Suspicious to the Core (4 / 2)

Selfless, Yet Re-Individualized

In “Ithaca,” questions saturate the paths Stephen and Bloom walk. Answers come in shapes and forms more often than not meandering around the central issues the questions raise. Many of them can hardly be perceived as proper responses to the questions posed. Perhaps, it can be claimed that the majority of the utterances only loosely reference the themes delineated in the questions. At least not in the way that would provide fully fledged information about the inquiry presented.

To what extent is such a communicational pattern reminiscent of the contemporary predicament that confronts one with information overload and the demand to find ways of managing such a situation? To what degree is verbal outpour and elusive trajectories of the intersection between the question and the answer informative of the sentiment of a dweller of the modern world highly sensitized to the everyday incorporated in the scarily detailed language of instructions for anything ranging from the use of appliances, to unpacking an object bought either online (for which one undergoes an ordeal of instructions, as well) or in an actual store (to which detailed directions are provided depending on the choice of transportation, if any), to recognizing emotions, or some such stuff? How much of it is part of the situation the modern world introduces to one on a daily basis challenging our capacity to resist being given an explanation, description, directions, instructions for each situation, every move, every single activity, or state?

Can a contemporary reader relate to the plethora of verbal input “Ithaca” presents? Can one refrain from a potential feeling of frustrated desire having not been provided with the information typically expected in response to certain questions? Can we accept the limits pivotal to being human? Can we, nevertheless, sustain the awareness of the cognitive potential and epistemological possibilities, despite restrictions? Can one, paradoxically, find the strangest of consolations in the fact that amid the ungraspable ocean of words, unbelievable orgies of information, emerge tiny pieces, miniscule messages distinct in tone, resonating with the aerials of the interlocutor? Can one rejoice in the reverberation of particular content, even though the reason why their frequencies are of the akin valences and how their distinctiveness can be detected can scarcely be known?

The tension sounds probably too familiar to the ear accustomed to noise this planet abounds in. Should one assume that the narrative world Joyce creates foreshadows some of the aspects of living in the same world almost a century after the novel was published? Certainly not. That’s one of the lessons this invaluable book teaches. Despite the temptations or whatever aims to assume such a role. Nowadays, one needs to be even more modern than the reader from the early twentieth century in order to be able to resist attempting to read Joyce’s miraculous text in the key of conventional prose.

The reader needs to sharpen one’s feelers, to invigorate the edginess, and enhance the critical apparatus in order to mobilize the capacity to sift, filter, select, and crystallize those significant bits in the midst of cultural amalgamation. Just as one needs to persevere in discerning and sustaining the distinction between individualism and individuality, between uniformity and unity. One needs to time and again reconstitute the energies to finetune the remapping potential and undo frankenstinian discourse, reconfigure power relations narratives, revitalize subtonic hi-fi solidarity, and reanimate a vibrant sense of integrity. In a word, the reader needs to be the dj navigating through the narrative realm with the combination of oscillating, yet unshakable, firmly resilient, attitude: the right to the remix. To experience reading-writing as an embodiment of refacement: rebirth of the human face out of cultural amalgamation, reintegration of  the community of selfless, yet re-individualized, fellow humans united in enduring hindrances to the patient, persistent creation of a free culture based on trust and love.

Evoking Arendt’s thought about erroneous pathways the French Revolution and the American Revolution took, in this noisy, mechanized and mechanistic world, the world that is acquiring properties of an omniscient paw(n)shop--the world of overregulated anomie--one is reminded of the relevance of the dialectic of distinctiveness and generalities, the individual and the communal, the public and the private. In that context, some of the notions and ideas principal to the debate Arendt delineates as follows:

The grammar of action: that action is the only human faculty that demands the plurality of men; and the syntax of power: that power is the only human attribute which applies solely to the worldly in-between space by which men are mutually related, combine in the act of foundation by virtue of the making and keeping of promises, which, in the realm of politics, may well be the highest human faculty. (On Revolution 167)

Such a human faculty knows neither oppressive nor coercive means of weaving social relations. Because it does not need them. It is free from an urge to persuade the electorate in its righteousness. Hence, it needs no “intrigue, falsehood, and machination” (On Revolution 95) to contrive its authority. It is not violent. Because it can communicate. It does not thrive on subjugation and/or dominance. Because it is immune to a sense of society understood in terms of threat, danger, rivalry. It does not atomize the unity of fellow humans in order to aggrandize its significance building it on afflicted powers of individuals. It does not instigate the allure of self-centeredness as a substitute for individuality. It does not need to inflict fear, uncertainty, and/or a feeling of an ongoing struggle where coexistence, sharing, and respect should be. It is anchored in the idea that homo homini homo est, regardless of numberless instances of a deviation of that fact.

It is precisely because of that human faculty that one perseveres in undoing ill-conceived misconceptions and mismanaged crossbreeds. Precisely for that reason, one sustains the awareness of the unlikely fusion of the economic and the ethical and their links with political fabric. By extension, it is an issue of burning importance to recuperate intrusion of “economic morality” in the sphere of religious institutions and their connection with politics: to remap power relations narratives. The fact that a major portion of those “narratives” resists verbalization and that the intricacies of the ineffable limit the capacities of linguistics and logic by no means diminishes the significance of rationality, reason, and critical thinking. Nor does it downplay the relevance in the key of reverence. It certainly has no impact on the right to the remix. Quite the opposite. Like revolution.

The remix relies on quirky intersections of the time axes. It celebrates the historicizable ahistorical. It thrives on the capricious dialogue between experimentation and tradition, between change and preservation. Neither lionizing the past--since no historical epoch is worthy of perpetuating social relations based on inequality, inequity, and inhumaneness--nor idealizing a somnambulist future, the remix is based on hic & nunc / anticarpediem poetics focusing on the here and now, yet refraining from the prevalent propensity in contemporary culture to instantaneous  gratifications, sensationalism, and sentimentalism. It objects to radical abandonment of the past vocabularies. Rather, it proposes communication with tradition rendering it remixable, just as contemporary cultural realities are. It invests in redeeming the past, reimagining the future, and resurrecting the present.

The remix is attuned to the sound of the epoch. So does it listen to the vibrations from traditional narratives. It is, therefore, sensitized to the conundrum presented in Arendt’s book and reads it with the awareness of the revolutionary role of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It rejoices in playfulness of wondering how to say it clearly that to say it is nothing new. That’s why, nowadays, the reader needs to be more modern than readers from the turn of the twentieth century. We bear witness to a rapidly changing face of the everyday. The velocity conquering each segment of the lives of the dwellers of contemporary world reaches the point of self-dissolvement, since it creates a sense of continual change that challenges typical notion of speed. Like (self)dissolving noise.

The sense of the potential of change and its being compromised by its own radical version Arendt accounts for quite aptly:

In other words, the political spirit of modernity was born when men were no longer satisfied that empires would rise and fall in sempiternal change; it is as though men wished to establish a world which could be trusted to last forever, precisely because they knew how novel everything was that their age attempted to do. (On Revolution 216)

This longing for continuity in some instances can divert into a perverted form that tracks the debate back to the question of omnipotence and a category mistake. Namely, having realized that just because things can change, societies can be reconfigured, and political elites replaced, one also understands that it does not follow that the world should be transformed into an epitome of instability. Hence, balancing between the experience of the instant and the succession of such instances, one cannot but acknowledge the comfort of being part of the flow of history and the moments that make it. In the mind of a citizen deprived of (or free from) the burden of political responsibilities, it may inspire reflections of philosophical, artistic, or some such kind. And yet, it may resemble idiosyncrasies the political realm features. Specifically, the sense of continuity oftentimes transmutates into the ideas of eternity and immortality. Given the previously mentioned discursive orgies pertinent to the modern world, one cannot help but note that such perversions of concept exude a very dangerous whiff of demigodliness and, by extension, entail a delusional sense of omnipotence and misconception of worldly and otherworldly categories. Terry Eagleton:”Immortality and immorality are closely allied” (After Theory 211).

The dynamic reflects the need to sustain sensitivity to the inexplicable and, to a high degree, unfathomable dialectic of change and preservation manifested in genuine authority and characterizing the very core of revolution. The ungraspable dialogue between the seemingly confrontational--antithetical, yet not antagonistic--notions is closely linked with the equally puzzling relationship between necessity and freedom. Arendt points out the nexus as the crux of the question of revolution situating it within the polemic about the American Revolution:

Less spectacular perhaps, but certainly no less real, are the consequences of the American counterpart to the world’s ignorance, her own failure to remember that a revolution gave birth to the United States and that the republic was brought into existence by no ‘historical necessity’ and no organic development, but by a deliberate act: the foundation of freedom. (On Revolution 208)

The paradox is that the very sovereignty of freedom, outplaying necessity, is suggestive of its immunity and its uncontestable character. The awkwardness of verbal articulation and logical reasoning in the narrowest sense, coupled with the weirdness of temporality and newness, may instate a deceitful impression of unlikely relationship between necessity and freedom. That’s perhaps why revolution can only be understood, if only in a restricted sense, through the prism of paradox.

It inspires thoughts about the wonder of birth as a radical novelty, yet strangely invoking a sense of continuity, as suggested in Joyce’s Ulysses:”regions and cycles of the generations that have lived” (338). Just as revolution incorporates logically hardly commensurable concepts of change and preservation. All this is tremendously invigorating and is a reminder that thinking worldly matters requires insistence on the limits of the human. Simultaneously, the problematic can be meditated upon in terms of eternity, ubiquity, and omnipotence--paradoxically, determinants of the limits of the human and the source of power.