2018: the year Kanye West finally came out of the cultural conservative closet.

Following a month-long Twitter screed in which Mr. West revealed his support for President Trump, Kanye finally dropped his 8th album, ye. Coming in at a concise 24 minutes, ye surprisingly remains fairly uncontroversial throughout, especially when compared to the two tracks Kanye released leading up to the album. Both “Ye vs. the People” (a political back-and-forth between Kanye and fellow rapper T.I.) and “Lift Yourself” (a throwback sped-up gospel beat with Yeezus-esque dark, urban jungle drum and bass intermixed with what can only be best described as a “scat rap”) wouldn’t have fit into the album for obvious reasons and dampened the blow of anything controversial on ye since it’s generally inoffensive by comparison. However, as a whole, ye reveals a lot about Kanye’s current mindset and tells us a lot about the contemporary subjectivity of the rich and (in)famous.1

Before diving into the aspects of ye that have broader social implications, I’d like to first address his comments on (transatlantic) slavery. Building on his statements he made at the TMZ headquarter a few months ago, Kanye states the following in “Wouldn’t Leave” (the 3rd track of ye):

I said, “Slavery a choice”—they said, “How, ‘Ye?”

Just imagine if they caught me on a wild day

Now I’m on fifty blogs gettin’ fifty calls

My wife callin’, screamin’, say, “We ’bout to lose it all!”

Kanye’s claim here is ignorant on two levels. First, it lacks any historical perspective. He implies that the individuals sold into slavery were aware of the exact conditions they would face across the ocean. Before Western contact, sub-Saharan Africa already had established systems of slavery. The type of slavery practiced was much different than transatlantic chattel slavery. Slavery was typically a (relatively) short-term status which an individual could earn their way out of. Most of these slaves were domestic servants rather than brute physical laborers. When Europeans came and offered money to purchase the slaves, the owners had no major incentive to not sell, especially considering they’d rather have the Europeans take the slaves by exchange rather than by force. Had Kanye been alive at the time, he might have ended up enslaved during an unsuccessful battle, where he wouldn’t be able to escape no matter how wild his day was.

But that might actually be part of what he’s trying to say: he’d rather die than be a slave. This is the second layer of ignorance. Unlike the first layer, this layer represents an ignorance of others’ perspectives rather than historical realities. Even if a large majority of slaves had committed suicide in response to becoming property, there would still be a number of slaves that would choose to live. Those remaining slaves would likely have children who would not know anything but being enslaved their whole lives. Kanye is (probably inadvertently) implying that these children, once becoming conscious of their status, should kill themselves (either through suicide or fighting slavers). And even if that chain of events happened on a massive scale, there would still be people who would choose to live. Without a Jonestown-like mass suicide, there would have been no way for the enslaved to end slavery by ending their own lives.

Despite the massive amount of ignorance displayed by Kanye’s simplistic view of slavery, there is a somewhat coherent point to be taken away from Ye’s seeming acceptance of death. A striking similarity is found in the Letters of Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger: 2

“Rehearse death.” To say this is to tell a person to rehearse his freedom…A person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. …no one has power over us when death is within our own power.

While more abstract and introspective in nature, the point Seneca made mirrors Kanye’s. They both claim that if you accept death as an inevitably and allow yourself to live without fear of death, you will never be constrained by any form of a “death in life”, where subjects are made utterly powerless and unfulfilled, occupying no autonomous subject position (much like a slave). This view of life coincides with another theme present in both of their works: the concept of the “unity of opposites” which traces its roots back to the pre-Socratic Heraclitus. Seneca found that dichotomies composed of seeming oppositions (e.g. good vs. bad) are actually what imbue either side of the dichotomy with meaning: 3

…if I could show you some men of the highest renown, men held up as objects of wonder and admiration, in whose to case to amend their faults would be to destroy them, their faults being so inextricably bound up with their virtues. No moment is exempt: in the midst of pleasures there are found springs of suffering. In the middle of peace, war rears its head…

Kanye expresses comparable thoughts on the first track of ye (“I Thought About Killing You”):

The most beautiful thoughts are always besides the darkest

Today, I seriously thought about killin’ you

I contemplated, premeditated murder

And I think about killin’ myself

And I love myself way more than I love you, so…

Today, I thought about killin’ you, premeditated murder

You’d only care enough to kill somebody you love

The most beautiful thoughts are always inside the darkest

Seneca and West are in agreement that life (and death) should not only be accepted in its boring, average, everyday form, but in its extremes, that bring both blissful happiness and bleak sadness in periodic waves. While Seneca’s proof lies in virtuous men having vices which sustain those virtues, Kanye’s lies is wanting to hurt those you love and being suicidally depressed while also taking intense psychedelic drugs such as 2C-B and DMT (as is mentioned in the second track of ye, “Yikes”). 4 Although placing the two texts side-by-side appears ridiculous at first, doing so allows us to more easily see the metaphysical implications of Kanye’s lyrics on ye rather than focus on how they relate to his actions as a public figure.

Is Kanye a philosophical genius? Sadly not. Without even going outside of Seneca (as we could do with the nearly 2,000 years of philosophy that came after him), nuances can be found in the Letters that show the deficiencies of Kanye’s limited worldview. In the Letters, Seneca states 5

Show me a man who isn’t a slave; one is slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear.

While Kanye and Seneca are similar in their perception of the fear of death as limiting, Kanye differs in that he does not carry out this critique to all fears or hopes (i.e. inverted fears) that drive an individual. While Seneca’s stoicism has a coherency in that it promotes limiting ones ambition toward that which they can already attain, Kanye oscillates back-and-forth between (at least theoretically) accepting and limiting suffering and accepting as much suffering as is necessary to satisfy pleasure.

How can a egotistical multi-millionaire be a slave? While Kanye may not be directly subordinate to any other particular individual, he continues to be driven by what popular opinion dictates of him. When Kanye says “We all self-conscious, I’m just the first to admit it!” in “All Falls Down” off of College Dropout, he is really projecting his own deep-seated insecurities. Although his recent bombastic behavior makes it appear that he “doesn’t care what anyone else thinks”, he depends on this disapproval to legitimize his self-importance. Kanye is much more the slave of Nietzsche’s “slave morality” than Seneca’s slave. While Kanye maintains a relative position of power, he must constantly justify this power and act in a way that signifies his power for it to maintain actuality. As Alenka Zupančič explains in her book on Nietzsche The Shortest Shadow: 6

In using the word “slave,” Nietzsche is referring not to the “oppressed,” and the “subordinated,” but to a different kind of master. He is referring to masters who are eager to legitimate their mastery with some positive feature or content, to “rationalize” it, to justify and ground it in some “empirical” factor (knowledge, wealth, honesty. . .). Nietzsche finds this turn toward the legitimization (and justification) of power “slavish”; he considers the very idea of a “legitimate power” obscene.

While Kanye’s wealth and fame afford him a lifestyle that most would consider quite freeing if they were able to experience it themselves for a few days, he is only able to sustain such a lifestyle by working at the behest of the market and the millions of faceless individuals that constitute it. Even though Kanye attempts to subvert this by obtaining an absolute freedom through accepting death, the freedom left in the wake of this realization leaves more answers than it solves. Zupančič continues: 7

Nietzsche’s remarkable thesis is that intimate, “inner” freedom can function as the ultimate prison, that it represents the most subtle and perfidious form of slavery.

Similar to Foucault’s famous claim that “the soul is the prison of the body” in Discipline and Punish, Nietzsche points out how one can be a slave not just by the limiting of choice, but by the paralyzing number of choices beyond comprehension that come with absolute freedom. As Nietzsche makes explicit in his essay “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life”:

This is a universal law; a living thing can only be healthy, strong and productive within a certain horizon: if it be incapable of drawing one round itself, or too selfish to lose its own view in another’s, it will come to an untimely end.

Rather than providing the subject with ultimate agency, the proliferation of choice actually limits the subject’s ability to act. Kanye comes surprisingly close to this same realization in his song “New Slaves” off of Yeezus:

You see it’s broke nigga racism

That’s that “Don’t touch anything in the store”

And it’s rich nigga racism

That’s that “Come in, please buy more”

“What you want, a Bentley? Fur coat? A diamond chain?

All you blacks want all the same things”

Used to only be niggas, now everybody playin’

Spendin’ everything on Alexander Wang

New slaves

Although money appeared to be the tool that African Americans could use to pull themselves out of subordination (at least as Kanye has it), it instead provided yet another medium for that subordination to be articulated. Instead of breaking the chains of enslavement, consumerism only offered a multitude of different chains, coming in a variety of colors and materials. Post-modern consumerist capitalism has made the satirical slogan of 1984 a reality: freedom is slavery, or, at least, the freedoms offered to us force us to participate in our own unfreedom. We are bombarded with a myriad of choices each and every moment, but we do not “choose to choose” this, to paraphrase Slavoj Žižek.

How do seemingly free choices cause us to be more unfree upon the act of choosing? The psychoanalytic concept of death drive can be instructive here. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud opposes death drive(s) (Todestriebe(n) or the “compulsion to repeat”) to the life drive(s) (Lebenstriebe(n), composed of the erotic instincts and the ego instincts). Lebenstriebe is guided by two metapsychological principles: the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The pleasure principle states that an individual seeks to gain pleasure and avoid unpleasure. The reality principle states that an individual will, at times, undergo momentary unpleasure in order to bring about a greater amount of pleasure later. The two principles imply one another: pleasure needs unpleasure to sustain itself and vice versa.

However, the Lebenstriebe do not offer a complete picture of desire. As the title of the book indicates, Freud identified a series of behaviors that could not be explained by the pleasure/reality principles, necessitating a new drive to explain them. Contrary to Lebenstrieben, subjects often force themselves to undergo unpleasure, not as an attempt to induce pleasure later on, but as a means to “master” this unpleasure, to make a perverse pleasure out of unpleasure itself. Freud evokes the image of a child’s game of fort/da (gone/there), much like the American staple peek-a-boo. In the story, Little Hans has a ball, which he continuously throws somewhere out of reach, which he is then able to retrieve. When he throws the ball away, he shouts Gone! (fort), and upon its return, There! (da). In this game, Little Hans in not getting satisfaction out of having the ball but from the play resulting in continuously losing/retrieving the ball (which stands in for the impossible object of his desire, the Lacanian objet petit a). The desire for the ball is never fulfilled, but Little Hans derives direct pleasure from satisfying the (death) drive of the ball’s loss (and subsequent retrieval), producing a pleasuring unpleasure.

If, like Lacan, we assert that all Triebe are derived from Todestrieben, i.e., all drives are satisfied as process rather than in completion, we can see how Kanye as subject is “doubly inscribed” by the production/desiring processes. In order to be able the make the choices that allow Kanye to attempt to satisfy inherently unsatisfiable desire, he must participate as a subject of the production process for material sustenance. His “freedom” (which is really only the desiring process appearing as a free choice) is sustained only in so much as he directly participates in his unfreedom. As Žižek states in Incontinence of the Void: 8

…the proletarian who sells his labor-power is doubly inscribed: he is a subject, a free agent, and at the same time a “thing”, a commodity sold on the market.

Although Kanye does not fit the image of the everyday prole, he is separated from his labor/self in the obverse fashion. Whereas the inability to fully identify with the products of one’s labor leaves a lack in the proletarian, the forced over-identification of the bourgeois artist with the product of their labor creates an excess which is generative of the subject’s de-subjectivization (I am relying on Žižek’s Lacanian-Hegelian positing of the ambivalence or dual aspects of lack/excess with this notion). As Žižek continues to explain: 9

Value production can thrive only if it incorporates its immanent negation, the creative work that generates no (market) value, it is by definition parasitic on it.

Despite displaying himself as a self-obsessed individual who works for no one other than himself, Kanye produces more for the capitalist symbolic order than he does for anyone else. While most only contribute to their own oppression by being forced to offer the surplus-value of their commodities to their oppressors, Kanye’s commodities re-enforce non-value which value production needs as an exception to sustain itself. While he might materially benefit more than anyone else from his music, he ends up symbolically supporting a system which benefits (more powerful) others much more than himself. Death drive, while appearing as the process of ultimate Sisyphean freedom, creates the stage for contemporary capitalism’s transmogrification of freedom into unfreedom.

Contrary to his multiple claims of “feeling free” in both ye and KIDS SEE GHOSTS, Kanye is actually less free than he has been at any other point in time. Even the disgruntled GAP employee of “Spaceship” appears more free than the contemporary Kanye. At least then, Kanye could establish and differentiate his identity from “the powers that be” and society as a whole by pointing out its contradictions through narrating his own dysfunctional place within it. Now, as an unabashed cheerleader of conservative ideology, Kanye is more POWERless than ever.

Kanye’s 5th album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, expressed similar themes in a much more powerful way. Analyzing it in comparison would warrant an entire new post, but it suffices to say that I chose ye as the subject of this post solely because of its topicality, not because it’s the best Kanye has to offer thematically or sonically. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, and Robin Campbell. Letters From a Stoic: Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. First quote 72, second 183 Ibid. First quote 216, second 178 Ye’s evocation of DMT and 2C-B is surprisingly apt for the current analysis: they both show the two sides of psychedelic “extremes”. 2C-B, legendary chemist Alexander Shulgin’s favorite drug, is known as one of the most stimulating and erotic psychedelics. In contrast, DMT is the most visual and hallucinatory psychedelic, much more like a comatose dream than all-encompassing mania. We could even make the homology of DMT : Dream : Lack and 2C-B : Mania : Excess to make things even easier. Ibid. 95. Zupančič, Alenka. 2003. The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 44. Ibid. 40. Žižek, Slavoj. 2017. Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 222. Ibid. 233.