The Sound of Refacement : The Hybrid Word in Glamvoid
The dialogue between these
realms in Jeff Noon’s novel Channel SK1N (2012)
is primarily suggested through the specificities of the deployment of
particular literary elements. It seems that, despite the apparent dominance of characterization,
it is the setting that constitutes the pillars of the novel and the abundance
of the symbolic offered to the denizens of the world now increasingly
characterized by a wide reaching penetration of the internet of things into the
spheres that were once imagined to belong to technologically generated and
managed aspects of culture.
The
internet of things implies broadening the perception and scope of technology.
It requires a transformed approach to digitized cultural realities. It demands
cultural critique in the key of resistance to noise. It also inspires
rethinking and remapping power-narratives. In From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City (2010) — a conversation
about urbanity informed by a somewhat blurry, yet potentially appropriable, redescriptions
of labor, play, the public, and the private -- Trebor Scholz and Laura Y. Liu
explore the ways of navigating those newly arisen possibilities, as well as the
caveats engendered by expropriation of labor, production of knowledge,
fabrication of information, the contested domestic, the public definable in
monetizing terms more than anything else, the online and the offline interlaced
within the culture plagued by the internet of things.
They
focus on the elusiveness of social relations in the context of questionable
values, norms, and ontologies. They emphasize the conundrums both immigrant and
native working classes encounter within extremely exploitative societies. Their
critique celebrates the potentialities of technologically advanced communities,
yet not for a second falling into a trap of a deceitful idea about the
omnipotence such culture may entail. Neither glorifying nor demonizing
technology per se, Scholz and Liu
rather call for media activism that would solidify a sense of communality and
recuperate individuality amidst cultural amalgamation partly informed by the
internet of things.
Cultural realities of their meditation can further
be investigated in the light of Kenneth Goldsmith’s ideas from Uncreative
Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011). His visions of
personified electrical appliances, supposedly enabled by the same means that
engender poetry, appear not very far from being turned into robopoetics
engines. The portrayal of the world plagued by such uncreative writing might be
a dystopian take on posthuman history (225). It may also be reflected upon
through the world of Noon’s novel. If there is a plot in Channel SK1N, it is contextualized within trickster alleyways
undoing parasite signals, confusing static, bewildering images. If such
responses to the hindrances in the communication channel can be characterized,
the easiest way to understand the dynamic is by juxtaposing them with the
question of alienation.
If detachment can be felt, it is certainly best
depicted in the realm of the setting. Nola Blue, the protagonist of the novel,
is a pop star. The reader first meets her during her stroll to the river,
through urban enclaves of disinterested streets, in night clubs. We see her in
her apartment. In others’ apartments: George Gold, her manager who facilitated
Nola’s transformation into a music star, enabled her acquiring a new name (instead
of Diana Knowles), new voice, learning how to navigate the signals, do the
transmission, learn to contain noise; Christina, her minder, personal
assistant, the loyal one. What makes the setting specific is that what is
supposed to be the domestic, the private, feels like any of the hotel rooms we
later see her in, or, indifferent spaces surrounding the freeways she drives
along. In search for signals, songs, stories. Or, perhaps, solace.
So
created, the setting allows the narrative to play along the lines Noon proposes
in his experimental writings and writings about literary experimentation such
as “How to Make a Modern Novel” (2001), calling for a radical immersion in
literary playfulness; Automated Alice (1996),
offering a take on rendering tradition remixable, just as contemporary cultural
realities are; “The Blind Spot” (metamorphiction),
providing a glance of the world of the overexposed in the context of the
redescription of darkness in the muted age; “The Ghost on the B-Side” (metamorphiction), making available to
the readership the remixing technique based on play, experimentation, and
preservation.
All
Noon’s literary devices can now be found in the setting of the novel Channel SK1N dazzling and pulsating with
a gleam of a celebrity-orwellian culture. The gloom of the blinding glitter is
exacerbating, but also energizing. It might easily be what John Brenkman in
“Innovation: Notes on Nihilism and the Aesthetics of the Novel” (2006)[1], a
study in the contemporary novel, dubs as “an enabling alienation” (823). If it
enables anything in this novel of Noon’s, it is neither the characters nor the
narrative itself. Instead, multiple, multilayered weakening invigorates the
very language. Language against noise. As weakness teaches, power is in
acknowledging the limits, incessantly reenacted in language.
[1] Franco Moretti, ed. The Novel. Volume 2 Forms and Themes. Princeton: Princeton
University Press (2006). 808 – 838. Print.
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