Chord Air Supply Goodbye

[Holly Coffell]

Oneof those little lies you tell undergraduates is that Romanticism-its obsession with unique inner feeling, its obsession with nature-emerged as a result of the Industrial Revolution. When you have black soot all over you whenever you go for a walk, you suddenly start making up ideas about "nature"; and when you get the creepy feeling that you really are just like the thousands of people you see every day in a city, you start becoming obsessed with your own individuality.

Yes, yes, I know things are more complicated than that (actually, I have always suspected that Wordsworth is not more complicated than that). But it's a lie that is ok to tell undergraduates because it's not entirely untrue, because it disrupts the "poetry is about feelings and individuality" thing that they all learn somewhere (from Romanticism?), and because, well, it's not entirely untrue, which is to say, it is a little true.

It leads me to a new, similarly technological-determinist sentiment: when the internet came around, academics started feeling really nostalgic for stuff, particularly for books. That is to say, when it was very, very obvious that the "material form" of a text does not necessarily matter very much-you can read the NY Times online or in print; you will soon be able to read something approaching all texts (books, manuscripts, cave drawings) online-people just started to get a warm, fuzzy feeling for physical objects. In the hands of a great, slow writer, this fuzziness is amazing: I could read Nicholson Baker describe how interesting old oak library card catalogs are all day and never get sick of it. And my friends Erik and Stephanie (source of much slog material) sent me this unnervingly moving book that is a diary of a couple's dissolution as seen through their household junk.

The world of academia, though, is seriously lacking in Nicholson Bakers. I don't know what your field looks like, but mine (Renaissance literature) looks like a dead relative's front yard. Everything has come out of the attic: there are old clothes, tattered books, the thing your cousin wrote in crayon when she was five, a broken smelly perfume bottle (I hope that was perfume), twelve versions of an essay someone started writing in 10th grade, the costume for Halloween in 1977 (R2D2), a formica table that maybe only someone in Williamsburg would like. And as at any moment of going through the dead persons things, it is important to keep in mind: you don't really want that waffle iron, even if it does just need one knob to make it work again. As part of the on-going effort to kill off all vestiges of literary idealism ("Shakespeare/Donne/Milton was a genius") and idealism more generally, Renaissance studies keeps turning to "material"; to scribbles in old books and Renaissance waffle irons, as well as bits of the mammals that once wielded them-humors, blood, animals. Shakespeare Quarterly is often country fair meets yard sale. There have been blips of dissatisfaction with this material turn, but only recently has something like a coherent discussion started to take place. And the tentative consensus that is starting to emerge from semi-sober conversations at conferences is that what was evoked in the battle against idealism has, perhaps inevitably, become idealism. Inevitably, I say, because the term material now tends to mean, with a sort of uncanny exactness, the hitherto existing materialism whose chief defect Marx pointed out in the Theses on Feuerbach a hundred and sixty years ago (arguments that locate truth in the material are always idealisms, and consequently subject to all the critiques of idealism). In its effort to combat idealism, materialism turns into idealism.

I am not absolutely opposed to this latest academic fad. It can be fun to learn about smelly things. And god knows the world needs dedicated followers of fashion so that I can buy the cheaper Banana Republic version, and the humanities really needs dedicated followers, if for no other reason than to keep the money flowing in. Fads are inevitable, sometimes tiresome, but also something worth thinking about. What I think is worth thinking about is this: 1) how did this happen? why did materialism suddenly seemed like a solution to all the world's problems? I'm not entirely going to talk about that question here (but I bet the answer has something to do with the internet). Instead I'm going to talk about 2) if materialism (the study of stuff) does not get rid of idealism, if it actually turns into idealism, what do you do with idealism? The trouble with idealism (it naturalizes social inequality) hasn't gone away: it many respects, it has gotten worse, especially if you believe Walter Benn Michaels. There seems to be a need for another way of talking about idealism, of dislodging its pretensions to truth, because materialism is not working.

The best discussion of this problem that I know of (aside from Adorno, of course) is Derrida's "Specters of Marx," which in my reading insists that you can't kill idealism off because it always comes back like the ghostly odor of old breakfasts off that waffle iron. This argument seems a little funny at first coming from Derrida, our deconstructing Dad: even Habermas (in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity) thought that Derrida was arguing for an endless, continual postponement of signification (which led Habermas to think that Derrida was unhelpfully blurring the line between philosophy and literature). But Zizek, at least, has insisted that the lesson of deconstruction is exactly the opposite: that you can't postpone idealism (aka "the question of ontology"). It sort of makes sense: for deconstruction to work, there has to be something to deconstruct, and there always is: an idealism, an ontology, some logocentrism to deal with. Like ghosts, they are always coming back, these idealisms (even when they are called "materialism"), and what you can do is chat with them ("Thou art a scholar, speak to it Horatio!").

It seems clear, for instance, that the ghost of Michael Jackson isn't going anywhere. But which ghost, exactly? The ghost of the one glove and the moon walk, the material Michael Jackson? In some respects, MJ would seem to be the poster child of new materialism because his life was in part an effort, conscious or not, to live the material critique-blurring the line between black and white with chemicals on his skin (a creepy realization of George Schuyler's creepy novel Black No More), blurring the line between male and female by making his face and nose look like Diana Ross while he grabbed his crotch (there was a reason the NY Post called him Jacko), blurring the line between child and adult by watching Home Alone at Neverland, blurring the line between labor (the second hardest working man in show business) and the invisible hand of the market with his metonymic single glove.

But to me, despite all these things, Michael Jackson was never really just the King of Material Pop. He was also, probably primarily, a soul singer-and I know he was a soul singer, because Genius on my iTunes puts him in a playlist with Al Greene and Curtis Mayfield. He was one of the great inheritors of Motown and the 313, even if he was from Indiana and recorded mostly in Los Angeles. And when you talk about soul singers, you have to talk about soul, about idealism, not stuff, or really you're not talking about anything at all. The entire point of a soul singer is that the singing hits you hard, not just in the heart (a muscle, in the end) but in the soul. To overstress the materialism of soul singing is really to miss the entire point.

That is not to say that material stuff doesn't have a crucial role in thinking about MJ. When you see his live performance on youtube of Billie Jean at the motown 25th reunion, no doubt you could talk at interesting length about the about the clothes, about lip-syncing, about technical aspects of how the sound was recorded and the show was filmed-all of these things matter, as do MJ's Pepsi ads and the money spent on videos. But all these things are only interesting and compelling when you tie them to the question of soul, when you tie them to the little rhythmic prance-thing that Jackson does with his feet (accented, but not driven, by his high water pants and white socks). Something else is driving Michael Jackson, something else that makes it worth paying attention to all the material things associated with Motown. Without that thing, MJ would be as tedious and uninteresting as Madonna, who is from the part of Detroit that thinks that the Cadillac STS is sexy and provocative. But MJ was always interesting, and he was interesting because he could actually sing.

Which brings me to one of my favorite Michael Jackson moments. Here are the lyrics to "Never Can Say Goodbye," which was written by Clifton Davis [ _Davis ]. I got them from sing356.com, though I fixed a few things that I thought were mistakes:

Even though the pain and heartache

Seems to follow me wherever I go

Though I try and try to hide my feelings

They always seem to show

Then you try to say you're leaving me

And I always have to say no...

Everytime I think I've had enough

I start heading for the door

There's a very strange vibration

That pierces me right to the core

It says turn around you fool

You know you love her more and more

I keep thinkin' that our problems

Soon are all gonna work out

But there's that same unhappy feeling and there's that anguish, there's that doubt

It's that same old did ya hang up

Can't do with you or without

Tell me why

Is it so

Don't wanna let you go

In the Jackson Five recording, you suspect something odd is going on right from the start. The song begins with a little A-B-D figure repeated three times, then settles into an Em9 chord that, as every barroom piano player knows, is basically the same thing as a Gmaj7 chord. The result is that the song manages to sound both assertive and major and sad and minor all at the same time, and the repetition of the opening figure makes the song sound less mechanical than haunting, not a repetition but a repetition compulsion. And this movement back and forth stays in the verse as the song moves back and forth between a Dmaj7 and a Dmin7, literally setting in motion the indecision, or the decision, of "never can say goodbye": major or minor? stay or go? Is staying or going a good thing or a bad thing?

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