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.

Wiered to a Maze: Pixel Saturnalia and Refacement (Part Two)

Towards the Remix

Were the Vurt sneeze bomb sent to our world, as it was in Pollen, it would come in the form of a bewildering massage. Its facelessness would be impressed on the human face. Its noise would mute the human voice. It would result from the assumption that corruption is what constitutes human nature. Svetlana Boym portrays part of such a dilemma in “Nostalgic Technology: Notes for an Off-Modern Manifesto” drawing the parallel between erroneousness of technology and human fallibility. The frustration and constraints one experiences on a daily basis confronted with technological dysfunctioning, in a way, proves the fact that to err is human. In other words, technological imperfection is remindful of our own. However, as much as it forces us to encounter the corruptible, malfunctioning aspects of our existence, technology, paradoxically, provides a platform for thinking and living differently. It informs our capacities to take advantage of what is typically perceived as a weakness and turn it into a potent device for walking the lateral paths. On “a margin of error” (Boym no date, no page number), occur encounters with such possibilities. Such erring is, as Boym sees it, neither high tech nor low tech. It is broken technology that she takes to be a basis of art’s new technology.

In Boym’s parlance, margins of error open up an off-modern avenue for neither quixotically fighting the technological Goliath nor sheepishly following its commandments. Put differently, it presents us with a possibility to see the world afresh if we opt for off-modern alleys. She devises the option instead of the terms modern, postmodern, antimodern, or hypermodern. According to Boym, choosing the off-modern mode, one it is possible to reclaim the uniqueness of the cities threatened by the global uniforming atomization. It also enables one to see the human face again. By extension, it expands and clarifies the understanding of what it means to be human. Based on Boym’s off-modern thinking about moving laterally, through the “exploration of the side alleys” (Boym, no date, no page number), one is prone to note 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--is part of what it is to be human as well.

Lateral alleys of exploring such possibilities concern critical thinking, cultural practice, and reconfiguring the communal. Wark points out that in gamespace critical theory is, like sports or porno, yet another specialized, precisely regulated vocabulary. It becomes “’pornography of the concept’ […] a mere subset of gamespace, a hypocritical theory, with different specialists, playing by different rules – equally worthy of the Marquis de Sade” (Gamer Theory [151]). Perhaps. But, as it could be inferred from his further observations, the critic, too, inhabits the gamespace. S/he can choose how to play: take the red pill, “playing for the real” [019], which also means proliferating the unreal. But there’s also the blue pill that allows one to “play within the game, but against gamespace” [019].¹

The absolute power of gamespace is a misconception parallel to that of the totality of discourse. Notwithstanding being thrown into the maze, gamers can look for the channels to reclaim play. What Wark describes as a hypocritical position comes as a result of trying to step out of the game in order to confront and conquer it. It entails further multiplication of (un)realities and keeps a gamer captive. Conversely, playing within, yet making choices through the cracks, lateral alleys of gamespace, enables disambiguing its totalizing tendencies. It means to “be ludic, but also lucid” [151]. In Noon’s idiolect, it translates into the following:

Allow them play […] All the underachievers, the desperate and the wild; the users, the losers, the self-abusers; the closet queens, the wardrobe kings; the mix-masters, the fixers, the mix’ n’ matchers; dead-enders, big spenders, low enders, pretenders to the bone; the pros and the knows and the job-blows; the drunks and the skunks and the hunks; the survivors, the suiciders; the morticians, the mathematicians; bimbos and criminals; rich men, poor men, beggar men, thieves; the nameless and the gameless […] All citizens, good and bad. Allow them play. Allow them numbers. (Nymphomation 320)

To allow them numbers means to bear in mind that “If everybody looked the same/ We'd get tired looking at each other” (Groove Armada, “If Everybody Looked the Same” lines 1-2). The question is essentially about coping with the difference-commonality dialectic:”A culture which results from the active participation of all its members is likely to be more mixed and uneven than a uniform culture which admits new members only on its own terms. In this sense, equality generates difference” (Terry Eagleton Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate 153-4). The reason for occasional perplexities caused by such tensions of peculiar dialectics often lies in amnesia. We sometimes forget that the deprivation of rights, liberties, and freedom is not limited to one’s own marginalization and exclusion, but is rather concerns oppression and dispossession in general terms.

Consequently, the mechanisms originally fought against are being perpetuated because such a war disables crossing cultural boundaries and keeping in mind that one cannot be emancipated at the expense of depriving someone else of their liberties. This calls for the reanimation of the authentic faith in freedom and rethinking social power dynamic that defines heterogeneity as a danger rather than a wager of solidarity: “Indeed, the evasive meanings of colonial history and its potential value to the multiculturalism of the future are pending inside the new global role of the United States as a successor to the European empires that were defeated and transformed during the twentieth century” (Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia 3).

Those who are inspired by the European spirit and refiguring its invaluable heritage also find invigorating the love for the anti-American Americana because it is faithful to the original American dream which disseminated cultural gems from gospel, via jazz, the blues, to rock & roll. For such a hybrid mindset has been nourishing unstoppable restorative potentials of the heritage. They say there are no second acts in American lives.² Or, is it wherever war on terror is being waged instead of war on culpability culture, whenever hypocrisy engenders alienated social relationships and occupies the human face?

For that reason, novels like Nymphomation, Pollen, 69 Thing to Do with a Dead Princess, and Downand out in Shoreditch and Hoxton inspire imagining different living conditions and sentiments. This includes love freed from the need to obtain, contain, and possess. Such an understanding and experience of love does not necessitate reaching out in order to find the missing part. Paradoxically, it is about reaching out to give (because it is not about having) and to receive (not to take). Because: “Love is receiving what one does not have and giving that of what one has no power” (Critchley, 2009).

Refacement: Rebirth through Subtonic Hi-Fi

 Redemptive Power of the Alternating Cycles of Noise and Silence

ⁱ

The reading of 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess in this chapter is focused on an intertextual exchange and its potentials for reanimation of human solidarity. It is concerned with vocabularies that favor glamour over human relationships, advertisements impersonating a genuine exchange, porn ventriloquizing an erotic experience, games that supposed to pass for spontaneous creativity, lionization of celebrities, and the fetish commodity aiming to compensate for spiritual fulfillment. The problem of discursively defined boundaries of freedom is read in light of resistance against multiple oppression. In the context of an exchange, oppression is noise in the communication channel. Resistance to it is pivotal for the remix of noise.

Among the questions the book explores contemporary culture’s susceptibility to sensationalism and instantaneous gratifications. Specifically, it addresses conspiracy and glamorization of the death of Princess Diana as a means of control through the fabrication of desire in a faceless cultural amalgamation. Perverse indulgence in the lives and deaths of celebrities is a picture of a displacement, uprootedness, and neglect of the innermost needs. The novel implicitly addresses the issues related to reactionary aspects of British politics and English supremacy. The critique references the complicity of the social segments across the class in replicating the politics of exclusion. At the same time, given the social engagement of the Royal Family and their participation in charitable organizations, the symbolism of Princess Diana in Home’s novel inspires thoughts about economic inequality, the public-private divide, and the possibility of bridging the gap between the upper and the lower social strata, the ruling and the dispossessed.

69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess is a metafictional travelogue presenting a journey around Aberdeenshire inspired by the alleged true story about the death of Princess Diana written by K. L. Callan in his book of the same title. Home, essentially, focuses on the social aspects of the historical events that reveal the culture of spectacle vultures perversely indulging in a tragedy and private life of celebrities publically exposed. In such a society, constructs ensure both emancipation and impositions. Discursive constructs both enable destigmatization of the social margins, but they can also proliferate cultural realities that cause confusion—noise in the communication channel. Amidst such noise—between coercion and liberation—the characters in the novel are trying to detect the voices of truth, as the epigraph suggests quoting from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria: “I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist. I care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible.” Immersing themselves in a quest-like endeavor, they find themselves intent on devouring books, as suggested in the other epigraph quoting from Karl Marx’s letter to his daughter Laura: ”I am a machine condemned to devour books.”

A man whose names fluctuate from Alan to Callum comes to Aberdeen with an intention to end his life, but needs someone to assist him. He lives in an inherited apartment full of books. He spends his days reading them: ”Alan wanted to become a machine” (69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess 24). One day, he meets Anna, a student who is also engaged in exploring the world of books. They eat and drink at restaurants, all the while discussing literature and theory. Once Alan reveals his obsession with K.L. Callan’s book 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, they together decide to test veracity of the story.

According to Callan’s narrative, the official version of the accident in Paris is fake. Alternatively, Callan claims that Princess Diana was “strangled to death Thugee-style at Balmoral by an unknown assailant” (69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess 67). In fact, her death was a result of the failure of the security service to guard her. Out of embarrassment, the security decided to dispose of the body. For that purpose they delivered it to K.L. Callan in hope he would find a way to manage the difficult situation. He did come up with an inventive solution. He took the body around the Gordon District Stone Circle of Trail. Within the itinerary, originally including eleven and later being extended to sixty-nine ancient religious shrines in Aberdinshire, the body was decapitated and dismembered.

In order to test the feasibility of Callan’s narrative, Alan and Anna set out on a bizarre trip, indulging in randomness of discursive and sexual games. With them they take Dudley, Alan’s ventriloquist dummy. First, he is only a prop. Later, he becomes an active participant, gradually taking an active, occasionally dominant, role in the confusion of discursive self boundaries, sexual fantasies, oneiric desires: “The body of a dead princess as a metaphor for literature” (168). Their heroic pilgrimage (67) embodies fetishist affinities in contemporary culture. Alan and Anna epitomize discursively defined identities in a battlefield of power. They are wandering through the maze. It seems that their search brings no (dis)closure. Such an anticlimax happens in the world desensitized to revelation. The sacred stones turn out to be everything but holy. Rather, they are sites in a wasteland in the military-entertainment complex--the society of dispirited physicality and discursively determined selves.

The sound in this anti-novel is the beehive buzz of a multitude proliferated through abundant banality of discursive carnality, “the orgy of history” (22). Masturbation symbolizes noise in the communication channel in discursively minded culture, self-absorption in the circularity of transformations “from semen to semantics” (8). The concept of rape is used to criticize dispossession and aggression. From the perspective of power relations, language games do not always appear to be a free play of the signifier and signified: “Alan had been raped by those who’d forced him to constitute himself as a bourgeois subject but his tormentors had been similarly abused” (57). Unlike masturbation and/or rape, the sixty-nine pose is suggestive of communicational reciprocity. Sexual intercourse is constitutive of the versatility of carnal games in which partners, blindfolded, indulge in sexual experiences without much need to actually “talk” to “interlocutors.” However, their identities cannot be reanimated through the depthless buzz of discourse. In spite of visiting religious sites, they can’t be enlightened. Partly, such an anticlimax can be understood in terms of George Steiner’s critique of the broken contract “the contract between word and the world” (Real Presences 132). In response to the world of empty signification, the characters in Home’s novel turn pages and turn away from them: “Living out the death of these fantasies in blasted and blistered night, we were consumed by the turning of the page…” (69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess 168).

Aberdeen of today is not desensitized to communication. Its streets are welcoming and friendly. Its denizens responsive to inquires. The city is being gentrified and not entirely averse to an entrepreneurial sentiment. Consumerism and mammonesque idolatry are evident in the Granite City’s peculiar eclecticism, particularly in the vicinity of the Trinity Centre, the Kirk of St. Nicholas, and casino iconography in a gambler paradise near the Beach. Fortunately, the brooding fiscal fog cannot conquer the gleam in the sand, the breath of the caressing waves, and the overarching blue dome that on the odd day happens to be bright too.³

Thus, one is prone to read cultural critique in Stewart Home’s 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess as an inspiration that vitalizes thinking about the potential for recuperation of the everyday. It stimulates ruminations about the communal restorative capacities in an age of media-saturated realities and possibilities for living fulfilled/fulfilling life despite aggressively manipulative and dehumanizing politics. Disaffection and dissolvement of authentic needs, primarily love and freedom, in commoditized superficialities are crucial parts of such critique, providing a platform for reimagining solidarity through the reconstitution of the human face. Endurance in resisting hindrances to fruitful exchange and creating a free culture based on love and trust enables reanimation of solidarity and refacement--rebirth of the human face through the remix of the alternating cycles of noise and silence, loops of disintegration and the reintegration of the subtonic layers into the wholesome sound of creation.

Whose Remix It Is

Genuine exchange and its redemptive power on vocabularies and the everyday can further be explored via Felix Guattari’s refiguring the notion of subjectivity in the context of: “ethico-political articulation – which [he] call[s] ecosophy – between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity)” (The Three Ecologies 28). Painstakingly outlining purifying tactics in the three spheres, Guattari looks at the problem of diluted individuality, polluted morality, the distorted political realm, and unwholesome environment: “social ecology, mental ecology and environmental ecology” (41). The tripartite cultural paradigm shift is envisaged through the channels of genuine exchange. One of them is a transnational conversation called rock & roll. Its transformative impact on fragmented, alienating, and faceless culture in the Integrated World Capitalism Guattari presents as follows:

As for young people, although they are crushed by the dominant economic relations which make their position increasingly precarious, and although they are mentally manipulated through the production of a collective, mass-media subjectivity, they are nevertheless developing their own methods of distancing themselves from normalized subjectivity through singularization. In this respect, the transnational character of rock music is extremely significant; it plays the role of a sort of initiatory cult, which confers a cultural pseudo-identity on a considerable mass of young people and allows them to obtain for themselves a bare minimum of existential Territories. (33)

Guattari calls for resingularization, as opposed to individualism. Such individuality invigorates communal cohesion because it is based on a new perception of subjectivity freed from dominance-ridden relationships, “heterogenesis, in other words, process of continuous resingularization. Individuals must become both more united and increasingly different” (37). They might be pseudo-identities, but the transnational character of rock & roll and its capacity to ensure a sense of personal autonomy, individuality, and privacy can be perceived as an impetus for refacement--rebirth through the solidarity of resingularized, selfless fellow-humans, engaged in enduring creation of a free culture based on trust and love. It also reverberates with the tension between uncertainty and the underlying stability throughout the remix

Postfuturist emphasis on communal cohesion at the intersection of the time axes understands refacement to be resurrection of the present by redeeming the past and recuperating the future. As such, it engages in disambiguing a misconception of the totalityof discourse and its tendencies to colonize the everyday. Taking into account both the limitations and potential of language, this aspect of the remix, celebrating both silence and sound of creation, focuses on silent disruptions in the discursive, thereby making the unuttered communicable. It also accentuates resilience of language. Due to its conventional character, it is remixable. By extension, it is reasonable to believe that culturally constructed realities we know are not immune from remixing either and that, consequently, one is free to think and live differently from current cultural impositions.

To a high degree, all of it concerns living with fellow humans. In this context, I rely on Jean Baudrillard’s idea of radical alterity illustrated on the example of Japanese culture as the epitome of “true exoticism […] based on a back and forth between recognizing the Other and returning to oneself” (Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism 64).⁴ Radical alterity, as presented, ensures recognizing in the other what is different from ourselves, accepting, and loving them for who they are. Baudrillard praises Japanese culture for living out the belief that “everything comes from the outside” (Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism 69). Accordingly, the input received from the outside is appropriated by the host, making Japanese a culture of hospitality, not imitation.

It is worth acknowledging that in each individual case different remix is created out of the input received. The remix is a manifestation of refacement making manifest the potential of creation in idiosyncratic idioms. Reading them in the key that fuses the elements of quest and activism, reveals their capacity to not only address the problem of oppression, but to epitomize its repressive effects. Consequently, they inspire responses. Many of the stories that demonstrate, rather than describe or explain, the problem of discursively defined identities and dehumanizing cultural realities call for the reader’s resistance. The reader’s subversive affinities, in such cases, help devise both linguistic expressions and an actual manifestation of resistance to oppression. Such responses are instances of refacement that reanimates individuality and reintegrates communality from the ashes of objectified everyday and, consequently, melancholy-induced soulful life.

1 A similar prospect for subversiveness can be found in Jameson’s (1982) remark about the space for it in fictional works dealing with imaginary totalitarian societies: “if these Stalinist masters dispose of some perfected scientific and technological power, then genuine freedom of inquiry must exist somewhere within this state” (156).

2 In Michael Winterbottom’s movie 24 Hour Party People (2002) Tony Wilson (played by Steve Coogan) references Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.

3 The information and impressions presented here are based on my research trips to Scotland (Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen) in August 2009 and August 2010.

4 Baudrillard’s idea about true exoticism is based in the presumption that there is nothing intrinsic that welcomes input from the outside. Without claiming the opposite, my weak postmodernist remix does not entirely embrace the postulate.

i Fiscal Noise and the Sound of Creation, Aberdeen, 2009.

Wiered to a Maze: Pixel Saturnalia and Refacement (Part One)

Re-face

Imagine a life without dreams, without the human face—the world of genetically programmed babies, peculiar journeys, shadow reading, unfathomable powers, petals of time, tradition retold, soul searching, scientific visionaries, life won from the whirlpools of oblivion, reunion with the the beloved, magical-erotic mathematics, games eating the gamers, compulsory (compulsive) domino (gamers), researchers on a mission of the Truth, academics on the quest, and corporate monsters. Imagine a dream. The picture you have created is the world of Jeff Noon’s novels Pollen (1995) and Nymphomation (1997).

Imagine a world of wicked pimps and zombie johns. Imagine a ghost town of tormented, ravaged souls. Imagine a community evicted onto the social margins in the name of the newly established order. Imagine persecution of the dispossessed in the name of Mammon. Think of a pilgrimage to the shrines where saturnalian deities are worshipped through a babylonian randomness of semantics. Envision a necroagony of addiction to dehumanizing hollowness. Imagine carnality robbed of the bodily—an individual devoid of substantiality. Hear a threat to silence. Visualize the communication channel contaminated by humiliating noise crippling human dignity. Imagine a city as an abyss, wide-open, devouring the detritus of what used to be the definition of a human being. Picture enslavement by a belief that the wonder of meaning is not that it is. Welcome to Stewart Home’s 69Things to Do with a Dead Princess (2002) and Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton (2004).

Dystopian as they may appear, the novels can be read as postfuturist phantasmagoric journeys. The term postfuture is adopted from Noon (“How to Make a Modern Novel” 2001) and sampled with Fredric Jameson’s syntagm “archaeologies of the future” (Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present 215) to suggest a transformative approach to writing-reading and cultural realities. It is read as the paradigm that assumes both a critical approach to and investment in tradition—the ways it is being lived and remixed. The fusion of Noon’s and Jameson’s ideas symbolizes the oscillation between melancholy and hope at the intersection of the time axes. Additionally, implicit are Jameson’s ideas from Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) about the mutual conditioning between commodity culture and discourse pertinent to it. The emphasis is mass culture’s threats to the human face and fulfilled/fulfilling life.

The analysis is contextualized within McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory (2007) that explores living under the spectacle, contestable limits of control, and the boundaries of freedom. Through the prism of Jean Baudrillard’s America (1989) and Radical Alterity (2008) are thematized depersonalization and dehumanization in media-saturated corporate culture, while Felix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies (1999) is the context for rethinking individuality and communality through the remix in the three spheres: environment, society, and subjectivity (economy, ecology, and ethics).

Exploring the unverbalized, this chapter looks at the ways in which a social commentary is delivered on through the tone and characterization. While acknowledging overt socio-political references in the novels, I choose to emphasize the tacit layers in order to offer an interpretation of the literary elements in a key accordant with Baudrillard’s vital point--recognizing and accepting the other with true interest. Closely related to this subject matter is Svetlana Boym’s take on technology and the modern-day predicament from “Nostalgic Technology: Notes for an Off-Modern Manifesto.” Some of her ideas are implemented in the reading to show the lateral paths of reawakening cultural activism and reclaiming human dignity.

Playful literary and theoretical vernaculars are read as forms of resistance to manifold control. Fusing the quest and activism through the written word and other forms of creation, simultaneously redescribing the boundaries of traditional disciplines, genres, media, and self. Focusing on the elements of quest narratives and cultural activism, turntablist poetics draws on the mutable notions of traditional categories and a presumption that new expressive modes emerge in the intersections between the textual, audio, and visual. It flashes out reading-writing tactics as the remix of existing idiosyncrasies. Storytelling born in the remix addresses the question of cultural exclusion, at the same time, delineating the possibilities of thinking, creating, and living differently from the imposed patterns. The remix is typically perceived as a form of music making, just as storytelling is traditionally understood to belong solely in the world of letters. DJ interventions reconfigure these boundaries, thereby accentuating the flux and interconnectivity, cultural exchange between and among fellow humans.

The critique includes the issues such as the misconceived totality of discourse, commoditized emotionality, vulgarized sexuality, afflicted playfulness, blinding noise, bewildering spirituality, oscillations between melancholy and hope, singularity and communality, reactionary and transformative vocabularies and practice. The reflections outline the vision of resingularized humans, engaged in creation and activism, galvanized by and fertilizing solidarity and creation—the rebirth of the human face through alternations of noise and silence. The phenomenon in question is called refacement and is understood as the reemergence of selfless fellow-humans, enduring the hindrances to patient, persistent creation of a free culture based on love and trust.

Wi(e)red

Once upon a time in the postfuturist wild, wild Manchester the city exists more on the virtual maps of xcab drivers--the system run by shady powers--than in actual lives of its dwellers. When one is expelled from the map, his, her, or its existence is uncertain. Breathing is virulent due to the hayfever vurtbomb sent from Juniper Suction, a virtual land of recorded dreams, a replica, looking down and rendering the notion of reality ridiculously redundant. The sneezing bomb launched from Vurt is about to explode. The pandemic vurtuality is conquering the zones of temporarily safe breathing. Tiny traces of the human are mercilessly marginalized.¹

Jeff Noon’s phantasmagoric cityscape is a hybrid of cultures, myths, species, and emotions. For example, John Barleycorn, one of the Vurt bosses, is an evocation of the old English pagan saint of crops and harvest sacrificed to ensure the next year’s fertility. Crossed with the ancient Greek Cronus and Hades, this divinity from the replica world envies humans their mortality and uses it as a means of control against off-Vurt breeds. He is the demon husband of Persephone, the refigured Greek goddess of the Underworld, a flower-tongued assassin, and the seed of the Vurt hayfever, infecting the off-Vurt crossbreeds such as robodogs, doghumans, robocops, dodos, shadowcops, and zombies. The novel draws forbidden, guerilla quest paths. It portrays search for one’s missing half, shadow-tracking the memories of tragic romances, smoke-seeking dead lover’s last thoughts, rebirth of mothers through a reunion with daughters, reanimated after suicide attempts. It also inspires reinventing humanity through the life contested between the hypercontroled Vurt zones and scarce pockets of temporary freedom.

The fictitious ghetto echoes the real Music City’s (Manchester’s) heyday. It gives off the smell of beautiful flowers of creation emerging from the soil of economic recession and social turmoil. From the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s that Manchester was the epicenter of lowkey creative responses against growing consumerism. It was a haven for lyrical, cynical, fun-loving, taciturn, flamboyant, freedom-and-experiment-starved outcasts. The performers include Joy Division, The Smiths, The Fall, New Order, Quando Quango, The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, Oasis, and the acid house scene. Anchored in Anthony Wilson’s Factory Records and the Fac 51 Haçienda (a.k.a. The Haçienda) nightclub, new aural blood was, at least temporarily, reconfiguring the center-periphery relationship in the U.K. Originally an indie music sanctuary, the scene turned into a self-consuming empire--a party Titanic disappearing in a merciless mixture of unfortunate circumstances including corporate mismanagement, criminality, and conformism.

After the business closed, the building changed the owner. Today the Haçienda is transformed into the Haçienda Apartments, breeding the real estate property instead of music. In memory of the Madchester days, in 2007 Urbis Centre organized the 25^th anniversary exhibition dedicated to the Haçienda. Curated by Andy Brydon, it showed original objects from the club, rare videos and recordings, and hosted talks and lectures revisiting the life of the community. Ironically, the exhibition center itself is a cultural yesteryear. At the beginning of 2010 it left the building to be replaced by the new National Football Museum in 2011.

The part of the city called Hulme, the club’s afterparty zone, underwent a radical transformation as well. In the 1960s it was an innovative urban architectural project. The Crescents were designed to modernize the area and ensure good standard of living and quality of life for the predominantly working class demographics. However, contrary to the initial ideas, the housing soon proved not to be as affordable as originally planned. During the decades of 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s the neighborhood was transformed into an infamous squatter community that was going to be gentrified in the following years. Fortunately, some neighborhoods in Manchester today are negotiating the new aesthetic in a slightly different way. For example, the Northern Quarter, defining its identity between a tourist attraction and the authentic groove: the cozy, smoke-free staleness of the previous night’s evaporations in a secluded pub welcomes a passer by, protecting him or her from afternoon drizzle.²

Outside of such pockets, the city is transforming into another massage³ in the global spectacle--a glossy surface, a battlefield for designer capitalist conquerors, and the arena of ecstasy.⁴ It is also a place on the map of the giant dreamer, negotiating its postcolonial identity between the imperial myth of an unrivaled power and an Orwellian neocolonial reality. In the global power ring the U.K. participates in creating the culture that urges one to choose the postfuture one wants to live.

Cultural critic Jon Savage observes the empire’s anticlimactic moment at the time of the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II, the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on June 7^th, 1977: “Here was the blind superiority that had characterized the English world-view after the Second World War; here was a concentrated doze of all the unappealing traits – snobbery, insularity, xenophobia – that rendered England’s continued claim to be a world power meaningless” (England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond 352). Like the pagan divinity, sacrificed to ensure the next year’s harvest, the eroding imperial myth is expected to catalyze the emergence of new, preferably myth-free, realities. Meanwhile, it resembles Singland in Pollen, agonizing between Columbus’s maps and the Unbeknownst.

Remixing history through history, the participants in contemporary culture resemble Boda, the shadowcop in Pollen. She is on the mission to find her daughter. However, the prerequisite for this reunion is defeating John Barleycorn and Columbus, the rulers of the city maps. Barleycorn himself explains that humans invented him out of fear of death. As a response, Boda undergoes a redemptive trial of deathlike deselfing, after which she is restored and reborn in her daughter’s body. Having untied Barleycorn’s and Columbus’s knots, she breaks the pollen spell and makes the city breathe again. This act can be read as a redescription–emptying--of self, the much needed act in the culture of megalomaniacal power addicts. It is the subject’s realization and acceptance of human limits, implying humility in some, but not all the gamizens. Vurt does something qualitatively different from the self-cancellation through the sublime:

Dialectically, in the conscious sublime, it is the self that touches the limit; here it is the body that is touching its limits, ‘volatilized,’ in this experience of images, to the point of being outside itself, or losing itself. What you get is the reduction of time to an instant in a most intense final punctual experience of all these things, but it is no longer subjective in the older sense in which a personality is standing in front of the Alps knowing the limits of the individual subject and the human ego. On the contrary, it is a kind of nonhumanist experience of limits beyond which you get dissolved. (Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism 46)

The following sections show this state of the vurtual sublime, dissolvement of the powers for resistance in pixelated discourse of saturnalian noise. In contrast, the remix is purging poetics of silence that creates room for the refacement and the potential for waging “war” in a new voice.

(The) Noise

⁵

On Friday nights in Manchester,⁶ some time now in the future of the past, gamers do not “face the Alps.” Instead, they stare at the screens. Their personalities are dissolved in the nonhumanist experience, but such a sacrifice does not relieve them from craving the intensities of flashy surface:”The people of good Mazechester, wild-eyed and lost” (Nymphomation 319). There are moments that create an impression of uncontested unity, undivided commitment, and unquestioning determinacy. Only, the cohesion has nothing to do with fellowship. Also, the integrity is temporary; it lasts for a couple of hours. The magical hour is when the lottery, a domino game called nymphomation, is played. Hypnotized, Mazechester’s gamizens dive into a computer screen, TV, or radio. Strangely, the fact that each of them is simultaneously focused on similar objects does not make the game a communal experience. It is all about scoring, actually. However, such a singular goal by no means informs a sense of individuality. It is not so much about choosing to participate in the game. It is, actually, being thrown into it:

Ever get the feeling you’re playing some vast and useless game whose goal you don’t know and whose rules you can’t remember? Ever get the fierce desire to quit, to resign, to forfeit, only to discover there is no umpire, no referee, no regulator to whom you can announce your capitulation? Ever get the vague dread that while you have no choice but to play the game, you can’t win it, can’t know the score, or who keeps it? Ever get mad over obvious fact that the dice are loaded, the deck stacked, the table rigged and the fix – in? Welcome to gamespace. (Gamer Theory [1]⁷)

Welcome to the nymphomation--the bone-domino world of reversed gazes, hyperreal horizons of (dis)appearance, organic adverts throwing gamers into the gameweb, magical-erotic mathematicians of a maze. The cyberpunk aspect of Noon’s envisioning lifespace colonized by Vurt resonates with Wark’s (2007) portraying computer games conquering the gamers’ world (Gamer Theory [ 015] ) and causing redescriptions of both. Wark investigates the inversion of realities and hardships entailed by such shifts. The main difficulty of living in the world that has repudiated the distinction between the original and a replica results from the assumption on which the dismissal is based: repudiating the notion of the original, thereby rendering replica redundant. Hence, the proliferation of realities is disabled at the expense of everything else. As a result, nothing is real enough. More precisely, having experienced the reality of gamespace from within, the world without doesn’t appear to be any more real than the game. Simultaneously, the game does feel real enough to keep captive those ecstatically euphoric gamers. Nothing more. Or, so the game has it.

Wark criticizes the military-entertainment complex that redesigns humans according to the logic of computer games. What makes such a world specific is: (a) That it transforms play into a game, thereby rendering freedom, spontaneity, and creation robotic, manipulated, competitive, utilitarian, and goal-oriented; and (b) That it is everywhere; (c) Well, almost.

Play becomes everything to which it was once opposed […] The utopian dream of liberating play from the game, of a pure play beyond the game, merely opened the way for the extension of gamespace into every aspect of everyday life. While the counter-culture wanted worlds of play outside the game, the military – entertainment complex countered in turn by expending the game to the whole world, containing play forever within it. (Gamer Theory [011-6])

Wark’s vision exposes global capitalism transforming individuals into robozombies whose existence is reduced to craving and scoring instantaneous gratifications. Although, while engaged with the game, the nymphomation gamers feel hyperexcited, the sentiment is controlled through suspense and focuses on anticipating the outcome of the game--the flash, the climax of euphoric fantasies. This also means that anything anywhere outside that Friday night hardly exists. Such are the troublesome affective responses of these hyperorgasm junkies. The joy of immersing oneself in the process is superseded by stunningly challenging self-perpetuating and self-consuming endeavors aimed at proving one’s existence. The nature of the phenomenon is presented in Jean Baudrillard’s America (1986): “Do we continually have to prove to ourselves that we exist? A strange sign of weakness, harbinger of a new fanaticism for a faceless performance, endlessly self-evident” (21).

It is small wonder that such futile activities make an individual feel displaced and overwhelmingly bored. Thus, gamizens find themselves in atopia—a nonplace such as the Manchester of Nymphomation. Noon’s prose is frequently characterized as futuristic, which it, in a specific cyberpunk sense, is. However, a look through the lens of Fredric Jameson’s thought adds to it an additional perspective: “That particular Utopian future has in other words turned out to have been merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past” (Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions 286). Jameson’s ideas inspire one to think that in the postfuturist vernacular choosing the genre is an act of choosing what type of postfuturist one is, or, can be. As such, it implies a transformative approach: imagining a future through a revision of the past as a social critique of the present, rather than as a nostalgic lionization of the previous eras, or, a somnambulist image of the future: “Ontologies of the present demand archaeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past” (Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present 215). It means to excavate the future, revisiting the past, simultaneously updating it. In Pollen and Nymphomation the future is hibernated between the present uncertainties and past confusion—between pollen invasion, magico-erotic mathematics, and undoing the knots. Resurrection of the future triggers the remix of the present through the cleansed communication with the past. This perspective brings into the common perception of the spatio-time axes a ray of hope—its opens up the possibilities for the remix.

McKenzie Wark looks at the hindrances to that light and the ways of managing them. He tells a story about the travesty of the game, simultaneously transfiguring the gamers. Within such dynamic, inverted worlds emerge from the interaction between the game and the gamer:

The problem is that in gamespace things target people, rather than the other way around. It is not that the digital is a technology that cuts into the world and presents it to the human as if it were always and already cut to suit us. It is that the digital cuts into us, rendering us as bits, and presents those bits to the world made over as a gamespace in which we are the targets. (Gamer Theory [174])

That is a story of blinding excitement preventing the gamers from realizing how repetitive, unimaginative, tiring, and mechanistic it all is: ”No wonder people find their leisure as dull as their work--leisure is work” ([156] ). So do the gamizens, wild-eyed walkers through nymphomation, named after the lottery game designed as “a new kind of mathematics based on sex” (Nymphomation 257). It was initiated in the 1960s by Max Hackle and developed during the following decade by a circle of co-researchers, friends, and lovers. One of the collaborators was James Love, father of Daisy Love--Hackle’s student at the University of Manchester, a gifted researcher, whose inquiring mind is intrigued by mysterious knowledge, allegedly coded in the professor’s theory. Her research focuses on Hackle’s writings, but they only partially disclose the secret science. Most of the material is inaccessible. Yet, the titles do fuel the scientific imagination:

Twisted Hackle Paths and Other Such Wanderings’, ‘The Trickster Virus, its Effect Upon Play,’ ‘Maze Dynamics and DNA Codings, a Special Theory of Nymphomation’, ‘Sealing the Maze, the theseus Equation’, ‘Lost in the Love Labyrinth’, ’Becoming a Maze, a Topology of Virgin Curves’, and even ‘Four Dimensional Orgasms and the Casanova Effect. (Nymphomation 119)

Among the available texts is the article “The Bifurcation Less Travelled” published in 1979 in Number Gumbo, a journal specializing in the Black Math Ritual. In a conversation with Max, Daisy learns about the postulates of Mathematica Magica, from which the nymphomation emerged only to be coopted by Anno Domino. Co that used it to turn Manchester into Madzechester--gamespace. Professor Hackle reveals to Daisy the secret about the character of the project, the spirit of the time when it was developed, and how experimenting with the maze provoked unlikely transformations. Hackle admits that he created the maze, challenging the boundaries of science with unparalleled enthusiasm: “It was a special time to be a scientist, the Sixties into the Seventies. Bliss to be alive. Lateral thinking, chaos theory, fractal dimensions, the unraveling of the double helix, cellular automata, complexity theory, the game of life. Each of these we could incorporate into the thinking of the maze” (Nymphomation 254). Thus, the researchers continued building the questlike maze, making it ever more complex:

Why did I build the maze? To prove something to myself, I suppose. You know that the ancients built labyrinths not to get lost in, but to find themselves. Not all mazes contain a monster, some contain treasures. It was a spiritual quest, a tool of the mystics. So maybe I was picking up on that feeling. You’ve read my early work, Daisy. You’ll know what the Sixties were like then; we were the mathematicians of the soul. (253)

He goes on to clarify that in the Sixties many activities were sexually based and ritualistic. Thus, the esoteric science of probability lead the researchers to literally incorporate their ideas into the maze. It was an experiment that launched the virtual turn. Hackle illustrates this telling the story about Georgie’s experience, the turning point, darkly redirecting the flow and purpose of the maze:

Over the next few months we experimented more and more with the Georgie-maze loop, creating ever-more-complex pathways. Georgie would always find his way through. He was becoming the maze. He took to spend all night linked to the machine, sometimes falling asleep while connected. Amazingly, even asleep he could still affect the outcome. His dreams were wandering the labyrinth, working the wanderers, breeding, multiplying, succumbing to the nymphomation. This had a parallel effect on his waking life. It was a two-way process. (260)

This undoubtedly indicated innumerable possibilities. Unfortunately, one of them was the transformation of the maze into a self-regulated system, disabling the designers’ control over the processes. As a result, fellow-wanderers were getting lost. The system was spreading the viral code, infecting the path and the walkers, injecting into them dangerous knowledge, turning self-breeding data into an orgy of information. The less controllable the maze was becoming, the more vehemently it was affecting the gamers. Some of them never returned from the maze. Its power was exponentially increasing. The dynamic of self-proliferation and self-consumption gained impetus to the point at which the game itself dissolved. Or, rather it was won over by yet another quasi-omnipotent corporate deity Anno Domino. Co. Thereafter, the corporation would run the business until the finale of Professor Hackle’s team fighting against the corporate monster. The climax of the war is the overthrow of Mr. Million, grey eminence, and, bizarrely, one of cofounders of the maze.

Such is the pathway from idealist revolutionary science to the soul-crushing beat of the Anno Domino gamespace. The seed of the sinister turn can be tracked down to the original axioms. One of them reads as follows: “To play to win a Hackle maze, all the various wanderers must actively fall in love with the puzzle. Every player is dependent on every other” (119). This would later be transformed into pure dependency, integrated into the mechanism of controlling the virulent addiction—the bloodflow of the gamespace.

In the game the participants’ relating to each other does not imply intimacy. It brings noit fulfillment. Instead, it breeds hardly redeemable disaffection: “That was it, wasn’t it? They were, all five of them, lost in their own little worlds, their own little mazes. Only the games had brought them together” (328-9). This signals that the group activity in question has no communal bearings. It has no life-generating energy, no capacity to invigorate genuine intimacy and friendship. The corporation operates in a sophisticated fashion: it does not allow the gamers to be aware of the actual condition. What is more, it makes the world look contrary to what it really is, as evidenced in some of its rules:

5a. AnnoDomino will not permit the players to become addicted to the game.

5b. The players of the game will not give themselves up to addiction.

6a. We cannot allow society to be threatened by addiction.

6b. We must always be searching for profit.

6c. Rules 6a. and 6b. must never come into conflict with each other. (37)

It seems that the only proper rule is 6b, while 6c combines the previous two simply to ensure the efficiency of 6b. Similarly, 5a, 5b, and 6a merely introduce the rest. The travesty in question becomes more obvious once Noon discloses the role of the Government:

Keen for the game taxes, but fearful of the populace becoming too addicted, the Government had specified that the nation’s dominoes must contain a rare chance of losing, and losing badly […] Of course the Government got it completely wrong: the chance of losing so badly only made the punters play to win even harder. That being the nature of the human soul. (244)

The Government surely got it “wrong.” It is precisely human corruptible nature on which they counted to create the ever increasing desire in gamers. Fortunately, it is not all what the human soul is about. There is more to it. But in the profit-driven culture, it is greed and fear that sustain the game. It is, at the same time, the most desirable type of desire, because it ensures a sense of “communality.” The absence of love provides space for desire, an urge to compensate for the lack. Supposedly, the hole cannot be filled because the missing part is forever elusive. This, allegedly, condemns one to living with an ongoing feeling of longing, at least in a culture that defines the words sex and love in terms of possession.

1 The terms virtual-vurtual/virtuality-vurtuality are deliberately used either interchangeably or confusingly to suggest the etymological transformations of the word virtual from signifying that what cannot be replicated into a concept that complicates the meaning because of the reference to virtual reality—technologically “mimicked” reality engendering an ontology in its own right.

2 The creation of the account of the historical Manchester and that of the novels analyzed was helped by the information received in the interviews with Andy Brydon,Hillegonda Rietveld, and Jeff Noon (Manchester, 16 June, 2008, London 20, June 2008, and London 26 June, 2008, respectively). Brydon, as a Mancunian and the curator in Urbis Centre provided the material related to the Hacienda days, but also to the changes in the city that happened in the aftermath. Hillegonda Rietveld--once a DJ at the Hacienda and a member of the band Quando Quango, now reader in cultural studies, teaching courses in music and sonic media at London South Bank University—provided a testimonial of an insider of the Music City about its heyday and a downward passage from a troublesome empire of creativity to the increasingly mindless crime emporium. Noon—a native Mancunian who moved to Brighton and has lived there for the past decade or so, elucidated the reality behind the fictionalized Manchester, its streets paved by broken glass, and wandering souls, paralleling the life narratives that inspired it.

3 A critique of the media’s complicity in the massification of culture: “Mass(age) is the message.” Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (44).

4 “Surface and appearance, that is the space of seduction. Seduction as a mastering of the reign of appearances opposes power as a mastering of the universe of meaning.” Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (62).

5 The Haçienda Apartments. Manchester, 2008.

6 Nikolina Nedeljkov, Narrow Daylighte (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXHue62u-zI&feature=plcp)

7 McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory (2007) is not paginated. Instead, the text is divided into numbered paragraphs. I provide the paragraph numbers in square brackets, the way they appear in the original.