Superstar satire, with character comparing his life to the nomadic wanderers of old. Tribal identity secures internalized, romantic-anthropological slumming that occludes political economy, actual stateless persons, and the whole bother of encounter. Brass band and banjo pump up the (oxy)moronic, T.J. Jackson Lears factor: elite antimodernist jetsetting.
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On September 12, 2013, Voyager 1 became the first Earth-made object to enter interstellar space. Perhaps more importantly, the “Golden Record,” curated by a Carl Sagan-led group, is affixed on its outside, offering what has been deemed a “global anthology” of Earth life as conceived in the early 1970s. Containing images, sounds, music, and “spoken greetings” in fifty-five languages, the LP was also meant to serve as a document of our shared “cosmic loneliness.” And the contents of the disc (folk-ed trax, especially) parallel the problem the record was to solve: how to bring people together by transcending difference that redeploys difference in order to communicate our “diversity.” Along with “Melancholy Blues” by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven, Blind Willie Johnson’s piece represents the blues on the disc. Marked by forlorn humming and at the edge of speech, Johnson’s trax resists what Jeffrey Carroll deems the “directly expressive [and ‘wordless’] . . . rhetoric of the interjection” (When Your Way Gets Dark: A Rhetoric of the Blues). If one invests in the “emotion” of sound, what’s abandoned is the articulation of abandonment that emerges from a homeless wanderer. And this isn’t Simmel’s “stranger,” who serves as a marker of and diagnostic for group belonging, but a manifestation of isolation articulated toward the other. “Meaning” isn’t present as such. What is: the disturbance of being at home in this world. Or: the alien-ness that comes from (punishing) relation.
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The journey into the desert represents a politicized movement to get under the problem of naming and interpellation. The desert not a wasteland, but a place with teeming “life underground,” seeking out “heart” below the process of subjectification. Resistance which does not neglect the fundamental exclusion: the anthropological foundations of the “political.”
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