Chapter 2.4: The Problem of the Vocal-Subject (Three Reterritorialisations)

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal Subject

This is the third in a sequence of four posts, which in turn form part of my extended essay series on the ‘vocal-subject’ and the pop song. These four chapters use Donna Summer’s 1977 hit ‘I Feel Love’, along with the work of theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Roland Barthes, to address a number of fundamental philosophical questions concerning the vocal-subject as a concept.

We left Donna Summer, at the end of the last chapter, as a prismatic mediator of reflecting and refracting desiring flows, channelling synthesised affects through her sonic body, inviting us to co-resonate, co-vibrate, and thereby enter into a desiring circuit with her. In Deleuze & Guattari’s terminology, this is the point of maximal ‘deterritorialisation’. Desire is cut free from its object, the groove is cut free from its tonal root, the voice is cut free from language and meaning, sound is cut free from its relationship to production and from its identity as subject or object, and the listeners are cut free from the illusory closedness of their individual, gendered bodies and the dimensions of (visual/tactile) space that enclose them. The transformation of sound into musical space must necessarily be accompanied by the (partial) entry of the listener into that space, which is perfectly ‘real’, to the extent that any experience of space is real. The listeners are collectively (partially) deterritorialised, leaving behind the ‘everyday’ space of the visual-tactile dancefloor (or bedroom, kitchen, etc.) and entering a space that is part sonic: whose physical architecture is overlaid by a sonic/musical architecture, or a pulsing, shifting blueprint of topographical possibility.

This is a familiar musical space; it has been drawn in lines and planes and shifting masses in the air above the heads of many a seated audience in a (Western) concert hall. The particular allure of Deleuze and Guattari as theorists of choice for the rave generation is testament to the way in which the new dance spaces of warehouses and fields and clubs, with their continuous mixes (temporal coherence) and immersive sonic architectures (spatial coherence), attempted to install the fugitive territory of musical space in a manner that allowed it to be occupied with one’s whole body and lived in, if only for a night or a weekend.

Chapter 2.3: What is Music? (Three Deterritorialisations)

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject

The previous chapter in this series used a single moment from Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ to discuss the concept of musical power as it is exercised by the vocal-subject. ‘oo heaven knows’: this is the moment when the voice takes control of the surrounding instrumental forces and begins to use it for her own devices. In the terminology that I set up earlier in the series, this is also the moment when the ‘track’ becomes a ‘song’ – the becoming-song of the music.

In these next two chapters, I will focus even closer on this moment, in order to test some of the implications of the framework that I have so far constructed – vocal-subject, objective instrumental forces, song, track, music – for ‘I Feel Love’ and for vocal pop music in general. This is particularly important because of the potentially fraught political and ethical implications of following such easy cleavages (between subject and object, voice and instruments, individual and society), when the sort of Adorno-inspired hermeneutics described in earlier chapters have been so extensively challenged in recent decades by more radical, and more optimistic, bodies of theory. To these ends, I will attempt to embed my analysis more deeply within the highly political aesthetics of Deleuze and Guattari, and thence to confront it with the scholarship that arose from the UK rave movement in the ‘90s (Simon Reynolds, Jeremy Gilbert & Ewan Pearson, Drew Hemment), which was so clearly informed by their philosophy from its inception.

Chapter 2.2: Power and Agency in Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love'

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject 

The first part of this essay series was about ‘vocal-subjects’ who could resist but never redirect, overpower, capture or possess the ‘objective instrumental forces’ that, along with the vocal-subject, constitute the power division of each ‘songworld’. These were vocal-subjects caught in the dominating and structuring grid of beats, or the oppressive gravitational pull of a particular groove. Giorgio Moroder’s epochal synth groove, which rolls inexorably through the heart of Donna Summer’s 1977 hit ‘I Feel Love’, might seem to function in a similar manner. A pioneering moment in the shift in beat technology from virtuoso disco/funk ensemble to icy electro automation, ‘I Feel Love’’s groove seemed to remove something of the plasticity of the disco beat, alienating it from the act of its production.¹ Like the tracks discussed in Chapter 1.3 (following the distinction that I make between ‘tracks’ and ‘songs’ in that chapter), ‘I Feel Love’ features a deeply coercive, regulatory beat – drilling home an unchanging, driving Moog pattern which would seem to predetermine what is and isn’t possible for the vocal-subject to perform, in terms of melody and rhythm.

However, from the perspective of the vocal-subject (i.e. as the song is experienced, rather than as we ‘know’ it to have been created), I will argue that ‘I Feel Love’ works in a very different way to the tracks previously analysed, even that it qualifies as a ‘song’ rather than a ‘track’. This is predicated upon the agency that Donna Summer’s vocal-subject displays in shaping and producing the ‘terrain’ of the songworld. She performs her control over the beat through a series of ‘high-power musical actions’, which will be the main object of analysis in this essay (already discussed briefly in the previous chapter).

Chapter 1.4: Asymmetrical Warfare: Voice, Topic, Resistance

This post is part of my series on Pop, Power & the Vocal-Subject

The previous essays in this series have begun to look at the power relationship inherent in all pop songs, between the ‘vocal-subject’ and the ‘objective musical forces’. The last essay in particular concentrated on the power and control that these instrumental forces exert on the vocal-subject, in terms of ‘technologies of control’ (timbral, rhythmic, dynamic, textural), but also ways in which the vocal-subject can resist this domination. The strategies of resistance addressed in those analyses, through co-opting, subverting, derailing or ironising the instrumental forces, constitute what I would call resistance through strength, which is often effected through the unique linguistic power of the vocals, allowing them to assign meaning directly, as well as their strategic placement in time relative to the beat.

In this essay, I will explore some very different ways in which the vocal-subject can resist the power of the instrumental forces – what I’ve previously called the ‘song world’ or ‘situation’ of the song – focusing instead on the possibility of critique and resistance through an affirmation of weakness. Rather than beginning from a discussion of objective musical forces and their ‘technologies of power’, this discussion begins with the vocal-subject and how, through ‘asymmetrical’ power relations and irreconcilable difference, their very weakness can become their strength. With this shift in focus from forces to subject, there is an accompanying shift from class-based politics to identity politics, ethics and post-colonialist thought. Yet the ‘sonic warfare’ metaphor still carries, feeding into the notion of ‘assymetrical warfare’: conflict situations between unevenly-matched groups, such as in guerrilla warfare.