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 25th
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 7th,
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
.JPG)
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).
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.
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