Was SOPHIE Revolutionary? — On Political Nostalgia and the New Modernism
So when you gonna tell her
That we did that too?
She thinks it’s special
But it’s all reused
That was our place, I found it first
I made the jokes you tell to her when she’s with you
Do you get déjà vu when she’s with you? — Olivia Rodrigo
A dominant strain of U.S. left politics sets itself in an eternal past, somewhere near the 1960s. This is the political and cultural equivalent of a concept from Fredric Jameson, nostalgia film.
It is important to see the political nostalgia I describe as distinct from psychological nostalgia. The latter can exist in politics, of course — but an ache to return to an imaginary past is in some sense the opposite of what I (along with Jameson and Mark Fisher) mean by nostalgia.
Formal nostalgia in politics is not a desire to return to the past, but rather an inability to imagine ourselves outside of the past. Fisher writes: “the nostalgia mode as Jameson theorises it might preclude psychological nostalgia, since it arises only when a coherent sense of historical time breaks down.”
In film and music, such a breakdown of historical time becomes evident when our attempts to portray the present begin to outwardly resemble deliberate attempts, as in nostalgia film, to resuscitate the past. As Jameson describes,1
The insensible colonization of the present by the nostalgia mode can be observed in Lawrence Kasdan’s elegant [crime] film Body Heat . . . set in a contemporary Florida small town a few hours’ drive from Miami.
. . . the setting has been strategically framed, with great ingenuity, to eschew most of the signals that normally convey the contemporaneity of the United States in its multinational era: the small-town setting allows the camera to elude the high-rise landscape of the 1970s and 1980s . . . while the object-world of the present day — artifacts and appliances, whose appearance would at once serve to date the image — is elaborately edited out. Everything in the film therefore conspires to blur its official contemporaneity and make it possible for the viewer to receive the narrative as though it were set in some eternal thirties, beyond real historical time. (Jameson 1991)
Fisher was fond of recounting his first hearing of “Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson’s reworking of The Zutons’ ‘Valerie.’” Upon listening, Fisher thought temporarily that “The Zutons’ original indie anthem must have been a cover of this apparently ‘older’ 60s soul track.”
We likewise see the blossoming of a retrograde movement in the design of public gathering places (think bars and restaurants). It is now the case that the most updated and “chic” spaces of this type actually simulate old age, with “warm” exposed brick and early industrial-age exposed parts.
“The ’90s was an era of really modern design,” says [Jeremy Levitt, co-owner of the New York City-based firm Parts and Labor Design], but in the 21st century, people became more interested in the historic, speakeasy character of old brick. . . .
Marie Ziar, co-owner of Le Grenier, which opened four years ago in Washington, D.C., credited nostalgia. “We are missing something, and I believe we need to go back to a specific time. It’s like we need to go back to the past.” Before opening, she found old art on the brick walls and decided to keep the brick exposed.
The end result of this warped time sense — this Jamesonian “waning of historicity” — is a social malaise most analogous to various forms of amnesia. In anterograde amnesia, depicted in Christopher Nolan’s 2000 film Memento, sufferers are unable to create new memories from experiences that occur after the amnesia’s inciting incident. After the break, events with the gloss of the new occur constantly. But, they have no real trajectory; all of them must be processed with the methods and heuristics available before the break took place.
I want to argue that these trends in mass art and culture mirror the left’s attachment to the past, one that is formal rather than libidinal: a reflexive recycling of techniques, formulas, and images. Rather than a singular break, the condition sets in “insensibly,” coming with the decline in our ability to fashion “representations of our current cultural experience.”
To visualize this, consider an experience described by Adolph Reed Jr., which occurred the same year that Jameson published his seminal work on postmodernism:
At a 1991 conference at the Harvard Law School, where he was a tenured full professor, I heard the late, esteemed legal theorist, Derrick Bell, declare on a panel that blacks had made no progress since 1865. I was startled not least because Bell’s own life, as well as the fact that Harvard’s black law students’ organization put on the conference, so emphatically belied his claim.
This example is obviously extreme. But similar claims that cover a less yawning historical gap are extremely common in today’s left-liberal discourse. In the area of race, this phenomenon has a family resemblance to another, which Reed calls “The Retrograde Quest for Symbolic Prophets of Black Liberation.”
much of today’s wokeness-inflected discourse . . . leans heavily on appealing to the authority individuals considered to be exemplary, from differing times or historical contexts, in lieu of empirical arguments to support assertions concerning how we should understand racial injustice. Some of the figures in the Moses pantheon are James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Marcus Garvey, Amílcar Cabral, Stuart Hall, the Black Panthers, Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., or the authors of the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement.
. . . one striking shared trait in the revived interest in these thinkers and movements is that none is enmeshed in the particular, post-segregation neoliberal regime that confronts us today.
A trend in left political hermeneutics is to do away with empirical constructions of (present) reality and instead to argue about which past concepts and figures most aptly represent that same reality. Race looms large, but with the very obvious abolition of racialized chattel slavery, it feels politically salient for most people to understand conditions today through comparisons to the 1960s and pre-’60s Jim Crow.
And so there is a new Jim Crow. There are new Nazis, and new concentration camps: “Trump is Legalizing Concentration Camps for Immigrant Families,” reads one headline in The Nation.
There is a new Antifa. There are also new socialists and a new New Deal.
There is a constant and churning politics of reproduction, an overriding sense that all of the old nemeses of the left — especially white supremacy and Nazism — have in no sense been defeated. Instead they seem, to us, to be just a hair’s breadth away from regaining their powers and subjecting us to the old atrocities (there is even a new Hitler: Donald Trump). Amnesia, within this jumbling of time, is privileged.
It is often that left “cred” gets awarded in direct proportion to one’s willingness to state how fundamentally unchanged all of the old conditions remain. “Trump is like Hitler” becomes less “left” than “Trump is literally Hitler.”
This discourse, in short, posits a new 20th century.
This is the feeling of the end of history. As Fisher says, “Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious.”
Cerebrally, the left obviously does reject Francis Fukuyama’s thesis. And yet we act as though the great gears of social progress have indeed corroded, or have even reversed, since Fukuyama wrote. (Bizarrely, liberals easily resurrected Russia as an existential threat to the United States, despite its massive geopolitical decline, such that now there is also a new Soviet Union and a weird new McCarthyism.)
All of these factors not only distort our sense of our obstacles and enemies; they also warp our sense of what — and who — is revolutionary.
My writing this essay was inspired by a well-written eulogy for, and essay about, a “hyperpop” musician known as SOPHIE. Celebrated for singles such as BIPP and a full-length LP, OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES, SOPHIE unfortunately passed away from a fall in early 2021.
An obituary and reflective essay penned by Matt Bluemink about SOPHIE made an ambitious, interesting claim. The thinking went that the type of nostalgia Fisher and Jameson describe, as well as its political and even ontological implications, has actually been upended by musicians like SOPHIE. In direct contrast to Fisher’s understanding of nostalgia and a closely related (Derridean) concept, hauntology, SOPHIE presents — for Bluemink — an “electronic futurism:”
Both the visual and auditory aesthetics of [the SOPHIE video] “Faceshopping” have been created to provide a sense of future shock in the listener. These are not cultural forms of the past ominously haunting the present, these are images of a virtual future being rendered into contemporary culture. This is something unlike anything we’ve seen before. This is anti-hauntology.
Bluemink doubles down with political stakes:
Fisher also . . . looks at the lack of subversion in contemporary culture as a sign of some kind of cultural regression from the decades in which he developed his thoughts. . . .
Again, I feel like this statement has aged poorly given the current landscape of popular music and leftist culture. Sophie [sic] herself was a transgender woman who played with and subverted the concepts of identity in her music.
As might be obvious from the first section and title of my essay, I take issue with both of these arguments. In fact, the nostalgia and cultural anterograde amnesia I describe above appear to be at play within Bluemink’s very claims.
To explain what I mean, I’ll include the video for SOPHIE’s “Faceshopping” before I compare it to prior art.
The visual themes of this video emerge from a rush of images. There is digital and physical manipulation of a computer-generated, but seemingly plastic, face, interspersed with various bits of text, images, and full-screen strobe effects in a type of lurching and aggressive montage.
One gets the feeling that the viewer is a bit assaulted by all of this variation.
And with all of the included plastic, product images, and allusions to the Coca-Cola logo (the word “real” flashes menacingly, spelled in that iconic font), one also gets the sense that commercialism is a strong part of the visual message (reinforced by the lyrical one).
The question is: does all of this really line up with Bluemink’s claims? Is this really something “unlike anything we’ve seen before?”
To the contrary, the SOPHIE video is actually quite reminiscent of video art described in Fredric Jameson’s 1991 opus Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Film and literature, Jameson wrote, no longer stand as “the richest allegorical and hermeneutic vehicles for some new description of the [social] system itself.”
Instead, he asks us to consider whether the “most likely candidate for cultural hegemony,” in the ’80s and ’90s, was instead video, “in its twin manifestations as commercial television and . . . ‘video art.’”
We should note that video art of the time was often “interpreted as provocation, as a calculated assault on the viewer, if not an act of outright aggressivity.”
Jameson sketches out an example videotext called AlienNATION. It presents us with a “virtually druglike experience of the present of the image” connoting the “noise and jumbled signals . . . of the new media society.”
In this aggressive montage, or stream, of images:
First, a little existential joke about a “spot” of time, which is excised from a temporal “culture” that looks a little like a crepe; then experimental mice, voice-overed by various pseudoscientific reports and therapeutic programs (how to deal with stress, beauty care, hypnosis for weight loss, etc.); then science fiction footage . . . At this point the rush of image materials becomes too dense to enumerate: optical effects, children’s blocks and erector sets, reproductions of classical paintings, as well as mannequins, advertising images, computer printouts, textbook illustrations of all kinds, cartoon figures rising and falling (including a wonderful Magritte hat slowly sinking into Lake Michigan); sheet lightning . . . Beethoven sonatas, Hoist’s Planets, disco music, funeral parlor organs, outer space sound effects . . . a grotesque sequence as well in which friable orange oblongs (that resemble Hostess Twinkies) are dissected with scalpels, squeezed by vises and shattered by fists; a leaky container of milk . . . and many more.
Jameson even writes that the experience of AlienNATION can be clarified “if we think of [its] various quoted elements and components — the broken pieces of a whole range of primary texts in the contemporary cultural sphere — as so many logos.” Logos, in turn, act semiotically as “the synthesis of an advertising image and a brand name; better still, . . . a brand name which has been transformed into an image.”
Truly, it is hard not to think of SOPHIE’s video in this same way: its broken pieces string themselves together in a ceaseless bricolage — the Coca-Cola “real;” the Google CAPTCHA; the close-up of raw meat; the visual voice-overs of the lyrics (they read and sound like fragments from dystopian advertisements); cartoonish alterations of the Barbie-like face, which at one point deflates pathetically; the existential confetti; and the actual logos from Twitter and Instagram.
So similar is this in form and gesture to AlienNATION, it would seem that, visually, “Faceshopping” would hardly shock a 1991-era Fredric Jameson at all, let alone give him the shock of the future. To the contrary, anyone studying the video art movement in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s would likely be shocked to find that the people of 2021 view “Faceshopping” as some sort of radical artistic vision from the future — especially considering the only post-’80s technology depicted in its montage doesn’t even look new (a computer mouse cursor, basically a stylized arrow).
Logos, in any case, are inherently backward looking. They are vessels for carrying “the memory of a whole tradition of earlier advertisements” within themselves. It is more than interesting that “Faceshopping’s” look into the future involves so many glances back.
Sonically, the story is similar — though it’s harder to make clear arguments for or against musical novelty. To my mind, SOPHIE could be described as carrying the industrial and inquisitive sonic ethos of ’80s acts such as Front 242 into an age where the global hegemony of hip-hop and ’00s-era pop has taken shape. But it’s easy to run into facile propositions about music-making here: isn’t all new music in some sense recombinant? Isn’t all of it based on what came before? These objections are ultimately undecidable, but they still can tell us something about what SOPHIE sounds mean for culture.
We can note that it would have been quite a feat to sound persuasive in debates about new and ascendant jazz music, for instance, by proposing that jazz was merely recombinant and therefore really not much different from anything else in the culture. It even would have been difficult, in another period, to discuss what existing memetic material needed to be combined with rock to produce heavy metal. In fact, the very genre names of these art movements suggest newness or at least transmutation.
What was the mainstream signifier antecedent to jazz? While there is much discussion of where the word came from, no one seems to think it was produced from a preformatted lexicon used to denote musical genres.
Metal already shows the process slowing down and standardizing as culture emerged from the heady days of the ’60s. But at least metal is a new material as compared to rock.
Hyperpop, in contrast, is meant to sound both literally and sonically as an exacerbation of preexisting materials. This, too, is culturally symptomatic. We should remain aware that the types of discussions we can have about hyperpop are not intrinsic to music itself; rather, they are the contingent products of a particular cultural environment. As Matt Colquhoun writes, “That culture is recombinant is, arguably, a distinctly late-capitalist truism.”
Amnesia and formal nostalgia creep into discussions about SOPHIE precisely within the conscious attempt to describe the music as futuristic. At the most basic level, one might simply point out that having to defend or market something’s futurity is a marker of something else going on. The future, like the “cool,” should simply speak for itself. Its unprecedented qualities should be simply obvious to most everyone who encounters it. What happens instead in discussions of SOPHIE is that the facets of the music tagged with the label of futurism are actually those which are the most mimetic of the 1980s.
Apparently, SOPHIE’s anti-hauntological tendencies are best displayed in the track entitled “Whole New World/Pretend World.” The tune, per Bluemink, features “a chaotic blend of industrial percussion, abrasive stabbing keyboards, and dystopian pop vocals.” But these things, even in this combination, can be found easily in albums such as Geography from Front 242, released in 1982:
This group also explored the idea of fading from such abrasive sounds into “a euphoric wave of ambient synth textures,” just as Bluemink praises SOPHIE for doing:
I recommend checking out these tracks in full, along with other parts of the album Geography, to get a fuller sense of the comparison. Older musical acts make clear that the parts of SOPHIE’s work which feel so connected to the present or even the future of music belong to an existing stylistic vocabulary of futurism.
Updates to musical form in SOPHIE tracks such as “Faceshopping” actually make the music less subversive of the musical mainstream and more compatible with its prevailing trends. An instant, near-complete, and effortless integration of SOPHIE’s work into arguably the most mainstream musical genre belies Bluemink’s claims of musical future shock.
In 2017, a SOPHIE-produced beat eerily similar to that of “Faceshopping” was used seamlessly in a hip-hop track from the already-popular rappers Vince Staples and Kendrick Lamar. Fans of these two artists, both well-known and deeply commercially successful without SOPHIE, could gain exposure to the latter’s music without leaving a familiar artistic groove. That is, mainstream listeners could listen to a mainstream genre — hip-hop — and consume SOPHIE’s work without realizing anything new or shocking had happened at all. In fact, the Vince Staples track was actually released the year before “Faceshopping.” (Imagine the distance between this and, say, the antagonism between punk and disco; imagine what would happen if ’80s pop had abruptly attempted to integrate death metal.)
Here, I am reminded again of Mark Fisher, this time in Capitalist Realism: “‘Alternative’ and ‘independent,’” he writes, “do not designate something outside mainstream culture; rather they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.” (Fisher 2009)2
It’s definitely true that Vince Staples was trying to work around these limitations and to sound futuristic with his work. “When the Vince Staples is playing, it’s 2029, bro,” the rapper would claim in an interview.
But still, it didn’t happen. A Pitchfork review of his album featuring SOPHIE beats confirmed that sounding like the future basically meant sounding more like the 1980s: “Big Fish Theory leans toward . . . house and Detroit techno, especially.” (I concur.)
I should be clear nonetheless: none of what I describe is really the fault of SOPHIE, or even of Staples. It is simply produced by the cultural machinery of our system: late capitalism.
Reduce me to nothingness. — SOPHIE
We can now circle back to the issue of subversion. Matt Bluemink and other commentators who joined the 2021 conversation on SOPHIE — most notably author and blogger Matt Colquhoun — all seem to work from a similar premise. That is, all of them believe that a breakout from the bounds of cultural, political, or even just artistic nostalgia could have palliative effects on the broader social system. I happen to agree. But these writers also seem to take for granted that SOPHIE’s work is both (meaningfully) new and subversive.
What’s so bizarre about this — and indeed, it’s likely yet another amnesic symptom — is that these writers tend to skirt around the height of the bar that must be cleared for real subversion to take place. Titanic figures such as Kurt Cobain failed to cross the breach. And it’s unclear what indications exist that SOPHIE’s pushing of boundaries could prove any more socially redemptive then Cobain’s.
“Cobain knew,” wrote Fisher,
that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance; knew that even realizing this was a cliché. The impasse that paralyzed Cobain is precisely the one that Jameson described: like postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in a ‘world where stylistic innovation is no longer possible, where all that is left is to imitate . . .’ Here even success meant failure, since to succeed would only mean that you were the new meat on which the system could feed. But the high existential angst of Nirvana and Cobain belongs to an older moment; what succeeded them was a pastiche rock which reproduced the forms of the past without anxiety. (Fisher 2009)
After Cobain came a mainline rock bereft of cultural momentum. The music splintered from culture to become a stylistic spice, tropes suitable for replay or rearrangement as needed for a particular audience. Key to this move — from subversion to reproduction and pastiche — was a loss of existential energy. Within the “popular modernism” that fueled Cobain, the artist could still resemble a monadic subject whose inimitable style becomes a focal point and definitive factor in the art’s formal situation. When it came to Cobain himself, that style was to rail and scream against the dying of style as such. Cobain’s meta-artistic concerns were not decoration (as in full postmodernism) but the lifeblood of the work, a transfusion from psychic wounds.
With SOPHIE, as the commentators rightly point out, one gets the sense that the artist’s existential identity was likewise put on the line. This time the chosen medium was an electro-pop that had, from necessity, to dilute the role of personality by covering a broader range of techniques than Cobain’s rock. Such dilution, of course, can be embraced and turned back on itself to constitute its own sort of style — a meta-formal replication of Cobain’s grunge protest. What determines if we are seeing another Cobain moment in SOPHIE, then, will be how SOPHIE’s successors in the artist’s generic movement, now dubbed hyperpop, engage in dialogue with SOPHIE’s push toward style.
I would have guessed, before listening to the newest denizens of the hyperpop microgenre, that such artists would face immense difficulty in reaching stylistic peership with SOPHIE. After all, the extra recursive layer in SOPHIE’s style-making takes style one step further away from the listener, making the emotional and now cerebral effort of gaining style even more difficult to achieve. The end result would be the devolution of hyperpop into pastiche of some other kind(s) of pop or electro.
What I found while listening to the reigning flagship artist of hyperpop, 100 gecs, was something altogether more symptomatic of the postmodern than I could have even dreamt. Here, there are so many layers of mimicry it’s hard even to pick them apart. But what was most dramatic was the utter removal of the existential content that SOPHIE worked into lyrics — which, according to Matt Bluemink, were a main site for SOPHIE’s subversion of norms. (SOPHIE “was a transgender woman who played with and subverted the concepts of identity in her music,” he wrote.)
Lyrics in “Faceshopping” bring out, even dramatize, existential and (inter)personal elements of the art, giving the work a Promethean charge:
So you must be the one
That I’ve seen in my dreams
Come on, touch me
Set my spirit free
Oh, test me
Do you feel what I feel?
Do you see what I see?
Oh, reduce me to nothingness . . .
With 100 gecs, the lyrics become pure pastiche of recent popular music, especially “mumble rap,” put through a slightly different cultural filter.
Bet my money on a stupid horse, I lost that
So I ran out to the track to get my cash back
I just gotta leave this place with a big bag
So I found the fuckin’ jockey and I grabbed that (pick it up)
Pushed him down to the ground and I punched him in his face (in his face)
Yeah, I stole his phone, that put him in his place (in his place)
Me on the horse, we ran out of the place (the place)
Then we took my Porsche back to my placeStupid horse, I just fell out of the Porsche
Lost the money in my bank account, oh no
Stupid horse, I just fell out of the Porsche
Lost the money in my bank account, oh no . . .
This ground had been tread as recently as Lil Nas X’s mega-hit “Old Town Road” (2018):
I got the horses in the back
Horse tack is attached
Hat is matte black
Got the boots that’s black to match
Riding on a horse, ha
You can whip your Porsche
I been in the valley
You ain’t been up off the porch, now
It’s also hard to imagine that the last two sets of lyrics would have seemed novel to an early ’00s Kid Rock fan. The following is from that artist’s “Cocky” (2001):
Come clean
You know I will drink a fifth of Jim Beam
And still stand still
I’m the illest foolCooler than the water in a swimming pool
Fly like a seagull kickin’ like a mule . . .I’m from the outskirts of Detroit Rock City
A-Shirts, Cadillacs, Big titties
Skinny models you can keep those
I like big corn fed Midwestern ho’s . . .You got a Bentley Wow
I got jets with wet bars
And trucks with gold plows
Bitch bow when I pimp through
While it’s interesting that 100 gecs puts lyrics over what is essentially a ska backing for the verse and a trap backing for the chorus, all of this amounts to a set of explicit if not outwardly conscious cut-and-paste operations from various forms of recent popular music. If SOPHIE’s work was the naturally conceived offspring of industrial-electro and pop, 100 gecs’ music is a CRISPR-engineered, artificial-womb-grown chimera of junked trends from music that flourished in the ’00s: pop, rap, electro, ska, rock, and so on.
Even the microgenre itself lacks organicity. In contrast with genres such as jungle, which cross-pollinated with subcultures such as rave, hyperpop was in some sense created by Spotify (NYSE: SPOT), “the world’s largest streaming music service provider.” The New York Times put out an article entitled “How Hyperpop, a Small Spotify Playlist, Grew Into a Big Deal,” in which the author attributes much awareness of the microgenre to Spotify’s renaming of an existing playlist of popular music to the word “hyperpop.”
[Lizzy] Szabo and her colleagues landed on the name after seeing it come up in metadata collected by Glenn McDonald, Spotify’s “data alchemist,” whose job is finding emerging sounds on the platform and classifying them into “microgenres.”
The genre spread further through the algorithmic machinations of big tech entities such as TikTok.
And now the genre is formally nostalgic — in addition to the pastiche lyrics and music, the content “has all the hallmarks of meme culture: endless remixes and reinterpretation of existing sounds and signifiers, with humour and kitsch masking more serious or sincere emotions.”
Hyperpop bears “rose-tinted nostalgia for the early days of Web 2.0.” It is a sound, writes Will Pritchard, enthralled with “surrealism [and] nostalgia for the apparently bygone internet age of the Noughties.”
The parallels to Cobain’s situation are striking. As happened with the grunge icon, whatever existed of SOPHIE’s futurism has been supplanted by an overt and thoroughgoing nostalgia; SOPHIE’s musical and poetic vulnerability now dwarfed by ironic distance from style and vulnerability — “I do not identify with music genres” wrote the clearly pop musician Charli XCX.
At its boldest, the hyperpop sound takes Kanye’s entire postmodern corpus and repackages it as so many scrambled-up Lunchable meals. But the logos in Kanye eventually broke down and gave way to a thoroughly nostalgic, even religious pastiche rap (JESUS IS KING). Mainline pop has gone that way as well, with Taylor Swift’s ’60s folk song “Willow” (2020), WILLOW (Smith)’s late-’90s rock jam “t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l” (2021), and Olivia Rodrigo’s ballad (could be ’00s, or ’60s if the mimetic synth became actual strings) “drivers license” (2021).
And so we have to wonder — are Bluemink, Colquhoun, and others simply unfamiliar with SOPHIE’s budding musical legacy, just as they were with the original video art? Or is something else at work in their appraisals of SOPHIE? Why are these writers so convinced that SOPHIE stands as subversive and futuristic, despite the artist’s visibly retracing cultural impact?
… But I come back stronger than a ’90s trend — Taylor Swift
The answer here is political after all. The concepts of anti-hauntology and futurism, inasmuch as they exist, can only overturn Fisher’s diagnosis of hauntology if their reverberations reach the broader culture and evolve our notions of subjectivity. Fisher writes,3
Throughout the 20th century, music culture was a probe that played a major role in preparing the population to enjoy a future that was no longer white, male or heterosexual, a future in which the relinquishing of identities that were in any case poor fictions would be a blessed relief. In the 21st century, by contrast – and the fusion of pop with reality TV is absolutely indicative of this – popular music culture has been reduced to being a mirror held up to late capitalist subjectivity.
In order to argue that SOPHIE’s work is a corrective to this situation, commentators seem to revert to a rough-and-ready version of Adornian modernism. This amnesic recycling of an ideal from a different cultural epoch fits squarely with the formal nostalgia on the left I described above.
Jameson already pointed out how Adorno’s appreciation of formal modernism lost vitality in postmodernity:
Jameson’s work on postmodernism began with an interrogation of the idea, cherished by the likes of Adorno, that [modern art] possessed revolutionary potentials by virtue of its formal innovations alone. What Jameson saw happening instead was the incorporation of modernist motifs into popular culture (suddenly, for example, Surrealist techniques would appear in advertising). (Fisher 2009)
Despite this development, numerous commentators have alluded to the socially redemptive and subversive power of SOPHIE’s work. For Bluemink, music from SOPHIE and Arca possessed “clearly subversive elements,” although strangely, this aspect of the work was supposedly enhanced by its use as a musical building block for utterly mainstream artists such as Kanye West and Madonna. But one has to wonder: if the musical mainstream was not being subverted by SOPHIE and Arca, then what exactly was being undermined?
It would seem that identity has much to do with the subversion SOPHIE supposedly carried out. SOPHIE’s presence in leftist (or musical?) culture with a specific identity was supposed to have opened up the field of that culture and to have carried it to new places. Bluemink writes that “trans-artists” such as SOPHIE and Arca “certainly embody ‘a future that was no longer white, male or heterosexual’ in the way Fisher imagined.”
Colquhoun puts things more directly:
When we argue over SOPHIE’s newness, detached from the new sort of subjectivity she represented, and focus instead [on] whether anyone has used chipmunk vocals and synthesised their own kicks before, we undermine the radical imposition that was her bold presence as a transgender pop star.
For these authors, SOPHIE’s very identity makes for a “radical” imposition of the new. It is identity that completes the circuit between art and culture and pushes both forward. This new modernism recuperates the Adornian idea that form itself possesses revolutionary potential, but the hermeneutics is now exacerbated and expanded to include formal information about human beings themselves. Group identity and art lose distinction: what defines the new modernism is investment into the various classes of identity as so many formal or generic categories. Hence, both art and humanity are similarly and indiscriminately genrefied, and the new modernism concerns itself most of all with the imbrication of these elements.
This mirrors how, for example, Netflix classes “Gay and Lesbian Dramas,” “LGBTQ,” “Black Stories,” and “Latino” as official genre categories. Amazon’s Prime Video likewise curates genre pages for “Black Voices” and “LGBT.” Spotify has the genres of “Afro,” “Equal” (featuring “women all over the world” at “full volume”), “Pride” (LGBTQ+), “Stop Asian Hate” (“celebrating and supporting the AAPI community”), “Arab,” and more.
Not only are identity classes reified anew in this way, identities themselves are now subject to the fashion flux and recombinatory impulses of music and art.
Consider the invention and near total scrapping of the term “Latinx,” designed to graft nonbinary gender ideas to the designation of a specific ethnicity. “Latinx” was created by a gender-conscious vanguard but broadly rejected by those who claimed the ethnicity itself. Or take for example the transition from “minorities,” to “POC” (and also “black and brown” and “maginalized folx”), to “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color). The last one extracts two elements from “POC” only to graft them together again as discrete, gene-like elements. Similar happened when “Asian” became “AAPI” (Asian American Pacific Islander) and “APIDA” (Asian Pacific Islander Desi American) and “AAPIDA” (seemingly a combination of AAPI and APIDA) and “AANHPI” (Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander).
We also have LGB, LGBT, LGBTI, LGBTQ, LGBT+, LGBTQ+, LGBTQIA, LGBTQIA+, just “queer,” and many other designations — including LGBTTQQIAAP and QUILTBAG — to refer to a panoply of gender identities and sexual orientations. We’ve also seen use of woman, womyn, and womxn (and then back to women again).
These trends come in tandem with the genrefication of political thought. A prime example is the totalizing expression “all politics is identity politics.” Positing the fictionality of universal political concerns, apologists for this view mimic those who argue against the possibility of transcending genre:
Conservatives may join some white male liberals in decrying “identity politics,” but nobody knows better than conservatives the power and importance of identities like Christian, American, traditional family, etc., in shaping thinking and giving meaning to political engagement. . . .
All politics is, on some level, identity politics. The idea that it’s some special attribute of black politics or feminist politics is just blindness. . . . The idea that gendered or ethnic claims are despoiling a liberalism of pure selves and neutral rationality is little more than an unselfconscious form of identity politics. Politics is about collective decisions. This necessarily implicates individuals’ identities . . .
The question of what happens when pluralities of many or perhaps all major groups of people begin to share political claims is a priori ruled out. (A strange thing, because there are certainly political injunctions, like recycling, shared in this way.) So in the end, the argument presupposes what it’s supposed to prove. But more importantly, it entails a claim that just as all artistic stuff belongs to one or more (but never all or no) genres, all politics belongs to one or more (but never all or no) identity groups. Only a “white male” could pretend otherwise — and with this pretending gains strangely more political freedom in the scheme than any other group.
The new modernism in some sense describes as much as it prescribes an era in which identities and (art) products are reversible. Just as much as “Apple” is an identity, human identity concepts such as blackness, womanhood, and queerness must be artfully maintained. The concepts and their differences become “beautiful,” “fabulous,” etc. even as there is a collapse in the traditional religious and scientific justifications for their existence (a move toward viewing all of them as social constructs).
The debates over identity representation are shaped inescapably by George Gerbner and Larry Gross’s concept of symbolic annihilation (from 1976). “Representation in the fictional world signifies social existence,” goes the theory. “Absence means symbolic annihilation.” Advocates of increased media representation thus propose that media should adopt a role in conserving identity as a consequence of its role in constructing it:
How individuals construct their social identities, how they come to understand what it means to be male, female, black, white, Asian, Latino, Native American—even rural or urban—is shaped by commodified texts produced by media . . .
Thus, our cultural demystification of the old forms of identity — our seeing them as symbolic fictions — has actually increased their cultural inertia. Identities must now be represented, made and remade. They are strengthened as they become more aesthetic, strengthened by the ironic distance people take from them, strengthened by the disavowals that people thereby make of their own ideologies. (I personally know that discrimination is wrong and illogical, but I must treat people of different races, genders, etc. differently because other people and things are racist, sexist, etc.; I personally know that people should not stereotype, but I must stereotype people because others stereotype them in a more harmful way; and so on.)
Functioning as art products, identities, too, become like sediment beneath the weight of formal nostalgia. They are made beautiful by their history, traditions, lineage of struggle, and so on — the exposed bricks of their past. They are timewise jumbled up, just as they are subject to fashion flux. For the influential Afro-pessimist school that developed in the 2000s, “slave” is the only appropriate descriptor for black people:
For [author Frank] Wilderson, the state of slavery, for Black people, is permanent: every Black person is always a slave and, therefore, a perpetual corpse . . .
Wilderson contends that “the narrative arc of the slave who is Black (unlike Orlando Patterson’s generic Slave, who may be of any race) is not an arc at all, but a flat line.”
Adolph Reed Jr. likewise writes,
One plain rhetorical tic in the world of race-reductionist scholarship is the casual referencing of black American experience across space and time in the first-person plural. Although this tendency seems to have become a zealously defended norm in the Great Awokening, it’s hardly new. My son, as a graduate student teacher’s assistant in the mid-1990s, would query African American history students who used “we” in their seminar papers to refer to slaves and sharecroppers: “Were you alive” in 1860 or 1880?
Nostalgic identity views are reinforced by a peculiar circuit. We are encouraged simultaneously to blame art and media for producing “bad” representations of identities but also to appeal to art and media as providing the only acceptable means of understanding identities themselves. In order to become “actively antiracist,” one author recommends diving
into the wealth of great podcasts and books about race in America. (Realizing that I don’t read enough work by Black authors has been part of my own recent self-examination.) Resist the urge to ask a Black person in your life to explain things . . . I recently heard one anti-racism advocate recommended buddying up with a fellow non-Black friend, keeping a text thread for sharing questions and resources to educate each other.
Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the interchangeability between art and identity than the discourse of “cultural appropriation.” The “property” that can be appropriated from a specific culture or group is of course intellectual property — which is to say, art (hence the search for “prior art” before filing a patent or copyright claim).
Thus, cultural appropriation only makes discursive sense when we, consciously or not, think of culture itself as being composed of art, composed of creative products that can be owned, exchanged, and appropriated. Transhistorical group ownership of culture turns the groups themselves into (immortal) corporate entities. Such entities maintain a portfolio of IP but also sublimate their corporate identity into IP (as so many logos and brand names). This is the constellation of signs that must be protected from appropriation, through which abstract “groups” can be harmed by appropriation. “Cultural appropriation can be most easily recognized by asking the question of the non-dominant group: Does the use of this element of your culture in this way bother you?”
Of course, people who condemn cultural appropriation often do so in the strongest terms when one group is able to “profit” from the activity. Cultural appropriation is a neoliberal discourse that only makes sense when everything, including culture and identity itself, is property used by individuals and groups in a competitive market.
By now it may go without saying: the new modernism of art and identity does not liberate artists like SOPHIE but rather enchains them to nostalgia and the ghosts of the symbolic past. It in no sense brings us closer to a future in which “the relinquishing of identities” can bring the culture a “blessed relief.” SOPHIE’s own story shows us this.
The artist kept distance at first from celebrity identity. At one point, “Sophie [sic] . . . shunned the spotlight, deferring to guest singers, using a voice distorter to give interviews, and enlisting fellow performers as stand-ins for live performances.” While alive, SOPHIE also expressed identity without the use of pronouns, as I’ve done in this article. But this attempt at free living and creation soon grew unsustainable.
SOPHIE eventually appeared openly and visually in a video called “It’s Okay to Cry.” Beforehand, the artist (emphasis mine)
was frequently misgendered by the press and attacked for feminine appropriation. Fellow futuristic pop icon Grimes once piled on, telling The Guardian two years before “It’s Okay” that “It’s really fucked up to call yourself Sophie and pretend you’re a girl when you’re a male producer [and] there are so few female producers.”
SOPHIE, who tried to explore a uniquely universalist mode of living, eventually had to negotiate with the cultural brand structure of femininity. Soon, the artist would be turned into a transgender “icon” and referred to most everywhere as “she,” despite the personal choice of no pronouns. Rather than relinquishing the poor fiction of a male or even male-to-female identity, SOPHIE had to be fashioned an identity to gain legitimacy among artistic peers and the music media.
“Initially,” the artist said, “I was quite all right with letting the music speak for itself, but then the problem is, people start filling in the gaps for you.”
In the end, pointing out the “radical” nature of SOPHIE’s subjectivity does nothing. The artist’s actual subjectivity was misarticulated in the language of formal nostalgia, and the hyperpop genre as a whole has been rendered with the same worn-out codes, destined to remain a niche community fascination: “queerness and hyperpop have been called ‘inseparable.’”
If we think back, we can remember another genre whose community was believed as a matter of identity to be socially subversive and even dangerous, a genre that became its own culture and aesthetic, a genre that managed, somehow, to bring its own ethos, its own language, and its own lifestyle into the mainstream. That genre was hip-hop. But now, some decades after the genre’s inception and long after it reshaped the entirety of American music and youth culture, we’re looking for another identity-genre to deliver us from the same evils that bedeviled hip-hop’s founders some 40 years ago.
Perhaps it is finally time we looked elsewhere.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press: 1991)
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books: 2009)