Just a Modern Guy: Iggy Pop and Minor Literature

So there I sat this afternoon in some coffee dive near the University of Pennsylvania, cooling my heels and thumbing around in my newly-purchased copy of The Deleuze Dictionary, when Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” came on the sound system. It’s not my favorite piece in the Iggy oeuvre, people, not by a good long howl. But it was a welcome relief after what I think must have been the world’s worst acid jazz album. Anyway, the conjunction of music and theory was instructive, if by instructive we mean “it sent me running around the joint begging for a pen so I could make some notes on my damp and crumpled napkin.” Now, hours later, I’m back in my hotel and deciphering the feverish cuneiform napkin notations of the caffeinated Archambeau. The main point (underlined not once but thrice in green felt marker bleeding into fuzziness at the edges) is this: “IGGY = MINOR LIT/DELEUZE & GUA… [illegible].” (Poor Felix Guattari, even here finding himself smooshed into the margins by his illustrious co-author). And I think, post-caffination, I can still stand by the point: Iggy Pop’s song “Lust for Life” performs some of the most important functions of what Deleuze and Guattari call “minor literature” (which, as we should all recall from Miss Starchington’s homeroom lecture on postmodern French critical theory, is a tremendously important form of literature — don’t let the name fool you!).

Are you in a hurry? No, me neither. I mean, there’s no Tivo in this hotel, and I can’t bear to watch commercials any more, so let’s take the scenic route to the main point, starting with some of the lyrics to the song. Here are the first and second verses, along with the chorus, of "Lust for Life":

Here comes Johnny Yen again
With the liquor and drugs
And the flesh machine
He's gonna do another striptease
Hey man where'd you get
That lotion? I been hurting
Since I bought the gimmick
About something called love
Yeah something called love
That's like hypnotizing chickens

Well I am just a modern guy
Of course I've had it in the ear before
'Cause of a lust for life
'Cause of a lust for life

I'm worth a million in prizes
With my torture film
Drive a G.T.O.
Wear a uniform
All on a government loan
I'm worth a million in prizes
Yeah I'm through with sleeping on the
Sidewalk - no more beating my brains
With the liquor and drugs
With the liquor and drugs

Well I am just a modern guy
Of course I've had it in the ear before
'Cause of a lust for life
'Cause of a lust for life

So how does this connect up with Deleuze and Guattari's idea of minor literature? Ah, well, it's simple. It's all in the — what? What's that you say? Yes, you, there, in the back, with the degenerates and ne'er-do-wells. What? You say you weren't paying attention in Mrs. Starchwell's class, and you need a refresher on the concept. You embarrass me, sir. I mean, I'm in Philadelphia, and without my copy of Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. I'll have to make do with the internet, and The Deleuze Dictionary (no, there's no Guatarri Guidebook — ol' Felix gets screwed again!). But okay, here's the deal. For all of you back-row reprobates.

It goes like this: minor literature, for Deleuze and his sidekick Guattari, doesn't necessarily consist of — what? Another interruption? What is it this time? Oh. Yeah. Well, sure. The song is music, not literature. So I guess you're right. Except I'm only going to discuss the lyrics, so it's sort of like teaching the text of Macbeth in a literature class, rather than studying a production of the play in a theater class. Okay? Okay. All right, then. And I see that spitball, Davis. I'm keeping my eye on all of you. So no funny business. Right, then.

So. It goes like this: minor literature, for Deleuze and his sidekick Guattari, doesn't necessarily consist of the literature written by ethnic, sexual, or any other kind of minorities. As Ronald Bogue puts it in (ahem) The Deleuze Dictionary,

What constitutes minorities is not their statistical number [sic], which may in actual fact be greater than that of the majority, but their position within asymmetrical power relationships that are reinforced by and implemented through linguistic codes and binary oppositions. Western white male adult humans may be outnumbered worldwide, but they remain the majority through their position of privilege, and that privilege informs the linguistic oppositions that define, situate, and help control non-western and non-white populations, women, children, and non-human life-forms. Minorities merely reinforce dominant power relations when they accept the categories that define them. Only by undoing such oppositions as western/non-western, white/non-white, male/female, adult/child. or human/animal can minorities change power relations. Only by ... blurring categories can new possibilities for social interaction be created.

Yeah, I know, I know. That "only by blurring categories" is a bit much. Bogue, at least here, seems to be kind of a "heroic theory" guy. But let's let it slide. Anyway, don't blame me for it, Davis. I can see you getting ready to fire off that spitball. The point is this: minor lit takes the terms used in the normative language of those in power and short circuits them, making them untenable in their old form (if not for everyone, then at least for the people to whom the piece of minor lit speaks most effectively and immediately).

Verena Conley, also writing in that most venerable of texts, The Deleuze Dictionary, puts it slightly differently. Speaking of D and G's use of the term "minor," she states: "The term is often developed in connection with language and the 'order-word,' that is, a pass-word that both compels obedience and opens up passages. In this sense Deleuze argues that language ... is fundamentally political." So: language, in this view, doesn't just describe. When used by the empowered majority (which, again, could consist of a numerical minority — Deleuze and Guattari define "majority" as a power-status, not a numbers-status), it is normative. It orders us to act in certain ways. This can be tremendously enabling, but it also forecloses on certain possibilities. Take the word "man." If you're a young guy, and you're told to "be a man," there's a command there to be, say, strong and brave and stoic and all that macho hoohah. And you experience the command all the time, not just when the coach is yelling "be a man, goddam it, Archambeau, you big girl's blouse! Man up and take the hit! If you're going to be a lineman you're going to have to take the goddam hit, already!" (uh, sorry — flashback time). And you experience the injunction to be those things the word "man" implies in its dominant usage all the time. But along with all the enabling stuff (you do learn to take the hit, to push the car out of the snowbank, and all that jive), other things are disabled. You know, like emotional expressiveness. Or whatever.

Now, what do you want to know about next? The way minor writing works, or the secret catch to the whole majority thing? The secret catch? Okay. You got it. The secret catch to the whole majority thing is this: there is no majority status. Or, rather, majority status exists, but only as an abstraction or an ideal. Nobody actually corresponds to that ideal entirely. Here, again, is Verena Conley on the issue: "Majority is an abstract standard that can be said to include no one and speak in the name of nobody." So: nobody actually embodies the ideal of "man" in its majority-usage as an order-word. Or, to move away from the language of "ideal" with all its Platonic weight and toward the terminology Deleuze and Guattari use, no one actually has a subjectivity that corresponds exactly with the territory demarcated by the word "man", without deficiency in some area or excess in some other. (And this goes for all order-words). So: major literature, and majority language in general, gives us terms that embody imperatives of how we're (insert scare quotes here) supposed to be. And minor literature works to fuzzy up those terms and all they stand for. Verena Conley's prose gets a bit godawfully algebraic when she deals with this, but she does know what she's talking about. Minority language "is characterized by the presence of connections," she says, "that is, by the additive conjunction 'and' and the mathematical sign '+': a minoritarian language is 'x + y and b + traits a + a and...'" Alrighty. Deep breath. What she means is this: minority writing takes a term like "man" and refuses to accept it on the terms of the empowered majority group. Instead, minority writing adds significances to the term. The term now isn't reducible to the set of meanings it once had. It now takes us outside of the territory once covered by the term. In one of Deleuze and Guattari's favorite terms, it becomes "a line of flight" out of that territory.

So, then. Iggy Pop.

"Lust for Life" works as minor literature in the way it reworks the meaning of what it means to be "just a modern guy." It's worth lingering a bit over what the phrase "just a modern guy" means in the song. I think the "just" (as in "only" or "merely") is important, because it really does make "modern" seem less like it means "up to date" or "of our time" and more like it means "ordinary" or "regular" or "not unusual." I mean, it's a matter of nuance. But "I'm just a modern guy" here does seem less like it means "I'm a guy who is neither affiliated with the past nor the future" than it means "I'm not unusual: I conform to the standards of our time and place." There's a kind of "you and I share a common subjectivity, that related to our time" vibe to it, and a lot of the vibe comes from the "just." So there's a kind of normality implied here, and Iggy tells us he accepts and embodies that normality. "Modern guy," then, is a kind of order-word, and Iggy seems to be following along. Being a modern guy. Just that. Nothing fancy. Nothing abnormal. Nothing out of the norm.

Nothing, that is, until the next phrase, the qualifier of the normative "just a modern guy": "of course I've had it in the ear before." As an article in Slate put it, it's a surprising lyric to find in a song once used to promote cheap Caribbean cruises: "I don't know what, exactly, Iggy means when he says that he's 'done it in the ear before,'" says the Slate write, "but I'm sure Royal Caribbean won't allow it on their cruise ships." Did you notice the slip-up there? The Slate guy says he doesn't know what Iggy means by having "done it in the ear," but the original lyric is about having "had it in the ear." So I think the slip-up actually indicates that the Slate guy has a pretty good idea what Iggy means: that he's (figuratively) had sex using the least likely of orifices, and that (implicitly) he's done things sexually that the ordinary, average guy, the guy who is "just a modern guy" hasn't done, and by which such a guy would claim to be appalled. There's lots of corroborating evidence for this theory in the song (the "flesh machine," and Johnny Yen's promised striptease, for example). And there's plenty of corroborating evidence from Iggy Pop's life to indicate that he knows whereof he speaks, here. His own adventurous, polymorphous bisexuality is the stuff of legend (Seriously! Have you seen Velvet Goldmine?). So: Iggy gives us what seems to be a kind of normative order-word (his particular usage of "just a modern guy") and then immediately blurs things. I mean, he doesn't say "I would be just a modern guy, except for the fact that I've had it in the ear before." That would be accepting the meaning of the normative term, and saying he doesn't fit into it. Instead, he says he is just a modern guy. But there's a kind of escape from what that term means in majority discourse. That idea of a uniform-wearing, government-loan having, gory movie watching regular guy? Iggy's not excluded from it. But he's also not contained by the boundaries of what it means to be that guy. His subjectivity covers all that territory, but exceeds it, too, in certain sexual areas. Or, to put it in slightly gaudier terms redolent of Deleuze's terminology, Iggy (or, rather, his autobiographical character "Johnny Yen") isn’t entirely contained in the territory designated as normative — he flies out of it, bursting its boundaries on the wings of his splendidly freakish libido. (Forgive me. “Lines of flight” and “deterritorialization” are my favorite Deleuzian terms, and I really want use them to invoke an Iggy-Johnny figure as a kind of winged Icarus. Maybe I do deserve the spitball for that. Fire away, Davis).