Introduction
Drawing on the recent âreligious returnâ observed in contemporary social theory, my study will examine a curious but generally overlooked concern with metaphysical and theological issues in popular culture. This study seeks to show that popular forms of expression deserve scholarly attention as significant barometers of emerging societal concerns, predominant issues, patterns, and ways of thinking. Extreme music subcultures, in particular, regularly address themes and concepts traditionally under the purview of theology and aesthetics, such as the sanctity of life, the nature of sin, and the moment of defilement. In the musical subgenre of metal, the profane conditions our experience of the social and the sacred as a means of interrogating broad societal concerns and even engaging normative expressions of the meaningful, the beautiful, and the ethical. My contention is that the more transgressive subculturesâin the case of this study, extreme metalâare heirs to a long tradition of art that articulates our experience of horror, the sublime, and the grotesque as well as our fascination with horror and transgression. Relying on various theoretical sources, especially the early work of French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur (1913â2005), I examine the ways in which extreme metal articulates a profound social and historical aspect of human symbolic experience, one from which religious and philosophical metaphysics have arisen. I argue that the familiar critiques of extreme metal and similar forms of popular culture, far from being simple examples of moral outrage or even moral panic, actually are symptomatic of a certain forgetfulness of the significance of defilement in contemporary culture. This text will show how conceptions of defilement have become diffuse signifiers that contemporary popular culture expresses. In order to accomplish this, I read closely the aesthetic material of extreme metal music and examine how defilement is a significant symbolic node around which most extreme metal musicians make their aesthetic decisions.
In this introduction, I begin by providing a general overview of the concept of âdefilementâ, with particular attention to its place in the work of Paul Ricoeur. Next, I briefly introduce the empirical topic of this studyâextreme metal music, aesthetics, and cultureâas a way of showing how sound and music are paradigmatic of a certain experience of defilement in contemporary society. Then, I lay out the methods that I used to collect my data on extreme metal. Finally, I sketch a brief outline of the flow of argumentation within this study.
Voices from the Past?
Sounds have a particular normative imperative that we understand viscerally and almost naturally, as seemingly pre-verbal experiences that affect and transform our social, emotional, and mental worlds. We humans naturalize sound in a way that is often difficult with words and images. At the same time however, sound and music have also gone through those same periods of symbolic transformations, deconstructions, rationalizations, and formalizations that words, ideas, and the visual arts have. Sound is just as much about ideas, ethics, and aesthetics as any of these other disciplines, yet we contemporaries experience sound and music as something immediate, normative, yet inexplicable. Weber (1978) recognized that music reflects the material and ideal relations of a society and believed that the particular kind of rationalization process that the West experienced led to polyphony and harmony that developed specifically in the West. Jacques Attali (1975), the professional French economist, famously argues that the organization of noise into music reflects and heralds the normative constitution of our social relationsâsomething that annunciates the social relations to come while at the same time existing as a threat to the prevailing order. Attali argues that music, beginning with an economy of sacrifice of which it was an integral part, has always been subject to social control because it has always elicited both the ideals and the threats to the hegemonic order of the time. The normative necessity of sound can partly explain why at the same time, noise is also profoundly controlled and mediated through various social and judicial institutions. Other more recent texts, such as Steve Goodmanâs (2009) Sonic Warfare, have shown also the extent to which governments and militaries have used sound, music, and noise as forms of coercive force and even of weaponry, from using metal music in interrogation and torture rooms, to âsonic bombsâ to terrorize the inhabitants of the Gaza strip. What these texts show is that noise is capable of both altering affective social landscapes and at the same time making apparent the meaningful, normative, and intellectual limits and boundaries of society.
Extreme musics in the West have proven to be just such a socially significant normative force. By existing at the normative boundaries of music, extreme metal has caused a great deal of concern. People from many countries have found extreme metal to be offensive, implicitly carrying the possibility of negatively affecting or even corrupting the people listening to it, leading to the judicial control of the music and its creators (Christe 2004). This particular experience of corruption is most telling of the phenomenological and historically dense symbol of defilement. Extreme musics, and especially extreme metal music, reflect a complex of social, economic, and cultural processes. In my estimation, extreme musics in the West have reflected generally the nihilistic tendency of the rationalization of social and intellectual discourses that Weber spent much of his career documenting (Weber 1946, 1978, 2003). My aim in this book is to attempt to elucidate broad ethical and normative frameworks of meaning that repose upon the nature and experience of religious signifiers exemplified within extreme metal.
More than reflecting ethical and normative frameworks of meaning, music also heralds explanatory frameworks, conceptions of causal relations and contemporary discourses of identification and affiliation. In fact, the experience of elusive cause and affronts to normative social frameworks of meaning is what makes extreme metal such an interesting example to explore. As an extreme music, it exists at the boundaries not just of behavior and appearances, but also in the sonic constitution of our normative world. Extreme metal has been at the center of social and political debates surrounding censorship since the âsatanic panicâ of the 1980s. These debates typically exhibit causal correlations between extreme youth violence and an individualâs interest in certain counter-culture musical genres, lifestyles and predilections (for discussions on the prevalent censorship debates and major figures, see Christe 2004, 290â303; Dunn 2005; Purcell 2003, 83â93; Walser 1993, 137â172). Yet, to look more closely at those criticisms, we can see that, in one sense, they arise from the tacit understanding that youth identification with counter-cultural music constitutes more than merely individual musical choice. Even if misguided, these criticisms understand that musical preference presupposes lifestyle, identity, ethical considerations, and even metaphysics (abstract concepts that we deem to be real). What is implicit in the criticism of extreme metal is the correct assumption that while taste bears upon issues that pertain to the identity of the individual it can also reveal transgressions of established social, political, and religious categories of the meaningful, the beautiful, or the ethical. What is questionable in the popular criticism of extreme metal is the psychological assumption that anti-social tendencies in the individual are the sole motivation for identification with this music. What censorship debates, popular media explanations, and early sociological literature on metal characterize as individual, reactive and anti-social behaviors may actually express a deeper social experience of a shocking, morally transgressive, and darkly critical and ironic aesthetic experience.
I contend that grotesque art utilizes the symbolism of defilement in order to evoke the sense of disorientation and to transgress social norms. Expressions of the grotesque as shown in aesthetic popular culture phenomena do not exist as purely nihilistic, asocial phenomena; rather they make structures of meaning more apparent by the transgression of boundaries and implicit value systems. If the sublime needs the grotesque (as Chao 2006 argues) then extreme metal reasserts the normative assumptions of our culture by representing the hidden face of our deepest fears, frustrations, and existential concerns. Extreme metal discloses to us the complicated symbolic lineage that transgression evokes. My wager is that the symbolic node of extreme metal is the notion of defilementâthe performance and evocation of defilementâand that this structure of defilement is the foundation of those seemingly basic visceral experiences of horror, terror, and the grotesque within aspects of contemporary popular culture. I argue that the myriad, conflicting, and often contradictory themes that extreme metal evokes all have affiliations with one another through the pervasive symbolism of defilement. In essence, the aesthetics of extreme metal represent for my research a paradigmatic limit case for the contemporary understanding and experience of evil in popular culture. In particular, popular normative conceptions of causal relations that place music as an indication and even a causal factor for youth violence is expressive of the symbolism of defilement. At the same time defilement structures extreme metalâs expression of evil and the grotesque in the music itself in band and album art, self-representations, and lyrics.
Paul Ricoeurâs (1969) thoughts can help deepen an understanding of the grotesque as more than merely an aesthetic category but comes out of an imperative within the âsymbolism of defilement.â Ricoeur maintains that defilement is fundamental and ultimately reminiscent in our current secular age to any experience of the sacred or the good, whether modernity has repressed, forgotten, or even flattened these conceptions. My argument is that more than merely an aesthetic category, the grotesque articulates social experiences that modernity has attempted to erase but through which the symbolism of defilement keeps alive. Modernity has also sought to expunge this same symbolism of defilement in its attempt to flatten metaphysical conceptions of the good. Our current age conceals the basic structure of defilement precisely because of the manner in which scientific understandings of the world and the language of clarity have taken over the etiological significance of myths. In extreme metal, and especially in the way it combines grotesque art with an experience of transgression, we see the residual effects of this repressed structure of defilement. In this sense, and in the manner in which it provokes an experience of indeterminacy and disorientation in the audience, extreme metal possibly evokes distant voices from the past.
Defilement in a Post-secular Age
This study relies on the wager that defilementâa set of symbols and ways of thinking often believed to be archaic, forgotten, and deconstructedâstill contributes to how people orient themselves, respond to, and explain things in the world. Paul Ricoeurâs work of the 1960s and his long-term preoccupation with understanding the human as culpable, fallible, and fragile helps situate some of the major characterizations of our current age as variously post-metaphysical, post-critical, post-religious, post-secular, and the age of interpretation. Situated in this context, I argue that defilement, thought to be extant within our current age, finds its expressions within marginal aesthetic genres such as extreme metal and it is through these genres that we can uncover a sense of the contemporary significance of defilement.
Scholars of religion have long thought that defilement has had an important place in the history of religious thought and experience. In fact, most scholars that have discussed defilementâfrom Robertson Smith (1894) to James Frazer (1922); Emile Durkheim (1912) to Mary Douglas (1966); Paul Ricoeur (1969) to, most recently, Julia Kristeva (1982)âbelieve that it is the most basic principle upon which the sacred and profane distinction is founded in most religions. While there are many cognate terms associated with the experience of defilement that are symbolically specific to individual religions and modes of religious behavior and rituals, the basic definition of defilement refers to the primary metaphorical and symbolic experience of social stain or taint and the associated methods and related rules used to mitigate this impurity. These scholars argued that, traditionally, foundational distinctions between clean and unclean, pure and impure, defilement and its expiation have dictated the religious and normative fabric of the social world.
According to Ricoeur, defilement is the symbolic and historically situated expression of a deeper constitution of the human subject. Essentially, defilement is the first-order, abstracted, symbolic expression of an innate and ubiquitous experience of human life. The human, plagued by the inability to reconcile the two fundamental poles of its existenceâthe voluntary and involuntary, the finite and infiniteâis constitutively a fragile creature, subject to a fallible nature (1986). The contingent experience of livingânecessityâwhich includes desire for what lies outside the subjectâs boundaries, undermines every attempt for wholeness. In The Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur argues that one can only gain access to this experience through that which lies outside the self, namely through the analysis and interpretation of the symbolic expression of this marked split. This important realization necessitated for Ricoeur a distinct shift from his earlier, more technical, phenomenological orientation of this innate experience with profound implications that Ricoeur contended with throughout his career. In essence, the experience of fallibility is the historically contingent symbolic experience of a more fundamental phenomenological experience that has been taken up in symbols, myths, and finally, philosophy.
An important question within Ricoeurâs early texts of the 1960s is to query t...