Occasionally, the results of mistakes are much more interesting than those of hard work. Marvin Gaye’s hallmark album What’s Going On (1971) serves as one of those miraculous examples of serendipity. During the mixing sessions of the title song and first single in 1970, a rather fortunate accident occurred. When the artist asked his sound engineer Ken Sands to play two alternate takes of the main vocals, the technician unwittingly played both tracks simultaneously. The unintended result was a duet between the singer and himself. Gaye liked this side-effect to such an extent that he not only decided to keep it, but even pushed this mistake to the extremes. Not content with mere duplication, the artist multiplied his voice several times on the final mix of the album. The harmonic, multilayered vocals became this record’s most recognizable feature.

By the time of the recording of his next solo album, Let’s Get it On (1973), Gaye had mastered this technique of overdubbing to perfection. In fact, he used it so frequently that his ‘old-school’ producer, Ed Townsend, even openly wondered if the singer was still capable of singing an entire song in one take. Nonetheless, it was precisely this extensive use of multitrack recording that turned his multilayered vocals into more than just a stylistic novelty. On this album, the singer capitalized on the immanent possibilities of the technical medium to play out the doubts, discussions and arguments that he had with himself. As a result, Let’s Get it On released the dissonant voices from the isolated existence in Marvin Gaye’s head and harmonized them on the multiple tracks of the recording.

Nevertheless, the album was more than just a therapeutic exercise of a troubled artist. In my opinion, the accidental duplication and intentional multiplication of Gaye’s voice are not harmless but have enormous philosophical, psychological and practical ramifications. Multitrack recording irreversibly cut the person Marvin Gaye up into a wide range of alter egos. The contradicting voices that were captured on Let’s Get it On can impossibly be reunited into a single, coherent one. They are autonomous personae rather than different aspects of a schizophrenic personality.

Multitrack technology accidently rendered the unified subject obsolete. The resulting effect of polyphony, however, has often been accused of being of mere esthetic interest. According to this line of criticism, the multiple voices of Marvin Gaye’s records and other works of art are purely fictitious, not part of any concrete discursive practices and can therefore impossibly initiate any social and cultural transformations. In this presentation, I will argue that it is exactly the other way around. Personae rather than individuals are the genuine subjects of discourse. Any person is part of multiple, diverse practices and is therefore incapable of fully identifying with the role that any particular one of them forces on him. Correspondingly, I suggest a re-conceptualization of the post-human subject as an arena in which the confrontation between different roles takes place. The new intellectual proposed here, is an example of such a battle field.

The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual

In his essay ‘The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual’ (1985) Cornel West vocalizes the unique predicament of the title’s protagonist:

“Caught between an insolent American society and insouciant black community, the Afro-American who takes seriously the life of the mind inhabits an isolated and insulated world.”

Although it is quite easy to misinterpret this quote as such, West actually refuses to define the subject of his dilemma in essentialist terms. The importance of the black intellectual neither consists in his skin complexion nor his ethnic lineage but in the ongoing tension between the contradictory roles that are imposed on him. Cornel West situates this specific individual in the struggle between the American society and the black community.

Instead of repeating the exact details of West’s analysis of the black intellectual’s predicament, I will here focus on the text’s implicit but crucial, theoretical contribution to discourse analysis. ‘The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual’ subtly shows that a subject first emerges when an individual finds himself caught between at least two practices. As long as an analysis is limited to a single discourse, one can only speak of a subject position or a persona. Subjects, on the other hand, emerge in the confrontations between multiple practices; they are borderline figures by definition.

It is precisely such a clash of discourses that gives rise to West’s so-called dilemma of the black intellectual. The singularity of this situated individual consists in the fact that the white society and the black community both try to impose a particular role on him. In the specific case of West’s protagonist, the former practice pushes the intellectual to adapt to its “bourgeois model of academic legitimation and placement”, whereas the latter only seems to value his ‘life of the mind’ when it comes in the form of a performance or a sermon. Although West claims that the black community does not have an intellectual tradition in the academic sense, he nevertheless recognizes

“…two organic intellectual traditions in African-American life: the black Christian tradition of preaching and the black musical tradition of performance.”

West, however, neglects to further distuingish between these two intellectual traditions and treats them as identical. In my opinion, he thereby misses a chance to fully capitalize on the opportunities that his method offers, because he does not take the situatedness of his protagonist seriously enough.

West’s juxtaposition of two practices implies that in order to be acknowledged by both practices the aspiring intellectual has to play the role of The Scholar and The Performer at the same time. Both the white academy as well as the black community try to impose a specific set of norms, rules and expectations on the black intellectual. In other words, these discursive practices force him to act out contradictory roles. It is of crucial importance to notice that the black intellectual can never fully identify with neither The Scholar nor The Performer. What constitutes the protagonist of Cornell West’s dilemma is the struggle between two discursive practices rather than a fixed identity. Instead of lamenting the loss of a coherent subject, however, he values the transformative possibilities that this split personality offers.

A presentation that I gave at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis on the 29th of April 2009 for the How To Do Cultural Analysis and Why (Not) lecture series organized by Murat Aydemir.

‘Oh Baby, I Like it Raw // On Music Production and Knowledge Engineering’

A presentation that I gave on the 27th of October 2008 at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for the Music and Sound Studies Initiative lecture series organized by Sumanth Gopinath.

earlier (and shorter) versions of this lecture were presented:

I later made an article out of it, that was published in the volume Sonic Mediations: Body, Sound, Technology by Carolyn Birdsall and Anthony Enns.

You can read it on this site:
Oh Baby, I Like It Raw: Engineering Truth (password protected)

A presentation that I gave on the 17th of November 2008 at the English Department of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for the eNow! lecture series organized by Terri Sutton.