You will write a response (650 words) to each performance you attend for class.

The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dancing Work

!"#$%& &'()*'

JUDITH HAMER A, professor of perfor-

mance studies at Texas A&M University,

College Station, is the author of Parlor

Ponds: The Cultural Work of the American

Home Aquarium, 1850–1970 (U of Michi-

gan P, 2012) and Dancing Communities:

Performance, Difference, and Connection

in the Global City (Palgrave, 2007). Her

current research examines intersections

of performance and American deindus-

trialization, with particular attention to

Michael Jackson.

Neverland could never have happened without Gary [Indiana]. —Denise Jordan Walker, tour guide (qtd. in Rousseau)

Automatic, Systematic / Full of color, self- contained / Tuned and gentle to your vibe

—+e Jackson 5 (“Dancing Machine”)

 B Y ANY OBJECTIVE CRITERION, MICHAEL JACKSON IS THE CLOSEST thing to a consensual virtuoso performer that late- twentieth- century popular culture produced. Sales ,gures, fans’ a-ective

investments, the acclaim of virtuosic peers, the foundational contri- butions and innovations for which he is credited—all attest to his command of the central paradox intrinsic to virtuosity: the ability to appear path- breakingly original in a way that is collectively obvious. Further, if all virtuosity can be described as “precarious excellence,” Jackson’s was more precarious than most: veering spectacularly from an inde,nably pleasurable surplus (more talented, more charismatic, more “something” than his brothers) to equally inde,nable and un- toward excesses (too many strange stunts, too many surgeries and antics with boys, too much of too much).. +e narrative arc of his virtuosity was always already entangled in multiple overlapping narratives of di-erence, including raced and gendered histories of American popular performance, the possibilities and limits of the mutable self, the bedrock or millstone of family, the pleasures and perils of spectacle, and the permissions and constraints of celebrity. +ese narratives have been picked apart in the popular press and, to a lesser degree, in the academy, while another issue remains largely unexamined: the relationship between Jackson’s virtuosity and the

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changing political economy of American work. Scholars have commented on Jack- son’s discom!ting ability to straddle multiple binaries: man/ woman, gay/ straight, black/ white, child/ man.2 Yet one underlying binary remains unremarked except, as the !rst epi- graph indicates, by those in his hometown: that of Gary/ Neverland—the seeming !xity of industrialization versus the neither- here- nor- there #uidity of neoliberal globalization or, in broader terms, Zygmunt Bauman’s “solid” versus “liquid modernity” (6–8). Jack- son’s virtuosity cannot be understood apart from these conditions.

Jackson’s virtuosity as a dancer at the height of his career reveals a neglected as- pect of virtuosity in dance more generally: its highly allegorical, nostalgic activation of imagined, idealized relationships between the body and work abandoned by the relentless motility of capital, allowing audiences to view these vanishing modes with a romantic, back- ward glance. Some dance techniques generate this nostalgia by mystifying these relation- ships. Ballet soloists, for example, beckon spectators with the phantasmic possibility of artisanal ownership of one’s own labor through e$orts so exceptional and so sublime they transcend even gravity. Jackson’s vir- tuosity does not work in this way, though it does include its own speci!c appeal to tran- scendence, about which I say more below. His particular virtuosity triggers nostalgia for a vanishing industrial past in ways best under- stood through the trope of the human mo- tor, while only barely containing the multiple contradictions and exclusions endemic to the industrial modernist project, especially those around race. %is trope is set in motion by the intersection of his movement vocabulary and key elements in the narrative construction of his celebrity, especially as these appear in his autobiography, Moonwalk (1988). Under- standing Jackson’s virtuosity as the performa- tive activation of industrial nostalgia allows us to make sense of some puzzling critical

responses to his dancing and o$ers new in- sights into relationships between dance and work in the last half of the twentieth century.

This essay examines selected perfor- mances from 1983 to 1988, the height of Jack- son’s dance career—the short !lms (the term he preferred to video) Thriller and Smooth Criminal and his performance on the tele- vised anniversary celebration Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever—as well as the autobiography, which serves as the rhetori- cal underpinning of his virtuoso narrative. I begin by discussing the key factors that po- sitioned Jackson as a potent cultural actor during this period: the relational economy of virtuosity leading to a$ective investment in the exceptional performer, the allegorical potential of dance to illuminate other forms of labor, and the complex intersections of race, performance, and industrial modernity that pre!gured him and persist in his reper- toire. From a theoretical and historical back- ground, I turn to analyses of Jackson’s dances and movement vocabulary.

Virtuous and Virtuosic Work

Dancing is work: a job, the product of labor. It is also allegorical: a “mix of making and reading” regimes of work “combined in one” (Fletcher 10). %is dual status makes dancers significant, if largely unrecognized, rhetori- cal actors in public imaginings of bodies and work. Bodies in motion offer visible, potent templates for imagining ways work is produced and consumed. Virtuoso performers illumi- nate these dynamics with special intensity.

Three aspects of virtuoso performance contribute to its critical slipperiness. First, its de!nitional precision is inversely propor- tional to its seeming self- evidence. Audiences know it when they see it, and what they see challenges referentiality while inviting a veri- table mash- up of metaphors. Virtuosos are “angels,” “devils,” “heroes,” “monsters,” “ma- gicians,” and “machines,” sometimes all at

 The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dancing Work [ P M L A

once.3 As these images suggest, virtuosos are human, but not quite: they are something else, something more than the sum of their merely human parts, and de"nitions strain to cap- ture both the performer’s humanity and this peculiar excess. #e term virtuoso migrated from Romantic classical concert music. Criti- cal histories of virtuosity o$en begin with the violinist Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840), whose performances enraptured audiences and led peers to proclaim themselves “already dead,” so great was the perceived gulf between his talent and their own (Brandstetter 178). David Palmer uses Paganini as the paradigm case for de"ning virtuosity as “the art of incredible skill which displays a heightened sense of self- expression, evokes a distinctive a%ecting pres- ence and transforms ways of viewing human agency” (345), to which Brandstetter, also us- ing Paganini, adds the exceptional “charisma” projected by the performer (178).4

Second, de"nitions of virtuosity are most effectively operationalized in comparisons with nonvirtuosos. Jackson’s performance with his brothers as the reunited Jackson 5 at the televised celebration of Motown’s twenty- "$h anniversary is illustrative. Jackson sang “Billy Jean” and introduced the moonwalk at this concert, but his solo e%ort was preceded by the group’s rendition of Jackson 5 hits. Michael is clearly the front man, though the medley features shared choreography. Many of his moves seem almost throwaway—time- keeping or rhythmic punctuation—but are executed with a precision and vehemence rendered more compelling and eye- catching against the comparative docility and root- edness of his brothers. He inserts rapid- "re corkscrew kicks and effortless close- legged spins almost gratuitously. The casualness with which the spins are tossed off belies their tightness and smoothness: he looks as if he is on ice while his brothers are weighted down. In line formations, he is visibly more taut and, simultaneously, very loose- jointed. His hip thrusts are sharper, his dimestops

(complete pauses, usually transitions between moves) more abrupt, and his crouches with turned- in knees so extreme they are almost grotesque. Yet these moves resolve so quickly into other steps that the group choreography seems utterly staid by comparison, and this underscores Michael’s virtuosity even fur- ther. His dancing is so superior to his broth- ers’ that he seems to physically enact the group’s inability to contain him (Jackson 5, “Motown Medley”).

Finally, though virtuosity presents itself as a quality of exceptional individuals, it is a relational economy—relational in more ways than in one performer’s surpassing of an ac- companying ensemble. It does not operate apart from communally sanctioned ideals of appropriate, even virtuous, display, and this is the source of the virtuoso’s power as an allegorical cultural actor. “Knowing it when seeing it” is recognition of the preexist- ing consensual template for reading the per- former’s seemingly effortless effort and the audience’s affective responses, conjured by the performance. #is template binds the au- dience to the performer, inviting attachment, identi"cation, and desire across some dimen- sions of di%erence—for example, gender and race—while performatively reinforcing oth- ers, which are then coded as “talent” or “ge- nius.” Simply put, virtuosity is a recognizable plot into which audiences set an exception- ally skilled, charismatic performer. It orga- nizes their own attachments and longings by projecting these onto, then enabling them to consume, others’ bodies on stage. Virtuosity alerts audiences to the noteworthy aspects of such bodies (both virtuous work and the transcendence of it) and to “appropriate” feelings about them (identification as well as alienation). Virtuosos incarnate “plots of possibility” for audiences—seeming mastery of one’s own labor and the a%ective surplus it generates—even while demonstrating the au- diences’ inability to activate these plots them- selves. #ey are objects of both attraction and

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anxiety simultaneously: reassuring and dis- turbing (Hamera 42). In the public sphere, their successful performances pull together a!ect and e"cient work so that these appear to coalesce naturally into ideologically potent plots of virtuous, visible labor and its equally virtuous consumption.

Virtuosity as a relational economy is par- ticularly complex in popular performance, in which communal ideals of virtuous labor cir- culate within frames of reference more elas- tic than classical concert music and dance. Consider the case of the saxophonist Kenny G., who, the musicologist Rob Walser asserts, “is in fact a virtuoso of a particular kind. His intonation is #awless, even on the treacher- ous alto sax. He plays #urries of notes with tremendous technical precision. He controls his instruments perfectly, doing with them exactly what he wants to. He plays ornaments on his ornaments, with nuances on his nu- ances” (34). Yet, despite his popularity, Kenny G. is also reviled, particularly by jazz a$cio- nados, who seem to delight in imagining his demise. For these detractors, Kenny G. is not virtuous enough. He violates jazz norms of “finding music” through “struggle” (36). %e jazz virtuoso should be more hero than magician, more devil than angel. Walser ar- gues that “violent reactions to [his] music . . . surely betray a widespread cultural discom- fort with, even contempt for, sensitivity” (37). This virtuoso reassures too easily and too well: Kenny G.’s perceived excessive emotion- alism is too much, while his e!ortless e!ort is not enough. He is too problematic an object for identi$cation, at least for one potential fan base, to earn his virtuosity.

As a dancer, Michael Jackson demon- strates the exceptional sk ill, self- evident, almost fantastic agency, charisma, and tran- scendence of nonvirtuosic peers common to all virtuosos. Yet his dancing is too o'en dismissed, in part because it falls between the conventions of popular and concert dance that de$ne virtuous work in performance. Virtu-

osity in concert dance is most obvious at the ends of a continuum of labor visibility: battles with technique that are clearly battles and po- sition the artist as hero, as in athletic butoh, or those in which the technique is so over- matched by the performer that it looks easy, as in ballet or tap, which positions the artist to be read as angel, magician, or machine. In popular dance, virtuosity is most recogniz- able in athletic, spectacular, “di"cult” moves that are, at the same time, strongly narrative and highly emotional. Jackson’s virtuosity is subtler and more complex. He combines ex- ceptional musicality, precise execution, and a repertoire that draws from so many genres it is best described as “polycorporeal” with re- curring invocations of hard work belied by the apparent e!ortlessness of his performances. Conventional virtuoso dancers make visibly difficult moves look easy; Jackson takes de- ceptively simple steps and complicates them in performance. His virtuosity is a function of his execution of these moves, not any inherent complexity of the moves themselves.

Critics of his dancing o'en miss the vir- tuosity of his execution—the actual work he does in performance—defaulting instead to presumptions about originality and spectacu- lar di"culty putatively intrinsic to particular steps. For example, in an otherwise laudatory essay Joan Acocella obser ves that Jackson “didn’t have a lot of moves. You can almost count them on your fingers. . . . He created very little dancing that was different from his own prior numbers, or anyone else’s.” She concludes that in his short $lms “dance is ter- tiary, even quaternary. . . . Jackson didn’t value his dancing enough” (77). Likewise, Peggy Phelan describes him as a “captivating (albeit relatively narrow) dancer,” while noting his “two- step, the double gesture of appropriating and transforming” other artists’ moves (944). But to fully grasp the complexity of Jackson’s virtuosity and its allegorical relationship to the changing nature of American work, it is important to read the speci$c dynamics of his

 The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dancing Work [ P M L A

performances, as well as to probe the precise point where “narrowness” and polycorporeal appropriations meet in performance.

Jack son’s movement vocabu la r y was relatively small, though his repertoire be- came richer and more complex over the pe- riod considered here. !e moves in !riller (1983) and in his performance of “Billy Jean” at the Motown twenty- "#h- anniversary con- cert (1983) are simpler than those in Smooth Criminal (1988), one reason the "rst two are more frequently reproduced by fans. Taken together, these three performances represent the range of his dancing at the height of his career. He makes extensive use of his knees, especially Charleston- informed moves from turned in to turned out, as well as isolations, quick corkscrew kicks, closed- leg spins, pelvic thrusts, toe stands, variations on the electric slide, and standing struts. He pops and locks his joints, juxtaposing these against seem- ingly weightless glides. He also makes ex- tensive use of “the robot” and variants, and of the dimestop. !ese elements are not dif- "cult in and of themselves. Indeed, in Smooth Criminal, they are reproduced, albeit not nearly as well, by one of the children spying on Jackson in the "lm’s nightclub setting. His virtuosity comes from the interrelationship of his musicality and the sharpness of his at- tack. Jackson seemed proud of this dimension of his performance style, underscoring the point by invoking Fred Astaire, who report- edly called him “a hell of a mover” (qtd. in Jackson, Moonwalk 213).

As Margo Je$erson aptly observed, Jack- son’s moves, particularly his quick changes of weight, are both “liquid and percussive” (87). He is able to forcefully insert half and quar- ter steps while visibly working within, not against, the music. He is also extraordinarily clean, even while extremely fast. His lean line emphasizes that every strut and kick is sharp and fully stretched, completed to the tips of his toes. In rapid- "re combinations, his pre- cision, especially his articulate management

of his joints and his feet, makes him readily discernible from others in the ensembles he leads or in crowd scenes when neither his face nor his costume is fully visible. He also dis- plays an impressive ability to clearly present contrasting moves in the same choreographic phrase. Thriller is an interesting case in point. In an early scene, when he and Ola Ray skip from the theater toward their eventual zombie encounter, Jackson’s liquid, almost weightless skips make his sti$- armed zom- bie walks seconds later seem so extreme and, therefore, so playful. His dance with his zom- bie chorines begins with isolations on beat, then switches to quick pelvic g yrations: a simple physical passage that is challenging to execute with the requisite sharpness, as dem- onstrated by hundreds of Jackson’s %ash- mob imitators. A few of his moves, like his forward lean and hyperspin in Smooth Criminal, were enabled by special e$ects. But these e$ects- assisted moves differ from the rest only in degree, not in quality: a bit more extreme, but exhibiting the same intricate coupling of grace and vehement precision that character- izes Jackson’s dance in this period.

Romantic constructions of virtuosity ob- scure the mechanics of creative production: hence the mystifications of the performing “angel” or “magician.” In contrast, Jackson routinely exposed the very labors that vir- tuosic dance—and his particular percus- sive liquidity—generally conceal, disrupting conventional visual equations of economy of input yielding spectacular output. E&ciency and precision in performance are always de- scribed as work. Jackson insisted on narrat- ing the labor involved, even in rare moments when he “let the dance create itself,” as he did when he choreographed the moonwalk for his performance of “Billie Jean” on Motown 25 (Moonwalk 210). Yet even here, as if to em- phasize that no dance really creates itself, he also highlighted his efforts as a choreogra- pher for the same show in ensemble numbers with his brothers that he “choreographed and

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rehearsed . . . for days” (208). Jackson never colluded in the rhetorical consignment of his virtuosity to the ephemerality of talent; it was always produced through repetitive hard work. Most important, he did not im- provise in performance; he consistently de- ployed the vocabulary of choreography and rehearsal as a way of establishing the labor pedigree of his dances. In so doing, Jackson exposed the unseen work of virtuoso perfor- mance—the labors that defined him by, in his view, erasing his childhood—and aggres- sively intervened in the stereotype of African Americans as “natural” dancers. He writes, “Black people are truly innovative dancers; they create many of the new dances pure and simple” (210). "e agency articulated in the terms “innovative” and “create” challenges racist dismissal of African American dancers as mere imitators of European culture just as Jackson’s adult invocations of hard work fore- close a priori attribution of his abilities to ei- ther “genes” or “genius” (Gottschild 110). On the rare occasions when he presents himself as a uniquely gi#ed dancer, it is not as a cho- reographer, nor as an instinctual artist, but rather as a quick study (Moonwalk 136).

In addition to his physical facility and discipline, Jackson’s virtuosity is inextricably linked to place and race: the socioeconomic landscapes from which it emerged or, as the popular mythos has it, the places from and to which he “escaped.” He was a child of the American industrial heartland, born in the steel- mill town of Gary, Indiana, and molded in the self- consciously Fordist studios of Detroit’s Hitsville, U.S.A.: Motown. His re- peated references to his childhood as a non- stop regimen of rehearsals and performances lay the narrative groundwork authorizing his virtuosity as something other than talent, charisma, or luck. This was not simply the dancer’s pleasure of practice, though Jackson does write about his love of performing. Even so, from a very young age, he argues, he was another working sti$ who did not and could

not control his own labor. In Moonwalk he writes, “I was reminded of that old song by Clarence Carter called ‘Patches,’ where the oldest son is asked to take care of the farm a#er his father dies and his mother tells him she’s depending on him. Well, we weren’t sharecroppers and I wasn’t the oldest, but those were slim shoulders on which to place such burdens” (150). Jackson’s repeated refer- ences to the burdens of his childhood and the image of the sharecropper, albeit disavowed, underscore the black body’s very speci%c and intimate relationship to oppressive regimes of work. Jayna Brown notes that this relation- ship was embodied by a much earlier genera- tion of black child performers crossing the country, and the ocean, over a century before Jackson took the stage with new versions of some of their moves.5 For Jackson this was a matter very close to home.

Michael Jackson was the driven son of a driven father. Joseph Jackson, Michael’s fa- ther, was a crane operator for U.S. Steel and an R & B guitarist. In Moonwalk, he seems much more of a shi# boss. Both father’s and son’s escapes from alienating regimes of work required strict adherence to more of the same: slowly building capital through “overtime” re- hearsals and performances, the equivalent of second and third shi#s to re%ne routines with Taylorist precision.6 Reference to the share- cropper aside, Jackson’s family was itself a site of industrial (re)production: a factory turning out professional entertainers. In Michael’s ac- count, Joseph’s demands for productivity in this arrangement unrelentingly trumped the unstructured pleasures of childhood. In this regard, the Jackson family dynamic resonates powerfully with Robin D. G. Kelley’s obser- vations about the e$ects of racist, exploitative labor practices in black working- class fami- lies. He writes that these families

were sites for internal con(icts as well as key institutions for sustaining a sense of commu- nity and solidarity. If patriarchal families are,

 The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dancing Work [ P M L A

at the very least, a system by which exploited male wage earners control and exploit the la- bor of women and children, then one would presumably !nd a material basis for a good dea l of intrafamily conf lict, and perhaps an array of resistance strategies, all framed within an ideology that justi!es the subordi- nate status of women and children. (36)

"e trope of the family as locus of production was repeated when Jackson and his brothers signed with Motown, whose corporate dy- namic operated through a rhetorical sleight of hand that shifted between business and family, most notably in the uncanny ability of Berry Gordy, the company’s founder, to oper- ate as pater familias and factory boss. Gordy had in fact worked at the Ford Wayne Assem- bly Plant and spoke explicitly about the assem- bly line as Motown’s production model (Smith 14). "is same tropic intertwining of family and factory circulated through the vernacu- lar of American industrial modernity: union members were “brothers” and a corporation like General Motors was a “generous mother.” "e trope also recalls other sites where black bodies, the family, and (re) production as work were intimately linked, including the “family” of a plantation, where, as Hortense Spillers writes, “fathers could and did sell their sons and daughters” (qtd. in Brown, Babylon Girls 24), and troupes of black performers that were literal families (e.g., the Whitman Sisters) or metaphorical ones.

Jackson’s virtuosity is inextricably tied to working- class credentials forged through both his own labors and those of his father. He observed, “A part of my earliest memories is my father’s job working in the steel mill. It was tough, mind- numbing work and he played music for escape” (Moonwalk 8). In underscoring his class background, Jackson made members of the working class gener- ally, and the black working class in particu- lar, visible as creative cultural actors in the hegemonic American public sphere. This was in itself a meaningful intervention, as

the normative working body of American in- dustrialization was presumptively white and heteronormatively male. Jackson would not trouble the latter attribute until later in his career, but his insistence on recognition of his labor pedigree challenged typical representa- tions of black life as bimodal (elites versus the multigenerational poor), even as it challenged virtuosity as magically produced (Pitts 99). It also performatively refuted the “sneering ref- erences” to black workers as lazy that “typi- !ed the manner in which whites could still use Blacks as a counterpoint to come to terms with their own acceptance of steady and even regimented labor” (Roedinger 180).

In his own “escape” from Gary to Nev- erla nd, Jack son seemed to incarnate t he promise of Fordist labor, one rendered retro- spectively simpler, more desirable, and more egalitarian by the emerging economic disloca- tions of deindustrialization. He could parlay the discipline and sweat equity of the mill and the assembly line into virtuosic class mobil- ity. Of course there are multiple ironies here. First, as noted above, he could embody a ge- neric American industrial imaginary that in fact consolidated itself through the exclusion and exploitation of black workers. Second, his father’s insistence on f lawless execution and his own perfectionism positioned Jack- son within what Paolo Virno calls “servile virtuosity,” a de!ning mode of post- Fordism characterized by, among other things, the imperative to be excellent all the time as the only bulwark against one’s own dispensability (196).7 Finally, Jackson could only embody a longing for this vanishing industrial past be- cause he so completely escaped it. From the 1970s through the period covered here, he was the Horatio Alger of the moment at which industrialization’s putative promises were morphing into something else: something seemingly more precarious, more Darwinian. Indeed, the entire arc of Jackson’s career par- allels the dismantling of this very industrial infrastructure; both accelerated in the 1980s.

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Relocated to “Neverland” in California, later in his career and in a period not covered in this essay, he could no longer embody both the virtuous results of industrial discipline and escape from it. Instead, he seemingly enacted the !ighty irresponsibility of capital itself, increasingly deterritorializing his ear- lier, carefully wrought relationships between e"ort and visibility, uncoupling the labors of celebrity from the work of performance. In this new iteration, the body of the performer came to stand in for the absence of his own labor and exposed the very corporeal and socioeconomic incommensurabilities of pro- duction, consumption, and visibility that vir- tuosity was supposed to reconcile. He himself became an object of nostalgic longing: where was the Michael Jackson of !riller?

Punched Out

Jackson’s virtuosity cannot be understood outside the economic moment that produced him. Daniel Bell may have optimistically viewed the “post- industrial society” as a quasi- evolutionary outgrowth of earlier formations, but, as a brief review of American deindustri- alization indicates, it was neither inevitable nor accidental. #e 1970s saw gradual erosion in the importance of industrial policy, partic- ularly regarding manufacturing, over against the rise of trade to support the economies of strategic Cold War allies. #ese allies, partic- ularly in Western Europe and Japan, quickly became competitors, further undermining job security for American workers in the domes- tic manufacturing sector. During this period, the United States “replace[d] the assumptions that capital and labor should prosper together with an ethic claiming that the promotion of capital will eventually bene$t labor—trading factories for finance” (Stein, Pivotal Decade xii). #e steel industry that employed Joseph Jackson was at the very center of this change, as it was for every major sociopolitical transi- tion in the postwar United States.

Several key events and policy decisions led to the steel industry’s systemic decline, which is illustrative of the larger trajectory of deindustrialization. In 1973, one year af- ter the release of Jackson’s $rst solo album, Got to Be !ere, the OPEC oil embargo and subsequent dramatic increases in fuel prices touched off a pernicious global recession, coupled with high in!ation, from which the developed world was slow to emerge. The economic malaise persisted through the mid- 1970s. President Jimmy Carter, fearing “the fragility of the world, not the U.S. economy,” and ardently committed to “reduc[ing] in!a- tion, where steel always played a role,” force- fully advanced policies favoring steel imports despite accusations of foreign—particularly Japanese—dumping (Stein, Running Steel 234). Meanwhile, as t he domestic indus- try su"ered, the Export- Import Bank of the United States was providing a multimillion- dollar loan to a South Korean company to $- nance a new steel mill in South Korea.

#e results of these policies were devastat- ing and appeared very quickly. In September 1977, over 2,500 workers at U.S. Steel in Gary were ruled eligible for “trade adjustment as- sistance”: bene$ts for those “who believe they have been or will become unemployed due to increased imports” (“U.S.”). Judith Stein es- timates that in August and September alone at least twenty thousand domestic steel jobs were lost as mills closed across the country (Running Steel 235). By the end of October, in- dustry earnings were plummeting; U.S. Steel’s dropped by almost seventy- six percent in the third quarter (Salpukas). In December George Meany, AFL- CIO president, blasted the Carter administration’s trade policies, arguing, “Free trade is a joke and a myth. And a Government trade policy predicated on old ideas of free trade is worse than a joke—it is a prescription for disaster” (Flint). He singled out the steel industry as particularly imperiled.

#is systemic drive to deindustrialization reached its apogee (or nadir) under President

 The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dancing Work [ P M L A

Rona ld Reaga n, elected in 1980. Reaga n “[r] educed taxes on capital, dismantled busi- ness regulations, privileged the !ght against inf lation, tolerated high unemploy ment, fought unions, promoted an expensive dol- lar, and championed free trade. His policies altered the composition of the U.S. economy. They promoted financial services and real estate and injured manufacturing” (Stein, Pivotal Decade 263). Membership in private- sector unions plummeted, spurred on by Reagan’s wholesale !ring of the Professional Air Tra"c Controllers Association a#er a job walkout in 1981, which created a ripple e$ect that strengthened employer resistance to em- ployee labor actions across the country. Wage packages shrank, labor costs were driven down, and no palliative jobs programs were o$ered. African American families were pro- foundly a$ected. Rising incomes and falling poverty rates, particularly between 1967 and 1973, had halted and, in hard- hit rust- belt economies, reversed. Unemployment rates for black workers were devastatingly high (Pitts 101). In this atmosphere of rising inequality and job uncertainty, Fordist labor conditions began to look like the good old days and Jack- son o$ered a reassuring spectacle: both the triumph of and the triumph over the human motor through the hard physical work, preci- sion, and e"ciency emblematic of industrial glories now clearly vanishing.

Dancing Machine

Automatic, Systematic

In his precise attack, preternatural cleanness and speed, explicitly mechanistic movement vocabulary, and recurring invocations of re- petitive work, Jackson both incarnates and transcends the trope of the human motor, combining the virtuoso’s seemingly mechan- ical exactitude with suprahuman charisma. Anson Rabinbach argues that this trope is “a paradigm of social modernity” linking “ex- panded output, greater work performance,

and more energetic workers” to social reform through metaphors drawn from thermody- namics and a larger “science of work,” includ- ing Taylorism (293). Popular performance was central to the domestication of the trope. The Fordist production model t hat sup- planted Taylorism as the paradigmatic inte- gration of worker and machine was praised in dancerly terms with the noise of the assembly line as the score.8 &e new model was, as Ezra Pound put it, “an experiment in tempo” that provided the “swing and exuberance which would increase production” (qtd. in McCar- ren 134).9

Concert and popular dance simultane- ously domesticated and resisted American industrialization in its most pivotal decades. Whether “internalizing the machine into the body” through biomechanics exercises and “machine ballets” or challenging Taylorized economies of gesture through “exotic” dis- plays of heightened affect in the modern dances of Isadora Duncan and Martha Gra- ham, amateur and professional dancers pro- vided generative strategies for organizing bodies and imagining alternative structures of physical productivity and primitivity (Mc- Carren 130).10 &e chorus girl was especially evocative of connections between dance and industrial work, and black dance moves were central to her allegorical potential. As Brown observes, the chorine incarnated both “indus- trial capitalism’s disciplinary claims on the (white) body’s time and energies and the . . . potential freedom and pleasures technologi- cal innovation was making possible” in urban centers (Babylon Girls 5).11 Black dance vo- cabularies were key components of the reper- toire across the color line: “Dance techniques developed by African American women vital- ized the white dance instructor’s choreogra- phy” of chorus routines (169). Brown argues that nostalgia for vanished modes of pro- duction from the “primitive,” preindustrial past was read onto or against black popular dancers by both black and white audiences,

1 2 7 . 4 ] Judith Hamera 

particularly in t he Depression era, when “[b] lack nostalgia, the desired return to a sim- pler time, ran alongside white romanticized versions of the black folk” (194).12 Half a cen- tury later Jackson would also evoke nostalgia at a moment of economic crisis, this time for the “simpler” life of the industrial worker.

In both the Taylorist and the Fordist scenarios, the exemplary human motor com- bined speed, efficiency, the minimum ges- tural range deemed necessary, the illusion of overcoming fatigue, and visibly high pro- ductivity. Jackson presented all #ve qualities united in and as virtuoso performance. He made the human motor lyric, beautiful, and personally expressive. But, in his testaments to the hard physical labor of performance, he also challenged romantic construction of the virtuoso as perfect human motor by in- sisting that dance was actually work, not the transcendence of it. He also challenged its presumed whiteness, as discussed below. Fur- ther, his laborious virtuosity was contagious. As his countless imitators demonstrate, audi- ences are not content simply to watch him. $ey consume and reproduce him at the level of their own musculature, making Jackson both a motor and a generator.

The trope of the human motor also in- vites reconsideration of Jackson’s pacing and his rejection of consistent full- body shots for quick edits that isolate parts of the dancing body. Across his repertoire, Jackson performs quick combinations, pauses, then executes others. $e pauses are complete—he is per- fectly still—but they are also tensive: not re- laxed, but poised for reactivation. $e e%ect recalls William Faulkner’s observation that “the cost of electricity was not in the actual time the light burned but in the retroactive overcoming of primar y iner tia when t he switch was snapped” (88). Though Jackson never conveys inertia on stage, he does dem- onstrate absolute command of the energ y needed to repeatedly snap the switch. Un- like “the master,” Fred Astaire, who favored

full- body shots, Jackson used editing to un- derscore his pacing despite its fragmentation of the dancing body; this choice is at the root of Acocella’s charge that he “didn’t value his dancing enough” (77). But this assessment ig- nores both the relationship between editing and his phrase- pause- phrase rhythm and the importance of isolations in his dancing.

Smooth Criminal is an interesting ex- ample. Midway through the #lm, the tempo slows dramatically as Jackson begins to moan, the ensemble moves as if in a collective trance, and a black cat walks across piano keys—its discordant notes underscore the surrealism of the scene. In succession, Jackson nods, only his head moving rhythmically up and down visible in the frame; snaps his fingers in a close- up of his hand; stamps his right foot in a full- body shot; and repeatedly &exes his right arm upward in a shot of his upper body. $e tight and long shots have the same e%ect: they underline each isolation within an erotic yet stylized sequence. Even when combinations do not contain such obvious isolations, as in the !riller zombie dances in which shots of- ten focus on Jackson’s upper body, the editing directs the viewer to speci#c gestures (shoul- der raises, in this case), inviting recognition of larger relations between a percussive part and the &ow of the whole. $is editing strat- egy emphasizes that precise, “narrow” ges- tures are the drivers making the entire dance go in ways that parallel the relationship be- tween the Fordist worker’s production moves and the overall &ow of the assembly line.

Jackson was not unique in his ability to embody the human motor in performance. As McCarren notes, mechanistic elements are now commonplace in popular and concert dance: increasingly prominent hip- hop vocab- ularies “embody the drive and frenzy of auto- mation, of robots . . . the fragmented gestures of the assembly line and time clock” (193). $e ubiquity of mechanistic movement at a decid- edly post- Fordist moment is an interesting development in the light of two interrelated

 The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dancing Work [ P M L A

historical trajectories, one pointing forward and the other backward. !e "rst involves the progressive marginalization of American con- cert dance in public discourse throughout the twentieth century and into the present. Mc- Carren argues that the “interpretive grid of modern industry” sidelined concert dance as a generative cultural metaphor (5). It became increasingly peripheral to discourses about embodiment in industrial and postindustrial modernity.13 Indeed, the critical neglect and misreading of Jackson’s dancing (as opposed to the structures of his celebrity) are symp- toms of this marginalization.

But Jackson’s virtuosic execution of the human motor in ways that now appear in mainstrea m concer t da nce a lso gestures backward to the early decades of industrial- ization—specifically, to the intersection of public performance and social and economic change in this period. In Highbrow/ Lowdown: !eater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Mid- dle Class, David Savran documents the rising anxiety around the “Fordized human sub- ject,” both white- and blue- collar, who, in the 1920s, had been “transformed into an exten- sion, simulacrum, or machine” (139). While the pleasures of precision were modeled by the chorus line, Savran notes that “cultural critics consistently displaced their anxieties about an exhilarating, frightening Machine Age” onto another mode of popular perfor- mance: jazz. Jazz was a “maddeningly monot- onous music” that “had passed through the stereotyping machine to emerge as standard jazz- finished one- steps, as tinny and char- acterless and undistinguished as a school of Fords” (139–40). !ere was a strong under- current of racial anxiety in this jazz aversion, exempli"ed by the pains so many took to ex- cise blacks from the idiom. George Gershwin, for example, “aimed to dispel the ‘supersti- tion that jazz is essentially Negro’” (71). !e excision of blackness is another hallmark of the connection between jazz and the indus- trial imaginary: both depended on whitening

the means of production. When jazz dancers put “jazz music in motion” during this period (Malone 91), it impelled whites to literally follow in the footsteps of black artists who originated the moves.14 Sixty years later, Jack- son’s virtuosity both challenged the putative whiteness of that industrial imaginary and answered charges that he and his jazz ante- cedents were either characterless and limited or undisciplined primitives. He used moves drawn from jazz dance and jazz dancers to revive a sanitized version of the promise of that now vanishing age, even as manufactur- ing jobs chased increasingly globalized cheap labor to be replaced by lower- wage service jobs when they were replaced at all.

Automatic, systematic: Jackson’s dancing romanticized the seamless fusion of dancer and/as machine, one “tuned and gentle to your vibe,” f luidity always working within, not against, his percussive phrasings. In so doing, he recast the trope of the human mo- tor itself as a site of nostalgic longing. Ford- ist mechanization viewed retrospectively through the anxieties of deindustrialization was not standardized racist wage slavery but a race- neutral vehicle for self- expression and mobility, just as Motown, modeled on the Ford assembly line, conveyed the Jacksons out of the inferno of Gary’s steel mills to a phantasmic place of control over their labor: neverland indeed.15

Full of Color

Of course the trope of the human motor has a far older and darker history: mechaniza- tion e'ectively replaced slave labor, America’s “other” human motor. Indeed, it is possible to argue that industrialization’s human mo- tor whitened manual labor and, in turn, the American ethnic groups most likely to em- brace factory work as a tool of social mobility. !is human motor, coupled with the racial- ized history of American industrialization and its unraveling, demands acknowledgment

1 2 7 . 4 ] Judith Hamera 

of Jackson’s mastery of polycorporeality over against claims that he is a narrow dancer.

Simply put, Jackson’s dances conjure many bodies: those of African American per- formers well- known and unknown and their high- pro!le white counterparts. His moves quote Josephine Baker, Cab Calloway, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, James Brown, Jackie Wil- son, and anonymous street dancers, to name only a few sources.16 $e number of steps in his repertoire may be small, but the histories, choreographic strategies, and performance styles he draws on are anything but.17 In this sense, Jackson is not a narrow dancer but a synecdochal one: the visible parts of his per- formances invite recognition of a much larger and more diverse corpus.

$us, Jackson did more than invoke and lyricize a nostalgically idealized human mo- tor and, with it, an entire mode of produc- tion. He also reminded his audiences that this motor was “full of color” all along: performa- tively tricking back on the racist exclusions of black workers from the promises and rewards of industrialization by drawing on tropes of African American performance going back a hundred years. Industries like steel and auto, which in a sense birthed Michael Jackson, drew willing black workers from the Ameri- can South to Gary and Detroit throughout the middle of the twentieth century. Over !f- teen percent of the region’s black population migrated to work in steel during the 1950s (Stein, Ru nning Steel 39). $ese workers were met with systemic racism from management and unions across industrial sites; seniority systems kept them out of top jobs and af- firmed racial hierarchies. Institutionalized discrimination was challenged from below— with, for example, the formation of counter- unions like the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement in Detroit, in 1968—and from above, as in a 1974 consent decree between the federal government, the steelworkers’ union, and the steel industry that provided plant seniority for all. $e results, however,

were negated by American policies sacri!c- ing domestic manufacturing for trade and finance. To add insult to economic injury, in a repudiation of black workers’ battles to secure equal access to well- paying industry jobs, Stein points out that institutional racism led to actively blaming victims of these poli- cies for their e&ects: “During the 1960s, the nation attributed black unemployment to rac- ism; during the 1980s, black unemployment came to be seen as a preference for idleness. . . . In both eras, racial ideology mysti!ed the sources of black unemployment . . . ,” e&ec- tively concealing the systemic redirection of capital to nonmanufacturing sectors (321).

Jackson’s activation and transcendence of the trope of the human motor positioned him as an agent within an industrial imagi- nary that never wanted to include him. More- over, by invoking movements drawn directly from the African American dance repertoire, he performatively integrated the presumed whiteness of these industrial mechanisms, inserting bodily comportments that racist infrastructure tried !rst to exclude and then to pathologize. During this period, he de(ly played both sides of virtuosity’s rhetoric of transcendence. Still recognizable as a black man during this period, Jackson could both perform readable racial identity as a black working body and invoke the extraordinary artist’s putative demographic transcendence using a tactical double positioning repro- duced in movement. His transitions from splaying knees to multiple spins emphasized mastery of vocabularies popularly regarded as both racially particular and universal, danc- ing both together in ways industrialization never would, all the while performatively re- futing racist charges of idleness and reduction to “nature” (versus discipline and “culture”).

Modernity has always loved its ruins, and postindustrial modernity is no exception. Images of abandoned, crumbling factories in American rust- belt cities now circulate as

 The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dancing Work [ P M L A

disaster porn, feeding a voyeuristic fascina- tion with scenes of underclass decay. Popular response to Jackson’s virtuosity has followed the same trajectory; it has also come to rest on morbid fascination coupled with nostalgia. I suspect the physicality for which he is most re- membered is not his dancing but his changing face. In a video setting these shi!ing tectonics of Jackson’s face to sinister music, the viewer is "nally confronted with a question just as ap- plicable to the shattered industrial infrastruc- ture and equally shattered neighborhoods of Gary or Detroit: “If this is what’s happening outside, what’s going on inside?” (Morphing). Jackson’s virtuosic activation of the human motor o#ered a fantasy of unalienated labor in an industrial modernity that was and never was. It could be mastered through hard work, activated as an aesthetic of personal and racial agency, and even become, potentially, eman- cipatory. Ultimately, though, the increasingly global f low of capital was itself a hell of a mover and Jackson, no longer publicly danc- ing, too much an embodiment of its irrespon- sible caprices and the devastating a!ere#ects of its failures. By the time of Jackson’s death in 2009, his American audience was already consigned to neoliberal neverland, le! to the tender mercies of some very smooth criminals in a postmanufacturing age.

NOTES

The author wishes to thank Alfred Bendixen and Kiri Miller for their contributions to this essay.

1. The formulation “virtuosity as precarious excel- lence” was developed by Brandstetter, Brandl- Risi, and Eikels in the context of the research project “Scenes of Virtuosity,” part of the Collaborative Research Center’s larger project “Cultures of the Performative,” at the Freie Universität Berlin. It captures both the constraints of economized, post- Fordist virtuosity and the seemingly structural instability in the concept of virtuosity itself: “Virtuoso performances do not subject their value to gen- erally binding social structures of productivity. . . . %is very individuality and display of self- will has also made

virtuoso performers suspicious in the eyes of their con-

temporaries” (Brandstetter, Brandl- Risi, and Eikels 2).

2. For representative examples, see Mercer; Fuchs; Fast.

3. Brandstetter 178; Palmer 341; Hamera 40–41.

4. Samson also adopts Paganini as a paradigm in his

discussion of virtuosity.

5. Brown notes that transatlantic touring “pic a ninny

choruses” were dialogically linked to the working child

of industrial En gland through an undi#erentiated com-

parison of all exploitative labor to chattel slavery, sug-

gesting that “the appeal of the scampering, resilient black

children on stage was perhaps that it brought an imag-

ined health to the bodies of the factory children” (Bab-

ylon Girls 42). %at appeal may also have been nostalgic.

With the coupling of blackness and childhood coded as

doubly “primitive,” these laboring youngsters may have

also conjured a longing for the putatively carefree days of

the agrarian past or for the sunny climes of En glish colo-

nies in the global South, where dark- skinned children

and their parents also toiled.

6. Taylorism is the ostensibly scienti"c system devised

by Frederick Taylor in 1911 for managing work. Its key

features include time- motion studies, task allocation,

and standardization of tools.

7. Virno’s use of “servile virtuosity” is multifaceted;

outside the post- Fordist context, the phrase conjures a

century and a half of American racialized performance

and spectatorship that turned on spectacles of black “ser-

vility,” most notably minstrelsy, the corked- up parody of

black vernacular dance that was, in turn, executed by

black performers themselves to forge a living out of the

genres of public performance available to them. Jackson’s

explicit incorporation of tropes of African American ver-

nacular dance also spoke back to this very di#erent his-

tory of “servile virtuosity.”

8. Doray enumerates the differences between Tay-

lorism and Fordism.

9. Pound’s racism, the relationship between the “swing

and exuberance” of jazz and industry discussed by Savran,

and industrialization as a tool of hegemonic whitening are

linked in the poet’s observation that “[m] odern man can

live and should live in his cities and machine shops with

the same kind of swing and exuberance that the savage is

supposed to have in his forest” (qtd. in McCarren 134).

10. Brown argues that racialized gender techniques

underpin modern dance from its inception: “%e moth-

ers of modern dance shaped their sexual mysticism from

Orientalist fantasies, spun from the hootchy- cootchy

dancers on the midway fairgrounds” (Babylon Girls 157).

11. Connections between the chorus girl and indus-

trialization involve more than the repertoire. In one case,

John Tiller, a bankrupt En glish industrialist, and his wife

opened a school to train chorines, giving girls an alterna-

tive to factory work (Brown, “From the Point of View”

165; Glenn 176, 178).

1 2 7 . 4 ] Judith Hamera 

12. In addition to racialized preindustrial nostalgia, the 1930s brought a hardening of genre divisions separat- ing white modern dancers, especially those active on the political le!, from white culture- industry professionals of- ten characterized as apolitical. "ese divisions obscured larger relationships between dance and speci#c ideologies of work, as well as all dancers’ rhetorical and social au- thority as workers. One lasting legacy of these divisions is the paucity of critical attention paid to contemporary pop- ular performers, and virtuosos in particular, as clarifying examples of “virtuous” workers. Franko and Gra$ provide a fuller history of these divisions and their consequences.

13. "e trope of the human motor has fared no bet- ter t han concert dance. Rabinbach suggests t hat t he human motor has largely disappeared as a meaningful heuristic, along with the “work- centered society” from which it arose, writing, “With the declining signi#cance of industrial work as a paradigm of human activity and modernity, the body no longer represents the triumph of an old order of productivism” (300). He is both right and premature. "e human motor may have vanished from the intellectual frameworks of scientists and social re- formers, but it never le! the stage.

14. See also Brown, “From the Point of View.”

15. "ough a complete survey of Jackson’s work be- tween 1983 and 1988 exceeds the scope of this essay, note that many of his #lms are explicitly nostalgic for periods rooted #rmly in the heyday of American urban industri- alism. For example, !riller’s 1950s teen romance/ horror scenography of postwar prosperity becomes a landscape of the vaguely postindustrial uncanny: darkened hulks of buildings, vacant lots, deserted streets. Even the “moon- walk” has an air of nostalgia about it: a reference to a now bygone era characterized by a triumphal coupling of sci- enti#c and manufacturing prowess, despite the fact that the actual move is evocative more of a conveyor belt than of weightlessness.

16. Astaire and Kelly were themselves quoting the movement styles of African American predecessors and contemporaries (Gottschild 32–34).

17. Jackson’s well- documented borrowing of steps from predecessors and street dancers can be productively explored using embodied theories of intellectual prop- erty. As Kraut demonstrates, these theories, including the parameters for acceptable “stealing [of ] steps,” en- abled African American dancers to negotiate authorship in the context of segregation and before dance obtained copyright protection, in 1976 (179).

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