vesivett.

The first is my issue with the word appropriation. According to Oxford English Dictionary, the verb appropriate means “to take for one’s own purpose, typically without the owner’s permission.” This definition is simple, yet there is much packed into it. What does it mean to own a (piece of) culture? What does it mean to take a (piece of) culture? The answer to these questions become muddy when we think about the Harlem shake itself. By many accounts, the Harlem shake originated from a resident named “Al B” in 1981, often done in a state of inebriation. Al B has cited the dance’s origins in ancient Egypt, stating because the mummies were all wrapped up all they could do was shake. Bracketing out a discussion of the accuracy of such a legend, let us take Al B’s claim serious that he was channeling the spirit of Egyptian mummies. Does that the mean the “Harlem Shake” is just an appropriation of Egyptian culture? Where is the origin of a dance, which is another way of asking: who owns the dance? Appropriation depends on defining our relationship to objects through the lens of property relations, so that an object is the property of a person or group. This relation is always already thorny, but is especially cut by cultural objects. Cultural objects can certainly be commodified, but the issue of ownership is always wrapped up in relations of power, privilege, and propriety. It is no coincidence that appropriate is also an adjective meaning “proper”: property, appropriate, and the proper (propriety) all share the same latin root proprius meaning “to own.” If we cannot properly delineate ownership for the cultural object, then it is open for the free use by any and everyone. This, of course, props up particular relations of domination, coercion, and force, which will bring us to my second issue with the concept of “appropriation.”

If we are to talk about commodities and property in relation to culture, this should swerve us face-first into the topic of slavery and specifically the “human commodity” known as the slave. What is important to distinguish here is that the slave is not simply an “unpaid” or hyper-exploited worker, but a being open to infinite desires of the master, including (and especially) the wanton violation of her body and gratuitous violence. The most horrifying to consider here is that the very happiness of the slave was owned by the master – this means the master often forced the slave to perform songs on the auction block, in the coffle to it, and for the slave to smile and laugh and joke in his/her presence (this is described as the “terror of pleasure” by Saidiya Hartman in her magnum opus Scenes of Subjection). This politics of appropriation can find its “origin” dispersed among the performance of domination we know as the peculiar institution. What we have called “appropriation” implies that black people own their culture and the master stole it from them. Yet, when we let go of romantic terms our claim sounds like this: a piece of property owns a piece of property and was stolen by the citizen who owns them both. How does a commodity own a commodity? How does the owner of that commodity steal a commodity from his own property? If this sounds cruel, we must remember that property relations (ie the relation of “people” owning things) is not natural, but produced in the development of liberalism that is founded within and because of racial slavery. The master is the embodiment of the liberal subject, a being that can own things. The liberal subject is defined as everything that the slave is not, ie the liberal subject owns slaves because the slave cannot own anything. What is revealed in the terror of the peculiar institution is not that black people have no culture, but it is that everything we did was owned by someone else. The relation of blackness to world has since survived into the time we call “post-emancipation,” and can be traced in the historical development of popular culture, beginning with minstelsy. Blackface minstelsy began in the age of slavery, most notably popularized by Thomas D. Rice’s performance of slave dances and rhythms in songs like “Jump Jim Crowe” as well as his abolitionist performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Appropriation does not only imply ownership, but also respect – a proper way of doing things – that is the very anti-thesis of the slave relation that forms the foundation of our society’s relationship to blackness. It is not simply that slaves could not own property legally, but it is to say that the ontological distinction that makes the propertied subject (and the very concept of property) possible demands the slave to be vulnerable to a perpetual state of disrespect and violation.

All this is to say that the concept of appropriation mystifies what is actually happening when white people “steal” black culture. Stealing implies a crime or a sense of wrongdoing or doing something improper. Yet the very concept of the proper – as well as property – depends on the black to be radically open to violation. So it is not improper to violate the black, it is in fact the definition of the proper itself. That Harlemites are demanding “props” is indicative of this mystification, for the fact is that nothing was stolen. They never owned their own culture, in any sense. They owned nothing, so nothing was stolen. But I am not really saying anything new here, and I doubt I am saying anything they did not already know. Instead, I am laying the groundwork to think through another way of understanding the suffering they are testifying to. It is not that something was stolen from them, but it is that their bodies were evacuated in the process of making Baauer’s “Harlem Shake.” This is the grammar of obliteration, and to explicate this we should return to my original Google search for Azealia Banks’ remix.

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.