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.
[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).
