New music video from upcoming 2009 Jeffrey Lewis album. I’m very excited.
Jeffrey Lewis’ work has always been playful in the ‘existential’ arena; it was inevitable: he’s the product of 1960’s NYC lower east side hippies, and a self-professed anti-folk hipster. The new lyrics show a depth beyond the spatial whimsy of ‘moving’, or explorative identity of “will oldham williamsburg horror”. This is Jeffrey Lewis full-on engaged in the world of phenomenology: a holistic, intersubjective description of the world - as a world experienced, and affirmed.
“…it would be such a relief to be objectified”
“…it would be such a relief to be a natural thing”
Jeff does not affirm that we are “natural things”, but posits the idea as an available mode of perception. His affirmation is a being-in-the-world in which “…the horizon seems to be a place that nobody can know.”
The world is not uniquely subjective or objective, but merely available. The world as available - to me, and to you, and to others. In this intersubjective world, why would Jeff desire to be objectified? The answer is perhaps described in his earlier song ‘anxiety attack’ - for the extreme opposite of experienced objectivity is solipsism, in all its mutating infamy.
I think it’s particularly interesting that Jeff notes that ‘to be objectified’ is not necessarily good or bad but temporary. Indeed being-in-the-world is a relief from a more pervasive mode of being-for-itself. Of course, we can imagine why a purely objective state is not preferable as a sustained mode of being: with the loss of self-consciousness (which accompanies an objectivated, othered self), we also lose agency, identity, and history, leaving only something we are no longer contituted to claim: the natural object of the mechanistic body.
