text: It reminded me of something about pop music that occurred to me when The Saturdays’ album came out. I thought, while listening to the album, that it sounded like the Sugababes, which then struck me as odd, as there are obvious ways in which the group are more like Girls Aloud. But while their may be some stylistic similarity between Girls Aloud and The Saturdays, there’s what seems to me to be a more important difference of affect, adds some further distinctions to the concept of cold pop.
  What many Sugababes and Girls Aloud songs share (and of course they’re not the only two groups that share this, but they may be the primary contemporary exponents) is an emotional texture built around a tension between the lyrical themes and the downbeat melody. But for the Sugababes, the sadness of the music is simply contradicted by the explicit positivity of the lyrics, built around uplifting themes of strength, recovery, moving on. The effect is a kind of musical version of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, in which the false emotion of the music is corrected by the rational judgment of the lyrics. This is also the predominant affect of The Saturdays, as might be predicted from the fact that their biggest hit is titled “Up” (which is an excellent track; it’s surprising that it’s not surprising that a top-ten pop hit can be constructed out of the sound of heart monitors and reversing trucks).
  One of the most marvelous and remarkable things about Girls Aloud is that they generally resist this compulsory positivity. Instead, the tension in Girls Aloud is between the musical representation of sad passions, and the power that comes from the objective recognition of these passions in the lyrics: a genuinely Spinozist music as opposed to the cut-price Spinozism of CBT (this, I think, also explains why Girls Aloud’s covers are almost always failures, as the conventional pop ballads that have been chosen don’t share Girls Aloud’s unusual affective strategy).
  If we have on one side a counterfactual (“it seems bad, but it will be OK in the end”) and, on the other side, the joyful resignation of the sub specie aeternitatis (“I can’t go on, I must go on, I’ll go on”), “Fight For This Love” occupies an interesting middle ground between the two, an ambiguous determination between reassurance and resignation. What’s so great is that this is accomplished via a fascinating manipulation of a contemporary R&B trend. Lots of R&B tracks at the moment take dance synths and apply a kind of shimmering, dissociative fuzz (I suspect the influence of Robitussin). The result alternates between narcotic high and depressive withdrawal. “Fight For This Love” drapes these fizzing synths in strings and dusts them with ringing glockenspiel, the most sugary of R&B tropes. The effect is of a great blanket of candyfloss against which the vocals valiantly struggle. The question becomes not, am I ecstatic or melancholy (two sides, in fact, of the same coin of detachment), but, how can I act in the face of the smothering effects (affects?) of compulsory positivity?
  The steampunk genre is all about historical discontinuity, about universes where some event happened at the wrong time or in the wrong way, the invention of computers in the 19th century, or a post-WWII British space program displacing NASA. Something similar might explain Girls Aloud; they certainly don’t sound like anything from our universe. In […]
  I wonder what the chances are that Girls Aloud will release “Control of the Knife” accompanied by a video featuring them all in braces and two-tone trousers? Probably not, really, all that high. It’s just as well I’m busy writing a paper on the welfare state, otherwise I might have accompanied this post with a […]
  Reading an excellent article from Nina on the possibility of a more just educational system, which makes a determined attempt to enlist Rancière in this project. As it happens I’ve been reading a chunk of Rancière for my dissertation of late, which has sharpened my skepticism towards him, and I’m more convinced than ever that Rancière is of no use in thinking about liberatory education. Maybe this is a result of differences between francophone and anglophone intellectual cultures, but the “mastery” Rancière attacks seems absurdly anachronistic, a model of education swept away at least by the late 60s (indeed, rejected by progressive educators since the 20s). Not to belittle the importance of these reforming projects, but not only is Rancière’s advocacy of an exploratory and democratic education, as against a directive and hierarchical one, rather pushing at an open door, it’s pushing at an open door that has proved to be a plausible entry point for neoliberalism. Indeed it’s worse than that: Rancière’s ignorant schoolmaster is, it seems to me, the perfect figure of neoliberal authoritarianism.
  The way in which a schoolmaster-supposed-to-be-wise can be authoritarian is fairly clear: the master posits a knowledge to which they alone have access, and they control the student by regulating their access to this supposed knowledge. But a pedagogy based on knowledge can also be egalitarian, if the knowledge of the master marks a purely contingent difference: the teacher happens to know something which in principle anyone can know, and the process of teaching consists in offering this knowledge to the student, for the student to do what they wish with. In the case of the ignorant schoolmaster, such equality is not possible. If the schoolmaster and the student are equally ignorant, what differentiates them? Either a purely arbitrary authority, or an authority grounded not in knowledge but in technique; the ignorant schoolmaster does not know what is being taught, but nonetheless knows how to teach it. This supposedly subject-neutral technique is the domain of Department of Education civil servants planning the National Curriculum, or university administrators deciding which departments to ax. Our contemporary Jacotot is Michael Gove.
  That a supposed egalitarianism ends up underwriting a marked authoritarianism is consistent with a more general failing of Rancière’s work, which is that his radicalism seems to be limited to that of early 19th century republicanism. The axiom of equality is, after all, an axiom of liberalism, and Rancière’s equality is, like liberalism’s, formal and ultimately obfuscatory. This is illuminated by the connection Nina draws between Rancière’s positing of educational equality and Virno’s discussion of the “general intellect” in post-Fordist, communicative, capitalism. This is an extremely interesting connection but not one which is, I think, ultimately to Rancière’s credit. The fundamental difference between Rancière and Virno is that Rancière’s equality is a posited universal indifferent to any actual realization, while the general intellect is a real abstraction, something that develops through a specific set of material circumstances.
  Politically, this means that Rancière focuses on discursive strategies that supposedly obscure this fundamental equality, ignoring the problem of real inequalities, and the material and institutional arrangements that reproduce them, and which might be reconfigured to produce a real equality. When Rancière attempts to show the denial of equality that produces the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, he admits that “it had doubtless ceased to be said that the members of the modern proletariat, the equivalent of the plebians of antiquity, are not speaking beings. It is simply assumed that there is no connection between the fact that they speak and the fact that they work” (Disagreement, 51). I’m not sure that this was ever true, but it’s surely not true in today’s capitalism, where communication is a crucial instrument of proletarianization.
  More generally, Rancière’s focus on an equality that is prior to any actual arrangements of inequality means that he abandons class politics in favor of the kind of liberal universalism criticized by Marx in “On the Jewish Question.” Yes, Rancière claims that equality introduces the political division between the community and the part-with-no-part which has nothing in common with the community but this bare equality. But this assertion of equality works as an assertion of equality of the excluded with the rulers; the plebians “execute a series of speech acts that mimic those of the patricians” (Disagreement, 24). This is an assertion of equality purely on the patricians terms, not one which challenges the structures that produce patricians and plebeians. It is the same politics of dressing-up that Marx identifies in the republicans of 1848, who could only act by mimicking a reflection of a reflection of ancient Rome. What’s missing from Rancière is an understanding of a social revolution which would involve a genuine reconfiguration, rather than a shuffling of appearances: a political movement where “the content goes beyond the phrase.”
  (I seem to remember Nina once describing Rancière as a “grumpy anarchist.” I suppose one could see this post as a grumpy—probably too grumpy—Marxist response.)
  According to OFSTED, At GCSE, the sheer volume of poetry, with the focus on technical analysis, coupled with “overly didactic teaching methods”, is putting pupils off. I wish I’d been taught technical analysis of poetry when I was doing GCSEs; indeed, a bit of excess didacticism would have made a nice change from the strange […]
  It was very considerate of Nina Power to publish an article on Rancière, Feuerbach and the early Marx just when I’ve been trying to figure out this relationship, and so when I’m in a position to take advantage of her very clear discussion. One thing that’s not clear to me, though, is the relationship between […]
  As the University of California gears up for tomorrow’s day of action, I’ve been hearing one argument against the walkout that deserves a little further attention. This argument proposes that there is a contradiction in a protest in favor of education that proceeds by students and academics halting education for a day. This argument is, […]
  Trying to define what makes a well appointed home can be somewhat subjective, but one thing that is undeniable and a core staple of our design aesthetic at The Well Appointed House is how a homeowner meshes comfort, personalization and style. We love Aerin Lauder’s Hampton home, as photographed in the July issue of Elle Decor and reported on by Kristina Stewart Ward, because it’s camera ready but at the same time, it’s not hard to picture milk spills and family time around the TV.
  The Well Appointed House particularly loves the kitchen and the way she displayed family photos, her children’s artwork and white designer Chippendale Chairs!
  Making a well appointed house a well appointed home is all about the attention to the details. Throughout her house Ms. Lauder employs the use of beautiful and interesting chandeliers to give it that custom feel.
  We love this Crystal Shower Chandelier in Short or Long; they play with height and diversify the look of a room.
  Another element of Aerin’s home that we love is how she meshes traditional and modern so seamlessly. Another motif we see throughout is blue and white porcelain pieces paired with animal prints and fun colors, making it anything but boring.