United in Discussion

Yo! At the conference titled Haters Against Superficial Perception Of Death[1] (University Off O’Heigh, on the first Friday of the month of April 4004, under the auspices Off Translucent Association) the presenters, commentators, inquirers, curious passers-by, docile acolytes, fervent opponents, sage advisers, intoxicating skeptics, soul-crushing cynics, suspicious episteme-hunters, gullible followers, robotic  listeners, gluttonous collaborators, and zomboid elocutionists are united in kicking the underbelly of perception of death as the (fore)shadow of the  kingdom of beyondness. The gathering aims to trigger tectonic shifts in the undercurrents of the consensus about life as a transitory stage in universal whateverness. On this gloomy Fday afternoon, when most of the denizens are rushing towards their suburban homes, wrapped in woolen shawls to protect themselves from the attack of the raging hostile wind, an unlikely crew of different affinities are assembled at 45 Half-Floral Ave. The unquenchable remixing drive brings them at Celestial Academy to for a zillionth time share, confront, offend, embrace, reject and/or accept each other’s opinions. A special treat for the listeners and the dedicated crew of WELD/Program. Awm.  straight from the hearth off the heated debate. Cheers!

 : Ladies’n’Gentlemen, welcome to the celebration of the 30^th anniversary of the inauguration of the seminal idea that opened up a brand new universe of exploring the notions of life and death in the context of bodiless somnambulism. To my petrol delight, today we will have the chance to hear numberless thoughts about the subject matter in question. It is a great pleasure and immeasurable honor to introduce to the audience Professor Jesjerbo Einzeshoolenolbagthen, a senior lecturer in quantum economics of spaceship trade. To his or her right is seated Kronaverous Dearkxnh, postconsensual journalist and a political activist for early retirement. Further to the right is Sonnunta Arcada!, a reader in cerebratory mechanics of the printed world at the University of Guess What. To his or her right is Paneloopy Harckoffianova Xille, The University of Refined Arts graduate, public intellectual, investigating the propulsiveness and stretchability of transindividualism. With no further ado, join me in welcoming our guests – give it up for the hopefully fruitful outcome of today’s gathering. 

(Clap. Clap. Clap.)

:Thank you. There is no reason to delay the first presentation: ladies’N’gentlemen, Professor Einzeshoolenolbagthen!

: Wassup! Lemmie see what we have here…a bunch of bloody bastards, eh? Well, well, well…what an inspiration for a dirty cynical mind…thanks, thanks everyone…What can I say? My early encounters with the notion of death as a prolegomenon to a kingdom of whatever was a decisive signal to my brain to set itself in the ongoing alarm mode. Why, you may ask…The answer is pretty straightforward, as I am not accustomed to postponing anything that can be done any time. Hence, my answer is because I recognized in it traces of a hallucinogenic attempt to establish once and for all the belief in vapidousness of transience as such. Having realized in it a far cry of what I found to be simply an abhorring recapitalization of the then already overthrown spaceship trade dogma, I felt a pang probing my chest with the intensity of the speed of light fertilized by the infinity of velocity. So, I instantly held my breath, exhaled deeply, and listened to the lexical selection packaged in phonological opulence, stunningly seductive, yet insufficiently deceptive for a veteran skeptic like your humble orator. That moment marked in my life the beginning of the struggle that I intend to end when death itself confirms my suspicions. Here’s to that!

 (Uaploading.)

: Thank you, Doctor Einzeshoolenolbagthen. I suggest we hear the next presenter before the beehive of thoughts spurred by Professor’s immersive account of his or her experience shatters the spirit of communal cohesion. To that end, Kronaverous Dearkxnh–the floor is yours!

 : Hey, thanks! What an afternoon, eh? Never thought I’d meet so many mind-blowing idea-generators at one place! Huh! Where to start? How to begin? When nothing that can be said would be welcomed with an emphatic flame…When all one could ever conjure is his or her own vision of heaven and / or hell, respectively, dependent on that very person’s nutrition and digestion…What a world has been given to us to inhabit? What a universe to dream of flying across…What a grandiosity of unhistoricizable strokes telling us where the answers cannot be found…what a glory of living in the agony of uncertainty, indecision, unrevealed paths leading who-knows-whatever…what a privilege to be called a human being (if the term itself, along with the signified, has not been  completely swept from the debate) here and now, regardless of where and when it is. Forever inspired by this blood-sucking realization about one’s spatio-temporal conditionality, I decided to commit my life (even if it’s just an appendix to the great book of antibiotics) to saying yes-I-mean-no-well-eh-oblige-me-not-I-dunno…to a constant influx of an ever increasing amount of ye stubble instability of death.

(Clap. Clap. Clap.)

:Thank you! Thank you, indeed! Isn’t the unstoppable train of thought just that! Before this stream of ideas drag us from concentrating on the gregarious aspect of today’s event, let’s keep our minds firmly focused on the direction from which the next speech bravado is coming from – right from the head and mouth of  Sonnunta Arcada!

:Not accustomed to live encounters with the producers and owners of ideas, I find my own position somewhat unnatural. This is only to beg in advance your forgiveness for the possible mishaps, flaws, and distortions in my speech. What makes this situation even more peculiar is that it seems to be the very tail of the body that the snake’s gob is biting. Let me be more precise and say that just because I became irreversibly disillusioned with regard to the possibilities and elusiveness of a live verbal exchange, I redirected my activities towards the printed world and the enchantments of its stubbility. The exegesis of my professional orientation and expertise is archeologically leading to the moment when the allegedly scientifically justifiable truth about  the undoubtedly empirical phenomena such as life and death (which /”      “/  turned out to be a mere projection of the speaker’s predecessor’s metaphysical aimless wandering) was “revealed” to me. I was shocked, to say the least. To be more generous in specifying the experience it, actually, was, I have to acknowledge another hardly comprehendible fact: my mind was spinning down a dazzling whirlpool of a hot-cold rollercoaster…Hwere to go, what to think, whom to ask, to whom to confess, with whom to share…was beyond my command…So, I opened a book…to find consolation …and guess what I found! The same idea that blew away the ground under my feet just minutes prior to that. But then, what’s even more shocking is that this time I felt it spoke differently to me. Then I decided to spend the rest of my life--regardless of how it stands in opposition to death—to the study of the world of print. Hence, all the flawed aspects of my today’s speech. Thank you!

 (Uaploading.)

:No, thank YOU! What a paradoxical way to direct one’s life! (Anyone care to share cognizance abt different paths?) May our attention not be dispersed in a factional fashion. Rather, let’s remain firmly nailed to the train of word of the forthcoming misterlady speaker -- Paneloopy Harckoffianova Xille!

: Pleasure to see all the familiar faces, as well as those of complete strangers! Ha! Whatapackofmotherphunkiewolvesyouare, ARE you not, huh? I have every wish to open today’s presentation with expressing my measureless joy caused by the flashes and sparkles in your eyes so alive. My idea of the prospects for increasing the strechtability of  one’s own being was originally inspired by my mother’s incidental delivery of an auxiliary lesson in literary theory. Specifically, on one occasion when she was lulling me  with an astonishingly sedating fairy tale told in a velvety voiceover alternating between a hysteric  soprano and a sinuous alto. Another piece of random literary knowledge and…well, skill…what else…happened when my ol’ man sent to my eye a look of 1000 swords  and zillions of elfin smiles telling me to take and read the book he presented me with earlier. Later, I realized that in his pulsating eyeball was hidden the quiet sanctuary which I’dl be revisiting as long as I live for a recharge of the battery in my pupil. The core of the lesson was  the revelatory clue for interpreting a dream of a factory worker in the key of continental politics of analysis and turntablist poetics in tune with the cosmic walk of the silent word. Having learned what readwriting—literature--is, I set out on a journey called life by all whose imagination fails to respond to the challenge to transcend that shamefully narrow definition. I was like them perhaps. Before the earthquake that forever restructured my cognition based on a definition’s capacity for strecthability. Once I started accumulating the necessary skills for the development of my life-defining strategies, I started hearing my mother’s voice coated in the shades superseding my explanatory faculties. Thus I started exploring the possibilities to transcend my individuality by becoming a transgressive tribal transindividual. I purchased special robes  symbolizing my decision to live forever deluded by the idea that I am alive.

  (Clap. Clap. Clap.)

: Thanks all the presenters for sharing their respective illusions, anxieties, comforts, aspirations, desires, thoughts, passions, and/or anticipations. Having said that, we’ll open the discussion and start with the A/Q session. Yes, I can see some hands over there…Lady-gentleman in the back has priority, for s/he is among the minority who actually paid the $10 admission. We’re all ears…

 (Uaploading.)

: As an inconsolable victim of the collapse of biologically inspired financial determinism, I am, to put it very mildly, unsettled by the words coming from the confession shared by Ms. Xille. What strikes me in particular is his or her uncritical, unquestioning acceptance of intuitive critical thinking and involuntary educational practices. As a single child, I too did receive a lesson in psychodynamic of remixing on more than one occasion while my carers were desperately, unsuccessfully so, trying to pacify my prenatal frustration manifested in the nonverbal quest for the financial essence of existence. However, I resisted it uncompromisingly, unconsciously knowing that the revelation was only to come once I would be given a privilege of enrolling in an actual educational institution and being epistemologically baptized by experts. Hence,,, my question is: Hwat the phunk does voice have to do with motherphunkie bunch of elated teleological stubbilities that the ingenuity of expertise transforms into whadeva?

(Clap. Clap. Clap.)

: I am most grateful for this strange encounter with the question throbbing the stretchy boundaries of transindividualism. First, I would give the reason for my gratefulness. It, on the one hand, pierces the tissue of the lofty body of definition per se. These metaphorical injuries are, on the other hand, the very manifestation…proof, so to speak…of the beauty of living as a transgressive tribal transindividual. Further, it vivaciously stabilizes the uncertainty of living through the aura of delusion as a selfconsuming counterpoint. In other words, that instantiates the presumable impossibility of a physical impact on metaphysical phenomena, outplaying transcendence as such. And I take hearing this to be the most gratifying of tensions that either a question like yours, or, a given life situation–regardless of the extent of postmonsterity–can present a human being with (A pint on me after the panel in the pub across the street, cool?)

(Uaploading.)

: On November 6^th, 20X, I went to the river to drown myself. I walked towards the shore and felt the misty air dampening the hairs on the inside of my nostrils. Humidity always smells of fall. Feels like yellowish leaves after the rain, emanating etheric waves into the bubblesque surrounding. The softness of the materialized scentless olfactory sensation evokes the stillness of rainy Saturday mornings in a working class quarter, in an apartment with the windows facing factory chimneys–the only joyful site in the morosely stern landscape. And that view from the bed on such drenched mornings was an equivalent for the long, foggy afternoons that suffocated the soul with the most startling of blankets. As I entered the water, I felt as if my awareness of the body robbed of a meaning was conquering my heart. With each inch of my skin subjugating to the powers of the aquavasion, I sensed the vurtuality of the new meaning expanding…merging with the tidal touch and presenting it with a new insight into the notion of spatial coordination. And I stopped when the waterline marked the boundary around my thigh, dividing it into two incommensurable zones. And that line told me about a mindless, devastating, arduous, merciless brutality of living unaware of the meaning of one’s own body.

:Thanks for the exchange. Time to proceed with questions…Gentlemanlady in the front row…

 : Wassup! Nothing can be more pleasurably challenging than asking me to share details of that conversion. First, one needs to be phunkie unborn into a seeker for whateverness in the kingdom of diachronically unhistoricizable space. Secondly, one MUST phunkie admit being gifted with the insurmountable amount of suspicion. This MUST be excelled in every phunkie communicational context that comes to hand. It is most elegantly done in three easy steps: (1) Find a random, ephemeral string of words written on the bank of the river; (2) Call them a bird; (3) Proclaim their/its originating from and residing in your romanticized dream of  dysfunctional family relations…and VØILAE–from a potential, weak cynic, one is converted into a born skeptic–never to enter the kingdom of reverence again! Cheers Madam Charie in re-tro-spect!

: On November 9^th, 20=, I realized that from being ostracized (point A) to being exiled (point B), may appear as a static trajectory. If you have a sense that such a journey does not coincide with the definition of kinetic, you may want to (a) Rethink your trip, or, (b) Redefine the word. If you opt for (a), that can either imply checking the flexibility of your muscles, or, a suspicious approach towards the very road. If your choice is (b), however, the consequences are more than obvious. Now, checking the flexibility might as well entail testing the stretchability of the muscles, whereas introducing a suspicious attitude towards the road itself can require physical engagement, should there be any need for its readjustment. By contrast, although the obviousness of the consequences resulting from the (b) option could be disputable, that fact is not worth considering for a simple reason: the very obviousness. As the most controversial among the abovementioned issues, special attention will be paid to it. A kind of blindness as it may be called, refuting the argument against obviousness is linguistically justifiable because the latter is one of the lesser rhetoric strategy and even a more morbid logical maneuver than the former. By the same token, although the act of refuting features a bearing pertinent to ad hominem argumentation, its application is, nevertheless, valid, as it confirms the belief in the power of non-principal parts of speech in the Latin language. Alas, that linguistic agency, a.k.a. Lace’n’Trism, features severe symptoms of an auto-asphyxiating bias. However, any objection of that kind signals unforgivable ignorance about the significance of lingua franca. As such, the linguistic common ground is frequently debated from the perspective of grounding-biased opponents. Needless to say, these opinions decisively ignore their own position.

To be aware of such ignoration counteracts the very stance. Thus, the awareness is ruled out as a possibility. Once the magnificence of even-handedness has manifested itself in the full glory of the broadness of perspectives, the consideration can proceed to the next stage, being: What can one do with a definition in order to change it? Or, the word for that matter.

:Cheers for transferring mutual thankfulness onto the all present and absent alike. Why don’t we take the next question from the floor…

 :ALrajt everyone! Coming from impoverished lower middle class background, I learned my lesson as I was going from one metonymical caveat to another. The most revelatory insight to me was that about sexual inscriptions on the food we daily devour not asked if we feel like it at all. Thus, I tend to read into spurting members and dripping cunts the foreshadowing of a loaf of apples bought to fruition with the erasure of my vision of the lionized past from the minds of the protagonist of the oneiric experience I might will have had. In all honesty, I am as modest as phunk! Gluck, gluck, gluck–ih am. In my teens all the streets of even the most deserted of towns were populated, inhabited, and dwelt by people. On summer nights, I would stroll along la boulevard and melt into the lusciously sweating concrete. I used to adore the filthy city. As I allowed the metaphorical magma to conquer my pores, I was automatically infused with nutrients necessary for the growth of me – baby! That I took to be the compensation for the birth-given class status, now forever lost to the endless wandering and search for more of that liquid rushing into the simile of my body. Like phunk!

:Hwatss yo question?

:As a specialist in question-free culture, I take the liberty not to respond to the previous commentator. Given the metamorphosis from a personified dactyl to a hyperbole of persona, my  everincreasing pleasure was being borne by a logically salient belief in simultaneous amplification of impatience as the most effective life strategy, refuting all the hypotheses about the possibility of the synonymity of value-free, disinterested, objective, unbiased, valueless, invaluable…inutilitable. This made of me an unshakable acolyte of the evasive opposition between the dichotomies such as life and death.

: On November 15^th, 20=, I decided that, despite my favourite pastttime being humming, I find it startlingly exciting to sometimes also bruzz. The reason for this passion of mine is that it is less easily detectable. The nature of the sound hides in the friction produced by the palate and the tonsils via the vibration of the short audio channel between them. What is particularly seductive about it is the way frequency is spread throughout the oral cavity, striking with the most specific of delights the teeth, parroting big tubes of the organ, spilling the sound from the “pulpit” onto the “nave.” Now despite this enchantment, I don’t spend too much time submitting to the spellbinding charm of the titillations in my nostrils, further encircling my eyeballs, and making my frontal lobe…well—hum. From there, I feel a sensationally mild wave of numbness invading the spots on my skull from where hair jumps out of the darkness and grids the air around itself. Although inanimate in a way, each of these attached ornaments of the human body encapsulates the energy of the impulse from the source. Whether they are capable of transmitting it onto the levels of reality with which they are in contact is the enigma for us to explore. Whether on numberless rainy days the drops kissing the soil can be heard, or, the kisses are voiced out by the humming sound, is a mystery of a similar sort. But bigger than these, or, any imaginable code-protected phenomenon for that matter, is one’s indifference to possible answers. Put from a subject-free perspective: The irrelevance of either answer.

 : Orajt all! Now, to whom to shoot my question–that is the question now. Which will not keep bothering me for long…because if I learned anything during this… what all the oscillations keep slide-style moving along the death-life scale…is to kinda cut the unnecessary whirlpool of bewilderment (having indulged for some time in the seductiveness of its tormenting pleasure-pain shifts) and, in a kneejerk fashion, hear my own inner voice as somebody else’s whisper. That said, I choose Sonnunta Arcada! to be the target of somebody else’s whisper-turned-my inner voice-turned a question for somebody…who happens to be YOU. Now, I hear the reverberation of the whisper that sets my mind in a specific state–preparatory, so to speak...a hallway leading towards a full-fledged interrogative form of the verbalized tissue of my thought…While I’m acutely fixated on its tender delays, I am being transformed into a decoding machine, translating the nearly infraaudible noises onto not-yet-ultraaudio sound. What I hear can, in words known to man, be expressed as follows: How aethical is it to think aethically?

 :Daplotri

: Yo! Wassup! Familiar as I might be with the nature of the transformations you are referencing in an extended introduction to the core of the ienquiry in question, I, at the same time, can by no means guarantee that I find your utterance completely comprehensible. However, that I take to be resulting from my lousy capacity to convert audible material into an imagined written form. For me what can be read is only what is materialized as the written word. All the alternatives I take to be almost the wagers for my failing to satisfy the addressee’s desire to be given an answer. Yet it neither prevents me from trying to respond, nor does it diminish the pleasure I get from the process of conversing. The preparatory stage of such a complex task is to wish strongly, visualizing it at that, if not in strictly image-like terms,  that my ashes be dispersed over the branches of the beech tree from the memory of my childhood as it’ld have been told and recorded by my posterity. Second, I surrender to the detonation of the words describing, albeit ignoring any reference to spatially situating the scenes, the act of burying my remains under the roots of the willow tree, drenched in my ancestors’ tale of their own death wish. Once the generational post mortem visions converge at the point where the universe’s cry can be heard if the senders of the respective visions show their IDs confirming the fervent listeners’ citizenship, I start seeing one’s spoken expression acquiring a form of the word recorded in the written form. The initial stage of such a transformation resolutely and unfailingly opens with the Truth #1: Urban legend has it that most of the translating business is bulls*it, which it is. But so are most urban legends. To me, to be able to begin any kind of activity, especially those related to the stringent procedural ordeals of the trade I chose to invest my academic capital in, I need to hear this truth in its entirety. More so, I necessitate to be alertly aware of its tangential, yet vital, connection to the fact that proves impatience to be the most gratifying of life generating strategies. Having had the fusion of the Truth #1 and its accessories reach the heart of my linguistic machinery, I inaugurate the advancement of transforming the content into the only one understandable to me. All the imprecision, imperfection, ignorance, ignoration,  and incomprehensibility, carefully calculated, predicted, and included in the horizon of expectations both on behalf of me as the creator of the answer and that of the creator of the question, united in being doomed to failure in either asking or answering…well…just about anything…Once I arm myself with the equipment I need to launch my thought to the heights of wordneckbreaking and shoot a breathtaking transfer beyond my idiosyncratic boundaries, thereby for a tiny second making of myself the Popeess of anticlimactic slogans, I am ready to decipher the meaning of the printed world-appropriated expression. Presuming that I have gone through all the abovementioned preparations while explicating the procedure itself, I am found at the apex of shooting a loser’s attempt to meet the requirements off A/Q games. 

Who Time It Is

: Having sheen your vocally uttered interrogative statement in the form of the printed world inscription in the pool of uncertainty, with the unshakable bias towards stubble simplicity, On How To Phunkie Remix (ØØØØ) translates the situation into:

: How. Here’s to Ben! You’ve been listening to WELD/Program. Awm. It is 3:30 PM, time for your humble DJ to thank you all for being with us. Thanks ladies’n’gents, comrade cyborg-talkers! You’ve been listening to WELD/Program. Awm. It is 3:30 PM, time for your humble DJ to thank you all for being with us. More of our activities can be found just around the corner in a spectacular, kaleidoscopic maze through the enchanting realities of both written and spoken word.

Dapoltri! 

---

[1] Nikolina Nedeljkov, Haters Against http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGeaGCsH1iE

Shadow Talk: Sites of Decapitated Majesties, Cites of Dethroned Words, and… (Part 2)

The Present of the Future Past: On What Can Be

“[T]he trade sells itself on enjoyment, on not offending.”

Stewart Home, “Writing about Writing”

Navigating the seas in which all stories meet in the communication flux demands devising tools for expressing one’s voice without necessarily claiming newness in the strict sense of the word. How then, one wonders, can the past narratives acquire the voices in which to speak here and now from the recuperated future? How can the communication channel be freed from contaminating noise, so the remix can speak clearly in the intersections of the time axes? McKenzie Wark:

Hacker history does not need to be invented from scratch, as a fresh hack expressed out of nothing. It quite freely plagiarizes from the historical awareness of all the productive classes of past and present. The history of the free is a free history. It is the gift of the past struggles to the present, which carries with it no obligation other than its implementation. It requires no elaborate study. It need be known only in the abstract to be practiced in the particular. (A Hacker Manifesto [097] square brackets in original)

In “Dead Doll Prophecy” Acker explicates her hacker tactics. She discloses particulars of the legal battle fought over the four plagiarized pages from a novel by Harold Robbins.  How abstract hacking needs to be in order to be practiced in the particular without legal repercussions? How many generations need to pass on their gifts so that one day today can be the history of the free? How does such history write itself?

Acker’s story is a testimonial about the generation of a piece of writing that entailed legal action and caused a series of disheartening, legally futile, defenses: “Understood that she had lost. Lost more than a struggle about the appropriation of four pages, about the definition of appropriation. Lost her belief that there can be art in this culture. Lost spirit” (33). On the one hand, plagiarized pages inspire the poet to question her own literary creed and, on the other, to suspect the literary establishment’s doctrine. Both have a paralyzing effect on her because The law is murky and kafkaesque experience precludes her inability to understand of what she is guilty (30).

In the story, the character Capitol makes dolls. The characters of the dolls re-enact the protagonists of the allegedly actual events: the poet, the publisher, the journalist, the dead doll. The characters of the dolls symbolize various aspects of the life of a writer in the society colonized by commodity: ”HERE IT ALL STINKS […] ART IS MAKING ACCORDING TO THE IMAGINATION. HERE BUYING AND SELLING ARE THE RULES: THE RULES OF COMMODITY HAVE DESTROYED IMAGINATION” (29).

The poet sets out on a journey into the literary world. She practices her writing according to the founding belief, instead of conforming to the founding fathers of the trade. She believes that writing has nothing to do with the rules they invented and everything to do with freedom: “Writing must be for and must be freedom” (“Dead Doll Prophecy” 27).  For her to be free means to refuse the advice from the elders. In particular, the Black Mountain bards inform her that a poet must find his own voice. She finds it to be counterintuitive because such voice would define her in an excessively dispiriting way--the way that would make her unable to recognize her own voice.

What is more, she feels that determining such voice would affect her sense of authority. Specifically, following the Old Masters’ sagacious suggestion would be an act of succumbing to the patriarchal authority, against which she, in fact, rebels. That would mean acknowledging god-like figures, and such recognition offends her sense of power and divinity: “All these male poets want to be the top poet, as if, since they can’t be a dictator in the political realm, can be dictator of this world” (21).  Approving of their quasi-godliness would be a self-sacrificial act that she finds…well, just out of the question: “Deciding to find her own voice would be negotiating against her own joy” (22).  

Instead of a demigod, she decides to be who she is—a writer: ”Wanted only to write […] To hell with the Black Mountain poets, even though they had taught her a lot” (22). The writer doll detects that the discussion is out of focus. Like the grey law, the Black Mountain poets’ rhetoric disguises the narrative of a different kind: “Knew that none of the above has anything to do with what matters, writing” (34).  She learns what heritage is and what to do with it. She learns that those who do not inherit—hack. McKenzie Wark: ”The hacker class is not what it is; the hacker class is what it is not—but can become” (A Hacker Manifesto  [045] square brackets in original).

: “Style can be a limitation and a burden” (William S. Burroughs, “Creative Reading,” The Adding Machine 39).

Yes, if it is practiced in a calcified form. But, then, one wonders whether it can be called style. In any event, in order to distance herself from the ossified perception of writing, she centers her literary persona around negation. The poet suspects that the criteria determining what good literature is correspond to that what qualifies a book to win a literary prize (22). Pornography, science fiction, and horror novels, according to the literary standards, cannot be classified as good literature. In response, she opts for “both good literature and schlock” (22).

The writer doll does not trust the bards’ supposed cleverness. She feels that what is commonly perceived as cleverness is blind to its own susceptibility to social control and manipulation. For that reason, she redefines her literary persona based on negation: ”Decided to use language stupidly. In order to use and be other voices as stupidly as possible, decided to copy down simply other texts. Copying them down while, maybe, mashing them up because wasn’t going to stop playing in any playground. Because loved wildness” (23). Eventually, Capitol decides not to make dolls any more”: “CAPITOL THOUGHT, THEY CAN’T KILL THE SPIRIT” (34).

Before that climatic moment, the writer doll realizes that part of her writing tactics is multiple offence: “Offended everyone” (22). The dilemma remains how the reader can respond to an offensive text. To that perplexity Robert Glück has an answer. In “The Greatness of Kathy Acker” (Lust for Life: on the Writings of Kathy Acker), he writes about the first encounter with Acker’s text as a massively confusing and unsettling reading experience. First, it didn’t reveal anything. Nor did it bring consolation. It inhibited any typical response. It is small wonder, because it aims at subverting literary conventions by destabilizing the reader, “keep[ing] the reader off balance” (46). It disables identification with the text (47). It suspends belief in the text.

Glück first realizes that reading Acker’s fiction is an oneiric experience. He also decides that in the story, it is repetition that has a dream-inducing effect. It is the repeated description of a dream in Acker’s I Dreamed I Was a Nymphomaniac that makes the reader question one’s perception. The passage that describes a dream Glück finds intriguing. The doubling of words makes him feel anxious because he cannot understand the reason for that discursive self-proliferation. He is not able to comprehend it because he cannot identify a possible reason for the writer’s strategy. Her intentions at that moment are completely beyond his imaginative and mental capacities. That disruption of the communication between the reader and the writer is a source of bewilderment and sadness. It arouses a feeling of loneliness, of being “lost in strangeness” (46). In that instant, the reader sees no sane way to respond to a psychotic text: “a text that hates itself, but wants me to love it” (46). The intention of the writer might be forever beyond the reader. But, what is experienced as the text’s invitation to be loved despite it hating itself, can certainly reinforce the reader’s decision to ignore such a wish. What the reader can do is endure in suspending disbelief in one’s otherness. And to love the reading experience for reconfirming such an insight.

Subjectivity, authority, and identity seem to be pivotal to Glück’s analysis of that revelatory encounter with the text:

When I lost my purchase as a reader, I felt anguish exactly because I was deprived of one identity-making machine of identification and recognition. I gained my footing on a form of identification that was perhaps more seductive, a second narrative about Acker manipulating text and disrupting identity. To treat a hot subject in a cold way is the kind of revenge that Flaubert took. Acker’s second narrative acts as a critical frame where I discover how to read the work: the particular ways in which a marauding narrative continually shifts the ground of authority, subverting faith in the “suspension of disbelief” or guided daydream that describes most fiction. (47)

:”Does the writer play fair with the reader?” (William S. Burroughs, “Creative Reading,” The Adding Machine 42).

Yes. The reader is inspired and patient enough to recall that discourse is a means of social control and manipulation. Acker’s text in particular makes manifest the ways in which authority can communicate its power and what possible responses to it can be. Her work demonstrates how voices of resistance can be defined and articulated. She delineates the social margins aware of their otherness. The awareness of one’s marginalization defines the authority:

Acker takes revenge on power by displaying what it has done; she speaks truth to power by going where the power differential is greatness, to a community of whores, adolescent girls, artists, and bums, the outcast and disregarded […] If hegemony defines itself by what it tries to exclude, then the excluded merely need to describe themselves in order to describe hegemony (48).

And they do. In voices. In shadow talk. The self-abhorring text that wants the reader to love it is also the text that wants the reader to know that it is fiction. It is the authority that wants to be dethroned. That wish the reader can satisfy. Postfuturist storytelling bears witness to the double blessing called language that savagely, but generously, reveals its duplicity. On the one hand, it is a source of confusion, control, oppression, and suffering; on the other hand, it provides room for its own remixing. Through such eerie oscillations one finds  libratory and redeeming powers of language. As one reads, one recognizes text to be, by definition, in the service of the sovereign—language. As one uses language to communicate, it occurs to the interlocutors that the communication channel is polluted. That awareness ensures resistance against contaminating noise. That subtonic ecorebellion is a means of remixing the noise.

Language epitomizes the intensity of consumption and creation. Language is threatening and friendly. In language, it is possible to argue. Alternatively, one can also share in language. Language is elusive, like its fluctuating laws, but it mercifully recuperates the right to the remix of the self-inducing confusion. It teaches how to look at both sides of imperfection: one’s own and everyone else’s. By showing its own limits, language indicates the limits of the human grandeur and reaffirms human potentials. It does so by resisting the belief in the possibility of replication. It shows that a replica is an impossibility by reanimating the stigmatized belief in authenticity.

:”Does the writer have a distinctive style?” (William S. Burroughs, “Creative Reading,” The Adding Machine 39).

Yes. It tells about the vision of reindividualized humans, engaged in creation and activism, vitalized by and inspiring solidarity and creation—the rebirth of the human face through alternating cycles of silence and noise defining resistance against the cannibalist culture of competitors and nihilist greed, as described in Eagleton’s The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction (2007):

As for wealth, we live in a civilization which piously denies that it is an end in itself, and treats it exactly this way in practice. One of the most powerful indictment  of capitalism is that it compels us to invest most of our creative energies in matters which are in fact purely utilitarian. The means of life become an end. Life consists in laying the material infrastructure for living. It is astonishing that in the twenty-first century, the material organization of life should bulk as large as it did in the Stone Age. The capital which might be devoted to releasing men and women, at least to some degree, from the exigencies of labour is dedicated instead to the task of amassing more capital. (155)

Acker’s uncompromisingly disobedient voice is a NO to such culture. In that voice she exemplifies a-proprietary writing of history. At the same time, in her shadow talk, it is a YES to remixing it. To reclaim human dignity. In Leslie Asako Gladsjø’s  movie Stigmata: The Transfigured Body (1992), Acker expresses her discontent: “If I had to spend all the time thinking what I cannot do, I wouldn’t be able to live.” This statement encapsulates resistance to oppression, reconstructing the axes of domination, refocusing the power relations narrative, and redefining subjectivity. Acker’s stories show how it feels to be alive today  in the culture that is not exactly a place that provides room for an impassioned immersion in play and creation. But can be. As pieces of fiction, Acker’s stories might want to be read. Acker’s metacritique is performative. The reader wants to reanimate it. The reader sees Acker’s writing as an instance of storytelling from the dark lands that draws inspiration from the transformative power of the world of letters, turning the temporarily contaminated communicational tunnel into the green communication channel and celebrating the greatness of the human spirit.

 Off- Heritage Song(s): Avant-Garde Revisited and Remixed

Epitaph/Epigraph: ye Roots of Uprouting[1]

 “Death is the loss of love.”[2] Dehumanizing. ”Exile whose other name is Delayed Death.”[3]  Disgust. “Robot fucking. Mechanical fucking. Robot love. Mechanical love. Money cause. Money cause. Mechanical causes. Possessiveness habits jealousy lack of privacy wanting wanting wanting.”[4]

Has New York/U.S. lost its hopeful appeal? Forgotten a possibility of rebirth from the jazz era, the obscure countercultural charm of the Beats, fervor of the civil rights movement, revolutionary NYC downtown noise of the 1970s…and the magic of rock’n’roll? Suffered from the amnesia affecting the core ingredient of life? ”If I knew how this society got so fucked up, maybe we’d have a way of destroying hell.”[5] “Even in the face of something like gravity, one can jump at least three or four feet in the air and even though gravity will drag us back to the earth again, it is in the moment we are three or four feet in the air that we experience true freedom.”[6]  Perhaps it’s not about knowing in the strict sense of the word. More likely, it's about the twist.Postfuturist at that. Methinks. 

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[1] Like the interludes, sections 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 demonstrate inspired writing/writing through affect, as explained in Chapter One.

[2] Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996) 159.

[3] Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates  (1996)  29.

[4] Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in Highschool  (1978) 98.

[5] Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in Highschool  (1978) 66.

[6] David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, 1991 (41).

Shadow Talk: Sites of Decapitated Majesties, Cites of Dethroned Words, and…(Part 1)

(An) In-cighte[1]

If noise occurs in the communication channel, the information flow acts accordingly in order to remix it. As an element of the communication flux, text is, by definition, in the service of the sovereign—language. It is also a form of resistance against contaminating noise, i.e., a means of remixing the noise. Language epitomizes the dialectic of consumption and creation. In language it is possible to express, say, tell, present, state, utter, but what makes language a double blessing is that it resists precise verbalization, or, in some instances, altogether resists verbalization. Language is frustrating because what it tends to distort the message that is to be delivered. However, besides being elusive, language is also protective. By making manifest the imperfection of communication, it silently acknowledges its limits. Analogously, it shows the limits of the human grandeur and reaffirms human potentials. It does so by demonstrating the impossibility of replicating what the contemporary pluralist discourse suspiciously  calls authenticity.

Creation is a purifying force in the communication channel. In the parlance of Terry Eagleton in “The Revolt of the Reader” (Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 1986), it means “to take over the means of production” (184) from the oppressor. As such, doing things with text is an ecorebellion. In order to present instances of green storytelling uprising, the analyses of Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations (1982) and Stewart Home’s Memphis Underground (2007) are centered around McKenzie Wark’s cultural critique titled A Hacker Manifesto (2004). They are mainly explored via the tacit content of the narratives because it is those  layers of the text that have the capacity to subtonicly  undermine the discursive. Relying on William S. Burroughs’s admiration of plagiarism, Acker’s Great Expectations is read in the light of the triumph of imagination and spirit, according to her testimonial  “Dead Doll’s Prophecy” (The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility 1994).

Extralinguistic and imponderable as it may be, silence, is also endemic to literary playfulness. It is the impalpable level of the story that suspends the reader’s belief, and yet sustains oscillating amidst uncertain certainties. It stirs the slumberous spirit, sedentary heart, and (un)dead soul. It undoes delusional  thinking. Of primary concern in this analyses is identifying the areas that can inspire suspicion about contemporary cultural realities. The critique is based on dissensus: a disbelief in what cultural mechanisms of control impose on one as the only way to live. It is resistance against the entertainment-military mentality that deprives human beings of individuality, and fellowship of communal cohesion.

Reading-writing against noise pollution is a creative practice, a form of resistance against oppression. It faces its own predicament resulting from the relational character of language. Yet, there is a noise filter that literature devises to silently clean the communication channel. The tone is the tacit layer that voices out the unsaid of the text, thereby enabling a fruitful exchange.  Through that layer Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations and Stewart Home’s Memphis Underground tell a story about how it feels to live in the  underdeveloped and overdeveloped worlds in an age of the oddly uniforming and isolating global politics. They challenge the reader, destabilize one’s trust in the narrative, and open up lateral paths of undoing the forged image of the totality of  discourse.

By extension, they render remixable discursive cultural realities, cultural constructs.  Reader-writer is understood to be  the DJ--the voice sometimes manifest, at times subtonicly present, a vessel for the free flow. As a re-enactment of the notion of construct, storytelling shows the limits of both dehumanizing and human control/power, thereby rendering remixable both discourse and cultural realities.

 Grace and/as Justice: Kitch’n’Sink Aesthetics of Ignoration

     Reading-writing across media, genres, and disciplines is a unifying practice combining words, sounds, and images. It is a remixed concept of storytelling demonstrating possibilities of analogous interventions on other planes. For example, it implies a critical reading of self as fluid and revisable through an exchange with fellow humans. Likewise, it opens up back alleys enabling silent disruptions  in the discursive, subverting the forged image of discursive omnipotence. By extension, it is reasonable to believe that culturally constructed realities we know are not immune from remixing either. For that reason, this is written in hope to reanimate the spirit that the novels analyzed propagate: freedom from enslavement by delusion that is transforming the world into a disney-babylonian market.

Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations (1982) portrays consumer paradise, the exposing the picture of Dorian Gray of commodity culture. To elucidate the thematic, the analysis is followed by an investigation of literary techniques in Acker’s story “Dead Doll Prophecy” (The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society & Social Responsibility 1994) Her metacritique of obsession by possession is taken as a literary tool enabling responses to oppressive cultural realities.

            In England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (2001), Jon Savage contends that “history is made by those who say ‘No’” (541). The exploration of Acker’s writing reveals a genuine punk-rock contribution to the process of making-writing history, the process that should by no means be confused with monopolizing history. Rather, it means challenging and remixing bewildering realities thriving on possession and the exercise of sheer power. McKenzie Wark:

Even the would-be “radical” histories, the social histories, the history from below, ended up as forms of property, traded accordingly to their representational values, in an emerging market for commoditized communication. Critical history only breaks with dominant history when it advances to a critique of its own property form, and beyond, to the expression of a new productive history and the history of the productive. (A Hacker Manifesto [094] square brackets in original).

Great Expectations criticizes vulgarized aesthetics rendering spectacular both life and creation. Acker presents the schism between the everyday colonized by commodity on the one hand and, on the other, a counteracting cultural practice. Through a layered psychodrama, characterization in the novel epitomizes living in culture of fluctuating media, self, and storylines. The characters flow and mutate, thereby suggesting both their interrelatedness and diversity within  one.  

: ”What about the title? Does it arouse interest?” (William S. Burroughs, “Creative Reading, ”The Adding Machine 42).

The novel opens with a conventional introduction of a character. The narration is measured. The storyline linear. Ignoring conventions of documenting sources, this particular form of plagiarism remixes reader’s interest, as  Anne Humpherys observes:  “Acker appropriates not only one of the greatest titles in English fiction and many sentences from Dickens’s novels, but also the three-part structure of Pip’s expectations /childhood, which she entitles ‘I Recall My Childhood’ and ‘I Journey to Receive My Fortune’; then ‘The Beginning of Romance,’ and finally ‘The End’” (“The Afterlife of the Victorian Novel: Novels about Novels,”A Companion to the Victorian Novel 449).  As such, it is a manifestation of  refacement, sustaining provocative dynamic through narrative tactics that  paint an excitingly distorted jigsaw puzzle.  As much as it is a literary strategy, it is also a statement about the reconfiguration of control and power. It renders remixable both tradition and contemporary cultural realities.

:”And the characters? Can you see them? […]You can move character and the story to a different time and place” (William S. Burroughs, “Creative Reading,” The Adding Machine 42-3).

The instable identity of the characters is underscored by fluctuating narrative styles. The name of the antihero is Pirrip, which might mislead the reader to expect an overt reference to Pip from the pretext. Instead, Pip is transformed into Peter at the end of the opening quote that is not one. That is how Acker plays with liquid characters in liquid culture: O emerges from a conversation with Rosa, who is introduced through a series of letters to her boyfriend Peter, a well-connected, promiscuous, violent, and well-off cokehead.

Complicating the themes of societal institutions and the implicated artistic practices, the character of Kathy is mediated through the third person narrative. She, as an artist, is mainly portrayed from the prism of her private life that underpins the public plane. Yet, the poignancy of that sphere traverses the private. The spectacle bridges the gap between the private and the public, if one can even speak about the distinction any more (or, could one ever?). Focusing on the intriguing, provocative, controversial, Acker satirizes celebrity culture that humiliatingly redefines the human face in the language of face-lifting and sappy entertainment. Dissolved emotionality, imbued in human life devoid of intimacy and genuine passion is suggested through art, sex, money, and politics, sickly conspiring in corruption.

Understandably, the details from private life flashed out in this part of the novel are, actually, not private at all. For instance, Kathy’s husband is involved in the North Eastern power coalition, whose socio-political-financial positioning is enabled by the connections with the organizations and bodies in power (218). The story acquires the elements of a psychothriller. The husband orchestrates revenge against his wife’s father, recklessly instrumentalizing her. Moreover, he has sex with his wife’s mother. In the tradition of Greek tragedy-turned-melodrama, the father/father-in-law/husband finds out about the affair and kills his wife.

Provocativeness in Acker is a stylistic intervention against sensationalism. In order to criticize cultural realities by demonstrating an extreme version of the commodity-induced insanity, the text may acquire something of the sentiment it reflects upon. However, the tone, heavily relying on irony, ensures a distinction between those levels. The story, thus safely deploys shocking, destabilizing techniques without being domesticated by the sentiment it scrutinizes. It provokes the reader’s suspension of the belief that to be obsessed with possession is what makes a human being human. That tone is here to bring to awareness what William S. Burroughs calls “the conditions of total emergency” (Burroughs Live: The Collected Interview of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997  59).

Thus, the subtonic layers of the narrative, in a quite clearly articulated voice speak about how it feels to be alive in the world that makes the human face horrifyingly invisible. Insisting on the superficial, prosaic, and vapid, between abhorrence and abhorrency, the story shows the monstrous, inverted image of the human face. Logically, the absurdity of such culture is presented in the artistic context, which precludes creativity instead of enabling it to flourish. The voice is stunningly subtle, yet disarmingly direct and paralyzingly honest: ”All my family is dead. I have no way of knowing who means me harm and who doesn’t” (209). That is how a human being feels in a psycho-babylonian-disney world: family, money, family money, art, sex, celebrity, and inheritance conspire against a person enraged on the surface and sad deep inside: “I knew I was no longer a person to a man, but an object, a full purse. I needed someone to love me so I could figure out reality” (209). 

Latent pain speaks particularly through the episodes about Claire’s relationship with her family—an aloof, negligent, elusive father and a disturbingly self-centered mother,  enmeshed in an inner storm, eventually climaxing in suicide. The family scenario is a devastation script for the daughter: “My mother is adoration hatred plan. My mother is the world. My mother is my baby. My mother is exactly who she wants to be. The whole world and consciousness revolves around my mother” (176). As a consequence, Claire is growing up into a person who will later be looking for a consolation in crude, nymphomaniacal, sadomasochistic, self-oblivious placebo.

Syntax signals the state of the mind in a limbo where the broken family narrative meets the erosion of communication on the communal level. The closing paragraph in Great Expectations is a breathless flow of speech disjoined from thoughts. Punctuation is scant. It delineates the horizon of their disappearance of the invisible subject and the hardly identifiable object. The punctuation, sketching the ghostly dummy subject, is also suggestive of the subject/object recuperation: “What is, is. No fantasy […] I know the only anguish comes from running away” (242).

Amidst that detrimental noise, a noise filter arises. Acker’s voice is blatantly defiant, yet astonishingly elegant with a queer twist. Its delicacy is in surgically meticulous (dis)obedience and wild lyricism. It is also exaltedly-humble, as subjectless sentences evidence, showing a radical change in the character. From such broken beat narrative is born a peculiar form of subjectivity. Antonio Negri:”These paths are rich—paths that lead not to undefined nothingness but to the fullness of destiny, to an objective and dramatic limit, that will, through pain, become subject—a process of redemption” The Labor of Job: the Biblical Texts as a Parable of Human Labor 107). The path to redemption is humbleness. In storytelling, it can be manifested, as it is in Acker’s prose, in subjectless sentences, suggesting deselfing, but anticipating reindividualized subjectivity. Liquid identities in liquid culture.

Subjectivity in Acker’s prose is an answer to the dilemma presented in Cora Kaplan’s Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (2007). She wonders why the Victorians still inspire us. Kaplan indicates that some writers are trying to respond to the postmodernist “prematurely[,] announced ‘the death of the author’”(8). Some such attempts are, in effect, uncritical revamping of the Victorian monolithic subject.[2] However, there are readings of history that remix it. Kaplan claims that a correlation between Victorian sentiment and that of our epoch lies in our need to rediscover humanness and innocence. She puts emphasis on a humble acknowledgement of human imperfection as a basis for empathy with the Victorians from a contemporary standpoint.

That certainly can be part of how a human being can be described today.  However, instead of asking why the Victorians still inspire us, one is rather inclined to accentuate the inquiry differently and ponder the question about why they inspire us now. One wonders whether the reemergence of innocence, romance, and the simplicity of the everyday in that context indicates a disguised susceptibility to sentimentalism, sedentary imagination, and dormant spirit. A possible reason for the interest in Victoriana can also be that today there is an aspect of the antecedent era that resonates with contemporary predilection for denial. As there was in the time of the Victorians, today there is also a need for  undoing fabricated realities. Back then, it was the imperial myth of omnipotence. Today, it is the delusional belief in the totality of discourse. Therefore, postfuturist research seeks “the sediments that must be there if one is here” (Jay Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace 29 emphasis in original).  

Jon Savage, for example, looks for the other Victoriana in England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (2001). Situating the study within the subcultural milieu, he criticizes the misconception of punks. More precisely, he points out that a reductionist perception of those subcultural scenes as aggressive and destructive results from a failure to recognize the subtext of intensity in punk expressive modes. Namely, the extremity of their idiosyncratic idiom comes from the investment in resistance against the imposed ways of living.

In that other Victoriana that Savage seeks, he sees the correlation between the twentieth century and tradition: “With their syphilitic, archaic language – ‘vile’, ‘poxy’, ‘bollocks’ –and this costume which theatricalized poverty, the Punks were the Postmodern children of Dickens” (374). Or, perhaps, the postfuturist renegades of Dickens. Punk rock writers, remixing the words of historical mafothers, are not nostalgically trying to reestablish the past, as no historical epoch seems worthy of complicity in restoring social inequities, austerity, and inhumaneness. Instead, literary DJs critically reimagine the past to reawake the future, by resurrecting the present.

In response to the past, one can create “quite conventional and nostalgic novels in both form and content” (Humpherys 444). By contrast, the postfuturist storytelling engages playful juggling of the pretexts and aftertexts, thereby discovering “what has been ignored, diminished, mis-stated, or distorted” (Humpherys 451). Of particular significance are Humpherys’s remarks about the aftertext subverting the pretexts to tell a story of resistance against politics of exclusion (Humpherys 449). Therefore, one can hardly imagine such remixes of the heritage to be nostalgic, especially if resisting the non-existent death of the subject entails a re-enactment of an authoritarian subjectivity:

For history to be something more than a representation, it must seek something more than its perfection as representation, as an image faithful to but apart from what it represents. It can express rather its difference from the state of affairs that present themselves under the authorship of the ruling class. It can be a history not just of what the world is, but what it can become. (McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto [091] square brackets in original)

Indeed. Envisioning such prospects, the looming shadow of the past legacy, coupled with the opacity inherent to literary fabric, the relational nature of language complicates devising new narratives. There are at least two aspects to this conundrum. One concerns the problem of power; the other is related to the question of novelty. The former’s complexity lies in the fact that the ruling class creates historiographies that accentuate its power. Creating alternative narratives can be a NO to the fabricated scenarios. The latter (the question of novelty) reflects Paul de Man’s ideas from Blindness and Insight. Opacity of language is both an obstacle and an inspiration for sustaining perpetual dialogue between modernity and historicity through postfuturist storytelling. Thus, the only thing postfuturist reader-writers can do is never stop naming: “Her name is not important. She’s been called King Pussy, Pussycat, Ostracism, O, Ange. Once she was called Antigone…” (Kathy Acker, Pussy King of the Pirates 163 ellipsis and emphasis in original).

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[1] Rage Against the Machine, “Take the Power Back”: “In the right light, study becomes insight” (Rage Against the Machine. New York: Epic, 1992. CD). Through this slight alteration in spelling I also reference jan jagodzinski’s homology site/sight/cite  reflecting the three registers – the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic – but also indicate the triad, constituting the liquid poetics deployed in this work: site, cite, and insight, unified in signifying spatio-cultural positioning, narrative exchange, and vision. Implied are also Paul de Man’s ideas about blindness and insight. Note that the reference to the RATM track emphasizes the process leading towards insight—vision—rather than championing the idea of taking power. This reflects the overarching idea in this dissertation about the limits of human powers and control. It is the platform that enables refocusing the debate onto the remix based on mercy.

[2] See Kaplan’s analyses of A.S. Byatt’s Possession: a, David Lodge’s Nice Work, Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, Fowels’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and particularly Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George.