Suspicious to the Core (eight)

tobaccoey dreams, fiery thoughts : the right to learn, the right to the remix

“That’s my choice—I’m glad! I should have done the same if I had had the first lot.”

Plato, The Republic

passion, darkness, and -- theater

Seekers learn. Learners seek. Partly, the privilege is manifested as and in the capacity to immerse oneself in the very act, to be synchronized with the adventure, and continuously energized by it. Partly, it is integrated into the playfulness inherent in such endeavors; abundance of its challenging, yet rewarding, tasks; quirkiness of its content, the ways it is delivered, and the nexus between the two; persistent invocation of its nature, of its authentic character.

Each instance within the trajectory called learning is a reminder to revisit the dark theater from Sherman Alexie’s story “Fearful Symmetry” from the book War Dances (2010). It is a story about the guy who embarks on a journey during which his resilience, adjustability, adaptability, stamina, and resourcefulness are tested.  He was going to be hired as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Sherwin Polatkin was to adapt an account of a former smoke jumper who captured the event in which sixteen adventurers parachuted in the Sirois Canyon to “fight a small wildfire” (162) that soon, unpredictably evolved into raids of raging flames, scorching adversaries threatening to obliterate the scenery. Calamity lurking from each wild movement of the destructive cohorts. The only survivor from the whole team, Wayne Ford, set a fire to escape the fire. It was weird. And yet, he was the only one who did not try to outrun the nature ablaze. The only one who did not run:

Did you know that you can escape a fire by setting another fire at your feet? You might seem to be building a funeral pyre, but you’re creating a circle of safety. In order to save your endangered ass, all you have to do is burn down the grass surrounding you, lie facedown in the ash, and pray that the bigger fire will pass over you like a flock of blind and burning angels. (162-163)

The event chronicled by Harris Tolkin decades in the aftermath of the event is entitled Fearful Symmetry: The True Story of the Sirois Canyon Fire. Sherwin was to devise a cinematic version of it. Only, he would have to de-tragedize it, so to speak:”The hero can’t die” (171 italics original). As a means of ensuring and, hopefully, enhancing box office success, he was advised to possibly include ”a scene where the hero fucks his girl in the ash after a fire” (169). And it was also suggested to him to “[g]et rid of the William Blake shit” (171 italics original).  

We don’t buy it. That’s when his “odyssey” across the seas of crossword puzzles begins. After those unlikely ordeals and trials, he settles in the territory he knows, but from which he was temporarily distracted due to challenging circumstances, tribulations, and inner oscillations spurred by and invigorating deceitful uncertainty, and elusive self-confidence.

Before them, as if his whole life could be encapsulated within, sublimated into, a single experience: a visit to a movie theater with a girl. Unexpectedly, Karen, who was not exactly an epicenter of his romantic world, turns the dark room and viewing of The Breakfast Club into an immensely intense, passionately emotional sensation that grips his whole adolescent being. She touches his hands. She plays with his fingers. His palms. He had had a sexual experience. He had sex with three girls before. The contact with Karen was very different from those:”It was simple—and nearly innocent—but it still felt like sex” (161). As their hands touch, in the midst of an ordinary, potentially quite prosaic viewing, the initial semi-indifference of the movie theater experience is being transformed into one of the most powerful, most vibrant, and most memorable moments.

From then on, it is deeply engrained in his mind map. It turns out that everything that follows is a search of the possibility to generate “courage to step into a dark theater, hold hands with a beautiful woman, and fall back in love with [his] innocence” (181). He is entertaining the idea on the plane, on his way back from a crossword puzzle contest. He is soon to land in San Francisco. On his way back home, he devises a metaphor as powerful as the passion that fuels the realm of letters itself is. And his place within it, as well.

We, too, need the passion that sustained Polotkin’s persistence in living up to the intensities of the magical moments of his and Karen’s dark theater experience. We, too, need it in order to go back to the dark theater and elucidate veering vagaries, lurking from disguises. Neither darkness nor blackness is what characterizes the dark theater. It is a symbolic device galvanizing the capacity to disambiguate hypocritical enchantment in the midst of babylonian noise and reconstitute energies regenerating the potential of the remix.

truths, worlds & scientists : re-vo-lu-tio-nize & know it

Neither darkness nor blackness is that what characterizes the works on which this book focuses. One of the ways to persevere in discerning and sustaining distinctions is to learn resistance against oppression, against coercion. In a word, learning resistance simultaneously fuels and is invigorated by critical thinking. One of the ways of deploying and demonstrating it through encounters with pieces reflecting that faculty is to look at the juxtaposition and parallels between and among them with regard to both the style and the message. Specifically, there is an undoubted sense of stylistic disparity—despite obvious reverberations—between Hubert Selby Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream and Dennis Cooper’s Try.

The former is unmistakenly a piece of realist prose. Everything in it is in tune with the dynamics of the street, monstrosity of drug addiction, terror of degradation, discomfort of a dysfunctional family, unease of the collapse of the solidity of societal institutions, morality, and human relations. And that’s just how it should be perceived. The latter, however, in spite of the persuasiveness of horror genre and all the aspects of the underbelly and demimonde of what to a majority of denizens who inhabit this planet appears as the only form of the everyday, in spite of the intricacies and, indeed, at times puzzlement, of the opacity overshadowing destinies of the characters and bending their orbits, there is a streak that stands in stark contrast to the disastrous aspect  supposedly underscoring the overarching concept that unifies the whole novel.

Particularly, there is a cartoonish, so to speak, characteristic that contradicts the cruelty of the word depicted that enables dissolvement of those mindless forces. The cartoonish streak in question is that what inspires distrust of the philosophies some of the characters propagate. The cartoonish streak is that what ensures the basis for recuperation. Were it solely for the plot, solely for the content of the dialogues taken at face value, solely for superficialities of the manifestations of inner dynamic, the characters of Ziggy and Calhoun would be sensed merely in terms of their messed up syntax, stinky jeans, stained linen, dimlit rooms-as-an-epitome-of-dimlit universes, dispassionate responses, or inexplicable affinities. Were those components solely the focus, Ziggy’s magazine I Apologize would be suggestive merely of the noise in the communication channel, rather than the noise coming from the amplifiers channeling the signal of the mighty strings, resonating with the time steadily sustained with each and every strike of the drum stick on the surface of the snare drum, with the symphony of cymbals—rather than the glorious polyphony of his favorite band Hüsker Dü. Were those tangential elements under the disguise of the key ingredients constitutive of the substantiality of the message, the reading of this immensely inspiring novel would be divested of the joy of diving into the profound lyricism it so generously offers and presents.

Those features that typically characterize fiction writings and are mainly woven in the layer that belongs to the sonic aspects of prose--the tone--apparently are not exclusively pertinent to the genre in question. More precisely, there is a peculiar narrative device that can be found in nonfiction, as well. Surprisingly, it reveals the stylistic components as central to the statement of the work. From those versatile manifestations of that audio plane one learns.

In Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), where he considers a dynamic within the discipline called science, patterns of normal science are juxtaposed with the occurrences of revolutionary science. The former is characterized by cumulative mode of acquiring and storing knowledge aimed at and deployed in the service of solidifying and reconfirming the existing body of knowledge and the entrenched perception of phenomena and data alike. The latter demarcates the crux of the dynamic: the moments when new insights, that no longer support the previous theories and hypotheses, are obtained.

Such moments require and entail a rather holistic reconfiguration of both the information and access to it. Those moments are called paradigm shifts. That’s when normal science is rendered obsolete, inoperative, when the knowledge available is not sufficient to explain the world, and when the pattern known as scientific knowledge is questioned, rethought, and refigured. That’s when it (the particular pattern/paradigm, not the category) is replaced by an alternative vocabulary, new theories, hypotheses, perception, and approach to the subject matter. That’s when revolutionary science occurs.

However, one cannot but notice numerous instances of Kuhn’s debating the issues from which it could be inferred that radical paradigm shifts are quite unlikely. There is a sense that each seemingly radical shift of scientific vocabulary is an increment on the scale of revision of the existing ones, that the existing ones are to diverse degrees being redescribed. This puts the theorist, and philosophers especially, in a curious position. For one, s/he acknowledges versatility of what is taken to be objective knowledge, thereby ascribing the same revisibility to the fact that knowledge is human creation.

To attribute an unchangeable character to a particular paradigm would mean setting it in stone, thereby enabling it to occupy a privileged position in culture and assume an unrivaled, uncontestable status. That, in turn, would entail an assumption of a demigodlike position of scientists—authors of(f)  inventions, owners of patents, of copyrights, royalties, principal researchers within projects funded by multifarious sources, the ones who both articulate and subscribe to the discovery. At the same time, to claim a discursive character of science would put emphasis on contingency that might be (as it has frequently been) misinterpreted as sheer arbitrariness, absence of structural solidity, unhinged relativistic anomie. It might be misconceived as a randomly articulated, purely subjective – matter.

Yet, Kuhn undoubtedly maintains the stance that heavily relies on the anchorage of scientific vocabulary (regardless of its being subject to redescription) in the objectivity of the world. His advocating objectivity features no affinity to determinism whatsoever, especially not at the expense of agency and individuality. So, rather than disruptions, discontinuity, and discrete nature of paradigm shifts, Kuhn’s theorizing inspires thoughts of continuity, process, constancy of revolution.

Kuhn seems to be reluctant to credit new angles of looking at certain scientific questions with the status of a revolutionary shift. Part of the reason he never explicates that hesitance might be understood in the context of the relationship between normal science (paradigm) and revolutionary science (paradigm shift). Specifically, the basis of the conundrum can be the problem of radical newness related to the notion of incommensurability. In other words, were those paradigms, indeed, utterly incommensurable, the shift would be out of the question altogether. They might be incongruous in the context of, with regard to, the object level (the questions they concern), but communication between them on the metalevel is intact. Hence, incommensurability is partial, conditional, specific, particular. So is newness. So is “revolution.”

Thomas Kuhn:” Two men who perceive the same situation differently but nevertheless employ the same vocabulary in its discussion must be using words differently. They speak, that is, from what I have called incommensurable viewpoints. How can they even hope to talk together much less to be persuasive. Even a preliminary answer to that question demands further specification of the nature of difficulty” (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 200).

To say that revolution is partial is to highlight the context within which Kuhn considers scientific vocabularies. His cautious approach to the notion of revolutionary/paradigm shifts is anchored in the understanding that new paradigms do not discredit scientific status/character of the one it questions and, potentially, modifies. Thus, the sense of certain kind of continuum of scientific vocabularies may imply that they do not necessarily propose completely different answers to the same questions. Paradoxically, it is not unreasonable either to presume that they might be addressing related issues and that they are constitutive of the same vocabulary called science.

The caution with which this should be handled results from the assumption inherent in such a precept. Particularly, the standpoint could be suggestive of there being diverse discursive descriptions of the world and that they are conjured up by humans called scientists. This may suggest ascribing to that knowledge merely subjective nature perceived as a radically mutually exclusive with objective knowledge. To say that absolutely objective knowledge is a philosophical impossibility by no means implies that the world can be molded by just any discursive description. Nor does it mean that any description is valid. Thomas Kuhn: “Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please” (150).

One needs hardly be reminded how extravagantly challenging Kuhn’s wording here is. The “different worlds” cannot be more symbolic in portraying disparity of views. Let’s consider a subtler version of the discussion in question: “To say that the members of different groups may have different perceptions when confronted with the same stimuli is not to imply that they may have just any perceptions at all” (195). The “different worlds” could be understood as different wording of “different groups. “ And yet, two vocabularies are quite what the phrase means. The contrast could be encapsulated by the observation Kuhn offers, thereby enhancing the critical edginess of the debate and accentuating both elusiveness and distinctiveness of the literal and the metaphorical, of the object level and the metalevel:”In the metaphorical no less than in the literal use of “seeing,” interpretation begins where perception ends” (198).

Capable of spurring relativistic accusations as it may be, the claim, in fact, clears the path to the clarification regarding both antirelativist purism and uncritical randomizing. That it is merely a demonstration of sensitivity to resilience, and yet, distance from unselectivity, sensitivity to critical thinking, and yet. distance from rigid discrimination Kuhn’s remark fortifies:

I do not doubt, for example, that Newton’s mechanics improves on Aristotle’s and that Einstein’s improves on Newton’s as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein’s general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle’s than either of them is to Newton’s. Though the temptation to describe the position as relativistic is understandable, the description seems to me wrong. Conversely, if the position be relativism, I cannot see that the relativist loses anything needed to account for the nature and development of the sciences. (207)

To generalize relativity would require drawing from the axiom that subverts its ever so versatile nature. Needless to say, it would spell out both its self-including and self-excluding, (self)denying and (self)affirming character. Simultaneously, to limit its scope, to negotiate articulating takes on it solely for the sake of ensuring “safe space” of theorizing that would enable its “immunity” can be a dangerous, dishonest, unscrupulously utilitarian, uncritical, theoretically not viable, and morally questionable maneuver. It’s not tasteful, either. Obviously, the dilemma implies the underscoring paradoxes generating the debate. Necessity/contingency, determinism/relativism are some of the polarities around which the conversation revolves. While they are per se frequently sensed as valid--despite numerous objections to dichotomies as such and albeit being even potentially theoretically untenable—it by no means invites mechanistic adjustments between theory and what it is supposed to fit in, let alone vice versa.

            That is precisely the reason why Kuhn might be reluctant to acknowledge and embrace in its entirety the postulate of/presumption about the continuum of scientific vocabulary. Simply put, it would signal an understanding of it as a succession of diverse takes on the constant called truth. Kuhn rightly has reasonable reservations regarding such a view. It is an admirably humble attitude towards the subject matter. Likewise, it is a manifestation of the awareness of both elusiveness and protectiveness of language, awareness of the limit and the greatness of the human.

fluctuating axioms, un-anchored tenets : limits to overregulated anomie

From another angle--from another group--a voice of a theorist resonates with Kuhn’s critique. Terry Eagleton’s book After Theory (2003) considers the trajectory that theoretical flows have delineated progressing from the clutches of the grand narratives toward a free wheeling discursive polyphony. The portion of the trajectory the book is mostly focused on spans the fluctuations characterizing discourse of the twentieth century and the very beginning of the twenty-first century. The period has brought to intellectual history the vernaculars widely known as modernism and postmodernism.

While distinct in some respects, the two may be approached in the key that addresses abandoning foundational, essentialist, universalist narratives. They both, in their own distinctive ways, tell a story about the ways we talk, think, create, live, and perceive the world, ourselves, and each other. Each in its distinctive manner demonstrates disagreement with a monolithic, homogenous expressive mode and, instead, offers a perspectivalist take on pluralist discourse and pluralist culture. Such a state of affairs may be perceived as ungrounded, uprooted, and unhinged. Some of its versions appear even as arbitrary, uncritically contingent, reductionist, and/or relativistic vocabularies. Many of the variants might sound way too unstructured. Some might even be untenable.

Those varied manifestations and perceptions of the increments on the modernist-postmodernist scale, those diversified approaches to the world within and without alike considered through modernist and postmodernist discourses can be understood through the prism of Eagleton’s theorizing, notably with regard to the observation about the quirky dialectic, oscillations between the polarities such as contingency-determinism, the conditioned-innate, discursive-biological, metaphorical-literal:“Moral values, like everything else, are a matter of random, free-floating cultural traditions” (57). Eagleton challenges this versatility raising a question about one of the most sensitive areas. His tone is unshakable, yet it is also comforting. Once he introduced the remark about limitless possibilities of discursively “founded” morality, Eagleton elucidates the counterpoint:”There is no need to be alarmed about this, however, since human culture is not really free-floating. Which is not to say that it is firmly anchored either. That would be the flipside of the same misleading metaphor” (57).

Strangely, part of Eagleton’s discussion reflects an aspect of the conundrum Kuhn is depicting. Kuhn is a scientist-turned-historian. Eagleton is a theorist. Both realize the bliss of polyphonic playfulness. Both warn against ruthless misuse of such a benefit. Each of them demonstrates uncompromising refutation of the equation between unlimited potential of language and senseless belief in human omnipotence. Each of them draws a clear distinction between the world and what we say about it, each acknowledges points of intersection between these. While sustaining a balanced approach to such a weird dynamic, not for a second denying objectivity as such, these immensely provocative, yet incredibly vibrant, thinkers keep inspiring investment in resistance to mindless proliferation of discourses and worlds--orgies of hypostatization. Eagleton’s extraordinarily vivid and lyrically loaded trope is suggestive of the stabilizing component in the midst of deceitful, tumultuous wanderings: “We are like someone crossing a high bridge and suddenly being seized by panic on realizing that there is a thousand-foot drop below them. It is as though the ground beneath their feet is no longer solid. But in fact it is” (57). Theories like theirs invigorate critical thinking, re-establish the significance of critical distance, galvanize the edginess of critique, and reintegrate the sound basis for the preservation of playfulness: elusiveness, but also protectiveness--by virtue of poisenous poetics.

/

To articulate it all might be ambitious beyond good taste. To demand verbalizing it entirely precisely might be even less tasteful. It could even be ridiculously delusional. Or both. However, to understand it--if not completely--to communicate it, and to even deliver the message in a logical, rational, coherent, imaginatively invigorating, engaging, but also accurate manner might not be impossible. One thing is quite certain: the tone, imbuing the signature in the content, is if not the same, then closely related to the voice. The concept of voice is not likely to be separable from the notion of the subject, as Steven Connor observes in his essay “Choralities” (2015).[1] While he concerns audio manifestations of soundscape in its aural form, the thoughts he presents can be understood in the context of the voice as the tone of the narrative. The sonic imagery thus delineated can be perceived via the awareness of the notion of the subject: ”there is no disembodied voice. That is, there can be no voice that does not imply and require the possibility of somebody and more particularly some body to utter it” (1).

Connor succinctly and ever so subtly unpacks the specter of objectification haunting this benighted planet. He does so in a fascinating lateral manner. The tactic almost resembles the-fire-to-escape-the-big-fire strategy from Alexie’s story “Fearful Symmetry.” Namely, verging on being perceived as a claim about insubstantiality, almost hallucinatory character of voice, Connor, in fact, strips the voice of a mythical dimension. He de-subjectifies it. He focuses on the perception of it, thus repurposing the narrative, as suggested in his essay”“Acousmania” (2015).[2] Re-purposing in question concerns subjectivity as the pivotal component of the polemic--the focus and the source. To look at the phenomenon of sound more closely, Connor proposes an angle from which sound is rendered undetectable, unperceivable unless received in its relational form. The form in question is constitutive of content. Sound is that what one hears, as it were: “A sound is a relational entity, not any kind of thing in itself” (6).

Tracking the debate back to the vacillations between the metaphorical and the literal, one is prone to note the persistent centrality of the perception-awareness nexus in Connor’s critique. Not only does he divest sound of thing-in-itself, but also demystifies the stance by illuminating the crux and directing the discussion toward disentanglement of knots: “The set of relations that constitutes a soundscape is certainly a relation between auditory elements, but the relations themselves are not auditory” (6). To further clarify the point about de-subjectification of the inanimate and re-subjectification of the subject, he goes on to fortify the awareness of the subject matter:

Nor, let us hasten to add, are they necessarily visual, so this is not a question of the auditory being subsumed under or reduced to the dominative order of the eye, as audiomanes like to insists. For relations belong to the intelligible rather than the sensible, and are therefore as anoptic as they are anaural; we may see the relations between visual items, but we can no more ‘see’ the relations than we can ‘hear’ the relation between a major chord and a diminished seventh. (6)

            How does one then rejoice in the intricacies of the caprice of quirky chords if it is not possible--and not necessary, either--to simultaneously listen to the pretext, so to speak? Perhaps transposing the discussion into philosophical lingo could be instrumental in understanding the quandary--if not in its entirety, then, at least, the major part of it: ”because sound is all and always epistemology, and not ontology” (5). Through this prism, Connor reveals the key to the enigma of sound as relations, as perception. He does so by invoking the linguistic playfulness teaching one and, at the same time, confirming the capacity for and sensitivity to the power of language generated through a paradoxical dialogue between its elusiveness and protectiveness. Specifically, Connor evokes reverberations of and between the words intelligible, sensible, awareness, perception, understanding, perspective, point of view, sound, voice, the tone. He approaches the perplexity via the analysis of the act of listening--one of the most precious faculties cultivated by human beings: “Perhaps, it may be said, when one listens for the way in which things operate as sound, rather than simply listening through the sound to what they mean, one is doing something different – but it is really no more or less sonorous, or ‘intuitive’ than the action of listening for meaning” (4-5).

            Connor solidifies the point where the key aspects of his reasoning intersect: “I have begun to wonder whether subjects must be understood as those entities who know how to subject themselves” (3). Indeed. One should be reminded that the discussion Connor offers is constitutive of the discipline called sound studies. In philosophical jargon, it is the metalevel to the object level called sound. At the same time, sound studies is the object level of the metalevel called acoustemology. Explorations of /observations about sound put the subject on various levels of the investigation and conversation. Since much of what is pertinent to sound concerns the subject’s perception of it -- the knowing -- clearly, studying sound can only be conducted from the metalevel looking at sound as the object level. However, that metalevel always includes interrogation of those who observe, contemplate, and communicate, i.e., human beings who are, thus, simultaneously constitutive of the subject matter.

            Connor’s interpretation is sophisticated. It summons the awareness of a perpetual introspection, especially within the endeavors such as those linked to phenomenology, and yet, it refrains from self-referentially. It amply centers on the significance of the subject, and yet, it does not wallow in an inflated image of self. It shamelessly, yet humbly, positions itself in the world. It is an admirable homage to language: elusiveness, but also protectiveness--communicating the potential of the remix.

/

In the age that colors the world the shade of fabricated desire and dromospheric pollution enables reckless commoditization as a channel of oppressive mechanisms of control—a tunnel of noise. In the age that obscures via overexposing, where distraction is packaged in myriad false foci, the world’s angles from which blindness generates vision hide in the shadow of noise. In the age that threatens to transform the communication channel in an empire of a mindless monetized flux, unselective, uncritical perception of the world, oneself, and others perpetuates sensationalism as the controlling mechanism in the universe of hollowness.

The world that welcomes the ecstasy of bewilderment celebrates euphoric haze that devours critical distance. Critical thinking. Such a world believes that its modus operandi is its genuine character—battlefield of power. Such a world believes that viagra, bank account, and mortgage are linked by virtue of mysteriously woven digitized fantasies. In such a world, power has become the new l’art pour l’artism. Only, it’s neither. It’s a misnomer.

Some of the perplexities of this nature call for sharpening the edginess of critical thinking enabling, inspiring, generating, and invigorating the capacity to discern and sustain distinctions. One of them is the distinction between individualism and individuality, between uniformity and unity. The legacy of the Enlightenment keeps the awareness of the world plagued by amnesia. The legacy of the Enlightenment keeps the awareness of the world that forgot the fervor of the investment in the age of reason. The era clad in a distorted image of the significance of the private sphere obliterates the distinction between the public and the private at the expense of transforming the latter into a cacophony void of a bilateral dialogue. The former, needless to say, is rendered self-referential to the point where individualism dissolves in the bacchanalia of disconnectedness. Both are dissolved in the murky entanglement of dictum of fiscal logic under the disguise of a crossbreed between sociopolitical structures and morality. Individuality is something else. It is constitutive of and is engendered through refacement.

 Cacophonic multivoicedness is a deviant version of polyphonic playfulness. Perspectivalism on steroids, hypostatization galore, proliferation of worlds, vocabularies, and senseless fantasy of human omnipotence reflect a misperceived potential of  pluralist discourse. In it, differences, instead of inspirational heterogeneity, establish the common denominator divesting them of -- distinctiveness. Such a proliferation of flawed diversification is, in fact, a means of further fragmentation, atomization, insularity, disconnectedness—by blandness. This paradox is the mode that both reveals and sustains a mutually dissolving relationship between cacophony and uniformity. Unity is something else. It is constitutive of and generated through refacement.

Both individuality and unity are pivotal to the remix. They are also key to refacement: subtonic hi-fi solidarity of selfless, yet re-individualized, fellow humans united in enduring the hindrances to the patient, persistent creation of a free culture based on trust and love. The remix is both the source and the vehicle for the intersection between vibrant creative / critical responses, peaceful/peaceable resistance, and reverence. By virtue of such intersections, learning persists, and so does the fellowship: against noise, and in the service of the remix.

---

[1] A lecture given at Voices and Noises, Audiovisualities Lab of the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, 27^th March 2015. http://stevenconnor.com/choralities.html

[2] A lecture given at Sound Studies: Art, Experience, Politics, CRASSH, Cambridge, 10^th July 2015. http://stevenconnor.com/acousmania.html

Suspicious to the Core (7 / one)

(Out)dated Times: (Hi)stories and Poetry

Does time have a name? What is it?

In Hubert Selby, Jr.’s novel Requiem for a Dream (1978),[1] time is suspended within unbearably long non-existing hours of waiting for the connection. Clock face melts with the sweat pouring down sick bodies shivering, crumbling in a subzero summer which does not recognize the winter that conquered it months ago. Clock hands are nothing but the extremities of the body parts serving mainly one particular purpose, i.e., providing access to the bloodflow, this, in turn, being a distributor of the vitalizing elixir spreading throughout the system called the body, the mind…u name it.

In Hubert Selby, Jr.’s novel Requiem for a Dream, time acquires a sensible signification only as a constitutive part of the idiom doing time. Interestingly, in that context neither of the words integral to the expression means what it does in its original, literal form. Together, however, they generate a meaning in its own right, independent of each particular ingredient’s. Not only is it the intricacy of the symbolic of this phrase pertinent to distorted perception of realities intrinsic to the characters of the novel, but to the layered structure of the symbolic in question, as well.

Namely, one would be prone to contend that divested of the lexical aspect signifying action, the verb do, from which the gerund and/or the present participle are/is derived, within the idiom doing time might also be freed from the burden of purposiveness in the key of Steven Connor’s meditation on intentionality in his essay “How to Get out of Your Head: Notes toward a Philosophy of Mixed Bodies.” And yet, it is highly doubtful that those who do time, such as the characters of Harry Goldfarb and Tyrone C. Love, can be imagined to be leisurely immersed in the directedness, void of goal-chasing mindedness. Even in jail, on their way to Miami, somewhere in the south, disconnected both legally and geographically from their New York underworld--from the source--scoring remains a pattern deeply ingrained into their mindset. Either unconscious summoning of the highs unalienable, inviolable, inaccessible to time quirks, “nodding in time to the music” (257) or crushed by sickness and pain annihilating a sense of temporality, mobilizing chrono-inhibitors, they seem to be resistant to the cognizance of the names constitutive of  time:”The time seemed to drag as they stared ahead, not noticing the trees and poles rushing by” (261).

Sara Goldfarb, Harry’s mother, is sucked into the tornado of TV fuelled fantasies, amphetamine whirlpools of chasing media imposed models of bodily perfection, and insurmountable detachment from the pain separating her from the genuine intensity of emotions, blinding her to the abyss separating her from her son Harry, from being present in the way that would sharpen her awareness of it. Having undergone a series of shock therapy treatments, she is tied to a wheelchair, humiliatingly soaked in wastes, abandoned by negligent staff, by insensitive workers in the service of medicine. She is waiting to be examined and, subsequently, admitted to a mental hospital.

In the meantime, time is dispersed across her blurry perception of realities. Heavily medicated, she is in the waiting room with little hope to be provided with the care she needs. She does not know the word scoring. Nor is she familiar with its manifestations. She certainly has no knowledge of the slang term connection, and she can hardly be imagined to relate to the subcultural aspect of the lexeme. And yet, it is highly unlikely that she is focused on the aim/object based directedness, rather than purposiveness:”From time to time someone would open a door and call a name and one of the attendants would wheel the patient through the door, and they seemed to disappear, yet there always seemed to be just as many people in front of Sara” (263). Only the mention of the name does draw her back to the moment in which she finds herself present:”Time continued to be time and Saras name was called” (263).

As for the other characters, tired of sick, cold, panic, and vacuity, Alice--Tyrone’s former girlfriend--leaves their junk nest for her family home. Marion, Harry’s sweetheart, the only one-- if seemingly, artificially, and infinitely unconsciously happy--is biding her time in an easy buck, hard earned paradise in the midst of the city heavy traffic beehive.

As the novel closes, each of them fades away, ever so ambiguously, into blackness--blackness that haunts their dispersal, their dissolvement into a diluted shadow of the dream in which they once seemed to believe. Or, they did not. Blackness like the frozen moment in Irvine Welsh’s Skagboys, the south like the L.A.archipelago in Dennis Cooper’s Try. Time evaporated into the haze of static saturating the computer screen, condensed in the mist of waiting for the connection in the limbo that knows no interconnectivity. To such timespace, peaceful/peaceable resistance is the vibrant response.

To some, time is a word spanning the trajectory of ten ghostly years featured in the title of the chapter in a book, as it is in “Time Passes” in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927). To others, it is dust of an omniscient significance, as suggested in the title of the essay “The Dust That Measures All Our Time” (2010) written by Steven Connor. In science, it is the notion pivotal to the hybrid concept of the cosmic curve, as revealed with the introduction of the twentieth century discourse, the legacy of which is still with us.

Some are prone to emphasize the question of transient, multifarious, versatile chronology and temporality, as does Stewart Home in his novel Tainted Love (2005), conjuring up the subtitle “The Times Change and  We Change Too.” Ten years prior to the publication of the novel, Home presents a more overtly humbleness invoking stance claiming:”We change and yet remain the same” (Cranked up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock 122).

It seems that, as Martin Heidegger’s lyrically charged philosophical idiom offers in Being and Time (1927), only contained within a measurement is time worthy of the names attributed to it by humans.

Skin-popping & Anchor-doping

“Find me, help me, retrieve me. Stop me.”

Jeff Noon, “Somewhere the Shadow” / Pixel Juice

In Ian McEwan’s story “Cocker at the Theatre” from the collection First Love, Last Rites (1972),[2] the question of deceitful perception of realities is approached from a slightly different angle. The story opens with a scene suggestive of an empty stage. It is a short description providing a glimpse of the theater which is soon to be reanimated with the introduction of the cast positioned on the stage. There are many actors and actresses on the stage. They are all naked.

Jasmin, the director, is strict regarding the policy: no hard ons, no transcending the boundaries of acting, no—in other words—confusion of categories and/or blurring the distinction between the metalevel and the object level. His close collaborator and an ally named Dale, the choreographer —an energetic lady and a dedicated professional—is monitoring the dynamics on the stage, simultaneously devising suggestions, so that the scene can be sustained intact.

In couples, they are rocking in time to the music managed by Jack, sound designer. The play, via the music, promotes copulation nationwide. It was the time when insistence on the privacy of intimacy mattered and smoking was allowed in public places. Jasmin smokes as he makes comments on the details from the scene. He seems to be particularly keen on his habit when he feels irritable.

The couples are rocking. Dale remarks the extent of the persuasiveness of their acting. She seems especially pleased with the movements of the couple in the back of the stage. She is satisfied to the point of being somewhat unsettled. However, not all of them demonstrate the same degree of enthusiasm. Jasmin is annoyed:”Stop. Enough” (76). He emerges from the dark of the auditorium. Urges them to immerse themselves in the fantasy of pleasure. He knows it’s hard (76). Some of them are responsive to the director’s input. Some are questionably so. That’s what worries Dale:”The two on the end are moving well. If they were all like that I would be out of job” (76). But, she is wrong. Not only does each of them feature a different amount of eagerness, but the two that are supposedly moving well are particularly suspicious. They are decontextualized, dislocated, and demonstrating bewilderment caused by miscommunication between the body and fantasy, between the metalevel and the object level. They are moving “too well,” so to speak. The director notes:”Cut. Stop” (77). Strangely, no one is able to prevent them from continuing with the distraction into an act superseding the framework of stage performance. Thus, they are let go.

Ian McEwan presents two salient reflections addressing the distinction in question, thereby sharpening and enhancing the critical edginess and problematizing senseless interlacing  of discourse and the extralinguistic. One of them is manifested in the way he articulates the invitation to the cast to enjoy what they do:”It’s fuck, you understand, not a funeral” (76). Clearly, it is a freudian insight calling for further discerning and sustaining the distinction between petite mort and death. Within the scene in the story when he dismisses Cocker after he and his partner finish their unstoppable bodily practice, Jasmin makes a point that undoubtedly concerns two distinct notions and perceptions of manhood. The director states:”Well, Cocker, you and the little man stuck on the end of you can crawl off this stage, and take shagging Nellie with you. I hope you find a gutter big enough for two” (78). Jasmin withdraws. He descends back to the comfort of invisibility. From the auditorium, only the microtorch crowned with ember tenderly glistens. Radiating from the cigarette just lit.

How does this inform the possibility to divest the notion of manhood of the burden of potency, thereby freeing one from the self-aggrandizement fixation and a deviant perception of power? How can one learn what death to self can ensure within the fellowship of human beings? How can one make choices with respect to human communication? What is the role of humbleness within cultural realities? Where can one find the basis for integrating solidarity into the way we live, think, talk, create, learn, know, do?

Given the ruminations, little doubt remains regarding the validity of Dale’s uneasiness. There is a job for Dale because we do need guidance: restraining, yet liberating, anchoring and restorative. Unshakably resilient. We do need guidance: the source of perpetual reintegration and affirmation of the sensibility of being friendly to one’s body, to all the aspects constitutive of that who one is. Authority, not oppression. Power, not coercion. Unlike houses of Horne from Joyce’s Ulysses where nakedness is the only common denominator for the inherently natural. Unlike those vulgarizations of grand narratives, as the character of King Lear in Shakespeare’s play of the same title brings to awareness. Against such a biological determinism that reduces humans to an image delineated solely by the threshold of  natural needs, patience is needed, indeed. So is modesty, as one learns from the actors in Hamlet. So is perseverance. So is resistance: refraining from ossification and destructiveness toward oneself and others, as Rorty urges in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Because we are learners. We ceaselessly seek avenues for reconstituting sound creative / critical responses.

---

[1] Selby, Hubert, Jr. Requiem for a Dream. New York: A Playboy Press Book, 1978. Print.

[2] McEwan, Ian. First Love, Last Rites. New York: Random House, 1972. Print.

Suspicious to the Core (6 / five)

Out of(f) Vacuum Cacophony : Polyphony of Playfulness

If there is a genuinely vibrant aspect of William Blake’s oeuvre, it is one of the many. If there is a way to discern what ensures that wholesome character, it is probably by focusing on its respectfulness and sensitivity to otherness. Neither overspiritualizng the material, nor objectifying the matters of the mind, Blake’s writings emanate a deep  sense of fulfillment resulting  from the awareness of and rejoicing in the marvel of wholeness. While the very provocativeness of the title of his collection of poems The Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1789) might mislead to a perception that Blake’s vocabulary is suggestive of the acceptance of the fragmentariness pertinent to the reductionist paradigms he criticizes, the subject matter, as well as the expressive mode, testify to a profound disagreement with blockages to the right to integrity. Underscoring the poetry strangely unified, despite the complexity both on the level of particular poems and the structure of the collection, is the resilient attitude unshakably defending distinctiveness of the ingredients constitutive of the integrated piece.

 Plato’s debate in The Republic features a similar approach toward a reductionist perception of self, society, the world. Although the wording of his principal trope of the balance between sports and music (242) slightly reverberates with a polarity which is being overcome, it, nevertheless, clearly indicates the oppositional stance, as mentioned. Kenneth Goldsmith invites continuing that dissident tradition. He diverges from the instances of violation of language:”emphasizing its materiality disrupts normative flows of communication” (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 35). Recuperating communicational flows resonates with the idea of relieving language of heavily prescriptive, directive, and mechanized streaks. It may also be akin to resistance to oppressive mechanism subjugating writing to normativity that verges on absurdity in its schematic, formulaic, artificial impositions.

However, Goldsmith’s acknowledging Warhol’s masterful invisibility of the author (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 139) ensured by persistence in inauthenticity inspires thinking in the key of balance. On the one hand, it aligns itself with the opposition to worshipping an aggrandized notion of author, indirectly spelling out the oppositional stand toward an inflated image of self, delusional idea of omnipotence, entrapment in ownership, commodity mindedness, and culture suffocating in crippling torpor of materiality, enslavement by (self)dissolving despotism. On the other hand, it leaves room for meditating against a seeming opposition, i.e., radical spontaneity and autonomy of text, since it implies: (1) hyperinvestment in discursively conditioned cultural realities and unlimited power of constructing them; (2) a specific kind of objectification and fetishization.

Neither constructivist nor biological – or any other type of – determinism can restore the much needed equilibrium. Unshakable resilience enables something that neither rigidity nor uncritical unhingedness does. It reanimates the awareness of and the capacity to discern and sustain the distinction between oppressive, tyrannical on the one hand and, on the other, nourishing and protective control. Like language.

/

Between materiality and stylization, discourse oscillates in a vacuum of contemporary culture where everything is “aestheticized” to the point of zero distance between meta and object levels. As the whole discourse seems to have been transferred into the virtual sphere, the very virtuality has become questionable -- because there is hardly anything to mimic/represent. If all realities have become hyperrealities, all spaces ubiquitous immortalized ephemeral chunks of faceless prescriptive alphabetical sequences and linguistically recorded directives, then the vacuum resembling the cold inhabiting deaf interstellar tunnels – like an urobors – forges interstices in its own hollowness.

Out of it emerge vocabularies that reanimate the flow in the key of the vibrancy of the distinction between the metalevel and the object level. Out of it resurface tales that inspire awe and/or disgust by virtue of what they narrate and how the stories are told. Out of it are rendered distinguishable accounts presented in language, and yet not constitutive of storytelling. The latter somehow resist being awed and/or abhorred the way the former are. There is something pertinent to the what-how nexus, to the relationship between the content and the form – to deploy somewhat obsolete wording – that in certain cases very differently informs the perception and, consequently, conditions very different responses.

Read the everyday as a story, approach your job as a lawyer as series of encounters with narrative pieces, experience other human beings as dots in the storyline, space as a deviation of containers of telepresences, history as a fantasy of a character in a computer game, future as irrevocably unavailable to the social imagination, society as an imaginary dream of each isle within the cosmic archipelago sustained on the wings of vacuum, and your capacity to generate a sufficient amount of scorn for such distortions will be an undoubted signal that a different kind of visceral response is not only needed, but is, actually, manifested in encounters with such contents.

There is something pertinent to, say, Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Burroughs’s Junky, Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers that makes them different from Terry Eagleton’s The Gatekeeper: A Memoir, Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, John Lydon’s Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. Likewise, there is a distinctive feature that differentiates these from, for example, The 9/11 Commission Report, The Constitution of the Unites States of America, and/or James Joyce’s letters to Nora Barnacle. Just as there is a difference between Warhol’s real time, uncut recordings of each segment of even the most mundane of instances on the one hand and, on the other, Kenneth Goldsmith’s experiments in uncreative writing in the form of the books such as Day (retyped The New York Times issue of September 1, 2000), Fidget (Goldsmith’s record of each body movement he made on Bloomsday 1997), and/or Soliloquy (a record of each word he uttered during one week).

In “Towards a Poetics of Hyperrealism,” a chapter in the book Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, Goldsmith introduces the work of Vanessa Place, a lawyer who presents the cases she defends as pieces of writing. Looking at them as narratives is her discriminative defense strategy, tactic that protects her from overexposure, excessive emotional strain by virtue of identification and empathy. And yet, there is something about her wording that is particularly intriguing and thought provoking. The more stylized such accounts are (even if stylization is a matter of the approach solely, and no actual interventions on the documents occur), the more questionable becomes the distance issue. More precisely, once one detaches herself or himself from the text of the document, all processing is supposedly transposed onto the realm of data parsing – not reading stories.

Try comparing it to an encounter with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and it does not take very long to realize that it is a very different kind of strategy from the one the reader deploys to distance oneself both from the character of Kurtz and those of natives. Put differently, they are distinct visceral –  not necessarily divorced from cognitive engagement – responses that ensure sliding on the scale of suspension of belief and distrust. As similar as those mechanisms may appear, few things can be more misleading than their identification. Namely, seemingly not entirely dissimilar, while, in fact, quite different mechanisms are at stake in those readings and writings. On the one hand, a lawyer’s critical analysis, bereft of emotional engagement (in a certain sense) is apparently a matter of dealing with raw information, no style involved. By contrast, quite different is the manner in which the reader may love the depiction of Lear’s agony, while knowing that what s/he loves is the stylistic aspect, not the phenomenon.

Degrees matter. So do manners. However, one should by no means erroneously overgeneralize such insights and equate quantifiability with substantiality. Nor should one be tricked to believe in the magic of radical stylization being no stylization and/or vice versa. One should certainly remain attuned to literary subtleties, thus hard-headedly and whole-heartedly resisting seductive blurriness that uncritically renders the word aestheticization interchangeable with other forms of managing language.

in defense of mafothers : aerials of desire

“Tell me, my friend, aren’t you enchanted by poesy yourself, especially when you see her through Homer?” (Plato, The Republic 483). This question might be perceived as a means of challenging the interlocutor’s sensitivity to suspicion. It may also reflect a profoundly introspective stance exploring the territory of doubt. Alternatively, it could emanate an ambivalence tearing the moral being of the citizen whose sense of responsibility seems to overcensor the domain of what was centuries after Plato’s time to be dubbed the realm of the right hemisphere.

If your desires obfuscate your prudence, blame it on poetry. If your sadness clouds your exuberance, blame it on viral powers of poesy. If your tears flood your cheer, blame it on the poetic sneer that devours your laughter. If the intensity of your emotions colors your whole being with the flame of the ethereal anchor, seek the quirky pathways along which verses are being reconstituted from crumbling tropes, words are being resurrected from the ashes of the symbolic, and the fervor fueling the flow is steadily breathing Odysseus’s shadow into the sails of that marvelous vessel.

(Choose : we are not robozombies!)

Are you doubtful to the point where your silence sensor deceives you? Can you not detect muteness under the disguise of silence? Are you blind to the buzz plaguing the communication channel? Do you not see insularity within blurry oceans of cultural amalgamation? Do you indulge in surface gloss? Can you dig it?

“Our air is now chokingly thick with language posing as silence. Nowhere is it as thick as in New York, with its density of population and architecture: language is both silent and screamingly loud” (Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 52).

(hack the abstraction!)

Kenneth Goldsmith:”in New York, poetry is all around us, if only we had the eyes to see it and ears to hear it” (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 53).

If tumult perplexes you, seek the glow where mushrooms thrive. If multitudes bewilder you, dive into the aura that thins the layers. If echo hails you, filter proliferation. If sound defines you, crystallize it. If pursuit dazzles you, know it. If communication is your middle name, disambiguate it!

/

In the world where the norm is normcore, hypostatization abounds. Hypostatized are notions, hypostatized are significations, hypostatized are worlds. Each of them is populated by hypostatized galaxies, proliferating themselves with each revolution of the celestial bodies constituting them. Strangely, in such worlds, sparseness abounds even more lavishly. Each of them is ruled by chimera of rigor. It is rigid, hence mimics authority. It is hallow, hence resembles gentleness. It is vapid. It is vacuous. It is not friendly. It forgets its own tenet: that there is nothing to mimic.

Kenneth Goldsmith: “Disorientation by replication and spam is the norm. Notions of the authentic or original are increasingly untraceable” (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 218).

In its uprootedness, it assumes casualness as its modus operandi. Denial of attachment, bonding, allegiance is the undercurrent of such worlds. Contingency is converted into radical uncertainty. Decenteredness, instead of liberating, tends to be destabilizing. Its relativistic factions are disseminated as randomly as their inherent structure allows. It voids everything of significance. It declares everything significant: facelessness as a new currency of oppression. In such an empire of indifference, everything matters only as a source that proliferates artificial desire, urge to purchase, to consume. The more objects populate each of those b(r/l)and worlds, the more chokingly thick its air is. The less oxygen those who inhabit them receive, the more intense the languor, the more torpid the communication flow.

In such a stupefyingly sedentary -- despite immeasurable desperate muscular effort and kinetic  tyranny – even rigidity melts into vaporous whirlpools of particles. Everything is diluted to the point where it can even look potentially libratory. And yet, when one looks from a different angle, one realizes that it is clearly not so. It may seem unimposing, and yet, the impression is deceitful.  It is not spontaneity that characterizes such an “antihegemonic” socioscape. Rather, it is disorientation. It is not a form of immersing oneself in the process, work-in-progress, celebrating being within it. Steven Connor, “How to Get out of Your Head: Notes toward a Philosophy of Mixed Bodies”: “In philosophical usage, particularly that of the medieval Scholastics, ‘intentionality’ has this meaning of ‘directedness’, rather than ‘purposiveness’. Intentionality is the condition of having an aim or object, not meaning to do something” (4).

If the basis overwhelms you, seek no floating signifiers to name you. If nondescriptness is your alphabet, pursue no letters to spell out your face. If entertainment is the object of your desire, wish not. If poetry galvanizes the shadow in your sails, persevere in regenerating the energies enabled by and ensuring the remix.