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The whole of May 6th was marked by demonstrations which turned into riots in the afternoon. The first barricades were thrown up at the Place Maubert and defended for three hours. At the same time fights with the police were breaking out at the bottom of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, at the Place du Châtelet, and in Les Halles. By the early evening the demonstrators numbered more than ten thousand and were mainly holding the area around the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where they had been reinforced only after 6p.m. by the bulk of the march organized by the UNEF at Denfert-Rochereau. On May 8th Le Monde wrote: What followed surpassed in scope and violence everything that had happened throughout an already astonishing day. It was a kind of street fighting that sometimes reached a frenzy, where every blow delivered was immediately returned, and where ground that had scarcely been conquered was just as quickly retaken. . . There were dramatic and senseless moments which, for the observer, seemed rife with madness. And on May 7th L'Aurore noted: "Alongside the demonstrators could be seen bands of young hoods ( blousons noirs) armed with steel bars, who had come in from the outlying areas of Paris to help out the students." The fighting lasted until after midnight, especially at Montparnasse.  For the first time cars were overturned and set afire, paving stones were dug up for the barricades, and stores were looted. The use of subversive slogans, which had begun at Nanterre, had now spread to several parts of Paris. Insofar as the rioters were able to strengthen the barricades, and thus their own capacity for counterattack, the police were forced to abandon direct charges for a position strategy which relied mainly on offensive grenades and tear gas. May 6th also marked the first intervention of workers, blousons noirs, the unemployed and high school students who that morning had organized important demonstrations. The spontaneity and violence of the riots stood in vivid contrast to the platitudes put forth by their academic initiators as goals and slogans. The very fact that the blousons noirs had fought in the streets shouting "The Sorbonne to the students!" marked an end to an entire era. Tags: collage, history, nostalgia, politics, theory
Current Location: 85704
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From Karl Marx, Grundrisse-- The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to the greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clans. Only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a "political animal," not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of a society. Production by an isolated individual outside society -- a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness -- is as much of an absurdity as the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other. Tags: holiday, politics, theory
Current Location: 85704
Muse: Celestialis - Deepchord Presents: Echospace - The Coldest Season
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In my seminar on New Media this semester, I've realized that the distinction between amateur and professional pornography -- as well as the latter's incentive to craft products that seem amateur -- provides a useful point of entry for discussing a whole range of issues, from user-generated content to reality television to the nature of selfhood in the era of social networking. I'm even tempted to say that, had there been no amateur pornography, New Media scholars would have been forced to invent it. Needless to say, the fact that the distinction between amateur and professional pornography is so helpful proves problematic in a classroom setting, where -- with the exception of a very limited number of cases, such as the courses Linda Williams has taught on the subject -- the topic can be discussed but not tackled directly. That's why I find today's interview between San Francisco Chronicle sex columnist Violet Blue and Bay Area porn actress Lorelei Lee so intriguing. In this case, the words that can be spoken do an able job of standing in for the film that can't be shown: B: How does a performer distinguish between sex work and sex-not-for-work?
LL: I think every sex worker has a different idea about the answer to this question — people seem to have very individualized physical and emotional boundaries and processes of compartmentalization. Some people choose to only perform certain acts on camera, in order to save something for their personal lives or for their significant others. Some women I know who primarily date men decide to only have sex with women on camera. Some women I know who primarily date women, decide to only have sex with men on camera.
Personally, I don't choose to draw that line in terms of physical acts, but rather, I have an emotional boundary between work sex and personal sex. That is, work sex, for me, is not an intimate experience. I don't choose to become vulnerable or emotionally open while I'm having sex at work. I enjoy having sex at work, and I often have affectionate feelings for the people I work with — many of them are my good friends — but I don't expect them to react to me in a vulnerable or emotionally intimate way and I don't react to them in a vulnerable or emotionally intimate way.
I'm not sure that I have good advice about how to do this, because I do think that strategies for this are entirely individual, but I also think it comes back to the importance of remembering what you will and won't get from a day at work. You will get a certain kind of attention for a limited amount of time and you are likely to get an intense physical experience. You are far less likely to get that attention for any extended period of time or to develop a romantic and/or emotionally intimate relationship with your co-workers. Even though you are having sex with some of the people you work with, you are still likely (perhaps advisedly, considering the prospects of your continued employment) to have a somewhat formal working relationship with them. I'm wondering, in reflecting on comments like the ones Lee makes here, whether the appeal of amateur pornography is not simply a result of our craving for reality, but also -- the word "dialectical" seems hard to resist here -- a testament to our desire to forget the work of sex, whether it's performed for money or not. After all, it takes effort to make even truly amateur pornography, just as it does to produce any cultural artifact. But the pleasure we derive from it, as well as other content imbued with the aura of the amateur, seems to be grounded on the fantasy that it's possible to produce without working, at least in the sense that a market-driven economy defines work. We don't just crave reality per se, but a reality in which production and consumption bypass the circuits of capital. And we're willing to buy into the illusion that such a detour is possible to such an extent that commodities like professionally produced amateur pornography are the hottest thing going. Tags: new media, sex, teaching, theory
Current Location: 85704
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Last Friday Joel Schalit and I gave our presentation at the EMP pop conference. It went reasonably well, despite a technical complication that led to the musical bed we'd set up starting late and therefore getting out of sync with the words of our text. Earlier that afternoon, however, we'd made the short trip to Seattle's superb independent music station KEXP in order to speak about our topic for possible later use in one of the station's short audio documentaries. And then we got to go on air, where, with Kevin Cole, a wonderful DJ, at the controls, the bed worked perfectly. Later that weekend, our gracious host Vance Galloway found a way to distill the four-hour stream in the KEXP archives into a sound file comprising only our twenty-minute segment. Be advised, if you listen -- it's in Apple's AAC format, BTW -- that I'd had way too little sleep and way too much coffee -- I was in Seattle, after all -- that day, amping up my nervous energy to the point where I ended up sounding like I'd been making recreational use of a dentist's office. Joel, who was so tired that I feared he would start nodding off, revealed his radio experience by sounding calm and collected. Oh well. At least the content came through clearly enough. In closing, I must give a shout out to some folks whose words played a major role in the development of our presentation and whom time constraints prevented us from properly acknowledging at the EMP: K-Punk, Simon Reynolds, The Stranger's Charles Mudede, Steven Shaviro, Tomas Palermo, and, last but not least, our host Vance Galloway. Joel knows enough about dub to fill their footprints, but I feel like I'm wearing baby shoes in comparison. Tags: clips, conference, friends, media, music, politics, theory
Current Location: 85704
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This is a self-interview I conducted while in the process of trying to write a big "statement" piece about the study of popular music for the Bad Subjects "Music" issue that I was then in the process of editing: Q: What's the basic point I'd like to convey in my piece?
A: The fact that the vast majority of popular music thinks of itself as being outside of a degraded mainstream. In other words, even the seemingly most 'mainstream' music (to alternative sensibilities) has its own ways of defining its artisitc expression as genuine, authentic, or culturally worthwhile. Often these depend more on the *context* of the music's production or reception. Madonna's music may be mainstream, but the apparatus that surrounds its marketing and performance strives hard for an alternative effect. A band like Bon Jovi thinks that it matters to its fans because it establishes rapport with them. Pet Shop Boys music sounds very mainstream, but its reception within gay/queer culture marks it as doing something else.
Q: So the real point is that popular music almost always distances itself from the supposedly democratic mainstream of 'popular culture' because it recognizes that 'democracy' has become synonymous with capitalism?
A: Maybe. That reading would suggest a 'moment of critique' within almost all popular music that I would feel inclined to deconstruct. I mean, isn't it the illusion that popular music provides something alternative to what the free-market in general provides a large part of what makes it sell so well? This would introduce Jameson's reading of the Utopian dimension to mass-cultural forms.
Q: Alright. I thought you wanted to talk about popular music as a 'means of distinction'?
A: I do.
Q: Well, how does it tie-in with the fact that almost all popular music distinguishes itself from a degraded mainstream?
A: I realize that there are two separate lines of thought in y argument. On the one hand, I want to talk about distinctions *within* popular music--'taste-preferences'--, on the other hand, I want to talk about the way in which individual taste-preferences within popular music define other taste preferences *as* the mainstream in order to make themselves 'alternative'. Popular music is a medium for the expression of 'negative identity', identity fashioned at the expense of others.
Q: What about 'cross-identification' and the cultural capital questions raised by the Bourdieu stuff? Are you going to throw them to the wayside? It seemed as if you were building up to an interesting point analogous to Annalee's point about trans-gender people and drag (of course, her point was based on economics--but it occurs to me right now that poorer people, particularly ethnicities, spend a lot of their money dressing in 'drag', i.e. as someone better off than they are--think of Darnell at Vallejo High who needed money for clothes). Do you want to evacuate the class issue?
A: No, I *do* want to note how an interesting combination of economic and cultural capital allows better-off people to musically 'trans-gender' themselves. It's harder to sustain collections in four genres than one. It occurs to me right now that music critics tend to promote diverse genres because they tend to get albums for free!--the music business gives them albums for review...I don't know, I'm getting lost here.
Q: Eat some pizza!
A: I did.
Q: Let's try this again: what do you want to say?
A: I want to suggest ways in which popular music differs from other mass-cultural media like mainstream film and T.V. by showing how it functions as a 'means of distinction', a way to separate oneself and one's subculture from a mainstream figured by other people's identities, taste-preferences, subcultures. By way of explanation I want to take alternative rock and rap as an extreme example of this. It occurs to me even more strongly now that both alternative rock and rap try to capture their alternativeness *within* the text more than supposedly more 'mainstream' acts like Van Halen or Madonna do. Maybe that's too fine a distinction to make. It *is* clear that alternative musics strive to interrupt pleasure with what is painful (white noise_), jarring (violent, sexual, or Joycean lyrical content), or otherwise demanding interpretation.
Q: So are you going to find a 'safe' way of explaining how alternative musics take the inherent anti-mainstreamness of popular music to its logical extreme?
A: I guess.
Q: What about the generational thing?
A: I do want to raise the issue of generational distinctions. It seems to me that music of a given generation has always tended to define itself against an older mainstream: the mainstream is the world of stable, secure, grown-up, self-satisfied fathers (and mothers). I think there's some blurring between such generational distinctions and the distinctions made within a generation between 'alternative' and mainstream youth for example: somehow the mainstream kids get coded as being like their parents. I think I might also want to bring up the hatred older artists like Rod Stewart and Eric Clapton arouse in younger generations.
Q: And where does Bourdieu fit in to all of this?
A: As far as generational distinction goes, clearly younger generations have a 'temporary class consciousness' as the not-yet and possibly never empowered lackeys and toys of the older generations in power. Whether this makes any sense within Bourdieu's schematics is a mystery. It occurs to me that his definition of taste is extraordinarily static and not particularly receptive to the notion of generational distinctions *within*, say, the working class.
Q: How about cross-identification and drag?
A: There would appear to me both generational cross-identification or 'generational drag' (me liking the 60's) and generational *identification* through the mixing of disparate musical genres *within* a particular generation's music (rock and rap co-mingling).
Q: Is this drag emancipatory a la Butler's *Gender Trouble*?
A: Not inherently. Maybe I should address the non-fixity of cross-id, the fact that temporary alliances form (90's rock and rap) for one situation (hating older folks), and are then replaced by other temporary alliances (60's psychadelic rock and alternative rock of today) for another situation (bonding with/or having nostalgia for Boomer music and time).
Q: So how does this tangent tie-in to your basic point about popular music as a means of distinction?
A: Maybe I just want to say that popular music is a particularly potent means of forging identifications and thus constructing an identity (however temporary a particular identity might be!) and that we must consider it not as a unified mass-cultural form so much as a potent aesthetic means of dividing the whole into subgroupings and individual.
Q: Would that just be a bad thing?
A: I think I'd like to isolate the capacity to make distinctions itself as a potentially useful political tool honed to sophistication by popular music. The trick would be to transfer the moment of distinction from the aesthetic realm (sucks/doesn't suck) to the socio-political realm (sucks/doesn't suck), *then* use it to distinguish between passivity and praxis, cynicism and commitment. The issue turned out nicely, with pieces that continue to impress me. And my editor's column, composed in a matter of minutes, provides the most succinct summary anywhere of my take on the politics of taste. But the essay itself went down in flames. I'd tried -- and not for the firs time -- to do too much, to do more than I needed to do. And what I ended up with was the difference between my aspirations and my capacity to realize them. Still, the remainder lives on, reflecting scattered light onto the potentially breathtaking but always already benighted shapes that rise from the vast steppes of the counter-factual. Although I haven't even looked at what I wrote for this abortive essay since October, 1993, I can see now, rereading this self-interview and a number of other fragments from the same period, that I ended up making many of the points I'd intended to make back then in the conference presentation I delivered at the UCLA DisChord conference on May 8th, 1997, a piece I later revised for publication in Bad Subjects as "Autobiography in Music Criticism." Even though all the sentences in that one were composed from scratch, a good number are eerily similar to ones that I had written for the "Music" issue and then filed away in the crawl space of trauma. "Autobiography in Music Criticism," incidentally, continues to be the essay of which I am proudest. Tags: autobiography, bad subjects, cultural studies, fragment, music, taste, theory
Current Location: 85704
Muse: a mental breeze from The Chronic
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The topical nature of this graphic, which I first shared with my readers four years ago, makes it worthy of a second look. But I'd recommend looking past the surface in search of its true significance: 
At first I was going to write that I'd pay money to read Slavoj Zizek riff on this image. But then I was inspired to jam a little myself. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has a theory of what he terms "communicative action" that I find extremely useful for making sense of social interaction. Like the sociologist Max Weber before him -- one of his biggest influences -- Habermas believes that we have to be mindful of the ideals that structure our experience, even though our practice inevitably falls short of realizing them. Post-structuralist thinkers have tended to dismiss Habermas either as someone too willing to overlook the power relations that intrude upon everyday communication or too ready to presume that there are human traits that are not bound to particular historical and geographic contexts. What their critiques usually miss, though, is the degree of self-reflexivity that Habermas exhibits in articulating his theory. He repeatedly acknowledges the fact that he is bracketing real-world problems, but feels that doing so is a requirement for figuring out why we continue to hope and strive for understanding, despite all the evidence that suggests how difficult it is to achieve. Although it is unfashionable and perhaps even dangerous for me to say so, I actually think that Habermas's theory is fundamentally correct. Having made that confession, though, I feel obliged to make it clear that I am conceiving of that word "fundamentally" at a level of abstraction that leaves room for a lot of attention to the details he passes over with big brush strokes. It's like he provides a map of the terrain that's good enough to know how to get where one's going, but too imprecise to determine what to do upon getting there. Take this graphic with the two chocolate bunnies, for example. While it's easy to grasp in an immediate way that brings laughter, it also doubles as an earnest commentary on what one might term, with an eye towards Habermas, "actually existing communication." From this perspective, the joke's deeper truth would be to show that the sort of "communication oriented towards understanding" that Habermas theorizes may not be a real-world destination so much as a mirage, perpetually shimmering on the horizon but never getting any closer, not because we lack the desire to make the journey, but because we are too deformed to undertake it. In other words, the missing ass and ears of the two chocolate bunnies can be seen to represent the negative effects of social, political and economic forces that precede and exceed us. If we fail to hear each other properly -- a technical distortion in communication, rather than the sort generated by asymmetries of power -- the problem may not be the sort that an engineer can solve. Who or what has bitten off the bunnies' parts? Is this simply an existential condition that is a sine qua non for all humanity? Or does the answer require that we attend both to the particular and universal constraints that conspire to do so much damage to the chocolate rabbits' integrity? Personally, I think this graphic reminds us to pay attention to the forces that shape individual experiences and capacities irrespective of personal preference, as well as the ways in which the need to express the pain of perceived injuries can come to dominate interpersonal communication to our collective detriment. Perhaps what this humorous picture is really conveying is not that all attempts to engage in "communication oriented towards understanding" are bound to be hopelessly compromised from the get-go, but that it is impossible for us to communicate our lack to others, since what we are missing -- the ability, in a sense, to realize that others feel no more whole than we do -- is precisely what disables our understanding. Tags: humor, theory
Current Location: 85704
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