Nikolina Nedeljkov: Academic Blog: 2015

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Suspicious to the Core (1 / foYr)

Fearful Symmetry & Other Fables

There seems to have been no response to the classicist ruminations inspired by Nathan’s enchantment and consequent disillusionment with fantasy saturated affair with Dunja. No wonder, given the perplexity of the situation and the pervading mindset deeply steeped in the belief in arousal by decay, insipidness of surfaces, nondescript verbal exchange, absurdity driven mental extravaganza, emotions coded in packages of information about depixelation terabytes per nanosecond, stature estimated based on the number of digitized uploads, regal status of celebrities, power imagined as translatable into the vocabulary of derivatives, semantics of stocks, epistemes of dividends. No wonder, given the hollowness of a communicational tunnel within which verbal chunks bounce around like satellites in pursuit of long lost planets, where inconsolable linguistic lumps wander around unlikely orbits of desire, where detritus of vocabularies are being dispersed across etherized celestial laceworks.

There is a scene in the movie entitled Wassup Rockers (2005) by Larry Clark that is among the ones with the most salient subliminal (for lack of a better word) message. Namely, the scene features two teens seated on a bed in her well off L.A. house. She tells him about her busy father and her words seem to be colliding with their own echo throughout the mansion crammed with riches, and yet, devastatingly empty at the same time. He tells her about the slums where he spends his days hanging around with a gang of the like-minded, excelling in cunning ways of resisting the imposed modes of thinking adopted as norm by the ghetto. They smile to each other. There is nothing pretentious in their communication. There is nothing weird about the weirdness of their stories. Nor is there anything awkward about the way they exchange them. There is, however, the odd detail that in all its multiple disguise of domesticated alienation might even pass for a communicational paradigm. There is a tiny gap within their somewhat hesitant conversation. The girl feels she might sooth the discomfort and says that he can undress if he wants. Nothing spectacularly strange, one would think. And it wouldn’t be were it not for the tone, the context, and the characterization. There is something about the characters--strangers to the worlds of power addicts--that is reflected in the utterance, an invitation to nakedness, that sits uncomfortably with the imposed norms, one of them being coded in the vocabulary of sexuality devalued by hyperinvestment.

One wonders if it is possible to learn anew to appreciate simplicity, and yet not become susceptible to vulgarized emotionality, to immerse oneself in lyric cornucopia, and yet not succumb to the charms of sentimentalism, to exercise the right to ceaseless reciprocal re-discovery of another human being, all the while resisting sensationalism, i.e., to incessantly reclaim the right to the remix—reintegration of those inestimable remnants of the potential for refacement, winning them over from a scavenger grip of deceitful infatuation with freudian-darwinian-babylonian mentality. In a word, as suggested in the short story entitled “Fearful Symmetry” from the collection War Dances (2009) by Sherman Alexie, one wonders whether it is possible to regain the purity of the dark theater where the memories of the adolescent, unadulterated romance still await to be rediscovered.

It seems that David Cronenberg’s medical narrative is indicative of the possibility to recuperate, i.e., reawaken the realm in question. Interestingly, such invaluable potential lies hidden in the most unlikely of platitudes in the novel—among seemingly adjacent commentaries. One such instance, perhaps, occurs within the conversation between Naomi and Ari of their Tokyo episode. During the interview, Naomi finds out that there is a gap in her erudition. There is, apparently, an essay that could be the key to the mysterious disappearance of Célestine Arosteguy--text that is allegedly a source of information about insect religion, an inspiration for her and, by extension, for Aristide to destroy it. Naomi entertains the idea of lacking knowledge about the crucial essay. For a moment, she recalls her friend Yuki’s ability to shamelessly embrace such a lack and indulge in superficiality. And yet, there is an awareness of a distinction between the two of them (David Cronenberg, Consumed 175), that despite their friendship, each of them remains within their respective boundaries, within one’s distinctiveness. Paradoxically, only so contained can one contribute to the thriving communication with the other human being. In a word, it is perhaps this inexplicable capacity to withdraw before and preserve a distance toward a delusionary image of self-grandeur and omnipotence, and choose the power of weakness instead that is constitutive of disentanglement of knots in the communication channel and (self)dissolving noise.

The potential for the remix stems from the very ambiguity of Naomi’s wake up call. Namely, the narrator’s observation negating identification between her and Yuki might signal Naomi’s denial of the propensity to flaunt not being familiar with sources such as bug-religion manifesto on which Célestine bases the invitation to a counteract. Naomi might not claim the ability to be in possession of all and any piece of information that can be constitutive of the cultural capital from which the conglomerate called erudition is extrapolated. The observation certainly indicates acknowledgement of the distinction between the two. This awareness of the distance ensuring dissolvement of blurry amalgamation, within which boundaries, distinctiveness, and individuality become suspiciously fluid, is also the anchor to the integrity of selfless, yet re-individualized, fellow humans.

One wonders if Nathan is also capable of discerning such distinctions. Can he disentangle the six breast knot, one wonders. He himself might not have an answer to that question, as he is spiraling further along the corridors of investigation. Partly driven by a professional obligation to excavate as much information as he can in order to harmonize the crumbling jigsaw puzzle, partly tracking the origins of the infection he contracted through the relationship with Dunja, and transmitted it to Naomi. Guilt? Curiosity? Search for remedy? Potential for recuperation.

Naomi knows the name of the “bug.” It is called Roiphe’s disease after Dr. Barry Roiphe. While allegedly noone has had it since 1968 (72), Dunja’s suppressed immunity allowed the infectant to inhabit her body. How did Nathan and Naomi manage to turn their respective bodies into hosts of the pollutant visitant might not be an easily answerable question. The answer to it might not even be a direct response in the form of an epistemological deciphering apparatus. One rather finds it within the vital ingredient of the redemptive potential of the remix : resistance to noise.

Whether Nathan is attuned to such a streak of inquiry is uncertain. What is quite sure is that in order to find out, he, instead of flying home to New York, goes to Toronto--to the source of information--where the doctor himself resides alongside his mysterious daughter named Chase. Chase is allergic to French due to a trauma she experienced as a second rate, English speaking citizen during her Sorbonne days. Hanging out with the Arosteguy professors, as most of their young philosopher students did, she, too, was infatuated. But, she also seems to have developed immunity to whatever the Paris episode might have engendered as traumatic to her. Her weapon of choice is a techno-philosophy nexus embodied in a miraculous lab of astonishing 3D printing. Her FabrikantBot 2 model is an appliance unlike any other. And yet, she desires a more advanced model, The RepliKator 3, because it can manage colors more faithfully. However, the doctor-father resists buying it.

The technological device is the generator of three dimensional imagery. It spits out stories into the space populated by humans. Those stories can be digitized, uploaded, and posted on the internet. They can be disseminated throughout the web. They can reach readers. Readers can interpret them. One such story might have been the one about the tragedy of Célestine Arosteguy. The other may be a 3D printed “phantom book called Consumed” (240)—the core of Roiphe’s project--that Nathan hopes to have made by the FabrikantBot:”Renewable organic plastic books by the thousands” (240).

Perhaps dispersable, too. Just as the characters in David Cronenberg’s novel are. Scattered across the globe : Célestine is in North Korea, Nathan in Toronto, Naomi abandoned in Tokyo, Aristide reportedly dead in some dodgy corner of that techno mecca. Like planets looking for their orbits. Like satellites in pursuit of their planets. Like 3D imagery searching for the printer. Imagery detached from its signification. Dissolving in etherized proliferation of melting pixels. By virtue of noise.

Monday, October 12, 2015

Suspicious to the Core (1 / three)

A(l)one & Multitudes

Based on Dr. Trinh’s claim, “There was nothing medically wrong with Célestine Arosteguy. Nothing beyond the normal complaints of a woman of her age” (48), and absence of medical tests, investigation, and findings that would support the reported disease, it is reasonable to take into consideration the possibility that, as suggested by Dr. Trinh, the cleaning lady’s-- maintenance woman’s, the Russian Madame Tretikov’s--interpretation, which went viral throughout the internet, was a misplaced perception of the philosophical understanding of humans being sentenced to death (50), terminally ill (49), by virtue of being mortal--not due to a certain condition, such as brain tumor, as the lady put it.

Célestine’s complaints about having the left breast heavily bugged coincide with her increasing involvement with a young guy named Romme Vertegaal and, therefore, Aristide’s observations of her changing body, transformations of their relationships, and the attempts to establish a new kind of connectivity in the midst of buggy circumstances overshadowing genuine passion. The key to the disentanglement of infested knots is subtly hidden in his meek statement, hesitantly acknowledging, ”There’s a basic life force that expresses itself even in me” (135), and strangely coinciding with Nathan’s disillusionment, a sobering insight reconstituting the boundaries of / to nearly unleashed desire for mesmerizing sickness:

Dunja, I’m not a sadist. I’m not a bondage freak. It really brought me down to see you getting cut up … When you recover from this, when you’ve healed completely, you’ll still be incredibly attractive to me. I mean, your disease and your treatment are not what make you sexy and beautiful. (56)

Doubtfully, Dunja could understand that his rejection was not of the same kind as that of her former Slovenian boyfriend, who simply could not cope with the hardship his partner was experiencing. The centripetal force of blindness, not infrequently featured by the characters in this novel, is rendered conspicuous in Aristide’s disarmingly simple remark. When Naomi joins him in Tokyo, she inquires about his loneliness there, to which he replies:”I was lonely in Paris” (133). When Naomi wonders whether the situation was the same after Célestine died (if she did, which would be contrary to some statements presented in the novel), he utters:”Now I’m…alone. It’s different” (133).

Aristide portrays the connection between himself and his partner against the notions of loneliness, isolation (133), and that’s perhaps the weirdness that could be ascribed to the nature of Nathan’s and Naomi’s--despite seeming intensity--potentially an aloofness/vapidity/vacuity drenched relationship.

Void, threatening to devour remnants of the potential for recuperation, seems to be filled with proliferation of hypostatized vocabularies. Complicity in their perpetuation and, hence, ever expanding worlds of dissociated emotional-mental packages, fragmented fabricated experiences of self and environment, kaleidoscopic imagery rolling through semipermeable cleavages of a communicational tunnel, is devised by a tripartite collaboration on behalf of Aristide, Célestine, and Dr. Molnár. Himself a photographer with a proclivity for arts, Zoltán Molnár enthusiastically encourages Aristide’s taking on a role of surgeon in a bizarre scientific-artistic collaboration, within which he would perform on Célestine medical mutilation by removing her breast.

Whether it is a symbolic commentary on the fetishization of motherness remains a question. Whether the trope “mother Naomi” (37) becomes a metaphorical magic wand in the hand of Dunja, who by decree refutes decades of familial, freudian agonizing fantasy --“[d]oesn’t count,” she says (45) -- is an interesting idea to ponder. How all these components of the narrative reveal a devastating detachment in Naomi’s and Nathan’s relationship --“[e]lectronics stores in airports had become their neighborhood hang-outs” (12-13) -- is significant. How the dots can be connected to further illuminate their mistrust toward engaging commitment -- Naomi’s thoughts are colored with marxist critique of consumerism and commodity while she is performing fellatio on Nathan (61), whereas Nathan’s are saturated with a six breast fantasy, combining Dunja’s, Célestine’s, and Naiomi’s within a single act of copulating with Naomi during their brief reunion in Amsterdam (62-63) -- is indicative.

Indicative of what? To this question various utterances appear as candidates for answers. One of them might be conjured up based on Aristide’s lyrically shaded testimonial about solitude. It can also be elucidated from the point of view spotlighting a sense of dislocation, as Nathan’s situation is portrayed: “His reality had been displaced by Naomi’s” (283). Confined to unrestricted mobility. Restlessness by blindness to the distinction between bondage and bonding. Distrustful of a possibility to be deprived of the right to…alienation? Comfortable in the safety of aloofness in the guise of the boundaries ensuring integrity? Well…as McKenzie Wark puts it laconically in The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011), “We don’t buy it” (1). One rather chooses the possibility of vibrant responses to such pellets of mimicry, such knotty entanglement : the capacity to discern and sustain the distinction between individualism and individuality, between uniformity and unity.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Suspicious to the Core (1 / 2)

Parallel trajectories, parallel narratives, crossing at some points with the Arosteguys’ are those of the couple of journalists Nathan and Naomi. On a business trip, research-meets-journalistic assignment, Nathan finds himself in Budapest at the heart of muddy medical waters. Under the supervision of the respectable Dr. Zoltán Molnár--an influential figure, celebrity of the red market--is Dunja who willingly participates in medical interventions of highly suspicious nature. Her eradicated sense of a future makes her indifferent to the present to the point of subjecting herself to assuming a role of a specimen in a laboratory of organic engineering. She acts as a patient-object of a multiple lumpectomy, a surgery nominally aimed at potentially bringing about improvement of her condition, while actually being a recklessly perverse immersion in thanatos-driven distractions, not unlike her exhibitionist exhilaration with the pictures of her medically mutilated body taken by the dedicated professional -- Nathan.

She is desperately indulging in sex with Nathan who becomes a collaborator in a mindless inversion of the disease-death and youth-ripeness axes (54), darkly shaded attempts at confirming one’s…well, being alive. It is perhaps when he reaches the lowest of the obscure levels of the opaque digression of his narrative that his seemingly quirky, and yet somehow, nevertheless, vibrant affinity for disconnecting dysfunctional umbilical cords resurfaces as a mighty signpost of reshifting. David Cronenberg, Consumed:

Naomi never let anybody go, and she used her unique, potent mixture of technology and witchiness to do it, whereas Nathan was only too happy to disconnect, to remove you from his Friends list and leave you dangling in the ether of cyberspace. Naomi thought that Nathan was ruthless with his friends; Nathan thought Naomi was compulsively, obsessively possessive. (54)

It is probably when flirtation with disgust becomes truly abhorring that he becomes capable of ruminating about the ideas diametrically opposite to the despicable morbid chasm of dislocated fantasies. David Cronenberg, Consumed:

Could he really say anything about classical concepts of art, and therefore beauty, based on harmony, as opposed to modern theories, post-industrial-revolution, post-psychoanalysis, based on sickness and dysfunction? (57)

It is probably when he becomes vaguely aware of having crudely violating the distinction between himself as a photo-journalist devoted to the medical feature starring Dunja and a voyeuristic seeker of moribund juiciness who betrays even his voyeurism by somewhat masochistically transgressing another boundary, almost finding himself on the wrong side of the camera. Paradoxically, it is the voice of the subterranean mogul that confronts Nathan with his distastefully gruesome erratic professionalism. Dr. Molnár is blatantly shameless in bowing before glam-divinity of pixilated empire: “For your big New Yorker article. I’ve always wanted to be the subject of a piece in the ‘Annals of Medicine’ section. It’s good for business, good for my vanity” (18).

Doctor’s “earnestness” might be a tactful, distracting technique which by “revealing,” i.e., overexposing obstructs a metaposition, threatens a critical distance. From the same notorious source comes another awakening remark. More precisely, as much as he is an acolyte of the glistening demimonde deity, hence a worshipper of the shrines of dromospheric pollution, he is, at the same time, heretical and subversively sinful. His susceptibility to corruptibility turns him even against the very source of reputation and wealth. He points out Nathan’s making a good choice by opting for taking photos instead of shooting a movie. By so doing, he articulates an observation signaling the potential for reshifting:”It’s a good thing you are not shooting a film, I must admit to myself. Her breasts will soon be radio-active, and your film would be fogged as a result!” (20).

It is the very possibility of the corrosion of the imagery that opens up an avenue for hindering a continuation of abysmal infestation of / by the bugged body-innerness nexus. Thus, Dr. Molnár’s technique might as well be a means of subverting indulgence in the sordid, typical of the endeavors such as Nathan’s task, of which he can even be an epitome, thereby symbolizing a self-dissolving nature of noise.

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Suspicious to the Core (1 / 1)

Displaced Fantasies : Resistance by Virtue of Noise

Il(l)communication

A married couple, philosophers, fervent participants in somewhat inspiring, partly turbulent, certainly challenging, edgy socio-political and cultural flows--Aristide and Célestine Arosteguy--are Paris based university professors whose pedagogies reflect the climate of the cultural realities they inhabit: oblivious of the critical distinction between the meta and the object levels within an orgiastic, indiscriminate proliferation of narratives, vocabularies, and descriptions in confusing encounters with their extralinguistic counterparts. They have been constituent ingredients of the matrimonial unity for forty years. From the early days of their then youth, and later on maturing relationship, they have been passionately attached to each other to the point of--detachment. Presumably.

The Sorbonne, a cradle of the revolutionary spirit of the modern era, accommodates their affinities for radical experimentation, rebellious attitude toward mainstream mentality and imposed modes of normativity, cultural fragmentation, mirroring social hierarchies, and a major bulk of postulates founding contemporary philosophy in an agony between the attempts to sustain the sovereignty / integrity of the discipline and an urge to be consistent in its age-long mission, namely being a redescription of antecedent vocabularies.

Comfortably immersed in the luxury their illustrious academic positions ensure, they are united in an irrevocable anticonsumerist commitment. Against a culture deeply submerged in infatuation by commodity, they set out early on on a journey aimed at dismantling fetishistic goliath. In an ever intensifying and expanding experiment, they mix philosophy, technology, and sexuality. They engage in liberal sex games with students, acquaintances, collaborators, strangers.

By doing so, they seem to be becoming strangers to each other. They might excel in the proliferation of, degree of, and approaches to the possibilities that liberties, rebellion, and experiments offer, but they also age. As they do, their bodies change. So do their hearts, it seems. An increased degradation of primary sexual characteristics and functions is apparently proportionate to carnal hunger.

In a politicized, technologically enhanced, media saturated vertiginous vortex, their adventures inform and are informed by a growing, greyest than ever, market of the medical profession, commoditized to the core, crudely reconfiguring the notions of legality, perversity, and…well, taste.

Within blurry whirlpools of the crossbreeds between the linguistic and the bodily, they end up in a drama combining elements of psycho-horror, mystery, fantasy, sci-fi confessional narrative encompassing parallel, spiral, and yet somehow felt as linear, trajectories spanning spots worldwide, featuring well delineated characters enmeshed in liquid identities smudged throughout the novel. In those fluctuations, they fade, as their radicalized practices appear to be means dissolving the edginess of their revolutionary hearts. Or, so the narrative on the most deceitful level wants one to believe.

Ari becomes the internet celebrity whose fame is based on the supposed bizarre episode in which he murders his beloved Tina partly to free her from the cancer-induced psycho-bodily bewilderment, partly to relieve them both from the devastating realization the diagnosis brought to their relationship--that because they did not have a future, they could not have the present. Above all, to immortalize their union by eating the flesh of her dismembered body.

Between a technology enabled spectacle and a profound inner tumult, the tribulations depicted in David Cronenberg’s novel Consumed (2014) are evocative of tall tales conjured up from evaporations of toxic “surgical smoke” (253). One of them concerns Célestine’s adventure with a young guy that transcends the boundaries of the Arosteguys’ games and has a crucial role in the couple’s separation. Photos of her left breast--in the midst of (mis)construed narratives, fluctuating between a surgically removed part of the body, a concept of emotional-mental detachment, digitally doctored imagery, and a 3D printed object--in a pixilated amalgamation suspiciously fuse with pictures of a student’s erect penis and certainly generate questions about Aristide’s supposed part of a surgeon in that grotesque scenario potentially symbolizing his own -- or others’-- castration. In a culture susceptible to pathologizing vocabularies, it is also called amputation. Furthermore, the metaphor in question is perceived in relation to sexual perversity based either on desire for amputation, fixation with having part of the body amputated (apotemnophilia), or partaking in sexual games with an amputee (acrotomophilia). By contrast, in the language sensitized to and investing in literary subtleties and playfulness, it is nothing but a form of disconnecting dysfunctional umbilical cords.

Likewise, the symbolic in question is suggestive of another reading of this utterly subtle, lyrically refined novel of Cronenberg’s: Aristide evaporates in a limbo of fabricated, (self)imposed narratives, just as Célestine dissolves in delusional enchantment by able muscles sharpening socio-political fervor. The drama of the heart unsolved in the midst of a blurry concoction--between the linguistic and the bodily--perhaps reflecting one of the most suggestive observations in the novel about a cultural betrayal being of an extremely intricate nature: “a traitor to France--again, in a cultural sense, which is to the French a betrayal worse than political betrayal” (David Cronenberg, Consumed 261).

Whose desires, whose fantasies were they chasing? David Cronenberg, Consumed: “Were they comic-book illustrations of the horrors of capitalism, of the insatiable, all-devouring Western consumerist ethos?” (300). Are they media induced? Are they, perhaps, discourse based? Could they be culturally imposed, socially constructed, myth fixated responses to bewilderingly cacophonous, sensationalism infested flows? How oblivious of their relationship were they becoming while mindlessly combining incompatible realms? Like participants in the marathon, as depicted in Jean Baudrillard’s America (1988), proving their existence by partaking in the athletic event--mobile shrines of kinetic energy--were Aristide and Célestine trying to justify, confirm, assure themselves of their presence? How much trust did they have in themselves if they needed such radical pieces of evidence?

How reliable are depictions of those characters, their scholarship, their passion, and their partnership? How reliable is infamously unreliable postmodernist storytelling? What kind of world do such utterly distrustful narratives mirror / inform? Is there an angle from which tectonic tribulations of their extravagant trajectories can be perceived differently, from which ”their new lives are ready to be lived” (David Cronenberg, Consumed 296), one would like to know.

Where can the noise-signal filter be found to turn distraction bugged communicational tunnel into the vibrant communication channel? What / how can one learn from such dromospheric stirrings and, more importantly, the much needed reshifting? One would like to know.