Reconstruction Vol. 12, No. 1
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The Subversion of Abstract Space in U2's Rhizomatic 1990s / Anthony Cristofani
Abstract: In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre analyzes the “geometric—neutral, empty, blank—mental space” that is posited in order to avoid the unpleasant, contradictory nature of social space, which it displaces. Abstract space is “also the locus of all the agitations and disputations of mimesis”, and the space is where books are canonized, genres are fixed, and university departments are calcified, a process that not only hierarchizes texts but fixes their context. Even avant-garde and purportedly subversive art and criticism is easily subsumed in the abstract space required for the functioning of capitalism. As such, I look to a popular art form, the rock concert, for strategies in reconfiguring space and time more in line with Deleuze and Guattari’s vision of a non-hierarchical, non-filial, rhizomatic production of meaning and critical impact. I will look at artist Willie Williams’ collaborations with rock group U2 on the ZooTV and Popmart stage shows to see whether a multimedia popular production of this sort, in contrast to avant-guard art or academic criticism, affords unique possibilities for the subversion of capitalist time and space. These shows will be construed as the kind of tactical media tackled by Rita Raley, on a larger scale. I will address both the cross-genre—music, theater, television, installation art, pastiche, film, painting, music video, agit-prop—format and the spectacle’s representation of author, audience and nation in order to outline a critical praxis for popular technocultural music productions.
“This is not animism, any more than it is mechanism; rather, it is universal machinism: a plane of consistency occupied by an immense abstract machine comprising an infinite number of assemblages.”
- Deleuze and Guattari
<1> Welcome to ZooTV, rock band U2’s staging of the rhizome. Why choose a capital-intensive rock concert to propose a Deleuzian attack on the production of capitalist space? For one thing, music can already be a Deleuzian event, and this particular staging of the music, in a multimedia, multimillion-dollar production of a massive staging of this type offers unique “lines of flight” from the presorted sectors, genres, and critical spaces afforded most art. Over the course of a handful of albums, two groundbreaking multimedia tours, and a few hermetic personas, the band and its collaborators excelled in staging just this:
When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis. Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points and bivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature. (Deleuze and Guattari 21)
More importantly, this rhizomatic staging made possible a critique and manifesting beyond the abstract space of capitalist production so acutely diagnosed by Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space.
<2> I will begin by addressing a few lines of flight emerging from U2’s praxis of staging—lines of flight out of Academia, and lines of flight from popular culture. I will then look at ways in which these productions tend to spill over the partitions created by abstract, capitalist space, including the political-economic genre formulations of both the avant-garde and the underground art championed by Rita Raley in her Tactical Media. It is overground tactical media, so to speak, that offers a rare and in some ways more effectual, if strangely closed in its capital-intensive availability to most practicing artists, critique of the capital that underpins its existence [1].
<3> The texts I am analyzing here are not concerts but concert videos, for reasons I will return to. Additionally, the concert video comes from an assemblage that might be seen as a larger work of art—the concomitant album, music videos, press conferences, talk show appearances, etc., all united under the umbrella of a set of alter egos which became for a few years the default ego of the frontman, Bono. This multi-faceted, masked presentation of band and world is, I argue, a tactical decision, designed to save the art from compartmentalization in the appropriate quadrants of the popular and critical space of reception.
SETTING THE STAGE: TACTICAL MEDIA
<4> U2’s Zoo TV tour (later Zooropa) was probably the most influential rock tour ever mounted, a nearly two-year long spectacle (1992-1993) whose size, scope, and general aesthetics set the tone for rock concerts over the next two decades. Its manifold art forms were discussed in everything from architectural magazines to fine art journals [2]. The tour and its audio-video-performative corollaries popularized everything from hip-hop and industrial rhythm sections in rock music to the chaotic, flashy editing style that still dominates music videos, advertisements, and, to a lesser extent, film. It was born out of a character Bono invented in the recording studio in order to draw a latent song out of the band, “The Fly.” Bono did not drop this character during those years—a smug, smooth-talking hermetic spirit, described by Bono as a “barfly, a self-appointed expert on the politics of love, a bullshit philosopher who occasionally hits the nail on the head but more often it’s his own finger-nail he leaves black and blue” (U2 224). He was an amalgam of the greatest rock stars of all time, usually at their worst. Even in interviews, trips to buy groceries, and activist appearances, he wore the absurdly large, impenetrable fly-eye shaped shades and leather suit, and spoke in a newly affected cocky drawl. He lived nowhere but in the production of himself, had no country but the one he was appearing in, and thus embodied some pure form of the transnational celebrity, although I will argue that even the notion of “nation” is disrupted by Bono-as-Fly on the set of ZooTV.
<5> The band in essence brought their own television studio on the road, with satellites capable of broadcasting different channels, mixed in with prerecorded visuals from renowned artists, live feeds to war-torn Sarajevo, and general static, broadcast across 36 televisions of various sizes, strewn about the stage, sometimes upside down or on the their side. The show included psychedelically-painted East German trabants hung in the rafters as spotlights, costumes, theatrical rehearsed interactions with cameras and audience members, and nightly phone calls to the white house from another Bono alter-ego, Mr. Macphisto, a cross between Mephistopheles and Elvis in his Vegas freefall years. With the televisions and stage design, the show’s scope encompassed architecture, visual art, television, poetry, interview, theatre, music, agit-prop, and political activism.
<6> To begin to analyze the strategy of Zoo TV’s architects, let’s look at Rita Raley’s conception of “tactical media.” In her book of the same title, Raley argues that certain artistic invasions or cooptations of popular media or media that is by default functional and nonartistic—such as video games, stock market graphs, or various forms of cyberactivism and hacktivism—are sometimes indistinguishable from their non-critical, commercial incarnations, except for “intentionality, procedure, and self-reflexivity” (Raley 23). What I will work to demonstrate is the way in which these new media artists use the virtuality of their medium to critique the immobility of material bodies. Their critique of the neoliberal ideologies of free-flowing virtual capital is manifest in their tactical use of the very technologies, techniques, and tools that late capitalism itself employs (Raley 37).
<7> Some elements of tactical media are intrinsic to the stage show in general, such as the contingent, “on the fly” performativity that presupposes interaction with the audience (Raley 29). But ZooTV is also tactical in a sense in which most concerts are not, in that it presents a challenge to “the existing semiotic regime by replicating and redeploying it” (Raley 7), or as Bono dramatizes it in a song about the ambiguities of rock stardom, called “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”:
You don't know how you took it/ you just know what you got Oh Lordy you've been stealing/from the thieves and you got caughtin the headlightsof a stretch car/ you're a star
…oh no, don't be shy/ it takes a crowd to cry
Hold me, thrill me / kiss me, kill me
<8> In the video for the song, an animated Bono freefalling off a skyscraper, pushed off by paparazzi, grabs his halo—a reference to the “over sincere” label he received during the previous tour—fashions it into his infamous fly shades, dons them, and instantly possesses the power to navigate the city like a superhero, swinging on a microphone cable through a massive neon ”O’ in the ZooTV sign. This is in fact exactly what the tour allowed them to do—navigate the strange world of late capitalism beset by new media using what some might call the enemy’s weapons.
<9> It is not within the purview of this essay to explain the myriad tactical uses of the technologies behind ZooTV [3]. I spend my time arguing that their employment deterritorializes the spaces created for the production and reception of both critical art and popular entertainment, i.e. the “lines of flight” within and with which the show escapes death-by-compartmentalization. As Deleuze and Guattari teach us, “Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come” (4-5). Like music. but even more so, deploying new technologies to defamiliarize the way music is received. “Who doesn’t want to come out to a rock show to watch television?” Bono quips before the third song of Zoo Tv, “Even Better Than The Real Thing.”
But it can’t be a mere matter of utilizing multimedia tools:
The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available—always n-1…Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n-1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. (Deleuze and Guattari 6)In previous tours, U2 strove to shove their humanity down humanity’s throat. With ZooTV (and beyond), Bono subtracted the unique from his personality, sang at n-1 dimensions and thereby found an assemblage of voices that accomplished more, artistically and politically [4].
LINES OF FLIGHT: FROM POPULAR CULTURE
<10> The first line of flight is that of music escaping popular culture, deterritorializing genre, perhaps closest resembling Larry Mcaffery’s coinage ”avant-pop,’ which navigates the increasingly blurred line between high and low culture. Discussing metafiction-heavy genres such as avant-pop, Takayuki Tatsumi directs our attention to the problem that these unfamiliar concepts confront: that in the age of hypercapitalism, every binary opposition—including…mainstream fiction/science fiction, and avant-garde experimentation/popular culture, among others—must be deconstructed and exposed as a product of human subjectivity positioned to narrate metaliterary texts, that is, as a metadiscursive effect of a grand narrative (Tatsumi 39).
<11> At every step of the way, the show makes explicit the economic ideologies and practices that make its existence possible. Like most works of metafiction it exhibits a fascination with totalitarian figures (Tatsumi 39). Mr. Macphisto ”s name itself suggests the merging of the capitalist superpower (McDonalds), the overpowerful rock icon (Elvis’s gold lame suit) and the Faustian devil [5]. It is a Benjaminan selection, born partially of the technology, the camera angles, close-ups, mash-ups, splices, feeds into living rooms afforded by new media, “a selection before the equipment from which the star and the dictator emerge victorious” (Benjamin 249).
<12> The Zooropa leg began with a compelling, pounding drum beat that via the massive video screams soon reveals itself to be from Triumph of the Will. The crowd goes wild, clapping in tempo with the Nazis, until The Fly is seen rising into the circle of stars that forms the symbol of the European Union. When the rally music turns into the distorted, feedback-ridden chords of guitar that begin the first song (“Zoo Station”), the stars crumble around the Rock Star, the only star left. On with the show. Far from being chastened, the crowd goes wild. Far from being ashamed, Bono is more charismatic than ever. This mixture of irony and sincerity tends to keep the show from being claimed by either the avant-garde or the popular. It rejects being claimed by the EU, and by the dictators. It stages itself in a constant movement across political values, nation-states, historical markers, familiar and unfamiliar visual tropes, and makes its star unrecognizable more than once over, every night. Take, for example, a speech of The Mirrorball Man, another Bono alter ego, a cross between Elvis and a televangelist.
I believe in love. Yes, I believe in love! Love! Money! Love! I believe in poetry! Electricity! Cheap cosmetics! I believe in the sky over my head and my silver shoes beneath me! I believe in Las Vegas! I've been there! I know that it exists. I believe in you! I believe for you! I have a vision! I have a vision! I have a vision! I have a vision! Television! Television! Television! Television! (ZOO TV Outside Broadcast, MTV special, 1992)
<13> As tongue in cheek as it comes across, as dangerous and dire as are the problems of ideological television, economics, religion, and their convergence, we partly believe and are compelled by this man. For one thing, the vision of ZooTV is indeed magnificent. For another, the mirrorballs from which this persona draws his name aren’t just a symbol of pop decadence. When they descend a song later and cover the entire arena, transforming the one light that shines on them into thousands of mobilized lights, it works as a metaphor for a fluid social distribution in stark contrast to the audience/performer, producer/consumer hierarchies, as the audience takes over for the singer and the televisions cease with the images and rest still in a silvery blue. There are many such gestures in the show, wherein it becomes clear that the audience is author as well, for better or worse.
There is an attack on pop culture, but not from above. From within. Larry McCaffery:
I’m talking about attacking pop culture on its own ground. I’m talking about being sick and tired of having 57 channels and nothing’s on! I’m talking about strategies related to cyberpunk’s strategy of taking on technological change on its own ground, seizing control of it for our own purposes rather than sitting around like aging 60s hippies and bitching about how ugly the concrete around our homes is.
I mean, you don’t bitch about Madonna or Rambo or all those awful sexist, violent/racist television shows, you colorize em, re-narratize em, give’em a new soundtrack, you supply a new non-sexist, non-racist ending that won’t offend you.
You sample the parts you like, you lay down a drumtrack (literal or narrative)... (in Tatsumi 195)
It is this repurposing of media in the context of a social event, the rock concert, that marks ZooTV as an important inaugural moment. We will return to the social function of this splicing of genres and of source materials in the section on social space. As Tatsumi argues, in the hyperconsumerist contemporary space of production,
When the logic of economics has demolished the distinction between aesthetically radical, politically subversive art (the traditional domain of the avant-garde) and MTV pop songs, as well as between what is realistic and what is antirealistic, it becomes necessary to rethink how art might resume its important “sadistic” role of “punishing” its audience. (37)
One rethinking generated by U2 is to hide one’s politics in a shiny, sing-along pop veneer, just as the band hid themselves in a giant mirroball lemon during the Popmart tour, during a song that hides a rhizomatic conception of love in the figure of a discoteque (“Discoteque”). Additionally, they sneak their activism in through performative contexts, a subject I will return to in the section on the political vs. the private.
LINES OF FLIGHT: FROM ACADEMIA
<14> The next line of flight is from academia. Perhaps it sounds academic, as it were, to claim that a rock concert video has escaped from the logic of critical space. After all, rock concerts aren’t exactly well-represented in academic criticism. But given U2’s tastes, proclivities, and the respect they’ve garnered among the world’s various art communities, it would have been logical for them to prosecute an avant-garde rejection of pop culture, or to subvert it continually, as many of the artists in Raley’s Tactical Media do. This was in fact how they began, as street punks in Dublin practicing street theater and performance art.
<15> This trans-critical community trajectory is partly a function of music; music is, after all, theorized by many as more immediately available for more contexts. In Bono’s words, “In fact, often, the music that’s the most eloquent is the least serious. That’s the thing that intellectuals don’t like. Think of the music of the seventies. It’s become a kind of folk music now” (Bono and Assayas 32). The postmodern, avant-pop project here is, a la Deleuze, a conflating of the concepts of depth and surface, so important to our notions of art and entertainment, respectively. The claim is not merely the increasingly obvious one that those classifications are breaking down, but that there might be more depth to the surface. This is the theme of songs such as “Zooropa,” which somehow creates an earnest vision of the future using only familiar advertising slogans, and “Even Better Than The Real Thing” (“Give me one last dance, we’ll slide down the surface of things”) [6].
<16> It is also the theme of Iain Thomson’s essay on U2 in the nineties, “Even Better Than The Real Thing”: “Some thinkers, following Nietzsche, deny the very existence of such depths, but in so doing they banish the contrast between surface and depth on which this portrait of postmodernism depends” (Wrathall 91). Presumably, one such thinker is Deleuze: “Alice is no longer able to make her way through to the depths. Instead, she releases her incorporeal double. It is by following the border, by skirting the surface, that one passes from bodies to the incorporeal” (Deleuze 10). Bono’s alter egos follow similar paths as Alice.
It is not that sense lacks depth or height, but rather that height and depth lack surface, that they lack sense…If there is an author for whom the death of God or the free fall of the ascetic ideal has no importance so long as it is compensated by the false depth of the human, by bad faith and ressentiment it is indeed Nietzsche. He pursues his discoveries elsewhere, in the aphorism and the poem (where neither God nor man speak), in machines for the production of sense and for the survey of the surface. (Deleuze 72)
<17> The project of U2 in the nineties is similar, not just in the new aphoristic style adopted by Bono and by the show’s artists. Indeed, U2 has marshaled literal machines hitherto unavailable to artists, and integrated them into a hypertextual, multimedia experience so variegated and interconnected that each element—the television, the video screen, the spotlight, the pop song – is abstracted from its purpose. The point is to get so abstract that we reach the level of the abstract machine that connects a language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropoltics of the social field. A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstance relative to the arts, sickness, and historical struggles (Deleuze and Guattari 7).
<18> U2 deftly uses the rare tools available to them—massive capital, large gatherings of people, and celebrity—to take their tactical media away from the channels by which it safely discharges itself as fiction, as entertainment, and even as activism or criticism. An otherwise serious song about a conversation between Jesus and Judas (“Until the End of the World”), for example, ends with the betrayer’s kiss, but is enacted by The Fly kissing the a camera that films the ZooTV concert. Thus not just the presence of the crowd, but the secondary element of the filming for home video becomes another layer of commentary. Home viewers cannot detach and dissociate; they cannot intellectually ruminate upon the Jesus and Judas, because of the affect (which I will return to below) involved; they are being kissed, but they cannot simply enjoy the kiss on the level of affect because the song is about a notorious kiss. Furthermore, The Fly then moves the camera down to his crotch and copulates with it. It is this kind of hybrid image—half rock-n-roll archetype of excess, half esoteric commentary (to copulate with an audience works as a revolutionary image of production )—that manifests as a Deleuzian movement horizontally rather than vertically, since it plays out on the surface. Meanwhile the deluge of meaningful and meaningless numbers on the video screens with which the song climaxes, Bono asking the audience “Is this rock n’ roll?!” in tandem with the work of the camera, ceaselessly establish connections between the semiotic chains. Bono betrays his audience, who are expecting the sincere singer of the eighties, but the betrayal is of course, per the Bible, willed by God. Or by the divine chance generated by ZooTV [7].
<19> Whereas a Lacanian would argue that the rock star serves as an ideally stable, heroic identity in our eternal search for solid identity and what we once had with our mothers, Bono deconstructs the pop star via the obviously shifting and temporary versions of himself on stage. During the Popmart performance of “Mofo,” a techno-infused song about looking for a lost mother in rock n’ roll, bono sings “looking for to save my soul / mother sucking rock n’ roll” [8]. He sucks his thumb and pouts before his audience, sings about having no one to tell him no, then screams “tell me no!” holding out the microphone. Of course one hundred thousand people yell “NO!” to him, both fulfilling his wish and frustrating it at the same time (since they are still obeying him). The rock star is presented and indeed manifest, Bono would admit, as more adolescent than manly [9]. Where commentators, baffled fans, and those who refuse the possibilities of depth-as-surface see Bono in an inauthentic narcissistic haze, the crowd at ZooTV is responding with enthusiasm to a new opportunity to engage rock music as such, to engage celebrity as such, to become co-authors of a multiply-determined set of meanings in a particular space and time.
<20> The use of the audience and the rhizomatic connectivity of ZooTV frees stage design from the “master’s hand” that despite Dadaism and modern art, is often still beholden to the suspicion of deception and inauthenticity. However, U2 were using deception and inauthenticity as tools for the exposure of the systems that produced the very deceptions their fans were constantly consenting to. In attempting to make a pact with the audience, one that offered play and subversion in place of their former seriousness and slightly shrill authenticity, U2 took the risk of being misread, misheard, misrepresented. Many fans and reviewers were incensed by what they saw as crass consumerism. Dave Marsh excoriated U2 in The Nation for holding a press conference to announce the Popmart tour in a Kmart: “U2 now seems out of touch, alienated from its roots: consumers turn to rock bands precisely for what they cannot find at Kmart.” (Bordowitz 116). But U2, announcing their tour from within a makeshift “Pop Band” (custom-made sign overhead) department of the Kmart, situated between Menswear and Toys, was demonstrating that all of our choices are made at the Popmart. It is best to accept that and then confound expectations by selling immaterial goods, such as a radical envisioning of casinos as cathedrals (“The Playboy Mansion”) from within a Kmart. In a word, those who want to protect themselves or others from dangerous art would never think to look in a Kmart, or in Popmart. “Paradox appears as a dismissal of depth, a display of events at the surface, and a deployment of language along this limit. Humor is the art of the surface, which is opposed to the old irony, the art of depths and heights” (Deleuze 9). As I discussed above vis-à-vis the Mirrorball Man’s speech, U2’s irony at this time transcended the tongue in cheek and the mere recognition and quotation of most bricolage and pastiche, à la Tarantino, as roundly criticized by Frederic Jameson [10]. As funny and frightening as the image of the gates of the Playboy Mansion replacing the gates of heaven is, or the image of a slot machine going off as salvation, they are also compelling, intoxicating, occasionally spiritually uplifting, especially mobilized as they are in uplifting major-chord music.
<21> These images are, in other words, always working with affect. Music is the home of affect, and the close-up and commodification into image of the singer is affect cubed. In his article “Too Blue,” Brian Massumi argues that affect is the “invisible glue that holds the world together. In event.” Appropriate, then, that the literal concert event should exult in its Deleuzian powers. Massumi’s example is Frank Sinatra’s eyes, which are remembered and posited as “too-blue,” in excess of their real blueness. U2 and ZooTv put this “too” in front of nearly everything. In fact, the show is a feedback loop, playing back Elvis, Jim Morrison, Lou Reed: too-Elvis; too-Morrison; too-Reed. As we saw above the feedback loop is enhanced by the home video version of the concerts.
<22> This is particularly true of the Popmart tour, since the home video version affords us a cutting between views of the football-field length screen from afar, and then close-ups of the band against the LED bulbs that make up the screen. From afar, we see pop-art images by Warhol, Lichenstein, Koons, and others. Up close we see only bulbs flashing different colors. From afar we see a tiny shadow (the “real” Bono) standing in front of a 60-foot image of Bono. Up close we see Bono against the flashing lights, but those lights are making up another, bigger Bono. As such, we see two simultaneous aesthetics, each one made possible by the other’s not functioning the same way as when it is the foreground or primary image. The two camera angles split the event into totally different affect-images, using the same raw material. Additionally, the ”too-big’ Bono on the massive screen is captured by a camera that points at ”real’ Bono against the backdrop of said screen, thus the screen screens itself—a good metaphor for Bono’s tricks of identity, or in Benjamin’s words: “enlargement…does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject” (238).
<23> The affective quality is what liberates U2’s stage shows from the fate of avant-garde art, and the small-audience tactical media Raley discusses.
Popular art is a collective technology of vitality. Its continued reliance on personalization and its emphasis on shareability means that it retains a connection to common sense, however stretched. However ”counter-cultural- or ”sub-cultural’ it gets, popular music is still playing personally with collective ”imitation’ effects. What is often dismissed as ”avant-garde’ art involves the creation of styles that refrain from presenting their qualitative expression as personal (arguing that it is first and foremost critical or cosmic); try to expunge the sense of sameness from the compositions (claiming inimitable singularity); and cut off or undermine the smoothness of connections between levels (movements of language; bodily movements; movements between actual contexts). The compositional strategies of avant-garde or ”serious’ art disjunctively conjoin the movement levels that popular art endeavors to connect seamlessly. It sometimes has a tendency to present itself as a ”pure’ activity opposite in nature from mere popular artistry. In fact, like all activity, it is always impure. Its unacknowledged impurity consists in being an operation on popular artistry….In high art, excess of creative personality (”genius’) is converted directly into capitalist surplus-value. (in Massumi 212-3)
Music facilitates the mixture of sincerity and irony I spoke of above, for no matter how ironic the costume, text or persona, the affect accessed by pop melodies is irresistibly ”sincere’ feeling. This is vital in U2’s attempt to steer their progressive art away from compartmentalized fates in either the avant-garde or the pop.
THE SUBVERSION OF CAPITALIST SPACE
<24> How then, can U2 convert genius instead into use value? In many ways, of course—indeed only by means of manifold ways. The employment of affect in serious critical contexts is certainly one way. The internal, self-conscious, self-reflective co-opting of the always already commercial rock singer persona calls attention to the pleasures and possibilities of a personality surplus value, without a recognizable style of capitulation to it.
<25> What I find truly rare in U2’s various lines of flight is the possibility of subverting what Henri Lefebvre calls the abstract space of late capitalism, as opposed to the contradictory nature of social space. Instead of merely analyzing the consequences and results of the capitalist modes of production, Lefebvre gets to the root of the transformation of everyday life by this production, including the production of space and time itself. It is worth quoting at length his description of the space we tend to produce:
We need space to be abstract to preserve the formal unity that gives our space-time meaning: capital. The heterogeneity, the conflicts and contradictions, are not disclosed in this formal unity. Things, acts and situations are being replaced by representations, and this homogenous abstract space is divided safely into sectors or systems: transportation system, school system, the work world; the world of texts, the money market…
Ideologues, whether technocrats or specialists, convinced of their own freedom from ideology, isolate the sectors, with the end result of a tautology masquerading as science and an ideology masquerading as a specialized discipline. The success of all such ”model building, simulation, and systemic analysis reposes upon an unstated postulate—that of a space underlying both the isolation of variables and the construction of systems. This space validates the models in question precisely because the models make the space functional. (314)
As an assemblage or abstract machine, both these stage shows and the life-as-art in the periphery of the tour (i.e. Bono’s life as performance) subvert such sectors or domains. BelowI will list a few of the ways this subversion is carried out, demonstrating how the tour fights this sectorization and compartmentalization of produced space and time.
<26> 1) Genre—including the genres of rock concert, concert film, pop music, performance art and television. It is not so much a mere matter of crossing genres as of crossing-up the spaces of production and reception (it helps to literally cross the signals, a la’ ZooTV). For example, a rock tour is supposed to be a moneymaking venture. ZooTV and Popmart were not. Both were so expensive, and ticket prices so below average, that they risked bankruptcy and the band barely broke even. However, another example is the subversion of the space of reception of ”political art’, since ZooTV is too capital-intensive, massively attended, and hallmarked with ”popular’ music to be consigned to that safe space.
<27> 2) The subversion of the abstract space that goes under the names “original” or “authentic.”
Per Deleuze and Guattari, “texts in an assemblage intermediate one another without necessarily bestowing on any one text the privileged status of the ”original.’ Everything is simultaneously a translation of everything else, each united to the others in a rhizomatic network without a clear beginning or end.” (17)
<28> Hence the critique of authenticity that became a theme in many of Bono’s interviews of the time. Authenticity is a concept, for Bono, that keeps artists squabbling amongst each other, and keeps critics pontificating on which band and which album is closest to an artistic ideal. Slowly, insidiously, the social use of the music is squeezed out as the conversation becomes more and more aesthetic. They have forgotten a truth Benjamin pointed out when “the age of mechanical reproduction” had started to degrade authenticity: “But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics” (Benjamin 226). In U2 of the nineties we are watching a Benjaminian “critical epoch” which marks the subsumption of rock music under television (Benjamin 239). The camera becomes an important part of the show and message(s), doubly so in the home video version, so that unoriginal artwork or poetry becomes authentic framed the right way, and we can say with Benjamin that “a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explained by man (Benjamin 238) [11].
<29> 3) Excess and affect. With “Zooropa” U2 disassembles the molar unity of Europe, along the way disassembling the molar unity of identity, genre, economic space. Connectivity is stressed over entity and identity, Europe is posited as a Deleuzian event, as in various activist tactical media:
participating in a Deleuzian project of using the virtual to enact the actual…hacktivist tactics of the electronic civil disobedience movement, the electronic Disturbance Theater, and the Zapatistas…correspond to, and are occasionally informed by, Deleuze’s notion of the event. To precipitate an event is to act without knowing the situation in which one will be propelled. (Raley 26)
This connectivity manifests not only vis-a-vis the media, but vis-à-vis affect.
The connection between embodied qualities Sinatra performed was intimately associated with a surprising way of connecting contexts that in principle (according to the conventionally accepted order of circulation of that era) should be kept carefully segregated: blacks and whites, presidency and sex, romance and corruption, politics and organized crime. (Massumi 211)
<30> But it is not just the ”order of circulation of that era’ that effects segregation, it is the order of space itself, in the extended era of late capitalism. While politicians and artists preoccupied themselves with the borders of the new Europe, U2 dissolved them, moved them around (recall the opening image of the concert described above). While parliaments debated the place of the former Yugoslavia in Europe, U2 broadcast its citizens speaking about the war nightly into various stadiums across Europe, mediated by The Fly. Unlike bands and artists striving to remain underground, U2 understood a fundamental Deleuzian requirement: “For the affect is not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel” (Deleuze and Guattari 240).
No wonder one of the many aphorisms splayed across the screens during “The Fly” included “Excess is Truth.” Think again of too-blue:
As a discursively defined content, it comes to be. As excess, it continues. It runs through this containment, jumping to the next contextual rigging. Its precession proceeds apace. The excess is the quality of continuing activity by which the differential object ”blue’ escapes its contextual containment—its objectivity. (Massumi 185)
This goes for the pink of the Pink Panther in Deleuze and Guattari, and the lemon of U2’s “Lemon”—a song about hue transcending function (not the yellow of sunlight or other lights, but tangy lemon that she wears):
A man makes a picture /a moving picture
Through the light projected/he can see
himself up close A man captures color/ a man likes to stare
He turns his money into light / to look for her
She wore lemon / see through the sunlight. (Zooropa)
<31> Excess includes amplification as well. As Deleuze and Guatarri argue, intensities and degrees are individuals, not mere extensions, and not mere additions and subtractions (253). The effect of Sinatra’s image described by Massumi is all the more powerful played across football-field length screens, as is the power of phrases like “We are One, but not the same,” amplified across thousands of voices, at hundreds of watts, across millions of televisions, from England to Burma. In Tatsumi’s words:
you rev everything up, turn up the dial and knobs of your system so that all the hidden “noise” of racism and sexist and political control can (finally) be heard clearly and you play it loud so that everyone can hear it.
In other words, you storm the reality studio, and retake the universe. In this sense, Avant-Pop turns out to be a radical ideological critique of what the avant garde and pop culture are. (Tatsumi 196)
<32> Another vital form of excess is speed. U2 meet and transcend many of Baudrillard’s concerns, for example, about identity and social life hyper-mediated by products and objects. Baudrillard complains about social relations being mediated by capital accumulated in image; U2 responds by making the images move fast enough to lubricate these relationships, and by dislodging the object from its place in the ambient harmony of consumer signs, releasing signs and words back into ambivalence [12]. Baudrillard is worried that we consume relations between objects, not just objects, so U2 multiplies and amplifies these relations until there is a salubrious excess.
<33> 4) Most importantly, the false and dangerous sectors of “politics,” “economics,” “private,” “public.” Cf. Lefebvre: “”Change life!’ ”Change society!’ These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space” (59).
<34> One way to help bring about such a space is to subvert one of the primary rules of economics, best ferreted out by Fredric Jameson—the championing of the purity of aesthetics and psychological realism over politics and social relations:
One of the determinants of capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the western realist and modernist novel, is a radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the political, between what we have come to think of as the domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the economic, and of secular political power: in other words, Freud and Marx. (69)
<35> One of the cherished rules of pop music, like fiction, film and poetry in America, held dear equally by hipster fans, music industry businessmen, and critics, is that it should not be overtly political. And indeed, Bono routinely receives vituperate criticism from all sides about his political work. In the era of ZooTV and Popmart, however, the political and the psychological, the entertainment and the reality mixed seamlessly in the flow of images and identities. As such, it bypassed the structural resistances to activism, slipping in as entertainment, and to entertainment, slipping in as activism. This was a moment in which U2 wondered if it were possible to collapse the space allocated to politics and the space allocated to popular art, not to elevate art or to popularize politics, but to mix them like a DJ and play them for the crowd.
<36> The examples are myriad. The band showed up at the proposed Sellafield nuclear plant—destined to supply weapons-grade plutonium—to protest in full costume, joking and throwing out serious criticisms of the plant along with their throwaway epigrams during “The Fly.” (After an organized campaign by Bono’s wife, the plant was finally shut down fairly recently.) The Mirrorball Man made nightly calls to the White House, asking the operator to tell George Bush things like “Tell the president to watch more TV.” Bono later said:
…when you’re dressed as the Devil your conversation is immediately loaded, so if you tell somebody you really like what they’re doing, you know it’s not a compliment. We used to ring up fascist politicians like Jean-Marie le Pen’s office and flatter them live in front of audiences of sixty or seventy thousand. I rang Alessandra Mussolini…and we’d have seventy thousand people singing, ”I just called to say I love you’ on her answer machine. I called the Archbishop of Canterbury and told him I loved what he was doing…During our Italian dates I had myself filmed walking across the square at the Vatican, limping with a walking stick, and I was shooing the birds, dressed as the Devil walking across the Vatican Square, muttering under my breath, “One day all of this will be mine. Oh no, I forgot, it is mine.” (U2 /McCormick 248)
Again, serious political messages and glib aesthetic gems flew by together in the deluge of texts and images, and artists like Emergency Broadcast Network were enlisted to do things like remix a George Bush speech on Iraq to serve as the opening of the show, the president rapping over a hip-hop beat: “Some may ask, why rock out now? The answer is clear: these are the times that rock man’s soul. I instructed our military commanders to totally rock Baghdad. And I repeat this here tonight…We will, we will rock you.”
<37> Perhaps most effective was the nightly use of live video feeds from war-torn Sarajevo. The band never knew what it was going to get—eloquent poets calmly narrativizing their plight, or angry women accusing the entire stadium of hiding from these realities in entertainment. Occasionally reality would entirely disrupt the flow of art. Most in the audience were uncomfortable. Again, perhaps the most discomfiting element was the breakdown of the abstract spaces allotted to ”concepts’ like Sarajevo, the rock concert, etc.
At a time when it seemed like the nightly news was just becoming a form of entertainment, this was the opposite. This was a form of entertainment presenting some real hard news where there was no editor involved, no way to soften the harsh reality of what you were seeing. We don’t normally see that kind of cold hard news. We get a very sanitized, editorialized take on everything…Live by satellite every night you had the extraordinary spectacle at a rock gig of reality trampling all over art. And then the band would try to recover. (U2/McCormick 252-3)
Even in the last decade, when U2 has turned down the technology and irony, one still gets the sense that their unprecedented political successes and presences—from Bono’s New York Times column to his debt-relief campaign—were assisted by the dislocations and deterritorializations effected by a man perpetually wearing stylish shades while canvassing George W. Bush and Angela Merkel.
<38> In any case, the social spaces created by U2 afford an envisioning of Hardt and Negri’s common, starting with a recovery and amplification of common space. ZooTV, in fact, is structured as such:
“Bakhtin’s polyphonic narration, in other words, poses in linguistic terms a notion of the production of the common in an open, distributed network structure” (Hardt and Negri 211).
And Deleuze and Guattari:
“the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states” (21).
By means of cameras and audiences, there is a salutary conflation of the individual and the common, against the grain of capitalist identity formation. Songs that, heard in a room, can be construed as between two lovers, become construed between groups when heard in a stadium, for and with the common. Bono is scrupulous about singing throwaway lines like “here she comes” directly into the camera, or climbing into the audience to sing “(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love With You”…and the whole world, too. This is what Ian Thompson is getting at:
Notice, however, that when these same lyrics are heard as addressed to an audience, the meaning of these words is subtly but radically realigned: Now the implication is that U2’s relation to this audience is “Even better than the real thing” not in the simulacra-triumphant sense that mainstream Western culture does in fact seem to prefer sex to love; instead, the song seeks to evoke and celebrate the experience of a profound feeling of communal love that is “even better” than genuine personal love, an experience in which we can all be taken “higher” and “higher” without ever reaching that fatal point (what the French call la petit mort) where, like Icarus, our wings “melt” and we fall back down to earth. (Thomson in Wrathall 93)
<39> This new common is facilitated/mutually envisioned by collaboration on an epic scale, from the video confessionals that opened the encore of ZooTV (fans, recorded pre-concert, revealing intimate details of their daily lives, to a massive audience) to the arsenal of artists and collaborators (including appearances by people like Salman Rushdie, during his time in hiding). When the camera pans the audience in Popmart, for example, we all become lights, our images broken up across the thousands of LED bulbs, presenting an image of us from afar, but pure color and light up close. We are in contradictory space. We are in Hardt and Negri’s “flesh of the multitude,” where the common is envisioned and set out for in our mixing singularity with commonality. Let’s go overground, indeed.
Notes
[1] See U2 by U2, pg. 238
[2] ZooTV is chiefly the vision of the band—particularly Bono—lighting designer Willie Williams, and various artists working with“new media” (at just the time when this phrase was picking up steam): Mark Pellington, Kevin Godley, Catherine Owens, Jon Klein, and Mark Neale. Of course, given the nature of the production the number of participating creators is in the millions, from the stage crew to the audience to those within clips or live feeds broadcast in the stadium that night. As such the production maps onto Hardt and Negri’s notion of the cooperative production of social relations, heightened by the increasing dominance of immaterial labor, in which it is absurd to track exactly who ”belongs’ to the work produced. I suspect, in fact, that the rock concert receives as little critical attention as it does because the author is, despite Roland Barthes’ proclamation, a still quite indispensable fiction to the contemporary practice of literary studies.
[3] But of course there are always endnotes for the curious! See my critique of the intro to the show above, as well as the use of alter egos. A particularly effective example of tactical media is stage production of “The Fly,” in which pithy one-liners are appear on the screen just quick enough to make reading them all impossible. I will discuss below the excesses of speed and text in the Deleuzian sense, but here I want to focus on the tactical turn of one of the phrases: WATCH MORE TV. Appearing as it does at a live concert, there is an absurdist element, as well as what can be (mis)perceived as pure irony. However, the concert video not only ”captures’ the performance and the video screens, it displays the words across our television screen as well. Now that we are watching it on TV, WATCH MORE TV becomes less purely ironic and critical and takes on an element of truth—we should watch more TV if this is what is on television. Television is after all the manifold vision of our contemporary telos, for better or for worse (or for both).
There are also the East German trabant automobiles graffittied and hung from the apparatus to serve as spotlights for the band. The cars are a symbol of the poor quality of East German assembly line, and function as both nostalgia and chastening of the communist epoch. At the same time, they are reconfigured as artful tools to illuminate human beings, so again beyond the irony there is a sincere yearning for the great ideas sedimented in the cars.
Finally, during “Even Better Than The Real Thing” Bono grabs a home video camera and begins filming the audience and then himself, reversing the voyeurism and image-capture we are used to. He allows himself to get tangled in the cord, in the snaking problematic of technology. His filming is displayed on the concert screens, with a network-like logo ”Zoo TV” in the bottom corner, such that we feel we are watching the convergence of mass media and art. What does this ”media outlet’ show us? Ourselves, and then our icon turning the weapon back on himself.
[4] Singing at n-1 dimensions: Bono, who has already subtracted “Paul Hewson” from his public identity, now subtracts the overfamiliar, unique Bono, and sings as The Fly or the Mirrorball Man or Mr. Macphisto. As such, as discussed below, each claim, statement, or song resonates rhizomatically, across the personas and across those people and personas his personas allude to, within the network of Zoo TV. He dispenses with the fiction of ”originality’ and thus comes closest to it.
[5] Mr. Macphisto’s speech near the end of the show and tour is indicative of his manifold address to manifold sites of culture, high and low and in between:
“Look what you've done to me..... you've made me very famous, and I thank you. I know you like your pop stars to be exciting, so I bought these (gestures to his shoes). Now, my time among you is almost at an end; the glory of Zoo TV must ascend and take its place with all the other satellites. Don't fear, for I will be watching you. I leave behind video cameras for each of you. So many listening tonight, I have a list... People of America, I gave you BillClinton—I put him on CNN, NBC, C-SPAN. Too tall to be a despot, but watch him closely. People ofAsia, your time is coming—without your tiny transistors, none of this [gestures to Zoo TV stage set] would be possible. People of Europe—when I came among you, you were squabbling like children. Now you're all hooked up to one cable, as close together as stations on a dial. People of the former Soviet Union—I gave you capitalism, so now you can all dream of being as wealthy and glamorous as me.
People of Sarajevo, count your blessings... There are people all over the world who have food, heat and security, but they're not on TV like you are. Frank Sinatra, I give you the MTV demographic; SalmanRushdie, I give you decibels. Goodbye "Squidgy," I hope they give you Wales; goodbye Michael [Jackson]... Goodbye all you neo-nazis, I hope they give you Auschwitz.”
[6] “Zooropa” is worth quoting at length:
Zooropa...Vorsprung durch Technik
Zooropa...be all that you can be
Be a winner
Eat to get slimmerZooropa...a bluer kind of white
Zooropa...it could be yours tonight
We're mild and green
And squeaky cleanZooropa...better by design
Zooropa...fly the friendly skies
Through appliance of science
We've got that ring of confidenceDon't worry baby, it'll be alright
You got the right shoes
To get you through the night
It's cold outside, but brightly litDon't worry baby, it's gonna be alright
Uncertainty can be a guiding light
I hear voices, ridiculous voices
Out in the slipstream
Let's go, let's go overground
Take your head out of the mud baby
Note the intention to go overground, contrary to the dominant aesthetic in rock at the time, which lionized ”underground’ music and the ”authenticity’ of Grunge. Note also the use of “slipstream,” which brings to mind Bruce Sterling.
[7] “The whole ZooTV tour that followed owes much to one of Brendan Kennelly’s great lines: ”the best way to serve the age is to betray it.’” (Bono in U2 227)
[8] Popmart was the follow-up tour to ZOOTV, with the massive television station metaphor substituted by the rock concert-as-shopping-mall-supreme. The show as groundbreaking and bombastic in its conflation of technology and spirituality, pop and profound.
[9] This gesture pointing towards the adolescent character of heroism tends to frustrate audiences and critics. Another example is the reception of the character of Anakin Skywalker in George Lucas’ prequel Star Wars trilogy. Audiences and critics alike railed against Lucas’ portrayal of the ascent to fascist imperial excess as leading not through, well, adolescent brattiness. What was viewed as bad writing is actually only an exposing of the bad metaphysics behind our narratological conventions. We want great good and great evil to also proffer a great ”character’, whereas Lucas rightly reveals that heroes and villains more often than not possess stunted, banal, adolescent characters. Both the hero (Luke Skywalker) and villain (Anakin Skywalker) are whiny brats, while the sophisticated “well-rounded” character is reserved for a ethically empty, politically irrelevant cowboy (Han Solo). As with Bono’s derivative characters, the derivative and ”poorly written’ hits closer to the truth than ”authenticity’ (see below for more on authenticity).
[10] Cf. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
[11] The distrust of polemics about authenticity also recalls Hardt and Negri’s distrust in Multitude of those who argue against any tampering with ”nature’, and so miss out on a opportunity for a productive organization of raw data of life on earth.
[12] During “Even Better Than The Real Thing,” Bono flips between a cricket match (drawing cheers from the crowd), the nightly news, and a soap opera, before the song descends into a blur of television images. During a cover of “Unchained Melody,” images of war and destruction play on the screens.
Works Cited
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Bono and, Michka Assayas. Bono in Conversation with Michka Assays. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Bordowitz, Hank, ed. The U2 Reader. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2003.
Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. trans. Mark Lester. New York, Columbia, 1990.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987.
Fast, Susan. “Music, Contents, and Meaning in U2” from Expression in Pop-Rock Music. Walter Everett, Ed. New York: Garland, 2000.
Jameson, Frederic. “Third World Literature in the Era of Multi-National Capitalism.” Social Text, No. 15. Autumn, 1986. 65-88.
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. trans. J.H. Bernard. New York: Prometheus, 2000.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Blackwell, 1991.
Raley, Rita. Tactical Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009.
Seales, Chad. E. “Burned Over Bono: U2’s Rock ”n’ Roll Messiah and His Religious Politic.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, Vol 14, Fall 2006.
Tatsumi, Takayuki. Full Metal Apache. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006.
U2 w/Neil McCormick. U2 by U2. New York: Harper Collins, 2006.
Williams, Willie, and U2. Popmart: Live from Mexico City. Video Recording.
---. ZOOTV: Live in Sydney. Video Recording.
Wrathall, Mark, Ed. U2 and Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court, 2006.
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