Fixations/Solutions: Audible Dissatisfaction Matthew Wolf-Meyer

<1> When the idea of this issue’s theme came to me, I was standing in a crowd of my peers, members of my generation, listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. As with all concerts, the performers left the stage to signal their eventual encore, and when they returned, they returned with the announcement that the U.S. military had begun its bombing, and formal invasion, of Iraq. Whether the idea for the issue had come to me prior to this moment, or as a result of it, I am unsure; I had, however, earlier decided that the summer issue we had planned must be delayed, and in its stead a more politically relevant issue needed to be put together (not that “Science Fiction and Everyday Life” is an irrelevant theme, nor apolitical). When I returned home, I quickly drafted the call for papers and contacted the editorial board for their approval of the project, which was met with unanimous agreement. However, before turning to the explanation for this issue, of its title and its intent, I want to reflect momentary on the effect of music on politics, and how being an audience member mitigated a decision.

<2> Music is always revolutionary. It always effects changes in its listeners -– albeit, at times, rather microscopic ones. It is the territorial mark of a species, as Deleuze and Guattari remind readers of in A Thousand Plateaus –- it lets listeners know who owns, who inhabits, a piece of land, whether they be singing bluejays or howling wolves. And it also changes minds (songs stuck in our heads, refrains that occur over and again). This is the most vital aspect of music in human society: Lyrics, however often we may ignore them, and more importantly the tonal qualities of the music itself (recall Plato’s musical prohibitions from The Republic), effect us. And there is surely a trend in contemporary music towards these ends. Rather than the hip-shaking 4/4 beats that ingratiated “rock and roll” into popular culture, slow tempos and odd time signatures abound. If these are refrains, and particularly Deleuzian refrains, what are they inscribing, who are the identifying, and to whom?

<3> I urge the curious to investigate three albums, solutions and fixations of my own (for aren’t all solutions and fixations ultimately personal ones, and aren’t we all willed to share these personal details?): Radiohead’s “Hail to the Thief” (the obvious), Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “Yanqui U.X.O.” (the connoisseur-credible), and King Crimson’s “The Power to Believe” (the forgotten). The former two are a product of their generation, surely, just as we all are, and the performers, quite routinely, produce the new anthems of today’s youths (who are actually today’s young adults and will be tomorrow’s thirtysomethings). King Crimson, founded in 1969, but one of the few bands from that era to not only survive, but to repopulate (personnel changes occur frequently), is a product of multiple generations, and it is in this sharing of perspective that they most obviously differ from Radiohead and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Whereas Radiohead and Godspeed You! Black Emperor both see desolation – they are both very apocalyptic in lyric, sound and imagery -– King Crimson seems to point to something else, something outside the system, something that remains untouched by the conflicts that we face in contemporary culture. The very titles of the albums belie this: “Hail to the Thief” (the thief being President George W. Bush) and “Yanqui U.X.O.” (“U.X.O.” being “unexploded ordinance”) are obviously political references, whereas “The Power to Believe,” in its insistence on a sort of faith, defies politics (for isn’t this the very crux of non-wartime conservative/liberal animosity in the U.S.?). But this belief is not in some higher power, no “god,” but rather the very terrestrial, and maybe very 1969, power of human relationships. Whether we can learn to love our neighbors, however, will rest upon a more mature form of compassion than contemporary conservative forms, and more intellectual forms of self-knowing. All relation is finally anthropological relation, and we can only know the Other as well as we know ourselves, hence the need for diplomacy and the primacy of speech.

<4> The title of this issue is a phrase that simply dawned on me as I attempted to narrow down the possible topics that could be included under this issue’s umbrella: The idea of a “solution,” like a “final solution” or a chemical dissolvent, made perfect sense; as a entendre, its meanings are manifold, and as the authors herein write about “solutions” of different sorts, I encourage you readers to deconstruct the sorts of “solutions” they provide -– to provide solutions of your own. Similarly, the idea of a “fixation,” since this most recent global war was surely that, made perfect sense: A “fixation” is both a fetish of sorts (and on this topic, read Walter Putnam’s “Stuffed Animals”) and also a pidgin verb, “to have been fixed.” The idea of a war fixing something, of fixing anything, is a philosophical “pidgining”: War is invariably a mutation, an abrupt, Lamarkian adjustment to the present course of things. Rather than the gentle coaxing of diplomacy, war is jarring rape. And like a rapist, with a fetish for power mixed with sex, military operations invariably disrupt gender relations, both at home and abroad, substituting the heterotopias of our domestic bedrooms for the homoerotics of man-on-man action in foreign lands (no wonder then that the American anti-sodomy laws were recently unconstitutionalized, thrown out of the body politic).

<5> One of our initial concerns in this project, this journal, was to make academic thinking more relevant to the lay reader, to continue our teaching of others outside of the classroom. In the furor that led the U.S. to war with Iraq, the thinking of academics seemed to be entirely sidelined in favor of the more visceral commentary of political “pundits.” But protests across the U.S., on university campuses and in city streets, were participated in by all, and diverse webs of information sharing sprang into being: Aged academics were speaking with adolescent Marxists, veterans were speaking with mothers of today’s soldiers, students were speaking with blue collar workers... But speech is ephemeral, and many of these thoughts, although they may have engrained themselves in the thoughts and actions of their listeners, have long since dissipated; this issue should give some of them both a longevity and audience they originally lacked. And hopefully, given time and maturation, it will become a historical document of a trend, “solutions/fixations,” that has long since stopped making sense.