Realistically Utopianish Speaking...

 “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.