The King of Yet-Also
Mar. 13th, 2005 08:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusOne of the reasons the Michael Jackson trial is so unfortunate is that the world of Either-Or will pass judgment on a creature of Yet-Also. The world of clear, unambiguous categories will pass judgment on someone who flies Peter-Pan-like over the binaries that confine and define the rest of us.
When we look at Michael Jackson, I believe we're looking at the future of our species. Michael is a creature from a future in which we've all become more feminine, more consumerist, more postmodern, more artificial, more self-constructed and self-mediating, more playful, caring and talented than we are today. But it's hard to use those adjectives, because they're Either-Or adjectives and he's from the world of Yet-Also, a world I believe we will all come to live in if we're lucky, a world where there is no more authenticity-by-default-through-brute-necessity and no more "human nature". A world of pure synthesis, pure self-creation.
Jackson is what all humans will become if we develop further in the direction of postmodernism and self-mediation. He is what we'll become if we get both more Wildean and more Nietzschean. He's what we'll become only if we're lucky and avoid a new brutality based on overpopulation and competition for dwindling resources. By attacking Jackson and what he stands for -- the effete, the artificial, the ambiguous -- we make a certain kind of relatively benign future mapped out for ourselves into a Neverland, something forbidden, discredited, derided. When we should be deriding what passes for our normalcy -- war, waste, and the things we do en masse are the things that threaten us -- we end up deriding dandyism and deviance. And Jackson is the ultimate dandy and the ultimate deviant. He can fly across our Either-Or binaries, and never land. It's debateable whether he's the king of pop, but he's undoubtedly the king of Yet-Also.
Consider all the extraordinary ways in which Michael Jackson is Yet-Also. He's black yet also white. He's adult yet also a child. He's male yet also female. He's gay yet also straight. He has children, yet he's also never fucked their mothers. He's wearing a mask, yet he's also showing his real self. He's walking yet also sliding. He's guilty yet also innocent. He's American yet also global. He's sexual yet also sexless. He's immensely rich yet also bankrupt. He's Judy Garland yet also Andy Warhol. He's real yet also synthetic. He's crazy yet also sane, human yet also robot, from the present yet also from the future. He declares his songs heavensent, and yet he also constructs them himself. He's the luckiest man in the world yet the unluckiest. His work is play. He's bad, yet also good. He's blessed yet also cursed. He's alive, but only in theory.
There's one way in which Michael Jackson is not Yet-Also though. He's not famous yet also ordinary. Almost all the other stars in the world, the stars of Either-Or world, anyway, make an exception to Either-Or's categorical thinking in this one instance: given the choice between being either famous or ordinary, they all insist they're both. It's the one instance in which hardline Either-Ors will accept a Yet-Also answer. It's an answer they like because it fills the positions of talent with the representatives of the untalented. It affirms them as they currently are rather than challenging them to become something else. They want affirmation, not aspiration. They don't want their artists and celebrities to embody the values of worlds they don't understand. Ambiguous worlds, future worlds. They want to walk, not moonwalk, and they want their stars to walk too.
And so our creature of Never-Land will be judged by the creatures of Never-Fly. They will almost certainly throw him into jail. Their desire to see him as grounded, categorised and unfree as they themselves are is overwhelming. The grounded, situated, unfree creatures of Either-Or are baying for the clipping of fairy wings. Knives, hatchets and scissors glint in Neverland. There's an assembly of torch-bearing witchfinders. Peter Pan must be ushered back from fiction to reality, from the air to the ground. Back into a race, back into a gender, back into a confined clarity. Assuming he doesn't commit suicide, as he threatens in Martin Bashir's documentary, by jumping from a balcony, Jackson will be ushered away from the fuzzy subtle flicker states of our future, back to the solid states of our past and present. Either-Or will have its triumph over Yet-Also. Yet it will also, unknowingly, "triumph" over its own better future.
When we look at Michael Jackson, I believe we're looking at the future of our species. Michael is a creature from a future in which we've all become more feminine, more consumerist, more postmodern, more artificial, more self-constructed and self-mediating, more playful, caring and talented than we are today. But it's hard to use those adjectives, because they're Either-Or adjectives and he's from the world of Yet-Also, a world I believe we will all come to live in if we're lucky, a world where there is no more authenticity-by-default-through-brute-necessity and no more "human nature". A world of pure synthesis, pure self-creation.
Jackson is what all humans will become if we develop further in the direction of postmodernism and self-mediation. He is what we'll become if we get both more Wildean and more Nietzschean. He's what we'll become only if we're lucky and avoid a new brutality based on overpopulation and competition for dwindling resources. By attacking Jackson and what he stands for -- the effete, the artificial, the ambiguous -- we make a certain kind of relatively benign future mapped out for ourselves into a Neverland, something forbidden, discredited, derided. When we should be deriding what passes for our normalcy -- war, waste, and the things we do en masse are the things that threaten us -- we end up deriding dandyism and deviance. And Jackson is the ultimate dandy and the ultimate deviant. He can fly across our Either-Or binaries, and never land. It's debateable whether he's the king of pop, but he's undoubtedly the king of Yet-Also.
Consider all the extraordinary ways in which Michael Jackson is Yet-Also. He's black yet also white. He's adult yet also a child. He's male yet also female. He's gay yet also straight. He has children, yet he's also never fucked their mothers. He's wearing a mask, yet he's also showing his real self. He's walking yet also sliding. He's guilty yet also innocent. He's American yet also global. He's sexual yet also sexless. He's immensely rich yet also bankrupt. He's Judy Garland yet also Andy Warhol. He's real yet also synthetic. He's crazy yet also sane, human yet also robot, from the present yet also from the future. He declares his songs heavensent, and yet he also constructs them himself. He's the luckiest man in the world yet the unluckiest. His work is play. He's bad, yet also good. He's blessed yet also cursed. He's alive, but only in theory.
There's one way in which Michael Jackson is not Yet-Also though. He's not famous yet also ordinary. Almost all the other stars in the world, the stars of Either-Or world, anyway, make an exception to Either-Or's categorical thinking in this one instance: given the choice between being either famous or ordinary, they all insist they're both. It's the one instance in which hardline Either-Ors will accept a Yet-Also answer. It's an answer they like because it fills the positions of talent with the representatives of the untalented. It affirms them as they currently are rather than challenging them to become something else. They want affirmation, not aspiration. They don't want their artists and celebrities to embody the values of worlds they don't understand. Ambiguous worlds, future worlds. They want to walk, not moonwalk, and they want their stars to walk too.
And so our creature of Never-Land will be judged by the creatures of Never-Fly. They will almost certainly throw him into jail. Their desire to see him as grounded, categorised and unfree as they themselves are is overwhelming. The grounded, situated, unfree creatures of Either-Or are baying for the clipping of fairy wings. Knives, hatchets and scissors glint in Neverland. There's an assembly of torch-bearing witchfinders. Peter Pan must be ushered back from fiction to reality, from the air to the ground. Back into a race, back into a gender, back into a confined clarity. Assuming he doesn't commit suicide, as he threatens in Martin Bashir's documentary, by jumping from a balcony, Jackson will be ushered away from the fuzzy subtle flicker states of our future, back to the solid states of our past and present. Either-Or will have its triumph over Yet-Also. Yet it will also, unknowingly, "triumph" over its own better future.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-13 09:31 am (UTC)How do you propose dealing with those who are criminally creative, especially when the charges appear to be valid? Do existing laws regarding sex with minors encourage a small evil, in order to protect society against a larger one... or visa versa?
Where and how do you rewrite the laws regarding consentual sex with minors? How can you reasonably judge the ability of a minor to give consent? Is any decision they make truely a consentual one, or are they victims, addicted to and overwhelmed by the attention or the stimulation... were they willing participants, or "sucked into it", as it were?
I say this based on having sex back in my early thirties with a few people who were the age of consent, plus a few months... and if I found out after the fact that they were a few months younger than I suspected, would I have stopped having sex with them entirely?! Questionable. They knew their own minds quite well.
While I believe that society should try to protect children from becoming victims of preying adults, why should society insist on protecting mature and worldly minors with years of sexual experience from consentual sexual relationships with mature individuals, set upon established ground rules? Why insist instead that they settle for young, immature, inexperienced lads who are, by and large, lousy lovers... with no ground rules, no sense of forming lasting relationships, and the occasional propensity for date rape? Aren't minors imminently qualified to victimize each other sexually, in the modern "Lord of the Flies" world, where adult supervision is often completely missing, a la "Kids" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113540/)? Why shouldn't parents ever take any responsibility for the premature deflowering of their "sweet, innocent child"?
Personally, I doubt that Jackson will be legally convicted -- his lawyers are too good, and the witness' motives are too tainted -- which is to say that he'll only be convicted in the court of public opinion. That, however, is arguably a worse sentence for an artist like Jackson. Exile, however, might be good for Jackson. It was, arguably, the best thing that could've happened for you and many other artists.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-13 03:40 pm (UTC)Mr. Jackson has been convicted of all kinds of things in the court of public opinion already for the last twenty years.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-13 04:37 pm (UTC)My issue is that before we start accusing adults of being predators that victimize young innocents, we should determine that the person was, indeed, an innocent, who didn't know what they were doing, and that it was clearly the intent of the adult to seek out and take advantage of young victims.
In the area where I live, for instance, it is very common for there to be publically "out" teenagers as young as 13, who, frequent the same places that many older gays do, and who aren't necessarily looking for someone young to get involved with. Likewise, there are young women under the age of consent who participate in the local BDSM community, and who are often looking for an experienced dominant.
It makes no sense to tell young teens that they can trusted to drive highspeed vehicles that could take others lives or that they can sign up to kill or be killed, but that they can't be trusted in their decision as to whom to sexually stimulate or be stimulated by. The purpose of creating laws that pay absolutely no attention to the issue of consent seems to be to protect the parents, not the youth.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-13 04:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-13 06:31 pm (UTC)W
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-13 06:58 pm (UTC)Malcom Gladwell writes an awesome piece about trauma, and how one gets over it, or not, here (http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_11_08_a_trauma.html).
So some kids have sex young, and it's no big deal, and others do, and it's the most destructive thing ever, and we turn out to be shockingly poorly equipped to make good determinations about which is which, but that's itself not surprising, because children are dependent and disempowered, and get a lot of platitudes and not much actual assistance, as the disempowered usually do.
A hypothetical question of Bateson's, one of the best I've ever heard: Say there's a mother who gives her young son ice cream every time he finishes his spinach. What else do we have to know about the situtation to predict whether the boy will grow up to: a) love or hate ice cream? b) love or hate spinach? c) love or hate mother?
How much are the kids Michael Jackson hung out with going to end up traumatized by Michael Jackson? vs. How much are they going to end up traumatized by Jay Leno?