Royalty

These are rough times for those of us with Jacobin hearts. Many people are intensely interested in a recently “well-born” child from an “ancient” family. This fascination with royalty makes a mockery of our shared humanity. Perhaps it’s too obvious to point out that being alive means we are part of an unbroken chain that reaches back to time immemorial. That our lives are a testament to the struggling of our ancestors, who suffered long enough to birth children in whose blood our own lives were destined. That all of us are the direct descendents of the first animals that found meaning in bare necessity, in whose minds the world became a symbol, who saw in the process of living the possibility of transcending the brute materiality of existence. We are all of us a large family connected by blood bonds. But we are also a bunch of fucking monsters. All of written history documents the negation, abridgement, or qualification of people’s humanity by those in power. Exploitation and repression have often been intrinsic aspects of certain societies, in particular societies that were considered as an extension of the monarch’s sovereignty. Vertical societies in which the monarch serves as the head of the body politic concretize the inequality that ensures unnecessary human suffering. That so many ding-a-lings celebrate the injustice represented by aristocracies as tradition speaks to how deeply some people have internalized and naturalized the unequal conditions of modern life.

The contemporary veneration of aristocracy also points to another interesting contradiction of capitalist modernity. The liberal principles that were marshaled against the symbolic primacy of the aristocracy by an emerging bourgeois order in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suggests that the triumph of those ideas should have done away with not only the actual ruling European aristocracies but with the meanings and feelings associated with them. But that has not been the case. Even in the U.S., which is perhaps the most powerful symbol of liberal democracy, people feel a strange bond with the lives of European nobles. Bourgeois society developed an economic system, capitalism, that eroded the financial basis of the feudal order, and it developed a philosophical position, liberalism, that eroded the moral basis of feudalism’s ideas of leadership, but it could not really create a vision of society that was all its own. Even after its triumph, bourgeois society retains the aristocratic ideals that suggest that wealth, leadership, morality, and beauty are intertwined, so that someone’s economic position indicates their intrinsic worth. Bourgeois society could not rid itself of an aristocratic world view because it did not fundamentally disagree with its basic premises. In other words, the bourgeoisie did not want to completely rethink society, they just wanted to rethink it enough to justify why they should be in charge.

Lorde’s “Royals” exemplifies what I’m getting at here. The song is primarily opposed to the conspicuous consumption of a lot of contemporary pop and hip hop’s showy excessiveness in particular: gold teeth, Grey Goose, Maybachs, diamonds on your timepiece.  (A brief aside: That this song equates hip hop with oppressive wealth suggests an unbecoming and mildly racist defensiveness. Flashy young black men are not the primary source of our society’s economic inequalities.) “We’ll never be royals,” the song maintains. Yet the protagonist of the song nonetheless wants to be “a ruler” and a “queen bee.” Obviously what the song is driving at is a sense of sexual power and really no more than that. But the metaphors are interesting to me because they demonstrate how entrenched our ideas of domination are. A song that is explicitly not about royals nonetheless relies on the figurative power of royalty and rule to get its point across. So doing it illustrates precisely the limits of the bourgeois victory over the feudal world.

Show Me Something

Resignation, muted yet desperate, “a fever” Rihanna calls it. The desire to keep loving, needing to love, and finding in anything—“show me something”—a purchase to continue to love with bleak determination. An ambivalence that is nonetheless grounded in a need that cannot be satisfied any other way. It’s the worst place to be when you’re in love: heart-sick at the situation but knowing that you would be heartbroken without it. It is asphyxiating and all-consuming. At some point, the string that holds you to your love snaps and you’re cast into that ashen world of heartbreak. Some people handle that process with grace and dignity. I roar at the world in childish defiance to the facts. Whatever way we manage it, at some point, many years later, you can look back and feel no pain at all. Isn’t that a motherfucker? When they don’t stay, eventually it all goes away, including the love and the hurt that accompanied it.

I watch my daughter sleep. Her brown face is completely relaxed. I’m so overcome with love for her that I lift her off the bed, squeeze her, and kiss her on the nose. She doesn’t wake up when I put her back down. But she does turn over while pulling a raggedy old cloth sheep up to her face. She inhales the toy’s smell deeply before settling back into her quiet sleep. The tenderness with which she smells her toy reminds me of a woman I once loved with a withering intensity. She had two blankets from childhood, from before her father died, and which in her mind were inseparable from the feelings of happiness she associated with the period before his death. She would occasionally press her face to the blankets and inhale whatever it was that was in them. Whenever she did that, I found it so sweet and sad that I always had to look away. She was the most beautiful woman I have ever known and the sadness and distance that suffused everything about her, so that you could feel it in every one of her gestures, combined to make me obsess about her constantly. But I never really knew how to love her in a way that made her happy. This stemmed from my own demands of how I wanted to be loved. I didn’t just want her love. I wanted her to love me in the way that made me feel loved. She had to show me something that I considered was an appropriate display of love.

In my mind, the contrast between these two consuming loves demonstrates the poverty of romantic love. My daughter does not have to do anything for me to love her. My love for her is unconditional: it makes no claims and requires nothing in return. She doesn’t even have to love me. But I don’t think I could ever love a romantic partner unconditionally. I also don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way. That kind of love demands something. It may not be much or even make us happy but in order for it to endure we need something, however small, to stay.

Phenomenology

Justin Timberlake’s “Mirrors” has many of the things I like in a song: romantic themes, a melancholic atmosphere, and it calls everyone to the dance floor. But the most striking thing about the song is the profusion of visual and ocular imagery. Love in “Mirrors” means being able to see clearly what had before been made obscure by the lack of belief. Understanding feeling in “Mirrors” is expressed as the clarity of vision: “You were right here all along/It’s like you’re my mirror/My mirror staring back at me.” In this, Timberlake sounds very much like my man, Husserl. For he too believed that understanding a sensation meant being able to see it clearly.

A feeling. Sometimes the distance between yourself and the easy conversations you see shared by other people seems like the space between the bottom of the sea and the face of the sun. An impossible distance. All these discontinuous events and thoughts that make up a life remain opaque and indecipherable. Sometimes all you want is a feeling. A tepid, breezy night and I sit by the window. I close my eyes and feel the air move over me. Perhaps this is what Husserl wanted all along: to sense and have that sensation destroy the impulse to see beyond it, to reconcile it to meaning. He wanted to describe no further than he could touch. He placed a boundary before him that contained all he could depict as the residue of experience. Everything beyond it was fuzzy and indistinct and unknowable, not in any reliable way at any rate. This was a man after my heart, a man that wanted to know only what life gave us to experience and not why. Nothing could be known except what could be adequately represented as experience. The desire for meaning was forestalled with the ruthless devotion of an ascetic. I drive down Telegraph as the day ends and the street is divided by the sinking sun. The top halves of the oaks shine like coins in the oblique light. Their leaves reflect and soften the light. The tops of the buildings have all turned rose-colored. The windows and the part of the street above the rising shadow-line are painted by the tired light. Everything else is in shadows. The bottom halves of the trees appear obscured as though you were looking at them through darkened glass. The pavement looks like a stagnant river as it stretches away from me. The grayish world of the shadows is the context that allows the sun its last moments. What would Husserl say about that? The lights and shadows transform the way we apprehend objects. They either clarify or obfuscate what we see in such a way that they allow us to confuse what is simply an optical effect with what might seem like an epistemological or perhaps even a moral one. True that. But I construe it nonetheless as the inequity of the sun. Just as I apprehend the night air over me as a benediction. My point is that I make a shitty phenomenologist.

This Kind of Game Is Hard to Come By

How do you like that Nietzsche? (Tall, pretty girl talking to me at the bar. Answer nicely.) I’m embarrassed to be reading this in public. It’s the kind of book that someone usually reads at the bar in order to get asked about it. (Jesus.) Do you like it? (She’s obviously trying to chat you up. Make inoffensive small talk.) I got tired of reading it at home. I didn’t want to bring it with me because, to tell you the truth, it seems to me like a book that people would have with them in order to seem intellectual. But I see why Nietzsche is attractive to some people. He poses irrationalism and the embrace of artistic mysticism against the positivism and instrumentality of the German nineteenth century. Mostly I’m reading this because I never have before and I don’t see the point of being proud of ignorance. (For fuck’s sake.) Huh. What do you do? (Say you teach.) I’m a professor. (Are you for reals?) Can I ask you something? (Yes, please do all the talking, so I can shut my fucking mouth.) I’m working on something and I want to hear an opinion from someone outside of my own social circle. (Whatever she asks say something positive.) Let’s hear it. (Whatever she asks you will be encouraging.) I’m developing an interface that allows people to engage in alternative kinds of economic transactions. You can list goods or services and exchange them for equivalent things with other people on the site. So for example, say you can provide an hour of yoga and in exchange you can get back a handmade pair of earrings. Does that sound like something you think that people would be interested in? (You will say something generous.) Yeah, it sounds like something that would really appeal to people with a predisposition toward bourgeois forms of economic romanticism. It’s like farmers’ markets, you know, where people participate in alternative kinds of exchange in order to purchase the illusion that in enabling other people’s unalienated labor they have somehow affirmed their own? (Jesus.) Yeah but couldn’t this also be a way of making it possible for other kinds of people to get things that they might not otherwise be able to get? (She’s white, be gentle.) Are you talking about people of color? ([My mind gave me a silent reproach here.]) I mean, don’t you think that this could make it possible for people of color, as you say, to get stuff that might not be available or cheaper than they might through traditional means? (This is a good point.) That’s a good point but I doubt that they would turn to these kinds of models generally. (Good answer!) Why? (Keep it up!) Because this would appear to most communities of color as a white economic initiative and those communities hold a deep and historically well-founded distrust of white people and their claims of economic betterment. (Fuck.) Hey, thanks for talking to me. [She turned back to her things and didn’t say another word.] (Yep, this is how I thought this would go.)

Hustling

Work is always secondary in the aesthetics of hip hop. It is strictly a means to an end. It is the hustle that allows the lifestyle, which is always what matters, for it is the lifestyle that allows the artists to be able to describe how far they have removed themselves from the marginality and disempowerment facing many members of the communities from which they emerged. Besides the hustle, traditional forms of work are generally ignored by hip hop. The elevation of informal routes to financial success represented by the hustle and embodied in such figures as the gangster, the pimp, the drug runner, the baller, and the rapper himself or herself represents the lack of faith of communities of color in general and African-American communities in particular toward achieving success through conventional avenues. The persistently pervasive forms of racism facing workers of color throughout all levels of contemporary society suggest that this lack of faith is well-justified. Nevertheless, hip hop also often mentions, if only in passing, the hard work of parents and the struggle of relatives barely keeping their heads above water through constant labor. It is not often, however, that work is the central object of representation in hip hop.

In its insistence on work against ballerness, Kat Dahlia’s “Gangsta” is quite unlike most commercial hip hop. Against conspicuous consumption and empty posturing, she poses the struggles and sacrifice of everyday life. Mom, dad, grandparents, and siblings are all shown to be managing in their own ways with obstacles placed before them. In its evocation of an entire family confronting the reality of scarcity “Gangsta” reminds me of Phillip Levine’s great poem “What Work Is.” In that text, the poem’s protagonist imagines he sees his brother ahead of him in a line of people hoping to find work for the day. But even while the person turns out not to be his brother, the narrator is overwhelmed by the love for his brother and his stubborn ability to work. Thus he metonymically affirms his love for all the other workers standing in line with him—theirs is a brotherhood based in their shared knowledge of what work is. The protagonist of “Gangsta” also knows what work is: “I’m paying for this session/And I’m paying for rent, food, clothes, phone, Christmas presents/6 shots in and I’m just counting all my blessings/No days off baby I’m not resting.” There is a value to work here, and hip hop is divested in this song of all flashiness and is rendered as a kind of labor that makes possible a better life for the performer and her family. Hip hop matters only in so far as it is work.

Hip hop as a calling. Weber argues that the Protestant idea of a spiritual calling was what made possible the modern notion of work as something which could be spiritually fulfilling instead of something that one is simply compelled to do in order to eat. He argues that capitalism initially penetrated everyday life in the transatlantic Protestant homelands of modernity because it was there that people first considered the banal idea of laboring in order to make money as something that could be seen as demonstrating one’s closeness to god, that economic stability was a sign of one’s good standing in the eyes of god. Work came to be seen as something good instead of something that simply was. What emerged as way for relating this crass world of ours with the other, better world of salvation became in time an asphyxiating limit on imagining human flourishing. The case isn’t that work couldn’t be for some people a satisfying thing but that labor often becomes in modern capitalist society something that eats up people’s lives, particularly poor people’s lives since they are unable to save for vacations or to take time away from work or to take early retirement and thus not have to work constantly. This is an aspect that cultural objects like “Gangsta” and “What Work Is” touch on obliquely but don’t quite come to terms with: work maybe a worthwhile thing in and of itself but it can also so consume people’s time that they are not able to live proper lives outside of it, and again this is particularly acute for poor people. Work can perhaps be meaningful for poor people but the one thing that it cannot guarantee and which could be potentially even more beneficial spiritually to poor people is freedom from work.