“Literature is dead.
Time and space died yesterday. You eat dead food, you fuck dead men, even your
words die in your mouth. Your sentences are rolled into the ebbing waters of
modernism and then wash back like a bulimic’s forced vomiting.”
Stewart Home, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010)
Reforgotten turntablist poetics in
Stewart Home’s in Memphis Underground (2007)
is a postfuturist excavation of the socioscape and the inner tissue alike.
Remapping the vocabularies of mafotherlands,[1] the book presents the topoi that have geographical
correlatives, but also a metaphorical meaning in their own right. Along with
relativizing the notion of physicality, such a narrative technique captures
commoditization of space and colonization of life by the global
military-entertainment complex: “In its thirst for labor that would make land
actually productive, and yield a surplus, no indignity is too great, no corner
of the world exempt from the claims of property and the uprooting of its
custodians.”[2]
The cultural plane is filtered through literary lenses.
An experimentation in genre is what adds up to this book’s layered structure
and stylistic playfulness. Metafictional and metacritical reflections intersect
with loose diary-style passages and fictionalized autobiographical accounts of
somebody else’s life. Such remix acquires phantasmagoric dimensions:
What I’ve just
written […] is in many ways more like a diary than autobiography. I’ve tried to
exclude reflections about how random incidents on the road contribute to a
general lack of pattern in my life. I’ve simply taken a slice of (un)reality,
and what I’ve left out is just as important as what’s been put in […] Autobiography
as science fiction. Journalism has always played a role in shaping my fiction.
For many years I’ve modeled my prose on pulp styles that were in turn
influenced by the popular press. Although I want a critical relationship to all
modes of writing, this does not necessarily prevent me from being amusing.
(307-8).
Home’s
remix features broken linearity, discontinuous storyline, syncopated
chronology, fragmented characterization, and the tone oscillating from
affective blankness, via bizarre sparseness and darkly paralyzing detachment,
to paralyzingly deadpan humor. The antisentimentalist tactic in question is
rooted in provocative, destabilizing maneuvering. It is a lateral path in the
exploration of the uninvestigated frontiers of living under the circumstances
not entirely of one’s choosing. As a critique of life threatened by reckless
commoditization, Home’s work can be read in the light of Antonio Negri’s
reflections in The Labor of Job (2009):
The
crisis of value and of labor leaves us with a decisive choice between
alternatives. Either the continuity of a mortal ailment that expands in the
inertia of the world, in the confusion of every choice, in the irrational
determination of Power; or the creative discontinuity and its system – the
system of the alternative, the river that courses and the banks that it
gradually constructs around itself – a system of power. We propose to follow
the second course. It is the one that, against the backdrop of the tragedy that
invests us, illuminates the human power of creativity. This creativity, this
hope and risk of reason, I call Job. (15)
Creation
is a mighty sword that silently confronts violation of freedom. The fusion of a
creative quest and practice is a redemptive means of “talking back” to the
power of constructed realties whose valences are strikingly incompatible with
the chemistry of playfulness. The subversive language in Home’s book is the
shadow undercurrent disrupting and reconfiguring delusional belief in the
totality of a discursive confinement. Antonio Negri:” The idea of liberation is
an idea of creation” The Labor of Job
(2). On the innovation-repetition scale of the legacy of the last century, Home
is reworking the static-kinetic dialectic through postfuturist literary
remixing. Although Memphis Underground is a narrative
labyrinth, mapping the path from the old school soul, blues, and funk tracks to
today’s eclectic, polyphonic scenes, that absorbingly mutable journey through
historical audio occurrences is, at the same time, a silent revisit to the
past—to the thematic that emerged at
the beginning of the twentieth century, has been hemorrhaging, and marked the
predicament thereafter:
Claire
thought I was pulling some kind of Samuel Beckett routine, that I was sick of
film-making and was going to switch to fiction. She imagined I’d spend my days
composing lures of the following type: ”I have nothing to say but I’ve yet to
run through the effluvium with which I might describe my taste for dissipation.
My contribution to avant-garde fiction is to announce its exhaustion, which is
merely another way of proclaiming it must live out its own death, since there
is exhaustion and exhaustion—as well as lethargy, languor and lassitude[“]. (Memphis Underground 210)
Certain
responses to a particular kind of exhaustion have transformative powers. In
many instances, it is the unuttered that is the source of such potentials. The
tone, for example, frequently directs the course of the quiet action of the
silent uprising against the tyranny of the ossified and/or imposed ways of
speaking and living. The tone is inextricably connected with characterization. The
tone is inextricably connected with characterization. The character of London
in this book is deindividualized, like its denizens and like the other
characters who aimlessly wander from one entrepreneurial attempt to another.
Hoping to recuperate life and regain human dignity, London is waiting for its
refacement. Between the swinging Sixties, punk-rocking Seventies/Eighties, raving
Eighties/Nineties, and the Millennial confusion, London is walking in solitude,
brooding over its own abandoned streets: “I’d never known London to be as boring
as it had become at the beginning of the twenty-first century, even the early
eighties had been better” (292).
However,
this should not be understood as a nostalgic cry, but rather vision of the
present as a reimagined history, resurrected to redeem the future DJing
decades. It is a NO to the culture of denial and a YES to
remixing it, along with its own identity of a ghostless apparition in a ghost
townlessness:
The Shoreditch
and Hoxton I’d once loved had receded into the mists of history. Money trampled
everything before it, and in the case of this and other recently gentrified
neighbourhoods, what got destroyed were the very things that had attracted
these fatal attentions in the first place. I was the last of London ,
and now London
The prevalent global affective trend
demands subordination of uniqueness to uniformity, which is not to be confused
with unity; on the contrary, it is atomizing and alienating. Commoditized arts
and forceful real estate industry, are
among the causes that have conquered the communication channel and degraded
humans: “Money destroyed truly human relationships” (134). All this noise made
London seem like a place where home cannot be found, a replica of Baudrillard’s
“nonexisting” America: “That first doubling/coupling consisted of an unreal
city of finance generated from and mediated by an unreal city of cool” (129).
Is,
thus, London
Amputee Authenticity
Amnesiac noise pollution. Phantom
alienation is coupled with the critique of property/ownership/authorship
indicating the prevalence of materialist culture emptying resistance of the
potential for containing, rather than escaping the problem of power (McKenzie
Wark, 50 Years of Recuperation of the
Situationist International, 2008). In the world that
knows no alienation, one, presumably feels inadequately displaced. For that
reason the characters are mutable and unidentifiable. Their identity cannot be
contained within one. The sense of being a misfit appears to be inappropriate--because,
allegedly, there is nothing to fit. Because of the mind-boggling
meaninglessness, their grand life projects are, in fact, aimed at
self-destruction. Hence, towards the ending of the book they partake a psychedelic episode taking place in the phantasmagorical
Minnesota, Finland. Amazingly, they engage in a somnambulist conversation with
the Reaper. But then, one wonders, how the dead can encounter death? Is the
fact that they are, actually, the living dead a sufficient explanation?
Does
John Johnson have these thoughts as Tony Cheam’s failed impersonator, looming
through the state of mind called Minnesota , Finland
John
Johnson, Tony Cheam, Scotland, U.K., America, Orkney…Does John Johnson have
these thoughts as Tony Cheam’s failed impersonator, looming through the state
of mind called Minnesota, Finland? What thoughts occupy Tony Cheam’s mind?
“America is a state of mind, not a geographical location” (30). What occupies
Tony Cheam’s mind. Has Tony Cheam withdrawn from life if he cannot rise to the
occasion and keep the position of
artist-in-residence in Scapa Loch, on the
island of Hoy in Orkney, off the Scottish northern shore? Does Tony
Cheam exist if he can no longer participate in his own life, if somebody else
is living his life:
“Who am I?” I
repeated. “Surely such a question lost any meaning it may have possessed once
modernism went into decline. Who am I? Tell me that and you’ve solved the
riddle of the sphinx. I am that I am. I am a man. And as for me, I’ve no
interest in issues and debates that revolve around completely arbitrary notions
of identity. As a proletarian postmodernist I am engaged in continuous
becoming, and I’ve no time for nonsense about centred subjects.” (140)
He
is a talented artist, suffering from a stalled career syndrome (149). Thus, he suggests
that John Johnson take over his career in the Scottish settlement, a
demilitarized American suburb. Scapa Loch was originally built for the
personnel of the U.S. Naval Intelligence, and now is under the control of the
developer Retro Americana (Suburban) Homes, offering to wanna-be proprietors dreams
come true at a reasonable price. John Johnson, a DJ-turned-music industry
entrepreneur, finds himself broke and homeless after unsuccessful dot.com merchandizing,
government welfare cuts, and his “council housing […] deliberately run down”
(130). For obvious reasons, he accepts the fake life of Hoy’s
artist-in-residence.
The
reader follows his re(pro)gression through a series of events thematically
unified as cultural hooliganism, initiated by the Comparative Vandalism show.
The character’s cultural engagement parallels an increasingly destructive
lifestyle and gradual disappearance in the labyrinth of liquid identities, fake
personalities, and the reality of heroin, cocaine, and LSD. This artistic extravaganza is a critique of
arts and a sketch of a practice in response to such a state of affairs. It is a
refiguring of modernist and the avant-garde legacy on the one hand, and, on the
other, postmodernist authoritarian pluralism, excluding from the debate
questions like: How is it possible to feel the impossibilized alienation?
The Present of the Future
The
episode featuring the Work, Talk, Rest, Play conference particularly
invites reimagining of the twentieth century heritage. Home’s critique of institutionalized production of knowledge,
reveals dissolving spirit of solidarity that sabotages creative criticism in “that
multifarious enigma known as contemporary society” (77). Postfuturist approaches to the dilemma of this
kind can be related to Terry Eagleton’s thoughts about the
avant-garde-modernist-postmodernist trajectory:
From modernism proper,
postmodernism inherits the fragmentary or schizoid self, but eradicates all
critical distance from it […] From the avant-garde, postmodernism
takes the dissolution of art into social life, rejection of tradition, an
opposition to ‘high’ culture as such, but crosses this with the unpolitical
impulses of modernism […] An authentically political art in our own time might
similarly draw upon both modernism and the avant-garde, but in a different
combination from postmodernism. Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 (146-7)
Crossing the politicized
avant-garde remix of tradition with modernist fragmented self approached from a
critical distance, one is creating a noise filter--refacement. McKenzie Wark:
“Recuperation must be all or nothing” (50
Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International 10). Enduring
shadow talk puncture discourse where nominalism puts naming on hold. It cuts
across the circle of discursive self-referentiality—on its (discourse’s, i.e.)
terms: “That’s why I had decided to give up writing, and it is also what made
the resolution essentially meaningless. The point was that there was no point,
that giving up was essentially the same as carrying on” (Memphis Underground 210-11). Because the fabric of literature
is duplicity, all postufutrist reader-writers can do is never stop naming.
McKenzie Wark: “In this tiresome age, when even the air melts into airwaves,
when all that is profane is packaged as if it were profundity, the possibility
yet emerges to hack into mere appearances and make off with them. There are other
worlds and they are this one” (A Hacker
Manifesto [389]).
An
endlessly recurring loop is an echo of the bewildering noise. The dissonance
bombarding one’s capacities for clear imaginative reasoning hits the message at
salient spots, thereby violating the flow through the communication channel.
The noise in this book comes in shapes and forms ranging from the disappearance
of individuality, denial of articulate subjectivity, cityscape face-lifting,
real estate refashioning the bucolic periphery, destructiveness of commoditized
art, individuals reduced to discursive self-referentiality, dispossession,
annihilation/fabrication of history, dispassionate relationships (or the absence
thereof), isolation, fragmented potential for critical creativity, muted
vitality of the cradle of radical sound, and a blocked vision of the future.
Thus, towards the closing scene in Memphis
Underground, after the tectonic trembling of the soil of Minnesota,
Finland, under the veil of the grotesque conversation with the Reaper, the
character, having met his exploding,
(--)dead (--)conscious, is encountering yet another metacritical loop of
disappearance that is not one:
I’m
seeking radical incompletion. I want to combine critique, poetics and popular
story telling. I want to combine poetics, critique and popular story telling. I
want to combine poetics, popular story telling and critique. I want to combine
critique, popular story telling and poetics. I want to combine popular story
telling, critique and poetics. I want to combine popular story telling, poetics
and critique. I am Death. I am Undead. I stopped living. Ad nauseam. (Memphis Underground 309)
In the cacophonic
whirlwind one is condemned to living
between death and the undead. A life of the living dead. Temporarily so.
Periods of noise alternate with those of green communication. But for the shift
to happen, remixing is needed in order to reanimate hibernated words. For that reason, I read Memphis Underground as a call for
reclaiming genuine passion and for an increase in the unification of
fragmented, defaced entities into a cultural force, renaming them human beings,
whose face would radiate life reemerged from the living dead. As a postfuturist
reading, it is a remix of the past, looking at the present to redeem the
future. The DJing in this vein relies on Eagleton’s vision of the excavations
in the intersections of the time axes:
All
historical epochs are modern to themselves, but not all live their experience
in this ideological mode. If modernism lives its history as peculiarly,
insistently present, it also experiences a sense that this present
moment is also of the future, to which the present is nothing more than an
orientation; so that the idea of the Now, as the present, as full presence
eclipsing the past, is itself intermittently eclipsed by an awareness of the
present as deferment, as an empty excited openness to a future which is in one
sense already here, in another sense yet to come. (Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 139)
The
contestable character of the period is evident from the different approaches to
its spirit. It can be understood as (a) an escalation of the eroding totality
that started at the beginning of the twentieth century, to which the modernists
responded with an implosion of fractured and fragmented narrative; (b) as a
substantially different sentiment from what the modernists perhaps foresaw as a possible reality, or did
not; or (c) as a combination of the unpolitical modernist art, uncritically
understood modernist fragmented consciousness and the avant-garde rejection of tradition. Regardless of the particular
specification of the boundaries, it seems that these versatile approaches share
an understanding of postmodernist cultural diversity. However, unlike the
common perception of culture as democratic, Jameson points to its oppressive
tendencies:”[E]ssential to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a
cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence
of a range of very different, yet subordinate features” (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 4). This
attests a paradoxical homogenization resulting from the alleged plurality of
voices. It is also to suggest that, despite the reported plurality of
vocabularies, in a genuinely pluralist culture. The dominant vocabulary
determining the sounds of culture is that of multinational capitalism:
depthless, contaminating noise.
Phantom Face
In
this grim theoretical portrayal of the present, one of the most striking tropes
Jameson deploys is that of waning of affect, pertinent to the culture of late
capitalism, which he rightly relates to the disappearance of vital cultural
ingredients: “But it means the end of much more--the end, for example, of
style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive
brush stroke” (Postmodernism, or, the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 15). Analyzing architecture, Jameson
claims that the human subject has not kept pace with the mutations of the
object, in which a new space – hyperspace - has been created, and for which one
simply does not have appropriate perceptual habits. In other words, there has
not been a mutation on behalf of the subject equivalent and accompanying that of
the object.
The
subject’s apparent lagging behind the advancement of the object can be understood
as a consequence of the atrophying constituents, affect and style/signature
being among them. In a word, incongruence
between the object and the subject in contemporary world is commonly understood
as a result of the subject’s inability to follow the changes happening on the
level of the object. However, it turns out that the subject is not all that
disabled. And that what adds up to its idiosyncratic character
(style/signature, for example) seems to be alive and well. More precisely, unlike
in hyperspace, for an entity of a different shape, such as the style/signature,
the subject does have a corresponding perceptual apparatus: a response is not
missing. Thus, the death of the style/signature seems to be a make-believe
reality that resulted from the fear of the loss of authenticity. Or, the fear
of authenticity not being lost. If the former is the case, one mistakenly
believed that what one feared would happen, actually, did happen. If the
latter, one was misled to believe that something disastrous would happen,
should have such a nightmare come true.
Consequently,
one lived a delusion of a deprivation of uniqueness, whereas death of the style,
actually, never occurred. Even prototypically inauthentic postmodernist works
speak in an unmistakably unique voice. Even those who dismiss the myth of
originality, like Stewart Home, create an idiosyncratic vernacular. Even
Derrida’s decisive deferral of authenticity is quite unlikely to be mistaken
for somebody else’s voice. Fredric Jameson:”[P]ostmodernism, despite its
systematic and thoroughgoing rejection of all the features it could identify
with high modernism and modernism proper, seems utterly unable to divest itself
of this final requirement of originality” (Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present 152). One would be prone to say
that whoever cares about authenticity
and the related issues and expresses one’s concerns about them--regardless of
the perspective--unavoidably does so in a unique way, thereby creating an
idiosyncratic idiom.
Therefore, death of the
style/signature is, essentially, what makes postmodernist a culture of and/or
discourse of denial. The proclamation of the alleged death comprises of a crass
understatement, or, an overstatement about the life of the subject.
Postmodernists are right to inherit a broken image of reality from modernists.
However, such a picture should remain communicable or else the polyphony is
merely a simultaneity of individual, disjoined cacophonic noise, disinterested
in and immune to redemption. If this were the case, the adjective individual should not be mistakenly
understood to be the stem for the derivation of the noun individuality, but rather of individualism.
Further, postmodernists are right to claim that there are as many
descriptions as there are idiosyncratic idioms, but this truth does not entail
a presumption that all of them are tenable. Finally, postmodernists are right
to believe in inauthenticity not because its opposite is untrue, but because a
replica is an impossibility.
Along
with the death of the subject, author, self, style, uniqueness, totality,
postmodernism claims the death of history. In The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 (1998), Jameson challenges it: “But
the notion of the ‘end of history’ also expresses a blockage of the historical
imagination” (91). Similarly, other blockages preclude other kinds of
imagination. For example, the imposition of multiple deaths overshadows the
theoretical imagination--the right to remix and see the signature/style and
solidarity as compatible. Impositions of that kind attempt to persuade one that
something dreadful will happen to cultural polyphony if one lives one’s
uniqueness. That kind of blockage of the cultural imagination presumes that
authenticity is inherent to the dominant self/monolith subject. It is a
blockage of the social imagination that would want one to equate individuality
with individualism and, by extension, refacement with the politics of
exclusion. It would prefer one to be content with an existence of a particle in
the amalgamation of defaced, disaffected, disinterested, nihilo-cannibalistic robozombies.
It aspires to overthrow one’s belief that, actually, there is nothing wrong
with the subjects’ being individuals. And alive.
Today,
one is prone to see the legacy in a remixed form, along the lines of Terry Eagleton’s
thought:
From
modernism proper, postmodernism inherits the fragmentary or schizoid self, but
eradicates all critical distance from it…From the avant-garde, postmodernism
takes the dissolution of art into social life, rejection of tradition, an opposition
to ‘high’ culture as such, but crosses this with the unpolitical impulses of
modernism […] An authentically political art in our own time might similarly
draw upon both modernism and the avant-garde, but in a different combination
from postmodernism. (“Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism,” Against the
Grain: Essays 1975-1985,
146-7)
Building
on Eagleton’s aesthetico-political
reconfiguration of the twentieth century vocabularies, the remix might be
sketched along the following lines: (a) The novel, pertinent to creative
practices is what one adopts from the avant-garde uncompromising uprooting;
yet, one keeps the awareness of having his or her vocabulary, to different
degrees, inspired by traditional
ones--only remixed; (b) Fragmentary consciousness that modernists made apparent
is, unfortunately, part of the realities one inhabits today; that, however,
does not mean that one is doomed to insanity; (c) Apolitical preservation of
the autonomy of creation is an integral part of the ultimate dream of freedom;
this by no means prevents one from
finding ways of juggling these two seemingly incompatible vocabularies
(aesthetic and political, i.e.).
Subversive
silent ruptures in the discursive are constituent ingredients of the remix—a
response to the noise, an eco-intervention.
In the light of Eagleton’s meditation on the problem of power and
readers taking over the means of production, I agree with understanding it as
an act of recovering the territory by the enslaving rule of profit-making. However,
critically distancing from the Readers’ Liberation Movement’s (RLM) slogan “The
authors need us; we don’t need the authors,”[3]
I think in the vein of Home’s idea of the reader-writer being “implicated” as
crucial to the creation of meaning. Being entwined, the reader-writer is, in fact, a DJ--the
voice sometimes manifest, at times subtonicly present, a depersonalized vessel
for the free flow, an embodiment of the belief that human existence implies and
requires acknowledging the limits of one’s own control/power.
Freed
from proscribing, but not of generating meaning, the deselfed, yet
reinvividualized, DJ acts concordantly to Terry Eagleton’s critique of radical
constructivism: “Surely life itself must have a say in that matter” (The
Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction 67).
In
an age of uncertainty, suspicious deaths, unreliable voice, threats to the
creative imagination and the potential of the textual are numerous. Since the
literature of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries has to a large
extent been self-reflective, it has also been a form of denial of its potential
and a delusion about its dead-end. In response to that, non-existent,
inauthentic voices are heard as a call for reanimation of the tired body of
literature and supposedly nonexisting readers/writers—subjects. Human, at that.
Humble, too. Well, stories, to be sure, must have a say in that matter.
[1] The term merges the words fatherland and motherland—a reference to the inspiration postfuturist writers find in the
heritage, all the while remixing it.
[2] McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto [102]. Wark portrays the historical development and perpetuation of
proprietary relations (“legal fictions”[101]) and the emergences of new classes
with a new form of property. He presents a progression from pastoralists who dispossess
farmers and take land, via capitalists who hack land and transform it into a
new, abstract form of property-capital that turns farmers into the working
class, to vectoralists who hack capital into its abstract form—intellectual
property that is hacked from them by the hacker class, should they become one.
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