“The flock of birds had spiraled elsewhere, and Jean-Paul was gazing
at the empty sky, which had nothing left to hint about itself unless blue air
knows something I don’t know.”
Dennis Cooper,
The
Marbled Swarm
In “Nostalgic Technology: Notes for an Off-Modern Manifesto,” Svetlana Boym
theorizes erroneousness of technology as a parallel to human fallibility.
Technological imperfection reveals a possibility for the “exploration of
the side alleys” (Boym, no date, no page number). Paradoxically, this provides
a platform for thinking and living differently. It informs our capacities to
see a streak of erroneousness not as justification, proof, or a definition of
human nature, but rather as a potential for living out other aspects of
humanness.
In Boym’s parlance, it opens up an off-modern avenue for neither quixotically
fighting the technological goliath, nor sheepishly following its commandments.
Put differently, it presents one with a possibility to see the reality afresh
if one opts for off-modern alleys, instead of modern, postmodern, antimodern,
hypermodern, or any other variant to signify the discourse and culture in the
aftermath of the linguistic turn. By extension, it reinstates the question of
the human face. It inspires thinking that “it’s only human to err”
should not be confusedly equated with “to be human is to err.” Because to
simply be—to resist the mindless “progress” rush, to resist noise--what it is
to be human, as well. Terry Eagleton:”Because we are able to be false to our
natures, there is some virtue in our being true to them” (
After Theory 110).
Pressing the power button on an electronic device, more often than not,
triggers a visual sensation. The focus of the activity is communication between
the sense of sight and the brain. When that communication is initiated by a
signal from the screen, the screen becomes a participant in the communication
flows. How that complicates the interaction between it and the viewer is
encapsulated in jan jagodzinski’s notion of the inverted gaZe. In
Youth
Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media (2004), he investigates the
effects of the exchange between the viewer and the screen. Despite the seeming
activity, that in the cases of heavily addicted gamers nearly equals a round
the clock engagement in digital adventures, a mutual effect on both interlocutors
jagodzinski characterizes as interpassivity.
Seemingly, terra digita is the land of opportunities that requires no
strenuous moral efforts. And yet, it is hard to imagine effortless perpetual
hyperreal networking. Even if freed from all ridiculous ethical burden,
threatening to overshadow the light from the screen, at least one
unpleasantry remains: that one has the body. Another one is that there is
an unstoppable activity of the mind. jan jagodzinski: “Such technology has made
all of us walking cyborgs. So where is the ‘No!’ to be found?” (
Youth
Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media 186).
Antidote against robozomboid mentality should not be confused with the
activity as it is promoted in contemporary culture, which does not leave a single
empty second, which worships passivity inhibitant placebo--self-celebratory
muscular kinetics--which makes the world kingdom of somnambulism, which is a
bottomless source of fun. Resistance against reckless instrumentalization
hides, among other places, in reconfiguring the subject-object nexus neither
via reexamining their political positioning in terms of narrowly defined
power-relations, nor solely via redescribing their ontological statuses.
Rather, by being “free to undo,” as high priest of the supreme imagination,
James Joyce, teaches (
Finnegans Wake 208).
A possible trajectory of undoing that knot is by refocusing the debate onto
dromospheric ecology, as Paul Virilio urges in
Open Sky (1997). He
stresses dromospheric pollution as an undertheorized and neglected aspect of
life: “Alongside air pollution, water pollution, and the like, there exists an
unnoticed phenomenon of pollution of the world’s dimensions that I propose to
call
dromospheric – from dromos: a race, running” (
Open Sky 22
emphasis in original). The reason for the lack of awareness of the
contaminating aspect he sees in the blind spots of memory, in “forgetting
the
essence of the path, the journey” (
Open Sky 23 emphasis in
original). Dromology is, thus, antidote against desertification resulting from
dromospheric contamination: “
the desert of world time—of a
global time—complementing
the desert of flora and fauna rightly decried by ecologist” (
Open Sky 125
emphasis in original). Dromology is an ecology aimed to recuperate the pace of
life.
In that context, the center of the subject-object thematic is relocated into
the gap between them—on the path so persistently kept out of the critical
focus: “Between objective and subjective, it seems we have no room for the
‘trajective’“ (
Open Sky 24). Or, do we not, indeed?
Reflections about objectivity/subjectivity have lead to the insights into
the possibilities arising from the repositioning of the categories in question
within the communication in hyperreality. Jean Baudrillard speculates
about it in
The Vital Illusion (2000). He aptly remarks that an
unprecedented paradigm shift occurs in hyperreality. Arguably, hyperspace
enables reconfiguration of the hegemonic position of the subject. Such a
situation calls for a further elaboration: interrogating specificities of its
impact on the object. Or, the subject. Or, the way human beings live: how
objective the subject should be/can be in order to recuperate human dignity;
how the culture of distraction frees the object in the world of the dethroned
subject; how free a value-free subversion is; how disinterested a value-free
subject is; how victory defines itself in the newly created situation.
Possible explanations to a great extent depend on the reading mechanisms
utilized in reconfiguring vocabulary of culture. To simplify it without being
simplistic, one is prone to see disinterested reading of subjectivity as
somewhat similar to metaphorical blindness, meaning being metaphor-blind, but, perhaps,
also metaphorically blind. In addition, it indicates an alarmingly high degree
of irony-sensor scarcity. Essentially, it results from being desensitized to
literary subtleties necessary for refining
the remix.
That said, Virilio’s desertification trope is a helpful tool. It can devise
a technique for describing peculiarities in the lacunae: to read ironically the
triumph of the supposed subversive interventions and to understand such victory
as an exodus awaiting the fruits of the promised land. After velocity,
dromology. After the bewildering wilderness, purifying water. After the passage
across the river, the radical light shift. After the oblivion-inducing desert,
resensitizing to the power of metaphor.
A way to reawaken these atrophied sensors is reading how Dennis Cooper’s The
Marbled Swarm (2011) weaves an obscure world of a mysterious linguistic web
epitomizing self-consuming and self-preserving potentials of language:
I learned this quote-unquote exalted style of speaking from my father, who
originally cooked it up after several early business trips around the Western
world. He nicknamed it “the marbled swarm,” which I agree is a cumbrous mouthful,
and its ostensible allure received a decent portion of the credit for accruing
his, now my, billions. (48)
The story is told in a low-pitch voice…an enigmatic husky whisper, in the
key of kitch’n’sink mystery-meets-horror narrative. Seductive, meandering
tunnels of it tell a tale about a boyish young man, sickeningly rich,
emotionally sickening, and metaphorically sick. S/he inherited from
quote-unquote father the language called
the marbled swarm,
a blissfully devilish weapon to be used in the battlefield called
Paris über alles!
S/he comes to the chateau that s/he is about to buy. The family who are
selling the haunted castle immediately reveal the presence of the ghost of
their late son Claude to be part of the reason for deciding to sell it. Claude’s
brother Serge befriends the future owner. Having shaken on that one, they see
the deal opening up the avenues for solving the mystery of the death that could
be a suicide, a murder, or, just fake.
Claude, possibly his own patricidal father Jean-Paul, is out of his mind
while performing the transcendental confirmation of his presence in the memory
of the fictitious impersonation of his late brother Serge, “a most unsightly
daydream in which a beet-red, hyperventilating infant gave birth to another
crimson, screaming infant” (
The Marbled Swarm 4).
Safely hidden from the public eye in the trunk of the car heading for Paris,
their mother Claire indulges in the bestiality of a fratricidal act conducted
on the twins called Jean and Paul engaged in the act of a mutual, self-imposed
affixation.
Claude-Paul’s suicidal girlfriend is an emo-faced version of Claire’s
subterranean swamp empire in the basement of the chateau, “if that mixture of
recalcitrance and focus is even possible” (7). The éminence grise, the family
chauffeur, orchestrates the family saga remotely. The idyllic, pastoral scenery
acts as the rhetorical code of the narrative, which enables its participatory
properties. The arcadian landscape becomes a literary device whose role is that
of a semi-permeable membrane selectively remixing the flow from the abutting
tales. Its rustic charm assumes the function of prenatal perfomative ontoethics
of postmortem aesthetics:
Q: We are not
robozombies!
A: We are not
robozombies!
If this way of DJing the roots of mafotherlands
is linguistically sinful, let’s immerse our good selves in the blasphemy of
creatively critical corrosion of discursive authenticity. If the flow is a
potential anagram of something else, let’s play Silent Spelling Bee. Yo! If a
communicational tunnel can become the communication channel, please, stay tuned
just phunkie green. Yo!
If it is antisubtonic to assume that a dream of
self-creation is incompatible with deselfing and / or cultural remixing in the
spirit of communal cohesion, one must be humble enough to call oneself a
postfuturist--the offspring of the bloody phunkie DJ mafothers. If this way of
reimagining literature, practice, and the everyday sounds too utopian for the
pluralist critical taste, too bad for the consensus. Postfuturist storytelling
finds the challenge worthy of resistance. Because the remix simply is in
alignment with life.
If to follow the radical guiding light of
refacement is perceived as contradictory to critical remapping of the creative
realms, one should be modest enough to be reborn through silence and solidarity
of reindvividualized selfless fellow-humans engaged in enduring creation of a
free culture based on trust and love.
