Notes on Anti-Structure: The B-Sides
excerpts from the archives
Follow up to Notes on Anti-Structure with some excerpts from old articles.
*Pre-modern societies permitted these breaks from “profane, ordinary” life and served as “kairotic knots,” reminding the public that “chronos” (temporal or secular time) is perforated by sacred time. These communal gatherings like Carnival or saint feasts put the “natural” in tension with the “supernatural” forces and serve to unify people across social statuses. Taylor argues that events like Princess Di’s funeral, rock concerts, or the Olympics that garner the world’s attention are secular counterparts to these moments of anti-structure, which contain muted vestiges of cosmic symbolism.
In the past, events like the royal funeral and the World Cup might have pointed more explicitly to something transcendent in our midst. But the signs embedded in such symbolic moments are quickly collapsed into the atomizing vacuum of global homogenization at the hands of corporate, technocratic elites. Rather than recognizing and actively upholding the transformative capacity of events like the World Cup, most of us will slip back into living our humdrum lives…the momentary feeling of transcendence it provided us dissipating into the flatness of our hollow daily existence. Were we to take a step back and look more closely, we would see that events like the World Cup are pregnant with cosmic forces that have the power to uplift and imbue a deeper meaning on our everyday routines.
-World Cup LARPing: Watching Soccer as Anthropological Research
*Though I was only five years old when Princess Diana died, I remember the visceral feeling of collective mourning as I saw clips of her funeral on T.V. and images in newspapers. Though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, I recognized the loss of a deific figure, an idol even, who symbolized a collective desire for unifying, transcendent ideals like Beauty and Goodness.
Taylor’s comments came back to me with even greater force as I watched the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II on YouTube. Between the soldiers, costumed musicians, throngs of mourners, majestic architecture of Westminster Abbey, angelic singing of the schola, and the poetically hope-filled prayers of the Archbishop, I couldn’t help but feel as if something sacred were reaching down into my normally mundane workday and imbuing it with a tinge of transcendent beauty.
*In his 1961 book Madness and Civilization, Foucault explores the changing attitudes toward "madness" from the Middle Ages to the dawn of modernity. He draws a correlation between the Enlightenment concept of "pure reason" and the medicalization of madness, juxtaposing it with contrasting attitudes during medieval times.
Foucault dedicates a significant portion of his work to the role of the "passions." Before the Enlightenment, the passions were understood to be subject to perversion by original sin. But through mortification and growth in virtue, those same passions can be transformed into tools of sanctity, charity and communion.
Rationalism set reason in opposition to the passions, deeming them to be something to be controlled and, when possible, eliminated rather than integrated.”
-Were some saints mentally ill, or holy, or both?
*The relationship between Princess Margaret and Fr. Derek “Dazzle” Jennings speaks to the long relationship between the British decadent sensibility and Catholicism. Scholars like Ellis Hanson and Frederick Roden have highlighted the extent to which decadent artists and writers — many of whom were same-sex attracted — along with those with “irregular temperaments,” were drawn to high church Christianity. Homosexuals and dandies, but also the mentally ill and disabled, the poor and marginalized, found a home in the Roman and Anglo-Catholic Churches — whose “rigorous” doctrines, ethical demands, and elaborate art and liturgy created a more hospitable space for those who didn’t fit the norms of British “respectability.”
As Oscar Wilde (a British convert to Roman Catholicism) once quipped, “the Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone — for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.” The sacramental ethos tends to place more emphasis on the “abnormal” reality of the God-made-man — who lived in the messiness of the human flesh — was ostracized, beaten, and bled to death. The doctrine and liturgy — the natural consequences of the paradoxical event of the Incarnation — drew in gay men like Dazzle and emotionally complicated, existentially hungry black sheep like Princess Margaret. It appealed to their temperaments and aesthetic sensibility, as well as their need to affirm a moral good beyond the flimsy promises of either carnal indulgence or royal “respectability” and a “pure” public image.
Foucault continues, “if we try to assign a value, in and of itself… to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.”
It was precisely this integration of the passions into the doctrines and worship of the high churches, this “dazzling” use of reason that drew in figures like Prince Margaret and Fr. Dazzle. While the poor, disabled, and debaucherous may have found the door shut to them by the cult of respectability, they found the door remained opened for them in the Church. Their alleged “defects” were not problems to be expunged, but gifts to be welcomed, purified — when necessary, and grafted onto the wounded yet glorified Body of Christ.
-The Danger of Respectable Christianity
*In the first season of FX’s Pose, we meet Damon, a black closeted teen growing up in a small Midwest town to conservative Protestant parents. Upon discovering his secret porn stash, his father beats him and kicks him out of the house. After escaping to Manhattan and living on the streets for a few days, he is “adopted” by transgender Ball dancer and “House mother,” Blanca Evangelista. She polishes him up to prepare him to dance in New York’s Ball scene. Blanca reassures Damon that he is free to be himself in their House: “Well in this house you can be the king of Arabia and wear golden robes every day of the year.”
We often see men playing with the boundaries of gender norms during times of anti-structure. Men can engage in emotional gestures of devotion and piety along with women during the feast of the local patron saint. They can be vulnerable and beg the patron for their intention…they can perform, dress up, perhaps even in clothes that are more fitting for females.
Dr. Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada refers to an excellent contemporary depiction of this type of piety in a recent article. During the feast of Saint Paulinus in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, “men have the freedom and the opportunity to partake in dramatic display and play with traditionally masculine aesthetics.” While wearing ornate outfits made of Lamé, taffeta, rhinestones, and gold, these men reenact the life of St. Paulinus…the strongest of whom have the honor of lifting and carrying one of eight four-ton gigli (devotional towers).
“If the lifters are penitential and disciplined, the Turk is their aesthetically excessive foil. In dressing up as the Turk, growing beards, donning turbans, and wielding the sword, men enter a masculine lineage and learn local and legendary history through their bodies.”
-Disenchanted Masculinity in a Secular Age
*Sontag comments that camp “is esoteric — something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.” Thus why most drag shows take place in underground bars. In the pre-Stonewall era, these venues also served to protect queens from police raids. But even post-Stonewall, the underground, hidden ethos fits the spirit of drag performances — creating an alternate reality that deviates from conventional norms. They are symbolic of what Camille Paglia would call drag’s dark, murky, “chthonian” origins.
Drag queens’ costumed persona holds up a mirror to us all. It reveals a difficult truth behind the façade of our bourgeois complacency. However much society attempts to fit us into an orderly mold, humanity is caught up in the snare of a messy, Dionysian force that urges us to pursue something beyond the temporal realm. That force, when released from repression, puts us in tension with the sinful, the socially unacceptable, the unnatural — lashing out in acts of destruction, violence, and sexual licentiousness…but simultaneously putting us in tension with the transcendent, the sacred, and the holy.
-How secular humanism is ruining drag
El Alfa’s hit “La Mama de la Mama” is a hallmark of the dembow genre, which has been rapidly garnering mainstream popularity.
The lyrics of “La Mama,” like many other dembow songs, play with words creatively making for edgy double entendres. The content of the sexual fantasies created are larger than life...so outlandish to the point that it's difficult to be scandalized by them.
As music journalist Roddy Perez wrote, “Dominican dembow is the medium of escaping from our reality, whether we like it or not, it’s a reflection of a fringe of our society and its cultural level is an experimental music, that creates a unique atmosphere of dance...If we take the lyrics of dembow as fiction, the same way we do a Hollywood movie, TV, or adult literature, joined to the same freedom of expression we ascribe to them...they have the right to express themselves.”
Similarly, Raquel Z. Rivera wrote of earlier reggaeton acts with outrageously sexual, violent, and even misogynistic lyrics that their “lyrics cannot be taken as windows to artists' souls. Some rappers express their deepest feelings in their lyrics; others step up to the microphone as actors playing whatever character they please.” She refers to the popular 90s song “Maldita Puta” by Guanabanas Podrias, claiming, “there is no denying the violent misogyny in [the song]. However, this does not necessarily mean that the members do (in real life and outside the sphere of artistic representation) engage in such behavior.
They could, in fact, be gang rapists who go around spitting and urinating on their victims. But they could also be disgruntled young males who would never spit on a woman but seek to assert their masculine power through their lyrics; they could be constructing their superiority at the level of artistic representation, since in real life that power is constantly being questioned. Furthermore, they could also be purposefully writing outlandish lyrics just to laugh at the mainstream outrage and shock.
Another possibility is that they are expressing a deep-seated violent sexism in joking, hyperbolic terms. Yet another possibility is that the artists are writing their lyrics according to what they think their audience likes; if images of violent sex are popular land they are, then violently sexual lyrics will sell. Finally, all or some of the above statements could simultaneously be true.”
-The ironic perversity of Dembow
“Se acabó la cuarentena, el cuerpo lo sabe, la calle está llena. The quarantine has ended, the body knows it and the street is full.”
Bourgeois suburban elites have no problem being cooped up in the house by their lonesome. Their disconnect from ethnic bonds, familial ties, and tradition has left them desensitized to atomization.
Thus why the “front row” coastal college educated elites had little difficulty quarantining themselves at the start of the pandemic, contrary to the experience of “back row America,” which consists of mostly ethnic and working class people.
Bourgeois comfort and complacency, total control and predictability, are the name of the game. They have no problem sacrificing basic human needs for the sake of not getting coronavirus.
This atomized norm represents the ultimate trajectory of the cartesian dualism between mind and body. The song represents the connection between mind and body for the back row, people with cultural and spiritual depth.
“El cuerpo lo pide, la calle está llena.” The body knows it, the body asks for it. Now the street is full. The body speaks of the need for communion, for dynamic motion, for meaning…a desire which the front row is intent on silencing, subjugating to the demands of risk-free predictability and complacency.
…
“Baby I would like to eat you all day long, what I would do to you if the clock gave us more time. Baby you’re mine…all the things I’d do to you, if the clock gave us more time.”
Rauw Alejandro speaks to the deep-seated yearning for total consummation with Being itself…for an experience of unity that reaches to eternity.
But in a neoliberal late-phase capitalist society, where eternity has been banished from our horizon of consciousness, we are left to accumulate an infinite amount of finite moments of pleasure. The yearning for a consummation with the eternal is reduced to perpetual consumption.
We aim in vain to resist the boundaries of time and space, asking for the finitude of our existence to transcend its boundaries and lead us to something lasting, but to no avail.
We must thus eat the object of our desire into oblivion, to the point that we forget the existential dread that this moment of pleasure is finite.
Check out Notes on Anti-Structure.
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Photo taken at the Good Friday procession in Astoria, Queens.