Boy, no access to the Net for a coupla days -- too hectic.
Had a video linkup with the ultracharismatic Tricia Rose, in which she determinedly faced certain questions about hip hop that had up to then been consistently elided during this conference -- namely, the consumption of images of blackness by white people, and what the market has to do with this, and what everyday lived and interpersonal experiences of cultural exchange have to do with this (if anything). Obviously these are great questions to ask of those who misread their own antihumanism and think that these days "everything goes everywhere", or that various sedimentations of power relations are something to be easily evaded by a few throwaway comments about the impossibility of authenticity.
Basically, Rose's thesis was that we're in a tragic era, in which huge swathes of white consumers are uncritically eating up images of pimps and ho's by way of various market mechanisms, and that the still brilliant possibility of a politics of resistance within mainstream hip hop is further away than ever. She demanded that we ask, "what should hip hop be?", and felt moved to explain why another Public Enemy so obviously doesn't seem to be on the cards for ultracommercial hip hop.
In some ways, her ideas seemed to be a mirror of Douglas Kellner's approach to media spectacle, in that for all intents and purposes, we must read everyday reality through the image of the market, and that it's very easy for cultural theorists and ethnographers to overemphasise and celebrate the marginal without waking up and smelling the coffee. As I said in my last post, I think while this move is a really important one to make, on its flipside is a danger to fall into a kind of tabloid politics that chases the crassest impulses of the market, rather than finding and working with practices of culture that might somehow come into contradiction with it. Rose talks about the resistant possibilities of hip hop, eclipsing what I think is far more important: the virtuality of resistance.
Responding to Rose's somewhat over-ideological reading of "resistance" leads me to Deleuze's distinction between the possible and the virtual. Rose tries to map the future of what hip hop "should" be, and fetishistically wants the possibility to declare one's ideological affiliations through the genre -- a somewhat instrumentalist, prescriptive approach to culture. It's the leftist flipside to commodity fetishism. Meanwhile, what about the virtuality of resistance, a project that isn't about (self) consciousness or declarations, but about radically expanding the space of freedom that comes with participating in various cultures of movement? Within that expansion, that furthering of social autonomies, I'm sure there can be lots of analysis and reflexivity, and even a few declarations. But the underlying quality of its movement can be radically political in a way which would make it invisible to Rose. Not in a desperate attempt to "find resistance where there is none", as she puts it, but in a different way of thinking about resistance altogether. Of course I don't think, therefore, that relatively privileged white kids listening to hip hop in their bedrooms are ready to tear down global capitalism because that would be a fashionable escape from the sedimented realities of the political geology of the world. And I think that there obviously needs to be more analysis and reflexivity to come if the virtuality of resistance is going to herald much structural change on this planet. But rather than think about what hip hop "should" be (saying), isn't it more productive to see how hip hop's enactment in its many cultural spaces might herald a coming community?
Postscript: After just talking to Tommy DeFrantz about this issue, I'd again underline that no, I don't want to privilege white boys in their bedrooms over more grounded and active social practices of hip hop as culture. His insistence on materialism is an ever-welcome corrective to flights of fancy. But I've said it before, and I'll say it again: those of us who do use stuff about "mobile concepts" in a luxurious and evasive manner are confusing subjectivity with the individual liberal subject, and this this continual slippage in the textualist humanities is very much at the heart of the depoliticisation we find there. People who imagine that disengaged academic types are simply self-indulgent wankers are only half right, just as those who obsess about Stalin's undeniably butcherous drive in an analysis of authoritarianism in the USSR are committing a massive kind of liberal reductionism. I don't agree with it, but Trotsky's critique -- that the repressive "Soviet" bureaucracy "arises" from Stalin's theoretical "mistakes" about "socialism in one country" -- is useful to flag here. The luxury of disengaged academics crucially involves the kind of effective theoretical error of which the slippage between subjectivity and the individual is a prime example. All of this -- theoretical slippages, self-indulgence -- is what happens when the individuating mechanism is enacted, and this has to be teased out, rather than accepted on its own terms -- that "they're just self-indulgent fuckwits". Otherwise we are doomed to their repetition.
