Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (part 3/4)

The Sound of Refacement : The Hybrid Word in Glamvoid

peaceful/peaceable resistance to power gladiatorship

Somewhere, in what is presumed to be his habitas, and what feels as interstellar spaces in proliferated galaxies hosting numberless orbits most astonishingly positioned against each other, Joe Palmer is entertaining thoughts of Nola. Firmly anchored in indecisiveness, or, at least, verbal elusiveness of that what once passed between them, he hopes to find a way to download her. Dweller of the kingdom of pirate frequencies, he patiently, persistently nourishes germs regenerating the invaluable legacy of the communication they once had.

Dozing on & off now, dreaming the wi(e)red dream, those vacuumlike spatiotemporalities seem less hostile. What once was a pulverizing beat of a crowded bar is now being transpositioned into a soothing lick of the sinuous, yet steady, bassline groove. What once was a hysterical echo of the masses enchanted by power is now being channeled into finely sifted, toned down, yet articulate, sonic kiss of the guitar strings enhancing the embroidery of that what spreads. What once was dominance of ferociously ravenous chaos of excessive notes lost in the memory of the overexposed desperately plugged into a (self)dissolving spectacle arena is now being finetuned to a smoky, yet undoubtedly present, vibe of the friendly cyborg shadow.

Through semi-oneiric meanders, the rhythm of the remix is being established, as Joseph finds the bruise he now acquired. Navigating the bruise, he is experiencing what once was “the city of lost images speaking in tongues, gathered together on a woman’s skin” (2843). Where he once emerged from, is now being sensed as Nola’s quietly spoken words:”Inside the lens lies a world beyond ours. We have created it, set it free. Now it grows, expands. People live there. The spectral ones, the lost and the damaged for whom this world sets too painful a task, there they live”(2395). Just as once her “body melted away into the forest, becoming the forest” (2488), so are her words now becoming tongueless. Just as once the whole skin of things was emitted from her own, so does Joseph’s bruise contain static : re-placing noise.

The universe, as we know it, might still revolve around the motto “It’s all about making money!” (2923). Yet, in Joseph’s bruise, there is a story dancing to the melody sketched after a silhouette of “a bird of deeper loveliness for all of that” (2883). It’s all about scoring. It’s a culture disneyfied to the core, thereby attempting to impose on one a deceitful idea about the totality of discourse abundant in delusional choices between cultural theory, either oblivious to its relationship with that what it theorizes, or, forgetful of a critical distance toward the subject of critique. Obfuscating the boundaries and relationships between narrative and extralingusitic levels, such a culture seems to provide little room for critical / creative voices that object to crippling impediments to sound responses. Or, so buzz logic would want one to believe.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory (2003):

In this social order, then, you can no longer have bohemian rebels or revolutionary avant-gardes because they no longer have anything to blow up. Their top-hatted, frock coated, easily outraged enemy has evaporated. Instead, the non-normative has become the norm. Nowadays, it is not just anarchists for whom anything goes, but starlets, newspaper editors, stockbrokers and corporate executives. The norm is money; but since money has absolutely no principles or identity of its own, it is no kind of norm at all. (16-7)

            Perhaps it really is not about having something to blow up or blowing up per se to start with. It’s not about the deceitful concept of revolution that aims solely at overthrowing a regime, a class, or any other category in power for the sake of replacing it with another dominance-starved elite. Power narratives call for remapping. Redescriptions of socioscape call for disambiguation. Cultural amalgamation that Noon’s fictitious world reflects can perhaps best be discerned through his writing that indefatigably explores the possibilities for wholesome responses against inhibitions coming from superimposed cultural models, and yet celebrating the restraint that enables articulating sensible communication. The much needed remapping and disambiguation spur from knots of obscurity vividly portrayed in the story “The Blind Spot” (metamorphiction). An oasis of embalming darkness, protective of the overexposed outcasts, dreamers of the wir/ǝ/d dream, in an electric empire of blinding noise feels not entirely unlike the call in the novel Nymphomation (1997) that offers to all the underprivileged a corner of alleviating play to quench their thirst.

Thus, out of bewildering polyphonic bruises, the vibe spreads, the message—ethereally rooted—spreads. Out of cacophony of cultural smudge buzz--beyond captivity by sensationalist parasite signals—threatening to dissolve individuality and unity alike--the human face is being borne. Told in the child’s voice, the story, spreading the message, is reconstituting hic & nunc / anticarpediem poetics. Selfless, yet reindividualized, united, yet distinctive, are fellow cyborgs enduring the hindrances to patient and persistent containing noise through the hybrid legacy of change and preservation.

Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (part 3/3)

The Sound of Refacement : The Hybrid Word in Glamvoid

Renegades of Noise : Mirror / Skin Alliance

Thus, the vacuity saturating hotel rooms is not very different from the vapidity of wide open spaces. Not entirely unlike them are the apartments, exuding exuberant affluence, resembling sites of glamworship. In particular, the Pleasure Dome, that can be perceived as an equivalent of reality TV shows in the culture we know, is where producers, managers, singers, viewers seem to dwell. That’s where their desires are being sustained, continuously animated, their longing fired, their projections galvanized. That’s where their skin starts acquiring features of slightly excessively permeable membranes. That’s where they most intensely reach the oblivion of the suspension of belief. Or, so somnambulist logic wants one to believe.

            In the novel where everyone is watched and perversely rejoices in such voyeuristic-exhibitionist conditions, surveillance is more rendered invisible than approved, accepted, embraced, or adopted. It is a society oblivious of and blind to the subtleties and nuances of being observed, overseen, and/or recognized. It is a culture deaf to the human face. Well, almost.

            Noon devises a symbol reminiscent of the nearly forgotten need and capacity for establishing an awareness about the role of skin : its sensitivity, its resilience, and its potential to maintain the boundaries. These characteristics are insisted upon via a symbolic plane that from another perspective concerns the difference between  individualism and individuality, between uniformity and unity. By extension, Noon’s narrative technique provides a creative / critical vocabulary. It demonstrates the vitality of creation and reconfirms the vibrancy of a critical distance. As such, it, simultaneously, reinstates the significance of both critical thinking and reading-writing in the spirit of reverence.

In Channel SK1N, mirrors emerge as anchoring, steadying signposts. In response to a dorian gray thematic in the context of digitized fame, the symbolic of the mirror is subliminally soothing, since it distracts the look from deafening noise of glamacams and visionplex towards an image more resembling the touch of gentler, less abrasive, more appeasing light spilling a friendly shadow over the face, over the body, over the skin—the mirror image as friendly, reconstituting, ethereally rooted energy amidst alien pixilated sites: the image remindful of the human presence / solace.

Mirrors—between nights fuzzing with thickness of liquor, smudged in distastefully oversaturated flavors, noise of overcrowded bars. Mirrors—between solitary night driving through desertlike luxury, abandoned landscapes, urbanity camouflaged in disinterested facelessness. Mirrors—through the crevices in the bruise on Nola’s belly, through the crack in the bruise on her hand. Borne out of these humanoid reflections, squeezing out digitized sensuality, is the child’s voice. Borne out of the mirror is an invocation of childhood, reminiscence of the human presence. Borne out of the mirror is Nola’s etherized self, bringing to the eye of the reader reconstituted, spectral Melissa Gold—daughter of George Gold--the Pleasure Dome superstar, who was to disappear into alleged suicide.  Until the mirror (somewhere, sometime), after Nola Blue’s body has been found by the railroad, regenerates her.

George Gold, father to them both, albeit in different ways, is in awe faced with the sheer wonder of the site of the bruise. As the white dove from the inside is becoming prominent, as the world is opening, George is being sucked in. Until the mirror renders available fruits of  Nola’s disintegration that started during those long forgotten nights of bar crawling when she was released—not screenbound any more. As Evelyn Moore, the gossip/spectacle hunter, was taking over the bodily narrative, and Melissa Gold assuming the digitized one, Nola was disappearing. Learning how to balance being open to signals and being resistant to them. Parts of herself functioning independently from each other, yet her whole being not disconnected.

Until the mirror regains the presence of Joe Palmer, once brought to Nola’s world out of the bruise. A young man who once was in the bruise, a young man with a voice that talks, sings stories of semisecret pockets within polluted information flow, the voice that semireveals contrapuntal signals, anticorrosive message: amidst the hollowness of a hotel room, he vocalizes the message about that what spreads not being an illness. Or, perhaps, solace.

And yet, still slightly distant, aloof, detached feels the interaction. Enabling alienation. By virtue of the power of weakness, language generously keeps the characters at bay. Being kept at bay, they are protected by the inability to dominate. At the same time, language acknowledges its limits. It cannot provide the characters with linguistic means to convey the message in its entirety. There is no way to precisely verbalize the characters’ humble withdrawal before the realization that it is less relevant which one of them sends out redeeming signals. There is no way to utterly precisely articulate that it is the message whose centrality enables recuperation of the communication channel. Jeff Noon, Channel SK1N:

Nola’s body reacted to the human presence, the closeness. Her skin tingled. Strangely, she felt comforted. It was good to be giving pleasure in this way, to be sending out signals, and to have those signals received and understood. She became a giving object. A subject to be viewed. Here was solace, of a kind. (861)

It is, perhaps, the very incapacity of the characters and the limits of language that are also suggestive of the limits of robopoetics engines. Like humans, albeit in different ways.

Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (part 3/2)

The Sound of Refacement : The Hybrid Word in Glamvoid

The Power of Weakness : Storytelling from Void

The dialogue between these realms in Jeff Noon’s novel Channel SK1N (2012) is primarily suggested through the specificities of the deployment of particular literary elements. It seems that, despite the apparent dominance of characterization, it is the setting that constitutes the pillars of the novel and the abundance of the symbolic offered to the denizens of the world now increasingly characterized by a wide reaching penetration of the internet of things into the spheres that were once imagined to belong to technologically generated and managed aspects of culture.

The internet of things implies broadening the perception and scope of technology. It requires a transformed approach to digitized cultural realities. It demands cultural critique in the key of resistance to noise. It also inspires rethinking and remapping power-narratives. In From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City (2010) — a conversation about urbanity informed by a somewhat blurry, yet potentially appropriable, redescriptions of labor, play, the public, and the private -- Trebor Scholz and Laura Y. Liu explore the ways of navigating those newly arisen possibilities, as well as the caveats engendered by expropriation of labor, production of knowledge, fabrication of information, the contested domestic, the public definable in monetizing terms more than anything else, the online and the offline interlaced within the culture plagued by the internet of things.

They focus on the elusiveness of social relations in the context of questionable values, norms, and ontologies. They emphasize the conundrums both immigrant and native working classes encounter within extremely exploitative societies. Their critique celebrates the potentialities of technologically advanced communities, yet not for a second falling into a trap of a deceitful idea about the omnipotence such culture may entail. Neither glorifying nor demonizing technology per se, Scholz and Liu rather call for media activism that would solidify a sense of communality and recuperate individuality amidst cultural amalgamation partly informed by the internet of things.

Cultural realities of their meditation can further be investigated in the light of Kenneth Goldsmith’s ideas from Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011). His visions of personified electrical appliances, supposedly enabled by the same means that engender poetry, appear not very far from being turned into robopoetics engines. The portrayal of the world plagued by such uncreative writing might be a dystopian take on posthuman history (225). It may also be reflected upon through the world of Noon’s novel. If there is a plot in Channel SK1N, it is contextualized within trickster alleyways undoing parasite signals, confusing static, bewildering images. If such responses to the hindrances in the communication channel can be characterized, the easiest way to understand the dynamic is by juxtaposing them with the question of alienation.

If detachment can be felt, it is certainly best depicted in the realm of the setting. Nola Blue, the protagonist of the novel, is a pop star. The reader first meets her during her stroll to the river, through urban enclaves of disinterested streets, in night clubs. We see her in her apartment. In others’ apartments: George Gold, her manager who facilitated Nola’s transformation into a music star, enabled her acquiring a new name (instead of Diana Knowles), new voice, learning how to navigate the signals, do the transmission, learn to contain noise; Christina, her minder, personal assistant, the loyal one. What makes the setting specific is that what is supposed to be the domestic, the private, feels like any of the hotel rooms we later see her in, or, indifferent spaces surrounding the freeways she drives along. In search for signals, songs, stories. Or, perhaps, solace.

So created, the setting allows the narrative to play along the lines Noon proposes in his experimental writings and writings about literary experimentation such as “How to Make a Modern Novel” (2001), calling for a radical immersion in literary playfulness; Automated Alice (1996), offering a take on rendering tradition remixable, just as contemporary cultural realities are; “The Blind Spot” (metamorphiction), providing a glance of the world of the overexposed in the context of the redescription of darkness in the muted age; “The Ghost on the B-Side” (metamorphiction), making available to the readership the remixing technique based on play, experimentation, and preservation.

All Noon’s literary devices can now be found in the setting of the novel Channel SK1N dazzling and pulsating with a gleam of a celebrity-orwellian culture. The gloom of the blinding glitter is exacerbating, but also energizing. It might easily be what John Brenkman in “Innovation: Notes on Nihilism and the Aesthetics of the Novel” (2006)[1], a study in the contemporary novel, dubs as “an enabling alienation” (823). If it enables anything in this novel of Noon’s, it is neither the characters nor the narrative itself. Instead, multiple, multilayered weakening invigorates the very language. Language against noise. As weakness teaches, power is in acknowledging the limits, incessantly reenacted in language.

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[1] Franco Moretti, ed. The Novel. Volume 2 Forms and Themes. Princeton: Princeton University Press (2006). 808 – 838. Print.

Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (part 3/1)

The Sound of Refacement : The Hybrid Word in Glamvoid

Strangely Akin : The Setting as a Social Commentary

Q : How does one tell the dream of the sublime in a dedivinized world?

A : By telling a story about scoring.

In the world in which all solid dissolves into the traces of their own insubstantiality, an apocalypse does not reveal anything. Such a world rewards its dwellers with hardly anything more than an awareness of the implausibility of such a status. It tends to reduce them to occupants of mutable spatiotemporality void of any affinity to perseverance. Elusiveness of the surrounding entails an increasing capacity for ever further eroding of the constituents enabling the environment to be called so. In such a world, mediated experiences tend to assume the status they themselves deny. Mediation that almost forgot that it is integral to the dazzling world of glamacams, wall screens, visionplex, portapops, telebugs, and other sound-vision machinery seems to be not just what happens in the world of omniconnectivity, but the very world. The world that feeds on the ecstatic almost forgot that thriving on glamour is an advanced version of highly commoditized social relations. In such a world, commodity knows no difference between what is sold, how it can be bought, who does the trade, and other subtleties of such complex socialties. Or, so somnambulist logic wants one to believe.

In the world in which all solid dissolves into the traces of their own insubstantiality, an apocalypse does not reveal anything. Such a world leaves little room for immersing oneself in the very activity, be it even a crudely antikinetic variant of dynamics. Instead, it’s all about scoring. It is a dystopian world. One might even be prone to identify such a world with the classification of Jeff Noon’s novels. One might be tricked to think that formal interventions as experimental storytelling means are solely tales of bland surfaces, faceless facades of architectural specimens in a world of unanchored signifiers. Few things are more erroneous than such assumptions. We don’t buy it. If Noon invents a world, it communicates doubts, affirmations, disentanglements, disambiguation, reintegration within secret passages through noise in the communication channel. It, in other words, disrupts dystopian narratives with a slightly different cyberpunk shade of storytelling.

Where oxymoron and paradox are in a mutually fuelling relationship--the world populated by characters whose bodies are but diverse responses to parasite signals--Noon’s stories weave a strangely invigorating nexus consisting of the setting and social commentary told in the key of the poetics evaporating from electric spores, sleazy surfaces, high voltage flashes, paralyzing static, electrifying euphorias,  self-referential arena of the spectacle, imperialism of the ocular plugged into itself, self-dissolving insipidness of the exhaustion by insatiable thirst for thrill, darkness of aloof hotel rooms, emptiness of freeways, spaces of crowded loneliness, solitude in glamvoid. If Noon invents a world, it is a stunning portrayal of the mutually conditioning relationship between reading-writing and cultural realities. It is language against noise.