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