Notes Toward a Lacano-Marxian (Lacanian-Marxist?) Interpretation of David Bowie
Nearly a decade ago, when I had been living in Taiwan for about a year, an older American who first came to this part of the world already before I was born warned me about the hazards of staying outside of one's native land for too long and about how the longer you stay away, the harder it is to return. His point of view saddened me, as I had decided by then to make a life of it and to settle down in Taiwan. I thought he meant that it would be more difficult the older I got to find meaningful employment at home. On questioning him, however, I learned that he meant that the host culture would influence me in such a way that I would never be happy in my native country. At the time I didn't share his view and felt that he must be embittered for personal reasons. More and more, however, I find myself giving air - in the inner dialogue I have with myself - to thoughts that recall his remarks.
The single most difficult thing to swallow about America for me personally (and there are many such things) is its culinary life. I always have a hard time explaining to people my dissatisfaction. "Americans have a wider variety of cuisines than any other people in the world! How could it be otherwise, as this country's citizenry is no more than a cross-section of the peoples of this world in its entirety!" Thus runs the sentiment. I find that I must concede this point that is invariably made in the round of protestations I receive when I air my complaints. "Yes, it's true. There's more available to us in this country than there is to the denizens of other nations." But people don't understand where the source of dissatisfaction for me lies, which is rooted in (though not confined to) the lack of a traditional basis to fall back on in terms of a daily dietary regimen.
I'll tell you a story that I hope will convey my sense of dissatisfaction. About an hour west of where my parents live, a few miles away from the Delaware border, there is a series of museums built on the old 19th-century estates of the Dupont family. The most famous of these is a rather magnificent and locally famous tourist attraction, Longwood Gardens - reputedly one of the largest floral displays in the world. One evening last December, back from Taiwan for the Christmas holidays, my wife, my daughter and I arranged to meet my brother and his wife and kids out there one evening to stroll around their extensive Christmas display. After an exhausting couple of hours largely spent making sure that the three children didn't in any way molest the floral specimens, we got back into our cars, agreeing to look for a suitable restaurant on the drive back towards Philly. The drive was along a rather old, mostly two-lane highway that is overly traveled due to the constant development in that part of Pennsylvania. It was a Friday night, and every place was packed. We tried a Friday's, we tried a Bennigan's, we tried a Chi-chi's...all filled with high school and college kids out on a date and no tables available for at least 45 minutes. It was strip mall after strip mall, interspersed with the latest housing developments. Despairing, we finally pulled into a not overly crowded Bob Evans and had a sickening meal in which the entrees arrived half an hour later than the salads, along with the kids' meals.
The next day in conversation with my sister I waxed sociological on the strip-mallization of America, on how I could just as well have been driving through Georgia or North Dakota, on how consumer capitalism has obliterated any attempts at regionalization that the American Geist might have felt itself capable of attempting fifty years ago had it been given a chance, on how the only way you can get a decent restaurant meal outside of those tiny colonies where quality is demanded in the goods that people are served and from the people who serve them (American cities, namely) is by spending a hundred bucks for two at the sole restaurant in the county that makes everything from scratch rather than importing en masse from Friday's or Chi-Chi's Central, on how ridiculous it is to have to spend so much money on a meal that was made from natural ingredients and from one or two pairs of human hands, when the far cheaper Friday's "Philly Burger" is the end result of an assembly line procedure that involves the manual labor of hundreds if not thousands of workers, and finally on how I can leave my apartment in Taipei and, because I am living in the Old World rather than in the New, where capitalism has not yet destroyed pre-modern eating habits, can step into a hundred decent eating establishments within a half-mile radius in which great meals are prepared from fresh ingredients by a few people in a small kitchen...where a family of three can stuff themselves for under US $10.
I shouldn't neglect to mention the peculiar circumstance that conditioned this spontaneous "wild social analysis" (after Freud's "wild psychoanalysis") - namely, that my holiday back at home coincided with leisurely re-readings of Adorno’s key texts on the “culture industry” and American life circa 1945. Suffice it to say, after several such experiences during our Xmas sojourn, I got to thinking about the title of a piece by one recent commentator on Adorno, something like "Maybe Adorno Was Right After All." I was also reminded of the old joke about Canada: "Those poor Canadians. They could have had French cuisine, English humor, and American get up and go. Instead they got English cuisine, American humor, and French get up and go." Then I got to reflecting that America hasn't lived up to its idea any more than has Canada. Or to any of its ideas. Like the dietary idea: We could have had American Cuisine, but instead we got T.G.I. Fridays, Inc. Or the architectural idea: We could have had Frank Lloyd Wright, but instead we got McMansions that will fall apart in a couple of decades. Or the athletic idea: We could have had American Athletics, but instead we got multi-million dollar spectator sports for couch potatoes. Or, in a more contemporary vein, just examining what's happened since the immediate post-war era: The movies: We could have had Orson Welles, but instead we got Arnold Schwarzenegger. Popular music: We could have had Elvis Presley, but instead we got Graceland and the Elvis Industry. Television: We could have had Carroll O'Connor and Maureen Stapleton in a quasi-Brechtian American Television Theater, but instead we got Beavis and Butthead. Humor: We could have had Lenny Bruce, but instead we got Mike Myers movies. Song and dance: We could have had Ella Fitzgerald and Twyla Tharp, but instead we got McDonna and MTV.
The idea that my re-readings of Adorno have stimulated reflects a famous passage in Lacan where he states that with certain thinkers (he names Marx and Freud and I forget who else), you can't really criticize them, as their discourse is so far-reaching and all-encompassing that any criticism you take it upon yourself to make will have already been brought up in the discourse itself or answered in advance in some passage buried somewhere within its chapter and verse. The most you can do with such thinkers is to find new tools that will give you what you need to make the extensions or elaborations you wish to make. The more of Adorno I read the more I think that this is no less true of him. I'm beginning to get the idea that the correct approach to take is to do as Lacan did with Freud, Althusser with Marx, or Žižek with Hegel and assume dogmatically that virtually everything that Adorno said was correct. Why is this necessary? Because, the same as with Marx, Hegel and Freud, he seems to have almost single-handedly created a discourse, a body and style of thought (what should we call it - aesthetic critique, simply?) – a discourse to which it is impossible to add and from which it is impossible to subtract. Rather, we must find hidden implications that were not made explicit or "for itself" in the original formulations of the discourse. In other words, if we wish to be totally honest to Adorno and to ourselves, we should say, "Well, in fact, Adorno was right - in the essentials and, hard as it is to admit, even in the details. Taken on the whole and in its minutiae, popular culture and in fact most everything that the New World has wrought presents, at least from our present vantage in time, at best a mixed bagful of trinkets that are hardly adequate to the ideas they have of themselves or to their hermetic self-conceit." This, in fact, is a trivial insight. But it represents an approach to the material. An alternative orientation to the one normally taken vis-à-vis the saggy baggy, distopian figure of "official Adorno."
One of the smartest things I've ever heard said about popular culture came from Jimmy Page - himself a deacon and beacon of popular culture. In an interview I read years ago and the details of which I forget, the interviewer asked him to compare his achievement with the likes of Bach and Beethoven. He just laughed and said something to the effect that the sort of thing he does has only been around for a few decades and nobody's yet been able to get far enough with it so as to merit comparison with the likes of the names the interviewer had mentioned.
The following notes represent the beginning of an attempt to come to an understanding as to what is most vital, what is most worthy of retention into our presently doubtful futurity - that futurity into which we are constantly finding ourselves thrust forward…more soberly, to what is most crucial for the contemporary poet in the vast and ever accumulating literature of that unique American creation that Adorno famously dubbed the Culture Industry.
Prelude: Domains both Private and Public
(from a correspondence)
…Speaking of Bob Dylan, an amazing news story concerning that Laureate of American Song came out last week. A Dylan fan who currently resides in Japan, from Minnesota no less, was reading a biography of a famous Japanese yakuza when some lines popped out at him as if they were highlighted in bold relief that he recognized verbatim from Dylan's recent Love and Theft (which I've been telling everybody is his masterpiece - it sounds like a cross between Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Mark Twain, Steinbeck, and Duke Ellington). Perhaps as much as a third of the lyrics on Love and Theft were lifted directly from the biography, although the context is so entirely different (concerning the usual American drifters, broken hearts, and down-and-outs) that you have no indication that any of it could come from anything else apart from Dylan's own prodigious noggin, let alone from a biography of a Japanese yakuza. This incident has led Dylan fans to the suspicion, of course, that perhaps all of his many songs and albums were so composed. For me this comes as a major, belated realization. As much as a quarter to a third of my own poems are "lifted" from various domains both public and private - a technique I thought I had learned from those great American innovators Charles Ives, T. S. Eliot and William S. Burroughs...Now I know that I had learned it at a subconscious level many years before in the songs of Bob Dylan…
I. “Life On Mars”
(Bowie with Lacan)
[Note: The piece referred to below, "From Ibeza to the Norfolk Broads: David Bowie avec Lacan," is now Chapter 3 of the author's Reading Adorno; Or, How I Made the Poem (forthcoming, Onroda Press).]
When I purchased the Tercel two years ago and, after six years of residence in Taiwan, finally became a driver here, I thought to myself, "Great, now I'll have time to listen to music." I quickly discovered that esoteric music, whether Mozart or Monk, doesn't really work in a car, particularly if you have the A/C running most of the time, as tends to be the case in sultry Taiwan. Even if you've got it at a good volume, you miss most of everything under the level of a mezzoforte. So I decided to invest in pop music and began reviewing the music of our times and the music of my youth - show tunes, Led Zeppelin, recent Asian pop, Esquivel, Piazzola (if you call Piazzola pop music), everything. Listened to it all with a fresh ear after not having paid attention to it much for many years, listened with varying levels of interest, disinterest, and bemusement.
My most recent foray has been into David Bowie, who along with Bob Dylan was my favorite pop artist as a kid. I had given up on Bowie during my late teens and, in fact, lost interest altogether in the music of my youth, which all seemed juvenile and inconsequential next to Beethoven and Debussy. The one exception is that, even through the inevitable snobbism with which one is afflicted when one enters upon a classical training in music, I have always retained an almost holy devotion and commitment to Bob Dylan, who claims a seemingly universally recognized worthiness of serious consideration through his antecedents in the early 20th-century blues singers and in Anglo-American balladry, not to mention through his lyrics.
It was only when I had made the decision at the age of 25 to become a poet that I began to think about pop music again, figuring that is was high time to say goodbye to the snobbism that is part and parcel of "university discourse," my hardly original view being that "the state of the material" in both poetry and art as a whole had arrived at a point where the claims made by popular and consumer culture on "high art" since the inauguration of the Industrial Age could no longer be ignored, that there had to be a rapprochement between high and low, that it would be more worthy of a true disciple of the muses to cultivate a sustained ambivalence to and disregard for the old high/low distinction…etc. That same trial by fire that all must go through today who choose to leave the aseptic supports and props of "higher learning" and throw themselves upon the vicissitudinous mercies and affections of the muses…
As for Bowie...It's been almost twenty years since I gave up on Bowie as febrile and drugged-out pop syncretism and space-age hokiness. I've learned in the past few weeks, however, that what I once took to be a haphazard mixing of styles and song-forms is, in fact, a virtuosic and frequently profound commentary on popular culture, with real and substantial debts to literary figures such as Orwell, Burroughs, and Genet. The constant sci-fi references are very definitely meant to be taken as social satire, a register I completely missed as a kid, and they in fact form part of an extended metaphor about Western civilization and the havoc it has wrought upon the rest of the world...a metaphor made increasingly explicit in later songs such as "Loving the Alien" - in which the alien (referring back to Bowie's earlier sci-fi caricatures such as Ziggy Stardust, the narrator of Diamond Dogs, and the Man Who Sold the World) is no longer an extra-terristrial but
is the ethnic or racial outsider (the song refers obliquely to the Holy Wars and to the current conflicts between the West and Islam). In fact, I'm so taken at the moment with this artist I'd long forgotten about that I'm prepared to think of Bowie as one of the two real giants of post-war Anglo-American songwriting, playing Vergil to Dylan's Homer.
So it is that I've spent the past couple of months deeply occupied with The Seminar of Jacques Lacan on the one hand and the art of David Bowie on the other, driving around Taipei from student to student (or "from station to station" as in the Bowie song) contemplating the meaning of the series of recordings released between the late sixties and 1980, which most critics feel (unfairly, I believe) to have been the year of Bowie's last great efforts before capitulating to consumerism and exacting his revenge on a series of unfair contracts with unscrupulous music industry big-wigs by getting himself into fashion-model physical condition, writing well-crafted but comparatively empty hit singles with dumb video accompaniments, and making gazillions of dollars at the outset of the MTV revolution (music television ruined pop music, in my no doubt old-fashioned and cranky opinion).
I was particularly eager to get my hands on his 1970 release, Hunky Dory, which included a song with which I was obsessed as a high school kid, "Life on Mars." Unable to locate a copy of that production in the Taipei record stacks, I finally managed to find the song on a greatest hits collection a couple of weeks ago and spent several days racing around Taipei, trying to figure out the allure it had on me way back when.
"Life on Mars" is odd if only for the reason that it includes a full-blown modulation to a secondary key - something not unprecedented, of course, in pop music...but whenever it happens my ears prick up. The musical language of the song is not what one expects from a singer generally marketed as a "rock" artist...with its lusher harmonies and lack of blues references, it sounds on a first hearing as if it could have been written by Sondheim, Lloyd Webber, or by the more recent Disney composers such as Alan Mencken. The lyric is about a girl who escapes the constant arguments that apparently go on between her parents by attending the cinema, though she despairs that the people who make movies can't offer anything more meaningful than stories about brawling sailors, cavemen, inept policemen, and Martians. What is most riveting about this song is the modulation: After the first verse in an unchallenged F major, there is a sudden jump, in
the bridge leading to the chorus, into the parallel minor (though it is heavily and ambiguously inflected by A-flat major, the relative major of F minor). The melody then makes as if to modulate to D-flat major but surprises us, after the preparations for a modulation to that key, with B-flat major, the IV of F major, in the chorus. All of this takes place in at most 15 or 20 seconds. Those are harmonic events that you might find in Richard Strauss, or at least in Schumann or Schubert.
Once I figured all of that out (in the car on paper and then at the piano to convince myself that my ears weren't deceiving me), I said to myself, "This is a pop song that runs three and a half minutes. If he wanted to modulate to B-flat major, why didn't he just do so? Why this circumlocution through the parallel minor?" Then I tried playing the song that way, substituting naturals for all of the flatted notes, and what I got was a nice melody with the novelty of a harmonic modulation, but something less than a great song. And I realized that this harmonic circumlocution was essential to the success of the song and that it adds to the emotional ambivalence of the girl's position vis-a-vis her chosen form of entertainment.
But, having discovered for myself this much, the question was still there: Why precisely is the song uninteresting without this turn through the brushwood of F minor/A-flat major? The whole procedure is conventional enough to not be felt as jarring...it in no way sounds "psychedelic" like the haphazard harmonies you often find in American West Coast bands of the period. There's just enough of a thread to keep the musical logic flowing: The jump onto (or into) F minor, while sudden, does provide a link between F major on the one hand and A-flat major on the other, the A-flat serving as the V of D-flat. But what is the missing link between the D-flat that is touched on but never really arrives and the B-flat of the chorus? I mean...why does it sound logically plausible and not jarring? The missing link is obviously B-flat minor, the relative minor of D-flat major, which is never sounded. So the whole thing goes like this: F major - F minor
(parallel minor of the tonic)/A-flat major (relative major of F minor, also V of D-flat major) - D-flat major (but never confirmed as I) - (B-flat minor...never heard but providing the link between D-flat major, its relative major, and the new key, its parallel major) - B-flat major (the IV of F).
I don't suspect that you actually fought through all that, but I hope it's enough to convince you that this song is somewhat out of the ordinary. Trust me...part of what I do to earn a living is choreography for kindergarten performances of Disney songs. I've similarly analyzed dozens of songs just to make the task tolerably interesting. Nothing (or little) of the music what I've choreographed comes close to this in subtlety of construction (and I haven't even mentioned the exquisite deceptive cadence in the chorus).
But to reiterate the question once more...Why does Bowie need to go through this 20-second rigmarole...why can't he just use the tonic as a dominant to B-flat, the easiest operation there is, in order to construct an interesting song? It dawned on me in a matter of minutes, one of those epoch-making epiphanies on which revolutions are founded (and a moment in which my puzzler got sore, like the Grinch atop the mountain contemplating why the Whos aren't crestfallen that Christmas has been taken away from them)...it dawned on me, I say, that musicians and musical theorists who think solely about music and music theory are not equipped to answer or even properly pose such questions, and that I, with a musical education and now ten years of reading and re-reading outside of music under my belt, just may be.
Anyway, all of this is what I plan to explore in a piece that I've planned out with the working title of "From Ibeza to the Norfolk Broads: David Bowie avec Lacan." The first part of the title refers to Bowie's lyric in the second verse ("See the mice in their millions hoards/From Ibeza to the Norfolk Broads"...Bowie pronounces the "z" in "Ibeza", incidentally, with the Iberian pronunciation of "th" which foreigners like to tease Spaniards about), the second to one of Lacan's key writings, "Kant avec Sade." My idea is to spend some time working on the conundrum presented in Bowie's song and write a piece that will develop a theory (or at least a draft for a theory) of tonal harmony that is routed in Lacanian theory, Adorno, Foucault, and, nodding back 150 years, in Schelling, whose theory of art coincides in many key aspects with Lacan. In addition, I hope in this piece to work out an essay style, something I've been pondering for some time, which would incorporate poems at certain points in my argument (I've taken the hint from my readings of William Carlos Williams, who mixed poetry and prose in some of his ground-breaking works, most notably "Spring and All").
This piece, I hope, will answer many questions that I have concerning my own writing and may help catapult me back into the terza rima project that I began three years ago. That, really, is my goal for this project, rather than coming up with a theory of tonality or of popular music. It's more to help me establish and define for once and for all the relation of my writing to music and to the popular arts, and also to confirm for me the fact that I have undertaken so many years of reading and have waded through so much material and so many pages of questionable relevance (like the 700 pages of Locke's major book...I'm glad that I'll never have to do that again) for the reason that I believe that art in general and poetry specifically is only meaningful, indeed is only capable of continuation at all, during these latter days of humankind in which we find ourselves, as a response to the central questions of theoretical modernism such as those of knowing, of being, and of speech and language.
Thanks for bearing with me! Here is the poem that will either open or close the piece:
From Ibeza to the Norfolk Broads
Coming at you, from afar, through the cosmic fuzz,
on a vector athwart eternity,
from a site across the plenum where it once was,
back to which you will return and again will be,
breaking headlong into sound, peal on peal,
and attaining to distinctions of night and day,
emerging, with quotations, from the starry real,
up over the wall of the things we say,
steady up, steady down into the peopled ditch,
here I am, there you are, the pleasure's mine, same here,
and all the others with their sales to pitch,
each one provided with a speech to vanquish fear,
careening through the story, its rigors, its frauds,
via sovereigns, paupers, pimps and bawds,
slowing home, from Ibeza to the Norfolk Broads.
As a sneak preview of some of the things I hope to accomplish in the piece, here are some annotations (I could write similar notes for any of the poems I've written...though I realize that from the reader's point of view such notes often add up to no more than a cumbersome and unenlightening appendage, and that readers in general prefer to find their own threads).
Line 1 ("Coming at you, from afar, through the cosmic fuzz...") - I imagined any of a dozen Bowie characters. The alien as S, in the Lacanian shorthand - which indicates symbol, subject and signifier - emerging from the undifferentiated cosmic fuzz of the unconscious.
Line 2 ("on a vector athwart eternity") - "Athwart eternity," because time is only constituted with the emergence of the subject, which metaphorically emerges from the unconscious in a straight line ("vector").
Lines 3-4 ("from a site across the plenum where it once was/back to which you will return and again will be") - A paraphrase of Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden," which is commonly translated into the sterility of the technical language accepted by Anglo-American psychoanalysis - "Where the Id was, there the ego shall be" - but which should be rendered as "Where It was, there I shall be." Thus, the cosmic fuzz of the unconscious is identified with the id of Freud's later topography, where it is the ego's job to boldly go where no one has gone before (to quote Captain Kirk).
Line 5 ("breaking headlong into sound, peal on peal") - Here the subject emerges into language.
Line 6 ("and attaining to distinctions of night and day") - Knowledge is only possible with the constitution of the subject, with its emergence into the play of signifiers that defines speech; the first signifier is a simple opposition: yin and yang, fort und da, presence and absence, positive and negative, yes and no, whatever. Here, "night and day."
Line 7 ("emerging, with quotations, from the starry real") - The real here is what is incontestably opposed to the symbolic world, the human world. Lacan: "Stars are real, integrally real, in principle, there is absolutely nothing about them pertaining to an alterity with respect to themselves [i.e. as with human beings], they are purely and simply what they are." Here the real of the cosmos coincides with the real of the unconscious - a fruitful and tricky metaphor to use in a poem, as Lacan himself identifies both the cosmos (or physical world) and the unconscious with the real (insofar as the latter has not yet been symbolized).
Line 8 ("up over the wall of the things we say") - the wall, that is, that separates the world of speech, the symbolic order, from that of the real and of the unconscious.
Lines 9-12 ("steady up...vanquish fear") - At last we get intersubjectivity (the human world, in conventional language) - the subject amid a host of objects that are also for themselves subjects...the passage concluding with an anthropological reference as to the function of speech (i.e. "to vanquish fear").
Lines 13-15 ("careening...Norfolk Broads") - And finally history (for which "the story" is a trope, repeated frequently in my poems) - or, more precisely, the subject as it is dispersed in time, telescoping through Shakespeare in the penultimate line to Bowie in his traverse back and forth across the square of globe that is left to the British Empire (Ibeza actually belongs to Spain, I believe, though it's most heavily frequented by English sunbathers).
Mind you, I don't see myself as a writer of didactic poems. I try to write in such a way that one doesn't have to have the slightest knowledge of Lacan or the philosophy of the signifier to appreciate my poem. But it's helpful to myself on occasion to lay out the ideas that went into the making of a particular poem. What I've demonstrated in my own poem concerning the constitution of subjectivity and how one, in reconstructing it, is led from creation through history is an indication of what I hope to show goes on in Bowie's song and in many of the most memorable moments, not just in popular music, but in tonal music in general. Wish me luck!
II. David Bowie and the Father-we’ve-never-found
(Bowie with Adorno)
I'm paging at the moment through my well-thumbed copy of the unbridled sea that is Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, trying to find a particularly pregnant sentence I spent a few minutes puzzling over a few days ago. Ah, here it is. It's the paragraph spanning p. 26-27 in the Hullot-Kentor translation. I'll paraphrase: "The truth of the new lies in its intentionlessness - in the fact that it deals with materials which have not yet been all used up. The truth of the new lies in opposition to reflection, which is also the motor of the new. This opposition between the new and reflection raises reflection to a second order, a second reflection...As reflection increases in scope and power, content becomes more and more opaque ...Confirming Hegel's thesis of the transformation of mediation into immediacy, second reflection restores naiveté in the relation of content to first reflection...The increasing opacity is itself a function of transformed content which can no longer be viewed as reasonable according to the norms set by reflection." Interspersed between the sentences that I have tweaked together are references to Beckett and to the Theater of the Absurd.
It seems on first glance that in this passage we have a typical dialectical movement of thesis (on the side of content: the new, the intentionless, the opaque) and antithesis (on the side of form: reflection), leading to a synthesis of the opposing parties (in second reflection). It's always assumed, in discussing dialectics, that the movement proceeds ever higher, so that in the terms, for instance, employed in this passage, each subsequent passage into the side of form and reflection brings with it a yet higher degree of sublated (and therefore more "opaque") content. But to my mind the text is ambiguous enough that we can read Adorno against the grain. For while "opaque" content on the one hand is ever again taken up into "reflected" form, on the other hand there is the sense that each new level presents itself as an absolute immediacy, as of yet entirely lacking in content and form, an absolutely blank slate, just as at the end of the Science of Logic, at which point the Absolute Idea, the culmination of the entire system, winds back into the beginning, all the way back at Being, left, like Bob Dylan at the end of "Memphis Blues Again," "waiting to find out what price/you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice." I'm just now getting the sense that it's possible to read Adorno in such a way that, unlike with Hegel who takes 800 pages to get back to being, an absolute beginning may be located at each turn, each new synthesis or sublation within whatever opposition Adorno happens to be contemplating. And it's through such a reading, I think, that it's possible to hook the Adornian dialectic up with the Lacanian drive - the endless and stupid (stupid because ultimately irrational) process of circulation around an empty void which at times is occupied by an object cause of desire (Lacan's "little object a"...I have yet to find a conceptual match for that in Adorno).
I see that I'm taking longer to say what I wanted to say about this passage, but I'll continue. We are each born into a world, a world (as in the title of one of Wallace Stevens' books) that consists of a whole made up of parts. The parts of which the world into which I was born consisted...what were they? Beatles songs. Mad magazine. Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. Nutrition information on the back of cereal boxes. Andy Warhol. Archie Bunker. Little league and baseball cards. Trick or treating at Halloween. Lackadaisical and innocuous brands of old world religions (Catholicism, in my case). Coming into adulthood, my "lifeworld" (to borrow a term from Husserl) was opaque to me. But it was an opacity, an immediacy pregnant with clearnesses and mediacies to be uncovered and brought into the light of intellectual adulthood, no less than the differently but not so differently constructed German lifeworld that was an opacity filled with clearnesses and mediacies to be articulated in the future perfect by the young Adorno. (Which isn't to say that I wish to make a vulgar, historicist statement like "20th-century American civilization is every bit as worthy as that of 19th-century Europe," of course. But continuing...)
You're David Bowie. It's 1967. Tony Newley is a dead-end. What do you find lying about you? Oh yeah...that other stuff. A few James Brown discs. Buddy Holly. The Platters. Martha and the Vandelles. The new Blond on Blond from Bob Dylan which seems to up the ante in so many ways, and a curious thing with a banana picture on the cover signed by Andy Warhol from some band in New York with a cult following. But what beyond the names? A few guitar riffs, a lot of "Oh baby, baby"'s variously declaimed, a melodic hook here, a memorable turn of the wrist on the drums there. A bunch of doo-dads, alike in their opacity. Opacity? Why opacity? Because they're not entirely intelligible. Rather, they're merely pleasing. Either not alive enough or not yet dead enough to be able to put their appeal into words (or to be able to assign signifiers to them and allow them to enter into the chain of signification and of interpretability). Anyway, you're just a kid. Of course they're opaque. Sure, you might be able to trace this particular turn of phrase back, record through record, to some unheralded innovator with a bad complexion who never got signed in 1957, or that particular drum effect to an unknown drummer who was supposed to have filled in for J. D. Fontana once during one of Elvis' first sessions. But what do you know of where it really all comes from? What do you know of the cotton fields, the salons and the saloons of 19th-century American antiquity...the only antiquity that America knows? But keep on with it. Reflect, guitar on your lap, at this crudely phenomenological level. Let a year or two go by. Keep these trinkets in your head. Sit down at the piano from time to time. Allow them to become "second nature." Make the immediacy you sense for these things ever more immediate. You've done your time in first reflection, you're ready for the second one. Maybe it will come, maybe it won't. It doesn't certainly come to everyone.
But it does come, evidently, to an English kid by the name of David Bowie in 1971, in a recording and a series of stage performances entitled Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Call it pop syncretism, call it space-age iconicism (I almost wrote "iconoclasm," which might be OK too). But whatever you call it, call it a great work of art, as full of resonance with Bowie's lifeworld as the first great poems of Keats or the first novels of Jane Austen with theirs. A masterwork of youth. And what finer an art has youth produced than the music that emerged in America and in Great Britain during the middle decades of the 20th-century?
Well, that sounds a bit more hagiographic than I intended and is nothing along the lines of what I intend to write in the Bowie piece, but maybe I'm getting closer to what I mean by a “dialectics without utopia,” without the Aufhebung or the shadow of an Aufhebung, that one might attempt to rescue from “official Adorno.” Continuing...The impression I'm getting as I begin my re-readings of Adorno is that the longing that one senses in the writings of the German exiles, in strict contrast to the lack of such longing notable in the writings of their French contemporaries, is permanently opaque to us, lost and dead to us. We can explain it, we can analyze it, but we can't comprehend it. That's what was so shocking to me about my recent, detailed reading of Capital...in many respects, the writers considered Marxists from Lukács to Adorno seem to retreat behind the Marx of the 1860's into a sort of pre-post-industrial nostalgia for states of affairs that might have seemed possible from Enlightenment thinkers from Rousseau through Owen, Saint-Simon and Fourier to the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts and the “Theses on Feuerbach” but that were more and more excluded from the realm of possibility after the revolutions and part-revolutions in the middle of that century, after reaction, restoration, and the rise of social democracy.
The very fact, however, that you can speak of this sense of longing as an "opacity" means that it must resonate with something in our own lifeworld. For if something is absolutely clear or transparent to you, it's obviously something that you don't need and have no use for or feeling for. We Americans have no utopian longings. But we do have nostalgia as a sort of shadowy double - a nostalgia that must surely be related through certain underground subterfuges to the utopian aspects of Adorno and the others. A nostalgia divested of thrust and truly opaque, meaning truly immediate and ready-to-hand in a way that utopian longing never was for the utopians themselves from Rousseau to Adorno. A nostalgia summed up in the memorable lines of that American oracle, John Ashbery:
So I cradle this average violin that knows
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself
In November, with the spaces among the days
More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.
It's in those forgotten show tunes, which for me are a trope for all popular music - that music, that is, that truly belongs to us as Americans or as inhabitants of the New World…it's in those show tunes of which Ashbery speaks that our nostalgia lies, more than anywhere else. A nostalgia so beautifully encapsulated at the end of On the Road as Sal Paradise thinks on "Old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found..." a line absolutely unthinkable in a European novel. A nostalgia of which Paul Simon sings, counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike, noting that "they've all gone to look for America," an America they'll all find and never find like Kerouac's Sal out in search of a father that, by grasping, will forever elude him. A nostalgia made palpable in Ray Bradbury's stories, in which you find yourself on a distant planet with everything arranged as you've always imagined it to have been during your parents' or grandparents' lifetimes, but in which the uncanny seems to have stained the homey picture through a familiarity that has inched up a bit too close to home...an uncanniness altogether different from the European sort of uncanniness found in Kafka. A nostalgia that you might think of as a hole that was ripped out of the symbolic universe of Europe and its symbolic utopias and that reemerged in the real - emerged, in fact, on the day in the 1490's when everyone realized that Columbus had stumbled upon a new world. A little memory of utopia, a little homage to the early-enlightenment utopias of Erasmus and Thomas More that took root in the new world as on virgin soil and that later swelled into an anamophorpic blot on the swath of globe comprising Western civilization that grew so big that it finally occupied a place in the vision such that you could only see either Europe and utopia or America and nostalgia, never both at the same time. And that's why you can't simultaneously read Adorno and think clearly about anything that grew out of nostalgia and its native soil until you have had Adorno in your mind for a very long time.
III. “Golden Years”
(Bowie with Adorno with Lacan)
Unable to read the Heidegger that I had set as my reading goal for this weekend, I got to thinking about another of my favorite Bowie songs, "Golden Years"…another song that seems to contain keys to unlock certain Pandora's boxes of meaning and interpretation in the realm of recent music. You must know that song, it's from Station to Station of 1976. The one that begins, "Don't let me hear you say life's taking you nowhere, angel." I believe it's in B-flat major, but I'll assume it's in C so as to make my analysis easier to follow. Nothing very complex, as in "Life On Mars?" The simplest and most intriguing of structures, in fact. I won't go into the sophisticated rhythms, which occupy a wonderfully urbane and, at this far remove in time from all things truly funky, ethereal zone straddling '70's soul, funk, and Latin American pop, and is dominated by the lucid strumming of Carlos Alomar (as is, indeed, the entire album, which many critics feel is Bowie's best, due in large part to Alomar's contribution). I hope you have the opening melody in your head. The most striking thing about it is the flat-7 on "life" in the descending 3-2-1-flat-7 line that accompanies "Don't let me hear you say life's…"
Let's call this descending melody on the tonic chord the "a-zone". Now get the melody of the "b-zone" into your head, the one that accompanies, "I'll stick with you baby for a thousand years/Nothing's gonna touch you in these golden years." An amazing little operation goes on here. First, we have a jump onto IV on "stick". Then what? The IV becomes the V of I in B-flat, the B-flat arriving on "Nothing's gonna…" The F to B-flat sounds like a bonafide modulation, and the B-flat is anticipated, of course, by the appearance of flat-7 in the C major of the "a-zone", mentioned above. So the harmonic structure of the song thus far, assuming we're in C, goes C to F to B-flat - backwards through the circle of 5ths. The only problem is that the confirmation of B-flat is frustrated by a G-minor chord (the relative minor of the new key) on "golden", which has the effect of a melodic skid off the track in the wrong direction. Then, after a descending flourish, which includes an anguished augmented 2nd (C-sharp, B-flat, A), accompanying a reiterated "gol-ol-den", we're suddenly, abruptly, jarringly back in the "a-zone" at C, where we started from.
What does all this mean? Let's take a look at the key lyric, which comes next, in this second verse of the "a-zone":
Some of these days and it won't be long
[You're] Gonna drive back down [to] where you once came from
In the back of a dream car twenty-foot long
Don't cry my sweet don't break my heart
Doing alright [but] you gotta get smart
Wish upon wish upon day upon day
I believe, oh Lord, I believe, all the way!
(With my bracketed interpolations to indicate the standard cuts that a singer is likely to make in the lyric to make things cleaner.)
A great lyric, a lyric of nostalgia - a classically American nostalgia. Life is taking the person to whom the song is addressed nowhere. The subject is meandering through life in a monotonously circular pattern, endlessly circling around the "nowhere" of her discontent. A uniquely American sort of prayer for a subject that is metaphorically lost in a search for a father she'll never find, in search of an America, an "American Dream," that will forever elude her. Then you have the dream car, the car of countless Springsteen songs, the Chevy that drove to the levee and found it dry, that will drive her back down to where she once came from, an American land of milk and honey. The same fertile crescent of which Bob Dylan sings and which he makes uncanny in nonsensical dreamscapes such as "Million Dollar Bash" ("I looked at my watch, I looked at my wrist/I punched myself in my face with my fist/I took my potatoes down to be mashed/Then I made it on over to that million dollar bash").
Thus, this "a-zone" on the tonic is the zone of prayer, the zone of unfulfilled dreams. The "b-zone" of the move to a new tonic on flat-7 is the zone in which the subject, the narrator’s sweetheart, or, say, Kerouac's Sal, imagines that he or she can almost glimpse paradise emerging from over the next horizon. And that character's name, "Sal Paradise" - has anyone ever tried to explain why Kerouac chose such an apparently cheesy family name for his hero? Or that of his alter-ego Dean Moriarty, with its resonances of "mortal"? Sal is driven to find Dean-the-father-he's-never-found. But if he ever found him, wouldn't he face just a sunken and decrepit old man? Wouldn't, in fact, he find the pathetic body of real-life Neal Cassidy, fifteen years later, who went off on a search of his own for a father-he's-never-found and dropped dead during an aimless count into the thousands of the horizontal wooden slats on a railway line? Similarly, if Bowie's sweetheart ever got to the milk and honey of B-flat, wouldn't she find it to be just another dull American town where people scrape by to make ends meet, where they live and die, "carrying trays in and out of the tomb," as I once wrote in a poem?
So Bowie never lets us get to B-flat. Maybe it wouldn't be so great to get there anyway.
Where's Lacan in all this? In "Golden Years," Bowie has staged the Great American Drive. This is barely even a song. Like most great pop songs, it's really no more than a fragment of something repeated a couple of times. Just a circular loop from C to F to B-flat and, after the harmonic hiccup on G minor and the bone in the throat posed by Bowie's anguished "Gol-ol-den" (which has the effect of a skipping LP...too bad CD's don't skip), back to C to begin the loop again. The Drive in a dream car, or in a Cadillac if you'd prefer, or in a Buick out on Highway 61, running right by your baby's door. The Drive in pursuit of a father-we've-never-found, around and around a void left vacant by the loss of the maternal Thing. And what's that precisely…the maternal Thing? Nothing else if not the motherland - though few Americans realize this, which creates all the trouble. Not only the European motherland, of course, but also the Asian motherland, the African motherland…the Old World motherlands and everything that went with them - tradition, the family, religion, home cooking, pride and distinction of nativity, the loss of all those things bemoaned by cultural conservatives and Pat Buchanan…
To return to Adorno. This is why I need to read the Adornian dialectic against the grain: In Europe, maybe it is true that, at each new twist of the dialectic, more and more is added to the repository of sublated content, and things become more and more opaque until the whole thing reaches a critical mass coinciding with some sinister Anschluss. But in America, nothing ever gets carried up into the next level. People just start over from scratch. If the levee runs dry, we’ll move to California. In Europe, it is always assumed that you'll get somewhere in the end (Utopia). In America, in contrast, you know that you'll never find that Father (who Himself is just a stand in, an object cause of one's desire that propels the search around the void left by the lost Mother…which, again, is a fact that nobody knows). But you go on looking anyway. Thus, Nostalgia.
As a footnote…I've written lots about America in the foregoing paragraphs, but have neglected to note the fact that our author and performer is not even an American. That, I find, is one of the most fascinating aspects of the art contained in the dozen or so LP's released between Space Oddity of 1968 and Scary Monsters of 1980. The fact that some of the most crucial statements on American life and culture in a medium native to that life and culture have been formulated by this dangly, pale individual from across the Atlantic. Possibly no one yet has properly discussed the strange significance of the fact that a whole generation of English kids born in the '40's understood American music in a way that Americans themselves couldn't. (What, for instance, would John Mellancamp, Aerosmith or Axyl Rose have done if they had written "Golden Years"? They would have given us paradise in all its shoddy glory by a full arrival on a chord built on that B-flat, on that flat-7 of the opening key. And what would it have looked like? Like Graceland. Not the Graceland of Paul Simon's great song, but the one you get when you actually there.) The English - not entirely European, not entirely Old World (perhaps because the Industrial Revolution destroyed the Old World earlier there than it did on the continent), yet certainly not belonging to the New World either. Aliens, all of them. Aliens in America, aliens on the continent. Yet they, better than the Americans themselves, it could be argued, understood the American search for the Father-we've-never-found. For if, in the 20th-century, there is a real name, a historical individual corresponding to that Mythical Father, certainly it's none other than Robert Johnson. (Why did Johnson sell his soul to the Devil? So that he could occupy the site of the symbolic father. The question is a trope for the rather more mundane question, "Why did he die young and leave so few traces?") And who were the first to realize this? Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones, Jimmy Page…I would argue, though I'll stop here, that Bowie's enactment of the American search for the father-we've-never-found is deeper and more authentic (in the best sense of that word) than the efforts of those slightly older musicians, who remain at the level of homage and emulation (in terms of the late Lacan…of wanting a Master).
Maybe the English, qua aliens, are posed to understand things about America as the German Jews from Heine to Benjamin - Germans whose legal Germanness was constantly finding itself on unstable ground - were posed to grasp certain things about Central Europe that no one else could. For most Americans, their nostalgia is not yet "opaque" (to bring up the difficult idea from that passage in Adorno one last time) because they're too much in it, just as the German exiles - insofar as they were "merely German" - could only think "around" their utopian longings, never set it in front of their eyes for examination. The English, in contrast, can see our nostalgia from afar, but not from such a distance that it and the trinkets of which it is comprised would sift through their eidetic clutches like grains of sand. American nostalgia for them is something that they can pick up "and examine it as if it were a rounded sphere," as I say in one of my poems.
Postlude: "It's the Drive, Mr. Haas."
I've been writing about Bowie. But who is that ghost standing behind the Thin White Duke? Is it that of Adorno or that of Lacan? Why do these two names keep converging upon each other from their cubby-holes on opposite sides of our theoretical Rhine? For what two giants of 20th-century thought could you possibly find situated at a greater remote from each other, in every possible respect, even down to their lingual/literary dispositions?…Adorno with his towering prose megaliths, imposing and im-prosing, inlaid, the next upon the last, like dominoes upon papery soil (may we dub his writing "Schwarz auf Schwarz", Black on Black…an avuncular Old World counterpart to the "Blonde on Blonde" of Bob Dylan's rolling strophes?)…Lacan with his non-dialectical, pointillist wit, with which you can never be sure what belongs to the proper dimension of the theoretical edifice and what has been thrown in for a Dadaesque subversion of the proceedings, or whether indeed the Dada elements might not in fact be proved thoroughly theoretical at some ideal, scarcely thinkable future point upon which a Master Lacanian (Žižek perhaps? Copjec? Fink? even Miller himself?) will Christ-like spring, overleaping the asymptotes, either causing a papery apocalypse (reminiscent of the exploding bureaucracy in Brazil) in which all Freudo-Lacanians will ascend into heaven, all ego psychologists (led by Anna Freud and Marie Bonaparte) descend into hell, and the libraries that housed the psychoanalytic canon spontaneously self-combust, or (more likely) causing the Lacanian theoretical edifice to drift apart into a vast sea of Bretonian cognates (speculations as to a heat death or cold death of Freudian theory)…What, to arrive at our full-stop, do Adorno and Lacan have to do with each other?
The Thin White Duke answers for us, affecting Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, peering through urbane whiffs of cigarette smoke: "It's the Drive, Mr. Haas…the Drive."
Adorno is huge enough to contain the best of Lacan (although the reverse may prove truer), and I'm happy to think that he unknowingly discovered the Lacanian drive a decade or two before Lacan really got rolling in his seminar…that it's all there in his version of the dialectic, which in fact is the only other version of the dialectic there is…the only true alternative to dialectic in its original Hegelian formulation. (For Marx only played with dialectic. It was his task to discover something new - namely, synchronic structure. Althusser was right…Marx's references to Hegel by the time he gets to Das Kapital are merely for fun. See "Norado Defended Against His Devotees," below.)