Enduring Schooling : Against Noise, and in the Service of the Remix

I

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891): “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing” (42).

McKenzie Wark, “A Christmas Carol: Dedicated to Scrooge, and His Art Collection” (2012): “With financial capital in particular, it is not just that financial ‘products’ are like contemporary art. They are contemporary art” (par. 20).

or, so somnambulist logic would want one to believe.

Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction (2007): “If this sounds unpleasantly slavish and self-denying, it is because we forget that if others do this as well, the result is a form of reciprocal service which provides the context for each self to flourish. The traditional name for this reciprocity is love” (91).

II

How Significant and / or How to Say it

”History is made by those who say ‘No’ and the Punk’s utopian heresies remain its gift to the world.”-- Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (2002)

Based on Terry Eagleton’s insights in After Theory (2003), invoking McKenzie Wark’s thoughts from The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011) about the work of Alexander Trocchi and, more broadly, the legacy of the Situationist International, the remix proposes low tech poetics. Originating in music, the remix combines textual, audio, and visual expressive modes. Creating a hybrid idiom, it puts in conversation certain elements of high culture with a more accessible, yet not oversimplified, not less rigorous idiom.  Firmly anchored in the potential of humbleness, it disambiguates the deceitful idea about the totality of discourse, all the while investing in the capacities of critical / creative reading-writing. Likewise, it objects to the delusion of human omnipotence, simultaneously acknowledging the limits and power of the human.

if not getting paid for housework is regarded as a betrayal of monetizing labor, it might be a good response against the misconception about the logic of somnambulism

To build on symbolic in Jon Savage’s historiography England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (2002):”The lack of an overall, defined ideology was heavily criticized but, just like Punk was at its most powerful when impossible to define, this is not a weakness, but a source of strength” (xvii). Neither a nostalgic longing for the times bygone, since no historical epoch is worthy of complicity in the proliferation of inhumane social relations nor idealized future anticipations--neither backward nor forward fabrications of cultural realities and / or selfhood--is in the postfuturist parlance spelled out either in the key of longing for the lionized past or somnambulist projections into the romanticized future, disregarding the relevance of being present in the here and now.

Erratic Pathways of Power-Narratives

The remix--hic & nunc, anticarpe diem turntablist poetics--seeks sources of storytelling, i.e., creative / critical remapping of cultural realities in counternostalgic, antisomnabulist legacy of punk rock mafothers : perseverance in the reemergence of genuine communication in the key of humbleness invigorating solidarity within the community of selfless, yet reindividualized, fellow humans enduring the hindrances to patient, persistent creation of a free culture based on love and trust. Focused on the existing vocabularies, always bearing in mind the inherited ones, DJ postfuturists draw inspiration from selectively remixable tradition and current stories, and yet, distance the inquiry from reestablishing social relations based on inequity, austerity, and inhumaneness.  On the contrary, the remix is the recuperation of the past, reimagining the future, and resurrecting the present.

Against Robozombism

The counterpoint to an arena of self-centered, competitive, solely accumulative erudition, nihilo-cannibalist rivalry, indistinguishable, uniforming amalgam suppressing individuality and mimicking, rather than containing, contemporary culture’s coercive, somnambulist, massifying, monetarist dictum is the awareness that opens up an avenue for thinking a possibility for reshifting onto the pattern that illuminates the significance of the questlike endeavors such as education.

III
 
The Education-Knowledge Nexus in the Service of Social Cohesion: Towards the Community Based on Love and Trust

Language is elusive. But it’s also protective. So is knowledge. So is education. At the moment, education is leaning towards an accumulative pattern of obtaining knowledge. It reflects the model of progress for progress’ sake, absurdly resonating with its supposedly oppositional, utilitarian nature that humanity seems to have acquired, oblivious of the need for disrupting such a logic with a friendly reminder that progress is and should be in the service of human beings.

The angle casts light on education to be constitutive of a vibrant source of resistance against noise, and in the service of the remix.

Weakness as strength. Language that eludes, but also protects. Maybe only such epistemological knots can, in a quirky way, explain why the struggle for power is not all education is about. Like the reconstitution of communal cohesion. Like refacement : rebirth of the human face through alternating cycles of noise and silence :  reintegration of  subtonic hi-fi preserving the wholesome sound of creation.