The Dark Stuff: Serial Psychopathology

I haven't laid eyes on Nick Kent's book since around 1995, but after spending some time compulsively turning the pages in the Ariel Bookstore that hot summer day, I'm unable to ignore [what seems like] the anecdotal evidence for later theoretical concerns. One of the things I find particularly remarkable is how forthright Iggy Pop was in agreeing to pen a foreword for this book. I applaud his honesty, for Kent marshals considerable evidence for the indictment of Iggy as one of the most dissolute, intemperate figures in the annals of rock history. Indeed, Kent confirms and builds on some of Iggy's assertions from I Need More concerning a sexual fixation on underage girls, replete with apocalyptic imagery of him passed out among industrial ruins, with a semi-naked pre-pubescent girl lying next to him. Other examples abound, but the general picture is clear.

It might become clearer though if read alongside Danny Sugerman's memoirs, Wonderland Avenue: Tales of Glamour and Excess. One of the most lucid and insightful passages in this book is when Sugerman offers a general evaluation of the transgressive behaviour of figures he was personally associated with, such as Iggy and Jim Morrison. He concludes that there was something calculated about their actions, inasfar as the obvious non-reciprocity was designed to destroy the sense of personal justice of those subject to it, thus controlling them. Upon returning home to discover an unconscious Iggy on the floor, with a trail of vomit, faeces and blood strewn down the hallway, Sugerman chose to adopt the managerial technique of instilling a sense of symmetry. Seizing Iggy by the ankles, he then proceeded to clean up the mess, using Iggy's long hair as a mop.

Reading The Dark Stuff and Wonderland Avenue in combination conveys a vivid sense of how such excesses define themselves against the sequenced interpolation of everyday encounters, which Giddens has fittingly described in terms of "seriality". The resort to primordialism draws its appeal from the possibility of transcending the negotiation of tact required by social interaction. Garfinkel was able to make comparable points with his experiments designed to breach trust. What this proves is the unfeasibility of the avant-garde's experimental approach to the world eventually destroying the Law; transgression is only meaningful insofar as a limit exists. On this basis I would modify some gender criticism of transgression, as it is not so much that protest masculinity is driven to return to a state of undifferentiation, to nothingness, at the most extreme end of the continuum. I think Nietzsche was closer to the heart of the matter when he noted that the problem was not the heights attained, but the fall. The discovery is not that there is nothing on the other side to "break on through to", but rather that its effects are inscribed within larger mechanisms of power. The self evolves in its complexity, and may revel in this reward, but this is a Faustian bargain, subject to continual renegotiation. Sooner or later then, seriality reappears to remind us that the retraction of symbolic boundaries constitutes a form of order.

If this holds, then it can hardly be coincidental that towards the end of his life, Morrison had adopted a more sombre, sociologically realist mode of songwriting. Indeed, "L.A. Woman" is one of the best things he ever wrote, with its ethnographic snapshots of everyday scenes (as opposed to an earlier "weird scenes inside the goldmine), "cops in cars/topless bars/never seen a woman so alone". True, glimpses of the old persona remain, with "The Changeling" and "L'America", but overall the album is his most diverse lyrically.

We know that Morrison claimed he would have studied more sociology if he had lived a different life, but whether this would have meant reading Deleuze's thesis of the "control society", Foucault and Lacan, that have influenced this posting, along with the aforementioned select sociological stablemates, no one can say for sure. In any case, Kent and Sugerman provide much grist for the theoretical mill, spurring the realisation that creativity can be a form of normativity. As I've commented on this blog before, it is only a failure to understand this that can fuel convictions of an inevitable Ballardian society leading us all on a merry dance towards the apocalypse. At first glance you could be forgiven for thinking that such theorists make for strange bedfellows with neoconservative cultural critics, but this impression may soon fade. My advice would be to articulate ideas of aesthetic revolt to permanent revolution, and consider how complementary they are. Then watch the documentary Arguing the World and draw conclusions as to how and why so many of the interviewees "broke on through" to the other side of the political spectrum.