Sirenic nuns and porous cloisters

The mid 12th Century classical commenter Master Alberich of London initiated a moralizing spin on the antiquarian Homeric myth of Odysseus and the Sirens. Eschewing the highly fantastical, Alberich proposed a properly Christianized warning-tale:

“The wise man stops up the ears of his dependants, less they hear [the Sirens’] melodies, that is he instructs them with salutary teachings, lest they become entagled in secular delights. But he himself passes by bound to the mast, that is, supported by virtue, although he feels the enticements of the mutable world, yet he despises them and makes course for his fatherland of eternal bliss.”

Alberich of London could have easily been writing this cautionary fable for communities of the sacred as much as it was intended to threaten communities of the heathen. Clothed in highly gendered language, Alberich makes no small insinuation as to the semiotics of the “male”. Wisdom, the defining virtue of the “wise man” casts him as the (after)life-saving good shepherd that “stops up the ears of his dependants”, averting the lascivious calls of the Sirens to “secular delights” en route to an ethereal post-worldly “fatherland of eternal bliss”. The wise man, however, himself protected by “virtue”, is able to deflect the seductive call of harlotry by rejecting its interpellation. What is evacuated by means of this textual construct is precisely the presence or notion of the female body – only briefly indicated via popular contemporary associations of Sirenic voices to female performativity. The single-sided epistemological wall serving to delineate virtuous masculine wisdom simultaneously casts a long, ambiguous shadow over the dwelling properties of the “other”.

Others, like Isidore of Seville, Hugh of St Victor, Brunetto Latini and Eustathius the Homeric commentator, chose to conflate the vocalic qualities of Siren bodies with “lyre-playing harlots who deprived passers-by of their travel goods”, accounting for the ways in which performing harlots “consumed travellers’ money and possessions”. This phenomenon, explicated as early as the 3rd century survived long into texts of the 12th and 13th century, bearing heavy moralizing accents that warned of the dangers of seductive, secular song in clerical circles, and the fundamentally deceptive-inclinations of women in others. These fast-establishing epistemological walls that sought to discipline, contain and control the vocalic dangers of unknown bodily/musical territories were equally matched in architectural structures of division. The 12th and 13th Century, in particular, saw the rapid rise of medieval cities, facilitating the localization of Universities and institutions of cloistered learning. These new physical “walls”, as William Cook and Ronald Herzman note, did not merely foster a structural divide between subscriptive communities and bounded realms of knowledge access, but also encouraged the lively growth and exchange of knowledge-communities organized around disciplinary concerns. Theology, medicine and natural philosophy filled the halls of these new sites of learning, although contemporary concepts of autonomous disciplinary “walls” tend to obscure the fact that intense debate between each of these disciplines was the norm rather than the exception. Fuelled with an increasing body of translated literature distanced by geography and historical time, learned men commented endlessly on matters of the word, slaving hard to integrate disparate sources of knowledge into one harmonious, integrated ‘truthful’ whole.

For intellectuals residing within the structures of the Church, university walls were not always necessarily impervious. Instead, large intersections across institutional borders ensured that Clerics and other religious thinkers stayed in touch, challenged, and effectively affected the translation and dissemination of sources of theoretical debate. As Joan Cadden notes, the commensurability between university and monastic structures of learning rested on their historical parity:

“[Many] of the new tendencies – the interest in systematic science, the development of new formats for discussing it, the elaboration of settings for teaching and learning, and the execution of translations – had roots in the same monastic tradition which in the earlier period had cherished and preserved (if also diluted and fragmented) the remnants of previous transmitted classical learning.”

University scholarship thus supplemented and expanded upon a system that was well in place in Monastic pedagogical structures, resulting in a rich tradition of imported, exported and hybridized epistemological worlds. This also meant that early theological concerns, especially concerning the sexual division between man and women as articulated in biblical scriptures, became what Foucault calls “transdiscursive” sites of linkage and shared scholastic concerns. A number of important scholars such as Constantine the African and Hildergard of Bingen, for example, represented these transdiscursive bodies that were located across monastic and other “extra-sacred” sites of discourse. These writers, drawing on popular intellectual concerns of their time, expanded and nourished the corpus of theorizing the natural body, along the received lines of neo-Platonian, Byzantine and Aristotelian lineages, shedding light on the shadowed epistemology of the “other” side of the sexual wall, that is, the contested dwelling space of the “feminine”, which, in turn, defined or ensured the conceptual integrity of the “masculine”.

Despite obvious contradictions between a large body of theoretical material in circulation, notions of “sexed difference” were mostly concerned with marrying observed empirical “difference” with biblical and philosophical sources – attempts that led many-a-thinker to assume a fundamental essential nature of sexual polarities, informing, as it were, typological or characteristic “dispositions” of the either biological sex. Semantic binaries between hot/cold, dry/moist were popular categories that further extended the conceptual division of gender, though not always uncontested. Theorists such as Jacopo of Forli, Bartholomew the Englishmen and Albertus Magnus echoed popular views that linked such gender-specific qualities in a chain of signification that tended to cast “woman” as the miscreant, albeit derisive counter to the male:

“Women’s complexion is more humid than man’s. [The nature] of the humid receives an impression easily but retains it poorly. The humid is readily mobile, and thus women are unconstant and always seeking something new. Hence when she is engaged in the act under one man, if it were possible, she would like at the same time to be under another. [...] In short, I should say, every woman is to be avoided as much as a poisonous snake and a horned devil.”

Quoted from Quaestiones de animalibus –expositional lectures on Aristotle’s zoological works – Albertus Magnus forged a logical pathway linking empirically observed data with speculative biological thought. Such a descriptive procedure of claiming knowledge over the Other, as Edward Said reminds us, is a mode of power acquisition, a mode of description that operates through prescription, eventually articulating means of proscription. Indeed woman herself is prescribed as naturally unfaithful, guaranteed by her biological disposition that projects itself into cultural typologies. Coupled with the rise of Aristotelian translations and debate in 12th and 13th Century academic circles, “women” also became typecast as a less-perfect or imperfect manifestation of man – a concept that rested well with scriptural evidence of women’s hierarchical subordination to man, having been made from Adam’s rib. As with the writers of Malleus maleficarum, John of Garland emphasizes his pre-redemptive conceptions of Eva’s “imitators” in a language that “put the case in the open”, casting the unredeemed woman as “enthroned” in “death’s eternal kingdom”, her lips dripping with sensuously sweet “honey” although inspection through the de-rarefying faculties of reason reveal her “depths” as being “wormwood”. “Woman”, Garland suggests, “is lovely, beautiful – and destroys everything through lust.”

Matters became further complicated by the complexity of women’s biological rhythms to monastic scholars who tried to align natural bodily phenomena and notions of behavioural proclivities while remaining consonant with scriptural sources. Nowhere was this interplay of intertextuality more pertinent than in the discussion of the Menstrual Cycle in discourses of sin, salvation and medicine. According to Charles T. Wood, medieval menstruation became seen as a symbolic marker or a perpetual bloody reminder of Eve’s “original sin”, although Pope Gregory rhetorically absolved menstruation as being a sin-in-itself:

“A woman’s periods are not sinful, because they happen naturally. But nevertheless, because our nature is itself so depraved that it appears to be polluted even without the consent of the will, the depravity arises from sin, and human nature itself recognizes its depravity to be a judgment upon it.”

Menstruation became an important paradox for scholars who wished to clarify the messy logic between Eve’s original sin (postlapsarian epistemology) with the redeeming virginal qualities of Mary’s immaculate conception. This very fulcrum situated upon the “split” nature of woman carried immense theological weight regarding the salvation of mankind, with Mary symbolising the absolution of bodily-sin by her intrinsic purity. The 15th Century Malleus maleficarum (which notoriously conflated base womanhood with witchcraft and “carnal lust, [of] which is woman insatiable”) spells out the rising importance of virginity over the flesh as no less than an epistemic revolution enabling believers to rise above the postlapsarian corpo-reality of the body:

“[It] is true that in the Old Testemant the Scriptures have much that is evil to say about woman, and this because the first temptress, Eve, and her imitators; yet afterwards in the New Testemant we find a change of name, as from Eva to Ave (as St. Jerome says), and the whole sin of Eve taken away by the benediction of Mary.”

What follows is an instruction for preachers to “say as much praise” of Mary’s redemptive qualities as much as possible, highlighting the grammatical revolution from Eva to Ave that, as Robin Hass Birky suggests, not only elevated the embodied virtue of virginity, but made possible what he calls a “Marian rhetoric”. For Birky, “Marian rhetoric” aesthetically incorporates this conceptual fulcrum into a linguistic one as “the feminized analogues of the masculine incarnational and naked rhetoric”. That is, while discourse on Eve and the “original sin” caused a “fall” that dismantled “language’s efficiency” through filial signification, Mary’s (Ave) conception as virginal purity embodied in flesh “reunites language and meaning”. Writers such as St Jerome and John of Garland do not merely bespeak of the redemptive qualities of Marian virtue; this conceptual revolution is mirrored, even performed rhetorically through a more “ornamental” employment of language. Initially espousing a reduced, “plain”, “naked”, indeed exposing form of rhetoric, John of Garland reverses his previous position on base women when considering the need to reflect an elocutionary shift from Eva to Ave:

“With Mary’s body a fit container for Logos, the virginal purity of that body redeems language’s capacity to depict the truth. Metaphorized as everything but the physical body, the body of Mary purifies language, thus allowing ornamentation.”

What better way to manifest theological markers of difference between Eva/Ave and divisions between the crass secular and the redeemed sacred through dividing architectural structures. The physical walls of the cloister provided a conceptual boundary that delineated spheres of outside/inside, resonating with pre-existing conceptual binaries that functioned to keep these spheres separate and autonomous. For Lisa Colton, architectural bastions extended to mark the physical body of woman metaphorically, especially through the proliferation of chansons piesus and chanson de nonne in the 13th and 14th Centuries. Such musical literature, she shows, exemplifies valorised modes of chastity and sacred virginity by associating bodily boundaries with “walls and other architectural structures”. The dwelling space of the womb, central as it were to the tipping point between Marian virginity, cloister or monastic chastity and secular vices, was commonly described as an enclosure resembling the fortified walls of a nunnery. Fortifications inscribe boundaries of restraint on the human body both physically and conceptually, disciplining its inhabitants to internalize its structures as given psychic reality.

Notions of the voice in medieval accounts of singing and musicianship, however, tend to trouble the authority and impermeability of these cultural markers of difference. In particular, the equivocal nature of a woman’s singing voice was a musical site of ambivalence that appeared to be able to transgress such carefully constructed walls of enclosure. As Colton notes, one of the common tropes of threatened chastity was the “excessive use of a woman’s mouth for ‘display’ ... [and] a singing woman was often feared as seductive and ‘siren’-like”. This dimension of “singing”, for Richard Middleton, features what he calls the “vocalimentary canal” that conceptually links performative body (and all its sexed implications) with the apparent spectrality of the singing voice as a partially “lost” object ejected from the body. But beyond appropriations of St Augustine’s easy division between the “aesthetic” nature of music (managing and regulating psychic-somatic jouissance) and its “representational” instrumentality, Mladen Dolar calls attention to the voice’s “third level” of the “object voice” which stubbornly resists dissolution in the Lacanian order of the Symbolic. For Dolar, this spectral “object voice” corresponds to Lacan’s objet petit a (the “little object” or the “object cause”) beyond the Symbolic or the aesthetic, a “lever of thought as opposed to the anthropomorphic masquerade of thinking”. The coincidence of the “object voice’s” mysterious sensuality yet transgressing alien quality residing impossibly outside Symbolization is the key feature of the objet petit a – an impossible psychic object of pure alterity that produces a horizon of desire always out of reach, a desire that can never be satiated. As Todd McGowan describes:

“Desire is motivated by the mysterious object that the subject posits in the Other – the objet petit a – but the subject relates to this object in a way that sustains the object’s mystery [i.e. sustains his desire]. Hence, the objet petit a is an impossible object: to exist, it would have to be simultaneously part of the subject and completely alien.”

If the voice was desire-inducing as well as irreducibly alien, then such a feature must be deemed dangerous and subject to discipline under clerical law. Indeed the excessive in monastic music was viewed with a suspicious (if not ambivalent) eye by religious authorities such as John of Salisbury who asserted in his 12th Century Policraticus that music defiles the sacred when musicians ornament the instrumental, “showing off as it were, strive with effeminate dalliance of wanton tones and musical phrasing to astound, enervate and dwarf simple souls.” Paraphrasing St Augustine, John warned that “pleasure”, especially in the purely musical, was “the father of lust”. Performance should serve ecclesiastical means and inspire worship rather than stir the loins, the latter which served as a popular denunciation of secular music-making beyond monastic walls in the lusty merriment of popular Caroles. Perhaps it is no surprise that numerous chanson de nonne as explored by Lisa Colton and Suzannah Clark depict female subjects singing in lament of their bartered sexualities for religious chastity. A similar chanson of interest to both scholars is Joliement en douce desirree / Quant voi la floret / Je sui joliete / Aptatur, a four-voiced chanson that draws rhetorical strength from the interplay between what seems to be a nun wishing to be delivered of her cloistered life having found love, a monk debilitating on the consequences of his current love interest, and a youthful nun feeling the pangs of desire.

Inasmuch as architectural metaphor serves to articulate boundaries of possible transgression, Clark’s analysis of the musical operation of the motet traces a link between the triplum (the ambiguously sexed individual that declares “for naught this nunnery confine me”) which derives from another pre-existent chanson de nonne in trouvere repertory Quant ce vient en mai. The chanson of interest tells of “a young woman trapped in a nunnery” singing out to be rescued while the “narrator” who recounts the nun’s tale, “reports that the lover received her message and arrives to rescue her”. If this passage survives in Joliement en douce desirree’s triplum as a culturally-informed quotation that may have been identifiable to listeners, Clark proposes that the subject voice of the triplum, possibly a monk, “sings” the nun’s song both alludes to exclusive knowledge on behalf of the monk in a “seductive routine” that channels the spirit of trouvere chivalry. Furthermore, Clark speculates that the musical parity of both sources suggest that the nun of Quant ce vient en mai and the monk in Joliement en douce desirree “share a unity of purpose”, suggesting that the monk may turn out to be the rescuer of that nun, though piping his response through intertextual means by a voice that, quite literally, transgresses the physical wall of the individual, printed score or autonomous performance.

Sirenic powers of the singing voice to pierce, transgress and penetrate epistemological walls were mirrored by real concerns about the “object voice’s” abilities to elude the sanctified house of knowledge. A scandalous tale recounted by Gerald of Wales told of how a Canon and Nun in the double-house system of the 12th Century Gilbertine Order were “driven to desire” by hearing their singing voices on either sides of the gender-partitioning wall. Both blessed with an “attractive” singing voice, the penetrative powers of their voices caused them to escape “over the cloister wall the same evening”. Although Gerald of Wales equally attributes siren-like transgressive qualities to both the male canon and female nun, the follow-up punishment enacted by Gilbert of Sempringham is highly revealing – Gerald mentions how the nuns were punished by restricting their musical activities for mere “humble psalmody”, and shaving their heads beneath their veils to reduce their physical beauty, but, as Heather Josselyn-Cranson argues, there are disturbing omissions in the text:

“The lacunae in the text leave many unanswered questions: were the lovers caught? Were the canons also punished? The kind of psalmody to which the nuns were restricted is also unclear.”

Indeed no mention of punishment on behalf of the canons were mentioned by Gilbert, perhaps clueing us in on the perceived danger of female sirenic bodies over male ones. An interrogation into the Gilbertine Order, though admittedly the first of its kind to employ the “double-house” system which paired both sexes in the same physical space nonetheless used physical partitioning means to keep carnal temptation from escalating. Walls divided the female and male sections of the Church to “keep the canons from hearing the nuns, and the nuns from seeing the canons”, save a Pyramus-Thisbee-like aperture with which to pass the pax brede in as chaste a manner as possible. Severe disciplinary schemes were enacted to silence the sirenic call, including sections in the Order’s Institutiones which “entirely forbid all of [their] members ... the use of organum and descant, falsetto and pipeth at the Divine Office”, fortifying the heavy-handed control of what was usually deemed “emasculating” and “effeminizing” secular musical practices. The section on sisters in the Institutiones further declares that:

“We do not allow our nuns to sing [cantare] but absolutely forbid it, desiring rather that they chant plainly [indirecto psallare] in a spirit of humility, together with that ever blessed virgin, mother and daughter of almighty God, rather than corrupt the minds of the weak by lustful melody with that wicked daughter of Herodias.”

Although Cranson suggests that indirecto psallare may have come to signify a more “naked” form of plainchant (recalling John of Garland), the specific restrictions applied to the female sex bears testimony to the known powers of the “object-voice” and its uncontrollable order-defiling properties beyond the sacred, self-sufficient realm of the Symbolic. Indeed Nigel de Longchamp’s Speculum Stultorum (1179-80) in description of the Gilbertine Order may be read on two levels concerning the epistemological and architectural walls erected to reinforce each other:

“One house contains a quartered
Arrangement
Of canons, lay brothers, and
Sisters
Similarly divided.
The canons perform masses, and the
Sisters do the rest.
They fulfil the due service of the Office;
A wall separates their bodies, not their
Voices; as one
They sing psalms directly, without a
Tune.”

Indeed the very transgressive qualities of the “object-voice” continue to dismantle the body politic of the church by queering its epistemological fortifications – fortifications that split up an already fragmented symbolic understanding of “women” and the plural nun that, with her voice, slips between Eva and Ave, probing and interrogating the intrinsically porous nature of cloister walls and gender bastions.

siren embodiment... a primer

In Judith Peraino’s Listening to the Sirens, the Homeric myth of Odysseus’ encounter with the monstrous feminine provides a heuristic fulcrum in order to investigate the potentially queering effects of Siren-song though modern-day musical technologies. In order to navigate the seas without being captivated by the seductive death-bearing potentialities of the Sirens’ song, Odysseus binds himself to the mast of the ship and instructs that wax fill the ears of his rowing mates. The male body politic is thus disembodied, order is momentarily thrown into disorder and irrational solutions: Odysseus forgoes the use of his limbs while his men sacrifice their ability to hear their master’s commands. Though this method of temporary incapacitation eventually prevents their ship from being steered in the direction of the sirens – and into a certain watery death – Peraino shifts the focus of the myth to Odysseus himself. It is he, she notes, that hears/queers himself in the aural proximity of the Sirens, eventually condemned to lead a queer (after)life himself as the sole individual having lived the ordeal to tell it. Odysseus’ predicament is lonely knowledge; the veracity of his tale ironically falling on the same wax-filled deaf ears he initiated in the first place, untranslatable and fragile amongst a community of non-listeners.

In the recent years, musicological studies has indeed beckoned audiences to break the phallic mould of the wax and, restraining themselves as Odysseus did, hear the Sirens without leaping to premature conclusions. Although “Queer” musical culture is a category asserted not without heavy theoretical contestation, its sister platform, the largely influential body of discourse that constitutes Feminism and Feminist theory, seems to have fared little better. Resting on the assumption that “woman” as a unifying social community has been exploited by male-dominated discursive manoeuvres, Feminism’s project tends to look backwards and forwards at the same time; that is, drawing legitimacy from previous (historical) narratives of oppression, suppression and repression, and projecting these narratives forward in time to discuss how such proscriptive apparatuses continue to operate through the exclusion of “woman”, or how sites of resistance and subversive strategies may work to interrupt, interrogate and even dismantle such topologies of power inequalities.

Barbara Bradby’s somewhat angry examination of sampling women’s voice in dance music performs that analytical task, inquiring how theoretical utopias of gender egalitarianism might be better applied in emerging fields of musical technology. Decrying a well-worn binary opposition that all-too-easily reinscribes the category of “woman-as-nature”, Bradby selects theoretical iconoclast Dona Harraway and her musings on the posthuman cyborg body as a liberating enframing device in modern-day feminist dissections of musical technologies. Bradby singles out the disconcerting representational fragmentation in Black Box’s music video “Ride on Time” for its entagled nature in ownership, citation and copyright issues. Black Box’s “Ride on Time” stirred up a messy court case regarding its video that:

“showed a tall, sexy model from Guadaloupe … [one Katherine Quinol], ‘performing’ the passionate vocal line. But the rumour quickly spread that the vocals had been ‘sampled’ from a song called ‘Love Sensation’ by the American soul singer, Loretta Holloway.”

For Bradby, however, in addition to being wrongfully “sampled” under the umbrella of a different song, Loretta Holloway seemed to be “doubly ripped off” since the image of her body had been replaced by Katherine Quinol to create a cyborg-like composite of an hyper-sexualized performing body. This, Bradby asserts, did much to reinforce existing fields of discursive struggle including the “tyranny of slenderness” and so-called “acceptable body images for women” that dominate issues in scopophillic culture. Another song on the Black Box label entitled “Strike it up” pays tribute to this hypersexualized/monstrous hybrid by accrediting the “visual performance” of the video to Katrin Quinol while reserving the title of “lead vocal performance” to its rightful singer, Martha Wash. Does this cyborg-like hybrid parading in the face of hyper-reality recruit the male-gaze to reinforce proscriptive images of sexuality, gender and womanhood? The answer is overwhelmingly yes for Bradby:

“Once again, Katrin Quinol appears as the acceptable (because attractive to the male gaze) image of woman that can sell the voice of another woman that has been electronically manipulated by the male producers.”

And yet, Bradby reserves room for small praise, pointing out the way in which Black Box’s double accreditation signals a challenge to “the primacy of the visual in our everyday imaging of the body … [implying] that the voice is somehow ‘disembodied’”, while the “real” bodies of two separate non-cyborg women are indeed given prominence behind the fantasy of the virtual. Such a disjoint, as Richard Middleton argues, interrogates the very embodied notion of performance:

“especially through … a bodily intimate mechanism as singing – [which] is to put a body on display, to flaunt it, offer it up […]. Indeed, in this discursive formation, to own to a body already produces a place of subordination, creating the potential to suffer […]; meanwhile, the owners of discourse … are all words, bodies effaced from view no less than those of the record producers.”

Acknowledging the “spectral” economy of the fragmented being sutured together at the site of fantasy may denote (as is for Bradby), what Donna Haraway terms a “significant prosthesis” or a new kind of embodiment afforded by the site of suturing. But Middleton is also quick to point out the fragility of such forward-thinking gestures:

“listeners [may] immediately invent an imagined source for them [or have fantasy sites perform the operation of bodily suturing], drawing on the contours embedded in their experience of the operations of the vocalimentary canal: the phallus (male or female) writes, the voice translates, and the mapping of this process to the structures of anatomical and other visual and tactile knowledge describes exactly how the sensuous and the symbolic create each other, through the Derridean networks of ‘dissemination’ and ‘invagination’.”

What is at stake, thus, is what Baudrilliard warns of as “integral reality”, or the collapse of the real into the virtual – the point of ultimate commensurability where pure virtual fantasy acquires a sheen of the real more real than the real itself. Perhaps Bradby’s criticism bespeaks a horizon by which fantasy hypersexual Quinol-Wash cyborgs bleed into the parameters of lived embodied experience to announce (voice) new forms of exclusions. The question, for either authors, is one of “authentic” voice, that is, behind the muppet-like flailing of fantasy-creatures, who supplies the words – whose authorial voice speaks? Odysseus, or the men with wax-filled ears? This perspective, however, assumes that there is an ever-present, situated panoptical Big-Other that usurps the complexities of modern day technological assemblages, assemblages that figure into the assembly-line of musical-cultural products and, as Nicholas Cook suggests, by-products. This Big Other attribution of the phallogocentric (to use Irigaray’s formulations), skirts around the fact that, like Irigaray’s metaphorical women, the Big Other is an Other that is not one. Indeed, hard-and-fast feminist accusations of phallogocentrism tend to forget that entire economies of gender are occluded by their epistemological enemies, throwing the male body into crisis as well.

To put a spin on the original question is to investigate how emerging musical technologies “speak back” in sometimes unintended ways, troubling both the normalized “male gaze” as well as the apex at which the feminist gaze returns. Nicholas Cook’s groundbreaking analysis of Madonna’s “material girl” throws questions of ocular-centrism into musical relief by attempting what he terms a “musicology of the image”, showing how purely “musical” attributes inform and penetrate the very autonomy of the image in an MTV. For Cook,

“There is, in effect, a collision between two competing hierarchies, […] the result is to destabalize the meaning of the words and, through them, the closure of the song as a whole. The pictures, in short, serve to open the song up to the emergence of new meaning.”

The semi-sonata altering between two Madonna image-themes which Cook calls “Madonna I” and “Madonna II” blur the distinction between narrative diegesis and fantasy performance space though functioning to keep these dimensions wholly separate. The ultimate effect, Cook suggests, is that an “invisible” master puppeteer works the strings behind the automaton-like Madonna homunculi: “the real persona constructed by ‘Material Girl’ is not Madonna II or Madonna I; it is an unseen, authorial Madonna whom logic compels us to call ‘Madonna 0’”. The problem for Cook is that the most “essential”, albeit “necessary” Madonna is that which escapes the world of a virtual – neither heard nor seen – perhaps the Madonna that never is. A mythological Madonna that vacillates between the disabilities of Odysseus and his men, forever condemned to the dark and watery cave of her lurking. But perhaps this “dark and watery cave” houses no Madonna at all, that the luxurious shrieking of voices are but echo-like reflections that constitute the epistemological somaticism of a pre-virtual Madonna which merely returns our own calls to her by the sonorous contours of the unknown.

Considering authorship: music, identity and authors

“What is an author”, asks French Poststructuralist Michel Foucault rhetorically. Writing in the late 1960s amidst a philosophical interrogation concerning the relationship between subjectivity and language, Foucault’s own concerns were mirrored by a host of other French intellectuals including Derrida, Lacan and Barthes, just to name a few. Indeed by the mid 20th century, the very notion of authorship was seen to be under radical revision, if not crisis. From the symbolist poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the assembled collages of the Dadaists and the epistemological teasers of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, the “traditional” aura of authority, anthropocentricity and originality of classical authorship was thrown into relief by these counter-practices that seemed to challenge the very epistemological structures – structures enabling fields of discourse upon which the ideological seeds of “authorship” were first sown.

If the “auratic” quality of a work for Walter Benjamin denoted a “tissue” of ritual time and space that constituted the author-ity of authorship, Foucault’s steely analysis of the operations of author-ity further deconstructs Benjamin’s mystical quasi-religious universalizing category, preferring to view the construction of the modern author as a specific epistemic product, beholden to the contingencies of culture, history and institutions. For Foucault, simply aligning the title of an author to a specific individual all-too-easily misses the deeper structures that validate and legitimize the author, providing the subject with a discursive position of enunciation and author-ial voice. Rather than penetrating into the deep psyche of a supposed authorial subject and attributing the material (or intellectual) products to him/her, Foucault suggests that we take a step back and reconsider the certain “excess” that escapes the author, as well as the contingencies that produce the locutionary space in which the author resides. Such an approach, no doubt, takes Heidegger under its wing in the sense that a certain cultural validation of “truth” operates by “clearing” a rational visible “opening” by which the speaking (or living) subject becomes visible or legible to a participating community. The author, then, is not simply an imagined transcendental category into which literary criticism invests its analytical sweat in order to explain “the presence of certain events in a work, [...] their transformations, distortions, and diverse modifications”, but, more importantly, a discursive function – a site that “knits” together disparate discursive fields. Indeed for Foucault, the notion of an “author” is explicitly performative, serving to “characterize a certain mode of being of discourse”. Foucault enumerates:

“(1) [The] author-function is linked to the juridicial and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses; (2) it does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilization; (3) it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producer, but rather by a series of specific and complex operations; (4) it does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects – positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals.”

What is important for Foucault, then, is the way in which institutions and their collective ideologies participate to produce a stratagem of power that structures the author-function. The very conceptualization of the author as a “function” testifies to its active mode of participation in discursive fields, although it also identifies the degree to which the subject who “fills” that particular role is responsible and beholden to those fields, institutions, and their corresponding laws and modes of regulation. What may serve to problematize the monolithic notion of authorship is the trans-performativity of the subject mistaken as monolithic. The very heterogeneous composition of the enunciating (or writing) subject taken for author does not answer to one source of power nor performs under the roof of a single identity. Like Lacan’s Symbolically saturated body “overladen with signifiers”, the performing subject under the purview of “author” is necessarily what Foucault calls a “transdiscursive” subject that answers to the call of different classification paradigms. The author-function thus performs the (Lacanian) operation as a point de capiton (the “quilting point” or the upholstery button) for these various discursive networks in an ultimate moment of méconaissance, in that it both serves as a fulcrum for understanding selfhood as well as a surface for the attribution of the objective world.

More than simply a linguistic signifier that organizes various discursive practices in a Symbolic web, notions of authorship similarly affects the way in which “works” of music are created, perceived and distributed. Perhaps one could go so far as to claim that the very concept of “work” as a historical trace of 19th Century ideology continues to sustain its scaffold of power through the use of the author-function. Composerly authority, agency and work-fidelity are but manifestations of institutional ideology coalescing around the notion of author-ity, in turn re-defining contemporary uses of the author-function. If we liken the composer to Foucault’s “author-function”, what becomes apparent is the ways in which the composer-function gestures towards “a certain discursive construct and its very particular mode of being”. Analysing the “discursive construct” which symbiotically relies on the “author-function” would mean parsing out the various institutions, industries, forms and media which “music” as a broad category encompasses, a heterogeneous background upon which “authorship” itself is foregrounded. However, as implied by the instable nature of the “author-function”, one cannot merely assume that “music” as a unifying category remains monolithic and unchanged. The rise of technologies that inform, distribute and enable “music”, too, constitute a decisive factor which continues to challenge received notions of authorship and composerly autonomy, perhaps even throwing light upon the constructedness of these functions. It is, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, when the system breaks down, that one locates the source of power and mode of functionality of machinic assemblages.

By examining the role of technology in buttressing the “author-function”, one is immediately reminded of the ways in which music is never its single, autonomous product, but, as Nicholas Cook reminds us, always a “co-product” which requires “mediation” – be it through live performance, media-storage devices or technologies of re-presentation. Instead of consenting too easily to Benjamin’s decay of “aura”, a more useful view of music’s renewed ontological possibilities reside in what Jeremy Stolow terms “liquid aura”, denoting the transmogrified (albeit mobile) nature of ritual’s original reliance on territorialization. “Liquid aura” for Stolow describes the creative ways and means in which the artistic object (or religious encounter) is experienced in a plurality of forms through the intercession of technologies of re-presentation. Indeed these technologies do more than innocently re-present: the relationship between various devices (such as CDs to CD players and mp3 files to decoding softwares) importantly dictate the temporalities and spaces in which these musics may be heard or accessed, thereby articulating new sonic possibilities of being and new modes through which music may participate in individual (or shared) subjective experiences. Similarly, the role of the “author” or “composer” is challenged by these disseminative (and) transformative technologies by their modes of presentation by problematising the idea of originality in music, and revealing the messy interstices where power, institutionalisation and agencies collide.

Indeed for David Horn, Benjaminesque auraticism has returned, though not without undergoing strict epistemological reformulations. In Horn’s exploration of the “work concept” with regard to popular music, he notes that the “work” in an age of (digital!) reproducibility has recruited a new objective status as “a piece of property”. “Reproducibility” thus loses its innocent techno-utopian sheen when realised as a highly contested intellectual and material product, highly regulated by laws and companies that erect barriers in order to “signal both its authorship and its individuality”. The field of popular music is particularly problematic in terms of individuality and authorship since exhibits a “complex relationship within that discourse between the activity of production, especially its performative aspects, and the end product”. In the case of Jazz, for example, what constitutes an “original” work (which then conforms to a rightful originator/composer), given the pervasiveness of “cover” tracks – popular songs which are recorded and performed by different artists? Citing Duke Ellington’s version of “Mood Indigo”, Horn notes the ways in which “individuality” as a substitute for composerly authorship asserts itself as a form of “liquid aura”, the arrangement inhabiting “its own time and its territory above the hurly-burly, preserving its own quality of presence”. The sonic qualities of the song rise above the song itself as an indicator of “originality” and “individuality” by partially “closing down” the space between “text and interpretation”. Thus, for Horn:

“[The] reason that the sound obtained by those voicings become so central to the identity of this Mood Indigo and set it apart from all others lay in the circulation and influence of the first recordings – within the very world of mechanical reproduction.”

However, while reserving much praise for the determining agencies of disseminative technologies, Horn seems to complicate his argument by reviewing the ways in which “invisible” powers that lie beneath mere re-presentation also work to reconfigure authenticity, originality and authorship. The rise of Afro-American music before the 1940s, for example, reveals a terse relationship between musicians (often seen as an originating site) and record producers. During this period, copyrights to these arrangements and songs were held by Record Companies instead of performing groups by declaring the producer as author, and citing the piece performed as being “traditional” – that is, belonging to the public sphere. In order to assert their claims of authorship, early Beebop musicians and songwriters created a new epistemological category of “versions” in order to legitimate their products and claim intellectual rights for themselves. If anything, Horn’s account of the tensions that conglomerate about music as a piece of intellectual property indicates the multiplicity of performing roles that exist behind a single recording. More importantly, the diffracted “performing body” assumed to “produce” or “author” a piece of music is itself “transdiscursive”, owing much to recording engineers, marketing personnel and producers that partake in the formulation of the final “product”. As Susan Horning points out, the birth of new technologies demands certain “tacit knowledge” in order to operate these technologies (such as the studio engineer), which configures the ontology of the final musical product. “Who authored the music” as a primer to inquiry reveals the multiplicity of “authors” that lurk beneath the shadows of an assumed artist, band, or composer. Perhaps Stolow’s “liquid aura” also indicates the phenomenon of “liquid authorship” in ascertaining the autonomy of a single “work”.

Though useful analytically, Foucault’s notion of the “author-function” risks slipping into a posthuman narrative that accords far too much agency upon the economy of technology and its related institutions. Indeed as a linguistic trope, a crucial factor is missing from this display of power and legitimacy. For Roland Barthes, that specific factor is the receptive receptacle which these “works” are intended for – the “audience” or the “reader”. Though Barthes’ radical proclamation of the “death of the author” sidesteps Foucault’s understanding of epistemological categories that lacerate the reading (listening) subject and produces spaces of entrainment for them, Barthes’ warning against “reading” too deeply into compserly/authorial intention focuses on the way in which a text is always necessarily “excessive” in that its performative function is determined largely by reading subjects who participate in the creation of meaning. For Barthes,

“[The] modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.”

“Meaning”, for Barthes, resides in the encounter between the written text and the reader. Given that the latter is never stable and located in the shifting tectonics of linguistic signification, every act of reading and re-reading will result in different hues of interpretation, since “the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.” Likewise, once a sonic product leaves the ink-drenched plume of its originating scribe, the author is “dead” in the sense that the work acquires an extra-scribal dimension in the eyes (and ears) of its recipients. Indeed whole audiences may “make” or “break” a performing nexus by rejecting the interpellation of sonic products. But more interestingly, the performative platforms afforded by new technologies may also point to a shifting site of authorial power akin to Benjamin’s notion of the “author as producer”. Here, Benjamin pays tribute to the idea of a “liquid composer/author” where the source of power (the platforms that give voice) between producers and the public become blurred. For Benjamin:

“The reader is indeed always ready to become a writer, that is to say, someone who describes or even who prescribes. As an expert—even if not a professional, but only a job-occupant—he gains entrance to authorship. Labour itself speaks out for writing it out in words constitutes part of the knowledge necessary to becoming an author. Literary competence is no longer based on specialized training in academic schools, but on technical and commercial training in trade schools and thus becomes common property. In a word, it is the literarization of the relationships of life which overcomes otherwise insoluble antinomies and it is the showplace of the unrestrained degradation of the word—that is, the newspaper—which prepares its salvation.”

The homogenization of vocabulary, for Benjamin, constitutes the revolutionary potential of readers-as-authors, providing common semantic sites for the exchange of information and the deliberation over knowledge and power. Such a homogenization or “flattening” of the playing field is precisely what Friedrich Kittler anticipates in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, in which the process of “alphabetalization” was but the first in a series of informational commensurability that finds its end in information bytes and binary operations. New technologies that ensure the parity between different presentational windows (such as peer-to-peer networks or the internet) equally constitute that field, transforming the instrumental potentiality of, for example, an “uploaded” musical work. Indeed, as Catherine Moore notes, “once music becomes digital information, it can be manipulated at will” with digitization facilitating musical “construction and its remaking”. When music can be so easily manipulated and shared at will, listeners-as-authors are given the possibility of flexing their own autonomy in creating and broadcasting self-created works (even if based on existing ones) through online channels (such as youtube.com or imeem.com) catered for the dissemination of self-produced works. Furthermore, with the availability of online payment systems (the digitization of cash), the dividing line virtually vanishes; individuals may be highly “transdiscursive”, occupying the position of engineer, recorder, publicist, composer, performer, marketer and producer altogether.

Emerging technologies do problematise existing ideologies of authorship and composerly authority, although their intercession in a network of discursive practices perhaps does no more than to reveal the structural contingencies informing “classical” formulas of authorship already existent in these networks. What mutates is the “author-function” under the signifier of “author”, continually negotiating between its various sources of power between discursive sites. Perhaps, as Foucault and Barthes suggest, the point of “origin” for authorship is an illusory one – each subject is an individual “author”, even of a work not created by him/her. On the other hand, the subject is delimited by institutional and cultural ideologies that place epistemological boundaries on representations of the self, disciplined, as it were to maintain heuristic divisions between levels of participation in order to validate or recognize the existence of other discursive spheres that constitute the “work”.

Globalization, "Napsterification" and World Music

Is “Globalization” a dirty word? A brief survey of google.com cites over 19 million web pages devoted to the scrutiny and discussion of this topic, proof that even if no final verdict had been issued regarding the subject, then at least it has been the grounds for much heated debate. “Globalization” as of today is still a young term, a neologism that gained rhetorical value in the 1980s through the work of various socio-economists attempting to re-theorize the effects of late modernization and capitalism. Most famously, globalization theorists assert the miniaturizing features of the modern world, claiming that the world is essentially “shrinking” due to advances in transportation systems, info-communications and the international compatibility of mediums of dissemination and reproduction (such as the internet, satellite phones et al) which seem to transcend national borders. “Seem” is the right descriptive here, since, as Allen and Hamnett remind us, globalization tends to ignore the fact that not all global communities enjoy equal access to these technologies of interconnectivity. Even “liberal” mediums such as the (once called) world-wide-web tends to be not-so-world-wide, considering the fact that a major proportion of the world’s population still live without access to the internet. Most recently a spate of editorials has further explored issues net-surveillance and censorship which enforce virtual state-specific boundaries, curtailing this so-called transgression of local constraints.

Charting the history of new media technology and its complementary political modes of surveillance would be complex terrain; one could easily get lost and wrongly assume logics of causality. Take the Napster case-study for example, a highly popular peer-to-peer file-sharing program that sent music industry giants into sweaty panic. Created by an enterprising 18-year-old who went by the name of Shawn Fanning, Napster was initially birthed as a student-to-student collective. What was refreshing about the application was the way in which:

“[Napster] collected and provided a centralized list of the music that most students had on their hard drives, and a convenient way to search that list. Using Napster, people could easily search through what amounted to a giant shared music collection, taking whatever they wanted ... for free, instead of [US] $15-20 per CD”

Symbolically, Napster embodied the ideology of a universe of free information, granting its virtual participants a passport to freely “own” whatever other participants had placed on the file-sharing network. Of course, Napster fell short of its near-hippie liberal wonderland goals: in December 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a suit against Napster. Liberal Disneyland became discredited as insouciant piracy, and Napster was forced to close, though not without making a terrific splash in the press. The end of the story is an equally paradoxical one; even though the “free” ideals of Napster were ruthlessly truncated by copyright laws and legal issues of intellectual ownership, the formal popularity of a “Napsterian” interface spurred already-rich media corporate giants such as Apple to formulate their own peer-to-peer systems: Napster was given a (white) facelift and emerged as I-tunes. But we rush ahead of ourselves. How did “music”, a primarily embodied, “auratic” (as Walter Benjamin describes it) praxis develop into a few megabytes of information? A historical trajectory would attempt to chronicle the rise (and fall) of gramophone technologies and records, the emergence of the radio, the “cassette revolution”, CDs, DVDs, and computers. But does “music” remain ontologically unaltered by its Darstellung? Furthermore, does the rise of recombinant media products such as Music Videos suggest different modes of perceiving and conceiving music?

Another problem seems to loom overhead: if self-recorded musics unbound by intellectual copyrights were, too, circulated on Napster, did they ultimately fall under the same laws that governed artistic and corporatist ownership – is it acceptable, perhaps even ethical to assume that all sonic traces that lent themselves to aural reproduction through technological Darstellung shared the same ontological status as each other? Any respectful religious Muslim would attest to the fact that the “melodic” chanting of the Koran is not music. And yet, years ago when participating in a choral music festival in Bandung, Indonesia, the heavily mellismatic chanting of the Koran could indeed be heard at daybreak, amplified from the speakers atop a nearby mosque. Though channelled through the same mediums as other commodified aesthetic products, different cultural and ethnic groups’ conception of “music” differ from each other. What should be made clear, then, is the way in which media’s blind (or deaf) processing of sonic entities open up new pathways of misrecognition, misappropriation and misinformation. In the afternoon, speakers in a neighbouring public park begin to blare Indonesian “popular” music: are these two products of the otological mode of reproduction therefore ontologically alike? It is not difficult to imagine how they could be mistakenly assumed to be so.

Thus, although transnational medias and technologies have brought us closer in (virtual) proximity in which “to connect presence and absence”, what has to be queried here is virtual “relations between ‘absent’ others” that displaces face-to-face presentism with an illusory one. For Anthony Giddens, this new proximity is a “phantasmagoric” one, which, like the case of amplified Koran chanting, appears to speak a ‘neutral’ language while masking complex differences, or latent relations of power. There is another word proposed for this ‘missed’ encounter, what Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo call “de/territorialization”:

“There is no dislodging of everyday meanings from their moorings in particular localities without their simultaneous reinsertion into fresh environments. You can’t have one process without the other. It is a matter of both at once. It is a matter of de/territorialization.”

De/territorialization also refers to the stripping and eventual re-accruing of meaning of certain cultural practices once they are uprooted from their originating geographical location and “grafted” into a new culture through diasporic communities. De/territorialization should, in extension, remind us that the cultural meanings of technologies and medias may not be innocent or equally shared across national or continental boundaries. Concepts such as “authenticity” or “originality” are hence problematic when they are used to describe large communities, disregarding the possibility that these cultural objects, such as musical practices, have been themselves subject to evolution through the encounter of Others via communicative technologies. In other words, such narratives assume a “hypodermic” model of passive reception of the Other’s cultural products, without undergoing “local” reinterpretation or meaningful transformation. Xavier and Rosaldo, for example, point out the ways in which Indian film songs are borrowed by religious singers who change the words to sing praises to the Prophet Mohammed in northern Nigeria. The appropriation non-western popular culture in Hausa, as Brian Larkin suggests, is predicated on a specific strategy that bypasses difficult colonizer-colonized power-relations to “envision new styles of fashion, beauty, love, and romance”. For Larkin,

“Indian films [and songs for Hausa viewers] offer images of a parallel modernity to the West ... but rooted in conservative cultural values. [...] Moreover, when Hausa youth rework Indian films within their own culture by ... copying the music styles for religious purposes, [...] they can do so without engaging with the heavy ideological load of “becoming western”.”

Though the de/territorialized encounter and appropriation of Indian popular song for local purposes, the Hausa example reveals the ways in which seemingly innocent cultural objects of exchange become embedded in a wed of meaning, sometimes meanings quite distinct from their reception at their originating scene. “Hybridization” is another such concept to track the mutation of cultural products within differing receptive and semiotic spheres, although one holds reservation for the term, as “hybridization” all too often stresses the plurality of the final product rather than real systems of power and domination that are wired into the figuring of the final article. Most alarmingly, however, under the purview of narratives regarding the music industry and Capitalism, these power-struggles achieve another level of complexity altogether. Take for example the popularization of “Reggae” in the West, which success, as John Connell and Chris Gibson point out, can be traced back to colonial power binaries of the colonizer/colonized whereby the exoticized product (colonized) performs for the gaze of the purchaser (colonizer). The case is further problematized in the case of so-called “World Music” where “authenticity” and “originality” is prized as an exotic commodity to excite the (colonial?) imagination of the West. Of course, sonic realities of “authenticity” are ultimately constructs, fabrications to the extent that truly “authentic” music sometimes becomes significantly altered to appeal to the consumer’s idea of authenticity. Amidst many examples, the Real World music company’s recordings of qawwali were heavily criticised for ignoring “the crucial religious and socio-critical elements of the music,” attempting “to reduce the music to an aesthetic form”.

Furthermore, by articulating the idea of “world music” as a distinct “marketing term”, “world music” fosters an internal paradox whereby “third-world performers ... gain more effective access to global markets” based on marketability. The question “who is listening?” becomes deeply embroiled in acts of performative agency, for, to succeed in the international “world music” market, one must play by its rules. “International success”, Connell and Gibson opine, “required artistic compromise”. Xavier Cugat, for instance, recalls the paradoxical move he had to take in order to please the musical tastes of (foreign) mass markets: “To succeed in America I have the Americans a Latin music that had nothing authentic about it ... Then I began to change the music and play more legitimately.” “Authenticity”, seemingly, is in the ear of the beholder. The difficulty of shoehorning radically different musical worldviews into the neat economic category of “world music” means inevitably contorting the cultural significance of differing musical ontologies upon a single, marketable, commodifiable – hence selleable – plane. This is the troubling question which Steven Feld attempts to unpack, zooming in on the cultural and capital politics at stake in Deep Forest’s use of pygmy tracks for a mix-track in a 1992 album, backed by UNESCO.

Feld’s essay “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music” is a complicated romp through the politics of ownership and musical ethics in Deep Forest’s contested digital sampling of a Baegu lullaby from Northern Malaita. The sample, which appeared in Deep Forest, was then used by Jan Garbarek (a Norwegian saxophonist) as raw material for his ECM CD entitled Visible World. Since Deep Forest failed to reproduce the origin of the lullaby, Garbarek misapprehended its origin to be an “African traditional melody”. When Feld attempted to point out these misappropriations and possible power-inequalities (in what way was the singer of the lullaby credited?) apparent in this cycle of borrowings, a messy fiasco of point-and-blame ensued, and Feld was eventually accused of wrongful defamation. But the primary question remained unanswered: in what way did either company or artist respect the originating context of the lullaby? Afunakwa’s name (the singer of the recorded lullaby) hardly surfaced in the litany of accusations, with Deep Forest representatives and Garbarek adopting angry, reactionary polemics defending the integrity of their “original arrangements”: another way of jokingly calling something an “authentic replica”. “World music”, therefore is far from symmetrical in its structures of accrediting and respectful artistic license. In no way was the community to which the lullaby was attributed to contacted or consulted; instead, heated exchanges were held over board-room tables and manager-to-manager phone calls. Perhaps “world music” corporate protectionists hoard exclusive telecommunication pathways while bypassing the very source of their revenues.

Media has simultaneously made the global flow of music (as a cultural capital) easier, though not symmetrically. Copyright and intellectual property laws continue to curb the disseminative power of these technologies – virtual space is not as liberal as McLuhan’s utopian “Global Village”. On the other hand, the increased mobility of music has led to those of privileged access to new and vast territories of musical encounters. A quick entry into google.com or youtube.com opens hundreds of pathways, allowing one to sample cultural products, or to construct assemblages of wide-ranging musical tastes. Yet, beneath this veneer of mobility lies the complicated and sometimes contradictory mechanisms of the consumer industry to which music (to be enjoyed via medias of reproductive technology) is increasingly bound to. These are, in turn, mediated by marketing conceptual frames of (sometimes) breathtaking triviality such as “world music”, which potentially threaten to reduce musical value to a single barometer of loss and profits. But de/territorialization and “live” musical practices do trouble the hegemony of the international music-industry circuit, often creating intersections of productivity where new musical lives flourish.

Lacanianizing the Media

Jacques Lacan is a curious figure. Spouting cryptic semi-messianic universalizing statements such as “there is no sexual relationship” or “the unconscious is structured like a language”, Lacan’s psychoanalytical re-engagements with Sigmund Freud’s theories since the 1930s have been the subject of much controversy and debate. Nonetheless, Lacan-speak (or what Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek calls “Lacanese”) gained significant (if not notorious) currency in the language of new Media Theory, an intellectual marriage fostered in the 1960s partly through the arrival of “French” theory on American shores, and a growing desire to understand the powers of these media in shaping contemporary subjectivities. Particularly potent to these theorists was Lacan’s 1930s formulation of the “mirror stage”, which suggested that the social subject was precipitated through a primal act of “misrecognition”. According to Lacan, the pre-mirror stage infant experienced the self and the world as fractured and heterogeneous; it was only through the process of “misrecognizing” the image of the self in the mirror as the self could the infant then posit a homogeneous, totalized and self-enclosed ‘subject’ (what Lacan called the “Ideal-ego”), ultimately an illusion which serves as a focal point for the subject’s hopes, fantasies and desires.

If the subject’s entire experience of the self was predicated upon a function of “misrecognition”, indeed an internalized illusion of totality, then it followed that cultural products in society were equally functional sites of identification, conceptual “mirrors” which appeared to “reflect” what socially acceptable subjectivities produced by agents outside the subject. In short, culture itself could be conceived as a mirror upon which the subject misrecognizes him/herself, assuming the images and products he or she encounters as “ideal-egos” on which the self is regulated, constructed and kept in check. Because of the primacy of visual identification in Lacan’s mirror stage, it should come as no surprise that film theorists were the first to pounce on psychoanalytic modes of identification through the cinema. In Britain, the film journal Screen edited by Colin MacCabe and Stephen Heath embraced Lacanian psychoanalysis with much enthusiasm, combining it with Louis Althusser’s theories of subject-formations in the matrix of ideology of the 1970s. Althusser’s essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (a Marxist analysis of Ideology that incorporated Freud’s psychic topologies) strongly suggested that ideology “hails” or “interpellates” its individuals as subjects, cueing early film theorists to the possibility of cinema’s subversive potentials as a giant “interpellative” machine of ideology. As such, early incarnations of ‘screen theory’ in the 1960s and 1970s attempted to:

“... uncover the symbolic mechanisms through which cinematic texts confer subjectivity upon readers, sewing them into the film narrative through the production of subject positions.”

Particularly productive in film theory was the notion of the “gaze” of the filmic actor and how audiences misconceive the “gaze” as intended for them. MacCabe’s highly influential essay Realism in Cinema (1974) proposed that the staging of the “gaze” through clever film editing ultimately produced a hypothetical subject-to-be-looked-at. This ‘receiving subject’, so to speak, was less offered to the spectator that had it thrust upon him; the spectator misrecognizes himself as the recipient of the “gaze” (just as he misrecognizes his image for himself in the Lacanian mirror stage), and rather passively occupies the receiving role structured for him by the film. As a heuristic tool, Lacanian psychoanalysis provided these early theorists with a persuasive insight into the “socio-political context of production” as to how “the filmmaker’s (and by extension the culture’s) view of the world became confused with, or displaced by, the spectator’s view”.

Because explorations of Lacan’s mirror stage in media theory tended to (over)privilege the visual over other sensorial facilities, musicologists required another heuristic model in order to access the shifting boundaries of sonic subjectivities through the technological encounter. Their source of inspiration ultimately lay with Lacan’s reconfiguration of Freudian psychic topologies, which Lacan reformulated as the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. For Lacan, the order of the Imaginary was the site upon which the subject’s fantasy of the “Ideal-ego” was projected as total and unfragmented. The Symbolic order marked the infant’s entry into the realm of language – by appropriating and mastering the use of language, the subject carved a linguistic space of inhabitation within a field of signifiers. However, entrance into the Symbolic through the mirror stage meant forfeiting the infant’s pre-Symbolic state of heterogeneity (his or her relationship with the mother) for illusory totality and self-determination. This introduced a “lack” into the psychic structure of the newly-formed subject (since his/her relationship with the mother is perceived as a unity, a lack-of-a-lack); there is no subject first without lack. The order of the Real thus designated the pre-Symbolic space of inhabitation, and occasionally perforates the Symbolic through trauma and severe psychic perturbation.

For Friedrich A. Kittler, these three orders corresponded directly to the three media technologies of the gramophone, film and typewriter. These three psychic orders bore more than just a passing affinity to these technologies; according to Kittler, Lacan’s tripartite topology effectively theorized the separation of psychic life according to the spaces of inhabitation afforded by these machines in the first place. That is, the machine was no longer neutral territory upon which subjects played out their desires and fantasies. Rather, the machine and the subject enjoyed a symbiotic relationship through which the specifications of the mechanical medium organized the subject’s psychic reality. In fact, Kittler goes so far as to suggest that the Lacanian division of the psyche was an epistemological model which was historically enabled through the production of these media, as Geoffrey Winthrop Young and Michael Wutz point out:

“Hence, the distinctions of Lacanian psychoanalysis ... appear as the “theory” or historical effect” of the possibilities of information processing existent since the beginning of this century.”

Specifically, Lacan’s order of the Symbolic “now encompasses linguistic signs in their materiality and technicity” as made possible through the typewriter: first through the production of standardized “alphabetized” readers, then through higher forms of encoding via computers and the binary system. Recalling Saussure’s famous description of language as a system of “differences” without “positive terms”, Kittler argues that both people and computers are “subject to the appeal of the signifier”, disciplined according to an abstract chain of endless signification without a final “positive” term or destination. With sound recording, however, Kittler designates the gramophone Lacan’s order of the Real, since “only the phonograph can record all the noise produced by the larynx prior to any semiotic order and linguistic meaning”. Alongside the reproduction of phonemes (which conceals the pure, abstracted signifier), the phonograph simultaneously stores the “waste or residue” of “noise”, a sonic excess that is never fully soluble in the realm of the Symbolic. Finally, the medium of film is matched with Lacan’s order of the Imaginary much in the same way the early film theorists sought a relationship between image and subjectivity. Nearly reproducing their claims word for word, “Film”, Kittler claims, “was the first [medium] to store those mobile doubles that humans ... were able to (mis)perceive as their own body”.

It is in Kittler’s insistence once subjectivity as psychic symbiosis between man and machine that leads Nicholas Gane to view him as a theorist of “Post-humanism”. For Gane, Kittler’s exploration of the psychic landscapes between man and machine recasts Lacan’s discourse as a “material definition of consciousness” which (like information theory) “does not start from the question of meaning” but focuses on the ways in which “meanings are generated by an underlying technological framework”. Kittler, Gane asserts, bears the bright new torch of “post-human sociology”. But perhaps Gane’s joyous verdict steps too far ahead of a pressing question too quickly. If Gane’s evaluation of Kittler locates him within the coordinates of an epistemological counter-move (one is tempted to believe as reactionary to human-sociology), then are Kittler’s arguments rhetorical or descriptive? To put it another way, are Kittler’s post-human (cyborg?) psyches the well-paced products of strategic writing in order to overcome certain problematic binaries latent in academic writing (such man/nature or man/machine binary logics), or do they actually articulate a current state of reality?

For Richard Middleton, the answer is the latter; or rather, the latter made possible through the former – new strategies of binary subversion enabling a new logic of social inhabitation beyond power-impasses. Middleton’s work has already invigorated the field of popular music studies through the appropriation of vast Lacanian topics, and in the essay Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, argues that new music technologies (especially that of the DJ “mix”) allow listeners to transgress embodied categories of identification (like race, age or gender) in embrace of a post-human existence. Indeed for Middleton, the (often dense though virtuostic) force of his polemic revolves around the peculiarities of the voice as a bearer of Symbolic meaning and (recalling Roland Barthes) traces of the body. Reproduction technologies and recording apparatuses act as:

“... an acoustic mirror [...]. ‘Reflections’ of the vocal body, traversing anamorphically the gap between mouth and ear, have a capacity to short-circuit the ‘normal’ distinctions between inside and outside, self and other – for ‘the moment we enter the symbolic order, an unbridgeable gap separates forever a human body from “its” voice. The voice acquires a spectral autonomy, it never quite belongs to the body we see.’”

Virtually paraphrasing Kaja Silverman’s concept of vocal “projection” and “introjections”, Middleton offers us a psychoanalytic sonic counterpart to filmic “gaze” theory by theorizing the fundamentally split nature of the sounding voice. There is something “excessive” about the voice that escapes pure acoustic reflection, a dimension of its production that is inevitably “lost” whenever we speak or sing. What Middleton also draws attention to is the extra-Symbolic aspect of the voice, or what Mladen Dolar calls its “third level”, the “object voice” which stubbornly resists symbolisation. For Dolar, this spectral “object voice” is literally what Lacan called the “object petit a” (the little object/the object cause) beyond the mere Symbolic or the aesthetic, a “lever of thought, as opposed to the anthropomorphic masquerade of thinking”. But what is Lacan’s object petit a? To put it crudely: an impossible object of pure alterity that produces a horizon of desire just out of reach, a desire that can never be satiated. As Tood McGowan describes:

“Desire is motivated by the mysterious object that the subject posits in the Other – the object petit a – but the subject relates to this object in a way that sustains the object’s mystery [i.e. sustains his desire]. Hence, the object petit a is an impossible object: to exist, it would have to be simultaneously part of the subject and completely alien.”

Phonographic technologies reproduce precisely this “spectral” quality of this forbidden, disembodied voice, amplifying its “impossible” qualities (in the absence of an originating body to verify its “true” source) through its mechanical mode of presentation. But transfixing oneself upon the qualities of the object petit a as a site of barred jouissance (enjoyment, the threshold of pleasure/pain) in the (re)produced voice “places previous systems of both gender and race relations into crisis ... whose underlying mode ... is one of hysteria”. After all, the very “barred” qualities of the object petit a renders this transmogrified voice thoroughly inconceivable, throwing familiar epistemological structures of elucidation and familiarity into disarray. However, there is a positive note at the end of all these “impossible” objects. Examining the strange vocal qualities present in the tracks of ‘Dr Funkenstein’ (“strangely positioned in a frame of reference between the simian and the avian”), Middleton suggests that these yet-(epistemologically)-identifiable “creatures” may provide (sonic) platforms to rehearse our encounters with post-human Others as a template for intersubjective ethics. On the other hand, “changes in cultural technology” help to illuminate the pre-existing complexities of body politics, allowing us to materially “grasp ... the potentially fluid and always problematic nature” of these social relationships, and to articulate/inhabit new bodies – and possibilities – of being.

Hence for both Kittler and Middleton, Lacanian psychoanalysis possesses more than a mere casual relationship with reproduction technologies. Granted, their theoretical theses are inverted: while Kittler fathoms Lacanian distinctions of the psyche as beholden to technological changes, Middleton believes that phonographic technologies allow us to perceive our problematic (Lacanian) subjectivities with greater perspicuity. Nonetheless, mapping the nebulous terrain of the human psyche is a difficult one; what Lacanian psychoanalysis allows theorists to do is to creatively imagine new wirings of the unconscious amidst shifting social, cultural, political or technological geographies by stressing the horizons of thought and language. Paradoxically, it is these restrictive horizons in the first place that allow us to articulate different possibilities of being, construing the subject as a problematic yet exciting canvas upon which to paint (many) alternative future(s).

"Jesus Rocks it out!", or, the political mediatisation of religion

In a suburban America household, a mother survey’s her children’s addiction to their television set not without scepticism and reserve, worried that the pervasive use of “secular” references such as sex and violence may shake the staunch Christian orientation of her family. Perhaps the 1999 Columbine massacre orbits at the back of her mind, an event of shocking proportions that incited religious organizations to blame the “popular media”, and its depictions of violence. Grassroot inspired demonstrations speaking out against the socially corrosive effects of the “popular media” wasted no time in signalling out various forms of represented violence ranging from “violence on television, in the movies, and in video games” as affective rehearsals for copy-cat crimes enacted in the real world. Rachel Scott and Cassie Bernall (who both were fatally wounded), both invested evangelical Christians, dominated press headlines, portrayed as religious victims persecuted on the basis of their faith. According to Bernall’s father:

“When that young man asked Cassie if she believed in God, she boldly said yes, and he shot and killed her. The reason he did that was because she believed in God.”

With this statement, a linear pathway of logic linking violence, popular media and anti-Christianity (or hyper secularization) was established that framed Cassie Bernall as a victim of a larger de-sacralising media system that produced what Glenn Muschert calls the “Juvenile Superpredator”. The “media-threat” narrative clearly is not unheard of in larger discourses of the effects of the media on religion. In a sociological project examining the attitudes of American Christians towards media technologies and popular programming, many interviewees eloquently elaborated their views on the “power and pressure” of media influences on the home, while simultaneously expressing their concern for the influence of popular programming on young minds. Stewart Hoover’s research findings, however, suggest a startling degree of self-reflexivity on the part of the survey participants:

“Most of our interviewees readily talked about these things in terms of “accounts of media” through which they positioned themselves on the media landscape.”

Can these accounts therefore be easily trusted as evidence of the media’s threat to religiosity, or is there a flip-side to this coin, suggesting the confluence and conflict between different discursive teams of media technology “played out” over and through these mediums? For Hoover, what this degree of “reflexivity” seems to articulate is not so much the polluting of the ideological hegemony of religious beliefs through the increased encounter with counter-beliefs, but an increased participation and awareness about discourse models of media and technology that have come to dominate public discourse. Furthermore, Hoover points out that despite their mounting concerns over programmatic issues over the media, most Christian families interviewed presuppose the dumb innocence of these broadcasting technologies, treating their “relationship to media as a mediation” between their households and the discursive topics of the public sphere. Television, in particular, is conceived as a window to a garden of shared cultural commodities, representing “symbols, events, and ideas that are both important and lodged in a broader social and cultural context”. As much as televised programs threaten to penetrate the hermetic barrier of Religious censorship, one may also posit that televised content helps to fashion a discursive public sphere heavily reliant on these media as fodder for discourse.


What is problematic, then, by such “hypodermic” models of passive reception (and hence narratives of victimization), is the ways in which religious discourses thrown into relief against media discourses fashion a sense of collectiveness, self-determination, identity and temporal stability. Put another way, by adopting the conceptual framework of victimiser/victimised, religious organisations and subscribing individuals appeal to a mode of ahistoricism, worse – transcendental essentialism – which easily conforms to narratives of decline and corruption by so-called secular media content. Furthermore, “hypodermic” models tend to obscure the (often messy) negotiations that occur at the intersection between religion and the media, masking internal divisions within religious institutions as well as its participation in larger modes of discourse (such as politics and economics) which are tightly woven into the scaffold of their very ontology. To do so would be to deny the dialectical, albeit evolutionary, nature between religion and the media. Jeremy Stolow suggests we place a Foucauldian spin on the matter, and closely examine the “deep entrenchment of religious communities, movements, institutions and cultural forms in the horizons of modern communication technologies and their attendant systems of signification and power.” Indeed for Stolow:

“[The] field of religious symbols, practices, and modes of belonging has been radically extended through the colonization of a dizzying range of genres, technologies and forms: from popular history and pop-psychology books to websites, cartoons, trading cards, posters, rock music, bumper stickers, television dramas, scientific treatises, package tours and sundry forms of public spectacle.”

The very platforms of “secularization”, then, offer religious institutions surfaces for self-expression and Althusserian “interpellation”, offering a counterbalance to what is delineated as “secular” media. The differentiating barrier between the former and the latter, of course, is clouted with grey areas and blurred distinctions, as exemplified in the case of the 1960s Christian Rock Movement (CRM) initially established “by American evangelicals as an alternative to the mainstream ‘secular’ entertainment business”. As “clean” alternatives to hypersexualized MTV spectacles, CRM gained enormous popularity, occupying (and incorporating) diverse commercial rock genres from “soft and MOR through rock, heavy metal, punk and new wave.” As a mode of interpellataion, participating in CRM (though listening, album purchase and discourse) offered Christian youths a platform upon which to articulate difference and, correspondingly, the construction of “social reality” and shared communities of faith, bound by acts of consumption. And yet, this very act of appropriation (or hybridization) troubles simple categorizations of sacred/secular boundaries: how, for example, does one identify a “religious” rock song from a “non-religious” secular one?

One way, as John Reid notes, in which such difference is produced is through characterizing “themes” in lyrics such as “1) personal salvation, 2) witnessing of one’s faith, 3) living by example, 4) human frailties, 5) rebellion, 6) sin, 7) forgiveness and 8) God’s love and mercy.” However, this radically simplified delineation tends to produce examples that overlap with other non-sacred songs and songwriters; can we take, by extension, Bob Dylan’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (the latter an ordained Rinzai Buddhist monk in 1996) as a sacred song? The reverse formula produces a similar paradox: not all self-proclaimed “Christian rock bands” (such as popular Nashville group “Jars of Clay”) continually produce Christian-themed songs. How are we inclined to view the degree of “religiosity” of their secular products? Does the band members’ self-proclamation of faith thereby guarantee the “sacred” status of all their musical products? Last but not least, does the shift of emphasis from the “music-itself” to “lyric contents” as a defining factor indeed suggest a strategic moving away from metaphysical debates that attempt to puppeteer the “ineffable” nature of “autonomous music”, for the productive purposes of Christian/rock music hybridity? The musical aesthetics of the “Other”, it seems, are not simply absorbed or grafted without mutual transformation. What this illustration shows is that existing discursive models that frame the epistemological object of inquiry too, have to change in order to strategically accommodate hybridized entities.

What emerges out of this “tight weave” between media technologies and religiosity is the way in which such “media” (as employed by religious institutions) “have become central to the terms of interaction within and among the embodied regimens and imagined worlds that constitute the sacred in the global present”. As Stolow suggests, what might be worth investigating is not an imagined “impossible” gap between religion and the media, but a fundamental reconceptualising of the nature of religion itself as media. For Stolow:

“The problem with the phrase ‘religion and media’ is that it is a pleonasm. Whether as the transmission of a numinous essence to a community of believers, the self-presencing of the divine in personal experience, of the unfolding of mimetic circuits of exchange between transcendental powers and earthly practitioners, ‘religion’ can only be manifested through some process of mediation.” (My emphasis)

That is, instead of clinging on to conceptually limiting binary opposites, Stolow’s suggestion of viewing religion as media allows us to pursue two tributaries that diverge around an initial epistemological obstacle: the mediation (or mediatisation) of the sacred, and, conversely, the sacralising of the media. Indeed the application of the latter heuristic framework upon case studies in Christian Rock helps us to visualize Christian Rock aesthetics as a (cultural?) sacralising of technologies of reproduction and representation. CDs, DVDs or live performances of contemporary “worship music” (such as the internationally famous Australian “Hillsongs” praise and worship conference) co-opt mediatised Darstellung (modes of presentation) into sacred spheres of signification, re-“auraticizing” supposedly “innocent” medias as religious relics, or sites of religious praxis and collective identification. One may even go so far as to conceive the fanatical “stockpiling” of religious media as a form of religious object-fetish, imbued with a transmogrified form of mobile “liquid aura”, not unlike fascinations with the Shroud of Turin or the respected status of the Bible itself.

On the other hand, the mediation/mediatisation of the sacred attempts to shed light on the ways in which religious organisations recruit technology for their own purposes and, in the process, alter or infuse these medias with cultural, religious and institutional meaning. For example, Charles Hirschkind’s illuminating 2006 study of cassette sermons in urban Cairo districts reveals how the very material qualities of recorded Islamic sermons accrue extra-religious agency, which, in turn, reflect, inflect and transform the very institution(s) from which they originate. According to Hirschkind’s findings, the social mobility of cassette recordings and its “acoustic architecture” it enabled was instrumental in the production of what he calls an “Islamic counterpublic” – an interpellated public organized around the sonic reality governed and potentiated by these cassettes. The “extra-religious” dimension of the cassette tapes, for Hirschkind, lay in its complex interaction between state-politics, institutions and individuals, eventually playing a key role in a nation-wide “Islamic Revival” (ak-Sahwa al-Islamiyya) that led to the critique, interrogation and transformation of existing structures of religious and secular authorities. The ubiquity of the cassette sermons gave a young, rising class of University-educated intellectuals easy accessibly (not to mention easily smuggled) to vast and differing religious opinions, providing, as it were, the “glue” for new discursive forms for “arguing about and acting upon the conditions of social and political life”.


Most importantly, Hirschkind notes how the proliferation of cassette sermons led to an implicit decentralization of religious and secular power by the dissemination of competing points of view and religious interpretations. Counter-opinions were sought beyond state boundaries, assigning the slowly accumulating “counterpublic” the agency to give “public prominence to these orators that the Egypt State ... has been able to do little about”. These sonic discourses occupied a symbolic battle-space outside the cloistered arena of the mosques, deterritorialized, as it were, to spaces wherever cassette-players were available. These mobile soundscapes, Hirschkind argues, created “the sensory conditions of an emergent ethical and political lifeworld [outside the jurisdiction of the mosque], with its specific patterns of behaviour, sensibility, and practical reasoning”. Through Hirschkind’s analysis, the mediatisation of the sacred does not merely reproduce a “hypodermic” model of transformation. Rather, the media “speaks back” to religion, albeit through the fashioning of new technologically-influenced “modern [sonic] subjectivity” which conceives agents of the new Islamic “counterpublic” as human mediums – mediums with transformed “perceptual habits” that constitute:

“A unique religiopolitical configuration that simultaneously compliments and challenges both the secular-bureaucratic rationalities of the state and Egypt’s longstanding institutions of religious authority.”

Though discerning of the wider implications of mediatising religion, Hirschkind’s employment of the “counterpublic” (as a privileged site of resistance or contestation) does not sit easy with Stolow. According to Stolow, the problem with “counterpublic” is ultimately a problem with the question of agency; the notion of a “counterpublic” does nothing to conceptualize the possible contradictions, fractures and fissures imminent in its relation to other co-existing communities. Every “counterpublic”, Stolow reminds us, “is still a ‘public’ – subject to the same performative demand to win legitimacy through claims of representativeness, and the need to marginalize those within and without who threaten to subvert this effort”. As such, Hirschkind’s emphasis on the “counterpublic” tends to over-romanticize the autonomy of such spheres without paying enough attention to “the nature of religious publicity and its relationship with what are purported to be the ‘non-religious’ dominant public spheres” especially in multi-ethnic, multicultural societies. The consideration of the “Other” within the context of plural postmodern communities provide a challenging nexus of intersubjective negotiation in which modes of self-determination of religious organizations undergo compromises under the purview of egalitarian governance.


Tong Soon Lee’s essay on the role of loudspeakers and the Islamic call to prayer (adhan or azan) precisely performs the tricky operation of teasing apart the politics of representation and self-determination in postcolonial Singapore. Owing to the culturally diverse makeup of Singapore’s demographics, the use of loudspeakers atop mosques to broadcast the adhan underwent a series of contestations in the 1970s due to political and ideological social restructuring projects implemented by the government. During the second half of the 1960s, a politically-driven program on “nation building” saw the destruction and local deterritorialization of urban villages or rural kampungs which (due to earlier colonial arrangements by representatives of the British East-Asian Company) were ethnically and hence racially distinct. The resettlement of villagers to multi-ethnic districts was (and still is) highly regulated by the government in order to microcosmically reflect the macroscopic ethnic makeup of Singapore, creating ethnically heterogeneous areas of population. As such, the reterritorialization of the adhan amidst an locally intense heterogeneous environment gave cause for complaint that the sonic universe of the “Other” was unnecessarily “polluting” the sonic terrain of non-Islamic residents. In 1974, despite drawing harsh criticisms from grassroot Islamic groups, the government and Islamic organizations “decided to re-direct the loudspeakers of the mosques inward” in order to minimize the sonic encroaching upon the Other’s space. Eventually, radio was mobilized as a solution to tensions between the public and the authorities, which “broadcast[ed] the call to prayer five times a day” in recompense for reducing “the amplitude of loudspeakers in existing mosques”.

For Lee, the redefinition of an Islamic “acoustic community” via the radio had a profound impact on the way the Islamic faith was practiced in Singapore. Faced with the problem of ethically dealing with the newfound spatial proximity of Others, Lee notes how it was “necessary for Muslims to reinterpret their tools of culture production and adapt to changes in social space”. Through fostering spaces of religiosity by adapting its method of mediatising interpellation, this new ontic property of the adhan subsequently redefined the reception and cultural, embodied response to these new adhan Darstellung. For Lee, “what was previously an inclusive, community-wide tradition has now become decentralized and individualized, reduced to an almost personal, private act of worship”. Lee goes further, claiming that the very production of gender difference in the remediated adhan positions women “equally to men ... in terms of their reception of the Islamic call to prayer” whereas previously, women were not expected to attend prayers.

When perceived as media, religion is understood to be an open-ended process rather than an enclosed hermetic system of static knowledge, beliefs and practices. Indeed one is able to focus on the act of transmission and the structures of knowledge that enable transmission, or problematize transmission. Conversely, the recruitment of new media technologies to widen the girth of possible transmission pathways inevitably tamper with the ontic properties of the transferred, revealing cracks and inconsistencies (or the locatedness) of existing knowledge-structures of transmission. Slowly but subtly, the alteration of these knowledge-praxis structures in order to validate or expedite these new pathways of transmission changes the features of the system itself, leading to the formulation of new beliefs, new challenges, and perhaps new media.

Marilyn Manson: That Cyborg/Posthuman Thing!

Kin Toffoletti's "Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls" is a great read: the first chapter alone lays bare some of the crucial tensions within the cyborg/posthumanist and feminist debate; each theorist generally views the possibilities of posthumanity very differently, and some criticism is aimed at the "post" prefix as a mode of political transgression. As Middleton suggests, stupid machinery may be easily absorbed into phallogocentric (I really think that's Irigaray's word...) rationality - he cites the "body" of the gramophone in its sexed implications and wonders if the mere materiality of technology may not reproduce conceptual binaries of masculinity/femininity or penetrative/receptive logics.

On the other hand, there are two other strands of thought that emerge beyond the domestication (Symbolic dissolution) of the machine into these simple categories. Sherry Turkle (The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, 1984) engages playfully with reconstructive subjectivity (with her spin on Simone de Beauvoir), with particular attention to Multi User Domains (MUDS) amd virtual chat rooms. These spaces are evacuated of the body, though they (re)present forums upon which electronic identities coincide and negotiate, upsetting previous forms of embodied essentialism which Middleton also pays attention to. With a nod that anticipates Judith Butler's "Undoing Gender", MUDS may funciton as theatres of masqued confusion, where "users" perform potentially subversive subjectivities (eg. Woman masquerading as a man, vice versa).

Even though the counter-argument is that these playful games of masking reinforce the abysmal dislocation of the self from the Other and reifies old articulations of difference, one may propose that the very ambiguity - that is, the very possibility of subverting (transgressing) the boundaries of one's (over)determined bodies online is reason enough to imagine a "nervous" citizenship in Cybertopia. Thus, the possibility that this always-anticipated "nervousness" (or, for Middleton, "hysteria", the lack of voice-knowledge) can either reformulate models of (cyber)intersubjectivity or illuminate the body as a site that is already (for Lacan) "overloaded with signifiers" beyond the "subject's" control.

Another train of thought is the machine as the anthromorphocized Other. This notion, of course, is frought with theoretical pitfalls that (perhaps) erase the easy distinctions between natural/artificial: as machine thinks more like man, man thinks more like machine? There is a vague echo of Arendt's "banality of evil" residing in the machinic, almost evacuated and sanitized extermination of the Jews as a consequence of systematization, of Heideggerian "enframing" of Otherness as (non/post-human) "standing reserve". Or take Deleuze and Guttari's oft appropriated notion of the post-psychoanalytic BwO that operates without lack, regulated by flows, sites of intensities, and "plugged in" to the sphere of the social/material through compatability with assemblages of desiring machines. There was a recent article (I have to check this up) on an Islamic terrorist group using D&G's (sounds like the Oxford ice-cream chain!!) concepts of "territorialization" and "deterritorialization" to inform their violent activities. "Plugged in" to war machines as modes of desire production, that is.

Even Virilio in "Speed and Politics" (plus Kittler too!) recruit military violence as a genealogical narrative in the formation of contemporary media-politics, and (especially Virilio) warn of the future deployment of these media as mobilizing devices. Or, as Baudrilliard warns us, a war faught upon the mediation of digital interfaces which keeps the soldier's hands clean; in a perverse reversal of logic, the Other that appears on the soldier's screen is already a machine, an image reduced to essentially (pun intended) "null" value.

Where does this take us to in music? Or, perhaps more specifically, the politics of music? Recall Michael Moore's biting inquiry into youth culture, media, representation and 1999 Columbine High School massacre, released in
2002. Moore's journalistic scrutiny parses apart the deeply tangled debate
between representations of violence, and the possibility of these representations in encouraging real "copycat" acts at the fringes of reality/representation. Here, Marylin Manson comes back into the picture, a figure who was automatically blamed as a contingent cause of cultural violence which (at least by Christian political groups) propagated or encouraged real acts of violence. (There is a fantastic related study into fringe violence by Mark Pizzato called Theatres of Human Sacrifice: from ancient ritual to screen violence (SUNY Press, 2005), see especially chapter 3 on "Natural Born Killers") These charges of culturally embedded violence in Manson's music and music videos were caustic enough to cause Manson to cancel the last leg of his American tour in honour of the memory of the victims of the Columbine High School massacre - does this suggest consent of his role?

Manson acutely points out that on the day of the Columbine massacre, American violence on foreign territory had multiplied exponentially, noting that in a cultivated atmosphere of American "fear", the public had hypocritically forgotten the acts of violence carried out in their name on alien soil. That is, to put it in Lacanese, "violent music" is but the object of fetish for subjects in need of verification, of reason, which allows them to "ignore" the wider systematic violence carried out upon the turf of American self-determination. Simple fetishistic disavowal... perhaps... But Manson goes further: "I am fear," s/he says, "I am the embodiment of fear", a monster, an intense locus of abjected being that embraces the radical alterity of the Other (implicit within the split self) upon him/herself. Perhaps this is why s/he is such an easily targetable icon.