1. Shadows’n’Majorities
In
The Beach beneath the Street: The
Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011),
McKenzie Wark states: “The essence of technology is nothing technical” (144). He
goes on to ask:” But could it be something playful? Could it be a way, not of
instrumentalzing nature, but of producing a new relation to it, as a totality?”
(145). He wonders:” Is it possible to imagine collective human agency as
productive of something playful, joyous, communal, even beautiful? “ (144).
Once upon a time, to be hip meant to be radical,
radically revolutionary, revolutionary decadent, decadently intoxicant,
toxically fiery, fiercely dedicated, decidedly transgressive. Not so long ago,
in 2005, Stewart Home writes in his book Tainted
Love about swinging London, beats,
and other revolutionaries heavily involved in the sweeping revolutionary
tornado generously fueled by the underground pharmaceutical industry. He casts light on the peculiar dynamism resulting in the
officialdom’s complicity in the criminalization of drugs, that, at a
dialectical stroke, sucked the underground—up! On the surface! Namely, the
authorities persecuted and prosecuted decadent revolutionaries, simultaneously
amplifying anti-subversive sentiment that culminated in the latter day
mainstreaming turn.
Modern day mainstreaming brought an inversion of
the criminalization of drugs as we know it. The anti-subversive climate has
conquered the underground, which is now overground. What once was persecuted
and prosecuted as the black market is now a sophisticated version of legalized,
scientifically improved, medically tested, user friendly, technologically
advanced pharmaceutical and/or chemical
products at anyone’s disposal. William S. Burroughs, that obscure prophet of
divine toxicity, once claimed that drugs were going to be demonized and used by
reckless right wing politics as a means of social control (Gus Van Sant, Drugstore Cowboy 1989). Today, nobody
cares about that fact. Why would they? Would you? When drugs have been
mainstreamed, having found fertile soil in anti-subversive minds susceptible to
legally available crutches—mental flux blockage aids’n’supplements. Consolation
at anybody’s disposal. Silently sedated, accelerated, euphorized, dazed,
hazed…you name it…according to one’s tastes.
To be hip is not to be hip. To be hip is to
accept what a free culture of today offers to free-minded individuals. Only,
its self-proclaiming free character is just
that. Or, is it, indeed? One wonders if its rhetoric can define a choice: the
words that spell out r-e-f-u-s-a-l
to choose such freedom.
2. Formalities for Formalities Sake
In the empire of appearances absurd abounds.
Absurd is fueled by a powerful
accelerating engine. Its seeming goal is efficiency ensuring betterment of the
living conditions for the human kind. Its less obvious goal is time
consumption. Its ultimate aim, or, at least, the effect, is depriving
individuals of the time, space, and capacity to think. The ideology of such
culture of distraction is desertification. It tends to transform humans into
desert dwellers. Its most prominent manifestations are eerily dialectical pairs
that include, but are not limited to, the following: immediacy/immanence,
instantaneity/focus, sedentariness / peace, visual/ vision, euphoria/joy,
political correctness/ humanness , uniformity/union,
individualism/individuality, mass/fellowship, utility/solidarity,
economics/politics, atomizing diversification/unified versatility, banalized
sexuality/passion, robotic pragmatism/rationality, globalization/insularity,
affectation/affection, sensationalism/beauty, possession/substance,
formalities/civility.
3. Beyond the
Hiyperline
“The flock of birds had spiraled elsewhere, and Jean-Paul was gazing
at the empty sky, which had nothing left to hint about itself unless blue air
knows something I don’t know.”
Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm
(2011)
Pressing the power button on an electronic device, more often than
not, triggers a visual sensation. The focus of the activity is communication
between the sense of sight and the brain. When that communication is initiated
by a signal from the screen, the screen becomes a participant in the
communication flows. How that
complicates the situation is encapsulated in janjagodzinski’s notion of the
inverted gaZe . In Youth Fantasies: The
Perverse Landscape of the Media (2004), he investigates the effects of the
exchange between the viewer and the screen. Despite the seeming activity, that
in the cases of heavily addicted gamers nearly equals a round the clock
engagement in digital adventures, a mutual effect on both “interlocutors”
jagodzinski characterizes as interpassivity.
Antidote against such robozomboid mentality
should not be confused with the activity
as it is promoted in contemporary culture, which does not leave a single empty
second, which worships passivity inhibitant placebo--self-celebratory muscular
kinetics--which makes the world kingdom of somnambulism, which is a bottomless
source of fun. Resistance against zombo-instrumentalization hides, among other
places, in reconfiguring the subject-object relations neither via reexamining
their political positioning in terms of narrowly defined power-relations, nor
solely via redescribing their ontological statuses. Rather, by being “free to
undo,” as high priest of the supreme imagination, James Joyce, teaches (Finnegans
Wake 208).
A possible trajectory of undoing that knot is by
refocusing the debate onto dromospheric ecology, as Paul Virilio urges in Open Sky (1997). He stresses
dromospheric pollution as an undertheorized and neglected aspect of life:
“Alongside air pollution, water pollution, and the like, there exists an
unnoticed phenomenon of pollution of the world’s dimensions that I propose to
call dromospheric – from dromos: a
race, running” (Open Sky 22 emphasis
in original). The reason for such lack
of awareness he sees in the blind spots of memory: “forgetting the essence of the path, the journey” (Open Sky 23 emphasis in original).
Dromology is, thus, antidote against desertification resulting from
dromospheric contamination: “the desert
of world time—of a global time—complementing
the desert of flora and fauna rightlydecried by ecologist” (Open Sky 125 emphasis in original).
Dromology is an ecology aimed to recuperate the pace of life.
In that context, the center of the subject-object
thematic is relocated into the gap between them—on the path so persistently
kept out of the critical focus: “Between objective and subjective, it seems we
have no room for the ‘trajective’“ (Open
Sky 24). Or, do we not, indeed?
Reflections about objectivity/subjectivity have
lead to the insights into the possibilities arising from the repositioning of
the categories in question within the communication in hyperreality. Jean Baudrillard speculates about it in The Vital Illusion (2000). He aptly
remarks that an unprecedented paradigm shift occurs in hyperreality. Arguably,
hyperspace enables reconfiguration of the hegemonic position of the subject.
Such a situation calls for a further elaboration: interrogating specificities
of its impact on the object. Or, the subject. Or, the way human beings live:
how objective the subject should be in order to recuperate human dignity; how
the culture of distraction frees the object in the world of the dethroned
subject; how free a value-free subversion is; how disinterested a value-free
subject is; how victory defines itself
in the newly created situation.
Possible explanations to a great extent depend on
the reading mechanisms utilized in reconfiguring vocabulary of culture. To
simplify it without being simplistic, one is prone to see disinterested reading
of subjectivity as somewhat similar to metaphorical blindness, meaning being
metaphor-blind, not metaphorically blind. It also indicates an alarmingly high
degree of irony-sensor scarcity. Essentially, it results from being
desensitized to literary subtleties necessary for refining the remix.
That said, Virilio’s desertification trope is a
helpful tool. It can devise a technique for describing peculiarities in the
lacunae: to read ironically the triumph of the supposed subversive
interventions and to understand such victory as an exodus awaiting the fruits
of the promised land. After velocity, dromology. After the bewildering
wilderness, purifying water. After the passage across the river, the radical
light shift. After the oblivion-inducing desert, resensitizing to the power of
metaphor.
4. Hips’n’Hypes
“There was a cleanness and simplicity about these machines.”
Terry Eagleton, Saints and Scholars (1987)
If I were a computer, I wouldn’t expect from
myself to be a digital Dorian Gray version of my humbly imperfect humanness.
Neither would I expect from it to be a confirmation of my erroneousness and,
thus, humanness. Unlike the imagined robotic variant of myself, I have
embarrassing, illusory hopes—half-hidden even from myself—that one day there
will be a laptop that does not freeze, a desktop that does not eat files, a
printer that does not run out of ink. I shamefully cherish a desire that that
day were now.
Most of the time I forget about such secret
aspirations. And just keep living. As a human version of my digitalized mirror
image. While in that hyperworld, I wonder if not to be hip is to be hyper now.
In that democratic fairy tale called the web, one might experience a
tremendously liberating effect of the communication freed from a Father’s
sanctioning voice. Hence, one is free to chat, search, play, prey, loot,
seduce, flirt, have sex, read, create…you name it…on the Internet.
In an age when faith in science evokes a gambler
spirit, unbelievers sinfully seek answers on the net. Moreover, technology, in
a broader sense, offers reasonable responses for numerous conundrums.
janjagodzinski, Youth Fantasies: The
Perverse Landscape of the Media: “Consumers are told which foods are likely
to cause cancer, and then which foods can help prevent it! Given that nobody
knows for sure, we invest more and more authority in technological solutions
like Viagra, and mood drugs like Prozac to avoid responsibility”(182).
But then, one wonders why that recentering of
authority is necessary to comfort one’s doubtful soul. Isn’t the whole
enterprise called hyperreality so appealing precisely because it frees one from
the sense of authority? Eerie dialectic, indeed.Shifts nothing short of the
creepiness of the land of shadow readers and robocops in Jeff Noon’s novels.
Inhabiting hyperspace bears semblance to wandering through the labyrinth of
empty spaces in the mind deprived of dreams in Pollen (1995). The air we breathe, marbled with an invisible
telecommunication jungle, is sometimes heavy. As if it were saturated with the
particles of the dispersed vurthayfever bomb. The same sneeze bomb that haunts
vurtual Manchester of Noon’s imagination.
Seemingly, terra digita is the land of
opportunities that requires no strenuous moral efforts. And yet, it is hard to
imagine effortless round the clock hyperreal networking. Even if freed from all
ridiculous ethical burden, threatening to overshadow the light from the screen,
at least one unpleasantry remains: that
one has the body. Another one is that there is an unstoppable activity of the
mind. jan jagodzinski: “ Such technology has made all of us walking cyborgs. So
where is the ‘No!’ to be found?” (Youth
Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media 186).
In this cyberspace there are yet other
cyberspaces, as McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker
Manifesto (2004) inspires one to think ([389] square brackets in original).
And it is this one, called vurtuality. In
Stewart Home’s book Blood Rites of the
Bourgeoisie (2010), communication is relocated into the language of the
ones & zeros binary coding and
decoding. Interaction reflects isolation of the characters whose words are
disassociated from the bodies.
Afflicted literature:
‘Abstract literature implodes in a subdued
fashion, like a slow motion reversal of an explosion or some other catastrophe.
It absorbs all energy generated by writing as a cultural practice and
neutralises it. Abstract literature is a billowing series of syllables followed
by an eruption of color. It is usually red with purple flashes…’ (Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie 5).
Since abstract literature does not exist, one
provides a definition. What one does with words in the world which denounces
possibilities for an interaction outside vurtuality.
It seems that words are being dismissed and invented without much consideration
about their relationship with the extralinguistic. One of the words that has
undergone such a hasty handling is alienation. Reflecting upon the thematic
within the dynamic of postmodernist culture in Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 (1986), Terry Eagleton observes:
“[T]here is no longer any subject to be alienated and nothing to be alienated
from, ‘authenticity’ having been less rejected than merely forgotten” (132).
In the world that dismisses and conjures up words
with close to no concern for the everyday, communication acquires properties of
“imperceptible passages of distant galaxies through hyper-space” (Stewart Home,
Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie 6). If
there is no such thing as alienation, one wonders how to call an unpleasant
feeling of isolation that some human beings experience in the cold
communication channels. One would be prone to suspect if, perhaps, it is the
word communication that calls for reconfiguring. Alternatively, one reimagines
human interconnectivity on the communal level in the way that would ensure
genuine exchange and relieve one from disconnectedness.
In Blood
Rites of the Bourgeoisie, communication
is limited to overpouring spam emails.
Ads promoting aids and supplements for sexual performance come in shapes and
forms that could be appealing to any male concerned with his social status. In
such a world of advertising, physical potency strangely plots power relations
narratives, cultural constructs curiously conspire with the vocabulary of
carnally conditioned hierarchies. In the world of male supremacy, it is only the names of female artists that
help define the type of pleasure a male will be able to provide once he gets a
“bigger and better cock” (Blood Rites of
the Bourgeoisie 7).
In the world that casts aside the concept of
representation, representational arts have been gotten rid of, as well:
“Theatre is dead. Cinema is dead” (Blood
Rites of the Bourgeoisie 10). Such culture of of denial and deception wants one to believe that literature abandoned
readers-writers: “Literature is dead. Time and space died yesterday. You eat
dead food, you fuck dead men, even your words die in your mouth. Your sentences
are rolled into the ebbing waters of modernism and then wash back like a
bulimic’s forced vomiting” (Blood Rites
of the Bourgeoisie 10).
To say that we now live in a technologically
advanced age is more than obvious. To say that cohesion of the human community
is disproportionate with technological development might be disputable. To
define the disparity in terms of
narrowly understood causality and conditioning would be crude reductionism and not a precise articulation of the solidarity of fellowship. It clearly calls for the
remix in order to reawaken the union of the community of reindividualized humans.
The poetics of Home’s novel inspires a response
to the fashionable cynicism of contemporary culture. It provokes resistance
against dispassionate acceptance of delusional thinking. In the world that
threatens to erase distinctions among individuals in the blurry, massifying,
sweepingly objectifying, amalgam, there is still hope to reanimate the
half-forgotten dromology. In such a world, to be hip is not to be hip. To
reject what nihilo-cannibalist culture packages
as free thinking for free-minded
individuals. Beyond hips & hypes is to choose. To
choose resistance against deceptions. To refuse to be absent from the abundance
offered to human kind. To persevere in resensitizing to literary subtleties. To
sustain dromology in the service of language. To accept to hard-headedly endure
in being present in life.
