Certain artists, historically, have responded to the prevalence of normate culture with their own irregular, lived experience, providing alternative representations of the human that do not correspond to the custom rules. Samuel Beckett and David Bowie, for example, employ artistic strategies to challenge the false consciousness governing acceptable sociality, providing dozens of characters who function as ciphers for those alienated by and from cultures of the normal.
In considering the normal person, it’s constructive to recycle and extend Rosemarie Garland Thompson idea of “the normate”[1], the idealized (and consequently unobtainable) healthy individual that, through comparison, condemns disability to the margins of social acceptability. The remix normate employed here is also a preeminent figure in contemporary western, neoliberal society and its petitions for normalcy take place on multiple fronts. For example, the normate is a white or blue-collar, 9-to-5 worker, or perhaps works their own hours as a self-made person, generally conservative or liberal, predominantly heteronormative, and generative (in other words believes straight culture and having babies is what culture is all about) doesn’t see gender or color (despite often being passively sexist and/or racist), unconsciously ableist, considers art as an object of consumption rather than production, is wary of politics and politicians while discreetly inhabiting a myriad of political positions and is inevitably worried about some “other,” be it terrorist, immigrants, or the environment, or whatever threat could consume and obliterate the symbolic society the individual imagines as immutable reality (and which determines the contours and responses of the normate consciousness). As a “normal” human being, the normate most likely feels, at base, sane (albeit stressed), decent, kind, and caring. In fact, pure cuddly-wuddly. Arguably, such individuals demarcate the ideological position par excellence in contemporary civil society.
Against this privileged dominant, right and left-wing ideologues are marginal outliers framed as renegade fascists. The right freely espouses racism, sexism, and homophobia, in pursuit of some misguided prelapsarian and wholly historically inaccurate ‘past as potential future idyll’ phantasma. The left, as represented by an organization like Intifada, advocate and occasionally practice violent resistance against the type of vociferous and visible right wingers who take unsanctioned walking tours around America’s fading democratic institutions. Tellingly, normate culture considers the radical left an equal danger to the neoliberal peace held in place, largely, to protect it. And this triumvirate, somewhat of a shorthand caricature, nonetheless provides a snapshot of life in a west that wishes to minimize and dial down its slow slide into the wild.
Certain artists, historically, have responded to the prevalence of normate culture with their own irregular, lived experience, providing alternative representations of the human that do not correspond to the custom rules. Samuel Beckett and David Bowie, for example, employ artistic strategies to challenge the false consciousness governing acceptable sociality, providing dozens of characters who function as ciphers for those alienated by and from cultures of the normal. On first inventing astronaut and then quasi-Martian characters, Bowie has reflected: “They were metaphysically in place to suggest that I felt alienated, that I felt distanced from society and that I was really in search of some kind of connection”[2]. For his part, Beckett’s protagonists run the full gamut from alienated outsiders like Belacqua and Murphy, to those rejected by society such as Watt and Molloy, to those like Malone and the people of “The Lost Ones” who find themselves incarcerated in some way, to those who are tortured, like the protagonists of How It Is, “Catastrophe,” and “What Where” (1983). Similarly, Bowie also imagines a series of oppressed and/or carceral outsiders such as the version of Major Tom who returns in “Ashes to Ashes,” the Sam incarcerated in “Scream like a Baby,” and the first-person narrator of “Heat” who aligns breaking the law of the father with extended carceral existence. These characters, and others like them, throw the disciplining function of “normal” into sharp relief, proving to be engaged protagonists in a struggle with conventional biopolitics.
Whether such biopolitics determines them as mad, or queer, or degenerate, this often moribund cast illuminates the contours of normate society and the discourses that support such social stratification. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault proposes
The point of … investigations concerning madness, disease, delinquency and sexuality is to show how the coupling of a set of practices and a regime of truth form an apparatus (dispositif) of knowledge-power that effectively marks out in reality that which does not exist[3].
In effect, society first frames and then others its own problem children, either as the subjects of discourses of exclusion or, in a contemporary development, as subjects embedded in discourses of aggressive inclusion and stratification. Responding to such social engineering in general, and through voicing the dispossessed with an egalitarian otherness, both Beckett and Bowie undermine the “regimens of truth” Foucault identifies as shaping, in the form of institutions and embodied actors, the authoritative disciplining functions of the social. Hence Beckett’s penurious tramps and Bowie’s peripatetic subaltern wander abroad in ruin-strewn lands in search of shelter from an impending – or enduring (as in Endgame and Diamond Dogs) – catastrophe. The characters that populate these material and spiritual wastelands indicate that both artists wish to frame and figure unresolved social antagonism as the space of their creative engagement. In projecting their internalized agon into conflicted characters (and, in Bowie’s case, into a quasi-fascist performer) Beckett and Bowie recognize, perhaps intuitively, the need to unmask the purportedly natural, trouble-free persona required to be acceptable and so successful in their respective societies. Moreover, both are aware the societies they critique are imaginary formations in which ideology becomes embodied unconsciously and instrumentalized deliberately as the symbolization of capital doctrine. Consequently, Beckett and Bowie’s work is a reaction against a civil society that distorts behavior and so pressurizes individuals towards a sociality entirely contextualized by normative or ostensibly natural identity constructs. These idealized formations, designed to maintain an economic equilibrium, are engaged, today, in attempting to quell intellectual and/or artistic interventions that might see fit to question it, proposing instead the pursuit of wellness, mindlessness (sorry…mindfulness) and other strictly atomized Cartesian, apolitical pursuits in place of engaged political activity. Although it predates many of these developments, Beckett and Bowie’s work implicitly rejects such ideological obfuscation.
Indeed, in their late work, the conflict they address takes place in outer space itself, framed, finally, as the need to recognize the posthuman in order to obviate the obsolete codes of the benevolent and consequently ineffective human spirit apparently nestling inside us, each and every one.
Identifying how one might identify and escape the lure of such ideological formulations, Siebers understands that “ideology creates, by virtue of its exclusionary nature, social locations outside of itself and therefore capable of making epistemological claims about it”[4]. Likewise, Beckett and Bowie produce an art the outer spaces of which critique the inside. Their imaginative visions are both the recreation of the coordinates of the spaces to be interrogated – its institutions, hospitals, schools, prisons – and the creation of a space outside these from which to critique them. Be it Murphy as psychiatric institution nurse seeking the refuge of a disconnected and solipsistic subjectivity in the eyes of a catatonic patient, or Ziggy, amid the noise of angry car brakes, abandoning an attempt at social engagement and stumbling back towards the isolation of his empty room, Beckett and Bowie’s characters shed light on the social codes, lived practices and discourses that determine the normal in contemporary biopolitics; in providing alternative creative spaces, they draw readers and listeners beyond the confines of the ideological inside, turning it inside out. Indeed, in their late work, the conflict they address takes place in outer space itself, framed, finally, as the need to recognize the posthuman in order to obviate the obsolete codes of the benevolent and consequently ineffective human spirit apparently nestling inside us, each and every one.
In terms of audience response, those who admire these disaster artists find refuge from social alienation inside the creative spaces Beckett and Bowie generate; spaces where the porous borders between estrangement and intersubjective identification are bridged. Essentially, those trapped within – but intuitively suspicious of the motivations and implicit consequences of – neoliberalism find in the work of Beckett and Bowie confirmation of their own otherness; a moment that leads to their individuation as beings within capitalism who now nevertheless think outside of it. This individuation also corroborates Marx’s dictum that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness”[5]. In this formulation, an audience’s consciousness, dictated by capital economy, is liberated into a socialist conscience by the influence of the artists in question. As Storey notes:
Almost everything we buy helps reproduce the capitalist system economically, but everything we buy does not necessarily help secure us as ‘subjects’ of capitalist ideology… capitalism produces commodities on the basis of their exchange value, whereas people tend to consume the commodities of capitalism on the basis of their use value[6].
In other words,
people find on the market incentives and possibilities not simply for their own confinement but also for their own development and growth. Though turned inside out, alienated and working through exploitation at every turn, these incentives and possibilities promise more than any visible alternative[7].
Consequently, many in the Bowie and Beckett audience, liberated from enslavement to exchange value, use these artists, and others like them, as indicators of a growing, collective desire for revolution change, a change incompatible with bourgeois ideology.
In other words, neoliberal freedoms, although appearing at first as a liberation, are in reality a trap because bourgeoise consciousness must first be sublated and then transformed before a truly free society is possible.
Additionally, and importantly, Beckett and Bowie also offer the possibility of a transformative epiphany for the normate; namely, those who exist happily within the status quo, fully incorporated into capitalism, satisfied with its commodity culture, and especially pleased to be favoured in its systems of profit making and distribution. It is against such thinking that they have conceived their art of alienation, and against incorporation into such hegemonic framing that they imagined their aesthetics of resistance, which is why the same are often, also, an aesthetics of impoverishment. As more and more liberal subjects understand their position at the heart of the control machine, and as access to digital information strips away the legitimacy of strawman threats to liberal society – racism, Islamaphobia etc. – the normate subject comes increasingly to understand that it is afraid of itself and its own capacity to live in a radically different way. Holding fast to normate identity in such instances is to remain immersed in a negative ontology that must be transformed if things are to change. Žižek ably sums up the structural logic of the tripartite Hegelian dialectic synthesis that can be employed by the liberal subject to effect such change, and he clarifies the tenor of its primary element:
Hegel does not actually start with negation, he starts with an apparent positivity which, upon closer inspection, immediately reveals itself to be its own negation … positive ‘bourgeoise’ freedom and equality reveal themselves (in their actualization) as their opposites, as their own negation. This is not yet negation proper, negation as a movement of meditation – the movement proper begins when the original form (which ‘is’ its own negation) is negated or replaced by a higher form; and the ‘negation of negation’ occurs when we realise that this higher form which negated the first effectively maintains the starting point, in other words, truly actualizes it, confers on it some positive content: the immediate assertion of freedom and equality really is its opposite, it’s self-destruction; it is only when it is negated or elevated to a higher level (in the socially just organization of the economy) that freedom and equality become actual.[8]
In other words, neoliberal freedoms, although appearing at first as a liberation, are in reality a trap because bourgeoise consciousness must first be sublated and then transformed before a truly free society is possible. In this regard, and again in the Hegelian Marxist sense
the shift from negation to the negation of the negation is thus a shift from the objective to the subjective dimension: in direct negation, the subject observes a change in the object (its disintegration, its passage into its opposite) while in the negation of negation, the subject includes itself in the process, taking into account how the process it is observing affects its own position.[9]
As part of a shared aesthetic strategy, and in a tri-partite synthesis, antagonisms which are often cosmetically camouflaged by normative patterns of behaviour within the social are at first emphasized and magnified by Beckett and Bowie. At the same time, the outsiders who illuminate these tensions are beyond the ideology of neo-liberal inclusivity, often beyond it in radical ways, and yet, paradoxically, instantly recognizable as within us, one and all, in the manner in which we all perform life, and in the manner in which we are all profoundly queer (a word central to the Beckett lexicon that describes marginal and marginalized experience). Such characters provide the template, and the trigger, for the type of transformation Žižek believes necessary for the next step to proper social inclusivity:
the point is … to recognize the stranger in ourselves … Communitarianism is not enough: a recognition that we are all, each in our own way, weird lunatics provides the only hope for a tolerable co-existence of different ways of life.[10]
Correspondingly, the weird lunatics that populate the Beckett/Bowie landscape are a veritable pantheon of disincorporation designed to undermine and dismantle a normate culture desperately in need of reimaging and redemption. Ironically, Hegel uses the metaphoric idea of home to describe a subjectivity at one with itself. Subjective integration is achieved “Bei-sich-selbst-sein-im-Anderen” [being at home with oneself in the other][11]. Bowie and Beckett, on the other hand, are always abroad in search of some communion with the dispossessed, their characters pursued by police and priests and the wild imaginings of their own paranoid consciousness. The shelter they seek is always only a temporary refuge, from where, as yet, there is no direction home.
* Bowie, Beckett and Being: The Art of Alienation by Rodney Sharkey has just been published by Bloomsbury.
Endnotes:
1.Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) xii. https://www.google.com.qa/books/edition/Extraordinary_Bodies/wRz1DQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Rosemarie+Garland+Thomson+Extraordinary+Bodies&printsec=frontcover
2.Nicholas Pegg, The Complete David Bowie (London: Titan Books, 2011), 7. https://www.google.com.qa/books/edition/The_Complete_David_Bowie/LqFkDQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=nicholas+pegg+bowie&printsec=frontcover
3. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, ed. Michel Senellart and trans. by Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 19. https://www.google.com.qa/books/edition/The_Birth_of_Biopolitics/4qntCwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=michel+foucault+the+birth+of+biopolitics&printsec=frontcover
4. Tobin Siebers, “Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment,” The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 279. https://www.google.com.qa/books/edition/The_Disability_Studies_Reader/Oor7avo2iDkC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=siebers+disability+studies+reader&printsec=frontcover
5. Karl Marx. “Preface,” A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977, Orig. 1859), 2. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
6. John Storey, Introduction to Popular Culture. (Harlow, England: Pearson, 2006), 264-65. https://blogs.bgsu.edu/span6350/files/2012/08/Cultural-Theory-and-Popular-Culture.pdf
7. ibid, 261.
8. Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London and New York: Verso 2013), 294. https://www.google.com.qa/books/edition/Less_Than_Nothing/XxYQCoaEU7AC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%C5%BDi%C5%BEek,+Slavoj.+Less+than+Nothing&printsec=frontcover
9. ibid, 299.
10. Slavoj Žižek, The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously. (London: Allen Lane, 2017), 176. https://www.google.com.qa/books/edition/The_Courage_of_Hopelessness/DC_eDQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%C5%BDi%C5%BEek,+Slavoj.+The+Courage+of+Hopelessness&printsec=frontcover
11. Christian Hofmann, “Being at Home with Oneself in the Whole – Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom as Actuality”, Concepts of Normativity. Kant or Hegel? ed. Christian Krijnen (Leiden/Boston: Brill 2019: Critical Studies in German Idealism Vol. 24), 10. https://www.academia.edu/40170756/Being_at_Home_with_Oneself_in_the_Whole_Hegels_Philosophy_of_Freedom_as_Actuality