Lauryn Hill- ‘i get Out’ I get out, I get out of all your boxes
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Cap LinksLauryn Hill- Their use of her is the symbolic change is capitalism, masquerading as BlkGrlMgcLondon 16 (Dianca, is a writer, music blogger, and follower of the fictive craft. She is currently earning her MFA in Fiction from the New School. She is also a black woman. Finesse) The first wave of “Formation” fever had barely settled by the time her much anticipated halftime performance with Bruno Mars dominated the blogosphere. Bey took the stage, and black America alongside their non-POC counterparts could not look away. Every aspect of her performance was lauded as empowerment. From her crew of afro-sporting dancers dressed in a fashion reminiscent of Black nationalists to her intentionally designed Michael Jackson-esque costume, fans and haters alike were reminded of Queen Bey’s reign. Yet what can be said about the irresistibly of and the lack of scrutiny surrounding Beyoncé and the “flawless” narratives that she “creates?” I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I can’t buy into the hype. I am openly anti-Bey. I don’t find her music to be particularly transcendent, nor do I view her as representation of my black femininity. For me, her brand of feminism (and the brand of feminism assigned to her identity as a pop icon) is severely limited, and her latest activism via “Formation” feels more like strategic consumerist dramatism rather than empowerment. Essentially, aside from its forthright celebration of blackness, “Formation,” much like the star behind it, is a construction tailored for the masses. It is a message catering to a demographic willing to not only invest their dollars but also their political ethos in a celebrity. Sunday’s performance, although viewed as radical through the eyes of fans, has subverted the very intentions behind the political party to which Bey’s troop of Panthers aimed to pay homage. Between retweeted images of her back-up dancers with their fists held high towards the heavens and trending hashtag movements like #BeingABlackGirlIsLit, it is clear that black Americans are indulging in a monumental cultural moment, basking in what many fans describe as the joy of seeing themselves represented in a realistic way by one of their own. Despite this, I am caught in a perpetual moment of pause. I am reminded of the continuous lack of attention given to unpacking the commercialized materiality of pop culture and its would-be gods. Above all else, Beyoncé’s music is created to generate profit much like Super Bowl 50 and its countless ads so many of us consumed on Sunday. Sure, pop music can be influential on an individual and communal level, but it is dangerous when we fail to consider the ways in which songs such as “Formation” or last year’s “Flawless” are essentially an advertisement for Beyoncé’s brand — making her forever evolving activism (and the public’s eager consumption of it) a self-sustaining cash cow with limitless potential. As Jazmine Hughes points out in this week’s piece for Cosmopolitan, Beyoncé “knows that her activism is a conversation with her fans.” For Hughes and many others, this conversation “brings Beyoncé back to what she does best: representing us while encouraging us to do better.” But what if such representation leaves some of us yearning for a conversation divorced from the very system that has historically profited from black bodies, black culture, and now black activism? If the “best revenge” or the answer to progress “is your paper” as the lyrics to “Formation” suggest, Bey’s brand of activism is ultimately doomed. Viewing monetary prowess as power is not only a familiar (and flawed) trope within her genre, it is also a predictably capitalistic formula for agency. Prefaced by a reminder to “always stay gracious,” Bey’s suggested route towards liberation is contingent on two things: respectability and the mobility that comes with affluence. Bey’s respectability politics operate on their own terms, allowing for her faithful followers to ascend but only to a point. The packaging may be different, but the pedagogy is all too familiar. Resist or dismiss her formula for agency and find yourself “eliminated,” banished to the fringe of black intellectualism and discourse. Bey’s route towards power in this sense is an ultimatum. As she addresses her listeners (“ladies”), she urges them to “get into formation,” to take action, while keeping herself at the forefront as a role model and example of how both “grace” and “paper” translates into power. “Prove to me you got some coordination,” she demands. Comply or be silenced. The options are clear: Utilize what Audre Lorde would call “the master’s tools” or be rendered irrelevant. In such moments of contemplation, activist Bobby Seale’s words in “Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton” echo in my mind. “The cultural nationalists say that a Black man cannot be the enemy of the Black people, while the Panthers believe that Black capitalists are exploiters and oppressors. Although the Black Panther Party believes in Black nationalism and Black culture, it does not believe that either will lead to Black liberation or the overthrow of the capitalist system, and are therefore ineffective.” Seale’s words and the conviction that “Black culture … will [neither] lead to Black liberation or the overthrow of the capitalist system” feels like a timely and relevant lens to apply when deconstructing representations of blackness within mainstream culture. Yes, “Formation” and its viral Super Bowl Sunday performance is inherently a black narrative, yet its mode of presentation is rooted in the same corrupt system that has lead us to this historical moment we stand in now. Activism and consumerism are one and the same. Its impact is temporary and perhaps “ineffective” in the long run due to being crafted by a capitalist we so lovingly call Bey. Bifo ExtensionTo call for a ballot is to breathe life into the system, a system content on devouring and consuming all beings and potentialities for the sake of dead labor which is turned on its head for more and more production - resistance is a sight for power to exert itself. Bifo 11 (Franco, classy mofo, Marxist scholar, After the Future, Finesse) Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object: no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal. […] The reality principle corresponds to a certain stage of the law of value. Today the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and simulation. The principle of simulation governs us now, rather that the outdated reality principle. We feed on those forms whose finalities have disappeared. No more ideology, only simulacra. We must therefore reconstruct the entire genealogy of the law of value and its simulacra in order to grasp the hegemony and the enchantment of the current system. A structural revolution of value. This genealogy must cover political economy, where it will appear as a second-order simulacrum, just like all those that stake everything on the real: the real of production, the real of signification, whether conscious or unconscious. Capital no longer belongs to the order of political economy: it operates with political economy as its simulated model. The entire apparatus of the commodity law of value is absorbed and recycled in the larger apparatus of the structural law of value, this becoming part of the third order of simulacra. Political economy is thus assured a second life, an eternity, within the confines of an apparatus in which it has lost all its strict determinacy, but maintains an effective presence as a system of reference for simulation. (Baudrillard 1993a: 2) Simulation is the new plane of consistency of capitalist growth: financial speculation, for instance, has displaced the process of exploitation from the sphere of material production to the sphere of expectations, desire, and immaterial labor. The simulation process (Cyberspace) is proliferating without limits, irradiating signs that go everywhere in the attention market. The brain is the market, in semiocapitalist hyper-reality. And the brain is not limitless, the brain cannot expand and accelerate indefinitely. The process of collective subjectivation (i.e. social recomposition) implies the development of a common language-affection which is essentially happening in the temporal dimension. The semiocapitalist acceleration of time has destroyed the social possibility of sensitive elaboration of the semio-flow. The proliferation of simulacra in the info-sphere has saturated the space of attention and imagination. Advertising and stimulated hyper-expression (“just do it”), have submitted the energies of the social psyche to permanent mobilization. Exhaustion follows, and exhaustion is the only way of escape: Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. The system turns on itself, as a scorpion does when encircled by the challenge of death. For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and suicide. So hostages are taken. On the symbolic or sacrificial plane, from which every moral consideration of the innocence of the victims is ruled out the hostage is the substitute, the alter-ego of the terrorist, the hostage’s death for the terrorist. Hostage and terrorist may thereafter become confused in the same sacrificial act. (Baudrillard 1993a: 37) In these impressive pages Baudrillard outlines the end of the modern dialectics of revolution against power, of the labor movement against capitalist domination, and predicts the advent of a new form of action which will be marked by the sacrificial gift of death (and self-annihilation). After the destruction of the World Trade Center in the most important terrorist act ever, Baudrillard wrote a short text titled The Spirit of Terrorism where he goes back to his own predictions and recognizes the emergence of a catastrophic age. When the code becomes the enemy the only strategy can be catastrophic: all the counterphobic ravings about exorcizing evil: it is because it is there, everywhere, like an obscure object of desire. Without this deep-seated complicity, the event would not have had the resonance it has, and in their symbolic strategy the terrorists doubtless know that they can count on this unavowable complicity. (Baudrillard 2003: 6) This goes much further than hatred for the dominant global power by the disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong side of global order. This malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share this order’s benefits. An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive power is happily universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center embodied perfectly, in their very double-ness (literally twin-ness), this definitive order: No need, then, for a death drive or a destructive instinct, or even for perverse, unintended effects. Very logically – inexorably – the increase in the power heightens the will to destroy it. And it was party to its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, you had the impression that they were responding to the suicide of the suicide-planes with their own suicides. It has been said that “Even God cannot declare war on Himself.” Well, He can. The West, in position of God (divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy), has become suicidal, and declared war on itself. (Baudrillard 2003: 6-7) In Baudrillard’s catastrophic vision I see a new way of thinking subjectivity: a reversal of the energetic subjectivation that animates the revolutionary theories of the 20th century, and the opening of an implosive theory of subversion, based on depression and exhaustion. In the activist view exhaustion is seen as the inability of the social body to escape the vicious destiny that capitalism has prepared: deactivation of the social energies that once upon a time animated democracy and political struggle. But exhaustion could also become the beginning of a slow movement towards a “wu wei” civilization, based on the withdrawal, and frugal expectations of life and consumption. Radicalism could abandon the mode of activism, and adopt the mode of passivity. A radical passivity would definitely threaten the ethos of relentless productivity that neoliberal politics has imposed. The mother of all the bubbles, the work bubble, would finally deflate. We have been working too much during the last three or four centuries, and outrageously too much during the last thirty years. The current depression could be the beginning of a massive abandonment of competition, consumerist drive, and of dependence on work. Actually, if we think of the geopolitical struggle of the first decade – the struggle between Western domination and jihadist Islam – we recognize that the most powerful weapon has been suicide. 9/11 is the most impressive act of this suicidal war, but thousands of people have killed themselves in order to destroy American military hegemony. And they won, forcing the western world into the bunker of paranoid security, and defeating the hyper-technological armies of the West both in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. The suicidal implosion has not been confined to the Islamists. Suicide has became a form of political action everywhere. Against neoliberal politics, Indian farmers have killed themselves. Against exploitation hundreds of workers and employees have killed themselves in the French factories of Peugeot, and in the offices of France Telecom. In Italy, when the 2009 recession destroyed one million jobs, many workers, haunted by the fear of unemployment, climbed on the roofs of the factories, threatening to kill themselves. Is it possible to divert this implosive trend from the direction of 107 death, murder, and suicide, towards a new kind of autonomy, social creativity and of life? I think that it is possible only if we start from exhaustion, if we emphasize the creative side of withdrawal. The exchange between life and money could be deserted, and exhaustion could give way to a huge wave of withdrawal from the sphere of economic exchange. A new refrain could emerge in that moment, and wipe out the law of economic growth. The self-organization of the general intellect could abandon the law of accumulation and growth, and start a new concatenation, where collective intelligence is only subjected to the common good. They appeal to the same structures of domination that they oppose David Campbell, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle in England, 1998, Performing Politics and the Limits of Language, Theory & Event, 2:1 Finesse. Those who argue that hate speech demands juridical responses assert that not only does the speech communicate, but that it constitutes an injurious act. This presumes that not only does speech act, but that "it acts upon the addressee in an injurious way" (16). This argumentation is, in Butler's eyes, based upon a "sovereign conceit" whereby speech wields a sovereign power, acts as an imperative, and embodies a causative understanding of representation. In this manner, hate speech constitutes its subjects as injured victims unable to respond themselves and in need of the law's intervention to restrict if not censor the offending words, and punish the speaker: This idealization of the speech act as a sovereign action (whether positive or negative) appears linked with the idealization of sovereign state power or, rather, with the imagined and forceful voice of that power. It is as if the proper power of the state has been expropriated, delegated to its citizens, and the state then rememerges as a neutral instrument to which we seek recourse to protects as from other citizens, who have become revived emblems of a (lost) sovereign power (82). Two elements of this are paradoxical. First, the sovereign conceit embedded in conventional renderings of hate speech comes at a time when understanding power in sovereign terms is becoming (if at all ever possible) even more difficult. Thus the juridical response to hate speech helps deal with an onto-political problem: "The constraints of legal language emerge to put an end to this particular historical anxiety [the problematisation of sovereignty], for the law requires that we resituate power in the language of injury, that we accord injury the status of an act and trace that act to the specific conduct of a subject" (78). The second, which stems from this, is that (to use Butler's own admittedly hyperbolic formulation) "the state produces hate speech." By this she means not that the state is the sovereign subject from which the various slurs emanate, but that within the frame of the juridical account of hate speech "the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of publicly acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain the line of consequential demarcation" (77). The sovereign conceit of the juridical argument thus linguistically resurrects the sovereign subject at the very moment it seems most vulnerable, and reaffirms the sovereign state and its power in relation to that subject at the very moment its phantasmatic condition is most apparent. The danger is that the resultant extension of state power will be turned against the social movements that sought legal redress in the first place (24) 1 Keynote address Download 356.95 Kb. Share with your friends:
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