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Abstract
Usually, when we determine the authenticity of a performer in popular music then we do so either through their biography or their inherence within a tradition. The question of authenticity then becomes one of betrayal. This article argues that there might be a unique way of approaching authenticity through affects, where authenticity is impersonal rather than personal. It uses the work of Pierre Schaeffer to describe the difference between indexes and signs on the one hand, and affects on the other, to develop a concept of abstract subjectivity, which is not the same as the individual. It explains abstract subjectivity through Will Oldham’s description of his performance. Finally, it compares this method of listening to popular music with Blanchot’s description of literature as free indirect discourse, speaking without a first person. It is abstract subjectivity that allows popular music to resist its own commodification, which is the very opposite of authenticity.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 An example of such an approach would be Middleton’s book on popular music and the voice. It is a work influenced by the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan and Žižek and so interprets the meaning of the voice as a sign. Iyer offers a subtle and positive description of Middleton’s method in his review article. Elliott also talks about the voice in popular music in his recent and exceptional book. He too speaks of it as either an index, biographically, or as sign, its cultural and symbolic significance. Perhaps, because he is particularly interested in the voice of old age, he does not totally neglect its affect, which he calls the “vocal act.” It is, however, only one item in a series, and he gives no precedence to it. He explains the voice through his case studies either in terms of indexes or signs. There is a significance of the affect distinct from that of the index or sign, and affects are anonymous and pre-representational.
2 See also, for the importance of affects in Spinoza’s work, Deleuze, “Spinoza and the Three ‘Ethics.’”
3 For the interpretation of Foucault’s work as the history of practices and affects, see Veyne. See also Deleuze, Foucault.
4 The origin of this phrase is the subtitle of a collection of Blanchot’s essays on Levinas (Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation). Deleuze makes no mention of this context. For this reason, he confuses “speaking” with what can be said. What Blanchot means by speaking belongs to the outside, or what he calls the neuter, which can be neither seen nor said. This outside, as Deleuze himself explains, is related to power and the affects that constitute it, and not regimes of visibility or statability (Deleuze, Foucault 87).
5 It is a surprise that such a classic of musicology has never been translated. There is an excellent guide to this work, which thankfully includes an index, by Chion. You can find a translation of this guide in Dack and North. All translations of this work are my own.
6 He is referring to an actual composition by Pierre Henry, Variations pour une porte et un soupir.
7 Les objets musicaux, les objets phonétiques, les sons industriels; les chants d’oiseaux, etc.
8
Que la musique est plus que la musique, que ce n’est pas un objet usuel, utilitaire ou esthétique, mais une démarche spirituelle, ou comme disait un vieux Maître, un “exercice êtrique,” une performance de l’être entier.
9 When it comes to speech and utterance in linguistics it is a given that the subject position is first (for an example of this, see Benveniste). There are three ways that we might question this dominant paradigm. First, that speakers are situated in a social context of which they are not conscious, and which determines what they say and hear. Second, that language is not first communicational or informational but fixed in a socio-political field that determines its force. The I is first neither subject of the statement nor the subject of enunciation but a response to an “order word” that produces the subject differently each time to flight as well as capture. Third, that indirect discourse is not secondary to direct discourse but the first determination of language. Our voices are lost in a vast sea of voices whose origin we do not know. Speaking replies to speaking. See “Postulates of Linguistics” in Deleuze and Guattari 75–111. For an excellent summary of these issues, see Grisham.