Rancid Aphrodisiac

Rancid Aphrodisiac
Subjectivity, Desire, and Rock ’n’ Roll

Mickey Vallee

Bloomsbury Academic
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 Contents

List of Illustrations vi
Preface and Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Felt, Not Perceived 1

1 “The One with the Waggly Tail”: Even ’n’ Emergence 27
2 The Backdoor of Desire 55
3 Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without the Other 79
Conclusion: Affect and the Medium of the Real 107

Bibliography 131
Index 145
 Illustrations

1 Lacan’s elementary cell 65

2 The lower graph of desire 67
3 The upper graph of desire 89
4 Shepherd and Wicke’s performative semiological model 107
 Preface and Acknowledgments

In January 2013 a Salt Lake City high school production of the rock musical,
All Shook Up, was temporarily canceled due to some lyrical content containing
mild sexual references and a scene of cross-dressing that offended members
of the community. To remain within community standards, parents solicited
changes to the publishers, who in turn granted permission to perform the
show with those changes executed. Sandy Riesgraf, Jordan School District
spokesperson, said: “Our biggest concern early on, we wanted to make some
changes to keep the play within community values. It’s a win–win for all of
us.” The play is one of a handful of literary representations to emerge in the
post-historical, post-ideological era which construct the imaginary space
of popular music from the early Rock ’n’ roll and Rock periods (along with
Across the Universe and I’m Not There). In line with its contemporaries, All
Shook Up does not tell us the story of Rock ’n’ roll but rather narrates the
perceived effects of the music simultaneously from the perspective of the
emancipated youth and the restrictive parent culture. It is the representation
of the real effects of a musical emergence. Rock ’n’ roll remains at the back
door. It is, in fact, the gaze towards the object that allows us to feel in the
periphery the contours of the “real” story—we are accustomed, in popular
music studies at least, to view music as a medium to the patterns of human
action through which meaning is generated in negotiation with dominant
ideology. This study is no exception.
By way of the intertwining affect of the gaze, its possessor, and its object,
seeing involves a paradoxically circuitous route towards the object that cannot
be resolved. So what emerges when we gaze upon Rock ’n’ roll with an entirely
new set of perceptual apparatuses involving an intent focus on its sympto-
matic ruptures rather than the agency of its main actors? A gaze upon a
historical emergence, one within which youth experienced the crazed energy
of sexual mayhem, under the conscientious eyes of their parents who could
only see them at a side glance, who could only encounter a culture at a side
viii Preface and Acknowledgments

glance, a culture which was manifest entirely through side glances. Rock ’n’
roll was subject to the power of the gaze in that it could not be heard directly
but only at angles: only in private locations, through underground networks,
through cultural crossovers, misrepresentations, in the threats that were felt
and not perceived. It is here where the gaze has the most control, by unflinch-
ingly controlling the thing that allows unspeakable features to emerge: “In this
matter of the visible,” Lacan (1998c: 93) writes,

everything is a trap, and in a strange way […]—entrelacs (interlacing, inter-

twining). There is not a single one of the divisions, a single one of the double
sides that the function of vision presents that is not manifested to us as a
labyrinth. As we begin to distinguish its various fields, we always perceive more
and more the extent to which they intersect.

This labyrinth description is aligned precisely with the manner in which Rock
’n’ roll dominated the popular music industry in the 1950s. The labyrinth
appeared by way of the sediments of industry, technology, youth, musical
style, networking of all varieties that primed a symbiotic mesh—that is, an
interconnected and horizontally integrated industry practice that aesthetic
readjustment comprised of a variety of human and non-human entities. So
how could a phenomenon comprised of interrelated parts seemingly without
beginning or end be responsible for moral corruption? The mesh of Rock ’n’
roll facilitated a kind of gaze that looked everywhere but could see nobody.
It renders the reduction of music to any of its mediated units ultimately as a
task for reification.
This perennial censorship of All Shook Up also is illustrative of some
general points about the “end of history” where repetition’s return intertwines
with the persevering social structure. As Richard Middleton (2006: 142) asks,
“If repetition is both a salve of subjectivity […] and a symptom of its disease
[…], how can we assess its effects at a moment when the end of history has,
it turns out, been indefinitely delayed?” Despite the erroneous end of history,
despite the decline in prohibitive authority, despite the rise of decentered
subjectivity and the flows of anarchic global desubjectivation, Rock ’n’ roll’s
dialectic with conservative prohibition evidently remains. This is to revisit the
story as a precipatory paradigm of consumerist indulgence: Rock ’n’ roll was
 Preface and Acknowledgments ix

the acquiescent contour of consumerism in its line of flight from ideology. It

is our task, then, to understand morality not simply through the lens of its
panics but also through its regulations. I want to offer a conceptualization
of Rock ’n’ roll that takes into account the relation between panic (excess)
and regulation (enjoyment). There are those who offer a conceptualization
of the dialectic more properly between regulation and panic (Critcher 2009;
Hier 2002): a moral panic is the result of a negotiation between the ideology
of media narratives and social action. I maintain that a moral regulation can
only be best approached as the unconscious determinant of the moral panic in
a libidinal economy of enjoyment. The governance of self and others are both
articulated through discourse but vary in their appeal to “common sense,”
“one as a sustained dialectical process of subjectification, the other as a volatile
moment of failure or dislocation” (Hier 2002: 332). The panic is indeed the
excess of the event, that blockage which interrupts the orderly world from
erupting, even if the eruption is no more than a projection of fear. This might
help in understanding the political intervention of a fantasy that blockades
the eruption of the Real. We cannot perceive the threat of the Real, but we
can feel it: as Freud said, anxiety is the only honest emotion we experience
since it is typified as the symptom of frustrated desire (desire, by definition, is
predetermined by its own unfulfilling function), the undercurrent affect that
accompanies every human being in his or her interpellation into the symbolic
order, to a greater or lesser extent, depending upon the trauma of their cut.

* * *

I would like to thank the following mentors for exposing me to the perplexing
debates regarding music, media, and cultural theory: John Shepherd, Paul
Attallah, Henry Klumpenhouwer, Adam Krims, Alan Stanbridge, Leo Mos,
and Rob Shields. I would like to thank the collective of the International
Association for the Study of Popular Music—Canada, the Canadian
Sociological Association, and the Media Ecology Association, for hearing and
responding to portions of the research that have informed this book.
It should be known that this book grew from lectures I gave on the history of
popular music at the University of Alberta from 2006 until 2012, and is joined
x Preface and Acknowledgments

by portions of my readings of Žižek and Lacan I undertook all too often while
teaching. I therefore have my students to thank most of all for this, for their
patience and insight. They are truly a continued source of inspiration, both
at the University of Alberta and now at the University of Lethbridge. I owe a
great debt to the department of sociology at the University of Lethbridge for
allowing me the opportunity to teach a wide variety of courses in sociology,
cultural studies, and media theory. Through these courses I have been able to
discuss the ideas in this book with the most open-minded and challenging
students an instructor could hope for. Lastly, the empowering aspects of this
book would not have appeared without my family’s support as a whole: Julia,
Penelope, and Anouk, thank you for helping me make this possible.
 Introduction

Felt, Not Perceived

“The standardized products of today’s variety shows, hit parades, and

show business are pathetic and prophetic caricatures of future forms of the
repressive channelling of desire.”
(Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, p. 31)

So the story goes: Rock ’n’ roll was a disorderly psychosocial eruption whose
hysterical impulses were unjustly sequestered by moral entrepreneurs in
a perennial frenzy of moral panic. As the antithetic response to myriad
conservative values sustained by a parent generation repressing the horrors
of the Great Depression and World War II with bureaucracy and Lorazepam,
Rock ’n’ roll emerged as the soundtrack to a newly emancipated white,
middle-class, emotionally charged generation. Magazines reacted to it, racists
attacked it, and Congress shut it down until the Beatles, the Rolling Stones,
and the Animals reintroduced it to American audiences in 1963 and 1964. The
rebellion was then reborn through the counterculture and bled into the 1970s’
hedonistic excess of classic rock, with its symptomatic ruptures of punk and
disco to follow, each having met with curdled reactions from mainstream and
non-mainstream milieus—and the beat goes on.
The delicate balance between the imaginary moral space of the 1950s and its
symbolic suburban enlightenment was elusive enough to render any rupture as
a potential agent in total collapse: Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent warned
parents of comic books (Egan and Hawkes 2012); the McCarren Internal
Security Act of 1950 stole civil liberties for the sake of protection against the
second Red Scare (Cuordileone 2011); the homophobic “Boise” panic insti-
gated an arbitrary connection between homosexuality and child molestation
(Hyde 2007); the preoccupation over teen pregnancy determined an educative
2 Rancid Aphrodisiac

regime of intense gender training to push the political agenda of early marriage
(Ehrlich 2013); and intellectuals feared that the masses were being indoctri-
nated by the media (Kornhauser 2013). But Rock ’n’ roll represents a special
figure of this period of the “Fall of Man.” As P. David Marshall notably states:

The 1950s have been construed as a period of moral panic, when the dominant
culture considered the new ethics, the new focus on sexuality, and the emphasis
on leisure, entertainment, and pleasure as assaults on the traditional values
of hard work and just reward. Teenage films of the period oscillated between
depicting the pleasures of the new morality and the dangers of excess. Popular
music—specifically rock and roll—stars represented the incarnation of excess,
decadence, and pleasure without connection to morality. (Marshall 1997: 160,
emphasis added)

Marshall concludes, however, that if we connect these moral panics to the

specific economy of the 1950s, we witness the “clear-cut emergence of a market
segment [of youth] for the circulation of goods and services” (Marshall 1997:
160). That is, Rock ’n’ roll can be read as the metastasization of the libidinal
economy of consumption—its affect can only make sense in a historically
specific context. The 1950s is generally taken as the most decadent decade of
mass consumption (Halliwell 2007), a crucial turning point towards to the
development of global capitalism. While Rock ’n’ roll’s “excess, decadence, and
pleasure” cannot be reduced to an economic activity, it should not transcend
the context that encoded its excesses.
Excess is the non-symbolic grimace of the Lacanian Real: a thing that lurks
beyond the fantasy of normalcy coordinated by the imaginary and symbolic
dimensions of the human psyche. Rock ’n’ roll terrified moral entrepreneurs
because it felt as though it would disturb the regularity of 1950s conformity
by arousing jouissance: excessive pleasure and/of/in disgust occasioned by
a traumatic encounter with the Other’s desire. Beyond any subject’s ability
to represent either the imaginary or symbolic dimensions of social-psychic
existence (Lacan 1960; Fink 1997), jouissance is the non-meaning whose
threat of rupture throws the dialectic of symbolic and imaginary off balance.
Jouissance is experienced directly, but its source is unknown to the subject
except that of the enigmatic answer to the call of desire. Jagodzinsky’s (2005:
12) account is thus worth quoting at length:
 Introduction 3

As an eruption of “non-sense” it [jouissance] indicates either a hole (or lack)

in the symbolic order of the signifier or an excess of over-presence in it. In
this particular sense jouissance can be interpreted as being “productive” given
its transformative potentiality, while desire, caught up in fantasy as a lack,
is theorized in terms of reproduction, consumption, and exchange where
the narrative structure of the signifier covers up jouissance as sense making.
Jouissance can, therefore, be excessive and abundant or lacking; at the same time
it is painful, addictive, and dangerous, outside the Law where the death drive
comes to the fore. Jouissance can produce an interruption when the subject is
completely unconcerned with the Other’s desire. The subject loses symbolically
situated identity as opposed to narcissism where the subject’s identity is invested
in the symbolic order.

Jouissance thus entices but undoes the subject as a self-destructive force,

realized in addictive properties that promise its transgression away from the
everyday banal. To be confronted with jouissance would be to simultaneously
be confronted with the Real of 1950s consumerist obscenity. The impossibility
of such a confrontation constitutes a blind spot. Indeed, it is essentially impos-
sible to confront jouissance because it is yielded by way of the social-psychic
dimension of the Real, itself a topographic section of human experience
that the Symbolic and Imaginary dimensions of reality conjoin to prevent
the subject from re-experiencing the trauma of its own interpellation into
the Symbolic Order (Cho 2007). Fantasy is the safeguard against the Real,
allowing the Real to rub up by way of dreams, songs, films, books, sexual
attachment, fetishes, hobbies, and so on  (Žižek 1997). Through the fantasy,
the subject can entertain the presence of the Real without facing it directly,
allowing it to be mediated by way of a safeguard, so that it still may be experi-
enced as a mystical ecstasy. Thus, in being confronted with jouissance, the
public was faced with an oscillating pattern between pleasurable fun and the
brink of dangerous rebellion.
Central to the moral rhetoric about Rock ’n’ roll was the issue of its affect,
a potential threat which was felt but not perceived. Affect theory has occupied
a key position in the newly emerging “object-oriented ontology” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987; Massumi 2002; Ahmed 2004; Brennan 2004; Gregg and
Seigworth 2010). Conceptualized as the autonomous in-betweenness of
material and immaterial bodies, affect is an ongoing extemporized formative
4 Rancid Aphrodisiac

power that undoes regimes of normalization. This book in particular is

concerned less with the affective quality of music than with the affective
politics of sound in the history of Rock ’n’ roll. Such a connection has been
made by Grossberg, who qualifies affect as a “structured plane of effect”
that permeates everyday life. This conception resonates in a range of affect
theory (DeChaine 2002; Fiske 1998; Shepherd and Wicke 1997). There
remains, however, an unavoidable paradox of affect under the circumstances
of contemporary capitalism—that is, the neoliberal tendency to hyper-
manage the enjoyments of life conducted on such a scale that annihilates the
incommensurable faculty of spontaneous social activity. Several arguments
have been forwarded for the de-autonomization of affect (Hemmings 2005;
McManus 2011; Pruchnic and Lacey 2011)—that is, to account for mediations
of the asocial affect towards its political mobilization. My own contribution
is via a reading aligned with the rejuvenated interest in the psychoanalytic
theory of Jacques Lacan, mainly as it has been interpreted in the last two
decades by Slavoj Žižek. However, I pay attention to Deleuze as well. The basic
tenet of Lacanian theory is that contemporary capitalism’s ecardinate power
is realized less through techniques of biopower than the total occupation of
consciousness. Affect theory, I contend, needs a phylactery as a cue to the law
of desire.
I admit that Rock ’n’ roll is an ambiguous term throughout this book. My
intention is to analyze Rock ’n’ roll less as an event than as an emergence, a
distinction I articulate in Chapter 1. For the time being, such a definition
would be as follows: Rock ’n’ roll is a historically contingent convergence of
commercially acceptable psychic excess, based upon a historically documented
series of gendered and racial exploitations. In this way, it precipitates an
aesthetic, psychic, and cultural precipitation of general consumption and of
a pathological connection between sexual excess and individual freedom. I
agree that “Rock ’n’ roll” is broad (the term could apply to doo-wop groups,
New Orleans blues ensembles, or Memphis rockabilly), but I will demonstrate
that the term was regularly designated towards sonic reconfigurations that
emphasized individualist freedom, which itself was aligned with the culture
of consumption in which it was embedded.
There may be, for some, a weak link between theoretical speculation and
 Introduction 5

the actions of “real people” in history. While I admit such a flaw could be
ratified with the further incorporation of developments in cultural/critical
musicology (as well as queer theory, feminist philosophy, new historicism,
and many others), such disciplinary developments represent entirely disparate
sets of criteria that would be useful for posing questions regarding the actions
of “real people,” which is a question I purposely never ask. I claim that a
particular form of subjectivity emerged culturally in the post-WWII era, which
is backed by substantial peer review research on the culture of consumption—
indeed, any amalgamation between subjectivity and real people is as arbitrary
a cause and effect as the amalgamation between speculative philosophy and
historical events one may find so reproachful.
I also admit that I adopt an argumentative style taken as legitimate
among practitioners of speculative philosophy and cultural theory, but may
strike more empirically laborious scholars as propounding more ideological
issues. In anticipation of such a critique, were I to adjust the book to suit the
empirical, it would be a different book. As it stands to reason, the content
of Rancid Aphrodisiac should suit the title as a descriptor of Rock ’n’ roll. It
follows, probably best of all, as the proliferation of Greil Marcus’s well-known
description of Rock ’n’ roll in Mystery Train: “Rock ‘n Roll is a combination
of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and
judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and
invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation.”

Medium of desire

This book applies Lacanian psychoanalysis to musical affect, which requires

an introduction for readers unfamiliar with psychoanalytic cultural analysis.
The following pages are intended to serve as a working introduction for those
readers. Readers familiar with the basic mechanics of the Lacanian theory of
subjectivity are free to skim. For those unfamiliar with Lacan, I want and hope
that the following pages serve as a sufficient working introduction.
This book assumes a materialist dimension on musical affect. One way
to approach this would be to ask: what might be the material of music?
6 Rancid Aphrodisiac

Shepherd and Wicke (1997) tell us: its sounds—not as they are transcribed
but as they are imprinted upon the psyche. We articulate musically through
the symbolic structuring of sounds. It is, curiously, Lacan who informs us of
how sounds are mapped onto the constitution of subjectivity, but his route
of access into this material mapping is by route of language, a system whose
formal structure is demonstrably opposed to that of music. However, Lacan’s
psychoanalytic work has influenced a number of musicological interrogations
properly belonging to “new musicology.”
In general, how is it that we are moved through and spoken to by the
navigational coordinates of social institutions? More specifically—and to turn
to the most bare and rudimentary of questions pertinent to the route of access
Lacan incised—how is it that we become the spoken subjects of the institution
of language? Saussure (2011), from whom Lacan adopted his linguistic regime
of signification, wrote that language is not a naturally designative system to
otherwise mute objects, but rather that language upholds a social convention,
is an agreed-upon symbolic system, virtual as a structure of interrelated
sounds whose processes are revealed through the diachronic chain of speech.
The sounds uttered through speech are comprised of discernible phonemic
units that comprise morphemes; by extension, morphemes signify specific
connotations and mental images that are tied only indirectly to their material
references. This moves our conception of language away from that of a trans-
cendent medium of reality into a more socially conventionalized role, because
the mental concepts that signifiers summon do not necessarily have a bearing
on their material references; they have a bearing instead on social conven-
tions. In Saussure’s conception, then, language is a signifying process that
retains autonomy from the world of the material by any seemingly organic
connection. But as language constitutes our understanding of the social world,
its utterances can only be understood as arising through social institutions
such as discourse, law, government, education, journalism, criticism, and
so on.
The subject is thus spoken through social institutions, is using a system
at his disposal that is habituated through convention, bearing little relation
to supposedly objective reality. The subject is hailed into socially deter-
mined positions rather than actively engaging in a world of their making. In
 Introduction 7

Althusser (1971) we are provided with a Marxist rendition of this concept in

his interpellation of the subject, where individuals are summoned into subject
positions by social institutions in separate yet mutually dependent ways that
conceal their own constitutive relationships to socially structured totality.
Althusser contested, in ways later challenged by the postulates of cultural
studies in defense of the empowerment thesis, that we are interpellated as
subjects of social institutions, each of us having absorbed the patterns of
these institutions through their material manifestations and taken as natural,
allowing the individual to “willingly” choose their subject positions, to make
choices amid the binary oppositions we unconsciously learned. As Althusser
(1971: 119) says,

[…] ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects, which

amounts to making it clear that individuals are always-already interpellated
by ideology as subjects, which necessarily leads us to one last proposition:
individuals are always-already subjects. Hence individuals are “abstract” with
respect to the subjects which they always already are.

Individuals enter socially into a predetermined relationship within which

each summons the other according to their imaginary relations to one
another. The legal system interpellates individuals as subjects of the court as
a custodian interpellates an object as the subject of historical artefact. Indeed,
interpellation takes society as a closed system of infinite interpellations.
Althusser reduced ideological phenomena to an imaginary relation between
a social subject and the material manifestation of a social institution. The
problem, however, is that Althusser’s model stopped short of explicating how
exactly ideological processes were internalized through material relations as
imaginary. The imaginary for Althusser is the domain of the always-already,
though it is not any fault of his that it remained untheorized. It is simply
that his analytic rubric did not contain the appropriate language that would
properly situate the manifestation of the imaginary within the domain
of subjectivity. The imaginary, I take in this book, is a materially consti-
tuted domain. If the material manifestations of social institutions summon
various subjectivities that contribute to the networks of social totality, then
spoken utterances (parole) are the material manifestation of the institution
8 Rancid Aphrodisiac

of language (langue). By extension, if people enter into relationships with the

material, the material with which they enter into a relationship in language is
in an imaginary relation with its sounds.
But we are left with a problem of how the material manifestation of a social
institution constitutes inner life and ideological processes of subjectivity. If
Althusser argued that ideology is less an institution in the external world than
one’s “imaginary relations” to its material manifestation, how the imaginary
is constituted remains beyond our grasp. For Althusser, the imaginary simply
exists through its own (mis)recognition of individuality. It is for this reason
that we are compelled to turn to the work of Lacan, because he provides us with
insight into the social construction of the imaginary through his synthesis of
Freudian psychoanalysis and Saussurean semiotics. For Lacan, the imaginary
is fundamental to the constitution of the subject; it is a site made through
language, a realm of consciousness that is tied to the trauma the subject suffers
when he is split from his own idealized (mirror) image of himself. The mirror
is central to Lacanian psychoanalysis and can be read in its initial discussion
quite literally. In Lacan’s initial work, the mirror stage refers to the event when
a child between six and 18 months of age discovers his own image looking
back at him from a mirror. The child discovers that he exists at once in the
external world (the imago) while the image he sees is sustained by his inner self.
Playfully, he may move a limb to make the child in the mirror move a limb, or
laugh to see the child laugh, and so is motivated by his desire to see his specular
image move; but he misrecognizes his own movement as his command over the
specular image, when it is the latter who summons desire to move the former.
Unity and wholeness are thus misconceptions of the cogito for Lacan.
They are based on a false pretense, since the mirror stage, a stage wherein
the perceiving subject misrecognizes himself, is the foundational experience
of human consciousness. For Lacan, the cogito is not unified, hence his
reworking of Descartes’s “I think therefore I am,” replacing it with: “I am
thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking” (Lacan
2002: 157). When patterns of self-deception are revealed as coordinates
that bar us from knowing the trauma of the cut from our own imago, we
learn to see things as the effects of such projections. For Lacan, the subject’s
unavoidable route towards alienation is facilitated by the symbolic cut that
 Introduction 9

interrupts the specular image of wholeness. Through the symbolic order, the
unity of the specular imago suffers a traumatic rupture under the disunity
and differential system of language—this is instantiated by the first signifier
of difference: the phallus, although it remains relatively unclear why this is so
(Lacan 1966c). Although they seem to occur in succession, the imaginary and
symbolic are engaged in an ongoing dialectic within the subject, constituting
two folds of the same self, each making up two parts of the same “I” (Lacan
[1949] 2006: 7). So while the specular image mirror at once constitutes an “I”
which is permanent, in Lacan’s words, “it prefigures its alienating destination”
(Lacan [1949] 2006: 5). But just how does this alienation become prefigured?
It is precisely within the promises of unity, coherence, and perfection given
by the mirror image. But its harmony is misleading, because the one who
perceives it is encased in a weak, fragile, and dependent body. This summons
for Lacan ([1949] 2006: 4),

[…] the striking spectacle of a nursling in front of a mirror who has not yet
mastered walking, or even standing, but who—though held tightly by some
prop, human or artificial […]—overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the
constraints of his prop in order to adopt a slightly leaning forward position and
take in an instantaneous view of the image in order to fix it in his mind.

Through its projection of the imago, the mirror exhibits a laminate coating
of the subject’s ideal self. At this point, the mirror begins to manifest itself
beyond the confines of a literal reflection: the approving gaze of parents and
family, the flow of breastmilk, love and affection, etc. Although the child
depends on these for his survival, he misrecognizes his dependence as an
ability to summon praise and nourishment at his command. This formative
stage of the “I” stands the inevitable danger of suffering alienation through the
promise of his unified self. But this imago is incompatible with the eventual
destination of the subject towards the symbolic order, which is constituted
by difference, fragmentation, and arbitrariness; such a symbolic is Saussure’s
intellectual milieu of signification, where the connections between signifier
and signified appear natural and ingrained yet are arbitrarily fastened.
Although Lacan made explicit use of Saussure’s terminology, there
remained significant differences between their deployment of the signifier/
10 Rancid Aphrodisiac

signified binary. Recall that in Saussure’s linguistics, the signifier is the phono-
logical property of the sign. It is not the sound itself, but rather the mental
image of the sound, the “acoustic image” that signifies a signified. But whereas
Saussure argued that signifier and signified are interdependent, Lacan insisted
that the signifier holds supremacy over the signified, that the former is the
determinant of the latter (Lacan 1985: 141–5). Because signifiers are initially
meaningless on their own, the subject is unaware of their presence until they
encroach gradually upon his imaginary space and inaugurate difference,
which hails the subject away from his specular image and into the differential
system of language (Lacan 1957: 155). For Lacan, signifiers are subject to the
law of a closed system of difference. This is where he agrees with Saussure that
signifiers are based upon the fundamental basis of difference, and that there
is no positive term in signification (only negation). Since signifiers cannot
signify the subject except in the skewed referrals to “I” or “Mine” or “My”
(etc.), signifiers can only signify each other in an inexhaustible metonymic
chain. A signifier can represent the subject for all other signifiers but cannot
signify the subject, rendering the subject as the void at the center of language.
In other words, the subject who is constituted through signifiers cannot be of
them (Lacan 1957: 148).
The condition of unity for Lacan is founded upon the primordial recog-
nition of one’s self as manifest in the external world through a specular image
that is at once a part of and apart from the perception that holds it. But
this recognition of unity simultaneously prefigures alienation, because the
recognized self is untranslatable through language into the symbolic order;
the symbolic law of difference within language is simply incompatible with
the coherence and unity of the mirror. As Bowie (1993: 87) summarizes:
“on the one hand, the Symbolic restlessly preordains and organizes human
experience, but on the other hand it cancels experience. It creates meaning, yet
also withdraws it. It vivifies, yet also mortifies.” The appearance of the subject
is generated by language in its arbitrary social convention, at least in terms
of its connection between signifier and signified. It remains impossible for a
person to situate himself socially unless he has in language a signifier which
serves his own interpellation: i.e., his name.
Lacan’s underlying principle is that the subject is conflicted between the
 Introduction 11

social conventions of signification and the misrecognized control through

the mirror stage. So while the symbolic might release us from the deceptive
falsity of the imaginary’s unity, it is only a partial emancipation because the
imaginary impregnates our experience when the symbolic is unable to make
any rational sense of the world we inhabit. The overlap is necessary because
the symbolic cannot always differentiate the world, and so the imaginary
creeps into the symbolic by way of metaphor when the latter cannot make
sense of the world through difference. Metaphor, then, is the mirror within
the symbolic order, ideal and unified specular images of other signifiers. This
leads us to Lacan’s most overquoted and misunderstood maxim: The uncon-
scious is structured like a language. As Bowie writes, Lacan is saying that “the
structure of the unconscious can be understood only in terms of its tempo-
rality, and that language, which is the sole vehicle of this temporality, cannot
itself complete the task” (Bowie 1993: 193). Specifically, note how Lacan never
says the unconscious is structured as a language or through a language. In his
Seminar XX, he clarifies:

You see that by still preserving this “like” (comme), I am staying within the
bounds of what I put forward when I say that the unconscious is structured like
a language. I say like so as not to say—and I come back to this all the time—that
the unconscious is structured by a language. (Lacan 1998b: 48)

Situated between language and the unconscious is precisely this “like.”

Language does not pre-exist the formation of the unconscious. Because
language cannot afford the origin of things by its free association in a closed
yet infinite system, the search for origin is a hollow endeavor. Lacan ([1949]
2006: 4) writes that through metaphor, the image is the form which “situates
the agency of the ego before its social determination, in a fictional direction,
which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which
will only rejoin the coming-into-being […] of the subject asymptomatically.”
The healthy subject lives out a fictional truth in lack of its essence.
That is to say, the law of language shows us how truth is a fiction we actively
play out. After all, language can neither signify the subject who speaks it nor
can it signify objective reality; it can only signify other signifiers. There is
no essential human core for Lacan except a subject split from its image of
12 Rancid Aphrodisiac

perfection it once perceived. For Lacan, the split occupies two domains of the
self: a specular “I,” which registers in the imaginary and a social “I,” which
registers in the symbolic. And although the two approximate one another, as
they are encased within one body, they cannot coincide. The lack of contact
between the two is what constitutes the subject as “lacking” and, paradoxi-
cally, what diagnoses the subject as “healthy.” Since the crossover of the
symbolic into the imaginary is a promise held by the latter, yet is repeatedly
cut by the former, this is a curious state of affairs for those of us who possess
high-minded ideals for ourselves, yet are inevitably disappointed when we
repeatedly fail to meet those ideals in our everyday worlds.
Yet the mirror holds the promise of transcendence. It reveals to us our
potential to move beyond ourselves and to become something else. Lacan
calls it a quasi-transcendental effect of the mirror; he suggests that the
mirror’s promise is at once encroached by the windfall of possibility yet
plagued by its inevitable implausibility. Certainly, the self is recognized in an
initial moment of Gestalt, but it is also a fictional coordinate by virtue of the
fact that the self is subject to a limited number of representations; there is only
room in the imaginary for so many selves. Thus, according to Lacan (2006
[1949]: 4):

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insuf-
ficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in
the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from
a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic—
and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity.

The drama we play out in daily life is one of eternally regressive return
towards the promises of perfection and unity first contained in the mirror.
This promise befalls the subject as he becomes closer to his ideal self through
elaborate and impenetrable fantasies that protect him from the trauma of
the cut. This is what alienates the subject, this shelter he builds around his
fragmented self to purport the fiction of his unity. The alienated subject thus
arises from within the promise of unity held by the specular image. It is an
innerly constructed mirror-image, quite apart from any objectivist reality, yet
entirely constitutive of the fictional truth through which we live out our lives.
 Introduction 13

The self is not autonomous, then, but subjected to, and arising from within, a
process, and Lacan insists that through it we are ultimately disempowered. As
Bowie (1993: 25) explains:

The mirror-image is a mirage of the “I” and promises that the individual’s
latent powers of coordination will eventually be realized; indeed it has a role
in triggering the development of these. So far, so good. But the “alienating
destination” of the “I” is such that the individual is permanently in discord with
himself: the “I” is tirelessly intent upon freezing a subjective process that cannot
be frozen, introducing stagnation into the mobile field of human desire.

The promise of the mirror never fades as long as there is consciousness that is
deceived into misrecognizing it. It gives hope that powers lay dormant within
the subject that will at last be realized (“if only this time, at least next, or the
next”). Because the unity of the imaginary suffers a rupture when it is interpel-
lated into the symbolic, the “I” of the imaginary is on a course of alienation
that causes an individual to be in combat with himself over the impossible
fusion between the two. The imaginary and the symbolic cross over and veil
an unrepresentable topography, which Lacan calls the Real, a concept separate
from the everyday notion of reality (Lacan and Granoff 2003). The Real’s
phenomena are irreducible to either imaginary or symbolic representation,
a permanent scar between the two whose appearance is the point of rupture
itself. And so the subject is stretched across the domain of the imaginary,
the symbolic, and the real in such a way that makes any sort of assimilation
among them impossible. The Lacanian Real is responsible for the emergence
of desire. But, because it is a product of that which is unrepresentable, desire
is equally unknowable. The route of access that Freud discovered to desire was
through parapraxes: slips of the tongue, forgotten words, substituted words,
etc. In the analytic context, slips offer the analyst the means of filling in the
gaps in a patient’s story, of giving the narrative a coherent structure according
to those facts that are unknown to the analysand. Desire is unknown to the
subject, but is determined by the point of deceit within the mirror stage,
emerging through the symbolic order. But there must be points when the
imaginary and the symbolic appear to be at their closest, and music has been
idealized as facilitating the possibility of just such a point.
14 Rancid Aphrodisiac

Lacanian psychoanalysis has only served an incidental value for the study
of music. Aside from references to the “technophallic” guitar performance of
Jimi Hendrix (Waksman 2001: 188), or the differences between phallic and
postphallic trumpet performances (Gabbard 1992), the role of the phallus
or the reason for its appearance is lacking. Others claim that “Lacan’s theori-
sation of desire and the metonymic chain along which it proceeds can provide
a basis for understanding the social construction of the possible positions
from which a musician or a fan may speak, may sing, may dance, may desire”
(Shank 1994: 129). Lastly, Sullivan’s (1995) analysis of the Beatles amounts to
little more than a basic sketch of Lacan’s primacy of the signifier along with
even more rudimentary character sketches of John, Paul, George, and Ringo
to elucidate their individual relationships to the (m)other in their music.
Generally, so say the critics, these approaches stop short of myopic specu-
lation. And there remains skepticism about whether Lacanian thought can
contribute to a meta-discourse on music.
In the psychoanalytic trope, music is privileged as a signifying system for its
non-representational status. This is an attitude held for music since aesthetics
emerged as a central concern in modern philosophy. From Kierkegaard’s
analysis of the absolutely musical as a plea for the unmediated erotic life
to Schopenhauer’s “will,” music has been held in the highest regard (Bowie
1993: 150–63). Psychoanalysis has taken up where philosophical aesthetics of
music have left off, by considering music a pre-linguistic non-representational
system that circumvents the external world and is attached directly to the
unconscious—whether it is responsible for the constitution of the uncon-
scious or for its revelation has been largely unresolved (Shepherd and Wicke
1997: 57–64). Simply, the philosophic disposition towards music has taken
the latter as the negation of the objective world in favor of the absolute, and
poststructuralist accounts have not strayed much further. Barthes (2009), for
instance, famously conceived of the terrain of the voice as signifying beyond
(or before) the symbolic through the quality of its “grain.” Kristeva claimed
that music signifies a non-representational drive embedded in our commu-
nication, an energy she called the “chora” (Kristeva 1974). Meanwhile, Žižek
(1997: 245) purports the most theoretically provocative yet under-researched
speculation on the subject of music:
 Introduction 15

What is music at its most elementary? An act of supplication: a call to a figure

of the big Other (beloved lady, King, God …) to respond, not as the symbolic
big Other, but in the real of his or her being (breaking his own rules by showing
mercy; conferring her contingent love on us …). Music is thus an attempt to
provoke the “answer of the Real”: to give rise in the Other to the “miracle” of
which Lacan speaks apropos of love, the miracle of the Other stretching his or
her hand out to me.

The only systematic approach among late-twentieth-century philosophers

with any modest tenability appears to be Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter on
the refrain from A Thousand Plateaus, where they depict music as exhibiting a
tripartite characteristic at once of territorializing, deterritorializing, and reter-
ritorializing refrains (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 310–50). Circumventing
the linguistic semiological model, their conceptualization of “the refrain”
situates music in terms of its spatio-temporal functioning over and above the
mechanics of its meaning. Jagodzinski (2005) has bridged Lacanian psycho­
analysis with Deleuze and Guattari, resisting the expected presumption that
the latter were reactionary and entirely counter to the psychoanalytic turn in
cultural theory. Jagodzinski (2005: 33) quite convincingly places mainstream
music (boy bands, pop music) as obeying the supremacy of the Symbolic,
while alternative underground music such as Gangsta, Punk, Goth, and Heavy
Metal “have attempted forms of transgressions to introduce a dissonance for
youth rebellion and resistance against the Symbolic Order.” However, since
Jagodzinski emphasizes the “post-Oedipalization” of contemporary pop music
for the youth market, the specificity of his project would lead this project
astray. In addition, Deleuze’s insistence on pure immanence and transcen-
dental empiricism runs counter to the aim of this book: to place the body in
its corporeality as the site of an indeterminate opening onto a world.
The value of Lacanian psychoanalysis for the study of music is only recently
being recognized (Jagodzinski 2005; Middleton 2006; Schwarz 1997, 2006;
Žižek and Dolar 2001). A more systematic musicological–psychoanalytic
approach to music is offered by Schwarz (1999, 2006), who uses Lacanian
psychoanalytic philosophy to inform music analysis. While in his latest work
we witness a sophisticated case study of German cultural national expression
through the psychoanalytic trope, his promise to break the boundary between
16 Rancid Aphrodisiac

high and popular culture is not fulfilled, and is in addition not necessarily
relevant to understanding the interpellating power of music as a medium.
It is in his earlier work that we witness a more explicit and generous serving
of psychoanalysis to the study of music in a variety of contexts. However,
even here, we find in Schwarz (1997) as misguided a conception of Lacanian
psychoanalysis as we find in Žižek’s vacuous references to the mechanics of
music. For Schwarz, a musical experience represents a structure of unknown
and unconscious processes. For instance, he takes musical processes as repre-
sentations of the destination from the imaginary to the symbolic order. His
primary example is John Adams’s Nixon in China. The simplicity with which
the piece begins, for Schwarz, represents a direct access to mother. However,
as the tonal centers begin to shift and the interjection of quotations saturates
its development, the music tells the listener that there is a disconnect between
mother and child, a blockage, a cut, or a castration. Schwarz (1999: 16) calls
this the inevitability of the acoustic mirror stage where “the subject experi-
ences a series of splits away from phenomenal experience, from the sonorous
envelope, through the binaries of the Imaginary Order, and into the plural,
dispersing signifiers of the Symbolic Order.” Whereas Lacan’s mirror stage
occurs between six and 18 months of age, Schwarz purports that the mirror
stage begins as the acoustic mirror not long after birth (Schwarz 1997: 16).
Schwarz curiously argues for music’s non-representational status from
within the representational system of notation. In fact, most of his examples
are text-based and make scant reference to the experiential, taking shelter
in notated scores. When he does turn his attention to popular music (i.e.,
technologically mediated for mass consumption), he loses himself in the
representation of the non-representational. For example, white noise in “I
Want You (She’s So Heavy)” by the Beatles is a “nightmarish nothingness
within male desire” (Schwarz 1997: 35). And with this token recognition of
pop music, he moves ungrudgingly towards serious music, such as that of
Schubert (a common topic in psychoanalytically informed musicology) to
employ Lacan’s “gaze.” The sonic properties of music remain a mystery, whereas
Lacanian psychoanalysis very clearly elucidates the signifying mechanics of
language. What are the sonic properties that constitute music as a signifying
process that proceeds “like a language,” yet displays properties which are
 Introduction 17

obviously different from spoken language? If language constitutes the uncon-

scious through the imprinted sounds of signifiers onto the bodily recognition
of signifieds, then what role can music be afforded in terms of its contribution
to the constitution of the subject? Primarily, if language is a medium in sound
that signifies through utterances whose constituents are a system of differ-
ences enunciated through their opposing repulsion (phonemes, morphemes,
and free associations), then music must work in an opposed yet comple-
mentary manner—it must be itself a language. Shepherd and Wicke (1997)
argue that while language signifies through utterances which are structurally
based on a system of difference through repulsion, music is based on differ-
ences in sounds which relate through their attraction to one another: the
two, language and music, are not articulated separately, however, but bound
up within one another. Language, in other words, is not uttered without an
affective substratum of emotion. After all, it is not just “what is said” that
determines a certain degree of meaning construction, but the context of its
articulation and the gestures that accompany it. Sound stands as a metaphor
of bodily gestures (the excitement around a statement, the emptiness behind a
sentiment). Let us recall Aristotle’s postulate that sound is, first, the energetic
manifestation of a body which is alive, but further, the sound of two bodies
making contact with one another (Barker 2004: 79); the sounds produced
through music are directly tied to the bodies responsible for their production.
Music must lie beyond the horizon of the symbolic, since it is so difficult to
articulate its sometimes overwhelmingly experiential effects symbolically. But
we must not become too festive with music: while music certainly engages the
emotions and the body, it engages them within structured contexts of articu-
lation, whereas the Lacanian symbolic world is responsible for framing the
musical experience.
While sounds in language signify according to the sonic differences
exposed in a linear chain of signification, music signifies according to stacks
of sonic attraction exposed cyclically throughout diachronic time. As much
as sound in music lifts off of its source, it remains tied directly to the thing
which sounds (as opposed to the arbitrariness language affords its reference
points). This, Shepherd and Wicke (1997) argue, is evidence that musical
meaning speaks directly from the external world and penetrates directly
18 Rancid Aphrodisiac

into the impulses, that it lets a person internally symbolize the internal
sounds of the external world. This is perhaps why music speaks to emotions
associated with experiences as opposed to the circumstances of those experi-
ences themselves. Music and language proceed co-jointly to constitute social
structures and states of awareness: music and language have been discursively
set at opposite ends as ideals in the universe of sound, the former signifying
through attraction and inward states of being, the latter signifying through
repulsion and outward ordering of the world. Of course, because there is no
“pure” music and no “pure” language in this idealistic scheme, but a flow of
subjectivity as constituted through a fluid universe of sound moving back and
forth between the two polarities while never entirely settling on one or the
other, they are interdependent elements. The categorical dimensions of the
music people articulate their values through are merely discursive according
to taste, class, gender, race, culture, and so on. Shepherd and Wicke (1997:
217) explain:

There is, in fact, nothing given in the relations possible between “language”
and “music,” the “conscious” and the “unconscious.” Within the constraints
evident in each instant of human life, constraints which facilitate its continu-
ation, everything remains possible. We would argue that “consciousness” can be
articulated “linguistically” or “musically.” Awareness does not have to be capable
of verbal explication in order to be assigned the status of “consciousness.”

It is challenging to conceive of music apart from its social ecology because

sound in music is not as arbitrarily tied to its referent as is sound in language.
Music is not primarily denotative. In other words, music is repetitious, but
it is so within a system revealed through a difference in attraction between
elements rather than through difference in repulsion (Shepherd and Wicke
1997)—albeit this is a conception of music that has been contested in both the
avant-garde jazz and high-art schools of composition. But, as Althusser said, if
one has a relationship to an institution (such as accepted conventions of music)
it is the relationship that is ideological and adheres to institutional norms even
when disobeying them. Those who counter these forms of musical utterance
adhere to structure by negating structure. Instead of a signifier, Shepherd and
Wicke are more convinced by the thought of music as signifying through a
 Introduction 19

medium in sound (Shepherd and Wicke 1997): the groundwork from which
signification arises but is not necessarily bound to the syntagmatic chain
privileged in language. Any such phonemes and morphemes are what Tagg
(1982) called musemes: a minimal unit of musical meaning, which cannot be
deciphered in musical signification because the units which call forth states of
awareness cannot be isolated from their context of articulation and must be
considered in their ecology. As Shepherd and Wicke (1997: 171) argue:

As each affective moment passes in music it is not therefore easy, cognitively

and conceptually, to separate sounds from the experiential moment of sound-
images, or sounds and sound-images from the same experiential moment
constituted through the calling forth of socially and culturally mediated
subjective states of awareness as elements of signification. This one experiential
moment is articulated through a material binding underwriting a technology or
instrumentality of signification. It is thus not possible to access easily the role
played by the characteristic of “extension” or “dimension” in sounds acting as a
medium independently of an analysis of sonic media (mediums) acting within
particular musical traditions as socially and culturally constituted.

Elements of signification as they are experienced through language are

conveyed more succinctly through discourse because language is afforded
a direct connection with the external world; we can, simply, use language
to connote linguistic meaning. But elements of signification as they are
experienced through music do not afford the same cut; a musical sound is
always-already referring to its source of articulation (i.e., the sound of a guitar
rises from the object of a guitar, the sound of a phonograph emerges through
a phonograph, etc.). Convention is not cut from the external world in music
as it is in language, and so music has a direct symbolic power over the consti-
tution of the subject and its metaphoric alignment.
Chapter 1 begins with governance in the novelty song, a genre oft-cited as
that against which Rock ’n’ roll retaliated most vehemently. I suggest, through
a Lacanian analysis, that the domesticity of the novelty song produces a
subjectivity of power by subordinating autonomy to the routine of domestic
caregiving that constitutes the edification of heteronormative desire. I locate
the ideological power of Rock ’n’ roll in the figure of the rebel, which is felt as
the master signifier of the music’s ontological requisite. By claiming that such a
20 Rancid Aphrodisiac

figure is located in a position largely unknowing of its own rebellion (as in Rebel
Without a Cause), I argue that the figure appears in Rock ’n’ roll’s rhythmic
persistence as an incessant drive to evade its historical situation. Such an
incessant evasion is what constitutes its orientation away from social obligation
and towards jouissance. Because of its rhythmic persistence, I argue that Rock
’n’ roll subjectivity, and indeed “any” subjectivity, if approached through music,
should be approached as a medium of transition rather than a position, an
argument I develop through a detailed reading of Victor Zuckerkandl’s theory
of musical time, which I tie into Lacan’s notion of the master signifier.
Chapter 2 is more explicitly devoted to the lyrical and basic musical content
that places the rebel in a figural relationship to desire; that is, the rebel, by
evading the gaze of the Other, pursues desire in its purest form as a drive, as
jouissance. Such a pursuit results in an obscene transcendence of the Law, but
in such a manner that abides by the law. In particular it locates within the lyrics
and musical arrangement of a famous Rhythm and Blues number, “Shake,
Rattle and Roll,” the precise location of rebel subjectivity by a disavowal of
hetero-monogamy. Building upon the Lacanian observation that the master
signifier’s rhythmic imperative lies between retroaction and anticipation, I
claim that Rock ’n’ roll’s retroactive designation is incorporated into the likeness
of objects that are adorned in lyrical content. Within such a configuration, a
schema emerges that establishes a particular dehumanization along gendered
and racial divisions. The subjectivity responsible for such a subordination is
one I borrow from the blues: the backdoor man, who typifies transgressing the
boundaries of the Other when the Other demands more than the subject can
provide its insatiable appetite. This is indeed a Subject which slips in and out of
the life of desire and which composes its vocation out of being unknown.
Chapter 3 begins with a discussion of Jerry Lee Lewis’s famous exchange
with Sam Phillips in the Sun Records studio, arguing around what belief the
Rock ’n’ roll subject should be aligned with. In Lewis’s testimony, he proffers
an over-identification with desire that converges on the total destruction yet
preservation of the civilization his subjectivity inherits: a unique merger of fire
and the piano. In an extended discussion of inherent transgression, I ask what
is at the center of such an act other than the emergence of a moral boundary
through which ideology is formulated and future law is established. Through
 Introduction 21

an extensive discussion of the technicality of Lacan’s graph of desire, I propose,

finally, that the rebel not only mediates desire in a stunned and unidentifiable
silence, but does so in such a way that precipitates the politics of enjoyment
that contemporary consumer society currently finds itself uncompromisingly
supporting. The title of the book, Rancid Aphrodisiac, makes its appearance at
the end of Chapter 3 in the context of Frank Sinatra’s testimony against Rock
’n’ roll, as essentially unidentifiable and unrepresentable noise, our enjoyment
of which we should ultimately sentence ourselves to guilt over.
The final section of the book is less a conclusion than a synthesis, an
extensive meditation on the semiological performance of musical meaning.
After fully exploring the limits of the Lacanian graph of desire, the synthesis
deploys a largely neglected diagram of musical signification proposed by
Shepherd and Wicke (1997). While their study arises from music in its most
abstract discussion, my adaptation of the model suits a more historicist
understanding of a particular way in which music performs a semiological
subjectivity. What I take as the binding force of the entire logic of this semio-
logical model is the persistent presence, malleability, and multiple assemblage
of the voice—and I don’t take the voice as something belonging to the human,
but as a quality of auto-affection that slips through multiple social institutions
of virtual and real character. It is the technology of relation between points
that need contact. The paradox is that the voice constitutes both internal and
external reality at once, and since music signifies primarily through configu-
rations in sound than it is grounded in the visual, it constitutes a zone made
up explicitly of these internal and external worlds. This consistent movement
between zones marks the zone of transition between events that makes Rock
’n’ roll as grounded through affection, but I claim it is mistaken to take affect
out of its historical context. Largely, what follows is a consideration of the
relations and orientation that constitute a particular affect that is unrepre-
sentable, but can be rectified by interrogating its attributes.

Filth ’n’ feeling

Rock ’n’ roll’s coup d’état hinged on its devious deployment of language.
22 Rancid Aphrodisiac

However, recall that the commodification of Rock ’n’ roll annexed its etymo-
logically grounded meaning (the sex act) throughout the 1950s in place of
the more general connotations of juvenile delinquency and norm-breaking
(Martin and Segrave 1993). Late capitalism (I take, with caution, as capitalism
as it developed from the end of World War II until somewhere between
11 September 2001 and the financial collapse of 2008) leads to the total
commodification of life, relationships, and identity under the rubric of
multifariousness and multiplicity. In such a context, capitalism was no longer
able to grow under the previous model of production-capitalism but shifted
towards the desire of the consumer. The commodification of Rock ’n’ roll
marked a central turning point in the constitution of capitalism’s strike against
the life force of desire. The flow between economic and cultural interests and
the rifts between the two is a celebrated cycle both within the discourses
of cultural studies and in economic capitalism. Indeed, Rock ’n’ roll does
not necessarily mark the first attempt by industry to commodify cultural
difference (for instance, as Garofalo [1997] writes, blues and Country and
Western music were more equal than they were separate, though industry
sold them to particular demographics in such a way). But, for the most part,
the popular music industry did not have a hand in the hyper-mediation of
other music as much as it did with Rock ’n’ roll. Colonel Tom Parker sold
Elvis Presley for $35,000 to RCA; Johnny Cash was signed onto Columbia and
subsequently cleaned up; Pat Boone brought the sounds of Rhythm and Blues
and Rock ’n’ roll to the vanilla-tinged rock he made famous. The practice of
co-optation was standard practice come the counterculture (the VW Bug, the
president of CBS Records combing Haight-Ashbury for anyone with a guitar,
their subsequent mass selling album, The Man Can’t Bust Our Music). It is the
central idea in a counter-consumerist ideology, that there is a place for those
who do not conform. Rock ’n’ roll may have been minoritarian history that
interrupted the striated state of conformity (Deleuze and Guattari 1986), but
it was an interruption that proved necessary to the annals of flexible accumu-
lation and niche marketing.
A song such as “Roll Over Beethoven” was more than a testimony to the
contemporary supremacy of Rock ’n’ roll. By posing a legitimate threat to
the dominant ideology of music which had become in many ways fulsome in
 Introduction 23

its conservatism, Rock ’n’ roll did not supplant Broadway and Tin Pan Alley,
but rather took both from behind. That Rock ’n’ roll indeed generated the
moral reaction that it did from social institutions is taken as evidence that its
presence was an albatross. Roll over, indeed. That is why it cannot be taken as
a revolution but a rebellion, or at best sedition. It is a desire which is situated
squarely in the present and emphasizes experimentation between sexes as a
continuous act of becoming-other. However, such a celebrated deterritori-
alization of the vertically integrated industry should not be uttered without
explicit acknowledgment of its reterritorialization as a new model of music
industry—one that would dominate the late-twentieth-century means of
connecting pockets of disenchantment with newly emerging demographics (a
practice that reached its apotheosis in the 1970s). Though its lyrics were effec-
tively altered, public concern over whether something in the music was making
an attempt to inveigle its listeners permeated virtually every aspect of its sound.

It is true that Rock ’n’ roll delineated a langue d’amour for the emergent teenager,
but in reality this was only giving a name to a new morality that had probably
sprung up during the war. Rock ’n’ roll may have been pushing at the barriers of
conventional morality—the name itself derives from another black slang word
for fucking, and most pop songs were slyly encoded tales of proposal, longing
and desire—but mostly it reflected the moral consensus, certainly as far as
deviant sex was concerned. (Gill 1995: 81)

When Little Richard originally sang the lyrics to “Tutti Frutti” to Dorothy
LaBostrie (“Tutti Frutti, good booty / If it don’t fit, don’t force it / You can
grease it / Make it easy”), she promptly transformed it into a veneer exiled
of allusions to anal penetration. That “Tutti Frutti” remained was perplexing
since at the time the slang referred to a mixed fruit ice cream or a mixed race
gay man. When Pat Boone replaced the line in “Tutti Frutti,” “Boy, you don’t
know what she do to me,” with “Pretty little Susie is the girl for me,” or Fats
Domino’s “Ain’t It A Shame” with “Ain’t That A Shame” to evade the potential
of hearing “Tit,” it became perfectly clear that the industry was aware of the
dangers of suggestive lyrics.
So if the connotations of filth were removed from the lyrics, where was the
filth? In the affect, where the forces of repression are discharged. It was rendered
audible by the value judgment cast upon the practitioners of Rock ’n’ roll. We
24 Rancid Aphrodisiac

are directly in line with the social and political power here of music’s affect.
As Grossberg (1984) observes, Rock ’n’ roll espouses a power that contains
an “ability to produce and organize structures of desire” (1983–4: 104) which
determines the historically located position of the genre. Grossberg, however,
falls short of telling exactly where affect lies. It is the affective discharge of
Rock ’n’ roll that precisely the conservative culture reacted against, what they
feared would take over teenage impulses. There is a particular organization to
the affect of desire in Rock ’n’ roll, then. To subordinate oneself to the pleasure
of Rock ’n’ roll one must assert that they are inside a group of outsiders who
have limited means of achieving gratification by means of directly challenging
authority. It is what Grossberg elsewhere (1984) called the “affective alliances”
which “rejects that which is outside of its self-encapsulation not on political
grounds but because their organizations of affect are no longer appropriate in
the postmodern world.” (1984: 236) It means that Rock ’n’ roll produces both
joyous and sad affect simultaneously, the former for the affective alliances for
whom affect increases power in action, the latter for those who perceive those
affects as inhibiting power. It is precisely this contradictory notion of affect that
is in need of interrogation, the mode of affect which evades the social stricture.
But this non-structured structure is precisely the locus of consumerism endemic
to postwar capitalism. Those affected positively by these changes were not privy
to the bureaucratic details of technological/cultural change as much as they were
to the effects of those changes, the necessary placeholders in the new shift of
power from dominant vertical integration (homogenous discipline society) to
horizontal integration (heterogeneous control society) (Deleuze 1994).
The extensive use of rhythm was enough of a marker of boundary crossing.
There are several ways to translate this to Rock ’n’ roll recordings:

1. how the recording conforms to the time restriction of the vinyl or how it
opened spaces through transportable transistor radios;
2. how the rhythmic insistence of the backbeat that critics scorned as
relentless was in fact politically aligned with desubjectivation; and
3. how the non-being of the recorded event was facilitated by the fact that
electric impulses on magnetic tape were the mark of infidelity to the
event.
 Introduction 25

We could think of the Rock ’n’ roll backbeat as the echo in time in this sense.
What else is the backbeat but a kind of resistant echo? How can we think of
the backbeat as syncopation? It is not. It is rhythmic insistence, repetitive
resistance. This reminds us of Gracyk’s (1996: 134) observations regarding
rhythm in Rock ’n’ roll, that although “there is no one rhythm or meter which
is characteristic of rock,” there is an affective force of rhythm in the genre that
blended and polarized affects of rhythm (polyrhythms in cyclical prominence)
that signified the dimensions of timbre in music over and above melody and
harmony: “When a piece of music features several distinct instrumental parts,
each has its own rhythm. But when all these rhythms maintain a pulse, we
have rock” (Gracyk 1996: 134). It is, in other words, felt, not perceived.
 1

“The One with the Waggly Tail”

Even ’n’ Emergence

I would like to begin with the moral regulation of the novelty song, especially
its impossibly conformist standards against which Rock ’n’ roll retaliated. The
novelty song, I argue, should not be underestimated in terms of its power of
subjectification, such as the impossible standards represented in Bob Merrill’s
bland novelty song, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” as sung by
Patti Page in 1952.
How much is that doggie in the window (arf, arf)
The one with the waggly tail
How much is that doggie in the window (arf, arf)
I do hope that doggie’s for sale

I must take a trip to California

And leave my poor sweetheart alone
If he has a dog he won’t be lonesome
And the doggie will have a good home

Refrain

I read in the papers there are robbers (arf, arf)

With flashlights that shine in the dark
My love needs a doggie to protect him
And scare them away with one bark

Refrain

I don’t want a bunny or a kitty

I don’t want a parrot that talks
I don’t want a bowl of little fishies
He can’t take a goldfish for a walk

Refrain
28 Rancid Aphrodisiac

The moral regulation implied by “That Doggie” is really quite distressing:

Page’s voice ingratiates her sweetheart into a well-managed routine in the
horizon of her impending absence by obliging “him” to the responsibility of a
creature whose desperate need for attention, love, and regular exercise super-
sedes any of his own potential injunctions to enjoy a brief period of autonomy
from the courtly work of the relationship. Snugly sung in a medium waltz over
an oscillating I-V7 pattern, Page’s voice articulates the moral coordinates of
appropriate etiquette and the cult of domesticity. Even its technical production
is aligned with domesticity, an argument forwarded by Doyle (2005: 144): The
specific use of echo and reverb was to reinforce the cult of domesticity estab-
lished in the early twentieth-century music industry, reinforced through the
recording techniques refined in the 1950s. Only by becoming acquiescent to
her own housetraining can the domestic properly administer her duty. The
law produces energies that are subversive to its imposition since it needs to
be imposed on a regular basis in order for its representation to remain intact.
What need is there to rebel if not against the blatant conformity of “That
Doggie”?
Indeed, how does the voice of Page maintain itself as a domestic? By
domesticating her others through a displaced object of domestication: that
doggie in the window. She sacrifices herself to the law, producing a subjec-
tivity through power. (By power, I refer to stretching for an all-inclusive
representation of subversive subjects, to align them with the ideal or provide
them as an example of a wrongdoing.) In place of her absence, she is not
supplying her sweetheart with the imaginary phallus, which would be his, but
with a traumatic inauguration of the system of meaning itself (Lacan 2011);
he will not become her missing phallus, become her object of desire, because
she is literally giving him the answer to his question: What is it that you want
of me? To behave, but especially to be emotionally satisfied by doing so. This is,
according to Žižek (2008: 18) at least, the trope of civilization through which
the intersubjective sexual utopia is strained: “And this brings us to civility,”
he explains; “an act of civility is precisely to feign that I want to do what the
other asks me to do, so that my compliance with the other’s wish does not
exert pressure on her.” Is it little wonder that the flipside to this record was
“My Jealous Eyes”?
 “The One with the Waggly Tail” 29

“That Doggie,” as the Other’s answer to the enigmatic question of desire,

is decidedly not in the window; rather, it is the window to a predestination
towards lack. “That Doggie” functions symbolically to disturb the illusory
place of desire because there is indeed no answer that satisfies the question of
desire. Instead, in the heteronormative doggie, desire is the veil that maintains
the binary split between man and woman. Popular music history, in its most
mainstream manifestations at least, has taught us that a woman must maintain
her composure for the Ego of the singing man who adulates her in a series
of enunciations that position her as his love object (McCusker and Pecknold
2004). And so Page’s direct answer of domestication takes what in other
contexts stands as the object of desire (the phallic tail-wagging dog in “Hound
Dog” or the curious master-obeying Jack Russell in His Master’s Voice) and
disrupts the edifice of male fantasy.
“How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” is a pathetic attempt to
please the Other of desire, which is why “That Doggie” is nothing less than
the imaginary phallus as conceived by Judith Butler (1999), a component of
the taxonomy of heteronormative desire. The phallus is metonymically linked
with lack, because at once the Ego gives up the phallus in the Imaginary by
recognizing that the feminine never possessed it, that it was never there, and
that what constituted so much effort to win desire was something that was
absent in the first place. So Page purchases “That Doggie in the Window” as an
abstract, a general equivalent on the market that, when assuming the role of
the Imaginary phallus, provides his ultimate humiliation. This domesticating
role of the Other provides precisely the domesticating gaze that the Rock ’n’
roll subject will evade at all costs. And it is why, I argue, that Rock ’n’ roll
makes no plea to the Other. It flees impotently and blindly from the Other.
Ultimately, perhaps, “That Doggie” represented a terrifying destination
of being-towards-death that Rock ’n’ roll was to eventually thwart off in
exaggerated steps of phallus-lacking machismo, a queer orientation. It repre-
sents a turning away towards the awry. Much like the man who awakens from
his dream wherein which his dead son asks him why he is burning (Freud
1997: 353), it was not that “That Doggie” was too unbearable for music to
wake up from its banal slumber, but rather how terrifying the banality of “That
Doggie” was to demonstrate a most purely mechanistic function of music: to
30 Rancid Aphrodisiac

command through the injunction of the master signifier (Žižek 2004). “That
Doggie” is a signifier without signified. It was the traumatic encounter that
made necessary the resurrection of the dog as the emblem of virility, which
was itself eventually displaced by a the family friendly hound dog Elvis sang
to on the Steve Allen show in 1956 (Humphries 2003).
Then again, perhaps it is too polemical to assert that Rock ’n’ roll started
with “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”—that is, a straw dog. But
is it not just as puerile to accredit any event as the inception of emergence?
At what point does the emergence edify to mark the event identifiable? When
does the event break off from the emergence that determined it? Accrediting
an emergence to an event is performing an Ouroboric coup on history—it
can only be retroactive, rendered meaningful once one disengages from
emergence, to recover the memory of an event from its historical echo. And
despite the fact that Rock ’n’ roll did not commence with a singular historical
instance, rock historians have disputed each other regarding its genesis,
whether in the service of serious scholarship or fandom aside. As Garofalo
(1997: 82) famously wrote, “Trying to pinpoint the beginning of rock and roll
is like trying to isolate the first drop of rain in a hurricane,” and so the debate
about its beginning is really insignificant. G. F. Wald (2008) in Shout Sister
Shout! claims it is Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Strange Things Happening Every
Day” (1944); some say it was “Good Rockin’ Tonight” by Roy Brown (1947),
as covered by Wynonie Harris; “The Fat Man” by Fats Domino (1949); Goree
Carter’s “Rock Awhile” (1949); “Rock the Joint” by Jimmy Preston (1949);
“Rocket 88”—either Jackie Brenston’s original, recorded on 5 March 1951 with
Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm, or Bill Haley’s cover, later in 1951; “Crazy
Man, Crazy” by Bill Haley and His Comets (1953); Bill Haley’s “Rock Around
the Clock” (recorded on 12 April 1954); Elvis Presley’s “That’s All Right”
(recorded in July 1954), a cover of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s 1946 song of
the same name (http://medlibrary.org/medwiki/First_rock_and_roll_record).
But let’s not toss the champagne out with the cork. When we correlate, for
instance, event with emergence, numerous factors materialize in the history
of Rock ’n’ roll (segregationist politics, misogyny, market capitalism, moral
politics, consumerism, hyper-individualism), which were and continue to be
components of the popular music industry and its major historical events.
 “The One with the Waggly Tail” 31

What we are interested in here is the emergence of a constellation of nodes

that conditioned the emergence of a particular subjectivity—to re-emphasize,
the current study is not necessarily invested in the “real experiences” of “real
people” but takes the experiences of early Rock ’n’ roll as the set of conditions
through which a type of subjectivity was fortified. Events are easy enough to
capture on record. But emergence is a sticky matter. We cannot reduce an
historical emergence to the status of the individual, yet we cannot account
for emergence by another method. Emergence is a transitory medium, a
topological zone, twisted with potential and reification. To put it another way,
the actual contrast here is between history and its own becoming. The history
books tell us Rock ’n’ roll was an historical event, but it was equally its own
becoming. It is important to recognize that emergence encapsulates the idea
of becoming, which, say, for a theorist like Deleuze (1994), would imply the
flow of forces and desires rid of their consequential shame. Events are like
consequences of emergence; they tether emergence to the soil of historical
events, much like, in the Lacanian quilting function of language, the S2
signifier threads the S1 signifier through the fabric of a signifying chain so as
to retroactively constitute at once meaning and the barred subject (a concept
that will be explored below). So becoming is against precisely this reifi-
cation of the signifying chain, it is a prick of the virtual “becoming-it-itself ”
removed from the corporeal, ripped from the present and containing always
past and potential (Žižek 2012: 8). If Rock ’n’ roll is a signifier, it begins with
the conformity it rebelled against. Becoming-new is radically opposed to its
historical context, yet is determined by that context. This is why it is tempting
to interpret Rock ’n’ roll’s emergence from a Deleuzean perspective. Deleuze
writes, for instance:

What history grasps in an event is the way it’s actualized in particular circum-
stances; the event’s becoming is beyond the scope of history […] Becoming
isn’t part of history; history amounts only to the set of preconditions, however
recent, that one leaves behind in order to “become,” that is, to create something
new. (Deleuze 1995: 170–1; cited in Žižek 2012: 11)

In response, Žižek wonders if Deleuze in his interrogation of the emergence of

the New through repetition is as novel a concept as the latter claims. The new
32 Rancid Aphrodisiac

is only capable of emerging through the ongoing process of repetition—like

knowing a serial killer is only such when he has killed three victims, quilting
the third victim into the elevated significance of the (now-martyred) first.
The very concept of the past in a pure becoming is radically changed by how
well one can shake off the shame of consequence. The new will always be new
because, by transcending its context, it radically changes its historical desti-
nation. Žižek’s Deleuzean question is thus: Can the Subject transcend historical
conditions in the creation of non-historical synthesis events? Recall that Elvis
Presley, for instance, in his infamous recording with Sam Phillips did not
intend to sell Rhythm and Blues, nor that Phillips intended on selling Presley
as a black and white crossover (despite his later claims). Yet, as Middleton
(2006: 87) suggests: “Elvis was at least dimly aware of what was at stake: […]
in his performances of, for example, ‘Hound Dog’ he purposely exaggerated
what he took to be typical black gestures to the point of caricature—part of
an in-built ironic stance that allies him with a specifically blues comedy.” So
who were these ostensibly transhistoric performers? Rock ’n’ roll performers
such as Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard are
the figures of prototypical challenges to history (“Roll Over Beethoven” and
many other Rock ’n’ roll songs were tackling this dialogue between youth
and the parent generation, many of them disingenuously so). Occupying at
once the margins and the mainstream, known for their moral reprehensi-
bility yet cultural prominence, critiqued for their primitivist aesthetic yet
lauded for their on-stage presence, these were figures who challenged any
pre-existing notion of a transparent subjectivity. They performed through
multiple identities. Jerry Lee Lewis was born into a strictly Baptist family and
could not bear the weight of sin he was obliged to serve. Little Richard’s sexual
identity conflicted with the heteronormative symbols that Rock ’n’ roll used as
currency. Elvis Presley was “caught in a trap” of his own performance whereby
his image overrode his multifarious interests. (The common criticism, for
instance, that Elvis “sold out” is laughable given the fact that Elvis was known
to be open to a wide variety of music.) There is not one determinant or
causation, but a symbiotic series of quasi-causes in the transhistorical events
and figures of Rock ’n’ roll.
To reiterate: to fully appreciate the gaze from which Rock ’n’ roll fled means
 “The One with the Waggly Tail” 33

we have to begin with the most normative of situations, such as the novelty
song. Where one is threatened with intense domestication with a vulnerable
pet: a threat to the heteronormative desire for masculine autonomy. Such a
domesticity needs to be resignified as its obscene opposition: in total anarchic
freedom. Less the pathetic pleasing of the Other, the Rock ’n’ roll subject is
constituted by a terrified and impotent escape from domesticity.

The specular image of the idol

So how can we reconcile the Rock ’n’ roll event with the infinite permutations
of its general emergence? Rock ’n’ roll could designate just about any musical
category: it could refer to Pat Boone, Doo-Wop, New Orleans blues ensembles,
Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, later nostalgic acts, Led Zeppelin’s tribute song
“Rock and roll,” and so on. How can we reduce the events of Rock ’n’ roll and
their provocations to particular causes such as the sentencing of a feminine-
subjectivity to the domestic domain and the enthusiastic dialectic between
consumption and repression characteristic of the postwar years? The contextual
benchmarks that conditioned the emergence of Rock ’n’ roll have been well
documented by Peterson (1990), who cites the major industrial shift that
contributed to the emergence of Rock ’n’ roll as an attribute of the shift from the
vertically integrated structure of Tin Pan Alley popular music (the dominant
style of popular music from the early to mid-twentieth century) to a horizon-
tally structured integration of rock and roll. Yet, numerous technological/
industrial factors equally contributed to the rise of Rock ’n’ roll: poorly financed
radio stations desperate for on-air content after they were abandoned by the
National Association of Broadcasters’ migration towards television (Garofalo
1997); the development of the cost-effective 45-rpm record that was simpler to
transport than the shellac 78-rpm records that preceded it; the transistor radio
that let teenagers listen to the sexually provocative music their parents would
have disapproved of; the top-40 radio format that came to eventually dominate
the 1950s, which inadvertently desegregated the airwaves by placing otherwise
culturally distinct genres next to one another (Latin American popular music,
calypso, folk, and, of course, rock and roll). Customer satisfaction became key
34 Rancid Aphrodisiac

to the success of corporations by the 1950s in their adoption of the marketing

philosophy, so understanding the psyche of the consumer was essential to
developing a surplus-generating product. The moral fabric of the individual
in the postwar USA was a view of welfare as being a shameful handout along
with a host of criteria for reproducing a good citizen and conforming, while
those with money were encouraged to contravene the boundaries of the
normal by way of the transgressive abilities of the dollar (Hunt 1999: 5–6). In
other words, the confluence of factors constituted the event as both singular
and multiple. That is, the very spatio-temporal dynamics of consumption
in the USA had, by 1959, changed dramatically: first, in regard to the rise
in consumer goods (technology, careers, urban space); second, the rise in
families in school with jobs and new needs; and third, a new bureaucracy,
industry, and government.
As technologies fostered more intimate connections between subjects and
celebrities, the former consulted the latter for unlimited advice on domestic
life. Exaggerated codes of behavior were imposed upon the new world by
the likes of Dr Spock, Norman Vincent Peale, Dale Carnegie, and countless
others, who constructed victims as heroes of the self-help rhetoric, the
unique historical situation in the production of bureaucracy of education, in
alienation, and in paranoia. So there was a progressive change, a protected and
suburban orderliness under a constant anxiety that, thanks to the Cold War,
everyone could be killed by a nuclear attack (quelled in elementary schools
by the bizarre stream of duck-and-cover videos). Betty Crocker, as Cormack
(2004: 61) observes, was the totem of domestic normalcy against a potential
threat of complete annihilation. Pop literature acted as a bridge between the
individual and the social spheres they may be unaware that they occupy—at
the time, the self-help expert was an oft-consulted figure. These figures of
popular culture icon emerged as the new experts in an age of mass visual
mediation.
Such a figure was not lost on Rock ’n’ roll. The Rebel, for instance, emerged
out of an increased urbanization of African-Americans moving from the deep
south, out of individuals in flight to transcend their socioeconomic class,
but its contingent commodification marked a decided change in postwar
capitalism—even preceding musical genres like “hillbilly” and “race” music
 “The One with the Waggly Tail” 35

were designated by the production philosophy of the music industry instead

of by the “kids” that found meaning in the music (the music industry’s
more profitable construction of the consumer rather than the producer).
Identification with the seller of the product was crucial for teenagers, who
were looking for role models in James Dean and Marlon Brando. As Stewart
Stern, the screenwriter for Rebel Without a Cause, indicated, teenagers sought
for identification with a role model who could fill the void of emotionally
negligent parents burying their pasts, and the Rebel figure gave them a role
model for this otherwise vacuous space. If the gaze of rebel image instantiated
the desire of the Rebel, the return of his voice was the voice of the jouissance
that stood to challenge order, the standard logic of deviance.
The sheer number of human and non-human actors in this historical period
is simply startling, reminiscent of when the gaze became the central constitutive
feature of power operating in consumer society (Cormack 2004). There is no
difficulty in demonstrating that the idea of the personhood of the image is alive
in this new world. But how are traditional attitudes towards images—idolatry,
fetishism, totemism—refunctioned in modern societies? The idol is both despised
and worshipped, reviled for being a nonentity, a slave, and feared as an alien with
supernatural power. If idolatry is the most dramatic form of image-power known
to visual culture, it is a remarkably ambivalent and ambiguous kind of force. As
for the gender of the image, it is clear that the “default” position of images is
feminine, “constructing spectatorship around an opposition between woman
as image and man as the bearer of the look.” The question of what images want,
then, is inseparable from the question of what the feminine wants.
Sound recording technologies, once inhabited by the contingencies of
post-WWII technological change, materially instantiated the possibility of
an ambiguous subject position that was as much the cause of anxiety as
the content of the songs themselves that were produced, broadcast, and
consumed. The anxiety, the repeated pelvic drives, the proximity of the instru-
ments, the sound of magnetic tape, this becoming-simulacrum of Rock ’n’ roll
was precisely what gave it its measurable yet seemingly inarticulate shock. At a
certain distance, its sounds were measurable, yet there were no physical traces
of sound events beyond the magnetic impulses of their representations on
tape and vinyl. The material of magnetic impulse overrode the acoustic event
36 Rancid Aphrodisiac

of the previous generation. Recordings had become pure information, a zero

point of possibility with an empty icon in its place: the rebel without a cause,
the thought without the representation, the affect. The icon is not a represen-
tation of the divine image but a type of invisibility, what John of Damascus
identified as the “type of that which has no type.” But the popular idol causes
stock identities to play host to an uncanny and unbidden guest: the materiality
of images themselves. Like a Halo, this is a material that comes after the form,
a visibility after the fact, after the completion of the image as an idol of our
times. In the Rebel, the symbolic ideal, the external point of observation by
the hegemonic white gaze of society is rejected, replaced, and dispensed with
imaginary identifications.
The idol stands as a contingency of history, yet transcends history. It is in
the gaze that the objet a emerges as the cause of desire. For Lacan, the gaze
becomes the object of the act of looking, or the object of the scopic drive. The
gaze is no longer on the side of the subject; it is the gaze of the Other. Lacan
now conceives of an antinomic relation between the gaze and the eye: the eye
which looks is that of the subject, while the gaze is on the side of the object,
and there is no coincidence between the two, since “You never look at me
from the place at which I see you” (Lacan 1998c: 103). When the subject looks
at an object, the object is always already gazing back at the subject, but from
a point at which the subject cannot see it. This split between the eye and the
gaze is nothing other than the subjective division itself, expressed in the field
of vision. The structural dimension of the gaze thereby guarantees that one’s
innermost desire will be less the transgression of and more the implantation
of the law, opening a space for the voice as well as for the gaze, which affords
us the opportunity to extract from Lacanian structural theory as well as the
feminist film philosophy the reason for constructing the imaginary space of
Rock ’n’ roll records as non-counter-hegemonic, but constructive of the very
type of idealization of identity relations that the idol manifested. The image
here is entwined in multiple looks of control: the look at the viewer, the look of
the subject, the object, entwined in a space that is hollowed out by the expec-
tation of the interpretation the listener is supposed to impose upon its space.
All of this rests with what negative space produces: the master signifier. In the
 “The One with the Waggly Tail” 37

case of the musical culture of Rock ’n’ roll, the figure of the master signifier
assumes the icon of the rebel.
Rock ’n’ roll was less revolutionary than rebellious, turning convention
in such a way so artificially against itself as to expose the artificiality of
conservative 1950s America: a time of great celebration for consumerism and
democracy, yet one that denounced some of the most successful consumerist
and democratic moments of American history, Rock ’n’ roll. As Reynolds
(1992: 3) explains, “the rebel’s main grievance is that a particular patri-
archal system doesn’t let his virility flourish freely, but instead offers a life
of mediocrity.” Everything in the milieu of Rock ’n’ roll followed this search
for nomadic roaming. Especially important is how the text of music started
to shift from the supremacy of the notated score to the rise in recorded
performances, and conducive with the change in preferred medium was an
entire series of changes regarding how the studio was being used at one end
and how the music was being consumed at the other. In other words, the
recording practices were changed from the conventional usages of recording
studio practices. It suffices to mention that Rock ’n’ roll marks the initial
emergence of sound recording as a practice in musical sculpture rather than
an environment that captures a performance, which marked the musical
phenomenon of the cover song: the musical equivalent of the simulacrum.
One reason that the recording practices could be said to be postmodern is
their blatant becoming-simulacrum. It is here that we would prefer the term
simulacrum, because “copy” would imply that a musical recording serves a
standard, deviates from it in order to reinforce its normative inscription—and
does it not make sense to employ the term “cover” in such a situation where
original Rhythm and Blues musicians, whose covers succeeded original perfor-
mances in sales, were discarded by the courts as legitimate grounds for copyright
infringement (Cusic 2005)? The recording studio was not an environment within
which a performance was captured but was an active agent in the sculpting of a
record—there was no music “behind” the recording of it (Hodgson 2007). If the
recording sessions from pre-WWII were actively made to recreate the sound of
a live event, post-WWII recordings blatantly constructed an imaginary space of
popular imagination (Blesser and Salter 2007).
38 Rancid Aphrodisiac

Although Rock ’n’ roll simultaneously announced something new at the

obituary of a conservative past, we would be mistaken to call it revolutionary,
then. Sometimes we forget that Elvis at Sun Records was a radically historical
shift instantiated by a radically transhistorical moment – still, not necessarily
revolutionary. The only thing that can be experienced in a Hegelian transhis-
torical actualization is the potential of the transhistorical thing. What we see
in Hegel is the antithesis to repetition: the Aufheben (meaning, crudely, to
preserve yet to cease). Yet the Aufheben is simultaneously that which inter-
venes as the deus ex machine (God from Machine). So the reproach is twofold:
the Hegelian theory is whole and unchangeable, yet subject to miraculous
external interventions that facilitate change. The shift, Žižek writes, is in
the very reconciliation between image and eternity (being and becoming,
identification and misidentification). Take, for instance, the dialectic between
Aufheben and deus ex machine, as explicated by Žižek (2012: 14):

[…] the reversal of Aufhebung intervenes as a kind of deux ex machina, always

guaranteeing that the antagonism will be magically resolved, the opposites
reconciled in a higher synthesis, the loss recuperated without a remainder, the
wound healed without a scar remaining.

Such a large number of historical elements contributed as an emergence to

the event of Rock ’n’ roll that it is difficult to isolate one as the determining
factor. However, if we were to locate a consistency in regard to the newer
affect of Rock ’n’ roll, we might pinpoint it on the figure of the rebel, the one
who evaded the gaze of enigmatic desire. Such a figure is encapsulated in the
celebrity figure of the rebel. In visual culture, it is less difficult to locate the
form of this figure, but in Rock ’n’ roll it becomes more difficult, since the
medium of dissemination was the more abstract commodity of the sound
recording. I argue in the following section that the idol still permeates such
a medium, only in more evasive and slippery ways that are best understood
when aligned with the Lacanian graph of desire.
 “The One with the Waggly Tail” 39

The Rebel quilt

A perennial paradox of youth in the 1950s involved their having been

thrown into a society that was as ripe with the fruits of consumption as it
was stringent to foreclose the traumas of preceding decades. Teens enjoyed
newfound freedom in consumption, but their freedom ignited fears of their
potential rebellion against authority. Numerous magazines provided advice
columns for the potential delinquents regarding appropriate behavior in an
ongoing process of moral regulation (Cohen 1997: 251–3). Without any signif-
icant evidence regarding the rise of youth crime, editorials and journalists
responded to the image of the rebel in popular culture as the potential threat
to social stability. As Cohen (1997: 254) writes, “Villains and disrupters
seemed to lurk everywhere, certainly in the proliferating artifacts of youth
culture—music, comic books, movies, and much more.” The cinema, one of
many new venues for teenagers to congregate at, was replete with images that
mainstream society perceived as a threat to the stability of family values, and
the teenagers themselves were taken either as law-abiding or law-breaking.
The rebel represents a peculiar freedom. What is the sublime nature of the
Rock ’n’ roll rebel in particular that grants him an ahistorical status? This is a
question easily answered by the Lacanian graph of desire, which grants access
not only to understanding the supremacy of idols (which I take to be master
signifiers) but also of the very mesh, labyrinth, or rhizome of master signi-
fication. As far as the graph represents an attempt to represent the alienated
features of subjectivity as well as the dialectical possibilities for traversing
fantasy or assuming alternative subjectivities seemingly evading the hypno-
tizing gaze of the Other, Rock ’n’ roll instantiates the affect of traversing the
fantasy towards the anarchic desire of freedom from constraint of the gaze
of the Other. Therefore, I consider it apt to place the rebel figure within the
Lacanian graph of desire, if only because the exercise of locating the space of
rebellion within the Rock ’n’ roll event resonates with a clearly structuralist
inquiry: i.e., how is transcendence of the historical event determined by the
grounded historical figure? The graph, in fact, serves as a useful reference point
because it resembles the type of mesh I wish to elucidate in regard to the sonic
40 Rancid Aphrodisiac

anarchic power of Rock ’n’ roll. However, in its line of flight across the graph,
it anticipates a new form of liberal subjectivity, as Žižek (2009) observes—one
based on permissive transgression, not punitive obedience.
This image of the law-breaking rebel found its affected amplification in
Rock ’n’ roll articulated as a master signifier. Because of the Lacanian political
drive of this argument, it is important to understand the central role that a
signifier plays in regard to the social construction of the subjectivity of the
rebel (and, in this case, subjectivities which evade the gaze of the Other).
To begin, I claim that affect in Rock ’n’ roll is purely symbolic, especially in
the context of the Lacanian maxim: the signifier is the subject for another
signifier. Lacan’s materialist hierarchy of the signifier’s supremacy over the
signified accommodates his own discovery that subjects are manifest through
the materiality of signifying processes: “The signifier doesn’t just provide an
envelope,” Lacan (1993: 238) writes, “a receptacle for meaning. It polarizes
it, structures it, and brings it into existence. Without an exact knowledge of
the order proper to the signifier and its properties, it’s impossible to under-
stand anything whatsoever.” Such a prioritization of the signifier guarantees a
material grounding to processes of signification in the constitution of subjec-
tively experienced social reality—social reality as it is affectively imprinted
upon the subject. Such a material grounding does not simply arrive with this
prioritization, however, for meaning in signification is never direct; meaning
requires anticipation of a final utterance that retroactively fills an initiating
utterance with meaning, making repetition a central Lacanian psychoanalytic
feature to the material ground of the subject. Lacan (1993: 240) asserts that a
“signifying unit presupposes the completion of a certain circle that situates its
different elements.” In terms of negotiability, the subject is tied into language
by a technological apparatus (like the Descartean pineal gland) that bonds its
meaning through language in retrospection. The retrospective aspect of signi-
fication is the baptism into the symbolic that determines the autonomy of the
nom/non-du-Père, a signifier which equates the fear of God:

The fear of God isn’t a signifier that is found everywhere. Someone had to invent
it and propose to men, as the remedy for a world made up of manifold terrors,
that they fear a being who is, after all, only able to exercise his cruelty through
the evils that are there, multifariously present in human life. To have replaced
 “The One with the Waggly Tail” 41

these innumerable fears by the fear of a unique being who has no other means
of manifesting his power than through what is feared behind these innumerable
fears, is quite an accomplishment. (Lacan 1993: 243)

Thus, the foundation of signification in which we find the operative of

power is the master signifier, known best in Lacanian psychoanalysis as the
quilting point (though Fink prefers the term “button tie”) (Fink 2004: 113).
Signification is thus rhythmic and relational. But although we might jump to
the conclusion that the quilting point in the “fear of God” is “God” (conducive
with the nom/non-du-Père), Lacan (1993: 244) asserts that the quilting point,
that anchor through which the thread is woven, is fear, “with all these trans-
significant connotations”:

Everything radiates out from and is organized around this signifier, similar
to these little lines of force that an upholstery button forms on the surface of
material. It’s the point of convergence that enables everything that happens in
this discourse to be situated retroactively and prospectively.

The questions here are obvious: what exactly is the substance of this type of
dialectical anticipatory/retroactive movement of quilting and how is it facili-
tated? This is less an ontological question than a historical one, because it is
a movement that marks a subject’s entrance into the symbolic order (which
emerges alongside the institutions of the imaginary and the real, not after the
fact).
Take Rebel Without a Cause, which furnishes the legitimacy of the master
signifier. The Rebel reached the status of the figure of indisputable devotion
when it was framed as a threat from within American borders (unlike the
Red Scare, for instance). Whether the destruction of family values was truly
imminent was, obviously, debatable. The estranged and isolated youth that
recoiled at conformity offered teenagers a figure with which they could
identify, eventually having “transcended its original iconoclasm—in the
rejection of the status quo—and was itself elevated to iconic status, becoming
a revered object of devotion” (C. Springer 2007: 1). It is important to note,
however, the retrospective designation that icon had on the significance of
rebellion. Consider, for instance, that James Dean might have expressed the
value of nonconformity for many youth in the 1950s, but that this expression
42 Rancid Aphrodisiac

was retrospectively quilted into his own image after he died at a tragi-
cally young age: “He became a posthumous symbol for the constellation of
disaffected youth, death by car crash, rebellion, and ambiguous sexuality,
crystallizing their combination in an overpowering way that resulted in
cultural enshrinement” (C. Springer 2007: 13). The significance of rebellion
was free-floating until it was quilted together by its death. Thus, Claudia
Springer (2007: 16–17) writes:

What Dean’s name sells is “rebellion,” a vague concept that over time has lost
any kind of political or social specificity, if it ever had any. Rebels now come in
all imaginable styles, and the term is used even by those who conform whole-
heartedly to the status quo and, without any sense of irony, label their rejection
of oppositional values as an act of rebellious defiance. Even during James Dean’s
lifetime, “rebellion” was a vague concept, creating an atmosphere in which a
moody young actor who had no particular commitment to political activism
could come to signify the ultimate rebel.

The rebel was as much a guide to moral conduct for youth as was Dr Spock for
mothers, as was Norman Vincent Peale for Christians, or Dale Carnegie for
businessmen. The screenwriter of Rebel Without a Cause, Stewart Stern, said
in an interview that the rebel served a moral purpose, framed in:

[…] the phenomenon of what was called in those days juvenile delinquency,
happening not in families that were economically deprived but in middle-class
families that were emotionally deprived. Partly, people felt it had to do with the
war, the fact that so many women were working for the first time away from
the home, that older brothers and fathers who would have been role models for
the young weren’t there, and the tremendous drive for material “things.” When
the kids saw that the material goods that were supposed to make their parents
happy really didn’t, they began to doubt their parents’ authority. […] The lesson
of Rebel was that if the kids could not be acknowledged or understood by their
parents, at least they could be acknowledged by each other. (Stern, cited in
Szatmary 2007: 50)

The title, Rebel Without a Cause, offers us a unique view into a culture which
sought the thrill of rebellion without the conscious knowledge of either
rebellion’s target or its cause. This fits well with Žižek’s (2009: 457) obser-
vation regarding fear of the unknown known, the Freudian unconscious that
 “The One with the Waggly Tail” 43

determines the habits we are prohibited from knowing why we obey. The
absence of the cause in subject constitution is how the subject transcends
the demands of the Big Other. Indeed, a feature of postwar capitalism was, in
Žižek’s most graspable moment, to solicit the form of enjoyment devoid of
its consequence, a kind of mass nostalgia for history without consequence—
a series of products without their “malignant properties” intact: “coffee
without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol” (Žižek 2002:
lxxvi). The rebel is devoid of the social consequence of revolution, but serves
as a hallmark for moral tales. Indeed, the rebel in Rock ’n’ roll would be out
of touch with its own historical contingency in the Rhythm and Bluesmen
of the 1940s.
Given the amount of Rock ’n’ roll material that is explicitly about giving
up the domains of domesticity in favor of fantasies of individual heroism, it
is no surprise that the feel of the rebel is the feel of flight, the line of flight.
Simon Reynolds’s (1996) classic study of “Sex Revolts” paints the rebel as a
hopelessly wayward misogynist looking to break free of maternal domesticity.
The poetic content of the musical rebel is that which positions the woman as
a dangerous victimizer: she is at once the devil that tempts him and the threat
of his own domestication. The rebel is radically counter the feminine, terrified
of it, in fact.
The attitude of the evasive rebel has its historical roots in Rhythm and
Blues. However, whereas the Rhythm and Blues tradition was notorious for its
sexual references, such references in Rock ’n’ roll were etymologically annexed
through its commodification in the 1950s. Trixie Smith boasts that “My
Daddy Rocks Me With One Steady Roll” and bounces to the “Black Bottom
Hop”; Big Joe Turner shouts out “Shake, Rattle and Roll” in commemoration
of the lover who makes him “roll his eyes” and “grit his teeth.” Even such an
ambiguous term as “thing” was most certainly associated with erogenous
zones:

Down in Georgia, got a dance that’s new,

Ain’t nothin’ to it, it’s easy to do;
Called Shake That Thing! …
I’m getting sick and tired of telling you to shake that thing!
44 Rancid Aphrodisiac

Now, the old folks start doing it, the young folks, too
But the old folks learn what the young ones start to do
About shakin’ that thing
Ah, shake that thing …

Why, there’s old uncle Jack, the jellyroll king,

He’s got a hump in his back from shakin’ that thing,
Yet, he still shakes that thing,
For an old man, how he can shake that thing,
And he never gets tired of tellin’ young folks: go on and shake that thing! …

Robert Springer (2007: 276) notes that the “thing” is:

[…] the hindquarters of the dancer who is the subject of the song; but, given
the allusion to “jelly roll” (the blues euphemism for the male sexual organ or for
sexual intercourse) and the predominant reference to men, the listener is given
to understand that other sexual connotations may be at work. But what really
makes the song work is the coy playfulness—often wordless—that Waters elicits
through the sultriness of her voice. On the one hand, the double meanings
behind the lyrics allow Waters to feign innocence, claiming to be singing merely
about a dance; but her tone and the song’s rhythm leave no doubt as to covert
references to sexual acts.

In other words, whatever “that thing,” “shake it,” “mama,” “c’mon,” “uh!,” “do it,”
“rock me,” “down,” “hoochie coochie,” “squeeze my lemon,” or “mercy” meant
for Rhythm and Blues was not necessarily as vivid under the guise of Rock ’n’
roll. Any such traces of the Blues genre’s massive storage of metonymies for
sex was efficiently euphemized (euthanized, emasculated) by an oligopoly of
producers and singers—and what was not euphemized was condemned by
the Press. The culture wars of Rock ’n’ roll are renowned for having added a
vital component of conflict to its narrative of rebellion. There was the notion
that music corrupted innocent youth; there was Variety’s infamous “Warning
to the music business”; there were local authorities cancelling concerts they
perceived as a threat due to the mixed race attendance; there were racists who
attacked Nat King Cole on stage; and so on. It would be nearly impossible to
conceive of Rock ’n’ roll without being caught amid the discourses of racial
segregation, oppositional politics, and conservative backlash.
The question of whether Rock ’n’ roll history can be studied apart from
 “The One with the Waggly Tail” 45

ideologies of good taste and bawdy excess is indisputable. We know, for

instance, that there were vehement political and religious oppositions to
Rock ’n’ roll but, aside from rather vague descriptions about musical “feel”
and “vibe,” we are at a disadvantage in knowing why the sound of Rock ’n’
roll bothered as many as it did. But it is only a disadvantage if we do not
engage in a critical interpretation of a sound’s social and political power. I’ll
cut to the chase: Rock ’n’ roll’s master signification of subjectivity was that of
the rebel, something one could not easily identify except in its accompanying
gestures, and something that quilted together a belief system about a certain
kind of emancipation specific to its historical contingency. But, even more,
the explicit ideological terms of Rock ’n’ roll (dirty, lewd, degenerate, etc.)
supported a more potent and onerous system to come. The institutional ritual
of Rock ’n’ roll, that of pushing the limits of the acceptable for consumption
by the youth market, was a form of unconscious transgressions of the moral
ideal. The New York Times reported on 28 March 1956, that Dr Francis J.
Braceland of the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut, condemned the
music as a “communicable disease” and “another sign of adolescent rebellion”
that impelled children “to do outlandish things.” Time in 1956 aligned the
sounds of Rock ’n’ roll with “the stampede” that sounded like “shrieks like the
jungle bird house at the zoo” with “spastically gyrating performers” who move
to an “obsessive beat” that “pounds through” the audience “to such rhythmical
movements as clapping in tempo and jumping and dancing in the aisles.”
Without further elaboration, Herbert von Karajan was quoted in the New
York Times on 27 October 1956: “Strange things happen in the blood stream
when a musical resonance coincides with the beat of the human pulse.” Time
magazine further elaborates in the same year:

There is no denying that Rock ’n’ roll evokes a physical response from even its
most reluctant listeners, for that giant pulse matches the rhythmical operations
of the human body, and the performers are all too willing to specify it. […]
[T]he fans’ dances are far from intimate—the wiggling 12- and 13-year-olds
(and up) barely touch hands and appear oblivious of one another. Psychologists
feel that Rock ’n’ roll’s deepest appeal is to the teeners’ need to belong; the results
bear passing resemblance to Hitler mass meetings.
46 Rancid Aphrodisiac

Youth in the 1950s were thus confronted with a society that at once celebrated
consumption, was optimistic, yet curiously repressive regarding preceding
decades of terror as well as by a potential threat from the Red Scare. It is in
this context that the figure of the rebel emerges as everything gone wrong
with the era of conspicuous consumption. The rebel was a sign of distinction
that knew no law of obeying the Other, with the exception of the law to
obey a transgression of the rules. This curious transgression constituted the
master signifier of the rebel, and the rebel became the master signifier of
Rock ’n’ roll, in its pulse and its meter and its rhythm—all elements which
were indescribable. There was no reason for it, it seemed, evidenced by the
popularity of Rebel Without a Cause, which provides us insight into the
Žižekian idea of a consumer society obsessed with transgression without
consequence; simply to perceive the hypocrisy of a parent culture looking to
domesticate the youth was enough for the rebel to evade responsibility. The
code words for these evasions were in rhythmic utterances in Rock ’n’ roll,
taken from Rhythm and Blues. This means that to understand how this trans-
gression permeated the affect of Rock ’n’ roll, we need to develop a vocabulary
of its rhythm that accounts for, at once, the specificity of musical signification,
along with the possibility of thinking the subject as a medium. It is for this
reason I turn to Zuckerkandl in relation to Lacan.
That there is “no Other of the Other” (Lacan 1960) is no surprise to the
rebel. In fact, such an assertion is the rebel’s ontological necessity. The rebel
is a continuous icon throughout the history of Rock ’n’ roll and is particular
to the notion of freedom under its guise. The rebel is badgered outside of the
boundaries of order for the big Other like a moth around a lightbulb, where
pure becomings in pursuit of acts without obligation to identity detach from
historical contingency yet are undeniably its consequence. Here I will attempt
to move from the iconography of the rebel (the sacred value of religious status
contained in an image that signifies beyond its psychic constituents—in it
more than itself) to the iconicity of processes of signification in music that
provided, in the Lacanian logic here, the call of the voice from the blind spot
of the gaze (the Peircean indicative of signs that, while resembling signifier/
signified, still signify on the paradoxical level that which prioritizes affective
connotation). The rebel is a central affective state of the social construction
 “The One with the Waggly Tail” 47

of delinquency in the 1950s: Rock ’n’ roll foreshadowed a neoliberal ideology

of freedom through transgressive consumption and persistent questioning of
the Other’s illegitimate basis of authority. Rock ’n’ roll’s affect is generated by
a particular mode of signification, as contradictory as this statement might
seem to proponents of affect who argue that it is non-symbolizable or at
least representative of the rupture in signification systems. Music is at once
structured and structuring (Shepherd 2012), and to straitjacket Lacanian
psychoanalysis as strictly structural does a disservice to the nuances of his
theory.

A rhythm that binds

Lacan’s quilting point resonates on a particularly rhythmic register. Pause,

for a moment, on the semblance of Lacan’s central observations on the
constitution of subjectivity against Zuckerkandl’s observation about the role
of rhythm in music. Zuckerkandl’s perspicacity regarding rhythm, time, and
repetition stands as perhaps the most distinctive in bridging subjectivity and
music through a substance the subject at once finds itself quilted within yet
undone by. Although musical signification equilibrates by way of the tripartite
assemblage of melody/harmony/rhythm, it is only the latter which affords
the intratemporal gap between everyday phenomena and the musical event:
rhythm is a force of an aleatoric deus ex machina for one isolated moment in
time to meditate on the substance of other moments in time in an unfolding
present. The dynamic capacities of musical signification unfold through the
auditory event of an element in context—in relation to a more Deleuzean
perspective, rhythm is the temporal structuring of a field by way of a question
which binds moments that repeat one another. Time is less the sensation
open by bodies traversing space, a conceptual actualization, but, rather, is
that which is conceptualized through rhythmic measurements we tend to call
time. Were those movements to change at the same pace, our measurement
of time would not change. So measurements of time are relative, but they
are not indications of time—they are measurements of bodies traversing
in space. Measurements can assume a more abstract character, such as the
48 Rancid Aphrodisiac

measurements of past/present/future: “Certainly, this must be time: the future

becoming the present, the present becoming the past. But what is time?”
Zuckerkandl (1956: 155) asks. “What is in the future is not yet, what is in the
past is not more; what remains?” Zuckerkandl responds that it is the present
which remains, but its remains are in a curious state of non-being, as the event
which is always-already no-more and not-yet.
Much like Lacan’s quilting point enacting an affected and affecting status
between two signifiers beneath which signifieds exact their slippery qualities,
for Zuckerkandl rhythm is affectively produced between two metrical events.
Straddling the no-more and not-yet is but a sliver between two abysses: the
principle of time equates the principle of uncertainty—since I cannot be in
time, I can only be in between two non-beings, but time is where I exist. Time,
not the measurement of it, is where my existence is not. Recall my earlier
reference to Deleuze, Žižek, and the event: the becoming which is the new as
the moment of eternity in time should be radically opposed to its historical
context. This is done in order to “shake off shame” of historical consequence
and rid the subject of its own fear of consequence to action—motion is to rest
what time is to eternity. Temporality and duration have taken on the principal
characteristic of life in the twentieth century. The difference between time
and rhythm is that the former is a rule-bound meter (such as 4/4 time, as
in the case of Rock ’n’ roll), while the latter is the expressive property of the
genre to which the example belongs (in the case of the strong backbeat, or
the echo of time). Rhythm does not conform to meter in the case of poetry
reading: “‘Time’ and rhythm here appear even to exclude each other: rhythm
resists regular time; ‘time’ appears to suffocate rhythm” (Zuckerkandl 1956:
159). But we have another element to consider, which is duration. Meter as
time is the straitjacket within which rhythm discovers its own freedoms.
Zuckerkandl (1956: 160) asks how “this synthesis of law and freedom [is] to
be understood” by way of a conformity between bodily gestures that produce
measurements of/in time; it is the perception of the measurement of time in
this case that we participate within the motions of sound as endured through
measurements. Zuckerkandl (1956: 162) adds that we must be aware of meter
as an “awareness of, and a sympathetic inner beating with, its meter.” Music
occupies a measurement of time, never in time (although a piece may be
 “The One with the Waggly Tail” 49

played in time). Metrical accent is thus the technicality of musical process,

but it is not the elasticity in which dynamic interest is generated. It is not
being/non-being—it is getting exactly what you expect. The inflection of a
beat within a measurement, however, does not demarcate the territory of
a refrain—it is only that, a refrain. It is not yet music until we have under-
stood its dynamic rhythmic character, that which evades the expectation of
emphasis, which creates the line of flight out of the strata. Zuckerkandl offers
us the psychological explanation of perceiving tone events in repetition and
succession, mainly that a succession of tone events begins to vary by virtue of
the fact that we group those events into like units until we perceive not meter
nor time but pulsation that locks the perceiver into a state of temporality as
described above as suspension between two non-beings in presence (no-more
and not-yet):

A piece of music is played; there is no accentuation. We count with the tones

one-two-one […] Why did we say “one” here instead of “three”? What peculi-
arity in our perception of the third beat makes us count thus and not otherwise?
If the new beat did nothing but bring us a further fraction forward in time,
the phenomenon would be incomprehensible. If we involuntarily and uncon-
sciously count “one” to beat number 3, this expresses the fact that it is not so
much further as back that this beat carries us—and back to the starting point. To
be able to come back, one must first have gone away; now we also understand
why we count one-two, and not one-one. Here “two” does not mean simply
“beat number 2,” but also “away from.” The entire process is therefore an “away
from–back to,” not a flux but a cycle […], a constantly repeated cycle, for the
“one” that closes one cycle simultaneously begins another. (Zuckerkandl 1956:
167–8)

A rhythmic signifier hinges on it binding to metrically symmetrical punctua-

tions. The cyclical suspension of a pulse that oscillates through phrases in time
constitutes the suspension of non-being that marks the experienced event in
tone, harmony, and rhythm as a musical event: “Our sympathetic oscillation
with the meter is a sympathetic oscillation with this wave” (Zuckerkandl 1956:
168). To count along with music, it is arguably contentious that one simply
and consciously counts out loud, as if to remind oneself where the beat should
return, where it has been, or where it should arrive. That would make for a bad
50 Rancid Aphrodisiac

performance, since the performer would be measuring time (meter) instead

of becoming it (rhythm). The cyclical time of music unfolds in a mesh. If we
were interested in determining the precise moments where the beats land, we
would not be doing a service to any music as music (nor its connections with
the inner and external states of social life): “our interest is not in the dividing
points but in what goes on between them,” Zuckerkandl (1956: 169) writes,
concluding that “if we are no longer speaking of what divides time but of what
connects the divisions, we are still speaking of meter at all and have not rather
already begun to speak of rhythm.” It is within the mesh that one experiences
what Shepherd and Wicke will later call the technology of articulation directly,
not in any conscious awareness of the mesh itself. Zuckerkandl states:

We cannot draw boundary lines on a wave; one wave passes into another
without a break. The successive beats of a metrical series are all alike; no two
waves are exactly alike. Meter is repetition of the identical; rhythm is return
to the similar. The machine runs metrically; man walks rhythmically. Meter
becomes the symbol of divisive, analyzing reason, rhythm the symbol of the
creative and unifying force of life. The radical opposition between rhythm and
meter is an expression of the basic conflict of two principles, one fostering life,
the other inimical to it. (Zuckerkandl 1956: 170)

If meter constitutes a capability to perceive difference in succeeding events,

rhythm is the perceived motion in the dynamic field of meter. And although
tone and harmony are the organizational principles that are socially constructed
in such a distance towards the musical event that marks its aesthetic character-
istics (or what perhaps qualifies a musical event under the rubric of romantic
aesthetics to determine its meaning), rhythm is taken as inherently imminent
to human life, subversive to meaning, registered somatically as affect. Rhythm,
Zuckerkandl maintains, is the feature of an oscillating wave that maintains the
ability of a human subject to lose subjectivity, to become the trace of subjec-
tivity, to become its echo—rhythm resonates in the echo of meter. The waves
build upon each other in intensity as each wave oscillates towards its own
repetition, cumulating in a diachronically unfolding pattern of difference in
attraction perceived on a metonymic chain of similarity. Zuckerkandl calls
this an accomplishment every time a wave is complete and a new one begins.
The rhythmic wave has been heralded as Rock ’n’ roll’s almost singular
 “The One with the Waggly Tail” 51

accomplishment, and the persistence of this wave of rhythm is precisely what

offered an otherwise conservative and repressive society its much-anticipated
shock. The meter of the finite and the rhythm of the infinite overlap one
another in patterns of repetition in a seemingly endless unfolding. The
opposing characteristics of rhythmic units signify polarity and intensifi-
cation. By virtue of musical signification through the notion of the “medium,”
rhythm positions a listener’s subjectivity as a point of consistency between the
no-more and not-yet, whereby the latter tends to displace subjectivity by way
of its routine anticipation through courses of difference, while the former’s
signification rhythmically positions a listener by way of a syntagmatic chain
of signification in attraction—memory. This between point is the positive
affect, that which is closest within the subject to his own power (puissance),
the quilting effect, to return to Lacan; the ideological base of the linguistic
difference in Lacan and in Žižek is structurally homologous with the kernel of
rhythmic identification in music. Indeed, if language and music share charac-
teristics, if there is an essentialism among them, it is the shared similarity
in the quilting effect that has the ideological quilting point on subjectivity.
Zuckerkandl (1956: 224–5) explains the disappearance of linear logic in a
musical event:

“Two,” then, follows “one”—in other words, if “two” is present, “one” is past. Is
this pastness equivalent to non-existence? Could “two” be what it is if “one,”
because it was no longer, were really non-existent? “Two” is not simply the
beat that follows “one”; it is something quite different, namely, symmetrical
complement, completion and fulfillment. The whole course of “two” is in direct
correspondence with “one,” it is this correspondence, in every instant of the
existence of “two” “one” is also contained, as the partner in this relationship,
the object of the symmetrical completion. If “one,” once past, were lost in
non-existence, extinguished—as, according to the hourglass concept, past time
is extinguished—“two” would be simply a second “one” and nothing more.

Subjectivity thus emerges as a medium. As every element unfolds in an

ongoing conversation with other elements in a manner that creates a mesh
out of the quilt, the quilt becomes a complex pattern that binds together more
of a net over subjectivity than a thread through it; subjectivity, in this consid-
eration, is a medium—it is, in other words, an ecological mode of being. The
52 Rancid Aphrodisiac

dynamic quality of the musical event arises from the fact that every musical
event is at once in conversation with its own virtual no-more and not-yet
events that gather up into its own gestalt-like orientation. The non-represen-
tational aspect of this is compelling, in that it constitutes a zone of human
experience that is neither natural nor socially constructed. It is non-represen-
tational, in that the auditory events experienced through a musical process
occupy the auditory field, can be represented in visual space/time, but cannot
be represented through the auditory field—they are the auditory field. This is
an argument that Shepherd and Wicke (1997: 135) pick up with great fidelity
to Zuckerkandl:

Auditory time and space (time–space) can only be articulated and is thus
articulated (as a unified field) inalienably through the articulation of auditory
events in relation to one another. Similarly, the virtual force field of musical
time and space—the social phenomenon made possible by the materially
grounded phenomenon of auditory time–space—can only be articulated and is
thus situated inalienably through the articulation […] of the musical present in
relation to one another.

Using Zuckerkandl we can thus see that Lacan’s master signifier echoes in
a musical dimension. In a similar manner to the quilting of two signifiers
that constitutes the inescapability of the symbolic order, there is a shared
space between this perception and musical phenomena. This shared space,
however, of meter does not constitute music, necessarily. That is, rhythm is
the imaginary space of motion in meter’s dynamic field, which covers over the
subject in a multiply meshed quilt—it acts more as a medium.

The terrors of the backbeat

Noise is subject to laws of rationalization. The comparisons between the

sounds of Rock ’n’ roll and its accompanying gestures are fused between its
evasive backbeat and its irrational effect of excess: a ruthless concentration
of noise. Noise is, on its own, nothing until it is subject to social represen-
tations of morality. Noise, as Kahn (1999) writes, is terrifying because it
marks the potential for dynamic agency and change, in that it compels us to
 “The One with the Waggly Tail” 53

decide whether to resist or adapt—noise is unlike sound with respect to its

subordination to representation. This highlights the importance in Deleuze’s
argument, for instance, that in the terrifying void of pure difference, repre-
sentation maintains its hegemonic sway as a symptom of the categorical
imperative whereby a body is attributed a spiritual adherence to its model:
noise is either tamed by Apollo or energized by Dionysus. Thus, noise is
subject to the rationalization of music in either its discipline or its excess.
This destination for noise has implications for simulacra in general, which,
for Deleuze (2004: 334), is deployed through the edifice of moral consensus:

What is condemned in the figure of simulacra is the state of free, oceanic differ-
ences, of nomadic distributions and crowned anarchy, along with all that malice
which challenges both the notion of the model and that of the copy. Later, the
world of representation will more or less forget its moral origin and presup-
positions. These will nevertheless continue to act in the distinction between
the originary and the derived, the original and the sequel, the ground and
the grounded, which animates the hierarchies of a representative theology by
extending the complementarity between model and copy.

Hence, if noise is pure difference, sound is its ground for judgment. Chained
within the monocentric confines of the identical, noise, as it is framed by the
sound through which it is experienced, proceeds towards a boundary that
synthesizes into identification—so noise must develop into something held
in judgment. Sound, then, becomes a general equivalent for representing, for
distinguishing noise from music, reduced to the utilitarian task of patching
the great divide between ethics and morality.
But Deleuze’s limit is also his boundary. As much as he identifies the
ideological fallacies of representation, he is not adequately convincing in
regard to how the system of representation maintains its power. Lacan is far
more useful for breaching the ideological coordinates of signifying systems.
After his in-depth readings of the mirror stage and establishing the coordi-
nates of the misrecognized/imaginary subject, he devoted significant attention
to the autonomies of signification. This new phase in his philosophy was, as
Liu (2010) recently argues, decidedly an interest in the symbolic order as a
cybernetic system. How exactly is the symbolic order self-sufficient? What
are its governing laws? If the Imaginary was constructed by a fundamental
54 Rancid Aphrodisiac

misrecognition that eventually determined the predestination of alienation,

how was the subject routinely misplaced as a fundamentally flawed part of an
entirely logical system?
The symbolic, Lacan would eventually conclude, obeys two fundamental
laws: one governed by difference and one governed by memory. The symbolic
is essentially the limited function of the world that the Imaginary subject
invests its ego within, though the subject does not recognize that the symbolic
system through which expression is given is operative according to a prede-
termined set of rules—if the mirror reflects the potential coordination of
jubilant excess as the determining condition for subject misrecognition, such
a potential becomes lodged in a systemic chain that “speaks” through the
subject. The unconscious governs the subject, speaks through it, is made up
of signifying material that has primacy over agency; it is the “discourse of the
Other,” language, the symbolic order. The symbolic is the limit of the human
universe. It is at once the language that I use to express myself, but it is also
the language that everyone else about me uses. With these others, we engage
in the laws of the symbolic, which constitutes its very autonomy. It is this fact,
that we speak about through the language that everyone uses, that makes up
the stuff of the Big Other. We articulate our desire through it, and others are
forced to do the same.
The circuit of discourse precedes us and will succeed us. It is the mistakes
that our parents made that we inevitably return to, the primacy of the Signifier.
We can never really grasp the full significance of this, because we are only
capable of expressing bits and pieces of it at a time (a scale in C, a splash of
red, a light on a certain dimmer, this sentence, punctuations of parole), but the
system eludes us. It is greater than us. We are subjected to it. So the Ego is the
imaginary function that the subject has in relation to its own image, while the
subject is entirely determined through the symbolic order. Here is the politics
of affect, the aspect of musical meaning that is not registered cognitively but
rather somatically from the position of a body that is affected by the body of
another. It is little wonder that Rock ’n’ roll was the notorious fabulist of the
twentieth century, claiming innocence when it clearly was devious.
 2

The Backdoor of Desire

Soiling the seafood store

Rhythm and Blues gave Rock ’n’ roll the autonomous conception of mascu-
linity that signified a well-dressed man who spent money freely and was great
in bed. What mattered more than being respected was being virile. So it is this
kind of image that we see in songs like “I’m ready,” “I’ve got my mojo working,”
and “I’m your hoochie-coochie man.” (Garofalo 1997: 123) The articulations of
such a figure in Rock ’n’ roll, however, had been reconfigured into a new master
signifier through a variety of ideological state apparatuses that at once disso-
ciated the historical meanings of Rock ’n’ roll from their socially grounded
meanings. By being co-opted into the mainstream as a master signifier, the
only signification it instantiated was that of enjoyment. In Rock ’n’ roll, the man
persistently refers to his own being “free,” the fact that his entire ontological
edifice relies on his imaginary relationship to woman, whatever fragment
of her evades his phallic enjoyment. The woman poses the threat to a man’s
ontological undoing, but as he merges with her through song he comes danger-
ously close to the territory beyond the phallus, towards perversion—towards
incest, as Jerry Lee Lewis did when married his 13-year-old cousin who still
believed in Santa Claus (Lewis and Silver 1982: 130). The perversion and the
proximity to the subjects-supposed-to-enjoy are what the moral legislatures
were obviously reacting to in their war on Rock ’n’ roll. Performers like Jerry
Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley were taken as disgusting and immoral. But they
were the stuff that made up the hedonistic consumption trends of the 1950s.
The fearful sexual predator is a pervasive theme in Rock ’n’ roll and resonates
with the Lacanian theft of enjoyment, especially in regard to the color line.
After all, the underground network of Rhythm and Blues and Country and
56 Rancid Aphrodisiac

Western record companies were deliberately attempting to profit by cross-

promoting black singers to white audiences without revealing the singer’s
skin color—this was to consolidate smaller buying markets. King Records in
Cincinnati, for instance, cross-marketed their Rhythm and Blues crooner, Bull
Moose Jackson, with Country and Western musicians in order to tap the white
radio airwaves with a black singer who sounded like a white crooner—his
color was concealed from the public (Cooper 2011). Sam Phillips, the owner
of Sun Records where Elvis Presley made his infamous first recordings, said
that he (allegedly) knew if he could find a white singer with a black sound he
would “make a million dollars” (Rodman 1994). But in the case of Elvis, DJ
Dewey Phillips at WHBQ Radio in Memphis purposely implied that Elvis
was white in order for his records to sell. It might be “impossible to segregate
the airwaves,” as Robert Walser (1998: 353) famously claims, but the façade of
segregation was obviously maintained. Desegregation was emerging, but only
at the cost of a new power which would retain racist hierarchy. Emergence is
conducive with the destruction of the thing that made emergence possible.
The Other alters its demand to accommodate the trope through which the
question of its desire is posed. To posit Rock ’n’ roll’s capacity to question the
Other is too broad. So the question needs to be more specific: where is the
figure of the Other in Rock ’n’ roll recordings? More importantly, to elicit
such a moral panic as it did from the prohibitive authority of the 1950s, how
did the sound of Rock ’n’ roll evade Imaginary recognition? Certainly the
lyrics are narcissistic—there is no doubt. As narcissistic as the lyrics appear,
though, such a realm of identification through the Other’s gaze is lost on the
masculinized drive of Rock ’n’ roll; it renders difference through attraction an
impossible proposition because Rock ’n’ roll connoted a diversion from social
responsibility. On the whole, the Rock ’n’ roll singer must be less interested in
locating his own desire in the desire of the Other than he is in transgressing the
boundaries of the Other when the Other demands more than the Subject can
provide its insatiable appetite. This is indeed a Subject which slips in and out
of the life of desire and which composes its vocation out of being unknown.
The Subject, I argue, is the Subject of the backdoor man:
Ashes to ashes, sand to sand
 The Backdoor of Desire 57

Every married woman has got a backdoor man

(Seth Richard, “Skoodledum Doo,” 1928)

The backdoor man stands as a Lacanian figure of anarchic drive motivated

by a resentful transference to the subject which desires too much, the object
of surplus in jouissance (Braunstein 2003). Donning a moment of ineffable
terror, delight, potential, and anticipation, a backdoor less signifies the
detailed act of a sexual encounter than it does position a figure in a line of
flight: a movement of pure difference that evades identification unchained
from identity legitimized under the gaze of the Other. The actorialization
of Rock ’n’ roll discursively positions the backdoor man whose quest is to
conquer the taboo object of another man’s wife. The classic actualization of
the backdoor narrative is rampant throughout Rhythm and Blues. Because
the object of value in this case for the backdoor man is taboo desire, jouis-
sance, the achievement of it appears as a slippery impossibility. To achieve
satisfaction in desire one must be in a position to recognize it, but because the
backdoor man must slip by recognition in order to achieve satisfaction it slips
through the fingers. Take “Shake, Rattle and Roll” as sung by Big Joe Turner:
Get outta that bed, wash your face and hands
Get outta that bed, wash your face and hands
Well, you get in that kitchen, make some noise with the pots and pans

Well, you wear low dresses, the sun comes shining through
Well, you wear low dresses, the sun comes shining through
I can’t believe my eyes all that mess belongs to you

I believe to my soul you’re a devil in nylon hose

I believe to my soul you’re a devil in nylon hose
Well, the harder I work, the faster my money goes

I said, shake, rattle and roll, shake, rattle and roll

Shake, rattle and roll, shake, rattle and roll
Well, you won’t do right to save your doggone soul

I’m like a one-eyed cat peeping in a seafood store

I’m like a one-eyed cat peeping in a seafood store
Well, I can look at you and tell you ain’t no child no more
58 Rancid Aphrodisiac

Ah, shake, rattle and roll, shake, rattle and roll

Shake, rattle and roll, shake, rattle and roll
Well, you won’t do right to save your doggone soul

I said, over the hill and way down underneath

I said, over the hill and way down underneath
You make me roll my eyes, baby, make me grit my teeth

I said, shake, rattle and roll, shake, rattle and roll

Shake, rattle and roll, shake, rattle and roll
Well, you won’t do right to save your doggone soul

At the discursive level we witness the constitution of a Subject (the backdoor

man) and the object (the object of its desire). The object of desire is estab-
lished on the lines of a series of binaries which align the makeup of woman as
simultaneously dirty and domestic: she rolls out of bed (dirty) to make noise
(dirty) in the kitchen (domestic) with pots and pans (domestic). The sun shines
through her dress (domestic) to reveal all that mess (dirty) that belongs to her.
The principal dichotomy of woman subjectivity was occupying at once the
dignity of domestic housecleaner while maintaining a subservient demeanor
to her husband’s sexual desire.
The symbolism of the enunciator’s eyes is especially significant—at once
Big Joe can’t believe what his eyes behold, eventually causing them to roll as
he grits his teeth. In the former they belong to an internal focalization (there
is a truly Cartesian moment here where the subject doubts his senses, betrayed
possibly by the Descartesian evil demon), whereas the latter they revoke in a
moment of ecstasy (jouissance)—his eyes occupy his genitals: “over the hill
and way down underneath / You make me roll my eyes, baby, make me grit
my teeth.” In a text that denies time-specificity (there is no indication whether
the pots and pans are used to make breakfast, lunch, or dinner), the timeless
quality emphasizes a libertarian ideology: freedom of will from power of
determinism in spite of the historical weight of adverse episodes. It is the stuff
that causes the event to rise above its own emergence. The narrative is not
literal but actantial: the subject’s quest for union with the object is one that
is conducted through anamorphic references to the sex act by way of a series
of metaphors and double-entendres (the most ambiguous yet direct being the
 The Backdoor of Desire 59

“one-eyed cat peeping in a seafood store,” which can only be made sense of
through its quilting effect with the other verses). The subject compels the
object to become desirable in such a situation that places her in the context
of the domestic sphere so that he can dirty her again. When he dirties her, he
cannot look at her but must be completely withdrawn in his own pleasure,
outside the gaze of the approving figure, the listener who suddenly is let in on
the song’s affective twist—it’s an orgasm. The subject seeks a union with the
object of his desire, which he has to keep at a distance in order to ready it for
the pursuit.
In order for the subject to reach a state of desire he must view her as poten-
tially dirty and actually clean: she must be seen at multiple angles of desire,
perhaps the most fitting being sun shining through her dress. The glaring
effect of the sun at once facilitates the properly Lacanian manner in which
woman is subjugated to the masculinized gaze: always awry. If the action
required by the subject in order to unionize with the object in a moment of
blind jouissance is her position as a desired object, the controlling feature of
the subject who initiates the object’s move so that she is positioned in the
figure of a mirror-image (where he can be desired) is crucial. He must act in
such a manner so that she can appear, summoning John Berger’s (2008) old
maxim: Men act, women appear. The modality is thus specific to the Lacanian
formulation of subjectivity: the subject is the subject for another signifier. The
specific modality here is to position the woman so that he can gaze upon her
scopophilically, without interference or the directness of the gaze. She accepts
the contract when she disappears at the end, is out of his gaze, his eyes rolled
back, his teeth gritted, ejaculating into the final chorus, when she becomes the
subject of the objet a, which is that it disappears once the subject has attained
it, deferred elsewhere.
The traces of desire here are homologous to the instrumental arrangement,
the pervasive backbeat, the horn solo, and other discursive historical constit-
uents (multi-modal contexts) that deny the simply synchronic specificity of
the act. What is the imaginary space constructed here? The instrumentation
of the medium itself means that the process through which the narrative is
delivered (the modality of a musical process) requires a kind of systematic
attraction at the syntactical level. What is the common denominator of
60 Rancid Aphrodisiac

oppositions throughout the text? Dirty/Domestic, Anamorphosis/Direct, and

Gaze/Blindness. The opposing effect here is between the imaginary and
the real: the imaginary constitutes a subject that appears desirable, that is
in the midst of misrecognition that his Ego is bigger than the situation, of
celebratory optimism; the orgasm, however, the moment when the subject has
attained the quest of union with the object, requires that the subject switch off
their power of sight, that they are blinded in their quest—it is difficult to resist
citing the scene where Oedipus blinds himself by seizing the brooches of his
dead mother’s dress and stabbing himself in the eyes. The object of the quest
here must be transformed into the object of desire in order for the machine
of desire to be mobilized, at which point it can only do so from within the
recesses of the imaginary space that he has constructed, before she is “dirtied”
again by his eyes that have sunk into the recesses of his exploding genitals. The
Real is marked as a partial object, a terrifying object that is disconnected from
its symbolic logic (eyes and gritted teeth becoming-genitals becoming-eyes
and teeth, all sites of transcendental schemata between interior and exterior
realities).
The order as such: she needs to get out of bed (dirty, displaced, move away
from him) to wash her face and hands (to make herself presentable and to
wash off the Real, perhaps ejaculate and sweat and other bodily fluids). The
first binary opposition thus between dirty and domestic is one that conjoins
the Real (experienced directly as a partial object) with the Imaginary (experi-
enced anamorphically through misrecognition as the desired imago subject).
This move to the domestic then mobilizes the object’s own transformation
from the imaginary projection to the object of desire, which is the agalma
that propels the subject to chase her in an evasion from the approving eyes of
the Other. She needs to be positioned as domestic in order for her dirtiness
to reach a distance from his desire. That’s why the “one-eyed cat” (his cock)
can look straight into a seafood store (where the goods are sealed in a hymen-
like wrapping) and can see whether she is a dirty slut or a virgin. She is truly
mobilized as the objet a once he can see her with his cock, that she is no longer
a child, no longer that imaginary object, that angel. She is mobilized as the
objet a once she occupies this position.
The feel of Rhythm and Blues should be regarded as a signifier without a
 The Backdoor of Desire 61

signified. It exceeds identification under the system’s line of flight that is desig-
nated negative association. The backdoor man, in particular, is the guise of the
bluesman that crept through the backdoor of Rock ’n’ roll. It has a deterritori-
alizing effect. As a married woman’s stealthy lover, the backdoor man counts
on the escape from a sexual encounter through the backdoor of the domestic
space; this is itself not without its own need of an escape hatch built into the
design of its comfort. This mutually dependent relationship is one that shares
a kinship with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic in self-consciousness. As Žižek
(1989: 118) explicates: “Behind an extremely ‘feminine’ imaginary figure, we
can thus generally discover some kind of masculine, paternal identification:
she is enacting fragile femininity, but on the symbolic level she is in fact
identified with the paternal gaze, to which she wants to appear likeable.” The
woman changes under the male gaze from monstrous to exalted in a structure
that shares with similar prejudicial systems such as racism and other kinds of
fears.
It is little wonder that the era where consumer is king, and the King of
Rock ’n’ roll graced the stage with his gyrating hips and his third leg, is also
the era that the king manifests woman as essentially a fictive coordinate of
a commodity system, or a symptom of man’s suffering. So, again, to say that
Rock ’n’ roll espoused freedom begs the perennial question—freedom on
whose terms? The way Rock ’n’ roll represented women, for instance, was
as abhorrent and exploitative as its representations of African-Americans.
“Women did not sing,” Garofalo reminds us (1997: 83), “they were sung about,
most often as babies—‘Since I met you baby,’ ‘Honeycomb, won’t you be my
baby,’ ‘Be Bop a Lula, she’s my baby,’ and so forth.” He continues:

Young male Rock ’n’ rollers were caught between the macho posturing of
the “Sixty Minute Man” with his “Great Balls of Fire” and passionate, even
vulnerable, declarations of unconditional romantic love, delivered in teenage
idiom. Accordingly, a woman could be portrayed as a “Party Doll,” a promis-
cuous “Butterfly,” or a “Devil in Disguise,” or, alternatively, as a heavenly
goddess, “Venus” or “Diana,” a “Dream Lover” with “Angel Eyes” sent to Earth
by a “Little Star” or a “Blue Moon.” At best, women were treated as totally
dependent creatures or ideal, unreal apparitions, perched high atop celestial
pedestals. Rarely were they seen as normal human beings or “real” people.
62 Rancid Aphrodisiac

Treated as though at once dependent, slutty, needy, or unattainable, the male

figure stands in utter confusion at her shifting behavior, or left confused by
another woman’s ways that are interfering with his true love for this woman
(Garofalo 1997). Woman is thus positioned as a hysteric, actually wanting
what she pretends she doesn’t want (“don’t you do what your big sister done”);
she wears a mask, wears a phallus, while man exists as a phallus. Woman is not
identifiable with the symbolic order, she is always a rupture in the symbolic
order through the syntactical repetitions of the semiotic (to refer to Kristeva’s
formulation regarding the subversions of the semiotic). How do we conceive
such an opposition to symbolization? The mistake would be, of course, to
assume that woman possesses some kind of pre-linguistic natural mystery that
makes her chaotically opposed to the iron cage of bureaucracy, as if a woman
is imminently split between her natural intuition and her symbolic mask.
What woman presents, in Lacan’s formulation (and it should be important
here that he was interested in the historical emergence of a social psychosis),
the symbolic order does not enact something upon her that prevents her entire
integration into the symbolic order—this would be to subscribe to essen-
tialism. A non-existence implies that the symbolic idealization has no reference
since it always misses its target—like the case of a Lacanian account of racism,
the signifier offers only an anamorphic glance at its signified (Seshadri-Crooks
2000: 3); woman is not there, because the psychic structure of the patriarchal
unconscious disavows it. There is thus no exception in woman, as woman is
that substance of nothing which discursively reinforces the binary logic of the
symbolic order. It is replete with its own being, yet erupts an illogical gap in
the consistency of being. Woman is always out of touch of the perverted gaze,
expressing what Žižek refers to as a dialectic between the Limit and its Beyond.
Žižek points out that woman, in the regime of patriarchal oppression, is not
an abstract character, a “cold and distanced inhuman partner” who is like a
machine. He says, rather, that a woman “is thus as far as possible from any kind
of purified spirituality—she functions as an inhuman partner in the sense of
radical Otherness which is wholly incommensurable with masculinist needs
and desires.” As a mirror that reflects masculine desires, she “functions as a kind
of black hole in reality, as a limit whose Beyond is inaccessible” (Žižek 1993: 91).
She is a traumatic encounter. Her stratified position is the gap, the chasm that
 The Backdoor of Desire 63

disappears as soon as man symbolizes her. Her resistance to symbolization is

an adherence to the patriarchal psyche, of the name-of-the-father.
Mistaken readings abound. To say, for instance, that woman is a symptom
of man and read it simply would be to say that woman is no more than the
manifestation of the sin of man: do not fight her or pin her down, rise to a
transcendent spiritual level so that she decomposes. Lacan is not quite so
anti-feminist. Symptom is still the right word, because Lacan insisted that
the only manifestations of reality that we have access to are in fact symptoms
(unintended interruptions) of the master signifiers of our belief systems: the
nation, the people, history. Woman as a symptom of man, for Lacan, meant
that it is the man who only exists through woman by way of his symptom. The
anxiety in the patriarchal system for Lacanian psychoanalysis is that woman is
the man’s access to the supreme enjoyment of the superego—jouissance. Lacan
attempted to account for the way in which woman had an excessive access to
enjoyment. Of course, gender theorists, Judith Butler in particular, are highly
critical of Lacan’s and other psychoanalysts’ tendency to view the subjectivity
of woman in such a light. From a cultural-historical perspective, however, we
are hard pressed to find a more obvious example of a woman’s subordination
to the anxiety of men losing their own ontological footing than in Rock ’n’ roll.
Any gaze of objectification is doubly identifying, an imaginary identification
of preferred vision of self and a symbolic identification from the perspective
of the other entwined in the entrapment of the gaze. This, I argue, is the
rhythmic quilting effect of identification.
By identifying with this superego, there is simultaneously an identification
with the obscene primordial father who hordes the prohibited incestuous
relations for himself; and so we see the cloaked obscene component of
society as having access to that which is prohibited, and we perceive it as the
primordial father who denies us access to the excessive pleasures he so enjoys.
Excessive enjoyment is in this fashion typically attributed to the minority,
as a figure envied yet vilified. The sexual bravado of the Rhythm and Blues
singer, for instance, underpins its own stereotype because it is taken to hold
the enjoyment for the audience which is forbidden access to it. It was what
the London blues revival would be based on in part—a fascination with the
sexual bravado of Muddy Waters would inspire the Rolling Stones to name
64 Rancid Aphrodisiac

themselves after one of his hit songs. Recorded Rock ’n’ roll exemplified
precisely this fact; although Rhythm and Blues was such a varied genre of
music, overt sexuality constituting only a part of it, Rock ’n’ roll appeared
to exploit mostly its sexually exploitative repertoire, even though white
covers annexed easily identifiable sexual references, prohibiting that access
and therefore punishing the subjects of those songs: the primordial fathers
(bluesmen) punished by receiving no royalties next to the white singers
and songwriters who profited off them, and eventually the gatekeepers (the
DJs) who were charged with payola (hoarding the riches) as the result of a
moral panic. Enjoyment was stolen by the object that summoned it. Again,
emergence is facilitated by the destruction of the thing that made emergence
possible—the emergence of the Rebel as iconographic was facilitated by the
destruction of the marginalized culture that made its emergence possible.

Animality and the elementary cell

The Lacanian quilting effect of the master signifier is moderately musical,

evidenced by the fact that signification arises through a tertiary force between
retroaction and anticipation of a continuously unfolding present. I take
Lacan’s graph of desire as the catholicon for the question of affect in Rock ’n’
roll because it provides: (1) the seminal delineation of transcendent hierarchy;
and (2) the substitution of its linguistic-specific terms in order to accom-
modate music-specific processes. However, it’s important to first look at the
elementary cell before proceeding to the full graphs, to incorporate elements
from the previous chapter into this one. There are three rostrums that precede
the full graph of desire: the primary (elementary cell, animality); secondary
(lower graph, conscious); and tertiary (upper graph, unconscious).
The elementary cell helps us understand Subject constitution as a temporal
and retrospective signification that preconditions the optical coordinate of the
gaze of the Other. In regard to the elementary cell (Figure 1), the lower right
zone of the graph represents a vitally unknown “animal being” inaccessible
to conscious awareness, until it has been interpellated into the position of
the split subject on the lower left. Only then is it sanctioned by the privilege
 The Backdoor of Desire 65

Figure 1  Lacan’s elementary cell

of self-reflection within the gaze of the Other. Lacan explains in Seminar

V: “it is not for nothing that I put the scopophilic position at the heart of
things, it is because effectively it is at the heart of this position, but just as
much in the attitude of the [O]ther, I mean that there is no such thing as a
sadistic position which in a certain way is not accompanied […] by a certain
masochistic identification” (1998a: 287, translated by author). But because
the Lacanian paradigm for signification is focused squarely on the consti-
tution of subjectivity (and not “meaning” necessarily, as for literary critics or
cultural studies scholars), we eliminate the need to search for a union between
signifier/signified and are more intent on the process through which the
Subject, when quilted through language, becomes split from the very social
institution it locates meaning within. Thus, we are not looking for meaning,
or “how meaning is put into things,” but the condition of possibility within
which meanings may be articulated. This primal activity operates at the level
of denotation, a ground of signification that Middleton (1993) terms primary
signification.
How does the phrase, a rebel without a cause, for instance, connote a
Subject (rebel) and a fixed object (lack of cause)? The rebel is on a trajectory
from le vivant (lower right) through the speech act of rebel without a
66 Rancid Aphrodisiac

cause around a retroactive meaning construction that fixates the subject on

something else alienated and transgressive—the cause vanishes as it is quilted
into the non-recognition of the rebel subject, and rebel dissolves unrecog-
nized into the gaze of its Master. The Rock ’n’ roll contingency is already well
known, something which was named retroactively by dominant institutions
in places of power and privilege. Proper names are unquestionable if they
enact the quilting effect, providing the ontological security of knowledge to
the subject unbeknown to its own alienated destination—we can only “know”
the proper name of something once it has been in circulation in a given
discourse, and it is only through this primary chain of discourse that it can
be known. Description is a literalist task, since every object that it describes is
equally described by its opposite absence (see Žižek 2002b: 21–7). The proper
name, the quilting effect, that is designated to permanent objects takes away
from those objects, since in the Lacanian scheme the name of the object is
summoned in its absence—or its presence is summoned in a kind of virtual
anterior of its immediate physical descriptor. Žižek (1989: 102–3) writes:

If we are really concerned with language in a strict sense, with language as a

social network in which meaning exists only in so far as it is intersubjectively
recognized—with language which, by definition, cannot be “private”—then
it must be part of the meaning of each name that it refers to a certain object
because this is its name, because others use this name to designate the object in
question: every name, in so far as it is part of common language, implies this self-
referential, circular moment. “Others,” of course, cannot be reduced to empirical
others; they rather point to the Lacanian “big Other,” to the symbolic order itself.

Timbre and the “real world”

The lower graph describes the subject in its predestination towards alienation,
through the misrecognition of the imaginary—this is where the subject
finds its likeness in objects that are misrecognized as reflecting a whole
and self-sustaining subjectivity. The graph begins where the elementary cell
ends (Figure 2): at the barred subject (S/)—it represents the second order of
associations founded upon the technological constitution of the signifier. In
 The Backdoor of Desire 67

Figure 2  The lower graph of desire

its destination towards the Ego-Ideal (lower left), the line of subjectification
instantiates a disjunctive split between the subject and its mythical cry that,
in my reading, justifies centralizing the concept of Imaginary identification
(the Imaginary subject as recognized through the patterned observances
and interpenetrations of the Other’s gaze) as endemic to the lower graph.
Retaining the “retroactive production of meaning,” the second graph shares
with the elementary cell a kinship of the quilted affect, except the quilting
points are now a fixation of desire, not one primary signifier quilted into
“another” signifier. This domain marks the line of subjectification which
now renders the subject in a state of awareness at a more conscious level of
the signification that produces the annals of subjectivity. The lower graph is,
in other words, the graph of conscious perception that registers an affective
discharge.
The constitution of the subject here occurs in simultaneity with the second
order of signification, the connotative. In such a connotative signification,
we no longer are able to reduce a meaningful utterance to any assemblage
of isolatable parts because the signification occurs more on the level of the
medium: any connotative sign can be made up of an infinitely permeable
assemblage of spinning signs. We might call this the “social context” of signi-
fication, the material grounding through which signs achieve their social
significance as they are quilted and grounded within the Subject which
68 Rancid Aphrodisiac

perceives them as meaningful, which resonates with them as a discharged

image of the self. In the context of the rebel, if he marks the groundwork for
primary signification in Rock ’n’ roll, this ideological kernel quilts conno-
tative signification into however many manifestations in popular culture.
The barred subject thus comes into being as a connotative signification of its
self.
Subjectivity is caught in a web of constantly changing and morphing complex
overlapping binary oppositions. We can read the lower graph as a dialectic
between opposites along three axes: between the gaps of Ego-Ideal and Barred
Subject, at the most extreme between signification of the other and Other,
and as a short circuit mediating these extremes of the ego and the specular
image (the core within which lies the infamous objet a). The barred subject is
on a predestined route towards alienation because the “I” that it employs for
self-identification signifies its petit a (its object-cause of desire) through the
signification of the specular image (the “I” that stands for the identification
from which the subject is barred) that it perceives as being likened to that
desired image of the self (the imago) (Fink 1997: 61). The destination short-
circuits the call to the Other as the call moves along a path of subjectification
by the signifier in a move of resemblance towards the free-floating ego (an ego
that can only be recognized, as in retrospect, as moving towards the eventual
Ego-Ideal). This imaginary subject is the subject of identification in alienation
because the subject misrecognizes its own agency in the signification that
speaks it into existence (Fink 2004: 117). Whichever way, the destination of
the ego is always towards an imaginary situation in which it resonates with the
Other’s view of itself. The “I” needs to be addressed to an Other, and is never
context-free. Although the I(A) is a little other like oneself, it is helpless until
facing its own recognition in the gaze of that which is perceived as greater,
capable of satisfying the demand of the “I” for self-recognition. This need is
returned as an interpretation of the subject’s demand, a signified supplied by
the Other. That is part of why the signified is slippery, because it is the mental
concept of the signifier that is determined through an authoritative institution.
The trajectory from the barred subject to the Other is therefore a carnal cry for
recognition that, through that recognition, abandons carnality. In language,
need loses something to its expression in demand and it is subject to the
 The Backdoor of Desire 69

distanced observations of the Other. Therefore, the demand is what is satisfied

across the trajectory from the signification of the Other to the Other, but the
scar tissue is the quilting point, an imaginary coordinate, free-floating yet
in its absence certain of its presence to the subject. It is a lost cause, the scar
that is lost in the process of the trajectory of desire. The question is: what will
satisfy the inaudible cry of need?
A quilting effect remains, but now creates a surplus of the voice. We can see
in the lower graph a kind of amplified version of the very quilting mechanism
of the elementary stage of signifier and signified, where (A) occupies the place
of the retroactively quilting signifier in the elementary cell of signification,
seated in the spot of retroactive meaning constitution, so that the “point de
capiton represents, holds the place of, the big Other, the synchronous code,
in the diachronous signifier’s chain: a proper Lacanian paradox in which a
synchronous, paradigmatic structure exists only in so far as it is itself again
embodied in One, in an exceptional singular element” (Žižek 1989: 114–15).
Here, I claim, is the crucial part of the graph for the constitution of subjec-
tivity through Rock ’n’ roll: prosthetic vocality. The quilting point produces
a leftover in the upper share of the graph, but it also produces a leftover at
the end of the signifying chain, a kind of operation whereby the signifying
power of communication as a system of difference in attraction rather than
repulsion makes itself fully explicit in the imagined space of popular music.
The subject internalizes its relation to the external world through timbre in
sound. These are the extra-levels of signification that cannot be reduced to
component signifiers. The center of musical articulation is based upon this
relation to timbre, which might be externally related to the “real world” (such
as the sounds of a motorcycle in Phil Spector’s “Leader of the Pack”), but more
generally speaking, timbre operates at the level of internal awareness endemic
to subject constitution. Travis Thrasher (2011) writes in 40: A Novel that
“Rock and roll feels and confesses and speaks truth. But most people [… we]
just listen to it and let it feel for us.” If the uncertainty in affect here is in regard
to what its power does for someone, or what it should be doing, then what is
certain is the point of identification that the subject proclaims to maintain
with the voice. Ultimately, the Rock ’n’ roll subject managed to evade recog-
nition of the Other. The discharge of the self is precisely an affective potential
70 Rancid Aphrodisiac

of the subject as it is released through the vocalized sexual releases of Rhythm

and Blues.

Timbres of denial

In psychoanalysis—classical Freudian psychoanalysis, at least—repetition is a

means of covering trauma, a memory of such historical certitude that it would
determine the coordinates of a Subject’s being-in-the-world (Freud 2011).
Middleton (1996) writes that as much as repetition for Freud signified a means
to forget, in other pedagogical domains repetition was heralded for its power
of assisting rote memory. Middleton further remarks that repetition accom-
modates a host of associations, all of which contain their politically negative
obverse potential: recognition/misrecognition, recollection/forgetfulness,
reproduction/original, regeneration/corruption, representation/misrepresen-
tation, replication/prototype, simulation/authenticity, interpellation/agency.
History comes into effect as the symptom of regulatory practices that we
remember to repeat, the ground of repetition in constant negotiation with the
shift in subject perspective. This should remind us of Žižek’s (1994) central
philosophical idea in regard to his ontological writings: it is not the idea that
we will believe if we repeat the habit, but that we will believe that we repeated
the habit because we acted as though we already believed that we acted. Thus
the central paradox of attacking Rock ’n’ roll’s sound: it smacks of a culture
steeped in repetition, obsessed with repetition, faithfully relying on persistent
onomatopoeic repetition for the generation of its own truth, yet when
repetition arises as an inconvenient by-product of bodily gesture, moral panic
supervenes. Descry, the contradiction of faith and tolerance.
Ideologies are maintained through private and public rituals that constitute
a political Subject in the discourse of the Other, something which Žižek
(Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000) calls an ideological disidentification: the
political system guarantees for each subject the transgression of law in order
to sustain a belief that the subject is not reduced to the status of a subject
of the state. The state allows for peculiar transgressions that maintain the
Subject’s belief that there is a part of them existing outside law. In order for
 The Backdoor of Desire 71

a political regime to maintain its power, it must allow its citizens a certain
degree of inner transgression in order to win their support and consent. A
properly working regime is not solely repressive, in other words; it has to be
permissive in some areas. To think regimes are solely repressive is an attitude
of the libertarian reactionist: they are productive and all-encompassing. In
order for political disidentification to be suspended, the subject must enter
into the phantasmatically coordinated relationship with their own enjoyment,
the Lacanian jouissance.
Rhythm, the ground bass within which the intratextual signification of
repetition is at its strongest (stacks of signification unfolding difference in
attraction, not repulsion), was subordinated by the conceptual rise of the
absolute. As rhythm sections in the orchestra were subordinated to the
harmony-/melody-producing phenomena, Shepherd reminds us that rhythm
and repetition were subordinated to the supremacy of harmony and melody.
Below rhythm, timbre (rhythm without repetition) is the most confounding
element in musical signification, writes Shepherd (1991), because timbre
(being in the classical world the “tone color” of an instrument that differ-
entiates it from another) is a quality of sound that is produced through the
condensed stream of micro-repetitions. It is, indeed, the vibration of being
that resonates in between points, the point of articulation in the external
world and the point of reception in the body of those in its proximity. It
compels the subject to decide not on the basis of their distance from the
world, but according to the degree of proximity. This proximity, Shepherd
(1991: 159) argues, is the foundation of male anxiety around timbre:

If timbre, as “the nature of sound itself,” is the very vibratory essence that puts
the world of sound in motion and reminds us that, as individuals, we are alive,
sentient and experiencing, then, as the essence of individual sonic events, it can
be said to speak to the central nexus of experience that ultimately constitutes
us all as individuals. If timbre is the texture, the grain and the tactile quality of
sound which brings the world into us and reminds us of the social relatedness
of humanity, then in touching us and stroking us it makes us aware of our very
existence. Symbolically, it is our existence.

Timbre-anxiety, rhythm-subordination, and repetition-criticism are symboli-

cally embedded in even the scientific practices of measuring perceived
72 Rancid Aphrodisiac

racial differences. Levine (1988) discovered that the terms “highbrow” and
“lowbrow” are connected to these practices, and that those differences were
drawn between race-specific categories of musical signification. In the USA,
the practice of phrenology, a defunct scientific method by which personality
traits could be read by measuring the bumps and slopes of the head, contested
that some individuals were inherently superior because of their high brows,
and so German composers were hailed while Italian opera composers were
considered light and trivial. Music from Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and the
First Peoples of North America was generally taken as noise, not music, and
the criticism of these kinds of music was usually that it was predominantly
rhythmic instead of harmonic. Keillor (2006: 7) quotes an article from 1918
for the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Down in the basement, a servants’ hall of rhythm. It is there we hear the hum of
the Indian dance, the throb of the Oriental tambourines and kettledrums, the
clatter of the clogs, the click of Slavis heels, the thumpty tumpty of the negro
banjo, and, in fact, the native dances of the world.

Generally, it was accepted that the so-called masses were incapable of compre-
hending harmonic music, which served elites better because it allowed them
to foster a community based on the perpetuation of esoteric musical ideas.
Shepherd’s central argument is, for this reason, that the analytic framework
that elevated music to the status of the absolute worked within a limited
framework that privileged the rational scientific measurements of harmony/
melody over the subjective and life-connected experiences of rhythm/timbre:

The sounds essential to meaning within the “classical” tradition have been
stripped down as far as is possible to a small number of basic and homogeneous
units or atoms susceptible to the exigencies of control through an analytic music
notation, and have in this way come to constitute a fundamental harmonic–
rhythmic framework that is elaborated into individual pieces of music through
complex and extended development according to principles intrinsic to the
framework itself. Notes stripped of much of their inherent sonic possibilities
thus form the basis for a musical “code” or realization of the brand of individu-
alism characteristic of industrial capitalist societies. […] Individualism among
those with power and influence must be underpinned and controlled through a
structured homogeneity. As this homogeneity has been generated, maintained
 The Backdoor of Desire 73

and controlled by an all-inclusive stress on visual channels of communication,

so it has been in the generation, maintenance and control of sounds admissible
to the tradition of “classical” music. (Shepherd 1991: 160)

But Shepherd’s antiquated notion of “the capitalist” is one that can only
be accommodated fragmentarily in contemporary capitalism. The type of
resistance timbres allowed, Shepherd notes, is the type of resistance homol-
ogous to factory workers who slack off on the job or those under the strict
regimes of Western bureaucracy to signify dissent from within its constraints.
But how do we come to understand the emancipatory aspect of repetition?
How do we approach this oft-criticized aspect of popular culture and popular
music as a potential for innovation, emancipation, or self-renewal? How do we
avoid the repetition-of-the-same? Repetition should not automatically imply a
repetition-of-the-same, for repetition is inseparable from the difference that it
accommodates. When Lacan refers to repetition, for instance, he is certainly
throughout his career attached to repetition automatism (as in the destination
of the letter in “The Purloined Letter,” written by Edgar Allan Poe [1844]).
What I hypothesize, however, is an extension of the iconography of the rebel
into the iconicity of the sound of Rock ’n’ roll, which was equally evasive as the
image. If the image of the Rebel is what conditioned the rise of the gaze, the echo
of the beat conditioned the impossibility of the Real. What we find repeatedly
throughout attacks against Rock ’n’ roll is a series of assaults against the sound
of the music itself, and much less in terms of lyrical content—at least, critics
are short of expressing what the offensive lyrics actually were. Although
the content was purified, the form in which it was expressed remained: the
quilting rhythm and drive, the connotative signification. In fact, by 1955,
white performers entering into the Rock ’n’ roll genre were already cleaning
up suggestive lyrics out of fear of being banned. When white Rock ’n’ roll
musicians and groups like Bill Haley and Elvis Presley performed blues covers
for mainstream consumption, they annexed sexual references yet profited off
the drive and energy that propelled the rhythmic momentum of Rhythm and
Blues. It is precisely this presence of the drive devoid of its content which
invites the Lacanian psychoanalysis—the silent drive of the unconscious. The
content might have shifted, but the drive was still hidden in plain sight. It is
74 Rancid Aphrodisiac

now time to revisit the master signifier in the context of the graph of desire,
to see how in content the signified might have slipped, but that the form
and energy of the musical syntax quilted and maintained the sexual excess
that preconditioned a certain type of transgression that obeyed the superego
injunction to Enjoy! … no matter the consequence.

Protecting the children

Although they were certain it wasn’t music, when critics attacked Rock ’n’ roll
they found difficulty revealing exactly what it was. ASCAP songwriter and
WCBS jockey Bob Haymes opined that Rock ’n’ roll is “poor music, badly
recorded, with lyrics that are at best in poor taste […] and at worse obscene
[…] this trend in music (and I apologize for calling it ‘music’) is affecting the
ideas and the lives of our children.” NBC claimed that “Peggy Sue” was “mood
music for stealing hubcaps.” The lyrics were taken as “smutty and suggestive,”
“filth passing under the guise of pop music.” Indeed, there was little to support
these arguments, serving no more than the master morality of good taste.
Rock ’n’ roll’s beat was the general equivalent for condemning all Rock ’n’ roll.
Lacan offered his own psychoanalytic formulation of the general equivalent,
the “fear of God” as the “quilting point” of the subject’s world and the starting
point in the idea that “a signifier represents the subject for another signifier”
(Žižek 2002b: 21). It is worth meditating on such a confounding statement:
a signifier represents the subject for another signifier. It is a crucial sentence
for understanding just how it is that “freedom” is approached as a master
signifier through the negative liberty of Rock ’n’ roll. The Lacanian approach
to ideology posits that as much as individuals believe what they believe, that
belief has to be mediated by an ideological quilt which assures them that they
know what their belief is—belief by necessity of the physiological inadequacy
of the human body must transcend its limitations, and so cannot be located
anywhere in the icons that occupy the immaterial real of social relations. The
Lacanian theory of desire addresses the subject’s fundamental relationship to
knowledge, what they acquire and what they know, the habituation of cultural
norms (Lacan 2008). The question is less what someone knows and more
 The Backdoor of Desire 75

where the subject is located in relation to the assurance of knowing. Knowing is

ongoing, it is unconscious, it is a logic of form that operates beneath conscious
awareness. Recall that, for Lacan, the subject refers to the constitution of the
unconscious (“I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think”)
as it is inscribed through a habituated rationalization. The unconscious cannot
be “known”—the unconscious is like a medium, in McLuhan’s sense, in that it
can only be perceived through the rate of change that it permits. The medium
itself is always deflected, taken at an anamorphic angle. So as much as there
are objects of knowledge that are easily acquired and articulated, there are
many aspects of life, many systems one navigates through without knowing
the innate homological connection between them (the insatiable appetite of
desire to pursue an object only to abandon it once acquired, to find oneself in
another position where the pursuit begins again). The figure of the backbeat is
the objet a, it must be kept at a distance—it represents the same kind of logic
as that which is embedded in such statements as the “rebel without a cause.”
The central idea here is the “constitutional inscience” (Fink 2004: 108) that
prevents the subject from knowing why they are doing what they do, why they
believe what they believe. All we have here are self-justified claims: a signifier
represents the subject for another signifier.
The backbeat constituted a quilt which allowed subjectivity the closest
access possible (in its time) to the proximity of the medium, a kind of
sexuality that was terrifying to mainstream society, where the ear assumed an
erogenous zone. Taylor (2012) speaks of sexuality in music as a kind of fetish-
istic auralism. Inherent in auralism is the observation regarding the sexual
power of music, in that it speaks to our embodiment and our sexual drives
over and above our masculinist rationalization. Rock ’n’ roll was a queering
of heteronormative space (even if it was constructed out of the adulation of
the feminine, it was an adulation that was born out of fear, perversion, risk,
and fetishism … non-normative relations of sexuality). Music and sexuality
are linked by the psychoanalytic observation that because music’s processes of
signification are pre- or sub-linguistic, they signify at the level of the “flesh”
instead of the level of rational thought. The changes in recording techniques
were in a sense a queering of the imaginary space of popular music, enough
so that a classic moral panic followed, and enough so that several unique
76 Rancid Aphrodisiac

intimate features of the recording now inhabited the imaginary space of the
listener: the proximity of the voice, the echo, the intimate recordings, etc. The
ear is an erogenous zone. In Rock ’n’ roll the ear became a more centralized
location for listening. The sexual practice of auralism rests on the argument
that musical signification (or elements of signification) signifies at the level of
the entire body through the orifice of the ear as an erogenous zone. Cusick
(1994) argues that music is sex; if it is sex, Rock ’n’ roll is its fetish. The partial
object is especially important here. Intimacy was evidently the problem:
the crossing of races, the crossing of classes, the crossing contact of bodily
flesh—all those crosses that grew out of the rhizomatic assemblage that was
Rock ’n’ roll. That is, if the semiological argument for music is indeed correct,
that elements of signification in music equate the substance of objects to
touch each other through their symbiotic patterns of signification through
difference in attraction, then, to quote Suzanne Cusick’s (1994: 00) well-
known postulate: “What if music IS sex? If sex is the only (only!) means of
negotiating power and intimacy through the circulation of pleasure, what’s to
prevent music from being sex, and thus an ancient, half-sanctioned form of
escape from the constraints of the phallic economy?” Indeed, but there are still
historically contingent consequences, ones that are aligned with the specificity
of Rock ’n’ roll’s particular musical signification: the symbiotic symptomatic
character of the backbeat … the echo.
In regard to the dialectic of emergence and event, we witness a reprise
between rhythm and repetition, since rhythm (emergence) occupied a central
place for the contentious reactions to Rock ’n’ roll, and repetition (event)
constitutes a central category of post-WWII consumption. If rememorization
denies the new as repetition, the Aufheben preserves and yet ceases. So perhaps
“repetition” does not stand as the correct word; perhaps something else inter-
venes. The deus ex machina that locates reconciliation in the contradiction
that instantiates the only change that is the shift in subject, a simple discovery
that was merely a terrible accident, like Elvis Presley at Sun Studios: what a
terrifying contingency, and one that will forever be New, which transcends the
material conditions of time to expose eternity-in-time. Repetition grounds us
yet changes us. In music, the subject is positioned where one perceives time-
itself (or eternity catching up with itself), as the pure moment of becoming.
 The Backdoor of Desire 77

But is this a position which privileges an ideologically grounded notion of

music as valued in the absolute? Repetition, after all, was the ground upon
which all Rock ’n’ roll was critiqued … strange, in the age where the consumer
was king, where suburbia offered comfort through the return of the same, why
was Rock ’n’ roll, through its iterative repetition on intertextual and intra-
textual scales (cover songs and signification of rhythm) attacked so violently?
 3

Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without

the Other

Vocal dis-identification

The first rule of dis-identification is that it requires over-identification. To

illustrate dis-identification with an example, we should examine the life of
Jerry Lee Lewis. The reason Lewis is such an interesting figure is that he is
aligned directly with this anxiety of relief from the approving gaze of the
Other. He is not the unintended symptom of consumerism but its wholly
abjected sinthome—the sinthome as a realm of dis-identification of impulse.
Back in Memphis, Sam Phillips busied himself in an attempt to find more
singers that fitted the Elvis Presley mould. From reading his interviews, we get
the impression that Phillips believed himself responsible for the emergence of
rockabilly, though any delusions of grandeur are entirely understandable. He
was a figurehead in the contingency. Although before Elvis, Sun Records was
open to record anything at any time, now Phillips stuck strictly to the disci-
plined regime of auditions. Sun had become known for its showcase of young
rockabilly cats from the South who were looking to break into the scene.
Another poor White Southerner, Lewis seems to have found a much-needed
escape with music, but was entirely ambivalent about his relationship with
it. He didn’t need to propose a rebellious image because his subjectivity was
aligned directly with his acts that consistently revealed the gaps of possessing
that which one desires. He transgressed the boundaries through sinthome that
his peers did through fantasy. Lewis revealed a dark twin of the crossing of
racial boundaries. Although rock history textbooks attest blandly that he was
called “The Killer” because of his stage antics, it does not dispel the perennial
80 Rancid Aphrodisiac

and favored idea that he was called such because two of his six wives died
under “mysterious circumstances,” one of whom was his 13-year-old cousin.
He did set a piano on fire when he was scheduled to open for Chuck Berry
during a rendition of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On” … then he said to
Chuck Berry as he walked off stage: “Follow that, Nigger.” The clash of cultural
icons: fire and the piano. Aligned with his “Great Balls of Fire,” a satirical song
mocking the Pentecostal moment when the Holy Spirit manifests itself as
“cloven tongues of fire,” “Great Balls of Fire” placed the spirit directly between
Lewis’s legs.
Jerry Lee Lewis converges on this Aufhebung of historical change first
through his over-identification with fire. Fire is central to the myth of the birth
of human civilization, and is a central theme in the constitution of the event,
the element which is at once destructive and regenerative, an unknown border
of the human psyche whose reality is entirely socially constituted. Bachelard
(1964) reminds us, for instance, that long before we know anything about fire’s
existence in the objective reality, we are not to touch it, or that there are conse-
quences for playing with it. Freud had written for years on fire as the myth of
the birth of human civilization regarding the power of acquisition over fire.
Physical reprimands for touching fire become scolds that we internalize as
the norms regarding the regulation of mythology through fire. This is why
Bachelard called the obtaining of knowledge of fire a kind of clever disobe-
dience—like Prometheus and the will to intellectuality (a not-too-distant cry
from the will to knowledge of Foucault). The funeral pyre is the destination of
mortality, the inevitable end. This act is conducive to the lyrics Chuck Berry
announced when he commanded Beethoven to roll over (is there a more
apropos Deleuzean sentiment than to ask the figures of the canon of history
to “roll over”?). Bachelard proposes, then, to place together under the name of
the Prometheus complex all those tendencies which impel us to know as much
as our fathers, more than our fathers, as much as our teachers, more than our
teachers. How it is by handling the object, it is by perfecting our objective
knowledge that we can best hope to prove decisively that we have attained the
intellectual level that we have so admired in our parents and in our teachers.
The acquiring of supremacy through the drive of more powerful instincts
naturally will appeal to a much greater number of individuals, but minds of a
 Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without the Other 81

rarer stamp also must be examined by the psychologist. If pure intellectuality

is exceptional, it is nonetheless very characteristic of a specifically human
evolution. The Prometheus complex is the Oedipus complex of the life of the
intellect (Bachelard 1964: 12).
Lewis’s second point of over-identification is with another marker of
civilization: the piano. The piano is a likewise yet antipodal socializing agent,
a technology of the domesticated self. The piano was traditionally a techno-
logical apparatus of the domestic space which facilitated social relationships
that were by and large gendered. In the private sphere, the piano was an
accomplishment; in the public sphere, it was a profession. As an institution in
the history of Western music at large, the piano is a site where the enlightened
logic of Western musical consciousness was securely locked within the
players—the principles of modern democracy with a black and white row
of keys. While the piano emerged from within specific musical and techno-
logical parameters during the early enlightenment, later becoming a staple
of Victorian high culture, in the industrial context it attained an important
position as a commodity. Indeed, the piano was the first type of “sound
carrier” (before the phonograph, gramophone or radio) to be produced for
mass consumption, specifically geared towards the domestic space while
holding an established public position of its own. Chanan (1994) argues that
the piano in its popular everyday existence fulfilled a “dual desire: both private
and public, solo and ensemble, intimate and exhibitionist,” which suggests
that the “invention of the piano was to music what the invention of printing
was to poetry;” the piano’s success was due to its being within reach of any
person who could afford one. While within the domestic space the piano was
a new and fascinating commodity, in the public space an increasing number
of those were attending high-culture events like virtuosic piano recitals,
becoming exposed to the piano’s potentials.
The Jerry Lee Lewis signifier is thus best seen as a collision between an
obsession over the intersections of death and renewal. Thus the clash between
civilization and destruction: fire, as the source of death and renewal, the
eternal flame for Jerry Lee Lewis, and the piano, his outlet and his burning
coffin. The pyrotechnic was a cremation not only of the classical music world,
a collision of two beginnings for civilization, but restitution. The medium
82 Rancid Aphrodisiac

itself does not make much sense as it is objective, the Real a sublime collision
of two signifiers of “origins” of civilizations, suggesting an alternate direction
for civilization. Framed within the symbolic world of the law, of musical
events, of states of being, its binding technology of articulation signified an
event that was more than the historical contingency that started it. A moment
of unrecognizability, the noise was at its noisiest for authorities, thus the music
was at its most deterritorializing for the attendees.
Jerry Lee Lewis’s life itself was wrought with the paradoxes that a psycho-
analyst would find beguiling. The psyche of Jerry Lee Lewis is unavailable to
any psychoanalytic interrogation because he is not present to respond in a
way that an analysand is able to contribute to an ongoing structural dialogue
regarding the slippery location of their desire. But his figure is available to us,
his presence as a performer, and the evidence that he was closer to the belief
in Rock ’n’ roll as a master signifier is perhaps the greatest of early Rock ’n’
roll. Simply, he didn’t purport a rebellious image and he didn’t have to sell it.
He was (and is) fascinating because he was talented, complex, tormented, and
believed himself a sinner, though he was perpetually seduced by women, by
music, and by whiskey. According to Morrison (1996: 92), Lewis knew there
were two possible destinations for himself: heaven or hell. Heaven was where
he wanted to go if only he could have changed his ways, but hell was the
one he knew he was destined to enter, because he knew change was impos-
sible. Having accepted his symptoms against the constraints of the Other, he
continuously transgressed his own boundaries in such a way that traversed
the fantasy that coordinated his desire. Between 1956 and 1963 he recorded
more than 160 songs though he only wrote a few, saying that songwriting was
what killed Hank Williams—though he may have fared well to write lyrics,
especially with spontaneous statements like: “I am what I am and not what
they want me to be. Why, I’m so unpredictable. I never heard a song I didn’t
like. I never seen a woman I didn’t love” (cited in Morrison 1996: 93).
Jerry Lee Lewis thus has a paradoxical relationship to the master signifier
of the rebel that would find other Rock ’n’ roll performers. Jerry Lee Lewis
provides for us a series of transgressive acts, as do the other Rock ’n’ roll
performers, but his is of a distinct class. It counts as the exception of trans-
gressive acts because the Lewis subjectivity does not retain the distance
 Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without the Other 83

from the master signifier of “rebel” in the same way that Elvis Presley or
others of the first generation had—the master signifier in this sense does not
quilt together meaning but rather returns the Real to the destination point
of signification that empties desire out of the Other. This is not to suggest
that Lewis was a sinner among saints, but his fear and his paranoia about
his own behavior suggest a more intense proximity, a more intense fidelity,
one aware of consequence, than in others. For instance, the 1957 argument
between Lewis and Sam Phillips is worth quoting at length. Lewis spells out:
“H-E-L-L!” He continues:
JLL: It says make merry with the joy of God. But when it comes to worldly
music, Rock ’n’ roll, anything like that? You have done brought yourself
into the world and you’re in the world, and you haven’t come out of the
world, and you’re still a sinner. And you’re a sinner, and unless you’ll be
saved, and born again, and be made as a little child, and to walk before
God, and to be holy. And, brother, I mean you got to be so pure. And no
sins shall enter there. No sin! […] It don’t say just a little bit. It says no
sin shall enter there. Brother, not one little bit. You got to walk and talk
with God to go to heaven. You got to be so good in his presence.
SP: Now look, Jerry. Religious conviction doesn’t mean anything resembling
extremism. All right. You mean to tell me, that you’re going to take the
bible, that you’re going to take God’s word, and that you’re going to
revolutionize the whole universe. Now, listen: Jesus Christ was sent here
by God almighty.
JLL: Right!
SP: Did he convict? Did he save all the people in the world?
JLL: No, but he tried to.
SP: He sure did. Jesus Christ came into this world. He tolerated man. He
didn’t preach from one point of view. He went around and did good …
JLL: That’s right! He preached everywhere!
[…]
SP: Now, here’s, here’s the difference. [Some nearly incoherent statements
made by Lewis regarding the lamb that made the wool.] Jesus Christ is
as real today as when he came into this world.
JLL: Right! You’re so right … [mumbling]
SP: Now, listen. I’m telling you, […] I have studied the bible. […] When you
think that’s you taint … can’t do good, Rock ’n’ roll responds.
84 Rancid Aphrodisiac

JLL: You can do good, Mr Phillips. […] You can have a [claps hands over]
kind heart!
SP: You can SAVE SOULS!!!
JLL: No! Nooo! Noooo! No! […] How can the devil save souls!?!? […] What
are you talking about!?!? […] Man, I got the devil in me! If I didn’t, I’d
be a Christian! […] Jesus […], he cast the devil out. The devil says:
“Where can I go? Can I go in the swine?” He [Jesus] said: “Yeah, go
unto.” Didn’t he go unto ’em?
SP: Jerry. The point I’m trying to make here, if you believe what you’re
saying, you got no alternative whatsoever.
JLL: Mr Phillips, I don’t care what you believe. […] It’s what’s written in the
bible.
SP: Now, wait a …
JLL: It’s what’s there, Mr Phillips. […] It ain’t what you believe, it’s just what’s
there.
SP: If it’s not what you believe, then how do you interpret the bible?
(Transcribed from YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-wsEcmwJK0)

Sam Phillips’s slip into the Other should be obvious here. The Freudian slip
is the turning point of madness in this exchange, when Phillips substitutes
“taint” for “can’t” and immediately corrects himself: I suspect, of “ain’t” and
“can’t”; to corrupt, contaminate, convict, to seize, perhaps not unrelated to
the manner in which Phillips is positioning his own authority over Lewis’s
conviction. This is the classic injunction of a superego command to enjoy
within the limits of inconsequential acts. The obvious insight here is that Sam
Phillips, faced with the potentially next Elvis Presley, made an attempt to use
Lewis’s faith as a means of saving people through Rock ’n’ roll. The question
is, thus, how could someone so close to Christianity believe he could not be
saved? What we have here is the glimmer of the successful union of capitalism
and Christianity, that the latter is now moved through the logic of the former.
Making a case for the “victory of liberal democracy” is the voice of Phillips,
standing in as a superego ideal, an Other. The clash of two universalisms is
central to the neoliberal coordinate of popular music’s imaginary space. Žižek
(2000: 211) argues, for instance, that:
 Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without the Other 85

Today, more than ever, one has to insist that the only way to open to the
emergence of an Event is that of breaking the vicious cycle of globalisation-
with-particularisation by (re)asserting the dimension of Universality against
capitalist globalisation. […] [W]hat we need today is the gesture that would
undermine capitalist globalisation from the standpoint of universal Truth, just
as Pauline Christianity did to the Roman global Empire.

And so the (Anti-)Christian does good with sin. The neoliberal Christian is
built upon the turn in the New Testament from the neighbor as a potential
threat to the neighbor as the target of universal brotherly love (a maxim that
would feed into the 1960s’ countercultural mantras of free sexual relation-
ships, psychic experimentation through drug consumption, and alternative
micro-political arrangements in living spaces and festival experiences). A
neighborly encounter, according to Žižek (1997), is the elementary encounter
with violence. It is the projection of one’s own hatred of oneself onto the image
of the neighbor, whom we then fear as invading our own pure bodies with
their sin; it is the reason that we are in a position to save the neighbor and
spread the central maxim of the Christian faith that aligns it, quite literally,
with a viral infection: spread the word. What else does Sam Phillips embody
in this situation other than a permissive force that compels sin to do good with
sin; that one may sin without the consequence of sin, but may in fact be useful
for carrying a message forward—an event without its consequence. Jerry Lee
Lewis becomes the neighbor that we fear because he is the one that is capable
of being saved, no matter how reluctant he is. The system of Law is edified
according to the logic of the scapegoat, and Lewis has no problem obeying
the law of sacrifice: he wilfully occupies the figure of the transgressor and
becomes the inherent transgression of a system built on a consumerist model
of capitalist accumulation. The inherent transgression becomes a focal point
for the Rock ’n’ roll ideology.
Paradoxically, Jerry Lee Lewis emerges as the moral boundary of the trans-
gression of subjectivity. In an extended discussion of inherent transgression,
Žižek asks what is at the center of the act of transgression itself other than the
very emergence of a moral boundary through which ideology is formulated.
The gap between the symbolic order and subject constitution is thus the point
of building idols through which the mediation of music can seem as though it
86 Rancid Aphrodisiac

is directly penetrating the unconscious. Music in this case is the direct reply
from within the gap between the symbolic and the subject, as that which
is the subject that is supposed to believe. Though one believes oneself as a
believer, one knows that one does not have unmediated access to the thing
that one believes in, so the sacrificial ideology is that a character must stand
in the place where one’s belief can be realized. This is how the subject is (a)
always decentered, and (b) socially constituted, because it cannot grasp its
own beliefs without internalizing the beliefs of an(O)ther who always appears
as the one perversely responsible for transgressing the boundaries of moral
responsibility. The act of censorship is thus central, a voice that truly believes
it is the sinner, the sacrificial lamb, in a world of sin, where that sin is projected
onto a figure that can be saved if that sin is annexed.
Thus emerges the superject, or the subject in relation to the sinthome.
As Edelman (2004) explains from a queer perspective, the subject without
authority must in the symbolic realm suffer certain death. It can only be
symbolized in terms of its sinthomatic rupture in the daily reality of the
symbolic. Why else would death play such a pertinent role in Rock ’n’ roll?
In 1957, when the USSR launched Sputnik, the USA became entrenched
in a political program to build a better future in a launch of the Star Wars
race, and so the children of today were seen as those in need of the most
protection for the sake of tomorrow. Tomorrow’s leaders, it was perceived,
were constantly under attack and were in need of the most state protection.
The loaded question presents a false dichotomy that immediately paints the
figure of the radical sexual being as an inherent threat to what Edelman calls
the ideology of reproductive futurism: either one is with children or one is
against them. It was a form of emotional, instead of rational, persuasion that
infiltrated key moments in political campaigns and debates. A form that was
crucial for the emotional persuasion based on unchecked morals, thus the
fantasy of the child shaped the model of the political itself: the ideological
limit on political discourse that renders unthinkable any position that does
not suit the root kernel of heteronormativity, making queer politics (not
LGBTTIQ community politics but cultural politics of queer theory) essentially
enemies of the state. The enemy of the state emerged as the enemy of the inner
sanctity and innocence of childhood, and was structured on the ideological
 Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without the Other 87

edifice of queerness. As much, in other words, as Western consumerist culture

thrives on those who transgress politically acceptable boundaries, indeed
those transgressions built into the value of those boundaries, the queer figure
is an example that Western culture employs to make a moral example of the
consequences of transgression. The inner mechanic of the drive to destroy the
queer is embedded in the political opinion that their acts alone do damage to
children by the very message they transmit. Political queering is the resistance
to the eventual realization of meaning in time (which is never fully realized
more than its desire to be realized).

Anarchic desire

Is it preposterous, then, to propose that music signifies through a system of

difference in attraction, which allows subjective access to the interior logic of
signification that produces jouissance? Perhaps an elementary, if not idealist,
stance on music, the proposition is misaligned with the Imaginary if only
because the concept of attraction is the counterpart to the alienated subject
that frames the very possibility of difference. Because the subject’s account
of Imaginary and Symbolic emerge from a point to which the subject has no
access, it is impossible to suggest that Imaginary structures can be penetrated
directly. For example, in Lacan’s graph of desire (beyond the elementary cell),
difference-in-attraction is accounted for by the destined alienated subject that
is now the departure point (posterior to the elementary cell of signification
that interpellates the subject into the Symbolic, an interpellation that grounds
at once the dimensions of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real). In the first
level of signification, the initial graph, recall, the subject’s mythical intention
is interrupted by the signifying chain and quilted through a master signifier
that alienates the subject from the possibility of totality, a prohibition built
into the very mechanism of signification by its retroactive quilting effect. It
is only following this alienation that the subject is capable of a relation to the
Other in an overriding course of (eventually dis)identification—I(A). The
Subject stands here in an imaginary identification with some aspect of the
symbolic order, mediated and meaning saturated through the recognition of
88 Rancid Aphrodisiac

the Other. The I(A) feature of identification summons the perplexing maxim:
“the signifier represents the subject for another signifier.” It is the concrete
form, to which the subject attaches itself as a means of identification, a kind of
ongoing elaboration of the mirror stage (which was not a successive stage, but
is an underlying plane of identification along all other modes of signification).
Since ego identification is less a process of internal regulation and more
how one perceives the self in the external environment, the subject places
its own ego outside itself as an objectified thing stained with the concrete
manifestation of the Other. Identification is constituted and constitutive:
“imaginary identification is identification with the image in which we appear
likeable to ourselves, with the image representing ‘what we would like to be,’
and symbolic identification, identification with the very place from where
we are being observed, from where we look at ourselves to that we appear to
ourselves likeable, worthy of love” (Žižek 1989: 116). To suggest, for instance,
that James Dean was a rebel-image that teenagers identified with is too simple.
Identification is far more complex than this. Imaginary identification is a kind
of identification with a jubilant excess of the Subject that short-circuits the
possibility of unification or renewal, as discussed explicitly in Lacan’s mirror
stage. The jubilant excess is precisely the short circuit between the i(a) and the
ego, whereby the image of oneself moving produces such an intense pleasure
in the perceiving subject aligned with the image of it-self. What is missing in
this identification is the place from which the subject identifies, and this is
the place of the Other (Naveau 2004). For as much as the subject sees itself as
the externalized ego, the imaginary identification, it experiences difficulty in
reconciling the point from which it sees itself. So we should be careful, warns
Žižek (1989: 117), not to “overlook the fact that imaginary identification is
always identification on behalf of a certain gaze in the Other.”
The uppermost portion of the Lacanian graph of desire configures experience
that constitutes the energy of pure desire (Figure 3), that is, desire dislodged
from the symbolic order beyond the bounds of the Other’s approving gaze.
The uppermost curvature stands opposed to the gestalt imaginary of a sexual
relationship: sexual fulfillment arises less by way of raw bodily connections
than through the fantasy coordinated by those material interactions that
transfer desire onto the desire of the Other. A sexual action must be escorted
 Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without the Other 89

by a qualifying recognition from the subject’s partner that it is a powerful

lover capable of satisfying the Other’s own insatiable appetite; even if their
insatiable appetite is to humiliate the subject, the subject still holds the power
that satisfies the Other’s desire. The top of the graph, however, the zone of pure
desire, is absent of the (A) which recognizes the subject in this split format. So,
the uppermost curvature asks us, what is left of desire without recognition?
The absence of representation … drive. To accommodate the uppermost
curvature the subject must undergo a process of self-transgression, is obliged
to evade the desire to satisfy the desire of the Other.
Self-transgression implies that the subject is potentially capable of coming
into contact with that component of being which is unknown to it, a
component of socialization through the mirror stage that instantiates the

Figure 3  The upper graph of desire

90 Rancid Aphrodisiac

feedback loop whereby the specular image teases the embodied subject with
the temptation to transgress its own frailty. It is a component of subjectivity
that lends political power to the credence of “demanding the impossible,”
apropos a subject socialized into complacency. Self-transgression enables a
means of recognizing the failures of the symbolic order to rationally integrate
the subject into its system either by raising the possibility of moral debate
regarding the boundaries of acceptability, or, even better, offering a radical
readjustment of those boundaries through an act which is derived from an
historical contingency to constitute a correlative event that expresses the union
of subject and action. This is why fantasy is the cornerstone for a subject’s
conception of reality; if the subject were aligned alone with the register of
res extensa without the mediation of the imaginary register it would have no
ability to negotiate with or transgress norms—there would be no conception
of the infinite without the closed circuit of the fantasy. Yet the transgres-
sions alone cannot be celebrated as espousing the freedom of the subject,
since the economic base of subjectivity is not simply to obey but equally and
perversely to transgress (and, “hey-hey, my-my,” enjoy itself). Fantasy, by way
of mediating between the symbolic and the imaginary, thereby is the locus
that allows for the possibility of transgressing the fantasy that sustains reality
in the symbolic realm. Fantasy may lead the subject towards a transgression
that is alienating and traumatic but potentially transformative. In this sense
we are never dealing with a centered subject, but one that confronts its own
negative dimension by way of a radical doubt.
This is where the top of the Lacanian graph of desire is at its most relevant,
where we recognize the absence of an Other for the Other. But the top of the
graph, the zone of pure desire, is absent of the (A), which recognizes only the
barred subject; with the anarchistic desire the (A) becomes obscenely disap-
pointed, making demands on a barred subject that is entirely unaware of its
own position except for its being mocked by the Other’s demand. The (A)
is itself not composed of this imaginary stuff that will uphold our preferred
visions of ourselves. It will, instead, subvert us into a disappointing position
that completes the cycle to the return of the barred subject, unaware of itself
until it has been approved of in the lower part of the graph. Why? The (A) is
asked what the barred subject should be in order to satisfy its desire: desire
 Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without the Other 91

is a regime for the vision of the I(A) as approved through its own gaze. In
opposition to the desire of the Other, which is ultimately symbolizable at the
lower register of the graph, the upper territory represents the anarchic desire
of subject as opposed to desire of other. Desire here displaces demand, spilling
its own excess beyond the capability of demand to position it in the gaze
of the Other. But separation transcends alienation and one cannot finalize
desire at the bottom rung of the graph. Another pathway of subject consti-
tution is possible (yet neurotic?): possible to enunciate subject position via
A.d.$<>a.S(A_). (A) reveals also the disjuncture of what one wants vs. what
they demand … being that thing of desire on the lower graph produces the
inability to bridge their disjuncture.
Thus, the logic of the complete graph: the S(–A) occupies a central place of
interest, because it is between two forms of desire that the subject is caught.
The subject asks the question of the Other, “what do you want from me?” and
the Other responds, as it does in school, that the Subject be subservient to the
reason of the Other: hand in your assignments, be rewarded the grade, move
towards the I(A), the imaginary identification of the self (the moi) in relation
to the gaze of the Other. But the Other can also refuse to speak and send the
subject into a kind of neurotic clamoring, refusing to answer questions that
position the subject as the Ego-Ideal in the clutch of the Other. This is where
the Other drops out almost entirely along a line of signification famously
known as jouissance that is beyond the machinic repetitions of language. How
can the lack not be productive? The lack is productive because it produces
the subject of jouissance, whereby what is missing (approval from the Other)
represents the trajectory of symbolization. You are unique—there is nobody
like you—you don’t need a boss to tell you what to do—are these not the lines
of neoliberalism? Were they not instilled in the youth culture from the very
end of WWII? The S(–A) occupies a very special place in the graph, then,
since it is the Other that allows the subject to occupy the answer to its own
question without recognition from the one s/he posed the question to; the
Other paradoxically may allow there to be something missing yet somehow
symbolized. In the upper part of the graph, the Other provides nothing, there
is no cause to embrace as the ground of the subject, which unlocks a kind
of neurotic desire. The Other either provides meaning at the bottom end of
92 Rancid Aphrodisiac

the graph with the signifier of alienation or it provides nothing, proving that
there is no discourse outside of discourse, that there is no guarantee of truth
outside of the statement of truth, that objective reality does not exist beyond
or before the signification that constructs it … really, the bar on the A should
have been an Anarchy symbol instead of a diagonal cross. How does one
move across the upper part of the graph? The lower part of the graph is easy
enough: it is answered in Lacan’s earliest formulations about the mirror stage,
something which anti-Lacanians appear to reject as though that small article
were somehow representative of his next 40 years of scholarship. The subject
is thus divided between meaning on the level of the signifier or jouissance on
the level of the subject without Other, purposeless, no cause. There is no cause
to embrace as the ground of the Subject unlocks neurotic desire.
What we find in the top movement of the graph is a movement from jouis-
sance to the absence of jouissance in the silence of the drive. Lacan calls this
part of movement the “minus phi,” or what Žižek calls the primal baptism
(related to Freud’s primal scene). This is the “first meaning” of a signifier, or
the master signifier that quilts ideological networks together. The point is, if
jouissance is symbolized it also is lost in the process of symbolization. It cannot
lack anything since it is not named itself but only has the designative task of
naming. In the impulse towards satisfaction and addressing, one can revoke
the addressing to be recognized by the Other and attain jouissance in drive
(enjoyment of loss in the loss of loss). Castration is simply the horizon that is
revealed through the ideological edifice of “other signifiers.” The name of the
father emerges when the subject is guided by the father he killed, a father that
does not know he is dead, a father that does not know he is absent. This is the
father of the Rock ’n’ roll musician: this is the father of neoliberal economics, the
clues of which were in these rebellious figures of youth in the 1950s. The image
of youth has us continuously fascinated with libertarian freedom from state
regimen.
The Che vuoi? is more than predestined alienation. It is the central feature—
for Žižek at least—of the graph, the point of potential when a subject may
make the decision between subjection and its radical negative undoing, the
consistent thread through symbolic identification, imaginary identification,
and that which is beyond identification (the upper level of the graph of desire).
 Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without the Other 93

The point at which the “I” is fixed (undermined by the fixation of the alienated
subject under the quilting effect of signification) is the most social fixation: the
performance for the internalized patterns of the Other’s penetrating gaze of
recognition and identification. It is whoever occupies the S(–A) who becomes
under the guise of Rock ’n’ roll the true hero, which is why his iconographic
ideology must be aligned with the idea that he can withstand anything in
perfect symmetry, even sacrifice his body (trajectory of the alienated subject)
without the consequences experienced or the causes known. The Rock ’n’ roll
rebel is the best kind of neurotic to fit the neoliberal persona. Individualistic,
autonomous, rugged, libertarian, conservative, all of this is commanded by
that which does not work, the objet a. Basically, it is from here that we take
the idea that we cannot know position and momentum at the same time. One
is known while the other is not. Science always has a limit: this is the truly
revolutionary core of science, by its own admission, that every step in the
service of knowledge anticipates its own falsification; it is produced in order
to be later falsified.
A backbeat is quilted self-descriptive, the object-cause of desire, the “real
thing,” the thing without an Other, a rebel without a cause. In this case, the
backbeat is incompatible with being recognized in the gaze of the Other,
much like the rebel who no longer asks the Other what it wants from him,
all while the while suffering the unbearable realization that the Other is not
unified, is instead itself full of holes, full of its own misguided misrecognition
and inability to sustain a whole—what is discovered is that there is no Other
to the Other. The backbeat is not on a course of meaning, but a trajectory of
jouissance, unbearably free of authority. The upper level of the graph provides
the signifier a signification without signified (a signifier without signified is a
signifier without meaning, which comes from the justification and identifi-
cation of the Other). This type of signifier is the scar tissue of signification in
general, a scar tissue that is experienced by the subject as jouissance, a signifier
that is at once terrifying as it is exciting, unsymbolizable, yet entirely existent
solely within the symbolization process.
The inversion here is thus: the rebel is less rebellious than a relentless
and insatiable happening of displaced rebellions. It is what one expects of a
rebel. The “rebel” refers only to itself, the self-evident claim, something that
94 Rancid Aphrodisiac

needed to be explained with studies of delinquency, films about conformity,

all the while producing the most irrational fears themselves: duck and cover,
watch for gays, don’t have premarital sex, don’t drink or smoke. Recall the
surplus of educational films that not only morally regulated women through
a series of domesticating routines, but obscenely displayed the consequences
of masculine rebellion in films that depicted violent assaults and homosexual
encounters between men. The teenage death song is a case in point that
illustrates the irrational fear that eventually found its way into the jouissance
of rock music (Denisoff 1983); it was the identification of Rock ’n’ roll with
a morality of heterosexual monogamy. First, the rebel in the teenage death
song is always approved of by the parents; second, the song, though ending
in death, more appropriately ends with the cry of commitment from the
lover left behind, that she will always be his and wait until she herself reaches
heaven to touch his hand again (“Running Bear,” “Teen Angel,” “Tell Laura
I Love Her,” “Moody River,” “Patches,” “Leader of the Pack,” “Last Kiss,” and
so on). He who lives outside of the law becomes the victim of that law. Žižek
(1989: 108) explains:

It is because the Real itself offers no support for a direct symbolization of it—
because every symbolization is in the last resort contingent—that the only way
to experience that a given historic reality can achieve its unity is through the
agency of a signifier, through reference to a “pure” signifier. It is not the real
object which guarantees as the point of reference the unity and identity of a
certain ideological experience—on the contrary, it is the reference to a “pure”
signifier which gives unity and identity to our experience of historical reality
itself. Historical reality is of course always symbolized; the way we experience
it is always mediated through different modes of symbolization: all Lacan adds
to this phenomenological common wisdom is the fact that the unity of a given
“experience of meaning,” itself the horizon of an ideological field of meaning, is
supported by some “pure,” meaningless “signifier without the signified.”

Rock ’n’ roll was not only aesthetically vacuous under the gaze of dominant
ideology but was a political threat. Testimony against Rock ’n’ roll, for instance,
outright contended that it was a threat to the democratic system of meritocracy,
as evidenced through the payola hearings. That threatening thing in Rock ’n’
roll was symbolized as a threat to democracy. Congress had heard testimony
 Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without the Other 95

that radio station owners owned stock in Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), its only
evidence being the value judgment against the music’s inherent distastefulness:
“why else would they play such music?” Thus, the quilting effect of the signifier
of rebellion (that which positioned transcendence from signifieds through the
raw material of signification) threatened the democratic core of a pre-WWII
meritocracy. The only way to define a democratic movement is any movement
whose ultimate service, its guiding thread of coherence, is in the service of
a context-dependent idea of democracy. All democratic movements serve
to legitimize democracy as a supreme signifier, a signifier without signified,
a self-justified apparatus of jouissance (not “meaning”). This is the radically
anti-essentialist account of democracy. The master signifier works in a series
of binary oppositions that obliterates its very ability to exist because it can only
be differential (there is no signified). What is the structural function of the
master signifier of the ideological edifice, that which makes it a performative
functional operative? With Rock ’n’ roll posing a legitimate threat to the estab-
lished music industry, what other choice did the latter have but to annihilate
the potential of the former?
Meaning is an operative of the signifying function of language in which
the demand made to the Other is spoken back, positioning the subject as
an Imaginary constitution, recognizing itself in the reflective gaze of the
Other. In this realm of meaning, when one is quilted into the imagination of
a saturated meaning, we are exposed to the true power of the pure signifier,
“the element through which the signifier’s non-sense erupts in the midst of
Meaning” (Žižek 1989: 99), something which stands for all other signifiers,
which makes all the other signifiers “make sense.” When the embodiment
of pure lack appears to stand as the supreme guarantee of meaning, “pure
difference is perceived as Identity exempted from the relational–differential
interplay and guaranteeing its homogeneity” (Žižek 1989: 110). The master
signifier rules by way of its deferral across all signifiers as a form of general
equivalence. It is not relational but is rather threaded through in a retroactive
manner.
Music as a form of communication plays with the quilted signifiers at
a synchronic intensity. The mind perceives the sublime in sound elements
that fold into homogeneity, quilted by a seemingly infinite permutation of
96 Rancid Aphrodisiac

master signifiers that signify through difference in repetition. If they are

master signifiers, then why is music the signification of the imaginary? Why
does it idealize the self so greatly? Is it that it idealizes the self through the
abandonment of the Other? Is it the Other that finally responds with its own
annihilation, an ideology of complete hegemony? Why must certain types of
music be dominated by certain conventions? Indeed, it is paradoxical that
noise disrupts as incessantly as it does. That which is noisy should be most
comforting to democracy because it is produced through pure difference,
even though those who protected their context-dependent democracy reacted
against the Other that it was responsible for producing in and through
difference for progressive social change. The question that the graph leaves
for Žižek is the ideological one: for Žižek the ideological is the domain that
escapes the quilting network of signification. If master signifiers operate in
such a manner as to quilt together the signifiers of a belief system, is there any
residue left over in the process? Yes, there is. This residue, as Fink describes
above, is what marks the significant difference between a “human mechanism”
and the “mechanistic human.” Recall that the central point of interest for Fink
in the graph is the S(–A), the Subject without recognition from Other on the
line of jouissance. While for Fink, however, who is a faithful psychoanalytic
Lacanian, this domain marks the potential for human beings to traverse the
fantasy that keeps them locked to their imaginary (mis)recognitions, Žižek
prefers to read this potential on a much broader social level. Žižek empha-
sizes the necessity to read the upper part of the transition as a continuation
of the original question, or rather that the former can only be understood as
an elaboration upon the initial question of the Other in the lower destination
towards the I(A).
Regarding the first graph, Žižek points out that this part of the graph is
an elaboration of Althusser’s well-worn “interpellation of the subject” (see
Boucher 2012)—the point at which the subject is interrupted by a social
process that subjectifies him as the end result of an address from the state: the
famous “Hey You!” of the police officer that addresses no name yet addresses
anyone who hears it. We can only ever make sense of it through the symbolic
order, so to call it something too close to nature is to cling ideologically to
this notion that somewhere before language was a state where we were at last
 Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without the Other 97

(at lost) whole with nature. Žižek argues that the ideological effect of trans-
ference occurs through the retroactive thread, that at the point of meaning
construction, at the point that the “slippage” of the signifieds settles under
the auspices of the master signifier, fixed meanings exude an aura that their
meanings were fixed all along. Despite that doubt in meaning in a signified, the
master signifier in its quilting effect effaces the other meanings as false, indeed
forecloses them, and the other signifiers give the appearance in retrospect
that their meanings were fixed (tied to) the dominant belief system all along.
The graph represents a Lacanian progression from the symbolic/imaginary
register to the dialectic that forms the subject’s obedience to, and transgression
from, authority. The subject of the rebel, for instance, can identify with its
image, but for the sake of the freedom behind it, one cannot approach that
freedom directly, so it requires the total immersion of the subject in a world
whereby the ideal is continuously evaded through intense repetitions of
difference in the chain of signification: though the subject can perceive its self,
it cannot perceive itself unless through the gaze of the Other. Psychoanalytic
readings are interested in precisely the location of the subject that cannot
know itself or its constitutional makeup, the position that guarantees that
there are “things known” unknown to the subject since the subject cannot
acquire objective knowledge about the unconscious position. This does not
mean that the unconscious cannot be known, which is a very different thing
to say from knowing the unconscious. As Mowitt articulated already, the
backbeat is always-already lost. The first is only known by its own repetition.

The rancid aphrodisiac of cretinous goons

In 1955, only 16 percent of records that made it to the Top Ten were catego-
rized as Rock ’n’ roll. But by 1959, 42.7 percent of record sales were attributed
to the genre, although it sounded exceptionally dissimilar from only a few
short years earlier (Garofalo 1997: 152; Peterson and Berger 1975, Cycles
in symbol production: 123). Independent record companies had become
successful in overtaking the vertically integrated system which the American
Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) had lived by for
98 Rancid Aphrodisiac

more than half a century. In fact, independent labels contributed 66.3 percent
of popular music profits in 1959 while the vertically integrated industry lost
shares (Garofalo 1997: 127).
It is not unlikely that labels like RCA Victor and Columbia were slow
to notice the Rock ’n’ roll emergence because of ideological issues involved
in soliciting music that appeared so blatantly sexual, that crossed cultural
boundaries in a society only just recently experiencing the beginnings of
the civil rights movement, and that appealed to potential audience members
otherwise perceived as rebellious. For years they were adhering to their own
ideological coordinates of middle-class safety as opposed to giving people
what they obviously desired.
So Columbia and RCA Victor, together with other powers of industry,
especially ASCAP, launched an attack against Rock ’n’ roll along with the US
government called the war on rock (Sanjek 1972). Major record companies
soon realized the money-generating power of Rock ’n’ roll, and so adopted
numerous strategies in order not to disappear. RCA Victor, for instance,
bought Elvis Presley from independent label Sun Records for an unheard-of
$35,000, a purchase which baptized Elvis into the pop mainstream and elimi-
nated his swivelling hips from his live performances. Columbia followed suit
in 1958 when they bought Johnny Cash. Cleaning up had a lot to do with it.
Bill Haley and His Comets regularly cleaned up sexually suggestive lyrics of
Rhythm and Blues numbers, replacing such lines as “you wear low dresses the
sun comes shining through” with “you wear those dresses your hair done up
so nice.” One strategy in the war on Rock ’n’ roll was thus to cleanse it of its
obscenity. Major record labels offered well-known distractions to the public
that at once catered to the demand for youthful singers yet conformed to the
good taste of the more conservative ASCAP membership. Idols such as Pat
Boone and Frankie Avalon were wholesome and attractive, usually Italian,
performers who appeared exotic without the danger of segregation (again,
Žižek’s history without consequence comes to mind). This figure, the stand-in
figure of rebellion without consequence (not rebellion without cause), was
Harry Belafonte’s 1956 recording of “Banana Boat”: a safer exoticism, a
Trinidadian form of music called calypso. Urban Folk was equally a viable
distraction, represented by the likes of the Kingston Trio, clean-cut college
 Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without the Other 99

kids who would in the 1960s grow their hair long and solicit calls to “Feed
your head.” In terms of form, especially in regard to retaining form without its
consequence, nowhere do we see greater evidence of the risk of consequence
annexed from form as in Dick Clark’s American Bandstand with its series of
friendly heterosexual teen couples dancing to “The Twist” as sung by Chubby
Checker. Originally written and sung by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters as
a sexually suggestive “twist” soliciting the love interest to “put on a tight dress”
and “twist til the break of day,” the dance, as co-opted by American Bandstand,
and others like it (the Monkey, the Mashed Potato) required no contact
whatsoever between the heterosexual pair, who appeared to be facing each
other out of custom more than out of physical desire. What danger could there
be in a dance in which the most concealed part of the body is the genitals?
So what we see as a moral reaction to Rock ’n’ roll wasn’t so much that
sexuality and racial difference existed, but it was more that sexuality and racial
difference existed in a white middle-class context. For years Rhythm and
Blues and Blues, along with certain forms of country, didn’t generate massive
retaliation from the government or other organizations largely because that
music was segregated just as well as the social groups that were performing
that music; now it was apparent that a cultural crossover was occurring and
that was simply unacceptable. In 1954 an editorial in Variety called the lyrics
that were hitting the airwaves “leer-ics” to hint at the degenerate immoral
sexual displays that were contaminating the youth (the editorial was reprinted
in a number of contexts), so while word was spreading, the authorities were
making claims to what was “obscene,” and a number of songs were banned—
such as “Sixty Minute Man,” and even the Everly Brothers’ “Wake up Little
Susie.” (Gillett 2011: xxxix)
Repressive apparatuses articulated values about the form (not the content)
of Rock ’n’ roll—they repressed in the name of good taste. If the content of
music is the bodily text, as Shepherd would argue, here is the list of terms one
discovers on the form: a communicable disease, cannibalistic and tribalistic,
rebellion, insecurity, boisterous carryings on, stampede, “rings and shrieks
like the jungle bird house at the zoo,” deafening shrieks, tumult, spasti-
cally gyrating performers, obsessive beat, reluctant listeners, resemblance
to Hitler’s mass meetings. As previously noted in Chapter 1, the renowned
100 Rancid Aphrodisiac

classical conductor Herbert von Karajan claimed that “strange things happen
in the blood stream when a musical resonance coincides with the beat of the
human pulse.”
But the main attack against Rock ’n’ roll manifested mainly into arbitrary
corners of ownership in full scope of the law. The industry had introduced
the term “payola” to describe the illegal practice whereby DJs accepted pay
for play from independent record companies. The charges were laid between
1959 and 1960, though the senate suspected the practice had been going on
for decades. The battle was largely waged by ASCAP and its conservative
membership’s mandate to make a public return to “good music,” one of many
strategies to maintain its grip on the market (Garofalo 1997: 153). This is
probably the most obvious case of prohibitive superego manifested in the full
extent of the law, and where the concept of moral panic becomes in and of
itself an event that transcends the historical situation that determined it.
The payola hearings appear to have been motivated less by evidence of
rising crime rates and more simply by the presence of raucous-sounding
music. As investigations into television quiz show scandals were on the
decline, the House Judiciary Committee began to investigate whether radio
stations owned stock in BMI, ASCAP’s direct competitor for the popular
music market. Funny that there was literally nothing suggesting such an
activity was occurring except for the fact that “payola” was a practice long
known to the music industry, crucial to the success of popular songs in early
vaudeville during Tin Pan Alley’s inaugural years (Garofalo 1997: 154–5). It
was a preventive measure, however, because never was so much on the line.
Frank Sinatra testified, for instance: “See how evil Rock and Roll is? This is
the kind of thing those people at BMI would do. So we have to put a stop to
it before it starts. If BMI gets most of the airplay we lose our jobs because of
a corrupt system.” In another context, Sinatra provided his proof of Rock ’n’
roll’s negativity:

It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.

It smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written for the most part
by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and
sly-lewd—in plain fact, dirty—lyrics, and as I said before, it manages to be the
marital music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.  This
 Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without the Other 101

rancid aphrodisiac I deplore. (Gertrude Samuels, “Why They Hate Rock ’n’
roll—and Should They?” New York Times Sunday Magazine, 12 January 1958,
pp. 19–20, emphasis added)

Payola hearings in 1959 proceeded based on a precise presumption that DJs

were taking illicit pay to play degenerate music, a pay that would prevent the
music of the beautiful soul (i.e., the mainstream vertically integrated Tin Pan
Alley industry) from hitting the airwaves. Should society be deprived of its
own imagined good taste, society would be deprived of a moral compass,
along with it a slippery slope towards anarchy. There was proof too: a value
judgment. A form of music so innately inferior as Rock ’n’ roll could only be
permitted on the air should a DJ be paid money for it. This was the argument,
at least, presented by the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign
Commerce. The most public target of these accusations, as we know, was
Alan Freed, the New York DJ who had become the most active member of
the first major crossover hit generation to grasp the dominant cultural norm
of popular music. In 1960 he was arrested for accepting $30,000 in payola,
was charged again with tax evasion in 1964, and died the following year
unemployed and near-homeless (Garofalo 1997: 156). Why? Because of a
value judgment against form and not content.
What value can be derived from using Rock ’n’ roll as a means of expli-
cating the potentials of social psychoanalytic cultural criticism? It is not
necessarily conceptually productive to remain attached to social psychoa-
nalysis as though it were a rubric in order to recover the potentially radical
core of early Rock ’n’ roll; yet it is not entirely responsible, sociologically
speaking, to disconnect a cultural process from its historical context, no
matter what the autonomy of the event that historical contingency affords.
Psychoanalytic cultural criticism is not about locating the unfulfilled Oedipus
complex in whatever appears pathological. This would be a disservice to the
Freudian legacy of potentially uncovering the libidinal charges of unconscious
desire that negotiate with dominant ideas. Indeed, even if the purpose here
was to find the emergence of an imaginary stricture, it is still produced by
way of an encounter between disparate systems of thought. There is more to
be done in terms of an encounter that produces, sublimates, subordinates, and
102 Rancid Aphrodisiac

emancipates subjects from their own historical contingencies. But such radical
reconceptualizations are not enough on their own. They are never complete.
We may note, for instance, in their technological and multimediated milieu,
the sounds of Rock ’n’ roll and its lyrics themes, that the imaginary space of
postwar consumption was afforded by the rise in imaginary institutions. As
much as Rock ’n’ roll is the rupture of the semiotic into the symbolic, it is still
best conceived as the non-reducible space for the pre-linguistic negotiation of
subject.
The hysteric discourse is the discourse of the rebel that was edified in the
last chapter as the coordinated line of flight from the Other, acknowledgment
that the Other has its own lack, and its own holes, because it is also subject
to the rules of the same symbolic order (Evans 1997: 82–83). The barred
subject here occupies the place of the agent: maintains conflict in desire, stuck
between the two signifiers, starts to question the master signifier. The S1 as the
object of the $’s actions is forced to reconcile that it has gaps in its authority,
to say that there are conflicts in its knowledge system; hysterics always tell us
that our tools are inadequate and are therefore most likely to progress. The
hysteric discourse actually occupies a favorable ethical place in this system,
because it produces change. Part of the production, though, is lack; the S2
now occupies the place of the leftover, and so as much as it is a train of infor-
mation, it is also serving the split subject, who finds (by way of challenging the
master signifier) a lack in the Other that facilitates the negative freedom—a
terrifying course of freedom that eventually leads to the castration, since the
jubilant excess of that freedom can lead to types of freedom repulsive to the
subject who wanted them (the stabbing at Altamont). The S2 in this position is
a unique configuration of knowledge that is produced out of lack in the Other:
it is the leftover produced through the agent–Other interaction and so is used
to produce not justification for the master but to expose the master’s lack (no
other to the Other); it produces something new when it is at the service of the
subject which refuses to be interpellated.
Take “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” by the Shirelles. In the early 1960s,
the Girl Group fad had hit the United States in light of “unsafe” Rhythm and
Blues being banned on the radio, and groups like the Shirelles, the Chantelles,
and the Ronettes were producing hundreds of songs on the radio, covered
 Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without the Other 103

by the Beatles. The girl groups were unusually political, exemplified in the
Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” because of the concrete dealing
with a choice over a sexual situation—here the girl is not an object of a man’s
desire, but a person faced with a real choice with real consequences. Such a
position of the Other is recognized as the figuration towards which one may
pose the question, “What do you want from me?” The master discourse here
is pushed to the position where it is lacking, where it is the other of the agent,
its production of new truths.
To meditate further on the perceptions of Black culture through Rock ’n’
roll lends credibility to the unknown rebel, because it is deeply entwined with
racial politics in the United States. Lacan and Žižek are particularly useful,
especially in regards to racial politics of Rock ’n’ roll, because the Lacanian
paradigm allows us the opportunity to reveal the racist stricture of the form
encapsulated in the figure of the obscene—the Rebel. First of all, according to
this critique, the Freudian superego is not a simple compass for the navigation
of everyday norms and law. The superego is rather made up of the same stuff
as the repressed urges of the subject, typically called the Id. To be a moral
conductor, the superego must be aware of how to properly channel the
repressed urges of the Id, and so at once must be prohibitive yet injunctive—it
must propel the subject to enjoy the secret perversions of desire through
socially sanctioned relatively autonomous precincts. The prohibitive superego
thus reinforces law through social institutions. The injunctive superego,
however, offers an excess of enjoyment, which the prohibitive superego is
well aware that the subject has access to. The mainstream music industry
(those who dominated the industry in the early part of the twentieth century)
reacted somewhat to the obscene lyrics of Rhythm and Blues-style Rock ’n’
roll, but they reacted more to the gyrations of Elvis Presley, the pumping piano
of Jerry Lee Lewis than to obscene lyrics; reactions were to form, in other
words, not content. The fantasy of a White music industry was interrupted by
the obscene and injunctive music industry of independent networks, manifest
most obviously to those in power as racialized. Yet, in such a time where
consumer is king, why did Rock ’n’ roll, a heroic tale of democracy, capitalism,
and upward mobility if there ever was one, get shut down? To understand the
moral rage and the emotional premises upon which legislation was drafted
104 Rancid Aphrodisiac

against Rock ’n’ roll, the Lacanian constitution of the unconscious medium
needs to be more fully explicated.
Echo implicates an exterior resonance to the Lacanian graph of desire
as the prosthetic stain of the voice. The psychoanalytic conception of the
object-voice positions it as the antithesis to the barred subject, since as a
remainder it is not based on any system of differentiation through which
meaning in signification is produced (whether difference through attraction
or difference through repulsion). It is not to say that the recording, as the
surplus production of prosthetic vocality, is essentially meaningless, but recall
the inability to commit the imaginary space of the recording to an original
event. It is obvious in the graph, for instance, that the subject is identified
through the production of meaning (i.e., how the Other responds to the
demand, produced through signification mechanism as a split or alienated
subject from that of the mythical intent, again, “the subject is represented by
a signifier for another signifier”). The phonocentric fallacy is that the voice
produces language, or that the latter is the residue of the former, granting
the voice a kind of unifying ideology that is, under the guise of so many
theories, “prelinguistic” signification. The voice territorializes the tape in such
a manner that grants the track an autonomy that is characteristic of the event
that rises above the surface of its own emergence. In such a manner, the voice
is the object cause of desire for the track—it is the studio producer’s task to
locate the meaning of the track in the veracity of the voice.
It is possible to transgress norms by way of a subversive ideological subjec-
tification. The subject confronts its own limit when it is in possession of the
object it desires: the law of non-contradiction sets off a panic switch, as one
cannot truly be in possession of the object of desire, since the latter maintains
its semblance at a distance. Possession transforms the object of desire into
something shocking that little resembles the object at a distance. The law of
compulsive repetition and eternal return dictates that the subject must revoke
the object of desire by retreating into a radical doubt. The shared identity
between the object and the subject here is how they are infiltrating a thing
which bears little constitutive consistency. The confrontation with the thing,
that is, the once-object-of-desire now drained of its own consistency to reveal
the radical confrontation with doubt, is the virtuality of the infinite totally
 Backbeat, Echo, and the Other without the Other 105

indifferent to the suspension of reality or the subject’s ongoing perception

it is contained within, requiring a desubjectivation to confront the thing, a
practice that engages the infinite outside the concentric circle of logic that
binds the binary of symbolic/imaginary relations. The paradox of denying the
law of non-contradiction of the object-of-desire (once sustaining the subject’s
immersion in “reality”) is enough to pose a conceptual deadlock, a paradox
that can be overcome in the clasp of its obscurity. The inevitable failure in
the system of meaning marks the political potential for self-transgression in
subjectivity, part of the system that contains the possibility for moving beyond
the system.
Thus, the quilting effect returns: the rational operation of meaning
construction, yet contained within such a rational system is the contradictory
component that lends the possibility of that system’s self-destruction. When
the system of meaning returns the object of desire, it is the revelation of the
fundamental flaw in that system. The logic that so much risk prevention goes
into the making of machines, when the self-destruction occurs it can be as
everyday as the Freudian slip or the pivotal historical event as in the sinking
of the Titanic. If Žižek (2000: 347) argues that “the only way to reach the
truth of some notion or project is to focus on where the project went wrong,”
then what went wrong with the project is obvious: the appropriation of the
discourses of Black culture as the figure of obscene enjoyment in a White
supremacist narrative which enjoys the act without the act’s consequence
(that of confronting radical negativity and thus the disappearance of subject-
desire), hidden from the view of the big Other, questioning its own authority.
The imaginary space of covers pulled consequences out of the act. But it
should be remembered that alienation is misleading if taken as inevitable.
Alienation can also be profoundly transformative. Alienation is not alienation
of labor but alienation of the barred subject from the regulatory restraints
of desire under the gaze of the Other. Alienation from the Other might be
especially liberating because pure desire, as inexpressible (because of the lack
of Other in its presence), permeates inarticulate experience. It allows not for
the possibility of becoming an anarchic subject, one free of constraint, but
for one wherein the subject self-determines their ability to do so. In keeping
with Glynos and Straviakis’s (2008: 257) assertion that “identifying a narrative
106 Rancid Aphrodisiac

as a specifically fantasmatic narrative, involves honing in on the affective

investment made in one or more of its elements, as well as the subject’s trans-
gressive relation to an officially affirmed ideal,” it is little wonder that the
semiologically specific elements of musical processes allowed for a kind of
relative autonomy of subjectivity, given the consumerist ethos of the times was
located around producing this type of individualism.
While the Durkheimean paradigm would, perhaps, suggest that the trans-
gression of norms facilitates our awareness of their boundaries, the strictly
psychoanalytic reading perceives those transgressions as having potentially
political alterations. Fantasy is structured within the constitution of the
subject in such a way as to allude to movement from misrecognition
towards attainment of the Ideal-Ego, which is always beyond reach. In
order for the structure of fantasy to be maintained, the reach beyond the
boundaries must remain the same. But it is equally important to understand
how the transgression can lead to the formation of new master signifiers
being quilted into the subject’s worldview, expanding evermore each time
a transgression is facilitated, when the boundaries that sustain fantasy are
significantly challenged. The more recently empowering narratives around
self-transgression are important to acknowledge, given their implications for
true political change, but the case I am investigating here is how new master
signifiers were deployed to revoke the inherent transgressions of Rock ’n’ roll
musicians. Knowing full well that regimes do not sustain their power through
the sole techniques of repression, the Foucaultian impulse informs that trans-
gression and permission is especially central to the means by which discourse
of power/knowledge/pleasure is productive to a subjectivity whose acts align
directly with the identities they subsume. If Foucault was quick to call such
regimes “knowledge,” I am partial to sticking with the old term “ideology.”
What sustains the position of the subject is not the obedience to the rules,
but the individual way in which they stand apart from the rules that contain
them—what Žižek (1998a) calls dis-identification.
 Conclusion

Affect and the Medium of the Real

Mobilizing the medium of desire

The performative semiological model, with which I end this book, offers
a historically situated position for the transcendence of subjectivity to the
anarchic position of traversing a fantasy of desire, which arises when we
transpose components of Lacanian psychoanalysis onto Shepherd and Wicke’s
(1997) semiological model of musical performance (Figure 4). First, we
examine the two external worlds, as proposed by the semiological model. In

Figure 4  Shepherd and Wicke’s performative semiological model (1997: 170)

108 Rancid Aphrodisiac

the original model, Shepherd and Wicke offer a tripartite vision of imaginary
reality composed of two external worlds to the left and to the right of the
internal world. I read the left external world as the Real and the right external
world as the Symbolic, the internal world as the Imaginary. If we were to polit-
icize and historicize the semiological model with the study here, it would read
something like this (it is assumed the reader will follow the graph closely):

1. The external world of the Real: The left of the “internal world”
demarcates a territory incapable of being encroached upon directly,
a virtual discursive network of recording practices that vanish under
the guise of a simulacrum performance. Its slippage into the internal
world depends on a technology of articulation which does not perceive
signifiers, but is facilitated by the amplification of the historically
contingent logic of the quilt. The transition works by way of gestures
which are perceived as fused to the medium. In this case, the medium
consists of a kind of effect of its own. This, however, is an aspect of sound
that remains underappreciated in Shepherd and Wicke’s conception, and
I suggest a set of terms in thinking about the medium below according
to a post-phenomenological conception of the affect. The medium is here
conducive with Lacan’s notion of the Real.
a. Sound as medium (the Real): The sound as medium occupies the
“external world” as the Lacanian Real, a concept that is coterminous
with the restricted jurisdiction of jouissance. Recall, music signifies
through an irreducible medium that undoes yet informs the subject,
not a signifier that bars the subject from its spectral image through
the discourse of the Other. The medium cannot be reduced simply
to a McLuhanesque sonic dissemination device (the phonograph
record, the transistor radio, the concert hall, the television, the guitar,
the voice, and so on), because a network of other media contains
each medium. Indeed, the medium in the Rock ’n’ roll era was an
assemblage of various forces and contingencies converging under
the new logic of horizontal integration. A subject was embedded in
the Rock ’n’ roll medium if aligned with the lifestyle of attending
concerts, listening to transistor radios, talking in a certain fashion
 Conclusion 109

aligned with idols and peers, buying and listening to phonograph

records, performing those records himself or herself with peers, etc.
This is why Ong’s notion of the “sensorium” (1967) is in particular an
apposite concept. Indeed, depending on the context, a situation that is
perceived as meaningfully musical is one within which the assemblage
of information is overcoded in such a way as to convey sonic
information directly to states of awareness. The linguistic underpinning
of this idea is thus that a medium cannot be revealed for what it is,
for that would undo the subject, its symbolic and imaginary matrix
shattered at the sight of what a medium is. Just as a train is built to
prevent its own disaster, there is a death drive within the medium that
needs to be pushed out of the socio-symbolic frame. It is similar with
the event: the event is the content of its ecological emergence, the latter
of which is something that cannot be accounted for but its general
“feeling,” its affect. Once we date an emergence, it is no longer an
emergence, it becomes subject to a historical date. Through the very
notion of the medium, subjectivity is consistently grounded between
the no-more and not-yet, it is a rhythm and a pulse, but not necessarily
a meter. It is not something measurable. Its measurement might be the
observable changes in their environment, but that’s all. It is the level of
connotation. To revisit the notion of the echo, whereas in pre-WWII
recordings the echo may have embellished the denotative signification
of a musical event, the echo in this context constituted a central
connotation of privatized space for consumption practices.
2. The internal world of the imaginary: In opposition to the arbitrary
connection of signifier and signified, Shepherd and Wicke propose that
signification in music is non-arbitrarily determined by the fixity of
signifieds over more negotiable signifiers. In this case, it is composed of
the rebel, the anarchic subject, racialization of material, the “postmodern”
performer, the racialized other, the (literally) disappearing woman, and
all those other elements of meaning that bind a subject to its material
property which justifies its identity. The mental concepts are modes
of self-reflection, the historically constituted dimension of the subject,
and those aspects that are bound to be determined by scripts like Rebel
110 Rancid Aphrodisiac

Without a Cause, the juvenile delinquent of the 1950s: imaginary states of

“being-listener,” “being-stigma,” and “being-delinquent.”
a. Sonic saddle (Quilt): How does the medium evade the awareness of
the subject? By way of the central constitutive quilting effect that at
once secures yet undoes the subject. The medium is the domain of the
Real, it cannot be approached directly but through this double-take of
the quilt. The medium slips into the sonic saddle by way of a quilting
effect, a quilt at the elementary baptismal cell that interpellates the
subject into the subject of a social institution. The slippage that
occurs from the medium to the sonic saddle is facilitated ultimately
by misrecognition and by the warding off of jouissance. The sonic
saddle affords a kind of specular joy in the subject which is motivated
by jubilant excess to control his mirror opposite, just as a first event
does not appear until it is repeated and framed in an ongoing spatio-
temporal hindsight. Once Rock ’n’ roll was annexed from its literal
sexual denotation, it became a fear of invasion or threat of the
stolen good. The backbeat is the quilt that takes music from within,
something that emphasizes the beat over the harmony, that takes the
anamorphic stance of a rhizomatic rebellion in the culture industry.
When Elvis Presley’s performance on The Steve Allen Show was taken
as “musical,” it was because the quilting effect of hound dog resonated
unconsciously with other coterminous events: His Master’s Voice of
RCA, the co-option of Rhythm and Blues (Big Mama Thornton), the
rise of the televisual medium, the dominance of the performer over
the performance, the annexing of sexual references, the overt sexual
references, the backbeat drive; everything in a moment is framed by
how it is quilted into the fantasy of the subject’s knowledge system.
This is why self-reflection only occurs after the subject has been
interpellated into the regimens of signification. So the assemblage
of the medium facilitated a quilting effect particular to its historical
circumstance: I do not know how people took the image of the rebel
or what they did with it, but rather that these variables established
the conditions within which new meanings are articulated. The sonic
saddle is at once at the level of the syntactic, but it remains also at
 Conclusion 111

the level of the subjective: retaining the retroactive production of

meaning, the lower Lacanian graph shares with the elementary cell
a kinship of the quilted affect, except the quilting points are now
fixations of desire, excess of symbolization, scar tissue. They are felt as
social context because of their historical contingency (which arrives
at the right cluster of the semiological model). This is the quilting
effect of identification. The Lacanian approach to ideology posits that
as much as individuals believe what they believe, that belief has to be
mediated by an ideological quilt which assures them that they know
what their belief is; belief by necessity of the physiological inadequacy
of the human body must transcend its limitations, and so cannot
be located anywhere in the icons that occupy the immaterial real of
social relations.
b. Elements of signification (Other): Lacan’s prescription for discourse
is that one is always-already engaged in a discourse with and through
the Other that is internalized in subjectivity to which the question is
persistently asked: “What do you want of me?” As Žižek contends,
the phenomenon of music is enigmatic because it appears as though
it is an answer to the question we don’t necessarily know how to ask
(which aligns such a disposition with Shepherd and Wicke’s assertion
that music’s signification arises through the fixity of signifieds over
negotiable signifiers). Perhaps in linguistic signification, it seems more
readily apparent that there is a split between signifier and signified
because we are able to elaborate on the social construction of language
through language; yet music evades the ease of the systemic shift to
arbitration. Because music unfolds through elements of signification
(the medium) balanced on relations of difference through attraction,
the binding element is much more apparent and music more permeable
than it is through other signification systems. It is perhaps why, in the
case of Rock ’n’ roll, the euphemisms for the sex act did not necessarily
work: the medium enters by the back door, the drive compels the
subject to believe something that it cannot perceive, no matter the
pains of labor one endures to censure sexual references. The discourse
of the Other in Rock ’n’ roll works by way of an elaborate escape
112 Rancid Aphrodisiac

because it must be one based on the affect of traversing the fantasy

entrapped by the gaze of the Other. Rock ’n’ roll entraps the subject
in the groove once the subject perceives itself outside of the groove.
What does this mean? That part of the medium of dissemination that
must become transparent under the act of consumption must be the
judgmental eyes of the parental institution. That one is misunderstood
is fodder for being truly free. How is this not foreshadowing neoliberal
consumption? How is this not, through the questioning of the rebel’s
ontological precondition, a continuous icon in the ideology of Rock,
badgered outside of the boundaries of order for the big Other? Its
iconicity dissipates the Other as another component of the medium
that dissipates under its own stricture. Again, that there is no “Other
to the Other” is no surprise to the rebel. In fact, the Other’s gaze is lost
on the masculinized drive of Rock ’n’ roll, rendering difference through
attraction an impossible proposition. The Big Other in Rock ’n’ roll
does not even get to pose the question because the I(A), by which it is
positioned, evades the politics of recognition through a line of flight
towards the Other-less jouissance.
c. States of awareness (imaginary): The states of awareness as
preconditioned through the affect of Rock ’n’ roll preconditioned a
mental concept of what it means to be free, i.e., through the egoistic
consumption that was rendered a viable social psychic solution to the
deprivation of emotional states by a repressive postwar environment.
The rift between the symbolic dimension of postwar capitalism and
the hedonistic excess of the outsider was exactly the social condition
necessary for permission to consume in excess. This is what lent
the autonomy of the Rock ’n’ roll affect, the rift between the greater
socio-historical symbolic dimension and the individually experienced
freedom of Rock ’n’ roll. Based on the misrecognition of a cognitive
split, the abhorrence of Rock ’n’ roll in mainstream society allowed for
an imaginary space of consumption that releases the subject from the
deceptive falsity of union with that symbolic towards a misrecognition
of the imaginary as a site of ontological security. The rift between
 Conclusion 113

the imaginary space and the symbolic world is precisely what makes
the point of shock (the medium as it penetrates the sonic saddle) so
shockingly close to total social collapse. Just as “How Much Is That
Doggie” is the traumatic encroachment of the Real upon the sonic
saddle which revealed the arbitrariness of previously established
social conventions, something new was needed to compensate for the
economic shift in power relations (why horizontal integration aligned
itself with the hyper-individuality of postwar capitalism). In Rock ’n’
roll, the rebel (the point of union) had to occur outside of the union
with the Other; it had to be misunderstood by the symbolic in order to
maintain its symbolic efficacy. It had to appear outside the symbolic in
order to be maintained as symbolic.
d. States of being (ontology): Rock ’n’ roll knows there is no “Other to
the Other,” as is clear in its canon, that man’s subsistence is dependent
upon his imaginary relation to woman, an enigmatic relation that at
once fulfills his imaginary phallus (providing what she wants of him)
while annulling his sovereignty. The paradox of sovereignty in Rock
’n’ roll is just that: to acquire freedom, he is obliged to engage in a
relationship with a member of the opposite sex (despite biographical
evidence to the contrary), a relationship that tarnishes his being as
suddenly domesticated and in need of running towards that other
object which guarantees his freedom once again. It is why neurosis
won out but perversion didn’t, why Jerry Lee Lewis’s marriage to his
13-year-old cousin wasn’t lauded but chastised. Women are the reason
men lose their ontological foothold in Rock ’n’ roll, but they represent
the object of desire.
3. The external world (symbolic): The overdetermined relations between
the cultural (signifying systems), the legal (social and cultural processes),
and the economic (material world) are binding in a sense that they
constitute the symbolic register. Recall that for Lacan, the subject’s
unavoidable route towards alienation is facilitated by the symbolic cut
that interrupts the specular image of wholeness.
a. Signifying practices (signifying system): Musical signification
114 Rancid Aphrodisiac

assumes a character unique to other cultural institutions such as film,

literature and language. Recall, in Saussure’s conception, language
is a signifying process that retains autonomy from the world of the
material by any seemingly organic connection. But, as language
constitutes our understanding of the social world, its utterances can
only be understood as arising through social institutions. In the
psychoanalytic trope, music is privileged as a signifying system for
its non-representational status. The sonic properties of music remain
a mystery, whereas Lacanian psychoanalysis very clearly elucidates
the signifying mechanics of language. What are the sonic properties
that constitute music as a signifying process which proceeds “like a
language,” yet displays properties that are obviously different from
spoken language? Music and language proceed co-jointly to constitute
social structures and states of awareness: music and language have
been discursively set at opposite ends as ideals in the universe of
sound, the former signifying through attraction and inward states of
being, the latter signifying through repulsion and outward ordering
of the world. The symbolic was comprised of the technological
assemblages that made up the unique character of Rock ’n’ roll. It is
like the medium, only the more consciously coded stuff. That music
speaks directly to states of being and awareness is communicable
through the rules and orders of musical signification: that it is a
stacked block of attraction of difference in sounds in attraction. This
realm is identified by the cultural routes through which Rock ’n’
roll was disseminated and can be more readily reduced to parts of
the assemblage that make up the medium: the 78-rpm, the record,
the image, the radio, the concert hall, the car radio, the transistor
radio, the bedroom scene, the car scene. These are equally reducible
points of mediation that are conducive with the musical affect of the
medium locked into an imaginary fixity by means of the technology of
articulation.
b. Social and cultural processes (law): The law here refers to social
and cultural processes that are the institutions through which music
is mediated (the press, the newspapers, the television shows, those
 Conclusion 115

preconditioned avenues that are garnered towards fostering the

musical event). But they are governed according to an overarching
law. They are closed systems of difference, based upon a fundamental
foundation of difference with no positive term for signification,
only negation. The law is based on the fundamental principles that
underlie social relations. The law of evading recognition in Rock ’n’
roll underlies the affect of its movement. We saw the law of evasion
of recognition in the backdoor man whose affect slipped under the
radar of Rock ’n’ roll through timbre and inflexion. Interestingly, we
witnessed the law of Rock ’n’ roll in the rebel figuration of Antigone,
who disobeys the Law to follow her own law. She is subsequently
punished for her choice either way by following death, the latter of
which marks her own freedom because she dies at her own hand
outside of the punitive restrictions of the symbolic order. She doesn’t
find everlasting life in her own choice, she finds death that belongs to
her, death that does not belong to the symbolic order. The foreclosure
of the falsity is the ethical act of evading the symbolic order, which
resonates with Žižek’s (2002) well-known assertion that suicide is the
last remaining ethical act. The law had to establish boundaries at this
zone beyond, it had to regulate the medium it perceived as the point of
access to those who went beyond the law (here the signifying system).
c. Material world (economy): The economic conditions of social life.
Such excesses were the drive of a market-driven production, the
driving force of the economy which metastasized into unpredictable
demographics of individual excess, the general anxiety around
which was the threat of introduction from outside forces: the Red
Scare, homosexuality, rebellion, and so on. The economy relied on
consumers identifying less with the product and more with the idol
with which the consumer could most easily identify. The figuration of
the Rebel emerges just out of this economic shift, out of an increased
urbanization of African-Americans moving from the deep south,
out of the National Association of Broadcasters moving from radio
to television, freeing up the airwaves for BMI artists to begin their
own programs using music recorded on more efficient technology for
116 Rancid Aphrodisiac

dissemination to pockets of new consumers for whom the soundtrack

was provided in new corners of privacy, and what perhaps Foucault
would have called heterotopias—more appropriately, what Kun (2005)
called recently, audiotopias. The individual was connected to the social
sphere by way of pop literature with a self-help expert building that
very bridge.

The problems remain regarding the theory of performance: the transitions and
the voice. I shall address each of these separately before making concluding
remarks on the most problematic area: the medium.

The medium of prosthetic vocality

If we take the voice as a pure transition between the internal and the external,
we can expand its definition to include those effects that run throughout Rock
’n’ roll, such as the pervasive drum beat, the rhythm, the feel, and so on. But
the voice is also resonant in the recording technology, especially reverb and
echo. The manner in which one positions oneself in regard to the gaze and
the voice is like a substantial auditory gaze. Recording could indeed instan-
tiate a kind of what Derrida (1982: 79) calls an auto-affection, the purest form
of which occurs in “hearing oneself speak.” Although hearing oneself speak
might appear natural when, as Malraux says, “I hear myself with my throat”
(quoted in Merleau-Ponty 1969: 144), the shocking reality occurs when
one hears oneself on record, when one’s voice is entirely exteriorized and
occupying a spectrality in the world. The voice does not have worldly form
and must be contained in a medium, it has no existence in the world, it is a
phenomenal element, Derrida writes. The subject proffers “phonic signs” that
are heard at once by the one who offers them to the context in which they are
situated: “the phenomenon of speech, the phenomenological voice, gives itself
out in this manner” (Derrida 1982: 496). “Between the phonic element (in the
phenomenological sense and not that of a real sound) and expression, taken as
the logical character of a signifier that is animated in view of the ideal presence
of a Bedeutung (itself related to an object), there must be a necessary bond,”
 Conclusion 117

which anticipates the critique that every signifier belongs to the interior world
he has constructed for the voice—but every signifier that is not the voice
occupies a spatial position in the world. Derrida’s contention is that the visual
operates to coordinate the external world at a kind of distance, whereas the
voice (the aural phenomenon produced from within the subject that proffers
speech to the world) is proximate. Derrida is not talking here about sounds
that locate the subject, but the sounds generated from voice: “This effacement
of the sensible body and its exteriority,” Derrida (1982: 497) writes, “is for
consciousness the very form of the immediate presence of the signified.”
The voice “belongs to the phenomenological essence” of the operative: “I
hear myself at the same time that I speak” (Derrida 1973: 80):

The signifier, animated by my breath and by the meaning-intention […], is in

absolute proximity to me. The living act, the life-giving act, the Lebendigkeit,
which animates the body of the signifier and transforms it into a meaningful
expression, the soul of language, seems not to separate itself from itself, from its
own self-presence. It does not risk death in the body of a signifier that is given
over to the world and the visibility of space. […] The phenomenon continues
to be an object for the voice; indeed, insofar as the ideality of the object seems
to depend on the voice and thus becomes absolutely accessible in it, the system
which ties phenomenality to the possibility of Zeigen functions better than ever
in the voice. The phoneme is given as the dominated ideality of the phenomenon.

The “colloquy” of everyday speech, its aesthetic transcendence, is facilitated

by the technological networks that first efface the auto-affection of hearing
one’s own voice, but is disembodied in such a way that it is carried into a sonic
casket. They are signifieds without signifiers, according to this logic. They take
on the character of a different kind of voice, the voice that Lacan said privi-
leges the remainder of signification. For Derrida, the proximity of signifier and
signified in speech renders expression “unproductive” and “reflective” because
it doubles in on itself in a moment of pure subjectivity. In signification there
is always a mix of what signifiers refer to and the expression through which
they signify, even though, rationally speaking, the two are dissimilar. Derrida
argues through deconstructive analysis that the two are in fact conjoined at
a primordial level, that expression and indication cannot be separated, even
systematically. At this level, the expressive and the indicative as conjoined,
118 Rancid Aphrodisiac

they cannot be separated to accommodate the phenomenological reduction

because the process of breaking down the distinction requires a transference
of such a reduction through the very system one is attempting to deconstruct.
The expressive medium through which indication is operative (or vice versa)
is impossible to break down; thus, the phenomenological reduction, if the aim
of it is to discover the pure phenomenological reduction (and this would be
it if there was one), is impossible because of the pure fact of auto-affection in
the voice:

Taking auto-affection as the exercise of the voice, auto-affection supposed that

a pure difference comes to divide self-presence. In this pure difference is rooted
the possibility of everything we think we can exclude from auto-affection: space,
the outside, the world, the body, etc. As soon as it is admitted that auto-affection
is the condition for self-presence, no pure transcendental reduction is possible.
But it was necessary to pass through the transcendental reduction in order to
grasp this difference in what is closest to it—which cannot mean grasping it in
its identity, its purity, or its origin, for it has none. We come closest to it in the
movement of difference. (Derrida 1973: 70)

The subject is thus produced through vocal auto-affection, and auto-affection

is not a by-product of the fact that the subject is granted the agency to produce
this kind of self-consciousness through which self-awareness arises—no, self-
awareness is guaranteed by the pure fact of auto-affection through which the
rules of signification are no less proximate than the sea and the strand (to
borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty 1969: 130–1).
Nothing less than narcissism, replies Dolar (2006). Such a conception of
the voice locks it firmly within imaginary (dis)identification and (mis)recog-
nition, and forecloses the possibility of political progress. Such a conception
also forecloses the possibility of the voice as it is disembodied and placed in
the external world, which requires a space of inhabitance between perceiver
and performer. In response to Derrida’s claim that the voice proffers a “unique
experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously from within itself ”
(Derrida, cited in Dolar 2006: 38), Dolar asserts that this sort of conceptual
assemblage is a panoply for the Lacanian mirror stage of misrecognition—
indeed, if the auto-affection of the voice holds any resemblance to Lacan, it is
between the concept of deconstruction and meconnaissance. The voice itself
 Conclusion 119

must be recognized as the coming-from-within-as-without which marks

the signification of the mirror stage identification. The voice, as much as we
symbolize it as belonging to this territory, has to be taken at the level of a
discourse: it is only recognized as belonging to this “before”-state from within
a conscious orientation of the symbolic towards the imaginary realms. The
acoustic mirror is the voiced mirrored without the reflective surface:
[…] the first “self-referring” or “self-reflective” move which appears as a pure
auto-affection at the closest to oneself, an auto-affection which is not re-flection,
since it appears to lack a screen that would turn the voice, a pure immediacy
where one is both the sender and the receiver without leaving one’s pure interi-
ority. In a deceptive self-transparency, one coincides in both roles without a gap
and with no need of any exterior mediation. (Dolar 2006: 39)

The voice, as such, is dissolutioned when it is heard externally, when it

becomes engulfed by the voice of the Other. The voice rebounded becomes the
remainder and the unrecognizable, the ultimate objectification in the Other.
When the voice is echoed, it is only echoed as a partial object, detached from
the corporeal being that marks a mirror without a reflective surface … as
soon as the reflective surface appears, it eradicates the possibility of reflection
by coming at us as disembodied, otherly. Authoritative surplus of the voice
is the other dimension to the presence of the voice, the presence in the spot
that fills in the absence of the split subject: surplus of the voice. This is the
voice of the conscience, the commanding superego. Voice, Jagodzinski writes:
exceeds the word so as to transgress and go beyond the law. This is where
the drive meets desire, where excessive jouissance meets logos, excess meets
satisfaction rather than metonymic deprivation. To unravel and support this
general claim, jouis-sense is the neologism for the moment when meaning
is eclipsed. Noise invades the established fantasy as the taken-for-granted
soundscape that conveys stability, wholeness, structure, reliability, harmony,
and so forth. Noise is also “driven” by an unconscious and unrepresentable
force of primary fantasy. Within the gap of the dialectical relationship
between noise and music we find a kernel of silence and an intervening
force that destroys the established sonic body of meaning by opening up
a new temporality and spacing between the oral and the aural, between the
voice and the ear (Jagodzinski 2005: 33–36). The voice is interruptive. If we
120 Rancid Aphrodisiac

take the conclusion to Lacan’s reading of “The Purloined Letter” seriously,

we learn that repetition automatism is triggered by the helpless bondage of
repressed anguish, a signifier contains a representation that always defers,
always contains death, yet hires it (Liu 2010: 191). The symbolic is not by
but of the subject. Symbolic nature of the dialectic is established through
getting habituated into repetition automatism. The series does not reveal
the outcome by fragments themselves, they are whole and not antagonistic.
In the chain, even though they are independent, each has an autonomous
50/50 chance of being + or –. We have constructed a symbolic system within
which each grouping (or representation) cannot be presented against one
another without a disruptive mediation—the structure thus contains an
impossibility. There is no known exception to the rest other than a binary
opposition that must by law be mediated by an aberration in the order. If
connotative echo was disruptive, it was by means of constituting an inauthen-
ticity in the track to its own emergence (what we might perceive as the
event). The chain thus keeps track of its own previous components, and a
subject’s role is to maintain this kind of continuum. Two conclusions can be
drawn: (1) there are prohibitions and orders in a symbolic system, which
(2) remembers its own system itself in that chain. Fink writes:
This is why Lacan said that “meaning is imaginary.” He did not imply
that meaning does not exist, or that it is simply something we dream up in
our imagination. He implied that it is tied up with our self-image, with the
image we have of who and what we are. In a word, meaning is related to the
ego or self, to what we view as part and parcel of ourselves; hence, meaning
excludes that which does not fit in with our own self-image. The ego is that
which we consider all-encompassing, it excludes all that we consider foreign,
all thoughts and desires that slip out in parapraxes for which we deny respon-
sibility. By privileging what patients actually say over what they mean, by
stressing the ambiguities and slips that appear in their speech, Lacan, like
Freud, gave priority to the unconscious over the Ego. It is when patients
begin to throw things into question that they are engaged in analysis. It is at
this point that they are engaged in something which goes beyond the simple
demand to be relieved of one or more specific symptoms (Fink 1997: 24–25).
Shepherd and Wicke argue that sound signifies according to a binary
 Conclusion 121

oscillation between the discursive categories of music and language as it

unfolds in space and time between signifying systems of repulsion and those
of attraction, but, while they prepare music as a paralinguistic system of
signification, they reduce its movements to an eternally embodied return
to singular subjectivity. Without historical reference points, however, the
abstractions they offer perpetuate musical signification as somehow innate
instead of historically grounded. As recent research on phonographic signi-
fication has demonstrated (Sterne 2003), however, listening practices were
encouraged through such media channels as phonographs, telephones, and
stethoscopes to encourage a ponderous reflection on the sounds being heard,
leaving to imagination a subjective interpretation as to sound’s “source.”
Rather than being in the presence of a live event, the phonography (and
telephonography) entwined absence and presence of the voice whose articu-
lation arose dialectically between past and present. An imaginative situating
was required of perceiving subjects who were experiencing the (dis)junctive
split between sound and source.
Subjective positioning, as sketched above, pervades philosophic thought.
Lacan (1949), for instance, argued that people understand the material world
as it becomes more clearly mediated through the sounds and associations of
language, dividing the space between self and other. A child, before acquiring
the division between self and other, sees the world as a mirror of its self,
misrecognizing others as serving its desires and therefore its being in control
of its desires. Language becomes the thing that fills in absence, the thing that
constitutes the desired object through symbolic abstraction. In this sense,
because the child feels as though they are acting through agency, they are
rather being spoken by the signifiers that fill in this lack, the signifieds that
arise creating a break from the material world to fill the imaginary.
Likewise, the body is a site of social organization and self-governance
mapped as a grid of various overlapping subjectivities. Butler (1999), for
example, argued that the body is a site of discursive constitution that
continually produces subjectivities throughout life (more accurately, the
body does not produce subjectivities but is a site for their articulation and
materialization). According to Butler, the overlapping identities create not
a unified subject spoken into one position, as appears to be the case with
122 Rancid Aphrodisiac

Lacan, but multiple subject positions that make categorization a contentious

proposition:

If one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive,
not because a pregendered “person” transcends the specific paraphernalia of its
gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently
in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class,
ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As
a result, it becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the political and
cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained. (Butler
1999: 3)

The “body,” the subject, is positioned on a grid of discursive polarities on

which one is supposed to position oneself on either side of a duality: White or
Black, straight or gay, man or woman, rich or poor, and so on. How the subject
reaches such a stage or how they perform between them remains oblique.

Movement, rest, repeat

According to Massumi (2002), conceiving movement requires a move away

from the binary linguistic model of signification as conceived by de Saussure
and replete through the writings of Middleton, Tagg, Shepherd and Wicke.
The signifier/signified model of meaning, which purports that the latter
is an image-concept summoned by the sonoral properties of the former
guaranteeing language its autonomous break from the things it names, talks
little of how one becomes positioned by said signifiers beyond saying: “its
sounds.” Massumi is instead interested in potential, whereas the semiological
tradition considers potential a given rise to signification. Massumi argues
that the motion towards signifieds “coincides with its own transition: its own
variation. The range of variations it can be implicated in is not present in any
given movement, much less in any position it passes through. In motion, a
body is an immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to
vary” (Massumi 2002: 4). In other words, movement has not yet determined
its course, and the possibilities of its direction make freezing it and extracting
its meaning in stasis an exercise in rational control.
 Conclusion 123

Thus, in contrast to the signified subject position articulated through

sounds, we are looking for an ontogenesis of signification—we understand
that certainly the domesticating character of signification, but doing so
subverts not just phonography but sounding practices in general. The notion
of ontogenesis may challenge this search for subject-placement but may
also help us ground the very being of signification in terms of the aesthetics
it generated regarding the repeatability of sound and the intertwining of
presence and absence. Such models of signification render sounding events
as crucial to our senses of self and memory, but especially in terms of sound;
the medium generates states of attentive recognition in relation to music
simply because it is a material manifestation of memory, a memory-block,
part of the cultural technological movement in photography, film, and audio
that could re-present the exterior manifestation of an event that was said
to have happened. At the turn of the century, Bergson was writing about
the differences between states of attentive recognition (such as the state of
attentive recognition to the presence of an event that happened in the past).
We can re-present within ourselves our significant moments in life, just was
we can re-present the significant moments in sound, but Bergson argued
that, while this is a feature of the body-subject, this wasn’t how we attend
to consciousness when we move through the world. In other words, the
“subject” as theorized by popular music studies sees an aspect of subjectivity
as symbolically representing a belonging to the constitution of the psychic
and social world. As Al-Saji (2004) asks in a reworking of Bergson’s Matter
and Memory, does the present become a point in the past if the present is
always moving? The generally accepted theory of time, upon which it is
thought that phonographs recreate a particular relationship with time and
place, offers Al-Saji two conceptual problems: (1) “it fails to account for the
passage of time and it cannot explain the constitution of the past qua past;”
while (2) it contributes to “our habit of identifying reality with presence—as
the realm of action and utility, that which holds our interest—and of assigning
the remainder not only to absence but to irreality” (Al-Saji 2004: 204). The
subject moments sketched earlier according to Bergsonian theory only exist
in specific moments one experiences as moments of attentive recognition; the
distance between past and present is created in states of attentive recognition
124 Rancid Aphrodisiac

and reflection. Bergson (1911: 171) described such attentive recognition in

the following manner:

Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period in our

history, we become conscious of an act sui generis by which we detach ourselves
from the present in order to replace ourselves, first in the past in general, then in
a certain region of the past—a work of adjustment, something like the focusing
of a camera.

Bergson insists that memory operated according to a cone of consciousness,

within which ever-increasing overlapping planes of memory reside with the
tip of the cone being at the present, or the most condensed projection of the
past. In the cone, according to Al-Saji (2004: 214), “the present is the most
contracted level of memory, the most condensed plane of the past. In it the
whole of the past is condensed around the dominant image of the object of
attention and is moulded to the contours of the object.” Therefore, what is in
memory becomes a virtual projection onto the things of the present. Al-Saji
(2004: 212) argues:

In normal perception (or attentive recognition), this virtual image remains

unconscious since it is not an actualized image. In other words, it is not a
memory image that can contribute any useful content to the present perception,
that can be inserted into perception and determine a future course of action.
This is because the virtual image appears limited to doubling the present
perception.

In other words, daily consciousness isn’t attended to with the recognition

common to positivist or empirical thought, in so many words that the past
and present are two separate entities only when conceived as two separate
entities. Daily consciousness is instead attended to according to a complex
interconnected communication of intuitions, or riding on the directions of the
unconscious, where Bergson (1911: 14) claims we experience a “memory of
the present,” which, according to Al-Saji (2004: 212), “emerges alongside the
perception of which it is the memory, like a shadow which accompanies and
outlines the body.”
Memory according to this system, in contrast to the interpellation of the
subject, is therefore not laid on the foundation of binaries that are otherwise
 Conclusion 125

commonly accepted. Bergson (1911: 170) conceded himself that memory

operated according to three instead of two distinct processes:

1. pure memory as that which resides in the cone of consciousness and

whose images are only visible when they are actualized in living images
“out there”;
2. memory-image as that which actualizes the pure memory into something
visible; and
3. perception as “impregnated with memory-images which complete it as
they interpret it.”

Within the cone itself, these pure memories can be brought out in more
complicated ways through their actualization, but they descend into the most
condensed version of themselves, the present. Bergson (1911: 197) said: “It is
from the present that comes the appeal to which memory responds, and it is
from the sensori-motor elements of present action that a memory borrows the
warmth which gives it life.”
Al-Saji concludes that, while attentive recognition constitutes a certain
proportion of consciousness, we seldom make the distinction between self
and world, present and past, subject and object, and so on. Instead, human
experience spends a significant amount of time riding on intuition, which,
according to Bergson and Al-Saji, is moving freely between differing lines
of subjectivity without selecting one alone to rest upon. In this conception,
a personal historical narrative is the inter-subjective residue of memory-
universe within the Bergsonian cone, and so extracting a subjective line
or a plane of consistency merely exercises a form of rational control by the
self pushing an ideological iron over the wrinkles of experience, for which
contradictions and paradoxes otherwise constitute a major part. Bergson and
Al-Saji thus mark intuition with its negation of hierarchy and preference for
heterogeneity that marks human experience.
Al-Saji (2004: 225) concludes that such intuition “represents a double
effort with respect to recognition: it is not only the temporary suspension
of habitual action (automatic recognition), but also a pulling back from the
actualization (condensation and selection) of memories into representa-
tional images (attentive recognition).” The inter-subjective motion of these
126 Rancid Aphrodisiac

memories that become actualized in the present may help in explaining the
phenomena of phonography enacting the dual presence/absence. The phono-
graph required one to have a chiasmatic memory, which is that to record
oneself on a phonograph was to attend to both intuition and state of attentive
recognition at once, pell-mell. Al-Saji (2004: 237) summarizes this ambiguous
conception of intuition as follows:

Because the memory of the present inscribes the whole, memory is recounted
along with others and with the world and is thus inscribed at different rhythms,
levels of tension, with varying affective tonalities and colorations, and in
different styles—it is recounted in multiple voices. These voices do not neces-
sarily form a harmony, nor are they organized according to any overriding
logic or order. Indeed, more often than not, the polyphony of memory records
dissonant, and dissenting, voices and inscribes discordant histories.

The subject in the process of recording and re-hearing must at once become
intuitive and rest in a state of attentive recognition. Rhythmic repetition seems
to be analogous musical structure to the persistence of cultural difference—
difference is repetition. Rhythmic repetition is not simply sameness; it is
unlike repetition of the steady job that leads to growth but circulates freely,
evading the gaze of the Other. Black culture appropriates an antithetical grasp
of rhythmic repetition, one where accident and unpredictability must be dealt
with since they inform life. Perhaps we might be so inclined as to think of
affect in music as something that is taken as pre-linguistic, like Kristeva’s chora,
Deleuze and Guattari’s Body Without Organs, Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmus. It’s
just difficult to do that, to simply stand by “pre-linguisticism” because such a
concept can only arise alongside the symbolic order that furnishes me with
the ability to conceptualize it as such. There is, however, something machine-
like in the rhythmic operations of affect in Rock ’n’ roll.

Affect ’n’ Other

An affect is a means of invention; it is something that is not given in a

signifying system; it is something that is invented to align with the act of
perceiving. There is no need to mention in affect that there is an arbitrary
 Conclusion 127

division, because in affect we have the image of a body as it is autonomous.

When we speak of affect, we speak at once of affection and affect, of being
affected and affecting. Spinoza marks the division as such: affectio (affection)
and affectus (affect). Because of this division, it is important to understand
that any definition of affect will be amiss in context. But, listen, what is the
affectual drive of Rock ’n’ roll? Even the name itself, Rock ’n’ roll, is a name of
affect. It is describing the way in which one is moved by the rock before one is
rolled, affect is in the ‘n’ of Rock ’n’ roll, the transition point between. And the
affect in this case is still sexual, but in a different variety, simply that rhythm is
the drive that moves and is yet moved by. You gotta feel it. It has a good feel. I
know it’s only Rock ’n’ roll but I like it. Affect is not an idea. An idea is a mode
of thought which represents something, it is an objective description. The
idea of Rock ’n’ roll arrives through the channels of musical representation;
in terms of its sonic saddle, one instance is recognized when it is framed
by its own repetition, when it becomes representation, when it is no longer
pure difference. In terms of elements of signification or the signification of
the Other we have an idea of Rock ’n’ roll because it was spoken through the
discourses of the Other: the Other in cinema, the Other in the rebel, the Other
in the disapproving parent, the Other in congress, and so on. In terms of states
of awareness, these are mediated by way of recognition in the mirror, another
point of representation, a figure which stands as self-recognizing because it is
motivated to move by the jubilant excess of having caused its own projection
to move along with it. Rock ’n’ roll’s ontological footing is guaranteed not by
autonomy but autonomy from the Other, from its piercing disapproving gaze.
So it is also a question of representation. In the symbolic order, the zone of
signifying practices, the law, and the economy, there is no question that Rock
’n’ roll came to represent something.
Affect, on the other hand, constitutes thought without representation.
Affect is a force that moves thought into transitions without destination,
without representation. Rock ’n’ roll’s predestination wasn’t ordained until it
was interpellated into the symbolic order of representation. In its emergence,
it was a rhizomatic network of independent communication nodes for the
sake of communication that gave the established music industry a cause for
concern. Rock ’n’ roll, then, is an idea. It is representational. But ‘n’ is the
128 Rancid Aphrodisiac

medium through which affect transitions towards a non-predestined state. ‘n’

on its own stands for nothing. It is the “uh,” the “uh-huh,” the “whoah-hoah,”
that interrupts as a stutter throughout the Rock ’n’ roll repertoire, that we take
as something as accidental but which is really the binding logic of the genre.
Affect is simply access to the system of representation that allows practitioners
to proximate its feeling. It was certainly not neoliberal destination—that was
only realized after the fact. A destination is always representational, so it is
always in the service of the political. If it is in the service of the political, it
betters some over others. So we are mistaken to say that Rock ’n’ roll allowed
for the expression of freedom from the gaze of the Other; freedom was the
precondition for Rock ’n’ roll. The latter was the idea.
Often we take rhythm as evidence that music is pre-linguistic. In popular
music studies, at least, when it was started as a discipline, Rock music or Rock
’n’ roll was taken as the “poster child” for affect because its rhythms were the
binding features that set it apart from the classical canon. But how is rhythm
non-representational? How can its feel be induced in another part of its rules?
The problem might be if we take the idea of Rock ’n’ roll as the representation.
Certainly the idea is objective reality insofar as it is representational, but it is
also a formal reality: its rules are proof of its autonomy. Aside from the idea
that the Event in Rock ’n’ roll can be taken as representative of its history, it
also means that it can be taken as a formal idea, as something that edifies as an
object because of its historical circumstance yet can be taken as autonomous
to that network that interpellated it. This formal reality is perfect. Ideas still are
things in themselves. But they are still not affect. Affect is without represen-
tation, but it is easier for us to see what affect is when we compare it, at least,
to the formal idea, since every idea expresses a property that qualifies it as
something apart from that which it represents. Affect is continuous variation
between states. And in the musical moment it counts as most paradoxical
because it can be experienced on several levels at once. It is a language of
multivocal assemblage. The question is with the idea of Rock ’n’ roll—and we
take idea as the representative of the Imaginary and the Symbolic registers,
in that they automate their subjects. They are overdetermined and they are in
succession; though aside from this succession there is a regime of variation
that is ongoing, something that tones the idea this way and that. This is the
 Conclusion 129

force of continuous variation, the force that pulls one idea into the next. The
experience is also a force of continuous variation—the experience of Rock ’n’
roll for church pastors was a force of continuous variation on the experience
of teenage fans compared to tolerant parents and intolerant parents, the force
of Rock ’n’ roll was a body without organs with continuous variation. The
power of acting is increased or diminished according to the qualities attached
to forms of ideas which determine the variation in, and of, affect. Therefore,
as Rock ’n’ roll was at its most rhizomatic, when the ideas that determined its
variations produced changes in quality and vibration, instead of adhering to
representation, its affect was at its most politically productive.
The affect is something that is an undercurrent of any system. It is an
underlying variation whose character is determined by ideas, though it is
not reducible to ideas since comparison is an intellectual (i.e., comparative,
representational) exercise. Sadness leads to a reduced power of action, joy
to an increased power of action. The Spinozist ethic here, the elementary
one, is that those who have political power affect others in such a way as to
diminish action; therefore, the discourse of the politicians and the legal courts
as well as the DJs who pinned teenagers as rockers and rollers, all those actors
responsible for the commodification of Rock ’n’ roll, inflicted a reified affect
of sadness upon the peoples. They were responsible for taking the non-human
agents of Rock ’n’ roll affect out of their medium and transducing them
into media channels of mass communication (from medium to signifying
system). This decreases power. These internally objective states were the most
restrictive option. The continuous variation along the lines of the medium
body as it affects the sonic-saddle body is a direction of the joyous, because
the medium represents the inaccessible forces of life of which one is unaware,
the saddle is the closest thing to that life.
For Spinoza, the body is an individually defined finite complex transmog-
rified through infinite forces of movement and rest in constant variation with
its exterior contours. There is no discernment of good or bad in these varia-
tions, but there are social technologies responsible for the transformation of
particular flows into points of morally sanctioned “goodness” or “badness;”
a morally regulated frontier of reactions to Rock ’n’ roll was that rhythm
begat badness, harmony begat goodness, and I have made clear the historical
130 Rancid Aphrodisiac

origins of these borders. But from a Spinozist position, what is ethically and
not morally good or bad is really a question of evaluating bodies that inhibit
or enhance the potential for complex relations. The more you are facilitated by
these encounters, the more you are able to fend, not death, but its brute fact
as a bad encounter. Just as Deleuze admires clowning, we must admire the
eternal youth of Rock ’n’ roll—it hopes to die before it gets old.
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 Index

absence 123 “Banana Boat” 98

Adams, John Berger, John 59
Nixon in China 16 Bergson, Henri 123–5
aesthetics 14 Matter and Memory 123
affect 3–4, 5, 17, 21, 24, 46, 50, 67, 106, Berry, Chuck 32, 80
107–30 Black culture 103, 126
theory 3 BMI see Broadcast Music, Inc.
African-Americans 61, 115 body 129–30
“Ain’t That A Shame” 23 Boone, Pat 22, 23, 33, 98
alienation 10, 13, 54, 66, 105 Braceland, Francis J. 45
Althusser, Louis 7, 8, 18–19, 96 Brando, Marlon 35
American Bandstand 99 Brenston, Jackie 30
American Society of Composers, “Rocket 88” 30
Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) 95, 100, 115
97–8, 100 Broadway 23
animality 64–6 Brown, Roy 30
Animals 1 “Good Rockin’ Tonight” 30
Antigone 115 Butler, Judith 29, 63, 121
Apollo 53
Aristotle 17 capitalism 2, 4, 24, 43, 73, 84, 112
articulation 50 Carnegie, Dale 34, 42
ASCAP see American Society of Carter, Goree 30
Composers, Authors and “Rock Awhile” 30
Publishers Cash, Johnny 22, 98
auditions 79 Chantelles 102
Aufheben 38, 76, 80 Checker, Chubby 99
auralism 75, 76 “Twist, The” 99
auto-affection 116–18 child abuse 1
Avalon, Frankie 98 childhood 86
awareness, states of 112–13 children 86
Christianity 84, 85
backbeat 52–4, 75, 76, 79–106, 110 cinema 39
Ballard, Hank 99 Clark, Dick 99
“Banana Boat” 98 American Bandstand 99
Barred Subject 68 cogito 8
beat 49, 50 Cold War 34
Beatles 1, 14, 103 Cole, Nat King 44
“She’s So Heavy” 16 Columbia 22, 98
being, states of 113, 114 consciousness 124
being-in-the-world 70 conspicuous consumption 46
Belafonte, Harry 98 consumer goods 34
146 Index

consumerism 3, 24, 37 fantasy 90, 106, 107, 110, 112

consumers 115 “Fat Man, The” 30
“covers” 37 feminine/femininity 29, 61
crime 100 feminism
Crocker, Betty 34 film philosophy 36
Crudup, Arthur 30 philosophy 5
“Big Boy” 30 fetish/fetishism 35, 75, 76
“That’s All Right” 30 film philosophy
cultural studies 22 feminist 36
Fink, Bruce 96
Dean, James 35, 41–2, 88 fire 80
Deleuze, Gilles 4, 15, 31, 47, 48, 53, 126, 40: A Novel 69
130 Foucault, Michel 80, 106, 116
delinquency 22, 39, 47, 94 Freed, Alan 101
democracy 37, 95, 96 freedom, individual 4
Depression see Great Depression Freud, Sigmund 13, 80, 92, 101, 103, 105
Derrida, Jacques 116–18 psychoanalysis 8, 70
Descartes, René 8, 40, 58 unconscious 42–3
desegregation 56
desire 13, 29, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 74, 82, Gangsta 15
87–97, 104, 105, 107–16, 119 gaze 20, 35, 36, 39, 40, 59, 61, 62, 63, 65,
Dionysus 53 67, 73, 79, 88, 91, 93, 95, 97, 127,
disco 1 128
disidentification 70, 79, 106, 118 gender 35
domestic life 34 theorists 63
domestic space 81 Gestalt 12
domestication 28, 29, 33, 94 “Good Rockin’ Tonight” 30
domesticity 43 Goth 15
cult 28 “Great Balls of Fire” 80
Domino, Fats 23, 30 Great Depression 1
“Fat Man, The” 30 Guattari, Félix 15, 126
double entendre 58
Durkheim, Émile 106 Haley, Bill 30, 73, 98
“Rock Around the Clock” 30
echo 79–106 “Rocket 88” 30
echo and reverb 28 harmony 71, 72
economy 115–16 Harris, Winonie 30
Ego see also “I” 11, 29, 54, 60, 68, 88, 120 “Good Rockin’ Tonight” 30
Ego-Ideal/Ideal-Ego 67, 68, 91, 106 Haymes, Bob 74
elementary cell 64–6 Heavy Metal 15
emergence 30, 31, 56, 58, 76, 85, 109, 120, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 38, 61
127 Hendrix, Jimi 14
emotions 18 heteronormativity 86
event 76 homophobia 1
Everly Brothers 99 House Committee on Interstate and
“Wake up Little Susie” 99 Foreign Commerce 101
excess, sexual 4 House Judiciary Committee 100
 Index 147

“How Much Is That Doggie in the language 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 22,
Window” 27–30 51, 54, 65, 91, 95, 96, 104, 114, 121,
128
“I”see also Ego 12, 13, 68, 93 law 70, 82, 85, 100, 114–15
Id 103 “Leader of the Pack” 69
Ideal-Ego see Ego-Ideal/Ideal-Ego Led Zeppelin 33
identification 63, 81, 88, 91, 93, 111, 118 “Rock ‘n’ Roll” 33
identity 36, 104 Lewis, Jerry Lee 20, 32, 55, 79–80, 81, 82,
ideological disidentification 70 83, 84, 85, 103, 113
idolatry 35 “Great Balls of Fire” 80
imaginary 3, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 29, 53, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On” 80
54, 56, 60, 66, 67, 87, 96, 97, 105, libido 43
108, 109, 112–13, 119, 128 linguistics
imago 8–9, 68 Saussure 10
imago subject 60 Little Richard 23, 32
independent labels 98 Lorazepam 1
individual freedom 4 lyrics 23–4
Internal Security Act, 1950 1
Interstate and Foreign Commerce, House machismo 29
Committee on 101 Man Can’t Bust Our Music, The 22
Marcus, Greil 5
Jackson, Bull Moose 56 masculinity 55, 56
jazz, avant-garde 18 Massumi, Brian 122
John of Damascus 36 master signifier 41, 52
jouissance 2, 20, 35, 57, 59, 63, 71, 87, 92, Matter and Memory 123
93, 94, 95, 96, 108, 110, 119 meaning 95
meaning construction 17
Karajan, Herbert von 45, 100 melody 71, 72
Kierkegaard, Søren 14 meritocracy 94, 95
King Records 56 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 126
Kings of Rhythm 30 Merrill, Bob 27
“Rocket 88” 30 metaphor 11, 17, 58
Kingston Trio 98 meter 48–9, 50, 51
Kristeva, Julia 14–15, 62, 126 misogyny 43
misrecognition 118
LaBostrie, Dorothy 23 morphemes 6, 19
Lacan, Jacques 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, Muddy Waters 63
16, 17, 20, 21, 31, 36, 38, 39, 40, 46, musemes 19
47, 48, 51, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 62, 63, “My Jealous Eyes” 28
65, 66, 69, 71, 73, 74, 75, 87, 88, 90,
92, 96, 103, 104, 108, 111, 113, 117, narcissism 118
118, 120, 121, 122 National Association of Broadcasters 33,
master signifier 52 115
psychoanalysis 5, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 41, National Broadcasting Company (NBC) 74
47, 73, 107, 114 NBC see National Broadcasting Company
quilting 47, 48, 64 new historicism 5
Seminar V 65 New Orleans Times-Picayune 72
148 Index

New York Times 45 queer orientation 29

Nixon in China 16 queer politics 86
noise 52–3 queer theory 5, 86
norm-breaking 22 queering 75
novelty song 19–20, 27–8 queerness 87
quilting 39–47, 48, 51, 59, 63, 64, 65, 66,
object 58, 59, 60 67, 69, 74, 75, 87, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97,
objectification 63, 119 105, 110, 111
Oedipus 60, 81, 101
Ong, Walter J. 109 race 99
orgasm 59, 60 racism 61, 62, 103
Other 2–3, 20, 29, 33, 36, 39, 40, 43, 46, radio 33
47, 54, 56, 57, 60, 65, 67, 68, 69, RCA/RCA Victor see Recording
70, 79–106, 108, 111–12, 113, 119, Corporation of America
126–30 real 3, 13, 60, 73, 82, 83, 87, 107–30
Lacanian 13
Page, Patti 27–8, 29 reality, objective 92
Parker, Colonel Tom 22 rebel 34, 35, 36, 38, 39–47, 64, 65, 82, 83,
patriarchy 43 93, 94, 102, 103, 110, 115, 127
payola hearings 94, 100, 101 Rebel Without a Cause 20, 35, 41–2, 46,
Peale, Norman Vincent 34, 42 109–10
“Peggy Sue” 74 rebellion 42
phallus 9, 14, 28, 29, 55, 62, 76, 113 recognition 92, 93, 115, 118, 123, 124,
Philips, Dewey 56 125
Philips, Sam 20, 32, 56, 79, 83, 84, 85 record companies 97, 98
philosophy, feminist 5 recording 37
phonemes 19 Recording Corporation of America (RCA/
phrenology 72 RCA Victor) 22, 98, 110
piano 81 recording studios 37
Poe, Edgar Allan 73 recording techniques 28, 75
“Purloined Letter, The” 73 Red Scare 1
pregnancy, teenage 1 repetition 70, 71, 73, 76, 77
presence 123 representation 127, 128
Presley, Elvis 22, 30, 32, 33, 38, 55, 56, 73, repulsion 17, 18
76, 79, 83, 98, 103, 110 rhythm 47–52, 71, 72, 76
Steve Allen Show, The 110 “Rock ’n’ Roll” 33
“That’s All Right” 30 “Rock Around the Clock” 30
Preston, Jimmie 30 “Rock Awhile” 30
“Rock the Joint” 30 “Rock the Joint” 30
Prometheus 80–81 “Rocket 88” 30
psychoanalysis 14, 15 “Roll Over Beethoven” 23
Freud 8, 70 Rolling Stones 1, 63
Lacan 5, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 41, 47, 73, Ronettes 102
107, 114
puissance 51 Saussure, Ferdinand de 6, 9, 114, 122
punk 1, 15 linguistics 10
“Purloined Letter, The” 73, 120 semiotics 8
 Index 149

Schopenhauer, Arthur 14 “Strange Things Happening Every Day”

Schubert, Franz 16 30
Seduction of the Innocent 1 subject 54, 56, 59, 64, 65, 67, 70, 85, 86,
self 10, 12, 13, 63, 68, 91 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 97, 102, 104,
self-awareness 118 108, 109, 112, 120
self-consciousness 61 Barred Subject 68
self-reflection 110 imago 60
self-transgression 89, 90 subjectification 67, 68
Seminar V 65 subjectivity 5, 6, 8, 18, 20, 21, 28, 31, 32,
semiotic 62 39, 47, 50, 51, 58, 65, 66, 68, 75, 82,
Saussurean 8 85, 90, 107, 109, 111, 117
sex 44, 76 Sun Records 20, 38, 56, 79, 98
sex act 58, 111 Sun Studios 76
sexual excess 4 superego 63, 74, 84, 100, 103
sexuality 75, 99 superject 86
“Shake, Rattle and Roll” 20, 43–4, 57–8 symbolic 3, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 53, 54,
“She’s So Heavy” 16 62, 82, 86, 87, 97, 105, 108, 113,
Shirelles 102, 103 119, 120, 128
“Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” 102, Symbolic Order 3
103 symbolization 63, 91, 92, 93, 111
signification 10, 19, 39, 40, 41, 46, 51, 53,
55, 64, 65, 68, 69, 75, 76, 87, 88, 91, technology 34, 35
93, 96, 111–12, 113–14, 123, 127 teenage pregnancy 1
primary 65 teenagers 35, 39, 129
signifier/signified 10, 11, 12, 17, 19, 20, Tharpe, Sister Rosetta 30
31, 36–7, 40, 46, 54, 55, 61, 62, 63, “Strange Things Happening Every
64, 65, 66, 68, 74, 75, 82, 83, 87, 88, Day” 30
92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 102, 108, 109, “That’s All Right” 30
117 Thornton, Big Mama 110
master signifier 40 Thrasher, Travis 69
signifying 113–14 40: A Novel 69
simulacrum 37 timbre 66–74
sin 85, 86 Time 45
Sinatra, Frank 21, 100 time 47–8, 49, 50
“Sixty Minute Man” 99 Tin Pan Alley 23, 33, 100, 101
Smith, Trixie 43 totemism 35
social reality 40 Turner, Big Joe 43, 57
sound 108 “Shake, Rattle and Roll” 43–4, 57–8
Spector, Phil 69 Turner, Ike 30
“Leader of the Pack” 69 “Rocket 88” 30
Spinoza, Baruch 129–30 “Tutti Frutti” 23
Spock, Dr 34, 42 “Twist, The” 99
spoken utterances 8
states of awareness 112–13 unconscious 11, 17, 42–3, 73, 75
states of being 113, 114
Stern, Stewart 35, 42 Variety 44, 99
Steve Allen Show, The 110 Vincent, Gene 33
150 Index

virility 30 “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” 102, 103

vocality 116–22 Williams, Hank 82
voice 14, 104 woman/women 61, 62, 63, 94, 109, 113
World War II 1
“Wake up Little Susie” 99
war on rock 98 Žižek, Slavoj 4, 15, 16, 28, 31–2, 38, 40,
welfare 34 42, 43, 46, 48, 51, 61, 62, 66, 70,
Wertham, Fredric 1 84–5, 88, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 103,
Seduction of the Innocent 1 105, 106, 111, 115
WHBQ Radio 56 Zuckerlandl, Victor 20, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50,
“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On” 80 52