Suspicious to the Core (6 / three)

Unshakably Resilient : The Resistance-Reverence Nexus

What Does Language Mean?

One wonders. It seems that a similar cognitive apparatus is needed to oppose mechanized, schematized distortion of the communication flow, to recuperate sensitivity to literary subtleties, resist formulaic approach to human relationships, refrain from infatuation with a monstrous fantasy of omnipotence, subvert dominance ridden social relations, to regenerate childlike investment in the playfulness of creation and adventure of the web. It seems that a similar attitude is needed to re-learn to immerse oneself in its vastness and help the internet restore its initial openness and vibrancy of the giving etherized empire. It takes quite a bit of attunement to the sound of historical shifts to restore a dream of a continuum of which those trajectories densely populated by diligent cohorts of ones & zeros are suggestive.

Once the internet was the thing that computers do. Nowadays, an internet of things challenges the notion of autonomy, complicates the perception of control, poses a threat to the experience of space, materiality, and centrality. Nodes in velocity-run digitized constellations have become sources of automated arrogance. Your appliances know when they need be intervened on. They utilize an abundant repository of digital signals to demand from other -- equally autonomous -- devices to mobilize their technology enabled means and contribute to sustaining equilibrium within that coded communicational giant. A sense of neglect looms. A sense of ubiquity perseveres.

Time and space meet and are subverted in the intersection of nodal orbits. Information abounds. But, can it be heard by interlocutors? Does it defy their linguistic capacities? Kenneth Goldsmith questions the intersection of globalized supremacy manifested in a malleable linguistic currency and erosion by virtue of insensitivity. By virtue of void:

Globalization and digitization turns all language into provisional language. The ubiquity of English: now that we all speak it, nobody remembers its use. The collective bastardization of English is our most impressive achievement; we have broken its back by ignorance, accent, slang, jargon, tourism, and multitasking. We can make it say anything we want, like a speech dummy. (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 221)

Goldsmith recognizes the feeling of insularity domineering cold communicational tunnels. He goes on to acknowledge the degree to which making sense confirms its superfluous character, as bards from the eras of yore taught, as DJs, learning from ancient sages—philosopher kings—adopt the information relayed on the wings of history:

Narrative reflexes that have enabled us from the beginning of time to connect dots, fill in blanks, are now turned against us. We cannot stop noticing: no sequence too absurd, trivial, meaningless, insulting, we hopelessly register, provide sense, squeeze meaning and read intention out of the most atomized of words. Modernism showed that we cannot stop making sense out of the utterly senseless. The only legitimate discourse is loss; we used to renew what was depleted, now we try to resurrect what is gone. (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 221)

Among other things lamented, gone seems to be the human face. Well…almost. In a multifarious conglomerate consisting of particles of versatile valences, cultural amalgamation, feeding on zomboid mentality and threatening to sweep individuality from that seemingly disappearing entity, circean chimera of uniformity emanates potions of(f) power to the centers of global economy. Only now,  they are not central. As it evaporates out of bubblebursts of its own concoction, it spreads over an archipelago of margins -- random, endlessly proliferated centeredness. By virtue of (self)dissolvement.

Kenneth Goldsmith:

We are making our way through this mass of language that’s now at our fingertips. We are intelligent agents and that’s the job of the writer now is to become an intelligent agent. And each person then, each writer then figures out their way to carve their own path through this mass of information. Hence, making each writer a unique writer. I’m not, in any way, suggesting that we become robots. In fact it’s quite impossible. The way I make my way through this mass of information is quite different from the way you’ll make your way through it. (Simon Morris, Sucking on Words, 2007)

Tales of travesty in the intersection of the time axes, tales of quirkiness in abysmal spaces of refacement : through hi-fi solidarity.