jane dark's sugarhigh!

between the wars (chapter five excerpt)

sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months; this is the last. It is now available. You can get the book here and here, and read more here.

...I was alive and I waited, waited; I was alive and I waited for this — this is pop itself singing, making its own true confession.

But that’s not quite right. It’s a kind of idealism, with pop as an autonomous actor haunting the wings until the times comes round for its aria. Why should we not think it’s empire singing, using a pop song as its prosthetic throat?

This must be part of it as well. There is not, cannot be, a belle époque for pop alone. If pop, to restate the situation, had always meant to be a triumph over time, it was bound to realize itself at this moment which had as its core meaning a triumph over time, inextricable from the collapse of historical opposition. Clocks will still run in circles, but nothing can happen — this is the sense that one returns to over and over after 1989, phrased a thousand different ways. This is the ambiguous exultation of America’s geopolitical belle époque, the seeming restoration of its glory as global hegemon, a glory greatly tarnished over the previous quarter-century. The period from 1988-1991 is, for both pop music and the United States, the emergence of this new formation. It is the antechamber of the unipolar world, of the Washington Consensus and the last Pax Americana which contains within it the spectacle of the nineties economic boom.

Even this temporary verdict on the settling of the political landscape exists mainly as a matter of convention – it takes its social force from the fact that it is believed, rather than from a clear-eyed assessment of the scene. The conflation of liberal democracy and free markets disguises the misprisions of both terms, and the conflict between the political and economic dynamics actually at play. World-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein concedes that “The destruction of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent dissolution of the U.S.S.R. have been celebrated as the fall of the Communisms and the collapse of Marxism-Leninism as an ideological force in the modern world. This is no doubt correct.” However, he continues by suggesting that “these same events marked even more the collapse of liberalism.” The disordered world system left by the chaotic thaw of the Cold War became a hothouse for the imposition of “overtly reactionary policies.” Writing in 1995, he asserts that “This rejection of liberal reformism is being implemented now in the United States under the label of the Contract With America, as it is being simultaneously force-fed to countries all over the world by the ministrations of the IMF.” This narrative of turbulence, force, and eventual counterforce does a better job of forecasting the post-millennial scenario of hegemony unraveling. But it is not the story that we liked to tell, liked to imagine we were living, the lullabye of the lull. The last hegemon rested, sated and righteous — a historical sleep relatively unvexed for a dozen years.

That is the full span under the sign of uncontested United States power, and the untrammeled expansion of markets. This boundlessness, this absence of barriers literal and figurative — surely “the Fall of the Wall” stands for this as much as for the specific unification of Germany, or the dropping of the iron curtain. Surely this unbounded sensation is the same as that of the sense of the end of history: a spatial version of the temporal account, a map painted in a single color to match the triumphal, monotonous unfolding of empty time.

This is the political sensation that meets itself in music determined to elaborate the unfettered feeling, the boundlessness, along a variety of axes — starting, as we have already seen, as a kind of excess which cannot be analyzed or contained, the complement of which is an inability to experience actual events. The absence of limit and ground for experience is a kind of fairytale that pop music had been recycling since its dawn, at least since the opening credits of Blackboard Jungle Posted by jane at September 20, 2009 06:37 AM | TrackBack