american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

CONTESTATORY URBAN AGENCY 177
relations. The large arena show, with its implicit emphasis on spectacle
and the resulting wide-eyed consumption of that spectacle, has a
fundamentally different and distant dynamic.
American pragmatism’s rejection of Cartesian subject–object dualism
is a key to understanding the immersion possible in a live hip-hop
show at a small club. As outlined by Cornel West in his book on pragmatism,
Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey
rejected Cartesian subjectivism and its attendant “fictive” spectator theory
of knowledge, which is predicated upon a subject/object dualism in
which the self (the “spectator”) is a detached observer who comes to
know an object from a position fundamentally apart from what she
comes to know. Peirce, James, and Dewey reject the subject/object
binary and show that the individual is always embedded in relationships
with other people, social, political, and economic conditions, and the
“furniture of the world” that predate any separation of subject and
object and that are continuously subject to change. The individual
always finds herself in medias res—in the middle of things—so that all
experience is prior to a subject/object split (West 44, 56, 89, 91–92).
This is exactly the type of immersion that exists in a small club. If
the handful of people lingering at the back of the club are bracketed,
there are few “spectators” at a small club hip-hop show. The vast
majority are active participants emerged fully in the middle of things.
The only way one can really know the small club show is not by being
a detached observer but by sweating and participating in the callsand-response,
by chanting song choruses when prompted, by joining
in the enactment of collective agency, and by “acting in concert.” In
many of the live shows I have attended, the artists have often ridiculed
(“called out” in hip-hop vernacular) or encouraged the few stragglers
usually present in the back of the room. These outliers, the artists
imply, are antithetical to the art form and to live hip-hop aesthetics. In
large arena shows, this level of intimacy and interaction is much more
difficult, and passive consumption is closer to the norm, especially if
we consider applause and screaming not primarily participatory but
congratulatory. A crude maxim largely holds: in a small club the audience
participates, in a large arena the audience observes, at a poetry
reading the audience politely applauds.
Another way of describing the immersion possible in a small club is
in terms of synaesthesia. The experience of collective identity and
agency created in the space of the live show to some extent cannot be
separated from the multiple sensory experiences that merge into each
other and the senses that are elicited by other senses. A Handbook to
Literature defines synaesthesia as “the concurrent response of two or