Sub-Versively Protective: In The Service of Language

If pluralist discourse presented us with anything, it is a versatility of vocabularies. If such a diversity brought anything to the world imprisoned in the stagnancy of grand narratives, it is a liberty to acknowledge each idiolect as equally valid. Such an anti-hierarchical shift is a triumph of human striving to achieve a cultural context that can enable fruitful exchange. To recognize each idiosyncratic variant as worthy of hearing is to get rid of the ages long marginalization, muted voices, and underprivileged social strata.  Such a reconfiguration of the socioscape is a promising move in thinking patterns of the humans.

To accept potential validity of voicing out what no longer need be suppressed is to create room for cultural dialogue that entails opening up other, more fruitful, paths of living out a sense of communality. This, more often than not, implies a recognition of different modes of speech, different lifestyles as a manifestation and demonstration of different perceptions of the culture flux, different affinities for the verbalization of such perceptions, and different moral tastes.

To approve the legitimacy of every single of them, in some intricate way brings the whole thematic closer to the legal vernacular. In the language of deceptive, fabricated realities, the contingency of the world is taken to be the wager for the equation between legitimacy and legality. Now, if you are a believer in law, you might as well want it to act as an arbitrator in regulating social phenomena and moral conduct. That might be a good way of imagining a society of sensible denizens. And yet, when legal vocabulary enters conversation with economy, than ethics becomes as arbitrary as it gets and its practitioners devotees of economics.

If it is yet another piece of evidence for its contingent character, that fact even ethics itself would not deny.  And yet, when such a reality starts conspiring with the medical sphere, then all somnambulist philosophies of the world cannot beat the inexplicability (for the lack of a better word) of the combination in question. To allow such an aesthetic would mean to rebuke the assumption that a human being is capable of reasoning. To agree with such a postulate would be another instance of an erroneous identification between contingency and chaos, polyphony and confusion. This, again, would render supracultural superfluous. To attune to such a tonality would indicate a misconception of the totality of the dictatorship of the cacophonic buzz. To even think of accepting the noise of fiscal orgies would mean dismissing the power of dissensus--something that some of us do not share at all. Even if one would, language—being innately subversive--would protect humanness.

Realistically Utopianish Speaking...

 “The flock of birds had spiraled elsewhere, and Jean-Paul was gazing at the empty sky, which had nothing left to hint about itself unless blue air knows something I don’t know.”
Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm
 
In “Nostalgic Technology: Notes for an Off-Modern Manifesto,” Svetlana Boym theorizes erroneousness of  technology as a parallel to human fallibility. Technological imperfection reveals a possibility  for the “exploration of the side alleys” (Boym, no date, no page number). Paradoxically, this provides a platform for thinking and living differently. It informs our capacities to see a streak of erroneousness not as justification, proof, or a definition of human nature, but rather as a potential for living out other aspects of  humanness.

In Boym’s parlance, it opens up an off-modern avenue for neither quixotically fighting the technological goliath, nor sheepishly following its commandments.  Put differently, it presents one with a possibility to see the reality afresh if one opts for off-modern alleys, instead of modern, postmodern, antimodern, hypermodern, or any other variant to signify the discourse and culture in the aftermath of the linguistic turn. By extension, it reinstates the question of the human face. It inspires thinking that   “it’s only human to err” should not be confusedly equated with “to be human is to err.” Because to simply be—to resist the mindless “progress” rush, to resist noise--what it is to be human, as well. Terry Eagleton:”Because we are able to be false to our natures, there is some virtue in our being true to them” (After Theory 110).

Pressing the power button on an electronic device, more often than not, triggers a visual sensation. The focus of the activity is communication between the sense of sight and the brain. When that communication is initiated by a signal from the screen, the screen becomes a participant in the communication flows.  How that complicates the interaction between it and the viewer is encapsulated in jan jagodzinski’s notion of the inverted gaZe. In Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media (2004), he investigates the effects of the exchange between the viewer and the screen. Despite the seeming activity, that in the cases of heavily addicted gamers nearly equals a round the clock engagement in digital adventures, a mutual effect on both interlocutors jagodzinski characterizes as interpassivity. 

Seemingly, terra digita is the land of opportunities that requires no strenuous moral efforts. And yet, it is hard to imagine effortless perpetual hyperreal networking. Even if freed from all ridiculous ethical burden, threatening to overshadow the light from the screen, at least one unpleasantry  remains: that one has the body. Another one is that there is an unstoppable activity of the mind. jan jagodzinski: “Such technology has made all of us walking cyborgs. So where is the ‘No!’ to be found?” (Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media 186).

Antidote against robozomboid mentality should not be confused with the  activity as it is promoted in contemporary culture, which does not leave a single empty second, which worships passivity inhibitant placebo--self-celebratory muscular kinetics--which makes the world kingdom of somnambulism, which is a bottomless source of fun. Resistance against reckless instrumentalization hides, among other places, in reconfiguring the subject-object nexus neither via reexamining their political positioning in terms of narrowly defined power-relations, nor solely via redescribing their ontological statuses. Rather, by being “free to undo,” as high priest of the supreme imagination, James Joyce, teaches  (Finnegans Wake  208).

A possible trajectory of undoing that knot is by refocusing the debate onto dromospheric ecology, as Paul Virilio urges in Open Sky (1997). He stresses dromospheric pollution as an undertheorized and neglected aspect of life: “Alongside air pollution, water pollution, and the like, there exists an unnoticed phenomenon of pollution of the world’s dimensions that I propose to call dromospheric – from dromos: a race, running” (Open Sky 22 emphasis in original). The reason for  the lack of awareness of the contaminating aspect he sees in the blind spots of memory, in “forgetting the essence of the path, the journey” (Open Sky 23 emphasis in original). Dromology is, thus, antidote against desertification resulting from dromospheric contamination: “the desert of world time—of a global time—complementing the desert of flora and fauna rightly decried by ecologist” (Open Sky 125 emphasis in original). Dromology is an ecology aimed to recuperate the pace of life.

In that context, the center of the subject-object thematic is relocated into the gap between them—on the path so persistently kept out of the critical focus: “Between objective and subjective, it seems we have no room for the ‘trajective’“ (Open Sky 24).  Or, do we not, indeed?

Reflections about objectivity/subjectivity have lead to the insights into the possibilities arising from the repositioning of the categories in question within the communication in hyperreality.  Jean Baudrillard speculates about it in The Vital Illusion (2000). He aptly remarks that an unprecedented paradigm shift occurs in hyperreality. Arguably, hyperspace enables reconfiguration of the hegemonic position of the subject. Such a situation calls for a further elaboration: interrogating specificities of its impact on the object. Or, the subject. Or, the way human beings live: how objective the subject should be/can be in order to recuperate human dignity; how the culture of distraction frees the object in the world of the dethroned subject; how free a value-free subversion is; how disinterested a value-free subject is; how victory defines itself  in the newly created situation.

Possible explanations to a great extent depend on the reading mechanisms utilized in reconfiguring vocabulary of culture. To simplify it without being simplistic, one is prone to see disinterested reading of subjectivity as somewhat similar to metaphorical blindness, meaning being metaphor-blind, but, perhaps, also metaphorically blind. In addition, it indicates an alarmingly high degree of irony-sensor scarcity. Essentially, it results from being desensitized to literary subtleties necessary for refining the remix.

That said, Virilio’s desertification trope is a helpful tool. It can devise a technique for describing peculiarities in the lacunae: to read ironically the triumph of the supposed subversive interventions and to understand such victory as an exodus awaiting the fruits of the promised land. After velocity, dromology. After the bewildering wilderness, purifying water. After the passage across the river, the radical light shift. After the oblivion-inducing desert, resensitizing to the power of metaphor.

A way to reawaken these atrophied sensors is reading how Dennis Cooper’s The Marbled Swarm (2011) weaves an obscure world of a mysterious linguistic web epitomizing self-consuming and self-preserving potentials of language:


I learned this quote-unquote exalted style of speaking from my father, who originally cooked it up after several early business trips around the Western world. He nicknamed it “the marbled swarm,” which I agree is a cumbrous mouthful, and its ostensible allure received a decent portion of the credit for accruing his, now my, billions. (48)

The story is told in a low-pitch voice…an enigmatic husky whisper, in the key of kitch’n’sink mystery-meets-horror narrative. Seductive, meandering tunnels of it tell a tale about a boyish young man, sickeningly rich, emotionally sickening, and metaphorically sick. S/he inherited from quote-unquote father the language called the marbled swarm, a blissfully devilish weapon to be used in the battlefield called Paris über alles!

S/he comes to the chateau that s/he is about to buy. The family who are selling the haunted castle immediately reveal the presence of the ghost of their late son Claude to be part of the reason for deciding to sell it. Claude’s brother Serge befriends the future owner. Having shaken on that one, they see the deal opening up the avenues for solving the mystery of the death that could be a suicide, a murder, or, just fake.

Claude, possibly his own patricidal father Jean-Paul, is out of his mind while performing the transcendental confirmation of his presence in the memory of the fictitious impersonation of his late brother Serge, “a most unsightly daydream in which a beet-red, hyperventilating infant gave birth to another crimson, screaming infant” (The Marbled Swarm 4). Safely hidden from the public eye in the trunk of the car heading for Paris, their mother Claire indulges in the bestiality of a fratricidal act conducted on the twins called Jean and Paul engaged in the act of a mutual, self-imposed affixation.

Claude-Paul’s suicidal girlfriend is an emo-faced version of Claire’s subterranean swamp empire in the basement of the chateau, “if that mixture of recalcitrance and focus is even possible” (7). The éminence grise, the family chauffeur, orchestrates the family saga remotely. The idyllic, pastoral scenery acts as the rhetorical code of the narrative, which enables its participatory properties. The arcadian landscape becomes a literary device whose role is that of a semi-permeable membrane selectively remixing the flow from the abutting tales. Its rustic charm assumes the function of prenatal perfomative ontoethics of postmortem aesthetics: 

Q: We are not robozombies!
A: We are not robozombies! 

If this way of DJing the roots of mafotherlands is linguistically sinful, let’s immerse our good selves in the blasphemy of creatively critical corrosion of discursive authenticity. If the flow is a potential anagram of something else, let’s play Silent Spelling Bee. Yo! If a communicational tunnel can become the communication channel, please, stay tuned just phunkie green. Yo!

If it is antisubtonic to assume that a dream of self-creation is incompatible with deselfing and / or cultural remixing in the spirit of communal cohesion, one must be humble enough to call oneself a postfuturist--the offspring of the bloody phunkie DJ mafothers. If this way of reimagining literature, practice, and the everyday sounds too utopian for the pluralist critical taste, too bad for the consensus. Postfuturist storytelling finds the challenge worthy of resistance. Because the remix simply is in alignment with life.

If to follow the radical guiding light of refacement is perceived as contradictory to critical remapping of the creative realms, one should be modest enough to be reborn through silence and solidarity of reindvividualized selfless fellow-humans engaged in enduring creation of a free culture based on trust and love. 

Consistency & Contingency

If structuralism deprived us of spontaneity by robbing us of the unrestrained freedom to self-creation and limiting us to deterministic boundaries of the world and language, it might also demonstrate the intricacies Terry Eagleton points out in After Theory (2003): “If cultures are contingent, they can always be changed; but they cannot be changed as a whole, and the reasons we have for changing them are also contingent” (59).

If possible coordinates defining who we are can be understood in terms of the faculty of intellect, overrationalization can be detrimental to spontaneity as well, as Romantics and, prior to them, Hamlet realized, according to Eagleton (63). One wonders whether Eagleton’s meditation is a reminder about the wholeness of a human being within which rationality and instincts, imagination and theorizing, playfulness and orderliness, spontaneity and  rigor, carefreeness  and systematicity are among the false opposites that are compatible and complementary, rather than exclusionary. Eagleton: “Or, to translate the sentiment into part of what lurks behind the anti-theory case: If we raise questions about the foundations of our way of life, in the sense of thinking too much about barbarism on which our civilization is founded, we might fail to do the things that all good citizens should spontaneously do” (63).

If so, one speculates whether the ethics of spontaneity has become our second nature. If so, one is prone to further inquire if it, once recognized as such, simultaneously ceases to be one. One would like to know if such adoption of acquired characteristics can, nevertheless, be a channel for resistance against analogy and/or sweeping generalizations, thereby sustaining necessary distinctiveness and distance from and among other, seemingly similar instances of first, second, and whatever natures.

Q: Who the fuck are you to say what is and what is not!

A: Who cares!

Texts about Texts

Once I read a text about a story. The latter I know and admire. I had not read anything by the author of the former. The reading inspired me to think about the possibilities of commentary. The theoretical apparatus used in the text was strikingly different from the set of theoretical frameworks I typically rely on in investigations into the potentials of interpretation. Hence, every attempt to accommodate the text to my idiosyncrasies turned out to be merely an instance of indeterminacy of translation. And yet, there were so many things in it that required a thorough analysis, so I started laterally approaching the points of significance. Instead of discursively clearing up the misty spots in the narrative, I imagined the text interrogating an individual. The dialogue would be of the approximately following content:

You should turn on flash on your camera. But, I don’t take pictures at night.

In your house there is no shoe rack. But, I only wear sneakers.

You need to borrow some money in order to buy that fabulous perfume. But, I can’t smell.

You must learn the formula to express the relationship between mass and velocity at maximum acceleration. But, there’s no such thing as the mass/velocity/acceleration nexus in the physics I know.

When you drive, make sure you change the tires every five hundred kilometers. I don’t drive.

In order to be famous, you must live out the illusion of your own grandiosity. But, I don’t give a fuck about illusions.

If you want to understand something, you must be an artist. But, fuck off!!!

In order to be somewhere, you must create space in the fantasy prerequisite for your somnambulist grandeur. 

You must be inherently incorrigibly mutable if you hope to inhabit somebody else’s delusions.

No concept can encapsulate the greatness of learning.

I have no idea if I made the ideas from the text clearer to myself. I’m not sure I’m interested in further decoding it. I was concerned about the vague areas that might remain impenetrable for me. I was nearly desperate because there was a possibility to persist in listlessness regarding the superknots in the narrative. I felt I was getting increasingly hopeless because the natural density of the text will irrevocably deny me access to the beauty hidden where I cannot find it.

I’m not concerned any more. I don’t care about the areas I cannot reach. Not because I cannot, but because whatever could be found there is not what I seek.

Indeterminacy of translation again told me a story about storytelling.

Cynicism & Shadows

1. Shadows’n’Majorities

In The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011), McKenzie Wark states: “The essence of technology is nothing technical” (144). He goes on to ask:” But could it be something playful? Could it be a way, not of instrumentalzing nature, but of producing a new relation to it, as a totality?” (145). He wonders:” Is it possible to imagine collective human agency as productive of something playful, joyous, communal, even beautiful? “ (144).

Once upon a time, to be hip meant to be radical, radically revolutionary, revolutionary decadent, decadently intoxicant, toxically fiery, fiercely dedicated, decidedly transgressive. Not so long ago, in 2005, Stewart Home writes in his book Tainted Love  about swinging London, beats, and other revolutionaries heavily involved in the sweeping revolutionary tornado generously fueled by the underground pharmaceutical industry. He casts light on the peculiar dynamism resulting in the officialdom’s complicity in the criminalization of drugs, that, at a dialectical stroke, sucked the underground—up! On the surface! Namely, the authorities persecuted and prosecuted decadent revolutionaries, simultaneously amplifying anti-subversive sentiment that culminated in the latter day mainstreaming turn.

Modern day mainstreaming brought an inversion of the criminalization of drugs as we know it. The anti-subversive climate has conquered the underground, which is now overground. What once was persecuted and prosecuted as the black market is now a sophisticated version of legalized, scientifically improved, medically tested, user friendly, technologically advanced pharmaceutical  and/or chemical products at anyone’s disposal. William S. Burroughs, that obscure prophet of divine toxicity, once claimed that drugs were going to be demonized and used by reckless right wing politics as a means of social control (Gus Van Sant, Drugstore Cowboy 1989). Today, nobody cares about that fact. Why would they? Would you? When drugs have been mainstreamed, having found fertile soil in anti-subversive minds susceptible to legally available crutches—mental flux blockage aids’n’supplements. Consolation at anybody’s disposal. Silently sedated, accelerated, euphorized, dazed, hazed…you name it…according to one’s tastes.

To be hip is not to be hip. To be hip is to accept what a free culture of today offers to free-minded individuals. Only, its self-proclaiming free character is just that. Or, is it, indeed? One wonders if its rhetoric can define a choice: the words that spell out r-e-f-u-s-a-l to choose such freedom.

2. Formalities for Formalities Sake

In the empire of appearances absurd abounds. Absurd is fueled  by a powerful accelerating engine. Its seeming goal is efficiency ensuring betterment of the living conditions for the human kind. Its less obvious goal is time consumption. Its ultimate aim, or, at least, the effect, is depriving individuals of the time, space, and capacity to think. The ideology of such culture of distraction is desertification. It tends to transform humans into desert dwellers. Its most prominent manifestations are eerily dialectical pairs that include, but are not limited to, the following: immediacy/immanence, instantaneity/focus, sedentariness / peace, visual/ vision, euphoria/joy, political correctness/ humanness , uniformity/union, individualism/individuality, mass/fellowship, utility/solidarity, economics/politics, atomizing diversification/unified versatility, banalized sexuality/passion, robotic pragmatism/rationality, globalization/insularity, affectation/affection, sensationalism/beauty, possession/substance, formalities/civility.

3. Beyond the Hiyperline

“The flock of birds had spiraled elsewhere, and Jean-Paul was gazing at the empty sky, which had nothing left to hint about itself unless blue air knows something I don’t know.”

Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm (2011)

Pressing the power button on an electronic device, more often than not, triggers a visual sensation. The focus of the activity is communication between the sense of sight and the brain. When that communication is initiated by a signal from the screen, the screen becomes a participant in the communication flows.  How that complicates the situation is encapsulated in janjagodzinski’s notion of the inverted gaZe . In Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media (2004), he investigates the effects of the exchange between the viewer and the screen. Despite the seeming activity, that in the cases of heavily addicted gamers nearly equals a round the clock engagement in digital adventures, a mutual effect on both “interlocutors” jagodzinski characterizes as interpassivity. 

Antidote against such robozomboid mentality should not be confused with the  activity as it is promoted in contemporary culture, which does not leave a single empty second, which worships passivity inhibitant placebo--self-celebratory muscular kinetics--which makes the world kingdom of somnambulism, which is a bottomless source of fun. Resistance against zombo-instrumentalization hides, among other places, in reconfiguring the subject-object relations neither via reexamining their political positioning in terms of narrowly defined power-relations, nor solely via redescribing their ontological statuses. Rather, by being “free to undo,” as high priest of the supreme imagination, James Joyce, teaches  (Finnegans Wake  208).

A possible trajectory of undoing that knot is by refocusing the debate onto dromospheric ecology, as Paul Virilio urges in Open Sky (1997). He stresses dromospheric pollution as an undertheorized and neglected aspect of life: “Alongside air pollution, water pollution, and the like, there exists an unnoticed phenomenon of pollution of the world’s dimensions that I propose to call dromospheric – from dromos: a race, running” (Open Sky 22 emphasis in original). The reason for  such lack of awareness he sees in the blind spots of memory: “forgetting the essence of the path, the journey” (Open Sky 23 emphasis in original). Dromology is, thus, antidote against desertification resulting from dromospheric contamination: “the desert of world time—of a global time—complementing the desert of flora and fauna rightlydecried by ecologist” (Open Sky 125 emphasis in original). Dromology is an ecology aimed to recuperate the pace of life.

In that context, the center of the subject-object thematic is relocated into the gap between them—on the path so persistently kept out of the critical focus: “Between objective and subjective, it seems we have no room for the ‘trajective’“ (Open Sky 24).  Or, do we not, indeed?

Reflections about objectivity/subjectivity have lead to the insights into the possibilities arising from the repositioning of the categories in question within the communication in hyperreality.  Jean Baudrillard speculates about it in The Vital Illusion (2000). He aptly remarks that an unprecedented paradigm shift occurs in hyperreality. Arguably, hyperspace enables reconfiguration of the hegemonic position of the subject. Such a situation calls for a further elaboration: interrogating specificities of its impact on the object. Or, the subject. Or, the way human beings live: how objective the subject should be in order to recuperate human dignity; how the culture of distraction frees the object in the world of the dethroned subject; how free a value-free subversion is; how disinterested a value-free subject is; how victory defines itself  in the newly created situation.

Possible explanations to a great extent depend on the reading mechanisms utilized in reconfiguring vocabulary of culture. To simplify it without being simplistic, one is prone to see disinterested reading of subjectivity as somewhat similar to metaphorical blindness, meaning being metaphor-blind, not metaphorically blind. It also indicates an alarmingly high degree of irony-sensor scarcity. Essentially, it results from being desensitized to literary subtleties necessary for refining the remix.

That said, Virilio’s desertification trope is a helpful tool. It can devise a technique for describing peculiarities in the lacunae: to read ironically the triumph of the supposed subversive interventions and to understand such victory as an exodus awaiting the fruits of the promised land. After velocity, dromology. After the bewildering wilderness, purifying water. After the passage across the river, the radical light shift. After the oblivion-inducing desert, resensitizing to the power of metaphor.

4. Hips’n’Hypes

“There was a cleanness and simplicity about these machines.”

 Terry Eagleton, Saints and Scholars  (1987)

If I were a computer, I wouldn’t expect from myself to be a digital Dorian Gray version of my humbly imperfect humanness. Neither would I expect from it to be a confirmation of my erroneousness and, thus, humanness. Unlike the imagined robotic variant of myself, I have embarrassing, illusory hopes—half-hidden even from myself—that one day there will be a laptop that does not freeze, a desktop that does not eat files, a printer that does not run out of ink. I shamefully cherish a desire that that day were now.

Most of the time I forget about such secret aspirations. And just keep living. As a human version of my digitalized mirror image. While in that hyperworld, I wonder if not to be hip is to be hyper now. In that democratic fairy tale called the web, one might experience a tremendously liberating effect of the communication freed from a Father’s sanctioning voice. Hence, one is free to chat, search, play, prey, loot, seduce, flirt, have sex, read, create…you name it…on the Internet.

In an age when faith in science evokes a gambler spirit, unbelievers sinfully seek answers on the net. Moreover, technology, in a broader sense, offers reasonable responses for numerous conundrums. janjagodzinski, Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media: “Consumers are told which foods are likely to cause cancer, and then which foods can help prevent it! Given that nobody knows for sure, we invest more and more authority in technological solutions like Viagra, and mood drugs like Prozac to avoid responsibility”(182).

But then, one wonders why that recentering of authority is necessary to comfort one’s doubtful soul. Isn’t the whole enterprise called hyperreality so appealing precisely because it frees one from the sense of authority? Eerie dialectic, indeed.Shifts nothing short of the creepiness of the land of shadow readers and robocops in Jeff Noon’s novels. Inhabiting hyperspace bears semblance to wandering through the labyrinth of empty spaces in the mind deprived of dreams in Pollen (1995). The air we breathe, marbled with an invisible telecommunication jungle, is sometimes heavy. As if it were saturated with the particles of the dispersed vurthayfever bomb. The same sneeze bomb that haunts vurtual Manchester of Noon’s imagination.

Seemingly, terra digita is the land of opportunities that requires no strenuous moral efforts. And yet, it is hard to imagine effortless round the clock hyperreal networking. Even if freed from all ridiculous ethical burden, threatening to overshadow the light from the screen, at least one unpleasantry  remains: that one has the body. Another one is that there is an unstoppable activity of the mind. jan jagodzinski: “ Such technology has made all of us walking cyborgs. So where is the ‘No!’ to be found?” (Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media 186).

In this cyberspace there are yet other cyberspaces, as McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto (2004) inspires one to think ([389] square brackets in original). And it is this one, called vurtuality. In Stewart Home’s book Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010), communication is relocated into the language of the ones &  zeros binary coding and decoding. Interaction reflects isolation of the characters whose words are disassociated from the bodies.

 Afflicted literature:

‘Abstract literature implodes in a subdued fashion, like a slow motion reversal of an explosion or some other catastrophe. It absorbs all energy generated by writing as a cultural practice and neutralises it. Abstract literature is a billowing series of syllables followed by an eruption of color. It is usually red with purple flashes…’ (Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie 5).

Since abstract literature does not exist, one provides a definition. What one does with words in the world which denounces possibilities for an interaction outside vurtuality. It seems that words are being dismissed and invented without much consideration about their relationship with the extralinguistic. One of the words that has undergone such a hasty handling is alienation. Reflecting upon the thematic within the dynamic of postmodernist culture in Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 (1986), Terry Eagleton observes: “[T]here is no longer any subject to be alienated and nothing to be alienated from, ‘authenticity’ having been less rejected than merely forgotten” (132).

In the world that dismisses and conjures up words with close to no concern for the everyday, communication acquires properties of “imperceptible passages of distant galaxies through hyper-space” (Stewart Home, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie 6). If there is no such thing as alienation, one wonders how to call an unpleasant feeling of isolation that some human beings experience in the cold communication channels. One would be prone to suspect if, perhaps, it is the word communication that calls for reconfiguring. Alternatively, one reimagines human interconnectivity on the communal level in the way that would ensure genuine exchange and relieve one from disconnectedness.

In Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, communication is  limited to overpouring spam emails. Ads promoting aids and supplements for sexual performance come in shapes and forms that could be appealing to any male concerned with his social status. In such a world of advertising, physical potency strangely plots power relations narratives, cultural constructs curiously conspire with the vocabulary of carnally conditioned hierarchies. In the world of male supremacy,  it is only the names of female artists that help define the type of pleasure a male will be able to provide once he gets a “bigger and better cock” (Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie 7).

In the world that casts aside the concept of representation, representational arts have been gotten rid of, as well: “Theatre is dead. Cinema is dead” (Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie 10). Such culture of of denial and deception wants one to believe that literature abandoned readers-writers: “Literature is dead. Time and space died yesterday. You eat dead food, you fuck dead men, even your words die in your mouth. Your sentences are rolled into the ebbing waters of modernism and then wash back like a bulimic’s forced vomiting” (Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie 10).

To say that we now live in a technologically advanced age is more than obvious. To say that cohesion of the human community is disproportionate with technological development might be disputable. To define the disparity in terms of  narrowly understood causality and conditioning would be crude reductionism and not a precise articulation of the solidarity of fellowship. It clearly calls for the remix in order to reawaken the union of the community of reindividualized humans.

The poetics of Home’s novel inspires a response to the fashionable cynicism of contemporary culture. It provokes resistance against dispassionate acceptance of delusional thinking. In the world that threatens to erase distinctions among individuals in the blurry, massifying, sweepingly objectifying, amalgam, there is still hope to reanimate the half-forgotten dromology. In such a world, to be hip is not to be hip. To reject what  nihilo-cannibalist culture packages as free thinking for  free-minded individuals. Beyond hips & hypes is to choose. To choose resistance against deceptions. To refuse to be absent from the abundance offered to human kind. To persevere in resensitizing to literary subtleties. To sustain dromology in the service of language. To accept to hard-headedly endure in being present in life.

Political Philosophy of Poetry

 “There was a cleanness and simplicity about these machines” (Terry Eagleton, Saints and Scholars 37). Reading could be decisively different from what it is like now. Instead of an overheated outburst of interpretation, it could be a coldly conducted vivisection of literary fiber. An understanding of the character may purge the confusion imposed on the  musings about it.

 The character finds oneself amidst the global crisis of just about everything. The historical context of the occurrence is blurred by the emphasis on the beauty of Cronos’s unimportance. That complicates understanding. Because the character comments on the notion of Martian-Saturnalian ethnicity and the observation triggers the initial reaction in a celebratory key of the antinationalist tone. The first response to such blatant political illiteracy is that it must have resulted from another  blind spot. Namely, in the scene in which the character is choosing attire for the evening at the theater, random thoughts reveal that the current existential situation is a far cry of the solid middle-class background. The economic degradation discloses another unexpected fact--an aspect of life typically not linked with economic potency. More precisely, the fewer the items in the wardrobe, the greater anxiety and insecurity takes hold of the life of this shivering, unprotected being just about to set out to spend early evening hours immersed in the enchantment of the stage.

“The city was glutted with crap and garbage and screaming to be purged” (Terry Eagleton, Saints and Scholars 36). 

If there is political philosophy of poetry, one imagines it as a logical colossus standing on the four gigantic pillars of what is reasonably salient: (1) solid causal base; (2) empirically testifiable propositions; (3) correspondence between the conclusion and its consequences; and (4) practically justifiable application of  their interpretative ramifications.

If these four giants hold the structure steadfastly, they spell out the following ideas about contemporary culture:

1.      The idea of safety must be equated with the frequency of visits of club goers to the hottest dance hubs in the city;

2.      Job must be understood as anything an individual does in order to support the development of small and medium businesses;

3.      The concept of job,  thus, includes the not-for-profit sector, thereby subverting traditional perception of employment;

4.      Equality must be understood in incremental class terms;

5.      Military-entertainment complex must be read in a freudian key;

6.      Peace must be tightly woven with, but at the same time diametrically disproportionate to, inflation;

7.      Tradition must be either smashed at a stroke or preserved within a fortress-like bubble;

8.      Art must be either totally free or there will be none;

9.      Citizenship must be a matter of(f) the bloodline, unquestionably founded in legislature;

10.  The degrees of humanity must be implemented in the health program  defined in architectural terms.

Wiered to a Maze: Pixel Saturnalia and Refacementi (Part Three)

To Be Human: Noises & Voices in Ye Land of Ye Olde Folks

[i]

The following reading of Stewart Home’s novel Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton (2004) focuses on reanimation of redemptive silence through the remix of noise. The remix includes, but is not limited to, acknowledging the silent layers of storytelling and render them accessible: the unuttered literary tissue, cracks in the discursive, lateral paths of cultural remixing.  In Stewart Home’s novels, a social commentary is both overtly presented and implied in the interventions manipulating the genre and literary elements such as characterization, tone, and setting. For instance, the characters, featuring emotional sparseness and awkward ways of socializing, are sketches of nihilo-cannibalist culture. Insistence on compulsion and aggression is a caricature of a human being in a soulless world. Disorientation and confusion, presented in the text and coupled with what is infused in the subtext, add up to a sketch of a fragmented culture of robozombies. A sense of isolation, dispassion, and destitution is accentuated through the broken beat plot. Syncopated rhythm patterns make manifest, rather than explicate, how it feels to live in an alienating culture in which fetishized labor relativizes the notion of the everyday in a highly undesirable way, as Terry Eagleton remarks the state of affairs in Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate: “Truly civilized societies do not hold predawn power breakfast” (11). 

In Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton, Home portrays the character Eve in a minimalist fashion to suggest detrimental effects of capitalism on an individual, as he states in Bubonic Plagiarism: “[I]n this world we are all prostitutes. It isn’t really possible to jump in and out of commodity culture” (62). Eve explores the transformation of quantity into quality, the distinction between art and crime, the pleasure-pain divide (Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton 13). Among her clients is Adam, who is interested in investigating into prostitution and its cultural aspects. They engage in a joint research discussing contributions of certain cultural figures to intellectual history.  Part of the thematic is proliferation and commodification of art: “Needing money to pay off debts, I resolved to transform prostitution into a form of arts” (Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton 27). Further implications in political terms can be imagined along the following lines: “Crime became art and art became crime” (15). This casts light on the novel’s problematizing mutual conditioning between the authorities and the mainstream culture on the one hand and, on the other, criminalized social margins.

What makes this social commentary specific is that, as much as it is overtly stated, it is also delivered through the silent cracks, mainly integrated into the characterization and the tone. The character of Eve, for example, is the epitome of the stigma against junkies and prostitutes. Home makes a point about stereotyping that masks politics of exclusion: “[T]he condemnations that are sometimes directed towards junkies and prostitutes should be deflected back against the alienated social relationships that produce prejudices” (Bubonic Plagiarism 61). Hence, the characterization constitutes tacit cultural critique combined with what is uttered. The fusion of the verbal and what punctures discourse tells a tale about the world in which afflicted solidarity engenders individualism instead of individuality. The culture of self-absorbed, commoditized humans is depicted in the thematization of prostitution between a choice and necessity, between privacy and spectacle: “To begin with transformations. I decided to throw away my own rules. I planned crimes against grammar by immersing myself in the grammar of crime” (7).

     In the context of the interlaced social and discursive realities, the Jack the Ripper conspiracy delineates a parallel between the nineteenth century and contemporary culture’s sensationalist susceptibility thriving on insatiable hunger for the euphoric. Closely related to such sentiment is the idolatry situated within the obsession with celebrity culture. Thus, among the candidates for the identity of Jack the Ripper are the characters based on cultural figures such as Henry James and William Burroughs, just as some of the prostitutes’ clients are Martin Heidegger, George Sorel, Albert Camus, Gilles Deleuze, and Jim Morrison.

Such characterization creates a platform for the scrutiny of power-relations within the cultural establishment and a critique of institutionalized knowledge.  The novel features obscenities in educational institutions, thereby questioning morality within the mainstream culture. For example, a promiscuous university professor seduces a student and exposes his sexual frustration in a violent erotic act. Images of graphic sex and violence are deployed in order to make prominent corruption and social relations based on exclusion and dominance. By depicting an alienated bodily experience and vulgarized sexuality, the novel makes an implicit commentary about body politics as a form of socio-political control that disguises questionable morality under the language of political correctness.

Hypocrisy is also problematized through the critique of global politics and the state of affairs in the European Union based on the Old-New Europe divide. Many of the prostitutes, for example, are from the former Communist Bloc, which emphasizes the problems of inequality and inhumane treatment of disenfranchised demographics. Expanding on Marx’s critique of alienation and exploitation in capitalist and allegedly socialist/communist societies alike, prostitution is used as a metaphor for social and existential dilemmas. For example, the character of Eve is portrayed as a well-educated, well spoken artist-prostitute-crackhead. Along with a class reference, crack, as the drug of “choice” of the impoverished, also metaphorizes prevalent affective patterns of our time, characterized by addictive behavior, instantaneous gratifications, and superficiality in human interaction that clearly dissolves solidarity.

The novel shows an individual as dehumanized, bewildered commodity. Through this is addressed the question of freedom under a threat of the military-entertainment complex. The symbolism of the occult demonstrates the characteristics of such culture. Literary techniques, used in the novel as means of an experimentation with the genre, accentuate the cultural critique in question. Home comments on the approach as follows: “Above all, and like all my books, Down & Out is about the impossibility of separating form from content within human expression and the ultimate futility of genre distinctions” (Bubonic Plagiarism 59). Insisting on one hundred words being the exact length of every paragraph, Home aims at subverting the distinctions between poetry and prose (Bubonic Plagiarism 59). The first part of the novel mainly follows conventions of traditional storytelling. As a parody of a bourgeois genre, the novel features “the odd elements of realism” (Bubonic Plagiarism 60). As the parody progresses, elements of goth aesthetic, portraying occult, ritualistic, phantasmagoric scenes, supersede the elements of realism—the narrative is moving from sex to death, again to convey a social commentary: “So the book becomes utterly fantastic and this is one of the ways [he] accentuate[s] [his] interest in the cultural construction of the relationship between sex and death” (Bubonic Plagiarism 60). 

In this stylistic spin-off is instigated the idea about cultural constructs as means of control and oppression. Esoteric context is suggestive of manipulative social mechanisms carried out via persecution and prosecution of the social margins. This addresses realities of prostitutes’ activities in gentrified areas, where they, “dressed in widow’s weeds […] are able to solicit business unmolested by cops” (Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton 153). Simultaneously, it reiterates the critique of discursive realities and cultural constructs: ”The reversibility of sex and death is never more apparent than when whores turn tricks in a graveyard” (Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton 159). Such a picture of the modern world inhabited by robozombies deprived of their own will, having projected on their brains “series of pictures with bright and vivid outlines” (Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton 166), evidently references the dilemma of living in media-saturated realities. Similarly, artistic circles are reminiscent of mystical orders in which objectification maintains social relations based on domination and exclusion.

With an exception of Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010), London is typically both the setting and a character in Home’s novels. The portrayal of the character of the London in Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton charters the changes in the area between Bethnal Green and the City. Cultural context indicates a mute collaboration and a mutually conditioned relationship between the authorities and the ghetto via the sustenance of tribulations within the neglected communities and/or neighborhoods. Partly, the problematic can be understood in the context of Habermas’s thought about the politics of distraction. In “Modernity--an Incomplete Project,” he writes about a populist reaction to neoconservative cooption of communication infrastructure. Different forms of resistance to modernization and science in the service of capitalist economy are suppressed under the flag of progress. Habermas reveals the underlying motives for modernization and the resulting socio-political dynamic. Precisely, he implicitly discloses the truth about the scapegoating of certain cultural segments and practices in the name of advancement of the cultural spheres by nature detached from the communication in question. Simply put, it might translate into seeing the key role of economic factors in the circles and activities whose primary interests are of the different character:

But the occasions for protest and discontent originate precisely when spheres of communicative action, centered on the reproduction and transmission of values and norms, are penetrated by a form of modernization guided by standards of economic and administrative rationality – in other words, by standards of rationalization quite different from those of communicative rationality on which those spheres depend. But neo-conservative doctrines turn our attention precisely away from such societal processes: they project the causes, which they do not bring to light, onto the plane of subversive cultures and its advocates. (8)

In this light can be read certain aspects of Home’s novel depicting modernization in urban areas. Focusing on architectural reconfiguration of the cityscape and cultural restructuring, it discloses instrumentality of modernizing policies in the criminalization of the dispossessed. Put differently, the impoverished neighborhoods are being gentrified, while the denizens are being continually marginalized. The underprivileged in the rejuvenated areas cannot meet new economic demands, so they not only remain culturally excluded, but are also forced to relocate  to the areas where affordable housing disguises the class divide. In order to endure the hardships, preserve day-to-day living, or, simply to support certain lifestyles, the dispossessed frequently opt for illegal acts. In such cases, the supposedly life-preserving choices are also destructive and degrading. Paradoxically, the authorities keep a blind eye on some aspects of crime because of their own complicity, at the same time not shying away from criminalizing those same social strata on a different basis, thereby sustaining the vicious circle.

Accentuated is the impact of the so called modernization turning the city into a jigsaw puzzle[1] of fashionable facades, bizarre galleries, grotesque shopping malls, olympic villages, and slums. Home elucidates hypocrisy behind such urban policies by pointing out that, contrary to the presentations in the media and arts of the urban transfiguration, the reality shows little evidence of easing social tensions.[2] Rather, they have been intensified through racist exclusion with regard to employment and housing opportunities. The distorted image of cultural realities in the East End of the mid naughties Home comments as follows:

The yuppies really changed the character of the area and have made it a lot worse for the predominantly Muslim local population. At the same time I’d be reading stuff written by art critics in which they’d be going on about how gentrification had solved the problem of racism in the Brick Lane area. This was complete nonsense, since community self-defence against fascism had addressed the most blatantly criminal aspects of this. However, institutional racism remains a massive problem in the area and gentrification has exacerbated it in terms of housing and jobs. (Bubonic Plagiarism 59-60)

 New money, thriving on unfathomable valences of economics, a manipulated image of power, and the affinities for sensationalism generates the logic of pricy cheapness that seems to be spreading beyond the East End, as suggested by the title of Home’s pamphlet Bubonic Plagiarism. As it is, it is reasonable to believe that, simultaneously, a web of resistance against those overwhelming corporate threats is spreading in the overlooked, forgotten, masked, parts of the city. One is prone to imagine that the authentic flavor of resistance can still be felt around slightly damaged facades in the originally Huguenot immigrant neighborhood in the Brick Lane area, in the unmowed grass in Weaver’s Fields, in the charming, supernarrow passages off Whitechapel High Street, or, in the buildings to be  rebuilt in the King’s Cross St. Pancras area.[3] There is the 5 Caledonian Road radical haven at Housmans bookstore. Lateral alleys of resistance can be found near Bunhill Row. Just off Bunhill Fields, the historic cemetery, where non-conformers such as William Blake are buried, there is a potential to inspire the dormant song of the chimney sweeper. In Finsbury Square, Occupy London calls for vitalizing the cleansing capacities of the remix.[4]

Literary playfulness, contesting cultural conventions, demarcates the ways of resisting cultural impositions, at the same time reconstructing the communal being and reinventing individuality, as Home suggests: ”The one thing I know is that we have to work this out together, no one in isolation and acting on their own will find the solution” (Bubonic Plagiarism 64). In the interstices of text, one finds creative spaces for cleansing the communication channel, for purging it from dehumanizing obstacles. Those recuperating energizes constitute the redeeming power of creation—the source for the remix, an inspiration for a reanimating intervention on behalf of the DJ.

Literature  shows both what language can and what it cannot do. It certainly reaffirms that it is not possible to step outside of language in order to verbally express something. However, not only the verbalized is what makes literature literature. There are literary elements, such as tone, characterization, and setting that deliver a message unutterable in and impenetrable through language. That is how silence punctures discourse. As much as cultural constructs condition freedom, they also enable a contestation of the constructed boundaries. Constructiveness of cultural realities makes them reworkable. The remix can generate unifying energies for the restoration of vital ingredients of fruitful communal exchange.

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[1] ResT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0AbIjKlbdE&feature=plcp

[2] This is particularly prominent in the area bordered by Brick Lane, Bethnal Green, Bishop’s Way, and Hackney Wick; between Dalston Junction and Hackney Central, and all the way to Liverpool Street; and the Bethnal Green- Bow Church-Whitechapel triangle (the information and impressions based on my research trips to London in June, August 2008, July, August 2009, and July, August, December 2010, January 2011, and May 2012).

[3] At the crossroads of Pentonville Road and Gray’s Inn Pl. there is a building usurped by the real estate. To my knowledge, there has been at least three years during which absolutely nothing has been done at what is supposed to be a construction site.

[4] The information about the Occupy activities is based on my research trip to London in May 2012.

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[i] Remixable. the intersection of Commercial  Street and Elder Street, London, 2009.