Out of(f) Vacuum
Cacophony : Polyphony of Playfulness
If there is a
genuinely vibrant aspect of William Blake’s oeuvre, it is one of the many. If
there is a way to discern what ensures that wholesome character, it is probably
by focusing on its respectfulness and sensitivity to otherness. Neither
overspiritualizng the material, nor objectifying the matters of the mind,
Blake’s writings emanate a deep sense of
fulfillment resulting from the awareness
of and rejoicing in the marvel of wholeness. While the very provocativeness of
the title of his collection of poems The
Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the
Human Soul (1789) might mislead to a perception that Blake’s vocabulary is
suggestive of the acceptance of the fragmentariness pertinent to the reductionist
paradigms he criticizes, the subject matter, as well as the expressive mode,
testify to a profound disagreement with blockages to the right to integrity.
Underscoring the poetry strangely unified, despite the complexity both on the
level of particular poems and the structure of the collection, is the resilient
attitude unshakably defending distinctiveness of the ingredients constitutive
of the integrated piece.
Plato’s debate in The Republic features a similar approach toward a reductionist
perception of self, society, the world. Although the wording of his principal
trope of the balance between sports and music (242) slightly reverberates with
a polarity which is being overcome, it, nevertheless, clearly indicates the
oppositional stance, as mentioned. Kenneth Goldsmith invites continuing that
dissident tradition. He diverges from the instances of violation of language:”emphasizing
its materiality disrupts normative flows of communication” (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital
Age 35).
Recuperating communicational flows resonates with the idea of relieving
language of heavily prescriptive, directive, and mechanized streaks. It may also
be akin to resistance to oppressive mechanism subjugating writing to
normativity that verges on absurdity in its schematic, formulaic, artificial
impositions.
However, Goldsmith’s acknowledging
Warhol’s masterful invisibility of the author (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 139) ensured
by persistence in inauthenticity inspires thinking in the key of balance. On
the one hand, it aligns itself with the opposition to worshipping an
aggrandized notion of author, indirectly spelling out the oppositional stand
toward an inflated image of self, delusional idea of omnipotence, entrapment in
ownership, commodity mindedness, and culture suffocating in crippling torpor of
materiality, enslavement by (self)dissolving despotism. On the other hand, it
leaves room for meditating against a seeming opposition, i.e., radical
spontaneity and autonomy of text, since it implies: (1) hyperinvestment in
discursively conditioned cultural realities and unlimited power of constructing
them; (2) a specific kind of objectification and fetishization.
Neither constructivist nor biological –
or any other type of – determinism can restore the much needed equilibrium.
Unshakable resilience enables something that neither rigidity nor uncritical
unhingedness does. It reanimates the awareness of and the capacity to discern
and sustain the distinction between oppressive, tyrannical on the one hand and,
on the other, nourishing and protective control. Like language.
/
Between materiality and stylization,
discourse oscillates in a vacuum of contemporary culture where everything is
“aestheticized” to the point of zero distance between meta and object levels.
As the whole discourse seems to have been transferred into the virtual sphere,
the very virtuality has become questionable -- because there is hardly anything
to mimic/represent. If all realities have become hyperrealities, all spaces
ubiquitous immortalized ephemeral chunks of faceless prescriptive alphabetical
sequences and linguistically recorded directives, then the vacuum resembling
the cold inhabiting deaf interstellar tunnels – like an urobors – forges
interstices in its own hollowness.
Out of it emerge vocabularies that reanimate
the flow in the key of the vibrancy of the distinction between the metalevel and
the object level. Out of it resurface tales that inspire awe and/or disgust by
virtue of what they narrate and how the stories are told. Out of it are
rendered distinguishable accounts presented in language, and yet not
constitutive of storytelling. The latter somehow resist being awed and/or
abhorred the way the former are. There is something pertinent to the what-how
nexus, to the relationship between the content and the form – to deploy
somewhat obsolete wording – that in certain cases very differently informs the
perception and, consequently, conditions very different responses.
Read the everyday as a story, approach
your job as a lawyer as series of encounters with narrative pieces, experience
other human beings as dots in the storyline, space as a deviation of containers
of telepresences, history as a fantasy of a character in a computer game,
future as irrevocably unavailable to the social imagination, society as an
imaginary dream of each isle within the cosmic archipelago sustained on the
wings of vacuum, and your capacity to generate a sufficient amount of scorn for
such distortions will be an undoubted signal that a different kind of visceral
response is not only needed, but is, actually, manifested in encounters with
such contents.
There is something pertinent to, say,
Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Burroughs’s Junky,
Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers that
makes them different from Terry Eagleton’s The
Gatekeeper: A Memoir, Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, John Lydon’s Rotten:
No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. Likewise, there is a distinctive feature that
differentiates these from, for example, The
9/11 Commission Report, The
Constitution of the Unites States of America, and/or James Joyce’s letters
to Nora Barnacle. Just as there is a difference between Warhol’s real time,
uncut recordings of each segment of even the most mundane of instances on the
one hand and, on the other, Kenneth Goldsmith’s experiments in uncreative
writing in the form of the books such as Day
(retyped The New York Times issue of
September 1, 2000), Fidget (Goldsmith’s
record of each body movement he made on Bloomsday 1997), and/or Soliloquy (a
record of each word he uttered during one week).
In “Towards a Poetics of Hyperrealism,”
a chapter in the book Uncreative Writing:
Managing Language in the Digital Age, Goldsmith introduces the work of
Vanessa Place, a lawyer who presents the cases she defends as pieces of
writing. Looking at them as narratives is her discriminative defense strategy,
tactic that protects her from overexposure, excessive emotional strain by
virtue of identification and empathy. And yet, there is something about her
wording that is particularly intriguing and thought provoking. The more
stylized such accounts are (even if stylization is a matter of the approach
solely, and no actual interventions on the documents occur), the more
questionable becomes the distance issue. More precisely, once one detaches
herself or himself from the text of the document, all processing is supposedly
transposed onto the realm of data parsing – not reading stories.
Try comparing it to an encounter with
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
and it does not take very long to realize that it is a very different kind of strategy
from the one the reader deploys to distance oneself both from the character of
Kurtz and those of natives. Put differently, they are distinct visceral – not necessarily divorced from cognitive
engagement – responses that ensure sliding on the scale of suspension of belief
and distrust. As similar as those mechanisms may appear, few things can be more
misleading than their identification. Namely, seemingly not entirely dissimilar,
while, in fact, quite different mechanisms are at stake in those readings and
writings. On the one hand, a lawyer’s critical analysis, bereft of emotional
engagement (in a certain sense) is apparently a matter of dealing with raw
information, no style involved. By contrast, quite different is the manner in
which the reader may love the depiction of Lear’s agony, while knowing that
what s/he loves is the stylistic aspect, not the phenomenon.
Degrees matter. So do manners. However,
one should by no means erroneously overgeneralize such insights and equate
quantifiability with substantiality. Nor should one be tricked to believe in
the magic of radical stylization being no stylization and/or vice versa. One
should certainly remain attuned to literary subtleties, thus hard-headedly and
whole-heartedly resisting seductive blurriness that uncritically renders the
word aestheticization interchangeable with other forms of managing language.
in defense of mafothers : aerials of desire
“Tell me, my friend, aren’t you
enchanted by poesy yourself, especially when you see her through Homer?”
(Plato, The Republic 483). This
question might be perceived as a means of challenging the interlocutor’s
sensitivity to suspicion. It may also reflect a profoundly introspective stance
exploring the territory of doubt. Alternatively, it could emanate an
ambivalence tearing the moral being of the citizen whose sense of
responsibility seems to overcensor the domain of what was centuries after
Plato’s time to be dubbed the realm of the right hemisphere.
If your desires obfuscate your prudence,
blame it on poetry. If your sadness clouds your exuberance, blame it on viral
powers of poesy. If your tears flood your cheer, blame it on the poetic sneer
that devours your laughter. If the intensity of your emotions colors your whole
being with the flame of the ethereal anchor, seek the quirky pathways along
which verses are being reconstituted from crumbling tropes, words are being
resurrected from the ashes of the symbolic, and the fervor fueling the flow is
steadily breathing Odysseus’s shadow into the sails of that marvelous vessel.
(Choose : we are not robozombies!)
Are you doubtful to the point where your
silence sensor deceives you? Can you not detect muteness under the disguise of
silence? Are you blind to the buzz plaguing the communication channel? Do you
not see insularity within blurry oceans of cultural amalgamation? Do you
indulge in surface gloss? Can you dig it?
“Our air is now chokingly thick with
language posing as silence. Nowhere is it as thick as in New York, with its
density of population and architecture: language is both silent and screamingly
loud” (Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative
Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 52).
(hack the abstraction!)
Kenneth Goldsmith:”in New York, poetry
is all around us, if only we had the eyes to see it and ears to hear it” (Uncreative Writing:
Managing Language in the Digital Age 53).
If tumult perplexes you, seek the glow
where mushrooms thrive. If multitudes bewilder you, dive into the aura that
thins the layers. If echo hails you, filter proliferation. If sound defines you,
crystallize it. If pursuit dazzles you, know it. If communication is your
middle name, disambiguate it!
/
In the world where the norm is normcore,
hypostatization abounds. Hypostatized are notions, hypostatized are significations,
hypostatized are worlds. Each of them is populated by hypostatized galaxies,
proliferating themselves with each revolution of the celestial bodies
constituting them. Strangely, in such worlds, sparseness abounds even more
lavishly. Each of them is ruled by chimera of rigor. It is rigid, hence mimics
authority. It is hallow, hence resembles gentleness. It is vapid. It is
vacuous. It is not friendly. It forgets its own tenet: that there is nothing to
mimic.
Kenneth Goldsmith: “Disorientation by
replication and spam is the norm. Notions of the authentic or original are
increasingly untraceable” (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 218).
In its uprootedness, it assumes
casualness as its modus operandi.
Denial of attachment, bonding, allegiance is the undercurrent of such worlds.
Contingency is converted into radical uncertainty. Decenteredness, instead of
liberating, tends to be destabilizing. Its relativistic factions are
disseminated as randomly as their inherent structure allows. It voids
everything of significance. It declares everything significant: facelessness as
a new currency of oppression. In such an empire of indifference, everything
matters only as a source that proliferates artificial desire, urge to purchase,
to consume. The more objects populate each of those b(r/l)and worlds, the more
chokingly thick its air is. The less oxygen those who inhabit them receive, the
more intense the languor, the more torpid the communication flow.
In
such a stupefyingly sedentary -- despite immeasurable desperate muscular effort
and kinetic tyranny – even rigidity melts
into vaporous whirlpools of particles. Everything is diluted to the point where
it can even look potentially libratory. And yet, when one looks from a
different angle, one realizes that it is clearly not so. It may seem
unimposing, and yet, the impression is deceitful. It is not spontaneity that characterizes such
an “antihegemonic” socioscape. Rather, it is disorientation. It is not a form
of immersing oneself in the process, work-in-progress, celebrating being within
it. 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).
If the basis overwhelms you, seek no
floating signifiers to name you. If nondescriptness is your alphabet, pursue no
letters to spell out your face. If entertainment is the object of your desire,
wish not. If poetry galvanizes the shadow in your sails, persevere in
regenerating the energies enabled by and ensuring the remix.
