24 November 2010: "Pitchfork continues negrofication, reviews albums by Rihanna + some other black grl"

This post is about the textualist critique of classificatory rationalism. Carles continues his rhetorical assault against hegemonic music-ranking website Pitchfork (Putschfork?) and its tentative elaboration of racialist hierarchies in the field of cultural capital and its reticulation of an apparatus of power/knowledge operant on the level of subjective consciousness and implemented on the body via the sensuous responsiveness to popular music. Carles notes that Pitchfork's recent foray into race politics "has confused many white indie music fans who used to think Pitchfork was their indie Bible, but now they are having an identity crisis."

As Carles suggests here, the "identity crisis" experienced by a substratum of the young white bourgeois class reflects the incursion of biopower across a new postracial axis that at once foregrounds race and seems to supplant it, render its encoded prejudices moribund. The basis of class dominance must rearticulate itself along lines that co-opt the divisive power of race rather than stand "independently" apart from it. "Indie" has become untenable with regard to race, as Carles notes. He asks, "Should 'hip hop/r&b/rap' albums be held to the same standards that white man's indie buzzband albums are held up 2?" In other words should the laws of miscegenation be reimported from the era of slavery to restructure inherited racial privilege in the field of culture, or can postraciality be used to cloak the cultural privileges being promulgated through other means, through other dichotomies, more récherché integuements. One example would be the gendered revaluation of cultural capital, often attacked by Carles in his febrile fulminations against the "slutwavers" -- female performers who have monetized their sexual symbology. Pitchfork and slutwave both are an ongoing exemplifications of the dialectical process Gayatri Spivak has called in a related context the "paradoxical empirical deconstruction of lexicographic ground."

This ideological upheaval naturally creates a consciousness of confusion on the level of the aesthetic, upon which redeployments of ideology often manifest themselves. "No idea what good music is any more," Carles reports, imagining the white man's dilemma. "Feeling so confused/betrayed/alone/scared." Betrayal, of course, is the key note in this symphony of distressed entitlement. Carles invokes Jackie Robinson, a black athlete who became the first to play in the erstwhile all-white professional American baseball league, as a reassuring emblem for the disoriented hegemon, a relatable figure whose codification in the media as nonthreatening could let "white indie altbros and cool dads feel like they were part of the decision making process." Though postraciality is being implemented in their name and for the extension of their privilege, their legacy of bigotry cannot be allowed to derail the transitionary process. Thus the critical importance of figures like Robinson, Obama, Kanye West and so on, whose personal prestige is an ironic proxy for the perpetuation of exclusionary power.