1.1 Eerie Dialectic of Power
More
than a half a century after its founding, even the thirty-year estimate seems
modest. The SI refuses to go
away. Perhaps it is because it speaks for a hidden God whose promise is now in
the past. Perhaps we would like to think that the dead are safe, that even in
this era of disenchantment, we still have a line back to another possible
world, even if it lies along a historical path not only not-taken, but which
had never even existed.
McKenzie
Wark, “Secretary,” introduction to Guy Debord’s Correspondence: The
Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957-August 1960)
Once upon a time in Ladbroke
Grove and Notting Hill / Or, some such intergalactic corner / Our contemporaries / Somebody's contemporaries / Realize that they were born in
the countries of the folks whom they see as kinship and aliens, comrades and an
indifferent crowd, benevolent and hostile, neighbors and passers by, guardians
of the cradle and scatter-brained wanderers, benign jokers and miserable
parasites, generous givers and narrow-minded cripples, unconditioning providers
and envious backbiters, warm advisers and unscrupulous upward-social-climbers, kings
of laughter and emperors of solemnity, masters of the healing embrace and
spiteful tormentors, torchbearers for the soul-saving wisdom and the experts in
heart massacring, a fascinating source of uniqueness and blank back-stabbers,
endlessly amusing and lame to the core, elated worshippers of life joy and
embittered cynics of the lowest order, prototypically passionate and
confusingly reserved: “History is made by those who say ‘No’ and Punk’s utopian
heresies remain its gift to the world” (Jon Savage Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture 541).
They
understand that there are countries that treat themselves as if the rest of the
world were the horizon of disappearance. And the rest of the world in exactly
the same way. There is the rest of the world that treats itself as contrary to
everything else. And everything else in exactly the same way. There are
countries that treat themselves as if they were an afflicted development of a
prematurely born child. The rest is the world. Who sometimes judges one for
misjudging the wrong turns. Those who observe these phenomena might think that
the cultural consensus about rhetorical polyphony is way too aggressive for
their genuine cacophonic taste. Therefore, they opt for practicing stylistic
variants of saying NO in the
subversive key of literary playfulness. In the service of language.
Today, what it takes for the human
face to reemerge equals the effort necessary for freeing oneself from delusional
thinking that being a faceless, unspecifiable particle in the amalgam called
contemporary culture is all a human being is about. To err is part of the human predicament. To be
humiliated by the deafening noise of social of control is integral to living in
the culture of competitors. To be denied the right to be an individual may mistakenly
become a segment of human life. But to say NO
to such enslavement is, too, what makes a human being human. To see one’s
refaced individuality as constitutive of the life of fellowship means to preserve the right to the signature.
A
way of exercising that right is practicing stylistic variants of saying NO in the key of creatively critical
playfulness. Such voices reimagine history as vision of the present in the service
of redemption of the future. They are, in other words, the remix culture--the
genuine phunkie DJ offspring of the postfuturist ancestors--that follow the
radical guiding light of shadow talk in the spirit of refacement: rebirth
through silence and solidarity of reindvividualized deselfed fellow-humans
engaged in enduring creation of a free culture based on trust and love.
Stories created through such interventions are
autobiographies of other people’s lives. They transform confessional diaristic
prose into an invitation to question the boundaries of privacy. They also create
a polymorphous extravaganza of countercultural implosion, leaving a heap of hipster
ashes awaiting a new voice to reanimate the signature from it. As Memphis Underground ends with the statement
about “radical incompletion” (308), Tainted
Love can be read as a continuation of such an attempt: “[h]owever, I want
to justify my sudden and unexpected taste for the most bourgeois of literary
genres – autobiography” (Memphis
Underground 306). Thus, they emanate the light of the retrospective dissection of the debris of the countercultural
corpse:
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. (309)
Partly
in accord with the voices in the novels, but at times subversively listening to
them, this reading excavates buried questions, poses new ones, and explores the
possibilities of hope to recuperate life
and regain human dignity. The reading is a quest for the refacement awaiting
between the confusion of the colliding noises of the swinging sixties,
punk-rocking seventies/eighties, and raving eighties/nineties, on the one hand,
and the new chimney sweeper-DJ’s voice on the other. Again, seeking such a
voice has nothing to do with an uncritical restoration of the past and has
everything to do with nostalgia for postfuture. It is a NO to the culture of denial. It is also a YES to the call to the remix of the dormant spirit of resistance against
the noise in the communication channel—to recuperation of human dignity.
Periods of noise alternate with those of greened communication. But for the
shift to happen, the remix is needed in order to reanimate hibernated words. In the spirit of radical
incompletion: ”There is no beginning, there is no end; this story goes on
forever” (Tainted Love 248).
1.2.Jilly,
That Obscure Mother
In
Tainted Love (2005), Stewart Home,
writing autobiography of his (m)other, challenges the postulates of
contemporary culture, simultaneously criticizing normalization of
countercultures. The book presents the collapse of the sixties swinging London
hippie and beatnik scenes through an increased consumption of drugs and the
authorities’ complicity in their criminalization. It is also a critique of the
literary canon and an investigation of the possibilities of its redescription.
The chapter contextualizes the themes within the cultural and theoretical
frameworks presented in the books Summer
of Love: Psychedelic
Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s (2005),
a
collection of essays edited by Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris, Burroughs Live (2000) collected interviews edited by Sylvére Lotringer, and Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism (1991).
Home continues exploring literary
potentials perpetuated through dialogue between and across genres and media. The
creatively critical inspiration in question spurs poetic excavations and
critical readings of cultural realities. In this book Home is still interested
in problematizing manifestations of cultural domination and the consequences of
oppressive social relations. The destructiveness of oppression is hardly ever
limited solely to a cultural critique. It is always already intertwined with the
question of individuality afflicted by dehumanizing forces of profit-driven minds. That further complicates
the thematic adding to the scope of a possible analysis diverse domains of
oppression and, as a result, of human suffering. Such a point of intersections
among these planes is the character of Jilly O’Sullivan/Julia Callan Thompson,
the anti-heroine of Home’s (m)other’s autobiography.
At the age of sixteen, Julia Callan
Thompson/Jilly O’Sullivan comes to London. The year is 1960. She starts working
as a model, a hostess, and a high class
prostitute in respectable clubs in Soho, such as Murray’s Cabaret Club/General
Gordon’s. Simultaneously, she gets
involved with Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove’s countercultural beatnik and
hippie scenes—experimental circles engaged in mystical trials, esoteric
ventures, and investigations of the occult as the ways of testing the levels,
kinds, and boundaries of realities. She soon starts using opiates to ease the
intensities of psychedelic experiences. Tragically, Julia/Jilly becomes
addicted to heroin. She is trying to fight the habit with little success.
Soon
after her arrival in London, she gets pregnant. She later finds herself heavily
indebted and absorbed by self-destructiveness and crime, notably through the
collaboration with Ronnie and Reggie Kray, the infamous underworld twins. Their
homosexuality, colliding with the attempt to sustain dominant masculine personae
of gangster kings, allegedly contributed to Jilly’s giving her son Lloyd to
adoption. She has been tortured by the mob, abused by the police, and forced to
spy on an institution for social work. Home casts light on the underground
Swinging London when beats and other revolutionaries were heavily involved in
the sweeping revolutionary tornado generously fueled by the underground
pharmaceutical industry. The eerie dynamism resulting in the officialdom’s
complicity in the criminalization of drugs was, at a dialectical stroke, sucked
the underground—up on the surface! Namely, the authorities persecuted and
prosecuted decadent revolutionaries as much as they amplified anti-subversive
sentiment that culminated in its latter day mainstreaming turn:
[W]hile the Krays could be nasty,
their influence and the purely economic level of their success have been vastly
overestimated. Spot and the Krays were ultimately straw men, and even the
movies on which these British gangsters modeled themselves were an outgrowth of
American police propaganda that built various and relatively unimportant and
archaic Chicago criminals into major figures of public menace, so that the
state could appear all the more powerful when it crush them. (126)
Jilly/Julia died amidst the whirlpool
triangulated by her personal limbo, abuse by the corrupt authorities, and criminals
proper. The mystery of her death is unsolved. She died on December 02, 1979.
Her dead body was found the following day by Marianne May/Mary Jane, whom
Jilly/Julia met through Church of Celestial Awakening/ Divine Light Mission
Event. Officially, her death was a result of a heart failure. Further
investigations into the details of how her life ended were massively obstructed
by the authorities in order to prevent disclosing the information about their
involvement. Her reflections about the period of trial reflect the perplexing conditions
within the oscillating countercultures: ”I didn’t know it then, but by 1969 I
was already a victim of post-hippie burn out. By the time the 70s really began
unfolding I was cursing my dependence on junk, since as a direct result of the
corruption that was rife in the Metropolitan Police I was experiencing my own
version of hell on earth” (Tainted Love 133).
Jilly/Julia’s
autobiographical accounts problematize the autobiographical in an autobiography
through a constant play with semi fictitious interjections. For example, a film
script is integrated within a film script; tape transcriptions of psychoanalytic
sessions feature the character of anti-psychiatrist and a psychedelic devotee,
R.D. Laing; cultural critique intersects with historiography; metacritique-cum-historical fiction meets
biofiction; metafiction is crossed with
satire; thriller-detective story mashup
embeds parody via tragedy and journalistic excursions into the Cain’s
Weekly magazine.[1]
The polyphony of genres is part of Home’s
ongoing assault on the dictatorship of celebrity culture and the audience’s
susceptibility to the charms of such simulacra. To this end, Home stresses how
conspiracy theory operates as a means of control by providing the spectatorship
with an illusion of partaking in the lives of celebrities, or, perhaps, taking
even a greater pleasure in participating in the aftermaths of their deaths. In
the vein of Fredric Jameson’s thought from Postmodernism,
or, the Culture of Late Capitalism (1991) about the ways conspiracy theory
creates a false sense of totality, Home addresses the assassination of John F.
Kennedy. Paralleling the sensationalism accompanying the gruesome political
shift is the case of Jack the Stripper, a serial murderer of London prostitutes
in 1960s. These are, in fact, versatile foci of the spectacle triggering
similar responses in the simulacra-hungry audiences. The thematization of the
salivating spectatorship addresses what Jameson calls the hysterical sublime
and exhilaration in gleaming surface. It is also a celebration of the limits of
a fantasy of human omnipotence, as articulated in an interview with Anders
Stephanson in the collection Jameson on
Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism (2007):
Dialectically, in the conscious
sublime, it is the self that touches the limit; here it is the body that is
touching its limits, “volatilized,” in this experience of images, to the point
of being outside itself, or losing itself. What you get is the reduction of
time to an instant in a most intense final punctual experience of all these
things, but it is no longer subjective in the older sense in which a
personality is standing in front of the Alps knowing the limits of the
individual subject and the human ego. On the contrary, it is a kind of
nonhumanist experience of limits beyond which you get dissolved. (46)
1.3 (M)others off (Re)invention
Julia Callan Thompson appears in the
book as the character whose name is Jilly O’Sullivan.[1]
The son, Lloyd O’Sullivan, wrote “Introduction: Bodies of Evidence” and
“Afterword by Lloyd O’Sullivan: The Signifying Junkie.” Stewart Home is another minor appearance among the
characters and voices. The cryptic
characterization is epitomized in the metaphor of a parent as ever elusive,
never graspable in one’s enirety: “A gifted impostor creates the impression
that those they’re fooling know pretty much all there is to know about them,
but cannily avoids providing any concrete details about their background which
might potentially provide a means of catching them out” (124).
One
aspect of the tripartite trope of the signifying junkie concerns the
antiheroine of the book. The other plane of the symbolic is related to demythologizing
of the hippie and beatnik narrative of Swinging London. The context emphasizes
the afflicted countercultural impetus
partly resulting from a destructive impact of the drug culture, enabled and
amplified by the authorities’ complicity in their criminalization. This is
closely related to the third level of the signification. Namely, the legacy of
such axes is manifested both in the corruption within the ruling structures and
in postmodernist culture’s thriving on consumers’ addictive affinities, as
pointed out in Jameson’s Postmodernism,
or, the Culture of Late Capitalism.
Home’s
vernacular challenges such tastes by subverting the very notions of
representation and realism. The chapter “The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the
Oedipus Complex,” along with Home’s film of the same title and somewhat
modified details (2004), remixes the psychoanalytic appropriation of the
Oedipus myth, the affinities for sensationalism and susceptibility to simulated
enchantments:
The cinematic
spectacle has its rules, which are framed to ensure satisfactory products are
placed in multiplexes and video stores. However, it is dissatisfaction that
characterizes my line of flight. The function of narrative cinema is to present
a false coherence as a substitute for a sovereign activity that is so blatantly
absent where the bourgeois ideology of ‘realism’ still reigns. To demystify
documentary cinema it is necessary to expose and thus dissolve the presupposed
form. (117)
The
chapter features the character of Stewart Home. He would be shot in the
apartment where his (m)other died. He would be lying in the pose simulating a
corpse, demonstrating death--the point of morphing of Jilly O’Sullivan, Julia
Callan Thompson, Lloyd O’Sullivan, Stewart Home, and other doublings—as always
already a fiction. Multiple freudian references highlight the age-long
incestuous patricidal mania--the seed from which therapeutic culture flourished aiming to impose on human beings a
belief in irredeemable culpability. Our
time sees other avenues for the reemergence of human dignity. We now have a
silver screen: “At the very moment Freud theorised the unconscious, his
fantastic notions were rendered obsolete. Men and women were already assembling
in the black womb of cinemas and their collectively realised and suppressed
desires were being projected onto silver screens” (126). One feels it’s about
time that cinema, too, was destroyed (117). Now is the moment for the
posfuturist remix of the displacement in question: “Cinema becomes theatre and
there is a much needed shift of emphasis away from cultural commodities and on
to human relationships from which such products emerge” (127-8).
Home’s filmmaker manifesto presents an approach
to reanimating the sedentary spirit of resistance against destruction and
ossification. I read it in the postfuturist key that renders remixable both tradition
and contemporary realities.
I am remaking
cinema in the way I wish to remake the world, correcting the faults of older
filmmakers and simultaneously demonstrating my indifference to any and all so
called works of ‘genius’ by self-consciously using the cultural heritage of
humanity for partisan propaganda purposes. Cinema becomes theatre and there is
a much needed shift of emphasis away from cultural commodities and on to human
relationships from which such products emerge. (127-8)
This is exactly what happens on the
narrative level, where the investigation of his (m)other’s life becomes a
revision on both personal and cultural planes. On the personal level, the
morphing of Home and Julia within the becoming (m)other process is a
reinvention of the following character: “As for me, I realised some time ago
that in order to be myself, I first have to become my (m)other, and to complete
this process I still need the information that will enable me to fully live out
her death” (247).[2]
Culturally, the remix of Jilly’s life and death symbolizes the deflated revolutionary
spirit of the sixties. The two planes Home summarizes through his critique of
the cinema and the aforesaid fabricated sense of totality:
What usually
makes documentaries so easy to understand is the arbitrary limitation of their
subject matter. They describe the atomization of social functions and the
isolation of their products. One can in contrast envisage the baroque
complexity of a moment which is not resolved into a work, a moment whose movement
indissolubly contains facts and values and whose meaning does not yet appear.
The journey I’m undertaking, an ongoing drift through the London of my
childhood and youth, is a search for this confused totality as it manifested
itself at the moment of my mother’s death. (131)
Kaleidoscopic image of endless atomizing
doubling. Mushrooming of the fragmented facts and values makes a world a place
overpopulated by islands. Surrounded by a desert. And yet, the dry spell of a
fabricated belief is the temporary austerity that after which contrapuntal
abundance of the imagination is released. Awaiting for the harmonization to the
syncopated beat.
Once
upon a time, to be hip meant to be radical, radically revolutionary,
revolutionary decadent, decadently intoxicant, toxically fiery, fiercely
dedicated, decidedly transgressive. 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 not, indeed? Can its rhetoric define a choice: the
choice to resist what it can offer?
1.4 Noises’n’Silences: A Second
Bite of the Countercultural Burn Out
Part of the reason why Home channels his
cultural critique via the cinematic realm is to stress the psychedelic
movement’s complicity in a celebratory approach towards ocular-centered popular
culture. The essay “Voices Green and Purple: Psychedelic Bad Craziness and the
Revenge of the Avant-Garde” from Summer
of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s (2005)
provides close reading of the pillars of the countercultural art of the period,
focusing on genuine social provocateurs and experimentators. In contrast,
flirting with semi-subversive vocabularies is scrutinized to show the
ever-growing mainstreaming under the totalizing tendencies of the culture of
commodity.
The study stresses a key role that drugs
had in the countercultural phenomena of the 1960s. Drugs were a way for youth
to rebel against the bourgeois values and the rat race. Yet, the criminalization
of drugs, enabled the police to control and benefit from the profit made
through drug trafficking. At the same time, the business put many of the
insiders of the scenes to the situations similar to that in which Jilly found
herself—in the limbo of mutually conditioned addiction and smuggling that threw
resistance into the haze of oblivion. Historical contextualization of the
countercultural movements of the sixties foreshadows the following decades, as
Jilly observes in the Tainted Love:
The 60s are well
and truly over: naked self-interest has destroyed any sense of solidarity there
once was on the drug scene, and our little world is an increasingly brutalized
place. I’m glad I’m not young any more, and I sincerely hope Lloyd is tough
enough to survive this benighted era. Thatcher attaining power is a symptom and
not the cause of the things that are wrong with London (224).
Crucial for the collapse of the revolutionary
impetus in the sixties is taken to be insufficient of solidarity that, eventually,
enabled the political elites to reassert control. Power was effectively
exercised through the fabrication of the scene’s independence. Specifically, in
the sphere of artistic production, proliferation of the margins, more often
than not, was a way of dissolving the edginess through a carefully executed deals of the nature on which William
Burroughs comments in the 1990 interview with Klaus Maeck:”A devil’s bargain is
always a fool’s bargain, particularly for an artist. The devil deals only in
quantity, not in quality. He can’t make someone a great writer, he can only
make someone a famous writer, a rich writer” (Burroughs Live 750).
An equally ambivalent role and character
can be ascribed to commoditized popular music that, coupled with the
criminalization of drugs, from the initial subversive force, ultimately ended
up in mindless profit-making. Home claims that the shift toward an irreversible
collapse of countercultures was orchestrated and accelerated through the
massivization of hard drugs, as they “migrate[d] from bohemia to the nascent
counterculture, and from there by way of popular music into the proverbial
teenage jugular vein” (“Voices Green and Purple: Psychedelic Bad Craziness and
the Revenge of the Avant-Garde” 137).
This is suggested through the title Tainted Love. Originally Gloria Jones’s
song (1964), it is also known as Soft Cell’s retake (1981). Its poetic, along
with its thematization in Home’s book, resonates with Burroughs’s remark from
the 1964 interview with Eric Mottram. He ascribes to social mechanisms of
control a role in the erosion of purity both on the cultural and personal
levels: “I feel that what we call love is largely a fraud – a mixture of
sentimentality and sex that has been systematically degraded and vulgarized by
the virus power” (Burroughs Live 55).[1]
Endless cycles of alternating abundance
and shortage--disaffection and an impassioned renewal of life-generating
energies--is a historical path that humans walk. Sometimes the engine fueling
one’s steps runs out of power, leaving the walkers abandoned in the desolation
of the waterless landscape. But subterranean currents find a way to resurface
and irrigate the soil, so it again softens and alleviates the suffering of the
aching feet.
[1]
See Home’s short story “A Second Bite of the Cherry” from Amputee Sex (2006) for a further exploration of the
innocence-corruption oscillations.
[1]
According to the writer, the (m)other’s first name is a modified form of Julia, whereas her last name resulted
blending the names of two lineages (Callan and Callahan – two
distinct Irish family names, which were almost randomly used in the family:
some of her brothers and sisters were Callan, while the others were Callahan).
Similarly, her identity was created through a transposition of her real Welsh
origins (born and raised in Newport near Cardiff) into the fictionalized
Scottish background (born and raised in Greenock near Glasgow). Jilly’s
heterogeneous ethnic identity is Home’s reference to the UK postcolonial
reality(personal interview 2008).
[2] The
concept was also realized through a series of photographs entitled “Becoming
(M)other” (2004) by Stewart Home and Chris Dorley Brown. The images of Stewart
Home and Julia Callan Thompson are combined to produce a blending morphing the
two into a peculiar synthesis – the (m)other entity. Part of this
deconstruction of the monolith self shows gender mutability. Shown within the
Stewart Home NYC retrospective exhibition at the White Columns gallery (October
22-November 19, 2011).
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