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.
[1] Plato, The Republic. 380 BC. Great
Dialogues of Plato. Trans. W.H.D. Rouse. New York: Signet Classics, Penguin
Group, 2015. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment