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.

---

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

Suspicious to the Core (5 / three)

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

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

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

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

/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suspicious to the Core (five / 2)

NOise : Hack the Abstraction!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

Suspicious to the Core ( five / 1)

The Language-Power Nexus : disenchantment with omnipotence

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

Historicizable Ahistorical “Scylla & Charybdis”

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

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

we are not robozombies!

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

we are not robozombies!

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

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

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

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

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