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.