MJ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zpTQCQEFhg

When Michael Jackson died, I was with my brother, who was on a ventilator in the intensive care unit in a hospital in Pennsylvania. We didn't turn on the television when the nurse mentioned what had happened. The next few days I was caught up in the rhythms of hospital life. As my brother improved, I found myself watching hours of video on you tube after I returned to my hotel in the evenings.

Mark K-punk and Steve Shaviro have insightful posts on their blogs.Their analyses are very smart, hooked into changes in race, sex, and commodity capitalism in the eighties. Mark emphasizes Jackson's freakishness, presenting an early talent that becomes trapped in decline, as if nothing Jackson did after Thriller can shine through or appear in the face of the Jackson's changes. It is as if Jackson is nothing but the ugliness of a signifier that has lost its signifying function, unable to open up something beyond the coarse chain of its own repetitions. Yet, Shaviro concludes (not in direct conversation with K-punk on this):

But such an interpretation, even if true, is inadequate to Jackson’s genius, to the way he created pleasure and hope and utopian aspirations in the lives of so many, and to the ways that his sufferings and his strangeness are quintessential expressions of American life and society in this neoliberal age.

I agree with Steve. And I'd like to add that there is something wonderful in the later, post-Thriller work, something that exceeds any preoccupation one might have with a disruption of the natural order of things (I wonder if the video for "Black and White"--the first time I ever saw those sorts of video morphs in a music video--was, if not a jab at those fixated on his appearance, then an instruction on how to see him). I was astounded by the clip above from the 1988 Grammy Awards. The intensity of the performance, its evocations of the black evangelical tradition and of James Brown, its ties to musical traditions, traditions of faith, and practices of community even as it urges and presents changes, indicate not the decline of a child star but a performer continuing to push himself as an artist. He doesn't moonwalk.

Would the US reception and response be different if "Earthsong" had been released here? And does the relative lack of popularity (compared to his other music) of "They Don't Really Care About Us" say that what the US audience really wanted was for Jackson to be something, someone, who wouldn't change, who was knowable and defineable, someone like the commodity he risked becoming, who was basically a brand, without a catch-phrase but with a catch-dance, a signature move, something as predictable as the repetitive circuits of popular culture?

Comments

[Alain]

Hi Jodi - My thoughts are with you and your family. I wish him the best.

[Jodi]

hey--thanks, Alain. I think that my post posted too quickly.

[Adrian]

"Would the US reception and response be different if "Earthsong" had been released here?"

I've wondered about this, too (at http://immanence.blog.uvm.edu). And why wasn't it, when it's been his biggest seller in the UK?

All the best to your brother...

[Mehmet Çagatay]

Hello Ms. Dean,

I hope your brother will be better soon.

I learned about MJ's death from a post on Marxmail. My first reaction was to arrange a personal commemoration ceremony on YouTube, of course, starting with "The Way You Make Me Feel", one of first the two songs in English that I memorized its lyrics (The other one was "It's A Sin" from Pet Shop Boys). After an hour or two, my short attention span turned towards to another musician, who in a way has nurtured a comparable image with MJ's. I'm talking about David Bowie, the man of thousand looks. Then in a moment of poetic intuition, I discovered that, MJ is David Bowie who was permanently caught in the video of the song "Life on Mars". I think his tragedy was not being a sort of a nonfunctional signifier which had been trapped in repetition, but, it resides in his stubborn but at the same time affirmative (in the sense of negating while preserving the form) resistance to the elasticity of free-floating signifiers. Therefore, his artistic transgression was that he debased the essential necessity of empty formalism, i.e. obsession with new forms which also dictates to maintain the possibility of demolition and reconstruction of its objects in an endless repetition. He debased it by transforming his body always for good, therefore confined the desire of infinitude to the finitude of his body. MJ, as being both an artist and a commodity, embodied the destructive ambition of formalism and commodity production in his exhausted synthetic face. He was a tragic hero who snatched the nightmare from the jaws of Other's dream.

[anon]

That's a beautiful post Mehmet.

[Jodi]

Mehmet--that is brilliant. My partner and I were talking about who else would fit in the same field as MJ, to whom one might compare him, his contribution, his impact, and loss, and we came up lacking. We thought about Elton John. But your evocation of Bowie here is completely insightful. Thank you.

[Jodi]

Mehmet--I've been re-reading your comment.

You write:

I think his tragedy was not being a sort of a nonfunctional signifier which had been trapped in repetition, but, it resides in his stubborn but at the same time affirmative (in the sense of negating while preserving the form) resistance to the elasticity of free-floating signifiers. Therefore, his artistic transgression was that he debased the essential necessity of empty formalism, i.e. obsession with new forms which also dictates to maintain the possibility of demolition and reconstruction of its objects in an endless repetition. He debased it by transforming his body always for good, therefore confined the desire of infinitude to the finitude of his body. MJ, as being both an artist and a commodity, embodied the destructive ambition of formalism and commodity production in his exhausted synthetic face.

Can you say more about transformation for good? If I understand it, your claim is that his tragedy is that he showed that formalism is never as formal as it presumes, that there is always some kind of stain or remnant. So, in a kind of ethical commitment, MJ exposes the falsity of formalism. Is that something like what you have in mind?

If this is correct, what leads to the assessment of change for good? What does this mean here? What sort of good?

[Mehmet Çagatay]

Hello Ms. Dean,

Thank you for kind words.

My assertion was like MJ exposes the fake novelties of formalism insofar as The Luddites had attested to the ultimate boundary of the revolutionary character of capitalist production, i.e. perpetual revolution intended to keep the Capital intact.

Whereas he was supposed to preserve the capacity of his body as an image placeholder for endless bodies deprived of any representation, he denied the very material of this formalism by gradually transforming his body to a complete mask, in Lacanian terms, to an idol of the absence of bodies. He changed for good since at every stage he destroyed the preceding body with no return.

[Mehmet Çagatay]

Sorry, it seems that I forgot to add my fundamental critique about MJ. I doubt this malevolent guy ruined my sexual development on adolescence with his video that I mentioned above. I was sort of a sheepish and suffering boy like the one in Traveling Wilburys’ song “Handle with Care”, but his video encouraged me to act like an verbally insistent man who knows what he wants, which usually ended up with an emotional disaster. When it worked though for a couple of times, it didn’t take long for girls to realize actually what a pathetic creature I am, just to make me act again but this time as a Woody Allen in famous break up scene from Bananas. And as now the King is dead, I feel I finally have the courage to embrace the male lesbian inside me.