Category: Personal

Pop Conference

Since I had a great time at the EMP Pop Conference, I should probably say something about some of the talks and panels I enjoyed, in addition to my own.

The best panel I went to was called “Breaks in Time: Rethinking Hip Hop Roots.” It was really about the multiple genealogies of hip hop: the ways that various cultural elements (beats, musical motifs, dance moves, forms of presentation, attitudes, etc.), coming from disparate sources, mutated and coalesced in the South Bronx in the early 1970s to produce what we know now as hip hop. In other words, the panel was focused on how cultural innovation happens: how instances of sampling, recycling, and appropriation lead to the production of something new. This also meant showing the ways that cultural production and innovation come from “below” (rather than, as institutional art histories like to claim, from “above”), and how miscegenated, mixed, and hybrid such innovations nearly always are.

Oliver Wang started things off with a discussion of Boogaloo (aka Bugalu) a New York City Latino (and specifically Puerto Rican) dance craze or musical subgenre of the mid-1960s that is largely forgotten today (or written off as merely commercial exploitation), but that mixed Latin/Caribbean and African American funk rhythms in interesting ways, and that in turn influenced both salsa (which emerged a few years later, in the late 1960s) and early hip hop.

Second, Jeff Chang, author of the well-nigh definitive hip hop history Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, looked at the evolution of the break beat, that rhythmic moment that hip hop DJs would isolate and play over and over again — which is the musical characteristic that first marked hip hop as a distinct musical genre (and not only musical, of course; since the break beat was really for dancers, even more than for listeners). Chang found Latino as well as African American/soul/r&b/funk antecedents to the break beat.

Next was Garnette Cadogan, who extended these genealogies to Jamaica. He traced the ways in which reggae and its predecessors (like ska and rock steady) appropriated and reworked various strands in North American r&b, how reggae lyrics interacted with other Jamaican sources like the poetry of Louise Bennett-Coverley, how the reggae mix then returned to the United States starting in 1969, and how Jamaican music entered into hip hop both musically and via DJ Kool Herc’s famous adaptation of Jamaican sound systems to the South Bronx.

Finally, Joe Schloss looked at how the breakdancing of early hip hop was influenced by a dance form called uprock. Breakdancing was done mostly by African American youth in the Bronx in the early 1970s; uprock was mostly done by Puerto Rican youth in Brooklyn in the late 1960s. Once again hip hop culture was shown to have miscegenated roots, and to have coalesced from a multiplicity of sources.

All four speakers played copious samples in the course of their talks — which was great, as you could actually hear what they were talking about. Joe Schloss also demonstrated the dance moves he was talking about, which was great (not to mention impressive on the part of a guy who looked like he was in his 40s, rather than being 17 or so like the original dancers). All in all, this was an exciting panel, and also one from which I learned a lot. It reached a point where academic and non-academic (journalistic) modes of writing/research/scholarship become indistinguishable from one another, and where genealogical investigations fuse with the appreciation of, and active involvment within, living culture. The panel was exemplary — as was the conference as a whole — in the way it moved transversally between deep involvement in, and critical reflection upon, popular music — something that we could well emulate in the ways we approach film, video and new media, and other forms of living culture today.

PS: there were many other interesting talks I heard at the Pop Conference; but I will only mention one more: RJ Smith‘s discussion of Destroy All Monsters, the band formed in the 1970s by Jim Shaw, Mike Kelley, and Cary Loren, all of whom went on to become famous as Los Angeles conceptual artists. Smith moved between the times of the band and the murals that the group made for the Whitney Biennial of 2002, which presented a dazzling pop art monumentalization and mythologization of Detroit popular culture and the attitudes derived therefrom. It was weird, magnificent, and hilarious, and, as a Detroiter, I really appreciated it.

Pop Conference

I leave tomorrow for Seattle, for the Pop Conference at the Experience Music Project, which in past years has been one of the best conferences I have ever attended, mixing journalistic and academic writers on popular music. I still haven’t quite finished my own paper, on Ghostface Killah’s use of soul samples (file under: sonic hauntology) — it looks like I will be typing away on the airplane until my laptop’s battery runs out.

The Virtual and the Future

Sorry there has been so little posting lately — but for the past several weeks, every free moment has been devoted to writing my talk for the Deleuze conference that is coming up this weekend. The subject of my talk is “Deleuze’s Encounter With Whitehead.” Unfortunately, I haven’t quite managed to finish the paper, or get to the end of what I am trying to say — but perhaps this is just as well, since the paper has also gotten too long, even if I finished I wouldn’t be able to get through it in the time provided.

The part I have finished — the part I will be giving at the conference — is really little more than “Whitehead 101 for Deleuzians.” I work through Whitehead’s notion of events, show how important this notion is for Deleuze’s own thinking of the event, and compare Whitehead’s and Deleuze’s treatment of some of their most important common predecessors (Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant). This leads up to a comparison between the virtual in Deleuze and the potential (also known as “eternal objects”) in Whitehead. I argue that both Deleuze’s virtual and Whitehead’s potential are “conversions” of Kant’s transcendental argument. They seek to define conditions of actual emergence instead of Kant’s conditions of (mere formal) possibility; but they join Kant in refusing to allow these conditions to be hypostasized as belonging to some radically other, transcendent realm. And they posit their transcendentals, not (as Kant does) to answer the epistemological question of how we can know, but instead to answer the (ontological? kairological? temporological?) question of how change is possible, or of how to account for a future that is not predetermined by the past.

However, this discussion is really just a preliminary to the argument that really interests me — and this is the part I have not written yet. I want to argue that Whitehead’s eternal objects offer us a better way to talk about change and becoming than the orthodox Deleuzian vocabulary of virtuality provides us with. And I want to suggest, similarly, that Whitehead’s notion of God provides a more useful alternative to Deleuze and Guattari’s formulations about the Body without Organs. Whitehead defines God – or at least what he calls “the primordial nature of God” – as the “graded envisionment” of all eternal objects, i.e. all potentials. The vision of God accounts for “how the actual includes what (in one sense) is ‘not-being’ as a positive factor in its own achievement.” Whitehead’s God, like the Body without Organs, is a non-totalizing and open “whole”, and can be regarded as the “quasi-cause” or “surface of inscription” for all events, in such a way that it does not determine these events, but allows precisely for their indeterminacy and continuing openness to difference in the future. But in a powerful way the notion of God (at least Whitehead’s notion of God, I don’t see how this would apply to anyone else’s) is a more flexible, more empirical, more pragmatic notion than D&G’s BwO is. Which means that it is, in a way, more accountable, more open to “temporal” considerations (like how to think the monstrous body of Capital) as well as to aesthetic ones (like how to conceive the affective qualities and implications of post-cinematic formal/technological developments). So I trying to ask Deleuzian questions — ones that Whitehead never thinks about — but arguing that these questions are better answered (or worked through) in Whiteheadian terms than in Deleuzian ones.

Will this work out or make sense? I don’t know. So far all I have is an intuition, and a project. I don’t know what will happen when I get the time to work through the actual argument.

Better post this now; I gotta go to the airport.

Virtual Life, “Real” Life

Interesting posts by both Kim Dot Dammit and, in response, Jodi, on how blogging relates to “real life.” The difference between the two is somewhat illusory. Even before blogs and the Net allowed for all sorts of virtual extensions, it was already the case that we aren’t always the same person in every situation and to everyone. I am not quite the same person to my wife, to my mother, to my kids, to my students, to my close friends, etc.; not to even mention my own sense of “self” or mental privacy. There are always degrees of multiplicity and difference. We are always being performative to some extent, though at times we are much more aware of doing so than at other times; and yet, all these performances are who we “really are.” We can’t separate them off from our “true selves”, even if sometimes we delude ourselves that we can. It is not an existential problem, but only one for certain (e.g. Cartesian) highly essentialized and reified notions of what it means to be a “self.”

Interesting posts by both Kim Dot Dammit and, in response, Jodi, on how blogging relates to “real life.” The difference between the two is somewhat illusory. Even before blogs and the Net allowed for all sorts of virtual extensions, it was already the case that we aren’t always the same person in every situation and to everyone. I am not quite the same person to my wife, to my mother, to my kids, to my students, to my close friends, etc.; not to even mention my own sense of “self” or mental privacy. There are always degrees of multiplicity and difference. We are always being performative to some extent, though at times we are much more aware of doing so than at other times; and yet, all these performances are who we “really are.” We can’t separate them off from our “true selves”, even if sometimes we delude ourselves that we can. It is not an existential problem, but only one for certain (e.g. Cartesian) highly essentialized and reified notions of what it means to be a “self.”

Of course, the problem gets exacerbated to the extent that part of one’s life is “public”; as it inevitably is for me, for instance, both because of my job (as a university professor), and because I write this blog. The nature of the Net as a medium gives the illusion of being more distant than is the case with other forms of interaction. This, presumably, is why Kim was surprised to realize, after all, “that the distance component is very illusionary and that cyber words and actions can have as much impact as an actual physical presence.”

I think I learned this lesson when I was on LambdaMOO in the early/mid 1990s. It was a very weird period for me, which started when my first marriage broke up. On the rebound, and also exalted (if that is the right word) by the semi-anonymity and sense of freedom that the MOO offered, I got involved very quickly in some very intense and (it ultimately turned out) seriously misguided virtual relationships, both sexual and not, some of which remained virtual (and quite strange and difficult), and others of which crossed over into “real life” with calamitous consequences. All of this only ended when I met Jacalyn on the MOO, and then in person, in the flesh — and we are together to this day.

I think that I learned from all this that my “freedom” to reinvent myself, which seemed nearly infinite in the virtual world that was LambdaMOO, was in fact much more constricted than I realized, because my MOO persona could not be separated as much as I thought it could from “myself,” my physical body and my habits, neuroses, etc. Which doesn’t mean it was all for nothing — I did become something of a different person as a result of spending that time in LambdaMOO — but that all of these transformations, all of these performative explorations, all of these experiences of “growth” (in this case, I use the scare quotes because I don’t want to sound New Agey; but I guess that “growth” is not a word that I can entirely disavow) are still finite, relative, and limited. Or, in other words, it is not so much that they are still related to, or aspects of, who I am — but, more strongly, they are who I am. They are my history as well as the mutations in the course of that history.

Julian Dibbell

The DeRoy Lecture Series 2006-2007
presents

Julian Dibbell

“PLAY MONEY: Gold Farms, Polar Bear Rugs, and the Theory and Practice of Contemporary Ludocapitalism”

Julian Dibbell has, in the course of over a decade of writing and publishing, established himself as one of digital culture’s most thoughtful and accessible observers. He is the author of two books on virtual worlds, My Tiny Life (Henry Holt, 1999) and Play Money (Basic, 2006), and has written essays and articles on hackers, computer viruses, online communities, encryption technologies, music pirates, and the heady cultural, political, and philosophical questions that tie these and other digital-age phenomena together. Currently a contributing editor for Wired magazine, he lives in South Bend, Indiana.

Friday, November 10, 3pm
English Department Seminar Room (5057 Woodward, room 10302)
Detroit, Michigan

The DeRoy Lecture Series 2006-2007
presents

Julian Dibbell

“PLAY MONEY: Gold Farms, Polar Bear Rugs, and the Theory and Practice of Contemporary Ludocapitalism”

Julian Dibbell has, in the course of over a decade of writing and publishing, established himself as one of digital culture’s most thoughtful and accessible observers. He is the author of two books on virtual worlds, My Tiny Life (Henry Holt, 1999) and Play Money (Basic, 2006), and has written essays and articles on hackers, computer viruses, online communities, encryption technologies, music pirates, and the heady cultural, political, and philosophical questions that tie these and other digital-age phenomena together. Currently a contributing editor for Wired magazine, he lives in South Bend, Indiana.

Friday, November 10, 3pm
English Department Seminar Room (5057 Woodward, room 10302)
Detroit, Michigan