2.1 Deadly Beat of Premature Deaths: Well,
Who Said That…
To characterize the whole countercultural
movement solely as commoditized idealism, however, is not to do justice to the
original purity. In many of its instances one could find a demonstration of
genuine resistance against the imposed models of living. One such NO is Burroughs’s remark about Ted
Morgan’s characterizing the writer’s attempt to write his way out of the human
condition as a failure:
Well, Ted said
that. Possibly it cannot be done to write yourself out of the human condition
because you are bound by the limitations of that medium. But he implies a final
passivity without the possibility of transcending the human condition, which I
don’t share at all. (Burroughs Live 749)
The
attempt to get away from the deadening noise of financial oligarchies was inspired
by a true desire to live differently through higher levels of human
consciousness: ”Supposedly there are only two ways in which to reach the higher
levels of human consciousness, either by devoting years of one’s life to
arduous spiritual practice or almost instantly with psychedelics” (“Voices
Green and Purple: Psychedelic Bad Craziness and the Revenge of the Avant-Garde”
141).
In
Maria Beatty’s film Gang of Souls: A
Generation of Beat Poets (2008), Marianne Faithful contends that
intoxication was a way of gaining a spiritual experience. Yet, she also admits
that such an attempt was doomed to
failure. Similarly, Jilly’s confessions indicate a kin inclination: ”In the
pre-psychedelic 60s using opiates seemed like the ultimate reality trip”
(132). Much earlier, at the beginning of
her involvement in the beatnik scene, she summarizes the roles of drugs and
rock’n’roll for the formation of a countercultural mindset: “After drugs,
Dylan’s systematic derangement of senses is one of the best weapons we’ve got
in the fight against mindless conformity” (11). Naturally, it wasn’t only Dylan
whose work inspired Jilly’s generation to rebel. She was also interested in
film and literature. In the realm of letters, she was particularly intrigued by
William Burroughs and Alexander Trocchi. Burroughs was already a living legend
and an (anti) star, whereas Trocchi, from the period of his novels Young Adam (1954) and Cain’s Book (1960), was a promising literary
voice. Sadly, it was soon to be muted by junk torpor. Even in that later period
he was still among Jilly’s closest acquaintances, albeit more as a connection
than a literary idol.
Nonetheless,
in both writers one finds an unconditioned investment in the scene’s momentum
and its subversive potential. For example, in Young Adam, Trocchi writes: “It is necessary only to act ‘as if’
one’s conventional categories were arbitrary for one to come gradually to know
that they are” (41). Concordantly,
Burroughs expresses the idea that creation is central to the totality of living
experience: ”It is my conviction that the artists are the most influential and
effective people on this planet. Without creation there is nothing” (Burroughs Live 747). In the Klaus Maeck
film William S. Burroughs: Commissioner
of Sewers (1991), the writer in an interview with Jürgen Ploog explains the
role art plays in paradigmatic shifts: “One very important aspect of art is
that makes people aware of what they know and not know of what they know…seeing
things that are there…the artist expands awareness and once the breakthrough is
made, things become part of general awareness.”
In that light, one notes both Trocchi
and Burroughs’s involvement in the events such as Wholly Communion (June 11,
1965) and the London Arts Lab, a.k.a. Alex Trocchi’s State of Revolt (April 13,
1969). Both are referenced in Tainted
Love (239) and Jamie Wadhawan’s Cain’s
Film (1969). The former event, presented in Peter Whitehead’s Wholly Communion (1965), is understood to be featuring the energies at
the onset of the decay, while the latter was the embodiment of the spirit’s total
disintegration in nihilism. In Cain’s
Film, Trocchi explains his novel Cain’s
Book to have originated in the belief
in his life being an act of a serious game. He talks about a conscious choice
of the identity of the junky, not only as a figure of the underground, but a
social leper of the 1950s in New York. A Glaswegian, who found temporary
residence in Paris and New York, and was forced to return to the native U.K.
due to drug-related legal charges, sees himself as an alien in the society of
conformers. He understands his art and practice to be a personal cosmology of
the inner space.
Burroughs, who also participated in the
London Arts Lab, acknowledges Trocchi’s pioneering role in gathering people of
the same orientation around the Sigma movement. In the film, numerous are
comments about his enigmatic, intriguing, and controversial personality. He is
credited for his literary work, cultural activism, involvement with the
Situationist International, editing the Merlin
magazine in Paris, and generally attracting people of the shared experimenting
affinities. This enthusiastic spirit of dissensus
was fading as the bottomless drug habit was taking its toll.
The early 1950s in Paris turned out to
be, in fact, the heyday of Trocchi’s creative and cultural activities. While
working on his first novel Young Adam he
was the centripetal force, maintaining the cohesion of the like-minded
interested in objecting to the mechanisms of control. Having moved to New York,
Trocchi continued working on his literary works (there he wrote Cain’s Book), but his charismatic
pioneerdom was fading away under the domineering presence of drugs. Thus, his
life in many ways reflects what is widely taken as the dynamics of the 1960s
countercultural movements and scenes and their subversiveness.
However, again to characterize the
activism of the generation as a complete failure is to overlook and/or downplay
significant details from the history of the movement. For example, impassion anti-war
support was part of the agenda of the Beat generation. Among the participants
in the scene, Home points out the significance of Terry Taylor, the author of
the novel Barron Court All Change (1961) who is known for his
excursions to Tangier, acquaintanceship with William Burroughs, an initiation
of an occult group in West London, and
taking the extravagant demands towards the society and consciousness quite
seriously. Terry Taylor’s collaboration with photographer Ida Kar, who
participated in the anti-nuclear movement of the group The Committee of 100.
Other partakers include Bertrand Russell and Gustav Metzger, who is a vital
point of reference for Home’s work. In particular, the 1990-93 Art Strike was a decisive appropriation of Gustav
Metzger’s strike proposal. In Home’s parlance,
Metzger’s anti-institutional activism and protest against
commodification of art through the system of art galleries become a demand for the abolition of art.
The troublesome negotiations between
progressive ideas and energy, incoherence, dispersal of solidarity, and
immersion in altered states of consciousness is summed up in the closing
thought from “Voices Green and Purple: Psychedelic Bad Craziness and the
Revenge of the Avant-Garde”. He there offers vision of the future as a platform
for refiguring and reanimating tradition:
Psychedelic art
must become an oxymoron. In a disalienated society the transformative power of
our realized human potential will be such that all specialized categories will
be dissolved within a greater and more universal creativity. It is the task of
revolutionaries not simply to re-establish the social forms of the classless
societies of the past, but also to re-appropriate (albeit at a higher level)
their modes of consciousness – that is to say shamanic consciousness. The
failures of the psychedelic fifties and sixties were a direct result of the
endurance of class society. Psychedelics will play a role in the coming total
revolution but they do not constitute a revolution on their own. (150)
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): legally available crutches for the minds
susceptible to mental flux blockage aids’n’supplements. Consolation at
anybody’s disposal.
2.2 Towards the Radical Light Turn:
Refacement of the Postfuturist Signature
The
remix of the revolutionary spirit is an intervention that implies rethinking
the assumption that cultural oppression results from socio-political relations
based on domination and exclusion. It is, to a large extent, reconfiguring the
legacy of the nihilo-cannibalistic culture of competitors in which utilitarian
primacy defines human life predominantly in terms of materialist possession.
Such mentality that centers culture, life, universe, and everything else around
self-aggrandizement, greed, and hunger for power. In this respect, the
character of Jilly signifies the ways in which such a mentality affects creatively
critical expressive modes: the playfulness that under a threat of the soulless,
utilitarian world has been violated, recklessly commoditized, and deprived of
the vivaciousness inherent to it. Therefore, the conclusion in “Voices Green
and Purple: Psychedelic Bad Craziness and the Revenge of the Avant-Garde” reads
as a hopeful voice that certain recuperation is possible. Presumably, the
realization of it would be conditioned by the disposal of the notions of the
author as the godlike untouchable, adjacent originality, authenticity, and other
myths.
These ideas in many ways coincide
with the theory of Fredric Jameson, particularly in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology
of the Present (2002), although
certain divergences can be identified. The basic assumption is that the current
cultural climate, which we tend (reluctantly so for a reason) to call
postmodernist is largely conditioned by the dynamics of global imperialism,
manifested in the politics of late capitalism: “American military and economic
domination throughout the world” (5). Home’s remark in Tainted Love and elsewhere about the impact of American policy and
economy resonates with Jameson’s stance. Similarity is evident in both
thinkers’ insistence on capitalist economy channeling cultural production.
Reminiscent of the subtext of Home’s
analysis of the London 1960s countercultures in “Voices Green and Purple: Psychedelic Bad
Craziness and the Revenge of the Avant-Garde,” Tainted Love and “A Second Bite of the Cherry” (2006) is Jameson’s
observation about the loss of “the first naïve innocence of the countercultural
impulses of early rock and roll” (19). He goes on to specify the deadly
connection between the counterculture being massively normalized by the
establishment:”[E]ven overtly political inventions like those of The Clash are somehow secretly disarmed and
reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a
part, since they can achieve no distance from it” (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 49). Perhaps one may lay such a claim based on
sweeping commoditization within the music industry, whose baptism into the
entertainment industry symptomatically reaffirms anxieties such as that of Jameson’s.
However, one should be constantly reminded of transnational conversation called
rock’n’roll as a means of breaking the spell of fragmented, sedentary, and
faceless lives in the Integrated World Capitalism:
As for young people, although they
are crushed by the dominant economic relations which make their position
increasingly precarious, and although they are mentally manipulated through the
production of a collective, mass-media subjectivity, they are nevertheless
developing their own methods of distancing themselves from normalized
subjectivity through singularization. In this respect, the transnational
character of rock music is extremely significant; it plays the role of a sort
of initiatory cult, which confers a cultural pseudo-identity on a considerable
mass of young people and allows them to obtain for themselves a bare minimum of
existential Territories. (Guattari, The
Three Ecologies 33)
Home
is obviously aware of the consequences of a countercultural force’s losing
distance from the mainstream. However, in his insider historiography of the
movement, he does see punk rock as a cultural segment capable of actively
communicating both with tradition and existing cultural realities: “’[T]he
culture we've inherited is something to be manipulated rather than passively
consumed” (Cranked up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock 122). In the language of McKenzie Wark’s Gamer
Theory, that would mean taking the blue pill.[1]
It could easily be the no pill situation, as he suggests in The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday
Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011), emphasizing that play, like work,
has also been normalized (157).
Historically, Jameson understands the
twentieth century to have featured two distinct periods and/or phenomena. The
term modernism proper, or high modernism, signifies the art and
culture from the beginning of the twentieth century, whereas late modernism covers the works of the
fifties and the sixties. Afterwards, but also during this period ( i.e., 1950s
and 1960s), according to Jameson, a
major cultural shift initiated postmodernist culture and art.[2]
In his view, the turning point demarcated a move from the sentiment of
alienation, solitude, isolation, and anxiety towards that of “euphoria, a high,
an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity” (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 28). One
notes that the opening of the new epoch borne a perplexing relationship between
a destabilized self and atrophied emotionality:
As for
expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society
from the older anomie of the centered
subject may also mean not merely liberation from anxiety but a liberation from
every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to
do the feeling (Postmodernism, or, the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 15).
Possibly. But, based on his reflections about the depthless
sublime ( Jameson on Jameson: Conversations
on Cultural Marxism 46), Jameson seems to be well aware that there is the
other side of the disappearance of a self. A possible form of such a present
absence is kenosis. In that case, little doubt remains with regard to
who does the feeling. Postmodernist hyperaffect is evocative of the 1960s psychedelic
and sensationalist cult, nowadays manifested in diverse forms of simulated
enchantment, compulsive affect, affective compulsiveness, affectation, and
addictive behavior. Closely related to this is the susceptibility to conspiracy
theory:
Yet conspiracy
theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded
attempt – through the figuration of advanced technology – to think the
impossible totality of the contemporary world system. It is in terms of
economic and social institutions that, in my opinion, the postmodern sublime
can alone be adequately theorized (Postmodernism,
or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 38).
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 the fractured 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 repudiation of the preceding
vocabularies and altogether breaking away from 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.
In
this grim theoretical portrayal of the present, one of the most striking tropes
Jameson deploys is that of the 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 supposedly 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, precisely the opposite: that authenticity has not been 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 the style, whereas death of the
signature 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, have created 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 disjoined cacophonic noise, disinterested in and
immune from 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, postmodernist anti-representationalism is a
perfectly accountable stance not because nothing is authentic, 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 such necro-affinities: “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 the supposed 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 faceless,
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. Humble, at that.
Such
impositions threaten the creative imagination and the potential of the textual.
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, one reads Tainted Love and similar inauthentic
voices as a call for reanimation of the tired body of literature and supposedly
nonexisting readers/writers—subjects. Human, at that.
The
accent is on the symbolic of the death of the heroine in Tainted Love. The unsolved mystery of the arguable suicide or the
assumed homicide, Home explains reflecting on the nature of the riddle: “The
perfection of suicide lies in ambiguity” (117). Implying the idea of a suicide
by society, the trope suggests that the multiple factors contributing to the
mortification of Jilly, Julia, counterculture, art, love, author, literature,
etc. come from the inside as much as form the outside of the subject(s) in
question. Facing the perplexities of such a high degree, one can hardly respond
with a formulaic solution. With regards to endurance in such overwhelmingly
complex circumstances, one is reminded of Burroughs’s reiterating the
significance of simplicity as an answer to the bewildering times:”Certainly not
commit suicide, no matter what you believe about life and death. Suicide is
obviously not a viable answer. Not wanting to live anymore is a form of
self-indulgence. You hang on to life as long as you can function” (Burroughs Live 751). Likewise, one would
hope to find a wager for social redemption through a perseverance amidst what
he characterizes as “the conditions of total emergency” (Burroughs Live 59).
2.3 Only with a Postfuturist Twist: Solidarity Beyond Pain
There
is room for the postnihilist turn under such conditions. There is a wager for
social redemption in the vocabulary of merciful relationship among human fellow
travellers because charity, being tightly interwoven with humbleness and kenosis, disables necromaniacal
self-indulgence in the possibilities of suicide, homicide, and forms of
inflicting pain. Even if it’s sometimes necessary to go “all the way down to
the blues,” as Jeff Noon observes in Needle
in the Groove, one is reminded of the cohesive potential of the blue note
fellowship.
Its
communal capacities can be traced from Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, where the author elaborates on
the concept of human solidarity. Originating in the neopragmatist philosophical
tradition, his theory claims that there is no neutral theoretical ground to
ensure socially acceptable behavior. This means that no theoretical apparatus can
provide a congruence between the public and the private. Rorty goes on to
suggest that we should strive to develop our sensitivity to other people’s
experience of pain and thereby contribute to the community’s better
functioning. This post-philosophical social critique sees feeling pain as the
only possible common denominator determining us as humans, while it proposes
human solidarity as the only imperative on the public plane:
Solidarity is
not thought of as recognition of a core self, the human essence, in all human
beings. Rather, it is thought of as the ability to see more and more
traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as
unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and
humiliation – the ability to think of people widely different from ourselves as
included in the range of ‘us.’ (192)
Rorty’s
liberal irony challenges the idea of
philosophy as a mediator, a neutral metaground between personal idiosyncrasies and a common
theoretical denominator ensuring the communal wellbeing -- between the private
and the public. Instead, he understands the human shared ability to feel pain
as the only kind of social glue. The liberal perspective of his theory is
concerned with moral aspects of that common ground, without prescribing a
theoretical foundation.
Time
and again, one realizes that hitting the
blue note can, indeed, get us closer to one another. It is also reasonable to believe that it cannot leave one unaltered. Even if
the dictatorship of discourse keeps one caught up in a constant narrative loop,
then “you’ll need a bloody good dj, won’t you?” (Jeff Noon, Needle in the Groove 287). Yes. Because
that is the way to remix one’s life into an act of constant gratitude for the life
that relies on the source of power to ensure the cohesion of fellowship
confronted with a challenging combination of uncertainty and underlying
determinacy throughout the remix of the noises’n’silences. It is the unifying,
peaceable/peaceful spirit of the Pentecostal fire, whose rebelliousness is the
source and the impetus to the
impassioned commitment, fervent striving for reawakening cultural activism and
regaining human dignity through soulful life. It is the radical light shift.
[1] The
blue pill enables one to “play within the game, but against gamespace”[019].
[2]
See A Singular Modernity: Essay on the
Ontology of the Present, particularly in the chapter “Modernism As
Ideology.”
No comments:
Post a Comment