Good Vibes, Bad Vibrations: Countercultures Between Potentiality and Materiality in Emma Cline’s The Girls (2016) and Zachary Lazar’s Sway (2009)

Abstract

In his infamous testimony at the Tate-LaBianca Murder Trial Charles Manson blames the murders on music, defining music as a conspiracy to “rise” and “kill” (quoted in Bugliosi & Gentry 1974: 508). While we know that it was not music in and of itself that caused Manson Family members to commit murder, Manson’s depiction of music as an agent of violence is in so far interesting that it suggests an affectivity of music. Music – in its capacity as sound - therefore, seems to be able to transform its potentiality (vibes) into materiality (vibrations), such as suggested by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Acting from the margins, therefore, the Manson Family, as a marginalized form of society, transforms its potentiality into the materiality of the body when committing the murders.
Considering sound as an affective agent, it is not surprising to come across sound as a frequently used motif in fiction depicting countercultures. Using Emma Cline’s The Girls (2016) and Zachary Lazar’s Sway (2009) as examples I argue that countercultures, like sound, subsist on potentiality in contesting values and habits of normative mainstream society. This potentiality manifests itself in materiality in the form of bodily repercussions (sexual exploitation, rape, violence and murder). Both novels explore the manifestation of countercultures in materiality by both making use of sound as an underlying analogy and framing it as the counterculture’s driving force. In my analysis I, therefore, take into account the affectivity of sound on the materiality of the body, which, according to Brian Massumi, “[…] moves as it feels, and […] feels itself moving” (2002: 1). Borrowing Steve Goodman’s terminology, I argue that in the case of the countercultures depicted in the novels good vibes turn into bad vibrations while potentiality turns into materiality of the Real of the body.