Suspicious to the Core (6 / five)

Out of(f) Vacuum Cacophony : Polyphony of Playfulness

If there is a genuinely vibrant aspect of William Blake’s oeuvre, it is one of the many. If there is a way to discern what ensures that wholesome character, it is probably by focusing on its respectfulness and sensitivity to otherness. Neither overspiritualizng the material, nor objectifying the matters of the mind, Blake’s writings emanate a deep  sense of fulfillment resulting  from the awareness of and rejoicing in the marvel of wholeness. While the very provocativeness of the title of his collection of poems The Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1789) might mislead to a perception that Blake’s vocabulary is suggestive of the acceptance of the fragmentariness pertinent to the reductionist paradigms he criticizes, the subject matter, as well as the expressive mode, testify to a profound disagreement with blockages to the right to integrity. Underscoring the poetry strangely unified, despite the complexity both on the level of particular poems and the structure of the collection, is the resilient attitude unshakably defending distinctiveness of the ingredients constitutive of the integrated piece.

 Plato’s debate in The Republic features a similar approach toward a reductionist perception of self, society, the world. Although the wording of his principal trope of the balance between sports and music (242) slightly reverberates with a polarity which is being overcome, it, nevertheless, clearly indicates the oppositional stance, as mentioned. Kenneth Goldsmith invites continuing that dissident tradition. He diverges from the instances of violation of language:”emphasizing its materiality disrupts normative flows of communication” (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 35). Recuperating communicational flows resonates with the idea of relieving language of heavily prescriptive, directive, and mechanized streaks. It may also be akin to resistance to oppressive mechanism subjugating writing to normativity that verges on absurdity in its schematic, formulaic, artificial impositions.

However, Goldsmith’s acknowledging Warhol’s masterful invisibility of the author (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 139) ensured by persistence in inauthenticity inspires thinking in the key of balance. On the one hand, it aligns itself with the opposition to worshipping an aggrandized notion of author, indirectly spelling out the oppositional stand toward an inflated image of self, delusional idea of omnipotence, entrapment in ownership, commodity mindedness, and culture suffocating in crippling torpor of materiality, enslavement by (self)dissolving despotism. On the other hand, it leaves room for meditating against a seeming opposition, i.e., radical spontaneity and autonomy of text, since it implies: (1) hyperinvestment in discursively conditioned cultural realities and unlimited power of constructing them; (2) a specific kind of objectification and fetishization.

Neither constructivist nor biological – or any other type of – determinism can restore the much needed equilibrium. Unshakable resilience enables something that neither rigidity nor uncritical unhingedness does. It reanimates the awareness of and the capacity to discern and sustain the distinction between oppressive, tyrannical on the one hand and, on the other, nourishing and protective control. Like language.

/

Between materiality and stylization, discourse oscillates in a vacuum of contemporary culture where everything is “aestheticized” to the point of zero distance between meta and object levels. As the whole discourse seems to have been transferred into the virtual sphere, the very virtuality has become questionable -- because there is hardly anything to mimic/represent. If all realities have become hyperrealities, all spaces ubiquitous immortalized ephemeral chunks of faceless prescriptive alphabetical sequences and linguistically recorded directives, then the vacuum resembling the cold inhabiting deaf interstellar tunnels – like an urobors – forges interstices in its own hollowness.

Out of it emerge vocabularies that reanimate the flow in the key of the vibrancy of the distinction between the metalevel and the object level. Out of it resurface tales that inspire awe and/or disgust by virtue of what they narrate and how the stories are told. Out of it are rendered distinguishable accounts presented in language, and yet not constitutive of storytelling. The latter somehow resist being awed and/or abhorred the way the former are. There is something pertinent to the what-how nexus, to the relationship between the content and the form – to deploy somewhat obsolete wording – that in certain cases very differently informs the perception and, consequently, conditions very different responses.

Read the everyday as a story, approach your job as a lawyer as series of encounters with narrative pieces, experience other human beings as dots in the storyline, space as a deviation of containers of telepresences, history as a fantasy of a character in a computer game, future as irrevocably unavailable to the social imagination, society as an imaginary dream of each isle within the cosmic archipelago sustained on the wings of vacuum, and your capacity to generate a sufficient amount of scorn for such distortions will be an undoubted signal that a different kind of visceral response is not only needed, but is, actually, manifested in encounters with such contents.

There is something pertinent to, say, Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Burroughs’s Junky, Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers that makes them different from Terry Eagleton’s The Gatekeeper: A Memoir, Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, John Lydon’s Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. Likewise, there is a distinctive feature that differentiates these from, for example, The 9/11 Commission Report, The Constitution of the Unites States of America, and/or James Joyce’s letters to Nora Barnacle. Just as there is a difference between Warhol’s real time, uncut recordings of each segment of even the most mundane of instances on the one hand and, on the other, Kenneth Goldsmith’s experiments in uncreative writing in the form of the books such as Day (retyped The New York Times issue of September 1, 2000), Fidget (Goldsmith’s record of each body movement he made on Bloomsday 1997), and/or Soliloquy (a record of each word he uttered during one week).

In “Towards a Poetics of Hyperrealism,” a chapter in the book Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, Goldsmith introduces the work of Vanessa Place, a lawyer who presents the cases she defends as pieces of writing. Looking at them as narratives is her discriminative defense strategy, tactic that protects her from overexposure, excessive emotional strain by virtue of identification and empathy. And yet, there is something about her wording that is particularly intriguing and thought provoking. The more stylized such accounts are (even if stylization is a matter of the approach solely, and no actual interventions on the documents occur), the more questionable becomes the distance issue. More precisely, once one detaches herself or himself from the text of the document, all processing is supposedly transposed onto the realm of data parsing – not reading stories.

Try comparing it to an encounter with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and it does not take very long to realize that it is a very different kind of strategy from the one the reader deploys to distance oneself both from the character of Kurtz and those of natives. Put differently, they are distinct visceral –  not necessarily divorced from cognitive engagement – responses that ensure sliding on the scale of suspension of belief and distrust. As similar as those mechanisms may appear, few things can be more misleading than their identification. Namely, seemingly not entirely dissimilar, while, in fact, quite different mechanisms are at stake in those readings and writings. On the one hand, a lawyer’s critical analysis, bereft of emotional engagement (in a certain sense) is apparently a matter of dealing with raw information, no style involved. By contrast, quite different is the manner in which the reader may love the depiction of Lear’s agony, while knowing that what s/he loves is the stylistic aspect, not the phenomenon.

Degrees matter. So do manners. However, one should by no means erroneously overgeneralize such insights and equate quantifiability with substantiality. Nor should one be tricked to believe in the magic of radical stylization being no stylization and/or vice versa. One should certainly remain attuned to literary subtleties, thus hard-headedly and whole-heartedly resisting seductive blurriness that uncritically renders the word aestheticization interchangeable with other forms of managing language.

in defense of mafothers : aerials of desire

“Tell me, my friend, aren’t you enchanted by poesy yourself, especially when you see her through Homer?” (Plato, The Republic 483). This question might be perceived as a means of challenging the interlocutor’s sensitivity to suspicion. It may also reflect a profoundly introspective stance exploring the territory of doubt. Alternatively, it could emanate an ambivalence tearing the moral being of the citizen whose sense of responsibility seems to overcensor the domain of what was centuries after Plato’s time to be dubbed the realm of the right hemisphere.

If your desires obfuscate your prudence, blame it on poetry. If your sadness clouds your exuberance, blame it on viral powers of poesy. If your tears flood your cheer, blame it on the poetic sneer that devours your laughter. If the intensity of your emotions colors your whole being with the flame of the ethereal anchor, seek the quirky pathways along which verses are being reconstituted from crumbling tropes, words are being resurrected from the ashes of the symbolic, and the fervor fueling the flow is steadily breathing Odysseus’s shadow into the sails of that marvelous vessel.

(Choose : we are not robozombies!)

Are you doubtful to the point where your silence sensor deceives you? Can you not detect muteness under the disguise of silence? Are you blind to the buzz plaguing the communication channel? Do you not see insularity within blurry oceans of cultural amalgamation? Do you indulge in surface gloss? Can you dig it?

“Our air is now chokingly thick with language posing as silence. Nowhere is it as thick as in New York, with its density of population and architecture: language is both silent and screamingly loud” (Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 52).

(hack the abstraction!)

Kenneth Goldsmith:”in New York, poetry is all around us, if only we had the eyes to see it and ears to hear it” (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 53).

If tumult perplexes you, seek the glow where mushrooms thrive. If multitudes bewilder you, dive into the aura that thins the layers. If echo hails you, filter proliferation. If sound defines you, crystallize it. If pursuit dazzles you, know it. If communication is your middle name, disambiguate it!

/

In the world where the norm is normcore, hypostatization abounds. Hypostatized are notions, hypostatized are significations, hypostatized are worlds. Each of them is populated by hypostatized galaxies, proliferating themselves with each revolution of the celestial bodies constituting them. Strangely, in such worlds, sparseness abounds even more lavishly. Each of them is ruled by chimera of rigor. It is rigid, hence mimics authority. It is hallow, hence resembles gentleness. It is vapid. It is vacuous. It is not friendly. It forgets its own tenet: that there is nothing to mimic.

Kenneth Goldsmith: “Disorientation by replication and spam is the norm. Notions of the authentic or original are increasingly untraceable” (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 218).

In its uprootedness, it assumes casualness as its modus operandi. Denial of attachment, bonding, allegiance is the undercurrent of such worlds. Contingency is converted into radical uncertainty. Decenteredness, instead of liberating, tends to be destabilizing. Its relativistic factions are disseminated as randomly as their inherent structure allows. It voids everything of significance. It declares everything significant: facelessness as a new currency of oppression. In such an empire of indifference, everything matters only as a source that proliferates artificial desire, urge to purchase, to consume. The more objects populate each of those b(r/l)and worlds, the more chokingly thick its air is. The less oxygen those who inhabit them receive, the more intense the languor, the more torpid the communication flow.

In such a stupefyingly sedentary -- despite immeasurable desperate muscular effort and kinetic  tyranny – even rigidity melts into vaporous whirlpools of particles. Everything is diluted to the point where it can even look potentially libratory. And yet, when one looks from a different angle, one realizes that it is clearly not so. It may seem unimposing, and yet, the impression is deceitful.  It is not spontaneity that characterizes such an “antihegemonic” socioscape. Rather, it is disorientation. It is not a form of immersing oneself in the process, work-in-progress, celebrating being within it. Steven Connor, “How to Get out of Your Head: Notes toward a Philosophy of Mixed Bodies”: “In philosophical usage, particularly that of the medieval Scholastics, ‘intentionality’ has this meaning of ‘directedness’, rather than ‘purposiveness’. Intentionality is the condition of having an aim or object, not meaning to do something” (4).

If the basis overwhelms you, seek no floating signifiers to name you. If nondescriptness is your alphabet, pursue no letters to spell out your face. If entertainment is the object of your desire, wish not. If poetry galvanizes the shadow in your sails, persevere in regenerating the energies enabled by and ensuring the remix.  

Suspicious to the Core (6 / foYr)

Unshakably Resislient : The Resistance-Reverence Nexus

phi-lo-so-phize : hic & nunc / anticarpediem poetics

They say time is a healer. Yet, history is also known as the territory hiding numerous lacunae of potential bewilderment, distorted hindsight, and deceitful memories. Coupled with babylonian linguistic noise, spatiotemporality is sometimes manifested at its most relativistic.

“Violence is now Good Breeding, Anarchy is Liberty, Licentiousness is Magnificence, Immodesty is Courage.” Is this Orwell’s idiom? No, it is the frequently neglected ironic streak overarching Plato’s The Republic (424).

“A battle follows, and they win; Shame they dub Silliness and cast it forth, a dishonored outlaw; Temperance they dub Cowardice, trample it under foot and banish it; they persuade the man that moderation and decent spending are clownishness and vulgarity, and drive them out beyond the border by the help of a gang of unprofitable desires.” Is this the vernacular of commoditized media propagating consumerism, closely knit with oppressive controlling mechanisms of debt based economy, as we know it? No, it is the acerbic critique of social deviations observed and imagined in Plato’s The Republic (423).

Surely one would call this a strong proof that no one is just willing but only under compulsion, believing that it is not a good to him personally; since whenever each thinks he will be able to do injustice, he does injustice. There is more personal profit, as everyone clearly believes, from injustice than from justice, and he is right in his belief, as those will say who give this account of the matter; since if anyone had this licence and yet would do no injustice or touch other man’s property, he would be thought a miserable fool by any who perceived it. But they would praise him to each other, deceiving each other for fear of suffering injustice themselves. So much then for that. (177)

Is this a depiction of the ambivalent attitude exercised in contemporary culture of scaremongering, gladiatorship, and nihilo-cannibalist façades of inviolable predators unscrupulously ravaging corporate arena? No, it is a sketch of the logic as practiced by unlikely despots enslaved in a fantasy of omnipotence, blind to (self)dissolvement, as portrayed in Plato’s The Republic.

We need to re-discover that platonic critical distance in order to do justice to that fervent exploration of the possibility to continuously reimagine socioscape. To reanimate the impetus pertinent to that piece, one needs to attune again to the historicizable ahistorical in order to finetune the perception of one of the crucial pillars of such potentials for recuperation. Namely, one needs to reconfigure occasional mispresentations of Plato’s apparent elitist stance with regard to the role of philosopher. The word philosophy is a hybrid of Greek origin stemming from two distinct words signifying dignified faculties available to human beings. As such, when practiced in any segment of society, it eludes an assumption about what in contemporary world resonates with the notion of hegemonic power. The meaning of that word is available to anyone. And yet, owned by no one. But, do we know it?

‘The philosophers must become kings in our cities,’ I said, ‘or those who are now called kings and potentates must learn to seek wisdom like true and genuine philosophers, and so political power and intellectual wisdom will be joined in one.’ (Plato, The Republic 319)

Likewise, it takes cultivating the faculty of listening and galvanizing the capacity to hear for this text to be unburdened and relieved of “platonic” attributes. While greatly investing in the power of the socio-political imagination, Plato’s The Republic is by no means solely fixated on a reductionist, simplistic version of utopian thinking. It is suggestive of the possibility to ingrain aspects of such visions in the here and now. Instead of duality -- twofoldness; instead of a schism -- polyvalent affinities; instead of proliferation of hypostatized vocabularies/cultures--playful plurality; instead of instability -- resilience; instead of rigidity -- unshakably anchored.

Plato explores what in the centuries to follow was developed and practiced as a bewildering experience of one’s diverse aspects, plurality of the world, and multitude of ways to describe it all. And yet, many centuries before William Blake’s courageous literary rebellion, Plato strived towards the vision not of arbitrarily attributable descriptions, not of indistinguishable uniformity, but of wholeness within which the components sustain integrity and distinctiveness: “It is clear that the same thing will never do or undergo opposite things in the same part of it and towards the same thing at the same time; so if we find this happening, we shall know it was not one thing but more than one” (Plato, The Republic 273).

That very dynamic of the dialogue between the whole and the integral components is suggestive of the resonance between them, and yet, the polemic is firmly based on hard-headedly persisting in the immunity to confusion:“So such a saying will not dismay us, and it will never convince us that the same thing in the same place towards the same thing could sometimes be or do or suffer two opposites” (Plato, The Republic 274).

It is not easy to tell whether it is logic or ethics or ontology or epistemology that should be perceived as the key aspect of such reasoning. And yet, even if it is any other than the potential candidates mentioned, it can certainly be differentiated from the others. They may be overlapping, since there is obvious relevance with which each can be credited.  However, that situation should not be mixed with the axiom on which the debate in Plato’s book insists. The philosophical aspects delineated here are not opposites. Plato:“the same thing with the same part of itself would not do two opposite things at the same time about the same thing” (The Republic 278).

That’s why poisenous poetics -- discerning and sustaining the distinction between individualism and individuality, between uniformity and unity -- seeks and reconsolidates being anchored in the intersection of the time axes. While it cannot defy being geographically situated, it draws an immensely energizing and inexplicably appeasing inspiration from that what might be implied within Heidegger’s lofty concept of states of mind. That is also the reason why it is constitutive of the remix. The mutually nourishing, protective, and restorative relationship between the two is based on the balanced approach to the issues in question. Unshakably resilient in the midst of vacillations between the awareness of contingent nature of rules and of humble gratitude for resistance to orgiastic proliferation of descriptions and discursively conditioned cultural realities, for defiantly subversive protection of language : by virtue of limits to omnipotence, anchored in the remix.

Suspicious to the Core (6 / three)

Unshakably Resilient : The Resistance-Reverence Nexus

What Does Language Mean?

One wonders. It seems that a similar cognitive apparatus is needed to oppose mechanized, schematized distortion of the communication flow, to recuperate sensitivity to literary subtleties, resist formulaic approach to human relationships, refrain from infatuation with a monstrous fantasy of omnipotence, subvert dominance ridden social relations, to regenerate childlike investment in the playfulness of creation and adventure of the web. It seems that a similar attitude is needed to re-learn to immerse oneself in its vastness and help the internet restore its initial openness and vibrancy of the giving etherized empire. It takes quite a bit of attunement to the sound of historical shifts to restore a dream of a continuum of which those trajectories densely populated by diligent cohorts of ones & zeros are suggestive.

Once the internet was the thing that computers do. Nowadays, an internet of things challenges the notion of autonomy, complicates the perception of control, poses a threat to the experience of space, materiality, and centrality. Nodes in velocity-run digitized constellations have become sources of automated arrogance. Your appliances know when they need be intervened on. They utilize an abundant repository of digital signals to demand from other -- equally autonomous -- devices to mobilize their technology enabled means and contribute to sustaining equilibrium within that coded communicational giant. A sense of neglect looms. A sense of ubiquity perseveres.

Time and space meet and are subverted in the intersection of nodal orbits. Information abounds. But, can it be heard by interlocutors? Does it defy their linguistic capacities? Kenneth Goldsmith questions the intersection of globalized supremacy manifested in a malleable linguistic currency and erosion by virtue of insensitivity. By virtue of void:

Globalization and digitization turns all language into provisional language. The ubiquity of English: now that we all speak it, nobody remembers its use. The collective bastardization of English is our most impressive achievement; we have broken its back by ignorance, accent, slang, jargon, tourism, and multitasking. We can make it say anything we want, like a speech dummy. (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 221)

Goldsmith recognizes the feeling of insularity domineering cold communicational tunnels. He goes on to acknowledge the degree to which making sense confirms its superfluous character, as bards from the eras of yore taught, as DJs, learning from ancient sages—philosopher kings—adopt the information relayed on the wings of history:

Narrative reflexes that have enabled us from the beginning of time to connect dots, fill in blanks, are now turned against us. We cannot stop noticing: no sequence too absurd, trivial, meaningless, insulting, we hopelessly register, provide sense, squeeze meaning and read intention out of the most atomized of words. Modernism showed that we cannot stop making sense out of the utterly senseless. The only legitimate discourse is loss; we used to renew what was depleted, now we try to resurrect what is gone. (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 221)

Among other things lamented, gone seems to be the human face. Well…almost. In a multifarious conglomerate consisting of particles of versatile valences, cultural amalgamation, feeding on zomboid mentality and threatening to sweep individuality from that seemingly disappearing entity, circean chimera of uniformity emanates potions of(f) power to the centers of global economy. Only now,  they are not central. As it evaporates out of bubblebursts of its own concoction, it spreads over an archipelago of margins -- random, endlessly proliferated centeredness. By virtue of (self)dissolvement.

Kenneth Goldsmith:

We are making our way through this mass of language that’s now at our fingertips. We are intelligent agents and that’s the job of the writer now is to become an intelligent agent. And each person then, each writer then figures out their way to carve their own path through this mass of information. Hence, making each writer a unique writer. I’m not, in any way, suggesting that we become robots. In fact it’s quite impossible. The way I make my way through this mass of information is quite different from the way you’ll make your way through it. (Simon Morris, Sucking on Words, 2007)

Tales of travesty in the intersection of the time axes, tales of quirkiness in abysmal spaces of refacement : through hi-fi solidarity.

Suspicious to the Core (six / 2)

Unshakably Resilient :The Resistance-Reverence Nexus

Let’s Bee/have : Dare 2 Distinguish

An exquisite and utterly provocative commentary on some of the issues regarding language, public discourse, the public-private scale demarcating individual and communal aspects of human beings, and the meaning and the role of norms and conventions in culture can be found in Ian McEwan’s novel The Children Act (2014). While McEwan’s oeuvre, in a very broad sense, may be perceived in the light of the wordsworthian tradition, as articulated in the Preface to the second edition of William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1800), even the most loyal readership mobilize their suspicion apparatus to question the narrative technique and seek justification in the message delivered within the how-what nexus.

The manner in which the storyline raises awareness of the formal aspects of the narration is to a high extent an invitation to enter a quietly rebellious conversation with that what is happening in this seemingly hyper-conventional, at times puzzlingly pacifying, story. That Ian McEwan’s style is certainly anchored in the capacity to juggle, combine, and put in a challenging dialogue soothing wording heavily relying on traditional prose with  nuggets of dissident thought spiking the lulling flow with a tiny dosage of darker shades woven in the narrative tissue is more than obvious. That it features incredible potential to galvanize a critical approach to the themes of relevance is what makes that signature part of the communication currency highlighting crucial aspects of the exchange within the community of human beings worthy of the challenge.

And yet, what seems to be specific about the way this signature technique is deployed in the novel in question is the degree to which it saturates the narrative. The literary convention weaves the narrative yarns solidly to the point where one wonders whether such a device becomes part of the message that addresses the issue of great importance. It is related to the question of the norm, abiding by it, questioning it, subverting it—in the service of communication between and among selfless, yet re-individualized, fellow humans. Namely, in an ultimate sense, it is the question of the way gentleness toward, respect, and care for another human being can be integrated into the social vocabulary conditioned and shaped by conventions and norms. Simultaneously, it looks at the ways cultural realities display an excess in insisting on formalities, thereby signaling certain deviations in the domain of the politeness-humaneness relationship.

The character of Fiona Maye, London’s High Court judge, epitomizes the burden of “being civilized.” To say that she is dedicated to her profession is neither an understatement nor an overstatement. It is an ill-articulated issue. Her “professionalism” hinders her functioning on the private plane. In the world where brazen survivalist impositions might blind one to the deviations of the patterns that can make human life much more humane, much needed resistance instigates suspension of belief, thus enabling thinking in the key that subverts threats of coercion, threats to the mutually conditioning relationship between discourse and cultural realities.

Fiona is confronted with her husband’s love affair with a much younger woman. He cannot resist the call to reanimate the passion fueling the whole being. She cannot accept being abandoned, betrayed. Having had him leave the apartment and the lock on the apartment’s door  changed, she undergoes an ordeal of self-doubt, social anxiety—interestingly, primarily considering the ways to avoid being pitied—and resurfacing through the case in which she “saves” a boy from a detrimental influence of his and his parents’ religious creed. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in transfusion. According to their doctrine, to allow somebody else’s blood in one’s body is sinful. The boy was going to turn eighteen in three months. Regardless, Fiona decides to make a legally questionable decision in order to enable the law to ensure the boy’s treatment. She declares transfusion legally justifiable. Adam Henry is not just cured, but he is also relieved of the clutches of the staggeringly restricting religious circle that he knew.

The judge experiences an extraordinarily rejuvenating jolt through the communication with Adam, through poetic and musical exchange, and a light encounter with his body at the moment when their cheeks briefly touch, when a soft, unpretentious, unimposing, and nonpromiscuous kiss marks their separation. Despite the allure of those lyrical moments, she refrains from challenging either herself or Adam beyond the limits of the social norm. Meanwhile, she resumes her matrimonial everyday with her husband Jack in an enchanting insipidness of the gated community in which they live.

Here arises the crux of the narrative. It is not her embracing social norms that adds up to the troubling dynamics of the character of Fiona. Rather, it is the way in which politeness and formalities assume a radical dimension that renders them questionable, to say the very least. The extremism in which manners are used as a defensive tool--sheer survivalist means--indicate not only its alleged capacity to ensure inviolability, but McEwan makes it clear how deceptive that defense may be. More precisely, the rigidity of “politeness” turns out to be a somewhat distorted version of the kindness that nourishing, protective control normally generates. In its radical version, it is a corruption of the meaning typically ascribed to the word. Instead of shielding, it isolates. Instead of protecting, it desensitizes. By supposedly preventing vulnerability, it, actually, inhibits openness to another human being. It constricts engagement in human communication. It is the distance that exceeds the vibrant threshold. Under the disguise of safety, it hinders bonding. It is maintained by virtue of anxiety, sense of threat, being endangered by other humans. It spurs the mentality of rivalry and hostility. It encourages a sterile socioscape—barren coldness in the midst of global warming. It is not polite.

How McEwan’s narrative technique conveys the message of that conundrum is a matter of peculiar, sophisticated sensitivity to literary subtleties and moral issues. There is a parallel between the unfolding of Fiona’s bleakly impregnable world that provides the enchantment of aloofness at the expense of everything else on the one hand and, on the other, the storyline that progresses steadily, and yet, so “politely” that it provokes suspicion. Until the clue is provided within an unlikely conversation between the couple at the restaurant. Upon Fiona’s return to London, having spent a fortnight on a business trip, they go out for dinner. Jack shares insights he was exposed to in a geology lecture:

A hundred million years into the future, when much of the oceans had sunk into the earth’s mantle and there wasn’t enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to sustain plants and the surface of the world was lifeless rocky desert, what evidence would a visiting extraterrestrial geologist find of our civilization? A few feet below the ground a thick line in the rock would mark us off from all that had gone before. Condensed into that six-inch sooty layer would be our cities, vehicles, roads, bridges, weapons. (The Children Act 184)

Jack is particularly keen on deciphering the instances within the lecture that mark the point he allegedly ascribes to the lecturer’s observations concerning “the beginning of a mass extinction in which life’s variety had started to narrow” (184).  He is insistent on detailing that minute layer that testifies to our civilization:

Also, all sorts of chemical compounds not found in the previous geological record. Concrete and brick would weather down as easily as limestone. Our finest steel would become a crumbling ferrous stain. A more detailed microscopic examination might reveal a preponderance of pollen from the monotonous grasslands we had made to feed a giant population of livestock. (184)

Jack’s tirade unsettles his wife. She goes to the ladies’ room to regain her composure, “where she stood in front of the mirror, eyes closed, comb in hand in case someone came in, and drew a few slow deep breaths” (185). The scene reflects the manner in which their relationship is being re-established: ”The thaw was neither quick nor linear. At first it was a relief, not to be self-consciously avoiding each other around the flat, not to be coldly competing in politeness in that stifling way they had” (185).

Only with the introduction of different sound do the harsh edges of their worlds soften. Atypically reduced preparations for the annual concert find Fiona strangely at ease. The time she and her co-performer, Mark Berner, were supposed to spend practicing was taken up by his extended confession about a particular case, apparently constituting his swan song, as long as the world of law is concerned. His tenor was stubbornly submerged in that lengthy analysis of legal sanctions applied to some of the participants in the case of a youth violence drenched clash. Fiona is anxious to lower her fingers on the keys. And, yet Mark shares on. Eventually, without either asking for a permission or waiting for an approval, the piano spills notes into the cold of London night having been touched by the hands of the pianist. Mark’s tenor joins her somewhat inspired, somewhat dutiful play.

One night in December, when London was zoning through a hazy corridor connecting the dissipating day and the onset of the evening, Fiona busied herself after work with the preparations for the performance she was going to give in a couple of hours. Not only does her utmost elegant attire color the evening with the shade of solemn exultation, but the room filled with Jack’s presence exudes a magical composite of warmth and smell rising from the fireplace in a silent conversation with a seductive coating leaking from their rarely used stereo. It is Keith Jarrett. Facing You drifts across the room. Sound that melts even the most frozen of thoughts. The wizardry of playing the written notes enriched with the sound created in the interstices of the record on the sheet.

Why does the complexity of jazz inspire nostalgic invocation of the rudimentary patterns of the blues and the beauty of their seemingly predictable combinations? Why is such nostalgic musical thinking evocative of even less demanding paradigms, blatantly sweet easiness of the three chord axiom? How does the sound snake seamlessly through that meandering borderless empire of genres within which each, paradoxically, remains intact, sustains integrity? One would like to know.

Why does the sound reanimate the memories of the early days of their relationship when passion occupied each cell of their bodies, each instant of their existence? It was the time when Jack exposed her to the magic of jazz and when alongside her discovery of the likes of Thelonious Monk, Fiona finds out what it means to be entirely immersed in an ecstatic buzz. The powerful sensation that perhaps never leaves one.

The quandary may acquire a somewhat clearer form once filtered and sifted through the lens of Terry Eagleton’s idiom, especially the instance looking at the nature of jazz jamming and the role of communication within the band:

[T]o a large extent each member is free to express herself as she likes. But she does so with a receptive sensitivity to the self-expressive performances of the other musicians. The complex harmony they fashion comes not from playing from a collective score, but from the free musical expression of each member acting as the basis for the free expression of the others. As each player grows more musically eloquent, the others draw inspiration from this and are spurred to greater heights. There is no conflict here between freedom and the ‘good of the whole’, yet the image is the reverse of totalitarian. Though each performer contributes to ‘the greater good of the whole’, she does so not by some grim-lipped self-sacrifice but simply by expressing herself. There is self-realization, but only through the loss of self in the music as a whole. (The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction 100)

So, is the parallel between the two discoveries an accurate trope depicting Fiona’s experience? Jack’s memories bear witness to her confined perception and consternated approach to the riches playfulness offers:

He played her Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” and bought her the sheet music. It wasn’t difficult to play. But her version, smooth and unaccented, sounded like an unremarkable piece by Debussy. That was fine, Jack told her. The great jazz masters adored and learned from him. She listened again, she persisted, she played what was in front of her, but she could not play jazz. No pulse, no instinct for syncopation, no freedom, no fingers numbly obedient to the time signature and notes as written. That was why she was studying law, she told her lover. Respect for rules. (200)

 Fiona becomes susceptible to the enchantment of that winter eve filled with music, flame-and-ember backdrop, Jack treating her with champagne, cheese, olives, kiss, and touch. They had to refrain from proceeding with indulging in the exhilaration with the re-enliven bodies. Fiona was to perform in a couple of hours.

Their playing was met by multiple--slightly unconventional for a classical music gig—standing ovations. As she walks from the stage, she meets a woman who tells her something, after which she walks home through the rain. Her hair is still wet when Jack comes home. Half concerned with helping her dry herself, half inquiring about the reason why she left, Jack is attentive. Unexpectedly, the boy who became a hero of her career and penetrated her emotional world in an utterly peculiar way, re-enters it.

Only now, he is dead. That’s the information the woman relayed. That’s the information she now shares with Jack. She shamelessly admits kissing him. Somewhat less assertively, she acknowledges that she never responded to his letters. She neglected the symbolic that might have been there. But only might. Was he determined to relapse, so to speak? Was he outlining his intent to go back to his family, religion, to embrace it, and (mis)use it as an excuse to refuse treatment once leukemia plagues his body again?

Those might be some of the thoughts occupying Fiona’s and Jack’s communication channel. As the story is sagging into the nocturnal sphere saturating the words being exchanged, the theme of the death of the boy morphs with the metaphoric realm, as the two are examining each other’s face, lying next to one another, and their marriage resumes by virtue of the soft rhythm of falling darkness.

Thus, once again one wonders where within Ian McEwan’s novel the equivalents of the descriptions  of the sediment-record can be found. Is it being too polite? Where is the voice that speaks in the key of the sound rebellion reinstating the currency in the communication channel: homo homini homo est?

Is Ian McEwan being overprotective? If so, is such an attitude patronizing? Could it be a commentary on the nanny state McEwan bears witness to? May it be related to the awareness of the society that is acquiring characteristics of overregulated anomie?

If the narrative parallels, reflects, and incorporates aspects of the worrisome thematic, one can’t but wonder if it is a high cost compromise? Does it sacrifice (or, scapegoat, for that matter) the adventure provided by an edgier, subversive, defiant vernacular? Perhaps. One would be misled to believe. Were it not for the components of the novel tangential to the plot, discreetly  embroidering the narrative tapestry, anchoring the belief in the potential of rebellion through subtonic hi-fi solidarity of selfless, yet re-individualized, fellow humans. The components of the novel where darkness closes in, where reigns rain sovereign. Anchoring the potential of the remix.

Suspicious to the Core (6 / one)

Unshakably Resilient : The Resistance-Reverence Nexus

Orgies of (self)enslaving Despotism : NOise

“The stupidest person in the world is an all-round genius compared to the cleverest computer. How we learn to imagine and express things is a riddle with premises impossible to express and a solution impossible to imagine.” Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions

we are not robozombies!

Despite certain relativist factions of postmodernist discourse aiming to redescribe moral vocabulary, one can’t but share the passion imbued in the defense of fathers in Plato’s The Republic (2015).[1] He points out instances in corrupt socioscape featuring unscrupulous patricide either driven by a bewildering rule of more than one in aristocracy--as opposed to the rule of one in kingdom--abysmal desire for profit, or insatiable hunger for social status, as is the case in oligarchy, or sheer nonsense and absurdity inherent in disorderliness (albeit not lawlessness) and chaos grotesquely mispresented under the disguise of liberty, as it occurs to a different extent in democracy and in a radical form in tyranny. One couldn’t agree more with resistance to patricide, as Plato’s narrative “unmasks” bestiality of travesty:”That perfect and unseasonable liberty has been exchanged for a new dress, the most cruel and the most bitter slavery under slaves” (The Republic 435).

Fortunately, however, power on steroids--so to speak--is not power. Plato:”the tyrannic nature has never a taste of true freedom and friendship” (The Republic 442). Power addicts, enchanted by a delusional idea of human omnipotence, tend to establish their supremacy through recklessly coercive mechanisms of control. Unlikely rulers sustain an illusion of power by perpetuating dominance-subordination based social relations. Alas, those pursuers of social and economic heights are but a failure of mimicry of sovereignity. Bereft of authority, they are but miserable slaves agonizing in an attempt to block an insight into despotism under the disguise of unleashed liberty. Despots enslaved in the dungeon of their own tyranny. Noise blind to (self)dissolvement.

Now, this rejection of patricide finds numberless instances of its deviant version. In other words, it is the very attempt to replicate the role of the father figure in social terms and its cultural significance that engenders and is generated by insistence on defense of seeming authority, while, in fact, sustaining tyranny. It should be noted that the remarks made here in relation to the symbolic of the father by no means imply inclinations toward patriarchal hierarchy based on inequity and inhumaneness. Nor should one be misled to equate resistance to patricide with affinity for ossification.

One can never be avant-garde enough to believe in unscrupulous, rigid, mindless, radical breakaway from tradition. At the same time, no epoch is worthy of regressive, reactionary nostalgia entailing a perpetuation of social ills. It is the capacity to nourish the hybrid attitude combining resistance and reverence that ensures sound social and creative / critical responses in the key of the communication between experimentation and tradition, between change and preservation.

Discourse and cultural realities are in a mutually conditioning relationship. In the modern world, one of its multiple manifestations is a digitized fantasy of omnipotence featured in an image of endurance coupled with a deceitful idea of eternity, as could be inferred from Kenneth Goldsmith’s observation in Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011):”the point that these ‘ephemeral’ wisps of data might not be so ephemeral as we think” (182). Virtual spaces reconfirm the thought of Eagleton’s:”Immortality and immorality are closely allied” (After Theory 211).

And yet, passion for learning keeps one’s awareness of the lesson Joyce’s novel Ulysses teaches. The vibrancy of the message concerning mutual recognition and bonding within the parental-filial fellowship resonates: those virtual falsehoods are not fathers. Neither demonizing nor glorifying technology per se, human beings, out of solidarity, engage in helping the internet hack its own integrity, break the spell of a corporate nightmare, recuperate and reinstate the postulate of playfulness—again.

Thus, according to Goldsmith’s reflection, appearance of certain data on the internet seems to challenge the notion of the ephemeral. And yet, mere sustenance of those materials stored in some virtual galaxies should by no means be erratically equated with endurance. Or, persistence for that matter. Let alone perseverance. By contrast, sifting and filtering--parsing, as Goldsmith notes--through the lens of critical thinking reveals the distraction,  reconsolidates critical distance, and reconfirms the potential for discerning and sustaining the distinction between randomly etherized sequences in a digital universe and cultivated legacy maintained through the intersection of the time axes: recuperating the past, reimagining the future, and resurrecting the present.

Pluralist playfulness in the critical / creative realm calls for a distinction between that source of inspiration and possibilities of communication on the one hand and, on the other, aesthetic anomie, blatant reductionism, unconstrained relativism, and/or indiscriminate proliferation of vocabularies, uncritical, orgiastic immersion in a mutually conditioning relationship between discourse and cultural realities, unselective investment in democratization of discourse, oversimplification of communication, unbridled hypostatization of concepts – as a means and/or result of the mentality of gladiatorship.

In a world that values quantity, celebrity status is ensured via sensationalist overload, paradoxically ending up in warholian fifteen minute chunks of fame. That brevity is but a chimera of contrast to the dictum of quantity. It may be part of the data supposedly eluding their own mundane nature, yet, clearly, the perception of those chunks of ones & zeros as a subversion of transience displays blurry signification ascribed to the symbolic aspect of the notion of the ephemeral – and/or its opposite, for that matter. This is only to reinstate the relevance of literary subtleties and to reconstitute the capacity to re-sensitize to the power of metaphor. To approach critically the allure of virtual eternity/immortality is to resist a deceitful idea of human unrestrained power – a fantasy of omnipotence. Language, by virtue of its limited power, helps humans resume and enhance the awareness of their own limits and the bliss of poise.

Tales of Opacity, Masks of Travesty / Multivalent Control

“Are we not men?”

Devo, “Jocko Homo,” Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! (1978)

Strangely, those etherized spaces, instead of resilience, oftentimes spur reflexivity leaning toward replicating. Or, attempts thereof. Instead of playfulness vouched for by the utopian vision of that empire of unhindered exchange, the virtual offers an entrapping reflective/reflexive model. Namely, a friendly approach to the way the message is delivered to those who happen to find themselves in an encounter with the contents available within the digital sphere--online and offline alike--has been transformed into a deviant version of that initial soft spoken lingo. As the instructions have become directions, suggestions directives, clues readily available (quasi)solutions, hints cognition inhibitors, rather than instigators of ideas, those who come across and/or use them might be misled to believe that they reflect the modus operandi of the human mind. And yet, if they dare allow themselves to establish immunity to such a repulsive offense, humans are likely to acknowledge the complexity and subtlety pertinent to our intellectual-imaginative apparatus resisting abhorrently mechanistic reductionism.

we are not robozombies!

The virtual is a vast empire. Information generated through those indefatigable combinations of ones & zeros spreads as fast as and as widely as it gets. So does the syntax to which its ingredients adhere. Proportionately to the time spent in the company of digital devices, there is an increase in attuning to the tone of the vernacular. To cultivate the faculty of listening and to demonstrate the capacity to hear the interlocutor is pivotal to the remix. So is the potential for critical thinking safeguarding and sharpening sensitivity to nuances, ensuring the ability to discern and sustain distinctions: perceptiveness vs. prescriptiveness, for example.

Kenneth Goldsmith:”When we look closely at what types of words platter across our environment, we’ll find they are mostly prescriptive and directive: either the language of authority (parking signs, license plates) or the language of consumerism (advertising, product, display)” (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 42). Language of authority? Hack the abstraction! McKenzie Wark: ”Capitalism or barbarism, those are the choices. This is an epoch governed by this blackmail: either more and more of the same, or the end times. Or so they say. We don’t buy it” (The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International 1).

Another absurdity arises from the inclination toward a pragmatic approach to communicational tools, affinities for unstylized verbalization: the more supposedly demystified the mode of communication, the more coded its articulation. Consumerist streak governing means of communication dictates a bias toward materiality. Absurdly, that decoupling from stylization is frequently categorized as aestheticization. One can’t but notice that verbal content void of implicit layers is not necessarily an epitome of clarity. Nor is it emblematic of simplicity. To simplify it does not make it simple. Just as stylizing it does not entail integrating into it critical distance. Kenneth Goldsmith:”By drawing our attention not to what they are saying but how they are saying it, Language Removal Services inverts our normative relationship to language, prioritizing materiality and opacity over transparency and communication” (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 49). This, again, inspires thinking in the vein of Eagleton’s reasoning: “The norm now is money; but since money has no principles or identity of its own, it is no kind of norm at all” (After Theory 16-17).

Neither materialist nor technological--or any other kind of--determinism is the basis on which this narrative is woven, however. Thus, neither ignoring nor hyperinvesting in the impact of the digital realm on the communication within the community of human beings, one is prone to note  instances of insensitivity to resilience and playfulness. Bizarrely enough, they can be found in artistic circles, just as they appear in other areas. According to Kenneth Goldsmith, both John Cage and Sol LeWitt bore witness to a tremendously afflicting effect of such blindness to creative processes:”There are many stories of John Cage storming out of rehearsal sessions in anger after contract musicians of orchestras refused to take his music seriously. Cage, like LeWitt, gave musicians a lot of leeway with his scores, providing only vague instructions, but was often frustrated by the results” (Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 135).

Between stylization and beautification, purity and bluntness--masks of travesty haunt babylonian empires. Between ease and oversimplification, silence and mutism—multivalent control. Robbing from individuals the capacity to discern and sustain the distinction between reagent and reactant, they draw from the legacy of oppressive social mechanisms. They are persistent in trying to dissolve interconnectivity. And yet, fervor and resilience, resistance and reverence generate vibrant social responses: subtonic hi-fi solidarity of selfless, yet re-individualized, fellow humans united in enduring hindrances to the persistent and patient creation of a free culture based on trust and love.

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[1] Plato, The Republic. 380 BC. Great Dialogues of Plato. Trans. W.H.D. Rouse. New York: Signet Classics, Penguin Group, 2015. Print.