Is Joy Denial? Well, You Tell Me...

According to psychoanalytic doctrine, the unconscious, roughly summed up, is where one stores thoughts and health-threatening emotions. In order to protect oneself  from overwhelming experiences, one denies such emotions and thoughts by devising ways to avoid them. Yet, not always can they be kept buried. Sometimes, such unpleasanties surface and, reportedly, reveal to one a monstrous mirror image.

Such a postulate calls for at least two angles to look and be looked at. First, the hidden undesirable/guiltily desirable can hardly be imagined without entailing some kind of agency. Be it even unconscious. That said, once revealed, such secret monsters become consciously accessible, which calls for questioning how one detects their unconscious character, i.e., what is the wager of their statuses. If the unconscious has an independent life in its own right, the questions arise: How does it “decide” to reveal itself to the conscious? 

How does the transformation into a conscious content occur? Further, if there is an area in the psyche called the unconscious, could it also conceal contents of the nature other than threatening, terrifying, and/or devastating?  Put differently, could it be that what ends up as unconscious is not merely what endangers one, but simply what escapes memory? If so, can a magical dismantling of such knots bring to light joy, as well? If so, can such occurrence be other than sheer denial?

Hips'n'Hypes

If I were a computer, I wouldn’t expect from myself to be a digital Dorian Gray version of my humbly imperfect humanness. Neither would I expect from it to be a confirmation of my erroneousness and, thus, humanness. Unlike the imagined robotic variant of myself, I have embarrassing, illusory hopes—half-hidden even from myself—that one day there will be a laptop that does not freeze, a desktop that does not eat files, a printer that does not run out of ink. I shamefully cherish a desire that that day were now.

Most of the time I forget about such secret aspirations. And keep living. Partly as a human version of my digitalized mirror image. While in that hyperworld, I wonder if not to be hip is to be hyper now. In that democratic fairy tale called the web, one might experience a tremendously liberating effect of the communication freed from a sanctioning Father’s voice. Hence, one is free to chat, search, play, prey, loot, seduce, flirt, have sex, read, create…you name it…on the Internet.

In an age when faith in science evokes a gambling spirit, unbelievers sinfully seek answers on the net. Moreover, technology in a broader sense offers reasonable responses for numerous conundrums. jan jagodzinski, Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media (2004): “Consumers are told which foods are likely to cause cancer, and then which foods can help prevent it! Given that nobody knows for sure, we invest more and more authority in technological solutions like Viagra, and mood drugs like Prozac to avoid responsibility” (182).

But then, one wonders why that authority recentering is necessary to comfort one’s doubtful soul. Isn’t the whole enterprise called hyperreality so appealing precisely because it frees one from a sense of authority? Eerie dialectic, indeed. Shifts nothing short of the creepiness of the land of shadow readers and robodogs in Jeff Noon’s novels. Inhabiting hyperspace bears semblance to wandering through the labyrinth of empty spaces in the mind deprived of dreams in Pollen (1995). The air we breathe, marbled with an invisible telecommunication jungle, is sometimes heavy. As if saturated with the particles of the dispersed vurt hayfever bomb.

Seemingly, terra digita is the land of opportunities that requires no strenuous moral efforts. And yet, it is hard to imagine effortless round the clock hyperreal networking. Even if freed from all ridiculous ethical burden, threatening to overshadow the light from the screen, at least one unpleasanty  remains: that one has the body. jan jagodzinski: “ Such technology has made all of us walking cyborgs. So where is the ‘No!’ to be found?” (186).

In this cyperspace there are yet other cyberspaces. And they are this one, called vurtuality. Not unlike silence that is not one in Stewart Home’s novel Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010). Interaction stripped of speech. Communication relocated in the 1&0 linguistic sphere. Literature rendered abstractLiterature 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. (10)

:Devouring  an undistinguishable amalgam of cultured milk, broth, coleslaw, sunny side up, cottage cheese, pizza, ketchup, lasagna, slow-rinsed lobster, wieners,  industrial amounts of garlic ice cream cake, baked catfish, chocolate mousse, tiramisu, wild salmon pancakes, gravy, matches, overcooked chair bottoms, porridge immemorial, scorched barn’s roof, walls of an ancient temple, frames of the pictures from the family album, curtains from the cellar, covered with thick layers of dust, rusty oven, stunned skeletons, massacred buses, busted clouds:

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. (10)

:And then me darkish camera and then me sunrise and then me coffee/cigarette and then me voddy /vodichki/vodochka and then me supergreen food and then me oatmeal pie and then me seaweed crackers and then me mulled apple cider and then me crunchy white chocolate-spiked biscuits and then me then me cherry jelly and then me strawberry tart and then me coconut-vanilla ice cream and then me candy bar and then me milk chocolate and then me dried currants and then me vegetable garden soup and then me eggplant zucchini pancakes and then me Caesar salad and then me royal rice pudding and then me beefheart-stU and me peach yoghurt and then me and then me cheese cake!

Shadows'n'Majorities: Well, Who Said That...

Once upon a time, to be hip meant to be radical, radically revolutionary, revolutionary decadent, decadently intoxicant, toxically fiery, fiercely dedicated, decidedly transgressive. Not so long ago, in 2005, Stewart Home writes in his book Tainted Love about swinging London, beats, and other revolutionaries heavily engaged in the sweeping revolutionary tornado generously fueled by the underground pharmaceutical industry. He casts light on the eerie dynamism resulting in the officialdom’s complicity in the criminalization of drugs, that, at a dialectical stroke, sucked the underground—up on the surface! Namely, the authorities persecuted and prosecuted decadent revolutionaries, as much as they amplified the anti-subversive sentiment that culminate in its latter day, mainstreaming turn.

Modern day mainstreaming brought an inversion of the criminalization of drugs as we know it. The anti-subversive climate has conquered the underground, which is now overground. What once was persecuted and prosecuted as the black market is now a sophisticated version of legalized, scientifically improved, medically tested, user friendly, technologically advanced range of pharmaceutical  and/or chemical products at anyone’s disposal. William S. Burroughs, that obscure prophet of divine toxicity, once claimed that drugs were going to be demonized, used in a reckless right wing politics as a means of social control (Gus Van Sant, Drugstore Cowboy 1989). Today, nobody cares about that fact. Why would they? Would you? When drugs have been mainstreamed, having found fertile soil in anti-subversive minds susceptible to legally available crutches—mental flux blockage aids’n’supplements. Consolation at anybody’s disposal. Silently sedated, accelerated, excited, dazed, hazed…you name it…according to one’s tastes.

To be hip is not to be hip. To be hip is to accept what a free culture of today offers to free-minded individuals. Only its self-proclaiming free character does not justify the underlying investment in nominalism. Or, does it? Can it define a choice to resist what it can offer?

Ye Empirivm of Ye Groove

[1]

: Thanks to the voices from the Library and welcome back to the studio. Inspired by this impressive datamining, some of your fabulous remixes have been created, me honorable listeners. Having said that, from now on, till the end of today’s program, no instant will be waisted:

 [2] Shifting Gears: “We’re attempting to delineate an America that is markedly different to the one Jean Baudrillard fancied didn’t exist” (Stewart Home, Memphis Underground 285).  

[3] Once upon a time in the postfuture, the streets’dl  be: “stone roses junction…inspiral carpets warehouses” (Jeff Noon, Needle in the Groove 213-16). Today: An American Prayer:

  

[4] Amerikka, Amuirkey, “America takes drugs in psychic defence” (Iggy Pop, “Neon Forest” line 22). …”America, Death” (Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless 163). … “America is the Utopia of modernity ” (Stewart Home, Memphis Underground 31). “I’m a product of America” (Iggy Pop, “Cold Metal” line 8).

[5]William S. Burroughs: ”Devise alternative endings.” (The Adding Machine  43)

 

[6]Ram it!

 

[7]t-h-e-g-r-o-o-v-e-s-o-f-t-h-e-s-o-u-l: Orajt, lemmie spell it out for you—there is noise and noise. The former is noise pollution: delusional babylonian belief in a positive connotation of Disney, etc. Then there’s a noise filter: the noise. But it’s kinda different. It’s ro-ro-rockin’N’ro-ro-rollin’. The latter is used to green the former.

[8] Let’s Groove: If “providing the wider world with the gift of democracy,”[9] makes one a denizen of the global suburbia, then we are all Americans “or at least a product of the Black Atlantic.”[10] 

[11] Inner City Blues: Home’s critical concept of The Black Celts–triracial Celtic tribe, consisting of ancient African, Indian, and Viking civilizations—is  playful questioning of the avant-garde-modernist-postmodernist trajectory. Home reads history through occult lenses. He portrays an Afro-Celtic carnival as a glorification of the dull everyday turned into an endless party. Or, so it seems.

[12] BaudriR: In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Paul Gilroy criticizes exclusionary ethnic discourse, contextualizing it within postcolonial black communities. He talks about cultural nationalism (2) in the nation/race/ethnicity intersections. More precisely, he indicates a connection between cultural homogeneity--cultural insiderism (3)--and the identity of black people in England being obscured/threatened due to the prevalent ethnocentricity.

[13] Bustin’ Loose: Drawing upon Du Bois’s concept, Gilroy argues that being “both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness” (1).

[14] Hot Pants: The Black Atlantic double consciousness generates a theoretical background that would outmode the essentialist take on cultural integrity. Gilroy offers an antiracist, supranational idea of identity based on hybridity and cross-cultural exchange, where borrowings and blendings are not understood as signs of ethnic impurity, but rather as a platform for the shift in discourse and cultural practice. He proposes the idea of the Black Atlantic as a transcultural, international formation with a “rhizomorphic, fractal structure” (4). Gilroy calls for a reading of culture beyond the notions of nation and race. He also accentuates the importance of cross-cultural borrowings that relativize the concept of cultural homogeneity. Bridging the black-white gap between and/or high-low cultures enables exercising the assertive mood (16) of the dispossessed communities.

[15] Green Tambourine: The postfuturist children of Dickens--punk rock writers--remix the words of historical mafothers. It is not a nostalgic attempt to reestablish the past, as no historical epoch seems worthy of the complicity in tacit reactionary conservatism and reaffirming social relationships based on control and inhumaneness. Instead, literary DJs critically reimagine the past, resurrecting the present to redeem the future.

 [16] Soul Superman: Yet, interest in the past does persist. The exploration of history is fueled with the passion of a journey into otherness. It sometimes causes uneasiness and restlessness. At times, however, communication with the past eras can be pleasurable. What one experiences exploring the past, simultaneously evoking the future into the reawaken present, is expressed in the remixes featuring creative techniques  ranging from irony, camp, humor, silent commentaries, via elements of allegory, appropriation, citation, plagiarism, parody, metafiction, matacritique, detournement, filtering, and drugging the pretext…all the way to the point of encounter between the subject and the object. But, rather than in a duel, they engage in sometimes antagonistic, albeit not antithetical, dialogue, which is also a joyful immersion in the morphing of the sobject.

[17] Trouble Funk Express: Jazz rock fusion mystically infused in Tricky’s electronic ocean. Powerchords imbued in core wrap, 4/4-meets-broken-beat-underneath, peppered with the traditional Middle Eastern melodic miniatures in Asian Dub Foundation. DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist’s (1999) live remix of the old school funk, soul, blues, and rhythm and blues samples, blending with turntablist wizardry, creates a new aural iconography. Thievery Corporation featuring a range of artists including a Brazilian singer and an Indian sitar player mixing the elements of world music, jazz, blues, and soul notes with urban electronic sound. Johnny Winter reinventing the blues guitar…

[18] Funkier Than A Mosquita’s Tweeter: Red Hot Chili Peppers  combine spoken word with the melodic line and harmonic variants of the pop tradition, Motown, and Chicago sound with a fresh infusion of the modern day slapping, loosened by sparse, edgy  guitar riffs on the early albums, and with electrifyingly dense six-string monstrosity of the latter day. All the while keep moving to the stable beat of the rocking drum. Forward. All the way to the north along the West coast—to the heart of grunge groove.

Lee Scratch Perry’s Jamaican dub-rock-steady-ska is an offering to the young punks’ experimental explorations. The likes of the Clash, the Specials, Madness, the Ruts, to name just a few, incorporate reggae elements into the explosive base, from the seventies onwards known as punk rock. Diverting from glam and prog rock structural complexities and expressive verbosity, these bands’ minimalist musical philosophy radiates surplus of energy amidst economic scarcity. Their music breeds lyrical delicacy underneath an ugly mask of anger and violence. The Sex Pistols opened up lateral postfuturist avenues under the guise of dystopian cynicism, verging on nihilism. In The Damned, a touch of goth harmony meets the rebellious impulse. The Stranglers’ keyboards are an insider’s provocative invitation to the conversation with comrades. 

 [19] The World is a Ghetto: Miles Davis, having “betrayed” jazz, keeps ignoring such accusations, and, instead of defending the title of bip-bop bard, he hacks Cyndi Lauper’s  “Time after Time” and comments on that eccentric pop daughter’s number  in his deviant doo-bop vernacular. The Cramps and the Jesus and Mary Chain create a new genre called psychobilly: the former’s signature being a psychedelic, fragmentary, distorted take on  rockabilly syntax, while the latter find its unique expression in a heavily lingering delay of dazzlingly hypnotizing, floating queer chords, spreading melliferious smell falling from the steely sky. Jon Spencer Blues Explosion corrodes the conventions of the blues with (a) the vehemence and brutality of a surgical knife cutting off the naval cord and (b) the beauty of the first inhale.

[20] Natural Soul Brother: White Stripes learn from the fathers to become mafothers. Their radically rudimentary blues powerhouse is an untamable string ode, slaying across the drum foundation. Violent Femmes’ and Wilco’s subtle critical references to country music tell stories of the reconfigured American Dream. Pop structure, yet somewhat different undertone in the Rezillos’s tongue-in-cheek acidic bitterness and a sweet aftertaste is the sound of… the other Scotland…the Scotland of Cocteau Twins.

Neil Young’s rebirth through the guitar sound on the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s movie Dead Man (1995) is another example of the remix.  ZZ Top introduce to the ear of the listener the glory of seductive irony. Iggy Pop’s steady rockin with the leftist twist immemorial on “Louie, Louie” is a survivor manifesto.

[21] “[T]he avant-garde ‘s insistence on the element of innovation within its 
creations leads to a spurious denial of its historic roots.”[22]

[23] Givers Don’t Lack: Primal Scream’s amazing  transindividualism is as versatile as their chameleonic passage from a crooked version of Brit Pop, via filtered echoes of acid house, to the modified Delta sound. Theirs is a jargon-free demonstration of the unspoken ramifications of the avant-garde-modernist-postmodernist journey. They show that postmodernism is right to denounce the notion of representation, but that the underpinning presumption is wrong. Representation is worthy of rebuking, not because nothing is authentic, but because a replica is an impossibility. Acknowledging the relational character of arts, they emphasize immediacy of creation, not by casting aside the original-copy dichotomy, but rather by rendering it redundant, thereby manifesting the inevitability of the much abhorred authenticity.

[24]”American is dead. Long live America!” (Memphis Underground 285). American might be dead, but Sheena’s spirit is still alive and well, haunting the Bowery as vivaciously as ever. The greatest punk rocka of them all.

[25] once upon a time…like  one ’dl always be walking along four postfuturists boulevard: “what if, like, all life is just one big remix / what then / I mean, what if we’re still caught up in it […] you’ll need a bloody good dj, won’t you?”[26]

[27] Yes. And mind you, the reader, too, has to be a bloody good dj. To remix the text and one’s good self guided by reforgotten turntablist poetics underlying the uncertainties during postfuturist excavations. To remap the vocabularies of the socioscape and the inner tissue alike is to bloody undo the knots in the dreamscape of mafotherlands. Digging the archive of the giant body of research is to spin one record after another until a flow is established and a leakage from abutting narratives is purged. In such remix, scratching is a sudden outburst of the radical light’s friendly smile amidst the communication channel, rather than a noisy agitation in the dark tunnel.

: Spot on! Respected fellow-travelers, I do want to express my gratitude for having the opportunity to be part of the stunningly impassionate exchange. If it is heretical to equate liberation with creation, let us immerse our good selves in some genuine blasphemy. If to seek the roots in mafotherlands is linguistically sinful, why don’t we creatively engage in corroding discursive authenticity. If the flow is a potential anagram of something else, let’s play Silent Spelling Bee. You’ve been listening to WELD/Program. Awm. It is 3:30 PM. If a communicational tunnel can become the communication channel, please, stay tuned just phunkie green. Yo!

---

[1] Trafalgar Square, London. August, 2010.

[2] Leicester Square, London. June 2008.

[3] Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, Metropolitan Museum, NYC, March 2008.

[4] L.E.S., NYC, November 2009

[5] Edinburgh. Scotland, UK. August, 2010.

[6] Victoria. London, UK, December, 2010.

[7] Siberia. Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. August, 2010.

[8] The Statue of Liberty, NYC, March 2009.

[9] Stewart Home, Memphis Underground, 258.

[10] Ibid., 31.

[11] Shoreditch, London. August 2009.

[12] Lieth, Edinburgh. August, 2010.

[13] Washington Heights, NYC. September, 2010.

[14] The Living Colour. Central Park, NYC. June, 2010.

[15] The West Village, NYC. April, 2011.

[16]East Harlem, NYC. September, 2009.

[17] Harlem, NYC. October 2009.

[18] Hackney, London. January, 2011.

[19] Hackney, London. January, 2010.

[20] St. Nicholas’ at St. Sava. Ladbroke Grove, London. December, 2010.

[21] Novi Sad, Serbia. January 2010.

[22] Stewart Home, Memphis Underground, 77.

[23] Leith, Edingburgh, August, 2010.

[24] Drummatics, 34^th St, Herald Square subway station, 2008.

[25] MUF, Ladbroke Grove, London. August 2010.

[26] Jeff Noon, Needle in the Groove, 2000; 287.

[27] Brookland, NYC. October 2011.