: on garvey and rastafariansim, as well a little-bitty intro to "political aesthetics."

this bit should be good for my students in "politics and hip hop" next semester, among other things. playlists etc will get posted along with videos here.

the north american anarchist studies network thingummy was kind of bizarrely situated in hartford. i don't think i've ever found a city more depressing and disturbing. joni and i stayed at the marriott downtown, but also drove around: it is a concrete wasteland, like they just demolished their city and started again with a few basic principles: (a) stalinism = everything must be conceived as coherent and gigantic and be designed at once, dropped on reality like a hippo on an infant. (2) death: all living things must be expunged, except the human bodies, which must be rigidly channeled into the approved grooves. (c) security state: all must be bathed in screeching klieg light and monitored with cameras.

really there were many huge insurance complexes and bank towers, not a single one of them even interesting or odd or distinctive: the most banal modernist gigantism. each building, including the convention center/hotel where we were, is surrounded by a "plaza": just concrete platforms, barriers, and stairs. you see these things everywhere, but in this case it composes a whole downtown that has been cleansed of the human stain.

it was bizarre, and when you saw a few old houses or buildings, sad, because you realized there was a habitable human town on this location at some point.

there was a lego convention next door: thousands of 7-10-year-old boys. and it struck me that there is a solution, and if i was running hartford i would in all seriousness do exactly this: issue this army of boys sledge hammers, spraypaint, and the occasional grenade. come back in twelve hours. lather and repeat.

so my daughter emma is taking a class at nyu with the great/weird popomo theorist slavoj zizek.she directs me to the fact that he's writing abercrombie and fitch catalogue copy. it, um rocks. i'm envious all the way round.

i guess the obama-as-heath-as-the-joker poster is the talk of the town. now let me say why, as against kennicott et al, i think it is a strong image.

the first thing to notice is precisely that it is the talk of the town; obviously it has power, or it wouldn't suddenly have been reproduced on every website. the shepard fairey thing kind of snuck up on us; this sucker instantaneously...killed, and will as instantaneously dissipate.

potentially, the power of the shepard fairey obama-hope was in its ironies: i personally did not know whether to read it as inspirational or scary, until fairey made clear that his purpose was purely obamania. how the mighty are fallen: fairey's "obey giant" stuff was notable for its combination of semantic repleteness and simplicity: it kept exceeding your grasp; or it seemed completely arbitrary, but somehow it was a political commentary too, bringing into play socialist realism, graffiti, pop art, etc. it was a propaganda poster. but what could it possibly be propaganda for? it was at play in the field of political aesthetics. then fairey imitated his own style without irony. he started marketing "obey" t-shirts at target. he decided to put his pointedly ambiguous art in the service of actual propaganda: really a bizarre re-appropriation, or a kind of paradigm postmodern moment. and you had to read the previous images differently. the "hope" poster sucked the irony retroctively out of the whole oeuvre.

now that poster has itself been re-appropriated, while being injected with a whole new series of contents: the mega-movie batman, eminem's heath ledger bobblehead [our best writer: "I'll do it --pop and gobble it, start wobblin', stumble, hobble, tumble, slip, trip, then I fall in bed with a bottle of meds and a Heath Ledger bobble head"]., etc: the dementia precisely at the heart of establishment entertainment, including politics. but i would hesitate, in the absence of collateral info, to pronounce clearly on the meaning of the poster, or who put it up and why. it could be - as everyone appears to believe - a straightforwardly anti-obama image. but as kennicott points out, if so it works against itself in a variety of ways.

if i do halloween this year as obama in shoepolish blackface, that is a racist incident. but what does it mean to paint obama white? perhaps this comes from the visual shop at the nation of islam. ledger's joker is an emblem of blackbuster derangement. but obama's personality is extremely the opposite. or maybe that's a diabolocal illusion. a false self, like the forged newspaper announcements of his birth? but maybe not. what would we be saying if we portrayed al gore as heathledgerjoker? would we be wishing he were a bit more unpredictable?

what i believe and hope is that this is a street artist or an art student (fairey was at risd when "andre the giant has a posse" started appearing all over the world). our art student intends all the ambiguities, the seemingly arbitrary juxtapositions, all the layers of reference, precisely the excess to interpretation. and he teaches us that the website can be the inheritor of the sticker and stencil.

you could get a bit of a preview of political aesthetics in the online journal contemporary aesthetics. it's one of the case studies: essentially on black nationalism and twentieth-century popular music. i'm kind of proud of this bit. it's maybe not my best sheer piece of writing, but it draws together the garvey movement, rastafarianism, reggae, the nation of islam, and the history of hip hop in a way that's only made possible by recent research by people like like jeff chang and helene lee, and which i think sheds light on the history both of political movements and music.

(from the latimes, which claims to be "sorting out the facts," but doesn't at all.)

"Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable President Earl Ofari Hutchinson is calling the depiction politically mean-spirited and dangerous. Hutchinson is challenging the group to come forward." yeah extremely. but not as dangerous as the shepard fairey "hope" poster.

don't tell anyone, but i'm posting the last chapter of my next book. the chapter is on black nationalism emerging from the marcus garvey movement in relation to the religion and popular music and arts of the twentieth century: in rastafarianism and reggae; nation of islam/fivepercenters and hip hop, etc. i think the story is fundamentally new and coherent.

another book i'm reading, which traverses much the same region as chytry's *aesthetic state* is *the ideology of the aesthetic* by terry eagleton. now this is a book of great scope, studded with insights. but these insights are buried under tons of marxist and freudian horseshit. indeed, i should think the book would cure anyone of wanting to do marxist or freudian theory, much less both at once, which leads to many a comical moment. here is eagleton on, believe it or not, kant: "If there is finally no reason to fear the punitive phallic law of the father, it is because each of us carries the phallus securely lodged within ourselves." what that kind of mind-numbing lacanian crapola is doing lodged in my kant is anyone's guess. and he might just as well have thrown in that each of us has the *bourgeois* phallus lodged in our kant, since the marxism generally degenerates into random insertion of the term "bourgeois" in any given sentence. no doubt somewhere eagleton has tried to render the mommymommy/phallus/mirror-stage crap compatible with the bourgeoisie/superstructure/material conditions of production crap, but they are not, in fact, compatible. and neither one of them helps much with kant; eagleton demonstrates that clearly, if nothing else. how someone so knowledgeable, so clever etc could be this enmired in jive is a hard sad question to face.

but although palin is doing the everywoman schtick with great flair and kitsch, she's anything but a demagogue, a huey long or george wallace. she's far too flat and friendly for that. there's no flamboyant cult of personality.

Mimesis
By Crispin Sartwell

Plato to Palin is a long path. But interpreting Palin raises ancient questions about the nature of representation, in politics and outside it.
A familiar figure in representative democracies is the man (now person) of the people, the politician whose public persona is that she's just like us, whomever exactly we may be. But Sarah Palin has pulled this off with more directness and self-consciousness than any national politician of the last half century: giving shout-outs to the third grade, and throwing down "Doggone it"s with reckless abandon.
In The Republic, Plato defined representation - the relation of a picture to what it depicts or of a city councilman to his constituents - in terms of imitation. A representation and what it (or she) represents must be or seem similar. For just that reason, Plato thought representation (and democracy) was stupid, redundant and misleading.
Palin is a mimetic representation of Americana, with just a touch of wholesome hokum: an imitation of us, like a Norman Rockwell.
On the other hand, Barack Obama represents us back to ourselves in an idealized fashion: the body of Obama has taken on an aura of a redeemed and confabulated America; we are all one in the body of Obama. But Obama is also smarter and wiser than we are as a whole.
The mimetic relation on the stage is, more or less, one-to-one even if filled with puzzles: Olivier as Hamlet. But the persons who consist of many persons raise the stakes to much higher levels of abstraction, measured as the disresemblance between depiction or representation and its object. The central terms of modern political philosophy - the people, the nation, the state, and so on - pick out levels or dimensions of representation, or constitute highly abstracted imaginary second-tier ontological entities that are saturated with representational content and, qua their conceptual functions, have no other content. There are layers of representation, each of which rests on another, and a question about the ultimate reality that underlies the representational strata as its foundation is one of incredible obscurity or perhaps a matter of conceptual preference. In democracy, "the people" serves this function. But surely the use of the phrase is itself highly semiotized; it is repeated until it achieves almost full abstraction.
Immediately in Aristotle, the mimetic account of representation was criticized: Aristotle said that representation in pictures or poetry educated us morally, and generations of artists from 1400-1750 in Europe regarded their basic project as idealizing reality, combining the best aspects of real things to make a better world.
Call these the 'mimetic' and the 'eidetic' conceptions of pictorial or political representation.
In the classical republicanism of Rome, of Machiavelli or John Adams or even Madison, the eidetic conception of representation is made the basis of political representation: an aristocracy of wisdom (and property) - the senatorial idea.
In Federalist 56, Madison, with characteristic lucidity, says

It is a sound and important principle that the representative ought to be acquainted with the interests and circumstances of his constituents. But this principle can extend no farther than to those circumstances and interests, to which the authority and care of the representative relate. An ignorance of a variety of minute and particular objects, which do not lie within the compass of legislation, is consistent with every attribute necessary to a due performance of legislative trust. In determining the extent of information required in the exercise of a particular authority, recourse then must be had to the objects within the purview of that authority.

Here the legislator is considered in the role of the artist, as interpreting, idealizing, simplifying, generalizing (from its minute and particular objects) the will of the people.
But throughout the history of American politics, radical democrats have questioned the natural aristocracy of wisdom and virtue and demanded that they be reflected accurately by their representatives - fundamentally, it is a technique for holding leaders to account. Jefferson in his more radical phases, Jacksonian Democrats, William Jennings Bryan, etc.
The anti-federalist Brutus, writing in the New York Journal, said
The very term, representative, implies, that the person or body chosen for this purpose, should resemble those who appoint them - a representation of the people of America, if it be a true one, must be like the people. It ought to be so constituted, that a person, who is a stranger to the country, might be able to form a just idea of their character, by knowing that of their representatives. They are the sign - the people are the thing signified. It is absurd to speak of one thing being the representative of another, upon any other principle.

The idea of saying: I am addressing people like *you*: "middle-class, hard-working Americans. I can help you." That's one thing. But addressing them, as them, is something else again. This tracks the distinction between, say, Obama and Palin, into eidetic and mimetic representational regimes.

Plus her voice is hilarious.

in light of palin's shouts out to the third grade, doggone its, joe six packs, etc, and biden's attempt to folow suit, it's worth thinking about the relation of representation in a representative democracy. this was a major topic, e.g., in the federalist/anti-federalist dispute: to say that p represents "the people": does that mean that p is a mirror, a mimesis, of the people? or, as the federalists argued - particularly such classical republicans as john adams, hamilton, and even madison - should the representative be an idealization of the people, a filter of knowledge, or wisdom? that conception is "senatorial": ancient and modern. well, what do we think about this? for one thing it's precisely the elitist element in democratic politics.  what does it mean to republicans, e.g.? is it important if palin really is like us in some sense that joe biden or barack is not?

hey i'll be speaking at the new york academy of art (west village?) at 6 on wednesday: subject: "the politics of pleasure: beauty and totalitarianism in modern art." much augustus pablo. leni riefenstahl. gustave courbet.