The Sound of Refacement : The Hybrid Word in Glamvoid
Strangely Akin : The Setting as a Social Commentary
Q : How does one tell the dream of the sublime in a
dedivinized world?
A : By telling a story about scoring.
In the world in which all
solid dissolves into the traces of their own insubstantiality, an apocalypse
does not reveal anything. Such a world rewards its dwellers with hardly
anything more than an awareness of the implausibility of such a status. It
tends to reduce them to occupants of mutable spatiotemporality void of any
affinity to perseverance. Elusiveness of the surrounding entails an increasing
capacity for ever further eroding of the constituents enabling the environment
to be called so. In such a world, mediated experiences tend to assume the
status they themselves deny. Mediation that almost forgot that it is integral
to the dazzling world of glamacams, wall screens, visionplex, portapops,
telebugs, and other sound-vision machinery seems to be not just what happens in
the world of omniconnectivity, but the very world. The world that feeds on the
ecstatic almost forgot that thriving on glamour is an advanced version of
highly commoditized social relations. In such a world, commodity knows no
difference between what is sold, how it can be bought, who does the trade, and
other subtleties of such complex socialties. Or, so somnambulist logic wants
one to believe.
In
the world in which all solid dissolves into the traces of their own
insubstantiality, an apocalypse does not reveal anything. Such a world leaves
little room for immersing oneself in the very activity, be it even a crudely
antikinetic variant of dynamics. Instead, it’s all about scoring. It is a
dystopian world. One might even be prone to identify such a world with the
classification of Jeff Noon’s novels. One might be tricked to think that formal
interventions as experimental storytelling means are solely tales of bland
surfaces, faceless facades of architectural specimens in a world of unanchored
signifiers. Few things are more erroneous than such assumptions. We don’t buy
it. If Noon invents a world, it communicates doubts, affirmations,
disentanglements, disambiguation, reintegration within secret passages through
noise in the communication channel. It, in other words, disrupts dystopian
narratives with a slightly different cyberpunk shade of storytelling.
Where
oxymoron and paradox are in a mutually fuelling relationship--the world
populated by characters whose bodies are but diverse responses to parasite
signals--Noon’s stories weave a strangely invigorating nexus consisting of the
setting and social commentary told in the key of the poetics evaporating from
electric spores, sleazy surfaces, high voltage flashes, paralyzing static,
electrifying euphorias, self-referential
arena of the spectacle, imperialism of the ocular plugged into itself,
self-dissolving insipidness of the exhaustion by insatiable thirst for thrill,
darkness of aloof hotel rooms, emptiness of freeways, spaces of crowded
loneliness, solitude in glamvoid. If Noon invents a world, it is a stunning
portrayal of the mutually conditioning relationship between reading-writing and
cultural realities. It is language against noise.
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