If Aenglish Were a Language (Part Three)

remembrance / forgetting  should by no means be equated  either with  self-grandeur or deindividualization

In order for an obfuscated polyphonic communicational tunnel to be transformed into the green communication channel, it takes a glimpse of what constitutes cultural flows at a particular instant.  Britain’s capital, as depicted in Temple’s vernacular, is partly a story of the reconfiguration of political powers and repositioning in the world as empires have been being remapped from the inside and externally alike. British is among those whose cultural significance might not be proportionate with heyday of its supremacy. Yet, the way its postcolonial identity is being (re)shaped is likely to be in accord with its redescribed sense of an unrivaled political and economic giant. The image of the sovereign in the global arena of power colossuses has been massively informed by the postvictorian reawakening into cultural realities that required allowing dawns and sunsets in other parts of the world. Thus, it was duly revised.

Further, the unprecedented atrocities of the First World War brought to the United Kingdom an awareness that can hardly justify being so called, given the manifestation of its affinities to the patterns more related to denial and oblivion in encounters with global policies. It was after the Second World War when dramatic shifts in power relations occurred. For Great Britain, it meant facing the ruins in the aftermath of the four-year agony which climaxed in Germany’s merciless demonstration of the survival impulse: something that can be taken as an extreme version of how McKenzie Wark in The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011), albeit differently contextualizing it, observes the situation in which “[o]ne way communication has usurped the space of civil dialogue” (85).

More specifically Caryl Phillips writes about the reconfiguring in question. The collection of essays entitled The European Tribe (1987), is a travelogue based on his visits to European countries ripening towards what was later to be known as post-Berlin-Wall-Europe. The essay of the same title shows Phillips’s return to his native Britain after considerable stretches of time colored in bleak insipidness of hotel rooms, scarce communication, cultures in contact, individuals in search for a disposal of excessive skepticism, corrosive cynicism, and a scant sense of home. He sees newly arisen British socio-economic realities as follows:

Since the Second World War Britain has had to make a major reassessment of her position in the world. Empire involuntarily gave way to Commonwealth, which in turn gave way to Common Market. This reductive pattern appears to be causing much anguish in the bosom of the British nation, as it ushers in a new age in which Britain will have both collaborate and co-operate with others. This process of reassessing her status will continue to prove painful. Involvement in discussions about a Channel tunnel, a common European currency, and freedom of movement across borders is a sad step down from the aloofness of just two generations past. There are those, however, including people in the highest Government positions, who find it difficult to accept this state of affairs. For them it is useful to imagine that Empire still exists, in order that they may occasionally fan nationalistic pride and galvanize the nation, in war if necessary. (The European Tribe 120)

Thus, time and again, one is prone to wonder what nation it is that some individuals invest in with such an unthinkable pride. One would persist to ask what national identity they are so blindingly trying to reestablish. Needless to say, of vital importance seems to be the questions of the value governing the denial of the restructured powers after the Second World War, when the techniques of looting underwent a specific redescription towards more sophisticated means of obtaining materialist wealth. Or, so obfuscation in the communication channel speaks.

Part of the distorted message informing a nation’s positioning its body polity and political imagination is an image of a world’s leading military power sustained through the role of an ally of the military power supreme. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (2006): “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” (3).

As if the fading of its glory from the past were being desperately prevented from surfacing. Instead, it seems to still demonstrate  its significance, albeit in a somewhat shadowy fashion. Terry Eagleton,  After Theory (2003): ”Meanwhile,  the  craven  overseas  lackeys  of  United  States power, most prominent among whose ranks is an off-shore US aircraft carrier once known as the United Kingdom, are rather more coy and hypocritical about the whole affair (225).

It is no wonder that Phillips rightly recognizes the eroding glamour of what once seemed to be an uncontested rule of the unbeatable powers. Somewhat degrading positions and roles appear to be, in fact,  aptly regained modesty from the perspective of understanding one’s country as remixable as the other countries are: “Britain’s and Western Europe’s days of imperialistic glory are history” (The European Tribe 120).

Philips is prone to emphasize the falsity and selfishness of the history inherited through manipulative societal institutions (The European Tribe 121). Expropriation of history is integral to the omnipresent production of knowledge. Rightly so, it seems. As if as the whole globe was granted with the permission to host dawn and sunset, the sense of the four cardinal directions had been destabilized, at least where it was previously believed that the whole kingdom encompassed the world’s geography. Such a self-absorbed political profile could only be a result of an uncritical investment in imperial power. For that reason, it is not difficult to imagine west, alongside the whole of Britain, recuperating its shameful past. Yet, it may find itself engaged in quite probably an unnecessary enterprise. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:

The West, then, may need to come up with some persuasive-sounding legitimations of its form  of life, at exactly the point  when  laid-back  cultural thinkers  are  assuring  it that such legitimations are neither  possible nor necessary. It may be forced to reflect on the truth  and reality of its existence, at a time when postmodern thought has grave doubts about  both truth and reality. It will need, in short, to sound deep in a progressively more shallow age. (73)

Unnecessary because noone is interested in acknowledging its reassessment, or, just because there is no need for such a troublesome mix of a guilt trip and an abysmal sense of insecurity. Unnecessary because there are other, gentler ways of soothing the seemingly troubling interplay between forgetting and remembrance. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:

This is a pity, since unless the United States is able to do some hard  thinking  about  the  world,  it is not  at  all certain  that  the world  will be around  for that  much longer. This would certainly save us all the  unpleasant  necessity of hard  thought,  since there would then be nothing to think about;  but there are probably  less drastic  ways  of making  thinking  less rebarbative. (223)

Eagleton’s critique elucidates cultural self-centeredness manifested in a delusional idea of mythical grandiosity. Simultaneously, the thoughts presented exude a highly provocative invitation to resist such an attitude as a fruitful form of interaction with other cultures. One can read in such criticizing an appeal to oppose reductionist and / or deviant versions of the mutually conditioning relationships between discourse and cultural realities.

In an age when an objective standpoint is still ascribed to certain vocabularies, and yet, it is also being severely challenged by a plurality of truths, no vocabulary is a sacred cow, but none seems to be vigorous enough either to justify destabilizing of objectivity.  Traditions, speaking of the obsolete belief that there is or should be a privileged vocabulary in sync with the language of the world, is a remnant of a mistaken thinking that such affinities may exist. We’ve been told that such atavism merely reflects a blind spot precluding cognizance about there being no reverberation where there is no linguistic means to ensure it. In other words, there is no language of the world underpinning the convergence between the world and a particular description of it. Descriptions are many. Ethics is among them. According to the linguistic situation within which any voice appears to matter, but their interconnectivity is of a highly questionable character, moral values seem to have reached the level of arbitrariness that render traditions dismissible. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:

Not many thinkers are bold-faced enough to go entirely rela­tivist on such issues and claim that if torture happens to be in your tradition, then more power to your elbow. Most of them would claim, with varying degrees of reluctance and liberal guilt, that torture is wrong for such people, too. Most people, if they had to choose, would rather be seen as cultural imperialists than champions of cruelty. It is just that for the anti-theorists, reality itself has no views about whether torture is admirable or repulsive. In fact, reality has no views about anything. Moral values, like everything else, are a matter of random, free-floating cultural traditions. (57-8)

    Eagleton asserts the awareness of there being the necessary distance between the world and how we speak about it. His perseverance in portraying the indifference of the world to verbalizations about it is the statement against the tendency that in a psychoanalytic sense may be perceived as fetishization, in literary theory as personification, in a broader theoretical parlance as subjectification of discourse, while in sociological, or, even loosely taken marxist terms, it may signal dominance-submission based relations. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:

There is no need to be alarmed about this, however, since human culture is not really free-floating. Which is not to say that it is firmly anchored either. That would be just the flipside of the same misleading metaphor. Only something which was capable of being anchored could be described as having floated loose. We would not call a cup ‘floating loose’ just because it wasn’t clamped to the table with bands of steel. Culture only seems free-floating because we once thought we were riveted in something solid, like God or Nature or Reason. But that was an illusion. It is not that it was once true but now is not, but that it was false all along. (57)

Needless to say, such a bewildering conquest of false convictions caused a pervasive sense of unreliability, suspicion, and insecurity. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:”We are like someone crossing a high bridge and suddenly being seized by panic on realizing that there is a thousand-foot drop below them. It is as though the ground beneath their feet is no longer solid. But in fact it is” (57).

But, because of distorted messages, we sometimes seem to be oblivious of it. Thus, some are quite unshakably prone to maintain that because of such crude authoritarian impulses, traditions are worthy of being dismissed, to say the least. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:

This is one difference between modernism and postmodernism. Modernism, or so it imagined, was old enough to remember a time when there were firm foundations to human existence, and was still reeling from the shock of their being kicked rudely away. This is one reason why so much modernism is of a tragic temper. The drama of Samuel Beckett, for example, has no faith whatsoever in redemption, but presents a world which still looks as though it is in dire need of it. (57-8)

No nostalgia should be taken as a clue for reading history from the perspective of Eagleton’s critique. Because there is nothing to be longed for with respect to the epochs soaked in inequity. Because each voice matters, and yet, one could hardly claim that all are valid. Although the thought indisputably radiates the strong antisupremacist belief, there is perhaps no persuasive enough argumentative way to support such a statement. Perhaps, it is for this reason that Eagleton’s sublimely unpretentious remark speaks volumes.  Terry Eagleton, After Theory: “There is nothing retrograde about roots” (21).

As Phillips points out, it is probably in the realms divested of a demand for continuous reinstatement of political power where genuine source of social currency can be found:

The crisis of a second-generation black British community, with no viable alternative to offer in either language or religion, will deepen in direct proportion to the vigour with which Britain tries to ignore the gross inequity of opportunity, thus further aggravating socio-cultural differences by unwittingly encouraging people to waste precious energy on the cultivation of conflict, energy which should be harnessed and used in the cause of mutual understanding.  (The European Tribe 125-6)

There might be other, traditional names for the exchange in questions, as Eagleton observes elsewhere. Maybe it’s precisely those capacities to understand exceeding, yet not diminishing, the relevance of merely cognitive activities that can alleviate political tension and ensure resuming reasonable social dynamics in the light of the notion of wholesome roots, as Eagleton's  statement is suggestive of, not excluding, but rather enhancing the idea of the purity of aerials, as McKenzie Wark’s ruminations in A Hacker Manifesto (2004) inspire one to think.