Notes on MIA, Neoliberalism and State Violence

(As promised, what follows is a brief sketch of a potential project on MIA, neoliberalism and state violence, which might — rather counter-intuitively — connect up w/a reading of The Bourne Ultimatum.)

Sri Lankan-born British hip-hop artist M.I.A.’s second album, Kala, samples, steals and otherwise appropriates musical traditions from all over the globe. Beginning with a reading of the track “Paper Planes,” I want to outline the ways in which I see M.I.A.’s work as offering a series of adept readings of the neoliberal state, or, more precisely, of the inseparability of (and the articulations between) the operations and logics of “globalized” late capitalism and state violence.

The backbone of “Paper Planes” is a sample of The Clash’s “Straight to Hell,” a scathing seven-minute indictment of the interconnections of early Thatcherite neoliberalism–and the xenophobia, racisms, imperial nostalgia and particularized (white) “Englishness” that were central to Thatcher’s support amongst the white British working classes–and US state violence in Southeast Asia and its legacies (both in Southeast Asia itself and in the experience of multi-racial immigrant populations in “the West”). In short, the song’s most obvious inter-text already requires that we think of the financialized/market-based policies and practices of neoliberal “globalization” alongside the state violence which is alleged to be a separate and, perhaps, even antiquated feature of the world-system (as though the Cold War days of nation-state-driven conflict and ideological contestation have been surpassed by global market rationality).

To that backdrop M.I.A. adds a few brief, enigmatic stanzas and the now-popular chorus, “All I wanna do is [sound of four gunshots]/ And [sound of cash register]/ And take your money.” The song shifts, I suggest, almost seamlessly between two distinct but related speakers: the first is a kind of representative of what Eva Cherniavsky terms a global “ruling caste” (rather than traditional national ruling class or historic bloc, in the Gramscian sense) under late capitalism, “whose restricted ranks are visible not only in the increasing concentration of wealth among an increasingly minute fraction of the global population but also in the transfer of a tiny roster of personnel between key corporate and state postings” (Cherniavsky 29). In other words, one speaker is an imagined representative of the neoliberal world-makers that make up what some have termed the “Party of Davos”–a party quite unlike the conventional understanding of political parties in liberal democracies in that they do not inhere in any one national form and do not adhere–and often don’t pretend to adhere–to the dictates of any articulatable or coherent (national) public.

Simultaneously, in my reading, the speaker is a kind of outlaw figure: not quite the persona of M.I.A., herself already a persona of Maya Arulpragasam, but a figure that employs and embodies and reproduces the very logic(s) of the global ruling caste against it, a pirate figure who rejects the state’s monopoly on violence in the name of private capital accumulation. The suggestion of piracy is made explicit when she intones and repeats, “Pirate skulls and bones/ Sticks and stones and weed and bombs/ Runnin’ when we hit ‘em/ Lethal poison through their system.” The lines speak to the systemic and requisite violence of global capitalism; the neoliberal state is understood here as a kind of accumulation-by-dispossession machine, which, having given up on any national incorporative project and any accompanying conception of social welfare, is merely concerned with the protection of the (increasingly unequal and uneven) system of private property and all the attendant violence and coercion that enable different modes of capital accumulation. It becomes, then, the conditions of possibility for the piracy of global capitalism.

That understanding denies and disavows the seductive shimmer of late capitalist logics–signaled by lines like “Everyone’s a winner/ Now we’re making that fame”–even as it recognizes the pervasiveness and inescability of such logics. So, the outlaw/pirate figure whose voice is layered on top of the voice of the global ruling caste (and can never been fully distinguished or disarticulated from it) both represents the logic of the system and exists as a perpetual threat to it.

The song’s ability to cohere the voices of both speakers and the persona of M.I.A. herself (since, of course, the verses also apply in various ways to the itinerant performer herself) might be usefully connected back to the wealth of punk references that appear in Kala, of which The Clash sample is just one example. Unlike some punk cultures, M.I.A. seems to continually undercut any claims to forms of authenticity. This is manifest at a most basic level in her styles of dress, her album covers and promotional materials, her website, blog, and MySpace page, and in her videos, all of which are works of obvious pastiche which combine different elements of contemporary hip-hop chic with a nearly-unidentifiable range of Bollywood references, over-the-top color schemes, retro ’70s and ’80s-derived hip-hop styles, anachronistic graphics, military imagery, and a seemingly endless variety of cross-cultural and “global” artifacts and images. The effect, in part, is that M.I.A. is always pointing up the constructed-ness, the inauthenticity, of her persona.

In this sense we might compare her work not to early UK punk artists but to the heady post-punk of bands like Talking Heads, who mixed punk idioms and ideas with a kind of performance art aesthetic and practice that was always intent on self-reflexivity and making explicit the artificiality of its own performance (and I’m thinking here specifically of Talking Heads songs like “The Big Country” and “Life During Wartime” that seem to involve a mixing of speakers similar to the one we find in “Paper Planes”). Thus, unlike some punk cultures–and, for that matter, unlike many leftist hip-hop artists–M.I.A. doesn’t seem to posit any notion of a pure, oppositional critique somehow outside the logics of late capitalism and the machinations of state power. For the most part, then, the specter haunting the neoliberal state is not an external enemy but a kind of terroristic, anti-systemic and often arbitrary violence (re)produced within and according to the prevailing logics of the world-system. If, in other words, the neoliberal state leaves off the production of consent and produces instead populations of “disposable labor” and abandons a newly-”surplus humanity” of billions no longer reincorporatable into global labor populations, the only return it can tangibly anticipate is one whose scale and extremity is commensurate with the neoliberal project itself.

Thus, in spite of her frequent references to categories like “the people” and “the poor,” M.I.A.’s lyrics do not seem to carry any sense of an articulatable public which might cohere within any particular social formation (or between them) in order to address state power. The one moment in “Paper Planes” where the slide between the two kinds of pirate figures is broken includes a vocal shift and the lines, “M.I.A./ Third World Democracy / Yeah, I got more records than the KGB / So, uh, no funny business.” In one sense, of course, this is a reassertion of the M.I.A. persona, but “Third World Democracy” as a category seems to be removed both from the workings of the neoliberal order and from any referentiality to contemporary social formations. Precisely because M.I.A. doesn’t seem to address herself to any particular, coherent public that might critique or upend late capitalism, the category remains not a reference to a particular form of postcolonial, “Third World” social order — though perhaps here a discussion of Tariq Ali’s idea of Chavez et al. as anti-neoliberal pirates would be worthwhile — but a kind of imagined and as-yet-unidentifiable response to and way out of our disastrous present and the bleak futures it currently promises.