According to Lawrence Grossberg (1993), effect is both psychological and material. It demands that we speak of the body and of discursive practices in their materiality. This foregrounding of affect is also probably connected with my reading of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990) “The resistance of the popular occurs on terrains altogether different from that of culture in the strict sense of the word…and it takes the most unexpected forms, to the point of remaining more or less invisible to the cultivated eye” (155). Thus, Rock’s identity and effects depend on the appeal of its sound textuality. To describe Rock culture as a formation is to constitute it as a material- discursive and nondiscursive- context, a complex organization of cultural and noncultural practices that produces particular effects, such as forms and organizations of boredom and fun, of pleasure and pain, of meaning and nonsense.
The Rock formation cuts across any attempt to divide up the field of popular discourses and practices; bringing together genres, media styles, and so forth. To speak of a formation is also to constitute Rock culture spatially as a particular dispersion of practices across time and space.
Grossberg moves on to say that, the Rock formation has a temporal extension and boundary. It is a historical event and production that emerged at a particular moment, made possible by and in response to specific conditions of possibility. These conditions (social and economic) had given rise to Rock culture but also constrained it at the same time. As these conditions opened up trajectories and transformations of Rock, they also confined it within particular frameworks. Following this logic, Grossberg says that the notion of Rock is dead, is about a discursive haunting within the Rock formation and a possible eventual reality. He assumes that if the Rock formation emerged as a response to particular conditions, then, when those conditions changed and the effects of the discourse within the formation changed, then the set of relations and effects articulated around it would not be the same. The set of relations and effects would be different. Two questions would then arise- Firstly, how is it possible to describe the changes in the formation of Rock? Secondly, what is relationship between social structure and artistic creativity, as well as the possibilities of resistance? In the first place, as the youth became sophisticated and opinionated, the discrepancies of ideas and philosophies on life emerged between them and their parent generation. According to Grossberg, a prevailing generation crisis was one of the factors that defined the content of the youth’s identity. The concepts of social structures that the world offered the youth would seem to fail to incite the youth’s sense of commitment and passion. They face the dilemma of living two lives- one
defined by the interpretation and institution of the adult world that attempted to incorporate the youth into them; the other was the prospect of following the ideologies and lifestyles of the parent generation.
It was based on this conflict that Rock opened up and offered a possibility of transition to help the youth maintain identification and sense of belonging. By highlighting the sentiment that “something matters”, Rock established a specific definition of authenticity. However, the term “authenticity” is not anything about ideological purity, or does it have an origin. According to Grossberg, the term was a middle-class obsession to compensate for the sense of absence of their authentic past (Grossberg 1992). Because Rock was able to make the youth feel belonged somewhere, it could speak both to the identity and difference of its audience. What Rock did was reconstitute an identity and offer meanings. By articulating the historical condition into a specific audience, the styles of Rock were able to evolve as a response to different demands of authenticity required by various generations of people). “Rock” thus means the entire formation. It includes affective machine, politics of fun, politics and strategy of everyday life (Grossberg 2002).
The definition of authenticity of Rock provides a measure of how Rock differs from other cultural forms. Since the definition of authenticity helps distinguish Rock from other music, it imposed different cultural practices between Rock fans and participants of other art types. This divergence termed as “excess” as Grossberg says, marks the reality and even the legitimacy of the fan’s difference which is often interpreted as Rock’s inexorable tie to resistance, refusal, alienation and marginality (Grossberg 1992). Among all other standards, the most important measure of authenticity is the musical sound. Because Rock was originally made available to the majority of fans through radio and records, the sound is Rock’s primary impression.
The ideology of authenticity lies in strategies to redefine the sensibility of youth culture, expanding from music to the entire lifestyle. Starting from the sensibilities felt in the music, Rock music involves subsequent development including definition of authenticity, lifestyles, discourses and ideologies. Rock therefore continually opens up new spaces and centers. Rock must change in order to respond to people’s needs, and reproduce authenticity in new forms. It constantly moves from one center to another to project its authenticity. It is the changes and transitions, which enable Rock to matter, to make a difference, and to empower its fans.
The discussion on Grossberg’s concepts needs to be called a temporary end since this study is about Heavy Metal, not Rock. However, the initial investigation of Grossberg’s theory may help to delineate the complicated fissures lying under music and social life. As the study is about the every day life of the performers, Grossberg’s theories play an important role in formulating some important arguments in later
chapters.
1.5-2 Issues of Culture Industry
Adorno characterizes the culture industry as an “assembly line” mode of production and referred to it as the “synthetic, planned method of turning out its products (factory-like not only in the studio but, more or less, in the compilation of cheap biographies, pseudo-documentary novels, and hit songs) into mere commodities (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979). Adorno (1967) condemned what he called the
“pseudo-individuality” in cultural industry because he thought the pleasure obtained from consuming only made people submissive. The needs created under capitalism oppose to the true needs and pleasure such as happiness and freedom. For example, he argues that free improvisation of Jazz performers was a mere display of conceit because “what appears as spontaneity is in fact carefully planned out in advance with machinelike precision” (123). Unlike Adorno, Steve Chapple and Reebee Garofalo (1977) saw the radical potential of popular music connected to the rebellion of youth in opposing authoritarianism. Popular music can provide possibilities for individual as a way of self-expression and communication, thus may consolidate societal stability.
Moreover, Sara Cohen (1991) sees a tension between commerce and creativity in her study on Rock bands in Liverpool. She found that bands can be categorized into two types- The first are bands that show opposition or resistance to hegemony; the other are bands that promote their music by commercial strategies (196). Pushing Cohen’s idea further, Simon Frith (1983) thinks that the commercial and creative aspects in Rock are interrelated. He argues that art and commerce were integrated in the 1950s’
Britain Rock. He thinks that Rock is an integral part of the commercial system in which there is less conflict between art and commerce than people previously assumed (83).
1.5-3 Strategies of everyday life
According to Chou (Chou 2005) the philosophy of everyday life started from Edmund Husserl. Although the idea of Lebenswelt (life-world) is not totally the same as the term “everyday life”, Husserl guides the followers to see the importance of everyday life as a basis of an ideal world. Husserl tries to theorize a philosophy without making presumptions. He starts with the discussion of experiences in life then develops the experiences into inquiry of intentionality. Husserl thinks that our consciousness is always the consciousness about something. The forms of consciousness are related to the content of experiences, and these experiences are directed upon objects. Thus all such objects are intended. Therefore, there is an immanent process in dealing with all experiences. The objects are constructed in the
synthesis of different “perspectives” in which the objects are seen or remembered later in the same fashion.
Husserl’s idea of phenomenology extends beyond the boundaries of individual consciousness. Husserl’s phenomenology thus not only focuses on one self’s experience but also the experiences of others and the society. He thinks the process, called “bracketing” is the basis of understanding and social life. What Husserl laid is the foundation of a phenomenological perspective of looking at social life. Although he departs from the life-world, he turns backs to it and broadens the understanding of it. Following Husserl, Alfred Schutz continues to discuss the idea of life-world as well as its connection to people’s daily life. Unlike Huseerl, Schutz does not juggle with metaphysical ideas like “bracketing” or “reduction”. He goes on to discuss the limits and the possibilities of meaning in the life-world. He thinks that the strength of phenomenology lies in handling the experience of everyday life world. In making this world the subject of sociology, he renders variegated realms of human experience essential components of sociological knowledge. Also, he moves on to discuss the experience of transcendence. Transcendence is an experience felt distinctly different from reality. Although transcendence symbolizes an unworldly experience, its basis is still in ordinary life. By outlining the characteristics of transcendence, Schutz concludes that transcendence is an indispensable part of daily experiences. There are several kinds of realms of transcendence including the world of dreams, the world of imaginations and phantasms, the world of art, the play world of the child and the world of the insane. Although these worlds are not pragmatic experiences, each of them has particular formation and specific connection to reality. Especially in the world of art and fantasy, people are freed from the life governed by instrumental reason. It is at this point that Schutz sees the potentials of art and fantasy as a transcending and liberating force. Since people are relatively restricted in thoughts or action in other realms (worlds), the unrestrained experiences that art provides grant freedom. Furthermore, because the world of art is a constituent part of the life-world, we may seek this type of liberation in everyday life. Thus it is possible to escape from limitations and constraints imposed on us.
On the other hand, Henri Lefebvre, another influential theorist of everyday life proposes in his “Critique of everyday life” that the western philosophy has to be criticized for its negligence of daily life. He thinks that every problem in philosophy has to seek answer in everyday experience. He points out that the idea of everyday life is a modern concept that which relates to the development of modern society. In pre-modern period, man remains harmonious with nature and whose experiences are more integrated into that of art, philosophy and religion. However, division of labor in modern life breaks this harmony. Based on the exchange values, the need to separate
work and leisure has emerged in order to conform to the modern lifestyle. The modern everyday life has become dull and rigid, and man is stripped of the sense of self-assurance.
5Nevertheless, Lefebvre still believe there is hope hidden in everyday life. There are ways and thus strategies to escape from the restraints of an industrialized world.
All the above-mentioned theories offer myriad perspectives in entering the fields of art, music and social life. They show that art and music are indispensable both in offering enjoyment and access to freedom. They also indicate the abundant everyday life experiences. Hence, the investigation of everyday life could be very interesting.
5Lefebvre (1981) argues that:
With daily life, lived experience is taken and raised up to critical thinking. It is no longer disdained, regarded as an insignificant residue, produced by a necessary methodological reduction, ultimately destroyed. But nor is it overestimated, inflated, counterpoised to what is rational. It assumes in theoretical thinking the place it occupies in social practice: there it is not everything, but it is not nothing either. On the other hand, lived experience and daily life do not coincide. Daily life does not exhaust lived experience, for there is lived experience outside it:
above and/ or below it. Nevertheless, the relation between the experiential and the conceptual is fore grounded. It contains a much larger issue: that of the relations between thought and life- a Faustian question that is scarcely resolved by apologias for life of for pure thought. (11)
Hence. The complexity of daily life, as it emerges from the proceeding summary, cannot be attributed to a linear process, whether historical, philosophical, economic or social. It results from many conjunctions. The realization of the social being known as ‘human’ found itself thwarted by distortions and alienations that were themselves attributable to a multiplicity of causes-the division of labor, social classes, ideologies and ‘values’, oppression and repression. But at the time under consideration, there was not yet no rupture between objects and people, their gestures, actions, situations and discourse. All these aspects of daily life were part not only of the mode of production, but of a totality called ‘civilization’ ( a stronger term ‘culture’, which was subsequently substituted form it). Fragmentation did not yet obtain; a certainty persisted, despite wars and despite the disappearance of the major religious, historical and moral referents since the beginning of the century. (14)
Chapter two: Visual Elements in the Performance
2.0 The cultural Significance of Visual Performance and Cross-Dressing
As a means of communication, clothing is an important source to tell others the basic information of a person. Clothing may function also as masks to conceal the gender identification, and the fact of a vacillation between sexes.5 As many feminists argue, the cultural construction of sex is a series of compulsory imitations and coercions. Nonetheless, the social requirements of sex may change with time and therefore are not indestructible. Dress codes themselves have specific signification.
The reversal of it may engender new meanings and impacts. As the dress code is similar to a kind of general principle, personal choice in choosing what to wear is the stylist variation by each person in contrast to the general norms. To look at dress codes from a wider perspective, transvestism is not just the violation of dress codes, but a disobedience to the strict separation between male and female constructed by culture. Hence, the visual performance of transvestism shows the vacillation of gender and instability of identity--a process from sexual identification to the disruption of meaning in the cultural context. On the one hand, drag conceals the real gender identification; on the other hand, it loosens the rigid sexual codes and images. It then
5 Roland Bathes has argued that the clothes function as semiotics and codes to be recognized by people.
In the fashion system, he argues that there are three different structures: one technological, another iconic, the third verbal for any given object (Barthes, 1990). He said that:
Although the choice of oral structure corresponds to reasons immanent in its objects, it finds some reinforcement from sociology; first of all becasue the propagation of Fashion by magazines(i.e., in particular by the text) has become so vast; half of all French women read magazines at least partially devoted to Fashion on a regular basis; the description of the garment of Fashion (and no longer its production) is therefore a social fact, so that even if the garment of Fashion remained purely imaginary(without affecting real clothing), it would constitute an incontestable element of mass culture, like pulp fiction, comics, and movies; second, the structural analysis of written clothing can also effectively pave the way for the inventory of real clothing that sociology will require for its eventual study of the circuits and circulation- rhythms of real fashion. (9)
to sum up, we may now be certain that any utterance provided by the corpus being studied consists of two terms, derived from two communicative class. Sometimes these two terms are explicit (Clothing|world), sometimes one is explicit (Clothing) and the other is implicit (Fashion).
But whatever the pair of classes being dealt with, one term is always uttered, and consequently the class to which it belong is actualized: Clothing. this explains why communication always takes place either between clothing and the world or between clothing and Fashion, but never directly between the world and Fashion, or even between worldly clothing and Fashion: even though we have three main categories at our disposal, we are dealing with two communicative ensembles: Set A (Clothing|world) and set B (clothing |Fashion). Thus, the corpus will be exhausted by locating all utterances belonging to set A and all utterances belonging to set B. (23) Judith Butler points out the performativity of the gender. That is, the citational nature of the
identification of sex roles and gender image. The study of dress codes and Heavy Metal traverses different aspects of studies from the dress codes as signs to the function of such signs working as the fixation of the gender stereotype.
replaces the restrictions and limits imposed on people and imbue them with another identity. Since sex, as Judith Butler argues, is a learned cultural construction, a
“misrecognized copy,” the sexual image is a mere result of social construction and gradual identification. There may not be the “real” men and women in essence, but only the process of becoming either of them. Seeing visual performance of transvestism in this light and given the fact that gender is mere construction and false image, the question may arise to examine the image of masculinity that is punctuated in Metal. What is the intention for players to dress like female? What do they want to convey? What is the significance of the visual performance in music to performers and audiences?
Performance of transvestism in Rock and Metal has different undertones. Metal players would dress like female as if they really wish to challenge the sexual stereotypes. In the history of Rock and Metal, Mick Jagger, Alice Cooper, Twisted Sister and Poison are examples of musicians intentionally dorned in women’s clothes and make-ups to cause social shock. Nonetheless, the anti-patriarchal stance in Metal, if any, seems pretty effeminate to a variety of groundbreaking discourses made by sexual activists. Scholars like Deena Weinstein argue that Heavy Metal is anything but masculine--masculine in the heterosexual sense that rather reinforces the dichotomy of male and female instead of assuming sexual rebellion. In other words, what transvestist performance aims at is to shatter the patriarchal order by its performances and dress codes as what Marjorie Garber contends to cause a
“categorical crisis” to the existing order. However, the visual performances of Rock and especially Heavy Metal players though seemingly significant from the feminist point of view, may just be used as perfomative strategies that have no progressive
“categorical crisis” to the existing order. However, the visual performances of Rock and especially Heavy Metal players though seemingly significant from the feminist point of view, may just be used as perfomative strategies that have no progressive