I doubt whether anyone reading this will need to be told that Mark K-P has written brilliantly on Michael Jackson, or that Shaviro has too, and so has Owen. I’m afraid I’m not going to write about Jackson, brilliantly or otherwise, because I haven’t much to say besides the obvious: Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough defies emotional gravity; Bad and almost everything subsequently denies it, initially with panache (Smooth Criminal) but increasingly luridly as time goes by.

Shaviro makes a couple of points that stick with me: the first is this one about aesthetic singularity:

The point of a successful aesthetic singularity is that it crosses over directly into the form of the universal, without all those mediations that usually come between. Something is so absolutely unique (even when we can trace all the sources from which it arose) and so absolutely, achingly, joyously or heart-wrenchingly right, or just itself, that it becomes a kind of universal value. (In philosophical terms, this is what Kant was getting at with his insistence upon the universal communicability of an aesthetic judgment devoid of cognitive principles and rules; or what Badiou is getting at when he speaks of an event; or what Deleuze was getting in his account of what he called “counter-actualization”).

There’s a kind of short-circuit implied in this crossing over without mediation: the “successful singularity” is “just itself” (I can’t not hear “justly itself” here) in a way that breaks the usual contexture of identity (a matter of being positioned and formatted in a way that makes the object intelligible to discourses of identification). And this leads us on to the other point of Shaviro’s that struck me:

In a certain sense, Michael Jackson’s diffuse expression of sexuality, which so many people have found disturbing, because it doesn’t fit into any normative paradigm, is the “line of flight” along which he continued to singularize himself, to a point beyond which universalization was no longer possible. It has a sort of negative relation to the deployments of sexuality in American popular culture today, where an evident explicitness and overtness of expression are purchased at the price of an increasingly narrow and normative range within which such expression is permissible, or even thinkable. You can be as raunchy as you want to be, as long as you remain even closer to the pre-established stereotypes of masculinity and femininity than was required in the pre-“sexual liberation” times of the 1950s. Michael Jackson’s refusal, or inability, to give more than rote lip service to this requirement, is the aspect of his persona, or expression, that is least understood today, and that desperately needs to be more fully explored.

Here is Jackson as a different kind of sexual outlaw: not taboo-infringingly explicit (in fact, never that, for all the frantic pelvic action), but somehow subtracted from “adult” sexuality, not altogether asexual but not identifiably (or actionably…) sexual either. No-one will ever quite be able to say what Jackson was, sexually, and whatever questions might remain about his conduct with children, it’s impossible to identify a coherent sexual agenda (whereas we generally recognise in paedophilic abuse the imposition on children of an adult sexual hunger). I don’t find myself willing or able to follow Jackson very far along this particular “line of flight”, but agree with Shaviro that its “negative relation to the deployments of sexuality in American popular culture” merits examination.