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.
