If Aenglish Were a Language (Part 7)

phunkie read / write / remix

Like nature, history is not revengeful. Unlike vulgar versions of rebellion, authentic resistance is utterly desensitized to and illiterate in the vocabulary of ossification and destruction. It is also highly responsive to the changes history brings about. Only in a peaceful/peaceable manner. The remix is sound sensitive. It is attuned to the music of the epoch. It is also sensitized to the sound enduring Chronos’s hindrances. So is Huxley’s narrative to the complexity within which at times antithetical, yet not antagonistic, aspects of diversity are interlaced. States such as sadness and happiness are quite possibly among the most angular interlocutors in the quirky conversation. Maybe it is the very unlikelihood of the communication such as the one between them that ensures even for the music chronologically contextualized to spill comfort over the supporting silence (Point Counter Point 24-5).

Perhaps. If so, one would have to thank the very quirkiness of the ambiguity it grants one with. To be misled to think that certain discursive models cultural realities impose on one are the only legitimate ones can indicate the possibility that such an imposition can be refused. Thus, the moment of entrapment could be an instant when a redescription starts to occur. It can be the moment of an insight into the realm of disambiguation of the confusion caused by the delusionary idea about the totality of discourse. It can also signal the potentials of acknowledging somnambulist tendencies of the claim to human omnipotence. It is to seek vibrant interpretations of social relations, not denying but rather reading cultural vocabularies in the key contrary to what they are trying to impose on one as the only valid way to look.  

The inspiration to seek other angles comes from a fruitful understanding of the notions such as class, uprising, and solidarity. The germ of the thought can certainly be found in Huxley’s ruminations about the matter. But, perhaps, it cannot be claimed for the novel of Huxley’s to be a class manifesto. Just as it can be said that Julien Temple’s documentary is not precisely about music scenes. So is Stewart Home’s book Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock suggestive of being not exactly about punk. It does ponder the vital class related ideas. Yet, it presents them in the light of the vacillations unique in their capability to render bewildering discursive magnitude perceptible:”class is actually a fluid category” (10). So is the genre which he is trying to delineate and polemicize. He points out “fluid nature of Punk as a musical genre” (Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock 12).

Disambiguation here might emerge precisely from the recognition of the elusiveness of the subject and the potential such a character provides in terms of remapping discursively conditioned cultural realities. First, by establishing a clear distinction between certain concepts, Home indicates the realm of interpretation capable of fueling a fruitful socioscape. For example, contemplating upon the punk era, he observes:”there was no such thing as a Punk band, there were only Punk records” (Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock 15). He rightly notes the intricacy of perceiving the phenomenon of the likes of punk in the cultural context that he, not without reason, accentuates to be a feature of a postmodern inclination toward a proliferation of margins.

In a time when the multiplicity of isolated underprivileged enclaves make little contribution to social cohesion, one can undoubtedly question such political vocabularies in accord with Home’s challenging the idea of punk being the opposition to the mainstream when the meanings of both notions have undergone harsh destabilization and have been threatened by further relativization (Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock 17). And yet, to acknowledge such a state of affairs is only to draw more from the source of further disambiguation of cultural realities and to realize that even if punk bands proliferated and fluctuated with the fluctuation of mainstream, margins, monetary dictatorships, oppressive mechanisms of social control, fabricated historicized narratives, and other culturally conditioned means of manipulation, and distorted perception of power / power relations, it by no means afflicts the subversive, transformative potential of punk rock.

We might not know whether the victorians had been like they were presented in the pageant in Woolf’s novel Between the Acts. More likely, we may imagine them through the lens of the portrayal of a subculture responding against some of the values with which victoriana distributed the imposed sunsets and dawns. Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (2002): “With their syphilitic, archaic language – ‘vile’, ‘poxy’, ‘bollocks’–and this costume which theatricalized poverty, the Punks were the Postmodern children of Dickens” (374).

Instead, being aligned with other vibes, one would, perhaps, rather be humble enough to persevere in forging postfuturist supracultural remapping in the key of the remix. As the offspring of the mafotherphunkie legacy, an-antibabylonian-renegade-of-Dickens, hic & nunc / anticarpe diem poetics reintegrates reading-writing, unshakably distancing it from robozombie vulgarization threatening to transform it into yet another commodity readily available for instant consumption massively and to dissolve communal cohesion of fellow cyborgs.

In the intersection of the time axes—recuperating the past, reimagining the future, and resurrecting the present--the remix reveals transformative potentials of language both as a challenging and as a redemptive means of communication preserving peaceful/peaceable resistance to noise : subtonic hi-fi DJing in the service of the wholesome sound of creation.

If Aenglish Were a Language (Part 6)

you cannot fight the peace of the universe

If in Between the Acts the narration conspires with characterization through the paradoxical dialectics of the vacillations in the tone, primarily resulting from the inexplicable emergence of the nearly sublime out of the pedestrian, in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928), the effect is manifested as a result of an interplay in question, only in a kind of reverse. Specifically, unlike the space provided in Woolf’s novel so the narrative can breathe, engaging the reader in an akin sort of activity, Huxley’s narrator is almost omnipresent. Each page, every single sentence, syntagm, phrase, morpheme, phoneme is loaded with narrating voices. All is noise in this novel of his. And yet, as the story is unfolding, it turns out that not all is as noisy as it seems. In addition, it, at least, is not all that noisy all the time. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point:”’Why should triviality be so fascinating? Or is there something else besides the triviality that draws one?’” (126).

What’s wondrous about the narrative technique in question is, again, a strange interaction between the narration and characterization. In the unwrapping of the storyline, it becomes apparent that the impression of the overcrowded narrative comes from the role each character has in that what comprises the novel. How those voices constitute the narration is also the way the storytelling shift occurs in the most astonishing of manners. Namely, not only do they participate in weaving the narrative tissue, but the way they are constructed is, at the same time, how the story is told. They, in a word, manage to take over the narrative. One might be prone to claim that it is, consequently, a weakness of the storyline, but few things can be more erroneous than such a statement, given the layered structure of storytelling at large, as well as this one in particular.

First, the seeming weakness could stem from the confusion of the notions such as individuality and individualism, unity and uniformity, crowd and community, noise / sound / music. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point: “Each is always alone and separate and individual. ‘I am I,’ asserts the violin; ‘the world revolves around me.’ ‘Round me,’ calls the cello. ‘Round me,’ the flute insists. And all are equally right and equally wrong; and none of them will listen to the others” (23). Then, one realizes that how the characters inhabit the world of Huxley’s novel is the way of making the omniscient narrative voice humble itself in front of the individual vernaculars of the novel-dwellers.

The characters’ taking over the narration is a silent rebellion. Quite noisy at that, one might say. So noisy at times that, being preoccupied with duties of higher priority and greater significance, one seems not to be able to hear it. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point: “Diminished and in fragments, the B minor Suite came floating up from the great hall to the ears of the two men in the laboratory. They were too busy to realize that they were hearing it” (30).  The intricacy and appeal of Huxley’s panoramic social portrayal of the birth of the new world between two wars lies predominantly in the whatness of the story. From it, of course, is borne the howness of the peculiarity with which alternating cycles of noise and silence are being remixed.

If in Between the Acts the characters speak of fragments, see the world as a broken mirror image, talk in fragments, feel like ones, Point Counter Point presents to the readership the characters that can be perceived either as rudimentary, atavistic, minimalist, reduced, or a combination of some of the features fused to epitomize the clime of the world plagued by new values. In the onset of an economic dictatorship, not unlike the system of values propagated nowadays as a dominant cultural paradigm, these were more often than not defined in monetary terms.

Coupled with it, possibly in a mutually conditioned relationship, is a desperate pursuit of amusement. Not unlike the exhaustion by superficial, forced forms of entertainment known to the dwellers of modern day culture, the world portrayed in Huxley’s novel is similarly hollow amid the plethora of ecstatic and euphoric battlefields against boredom. Sites of fun. Dens of intoxication. Streets covered with evaporations, saturated with torpor, conjuring disenchantment as the sun rises and swipes the magic of the night (Point Counter Point 148).

When the night climaxes in its decay that sees its early hours with first appearance of dusk, noise of the sweaty, crowded amusement joints dissolve in the vapor of boredom. One can only hear sad music of a failed attempt to conquer and shape the totality of experience according to one’s perception of how changes in the world and the notions such as individuality and communality inform one another. The world has become a timespace offering to the inhabitants to emphasize certain aspects of experience, while disregarding the others. The speed at and with which societal relations are being redescribed echoes the progress with which linguistic descriptions proliferate. It also reverberates with the dynamics of the self-disintegration of bewilderment.

In the long aftermath of the Enlightenment, modern babylon offers myriad ways to reaffirm the significance of rationality. Or, so babylonian tower would want one to believe. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point: “The intellect’s been exalted as the spiritual upper classes; the spiritual lower classes rebel’” (128). In a time of fluctuating, discursively conditioned categories, one wonders how to articulate the rebellious classes in question. The body for sure is part of the vocabulary. So might be the heart. But, how to understand such an elusive constituent of the communication channel is an enigma in its own right. In Virginia Woolf’s novel, it is now childless (Between the Acts 100-1), now broke (Between the Acts 113), then dry (Between the Acts 119), and again melting (Between the Acts 130). It is motherly (”for a mother must ask, if daughters she has” Between the Acts 169). Above all, it is human (Between the Acts 176).

To imagine how such unlikely interlocutors negotiate a hierarchy within discursive games is not an easy task. How they position themselves within a broader context of power relations is perhaps most suggestively presented in the debate over the issues of burning importance for the protagonists of Huxley’s novel: “’The only result of your progress,’ he said, ‘will be that in a few generations there will be a real revolution—a natural, cosmic revolution. You’re upsetting the equilibrium. And in the end, nature will restore it’” (Point Counter Point 58).

The advent of science enlightened the world with a blessing that humans gradually started to misinterpret and assumed the meaning of words that to a high extent confused them. Not only did the new paradigm create a sense of omnipotence that some individuals wholeheartedly accepted, but it also introduced a vocabulary of culture that enabled a proliferation of vocabularies and discursively conditioned realities calling for reconfiguring. Neither stigmatizing the paradigm per se nor divinizing it, one is rather prone to question how it reflected in the realm where social relations were becoming increasingly dependent on and, indeed, subjugated to the idea of progress not galvanizing, but rather weakening the flourishing of human potentials. Huxley observes an instance of such a perplexing situation:“They’re telling him that the laws of nature are useful conventions of strictly human manufacture and that space and time and mass themselves, the whole universe of Newton and his successors, are simply our own invention” (Point Counter Point 153).

The world became a mosaiclike image describable from diverse points of view. Each description seemed to be equally valid and not lacking in competitiveness with others. Such an arena, featuring numberless candidates for the privileged discourse, mirrored the overarching sentiment of commodity culture. And yet, none seemed to be sufficient to provide a comprehensible picture of how the world spoke. Trying to decipher the versatility of the complexity in question, humans tended to adopt what appeared to be the lexicon of correspondence between their own and the ways the world was. Huxley portrays a segment of an attempt to grasp kaleidoscopic cultural realities in the vocabulary they were trying to impose on one:

’Because the essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen. For instance, one person interprets events in terms of bishops; another in terms of the price of flannel camisoles; another, like that young lady from Gulmerg,’ he nodded after the retreating group, ‘thinks of it in terms of good times. And then there’s the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees, professionally, a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want to do is to look with all those eyes at once […]’. (Point Counter Point 192)

Not that there was no solid basis for thinking of an individual in terms of multitudinousness, but the way it was perceived proved as somewhat misleading. Its trickster character can be said to, in a way, have tricked itself into believing in the imposition of multiplicity as the dominant expressive mode in which valid statements can be uttered, revealing the vocabulary of the world, matching the ways in which humans could navigate their ways through it. And yet, within a bewildering cacophony, Huxley’s character seeks:“Where was the self to which he could be loyal?” (Point Counter Point 194).

For some, it was a specific intellectual capacity that occupied the centrality of the endeavor:

The essential character of the self consisted precisely in that liquid and undeformable ubiquity; in that capacity to espouse all contours and yet remain unfixed in any form; to take, and with an equal facility efface, impressions. To such moulds as his spirit might from time to time occupy, to such hard and burning obstacles as it might flow round, submerge, and, itself cold, penetrate to the fiery heart of, no permanent loyalty was owing. The moulds were emptied as easily as they had been filled, the obstacles were passed by. But the essential liquidness that flowed where it would, the cool indifferent flux of intellectual curiosity—that persisted and to that his loyalty was due.  (Point Counter Point 194)

For others, it might be religion. There were those who chose to divest themselves from loyalty as such. But, then, they found themselves inexplicably trapped within the liberty, i.e., the characteristic they ascribe to such a state:

But always, whatever he might do, he knew quite well in the secret depths of his being that he wasn’t a Catholic, or a strenuous liver, or a mystic, or a noble savage. And though he sometimes nostalgically wished he were one or other of these beings, or all of them at once, he was always secretly glad to be none of them and at liberty, even though his liberty was in a strange paradoxical way a handicap and a confinement to his spirit” (Point Counter Point 195).

Instead, some opted for other choices: “She felt as though she were melting into that green and golden tranquility, sinking and being absorbed into it, dissolving out of separateness into union: stillness flowed into stillness, the silence without became one with the silence within her” (Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point 355).

Just as uncritical reading of social relations based on dominance-ridden polyphony can conjure a dissolution of clear distinctions between sameness & difference, unity and uniformity, individuality and individualism--to name a few—so can a belief in progress without a critical distance from its aspect in which radical utilitarianism paradoxically converges with self-referentiality may  entail a misinterpretation of advanced technologies in the service of creativity. Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011):

At first glance, armies of refrigerators and dishwashers sending messages back and forth to servers might not have much bearing on literature, but when viewed through the lens of information management and uncreative writing--remember that those miles and miles of code are actually alphanumeric language, the identical material Shakespeare used--these machines are only steps away from being programmed for literary production, writing a type of literature readable only by other bots. And, as a result of networking with each other, their feedback mechanism will create an ever-evolving, sophisticated literary discourse, one that will not only be invisible to human eyes but bypass human altogether. (225)

If Aenglish Were a Language (Part Five)

Scraps & Sync

Despite the multiple intricacies with regard to how literary elements operate in Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts (1941), it is probably the narration that is the most captivating one. However, one cannot think of narration in the narrowest sense of the word. It can simply not be perceived as an isolated aspect of the novel. The observation might appear to be addressing a more than obvious fact: any reader with a tiniest interest in getting a grasp of a literary work one encounters could make the same, or, at least, a very similar remark in relation to any piece of writing. And yet, applied to Woolf’s prose, this common wisdom acquires slightly modified meaning. To support such a statement by emphasizing the role of the tone in shaping the narration is nothing new. Perhaps, it is not spectacularly informative either. But, although reading the dialogue between them in Woolf’s storytelling might not be an entirely fresh approach to a novel, it certainly does inform the reader’s perception of the fictitious world presented.

Few are novels that parallel Between the Acts in terms of the elusiveness of a narrator. Fewer dare to allow such a seemingly unreliable polyphony to carry the structure of the narrative. Seldom could a book written at the time Woolf wrote hers be said to have ventured into the adventures Woolf’s did. But, what, one wonders, could it be that which constitutes such a specific conversation between and among the storytelling layers in Woolf’s prose?

Partly, it is for sure the way poetic components spike the prosaic tissue. Partly, it is how those minute connective lyrical ingredients sparkle from the solemn easiness of her fiction. It is quite possible that more than each particular nutrient, the interconnectivity between and among them is what constitutes the cornucopia of the literary diet sustained within and by Woolf’s filigrane, yet bold, signature. Specifically, the most stunning effect the narration can have on a reader comes from the nearly paradoxical, almost sublime strain in the voice overburdened with the quotidian. It is perhaps precisely the aloofness exuding boredom of a dispassionate engagement in daily chores that emanates a profound emotional charge from the layers underneath the tasteless everyday.

Even an event as extraordinary as a pageant provokes reserved responses of the participants. For example, while preparing the stage, Miss La Trobe meditates upon the audience. Due to a touch of a unique remoteness in the tone, her thoughts can scarcely be taken at face value. Way too deeply immersed she seems to be in the shadow of history, maintaining a distance from the audience for whom her consideration borders on carelessness, albeit not exactly verging on either disrespect or neglect. Therefore, neither does a single page of this astonishing novel signal a slightest possibility of leaving the reader with a sense of indifference. Such is the quirky dynamics with which one comprehends and responds to the seeming disinterest the tone in the book at times tends to incline towards. One would be prone to assume that the audience in the novel might mistrust the apparent lukewarm attitude demonstrated in the characters’ organizational maneuvering.

Is it, then, one would ponder, solely the dialogue between the narration and the tone that imbues in Woolf’s singular poetics the streak constitutive of the signature? Quite possibly not. One can hardly think of the tone without rightfully crediting the characterization. This opens up a whole new avenue to muse about the way the flux of history shown in the novel conditions the fluctuating character of the protagonists. How trustworthy is their elusive presence? How praiseworthy is the manner in which they win autonomy and guard themselves from multifarious voices of the audience. How incredibly the tone thereby serves the characterization, all the while strengthening the narration in the most delicate and dignified of manners allowing both the story and the reader to breathe freely.

`           La Trobe might be perceived the way the Rev. G.W. Streatfield observes in a postclimactic tone preaching with a look directed first towards the audience, then towards the sky: “He looked round. La Trobe was invisible” (Between the Acts 191). And yet, absent she is not. It is perhaps how one sees the pageant that can inform hearing Miss La Trobe’s presence. It may also be a perspective from which to contemplate how history is told. It is to ruminate about the quizzical relationship between continuity and syncopation. It is to see the current moment in the looking glass whose acoustics consists of the imagery not so much visual as it is semantic. The closing scene of the pageant is loaded with kaleidoscopic pictures and fragmentary voices. The characters in the pageant leap, jerk, skip, jump, dance. The scenery is flashing, dazzling (184). The audience seems to believe what the play is communicating:

Look at ourselves, ladies and gentlemen! Then at the wall; and ask how’s this wall, the great wall, which we call, perhaps miscall, civilization, to be built by (here the mirrors flicked and flashed) orts, scraps and fragments like ourselves? […] All you can see of yourselves is scraps, orts and fragments? Well then listen to the gramophone affirming…. (188 italics in original).

Only Manresa’s conduct radiates the perception in a subversive key. She powders her nose (186), after which a voice asserts itself. The Reverend was to speak shortly. But, before he does, the audiences are confronting the looming, ominous sites: “And the audiences saw themselves, not whole by any means, but at any rate sitting still” (185). They seem to be listening to the gramophone affirming (188). For them, it is still like an echo of the brooding scratches the music is being dashed with: “The music chanted: Dispersed are we. It moaned: Dispersed are we. It lamented: Dispersed are we, as they streamed, spotting the grass with colour, across the lawns, and down the paths: Dispersed are we” (95-6 italics in original).

First Manresa (96), then Isabella (96), followed by Mrs. Swithin (103) murmur and hum a consensus about the portrayal of who they thought they were: “The hands of the clock had stopped at the present moment. It was now. Ourselves” (186). Anxious indifference, stupefyingly unsettling is the aural aspect of the perception of the play. They ask. From the question, an answer arises: “Was that voice ourselves? Scraps, orts and fragments, are we, also, that? The voice died away” (189).

            Having been deprived of the acoustic component, they seem to be increasingly perplexed by the shadow overhanging from a displaced, almost unidentifiable comment on the discussion Oliver and Lucy have about time. Isa distracts the debate from the lofty realm towards the awareness of temporality. An interjection emerges from the crevices in the conversation: “The future disturbing our present” (82). All is fragments. All is abysmal hollowness threatening to sweep daylight from the eyes of the audiences. All is noise, the troubled history-lovers seem to be suggesting: “Here came the sun—an illimitable rapture of joy, embracing every flower, every leaf. Then in compassion it withdrew, covering its face, as if it forebore to look on human suffering” (23). One wonders if the gramophone affirms.

            Instead of a response to the query, the signs of the times were revealed via the emissaries of modernity: “The word was cut in two. A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead. That was the music. The audience gaped; the audience gazed. Then zoom became drone. The planes had passed” (193 italics in original). Little room does it create for doubts about the eras bygone. Fewer a suspicious thought can conquer the mind when the music of the planes outvoices the sound coming from the gramophone. The audiences seem to believe the music they listen to. Music as the signs of the times. Music as the signs of the historical narratives about traditions seemingly floating along the flux of Chronos’s tales. As if each attempt to tell the world that once upon a time a world existed that spoke a different language were a walk across the bridge tricking one to suspect the solidity of the ground beneath.

Sometimes, stories coming from the depths of history bear witness to the worlds so irredeemably incommensurable with current cultural vocabulary that one doubts the linguistic unity underpinning the prolific descriptions. How arbitrary is such a verisimilitude, one would like to know. How comprehendible is a story borne out of polyphonic flows? How hostile is the past that resists deciphering? Traditions : either as a succession of disposable linguistic variants—a centuries-long pageant of differences dissolving into a tasteless indistinctiveness, or, as a linguistic rigidity of a privileged vocabulary excluding the validity of playfulness.

The rule of absolutely random morality or robozombism seem to be the choices on offer. We don’t buy such a dichotomy. We don’t buy deceitful binary opposites. We don’t even care about the number of the components in the debate, we don’t care how many oppositional parameters constitute the edginess of a critical / creative narrative. But, there is no way to argumentatively defend such a seemingly controversial attitude. Sometimes we wonder like the characters in Between the Acts do: “’Were they like that?’ […] ‘The Victorians,’ Mrs. Swithin mused. ‘I don’t believe,’ she said with her odd little smile, ‘that there ever were such people. Only you and me and William dressed differently’” (174-5). Sometimes, one wonders what the sound of the versatile attire in question is like. One wonders how the gramophone could affirm a response to such an inquiry. An answer seems to be coming from the characters in the play: “... All passes but we, all changes…but we remain forever the same…” (139 italics in original). The same fragments? The same broken beat voices? The same kaleidoscopic imagery? The same noise? Possibly. But, most probably in the way calling for a different combination of those scraps & syncopations. To say the very least.

The reverend makes a point about the congregation : each individual is part of the whole (192). One could hardly resist taking his observation as a clue for a literary analysis. The metaphorical charge of the remark is suggestive of the idea that just as the members of the congregation make sense only as nodes interconnected within a web, so do literary elements in Woolf’s novel become articulate only when they are put in conversation with other constituent parts of the web in question. Only then are they fully animated. Only then are they reintegrated. Only then do they resonate with the sound coming from the gramophone: “Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken” (120). Such moments might even be capable of disclosing the dissoluble character of bewildering historical flows, of disambiguating deceiving mirror images, re-animating the linguistic anchorage underneath the deafening “easy pluralities”: “But somewhere, this cloud, this crust, this doubt, this dust— She waited for a rhyme, it failed her; but somewhere surely one sun would shine and all, without a doubt, would be clear” (61).

            Rather than isolated particulates, what was believed to be irrevocably alienated pollutants in the communication channel, one would preferably accept the perception based on transformative potentials of music. Translated into the language of theory, it may be illuminated from the angle presented in Sucking on Words: A Documentary about Kenneth Goldsmith directed by Simon Morris (2007). Goldsmith points out the following:

What are you going to do, take a grain of sand and chop it up even further or are you actually going to forget about deconstruction and begin some sort of re-construction acknowledging and re-building this vessel. Acknowledging the cracks in it. We’re not going back but instead we have to, kind of, look at wholes again. I’m not interested in rips. I’m actually interested in wholeness. (Sucking on Words)

            History can be oppressive. Historical narratives can be confusing. The imperial grandeur of western empires might be history : huge chapters in history books long over. And yet, some tales endure. Neither nostalgic nor somnambulist : neither lionizing the idealized past nor projecting into a romanticized future, the poetics of the remix perseveres in DJing in the intersection of the time axes : recuperating the past, reimagining the future, and resurrecting the present.