Sartre & Reggae

[Dennis R Redmond]

Sartre was a great theorist and dialectician. "The Family Idiot" remains
the supreme literary psychobiogaphy of Flaubert, and was the secret
springboard for Fredric Jameson's wondrous "The Political Unconscious" (or
so I would argue). Not that there aren't problems with J.P. --
occasionally he markets concepts he should develop first, and he was never
one to shy away from the broad brush. The point is that you have to read
Sartre in conjunction with Adorno: as two thinkers, both trying to grasp
the dynamics of an unfolding world-system in the Sixties, with very
different tools, techniques, etc. Adorno worried about constellations;
Sartre pondered seriality. The amazing thing is, they both came
remarkably close in their diagnoses: Sartre's "Critique of Dialectic
Reason" forecast thirty years of micropolitics; Adorno's "Negative
Dialectics" takes a more immanent approach to the rise of the Eurostate.
Both insisted that Stalinism sucked, that Maoism was a crock, and that
capitalism was gearing up for new predations worldwide. 
Both located the central dynamic of late capitalism as one of integration:
an ever-tighter network of commodities, capital, ideas, ideologies spreads
across the globe -- a situation which needs to be theorized anew today,
but not without first acknowledging the immense contributions Adorno, 
Sartre and indeed the entire canon of Western Marxism, back to Lukacs and
Gramsci, historically made here.

In re reggae: I used the term somewhat broadly. Reggae was indeed one of
the great resistance movements and counter-cultures of the globalizing
Seventies: it emerged in subcolonial Jamaica, in the Kingston slums,
during the early Seventies, when the world proletariat show signs of
getting uppity, and when the raw materials economy began falling apart in
the 3rd world. In Jamaica's case, the main export earner was bauxite
(aluminum ore); Manley's Leftwing government did indeed tax the
alu-companies a little more, but never developed a coherent development
strategy a la Singapore or Taiwan. Result: Jamaica stayed a neocolony,
which meant that the only outlet for Jamaicans was (1) local resistance or
(2) global emigration to the US and Britain (Jamaica was a Brit colony
till the early Sixties). Reggae music was a blend of US blues, gospel
traditions, plus Rastafarian religious traditions taken from East Africa,
but quickly blossomed into a genuine counter-culture, with its own slang,
dress, conduct etc. The greatest aesthetic works of reggae were recorded
by Bob Marley and the Wailers -- check out "Legend" and "Exodus", the two
best collections. Marley did something new, by selectively editing 
extended electronic effects (the reverb and feedback effects pioneered
by Hendrix in 1967-68) onto tracks with an austere bass-line, all driven
by Marley's own incomparable Jamaican voice and lyrics which are defined
by a kind of nascent liberation theology. Reggae also pioneered the art of
dubbing, i.e. sampling sounds, effects, voices, beats etc. from other
works, and creating composite tracks of all these things: Jamaica, being
a 2nd World country with cultural ties to the metropoles, imported a lot
of musical technology, which made all this experimentation and innovation
possible (but of course, it took the genius of a Marley to raise a folk
art form into a global masterpiece). 

As for the cash: what Bruce Lee did for the Hong Kong film 
industry, Bob Marley did for the Jamaican music industry: 
both became world superstars. You can critique the cash flow
here (though Bob wasn't exactly stashing his lucre in Swiss bank accounts
and mutual funds, unlike the comprador bourgeoisie in Brazil and Mexico),
but the music is always a separate issue. Use-values are never identical
to exchange-values, comrades -- nor does the commercial success or failure
of a work of art have anything to do with its inherent quality. The market
of aesthetic valorization diverges from the market of aesthetic
production, both in time and place. Conversely, Marley couldn't have done
what he did without Jimi Hendrix; Hendrix simply pushed tendencies already
apparent in John Coltrane's late work beyond their limit, etc. 

-- Dennis