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
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.
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