Abstract
This chapter draws some consequences for future scholarship: It identifies the structural “whiteness” of the academic “we” generally invoked in Hegel studies, and demonstrates that the rap-centric approach in Hip Hop studies has meant that the voices and views of the Hip Hop’s pioneers are often underrepresented, or even undermined, in scholarly literature. It calls for scholars in both fields to work to engage with the social movements and organic intellectuals that emerge from socially excluded groups, and argues not only for an emancipatory vision implicitly shared by Hegel’s theory of art and the artistic and ethical practices of Hip Hop culture, but for their marked and revealing distance from “postmodern” accounts of rap music that reduce art and politics to mere subversion or revolt.
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- 1.
Hess, 2.
- 2.
William Maker, “Introduction”, in William Maker, ed. Hegel and Aesthetics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), vii–xxvi (vii).
- 3.
Ibid., xv, emphasis added.
- 4.
Beauty and Truth, 23; 79.
- 5.
Willian Desmond , “Art and the Absolute Revisited”, in Maker, ed. Hegel and Aesthetics, 1–12 (2, emphasis added).
- 6.
Carl Rapp, “Hegel’s Concept of the Dissolution of Art, in Maker, ed. Hegel and Aesthetics, 13–30 (14).
- 7.
Hegel on the Modern Arts, 261, emphasis added.
- 8.
After the Beautiful, 60.
- 9.
Rapp, 14, emphasis added.
- 10.
On the social construction of whiteness, and its particular function in Western and academic philosophy, see Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). I certainly don’t exempt myself from this critique; chief among my regrets about past publications is the deflection of the charge of Eurocentrism in my first venture into defending Hegel’s grasp of history as the collective struggle for progressive self-determination, “Hegel, Edward Sanders and Emancipatory History”, Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History, 42:1 (2013), 27–52.
- 11.
By no means a Hegelian, Paul Gilroy speaks of this relationship in very similar terms, arguing that for the “descendants of slaves […] [a]rtistic expression […] becomes the means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation” and thus under specific “conditions, artistic practice retains its ‘cultic functions’” (The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 40; 57).
- 12.
Bernasconi , “Hegel’s Racism” is required reading on these issues.
- 13.
While there are obvious differences between them and Hip Hop, I think comparable histories could be written of other aesthetic cultures—for example, hardcore in L.A. and Washington and footwork in Illinois and Indiana—produced by the marginalized communities of collapsing empire. There is, in fact, considerable continuity between Hip Hop and a recent dance-based culture to emerge in New York: Litefeet. It retains not only the sculptural depiction of human divinity (achieved through a potent form of slow motion movement, combined with prop tricks and gymnastic feats, rather than through floor work or power moves consummating in a freeze), but graffiti’s focus on the subway system (many early practitioners performed inside the cars themselves for spare change, and the space became a central part of the dance, leading, with sad predictability, to a heavy-handed legal crackdown) and a novel form of beat-centric music (which often emphasizes the physical sounds of clapping and snapping alongside the sampled, almost chanting vocals of producers and participants, but rarely features anything resembling lyrical MCing); despite the marked de-emphasis on rapping, some of its participants have gone so far as to call it “the second coming of Hip Hop”. Hat tip, once again, to Serouj Aprahamian.
- 14.
On the vexed and varied relationships that Douglass and Du Bois may have with Hegel, see Gilroy , The Black Atlantic; I follow one route directly linking Hegel to King in “‘A Passion For Justice’: Martin Luther King, Jr. and G.W.F. Hegel on ‘World-Historical Individuals’”, Philosophy and Social Criticism 43:2, 187–207.
- 15.
Break Beats in the Bronx, 5.
- 16.
Black Noise, 26; xiv, emphasis added.
- 17.
Ibid., xiv.
- 18.
Hip Hop’s Amnesia: From Blues and the Black Women’s Club Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Movement (Plymouth: Lexington, 2012). 247; 246.
- 19.
Having begun my career in deconstruction, I’m well aware of how unsatisfactory this term is, and how strenuously pivotal thinkers like Jacques Derrida worked to distance their work from the label as loosely used within the academy and beyond. Concepts from Gilles Deleuze, for example, are often invoked in Hip Hop studies in ways that seem distinct from his commitments (see, e.g. James Braxton Peterson, The Hip-Hop Underground and African American Culture: Beneath the Surface (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), or Awad Ibrahim, The Rhizome of Blackness: A Critical Ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity, and the Politics of Becoming (New York: Peter Lang, 2014)); however, the discussion which follows builds upon my critique of Deleuze’s aesthetic theory, “Deleuze on the Musical Work of Art”, in Intensities and Lines of Flight: Deleuze and Guattari and the Arts, eds. Antonio Calcagno, Jim Vernon and Steve Lofts (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 55–65, and I believe similar cases could be mounted against many recent figures and movements in Continental philosophy-inspired cultural theory. As regards postmodernism’s impact on Hip Hop scholarship, see Gilroy , Against Race, for an investigation into why “it seems no longer appropriate or even plausible to speculate about the freedom of the subject of black politics in the overdeveloped countries” (184–5).
- 20.
While I read this case as exemplary, it obviously is not indicative of every “postmodern” reading of Hip Hop’s aesthetic politics; however, written early in the field’s development, and enjoying a citation count well above 500, it is safe to say it is not only substantially influential within the specialist literature, but is often read as representative of the field by those outside of it. For a generally similar account, see Bailey ; other influential texts that read rap as a distinctly postmodern practice include Andre Craddock Willis, “Rap Music and the Black Musical Tradition: A Critical Assessment”, Radical America 23:4 (1991), 29–38, and Richard Shusterman, “The Fine Art of Rap,” New Literary History, 22: 3 (1991), 613–632. While Rose is compellingly critical of some postmodern accounts, in part because they focus on rap to the exclusion of the wider culture, claims such as “Hip Hop artists used the tools of obsolete industrial technology to traverse contemporary crossroads of lack and desire” (35), or that Hip Hop’s “style can be used as a gesture of refusal or as a form of oblique challenge to structures of domination” (36) seem quite close to broader themes in the postmodern aesthetics of resistance as found in Potter and Bailey; the same is true of Fred Moten’s recent claim that “hip-hop is […] a non-coercive rearrangement of desire that moves—that somehow obliterates the distinctions between being made to move and wanting to move and wanting to be made to move—in that gap, that break, which is a field of feel in dance, in which the representation itself is negated by an overwhelming affirmation” (Black and Blur (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 273). Although we have a different understanding of what its history reveals, I agree with Adam Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) that, even if it “seems, at times, that rap music would have to have been invented by postmodern theory, had it not been there, poised to exact its tribute”, nevertheless a “strong case could be made that the history of hip-hop culture demonstrates precisely how [such] cultural practices can be deployed to reinforce, at least as much as to challenge, dominant discourses” (8).
- 21.
Potter, 3. It is, indeed, in the understanding of time and history that we find postmodernism’s most serious challenge to the conception of both art and politics defended in this book; however, the arguments for, and consequences of, non-chronological/progressive theories of temporality are, in my view, underdeveloped by Potter. For one of the most compelling and nuanced attempts to reveal the import of postmodern theorists of time like Derrida and Deleuze for aesthetic and political practice, see Jay Lampert, Simultaneity and Delay: A Dialectical Theory of Staggered Time (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), especially chapters 7–9.
- 22.
Ibid., 61; 8, emphasis added to “aim for”. Compare Bailey , for whom Hip Hop “departs from modernity’s sensus communis [and thus reflects] a manifestation of the postmodern or the post-historical” (1), or Shusterman, for whom rap essentially refutes the “dogma that good art should […] focus[…] only on universal themes” (619).
- 23.
Which explains Potter’s perplexing claim that “hip-hop culture arose in places like the South Bronx” (142, emphasis added).
- 24.
Ibid., 8. In citing Run DMC , note how late in the culture’s development he finds its core message.
- 25.
Ibid., 8; 15, emphasis added.
- 26.
Ibid., 64, emphasis added.
- 27.
Ibid., 53.
- 28.
Ibid., 18, emphasis added to “ironic”.
- 29.
Ibid., 153. For Hegel, “this negativity of irony is […] the vanity of everything factual, ethical, and substantial, the nullity of everything objective and valid in and for itself […] the ironical […] lies in the self-destruction of the noble, great, and excellent; and so the objective art forms too will have to present only the principle of absolute subjectivity, by showing what has value and dignity for humanity as void in its self-destruction” (66/I, 96–7, trans. modified). See Judith Norman, “Hegel and German Romanticism”, in Stephen Houlgate, ed. Hegel and the Arts, 310–336, for a detailed discussion of Hegel’s vexed relationship with the German Romantics, who exemplify this “irony [which] is undiscriminating in its negative intents, running roughshod over the good and noble” (313). Correctly, she critiques Hegel’s limited understanding of the Romantic movement, emphasizing its potential productive side, which she also locates in Derrida’s deconstruction, pace the nihilism, mere subversiveness or meaningless “free play” often attributed to it. In postmodern appreciations of Hip Hop, we see this, for example, in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, 25th-Anniversary Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), which argues that “hip-hop sampling” or citation (xxxii), like the appropriation of pop songs in “jazz performances [or] the play of black language games” in verbal sparring matches (57) reflects the uniquely African American practice of Signifyin(g), “a game of language, independent of reaction to white racism or even to collective black wish-fulfillment” (77), which emphasizes “the figurative difference between the literal and the metaphorical, between surface and latent meaning” (89). While the literary theory Gates derives from the traditions of Signifyin(g) is remarkably close to certain aspects of Derrida’s thought, like Derrida he emphasizes the potentially constructive contributions of this play, finding sampling’s citation to be “more admiring than mocking […] ironic or critical” of its source materials, which thus marks a transformative extension of the various traditions from which it springs, reflecting a “remarkably self-conscious art form” that seeks to build upon, rather than undermine, its past (xxxii). Thus, while thinkers like Derrida and Gates should make us question Hegel’s somewhat crude caricature of romantic irony, and by extension postmodern philosophy, a text like Potter’s may indicate how presciently Hegel intimated where such thought—precisely because of its emphasis on subversive appropriation—might inevitably be taken up by others.
- 30.
Ibid., 71. Again, compare Bailey , for whom Hip Hop “is much more of an ‘attitude’” than anything else; an “attitude, which is, in essence, a reaction contra the rigidly limiting aesthetic of modernism”, which “rejects conventional moral wisdom” precisely because “its creators share with most postmodernists the tendency to revere subversives” (7, emphasis added).
- 31.
Etter, 207, emphasis added.
- 32.
Gospel, 28.
- 33.
Potter, 10; 6.
- 34.
Ibid., 132.
- 35.
Black Atlantic, 77; 84.
- 36.
Chang, Can’t Stop, xii–xiii.
- 37.
Gospel, 576–7. In fact Potter admits, seemingly against his own “postmodern politics”, the need for Hip Hop to move to non-aesthetic means of resistance, claiming, “If hip-hop wants to make a serious challenge to commodification, it needs to do more than simply make lyrical resistance” (113), just as Bailey claims that Hip Hop holds out a promise for “individuals who seek an alternative to atomization” (Philosophy and Hip-Hop, 16–7). However, as KRS-One argues, this would imply, as it were, a change in attitude, and one towards the “outmoded” values of humanism, universalism, ethical duty to one’s community through earnest social contribution, and emancipatory progress that we associate with figures like Hegel.
- 38.
Verharen , 457. Verharen uses Cheikh Anta Diop’s critique of Hegel and his account of Egyptian philosophy, as well as the work of Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois, to envision a “human unity” that “can be reached only through evolutionary processes grounded in self-knowledge” (482), but which requires us to “preserve a cultural identity directly linked to Africa” (489), against Hegel’s removal of it from progressive history. While this, I would argue, manifests a different vision of progress than that forwarded by Bambaataa and KRS-One, there are assuredly resources in this suggestion for writing alternative histories of Hip Hop’s development, lesson and direction, as well as for countering the increasingly dominant voices of the postmodern in its scholarship.
- 39.
The state actors in the murders of Hampton and Clark are exposed with exacting detail in Jeffrey Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010). While few now doubt there was some level of state complicity in King’s assassination, the precise agents and contributions remain unclear. The case for the FBI’s active role is best laid out by the man who successfully prosecuted the case regarding it in civil court, William Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King (New York: Verso, 2008), but a compelling argument for the role of more diffuse and local networks, involving local law enforcement, but which the FBI may have actually sought to subvert, is made in Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock, The Awful Grace of God: Religious Terrorism, White Supremacy and The Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2012).
- 40.
Peter Hallward, “The Politics of Prescription”, South Atlantic Quarterly 104:4 (Fall 2005), 769–789 (769). While he is often sharply critical of Hegel, my case, here, is indebted to Hallward’s pioneering work on trends in academic political and aesthetic theory since the 1970s.
- 41.
Paul Gilroy, Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 88. He is speaking, here, of Bob Marley who he presents—along with Curtis Mayfield and Jimi Hendrix—as a kind of cultural antipode to the crass materialism and cultural narcissism reflected in much recent rap music. As the preceding should make clear, however, Hip Hop intellectuals like Bambaataa and KRS-One share Gilroy’s push for an aesthetic pairing of “Black power on the one side and, on the other, the hope of a future in which race has been drained of meaning” (100). I hope that this book’s analysis offers evidence of Gilroy’s claim that cultural forms like Hip Hop reflect a “political relationship” forged across racial and ethnic communities through aesthetic cultures, which “reconstruct[s] and rework[s] tradition as they pursue their particular utopia. A vision of the world in which ‘race’ will no longer be a meaningful device for the categorization of human beings, where work will no longer be servitude and law will be dissociated from domination” (There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, 218). However, while Hip Hop assuredly proves that “people can act socially and cohesively without the structures provided by formal organizations” (247), the Zulu Nation, the Temple of Hip Hop, and other, more directly political institutions grounded in the philosophical and religious spirit that emerged from the culture suggest an intrinsic limit to merely aesthetic struggle. Thus, while we assuredly need to stress and defend the enduring role art plays in struggles for historical emancipation, the tensions explored in the previous chapter may mean that Gilroy’s suggestion that such “expressive cultural forms and the intercultural conversations to which they contribute are a dynamic refutation of the Hegelian suggestion that thought and reflection have outstripped art and that art is opposed to philosophy as the lowest, merely sensuous form” of emancipation is challenged, rather than confirmed, by Hip Hop’s ongoing history (Black Atlantic, 73).
- 42.
Hip Hop scholar Marcyliena Morgan, interviewed in Kitwana, 152.
- 43.
Gospel, 817; 574–5.
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Vernon, J. (2018). Conclusion. In: Hip Hop, Hegel, and the Art of Emancipation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91304-9_7
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