Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (5 / 2)

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Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (5 / 1)

This blog entry has been temporarily removed. Further info will be available in due course.

Thanks.

Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (4 / 3)

against distraction / against overexposure

“He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.”

James Joyce, Ulysses

If there is a way to approach the perplexity of the ineffable, if it is possible to experience contentedness with perceiving it without entirely comprehending it, the way may be glimpsed via the metaphor of the organic harp whose strings are moved by “one intellectual breeze,” as Coleridge’s highly contemplative poetic devices suggest (“The Eolian Harp” line 52). If such natural imagery can be thought of as a means of portraying the inexhaustible source quenching ceaseless thirst for incessant learning, the way to open up for its abundance is via the trope of “the  Great universal Teacher,” as invoked in “Frost at Midnight” (line 63).

If such contexts offer anything that could help conjuring up the key in which the remix invigorates and consolidates creative / critical voices in the service of peaceful/peaceable resistance to noise in the communication channel, it is the awareness of the significance of the fellowship of selfless, yet reindividualized, humans humbly, yet shamelessly, exercising the right to the distinction between individualism and individuality, between uniformity and unity.

If such an approach can open up the avenue elucidating further possibilities for learning, it may be in the light of the search depicted in Vladimir Nabokov’s reminiscences of his mother’s dedication to collecting mushrooms, as presented in Speak, Memory (1999):

One of her greatest pleasures in summer was the very Russian sport of hodit’ po gribï (looking for mushrooms). Fried in butter and thickened with sour cream, her delicious finds appeared regularly on the dinner table. Not that the gustatory moment mattered much. Her main delight was in the quest, and this quest had its rules. (28)

If anything, this provides a great lesson in the perception of intentionality as directedness, not purposiveness, but not purposelessness, either. It is also suggestive of an antiutilitarian counterpoint to self-referentiality of formulaic, cumulative approach to research and knowledge for that matter. As such, it certainly casts light on some of the issues pertinent to shrines of erudition—academia.

It is endlessly fascinating and bizarrely amusing to listen to some contemporary academics dissecting the work of Virginia Woolf. Despite the celebratory undertone and congratulatory subtext, one cannot help but detect the discrepancy between the uttered and silent portions of some messages. Regardless of intentionality in either (since it is beyond both the scope and capacities of this work to decipher their character with regard to the nuances of the parameter in question), one can barely ignore peculiarities of worshipping in Woolf’s work the voice of a courageous literary experimentator, exploratory literary critic, and an advanced cultural activist. Her daring attitude towards political elites, cultural establishment, and literary canon cannot be contemplated upon without noting the stance in these proponents of academic freedom a tint exerted by rigid institutionalized, expropriated knowledge imprisoned in the hypocrisy of the allegedly liberated modern day mind, and yet, exuding the very dual shadow of (1)  a perverse giggle of victorian ladies in front of even the tiniest signal of obscenity, scandal, opacity, intrigue; and / or (2) uncritical indulgence in the trickiness of tradition-entrenched elegance and lyrical smoothness.

Can the subconscious of contemporary victorians be freed from reading in the key of sensationalism, sentimentalism and / or superficial entertainment, one wonders.

Time. Progress. Thought.

Steven Connor, “Literature, Politics & the Loutishness of Learning”:”It is entirely unlike the plainer, more professionalized, technicised critical diction that had begun to be developed among university critics like Richards and Empson from the early 1920s onwards, a critical writing that attempted to take the measure of its literary object rather than wrangling or straining to effect sacramental mingling with it” (9).[1] While discussing the contrast between the style of Samuel Beckett and the aforementioned critical voices, Connor inspires thinking that for a meta account of a literary work to be objective (if certainly not in exactly the same way scientific objectivity is validated), it does not necessitate assuming a rhetorical apparatus decisively distinct from the vernacular in which the work was written. In other words, approaching a piece of literature from a vibrant critical distance does not require a scientific travesty, nowadays still — absurdly enough – echoing the looming cloud of positivism. Conversely, while stylistic resonance between the object of the study and the critique itself is not a precondition for a sound critical view, validity of the account can be maintained without  the disguise of forced technicality and mechanistic professionalism aimed to constitute the distinction between the two realms : language on the object level and idiosyncratic meta takes on it.

How this relationship is established is probably not among easily explicable issues. However, Connor introduces the notion of the metatextual voice (14) that can perhaps offer a possibility to understand at least part of the intricacy. He remarks in Beckett’s works the voice of the literary aspect of the text, but he claims that, at the same time, there is a voice that tends to suggest to readers the clue for creating a meta account of the text analyzed. This may mean that the clue sets the framework in which the work is read. It should follow that those whose reader valences reverberate with the tone of the metatextual voice come up with interpretations akin to the key in which the text was written. It might even be assumed that only such cases occur, given the precoded interpretational frame. Further, readers attuned to different frequencies might “fail” to provide a valid take on the piece scrutinized.

Yet, anyone with a modicum of experience in reading-writing matters finds such reasoning erratic. The previous example of the comments on Woolf’s writing clearly indicates the tension between the readings seemingly in tune with the text and an oppositional streak objecting to celebrating it in the way that ignores fervent subversiveness pivotal to her oeuvre. This is obviously even a tougher nut to crack, but it is not unreasonable to believe that what is at stake constitutes a defiant response against blatant formalistic interventions within reading-writing practices and irreducibility of a piece of literature to platitudes. As such, it generates a sound basis for resistance integral to the remix.

In academic context, these antithetical aspects, frictions, polarizations, and collisions could be understood to stem from what Connor sees as an antagonistic duality manifested in the contrast between academic ideals and academic trivialities. One such triviality is  incapacity to come to terms with the contradiction of the limit of knowledge  regardless of the cognizance accumulated. Another is juggling academic freedom under a threat of invasive corporatization. Both reflect issues in the domain of wrestling with the question of power. The symbolic of “the imaginary power of escaping the demands of power”(15) is powerful. But, perhaps, even more alleviating is Connor’s statement spelling out the moral aspect of the thematic:”If ethics may be defined as deliberation of the good, and politics as the necessary coercion of the good, then this is a politics characterized by a refusal of coercion” (15).

Accordingly, and as mentioned before, McKenzie Wark’s vocabulary in 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (2008) proposes containing, rather than escaping the problem of power. This finds fertile soil in an attempt to grapple with the fusion of the problem of power, the question of knowledge, and the notion of commodity. Fabrication of knowledge might be the crudest example of it, but a no lesser evil is expropriated knowledge, quite frequently mobilized as a vehicle oiled by and fueling a misconception about the totality of discourse and the way it is reflected on the dynamics within cultural realities – ivory/babylonian atopia between ruritania and cyborg urbanity, between the nodal and the central.

/

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty writes:

I can crudely sum up the story which historians like Blumenberg tell by saying that once upon a time we felt a need to worship something which lay beyond the visible world. Beginning in the seventeenth century we tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of God, treating the world described by science as a quasi-divinity. Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century we tried to substitute a love of ourselves for a love of a scientific truth, a worship of our own deep spiritual or poetic nature, treated as one more quasi divinity. (22)

In the light of the critique of a distorted understanding of progress as an allegedly advanced version of the legacy of the Enlightenment, in Open Sky (1997), Paul Virilio examines the evolvement of scientific axioms of sorts. One of the aspects of the debate particularly focuses on the adjustment being made within the time / space  / distance triad. Situated in relation to the categories of speed and acceleration, the three seem to be undergoing considerable redescriptions. Virilio is prone to back up the discussion with the constant called the limit of the speed of light, thereby ensuring a critical distance towards and indicating a limit to potential uncontrollable reconfigurations of the components of the equation and the equation itself.

Namely, the mutually conditioning relationship between discourse and cultural realities have apparently brought about a resultant confusion, so to speak. More precisely, emphasizing speed tends to entail shifts in the perception of temporality to the point of a radical destabilization of the notion and experience of chronology, ”an unprecedented temporal breakdown,” as Virilio puts it (Open Sky 71). This is more often than not manifested in uncritical debunking of historical thinking.

Coupled with this is a propensity enabled by advanced technologies that creates an impression of space reduced to virtual dimensions. In the vein of Virilio’s critique of telepresence--virtual interaction, outdoing other modes of communication--it is possible to seek seeds of recuperation from the ashes of dissolving dialogue associated with ascribing to the human and, by extension, to the virtual properties incommensurable with these spheres, notably omnipotence and ubiquity.

Virilio claims that certain transmutations are occurring within the time / space / distance triad polluted by the dominance of speed, i.e., within cultural realities that impose distorted relations among the three, hence entailing negligence of the very central notion and phenomenon : the journey. This he calls dromospheric pollution. One of its manifestations is a threat of the colonization of the bodily realm by “prostheses that make the super-equipped able-bodied person almost the exact equivalent of the motorized and wired disabled person” (Open Sky 11).

These tectonic spatiotemporal reconceptualizations that Virilio suggestively, and aptly so, dubs as “the desert of world time - of a global time – complementing the desert of flora and fauna rightly decried by ecologists” (Open Sky 125 bold in original) call for a specific type of greening. Such a state of affairs, implying spatiotemporal desertification, threatens to cause redescriptions of the concept of durée. And yet, durée endures. To explain the paradox in question requires, perhaps, an intervention that fortunately fails to meet expectations, thereby simultaneously reconfirming the limits and the greatness of the human.

Where eradication of the historical perspective sabotages a sense of the future, insistence on euphoric instantaneity obliterates the seeming focus on the here and now. In Steven Connor’s parlance, the polemic can be approached through the prism of the refined perception of intentionality as directedness, rather than a goal oriented activity. Likewise, Connor’s trope of impassioned emptying vividly illustrates the redemptive potential of the otherwise devastating situation of telepresent bodiless bodies.

Noting, yet  not anathemizing, overstatements about the value of virtual spatiotemporality, simultaneously acknowledging the role of the cyborg sphere, pondering the perplexities re-focuses on the distraction-free domain. Were it not for the context of Virilio’s thought that ensures a different perspective, one wouldn’t be surprised by his dystopian account. Likewise, did he not explicate a take on a hidden perspective (Open Sky 2) in the crevice of the somewhat apocalyptic portrayal, one might succumb to the idea of ruthless, coercive desertification – a conquest of the trajectory by velocity – one could surrender to a reckless, oppressive tyranny of acceleration, dislocation into a distraction called noise in the communication channel.

And yet, durée endures. Virilio indicates an angle that enables defiant resistance to a verisimilitude of noise. In an empire of the ocular, domineering visual sensations inflict overexposure as a prevalent mode of noise. Here, “right to blindness” (Open Sky 96 italics in original) is asserted against politics of distraction. Paul Virilio, Open Sky: “Sometimes all you have to do is look differently to see better” ( 97).

Thus, hic & nunc / anticarpediem poetics celebrates the power of weakness as an enduring source of a critical / creative perspective worshipping the investment in a distanced approach to discourse, cultural realities, and their mutually conditioning relationship. By so doing, it not only secures a critical stance towards the misconception about the totality of discourse, but also demonstrates the point from which remixable character of cultural realities is revealed. Specifically, highlighting the idea of the  historicizable ahistorical, the remix neither lionizes the past nor romanticizes the future. It does not glamorize ecstatic sensationalism  of instantaneity, either. Rather, it glorifies the possibility of redeeming the past, reimagining the future, and resurrecting the present.

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[1]The essay  is based on a talk delivered at the Samuel Beckett: Debts, and Legacies seminar, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, June 19, 2009 and a plenary lecture to the Literature and Politics conference of the Australasian Association of Literature, University of Sydney, July 6, 2009 (http://www.stevenconnor.com/).

Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (4 / 2)

NO : Normcore!

“They say, ‘So what?,’ I say, ‘So this.’”

Iggy Pop, “Hideaway,” Blah, Blah, Blah (1986)

A lump of grayness, almost suffocating in its thickness preventing the particles to obtain the form which would disclose their distinctiveness, casts a shadow over the scenery it can by no means be aware of. The thickness is a color. More precisely, it’s a shade—a shade of what seems to be an ever increasing darkening nuance of grayness.

There is an intruder, however, silently subverting the congestion separating chunks of space around it. The tiny rescuer of the captives punctures the seemingly impenetrable thickness with a gentle maneuver revealing the distinctive features of unruly amalgamation, simultaneously highlighting verbal reshifting from what up to that moment characterized them as particles towards the signification of the notion of particulates.

Like the smudginess of paint spread across the canvass, like pixels consolidating an image out of dispersal, like digitized narratives pasted on etherized celluloid, like poetry evaporated from moist barks, raindrops drying on the surface of leaves, like words emanated from the withdrawal in front of the impossibility to either comprehend in its entirety or verbalize in totality the subtle, yet vigorous, modification of the scenery from the site of abhorringly oppressive consternation towards an openness enabling the smooth, yet balanced, flow of the mighty oxygen and its two co-dwellers within the precious molecules constituting vivid play of white and blue interlocutors.

/

The thematic portrayed here is partly an acknowledgement of the idiosyncrasies pivotal to the genre forged through the hybrid form such as essay at cultural phenomenology—a crossbreed between a style of writing, an epistemological perspective, and a discipline. Partly, it can be perceived as the cluster of questions informing the subject matter of Steven Connor’s piece entitled “Obnubilation” (2009).[1]

Few can deny the intensity of the experience of immersing oneself in cloudgazing. The notion and the phenomenon suggested in the title of Connor’s essay can be thought through the idea of the historicizable ahistorical. To bring the context closer to the core debate of this work, one is prone to invoke the frequently stated historical fact about the contribution of certain artists on the way creation is perceived. For example, it has often been indicated how revolutionary the sound of the Stooges, especially the 1969 self-titled album, has been. As much as that particular one can be thought of in the context of the revolutionary role, so can it be said that the following ones have been of very specific significance for the history of subcultural voices. Fun House (1970), for instance, relies on a darkish psychedelic strain inherited from the preceding decade, and yet, featured in a slightly modified fashion. Not only did it bring to the music scene reflections about and echoes of the liberatory predilections for the experiment such as the sound of the Stooges, but it also introduced a hint of where such inquisitiveness was going to find fruition, albeit conditionally speaking. More precisely, Raw Power (1973) vocalizes rebellion the way rusty, slimy sewers would display a commentary on the manners and nuances of discharge layers manifesting themselves over time.

This fervent unorthodoxy, innate to the music of the band, set the tonal frame in the light of the signature unadulterated invocation of the opacity imbued in fuzzy, grumpy, unrefined, untamed intensity of nonconformity : the alphabet of resistance : a selective approach to the vacillations between dissensus & consensus. Thus, it, if not foreshadowed, then inspired the nascent punk rock generation to adopt certain aspects of the subversive idiosyncratic idiom and intertwine them with the novel creative / critical accounts of the world. As if it were now, the hybrid including both robust, defiant edginess and a vibrant, yet gentle, lyrical streak of sorts opened up the avenue of exploring, on the one hand, a troublesome socioscape calling for an increase in communal cohesion and, on the other, demands at the level of the individual in the key of integrity, as well.

How the band’s music redescribed the musical pattern of the sixties seems to be of particular relevance. Given the following decade that brought the advent of punk rock, little doubt can be cast upon such an assumption. And yet, for the generations who have been introduced to the fruits of this paradigm modification in the aftermath, it is highly unlikely to ever experience the authentic freshness of the sound in question. This by no means diminishes either the pleasure gotten from or the reverence for either the revolution or its fruits.

Conversely, other contexts do not seem to necessitate the same kind of historicity. For instance, no first hand experience of the epoch is needed in order for one to be provided with an unhindered access to the reasoning depicted in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1961 film The Night (La Notte). Namely, in the wee hours of the morning, amid decadent luxury of the party at the Gherardini family, Lidia (stunningly acted by Jeanne Moreau) wanders in solitude. Directionless, she comes across a young man named Roberto. A sudden spell of a night summer shower entails a seductive conversation in the stranger’s car. Driving through the forest of rain. A romance is emerging from the horizon of the mansion where they return. Soaked. What it is that motivates Lidia’s withdrawal confronted with Roberto’s (charmingly subtle, yet courageous, cameo played by Giorgio Negro) lips approaching hers might elude verbal articulation. Perhaps, it is not something entirely divergent from that what makes Valentina Gherardini (glamorously portrayed by Monica Vitti), having almost gotten involved in a wild adventure with Lidia’s husband, Giovanni Pontano (the role, sublimating the troubling hollowness borne out of sweeping—dazzlingly solemn—alienation, presented by Marcello Mastroianni), restrain herself from interfering with the marriage.

Given the subtext within which inexplicable dynamics of the overarching question about what it is is sought, it is not unreasonable to contemplate the humbleness of accepting the answer and understanding it without entirely comprehending it in the context of Connor’s idea of impassioned emptying, as presented in his essay “How to Get out of Your Head: Notes toward a Philosophy of Mixed Bodies.” It may easily be the very kindred concept that ensures the perception of the significance of bands such as the Stooges. Likewise, it could appease the hardship of the conundrum epitomized in the idea anchoring the notion of the historicizable ahistorical.

/

Thinning the layers of noise that sometimes look like clouds…To track the debate closer to the context of Connor’s writing, the vacillations suggested within the idea of the historicizable ahistorical in a certain sense can be said to parallel spatial indeterminacy of clouds. Other aspects of the phenomenon feature similar elusiveness. For example, their symbolic oscillates between the ominous and the numinous, between the benevolent and the sinister, between form and insubstantiality, between monstrosity and solace.

To position oneself according to the value thus ascribed is to accept an ontology. And yet,  a looming cognizance, half-perceivable, resists being totally encapsulated by linguistic, logic, epistemological—you name it—patterns available. Therefore, the attempt to entirely grasp it is to be approached in the vein of Terry Eagleton’s thought in The Gatekeeper: A Memoir (2001). He presents a critique of the genre called autobiography, conforming to the audiences’ susceptibility to superficial entertainment and forced affinities for sensationalism, instantaneity, and sentimentality; hence, it is to be surpassed, rather than ignored. Like the problem of power : to be contained, rather than escaped, as McKenzie Wark observes in 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (2008).

In Connor’s essay, clouds roll now as lumpy, slimy miasma, now as thick gaseous formations, yet magically penetrable by majestic rays. Like obstacles in the communication channel, clouds hinder the flow. And yet, the rays persist. Like obstacles in the communication channel, clouds distort the image of the sky. And yet, they are also “a source of vitalising rain” (Steven Connor, “Obnubilation” 5). They epitomize the idea of density. Overarching the sites below, they fuse the concepts of volume and tumult. Like a swarmed motion, they exude a sense of turbulence. They breathe into the atmosphere rhythm of collision. Their movements are restless and chaotic. And yet, suggestive of quirky consistency. The rays persist.

Elevated, like inflated droplets, swollen divinities, clouds appear as “the scene or source of visions of prodigious horror”  (Steven Connor, “Obnubilation” 7). Like magnified bulbous travelers across the horizon, this (self)-dissolving terror-vapor — between water and air / between earth and air — meets warm climes : solvent to a cloud’s frown. A sky’s puke...Pods of plague…Melancholy thunderbolt...Contagious ennui. Etherized dispassion. Borne out of the gale & storm : solvent to tumult.

They consist of particles that quite often turn out to be particulates. They are charged with poisonous ingredients, but sometimes, they bring the much needed--not necessarily polluted--water. They spread.

Such travesty is wondrous. Like noise in the communication channel, like blurry amalgamation threatening to annihilate the distinction between uniformity and unity, between individualism and individuality. Only, not wondrous in exactly the same way. Perhaps not wondrous at all. What is, however, astonishing is the endurance of the distinction. What is, however, startling is the perseverance of the human face. Despite bewildering cultural flows.

To sum up in a romanticist tradition without romanticizing either the phenomena or the vocabulary in question, the dynamic of the vapor might best be perceived in the key of natural imagery, as presented in Coleridge’s poems “The Eolian Harp” (1796) and “Frost at Midnight” (1798). Borne out of nebulous tribulation, borne out of the vitalizing dialogue between the sick and sound—refacement : rebirth of the human face through alternating cycles of noise and silence / subtonic hi-fi solidarity of selfless, yet reindividualized, fellow humans united in enduring hindrances to patient, persistent creation of a free culture based on trust and love.

/

The indefinable character of the phenomenon and experience in question can perhaps best be perceived in the context of the elusiveness of language itself. Not only is it both threateningly obscure at times and inexplicably protective, but any attempt to confine the abundance of meaning--on the object and the meta levels alike--within an absolutely precise linguistic articulation is of the same twofold nature. For example, should one try to explicate the components constituting the message, the result may be an exhaustive list including intonation, accent, lexical choices, semantic nuances, morphological playfulness, eerie and / or humbly plain spelling, untamable and / or meek, obedient punctuation, coloring at the level of syntax. However, neither any of them separately nor a fusion of them all suffice to embody the tacit sphere of that what is conveyed. It, in other words, always already remains in the domain of resistance to being entirely fathomable and / or completely effable.

Like quirky wondering in Gang of Four’s number “What We All Want” (1981),  insisting on one’s incapability to put one’s finger on it. It may be annoying, but, paradoxically enough, it can also be strangely comforting.

Like clouds : between the ominous and the numinous, between the obfuscating and the elucidating, between a wild fantasy fuelling device and a stunning alphabet spelling out the message comprehendible only in the power of weakness--one’s capability to humble oneself before and in the service of their mesmerizing stories.

[1] An extended version of a talk given in a series devoted to Clouds, broadcast as BBC Radio 3's The Essay. 25 February, 2009 ( http://www.stevenconnor.com/atmospheres.htm).

Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (4 / 1)

we are not robozombies! : resistance to somnambulist nihilo-cannibalist culture

Goal : NO!

“And the more I see, the more I know / The more I know, the less I understand.”

Paul Weller, “The Changingman,” Stanley Road (1995)

“The more I see, the less I know / The more I like to let it go.”

Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Snow (Hey Oh),” Stadium Arcadium (2006)  

What Richard Rorty criticizes romanticism for is the overlooked capacity to disavow the status of privileged cultural vocabulary ascribed to poetry. Exalting the idea of a poeticized culture in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), he certainly does not undervalue the redemptive potential of creation. However, he, nevertheless, strives to maintain the much needed restraint to unleashed interpretations of cultural remapping through the stages of diverse kinds of divinization of discourse. In Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980 (1982), Rorty fervently espouses what he calls weak textualism as a means of avoiding a deceitful idea about the totality of discourse and, simultaneously, taming the equally delusional thinking in the key of human omnipotence. McEwan does so by destabilizing the role of the narrator and other literary conventions suggestive of phantasmal, overstated power of mediation. Symbolizing self-dissolving untrustworthiness of unreliable communicational tools, narration enables consolidating the sovereign rule of the message. Dennis Cooper’s masterfully hazy fluidity of characterization challenges delusional thinking by safeguarding silent, clandestine unadulterated oases amid a dispirited archipelago infested by a seeming reign of disassociation, indifference, and decay. Jeff Noon contributes to the debate by marvelously deploying the setting in the service of the message, thereby reconfirming and solidifying the relevance of that what spreads despite the bewilderment-saturated, intoxication-affluent communication channel. Despite noise.

In one of his essays in cultural phenomenology titled “How to Get out of Your Head: Notes toward a Philosophy of Mixed Bodies” (2006),[1] Steven Connor vocalizes rebellious reflections against “the imperialism of spirit” (1).  He aptly criticizes the supremacy of and hegemonic streaks within the legacy of the age of reason, yet always reasserting the indisputability  of the significance of the ability to reason. Further, in the context of the tendencies in certain schools of thought to overspiritualize, dematerialize, and/or overrationalize self, the world, and discourse, he proposes a balanced take on the reconfiguration of the traditional subject-object dichotomy. Not entirely unlike Baudrillard’s theorizing in The Vital Illusion (2000), Connor rejects objectification of that what cannot be thought of in terms of things. Likewise, he insists on refusing to credit the inanimate with the capacity to be subjects. Pondering the thematic, Connor states:”The things towards which the mind is directed are paradoxically both in the mind and outside them” (4).

In the tradition of the power of weakness, Connor’s thought is considered particularly with regard to his observation about the negotiations along the subordination-dominance scale. Steven Connor, “How to Get out of Your Head: Notes toward a Philosophy of Mixed Bodies”: “Romanticism was particularly keen on motions of subsuming” (1).  Rather than in kinetic terms, the dynamics should instead be pondered in relation to the much needed dialectic of humbleness and elevation. Clearly, in the context which divinizes discourse, it cannot be imagined and reflected upon in a sufficiently precise fashion. If the romantics overspiritualized poetry, it only means that such a situation calls for disambiguation. The context in which this remixing sidekick technique is thinkable is certainly Connor’s magnificent device called “impassioned emptying” (8). Humbly, yet shamelessly, he remarks:”But to know yourself is to develop an intentional relation to yourself, to be able to constitute yourself as part of the world” (7).

Connor, conditionally speaking, entertains the idea of losing oneself (3), presumably within the dynamics of the notion of being oneself. The versatility of potentially misleading manifestations of the increments on such a scale is illuminated through etymological tracking of the modifications of the meaning of the word intentionality. Steven Connor, “How to Get out of Your Head: Notes toward a Philosophy of Mixed Bodies”: “In philosophical usage, particularly that of the medieval Scholastics, ‘intentionality’ has this meaning of ‘directedness’, rather than ‘purposiveness’. Intentionality is the condition of having an aim or object, not meaning to do something” (4).

The perception of so understood notion of intentionality stems from Connor’s succinct scrutiny and reiteration of the idea of relationality. It is particularly observed in the context of the question of the correlation between the mind and the world. While, as Richard Rorty claims, the world might be indifferent to our descriptions of it, that fact by no means invites indiscriminate linguistic proliferation of descriptions. While it is indisputable that what we can say about the world is what our mind filters allow, this by no means entails that any portrayal of it is discernible, cogent, and viable. In other words, what is needed is to humbly adjust our redescriptions, although we cannot expect either an absolute confirmation or renouncement on behalf of the world. That’s what is here celebrated as unshakeable balancing of constant uncertainties : throughout the remix. While selfidentification is invaluable, self-referentiality is not.

If such a strategy can elucidate obfuscating self-referentiality, strangely aligned with deindividualizing hollowness, it does so from the perspective here known as the reconstitution and reconsolidation of the distinction between individualism and individuality, between uniformity and unity. It is, in other words, the context here celebrated from the angle of refacement: rebirth of the human face through alternating cycles of noise and silence / subtonic hi-fi solidarity of selfless, yet reindividualized, fellow humans united in persistent and patient enduring hindrances to the creation of a free culture based on trust and love.

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[1] A talk given to the London Consortium,  26 January, 2006 (Steven Connor, Essays at Cultural Phenomenology, http://www.stevenconnor.com/cp.htm)

 

Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (Interlude 2 / part 2)

Icelandic Saga

in glamvoid, reigns of oversaturating pixilated metaphors rule.  / or, so somnambulist logic wants one to believe.

in response, the poetics of the remix provides devices of peaceful/peaceable resistance to noise : renegades of glamvoid.

one prefers to think of it in terms of surveillance. / only with a postfuturist twist.

We don’t buy it.

instead, alternating cycles of suspension of belief and distrust.

words of angular tenderness / words of quirky gentleness:

Q : mafotherphunkie counterrites.

A : mafotherphunkie counterrites.

Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (Interlude 2 / part one)

Interlude 2 : Icelandic Saga

“I prefer to think they’ve cancelled out and that we’re too entwined in mutual surveillance to let each other go.” Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth (369)

Once upon a time, in glamvoid, instead of stars, zillions of electric eyes’ld observe the band of the overexposed in pursuit of climes otherwise elucidated, rays from different sources to quench thirst.

Once upon a time, in glamvoid, instead of suns, camera flashes’ld announce the long sought word born out of the disintegration of corrosive noise.

In glamvoid, oversaturation by digitized oneiric imagery rules. Or, so somnambulist logic would want one to believe.

We don’t buy it.

Crawling across urban wastelands, exhausted fellow cyborgs thirst ever so intensely. Drawing closer to what they think might be the scenery of different light, messages reach them. Messages are numberless. Among them, one resonates with the nature of their search. Based on the echoes, carefully filtered, meticulously sifted, and perceived with the sensitivity granted by the correlated rhythm of their indefatigable seeking and the signals from the sites afar, they learn about a pocket of darkness on the outskirts of the city.

“roots we have no more,” they say to themselves, “aerials root us.”

Hence, they think: “we are rooted, as well.” Webwiered.

They choose daylight, when parasite signals seem to be overshadowed by different light, to find the corners of darkness promising encounters with a different version of extended moments of solitude amidst the multitudes. Solace of darkness.

Walking is the only vehicle they can afford. Underprivileged as they may be, walk, nevertheless,  they can. 

Walk they know. Because they know of the word long searched for--half-forgotten, half-dissolved in the threat of an overwhelming amnesia spreading like contagious spleen across the urbanity that seems to be redescribing its own name. Because they know how to seek. Where to look. How to walk, how to speak. Despite noise.

beyond parasite signals / beyond static / beyond noise.

“beyond glamvoid, my fellow cyborgs,” they say to each other.

That’s how they find anew strength to keep walking. Moving closer towards the peculiar dark corners, where distant cypresses whisper tales of nearly unthinkable possibility to contain noise. Spots of tales, spots of darkness.

Darkness with a strange affinity to disclosing its valences and synchronizing electric charge of its particles with the akin mollicules, thereby transforming itself into a crepuscular hue, thinning as the fellow cyborgs are populating the friendly spaces of peculiar darkness. Spots of angular tenderness, spots of quirky gentleness.

Spots that reveal what they offer : that what spreads.

Those dark enclaves turn out to be constitutive of the colossal creature whose, perhaps, most astonishing characteristic is its innerness consisting of mirrors. Thus, it is the mirror images that those weary fellow travelers find so appeasing.

“could it be that mirror images are capable of such an alleviating effect?” they ask themselves.

“possibly,” they contemplate.

Perhaps. Because those mirror images speak of different light :

words of ruby amber / words of crystallizing petals :

melting in the intersection of the time axes : DJing : against noise, and in the service of the remix.

Q : we are not robozombies!

A : we are not robozombies!

Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (part 3/4)

The Sound of Refacement : The Hybrid Word in Glamvoid

peaceful/peaceable resistance to power gladiatorship

Somewhere, in what is presumed to be his habitas, and what feels as interstellar spaces in proliferated galaxies hosting numberless orbits most astonishingly positioned against each other, Joe Palmer is entertaining thoughts of Nola. Firmly anchored in indecisiveness, or, at least, verbal elusiveness of that what once passed between them, he hopes to find a way to download her. Dweller of the kingdom of pirate frequencies, he patiently, persistently nourishes germs regenerating the invaluable legacy of the communication they once had.

Dozing on & off now, dreaming the wi(e)red dream, those vacuumlike spatiotemporalities seem less hostile. What once was a pulverizing beat of a crowded bar is now being transpositioned into a soothing lick of the sinuous, yet steady, bassline groove. What once was a hysterical echo of the masses enchanted by power is now being channeled into finely sifted, toned down, yet articulate, sonic kiss of the guitar strings enhancing the embroidery of that what spreads. What once was dominance of ferociously ravenous chaos of excessive notes lost in the memory of the overexposed desperately plugged into a (self)dissolving spectacle arena is now being finetuned to a smoky, yet undoubtedly present, vibe of the friendly cyborg shadow.

Through semi-oneiric meanders, the rhythm of the remix is being established, as Joseph finds the bruise he now acquired. Navigating the bruise, he is experiencing what once was “the city of lost images speaking in tongues, gathered together on a woman’s skin” (2843). Where he once emerged from, is now being sensed as Nola’s quietly spoken words:”Inside the lens lies a world beyond ours. We have created it, set it free. Now it grows, expands. People live there. The spectral ones, the lost and the damaged for whom this world sets too painful a task, there they live”(2395). Just as once her “body melted away into the forest, becoming the forest” (2488), so are her words now becoming tongueless. Just as once the whole skin of things was emitted from her own, so does Joseph’s bruise contain static : re-placing noise.

The universe, as we know it, might still revolve around the motto “It’s all about making money!” (2923). Yet, in Joseph’s bruise, there is a story dancing to the melody sketched after a silhouette of “a bird of deeper loveliness for all of that” (2883). It’s all about scoring. It’s a culture disneyfied to the core, thereby attempting to impose on one a deceitful idea about the totality of discourse abundant in delusional choices between cultural theory, either oblivious to its relationship with that what it theorizes, or, forgetful of a critical distance toward the subject of critique. Obfuscating the boundaries and relationships between narrative and extralingusitic levels, such a culture seems to provide little room for critical / creative voices that object to crippling impediments to sound responses. Or, so buzz logic would want one to believe.

Terry Eagleton, After Theory (2003):

In this social order, then, you can no longer have bohemian rebels or revolutionary avant-gardes because they no longer have anything to blow up. Their top-hatted, frock coated, easily outraged enemy has evaporated. Instead, the non-normative has become the norm. Nowadays, it is not just anarchists for whom anything goes, but starlets, newspaper editors, stockbrokers and corporate executives. The norm is money; but since money has absolutely no principles or identity of its own, it is no kind of norm at all. (16-7)

            Perhaps it really is not about having something to blow up or blowing up per se to start with. It’s not about the deceitful concept of revolution that aims solely at overthrowing a regime, a class, or any other category in power for the sake of replacing it with another dominance-starved elite. Power narratives call for remapping. Redescriptions of socioscape call for disambiguation. Cultural amalgamation that Noon’s fictitious world reflects can perhaps best be discerned through his writing that indefatigably explores the possibilities for wholesome responses against inhibitions coming from superimposed cultural models, and yet celebrating the restraint that enables articulating sensible communication. The much needed remapping and disambiguation spur from knots of obscurity vividly portrayed in the story “The Blind Spot” (metamorphiction). An oasis of embalming darkness, protective of the overexposed outcasts, dreamers of the wir/ǝ/d dream, in an electric empire of blinding noise feels not entirely unlike the call in the novel Nymphomation (1997) that offers to all the underprivileged a corner of alleviating play to quench their thirst.

Thus, out of bewildering polyphonic bruises, the vibe spreads, the message—ethereally rooted—spreads. Out of cacophony of cultural smudge buzz--beyond captivity by sensationalist parasite signals—threatening to dissolve individuality and unity alike--the human face is being borne. Told in the child’s voice, the story, spreading the message, is reconstituting hic & nunc / anticarpediem poetics. Selfless, yet reindividualized, united, yet distinctive, are fellow cyborgs enduring the hindrances to patient and persistent containing noise through the hybrid legacy of change and preservation.

Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (part 3/3)

The Sound of Refacement : The Hybrid Word in Glamvoid

Renegades of Noise : Mirror / Skin Alliance

Thus, the vacuity saturating hotel rooms is not very different from the vapidity of wide open spaces. Not entirely unlike them are the apartments, exuding exuberant affluence, resembling sites of glamworship. In particular, the Pleasure Dome, that can be perceived as an equivalent of reality TV shows in the culture we know, is where producers, managers, singers, viewers seem to dwell. That’s where their desires are being sustained, continuously animated, their longing fired, their projections galvanized. That’s where their skin starts acquiring features of slightly excessively permeable membranes. That’s where they most intensely reach the oblivion of the suspension of belief. Or, so somnambulist logic wants one to believe.

            In the novel where everyone is watched and perversely rejoices in such voyeuristic-exhibitionist conditions, surveillance is more rendered invisible than approved, accepted, embraced, or adopted. It is a society oblivious of and blind to the subtleties and nuances of being observed, overseen, and/or recognized. It is a culture deaf to the human face. Well, almost.

            Noon devises a symbol reminiscent of the nearly forgotten need and capacity for establishing an awareness about the role of skin : its sensitivity, its resilience, and its potential to maintain the boundaries. These characteristics are insisted upon via a symbolic plane that from another perspective concerns the difference between  individualism and individuality, between uniformity and unity. By extension, Noon’s narrative technique provides a creative / critical vocabulary. It demonstrates the vitality of creation and reconfirms the vibrancy of a critical distance. As such, it, simultaneously, reinstates the significance of both critical thinking and reading-writing in the spirit of reverence.

In Channel SK1N, mirrors emerge as anchoring, steadying signposts. In response to a dorian gray thematic in the context of digitized fame, the symbolic of the mirror is subliminally soothing, since it distracts the look from deafening noise of glamacams and visionplex towards an image more resembling the touch of gentler, less abrasive, more appeasing light spilling a friendly shadow over the face, over the body, over the skin—the mirror image as friendly, reconstituting, ethereally rooted energy amidst alien pixilated sites: the image remindful of the human presence / solace.

Mirrors—between nights fuzzing with thickness of liquor, smudged in distastefully oversaturated flavors, noise of overcrowded bars. Mirrors—between solitary night driving through desertlike luxury, abandoned landscapes, urbanity camouflaged in disinterested facelessness. Mirrors—through the crevices in the bruise on Nola’s belly, through the crack in the bruise on her hand. Borne out of these humanoid reflections, squeezing out digitized sensuality, is the child’s voice. Borne out of the mirror is an invocation of childhood, reminiscence of the human presence. Borne out of the mirror is Nola’s etherized self, bringing to the eye of the reader reconstituted, spectral Melissa Gold—daughter of George Gold--the Pleasure Dome superstar, who was to disappear into alleged suicide.  Until the mirror (somewhere, sometime), after Nola Blue’s body has been found by the railroad, regenerates her.

George Gold, father to them both, albeit in different ways, is in awe faced with the sheer wonder of the site of the bruise. As the white dove from the inside is becoming prominent, as the world is opening, George is being sucked in. Until the mirror renders available fruits of  Nola’s disintegration that started during those long forgotten nights of bar crawling when she was released—not screenbound any more. As Evelyn Moore, the gossip/spectacle hunter, was taking over the bodily narrative, and Melissa Gold assuming the digitized one, Nola was disappearing. Learning how to balance being open to signals and being resistant to them. Parts of herself functioning independently from each other, yet her whole being not disconnected.

Until the mirror regains the presence of Joe Palmer, once brought to Nola’s world out of the bruise. A young man who once was in the bruise, a young man with a voice that talks, sings stories of semisecret pockets within polluted information flow, the voice that semireveals contrapuntal signals, anticorrosive message: amidst the hollowness of a hotel room, he vocalizes the message about that what spreads not being an illness. Or, perhaps, solace.

And yet, still slightly distant, aloof, detached feels the interaction. Enabling alienation. By virtue of the power of weakness, language generously keeps the characters at bay. Being kept at bay, they are protected by the inability to dominate. At the same time, language acknowledges its limits. It cannot provide the characters with linguistic means to convey the message in its entirety. There is no way to precisely verbalize the characters’ humble withdrawal before the realization that it is less relevant which one of them sends out redeeming signals. There is no way to utterly precisely articulate that it is the message whose centrality enables recuperation of the communication channel. Jeff Noon, Channel SK1N:

Nola’s body reacted to the human presence, the closeness. Her skin tingled. Strangely, she felt comforted. It was good to be giving pleasure in this way, to be sending out signals, and to have those signals received and understood. She became a giving object. A subject to be viewed. Here was solace, of a kind. (861)

It is, perhaps, the very incapacity of the characters and the limits of language that are also suggestive of the limits of robopoetics engines. Like humans, albeit in different ways.