Losing Himself in the Music
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that makes it so fundamentally they no longer resemble
anything, except the empty figure of resemblance, the empty
form of representation (44).
Such “irreferentiality”—as he describes it—in the symbolic order has made its
way into examinations of the postmodern self. Critics such as Giorgio Agamben
and Victor Vitanza have refined their definition of postmodern identities towards
this idea of “irreferentiality” through the idea of “whatever beings”—those whose
response to questions is most often “whatever”—a word whose meaning is
radically negated by its multiplicity, or, more simply put, a word that suggests
every possibility and hence suggests no meaningful answer at all. Again, this
description of the self is akin to Baudrillard’s description of how media
simulations perform semiotically: “[simulation . . . stems from the utopia of the
principle of equivalence, from the radical negation o f the sign as value, from the
sign as a reversion and death sentence of every reference” (6).
If Eliot preached that the artist should experience a continual extinction
of self, the new subjective nonessential self presented by Eminem becomes a total
of extinction of self. The contradiction and irony of his competing selves become
a radical negation of all references to himself. In “Superman,” Eminem bridles at
groupies who think they know him through his music and the self that he has
presented through it:
I don’t see what the big deal is anyway,
You’re just plain ol’ Marshall to me . . .
Hailie Jade—I love that name,
Love that tattoo. What’s that say?
‘Rot in pieces’—Oh, that’s great.
“Plain ol’ Marshall,” the father of Hailie Jade and an effort on the part of the
groupie to essentialize Eminem, is rejected outright by the rapper: “you don’t
know Marshall.” How can she? In other words, there is no plain essential
Marshall to know through the simulations built by Eminem. As Eminem has
already made clear in “My Name Is”—a song about who Slim Shady is—
extinction of the self is clearly on his mind: “Well since age twelve I felt like I’m
someone else / ’Cause I hung my original self from the top bunk with a belt.”
The multiplicity of Eminem’s selves are evident in this feeling of being someone
else, which has become Eminem’s stock-in-trade: playing roles.
This role-playing and the hyperreality of role-playing is most evident,
though, in one of the songs produced for 8 Mile. 8 Mile is a further extension of
Eminem’s personas as he literally acts like someone else, Jimmy Smith, Jr.,
whose life is based loosely on Eminem’s own. Jimmy Smith, Jr. also reflects
additional multiplicities through his dual identity as the rapper Rabbit. The film,