From Jacksonism to Kanye Theory

Following the recent prelude…

I’m thinking here, initially, of Mark Fisher’s interest in Michael Jackson. His introduction to 2009’s The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson begins with the assertion that the “King of Pop” was “a symptom that needs to be reckoned with and analyzed”, in large part because “his death — which happened just after the disintegration of the economy and the election of Barack Obama to the US presidency — came at the end of an era, an era which he has done as much as anyone else to define.”

Perhaps most obviously, Jackson was emblematic of a creeping new reality of celebrity. Elvis came first, no doubt, but Jackson’s rise to fame saw him become “a figure so subsumed and consumed by the videodrome that it’s scarcely possible to think of him as an individual at all … because he wasn’t of course …”

Fisher’s writing, as was generally true at this time, is deep-cooked in Lacan. It is easy to read his introduction to the collection, entitled “MJ, the Symptom”, as a play on Lacan’s “Joyce, the Symptom”, and it is a reading that certainly makes sense for Jackson on a comparative level. Jackson is a racialised Joyce, and we can spin this analogy out endlessly. He is the free radical breaking free from a family unit, the Jacksons; he is a man who identifies interminably with Peter Pan, a fictional child failed by Oedipalisation; the artist engaged in a white-becoming that, like pop in general, is increasingly distanced from its black mother-tongues; the man abused by his father, whom he left out of his will, struggling constantly to escape and reconstruct the childhood block that Joe Jackson corrupted.

But this was only Fisher’s interest at the start of his publishing career, and what is so often ignored today — and if you know me, my bugbear is precisely that so much of what is most interesting about the later Fisher (2013–2016) is perpetually ignored — is the way in which his developing lexicon was increasingly shorn of Lacanianisms. In the mid-2000s, for instance, Fisher believed that the “most productive area of conceptual discordance is that between Badiou and Deleuze-Guattari” — a discordance partly based on their respective attitudes towards Lacan. But towards the end of his life, the likes of Badiou and Lacan feature less and less in his writings; Deleuze-Guattari instead become the more essential background to Fisher’s postcapitalist desires.

So much of my work over the last eight years has been dedicated to contextualising the various shifts that occurred in Fisher’s work towards his unfinished Acid Communism, and it is here especially that Deleuze and Guattari’s influence becomes more pronounced. In the introduction to Postcapitalist Desire, I wondered if Fisher’s unfinished Deleuzo-Guattarian text might even be made analogous to Deleuze’s own unfinished book on Marx:

The sixth lecture in the series was scheduled to consider the autonomist movement in Italy in the late Seventies. In particular, Fisher asked his students to read a chapter from Nicholas Thoburn’s 2003 book Deleuze, Marx and Politics. Although Fisher intended to focus specifically on the book’s fifth chapter — on the politics of the refusal of work — it is nonetheless interesting to consider the fact that Thoburn’s text is similarly concerned with the unrealised plans of a great thinker.

Before his death in 1995, Gilles Deleuze had announced that his final book would be called The Grandeur of Marx. It remains an intriguing title, not least because Deleuze’s seemingly unorthodox Marxism has dogged the political reception of his work for many scholars. But, as Thoburn writes, this unfulfilled promise of a final work on Marx “leaves a fitting openness to [Deleuze’s] corpus and an intriguing question.”

“How was this philosopher of difference and complexity — for whom resonance rather than explication was the basis of philosophical engagement — to compose the ‘greatness’ of Marx? What kind of relations would Deleuze construct between himself and Marx, and what new lines of force would emerge? Engaging with this question and showing its importance, Éric Alliez [argues]: ‘It can be realized therefore just how regrettable it is that Deleuze was not able to write the work he planned as his last…’ But this is not an unproductive regret. For, as Alliez proposes, the missing book can mobilize new relations with Deleuze’s work. Its very absence can induce an engagement with the ‘virtual Marx’ which traverses Deleuze’s texts…”

The spectre of Acid Communism looms productively over Fisher’s thought in much the same way.

In light of this, I am also left wondering what other projects might have further buoyed Fisher’s thesis. Capitalist Realism has The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson; would Acid Communism, the true sequel to Fisher’s first monograph, have had a corollary?

I think it would have. One of the projects Fisher hoped to work on that I’m most disappointed did not come to fruition was a book with Kodwo Eshun called Kanye Theory (which Kodwo mentioned in his inaugural Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture at Goldsmiths in 2018). I do not imagine that anything was produced for this project, beyond the general idea. But it would have been fascinating to compare his writings on Jackson to West, and I imagine that the shift from Fisher’s interest in Lacan and onto Deleuze-Guattari would have been writ large here.

Kanye is another pop-cultural psychotic; an extreme example, partly because Kanye’s psychosis is so disastrous. But whereas Jackson can be understood somewhat neatly as a Lacanian psychotic, à la Joyce, Kanye is better understood in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms.

Although his mother’s death is often held up as the moment when all of his troubles began, this is only notable given the fact that the Kanye-self starts to careen violently through pop-cultural plateaus following his orphaning. The Kanye that we now know, and generally despise, is still a symptom, but not a sinthome. The names-of-the-father are too myopic here. His psychosis does not pass through mommy-daddy, who are instead supplanted by something else — perhaps fame itself, which West does not shy awkwardly away from like Jackson did.

Guattari is instructive on this point when he speaks of the phallus that so preoccupied Lacan, but which he also distinguishes from the father as such, separating the organ from the body. This is important, as although Jackson’s ‘castrated’ relationship to the phallus — as symbol of fantastical authority / authoritative fantasy — is made clear, West’s childhood raised by a single mother produces a very different symbolic relationship. If we wanted to remain Lacanian, we could say something about him symbolically being his own father — single child to a single mother; the ‘man of the house’. If his upbringing hardly seems disrupted by his absent father, being ostensibly middle class and well educated, it also lends itself to explaining his self-possession and self-confidence. But a Lacanian formatting starts to quickly lose its valency here. West has a far more immediate relationship to culture, and here we can turn to Guattari in The Anti-Oedipus Papers for a better understanding of the context in which West should, I think, be understood:

The phallus … plays a particular role in consciousness raising. It threatens mercilessly — in the name
of the socius — to explode consciousness, it haunts the structure as if it were its own machinic alterity. It speaks in the name of the most deterritorialized machinic alterity.

… The phallus promotes individual consciousness, the subject of the statement. In archaic societies, things were enunciated collectively, because there was less imperialism of one flow over others … Machinic alterity is taken to the extreme with the phallus. Ultimately, the phallus supplants the Oedipus. This is the endpoint of capitalist psychosis.

What I take from Guattari’s commentary here is the observation that the family and its associative psychoanalytic metaphors becomes unnecessary in any analysis of the late-capitalist subject. We are already aware of the fact that the family has been eroded, de- and re-territorialized by capitalist flows, and so capitalism’s supreme individualism has no need for the family any longer.

This is the irony of so much reactionary prevaricating from the right about traditional family values. “There is no such thing as society; only individuals and their families”, Margaret Thatcher infamously claimed, but her formula buries the lede here. We might read this instead as “There is no such thing as society; only the phallus and its families.” We could alternatively say ‘individual men and their families’; however, the Iron Lady complicates things here. But she makes herself an exception that proves the rule. Guattari’s ‘individual’ leaves space for anyone to ‘own’ the phallus, and so the apparent contradiction produced by Thatcher’s proto-girlboss feminism isn’t so contradictory after all. Families are only important on the basis of giving patriarchs a small social group to lord over, and Thatcher, despite her gender, was nonetheless still ‘the patriarch’ of both her family and, indeed, of the nation. (And no, not a ‘matriarch’, because this too suggests a feminist reading of her standing that is inapposite.)

This is one instance in which Guattari goes further than Lacan. For Lacan, “[t]he phallus belongs to the father. It is attributive. I.e. marked.” Lacan does his best to separate his terms from any reference to biology — anyone can ‘possess’ the phallus qua law (of dissemination) — and whilst some argue that he is betrayed by the linguistic (and gendered) structures to which he remains loyal, we’re still talking about appropriate symbolic forms of patriarchal power here. The issues only really arise when Lacan’s language is not only gendered, but also remains familial. The lede buried even deeper in Thatcher’s infamous utterance is that the equation is set up to retain an illusion of consistency. The truth of neoliberalism, fascism, and capitalism, as Deleuze and Guattari have it, can be reformulated as follows: “There is no such thing as the family; only individuals and society.”

We can return to Kanye here because he is the most blatant pop-cultural product of this new equation. The orphaned Kanye loses all balustrades between self and society, and thus finds himself utterly alienated from the all pretensions of participation in family life. We need only think of his fleeting appearances on Keeping Up With The Kardashians: the ‘reality’ show about the Kardashian family, which West is technically a part of, but does not participate in; when he appears on screen, is there any scene in which he actually speaks? West does not participate in the family, or what’s more, he does not participate in Oedipus (as an ongoing process).

But West appears very differently from the psychotics that Deleuze and Guattari have a tendency to romanticise. For all his contributions to popular culture, is he really any sort of revolutionary? The revolutionary must learn from the psychotic, they argue, for his resistance to encoding. But this is not necessarily a fully positive consideration. We might also learn from the psychotic by way of the encoding forced upon them, which is perhaps what drives them most ‘mad’. As such, the problem for West, perhaps, is that he cannot actually escape the family. His slide to the right, to its obsession with ‘family values’, its penchant for family chauvinism, makes it impossible for him to reckon with the freedom afforded to him.

Consider the following point raised asked by Deleuze and Guattari: “Everything changes depending on whether we call psychosis the process itself, or on the contrary, an interruption of the process (and what type of interruption?).” Psychosis, for Freud and Lacan, for example, is an interruption of Oedipus; psychosis arises when we cannot find our place in a signifying chain. It is an interruption, or eruption, within the symbolic family. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, psychosis is a process of life, an Orphic eruption of desire. But they also recognise that it can be difficult to tell the difference between the two, and even blame psychoanalysis for this. In always referring back to the family, the orphan is left desiring the thing they do not have — the thing that our psychoanalytic society insists upon: the family — without appreciating the freedom they actually have.

Thus, when Deleuze and Guattari reiterate Reich’s question — why do we fight for our oppression as if it were our salvation? — they are referring here to family chauvinism explicitly. It is our obsession with the family, as an inalienable and preternatural form of relation, that makes us fight for this utopic thing that fails us everywhere. It is the family that is exclusory, protective, isolationist, atomised, individualistic; it is family chauvinism that leads us to fascism. West is a fascist, then, because he is an orphan, a psychotic, fighting to secure an authoritarian sense of social order he has actually been freed from.

Far from contradicting Deleuze and Guattari’s romantic vision of the psychotic, West exemplifies it. The ambiguity of Anti-Oedipus, after all, is that it is capitalism that has made us psychotics, in the sense that its deterritorializing forces have freed us from oppressive hierarchical ties like never before. But in reterritorializing what is abolished back onto its own ideological rot, it is also capitalism that makes us “crazy”. Capitalism orphans us so violently that we went up scrambling for what is most reactionary within us: that most narrow sense of sympathy, our ‘family values’.

By way of another example, I would like to use my own. I have often thought about my own reactionary tendencies as a teenager. Being an adoptee made me anti-abortion, for example, because I felt that the very existence of abortion was an insult to my own continued existence. There is no logic to this position, of course, as if it were at all sensical to argue that it is worse to live as a child rejected and dead than a child rejected and alive.

This sort of argument isn’t uncommon, however. Sophie Lewis, in Full Surrogacy Now, notes how adoption rights activists have seldom been the friends and allies of feminists seeking family abolition. This is because, Lewis argues, such activists see in a politics of family abolition the very thing they “abhor most”, which is the argument that all children “are contingently rather than automatically their parents’ children; the products of an active choice of care, rather than a necessity borne of nature.” But if adoption rights advocates abhor this argument, perhaps it is because it is a contingency that they have already had to wrestle with, and in ways that the general population has not. This is to say that adoptees already live with the consequences of family abolition, whilst the world around them refuses to accommodate their experiences.

We live in a society that prizes the family so dogmatically above all else that it is precisely those have not experienced the family according to a norm that can end up fighting for its efficacy most forcefully. Michael Jackson’s version of this was similarly corrupted. His lack of a childhood led him to actively reconstruct one for himself, and within the bounds of his corrupted childhood, he reproduced various forms of abuse as well. The contradiction of Jackson, of course, is that he was already deemed a creep before his crimes were further brought to light. His corruption of a childhood held and protected by the family was double-edged in this regard. People would have seen him as a creep whether he’d abused any children or not — and indeed, they did, before everything seemed far more obvious after his death. West travels in the other direction. He seeks not a postmodern infancy, which Jackson represented, but rather a recapitulated family chauvinism. Both are symptoms, in this regard, corrupted by a far more immediate relationship between self and society. But whereas Jackson fantasised about a life freed from familial tyranny, West seeks that familial territory again, as it is the very thing that has been vanquished. Faced with this situation, however, he, like the rest of us, fails to see just how free he is.

This is why Fisher’s Acid Communism — had he finished it — would have been prescient. At a time when everyone else was fearing the rise of the Acid Right, he looked to the Acid Communism that this newly explicit socio-political situation was actively covering over. West would have suited his argument as a corollary because West is that most extreme pop-cultural example of what happens when this new freedom is reterritorialized by capitalism. But whereas many others have since leapt upon this current as a scapegoat, they have also helped to further erode the potentials offered to us within the present, suppressing any potential for consciousness-raising by instead trying to keep tabs on processes of reterritorialisation. We have missed the moment of deterritorialization, that moment when things were primed for intervention.

Kanye West is symptomatic not only of the present’s worst excesses in this regard, but like so many other celebrities who have succumbed to over-exposure to society, he is also symptomatic of our failure to offer up a narrative capable of competing with, even defeating, capitalism’s family chauvinism. West is an orphan we have failed twice.