Dolly Parton wrote the song ”I Will Always Love You” as a farewell to her business partner and mentor Porter Wagoner. It was a great song when it came out in 1974, sang with a genuine Parton vibe, after all, she wrote it and performed it. It was her emotions, her goodbye.
In 1992 Whitney Houston recorded the song in connection to the film The Bodyguard, and the soul-ballad version became a super hit. It’s strange though, at least to me Whitney’s version is something else, deeply touching and irreversible, which is paradoxical because, it’s not her words, her harmonies, her feelings, her departing from a loved one. Still, I cry, every time.
Jacques Rancière writes about dissensus in art and politics, proposing that dissensus, in fact, isn’t a conflict, a dispute between two identifiable entities where one is more likely to win. It’s not a form of antagonism in line with Chantal Mouffe, but instead a productive tension between, as he words it, sense and sense. Between “sensory presentation and a way of making sense of it” or, in day-to-day language, between how something is experienced and how it is given meaning. Consensus, which isn’t something negative but instead absolutely necessary in order to conduct life, occurs when sense and sense, experience and meaning, fit together or coincide when there’s no leakage in either direction.
Mind you, the French philosopher doesn’t exemplify with Whitney Houston, but perhaps what makes the difference between her and Dolly Parton’s versions is precisely that in regard to the original version, there’s consensus between this and that, whereas in the remake rather than creating a sense of estrangement or simply coming across as superficial, the leakage between experience and meaning is what creates the possibility to get emotionally carried away. Or, actually not emotionally, what surfaces is sensation or affect, and the difference is that emotion is something that can be identified and located whereas affect is sensed but cannot be identified, named or located. Dolly Parton’s version of “I Will Always Love You” is surprising but conventional, and Whitney’s, not least because it’s a cover, is ordinary yet overwhelming. Or, Parton: Oh wow but it’s just a love song, and Houston: It’s just a pop song but oh wow, and where wow, or whatever the exclamation, never lands, it just continues to wow even though it’s nothing else than a cover version of a commercial hit.
In an interview available on Youtube, another French thinker, Jacques Derrida, asked to reflect on love, differentiates between who and what one loves, between the absolute singularity of who the person is and the qualities, the beauty, the intelligence, the economic value of the person. The heart of love is divided into the who and the what. Love is an engagement with, however, Derrida isn’t using the term, the dissensus between who and what, between sensory presentation and the way it’s given sense.
I wonder what Jacques Rancière thinks about people that use sentences such as let’s agree to disagree. In regard to dissensus isn’t that precisely to transform a productive tension into a thing, something that can be located and identified, or in other words, let’s agree to disagree is enforced artificial consensus? Dissensus, perhaps similar to twilight or dusk, can only be identified through its negative, not simply in the sense of what it’s not, as that tends towards opposition, juxtaposition or contrast, and certainly not in respect of lack or absence. Twilight nor dissensus isn’t some kind of psychoanalytical backyard, on the contrary, it’s a stretched moment that although extended remains unframed and hence recalcitrant to image and technologies of capture. Dissensus is that immaterial extension that simultaneously is and isn’t between day and night, and that constantly withdraws from caption.
In “Bergsonism,” from 1966, Gilles Deleuze, today’s third French philosopher, differentiates between false and real problems. The first category is problems to which there exists a catalogue of solutions. It’s just a matter of making the right choice and every choice is obviously attached to value. Possibly this, or possibly that, in short, it’s a matter of probability, and even if there’s no final solution false problems confirm us as human beings, precisely because to overcome the problem demands nothing else than a bit of negotiation.
The real ones, on the other hand, are problems to which there are no solutions, that don’t offer choices, that cannot be negotiated. To which there’s no possibly this or possibly that. Real problems don’t operate in the realm of probability and are even beyond the sphere of imagination.
Evidently, it’s impossible to produce, to make, a real problem, neither can we look or search for them because they don’t exist as such. A produced or manufactured problem cannot not offer a solution of some kind. From Deleuze perspective, one can only produce the possibility for the emergence of a real problem, and it goes without saying that a real problem is intimately related to Jacques Rancière’s notion of dissensus. Real problems similar to dissensus have no direction and are indeterminate, still, it’s dissensus and real problems that generate prominent change in the world. Like affect, they cannot be located or pinned down, indeed a real problem is the emergence of dissensus.
In continuity, false problems, consensus, can orchestrate, as Deleuze proposes, change or difference in regard to degree, but only real problems, dissensus, can generate possibilities of difference in kind, and difference in kind operates outside the domain of possibility but instead in the realm of potentiality, that is, a dynamics that also includes what lies beyond the reach of language.
Between Dolly Parton’s and Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” a conceptually crucial moment occurred, the publishing of Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble,” on the 1st of March 1990. In her seminal book, the American scholar connects J.L. Austin’s theories of performativity with Jacques Derrida’s proposition that language in itself is performative and elaborates the world-changing idea that identity, and not just human identity but anything’s identity, is performative and prominently situated, or made possible through language.
Judith Butler convincingly unpacks the impossibility of a static, singular and personal identity on several layers. If language is how humans have access to the world, identity cannot not be constructed through language, and if language is performative, in other words, that it has no foundation but is constantly changing, there can be no proper stability to identity. A radical aspect to Butler’s thought is that a person’s identity is never personal but engineered or constructed through shared conventions. There is no real you, no true self to find underneath your skin. Identity is performative, constructed by each of us in collaboration with the world in an ongoing process, which of course means that our identity changes depending on context from daughter to mother, professional, lover, performance artist, dog owner, New Yorker, single and millions of other opportunities. You are never you but always they, forever plural, and by the way you are never but are constantly practising all those overlapping identities. To be someone after all refers to a stable entity. Identity politics eradicated being.
Just in order to underline. If language has no foundation, truth, in any radical sense becomes impossible. Truth is dependent on a firm foundation, on some or other form of index, and hence there something like a true self becomes an anomaly, and even if there could be a true self, as humans we cannot gain access to it, precisely because it exists outside the realms reachable through language. We should, however, remind ourselves that this fact is a blessing since a true self is absolutely static and as boring as contemplating the universe or dad jokes.
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Returning to Dolly and Whitney, in Parton’s version, from the early 70s, it’s a stable form of identity that performs the song and hence her love can be true, which is perhaps why she can or had to, perform it without baroque exaggerations. In the case of Whitney, the name of the game is altogether different, to her it’s all about how she performs the song because there’s nothing real only a matter of appearing convincing, to Whitney’s love there’s no truth.
The importance of Judith Butler’s articulation concerning performativity and by extension the rise of identity politics cannot be overestimated. Although in the shadows, it has revolutionized the world, perhaps both for the good and the bad. Not only did it give traction for entirely new forms of struggle and opportunities for minorities of different kinds, in particular women, people of colour and sexual minorities, it also paved the way for entirely new ways of comprehending what it implies to be human, even what a human is. Interestingly, the advent of the so-called performative regime coincided with new forms of individuality geared through neoliberal capitalism that could take on globalised economies the moment the cold war ended in 1989. Not only were Butler’s concepts brilliant the timing was also immaculate and in hindsight appears tailored for the moment.
A performative identity contrary to a classic static understanding of the I, business understood can be improved and it becomes up to each and all of us to invest in ourselves. As proclaimed in the influential and provocative book “The Coming Insurrection” by The Invisible Committee from 2007, we had no choice but to understand that today and into the future our most precious property is not your yacht, luxury villa or car but your identity. What you sell is you and how affordable respectively investible you are, which includes dress code, what Pilates studio you visit, if you’re vegan, prefer wine in front of beer, what’s on your playlist, if you make activist art or not, dress up or down, solve sudokus, read Sally Rooney or carry a copy of John Cage’s “Silence,” and so on.
In the early 2000s, performativity became a watchword in art contexts, not just in regard to performative arts but all over the place and every biennale, museum and literature festival needed to include something performative. It wasn’t only that dance at this time ended up in the museum but every kind of art was packaged as performative. Not seldom was performative used as an adjective, it’s a bit performative you know, as if that made something interesting or cool. At other times it was understood as quantitative as if something could be more or less performative. But sorry, your identity doesn’t become more performative because you dance a lot, walk with a bouncy step or exaggerate facial expressions. Everything in the world, including immaterial things, every things’ identity including chairs, cities, historical events, dance performances, doctor’s appointments and so on, are performative. The moment when something is in relation to something else, performativity is inevitable.
A somewhat neglected perspective on identity politics and how it constructs worlds is that it’s deeply human-centric, and, as a prolongation of post-structuralist theories of language, became occupied to an overwhelming degree with relations, with the twist that objects, things and stuff are allowed existence only in regard to relations, and not in themselves. With its phenomenological backdrop, for theories around performativity objects don’t exist.
If language is conventional and, so to say, is the world in regard to access, a question arises: can one practice forms of identity that aren’t already incorporated in language? Said otherwise, from the perspective of identity politics one can only “be” forms of identity that language allows one to be, which from the perspective of Jacques Rancière implies that identity can only be consensual, frictionless and without tensions. Every identity is a possibility, it’s possibly this or possibly that, it’s probabilistic and, however for some provocative, always confirming being human in ways we already are. Simultaneously, identity politics must denounce Rancière’s concept of dissensus because it proposes the possibility that language is not as everything, which irreversibly would crumble the authority of the performative regime.
As far as I can see and feel, identity politics moreover ends up having problems with love, if love has anything to do with what Jacques Derrida proposed – that it’s a struggle between who and what, because from the perspective of Judith Butler’s theories, there can be no such thing as a who, that’s absolutely singular and unique. The performative regime ends up dismissing who and is left only with what, a form of love that’s nothing special but simply a matter of convention and negotiation. If Derrida could whisper, I love you because I love you, because of who you are, Butler ends up concluding that she loves somebody because of his or her features, long legs, scholarly success or rich family, which to me is a pity concerning love.
If this is what happens with love it’s also what befalls identity politics’ relationship to art. Because theories of performativity cannot expand, without some structural issues in the domains of language, it must reduce art to its tangible effects, thus dismissing the dynamnics of affect, or call it magic, that Rancière names dissensus. Hence, it’s making art into instruments, or tokens in regard to social environments. It cannot comprehend art in any other way than in respect of signification, what it does or produces, and even worse in regard to conventional causal relations, it transforms art into matters of cognition, knowledge and reflection.
Identity politics cannot blurt out, I love this painting, but is constantly covering its own tracks with arguments for why and under what circumstances this or that art is valuable. One could even say that identity politics crosses out the realm of art, a realm that carries the possibility for an absolutely singular experience, incorporating art fully into culture. Art is certainly created in regard to some or other culture but that doesn’t mean it’s identical to culture. The difference is crucial, first of all in respect of notions of autonomy and second, equally importantly, in relation to quantifiable value.
In order for a moment of dissensus to emerge it’s imperative that it’s without value, that it’s non-locatable and withdraws from language. The aesthetic experience, the encounter with dissensus is without directions, it’s an effect without cause as Rancière has it, it’s a moment without identity and lastly, it’s not performative, it’s not relational but an encounter with an object, an object as such.
Yes, a painting performs painting, a dance performance is performing dance performance and there might be people performing the dance and all of them are identities and have endless relations to each other and the world, but the aesthetic experience is not performative, it’s not constructed, it’s not dividable and therefore not measurable, it’s absolutely singular, and exactly because of that, it’s not an experience different in degree but different in kind.
It is there, in between Dolly Parton’s song and Whitney Houston performing it, between what it means for a white American and an black American woman to voice I will always love you, between the impossibility of truth and the miracle of love, between identity politics and absolute singularity that dissensus resides. It is there where art’s autonomy for a short moment appear, there between day and night that truth can be sensed, where things are not what they seem and yet more real than ever before.
