Working Paper #5: Spatial Secularization: A Comparative Analysis of Religious Space in Mircea Eliade and Henri Lefebvre

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Weighing in on Vazquez vs. Frere-Jones

New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones recently penned a column called “Wrapping Up” about the “aging out” of hip hop. It has gotten a lot of responses, one of which interestingly enough is from my buddies Das Racist (though I will be focusing on Vic’s non-haiku portion of the response) with sensationalist headline “Das Racist to Sasha Frere-Jones: “Stop trying to kill rap”(which Frere-Jones linked on his New Yorker blog). Despite the overstatement of this headline, with which I have almost no doubt that Vic nor Hima had much to do, the response is prefaced with “I have to say I probably wouldn’t be wasting my time writing this if I didn’t think it would be a good publicity look for my band,” a statement much in line with what Jon Caramanica has described in the New York Times as the “shambolic” aesthetic of Das Racist. But publicity stunt or not, I wanted to take Vic’s critique seriously and hope that my comments below will not sour our friendship (nor our project LONG HAIR DON’T CARE).

Now, onto the meat of what I believe the debate to be centered on…

Here’s what I read to be the crux of Vic’s main complaint against Frere-Jones:

I’m not saying he’s consciously and intentionally trying to assert his superiority. I’m just trying to point out that his language is typical of that (white) journalistic voice which presupposes the (white) journalist’s authority.

He goes on with this line of attack, suggesting that Frere-Jones exemplifies a kind of general tendency in music journalism, in which music (read: white)  critics exercise their journalistic authority to make claims about that which is outside the scope of their knowledge or experience. In this case, it is Frere-Jones claiming in his article that hip hop is dead in 2009, not 2006 as Nas had suggested. Thus, Vic finds Frere-Jones’ attempt at periodization to be tinged with, the word I keep thinking of,  paternalism, which I will flesh out in a second.

But first, let’s see what Frere-Jones’ periodization attempt consists of, and what objections Vic raises. FJ proposes

that hip-hop is no longer the avant-garde, or even the timekeeper, for pop music. Hip-hop has relinquished the controls and splintered into a variety of forms. The top spot is not a particularly safe perch, and every vital genre eventually finds shelter lower down, with an organic audience, or moves horizontally into combination with other, sturdier forms.

So the claim is in fact a bi-level one. On the one hand, he is suggesting that hip hop is no longer at the cutting edge of pop music. This is a claim that I find to be reasonable enough. Many critics feel this way though not all agree on the significance of it. For some, this is a sign of hip hop “growing up” and an inevitable consequence of becoming American pop music itself. But there is an added layer to FJ’s claim, that hip hop has also “found shelter,” as he puts it, in other musical forms. In turn, he goes on to put some meat on the bone by looking at the new Jay-Z album, Kanye West’s recent tour, and the club smash of the year Kid Cudi’s “Day n’ Nite,” suggesting that these three are considered hip hop more so by “rapping” than by sonic aesthetic.

It is in the engagement with this particular attempt at periodization that I believe Vic’s response to be most sharp. Vic suggests that if Frere-Jones thought periodization to be such a “dicey proposition,” why even go through with it? I agree, as readers of this blog well know, I frequently go after periodizer par excellence, at least in the realm of cultural theory, Frederic Jameson. Though Vic does not say it so, I believe his critique to be resonant with a kind of historiographical approach made famous by Michel Foucault–genealogy, an approach for which I have great sympathy. Vic writes,

Concepts like “periods” and even “genre” are loose collections of tropes that have no inherent meaning but rather contextual meanings that are only useful to the extent to which they can help organize texts. The point at which they actually serve to define texts is when they can enter a lens of scrutiny so intense as to render them meaningless.

I agree wholeheartedly. Vic is pointing out, if you can indulge my academic-ese, that there must be a clear distinction between an heuristic, an analytical tool, and what one believes to be actually existing in the world. When one takes that analytic tool, in this case “the period,” as somehow easily reflected in the world, then it becomes simply a matter of taste and/or opinion. This would be, what us hokey intellectuals call, an “empirical question.” And for good measure, Vic raises great points about Frere-Jones formulation of what “hip hop” is characterized by, offering up what I believe to be the most shrewd point in Vic’s response regarding the merits of the difference between “swing” and “thump.”

But sprinkled throughout this part of Vic’s response, there seems to also be a tension, a double-bind that Vic spins himself into as he constructs his argument. While he rightly takes Frere-Jones to task for reifying “hip hop” as some kind of self-contained, pure form, Vic also goes on to somehow construct a “hip hop lineage” and also defends against Frere-Jones’ charge that it is dying. So alongside such genealogical statements such as…

From the griots to the dozens to the beats to Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War” to The Last Poets to Bob Dylan to the Modern Lovers to Yellowman to the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s “Give It Away Now,” to the Butthole Surfer’s “Pepper,” to Vybz Kartel… these are all arguably rap depending on how you how one chooses one’s criteria. Rap (nor anything else) needs not necessarily be viewed in terms of origins or boundaries, births or deaths. Genre is a construction whose analytical use is primarily economic in nature. The study of genre is largely the study of marketing.

…are statements like

Kanye and Jay-Z made popular rap albums in a solid and relatively inarguable hip-hop tradition a few years back and now they are experimenting more. It seems they didn’t ”relinquish the controls,” (whatever that means) so much as they just decided to make weird, experimental, explicitly genre-bending albums (which isn’t necessarily a surprising or new thing in rap — Andre 3000, Q-Tip, and Common made similar moves with varying degrees of success years ago) and these weird, experimental, explicitly genre-bending albums made a lot of money and seem to be pretty popular with the kids.

It seems to me that Vic can be accused of wavering on the very thing he is accusing Frere-Jones of, that is, a definitional rigidity in positing of such a thing as “hip hop” as genre. I feel that Vic could have made his point stronger by denouncing the entire notion that “hip hop” was and is a self-contained entity, and then jettison it as something to defend. Further, I think Vic and Frere-Jones to be arguing the similar points, in that, hip hop, whatever it is, cannot be said to be identifiable. What on blogs, music criticism and news media is referred to in the deployment of the term “hip hop” is, at best, a floating signifier. Here, along with Vic, I believe this to be a positive development whereas Frere-Jones clearly expresses some grief.

However, it seems that Vic dithers a bit due to a kind of fallback notion of the “black experience” which he relies on not only in this particular response but also in the email that he refers to regarding another piece by Frere-Jones on Arcade Fire. (Sidenote: Come on Vic, Arcade Fire is really white.) In other words, I believe that Vic’s formulation of blackness in specific reference to hip hop to be analogous to what Vic accuses Frere-Jones’ conceptualization of “hip hop” as genre to be, and unfortunately falls into a kind of soft-essentialism of identity politics. By critiquing Frere-Jones for pulling a “white man speaks authoritatively on black culture” move and accusing him of such sentiments as “Nice try, Nas, but leave it to the professional (white, college-educated) music journalist to make sweeping statements about (black, ghetto-originated) music,” I believe Vic undermines the shrewd analysis that makes up most of his response. By framing his argument this way, I think it gives the reader a false sense of what Vic ultimately goes on to suggest, which is not so much a “white man, don’t speak out of your place” argument, but something else altogether.

If indeed, Vic was “just trying to point out that his language is typical of that (white) journalistic voice which presupposes the (white) journalist’s authority,” could we not, in turn, ask him if he would’ve felt better if another writer for the New Yorker, say, Kelefa Sanneh, would have written the piece? If he did wish to investigate the paternalism of the white critic, I think he could have addressed the issues of power, authority and cultural capital more directly by looking at why Frere-Jones is given the status of “expert” in the first place. I think Vic assumes he does, but I would ask, With whom does Frere-Jones have this “expert-status”? It must be for those of us who are educated enough and with access to the New Yorker, the utter embodiment of American white, upper middle-class cultural elitism. (If you don’t buy this, then I suggest you go to a session of the New Yorker Festival and see for yourself. I tried but the tickets are too expensive.) I believe Vic to also overstate Frere-Jones’ importance among those Vic sees himself as defending from Frere-Jones’ racial paternalism. To put it differently, can we be sure that if I run across the street to the bodega and ask everyone hanging out in front if they knew who Sasha Frere-Jones was, that many would? If they did, would they give a f*ck about what Frere-Jones said about “Blueprint 3″? I’m not so sure. Further, what is the motivation behind this response (beyond the publicity for Das Racist, which is a worthy reason as any other)? Is it to guilt Frere-Jones? If so, then is that too not an instance of what Nietzsche calls ressentiment, or “slave morality,” in which the slave accepts moral superiority for social, economic and political subjugation?

In sum, I ultimately agree with my buddy Vic in every aspect of his response but I wonder whether what he says he’ll do is ultimately what he does, most successfully at least, in his piece.

Digital Playbor?

UPDATE: I was having embed issues but they are solved. Scroll down for the videos.

There is a conference coming up at the New School called “The Internet as Playground and Factory.” The lineup is ridiculous, comprising of who’s who in media studies, sociology, anthropology and other related disciplines. Moreover, it features three of my teachers–Patricia T. Clough (my dissertation chair), Alex Galloway (with whom I took a 6-person seminar at NYU) and Paolo Carpignano (for Fieldston/Wesleyan people, yes…Jonas’ dad). What’s cool is that the conference organizer Trebor Scholz has been taking video of the various speakers and compiling them on Vimeo channel. They’ve been fantastic quite frankly. So here they are:

Clough

Galloway

Carpignano (from different Vimeo channel but speaking on thematically similar issues)

Where you at?

Jenny Wortham of the New York Times on the “planned serendipity” of mobile social networking service Foursquare.

LINK

Related: Her blog post on the implications of informatized experience of cities vis-a-vis Foursquare.

Utter self-promotion: My new edited book is OUT

The Race of Time: The Charles Lemert Reader (Paradigm Publishers, 2009) is finally out. My good friend Daniel Chaffee and I select key writings of Lemert, who some have called “the pre-eminent social theorist in America today.” We select writings from his long, illustrious career ranging from his early writings on religion to his recent writings on the “new individualism.” Also, we have a lengthy introduction to frame Lemert’s thought in the context of American sociology.

As students of Charles, Daniel and I are especially proud of this work. Paperback edition will be out soon.

Working Papers #4: Knowledge in the Age of the Withered Civil Sphere: The Blogger as Intellectual?

This is a paper that I presented at a graduate student conference at Brown University on “the intellectual and history” in 2007.  It was actually a great panel and conference. But I discovered that I was really the only one talking about media at all, which I found to be bizarre.

And as usual, please leave comments if you wish.

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“YouTube Videos”: Redefining the Avant-Garde

I’m painfully aware that many of my posts are responses and reactions to The Medium blog at the New York Times Magazine. I should probably cut them a check if this blog made any money (or had any readers…HIYOOOO). But until that happens, I’ll keep linking to it.

At any rate, Virginia Heffernan has posted a piece on YouTube and the avant-garde, where she contends that YouTube has not only created a new genre of video but also has forced us to reconsider what avant-garde means. At the heart of her position is the way that YouTube has “facilitated” (not sure what the right word is here) a formal shift over time.

Hit videos by amateurs in the site’s early days tried to produce the recognizable short-form genres that existed on TV: music videos (“Numa Numa”) and sketch comedy (“MySpace: The Movie”). But uploaders since have drifted from known forms, contributing entries now known only as “YouTube videos,” because it’s not clear what they would have been called before the advent of the site.

This is a great point. Short-form video that was neither “a short” as many film-makers call short films (which can be as long as 30 minutes) nor a television commercial, was basically an anomaly(with the obvious exception of video art). YouTube has not only found a home for this kind of thing, but more importantly, as Heffernan seems to be arguing, birthed it.

But what’s surprising is how little the homemade videos resemble the pro goods. Sure, there are parodies of mainstream clips here and there, but mostly the amateurs are off on their own, hatching new genres. Consider “haul” videos, in which people show off the stuff they recently bought, or the popular “fail” videos, which show all manner of efforts gone wrong. Individual haul and fail videos often attract 100,000 views or more — and no one had even imagined such genres until recently. At the same time, no one at any production company seems to be struggling to serve the haul-fail audiences (or combine them?).

Additionally, what’s so great about the genre of “YouTube videos” is that it decouples the avant-garde from class, allowing for access to the avant-garde for those without cultural and technological capital.

In serving these niche audiences with their microgenres, YouTube has solidified its slot as a home for the vernacular avant-garde. For years, I have believed this, and for years people have warned (or promised) me that any day now the heterogeneous site would be steamrolled by commercial forces that would wipe out the indigenous flora and fauna. But not only has the weird, small stuff hung around — out of sight of the home page, in many cases — but it also continues to be found by its audience. YouTube may not be making money as efficiently as Google once hoped it would, but it’s still incubating novel forms of creative expression and cultivating new audiences.

However, the question that remains is whether the “vernacularization” of the avant-garde leaves us…well…without an avant-garde. Inevitably, a critic like Frederic Jameson would argue that once there is a “massification” of formal techniques once associated with an auteur such as Godard or Sheeler and Strand, the “social mission” (aka its politics of resistance) of the avant-garde is stripped away. For instance, when pastiche, the technique utilized by many avant-garde movements across a variety of arts, is incorporated into a shampoo commercial, according to someone like Jameson, the antagonistic relation is gone. It is, in effect, a “blank parody,” as he once called it.

Now, I strongly disagree with Jameson’s assessment. It is at once utterly austere and reactionary. Further, it is also a position that is complicit, at worse, and indifferent, at best, regarding the relationship of art and class. Indeed, as Jameson has noted himself, the avant-garde had to come out of the upper classes, as it was their own bourgeois lifestyle that they were critiquing. (A great example of this would be Luis Bunuel’s comical film “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), which is highly recommended.) So, are the working class and the poor relegated to politically unmotivated folk art, and emancipatory aesthetics left to the elite? It seems that Heffernan’s thesis raises a clear division in the debates surrounding aesthetics and politics, of which the Jacques Ranciere is a critical voice.(See a great interview on this very issue.[pdf])

Does one side with the “resistance” as an abstraction or does one side with “democratization” of technique?

Bonus: The trailer for “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”

New Look

I’ve changed themes for the blog, as well as the header image. Not sure how I feel about it just yet. So if the header image changes back to the eBOY image, don’t be surprised. I changed it back. LOL.

Working Papers #3: Disaffection: Blogs and Intelligence in a Withered Civil Sphere

I’m putting this up at the risk of vulnerability.(Vulnerable to suckiness that is.) This is a paper that I presented in 2007 at the Critical Themes in Media Studies conference at the New School, and I’m not sure how good it was/is. I was attempting to provide a critique of the concept of the “civil society” and what I believed to be a tendency among certain media scholars to view the Web as a simply an electronic civil sphere, using Michael Hardt and Bernard Stiegler, chiefly.

As always, please feel free to leave comments.

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Ideological Alignments on the Web

Virginia Heffernan writes a brief but rather insightful piece at the Medium blog of the New York Times about how the Web has become the breeding grounds of what she is calling “feminist hawks.” What is a “feminist hawk,” you ask? She has a succinct definition:

…one that advocates the use of force to liberate Muslim women from persecution and burkas.

As she argues, this position began its widespread movement on the web.(She even calls it an “artifact” of the web.)* The example she gives is of course the right-wing turncoat David Horowitz, who now makes a career off, what I’m calling, an ideological re-alignment that the Web has facilitated. Structurally, the Web seems like it is bent left. Or, as Heffernan describes it, in reference to online petitions:

[It contains] the promise of global participation implicit in online communication. It made clear that a far-flung community with eyes and ears everywhere — and connections in high places — already existed. You could add your name to its moral ranks with a few keystrokes.

But in fact the Web has done just as much to spread right-wing nonsense. How does one explain it? The expert Heffernan cites is Tim Hwang, of the Web Ecology Project, who suggests that what Horowitz is doing, by “championing” the rights of women in foreign countries(enough to invade them, that is) and using the Web as the primary platform for his hawkishness, is a new instance of an old technique– right-wingers using left tactics.

This is quite odd to me, as Hwang is functioning in Heffernan’s piece as an expert on how the mechanics of the Web influence the spread of certain ideas. His explanation is rather untechnological.

“The neat marriage of hawkish tendencies and feminist framing of issues does this quite effectively,” Hwang explained to me in an e-mail message. Borrowing left-wing shibboleths is one way that “conservative ideas can make it big in a generally more liberal online social spher

This kind of explanation is no different than what writers in the Frankfurt School tradition have been saying forever about the spread of Fascist ideology, but without the key insight. The spread of fascist ideology, the Frankfurt school generally argues, is not rooted in the use of fascist tactics or strategies. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Fascism spreads so rapidly because it sells itself as emancipation.** So where my confusion stems from is why Hwang is not talking specifically about how the Web functions differently in the spread of ideas. Isn’t that the point that Heffernan was trying to make at the start of her piece–that this kind of ideological realignment or “unholy alliance” or “unlikely bedfellowship” is symptomatic of the Web? So why is Hwang recycling the “ideologycritique” of mid-20th century critics, who have since been critiqued for theories of ideas that were too top-down(which I believe Hwang’s to be as well)? It may have served Heffernan well to interview Alex Galloway instead, for an alternative theory of the spread of ideology as well as a perspective far more attuned to how the technics of the Web help it do so.

*I think there is room for disagreement with Heffernan’s attempt at periodization here. For one, the rise of Western feminism (as Gayatri Spivak and Chandra Mohanty have argued) relies on a certain kind of racialized savior-status for white feminists(who can be men or women), who see themselves as on a mission to “save brown women from brown men,” as Spivak has noted.

**The loci classici of this kind of criticism, in my estimation, are: Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man as well as Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism. But nearly all the thinkers in this tradition have written similarly. Another one to look at is Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom.