Suspicious to the Core (1 / 1)

Displaced Fantasies : Resistance by Virtue of Noise

Il(l)communication

A married couple, philosophers, fervent participants in somewhat inspiring, partly turbulent, certainly challenging, edgy socio-political and cultural flows--Aristide and Célestine Arosteguy--are Paris based university professors whose pedagogies reflect the climate of the cultural realities they inhabit: oblivious of the critical distinction between the meta and the object levels within an orgiastic, indiscriminate proliferation of narratives, vocabularies, and descriptions in confusing encounters with their extralinguistic counterparts. They have been constituent ingredients of the matrimonial unity for forty years. From the early days of their then youth, and later on maturing relationship, they have been passionately attached to each other to the point of--detachment. Presumably.

The Sorbonne, a cradle of the revolutionary spirit of the modern era, accommodates their affinities for radical experimentation, rebellious attitude toward mainstream mentality and imposed modes of normativity, cultural fragmentation, mirroring social hierarchies, and a major bulk of postulates founding contemporary philosophy in an agony between the attempts to sustain the sovereignty / integrity of the discipline and an urge to be consistent in its age-long mission, namely being a redescription of antecedent vocabularies.

Comfortably immersed in the luxury their illustrious academic positions ensure, they are united in an irrevocable anticonsumerist commitment. Against a culture deeply submerged in infatuation by commodity, they set out early on on a journey aimed at dismantling fetishistic goliath. In an ever intensifying and expanding experiment, they mix philosophy, technology, and sexuality. They engage in liberal sex games with students, acquaintances, collaborators, strangers.

By doing so, they seem to be becoming strangers to each other. They might excel in the proliferation of, degree of, and approaches to the possibilities that liberties, rebellion, and experiments offer, but they also age. As they do, their bodies change. So do their hearts, it seems. An increased degradation of primary sexual characteristics and functions is apparently proportionate to carnal hunger.

In a politicized, technologically enhanced, media saturated vertiginous vortex, their adventures inform and are informed by a growing, greyest than ever, market of the medical profession, commoditized to the core, crudely reconfiguring the notions of legality, perversity, and…well, taste.

Within blurry whirlpools of the crossbreeds between the linguistic and the bodily, they end up in a drama combining elements of psycho-horror, mystery, fantasy, sci-fi confessional narrative encompassing parallel, spiral, and yet somehow felt as linear, trajectories spanning spots worldwide, featuring well delineated characters enmeshed in liquid identities smudged throughout the novel. In those fluctuations, they fade, as their radicalized practices appear to be means dissolving the edginess of their revolutionary hearts. Or, so the narrative on the most deceitful level wants one to believe.

Ari becomes the internet celebrity whose fame is based on the supposed bizarre episode in which he murders his beloved Tina partly to free her from the cancer-induced psycho-bodily bewilderment, partly to relieve them both from the devastating realization the diagnosis brought to their relationship--that because they did not have a future, they could not have the present. Above all, to immortalize their union by eating the flesh of her dismembered body.

Between a technology enabled spectacle and a profound inner tumult, the tribulations depicted in David Cronenberg’s novel Consumed (2014) are evocative of tall tales conjured up from evaporations of toxic “surgical smoke” (253). One of them concerns Célestine’s adventure with a young guy that transcends the boundaries of the Arosteguys’ games and has a crucial role in the couple’s separation. Photos of her left breast--in the midst of (mis)construed narratives, fluctuating between a surgically removed part of the body, a concept of emotional-mental detachment, digitally doctored imagery, and a  3D printed object--in a pixilated amalgamation suspiciously fuse with pictures of a student’s erect penis and certainly generate questions about Aristide’s supposed part of a surgeon in that grotesque scenario potentially symbolizing his own -- or others’-- castration. In a culture susceptible to pathologizing vocabularies, it is also called amputation. Furthermore, the metaphor in question is perceived in relation to sexual perversity based either on desire for amputation, fixation with having part of the body amputated (apotemnophilia), or partaking in sexual games with an amputee (acrotomophilia). By contrast, in the language sensitized to and investing in literary subtleties and playfulness, it is nothing but a form of disconnecting dysfunctional umbilical cords.

Likewise, the symbolic in question is suggestive of another reading of this utterly subtle, lyrically refined novel of Cronenberg’s: Aristide evaporates in a limbo of fabricated, (self)imposed narratives, just as Célestine dissolves in delusional enchantment by able muscles sharpening socio-political fervor. The drama of the heart unsolved in the midst of a blurry concoction--between the linguistic and the bodily--perhaps reflecting one of the most suggestive observations in the novel about a cultural betrayal being of an extremely intricate nature: “a traitor to France--again, in a cultural sense, which is to the French a betrayal worse than political betrayal” (David Cronenberg, Consumed 261).

Whose desires, whose fantasies were they chasing? David Cronenberg, Consumed: “Were they comic-book illustrations of the horrors of capitalism, of the insatiable, all-devouring Western consumerist ethos?” (300). Are they media induced? Are they, perhaps, discourse based? Could they be culturally imposed, socially constructed, myth fixated responses to bewilderingly cacophonous, sensationalism infested flows? How oblivious of their relationship were they becoming while mindlessly combining incompatible realms? Like participants in the marathon, as depicted in Jean Baudrillard’s America (1988), proving their existence by partaking in the athletic event--mobile shrines of kinetic energy--were Aristide and Célestine trying to justify, confirm, assure themselves of their presence? How much trust did they have in themselves if they needed such radical pieces of evidence?

How reliable are depictions of those characters, their scholarship, their passion, and their partnership? How reliable is infamously unreliable postmodernist storytelling? What kind of world do such utterly distrustful narratives mirror / inform? Is there an angle from which tectonic tribulations of their extravagant trajectories can be perceived differently, from which ”their new lives are ready to be lived” (David Cronenberg, Consumed 296), one would like to know.

Where can the noise-signal filter be found to turn distraction bugged communicational tunnel into the vibrant communication channel? What / how can one learn from such dromospheric stirrings and, more importantly, the much needed reshifting? One would like to know.