If Aenglish Were a Language (Part One)

How Speaks History

Not “tomorrow is another day,” but “tomorrow is another world” is what could be heard from Julien Temple’s documentary London: The Modern Babylon (2012). The archival material used in the film is seductive. Its enchantment inspires the viewer to wonder whether it owes the sense of naivety, exuding from nearly every single frame, to the imagery so unmistakenly different from that to which one is customarily exposed, or, to a sentiment entirely distinct from the modern day one.

Likewise, as it to a great extent deals with the question of diversity, especially in a multicultural society such as Britain, one wonders whether the panoramic historical overview is suggestive of Richard Rorty’s ruminations in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), where he advances the belief that different vocabularies, synchronically and diachronically alike, describe different worlds and are indicative of both the vocabularies’ and the worlds’ incommensurability. If so, it may imply not only certain incommunicability between and among the vocabularies and the worlds, but within them, as well.

By contrast, one is prone to entertain the idea Stewart Home presents in his novel Tainted Love (2005): “The Times Change and We Change Too” (217 capitalization in original), coupled with the thought from his exploration of the conversation between punk scenes and culture at large entitled Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock (1995):”We change and yet remain the same” (122).

Such dilemmas imbue the meditation with an additional layer of cultural critique, building upon what Temple suggests in the film. Clearly, it is a recklessly commoditized, worryingly violent time portrayed there. The Sex Pistols lyrics “pretty vacant” resonate with the footage of the August 2011 riots in several towns and cities in England, when the apex of the revolutionary spirit manifested itself in random looting of the nearby businesses. That may raise doubt about there being any pocket within cultural realities left readily available to be used as a source of wholesome resistance.

Dystopian as it may look, such a cultural climate may, nevertheless, provide a glimpse of the world whose languages might not be perfectly compatible, and yet, in accord with Home’s writing, in which humans can still be capable of communicating, despite an erratic nature of communicational content, hindrances in the communication channel, and / or alternating cycles of noise and silence.

Enduring Schooling : Against Noise, and in the Service of the Remix

I

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891): “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing” (42).

McKenzie Wark, “A Christmas Carol: Dedicated to Scrooge, and His Art Collection” (2012): “With financial capital in particular, it is not just that financial ‘products’ are like contemporary art. They are contemporary art” (par. 20).

or, so somnambulist logic would want one to believe.

Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction (2007): “If this sounds unpleasantly slavish and self-denying, it is because we forget that if others do this as well, the result is a form of reciprocal service which provides the context for each self to flourish. The traditional name for this reciprocity is love” (91).

II

How Significant and / or How to Say it

”History is made by those who say ‘No’ and the Punk’s utopian heresies remain its gift to the world.”-- Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (2002)

Based on Terry Eagleton’s insights in After Theory (2003), invoking McKenzie Wark’s thoughts from The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011) about the work of Alexander Trocchi and, more broadly, the legacy of the Situationist International, the remix proposes low tech poetics. Originating in music, the remix combines textual, audio, and visual expressive modes. Creating a hybrid idiom, it puts in conversation certain elements of high culture with a more accessible, yet not oversimplified, not less rigorous idiom.  Firmly anchored in the potential of humbleness, it disambiguates the deceitful idea about the totality of discourse, all the while investing in the capacities of critical / creative reading-writing. Likewise, it objects to the delusion of human omnipotence, simultaneously acknowledging the limits and power of the human.

if not getting paid for housework is regarded as a betrayal of monetizing labor, it might be a good response against the misconception about the logic of somnambulism

To build on symbolic in Jon Savage’s historiography England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (2002):”The lack of an overall, defined ideology was heavily criticized but, just like Punk was at its most powerful when impossible to define, this is not a weakness, but a source of strength” (xvii). Neither a nostalgic longing for the times bygone, since no historical epoch is worthy of complicity in the proliferation of inhumane social relations nor idealized future anticipations--neither backward nor forward fabrications of cultural realities and / or selfhood--is in the postfuturist parlance spelled out either in the key of longing for the lionized past or somnambulist projections into the romanticized future, disregarding the relevance of being present in the here and now.

Erratic Pathways of Power-Narratives

The remix--hic & nunc, anticarpe diem turntablist poetics--seeks sources of storytelling, i.e., creative / critical remapping of cultural realities in counternostalgic, antisomnabulist legacy of punk rock mafothers : perseverance in the reemergence of genuine communication in the key of humbleness invigorating solidarity within the community of selfless, yet reindividualized, fellow humans enduring the hindrances to patient, persistent creation of a free culture based on love and trust. Focused on the existing vocabularies, always bearing in mind the inherited ones, DJ postfuturists draw inspiration from selectively remixable tradition and current stories, and yet, distance the inquiry from reestablishing social relations based on inequity, austerity, and inhumaneness.  On the contrary, the remix is the recuperation of the past, reimagining the future, and resurrecting the present.

Against Robozombism

The counterpoint to an arena of self-centered, competitive, solely accumulative erudition, nihilo-cannibalist rivalry, indistinguishable, uniforming amalgam suppressing individuality and mimicking, rather than containing, contemporary culture’s coercive, somnambulist, massifying, monetarist dictum is the awareness that opens up an avenue for thinking a possibility for reshifting onto the pattern that illuminates the significance of the questlike endeavors such as education.