Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

On Joshua Clover’s 1989

From the latest issue of The Progressive, here’s a teaser for my review of Joshua Clover’s new book 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About:

What can popular music really do? Can it topple walls, stop tanks, unleash hope and change? Or are those powers really just a mass delusion, simply another part of the sale? For centuries the question of culture’s influence has occupied poets, philosophers, even those disposed to the sordid arts of politics. At the start of a new decade, poet-philosopher-activist Joshua Clover finds them worth reexamining in his dense, provocative, wonderfully written little book, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About.

In 1989, the scope of global events suggested political change on a scale unseen since 1968. The new expansiveness in pop music seemed to sound out a perceptual change as well. Something new was happening in what Clover calls “the unconfined, unreckoned year,” but exactly what?

Forests of hagiographies have long since taken the riddle and blood out of 1968. 1989 presents a different kind of capstone, one that leaves the left in a quandary. For the 1980s were the decade that the North American left never wanted. They remain critically under-examined, as if they were better forgotten.

But in neocon narratives, those years are carried as if on a wind of inevitability. Borrowing Raymond Williams’s startling turn of phrase, Clover is interested in describing “structures of feeling.” And the feel of 1989 was captured by Francis Fukuyama’s wacky “end of history” thesis, in which he posited from cascading global events that history had finally collapsed into the eternal truth of “the Western Idea”—World Liberal Capitalism (itself the flattening of two different subjects, “liberal democracy” and “global capitalism”).

Intellectuals love “end of” narratives: “the end of liberalism,” “the end of Black politics,” “the end of irony.” But these stories, even when nostalgic and ridden with regret and loss, are almost always rigid and triumphal. Clover takes this as a given. To him, the fact that history did carry on after the Fall of the Berlin Wall is barely worthy of comment (although this means he also misses an opportunity to cite the lyrics of Soul II Soul’s fine ’89 hit, “Keep On Movin’ ”).

But the popularity of certain “end of” narratives fascinates him, because they capture a mass consciousness, “a way of knowing.” Clover links the functions of pop music and what might be called pop history. So OK, it may be true that we live in an age of iPod isolation where smart pop criticism has retreated into microgenre formalism and an age of tabloid capitalism where the cult of celebrity eclipses even the most fashionable forms of materialist analysis. (These phenomena may be better known by their names “The iTunesification of Everything” and “The Cornel West Dilemma.”) But Clover doesn’t allow the reader to sweep all of that into a dustbin called “false consciousness” and walk away from the masses. Instead, he wants to clarify the real stakes of culture.

Clover is an acclaimed poet who may be best known for his music and film criticism. He is also an 89er who was shaped indelibly by the left movements of the era—from anti-apartheid and Central American solidarity to the AIDS crisis and anti-racism to the anti-corporate globalization movements. (Most recently, he has been a key faculty leader in the broad movement against the University of California’s budget cuts and fee increases.) But Clover holds serious doubts about pop music’s ability to “herald a new political awareness,” the notion—to borrow (and tweak slightly) Jacques Attali’s famous dictum—that music can be prophecy…

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posted by Jeff Chang @ 5:46 am | 1 Comment

One Response to “On Joshua Clover’s 1989”

Plug One Boss says:

February 16, 2010 at 10:30 pm

This paragraph kills me (literally):

“So OK, it may be true that we live in an age of iPod isolation where smart pop criticism has retreated into microgenre formalism and an age of tabloid capitalism where the cult of celebrity eclipses even the most fashionable forms of materialist analysis.”

Feed Me!

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