A Third Space for the Soul: 'The Cut' Between Humanity and Slavery in Gaye's 'Since I Had You'

“The image of the technical world possesses an ahistorical aspect that enables it to sere as a mythical mirage of eternity. Planned production seems to purge the life-process of all that is uncontrollable, unpredictable, incalculable in advance and thus to deprive it of what is genuinely new, without which history is hardly conceivable…” (Adorno, Perennial, 125)

"And this, in turn, leads to the question of the relation between castration and alienation, between castration, on the one hand, and disavowal and fetishization, on the other hand, in the Freudian and Marxian registers. Here we can begin to examine how a particular line of psychoanalytically influenced inquiry—say, from Adorno to Silverman— operates against the backdrop of these racial-historical determinations of language and the background of a reduction of the phonic substance of language that bends their analytics of aurality in the direction of an overwhelming ocularcentrism. For Adorno, black aural culture is defined by its fetish character in a way similar to the definition of female body/voice that Silverman sees in classic cinema. After all, according to Adorno, “[p]sychologically, the primal structure of jazz may most closely suggest the spontaneous singing of servant girls . . . [,] the domesticated body in bondage.”16 But I’m interested, here, in the insight Adorno’s deafness carries: for what is borne in work of the black radical aesthetic tradition—and not only at the site of its recitations of terror and violation but also in the critical and metacritical discourse it produces on its own productions—is nothing other than the cries of a servant girl, the material-phonic substance that is transferable but not interpretable from either inside or outside the circle, the aural content that infuses and transforms (our dominant understandings of ) primality, extremity, or extension out from inside or outside. Here I want to establish black aurality as the site of an improvisation through the structures both Silverman and Adorno talk about. Ultimately, I want to show how Baldwin’s baraka, his blessing, moves in the tradition of the servant girl and in the encounter with psychoanalysis and in light not just of castration but of augmentation, of a beneficent and song-producing prosthesis—the augmentation of vision with the sound that it has excluded, the augmentation of reason with the ecstasy it has dismissed—that improvises through the determinations of lack and alienation, not via some direct adequation between word and object, but through the object’s transferential reproduction in and as the (re)production of sound and of an ensemblic, dynamic totality. What I’m trying to talk about is another address of Lacan’s “question of a horn,” about which more in a minute. That address takes into account those transferences of the servant girl’s scream in the black musical and literary traditions, the “afro-horn[s],” say, of Henry Dumas or of Albert Ayler, phallic instruments infused and reconfigured by the materiality (content-substance-objectivity) of the maternal and by the knowledge of freedom the experience of bondage affords...
In Gaye’s work after What’s Going On, the contrapuntal is constructed not only by way of such polyrhythmic and extraharmonic intervention (a kind of irregularity or nonstandardization of pulse-to-hummm-or-buzzzzzz to whose differentiating force Adorno was unattuned), but as the disruption of the disciplinary hegemony of another powerful technic, namely, the rhetoric of the love song, a generic technicality that produces its own large set of problems. Here subordination to the technical apparatus of the love song is again cut by manipulation of, by technical in/subordination to, the recording apparatus. The lyric subject of the love song is disrupted by Gaye’s own other voices. The rhetoric of a most instrumental rationality is cut by the rhetorician’s own rapture. Listen to the song and think about how the theoretical image of the city might be held in and might emerge from the interconnection of the knowledge/discipline of labor and sexuality that this particular aesthetic space-time contains." - Fred Moten, "Visible Music," In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, pp. 179-180, 228

Adorno believes that the reproduction of certain sensations that are common between pop and jazz have produced a lack and a need for reproduced, external stimulus. This deprivation, as he calls it, is the castration at the heart of Fred Moten's deconstruction of the psychoanalytic foundations of Adorno's theory. Moten characterizes the production of Marvin Gaye's "Since I Had You" as transcending this by producing a prosthetic for the cries of slavery inherent to the black "aural" (cultural?) tradition. The music goes beyond castration and produces a sense of social life typically denied to the slave girl. This seductive capacity inherent to black music like Gaye's is the reflection of these cries, which Adorno arrogantly writes off as "feminine" and "female" at various points. Adorno misunderstands black music as a reflection of the paradigm of slavery their history has produced. He has excluded that as the essential history that determines the political ontology of social life within social death, where the music finds itself. It should also be of note that Adorno begins his discussion of the history of jazz with minstrel folk songs, which were also a part of this political ontology of antiblackness that jazz finds itself. He ignores the true impact on the political economy of American culture by ignoring the way minstrel music sustained slavery, and thus ignores a fundamental limit that is required in order to properly trace the psychoanalytic structure of music as a fetish, because these minstrel songs supported blackness as the fetish object.

Edit: After class, I find it necessary to clear up a couple things. Foremost, we cannot equate black people and blackness. Black people are black, but there is no "the black." Assuming an authentic "black person's experience" exists in black cultural forms like jazz would be susceptible to any basic critique of the Enlightenment's universal category of the subject. This is not what we are after. What we are after is blackness as a metaphysical category in the Western political ontology. Although there is no authentic category of "the black," there is the problematic of blackness that alters such phenomenal realities. (Moten has some great quotations on how the black aural tradition is fertile soil for discussing the history of philosophy (of music), and if anyone would like, I have a free electronic copy available.) Thus tracing jazz, soul, and other myriad black cultural forms as authentically black isn't the point. What we must do first is understand the political ontology in which these forms materially participate. Adorno has identified several problems with certain - I would argue  petit-bourgeois - audiences, but has overlooked the fetization of  blackness at root in early jazz (minstrel) performance. As such, his attention has been drawn away from the way jazz operates within the paradigm of social death necessitated by slavery. Instead, he argues is merely a palliative against universal social death under capitalism. Slavery breaks the usual subject/object divide which assumes itself in the ontological category of the human at work in this universal social death. Slaves were objects that spoke, commodities that spoke in breaking with Marx's critical analysis of the commodity. (Moten, In The Break, p. 6) As such, they attained social death beyond the industrial worker or the postmodern consumer. To that end, their material and cultural resistance in refining the cries of the slave girl "into music" is not a fetish project but a necessary instrumentation of the black aural tradition. This focus on instrumentation of such a tradition, which is the tradition of the object who speaks, means that sex and labor change into genuine and loving categories because they exist not as a palliative but as survival of social life in social death.

Final Project Addition
               When the “apparatus” of the song meets the process and manipulation of the recording apparatus, a cut occurs between the two, and as the cut grows a third space opens up. “The lyric subject of the love song is disrupted by the Gaye’s own other voices. The rhetoric of a most instrumental rationality is cut by the rhetorician’s own rapture.” This is the process by which a space beyond either expression of sentiment, which Moten recognizes in the love song, and the repression of that very sentiment by the presence of the master in the “planned production” of recording, forms. Adorno identifies jazz as slave’s music, but it is precisely because jazz and soul inherit slavery that they must produce a way of “rapture.” However, this “rapture” could easily fall prey to Adorno’s criticism of a false consciousness. In this case, the false consciousness would be false liberation of blackness from slavery. This "rapture" of slavery is only ideology that soul music sells. Moten’s analysis demonstrates that the cut is a musical move through and between the expression of humanity and the repression the slave faces.

While Gaye’s voice no doubt echoes the slave girl that Adorno finds in jazz, the production of “Since I Had You” finds life in the third space produced by the cut. The cuts congeal, so to speak, and do not negate the existence of the slave’s humanity nor her repression. Instead, this congealed space exceeds the first and second ways of liberation (expression of sentiment in love songs) and doom (repression in production) in favor of a third way: fugitivity. The fugitive slave is always, always in flight from the master and finds life in the flight. This movement requires neither freedom from slavery nor an acceptance of the repressive destiny. Specifically it is the production, the laborious aspect of music that Adorno criticizes as “purg[ing] the life process,” that enables such a movement. In the process of production, the slave girl’s voice finds flight away from her masters in the space produced by Gaye’s cuts.