Brad tries understanding critical theory.

Essay question: Discuss the politics of style and the reconfiguration of cultural material.

Introduction

Terrorist chic is the reconfiguration of terrorist iconography and aesthetics into commodities for consumption. It is becoming increasingly pervasive from the hooded sweatshirts of Anticon (link) to the reappropriation of Hamas’ kaffiyehs by hip hop’s fashion elite (link). My aim with this essay is to challenge the idea that terrorist chic always operates to transform terrorist symbols and narratives into empty signifiers for consumption, through an analysis of the pop star MIA. Born Mathangi “Maya” Aulpragasam, MIA is a recording artist who spent her early life in Sri Lanka before the ethnic conflict forced her family to move to London as a refugee. Her father was an educated, militant Tamil but resisted joining the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Her music is a mash up of various cultural styles, often combining the sounds of world music with a contemporary Western electronic dance aesthetic. Her music and visual art show sympathy for the plight of the oppressed and disenfranchised and, most controversially, those who are stigmatised as terrorists. In the first section of this essay, I will argue that MIA’s terrorist chic is a legitimate strategy for engendering a revolutionary politics from within commodity culture. In the second section, I will argue that MIA deterritorialises her own terrorist body and in doing so, transgresses the cultural/regional/political borders that prevent radical becomings. I will be discussing MIA as a machine in the Guattarian/Deleuzian sense. MIA as a machine is a cultural assemblage, the consumption of which brings MIA into the process of productivity production even as exterior elements define what the MIA machine is (Guattari, 1995, 37).

Terrorist chic / Becoming terrorist

Much of the discourse surrounding the appropriation of imagery attributable to radical political movements revolves around Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, the idea that in the production of commodities, the object of commodification is ascribed an exchange-value that obscures its use-value (Marx, 1867, 44-45; Tetzlaff, 1993, 248; link). For example, Samantha Edussuriya has expressed concern that though MIA utilises iconography referring to the struggles of the Tamil Tigers, any political reading of this iconography is “undercut by the gimmicky enthusiasm invested in these symbols” (link). Underlying such arguments is the idea that consumers’ prehension of terrorist iconography is relegated to a superficial engagement as soon as it enters into the realm of terrorist chic and is co-opted by the corporate media. The problem arising from the Marxist-based position is that it fails to take into account how patterns of consumption have changed. The consumption of a commodity such as MIA is accompanied by magazines, video clips and, of particular contemporary importance, Internet blogs that all inform the commodity’s production of subjectivity. MIA should be understood in terms of Deleuze’s concept of the event (Deleuze, 1988, 18-25; link) as a commodity whose meaning is produced through the consumer’s prehension of elements received in multiple media platforms.

Representations of MIA in the media consistently align the politics of resistance struggles with her identity. In the video clip for her single, Galang, MIA performs her song in front of Day-Glo coloured graffiti images of armoured tanks, tigers and bombs. The tigers are a reference to MIA’s ties to the Tamil Tigers through her activist/militant father. This political link is cited by nearly every review of MIA’s albums. Josh Timmerman of Stylus Magazine called her a “political dissident” (link) while Robert Christgau of Rolling Stone describe how MIA’s “[s]tar access enables a woman who grew up an impoverished refugee to observe the outcomes of similar histories in immigrant and minority communities worldwide” (link). On a pure sonic level, MIA’s music evokes global conflict. On Kala, for example, the sounds of Bollywood musicals (on “Jimmy”) collide with didgeridoos and youthful Australian indigenous rappers (on “Mango Pickle Down River”) along with the jolting sound of machine guns as percussion (on “Paper Planes”). MIA in interviews usually calls attention to her politics. In a typical interview on Pitchfork, MIA stated that (link)

politics is the first thing that defines who I am. It’s like, “You’re just The Other, you’re this thing. You have evil thoughts about the world.” When I watch President Bush on the telly going, we need to fight the axis of evil and kill these terrorists by all means necessary, I just go, “Shit, poor Dad.”… They’ve made a cartoon character out of a terrorist. It’s so ironic that I’m here because the front of this week’s Newsweek is exactly what I was singing about on “Sunshowers”.

The concrescence of these elements in the consumer results in a prehension of the MIA event that is inextricable from a politics that problematises the rationalisation of global conflicts using reductionist terms such as “terrorism”. The political component of MIA is an eternal Object as references to real conflict are made consistently throughout her media representations and thus serves as consumers’ dominant ingression into the MIA event.

It is worth noting that this media savvy mode of consumption is in no way universal but rather singular and subjective. A Deleuzian conception of the MIA event must also take into account those whose consumption of MIA extends to merely hearing her song in a club and reacting to the beats. The government and media industry have even intervened in an effort to curb prehension of MIA’s terrorist-humanising narratives with MIA being denied a working visa to the United States when recording Kala and MTV refusing to play the single Sunshowers. However, these interventions have been reported in the media and actually worked to strengthen the eternal Object that is MIA’s politics

But even if MIA’s terrorist chic does not empty the iconography she engages of the political history in which it was originally couched, some might argue that the consumer’s engagement with the commodity’s politics is merely superficial. Karen Bettez Halnon argues that the trend of consuming commodities that adopt an aesthetic of poverty is a “rationally organized type of class vacationing” that controls the spectre of the underclass by treating it as a tourist site to be “symbolically consumed as so many safely objectified and dehumanized commodities” (2002, 513). Similarly, it could be argued that MIA’s terrorist chic merely engenders a desire to engage in a terrorist on a superficial, transitory and touristic sense in order to allay the fear of real terrorism.

However, it is reductive to describe consumers of MIA as engaging in terrorist chic because they fear terrorism. Guattari and Deleuze wrote that “the social field is immediately invested by desire” (1983, 29) and that (1983, 31)

[a]rt often takes advantage of… desiring-machines by creating veritable group fantasies in which desire-production is used to short-circuit social production… by introducing an element of dysfunction.

The MIA-machine engages an aesthetic of dysfunction as part of her terrorist chic. This is evident in the patchwork style of her cover-sleeves or in the intentionally clumsy special effects in her videoclip with “Boys” whose pixelated decorations spill off the screen. As Manish and abhi from Sepia Mutiny point out, MIA’s appeal is inseparable from her rebellious politics. The consumption of MIA involves plugging one’s self into a machine/commodity that produces desire for political change and rebellion. It involves a becoming-terrorist.

Deterritorialising the terrorist body

MIA is concerned with the politics of naming in global conflicts, particularly with the label of “terrorism”. MIA’s reconfiguration of terrorist aesthetics enacts a deterritorialisation on discourses of resistance struggles. I am using Guattari and Deleuze’s concept of “deterritorialisation” (1987, 508-510) by which is meant “the movement by which “one” leaves the territory” (508).

The role of territorialising political groups through the label of “terrorist” is important. Austin T. Turk (2004, 271-272) writes that terrorism is an interpretation of events and

these interpretations are not unbiased attempts to depict truth but rather conscious efforts to manipulate perceptions to promote certain interests at the expense of others. When people and events come to be regularly described in public as terrorists and terrorism, some governmental or other entity is succeeding in a war of words in which the opponent is promoting alternative designations[.]

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is an organisation whose aim is the independence of the Eelam Tamil Nation from Sri Lanka (link). Yet the conflict between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government has been framed with two narratives. The LTTE’s narrative is one of an “armed struggle for political independence as a response to institutionalised racism and violence against the Tamil people by a Sinhala-dominated state” (Nadarajah & Sriskandarajah, 2005, 88) while the government’s narrative is one of a violent terrorist group challenging the state’s “authority, unity and territorial integrity” (Nadarajah & Sriskandarajah, 2005, 88). It is the state’s narrative that has largely been accepted by other nations such as India, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada and Australia (link). As Nadarajah and Sriskandarajah argue, the state’s labelling of the LTTE as “terrorists” has supported policies of strong military action and non-engagement with the LTTE’s political demands and undermined negotiation processes (2005, 94-98). What is evident then is that the Sri Lankan state has undertaken a conceptual territorialisation of the LTTE’s political aspirations through the discourse of terrorism in order to delegitimize their efforts of independence/liberation.

Sound

MIA’s terrorist body is deterritorialised through the sonic assemblage of cross-cultural styles in her music. Throughout the album of Arular, favela trumpets on “Bucky Done Gone” clash with London slang on “Galang” and electronic beats on “Pull Up the People”. On Kala, the world musics that are sampled are even more diverse with Bollywood samples in “Bamboo Banger” and didgeridoo samples in “Mango Pickle Down River” sitting next to the disco sounds of “Jimmy” and the African drumming of “Bird Flu”. MIA’s globalised sounds therefore deterritorialise her by breaking down regional/cultural/political boundaries and identifying her as both internal and external to various nation-states. This enacts a deterritorialisation on the moralistic and cultural binaries that form terrorist discourse as perfectly embodied by President Bush’s proclamation that terrorists “hate our way of life” (link).

Lyrics

The lyrics of MIA deterritorialise the terrorist body, not by simply providing an alternative narrative of freedom struggle but by deterritorialising the signifiers of terrorism onto a range of machinic affects that do not engage the logic of fear, paranoia and stigmatization that terrorist discourse usually does. Guattari writes in Chaosmosis that a “continual emergence of sense and effects” is an essential dimension of machinic autopoiesis (1995, 37). This is relevant to MIA’s reconfiguration of terrorist discourse. In “Sunshowers”, MIA narrates the story of a man killed by the authorities for associating with Muslims. She sings “From Congo to Columbo / Can’t stereotype my thing yo” and then “You wanna win a war? / Like PLO I don’t surrendo” thus territorialising herself within terrorist framework. The chorus, however, deterritorialises that framework: “Sunshowers that fall on my troubles / Are over you, my baby / And some showers I’ll be aiming at you / Cause I’m watching you my baby”. Terrorist bombs mutate into Sunshowers. Anti-terrorist authorities mutate into “my baby”. This invocation of RnB clichés introduces a range of complex desire productions in the interactions between terrorist and authority/capitalism. The terrorist body is then reterritorialised onto capitalist desiring machines when MIA sings “He got Colgate on his teeth / And Reebok classics on his feet / At a factory he does Nike / And the he helps the family”. On “Bird Flu”, MIA further complicates things by deterritorialising capitalism from its freedom-through-consumption rhetoric, singing, “A protocol to be a Rocawear model?/ It didn’t really drop that way / My legs hit the hurdle / A protocol to be a rocker on a label? / It didn’t really drop that way our beats were too evil”.

Visuals

MIA imbues her videoclips with third world imagery but presents it using MTV editing techniques. In the videoclip for “Sunshowers”, MIA performs the song in a Sri Lankan jungle with a group of women that might be read as a group of insurgents, given the discourse surrounding MIA but this is never explicitly known. The jungle setting and MIA’s traditional outfit at first suggest a self-reterritorialisation onto fairly stereotypical images of Tamil ethnicity. The same may be said of the videoclip for “Bird Flu” set in a poor Sri Lankan town. However, the rapid editing and the display of dancing bodies deterritorialises MIA’s ethnic, terrorist body into a sexualised MTV aesthetic. The terrorist body becomes a site of desire, drawing the consumer into another community and becoming complicit with them at the same time that the terrorist becomes complicit in commodity culture.

Some of MIA’s critics have accused her of homogenizing and essentialising all resistance movements into a generic terrorist label (link 1; link 2). For example, the Columbia Spectator published an opinion article that argued that

For her, there is an identifiable space outside of the metropolitan West, but it is largely undifferentiated and basically exotic. It is, in a word, a “general” space. The lyrics of “Bamboo Banga” are proof enough: Ghana, India, Sri Lanka, and Burma exist not as unique places and people, but simply as abstract notions of foreign places. M.I.A. considers them together, with the word linking them being, unfortunately, bamboo.

The problem is that even separating the Orient into unique places and people will rest upon a “homogenizing impulse” (West, 1990, 27). Hence, MIA never fully endorses the LTTE even as she calls attention to their plight. Hence, MIA emphasises her Tamil background even as she constructs her identity out of other cultures. Deleuze and Guattari talk about the opposition between smooth space and striated space (1980, 481):

In striated space, one closes off a surface and “allocates” it according to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth, one “distributes” oneself in an open space, according to frequencies and in the course of one’s crossing[.]

The MIA machine produces a perception of the world that is striated to the extent that she acknowledges specificity; that the experience of Aboriginal kids in “Mango Pickle Down River” (There’s only one ocean that got fish left / One day we’ll have to be a really good chef / And I don’t mean us in the bush making meth) is different from that of African immigrants in the UK in “Hussel” (I’m illegal I don’t pay tax tax / EMA yes I’m claiming that / Police I try to avoid them / They catch me hustling they say deport them). But MIA’s terrorist body also exists in a smooth space as she exists across cultural boundaries. She draws on the politics of various political movements such as the PLO and the LTTE but MIA is not bound by regionally essentialist identities.

Conclusion

I have argued in this essay that MIA’s reconfiguration of terrorist narratives and iconography in her sonic and visual style engenders a becoming-terrorist that is made possible by a media matrix that ensures that the political/historical content of her aesthetic is prehended by the MIA-event. The use of an MTV aesthetic to sexualise the terrorist body radically engages a desire for her political project. Secondly, I have specified her political project as a deterritorialisation of the terrorist body. Rather than advance an alternative narrative of “freedom struggle” onto existing conflicts, MIA opens alternative pathways to understanding what a terrorist is. MIA’s success as a political artist is her combination of ideological vagueness and historical specificity. We must hope that she can maintain this balancing act, operating within the sexualised regimes of commodity culture to enlighten her consumers about the oppressed peoples she sympathises without either letting sex subsume her message or letting herself be marginalised within an essentialist identity.

KEY TEXTS CITED:

Deleuze, Gilles (1988), ‘What Is an Event?’, in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Tom Conley (trans.). London The Athlone Press, 1993: 76-82.

Guattari, Felix and Deleuze, Gilles (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University Press, (1st pub 1972), chapter 1: 1-50.

Guattari, Felix and Deleuze, Gilles (1987 [1980]), ‘1440: The Smooth and the Striated’, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, B. Massumi (trans.). London and New York: Continuum, 474-500.

Guattari, Felix and Deleuze, Gilles (1987 [1980]), ‘Deterritorialization’, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, B. Massumi (trans.). London and New York: Continuum, 508-510.

Guattari, Felix (1995), ‘Machinic Heterogenesis’, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, P. Bains and J. Pefanis (trans.). Sydney: Power Publications: 33-59.

Halnon, Karen Bettez (2002), ‘Poor Chic: The Rational Consumption of Poverty’, Current Sociology, July 2002, Vol. 50(4): 501-516.

Mark, Karl (1867), ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and the Secret Thereof’, [Das Kapital] Karl Marx Capital: An Abridged Edition, ed. David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999: 42-50, 491.

Nadarajah, Suthaharan and Sriskandarajah, Dhananjayan (2005), ‘Liberation struggle or terrorism? The poltics of naming the LTTE’ Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26(1): 87-100.

Tetzlaff, D. (1993), ‘Metatextual Girl’ in The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory, ed. C. Schwichtenberg. St. Leonards, Sydney: Allen & Unwin: 239-263.

Turk, Austin T. (2004), ‘Sociology of Terrorism’, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 30: 271-286.

West, Cornel (1990), ‘The New Cultural Politics of Difference’, in Russell Ferguson et al (eds.).

Terrorists, freedom fighters, resistance groups whatever…

These groups tend to have an identifiable aesthetic of their own which is part of their political strategy.

Let’s have a look at how radical aesthetics and images move through culture…

From thecoolhunter (!) ….

“Terror fashion” is about to invade cities. The new French brand Anticon is launching a new concept of hooded sweatshirts. Graffiti artists, people with acne, snowboarders or simply superheroes would certainly be into them. To order your sweatshirt, you’ll have to wait a few more weeks but we wanted you to be first in the know. Definitely an eye-catching fashion statement!

Note there is also excerpts from Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama in the readings. Which might be useful in someway. Here’s an excerpt of a review from the NY Times:

It’s awfully hard to make the leap Mr. Ellis wants us to make from the world of beautiful narcissists to the world of coldblooded killers: there are, after all, differences between models, however self-absorbed, and bloodthirsty serial killers; there are differences between fashion-obsessed hipsters and Hitler, whom Mr. Ellis has the nerve to quote in an epigraph to this novel. (”You make a mistake if you see what we do as merely political.”)

It is equally hard to understand why Mr. Ellis wants to spend so much time (in this novel and every other book he’s written) chronicling a world he seems to recognize as shallow, mercenary, cynical and meaningless — a world he glamorizes as much he debunks. This time around, it results in characters whom the reader and Mr. Ellis have nothing but contempt for, and a novel, as Victor might say, that ”equals yuck.”

Urban Outfitters called their kaffiyeh an “anti-war scarf.” Delias.com gives it the Orwellian name: “Peace Scarf.”

From The Black Snob:

Usually accentuated with some sort of bling, rocked over expensive urban couture. It was outlaw fashion. Terror chic. And it made sense that the coolest of the cool would be attracted to a look sported by rebel fighters living along the Pakistani border with Afghanistan and in the besieged territory of Gaza.

…

Hot with every paramilitary, militia-loving Zapatista-uprising or FARC, PKK, PLO bomb maker, the look is the no. 1 accessory for all terrorists and revolutionaries from Hamas to Hezbollah. The scarf has been hot since Fidel Castro took Cuba from Batista and the upper class. A mainstay since the Viet Cong made it hot in the Mekong Delta. Basically, if you’re a rebel with a murderous cause, you can’t live without your scarf. Not only can it serve as a mask, but it can keep the sweat off your face, the bugs out of your mouth (if you’re in the jungles of Colombia) and keep the sand out of your nose (if you’re in Saudi Arabia).

It’s a must have.

Of course the Madhi Army and the original gangsta of all radical jihadis, Osama bin Laden, aren’t rocking Kanye’s Louis Vuitton model. Mostly because they 1) despise our narcissistic, hedonistic capitalism, mixed with our imperial desires for global domination and 2) are not going to pay $100 for a scarf. You know they probably get those two-for-one at the flea market.

And Kanye has to take it even more uptown. He’s not going to any jungle or desert anywhere to kill anything. He’s from Chicago, USA. He’s not interested in getting his ass blown up. Rather than fight the man, he just adds a pair of matching gloves and color-coordinated custom kicks to pimp that look out a little more.

War urban chic isn’t a new idea. During the first Gulf War in 1991 desert camouflage was all the rage among the hip hop set. While shouting out “Peace in the Middle East” lazily at the end of a track there were the tell-tale military style boots, desert cami baggy cargo pants and a crisp white T-shirt with a platinum chain dangling.

From Gawker:

How does Mingo’s shirt represent “a Muslim looking for a kind of salvation because his family is poor”?

Carl Williamson, graphix designer

Oh sweet Jesus. Do you remember that annoying girl on America’s Next Top Model who said she was from a gated community in the Bronx? I have a hunch this is her brother.

Damali Campbell, soon to be grad school drop-out

Because punishing Americans by flooding our stores with dumb shit like that is cheaper than Jihad.

Now some stuff on M.I.A. from City Pages:

So M.I.A.’s website filled me with revulsion, rage, and probably a little envy. Most of her artwork appropriates terrorist iconography–sometimes incongruously. For example, the airlines that border her self-designed album cover are a nod to that other terrorist group. Planes have nothing to do with the LTTE, or their tactics, but sweeping it all together seems to connect to the terrorists are people too view she espouses. It’s galling to see LTTE tiger symbols on candy-colored backgrounds. People died because of this! And she makes it…cute? But she is here, in the West, and so am I. And she’s taken her Sri Lankan-ness and pushed it to the fore, something I’ve been too timid to even try.

…

I love “Galang”; it’s my favorite track, and the “yah yah heyyy, oey oey oh oh oh” near the end reminds me vaguely of being at the Galle Face beach, listening to the fishermen’s chants as they hauled in the day’s catch. But I saw the video the other day, and as she’s dancing all these stenciled pink bombs fell in Pop Art sheets behind her. Does she know what she’s doing? I mean, this stuff is real. She gives her images power and meaning by connecting her work directly to her father (the album title is supposed to be his “rebel code name” for shit’s sake). Her music, for all its nonsensicality, is so…smart. It’s fun. It’s interesting. She’s not concerned about proving her identity to one group, and instead searches for other dislocated people, displaced sounds. But, at least for me, what she’s trying to say (oppressed people turn to violence for a reason) gets undercut by the gimmicky enthusiasm invested in these symbols.

Finally an interesting interview with Bruce La Bruce director of 2004’s The Raspberry Reich (thanks machinepeople for the heads up), a film critiquing terrorist chic, from kamera.co.uk:

Why did you decide to tackle the Radical Chic theme? When did you develop an interest in that?

Radical Chic has always interested me, ever since I took a course in university called Protest Literature and Movements. Part of the appeal of all the early equal rights movements – feminist, gay, black – was that they understood the importance of adopting a militant image and rhetoric that was both intriguing to the media and also politically charged, alluding to the kind of Marxist-based guerilla insurgencies that were happening in Latin America in that era. But the problem with working within the capitalist system by making these radical political movements alluring and even sexy is that it plays into what Marx called commodity fetishism.

Eventually each of these movements was subsumed and co-opted by the corporate media to the point where you have someone like Madonna manufacturing reputedly radical images of guerilla insurgency to sell millions of records, and the image of Che Guevera becoming a capitalist, sexual icon in the order of James Dean or Marilyn Monroe. The political substance of these radical images has been excised, resulting in a set of empty signifiers which can only be seen as an aspect of fashion or style.

I think that’s the biggest problem facing any new radical political movement today, is to figure out how to avoid the co-optive powers of the media and make a sexy insurgency without succumbing to the merely cosmetic realm of radical chic. Nonetheless, you can now order the new Raspberry Reich t-shirts at www.brucelabruce.com featuring six sexy slogans: The Revolution is My Boyfriend, Join The Homosexual Intifada, Put Your Marxism Where Your Mouth Is, Heterosexuality Is The Opiate Of The Masses, Madonna Is Counterrevolutionary, and Corporate Hip Hop Is Counterrevolutionary.

This is taken from a Salon interview with Trisha Ziff and Luis Lopez who directed a movie this year called Chevolution about the above iconic image of Che Guevara:

I’m kind of curious about all the man-on-the-street interviews with people wearing the Che T-shirts who have no idea who he is. I’m wondering about the process of finding those people. I’m guessing it wasn’t very hard to do.

Ziff: We went to gathering spots. At Venice Beach, we waited about five minutes for a Che T-shirt to come along. Maybe we were very lucky, but they happened pretty quickly in London, in different places. What happens is once you become sensitized to the image, you hate it, because you start seeing it everywhere. You realize our world is saturated by Che T-shirt wearers. So it wasn’t that difficult, but it was interesting the level of ignorance.

I would say it’s culturally specific, too. Because if you were to walk through the streets of Belfast or Dublin or Mexico City and you ask people “Who’s on your T-shirt?” they’d know. I think it’s quite culturally specific to the United States and to education in the United States and what people are taught and not taught in the States. It’s quite mind-boggling as a non-American.

On my way to New York for the festival, I sat next to a Tibetan monk on the plane and I was looking at some of the early reviews with the Che image on them. He leaned across and he said, “I see that man in so many countries, but not in my country, not in Tibet. Is he a musician?”

Do you think the image has lost or gained power in its explosion? Or both?

Ziff: I think both. It’s changed. It metamorphoses. It travels. It takes on new meanings. It gets attached to different moments. In Mexico City, you don’t really see that image without seeing the image of the Zapatistas, and it becomes an image about indigenous voices and the rights of the indigenous and independents. The schoolteachers strike in Oaxaca, it’s the same thing. It becomes this strong image of a struggle and specific in some contexts and in others this much more generic image used in protests we wouldn’t even associate with it, like green issues or whatever.

What are some of the strangest things you’ve seen the image on?

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Ziff: A doormat. Wipe your feet on Che Guevara!

Lopez: I just saw a “Che-r” T-shirt: Cher’s face with the beret.

Ziff: You see that a lot. People just put a black beret and a star on other people: Libera-Che, Che-ney. You can go on and on Googling them.

From abhi at Sepia Mutiny…

can you blame an artist for supporting a group that seems to be assisting what the U.S. has designated as a terrorist group, if said artist has a father who is one of the rebels? Is she supporting the group and its practices or simply her father? Secondly, isn’t part of M.I.A.’s appeal that she has rebellious lyrics? Haven’t young people always been drawn to rebellious lyrics? Thirdly, how can you (if of a politically liberal persuasion) enjoy yourself at a concert knowing that the lyrics (and possibly your money) are in support of a group that employs child soldiers and female suicide bombers? I understand that the Sri Lankan government is also complicit but simply letting two wrongs balance each other out doesn’t seem right.

And from Manish at the same site…

As Abhi points out, the terrorism issue will unquestionably be a serious roadblock for M.I.A. commerce: MTV refused to run ‘Sunshowers’ without a disclaimer. In 1991, the Tamil Tigers assassinated the prime minister of India with a female suicide bomber. As suicide bombing pioneers, they’re hardly a cuddly, symbolic, ‘stick it to the Man’ organization, which makes Arulpragasam analogous to Lee Harvey Oswald’s daughter or that aspiring pop singer, bin Laden’s niece.

And Arulpragasam doesn’t downplay her Tiger connection, she flaunts it, it’s integral to her marketing. She did a mix album using unauthorized samples called Piracy Funds Terrorism. Her song ‘Sunshowers’ refers to suicide bombs (‘And some showers I’ll be aiming at you’), her first album bears her dad’s eponymous codename. Jungle guerrillas are all over the ‘Sunshowers’ video, there’s a large running tiger in her excellent concert visuals, she does a soldier step on stage and a shoutout to the P.L.O.

At the level of an individual music fan, going white hat can be quite difficult. So much shared infrastructure is contaminated, you can go nuts trying to track it all. If you watch Bollywood, you fund criminal gangs. If you go to Vegas, you fund the mob. If you buy gas, you fund al Qaeda.

At the same time, ‘it’s too hard’ is the main excuse people use to turn a blind eye to all kinds of injustices. You do as much as is practical. I don’t expect to agree with Arulpragasam’s ideas. She’s a Sri Lankan Tamil, they are right to be bitter about their situation. Where I disagree with them is in methods, their choice of the expedient over the good. The key is not the fuzzy politics of rebellion, it’s whether you press into service the slaughter of non-combatants as a tactic. You can’t simultaneously be against indiscriminate profiling in London and for indiscriminate killing in Colombo, by either side. ‘Sunshowers’ is less ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ than ‘I Bombed the Sheriff’s Wife and Kids.’

The dividing line for me is whether my album and concert dollars go to a great new artist, or to inadvertently funding terrorism. That’s what’s still murky. For M.I.A. to blow up big, she’ll have to come out into the sunlight.

However, the M.I.A. blog of the day goes to sepoy from Chapati Mystery who analyses M.I.A. in the context of contemporary uses of “terrorism” as a label to illegitimise certain causes.

For all her cheap nintendo beats and vacuous posturing, M.I.A. does provide a narrative from the frontlines of disenfranchisement at the hands of an ethnic nationalist government (one supported by international capital and military force). If the most feasible means of self-empowerment for Sri Lankan Tamils is, as she suggests in her song ‘Sunshowers’, to go to work in a Nike sweatshop in order to support one’s family (and buy Reeboks) or to suicide bomb the well-armed opposition, then the Sri Lankan state needs to be seriously reconfigured

…

The market appeal of M.I.A. resembles that of musics yoked to the cause of resistance to racial, ethnic or gender domination by content (punk and ‘two-tone’ from the UK like the Gang of Four or the Specials, hip hop from BDP to Talib Kweli) or genealogy (the guitarist for Rage Against the Machine is nephew to Kenyan anti-colonial nationalist Jomo Kenyatta). While her message is much more difficult to pin down than any of these artists’, she often advocates similar causes (’Pull up the People’ is the most bland and obvious); but as she says elsewhere London, New York, Kingston and Brazil ought to be quieted down; long enough, hopefully, to comprehend the particular ways that global and local processes intersect to maintain conflicts and exclusions in Sri Lanka. It would be quite a shame if consumers of this music are to take its politics seriously enough to demand boycotts of M.I.A. for being an LTTE supporter, but obscure the cause of the problems in Sri Lanka by applying the chock-a-block ‘terrorism’ label.

A very enlightening article!

As a final note for this post, it seems that any idea that M.I.A. uses profits to fund the Tamil Tigers is merely heresay. So I am loath to actually comment on what this act means seeing as there is little proof of the fact. However, the rumour/idea that M.I.A. funds terrorism is certainly part of the machine/event and how we consume her (even if this idea has less force/authority in creating meaning than elements that come through more legitimate channels i.e. the albums, videos, interviews, press releases.

From NPR:

At a time when globalization is both dissolving and reinforcing national identities, M.I.A.’s music speaks from a blurry borderland through a lingua franca of agitated, propulsive pop.

From CBC:

Arular’s easy blend of vague threats (“I got the bombs to make you blow / I got the beats to make you bang”; “Growin’ up, brewin’ up, guerilla gettin’ trained up / Look out, look out from over the rooftop”) with schoolyard choruses (“Blaze to blaze, galang a lang alanga / Purple haze, galang a lang alanga”) has triggered wide-ranging music-crit speculation that M.I.A. is a rebel fomenter, some secret weapon of dance destruction in terrorism’s war on freedom. She is charmingly elliptical about her politics – her website contains smiling photos of gun-toting Tamils, but no explicit endorsement of their rebellion – a mystery that makes her seem dangerous in these edgy times.

From Fimoculous:

Maya’s critics seem to present her songs as equivocally advocating various causes. This seems foolish. I suspect what MIA is actually doing is more like acting. And I don’t mean just conveniently sampling subversive agitprop (she seems to legitimately understand the cultural issues). Rather, Maya uses songwriting to play out the roles of various third-world revolutionary characters. So when you hear her talking about the Tamil Tigers or Palestine, it’s not exactly “her opinions” as much as the voice of people she’s encountered. Critics insist on imposing autobiography on this album, but it seems more like contemporary historical fiction.

From Pop Life:

The more MIA works with other musicians, the more their individual styles are subsumed and flattened into a fairly one-dimensional sound; despite the global travelling, her sound has actually become less ‘ethnic’; and although MIA decries globalisation, this anti-globalisation is her very own global brand.

From Culture Bully:

Kala is a direct result of globalization, a direct result of mainstream pop, rap and rock, and without those influences it would have never been made; a scary thought indeed - that there might be an up-side to the down-sides of globalization.

The most engaging read (beware: it’s negative) comes from the Columbia Spectator. Here’s a bit:

M.I.A. commits many of the same transgressions often committed by politicians and other powerful individuals. For her, there is an identifiable space outside of the metropolitan West, but it is largely undifferentiated and basically exotic. It is, in a word, a “general” space. The lyrics of “Bamboo Banga” are proof enough: Ghana, India, Sri Lanka, and Burma exist not as unique places and people, but simply as abstract notions of foreign places. M.I.A. considers them together, with the word linking them being, unfortunately, bamboo.

The basic premise behind this borderline offensive formulation underwrites much of M.I.A.’s work—she produces foreign people and places for consumption in the marketplace, thereby destroying any agency she might have given these people. The children dancing in her video footage are not speaking for themselves, nor are they acting for themselves. We do not know what country they come from, and we do not know their stories. They disappear after her show, and we do not hear of them again. But they are smiling for M.I.A.’s camera lens, and for M.I.A. this seems to be enough—they will give her the kind of credibility she wants. In this sense, M.I.A. is roughly analogous to the Bonos , Angelinas, and Mia Farrows of the world—except that unlike those advocates for some abstraction of “Africa,” M.I.A. is not involved with any identifiable projects that are actually trying to improve conditions on the continent. M.I.A.’s stance, then, is politics-lite, a thin attempt to imbue her music with political energy. In the case of M.I.A., “Africa” sells, and we certainly buy it

So I have decided to write an essay up about the political positioning of M.I.A. who has commodified her own  brand of transcultural politics into a unique aesthetic which appropriates sound and images from all around the world. Here are her videoclips:

• “Paper Planes“, Kala, 2007.
  Sample lyrics:
  I fly like paper, get high like planes
  If you catch me at the border I got visas in my name
  If you come around here, I make ‘em all day
  I get one down in a second if you wait
• “Jimmy“, Kala, 2007.
  Sample lyrics:
  When you go Rwanda, Congo
  Take me on your genocide tour
  Take me on a truck to Darfur
  Take me where you would go
  Got static on the satellite phone
  Got to get you safe at home
  Gonna get you somewhere warm
  So you get me all alone
• “Boyz“, Kala, 2007.
  Sample lyrics:
  How many no money boyz are crazy
  How many boyz are raw?
  How many no money boyz are rowdy
  How many start a war?
• “Bird Flu“, Kala, 2007.
  Sample lyrics:
  Big on the underground
  What’s the point of knocking me down?
  Everybody knows
  I’m already good on the ground
  most of us stay strong
  shit don’t really bound us
  then I go on my own
  making bombs with rubber bands

  I have my hard down
  so I need a man for romance
  streets are making em hard
  so they selfish little roamers
  jumpin’ girl to girl
  make us meat like burgers
  when I get fat
  I’ll pop me out some leaders

• “Sunflowers“, Arular, 2004.
  Sample lyrics:
  Semi-9 and snipered him
  On that wall they posted him
  They cornered him
  and then just murdered him

  He told them he didn’t know them
  He wasn’t there they didn’t know him
  They showed him a picture then
  Ain’t that you with the Muslims?

• “Galang“, Arular, 2003.
  Sample lyrics:
  they say
  rivers gonna run though
  work is gonna save you
  pray and you will pull through
  suck a dick’ll help you
  don’t let em get to you
  if he’s got 1 you get 2
  backstab your crew
  sell it i could sell you
• “Bucky Done Gun“, Arular, 2005.
  Sample lyrics:
  Can I get control
  Do you like me vulnerable
  I’m armed and I’m equal
  More fun for the people
  Physical, Brute force
  Steel, lion you’re the boss
  Yeah, you’re so do-able
  Grind me down sugar slow

And some live clips:

• “Hussel” at Lowlands, 2007.

  (Note how she tells the audience at the start that she is going to take them to Africa)

When we speak of an event, we speak in terms not dissimilar to when we discuss the machinic. Deleuze talks of the event as a formless elastic membrane that extends over plural elements, transforming the “many” into the conceptual “one”. This reminded me of Guattari’s abstract machine (from machinic hetereogenesis):

They are montages capable of relating all the heterogenous levels that they traverse… The abstract machine is transversal to them, and it is this abstract machine that will or will not give these levels…a power of ontological auto-affirmation

Central to both the “event” and the “machine” is “becoming”.

Deleuze (as I understand) argues that events only exist as perceived by individuals. Perception of a singular element is called prehension. The individual involves a convergence of such prehensions (”concrescence”) in the perception of an event:

The event is inseparably the objectification of one prehension and the subjectification of another…participating in the becoming of another event and the subject of its own becoming.

The event, like the machine, is a process always in a state of flux (fluvia).

So what is the difference between “event” and “machine”.

Some discussed how time is central to talking about an event but we also talk of machinic processes as existing in specific historic moments.

What then is the difference in talking about “event” and talking about “machine”?

My thought is that there is a lot of overlap when we discuss events and machines. But they involve different kinds of inquiries.

Talking about the event provokes inquiries of identification/conceptualization: i.e. if we are talking about Madonna, what is Madonna? How does event-Madonna permeate through elements in time-space? This is not just a question of definition. Firstly, definition is impossible as the skin of the event is always changing with each becoming. Secondly, where/when we define the skin (contradicting myself I know but bear with me) will have a bearing on what the event means and it’s political positioning e.g. What does the Buffy-event encapsulate? Is Buffy-slash that is created by fans/consumers part of the Buffy-event?

Here’s another example -
9/11…and the case of the crazy preacher’s comments:

Reverend Wright said:

We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

This is far from original sentiment - the kind of thing you hear from your ordinary first year Arts student who has just joined the Socialist Alternative. But what you see in this statement is various elements (Bombings, state-supported terrorism) that the Reverend has prehended and now the 9/11-event has traversed them, permeated them. Because of this 9/11 is no longer a simple attack from evil-doers or a cause for war in Iraq. Now it is the consequence of American foreign policy, “America’s chickens” coming home to roost.

When I talk about the machine, on the other hand, the lines of inquiry are more of function: What does the machine do? What sorts of desires does the machine activate? What kinds of subjectivities are produced through the machine? Again, these inquiries will involve the analysis of the interactions of various elements - little becomings - so there is some overlap with the event, but we are attacking the issue from a different angle.

Have I got this all wrong? Or does this make some sense to you?

Capitalism, the ultimate body without organs. It feeds of everything. It accomodates and commodifies all subcultures. This, we assume, is what makes it so threatening. But this morphability - isn’t this the best thing about capitalism?

In contrast to, say, some religious systems, capitalism has no set values besides profit. Sometimes this leads to exploitation but it also means that all social change is within the realm of possibility provided it is marketable.

We discussed this in class with the example of Xena. In the beginning of the series, there was no explicit relationship between Xena and Gabriel. After a proliferation of slash literature, Xena and Gabriel on screen became more explicit in their queerness. Great article at Salon on the issue here:

Right now, apparent trademark violation and copyright infringement are rampant in the Xenaverse, but so far, Universal isn’t cracking down on anyone. The Universal approach is in sharp contrast to that taken by its media-titan brethren, Fox Television and Viacom, both of whom have stirred up considerable Net ire with harsh cease-and-desist stances against unauthorized Web site creations by fans of such shows as “The X-Files,” “Millennium” and “Star Trek.”

But what is Universal’s policy? It’s not easy to find out. In response to repeated inquiries, a spokesperson for Universal (who insisted that she be referred to only by that label) finally issued the following statement:

“We do monitor Internet sites for many of our characters and properties and sometimes certain Web sites are also called to our attention, and in such cases we will analyze on a case-to-case basis when it might be appropriate to take action. But we recognize that most of these unauthorized sites are created by fans, and we find that flattering and supportive of our shows and properties.

The queerness depicted in Xena is quite radical considering the general absence of queer characters or sterotyping of queer characters on television. Universal was happy to do something radical on television because they realised there was a fanbase/market to support it.

As fans see it, their online creativity has helped propel “Xena’s” huge popularity to its spot today as the No. 1 syndicated action-adventure television show in the world.

“It appears that MCA/Universal has realized the value of a few dedicated Webmasters who spend ungodly hours creating monstrous Web pages that only serve to help advertise their product more,” says Simpson.

I had an initial feeling of what a body without organs is when I read that section of Artaud’s radio play which reads:

When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom.

They you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dance halls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.

I felt that the body without organs was related to a state of no desire.

It is similar to the Buddhist idea that desire and ignorance are at the root of all suffering.

So the body without organs is the body without desire. Without organs/desire we are free of our automatic reactions e.g. buy a car, be rich, be beautiful…

And then to be without organs/desire, you would be truly free. Because capital produces desire, to be free of desire is to be no longer subject to capital.

But I guess I got it wrong.

Deleuze and Guattari understand the body without organs in a different way.

Old faithful wikipedia puts it this way:

But every “actual” body also has a “virtual” dimension, a vast reservoir of potential traits, connections, affects, movements, etc. This collection of potentials is what Deleuze calls the BwO. To “make oneself a body without organs,” then, is to actively experiment with oneself to draw out and activate these virtual potentials. These potentials are mostly activated (or “actualized”) through conjunctions with other bodies (or BwOs) that Deleuze calls “becomings.”

A body without organs is not then a utopia, a destination, an ultimate way of being (as in Buddhist enlightenment).

A body without organs is a set of practices, everchanging, unformed, never completely knowable. It is like autopoeisis, differentiated from structure, structure that “puts into play a concept of totalisation…It is occupied by inputs and outputs whose purpose is to make the structure function according to a principle of eternal return.” (Guattari, Machinic heterogenesis p.37).

Identifying a body without organs as such does not of itself tell us anything though.

Again from wikipedia,

There are 3 kinds of bodies without organs:

• empty
• full
• cancerous

EMPTY: “completely de-organ-ized; all flows pass through it freely, with no stopping, and no directing. Even though any form of desire can be produced on it, the empty BwO is non-productive.”

FULL: “it is productive, but not petrified in its organ-ization.”

CANCEROUS: “caught in a pattern of endless reproduction of the self-same pattern”

The desire-less body without organs I described earlier. If it was possible in the first place, it would be best described as an empty body without organs.

The buffyverse might be an example of the full body without organs - the intersection of fan culture with the Buffy canon an example of how Buffy is not petrified in its organisation.

Capitalism, the ultimate body without organs is like a cancerous BwO. It can’t die, it is never knowable but it is endlessly reproducing.

From an interesting article in EW:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Of course, there are downsides to the burgeoning Internet age — and one of those downsides is, when a popular movie is coming up, people sort of peck it to death before it even opens. There’s been a huge amount written on the Internet about the development of Crystal Skull, including lots of spoilers on chat boards — though most of it is clearly labeled. Is it getting harder to protect the development process?
STEVEN SPIELBERG: It really is important to be able to point out that the Internet is still filled with more speculation than facts. The Internet isn’t really about facts. It’s about people’s wishful thinking, based on a scintilla of evidence that allows their imaginations to springboard. And that’s fine.
GEORGE LUCAS: Y’know, Steven will say, ”Oh, everything’s out on the Internet [in terms of Crystal Skull details] — what this is and what that is.” And to that I say, ”Steven, it doesn’t make any difference!” Look — Jaws was a novel before it was a movie, and anybody could see how it ended. Didn’t matter.
SPIELBERG: But there’s lots and lots of people who don’t want to find out what happens. They want that to happen on the 22nd of May. They want to find out in a dark theater. They don’t wanna find out by reading a blog…. A movie is experiential. A movie happens in a way that has always been cathartic, the personal, human catharsis of an audience in holy communion with an experience up on the screen. That’s why I’m in the middle of this magic, and I always will be.

Do you think the sanctuary of the dark theater is being eroded?
LUCAS: No! Look, it’s like sports —
SPIELBERG: Yes. I think it is being eroded, by too much information and too much misinformation, especially.
LUCAS: But look, it’s like sports. This isn’t new. When March Madness gets started with the NCAA [basketball tournament], there are thousands of blogs out there. Rampant speculation. If you follow it enough, you go crazy. [With Crystal Skull], you don’t know what’s actually gonna happen till you walk into that theater. I don’t care if you know the whole story, I don’t care if you’ve seen clips. I don’t care how much you’ve seen or heard or read. The experience itself is very different, once you walk in that theater.
SPIELBERG: Well, here’s my debate on that. I’ve always been stingy about the scenes I show in a teaser or a trailer. Because my experience has been — and my kids’ experience has been, ’cause they talk out loud in theaters, like everybody else does today — that if a scene they remember from the trailer hasn’t come on the screen yet, and they’re three quarters of the way through the movie, they start talking. ”Oh — I know what’s gonna happen! Because there was that one little scene they haven’t shown yet in the movie I’m experiencing, and it’s coming up!” And it ruins everything.

What about creating deliberate disinformation, the way, say The Sopranos‘ producers did?
SPIELBERG: I did that, but I don’t do that any more ’cause it takes too much effort.
LUCAS: We have managed to keep the fact that Will Ferrell is the main villain in Crystal Skull out of the blogosphere.
SPIELBERG: Exactly. But it did get out that it’s Steve Carell, last week.
LUCAS: Except people don’t know that they’re a team…
SPIELBERG: [Laughs] And by the way, when you run this? There’ll be people that believe it!