against
distraction / against overexposure
“He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s
grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his
own father.”
James Joyce, Ulysses
If there is a way to
approach the perplexity of the ineffable, if it is possible to experience
contentedness with perceiving it without entirely comprehending it, the way may
be glimpsed via the metaphor of the organic harp whose strings are moved by
“one intellectual breeze,” as Coleridge’s highly contemplative poetic devices
suggest (“The Eolian Harp” line 52). If such natural imagery can be thought of
as a means of portraying the inexhaustible source quenching ceaseless thirst
for incessant learning, the way to open up for its abundance is via the trope
of “the Great universal Teacher,” as
invoked in “Frost at Midnight” (line 63).
If such contexts offer
anything that could help conjuring up the key in which the remix invigorates and
consolidates creative / critical voices in the service of peaceful/peaceable
resistance to noise in the communication channel, it is the awareness of the
significance of the fellowship of selfless, yet reindividualized, humans
humbly, yet shamelessly, exercising the right to the distinction between
individualism and individuality, between uniformity and unity.
If such an approach can
open up the avenue elucidating further possibilities for learning, it may be in
the light of the search depicted in Vladimir Nabokov’s reminiscences of his
mother’s dedication to collecting mushrooms, as presented in Speak, Memory (1999):
One of her greatest pleasures in summer was the very
Russian sport of hodit’ po gribï (looking
for mushrooms). Fried in butter and thickened with sour cream, her delicious
finds appeared regularly on the dinner table. Not that the gustatory moment
mattered much. Her main delight was in the quest, and this quest had its rules.
(28)
If anything, this
provides a great lesson in the perception of intentionality as directedness, not
purposiveness, but not purposelessness, either. It is also suggestive of an
antiutilitarian counterpoint to self-referentiality of formulaic, cumulative
approach to research and knowledge for that matter. As such, it certainly casts
light on some of the issues pertinent to shrines of erudition—academia.
It is endlessly fascinating and bizarrely amusing to listen to some
contemporary academics dissecting the work of Virginia Woolf. Despite the
celebratory undertone and congratulatory subtext, one cannot help but detect
the discrepancy between the uttered and silent portions of some messages.
Regardless of intentionality in either (since it is beyond both the scope and
capacities of this work to decipher their character with regard to the nuances
of the parameter in question), one can barely ignore peculiarities of
worshipping in Woolf’s work the voice of a courageous literary experimentator,
exploratory literary critic, and an advanced cultural activist. Her daring
attitude towards political elites, cultural establishment, and literary canon
cannot be contemplated upon without noting the stance in these proponents of
academic freedom a tint exerted by rigid institutionalized, expropriated
knowledge imprisoned in the hypocrisy of the allegedly liberated modern day
mind, and yet, exuding the very dual shadow of (1) a perverse giggle of victorian ladies in
front of even the tiniest signal of obscenity, scandal, opacity, intrigue; and
/ or (2) uncritical indulgence in the trickiness of tradition-entrenched elegance
and lyrical smoothness.
Can the subconscious of contemporary victorians be freed from reading in
the key of sensationalism, sentimentalism and / or superficial entertainment,
one wonders.
Time. Progress. Thought.
Steven Connor, “Literature, Politics & the Loutishness of
Learning”:”It is entirely unlike the plainer, more professionalized,
technicised critical diction that had begun to be developed among university
critics like Richards and Empson from the early 1920s onwards, a critical
writing that attempted to take the measure of its literary object rather than
wrangling or straining to effect sacramental mingling with it” (9).[1]
While discussing the contrast between the style of Samuel Beckett and the
aforementioned critical voices, Connor inspires thinking that for a meta
account of a literary work to be objective (if certainly not in exactly the
same way scientific objectivity is validated), it does not necessitate assuming
a rhetorical apparatus decisively distinct from the vernacular in which the
work was written. In other words, approaching a piece of literature from a
vibrant critical distance does not require a scientific travesty, nowadays
still — absurdly enough – echoing the looming cloud of positivism. Conversely, while
stylistic resonance between the object of the study and the critique itself is
not a precondition for a sound critical view, validity of the account can be
maintained without the disguise of forced
technicality and mechanistic professionalism aimed to constitute the
distinction between the two realms : language on the object level and idiosyncratic
meta takes on it.
How this relationship is established is probably not among easily
explicable issues. However, Connor introduces the notion of the metatextual
voice (14) that can perhaps offer a possibility to understand at least part of
the intricacy. He remarks in Beckett’s works the voice of the literary aspect
of the text, but he claims that, at the same time, there is a voice that tends
to suggest to readers the clue for creating a meta account of the text
analyzed. This may mean that the clue sets the framework in which the work is
read. It should follow that those whose reader valences reverberate with the
tone of the metatextual voice come up with interpretations akin to the key in
which the text was written. It might even be assumed that only such cases
occur, given the precoded interpretational frame. Further, readers attuned to
different frequencies might “fail” to provide a valid take on the piece
scrutinized.
Yet, anyone with a modicum of experience in reading-writing matters
finds such reasoning erratic. The previous example of the comments on Woolf’s
writing clearly indicates the tension between the readings seemingly in tune
with the text and an oppositional streak objecting to celebrating it in the way
that ignores fervent subversiveness pivotal to her oeuvre. This is obviously
even a tougher nut to crack, but it is not unreasonable to believe that what is
at stake constitutes a defiant response against blatant formalistic
interventions within reading-writing practices and irreducibility of a piece of
literature to platitudes. As such, it generates a sound basis for resistance
integral to the remix.
In academic context, these antithetical aspects, frictions,
polarizations, and collisions could be understood to stem from what Connor sees
as an antagonistic duality manifested in the contrast between academic ideals
and academic trivialities. One such triviality is incapacity to come to terms with the contradiction
of the limit of knowledge regardless of
the cognizance accumulated. Another is juggling academic freedom under a threat
of invasive corporatization. Both reflect issues in the domain of wrestling
with the question of power. The symbolic of “the imaginary power of escaping
the demands of power”(15) is powerful. But, perhaps, even more alleviating is
Connor’s statement spelling out the moral aspect of the thematic:”If ethics may
be defined as deliberation of the good, and politics as the necessary coercion
of the good, then this is a politics characterized by a refusal of coercion”
(15).
Accordingly, and as mentioned before, McKenzie Wark’s vocabulary in 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist
International (2008) proposes containing, rather than escaping the problem
of power. This finds fertile soil in an attempt to grapple with the fusion of
the problem of power, the question of knowledge, and the notion of commodity.
Fabrication of knowledge might be the crudest example of it, but a no lesser
evil is expropriated knowledge, quite frequently mobilized as a vehicle oiled
by and fueling a misconception about the totality of discourse and the way it
is reflected on the dynamics within cultural realities – ivory/babylonian atopia
between ruritania and cyborg urbanity, between the nodal and the central.
/
In
Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty writes:
I can crudely
sum up the story which historians like Blumenberg tell by saying that once upon
a time we felt a need to worship something which lay beyond the visible world.
Beginning in the seventeenth century we tried to substitute a love of truth for
a love of God, treating the world described by science as a quasi-divinity.
Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century we tried to substitute a love of
ourselves for a love of a scientific truth, a worship of our own deep spiritual
or poetic nature, treated as one more quasi divinity. (22)
In the light of the critique of a
distorted understanding of progress as an allegedly advanced version of the
legacy of the Enlightenment, in Open Sky (1997), Paul Virilio examines
the evolvement of scientific axioms of sorts. One of the aspects of the debate
particularly focuses on the adjustment being made within the time / space
/ distance triad. Situated in relation to the categories of speed and
acceleration, the three seem to be undergoing considerable redescriptions.
Virilio is prone to back up the discussion with the constant called the limit
of the speed of light, thereby ensuring a critical distance towards and
indicating a limit to potential uncontrollable reconfigurations of the
components of the equation and the equation itself.
Namely, the mutually conditioning
relationship between discourse and cultural realities have apparently brought
about a resultant confusion, so to speak. More precisely, emphasizing speed
tends to entail shifts in the perception of temporality to the point of a
radical destabilization of the notion and experience of chronology, ”an
unprecedented temporal breakdown,” as Virilio puts it (Open Sky 71).
This is more often than not manifested in uncritical debunking of historical
thinking.
Coupled with this is a propensity enabled
by advanced technologies that creates an impression of space reduced to virtual
dimensions. In the vein of Virilio’s critique of
telepresence--virtual interaction, outdoing other modes of communication--it is
possible to seek seeds of recuperation from the ashes of dissolving dialogue
associated with ascribing to the human and, by extension, to the virtual
properties incommensurable with these spheres, notably omnipotence and
ubiquity.
Virilio claims that
certain transmutations are occurring within the time / space / distance triad polluted
by the dominance of speed, i.e., within cultural realities that impose
distorted relations among the three, hence entailing negligence of the very
central notion and phenomenon : the journey. This he calls dromospheric
pollution. One of its manifestations is a threat of the colonization of the
bodily realm by “prostheses that make the super-equipped able-bodied person
almost the exact equivalent of the motorized and wired disabled person” (Open
Sky 11).
These tectonic spatiotemporal
reconceptualizations that Virilio suggestively, and aptly so, dubs as “the
desert of world time - of a global time
– complementing the desert of flora and fauna rightly decried by ecologists” (Open Sky 125 bold in original) call for
a specific type of greening. Such a state of affairs, implying spatiotemporal
desertification, threatens to cause redescriptions of the concept of durée. And yet, durée endures. To explain the paradox
in question requires, perhaps, an intervention that fortunately fails to meet
expectations, thereby simultaneously reconfirming the limits and the greatness
of the human.
Where eradication of the
historical perspective sabotages a sense of the future, insistence on euphoric
instantaneity obliterates the seeming focus on the here and now. In Steven
Connor’s parlance, the polemic can be approached through the prism of the
refined perception of intentionality as directedness, rather than a goal
oriented activity. Likewise, Connor’s trope of impassioned emptying vividly
illustrates the redemptive potential of the otherwise devastating situation of
telepresent bodiless bodies.
Noting, yet not anathemizing, overstatements about the
value of virtual spatiotemporality, simultaneously acknowledging the role of
the cyborg sphere, pondering the perplexities re-focuses on the
distraction-free domain. Were it not for the context of Virilio’s thought that
ensures a different perspective, one wouldn’t be surprised by his dystopian
account. Likewise, did he not explicate a take on a hidden perspective (Open Sky 2) in the crevice of the
somewhat apocalyptic portrayal, one might succumb to the idea of ruthless,
coercive desertification – a conquest of the trajectory by velocity – one could
surrender to a reckless, oppressive tyranny of acceleration, dislocation into a
distraction called noise in the communication channel.
And yet, durée
endures. Virilio indicates an angle that enables defiant resistance to a verisimilitude
of noise. In an empire of the ocular, domineering visual sensations inflict
overexposure as a prevalent mode of noise. Here, “right to blindness” (Open Sky 96 italics in original) is
asserted against politics of distraction. Paul Virilio, Open Sky: “Sometimes all you have to do is look differently to see
better” ( 97).
Thus, hic & nunc
/ anticarpediem poetics celebrates the power of weakness as an enduring
source of a critical / creative perspective worshipping the investment in a
distanced approach to discourse, cultural realities, and their mutually
conditioning relationship. By so doing, it not only secures a critical stance
towards the misconception about the totality of discourse, but also
demonstrates the point from which remixable character of cultural realities is
revealed. Specifically, highlighting the idea of the historicizable ahistorical,
the remix neither lionizes the past nor romanticizes the future. It does not
glamorize ecstatic sensationalism of instantaneity, either. Rather, it
glorifies the possibility of redeeming the past, reimagining the future, and
resurrecting the present.
[1]The essay is based on a talk
delivered at the Samuel
Beckett: Debts, and Legacies seminar,
Regent’s Park College, Oxford, June 19, 2009 and a plenary lecture to the Literature and Politics conference of the Australasian
Association of Literature, University of Sydney, July 6, 2009 (http://www.stevenconnor.com/).
