The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [22]
For a Marxist philosopher like Žižek, it’s not surprising that most of what belongs to the Real, or what is most interesting about it, is economic. For most of us, Žižek would say, the actual operation of the global capitalist economic system that shapes our world of experience is something that lies outside the scope of what we ordinarily think about or are able to understand or articulate. Nor, typically, do we think about the broader consequences of global capitalism such as poverty, homelessness, and malnutrition. Still, without the steady operation of this economic ‘Real’, none of us would be who or where we are today. Without the machinery of record companies, for example, Mick Jagger would likely have given up rock long ago and would now be retired and playing with his grandchildren in a nondescript middle-class London suburb, like countless others his age.
Violence, Rock, and the Rolling Stones
Žižek says that violence can occur in each of the three orders, and to understand it fully in any specific case we have to distinguish its different manifestations and see whether and how they interact. In the Imaginary realm of private experience, there are all kinds of violence and disruption, most of which are connected to our desires. If Žižek had written the song, it would have been “You can’t ever get what you want …” and when you can’t get what you need, the resulting frustration can lead to overt physical violence. When the Stones sing, “Don’t play with me, ’cause you’re playin’ with fire,” they directly evoke this psychic link between desire and potential violence. Or if “Little Susie” continues to send “dead flowers” (refuses to satisfy the desire of the song’s author), the singer vows, in an unnervingly threatening final line, that he “won’t forget to put roses on your grave.”
The Stones fast became familiar with one kind of violence in the early 1960s. In his memoir Life, Keith devotes a lot of time to “the power of teenage females of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, when they’re in a gang… They nearly killed me” (p. 139). “If you got caught in a frenzied crowed of them,” he explained, “it’s hard to express how frightening they could be … this unstoppable, killer wave of lust and desire, or whatever it is” (p. 140).
Purely symbolic violence, on the other hand, remains within this realm of symbols and codes, but can still be destructive and hurtful. It can be deployments of words or other sorts of signs that tend to harm, injure, or degrade persons either by further reinforcing the social distinctions already operative in the Symbolic order or, sometimes, by creating new ones. This can take many forms, including overt ‘hate speech’ (for instance, the ‘N-word’ Mick quotes in “Sweet Black Angel” on Exile); more or less explicit stereotyping in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, or objectification like “babe” or “bitch.”
Looked at in this way, the Stones have consistently employed Symbolic violence in their lyrics. The two general types are the objectification of women and racial stereotyping, especially of African Americans (in, for example, “Under My Thumb” and “Brown Sugar”). But these lyrics, you could say, are “only rock’n’roll” and do nothing to explain the kind of violence witnessed at Altamont.
Both these Imaginary and Symbolic kinds of violence, however, remain ever connected to, and enabled by, the Real, whose operations are usually cloaked by the Imaginary and the Symbolic. While we think that a rock star’s getting mauled on a street by violent fans is just an aspect, however unfortunate, of relations between musicians and their fans, you can’t understand this violence apart from the underlying economics of popular culture. Girls weren’t attacking