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.