Lawrence Kwok

I read Harlan Ellison’s short story, ‘I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream’ last night, and I have to admit that it’s just about the scariest thing I’ve read in a very long time.  Upon falling asleep, I had a nightmare the likes of which I haven’t experienced since I was about 4.

To clarify, I don’t think it’s Ellison’s imagery that is effective as much as the fact that the imagery can’t be placed as real, symbolic or imaginary.  In that sense, the unknown always remains unknown, even to the reader.  It renders your omniscience useless, placing you no better or worse off than the characters themselves.  The imagery stands as merely a placeholder for things that are supposed to have meaning, and yet meaning is always deferred by another nightmarish image. So you the reader, ultimately survive the imagery, but at what cost? Only to have nothing left to read.  The main character has no voice and your eyes have been glued open.  A true nightmare.

All of Ghandi’s worldly possessions.  Photograph was in some book, I don’t remember where or when, or by whom.

My Portfolio, finally done.

Blade Runner Sketchbook

McLuhan probably coined the terms, ‘Speed of Light Society’.  I would say that for however many explanations the terms have, I don’t really know any.  He may have said it, but I won’t ever really grasp at what he meant. I may tend to more easily understand Flip Wilson (“What you see is what you get”). I mean, all I feel is a kind of Alzheimer’s, but not the kind of affliction one has physically, but almost the kind of mental abstractness one might feel after having died, and then say, gone back to work.

Every image I see before me, moving or still, is something I can instantly take for granted, and can equally take me for granted.  Am I supposed to know what this is? I’m supposed to know what this is.  I’m supposed to take it in and digest it.  And like Olestra, it just passes through me, on to the next destination.  I just continue to sit there, helpless.  I’m either socially unified in my praise, or unified in my disgust, but I must be unified.  Or else, why would I be sitting here subjecting myself?

So then what is this feeling if not an actual Alzheimer’s? Some kind of post-dementia? What’s the difference between a mind that cannot hold on to what it knows, and information that merely washes past it, like a babbling brook?

Perhaps when it comes down to it, maybe Flip has a point: When you watch a, ‘time lapse’, that’s precisely what you get.

Back to work.

Question de jour…

I’ll keep ya posted.

edmontonwriters:

Who Are We Writing For? takes place this weekend at Latitude 53, the Art Gallery of Alberta, and dc3 Art Projects in downtown Edmonton, including Andrew Forster’s public talk at Latitude 53 on Friday at 7, where you can meet the workshop participants as well as a discussion with John Shelling,…

I recently visited the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto during CONTACT festival and Michael Wolf’s work was among the stand-outs for me. 

‘tokyo compression’ by michael wolf
images © michael wolf

The series, ‘tokyo compression’, by german-born hong kong-based photographer michael wolf is a collection of images featuring commuters through the lens of foggy subway windows. 

Totally digging Jon Rafman’s work lately. 

Google streetview, surveillance and magic. rad.

This guy is fantastic.

latitude53:

Yusuke Shibata is getting ready for his workshop on May 12th by eating a lot of pizza and making plans—here’s what he sent us this week:

What have we been surrounded by?

Street skateboarding tricks indicate it appropriately. The street skateboarders focus on the unrealistic scenes and the back scenes we receive blindly because they are taken for granted. It is the recovery of the tactile reality; you can feel and get the blind scenes just only by attacking the structures existing as materials you see but actually don’t realize.

In this workshop featuring the skateboarders’ approach to their cities, you can visualize the area by performing tricks with the pizza boxes to the blindly accepted and unconscious scenes.

I will have a lecture first and then, go out the street on a video shoot in the workshop. If there are a lot of participants join, I’ll divide them into groups so I would like you to bring your video camera if you have. Also, I strongly recommend putting on comfortable clothes(skateboards clothing is welcome!).

Let’s do pizza box great tricks in downtown Edmonton!

Watch Yusuke’s video that we posted earlier to get a little bit more of an idea—we’re definitely looking forward to this one!

mnemata:

“A house is a machine for living in” ~Le Corbusier

(image: Esther Stocker). 

lionskeleton:

Martin Creed

If you follow The Ritournelle, you may be aware of my fondness for Ms. Claire Boucher, a.k.a. Grimes. I could list the reasons for this fondness, including her cyber/cyborg-post-internet-k.pop-hip.hop-AphexTwin influences, but instead, here, I want to take a little looksy at her video for the killer song Oblivion.

Cue video.

WATCH!

I’ve been looking at “youth culture” for a class and this video made me think of many things. What, you ask? Well, let’s get into it…

As a youth, the prospect of oblivion, the condition of being forgotten or unknown, can offer both welcome respite and immense fear. Some youth go to extreme efforts to “blend in” or “stand out” to either embrace or rebel against being lost in oblivion. The politics of “seeing and being seen” are underscored in the world of youth, where spectacle and performativity are often central practices of identity formation. In the music video for Oblivion, “cyborg-pop” musician Grimes and director Emily Kai Bock approach some of these ideas through the lens of the camera. Let’s take a closer look at this video as it relates to the concepts of spectacle and performing identity! Hooray!

The video for Oblivion begins in a men’s locker room. The petite Grimes is dressed in her usual melange of styles – including multi-toned hair, tulle skirt, second-hand sweater, skeleton gloves- and is surrounded by half-naked men, lifting weights and moving in slow motion across the room. A strobe light pulsates almost in unison with the distorted beats of the song before the video cuts to a shot of Grimes entering a stadium full of spectators. Her “twee” voice kicks in and the performance begins.

The question is, however, what performance?

The video features Grimes in a variety of settings including a motocross rally, a football game, a fast food restaurant and a living room of shirtless, raucous young men. Each of these settings offers a new form of spectacle and a new performance. Grimes, with her headphones on and boom box in tow, is at the same time another face in the crowd and central to a spectacle all her own.

Grimes, born and raised in Vancouver, is a twenty-three year old, self-taught musician who credits her recent musical success to curiosity (Holson, 2012). Labelled often as “post-internet”, Grimes’ describes her work as “the only means through which [she] can be fully expressive. It is both an ethereal escape from, and a violent embrace of [her] experience” (Boucher as cited in Dombai, 2012). In the video for Oblivion, this simultaneous escape and embrace becomes a spectacle among spectacles. Directed by Emily Kai Bock with cinematography by Evan Prosofsky, this video plays with the distance between spectator and spectacle and the inner and outer world of the “performer”.

So, spectacle, hey? WTF?

The etymology of the word spectacle derives from the Latin root spectare “to view, watch” and specere “to look at” (Spectacle, n.d.). Spectacle, as a concept, is often associated with the display of performance and its ties to the visual dates back to Greek tragedy (Kan, n.d.). Although spectacle is experienced differently depending on the affective response of each individual spectator, much of the appeal of the spectacle comes from its power to hold the gaze of the viewer (Kan, n.d). This power, in many ways, has a very direct link to authority and, as Myra Mendible (1994) puts it, spectacles as public displays are most often “cultural performances sponsored by an empowered or authorized group” (Mendible as cited in Hughes-Fuller, 2009, p.98). Mendible notes that often in the past, spectacles aimed to play off the already established desires of the public, working to “sustain the gap between the empowered and the powerless” (Mendible as cited in Hughes-Fuller, 2009, p. 98).

In the video for Oblivion, we see some reference to these forms of spectacle. As motorcycles and female cheerleaders fly through the air, one can’t help but think back to early arenas where the gaze of the audience was held by the spectacular.

Instead of gladiators and dangerous animals, however, now we have football players and dangerous machines.

Other than Grimes herself, the video features men predominantly, as both the spectacle and spectator. In an interview with Pitchfork, the director explains that the choice of these spectacles demonstrate “the gladiator archetype and how boys are predisposed to that as a universal role model” (Kai Bock as cited in Dombai, 2012). The spectacle “on the field”, so to speak, provides an archetype and model to which the crowds of men can refer. In many ways, the spectacles featured here, serve to reproduce hegemonic notions of masculinity, through the practice of performance. Butler states that “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results” (Butler, 1990, p. 25). Drawing on both Butler’s and Mendible’s ideas, the spectacle here is that of masculinity itself, which in turn empowers those who desire to replicate this specific form of masculinity.

While these “sponsored” or “authorized” spectacles and performances take place, both on and off the field, there is another spectacle a play. Central to each shot is Grimes, singing, dancing, and performing. This spectacle holds the gaze of some of the spectators around her, but there is another set of spectators for whom she performs: those beyond the camera. The concept of the spectacle and the relationship between spectacle and spectator becomes complicated with the mediation of recording technology.

Throughout Oblivion, Grimes performs to us, an audience yet to come. The director purposefully places Grimes in the centre of the shot, controlling our perception of what we see, creating a new spectator through the lens of the camera. In this way, there is a subversion of the usual distance between spectacle and spectator, creating an interesting dialogue about spectacle and the “reality” in which it exists. Baudrillard claims that “in the media and consumer society, people are caught up in the play of images, spectacles, and simulacra, that have less and less relationship to an outside, to an external “reality,” to such an extent that the very concepts of the social, political, or even “reality” no longer seem to have any meaning” (Kellner, 2009). In this example, Grimes deliberately escapes the “reality” and empty spectacle in front of her and instead, she embraces her own experience of the world to create her own spectacle.

The way in which this spectacle is created is through performance. It can be said that the performance offered by Grimes is in response or direct contrast to the performance of masculinity around her. Although surrounded by these performances of masculinity, Grimes is, in many ways, controlling the action and in turn, asserting a certain form of power. Unlike the version of spectacle outlined above, where the performance is “sponsored by an empowered or authorized group”, the spectacle of Grimes’ performance is “sponsored” by the video camera.

By altering the dynamic between spectacle and spectator, she is asserting, in a way, her own power as an artist and a female in an otherwise male-dominated arena. The arena referenced here is conceived as both the physical arenas she infiltrates, as well as the metaphorical arena of the music industry, especially the electronic music industry. Grimes herself comments on this idea stating that “art gives [her]an outlet where [she] can be aggressive in a world where [she] usually can’t be, and part of this was asserting this abstract female power in these male-dominated arenas” (Boucher as cited by Dombai, 2012).

The spectacle, as it is presented here, is more than just a cultural performance but also a way in which hegemonic notions of identity, in this case masculinity, is either embraced or subverted. Although Grimes is not offering a specific feminist answer to the masculinities presented here, she is opening up space for her own subjective experience to become. In doing so, she may, at the same time, escape from and violently embrace her own potential to be lost in oblivion.

Or something like that.

Jessie Beier

References

Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Gender. London: Routeledge.

Dombai, R. (2012). Grimes: Oblivion. Pitchfork: Director’s Cut. Retrieved from http://pitchfork.com/ features/directors-cut/8783-grimes-oblivion/.

Holson, L. (2012). Claire Boucher Mines Beauty from the Dark Side. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/fashion/claire-boucher-known-as-grimes-mines-beauty-from-the- dark-side.html

Hughes-Fuller, P. (2009). Wild Bodies and True Lies: Carnival, Spectacle, and the Curious Case of Trailer Park Boys. Canadian Journal of Communication. Vol. 34 (2009): 95-109.

Kan, L. (n.d.). Spectacle. Theories of Media: Keywords Glossary. Retrieved from http:// csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/spectacle.htm

Kellner, D. (2009) “Jean Baudrillard”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Retrieved from <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2009/entries/baudrillard/.

Spectacle (n.d.). Online Etymlogy Dictionary. Retrieved from http://www.etymonline.com/index.php? term=spectacle.

Timely article considering my recent posts…

So, I just got back from SXSW (arguably the “hipster” convention of the year) and realized that while I was there, I had several conversations about the notion of the “hipster”. Being the big dork that I am, I was able to reference I piece I just wrote for a class. An encyclopaedic entry, if you will, on the subculture that has come to be known as the “hipster”.

And this is how it goes…

Since the Allies bombed the Axis in World War II a stream of subcultural movements have emerged, creating venues for youth to push against the status quo and make space for new forms of subjective experience. A subculture is created “when the responses of a group are distinctly at odds in both content and structure with both the hegemonic culture and the parent culture, and when these responses are taken up in that group as a way of life” (Epstein, 2008. p.10). In the twenty-first century, a time marked by unprecedented connectivity and near-global capitalism, subcultural movements have become fluid entities. Not only are subcultures at odds with “parent cultures”, but the “way of life” of a subcultural group is harder to generalize and within each subculture customization and flexibility is available based on the personal interests, values and tastes of the individual. A key example of this phenomenon is demonstrated by the “mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behaviors” (Haddow, 2008) that has come to be defined as the indefinite idea of the “hipster”.  

Hipsterdom: Defining the Indefinable 

The hipster, by its very definition, is indefinable. (Ask someone if they are a hipster and see what happens, I dare you!) The whole point of being a hipster is to avoid labels and being labeled. However, it can be argued that there is a certain aesthetic and philosophy that can be attributed to this otherwise indescribable subcultural group. For the purpose of this examination, the hipster will be characterized by three major elements: a set of stylistic trademarks, the ironic use of symbols and icons from the past, and a desire for novelty.

The first element, and possibly the one used most often to define the hipster, is their style. Although the stylistic trademarks vary within the group, generally the hipster is identified by a series of codified markers including skinny jeans, fixed gear bikes, vintage flannel, and non-prescription eyeglasses.

The second element shares characteristics with the first and helps to further describe the stylistic aesthetic of the hipster. In addition to the markers listed above, the hipster is known for wearing and using iconic symbols from the past in an ironic manner. It seems that those labeled hipster appropriate working class and revolutionary symbols, be it beer and cigarettes of American laborers of yore or the keffiyeh scarf of Palestinian activists, and interpret them in new ways.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, hipsters play at being “the inventors or first adopters of novelties: pride comes from knowing, and deciding, what’s cool in advance of the rest of the world” (Greif, 2010). For the hipster, the new is a form of capital in itself.  

Although these characteristics alone are somewhat easy to classify and therefore attribute to the hipster, it is difficult to find a hipster who will, in fact, self identify. The hipster aims to pull away from labels that have come before while at the same time appropriating a mélange of pre-existing styles, influences and symbols. This ambiguity, flexibility and indistinctness, combined with the fact that hipsters do not necessarily have one specific social or political agenda or ideology, has meant that as a subculture, “the movement remains the most socio-economically inclusive, globally present, and sexually and racially diverse in history” (Mitaru, 2009). For this reason, the hipster offers a unique example of how subcultures manifest in an    increasingly globalized, connected world.  

From Psychopathic Brilliance to Capitalistic Capture 

The notion of the hipster is not novel to the twenty-first century. The signifier itself was “coined after the jazz age, when hip arose to describe aficionados of the growing scene” (Fletcher, 2009). At this time, hipsters were usually “middle-class white youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely-black jazz musicians they followed” (Fletcher, 2009). One of these middle-class youth was the American writer Norman Mailer.  In 1957, Mailer wrote an essay entitled “The White Negro” which “analyzes and partly defends the moral radicalism of the outsider and hipster” (Bromwich, 2008).

In the essay, Mailer underscores the milieu from which the original hipster emerged, pointing to the devastating social and psychological effects of World War II: “The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked in it” (Mailer, 1957). Mailer asserts that WWII reflected a crippled and perverted image of man, which in turn, led to a time marked by depression and conformity. Within this conformity and a “collective failure of nerve”, Mailer suggests that the “American existentialist”, or the hipster, was born. In Mailer’s account of the hipster, the importance of the “psychopathic brilliance” in oneself is highlighted and Robert Lindner is referenced in his understanding of the psychopath: 

“The psychopath is a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program: in other words, his rebelliousness is aimed to achieve goals satisfactory to himself alone” (Lindner cited in Mailer, 1957). 

To further define the hipster, Mailer juxtaposes it with the “Square” or the conformist. While a square will conform and adhere to the status quo, the hipster will rebel. In this way, the source of the hipster for Mailer was “the Negro”. Mailer posited that “the hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro” (Mailer, 1957).

In summary, Mailer understood the hipster as an extreme non-conformist that had almost no interest in judging human nature from a set of a priori standards, but rather sought to rebel for the sake of rebellion in an attempt to create a new alternative for living (Mailer, 1957).  

As the first hipster generation aged, it was replaced by a subculture known as the “hippies”, who appropriated the fear of war, this time responding to the Cold War, but embraced a sense of community over the individual. The hipster then faded for a time until it was used once again, this time to describe a generation of middle-class youth interested in alternative music, magazines, and art in the late nineteen-nineties. Similar to Mailer’s version of the hipster, this group grew out of a desire to rebel against the mainstream.

At the turn of the millennium as the world watched everyday people turn celebrity on reality television and celebrities turn everyday through paparazzi photos and gossip blogs, a subculture grew. This group of youth ignored the glitz and flash of celebrity culture that took hold of the mainstream opting to appropriate trends and styles from a forgotten past. Unlike the hipster of Mailer’s day who aimed to create new alternatives of living, this group of non-conformists appropriated past lived experiences and adopted them as their own.  

Due to this difference, the modern reincarnation of the hipster has been criticized heavily for a (mis)appropriation of symbols, lack of authenticity and for the inability to create new meanings (Haddow, 1998; Fletcher, 2009).  Many have identified the hipster as less of a subculture and more of a consumer group that uses capital to “purchase empty authenticity and rebellion” (Haddow, 2008). Unlike the hipster of Mailer’s time, the modern hipster is seen by many as “left with consuming cool rather than creating it” (Haddow, 2008). In addition, from this perspective the modern hipster simply “mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society” and “represents the end of Western civilization” (Haddow, 2008). Although this critique is strong, some have read the hipster’s broad sampling of styles and incongruent lifestyle preferences less critically, suggesting that the current social and economic state of affairs has “so thoroughly degraded our social environments and clouded our futures, the natural reaction is to search for meaning in those narratives still offering promise: technology, sustainability, relationships, aesthetics, the self” (Mitaru, 2009). These narratives, in many ways, are what the hipster is all about. 

Hipster Morality and Vice Magazine  

Whether the hipster represents “the end” is debatable. However, what the subcultural movement does highlight is that the subjective experience of youth is taking shape in new ways in the twenty-first century due to increased global connectivity and the proliferation of neoliberal, capitalistic ideologies. On a superficial level, the hipster may appear to embody an apolitical and apathetic attitude that is therefore unable to create new meaning. On a deeper level, however, the hipster may point to what Mailer conceived as the “philosophical psychopath” or, in other words, “a man interested not only in the dangerous imperatives of his psychopathy but in codifying, at least for himself, the suppositions on which his inner universe is constructed” (Mailer, 1957).

Here, Mailer highlights an interesting aspect of the subjectivity of the hipster that can also be attributed to the group today. Now more than ever the “inner universe” of the individual is manipulated, measured and controlled. In a time marked by neoliberal ideologies, where the individual and the “freedom to choose” are held in high esteem, the ability to “codify” one’s own “inner universe” is increasingly connected to how and what one consumes. Practices of performing and shaping the self are now broadly diffused throughout society and our lives are “(self-)governed in concert with massive processes of textual production and simulation associated with media and educational systems and other institutional apparatuses of the state and global capital” (McCarthy, 2004, p.153). The hipster, both today and in Mailer’s time, exemplifies a “Hip morality” wherein one must “do what one feels whenever and wherever it is possible [and…] to open the limits possible for oneself, for oneself alone, because that is one’s need” (Mailer, 1957). 

This morality is exemplified today by the ability for the hipster to self-style and pick and choose elements from a variety of sources that best suits their current needs and desires. These desires are ultimately driven by the need to capture the new. Mailer may have said it best: “this is the terror of the hipster—to be beat” (Mailer, 1957). The above examination points out that unlike subcultures that have come before, defined by models of conflict and resistance, the hipster as a contemporary social group is defined more so by “overwhelming patterns of transnational hybridities, new forms of association and affiliation that seem to flash on the surface of life” (McCarthy, 2004, p. 160).

If the morality of the hipster is as Mailer suggests, “opening the limits possible for oneself”, then what is the moral guide to which this group refers? It could be argued that one such guide is Vice magazine. Called by some the “world’s smartest youth-oriented magazine” and the “hipster bible” (Burrell, 2010), Vice is a worldwide publication that was founded as a fanzine by three friends in Montreal in 1994. Drawing on the characteristics of the hipster outlined earlier, Vice offers a good example of how a movement marked by ambiguity and flexibility has taken on a global presence.

Gavin McInnes, one of the founders of Vice, is considered to be one of hipsterdom’s primary architects. McInnes was responsible for a column entitled “Dos and Don’ts”, which defined the rules of hipster fashion and experience for over a decade (Haddow, 2008). The column features candid photos of everyday people with captions that either praise or ridicule their style and behaviour. This column, in many ways, acts as a form of surveillance, which reminds the hipster that he or she can also be seen. This, in turn, leads to a desire to self-regulate and self-manage as Foucault suggests in his History of Sexuality volumes. In addition, the bodies in this column act as a canvas for commodity fetishizing and it is in “this framework of cultural oversupply that the modern consumer tries on new identities and directs and redirects practices of self-correction and modulation” (McCarty, 2004, p. 158).

In a drawing from 2005, the magazine presents “The Vice Guide to You” (Figure 1). The drawing dissects a Vice reader, from the perspective of the magazine itself, pointing to several defining characteristics.  

Like the “Dos and Don’ts” Column, this illustration serves to create a hipster identity while at the same time critiquing that which makes the hipster a hipster. The irony here is not accidental. This self-protective irony is, in the end, what has helped to create the hipster. Mailer makes reference to this form of irony as early as 1957 stating that the hipster is “living with questions and not with answers” (Mailer, 1957). It is these questions, of identity, the self, consumption, affiliations and aesthetics that maintain the hipster as a subculture.  

In Conclusion…

As a subcultural movement, perhaps the hipster points to new understandings of the subjective experience of youth. We blind ourselves to possibility if we expect future movements to resemble those of the past. The hipster movement has been criticized for its lack of cohesiveness and authenticity, but it may be the case that hipsterdom presents a new understanding of the idea of subculture itself, one that is more relevant for the twenty-first century.

Jessie Beier

March 20, 2012

References 

Bromwich, D. (2008). Norman Mailer. Retrieved from http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1168 

Burrell, I. (2010). Substance over style: Hipster’s bible Vice Magazine is making documentaries about war zone. The Independent. Retrieved from 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/substance-over-style-hipsters-biblevice-magazine-is-making-documentaries-about-war-zones-2112119.html

Epstein, J. S. (Ed.). (1998). Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World. Malden, MA and Oxford UK: Blackwell. 

Fletcher, D. (2009). Hipsters. Time Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1913220,00.html

Greif, M. (2010). The Sociology of the Hipster. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/books/review/Greif-t.html?pagewanted=1

Haddow, D. (2008). Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization. Adbusters. Retrieved from http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

Mailer, N. (1957). The White Negro. Dissent. Retrieved from http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=26

McCarthy, C. (2004). Thinking about the cultural studies of education in a time of recession: Learning to Labor and the work of aesthetics in modern life. In, N. Dolby & G. 

Dimitriadis (Eds.), with P. Willis. Learning to Labor in New Times. (NY: Routledge). 

Mitaru, I. (2009). Reconsidering the Hipster: An Acknowledgement of Potentiality. Adbusters. Retrieved from http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/rants/reconsidering-hipster.html

Williams, A. (2010). A Wild Man Grows Up (Just Enough). The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/19/fashion/19upclose.html?pagewanted=all

gosergiogo:

The digital dark age is a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical digital documents and multimedia, because they have been stored in an obsolete and obscure digital format. 

— “Digital dark age,” Wikipedia.

Hey it’s been a while! Check this out!

It begins with an image of a girl, eyes trained on us, the audience. Cut to amateur “home” video footage of young couples on motorcycles racing through the country side before another quick cut to a swimming pool lined with young boys, each taking a turn to plunge into the water. Next, a brief image of the American flag flaps in the breeze before the shot changes to an animated conductor directing a cartoon orchestra as the strings begin to swell. These are the “video games” written, sung, directed and edited by Lana Del Rey that made waves over that epic body known as the Internet last summer. 

Here, we investigate the image of American singer Lana Del Rey. How? By drawing on an immanent conception of the image as proposed by Gilles Deleuze. Cue theoretical background info.

According to Deleuze, images are not just in front of us, something on a screen to be viewed, but instead we live in images and images live in us (Deleuze, 1986). An immanent conception of the image is, in this way, not a vacuous vessel waiting to be filled with meaning but rather an active production in itself that is constantly affecting and being affected by other concepts, images, bodies and thoughts (Deleuze, 1994). In this way, the image of analysis here is not only that of Del Rey staring out at her audience, doe-eyed and pouty lipped, but also the concepts that this image has produced.

Okie dokie. Moving on. Let’s chat about the “problem” with the image of the young songstress known as Lana Del Rey. My first encounter with Del Rey was through the music video for “Video Games”, referenced above. I was immediately intrigued by the song and by the discrepancy between the lyrics, a “sadcore” ballad for all intents and purposes, and the images presented, video clips of skateboarders, shots from old movies, celebrity paparazzi footage, and Americana kitsch. Upon its release, the video for “Video Games” was featured on numerous music blogs and was quickly taken up on Twitter feeds, music websites and online music forums.

I remember being very curious: “Who is this Lana Del Rey and what is her deal?” For others, the questions were much more critical, causing what has been dubbed (and even trademarked) by some as “the Lana Del Rey Authenticity Debate ^TM” (Hopper, 2012). Deleuze taught that to understand a concept, we must seek to understand the problem to which it responds. Here, I seek to investigate the concepts of “authenticity” and “truth” within the “problem” of the image of Lana Del Rey. Ultimately, this analysis aims to uncover how the image of Del Rey has put “truth” in crisis within the independent music scene. I think.

The criticism of Del Rey, who has been described as a “self-styled gangsta Nancy Sinatra” (Lester, 2011), generally falls into two categories: a) she is an underdeveloped performer getting more attention than she deserves; and b) she is inauthentic.

The first category is perhaps easier to explain, based on some “underwhelming” live performances including a highly tweeted/blogged/Facebooked performance on Saturday Night Live where Del Rey was called nothing short of “horrible” (Stewart, 2012) and “Born 2 Fail” (Hopper, 2012). The second category, the criticism that focuses on Del Rey’s “authenticity” or lack thereof, is perhaps less straightforward and therefore worth deeper analysis. Many of the harshest words of Del Rey have come from the very scene in which she is enjoying her success: the “independent” or “alternative” music scene. The charge against the twenty-five year old singer is that she has been “created in the name of commerce” (Danby, 2012) and that “she was Frankensteined together by old white guys in ties in order to exploit the now sizable “indie” market” (Hopper, 2012). 

This image of Lana Del Rey, one that continues to affect and be affected, has catalysed a discussion of the concept of “authenticity”. Lana Del Rey, born Elizabeth Grant, is not dissimilar from other pop singers who have undergone transformations in the name of their career. Transformation is not unheard of in the music industry and speaks to the importance of performativity within this sphere. What then, makes Del Rey inauthentic? To answer this question let’s, once again, draw on the work of Deleuze and the notion of the actual/virtual distinction.

Lana Del Rey has, in many ways, put “truth” in crisis within the independent music scene by presenting an image that is seen as inauthentic. Deleuze makes reference to this type of “crisis” and the inability in contemporary society to clearly discern between an “original” and the “copy” and therefore “true” and “false” (Pisters, 1998). In the example of Del Rey, the “original”, and therefore “true”, image of authenticity is difficult to discern from this supposed “copy”. In order to come to terms with this crisis, Deleuze proposes that we replace the true/false dichotomy with the actual/virtual distinction. The difference in this distinction is that both actualities and virtualities are real, in that they have an effect on us. In the example of Lana Del Rey, she is very real in that she clearly has an effect on the images, thoughts and bodies around her. The numerous articles, Tweets, and videos are actualities that exist as a reaction to Lana Del Rey. However, within the actual/virtual distinction, not all virtual potentials will always become actual. In other words, of all the potential effects Del Rey may have on the music community, only some of these will be actualized. It is this potential that may be the real “problem” for those affected by this image. 

Music + the odd Deleuze reference = The Ritournelle

The Ritournelle is therefore a form of incantation for a claimed spatiality, but it is also a sort of song that, despite is supposed lightness is calling for the power of the cosmos. As Deleuze turns it: “This is like if the stars would start to play a small song of cows’ bells or actually it’s even the opposite, that’s the cows’ bells that become, all in a sudden, promoted to the status of celestial noise, or of infernal noises.”

# DELEUZE /// The Ritournelle