Tag Archives: Carl Wilson

Let’s Talk About Nothing

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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In the primordial blogs and antediluvian websites where rock critics lurk and prey upon one another in an endless Darwinian struggle of tooth and snark, the steaming red meat of contention over the last few years has been rockism. Rockism is essentially a more or less deadly insult, directed at those critics (like, say, Jim Derogatis) who fetishize indie rock authenticity and gritty individuality and don’t like Mariah Carey because she includes ads from Elle in her CD packaging. Facing off against rockism are the adherents of popism (like, say, me) who embrace the fluid jouissance of transitory pleasures and guiltless booty-shaking, and don’t like Bruce Springsteen because everyone tells them they have to. Popists like to accuse rockists of being racist, sexist, uptight poseurs. Rockists like to accuse popists of being shallow, trend-following, tasteless poseurs.

For those who enjoy the spectacle of atavistic struggle, the rockist/popist survival-of-the-fittest donnybrook has actually generated a lot of entertaining copy, from Kalefa Sanneh’s Rap Against Rockism to Jody Rosen’s The Perils of Poptimism. My favorite broadside from the struggle, though, has to be Carl Wilson’s 2007 book, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. Wilson, a blogger and critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, doesn’t necessarily fit comfortably into either rockist or popist camps, but his book is clearly inspired by a popist aesthetic. His project is to redeem the woman who Simon Frith called “the most loathed superstar I can remember” — Celine Dion.

Wilson picks Celine not because he likes her and no one else does, but rather because he hates her — and, because, contra Frith, that makes Wilson unusual. Though I personally don’t know anyone who likes Celine, and though you may not either, the fact is that no one sells records the way Celine sells records. For Wilson, this is part of her fascination. Celine stinks of democracy — of “grannies, tux-wearers, overweight children, mobile-phone salesmen” as one critic put it in the Independent. Like most Canadians, liberals, and rock-critics, Wilson has an instinctive mistrust of elitism, and he can’t help feeling that his own hatred of Celine is less about her intrinsic worth than it is about placing himself above the drooling masses. This conviction is only strengthened as he goes out to interview actual Celine Dion fans. One of these is Sophoan Sorn, a Californian film-maker and former Vietnamese refugee, who Wilson says struck him as “one of the nicest people I’ve ever talked to.” Wilson goes on to say that, “Not only does [Sophoan’s taste] seem as valid as my own, utterly incompatible tastes, I like him so much that for a long moment his taste seems superior. What was the point of all that nasty, life-negating crap I like?”

It’s not quite so easy to utterly abandon one’s viewpoint, as Wilson finds. “You don’t know what an egotistical control freak your taste can be until you try to turn traitor,” he muses. He admits, with some regret, that he’ll never like Celine the way many of her fans do. But he does manage to find a way, if not to love her, then at least to rationalize her. He argues that critics too often act as if the point of music is to sit still and be aesthetically dissected. This works, he argues, for bands like Sonic Youth, but makes much less sense for an artist like Celine, who produces “lousy music to make aesthetic judgments to” but whose songs “might be excellent for having a first kiss, or burying your grandparents, or breaking down in tears.” He adds that aesthetic distinctions are necessary for enjoyment, but he argues that critics need more humility, and a willingness to admit that they are arguing from a subjective and culturally determined place. In short, Celine is useful for her audience in specific, practical ways — condemning her through absolute standards is elitist, potentially oppressive, and compromised.

Wilson’s argument for Celine, is, therefore, on its surface, a basic statement of enlightenment, utilitarian tolerance (Celine is useful, she hurts no one — who are we to criticize?) It’s also a particularly clear statement of how those values end up in a post-modern rejection of judgments in general as absolutist. Underneath this conscious clarity and fair-mindedness, though, the book has another, less fully spelled out agenda — one which surreptitiously gives the book much of its energy.

In the period where Wilson was researching and writing about Celine, his marriage had come apart. Wilson mentions this forthrightly enough, and even links it to his burgeoning, on-off appreciation of Celine. For example, when he saw Celine’s Vegas show, he says, part of the reason he was able to enjoy it was that “Celine helped me feel that big, dumb emotion on some gut level.” His personal turmoil allowed him to see the point of Celine’s blatant sentimentality.

That doesn’t seem to be the entire story, though. In recounting his trip to Vegas, during which he was lonely and miserable, Wilson mentions as part of his litany of discomfort with his surroundings: “I am entirely too shy to hire prostitutes.” That casual tie between self-definition and shame is not explored immediately…but later it becomes one of the important themes of the book. While listening to Celine’s Let’s Talk About Love alone in his room, Wilson is intensely embarrassed — as, presumably, he would have been had he hired that prostitute. He is afraid people will hear what he has in his room, and judge him for it. What follows is probably my favorite passage in the book:

Yes, it was vain not to want the neighbors to hear me playing Let’s Talk About Love….But the worst part was feeling ashamed to feel ashamed…. Try it yourself: Pick some music you find particularly unattractive and crank it up every day for a couple of weeks. Or go out for the evening wearing clothes you find ugly, and not in a funny way Before having a dinner date over, hang a painting from a Christian-art sale over your bed….Shame has a way of throwing you back upon your own existence, on the unbearable truth that you are identical with you, that you are your limits. Which immediately makes the self feel incomplete, unjustified, a chasm of lack. It’s the reverse of the sense of self-extension that having likes and dislikes usually provides. It is humbling.

Wilson, then, is arguing that part of the benefit of listening to Celine is a sense of shame. He presents this shame as enforcing the boundaries of the self; increasing his consciousness of who he is and can’t escape. But surely the experience is not just about enforcing boundaries, but about destroying them. Wilson’s book is about changing himself; he starts as someone who hates Celine, and becomes someone who doesn’t. There is a transformation, and that transformation involves shame, and, indeed, degradation. In Bataille’s formulation, Wilson is violating a taboo in order to obtain sacred experience; he is bathing in the filth of democracy in order to be changed.

Perhaps it’s only coincidence, but to me at least, the juxtaposition in the quote above of Celine, dating, and Christianity seems suggestive. I don’t think it’s fair to psychoanalyze; to say — “Well, Wilson’s interest in Celine is inspired by his desire to escape from his self in the wake of a failed marriage.” But I think it is fair to point out that Wilson has constructed the book in part as a story about revelation and healing. He needs to be somebody different, and part of the way he does that is by becoming a person who can appreciate Celine Dion.

Wilson’s book, then, turns out to not really be a polemic in the rockist/popist internecine war. Instead, it’s a statement of faith — though of faith in what isn’t entirely clear. Democracy, perhaps? Art? Celine herself? Perhaps, more abstractly in the transformative power of aesthetic choices? Terry Eagleton comments in Reason, Faith, and Revolution that “certain of our commitments are constitutive of who we are, we cannot alter them without what Christianity traditionally calls a conversion, which involves a lot more than just swapping one opinion for another.” Wilson seems to be almost inverting this, proposing, or hoping, that if we can but treat our opinions as constitutive of who we are, we can experience a conversion merely by changing them.

As I said, the emotional commitment and the yearning in Wilson’s book are what give it its power and, indeed, its beauty. The single most affecting scene in the narrative is when Wilson remembers his now ex-wife singing Buddy Holly to him at the beginning of their relationship: “Oh Boy,” featuring as both corny weakness of taste and sacrament. At the same time, though, it’s hard not to feel — in Wilson’s longing, his shame, and his tentative renewal — a thinness and almost a self-parody. At the end of the book, he rather lamely admits, for example, that the Beatles and Louis Armstrong are better than Celine Dion on the basis of the fact that those artists “appeal to people across taste divides” — as if no one hates the Beatles, right? He also confesses — with his tongue not nearly far enough in his cheek — that Celine’s continuing, unassailable uncoolness is what may “give him the heart to go on.” Thus, after 160 odd pages of intense thought and deliberation, Wilson is left with no basis for aesthetic judgments except the extremely dubious one of popular approval, and no grounding for his own spiritual health other than critical disapproval. He has journeyed to the end of taste, and there he has found only arid clichés and a vapid contrariness.

Or, to put it another way: the only way you can experience a sense of shame and guilt is to play Celine Dion loud enough for the neighbors to hear? I mean, really? Haven’t you ever, I don’t know, betrayed a friend? Insulted a loved one? Told an untruth? Wilson is thoughtful enough to realize that a sense of sin — of the worthlessness of the self — is necessary for conversion. But as a tolerant but definitive atheist, and as a rock critic, he seems able to conceive of that sin only in terms of relatively banal aesthetic faux pas.

Terry Eagleton notes that “It is culture, not religion, which is now for many men and women the heart of a heartless world.” Art, Eagleton argues, often functions as a kind of displaced theology. This aesthetic theology is spread variously among denominations, like rockism and popism, and these denominations espouse competing values, such as democracy or tolerance or authenticity. These differences in values certainly matter; our aesthetic choices are bound up with who we are, what we believe, who we love, and what we want to become. But such distinctions are also limited — a band may save your life, in some sense, but it isn’t going to save your soul, or the world. Celine may be good, or she may be bad, but she’s not the Cross. Beyond taste, there are only those things that will not accept the condescension of your aesthetic pronouncements. You can call that reality, or truth, or God, or, for those of us who are atheists, the absence of God. In any case, it judges you, not the other way around. To forget that is to start worshipping idols, which means that you are outsourcing your spiritual and emotional life to another sinner, and are living a lie. Liking or disliking Celine is not a moral issue. Wilson treats it as one, which is why his book has so much passion, love and heart — and why, despite all that, his journey can lead nowhere.

One For All and All For One

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I was recently reading an essay by sociologist and comics scholar Casey Brienza about the rise of American manga titled “Books Not Comics: Publishing Fields, Globalization, and Japanese Manga in the United States” (first published in Publishing Research Quarterly.) Most of the essay is an interesting discussion of the format rejiggering by Tokyopop which triggered the manga boom in the U.S. However, at the very end, she broadens her net a bit to focus on the implications of globalization in general.

This is the great tragedy of globalization. Although globalization has changed the world in which we live dramatically, there are places within our interior worlds that even those outward changes cannot penetrate. There is an irreducible distance between different people and different cultures that globalization cannot bridge. Much of manga’s “cultural odor,” to borrow a term from Iwabuchi, is preserved intact on the level of content. But as the manga field migrates into the book field, and manga became just another category of books, like cookbooks, science fiction, or biographies, actors throughout the field will slowly lose their ability to detect that odor at all. Therefore, even though we may all be looking at exactly the same pictures and reading exactly the same prose, there is no positive guarantee that, when we do so, we are seeing anything else besides our own, forever-separate selves reflected back at us.

For Brienza, cultural imports do not change the importer; instead, they themselves are altered. Manga doesn’t make America more Japanese; instead, America simply swallows manga and turns it into plain old bland American books.

In Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the Center of Taste, Carl Wilson observes the same phenomena of cultural adaptation…but he sees it as a positive, not a negative. In discussing Celine Dion’s global appeal, he notes that she has to be marketed carefully and specifically to each global region. Instead of creating a one world of Dion, she has to change herself to fit each niche. Wilson writes:

Now a successful artist has to figuratively become local by fulfilling entertainment conventions in other parts of the world. It is less homogenization than hybridization of cultures. As Jan Nederveen Pieterse of the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague writes, “How do we come to terms with phenomena such as Thai boxing by Moroccan girls in Amsterdam, Asian rap in London, Irish bagels, Chinese tacos and Mardi Gras Indians in the United States…? Cultural experiences, past or present, have not been simply moving in the direction of cultural uniformity and standardization.” He suggests what we’re witnessing is a “creolisation of global culture.” It does not follow that creolization will take a standard form. Localism is ignored, as Celine’s marketers know, at peril. Likewise the global hegemony model presumes there won’t be reciprocal cultural influence on the West, but the counterevidence is all around us: Asian video-game music, for example, is arguably among the most pervasive influences on young pop musicians now. And as Pieterse points out, with the exception of isolated indigenous groups, civilization and hybridization have been synonymous for centuries.

Canadian singer Celine Dion and Japanese signer Juna Ito

So where Brienza laments the hybridization and adaptation of borrowed cultural objects, Wilson celebrates it. Where Brienza experiences a loss of manga’s unique cultural smell, Wilson argues for the joyful blending which results in Asian video game music taking on an altogether new odor in an American context.

As a final take on globalization, here’s Nadim Damluji’s essay about Mickey Mouse in Egypt, written a while back on HU. Nadim discusses an Uncle Scrooge story about Egypt which was reprinted in an Egyptian comic.

The Western ducks discover a historical landmark that the Disney Arabs were incapable of finding on their own and what naturally follows their act of discovery in a foreign land is their immediate sense of ownership (Christopher Columbus much?). Furthermore, we as readers are lead to believe that the pyramids do not possess inherent value for their historical and cultural significance, but only for their ability to hold potential treasure. You see, without this treasure it wouldn’t have been worth digging out the pyramid, not worth hiring the cheap Arab labor. Lastly, we see the popular trope of Pharaonic culture being used as shorthand for all of Egyptian culture. In other words, traveling to Egypt for the Ducks is traveling into the past, not into a different contemporary culture.

Ultimately, I believe the real harm of this story is that it was tucked within the pages of a comic’s magazine that had Mickey wishing young readers Happy Ramadan or celebrating Mawlad on the cover. Mickey was localized insomuch as he could help Disney sell more comics globally, extending their commercial reach deep in to an emerging comic’s market. To be an avid Miki fans means to be an avid internalizer of the importance of capitalism and hence a way of seeing the world that makes certain countries first and others third. Mickey Mouse certainly has a big place in the history of Arab comics, but I believe it is a history whose depth we must challenge and whose psychological harm may be immeasurable.

Against Wilson’s joyful vision of hybridization, Nadim sees the same old hegemony. And where Brienza mourns the fact that cultural objects don’t change people, Nadim mourns the fact that they do. For Brienza, manga is altered so much that it loses its foreign flavor; for Nadim, Uncle Scrooge is given just enough foreign spice so that Egyptian readers can be poisoned by it.

So is globalization bad because it does not make us more alike? Is it good because it does not make us more alike? Is it bad because it does make us more alike? Or (as a possible fourth position) is it good because it makes us more alike?

Or, to put it another way, is the world better if people are more alike or less alike? And how does globalization affect that?

Philosopher Alain Badiou argues that these are the wrong questions. In his book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Badiou insists that, in terms of the movement of global capital (both economic and, presumably, cultural), homogeneity and diversity are not in opposition. They’re the same thing. Wonderful hybridized Arab Mickey and sneaky Mickey hegemon are not opposed — they work together.

Our world is in no way as “complex” as those who wish to ensure its perpeturation claim. It is even, in its broad outline, perfectly simple.

On the one hand, there is an extension of the automatisms of capital, fulfilling one of Marx’s inspired predictions: the world finally configured, but as a market, as a world-market. This configuration imposes the rule of an abstract homogenization…. For capitalist monetary abstraction is certainly a singularity, but a singularity that has no consideration for any singularity whatsoever: singularity as indifferent to the persistent infinity of existence as it is to the evental becoming of truths.

On the other side, there is a process of fragmentation into closed identitities, and the culturalist and relativist ideology that accompanies fragmentation.

Both processes are perfectly intertwined. For each identification (the creation or cobbling together of identity) creates a figure that provides a material for its investment by the market. There is nothing more captive, so far as commercial investment is concerned, nothing more amenable to the invention of new figures of monetary homogeneity, than a community and its territory of territories…. What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments in this upsurge — taking the form of communities demanding recognition and so-called cultural singularities — of women, homosexuals, the disabled, Arabs. And these infinite combinations of predicative traits, what a godsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles, moderate Muslims, married priests, ecologist yuppies, the submissive unemployed, prematurely aged youth! Each time, a social image authorized new products, specialized magazines, improved shopping malls… (All italics are Badiou’s; ellipses are mine.)

So, for Badiou, Celine singing first in Spanish then in Japanese is not a sign that hegemony has been defeated. It’s simply the flip side of the universalism of capitalism; the reduction of every individual soul to a marketing demographic. Similarly,a truly Egyptian Mickey Mouse (or truly Muslim superheroes) would not resist the logic of Western hegemony; it would simply reinscribe the identity of “Arab” on which (with all other identities) Western hegemony depends. The world is one giant bland glob, but not because, as Brienza would have it, we our trapped in our own national identities. Rather, it’s because all identities are the same identity. The lack of smell when you read manga is not a product of Americanization. Rather, the lack of smell is the result of the fact that an identity based on reading manga, whether Americanized or not, is an identity that it entirely permeable by the market.

So if, for Badiou, homogeneity and heterogeneity are the same thing, what exactly is the alternative? Well, among other things, I think he’d probably like us to ignore “culture” all together (he has acid things to say about the flattening of “art” into “culture.”) But more than that, he argues for the primacy of the Event.

The Event for Badiou is something like a miracle and something like a paradigm shift; Paul’s revelation on the rode to Damascus is his exemplar. Subjects do not experience or create the Event, rather they are created by it, and remain subjects to the extent they keep faith with it. Childbirth makes you a mother; having your mother shot makes you Batman. The Event, and your continued investment in the event, is who you are.

In the wake of the Event,individual differences are neither obliterated nor homogenized. Rather, they are accepted without being fetishized or even especially emphasized. So, for example, in Twilight, whether a vampire is white or black, male or female, is unimportant, not because those differences vanish, but because the vampire’s subjectivity is created by the Event of the transformation.

Neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female in vampirism.

Similarly, Badiou points out that for Paul whether Christians were circumcised or uncircumcised made no difference. Thus, Badiou argues, for Paul, Christianity was not a sectarian identity among many, but an insistently universal human subjectivity, available to all through faith in the Resurrection, rather than through coercion or insistent self-demarcation. (Badiou, presumably, hates the Inquisition and Christian pop about equally.)

Badiou’s formulation raises perhaps as many questions as it answers. As just one example —how can you tell a sectarian identity from a universal one? Aren’t the vampires in Twilight themselves essentially a subculture? Isn’t Christianity an identity? Moreover, Badiou bases his whole thinking on idea that the Event constitutes Truth — but his paradigmatic Event is the Resurrection, which (as an atheist) he insists is false. So how exactly do you tell if the Event is true? And if Christianity was not universal because it was true, why was it universal?

Still, arguing with Badiou is, I think, a helpful corrective to arguments about globalization, which can slip rather quickly into disputes about the ideal purchasable cultural product. For Badiou, such managerial fiddling at the marketing margins is a depressing simulacrum of utopian thinking. If we’re going to dream, why not imagine a world where our souls aren’t for sale — where, as Bert Stabler said in a recent comment, “everyone can create shared institutions that aren’t niche markets or normality factories.”