The Graduate English Journal of Hunter College

           Eight years ago in 1997 Greil Marcus published what remains today the definitive study of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes.1 In order to grapple with these elliptical recordings his analysis proceeds along lines akin to dream interpretation—sifting through the haunting evocations of dreams deferred and emancipatory political potential gone astray. Yet even while Marcus’ prose nostalgically documents a moment in American history “now most often spoken of as an error,” (Marcus xv) an image with unsettling contemporary political implications begins to form. Adhering to a version of New Left political history which recognizes its experience in the early sixties as a trajectory of decline, Marcus’s book maintains an air of betrayal regarding the failed cross-racial alliance which had gathered around the civil rights movement.2 Recently however this narrative has been significantly challenged by the reevaluation of these years under the trope of blackface minstrelsy, specifically by questioning the veracity of such a transparently authentic alliance. While some on the left view this reevaluation as historical gerrymandering of the worst sort— undermining the very visionary political possibilities many have built their lives around—this trope is useful because it reveals the point in which misrecognition of cultural spaces passes into illusory political assumptions.  But as valuable as this trope is in subverting the belief in a transparent cross-racial authenticity that in many ways forms the quilting point of Marcus’ ideology, its theoretical backdrop provides an even broader context with which to challenge the thesis of a progressive politics grounded in the notion of a foundational national identity. Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, when re-read through a frame of ideology critique that acknowledges a non-essentialist theory of subjectivity, becomes something much different than the panegyric to the Old, Weird, America Marcus would have, but a ground of contestation upon which competing ideologies struggle over the meanings of the past in order to control the present and future. 

           The confluence of the folk music revival and the Civil Rights movement has been    combed over multiple times,3 and depending on to whom one listens the stories can sound quite dissimilar. In placing the Basement Tapes into a theoretical and historical context, Marcus’ book follows the thesis of the New Left as a fall from grace—generally traced as moving from a popular front solidarity in the early sixties, through the gradual exclusion of whites from SNCC and an increasing pursuit of self-gratification, finally coming to rest in a cynical rejection of politics in general. The question Marcus asks then is simple: what happened? To answer it he turns his gaze backwards into the annals of American folklore and literature, shaping a narrative that trades less on chronological temporality than jeitzeit.4 Marcus reads both the Folk and Civil Rights movements as a re-incarnation of an essential American spirit motivating its participants with ethical vigor and purpose:

More than its own art movement, its own social movement, or its own fact, the folk revival was part of something bigger, more dangerous, and more important: the civil rights movement. This is where its moral energy came from—its sense of a world to rediscover, to bring back to life, and to win. The two movements were fraternal twins, for the civil rights movement was also a rediscovery, a revival: of the constitution (Marcus 22).

With this injunction, Marcus proceeds to form Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes into a city (a peculiar amalgam of John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill,” the rough and tumble frontier towns of legend, and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project) in which to recover a mythical prelapsarian past. At the heart of this city, in its metaphoric center, can be found the essence of what it means to be an American, and the duties and obligations attendant on that identity. For a time, so Marcus goes on to argue, this spirit (essential identity) infused the workers in the Civil Rights movement and united them all behind the same moral and historical sense of purpose, until, due to man’s penchant for self-indulgence, they lost their direction and drifted off into hedonistic pursuits. If this story is starting to sound quite a bit similar too another famous “fall” story, it is not accidental, and the similarity only serves to increase the charm of Marcus’ telling. The way this story works, as implausible as it sounds, is because it traffics on our vanity. It partakes of that other great American story, the master narrative that governs all other American narratives—the puritan “Errand in the Wilderness.”

            This narrative is grounded fundamentally in a sense of exceptionality ordained by God, and whose first formulation can be found in John Winthrop’s Modell of Christian Charity. This document is an exhortation to one of the first groups of  puritans (comprised by the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Company of which Winthrop would be governor) as to their duties in bringing religious enlightenment and peace to the untamed land of the new world. It was the inauguration of, in Marcus’ words, “the notion of a blessed society of right” (209). Yet it is also a very ambiguous political document, demanding a charitable attitude smacking of paternalism with a divine inscription of the necessity of inequality5 . It has been deployed throughout American history as justification for policies from Manifest Destiny to Reagan’s triumphalist version of 1980’s America to the war on terror.6 It is, according to Marcus, “along with Martin Luther King’s address to the March on Washington the only American political speech that can be compared to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural” (207). But whatever politics for which it is enlisted, this narrative serves to put America and Americans somehow outside the realms of possibility and, more importantly, regulation, to which others are confined. It claims this right for itself because, as Bob Dylan first sang so ironically and in a much different context in 1963, “God’s on our side.” What Marcus’ book does is attempt to tweak the narrative Bob Dylan and the New Left criticized so vociferously in the early sixties for its militarism and past crimes and mobilize it in the interest of a progressive politics.

            One might rightly ask at his point, “so what? So long as it works in the interest of the just and good who cares what narrative it gains currency off.” The point is that on its own there is nothing wrong with such an attempt, as effective socio-political movements must at some point be founded upon something, but Marcus’ error is that for him it is not just an evocation of this narrative as a functional center around which diverse individuals might gather for immediate political purposes, but a legitimate source of moral authority as such. Whether a person recognized this narrative at the time as authentic or not is not what is at stake, but rather if continuing to hold onto this notion as good in and of itself does not move moral purpose into self-righteousness7 .

           By translating the movement into proto-mythical terms the meaning of that movement is also altered, in that it is no longer just a case of increasing and distributing human rights among an oppressed population, but also (and at times more importantly) a successful reiteration of the reasons why Americans are so moral and exceptional. Thus instead of a temporary alliance precipitated by mutually (and contingently) aligning goals, the Civil Rights movement is understood as a coming together of Americans who, united under their shared identity as Americans (including their exceptionality), presided over the re-birth of the constitution upon its basic precepts of equality and freedom, furthering the work began by the puritan and political forefathers. What Marcus’ grand narrative fails to take account of is, firstly, the purely fictional aspect of this essentialist American identity that those individuals involved in the movement were to take part. Secondly such an assertion tends to obscure the horrors incurred under the rubric of this ideology, dissolving moments of real oppression in order to attain the fantasy of a mythical past. It is this very misrecognition of authenticity that is the cause of the ideological symptom he so laments in his book on the Basement Tapes. And therein lay the rub. For rather than assume Civil Rights was a visionary alliance making good on the promise of a transcendental, idealized America, a more honest examination might identify the specific needs and desires of each social group participating in the movement. For the middle class white northerners (Marcus included), one of the prime motivators was the desire for an escape from the pressures of modernity via a belief in the possibility of an authentic connection with a pre-modern existence.

            As the backbone of the New Left political ideology, “The Port Huron Statement” of 1962 cites authenticity and autonomy as the two main goals of their social movement, placing their attainment through a legitimate connection with the past. This “full and spontaneous” connection "easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history" induced by the anxieties of the modern world and provides a sort of healing tissue that, through its supposed link to a more "real" pre-modern existence, could mend the anxieties and confusions of modern life. Furthermore, this authenticity would guarantee the actors’ ability to move through society in an autonomous fashion, freeing them from the concerns of "image and popularity" as well as the unconscious acceptance of "status values." Such a notion of the modern subject's place in society was one which eschewed commerciality and so-called "pop" habits (commodification, competition in the 'rat-race' for success, conformity), depending instead upon the examples set forth by previous modes of existence. As historian Robert Cantwell writes, the folk revival “made the romantic claim of folk culture—oral, immediate, traditional, idiomatic, a culture of characters, of rights, obligations, beliefs, against a centrist, specialist, impersonal, technocratic culture, a culture of types, functions, jobs, and goals” (quoted in Marcus 20). The folk revival and the Civil Rights movement were fraternal twins, as Marcus points out, but they were twinned perhaps more so by the desire of their participants to seek an authentic connection to an idealized past rather than as a spiritual rebirth of America’s righteous destiny.

            Consider Marcus’ words as he describes the early Newport Folk festival in these visionary terms:

…the Newport Folk Festival was, for those who took part, a national convention, less a counter to the merely quadrennial of Republicans and Democrats than a rebuke. Here were brought together the privileged and the forgotten, white students from the finest colleges and their academic elders along with rediscovered and reclaimed singers from the past, unheard for thirty, for forty years, black guitarists and white banjo players who now stood together on stage…legends all, now addressing an audience, a society in miniature, a country in fantasy, they could hardly have imagined existed. Their authenticity was in their hands and faces and it could not be questioned; as authentic beings they sealed the words and airs of those who now, Bob Dylan first among them, sought their many pieces that made their one true voice (26)

Here we have both a cultural and a political stage combined into one. It is a place in which the cultural/political significance of the New Left ideology could be fused into a single space that eradicated class and racial difference in one fell swoop. It is a place where “legends” are put on display for a “country in fantasy” that will, so they believed, change the world for the good. On the outside all seems well, with only the linked hands and blending voices of “We Shall Overcome” missing.

            Yet there is something egregious just below the surface in this passage that I believe bears explicating, and in it can be deciphered the central problem of subjectivity in the grander project of New Left politics.  First off there is the academic elite, primarily (if not exclusively) white, liberal arts students and their teachers who have, out of the abyss of the past, suddenly “rediscovered” and “reclaimed” these lost and drifting individuals. Marcus’ panegyric to equality is particularly eye-raising given him and his bourgeois comrades’ palpable sense of ownership over these individuals, as if their proprietorship did not automatically exclude the pretensions of their high praises. These black guitarists and white banjo players “legends all” are displayed upon a stage in a spectacle that affirms the audience’s belief in their own authentic connection to a pre-modern, edenic cultural imaginary. The artists are inscribed through a process which doubly abstracts them from their individual social relation, first in their status as legends who have some otherworldly knowledge or connection, and secondly by their status on the stage as spectacle. Their assumed ghostly connection serves to reify them into a cultural repository which then could be appropriated by and for the benefit of the audience.  There is the shockingly direct final sentence which reveals this objectified difference they posses and which is desired by the audience in order to create “their one true voice.” If the goal of the Port Huron Statement was to unify the fragments of personal history through the medium of the past, than what Marcus is saying here is a sort of reversal, where it is the modern artists who will unify the disparate pieces of the older singers in order to put them together in their one true meaning.

            This retroactive attribution of signification is the proper location of the ideological structure, by which meaning always, in a sense, comes from the future. Slavoj Zizek has delved into this question extensively in his Sublime Object of Ideology, and he writes of this investment of meaning after the fact in terms quite apropos to the current question:

What is a ‘journey into the future’ if not this ‘overtaking’ by means of which we suppose in advance the presence in the other of a certain knowledge—knowledge about the meaning of our symptoms—what is it, then, if not the transference itself. This knowledge is an illusion, it does not really exist in the other, the other does not really possess it, it is constituted afterwards, through our—the subject’s—signifier’s working (56).

In the above quotation from Marcus there are actually two attributions of meaning descending from the future and onto the past, though both have similar content; the first is his original (Greil Marcus from 1963) investment of authenticity in the folk singers from previous generations, and the second is the continued attribution of authenticity from 1997 unto the meaning of the New Port Folk Festival. In the sense described above by Zizek, we might say that the other which we believe to possess the hidden meaning of our symptom (those with the authenticity to unite our “fragmented personal histories”) is a literally embodied other.  As Zizek goes on to write this is, “at the same time a necessary illusion, because we can paradoxically elaborate this knowledge only by means of the illusion that the other already possesses it and we are only discovering it” (56). Thus for Marcus, the world to be re-discovered, the world he believes is located within the authenticity of the American folk re-vival (in the hands and faces of legends gathered on stage), and by extension of his own argument the Civil Rights movement (Marcus 22), is in fact his own ideological fantasy.

            As the passage about Newport indicates, Marcus’s belief in the reincarnation of an essential American spirit infusing the Civil Rights movement is an attempt to sweep away distance—distance between historical moments, between individuals, and between individuals and their own nature. In InvisibleRepublic he attempts this suture discursively. He brings together the letters of the past—Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, Winthrop’s Modell, and King’s speech to the March on Washington— along with the “unrecognized” voices of folklore in order to evoke a national identity which will then close the distance between civil subjects, creating a community of Americans under a cohesive national identity.  The stage at Newport is a signifier for the dreams of authenticity and a national voice (the “one true voice”) under which distance and difference can be erased in the interest of a national, collective subject. For Marcus, if there is no national collectivity, there are only atomized individuals drifting upon the whims of their own self-interest and alienation. Listen as he describes the nature of the cuckoo, which Oliver Wendell Holmes once suggested for the national bird:

The cuckoo—the true, ‘parasitic’ cuckoo…lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. It is a kind of scavenger in reverse: violating the natural order of things, it is by nature an outsider; a creature that cannot belong. Depositing its orphans, leaving its progeny to be raised by others, to grow up as imposters in another’s house—as America filled itself up with slaves, indentured, servants, convicts, hustlers, adventurers, the ambitious and the greedy, the fleeing and the hated, who took or were given new, imposter’s names—the cuckoo becomes the other and sees all other creatures as other…As a creature alienated from its own nature, the cuckoo serves as the specter of the alienation of each from all (119).

This is the Althusserian subject of discourse, the non-subject inside the discursive one, removed from all ties that bind and cast upon the winds of language (their 'imposter's names). From here no political movement can be galvanized, because there are no people (humans as subject) to galvanize, there are only empty bodies twisted this way and that by the tides of words. This is the specter that haunts Marcus and why he feels he must believe in the American master narrative, because without it, nothing else is believable.8

            The authenticity of an experiential communicability is essential to this nationalized collectivity, and is the basis for Marcus’ polemic against the more identity based politics of the new social movements.9 In his book Marcus levels his invective against David Whisnant, a University of North Carolina professor:

…writing about country music, [Whisnant] decries the concept of, in his own scare quotes, “’national’ experience”—an idea, he says, “long since rendered useless by careful analyses of regional, gender, racial, class, and occupational differences within the body politic.” This wasn’t Winthrop’s body. If there is no national experience their can be no such thing as national voice—no notion that, say, when Dock Boggs or Clarence Ashley, or Geechie Wiley, or, in certain hours in the basement, Bob Dylan sang, the contours of the country’s aspirations and failures, shaped according to the particular hopes specific individuals invested in them and have produced, could be heard. There could be no nation in Dock Boggs’s voice; rather one could only hear a white male working-class miner Virginia miner. What one can hear in King’s address to the March on Washington, with all of its invoking of national icons, landmarks, and songs, is no American voice but false consciousness (213).

That’s pretty tough stuff to refute. Marcus’s rhetoric makes throwing it back more or less the same as calling America’s representative of inter-racial cooperation a hoodwinked sucker lost in delusions of America’s grandeur. By the way the passage works, somehow if we don’t like Winthrop’s Modell than we also don’t like King, and that is a difficult proposal to swallow. In the hands of Marcus’s forceful prose this sort of discursive compulsion can seem hard to resist; that is of course, if we accept the unspoken proposition which is that there are only two kinds of consciousness, false and true.    

            Marcus rejects the notion of King’s discourse as “ideological” based on its apparent truth content, and this appeal in turn reveals Marcus’ assumption of a rather crude definition of ideology. However if one were to apply a more nuanced theory of ideology, one that acknowledges a certain fissure or split as constituent in the subject and out of which the ideological fantasy necessarily arises, it would be possible to gather a wider understanding of the intricacies at work in the construction of the New Left political outlook. This is precisely the valence brought to bear by the reexamination of these years through a consciousness of the complex nexus of blackface minstrelsy.

            While the quest for authenticity in the New Left ideology can be placed within the larger narrative of America as a “Blessed society of right,” as to why the articulation of this desire took place in conditions specifically related to African-Americans has a more historical answer. The basic trope of blackface is that of personal transformation, whereby a young white male attempts to remake himself through performing black music. This tradition stretches back to the early nineteenth century,10 and has perhaps the longest and most complex history of any in American popular music. From the start it was a strange phenomenon; arising out of a socio-historical moment of abject racism, it simultaneously contained, even in its early formulations, a peculiar reverence and awe.

            The idea of authenticity was always one of blackface’s primary attractions, and it was an authenticity which was not relegated to one single meaning, but could signify multiple desires at once. At times it suggested to whites a primal connection to a mode of existence centered on the natural cycles of the earth, a connection they were forced to throw off in the civilizing process, as when Barry Shank explains:

This sentiment is not so very distant from the longing for premodern pleasures that characterized minstrelsy. Based on a nostalgia for a form of social organization seemingly more deeply grounded in the rhythms of nature, minstrel performers projected an imaginary lost essence onto black bodies in order to momentarily recapture that loss through blackface performance (Shank, “Bliss, or Blackface Sentiment" 50).

It could also serve to signify an authentic national culture, as one of its earliest admirers, Margaret Fuller, noted with patriotic overtones in 1842:

Our only national melody, Yankee Doodle, is shrewdly suspected to be a scion from British art. All symptoms of invention are confined to the African race, who, like the German literati, are relieved by their position from the cares of government. “Jump Jim Crow,” is a dance native to this country, and one which we plead guilty to seeing with pleasure, not on the stage, where we have not seen it, but as danced by children of ebon hue in the street. Such of the African melodies as we have heard are beautiful. But the Caucasian race have yet their railroads to build…(quoted in Lott 16)

Never mind that “Jump Jim Crow” was created by a white man mimicking, in racist fashion, an African-American servant. This original misrecognition of authenticity by Fuller was almost universal, and begins opening up the ways in which whites projected their fantasies of authenticity on to blacks from the country’s earliest days. Taken as a discursive formation, Shank and Fuller’s comments begin to form a picture of a fundamental lack in the subjectivity of white-America which articulated itself through a projection upon black bodies which could than be re-appropriated through their imitation.

            Barry Shank has argued that blackface minstrelsy was, to use Zizek’s terms, the unconscious fantasy structuring the social reality of the New Left.11 His article “That Wild Thin Mercury Sound,” follows the ways in which this trope both enabled and limited the Civil Rights movement, providing the requisite desire for social change but also, through the misrecognition of that desire, creating false hopes for its future.  Shank traces the New Left path through the trajectory of Bob Dylan’s early career, and locates within the singer’s music many of the essential fantasies of blackface. While it is not the intent of this essay to re-hash his argument, it would rather like to extend his analysis beyond the celebrated electric albums of the mid-sixties12 and into the interstices between that period and what would be a more mature phase inaugurated by the release of John Wesley Harding. And just as every argument opens different theoretical nuances when stretched, re-reading Dylan’s Basement Tapes with the consciousness of the pressures created by blackface minstrelsy’s long, passionate, and violent history similarly distends, destabilizing these recordings with an over-determined surplus of desire.

            “Never give up on you’re desire,” Lacan once famously said, and on the Basement Tapes Bob Dylan and the Band take this injunction to heart. They are recordings that are filled to the bursting point with it: desire for place, desire for nation, amorous desire, frustrated desire, forbidden desire, and whatever else you can name—perhaps above all the desire for their desire to be made real. You can hear this desire all throughout the discs; when Dylan, the band playing over the top on a country stomp version of “Next Time on the Highway,” suddenly breaks out laughing, stuttering in his excitement to get the words out, “yes listen to Richard play that piano, yes j-j-j-just listen to Richard, he plays that piano with his shit face, just pounding the fucking piss out  of that piano”; or when his voice, along with his heart, seems to break on “Tears of Rage” as he sings, “and now the heart/ is filled with gold/ as if it was a purse,/ and oh what kind of love is this,/ which goes from bad to worse”; it is in the bordello humor of “Mrs. Henry” and the nonsense verses of “Under that Apple Suckling Tree.” It is the kind of desire that Robbie Robertson suggests comes from, “playing with absolute freedom” (quoted in Macus xx). This is what Marcus responds to, and in a striking way, as it stimulates his own desire for the beliefs of the sixties to be validated. And this is perhaps the most maddening part of his book; because in his individual analyses of the songs he often proves right on the money, but then picks it up and runs in the wrong direction afterwards by placing the songs under a misrecognized master signifier. He mistakes the reality of desire for historical reality by ignoring the missing link provided by the multiple modes of racial oppression and the logic of domination, and ends erroneously believing, in his heart of hearts, that he can dream away the horrors of American history by the promise which that narrative holds out.13

            The surplus of desire infusing the Basement Tapes makes the songs come across as a succession of mini-dreams without an overarching frame of meaning. Recorded in the basement of the Band’s house, Big Pink14 , the music was created out of boredom, it was simply an effort to “kill time” as Robertson put it, with no expectation that anyone would ever listen to it.  Composed with a goopy organ, barroom piano, licking guitar, and Dylan’s elusive vocal— the songs sound like they come from another world, drifting through a veil separating the known and unknown. Marcus does well in recognizing this and it his achievement in the book to articulate this miasmic displacement.  This feeling of displacement, the absence of a governing sign, makes of the songs on the Basement Tapes free-floating signifiers whose content waits to be filled by whichever ideology makes the strongest claim on them, and whose logic will then regulate the desire churning within each individual song. Depending on the ideological content of this master signifier, certain forms of desire may be muted, some extrapolated, others repressed. It is the inevitable result of recordings filled with nonsense verses, fragments, and parodies. Songs like “Yea Heavy and a Bottle of Bread” functioning in a fashion similar to musical Rorschach tests. When Marcus writes

Heard as something like a whole—as a story, despite even because of its jumble of missing pieces, half-finished recordings, garbled chronologies of composition or performance—the basement tapes can begin to sound like a map; but if they are a map, what country, what lost mine, is it that they center and fix? (Marcus xix)

He is prepping us for an adventure into his own subjective fantasy of America as a “blessed society of right.”  The rhetorical question ending the excerpt has already been answered in advance, and the center it fixes is the metaphorical one upon which the authenticity of the New Left political project will be validated. However, what Marcus’ reading cannot control is the surplus desire constituent in any narrative being placed upon these recordings, and which constantly disrupts every claim to totality.  In this way the repressed desire of the Basement Tapes always threatens to implode the signifying chain impressed upon it by the ideological fantasy.

            This outburst of repressed desire occurs on “Get Your Rocks Off.” This song, called by Marcus, “half obscenity, half ‘don’t tread on me,’”15 formulates the desire as it displaces its pleasure and terror upon the other. It is a song of same-sex couples in sexually ambiguous situations—in bed, alone on top of Blueberry Hill, lying down around Mink Muscle Creek. They are attracted and repulsed by each other, demanding to be left alone but also to be gratified. The quadruple repetition of:

"Get your rocks off! (Get 'em off!)
Get your rocks off! (Get 'em off!)
Get your rocks off! (Get 'em off!)
Get your rocks off-a me! (Get 'em off!)"

Taking different shape with each utterance, swing back and forth between liberation and subjugation. The low background vocal after each line (the parenthetical text above) contrasting with Dylan’s higher-pitched croon deepens this sense of movement in signification, bringing the ear one way and then another.  His laughter as he sings:

Well, you know, we was layin' down around Mink Muscle Creek,
One man said to the other man, he began to speak, he said:
"Get your rocks off! (Get 'em off!)
Get your rocks off! (Get 'em off!)
Get your rocks off! (Get 'em off!)
Get your rocks off-a me! (Get 'em off!)

Comes off as ribaldry of the highest order, the joke flirting somewhere between homosexual and homosocial humor. Yet after three stanzas, of these same-sex ambiguities, the final verse twists the fun in a different direction:

Well, you know, we was cruisin' down the highway in a Greyhound bus.
All kinds-a children in the side road, they was hollerin' at us, sayin':
"Get your rocks off! (Get 'em off!)
Get your rocks off! (Get 'em off!)
Get your rocks off! (Get 'em off!)
Get your rocks off-a me!"

The likening of sexual desire to that of the Freedom Riders crossing state-lines in the interest of Civil Rights suddenly sounds a different note. The same dialectic of freedom and oppression that haunts the perturbed desire of the previous verses here takes on a more specifically political valence. The riders may be fooled by their noblesse oblige, but the children on the side road whom they are ostensibly helping know the score. The children (presumably black) chant the same words as the partners of the earlier stanzas, but those words now take on an added meaning. It is still the same dialectic, but now, under the awareness of blackface’s influences, we might also see a historical significance, as the refrain can be read as a demand to be released from the burden/degradation of being the repository of frustrated white desire—be it sexual or otherwise.16

            This intermixture of sexual and racial desire has powerful antecedents in the history of blackface, where the male dominated stages of the nineteenth century and their cross-dressing performers coupled with the sexually laced dialogue of the minstrel shows often lead not only to racial transgression but sexual as well. Lott has thoroughly documented this fascination with black male bodies in the minstrelsy of antebellum America, concluding:

The blackface image, I have suggested, constituted black people as focus of a white political imaginary, placing them in a dialectic of misrecognition and identification. And this dialectic was achieved by a double structure of looking; black figures (male and female) became erotic objects both for other characters onstage and for spectators in the theatre, with a constant slippage between these two looks. It follows that white men found themselves personified by ‘black’ agents of desire onstage, as in Rice’s O Hush; and this was of course an equivocal ideological effect because, in allowing white men to assume imaginary positions of black male mastery, it threatened an identification between black men and white men that the blackface act was supposed to annul (Lott 152)

The sexualized fantasy of the black body was no more a stranger to post-war America than it was during the heyday of minstrelsy17 , as Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” (1957) makes abundantly clear:

Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing  but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm (qtd in Lott 55)

Mailer’s words document both the mythology of the blacks’ primal connection to the earth, as well as and by extension, their primordial hyper-sexuality. These fantasies are encompassed within a frame of regret for something whites were forced to abandon in favor of the “pleasures of the mind” and the “sophisticated inhibitions of civilization” those pleasures demanded18 , once again articulating the sense of loss located within the white American subjectivity. In the complex nexus of desire over-determining blackface—the constant misrecognitions and fantasy substitutions—the easy slippage in “Get Your Rocks Off” from ambiguous sexual relations to white northerners heading south no longer seems so far-fetched, but can be understood as part of the structure of feeling inherited through a long and tortured history of race relations.

            While these slips between objects of desire may seem, post-facto, unsurprising, they are nonetheless unpredictable, often appearing out of nowhere and with little warning. This is what happens on another traditional blues on the recordings—a cover of John Lee Hooker’s “Tupelo” re-named “The Big Flood.” In the song Dylan engages the burdens and pressures that come with the artificial assumption of another’s experience, and grants a fleeting glimpse at the radical contingency endemic to any such attempt. This song, like so many others from the basement, starts out as a goof. It is just another of a long-line of parodies that inhabit the Basement Tapes, and like most of those others, ends in a place far away from where it begins. This slow Delta Blues motors up, despite its ominous lyrics, innocently enough:

            ..All the little children crying in the streets
            All cryin’ when they heard about the flood
            Ain’t nobody gonna tell you about.
            Yes it just a little country town
            Down in Mississippi
            That’s M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I--P-P-Y
            Mississippi.
            Ev’ry body expecting the flood
            Nobody knew it would happen.

Dylan’s voice is short and lazy. He seems like he could be anywhere and it would be the same as here. The slow, disinterested quality of Dylan’s vocal evokes the languid speech of a porch preacher reciting a story for the umpteenth time, passing the late afternoon before sunset. As the song continues however one hears a gathering sense of urgency. The guitars pick up; the drums beat a little louder; and Garth Hudson’s organ pipes in with a little more authority than originally intended. The adamant indolence in the singer’s voice begins to sound less like indifference and more like evasion—an acoustic mask covering something much deeper than the mere communication of information:

I'se just a little boy at the time; twenty-two years old. I was just walkin' round when the flood started. Mindin' my own business. Tending my cows.
Didn’t have no shoes down in Mississippi…Big Flood. Happened long time ago. I remember it well. I was there. I was there but I didn't want to be there.

Suddenly it is not just a flood but the flood. “I was there but I didn’t want to be there.” The singer’s repetition of his own presence at the event, an event he was certainly not at physically19 , takes on the tone of something far more terrible than the actual rising of water itself. The song written through Hooker’s secondhand experience and copied by Dylan comes at a double distance, yet in Dylan’s singing there is the initial adamant assertion of presence, as if the 1927 flood is a signifier for the metaphoric flood always rising all around us, always ready to wash us away.20 This flood is not merely one thing (the flood of discourse, the flood of history etc), but can be read as an engagement with the Real of our desire, the Real which we both seek and fear. We want the experience of the historic event (its authenticity, the privilege of witnessing something ‘historic’), but once there we become terrified by its traumatic content and turn away, denying our desire for it. The distance between Dylan and the event is in constant unrest between being stressed and overcome, fluctuating as unpredictably as the desire in “Get Your Rocks Off.”

            If Marcus’s analysis works in such a way as to mute this distance (and the difference it entails) by subsuming it under a foundational national signifier, songs like “Get Your Rocks Off” and “Tupelo” constantly reawaken and resist this imposed fixity. They stretch the boundaries circumscribing their signification under such an ideology, revealing any such imposition as ultimately contingent. Whereas for Marcus the authenticity of a past connection—a connection mediated through the American narrative of a “blessed society of right’—is the only guarantor of political activism, it is exactly because of his overlooking of the racial tensions inherited through the history of blackface that his grand dream of a left united under one banner was doomed to fail. His own ideological fantasy prevents him from conceiving why African-Americans would need to construct their own social movement relatively free from the pressures put upon them by the New Left desire for authenticity.

            The publication of Marcus’ book occurred during the heyday of Clintonian liberalism, and it is written in many ways as a legatee of the somewhat dubiously termed “culture wars.” As one parses the prose of the book, one finds shots at what has been rebuked as the “cultural” left whose engagement with identity-based politics has often clashed with the “mainstream” left. In 1998 Eric Lott took a seemingly disparate group of philosophers, critics (Marcus among them), and activists who fell toward the latter position and gathered them into a discursive formation he dubbed, rather controversially, “leftist conservative”.21 A 1998 conference at the University of California at Santa Cruz also opened up a series of explosive debates on the topic where it became increasingly clear that what was at stake on one level was an important theoretical struggle between foundational and anti-foundational approaches to literary and cultural studies.

            While this essay obviously places itself within the purview of anti-foundationalism in regards this debate, the question is not merely theoretical, and has significant contemporary political implications that stem far beyond the boundaries of domestic politics and struggles. As flows of transnational capital continue to increase and questions of US legitimacy engaging in so-called “pre-emptive” strikes are raised, a clearer picture begins to form of the dangers endemic in the belief in a foundational national identity—particularly ones which advocate the United States as a “blessed society of right.” Such advocacies have almost necessarily ended in one degree of reactionary militarism or another, providing the ideological ground from which to launch assaults in “defense” of the nation. If these present-day political struggles seem far away from the idyllic conditions surrounding the composition of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, this distance only serves to reinforce the comment made by the literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” The past lives on as a terrain of struggle whose ground is never fully won by this or that ideology, but remains an open field for which one must always be willing to fight.

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