Suspicious to the Core (5 / three)

Lear learns what he needs (2.4.264). He also learns to cast aside what he does not need. His temperance matures as the tempest of “filial ingratitude” (3.4.14), once ravaging his heart, recedes. So long as Gonerill knows what she does (2.4.228), as Regan points out, there is potential for recuperation. Lear knows it. Lear learns. That knowledge seems to be reaching him in the ways as mysterious as the flow that redeems Gloucester’s unrequited heed. Edgar’s words of encouragement and comfort, “Bear free and patient thoughts” (4.5.80), are constitutive of the anchor that provides stability and solidity of the attitude, as it is being established. Lear learns:”No, I will be the pattern of all patience. / I will say nothing” (3.2.35-36).

Strangely, as Kent informs, “[t] hings that love night” (3.2.40) withdraw before the “darkness” of the night from which Lear speaks. The power of the night like that exudes an air of animosity toward the thickness of obscurity. It creates a chemistry of negative valences. It procures Lear the basis for the oppositional attitude. It provides him with knowledge -- the knowledge of resistance, that weird source of vigor. The power of “NO.”

Lear learns the virtue of noble rebellion, so Kent’s temptations, “Sir, where is the patience now / That you so oft have boasted to retain?” (3.6.15-16), can be refuted and, accordingly, discarded. Again, what is clouded by the harshness of Lear’s verbal spitting surfaces through the kind, appeasing words of Edgar’s:”My tears begin to take his part so much / They mar my counterfeiting” (3.6.18-19). That falling mask, as it were, is the adhesive tissue of the soothing power of filial gentleness. It epitomizes the credibility of Lear’s attitude reflected in fiercely challenging hard-heartedness (3.6.34-35).

It re-shifts erratically channeled passion. It reconfirms the vibrancy of resistance. It reconstitutes the sound response to bewilderment and oppression: the cleansing power of the capacity to discern and sustain distinctions. It reanimates the basis for the reasoning that highlights the difference between the nourishing restraint and abusive, manipulative, oppressive distortions of that bliss.

/

So spoke Lear when he could not cry. Similarly, the cornucopia of speech ignited by Bloom’s magical act in the encounter with the faucet--revamping the waters of words flowing from the earlier chapters such as “Nestor,” “Hades,” and “Nausicaa” like tributaries leaking into the main flow and apexing in Molly’s soliloquy in the “Penelope” chapter--seems to deafen and overshadow unlikely tears of repentance. In Vladimir Nabokov’s ambiguously ironic, provocatively elusive opinion, “James Joyce’s mistake in those otherwise marvelous mental soliloquies of his consists in that he gives too much verbal body to thoughts (Strong Opinions 30). Perhaps. Or, rather, as Stephen ruminates, “Nes. Yo” (Ulysses 430). One would like to know.

The flow released by lifting the valve from the jet pouring out of the faucet reveals all the water-words meandering throughout the novel as a maplike delta comfortably protected by the sea hybridizing all the streams, yet somehow preserving their distinctiveness. Fluid, yet distinguishable. Fluctuating, yet steady. Elusive, yet strangely fathomable. Such is the mighty flow anchoring the storyline in this stunning novel of Joyce’s. Like language, those narratives reiterate the concept of power and what it means to be constitutive of it.

As if unified by the “Aeolus” chapter, the episodes immersed in the imagery of water offer a symbolic in the key of versatile fluidity. As if an overarching, hub trope were that of “gaseous vertebrate” (Ulysses 162) that spans the trajectory of the whole vastness of the story, persisting in providing the much needed connective, sustaining the consistency of its yarns, subtlety of its threads. Like the omnipresent imagery safeguarding the coherence of that giant narrative by the very virtue of its own mutability, the metaphor, while creating a sense of an impalpable presence is also invoking the awareness of the communication between quirky spatiality and capricious chronology. The perseverance of that presence through time epitomizes the idea of the historicizable ahistorical: undoubtedly situated within a particular moment, and yet, reflecting other timeframes, other spatio-temporalities.

Like the characterization, defying cronos’s empire, and yet not detaching itself from the bitter-sweet romance with history: “probably that was it to somebody who thinks she has a softy in him because all men get a bit like that at his age especially getting on to forty he is now” (Ulysses 609). Like the young surgeon in the episode “Oxen of the Sun” challenging the perception of age. Like the symbolic of  “childman,” its inverted version of “manchild” (Ulysses 606), and the communication between them. What is the age of that historicizable ahistorical character? One would like to know.

Just as there is something about the characterization owing its eccentricity to the communication channel saturated with static, so is it to a high degree suggestive of resilience that allows the fluidity to deliver a solid, yet not rigid, message. Thus severed by the battle between corrosive noise and the signal persisting those temporary threats of distortion, it is a transient communicational tunnel that acquires characteristics of the communication channel as a momentary corruption of the communication content is dissolving, and the flow is being re-established. Those are the loops reverberating with the themes of labyrinthine seductiveness of entrapment by potion, distraction by unlikely tones, and bewilderment by facelessness, as portrayed in the episodes such as “Sirens,” “Cyclops,” and/or “Circe.”

Molly, in possession of the most prominent vocal of all the characters in the novel, articulates profound comments cacophonous in tone, polyphonous in thematic. Ranging from sometimes charmingly lascivious, at times nearly vulgarly blatant explorations of the realm of the carnal, her internally verbalized thought addresses the issue of the body finding questionable satisfaction in copious fornication not infrequently associated with clerical context. At the same time, evoking bodily sensations semidetached from inner dynamic, her speech-flow reinstates random encounters and elusiveness, unreliability, and suspicion pertinent to their irredeemably aloof nature, to their aura echoing irrecoverable alienation, incorrigible insularity.

Partly, her brooding thoughts reflect a perception of another being as afflicted, fragmented, disjoined. Partly, they voice an agonizing sense of longing. Those aspects of her soliloquy portray the experience of the other as the utter unknown, just as the whole world appears to be observed from that angle: “he says your soul you have no soul inside only grey matter because he doesn’t know what it is to have one” (Ulysses 611).  Here, Joyce sketches the crux--the key knot--of the narrative presenting the world populated by disconnectedness, void, and vapidness. Simultaneously, he offers a hint for disentangling those static drenched nodes within the web constitutive of and constituted by the communication between and among fellow humans.

Where frustration by hindered communication mirrors dissatisfaction with human interaction, simplicity, instead of being a manifestation of purity, is rather sought as a haven for comprehension starved minds. Likewise, unfathomable information is understood to be a result of the perplexities imposed by the style and demanding level of complexity of the communication input:“he never can explain a thing simply the way a body can understand” (Ulysses 620). Where compromises are uneasy choices brining a sense of insipid indifference, human relationships merely reflect a worryingly uninspiring, unfulfilling experience of oneself:“hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do” (Ulysses 613). Friction inducing mutuality, rather than soothing reciprocity, is indicative of the prevalent offcolor lenses that render the perception of the world painfully alien:“and he knows that too at the bottom of his heart” (Ulysses 613).

And yet, there is noise within noise. Within that disheartening confession, “there is a flower that bloometh” (Ulysses 625), as Joyce puts it so well. Within those supposedly comforting, while, in fact, saddening crumbs of disillusionment, a bud of genuine solace is hidden. Waiting to be recuperated and its alleviating power resumed, waiting for its vibrancy to resurface --recovered. He knows it. Just as she does: “theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you” (Ulysses 610). The passion engrained in the power of that knowledge ensures discerning and sustaining distinctions such as the one between the flower in question and other types of flora. It safeguards from a threat of “ignoramus that doesn’t know poetry from a cabbage” (Ulysses 638). The oneiric of poetry undoing nightmares of history. Such is the mighty flow of the anchorage, the quirky disenchantment with that what eludes even the elusiveness of language.

Suspicious to the Core (five / 2)

NOise : Hack the Abstraction!

“For it is not the work of heat to make cold, but the opposite? / Yes. / And it is not the work of what is dry to make things wet, but the opposite. / Certainly.” Plato, The Republic

Invoking the re-emergence of the shakespearean ghost in the trope casting light on the recurring imagery of the constellation of Cassiopeia (Ulysses 575) renders the name of the Bard perceivable at the level of characterization. Although suggestive of a potential symbolic act of “disestablishment,” the metaphoric charge of this narrative maneuvering, in fact, offers a far more complex and nourishing signification. It is provocative, to say the very least. And yet, it invites thinking reverence through the nobility of rebellion. By so doing, it disentangles one of the many seeming knots within its very tissue. Not only does it reconfigure the meaning of the mythical names of Scylla and Charybdis in the context of the novel, but inspires disambiguation of the entrenched perception of uneasy “choices.” Does avoiding one perplexity necessarily imply accepting another? One would highly doubt it.

That ghostly presence of the shakepearean flow brings into the narrative the names of the sons of the novel: Stephen Dedalus and Rudolph Bloom (Ulysses 575). It is the very presence of those sons that is evocative of the looming shadows of their fathers: Simon Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. And it is precisely the elusive characters of each one of them that is suggestive of their infinitely interlaced aspects: crossing, merging, fusing, colliding, separating…distancing…and yet, remaining hybridized in the immortalized image of the birth of the Bard in the interstellar spaces overlooking the mighty water. Like the whisper from the fountain (Ulysses 389). Like hamlet, the sonfather. Like the mutual recognition between the son and the father--womanly man--through the communication channel free of foggy noise, relieved of amalgamation obfuscating the flow – invigorated and cleansed by the power of crystalline signal, by virtue of noise.

Shakespearean presence bears some semblance to the wandering companionship depicted in the imagery of the moon and the parallels Joyce draws between it and the symbolic of woman. Hardly could a description of the dynamic of those convergences and juxtapositions be imagined in a more powerful poetic key than the intersection highly suggestive of the restorative potential of the vacillations between diverse aspects of ambivalence and ambiguity epitomized in antithetical, yet not antagonistic -- colliding, but also resonating -- affliction and elevation,  turbulence and vibrancy, adversary and solace, as presented in Ulysses:

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible. (576)

When Bloom in the “Ithaca” episode turns on the faucet in the kitchen of his house, he lifts a valve and the cornucopia of imagery leaks through that tubular device (Ulysses 549). The outpour symbolizing the versatility, quirkiness, elusiveness, and gentleness of water brings to awareness the perplexity of earthly affairs in the shadow of moonlight. The valve opens up the flow perceivable by many, available to all, owned by noone. It sheds light to the particularly salient trope of “satellitic dependence” reflecting the power of meekness embodied in the tricky wording. Just as the silvery companion is dependent on the planet it shadows, so is its impact and power inevitably experienced and mirrored in the pulsation of the orbit it safeguards. Just as the satellitic character defines it, so is the planet characterized as being the host of its satellite. Just as one is characterized by its accompanying attributes, so is the other recognized in the key of being accompanied. How does this dynamic reshift the dependency narrative?

This constancy by virtue of resilience, power by virtue of weakness, stability within fragility is what is integral to the flow connecting Stephen and Bloom in the midst of those unfathomable tribulations, indecisiveness, and bewilderment. There is the flow anchoring those stormy surfaces, anchoring those wandering “Jews,” those wandering rocks. The same anchor that cleanses poor Lear’s agitated heart torn by torrential gushes of guilt. His “faucet” unleashes the purifying shower of tears (1.4.251-264). While he is not entirely willing to repent, his tears speak that what he cannot. Vladimir Nabokov:”We think not in words, but in shadows of words” (Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions 30).[1] As they flow, they offer a possibility to recuperate his inner turmoil and cleanse his curse plagued mouth with the appeasing faculty of the friendly presence reconstituting the vitalizing bonding between the parent and the offspring.

Lear learns. So can everyone else. By virtue of humbleness.

---

[1] Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions.  1973. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

Suspicious to the Core ( five / 1)

The Language-Power Nexus : disenchantment with omnipotence

“Freedom in a positive sense is possible only among equals, and equality itself is by no means a  universally valid principle, but, again, applicable only within limitations and even within spatial limits.” – Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

Historicizable Ahistorical “Scylla & Charybdis”

“Was it not agreed that the rulers, in telling their subjects what to do, sometimes make a mistake, and miss their own advantage, but whatever the rulers enjoin upon them it is just for their subjects to do?” Plato, The Republic

Eden--torpid and deadly sanitized--is being saturated with a sulfur virus. Rotten odor spreads. Miraculously, its molecules undergo a transformation resulting in consolidation of gaseous masses into crystalline formations. Those, under the impalpable touch of an invisible wand, are being transformed into constituent ingredients of--an apple! The myth has it that the embodiment of rebellion to mark the beginning of eons of attempts to replicate the original revolt was demonstrated in breaching the ban on eating from an epistemological source--the tree of knowledge, the fruit of power. To imagine obedience as ignorance would imply a logical impossibility, i.e., to perceive the counterdemonic as darkness. How, then, is one to reconcile those perplexing paradoxes and figure out the puzzle of the early days of  Genesis, as Judeo-Christian narrative presents it? Is the key to the conundrum in the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle? Are they missing because they are lost? May this quizzical nature of knowledge in the crevices of the tale be part of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost (1667)? One would like to know.

we are not robozombies!

            Turmoil at Pandemonium, generated through an accumulation of ill-conceived energies, is suggested through the saturation of the sinister atmosphere with evil forces epitomized in names such as Mammon, Chaos, and Babel. The power of the presence of those names is proportional to the increase in militant aspirations in their midst. They are throne thirsty. They are heights hungry. They might know what they do in a similar way Gonerill in William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606) does, or, so her sister, Regan, claims (4.2.228). If so, do they know indeed? One would like to know.

we are not robozombies!

            Uneasiness exuding from unlikely cohorts soaks each and every foot of Milton’s profoundly insightful and incredibly accurate depiction of inner tension between fluctuations and equilibrium. The intensity of the dynamic is conjured up through the combination of lyricism woven in the epic and the moral dilemma underscoring the verbal tapestry. The narration is steadfastly focused on the quirky antagonism and ethical collisions. It can easily echo the innerness of a Parliamentarian confronting Royalist oppression. It may reflect friction caused by antithesis, ambivalence, and duplicity challenging the heart and the mind of a rebel not averse to orderliness, and yet, highly critical of illogicalities under the disguise of lawfulness.

Milton’s poem, indeed, exceeds the boundaries of the epoch that saw a Stuart ruler -- Charles I -- on the English throne dethroned, a monarchy overthrown, and the civil war ravaging the country. It resonates with the eras preceding  it, when death of the last Tudor monarch --Elizabeth I -- demarcated the turning point in the constellations of dynasties and brought to England a neighboring, yet nevertheless, foreign royalty, thereby inflicting on the subjects a considerable amount of bewilderment, insecurity, and discomfort. It can also be perceived from the modern day  perspective – from Ireland’s struggle for independence to contemporary cultural realities where regal figures are almost reducible to the notion of celebrities within an eerie spectacle of  mindlessly mechanized, indiscriminately legalistic and legalized, overwhelmingly formalistic and formulaic, overregulated anomie.

Those aporias miltonian parliamentarian is confronted with are in the antecedent works manifested in the imagery of enraged nature, as Shakespeare colors the world of  Lear’s reasoning and power obscured by a looming dark cloud of greed, unscrupulousness, moral vacuity, and filial bestiality. So are they depicted in sometimes hardly understandable mismatch within the respective characters of Bloom, a.k.a., “childe Leopold” (Ulysses 317) and Stephen with regard to maturity and stability. Fatherly son…”womanly man” (Ulysses 403)…age defying young surgeon passionately dedicated to his calling (Ulysses 332)…words of encouragement with which Edgar presents his blind father Gloucester:” Think that the clearest gods, who make them honors / Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee” (King Lear 4.5.73-74)…and the edifying power of Cordelia’s affection: Lear learns patience, which he knows and claims to need (2.4.264), as if reflecting Edgar’s words of consolation to his  tormented father:”Bear free and patient thoughts” (4.5.80)…”The wise father knows his own child” (Ulysses 337).

Uncritical, stereotypical, and—above all—reductionist fantasy of the fallen angel presumes a heavenly demand for refraining from knowledge. To say that such blockage of the imagination makes a crude error by premising the Genesis myth on the idea of humans as an ignorant bunch is superfluous. It is also epistemologically flawed. There is no such demand: human capacity to know is by default limited; so is human power. That, however, makes human beings neither bereft of vitality nor deprived of knowledge. It certainly does not threaten freedom. Quite the opposite. By virtue of limitation, by virtue of restraint.

Does this justify oppression by analogously claiming hierarchy based orderliness, thereby perpetuating social  relations thriving on dominance, injustice, and inequities? Certainly not. Should rebellion against tyranny of rule void of authority be articulated in the vocabulary different from that which by being so fraudulent poses a threat to the perception and critique of hypocrisy? One would find it reasonable to believe so.

Suspicious to the Core (4 / three)

how old is the american dream?

Noone can remember when the american dream was conceived, when it started. Hardly can anyone know. That happens to be yet another manifestation of the epistemological quandary. A possible sense of frustration--annoyment--may be ascribed to what Arendt classifies as the western civilization predicament:

The curious fact that the men of the revolutions were prompted into their desperate search for an absolute the very moment they had been forced to act might well be, at least partly, influenced by the age-old thought-customs of Western men, according to which each completely new beginning needs an absolute from which it springs and by which it is ‘explained’. (On Revolution 198)

This insight into the perception of an absolute as a cultural construct is eerily elusive in its potentially ambiguous referencing of pronouns and, hence, possibly misleading understanding of the relationship between the subject, the object, and the predicate of the sentence. Needless to say, such quirky syntax reflects part of the uncertainty characterizing multifarious linguistic socioscape of a babylonian culture of today.

That both the implied statement about cultural cacophony and the overtly raised question about the need and want to know where the beginnings are and what the source is sound too familiar to the ear of a denizen of contemporary culture is self-evident. We are living in a culture that does not tolerate unconquered (or, unconquerable) epistemological zones. If it accepts their existence, it does so only to transform--hack--them into maneuvering space for oppressive socio-political control. Contemporary cultural realities are averse to silence. Silence is being under a constant threat of commoditization--of becoming a brand selling disguised muteness. We don’t buy it.

Contemporary cultural realities tend to impose a model of thinking based on infinitely dumbing urge to explicate, explain, instruct, formalize, banalize. It is a culture of vagaries that absurdly combines inclinations toward rigidity and illogicalities, a culture that, while detailing, does not celebrate clarity. If it seemingly refrains from the mode of perception crudely dulling the edge of critical thinking, it does so not to provide an individual with space for either exploration or contentment with the experience of the limit in diverse spheres that characterize the human, but to advance the possibility to distract, bewilder, and pollute--hack. We don’t buy it.

The bitter-sweet truth about blindness pertinent to such mindlessly orgiastic affinity for dominance and control is that manipulation, falsified power, and bewilderment are but manifestations of futile attempts at omnipotence--instances of (self)dissolving noise. This, among other things, concerns a category mistake Arendt points out in relation to the development of the French Revolution, and can be contextualized within contemporary situations, as well. Namely, she rightly indicates the inversion of the relationship between the social and the political. She demonstrates the meaning of the dislocation of the role of oppression as a consequence, not a cause, of poverty and other social ills that galvanized the revolutionary impetus in the France of 1789. The idea that oppression and violence ensue from economic inequities--not vice versa--determined the course of the French Revolution. No less was it instrumental in framing cultural climate to be further integrated into the socioscape during the centuries to follow.

Nowadays, we are no strangers to the fruits of such masterminding. No wonder revolutions are associated with severe reductionism in understanding of the public and the private. More precisely, both the French Revolution and the American Revolution practically abandoned the idea about citizens’ participation in the public affairs as the end of the revolution. Instead, it was pursuit of prosperity that was accepted as a major revolutionary demand. Citizens became merely individuals (interestingly, void of individuality) -- no masks, no hypocrisy, no role play -- whereas politicians assumed the properties of professionals, experts, businessmen focused on self-interest and wealth, drunk on a delusional sensation of power. Hannah Arendt:

The trouble lies in the lack of public spaces to which people at large would have entrance and from which an élite could be selected, or rather, where it could select itself. The trouble, in other words, is that politics has become a profession and a career, and that the ‘élite’ therefore is being chosen according to standards and criteria which are themselves profoundly unpolitical. (On Revolution 269-270)

By extension, this demarcates a vehement offense to the concept of freedom. Hannah Arendt: “Freedom and power have parted company, and the fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun” (On Revolution 128).

Such is Arendt’s portrayal of history and geography out of joints, and “under the pressure of wealth” (On Revolution 129). The world featuring “a society intent upon affluence and consumption” (On Revolution 129) is looking for the mirror image on the faces of its dwellers – the image that subverts the presumption that since “the end of revolution and the introduction of constitutional government spelled the end of public freedom” (On Revolution 125), it does not follow that pursuing to end the revolution should be desirable. Arendt is being provocative. She, too, is a modern reader. Her text provides one with the opportunity to learn. To learn to…well, read. Do we trust each and every syntagm constitutive of the questions asked and statements made in this book characterized by vibrant thought and abounding in invigorating energies? Certainly not.

For that reason, one should time and again revisit and rediscover the wonders of questions and statements and ask/state every time, while finetuning the linguistic content to the sound of the moment. At this point, one is prone to ask how relevant the genuine version of the American Dream is, how significant the core of revolution, when the dwellers of the modern world bear witness to a global exodus. Above all, how almost universal the symbolic of the wandering Jew is (or, wandering rocks, for that matter), hybridized in the conversation between Stephen and Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses. One would like to know.

Suspicious to the Core (4 / 2)

Selfless, Yet Re-Individualized

In “Ithaca,” questions saturate the paths Stephen and Bloom walk. Answers come in shapes and forms more often than not meandering around the central issues the questions raise. Many of them can hardly be perceived as proper responses to the questions posed. Perhaps, it can be claimed that the majority of the utterances only loosely reference the themes delineated in the questions. At least not in the way that would provide fully fledged information about the inquiry presented.

To what extent is such a communicational pattern reminiscent of the contemporary predicament that confronts one with information overload and the demand to find ways of managing such a situation? To what degree is verbal outpour and elusive trajectories of the intersection between the question and the answer informative of the sentiment of a dweller of the modern world highly sensitized to the everyday incorporated in the scarily detailed language of instructions for anything ranging from the use of appliances, to unpacking an object bought either online (for which one undergoes an ordeal of instructions, as well) or in an actual store (to which detailed directions are provided depending on the choice of transportation, if any), to recognizing emotions, or some such stuff? How much of it is part of the situation the modern world introduces to one on a daily basis challenging our capacity to resist being given an explanation, description, directions, instructions for each situation, every move, every single activity, or state?

Can a contemporary reader relate to the plethora of verbal input “Ithaca” presents? Can one refrain from a potential feeling of frustrated desire having not been provided with the information typically expected in response to certain questions? Can we accept the limits pivotal to being human? Can we, nevertheless, sustain the awareness of the cognitive potential and epistemological possibilities, despite restrictions? Can one, paradoxically, find the strangest of consolations in the fact that amid the ungraspable ocean of words, unbelievable orgies of information, emerge tiny pieces, miniscule messages distinct in tone, resonating with the aerials of the interlocutor? Can one rejoice in the reverberation of particular content, even though the reason why their frequencies are of the akin valences and how their distinctiveness can be detected can scarcely be known?

The tension sounds probably too familiar to the ear accustomed to noise this planet abounds in. Should one assume that the narrative world Joyce creates foreshadows some of the aspects of living in the same world almost a century after the novel was published? Certainly not. That’s one of the lessons this invaluable book teaches. Despite the temptations or whatever aims to assume such a role. Nowadays, one needs to be even more modern than the reader from the early twentieth century in order to be able to resist attempting to read Joyce’s miraculous text in the key of conventional prose.

The reader needs to sharpen one’s feelers, to invigorate the edginess, and enhance the critical apparatus in order to mobilize the capacity to sift, filter, select, and crystallize those significant bits in the midst of cultural amalgamation. Just as one needs to persevere in discerning and sustaining the distinction between individualism and individuality, between uniformity and unity. One needs to time and again reconstitute the energies to finetune the remapping potential and undo frankenstinian discourse, reconfigure power relations narratives, revitalize subtonic hi-fi solidarity, and reanimate a vibrant sense of integrity. In a word, the reader needs to be the dj navigating through the narrative realm with the combination of oscillating, yet unshakable, firmly resilient, attitude: the right to the remix. To experience reading-writing as an embodiment of refacement: rebirth of the human face out of cultural amalgamation, reintegration of  the community of selfless, yet re-individualized, fellow humans united in enduring hindrances to the patient, persistent creation of a free culture based on trust and love.

Evoking Arendt’s thought about erroneous pathways the French Revolution and the American Revolution took, in this noisy, mechanized and mechanistic world, the world that is acquiring properties of an omniscient paw(n)shop--the world of overregulated anomie--one is reminded of the relevance of the dialectic of distinctiveness and generalities, the individual and the communal, the public and the private. In that context, some of the notions and ideas principal to the debate Arendt delineates as follows:

The grammar of action: that action is the only human faculty that demands the plurality of men; and the syntax of power: that power is the only human attribute which applies solely to the worldly in-between space by which men are mutually related, combine in the act of foundation by virtue of the making and keeping of promises, which, in the realm of politics, may well be the highest human faculty. (On Revolution 167)

Such a human faculty knows neither oppressive nor coercive means of weaving social relations. Because it does not need them. It is free from an urge to persuade the electorate in its righteousness. Hence, it needs no “intrigue, falsehood, and machination” (On Revolution 95) to contrive its authority. It is not violent. Because it can communicate. It does not thrive on subjugation and/or dominance. Because it is immune to a sense of society understood in terms of threat, danger, rivalry. It does not atomize the unity of fellow humans in order to aggrandize its significance building it on afflicted powers of individuals. It does not instigate the allure of self-centeredness as a substitute for individuality. It does not need to inflict fear, uncertainty, and/or a feeling of an ongoing struggle where coexistence, sharing, and respect should be. It is anchored in the idea that homo homini homo est, regardless of numberless instances of a deviation of that fact.

It is precisely because of that human faculty that one perseveres in undoing ill-conceived misconceptions and mismanaged crossbreeds. Precisely for that reason, one sustains the awareness of the unlikely fusion of the economic and the ethical and their links with political fabric. By extension, it is an issue of burning importance to recuperate intrusion of “economic morality” in the sphere of religious institutions and their connection with politics: to remap power relations narratives. The fact that a major portion of those “narratives” resists verbalization and that the intricacies of the ineffable limit the capacities of linguistics and logic by no means diminishes the significance of rationality, reason, and critical thinking. Nor does it downplay the relevance in the key of reverence. It certainly has no impact on the right to the remix. Quite the opposite. Like revolution.

The remix relies on quirky intersections of the time axes. It celebrates the historicizable ahistorical. It thrives on the capricious dialogue between experimentation and tradition, between change and preservation. Neither lionizing the past--since no historical epoch is worthy of perpetuating social relations based on inequality, inequity, and inhumaneness--nor idealizing a somnambulist future, the remix is based on hic & nunc / anticarpediem poetics focusing on the here and now, yet refraining from the prevalent propensity in contemporary culture to instantaneous  gratifications, sensationalism, and sentimentalism. It objects to radical abandonment of the past vocabularies. Rather, it proposes communication with tradition rendering it remixable, just as contemporary cultural realities are. It invests in redeeming the past, reimagining the future, and resurrecting the present.

The remix is attuned to the sound of the epoch. So does it listen to the vibrations from traditional narratives. It is, therefore, sensitized to the conundrum presented in Arendt’s book and reads it with the awareness of the revolutionary role of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It rejoices in playfulness of wondering how to say it clearly that to say it is nothing new. That’s why, nowadays, the reader needs to be more modern than readers from the turn of the twentieth century. We bear witness to a rapidly changing face of the everyday. The velocity conquering each segment of the lives of the dwellers of contemporary world reaches the point of self-dissolvement, since it creates a sense of continual change that challenges typical notion of speed. Like (self)dissolving noise.

The sense of the potential of change and its being compromised by its own radical version Arendt accounts for quite aptly:

In other words, the political spirit of modernity was born when men were no longer satisfied that empires would rise and fall in sempiternal change; it is as though men wished to establish a world which could be trusted to last forever, precisely because they knew how novel everything was that their age attempted to do. (On Revolution 216)

This longing for continuity in some instances can divert into a perverted form that tracks the debate back to the question of omnipotence and a category mistake. Namely, having realized that just because things can change, societies can be reconfigured, and political elites replaced, one also understands that it does not follow that the world should be transformed into an epitome of instability. Hence, balancing between the experience of the instant and the succession of such instances, one cannot but acknowledge the comfort of being part of the flow of history and the moments that make it. In the mind of a citizen deprived of (or free from) the burden of political responsibilities, it may inspire reflections of philosophical, artistic, or some such kind. And yet, it may resemble idiosyncrasies the political realm features. Specifically, the sense of continuity oftentimes transmutates into the ideas of eternity and immortality. Given the previously mentioned discursive orgies pertinent to the modern world, one cannot help but note that such perversions of concept exude a very dangerous whiff of demigodliness and, by extension, entail a delusional sense of omnipotence and misconception of worldly and otherworldly categories. Terry Eagleton:”Immortality and immorality are closely allied” (After Theory 211).

The dynamic reflects the need to sustain sensitivity to the inexplicable and, to a high degree, unfathomable dialectic of change and preservation manifested in genuine authority and characterizing the very core of revolution. The ungraspable dialogue between the seemingly confrontational--antithetical, yet not antagonistic--notions is closely linked with the equally puzzling relationship between necessity and freedom. Arendt points out the nexus as the crux of the question of revolution situating it within the polemic about the American Revolution:

Less spectacular perhaps, but certainly no less real, are the consequences of the American counterpart to the world’s ignorance, her own failure to remember that a revolution gave birth to the United States and that the republic was brought into existence by no ‘historical necessity’ and no organic development, but by a deliberate act: the foundation of freedom. (On Revolution 208)

The paradox is that the very sovereignty of freedom, outplaying necessity, is suggestive of its immunity and its uncontestable character. The awkwardness of verbal articulation and logical reasoning in the narrowest sense, coupled with the weirdness of temporality and newness, may instate a deceitful impression of unlikely relationship between necessity and freedom. That’s perhaps why revolution can only be understood, if only in a restricted sense, through the prism of paradox.

It inspires thoughts about the wonder of birth as a radical novelty, yet strangely invoking a sense of continuity, as suggested in Joyce’s Ulysses:”regions and cycles of the generations that have lived” (338). Just as revolution incorporates logically hardly commensurable concepts of change and preservation. All this is tremendously invigorating and is a reminder that thinking worldly matters requires insistence on the limits of the human. Simultaneously, the problematic can be meditated upon in terms of eternity, ubiquity, and omnipotence--paradoxically, determinants of the limits of the human and the source of power.

Suspicious to the Core (4 / one)

Remapping Power Relations Narratives : Poisenous Poetics

Potions of(f) Potency

Like the search for the elusive Saturn—once detected, now unidentifiable. Like the anxiety…a thought that it might have disappeared. Whereas, it is there…somewhere. Only inaccessible to the sense of sight.

Like darkness filling the interior of the house of the stargazer. Who almost forgot that what hides underneath the misnomer might just be observing the ungraspable vacuity, vastness of dark, ineffable spaces.

Not entirely unlike the atmosphere infused in the ”Ithaca” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It is an unparalleled instance of the energy of resistance experienced in the encounter with the narrative devices ranging from the point of view, via the plot, the setting, to the characterization and the storyline itself. Namely, a contemporary reader might need to re-sensitize to the freshness of the revolutionizing occurrence of the narrator that mutates from the dialogue between Bloom and Stephen to a supposed neutral position traditionally devised to secure authoritative guidance along possibly misleading narrative paths.

None of it is true in the case of this defiant text of Joyce’s. The voice posing the questions might be perceived as either Bloom’s or Stephen’s, but it might not. It could be sensed at the level of narration that is conventionally provided to connect and/or ensure a distance between the reader and the story, but it may not. It is undoubtedly intertwined in the tension of the negotiations between Leopold and Stephen, but it is also safely detached in its apparent metaposition. It is unmistakably imbued in the depths of profoundly personal endeavors of Stephen and Bloom, respectively, and their mutual considerations of a possibility to continue the wanderings in the form of a joint effort. However, it is also incontestably aloof while generally observing, noting, and stating. Close, and yet unreachable. Familiar, and yet alien. Suggestive of guiding potential, and yet, suspiciously unreliable.

A contemporary reader might be oblivious of the revolutionary role of the introduction of such a narrative voice—between the point of view, setting, plot, characterization—storytelling in the crevices of narrative tissue, narrative flow generated through the oscillations between the convivial and distrustful. To the core.

Like the hamlet son-father…and the ghost…seemingly tangential, and yet, quirkily central to the play. Like Stephen’s response when asked how trustworthy his theory is.

Joyce’s writing is inexhaustibly inspiring, despite its untameably wild energy resisting any attempt to be contained within encompassing comprehension, captured in its entirety. Or, precisely by virtue of such an impossibility. By virtue of the capacity to be approached, if not usurped, solely through patience and perseverance. By virtue of humbleness.

Such recalcitrance reflects a possibility of remapping power relations narratives. It resonates with Hannah Arendt’s ruminations about deviations in both perception and practice of authority--vapidity of political power bereft of substantiality, based on the vacuity of flawed projections and corrupted image of omnipotence:

Theoretically speaking, it is as though absolutism were attempting to solve this problem of authority without having recourse to the revolutionary means of a new foundation; it solved the problem, in other words, within the given frame of reference in which the legitimacy of rule in general, and the authority of secular law and power in particular, had always been justified by relating them to an absolute source which itself was not of this world. (On Revolution 151)

Obviously, a tendency ensuing from a delusional sense of ubiquity and absolute power in the political realm--despite frequently disguising it in the appearance of progress, distorting the genuine spirit of the age of reason--indicates a truly atavistic mentality manifested in aspirations toward an olympo-babylonian sentiment, rather than genuine communication within the community of human beings.

Thus, just as secularization is needed in order to sustain a distinction between the church and the state, thereby reflecting a distinction between worldly and divine power, so is “secularization” key to the disambiguation of the public sphere polluted with byproducts of unholy mashups merging ethics and economics, politics and business--particulates epitomizing bewildering cacophony concocted in the brewery of circian fake nectar and ambrosia.

Likewise--or conversely--depending how one looks at it, those who revel in intoxicating properties of the mimicry of solid grounding in tradition lean in vain toward the eras bygone to prove the anchorage to their basically reactionary mindset under the disguise of traditional proclivities, a.k.a., conservatism. By contrast, Arendt calls for uncompromising, nonconformist rejuvenation and recuperation of the proper sense of continuity:

This exposure of the dubious nature of government in the modern age occurred in bitter earnest only when and where revolutions eventually broke out. But in the realm of opinion and ideology it came to dominate political discussion everywhere, to divide the discussants into radicals who recognized the fact of revolution without understanding its problems, and conservatives who clung to tradition and the past as to fetishes with which to ward off the future, without understanding that the very emergence of revolution on the political scene as event or as threat had demonstrated in actual fact that this tradition had lost its anchorage, its beginning and principle, and was cut adrift. (On Revolution 153-154)

Because of multiple bastardization of the perception and practice of power and rule, politics has infrequently been but a futile reconfiguration of sovereignty. Or, attempts thereof. Being void of authentic authority, political elites have been trying to discursively conjure up and manipulate an image of it, hence striving to live up to the chimera thereby produced. The flaccidity pertinent to such artificial endeavors required means to solidify the unlikely rule. That’s the reason why aggression is often associated with the politics of that kind. That’s why it--enchanted by a deceitful fantasy of power--proliferates duplicitous socioscape premised on fearmongering. That’s why, as Arendt rightly observes, nationalism is only possible as a political means conditioned by negative social relations. It is devised as a form of defense against external and internal threats alike. It is imagined to have the capacity to provide social cohesion, whereas all it can do is fabricate socio-political ties that generate corrosive energies.

Thus, the argument advocating a positive meaning of nationalism is, predictably, untenable. As Arendt succinctly remarks, nationalism thrives on hostility. Nominally instrumental in ensuring  society’s communal being, it, in effect, serves as a manipulative mechanism of oppressive socio-political control. If presumable political tensions are not merely orchestrated narratives, it is, nevertheless, highly questionable how vibrant its gregarious potential is, how sensible the choice of defensive mode.

No wonder nationalism finds fertile soil in an eerie alliance with religious fundamentalism and the military-entertainment complex. Needless to say, all these instances of critique illustrate Arendt’s persistent insistence on discerning and sustaining the distinction between the secular, the church, and the sacred. Furthermore, they are indicative of her observation about obsolescence and failure pivotal to the phenomena that in the parlance of the remix spell out as olympo-babylonian aspirations: (self)dissolving noise.

Suspicious to the Core (three / 4)

Ludic & Vice Versa

A hypocrite knows what s/he pretends to be, what role s/he plays and acts upon that crooky sincerity. Unrecommendable--or, at least, ambiguous--mode  of social interaction as it is, hypocrisy is in this context pointed out as a source of doubt that outplays an uncritical, inflated image of self. It prevents one from indulging in a non-hypocritical role of a demigod. As a device enabling a healthy dosage of suspicion, it can be instrumental in its own subversion: (self)dissolving noise.

More than two centuries after the French Revolution shook the world, McKenzie Wark explores revolutionary legacy focusing on the contribution of the Situationist International to resistance against oppression. The graphic essay created in collaboration with Kevin Pyle and entitled Totality for Kids (2011), traces the steps across Paris in the aftermath of the Second World War, predating the days of the Letterist International and leading toward the period from 1957 to 1972 during which the group were actively creating, criticizing, performing, and thinking, thereby integrating each derive, each situation, each detournement into the reimagined map of the world. The band of bohemians, artists, theorists, decadents, wild dreamers, and visionaries with unquenchable thirst for revolutionary ideas, built an invisible counter-Bastille that like a seedpod called the Sorbonne of 1968 opened and disseminated spores throughout the planet.

Like vultures craving sparkles that could ignite new vibrancy amid the postwar Europe, like outcasts seeking a harbor toward which scattered planets could  gravitate form a new galaxy, like self-styled exiles from the society of mediocrity induced torpor, they haunted the postapocalyptic scenery and walked toward a Paris reemerged from the ruins into a renewed capital of culture. They did not shy away from offending. They abhorred coercive mechanisms of  increasing power of capital. They were edgy thinkers. Tough players. Wark calls it glorious times of the Situationist International.[1] Yet, he shows no inclination toward  idealization of the legacy. Rather, while acknowledging their invaluable role in the history of civilization, he remarks the potential for a critical examination of expropriation of revolutionary impetus and a corroding impact of traditional power relations intruding the realm of revolutionary thinking. When babylonian sentiment infects the body of the revolution, an atrophying effect causes its decay, at the same time opening up an avenue for the reconstitution of critical thinking:”In a world that really is topsy-turvy. Truth is a moment of falsehood” (Totality for Kids 9).

If all theory is hypocritical, as Wark suggests (Gamer Theory 2007 par. [151]), then it is a very good source of cultivating, rethinking, and regenerating the balanced approach that admits the impossibility of discursive totality, yet perseveres in that means of communication integral to the perception of the world, self, and relationships between and among humans.

Not only is duplicity pertinent to the realm of theory, but the world of arts is no stranger to it, either. Cinematic idiom of Gus Van Sant explores it with astonishing sensitivity to details informative of the state of affairs in the sphere of morality in contemporary culture. Two instances of different degrees and types of role playing can be observed respectively through the dynamics of the characters of Suzanne Stone Moretto (Nicole Kidman) in To Die For (1995) and Bob (Matt Dillon) in Drugstore Cowboy (1989). While not precisely illustrating Arendt’s polemic insofar as they are not proponents of the public plane, politics, and social persona in the traditional sense, the symbolic of the characterization underscores the narrative highly critical of questionable  disaffection, moral illiteracy, and emotional blindness.

Suzanne Stone Moretto shares machiavellian sentiment, although she is not a participant in the political arena proper. Yet, given the reconfiguration the perception and practice of the political and public domains underwent since Machiavelli’s--let alone the ancient Greeks’--times, it’s fair to say that the media are as politicized as politics itself, as public as the discussions of public matters and of public significance from the eras bygone. The media are the spot of the intersection between politics, privacy, and entertainment. It is part of the military-entertainment complex. No wonder Ms. Stone Moretto is prototypically unscrupulous, sickly ambitious, horridly desensitized to other human beings, and--alas--irredeemably self-assured. Her threshold of empathy is non-existent. She might have an awareness that orchestrating murder of her husband Larry Moretto (Matt Dillon) is wrong, but she is incapable of mobilizing the capacity to approach it critically, since in her microcosm there is no device called a critical distance. Her husband is way too serious an impediment on her way to fame as a media personality to be subject to moral conditioning. She does not doubt her decisions. She might be suspicious of many things, but not of her choices. Her determinancy blinds her. Her topsy-turvy darkness is not a moment of falsehood in Wark’s sense. It is rather a sweeping inversion of just about everything—not unlike macbethian overpowering bewilderment.

The character of Bob is a peculiar issue. Certainly not an example proper of Arendt’s invocation of the word persona signifying social roles firmly anchored in societal institutions, based on an individual’s identity of a citizen. Junkie certainly does not coincide with and / or fit into such categorization. Junkie is anti-social, clearly anti-institutional, and incorrigibly marginal. As much as Suzanne is in the public spotlight, so does Bob reside in the obscurity of those excluded from the public dialogue. Like mushrooms, they thrive on the dampness in darkness-occupied spaces. Their invisibility is exponentially proportional to the dazzling world of socially engineered darwinian gladiatorship within power games. They might not be aware of their insignificance in the mainstream politics, or they might. They may have no knowledge of the stigma attached to their circles, or they may. They can be absolutely ignorant of their potential for countercultural stance, or they cannot. They might not even have a slightest idea of wrongness pertinent to the destructive aspect of their existence, but one would highly doubt it.

Bob is a fully-fledged devotee to opioid induced immersion in inviolable aloofness, protective detachment. He cares for his partner Dianne (Kelly Lynch). He even demonstrates traces of a fatherly figure as the leader of the gang of four consisting of the two of them and another couple. The gang of ceaselessly junk starved four on a constant drugstore robbery mission. They know no sideways. They go to the source. The source seems to be inexhaustible. Unlike their junkie luck. Bob realizes it. The moment of that realization is the instance of making a choice to withdraw from the business. He does not believe in the perseverance of his junkie persona. For dissensus consensus is needed. William Burroughs:

The conversations had a nightmare flatness, talking dice spilled in the tube metal chairs, human aggregates disintegrating in cosmic inanity, random events in a dying universe where everything is exactly what it appears to be, and no other relation than juxtaposition is possible. Junky (117)

Resistance, Refacement & the Remix

Arendt draws attention to the weird circumstances under which the French Revolution was emerging. The core constitutive of the then potential nucleus of the new res publica consisted of intellectuals with a profound awareness of the anchor of revolution being freedom. It is worth noting, however, that she insists on the distinction between the modern connotation of the word intellectuals and the expression used to specify the source generating the revolutionary impetus who vacated the leading position due to invasive strategies of businessmen:

In the eighteenth century the men prepared for power and eager, among other things, to apply what they had learned by study and thought were called hommes de letters, and this is still a better name for them than our term ‘intellectuals’, under which we habitually subsume a class of professional scribes and writers whose labours are needed by the ever-expanding bureaucracies of modern government and business administration as well as by the almost equally fast-growing needs for entertainment in mass society. (On Revolution 112)

Unlike those hommes de letters, different demographics gravitated toward the epicenter of the socioscape-reshaping events. Those were profit-driven, materialist, utilitarian, power hungry gladiators who set prosperity as the top priority on their “revolutionary” agenda. Needless to say, acolytes of traditional power politics were by default more decisive in aggressively usurping the helm and taking control of the navigating process across the revolutionary sea. Obviously, those who originally created a revolution friendly environment withdrew from the power arena, since there was no means of communication that would enable them to proceed with the endeavor. What was supposed to be the public realm was deprived of the very characteristic pivotal to that sphere: authority.

What was occurring under the name of communication could hardly be called so, since, as McKenzie Wark notes in a slightly different context: “One-way communication has usurped the space of civil dialogue” (The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International 85). In addition, as Arendt advises, where there is either coercion or persuasion, there is no authority. There might be attempts at mimicking authority, but they are flawed and, as they are (self)dissolving, they certainly fail to generate vibrant communication and sound socioscape such as revolution and revolution related phenomena. They might even produce an image of success by claiming that progress is pertinent to their enterprises, but there have always been those who resist being blinded by platitudes and who persevere in remembering the authentic core that anchors all revolutions.

Further exploring the historical trajectories of revolution, Arendt remarks the American Revolution being severed nearly at the very onset:

However, even in America where the foundation of a new body politic succeeded and where therefore, in a sense, the Revolution achieved its actual end, this second task of revolution, to assure the survival of the spirit out of which the act of foundation sprang, to realize the principle which inspired it—a task which, as we shall see, Jefferson especially considered to be of supreme importance for the very survival of the new body politic—was frustrated almost from the beginning. (On Revolution 117)[2]

And yet, despite this, essentially, valid observation, it is fair to note that the potential for revolution, alongside the awareness of what Arendt calls its foundation, is still there and available to the seekers for sound social responses and wholesome communication within the community of humans.

Meanwhile, usurpers kept busying themselves, all the while making the system ever more complex, thereby masking their own “mask” – businessmen under the disguise of politicians:

The deputies of the French Assembly who had declared themselves a permanent body and then, instead of taking their resolutions and deliberations back to the people, cut themselves adrift from their constituent powers, did not become founders or founding fathers, but they certainly were the ancestors of generations of experts and politicians to whom constitution-making was to become a favourite pastime because they had neither power nor a share in the shaping of events. It was in this process that the act of constitution-making lost its significance, and that the very notion of constitution came to be associated with a lack of reality and realism, with an over-emphasis on legalism and formalities. (On Revolution 117)

Interestingly, the abovementioned usurpers lacked the capacity to mobilize the awareness of their own “hypocrisy” or the lack thereof. The absence of a critical distance can be interpreted as a signal of undoubted investment in one’s enterprise. It can also be perceived to be indicative of multiple duplicity that exceeds the boundaries of good taste with regard to the role of persona in social relations. In such a scenario, one is typically confronted with choices that boil down to selecting the lesser of two evils. Or, so common wisdom would want one to believe. McKenzie Wark:”Capitalism or barbarism, those are the choices … We don’t’ buy it” (The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International 1).

The much clearer aspect of the predicament is that the reason why making the system so complex and complicated is not only masking the entrepreneurial nature of those policies, but their being incontestably void of authority. Thus, those policy makers produce a deceitful impression of significance. They rank highly in the social hierarchy, but they misconstrue their distinctiveness in an utterly suspicious manner. Their vocabulary is a means of perpetuation of the politics of exclusion, inequities, inequality, injustice, and kindred socially detrimental features. In a word, a society ill-conceived and mismanaged. To the core.

A major component in the further course of action was an equation (by extension) between or replacement of the word property and the word happiness. The right to “life, liberty and property” was reworded into “life, liberty and happiness” (On Revolution 117-118). Hence, the public happiness and personal happiness crossed in an unlikely and, both in individual and socio-political sense, highly questionable fashion. Among other things, it implied a confusion of the categories such as one’s own economic prosperity, personal happiness/fulfillment, civil rights, wellbeing of the community.

The awareness of the obstacles neither the French nor the American Revolution was successful at managing seems to be crucial for understanding of the predicament as it was at the time of the Revolutions and the modern ramifications. Arendt marks the shift in socio-political vocabularies in the aftermath of the Revolutions from public freedom toward personal happiness, yet strangely intersecting with the public realm in, in the case of America, the concept of the pursuit of happiness. The dynamic implied and entailed enabled further “masking” of the socio-political.

More precisely, it, for one, discarded the imperative for understanding of citizens as participants in the public sphere. It did so by putting emphasis on the importance of the private realm, yet in the way that spurred the perception and practice of the private mainly in terms of self-interest. This, in other words, was the shift that demarcated the onset of an increasing generation of individualism instead of cultivating individuality. Secondly, because it relocated the center—the question of freedom--from the public onto the private level, the strategy ensured at least twofold unfolding:

(a)    by emphasizing the private, the strategy not only insisted on the salience of that sphere, but manipulated it to transform it into a device that encouraged the mentality of minding one’s own business, thereby keeping citizens’ participation--and interest for that matter--in the public matters at bay; needless to say, it enabled the ruling class to continue with their own business under the disguise of politics;

(b)   by accentuating private freedom, the strategy ensued experiencing it solely in a limited fashion; closely related to this, the government was no longer perceived as the protective source providing individuals with a sense of freedom and contentment, but started being perceived as an oppressive, violent mechanism of control.

Instead of nodes, so multiply entangled social threads form knots in social fabric. Clearly, such a situation calls for the remix.

The officialdom that instead of protection, security, freedom, and contentment instills anxiety, fear, and animosity cannot be trusted. It cannot be trusted because it is not capable of distrusting its own mask. It cannot be trusted because it is not capable of reanimating the faculty of disbelief in the perfection of its hypocrisy. It cannot be trusted because it is neither sensitized to nor capable of refacement. It is an unprecedented social occasion causing the climate of hostility, alienation, and disaffection. It is the climate that calls for resistance. It calls for the remix: draining from the social fabric remnants of the potential for regenerating hibernated vigor that can only be reconstituted through the faculty of humbleness.

One learns it from historical records. That’s the teaching that can be found in theoretical meditations. That’s what literature offers partly as a vehicle to navigate the raging sea of power games, partly as consolation. Some pieces of literature might ignore it. Some may tacitly play with humbleness as the source nourishing human communication and integrity on the communal and individual levels. James Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, is among those that certainly do not shy away from elucidating it as the most potent educational device. That’s why it offers an unrivaled reading-writing experience. That’s why it inspires learning. It teaches a lesson in the possibilities language provides. It highlights the playfulness integral to language. It shows how it can distort and be distorted, how crooked its voice may be, how hoarse the texture, how rough its tissue. But it also demonstrates how mellow the subtext is, how splendid the subtonic hi-fi. It does not mask its imperfections, but it always praises the counterpoint: it might not be infallible, but it’s reliable. It is protective. Like revolution.

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[1] The Beach beneath the Street: Glorious Times and the Everyday Life of the Situationist International (2011)

[2] Cf. Arendt’s observation about a more up-to-date context of the failure of the American Revolution to accomplish the second task and the consequences manifested in expropriation of the notion of revolution and ensuing sharp contrast between the growing economic and, indeed, ideological discrepancies within the transatlantic dialogue between the New World and the old Continent (On Revolution 212-213).