Can It Be Beautiful, Or, Something: Says Who

How Big Is Political?

For some writers literature is history. For some it is norms. For others it is just about everything else. Or, so it seems:

Once upon a time, humanity realized that many individuals were increasingly withdrawing from the streets…into other universes: their rooms, skulls, echoes of somebody else’s words…At that point in history, humanity started compulsively thinking about the places where the soles touched the ground…and everybody was wondering if those places were good for laying their weary feet on the soil…nobody seemed to have an answer…The question was a shuttle-locomotive running from one ear to another, drawing ellipsoid orbits on the cracked inside of the crania… buildings were tumbling down outside…and there was no answer…because nobody knew where was what…or from…or who…

This essay explores certain aspects of the investment in creation. In order to elucidate the ways in which writing-reading resists ossification, vocabularies concerned with the character of  literature and culture are put in conversation. As a result, potentially illuminating insights are borne out of a fruitful oscillation between dissensus and agreement, between and amongst troublesome pairs: pleasure and normativity, inherent and culturally conditioned, individuality and communality, authorship and text, biography and hermeneutics, social plane and idiosyncratic intricacies, to name just a few. The ideas of T.S. Eliot, Richard Rorty, Paul de Man, Terry Eagleton, and McKenzie Wark are presented along with a metafictional case study to illustrate the supposedly clashing axes and demonstrate the unsayable as the language of the remix.

A perspective from which the abovesaid issues can be observed is the one concerned with the dialogue between formal literary features and their relation to extralinguistic realities. In that context, one is yet again faced with the necessity of avoiding reductionist portrayals of the encounter with a literary work. Neither cocooned, overprotected from and/or indifferent to the cultural, nor overdetermined by it seems to be the character of  writing-reading. Is that part of the way new formalism sees the activities occurring in the world of letters?

If new formalism is a return to aesthetics, then it’s right to implicitly indicate supremacist inclinations of certain vocabularies. It is probably even more accurate in defining the boundaries of the new movement by putting emphasis on the formality/formalism distinction. Moreover, balancing between the legacy of the new criticism and new historicism, new formalism rightly sees its potential territory in the marriage of beauty and activity. T.S. Eliot:” [W]hen a people is passive, may be torpor: when a people is quick and self-assertive, the result may be chaos” (“Unity and Diversity: Sect and Cult,” Notes towards the Definition of Culture 71). And chaotic it was. The new world that humanity saw the first half the twentieth century can surely be an explanation for the new critics’ insistence on a radical autonomy of literature, literary theory, and criticism. Today, one is prone to see the legacy in a remixed form, along the lines of Terry Eagleton’s thought:

From modernism proper, postmodernism inherits the fragmentary or schizoid self, but eradicates all critical distance from it…From the avant-garde, postmodernism takes the dissolution of art into social life, rejection of tradition, an opposition to ‘high’ culture as such, but crosses this with the unpolitical impulses of modernism […] An authentically political art in our own time might similarly draw upon both modernism and the avant-garde, but in a different combination from postmodernism. (“Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism,” Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985, 146-7) 

However, one wonders how unpolitical is unpolitical, if understood in holistic terms the way Eliot did: ”Yet there is an aspect in which we can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people, from birth to the grave, from morning to night and even in sleep, and the way of life is also its culture” (“The Three Senses of Culture, ” Notes towards the Definition of Culture 31). The fragmented culture that is today taken for granted, if with different degrees of resistance, for Eliot and his contemporaries was alarming enough to inspire designing a platform from which to confront it: ”Culture may even be described as that which makes life worth living” (“The Three Senses of Culture,” Notes towards the Definition of Culture 27).

The first half of the twentieth century found the Western world bewildered by the newly emerged circumstances in which war, destruction, collapse of order, and eroded morality played crucial roles in shaping individual lives and socioscape alike. Strikingly differing from anything that humanity experienced before, the world was faced with a demand to respond to the novel realities. A devastating effect of The First and the Second World Wars exposed the reasons for profound suspicion about humanity and civilization. Individuals whose life heavily relied on creation felt particularly compelled to speak about it. Sometimes their voices were loud cries, sometimes shadow-talk.

Regardless of the tonal register, they were patently calls addressed to fellow-contemporaries. At times, those were embittered  laments; often, they were reanimating tactics. As a rule, they  acted as an injection of new blood in the humanity’s polluted body. In other words, those calls were mighty weapons of regaining human dignity through the power of creation against the acute aural infestation that invaded the intersubjectival web. Concomitant with that was the noise precluding clear vision from within. In response, fresh vocabularies are being devised. New realities demand new ways of speaking about  new experiences: “When the poem has been made, something new has happened, something that cannot be wholly explained by anything that went before. That, I believe, is what we mean by ‘creation’” (“The Frontiers of Criticism,” On Poetry and Poets 112).

Enduring Naming

In  “Literary History and Literary Modernity” from Blindness and Insight (1971), Paul de Man illustrates the dilemma resulting from a creative impulse. He centers the analysis around the clashing aspects of it, emphasizing the inevitability of fresh literary pieces’ being simultaneously self-interpreting  and interpretations of the existing texts:

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretative process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature or specificity. Unlike the historian, the writer remains so closely involved with action that he can never free himself of the temptation to destroy whatever stands between him and his deed, especially the temporal distance which makes him dependent on an earlier past. The appeal of modernity haunts all literature. (152)

Occasionally, literature responds to the appeal. Such attempts de Man sees as blindness of literature caused by “romantic disease,” (“Criticism and Crisis” 13) the haunting ghost of the romantic belief in poetry as the mirror of the world: “The fallacy of the belief that, in the language of poetry, sign and meaning can coincide, or at least be related to each other in the free and harmonious balance that we call beauty, is said to be a specifically romantic delusion” (“Criticism and Crisis” 12).

It might be a romantic delusion to believe that there is such correspondence, but the indefatigable reoccurrence of the appeal of immediacy is as an undisputable characteristic of literary fabric as is its mediating nature: “No true account of literary language can bypass this persistent temptation of literature to fulfill a single moment. The temptation of immediacy is constitutive of literary consciousness and has to be included in the definition of the specificity of literature” (“Literary History and Literary Modernity” 152). The mediatory dialectic creates a lacuna, revealing literature’s playing on the edge of the abyss, as if it were tending to substantialize the absence, the void. Such tendencies sustain an ongoing deferral of the cancellation of mediation: ”It is this possibility that constitutes the supreme wager; however, since it must remain wager, it is substance itself that is the abyss” (“The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism” 245). From this perspective, to create in a literary vernacular is to face the void and try to find the words to name the abysmal substance. As a relational vocabulary, literature is not capable of providing means for superseding the void. All literature can do is simply never stop naming: “Poetic language names this void with ever-renewed understanding and, like Rousseau’s longing, it never tires of naming it again. This persistent naming is what we call literature” (“Criticism and Crisis” 18).

De Man’s exploration of that naming is depicted through the reflections about the character of criticism in time of crisis in “Criticism and Crisis.” Reflecting upon the tension between modernity and historicity of literary creation, de Man contrasts criticism to the disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, and philosophy to show their supremacist tendencies in the cultural arena.  Criticism, as a metavocabulary, questions and establishes  its own role, all the while resisting the dominance of other vocabularies. De Man positions criticism simultaneously scrutinizing the fabric of the faculty itself and the circumstances vital for its activation. Penetrating the layers underlying the reading-writing practice occurs in times of crisis, crucial for the existence of the discipline: “In the periods that are not periods of crisis, or in individuals bending on avoiding crisis at all costs, there can be all kinds of approaches to literature: historical, philosophical, psychological, etc., but there can be no criticism” (“Criticism and Crisis” 8).

From his other works, such as Critical Writings 1953-1978 (1989) and The Resistance to Theory (1986), it could be inferred that laying claims about the specificity of the literary-criticism axis results from contextualizing it historically within the web of diverse descriptions of the world. More precisely, it could be that the insistence on a certain autonomy of the language of literature and/or criticism comes as a response to the age-long role of philosophy as the mediator between the world and what is being said about it. With the historical paradigm shifts, this mediatory privilege was passed on to the realm of science and, it seems that de Man feels that through positivist legacy, the scientific paradigm is still felt as the vocabulary imposed on that of criticism. Since an “unmediated expression is a philosophical impossibility” (“Criticism and Crises,” Blindness and Insight  9), de Man designates the area of literature as an impossible territory to be explored—and demystified—philosophically.  McKenzie Wark: “But while one aspect of romanticism is otherworldly, an escape from this alien planet to one more hospitable, the symbols drawn from the total semantic field can also be brought back to the everyday. They can be lived” (The Beach beneath the Street 107).

If all comfort is to be found along the paths of theoretical art of mimicry, then all poetry is always already subtonically historicized.  If all genuinely mimicry-based theoretical art is always already justified by its imperfection, then its reality is either in its purposelessness or in its radically immutable variability. If  the glow projected from the torch is always already cast under sullenly tedious everydayness, the brutality of mundane immediacy is always historically theoretizable. DaerfoYr, it carries in itself potential for playing a role of the buffer between the dis-quiet buried deep in the mind’s engine and itself. As such, it is a chimera of its own doubling, while, in fact, it only acts as both—itself and a protection between itself and something else. Since the buffering territory is where one’s juggling gift finds its most fruitful justification, the chimera of doubling – i.e. double-role-playing immediacy of everyday experience – is also where nearly each subtonic pilgrimagist conjures up one’s way of researching the paths of the historical nature  of one’s artistry  and/or identity of a theoretico-poetrician.

 Names’n’Uses

 In accord with the antifoundational aspect of de Man’s thought, Richard Rorty, nonetheless, remarks in it traces of deterministic thinking, a sense of an essentialist apparatus, lurking from de Man’s reflections about literature and criticism.  In “De Man and the American Cultural Left” from  Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991), Rorty’s ironist reading, integrating latent psychoanalytic elements, focuses on the notion of longing in de Man’s explanation about poetic language as enduring naming of the void. From that angle, such drive is understood as desire that can never be satisfied: “the fact that language is a play of relations is just one more example of the more general fact that desire is, in its inmost nature, unsatisfiable” (131). To Rorty’s mind, this particular fact indicates essentialism in guise: “De Man should not turn essentialist at the last moment by claiming to have discovered such a nature” (131).

This complements Rorty’s reflections about the tension between theorizing and poeticizing discourses from Consequences of Pragmatism (1982). Admittedly, his own vocabulary is oxymoronically called postphilosophical philosophy. Such a position entails uneasy negotiations between private idiosyncrasies and communal rhetoric: “moral objection to textualism […] is also an objection to the literary culture’s isolation from common human concerns. It says that people like Nietzsche, Nabokov, Bloom, and Foucault achieve their effects at a moral cost which is too much to pay” (158). He confesses, however, that he has no discursive way to support the belief in the impossibility of translation between the public and the private, or between fantasy and theory. What could be called  the ironist dilemma is the implication of an antimetaphysical understanding of the world manifested in the irresolvable tension between the need to stand up for what is morally salient and inability to argumentatively defend one’s stance. Rorty focuses on the conversation between and among diverse vocabularies without proscribing a normativity for the dialogue:

Bloom’s way of dealing with texts preserves our sense of common human finitude by moving back and forth between the poet and his poem. Foucault’s way of dealing with texts is designed to eliminate the author – and indeed the very idea of “man” – altogether. I have no wish to defend Foucault’s inhumanism, and every wish  to praise Bloom’s sense of our common human lot. But I do not know how to back up this preference with argument, or even with the precise account of the relevant differences. (158)

Examining the new criticism, Rorty agrees with the claim that literature cannot reveal anything outside of itself (Consequences of Pragmatism 155). However, he disagrees with  prioritizing close reading as the method for textual analysis because claiming a method implies claiming an epistemology -- mimicking philosophy (156), thereby abandoning the model of an autonomous, revolutionary  vocabulary that establishes itself devising an authentic mode of speaking. Such attempts prevent poeticizing of culture, since they confine literature and literary to the realm of old vocabularies: “The weakest way to defend the plausible claim that literature has now displaced religion, science, and philosophy as the presiding discipline in our culture is by looking for a philosophical foundation for the practices of contemporary criticism” (155).

Rorty is contrasting the new criticism to the next historical occurrence of text-oriented antimetaphysical thought that focuses on nontranscendent/nontranscendental character of literature. This group of thinkers he calls textualists: ”[T]he so called ‘Yale school’ of literary criticism centering around Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartmann, J. Hillis Miller, and Paul de Man, ‘post-structuralist’ French thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, historians like Hayden White, and social scientists like Paul Rabinow” (139).  This school of thought Rorty considers to be genuinely modernist – it nonargumentatively introduced new forms of reading literature, neither proscribing a method, nor assigning to their activity the status of a privileged vocabulary. Consequently, their works epitomize Rorty’s perception of poeticized culture based on a new understanding of literature and meaning as creation, rather than discovery: “By ‘literature,’ then I shall mean the areas of culture which, quite self-consciously, forego agreement on an encompassing critical vocabulary, and thus forego argumentation” (142).

If all poetry happens in time, one moast always theorize. If theory reflects one’s meditative perception of the world, one moast not replicate the object of the metavocabulary. Even if one could. If theoryverse is a world in its own right, its reality is lived out through its closeness to itself. And, by extension, to reality. At bottom, the extension lies in its exegesis, i.e. in its originating from a meditative search for the buffer between the profound dis-quiet with the immediate everyday experience and the knowledge of a suspiciously empirical character buried in the heart of the mind’s engine. 

Poeticized Philosophy

In “Pragmatist Progress” (1992) Rorty further develops vision of nonargumentative writing, previously exposed in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982). Specifically, writing is presented as an act of creating meaning by different readers to different ends. Similarly, literary criticism is not understood as a practice of seeking for the hidden, real meaning of the text, because there is no such thing. Instead, there are as many meanings as there are uses of text within the process of knitting an intertextual, hybrid web of revised vocabularies from the past and of the present. This perspective delineates the contested boundaries of the activity called literary criticism:

 It [literary criticism] originally meant comparison and evaluation of plays, poems and novels – with perhaps an occasional glance at the visual arts. Then it got extended to cover past criticism […] Then, quite quickly, it got extended to the books which had supplied past critics with their critical vocabulary and were supplying present critics with theirs. This meant extending it to theology, philosophy, social theory, reformist political programs, and revolutionary manifestos. In short, it meant extending it to every book likely to provide candidates for a person`s final vocabulary (81).

Commenting on the revised notion of literary criticism, Rorty observes that the term cultural criticism would more accurately describe the actual practice. However, he notes that “literary” has, nevertheless, endured. Thus instead of renaming the term literary criticism, the notion of literature has changed:

It is a familiar fact that the term “literary criticism” has been stretched further and further in the course of our [the twentieth] century…This meant extending it to theology, philosophy, social theory, reformist political programs, and revolutionary manifestos. In short, it meant extending it to every book likely to provide candidates for a person`s final vocabulary […] So instead of changing the term “literary criticism” to something like “culture criticism,” we have instead stretched the word “literature” to cover whatever the literary critics criticize. (81)

Casting aside any immutable component of reading-writing, these fluid, dedivinized notions of literature and literary criticism enable a plurality of created meanings. In other words, instead of proving to have “the key to the door,” this antifoundationalist  approach to the world of letters is a revolutionary paradigmatic shift of cultural vocabulary:

This is what the literary culture has been doing recently, with great success. It is what science did when it replaced religion and what idealist philosophy did when it replaced science. Science did not demonstrate that religion was false, nor philosophy that science was merely phenomenal, nor can modernist literature or textual criticism demonstrate that the “metaphysics of presence” is an outdated genre. But each in turn has managed, without argument, to make its point. (Consequences of Pragmatism 155)

 Such shifts of paradigms Rorty sees as crucial for poeticizing of culture. Accordingly, radical examples of the revolutionary practice include Harold Bloom’s “strong misreading” and later Derrida -- “the period in which his writing becomes more eccentric, personal, and original”  (123).  In the essay “From Ironist Theory to Private Allusions: Derrida” in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Rorty  praises Derrida’s challenging the consensus about the supremacy of argumentative discourse, simultaneously confronting the domesticated private-public binary:

 I take Derrida’s importance to lie in his having had the courage to unite the private and the public, to stop trying to bring together a quest for private autonomy and an attempt at public resonance and utility. He privatizes the sublime, having learned from the fate of his predecessors that the public can never be more than beautiful. (125)

Similarly, de Man points out the potential of Derrida’s writing: “His text, as he puts it so

well, is the unmaking of a construct. However negative it may sound, deconstruction implies the possibility of rebuilding” (“The Rhetoric of Blindness,” Blindness and Insight 140).  It is precisely Derrida’s belief in the limitless potential of literature that entails the idea of inexhaustible activity of creation.

Once upon a time humanity found itself plagued by lexical proliferation. The critical area of confusion happened to be the schizoid split within the term privacy. On the one hand, the meaning of the word got atomized through the replication, resulting in seemingly akin, yet, in fact, resolutely distinct concepts such as intimacy, individuality, identity. On the other hand, however, the fragmentation in question lead to an overwhelming sense of universality, contained in the interaction between and amongst the particularities at stake. The universality that, for some reason, felt unbearable. Unbearable for the counterintuitive clash between resemblance and differentiation. Counterintuitive because intuition presumes coincidence, resonance, and/or  convergence between logically discordant phenomena. Logically discordant because of the counterintuitive, a priori laws of logic. Counterintuitive because of the logic of negation of innate categories. Negation because of the facticity of the constructivist character of the mind. Constructivist because of the counterintuitive nature of the perception and meaning of the likes of color red as a stimulation of neurons, communication between transmitters and the rest of the nervous system, climaxing in the signal reaching the target in the central part of it, revealing to the remaining parts of the organism that the sensory input translates into Я-AE-D.

Dedivinizing Cultural Reshifting

Thus, is the world of letters solely discursive matter? If so, could it be granted autonomy, provided that cultural realities are discursively conditioned, as well? If not, can the world be free from cultural overdeterminism? Consequently, does it mean that one is not doomed to the deprivation of an idiosyncratic idiom? Can extraliguistic realities inform that who one is? In an age of peculiar pluralism, a double blessing enables voicing out diverse beliefs, simultaneously imposing boundaries on the vocabularies in which they are verbalized. Thus, one wonders how to resist oppression and express that what refuses to disappear: a sense that part of reading-writing might be creation of meaning haunts ceaseless explorations of literary fabric.

According Rorty, many supposedly revolutionary redescriptions of the vocabulary of culture have merely been shifts of the focus. For instance, the Enlightenment refocused human existence from God to science. Classical German Idealism denounced the language of science and argued that the vocabulary of philosophy being congruent with that of reality, while the Romantic poets shifted the focus from philosophy to poetry: “Kant and Hegel went only halfway in their repudiation of the idea that truth is ‘out there’[…] What was needed, and what the idealists were unable to envisage, was a repudiation of the very idea of anything – mind or matter, self or world – having an intrinsic nature to be expressed or represented” (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 4).

Vital to the analysis is Rorty’s observation about the role of irony with regard to revolutionary vocabularies. More precisely, an ironist vocabulary does not strive to step outside the realm of the private and poeticized. Such an attempt leads to what is in Heideggerian terms called a metaphysical relapse. Just as Heidegger accuses Nietzsche of Platonism in disguise, Rorty criticizes Heidegger’s attempt to overcome metaphysics and all overcomings by introducing yet another capitalized notion – Being.

Analogously, Rorty claims that the Romantic poets partially redescribed the vocabulary of  culture of the nineteenth century. He sees the significance of Romanticism in its centering culture around a secular, albeit nonscientific, nonphilosophical vocabularies. Although a major contribution to a poeticized culture, Romantic irony is decisively distinct from liberal irony. While both imply radical playfulness, the former, based on Friedrich Schlegel’s thought in Lucinde and the Fragments (1971), is defined in terms of the absolute and necessity: “Irony is the freest of all licences, for by its means one transcends oneself; and it is also the most lawful, for it is absolutely necessary” (161). Additionally, it is concerned with concepts such as  infinity, the distinction between text and  reality, and the perception of poetry as representation: “In each of its representations / transcendental poetry should / also represent itself, and should always be both poetry and the poetry of poetry” (242).

            From the Romantic point of view, culture is poeticized because it is in poetry where the key that opens the door to the Truth can be found. Thus, in A Defence of Poetry (1910) Shelley claims that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (233). However, despite sharing a common belief in poetry as the language connecting  microcosmic and macrocosmic voices, there were discrepancies among the Romantics  understandings of poetics. For instance, in Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge claims that truth has a polyvalent, instead of monolithic, character: “I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist.  I care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible” (89). However, he stresses an organic nature of poetry, implying traditional, metaphysical notions: “A legitimate poem[…]must be one the parts of which naturally support and explain each other” (172).  These contradictions make Rorty suspect that the irony in the Romantic poetry is not necessarily the same as the one he is offering as a descriptive strategy. He also finds it reasonable to believe that the Romantic and ironist worlds do not share the same vision of a poet as the central cultural hero — the latter is a dedivinized version of the former. This is reflected in his recapitulation of historical reshifting from religion to poetry via science and philosophy -- secular vocabularies reverberating with the sacredness they were trying to refute:

I can crudely sum up the story which historians like Blumenberg tell by saying that once upon a time we felt a need to worship something which lay beyond the visible world. Beginning in the seventeenth century we tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of God, treating the world described by science as a quasi divinity. Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century we tried to substitute a love of ourselves for a love of a scientific truth, a worship of our own deep spiritual or poetic nature, treated as one more quasi divinity. (22)

Dead Words

Nonargumentative, poeticized uses of text can, thus, be perceived as restorative deconstructionist naming of the void. Within such a redescription of the notion of literature, theory, and criticism, one wonders whatever happened to culture. Building on Eagleton’s  aesthetico-political reconfiguration of the twentieth century vocabularies, the remix might be sketched along the following lines: (a) The novel, pertinent to creative practices is what one adopts from the avant-garde uncompromising uprooting; yet, one keeps the awareness of having his or her vocabulary, to different degrees, inspired by  traditional ones--only remixed; (b) Fragmentary consciousness that modernists made apparent is, unfortunately, part of the realities one inhabits today; that, however, does not mean that one is doomed to insanity; (c) Apolitical preservation of the autonomy of creation is an integral part of the ultimate dream of freedom; this  by no means prevents one from finding ways of juggling these two seemingly incompatible vocabularies (aesthetic and political, i.e.).

But how political is it? How aesthetic? How formalist? Or, how pleasurable, for that matter, in an age of uncertainty, when nobody knows whether the author is dead, or, whose voice it is that one utters sentences in. Fredric Jameson: “[T]he end, for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive brush stroke” (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 15). Analyzing architecture, Jameson claims that the human subject has not kept pace with the mutations of the object, in which a new space – hyperspace - has been created, and for which one simply does not have appropriate perceptual habits. In other words, there has not been a mutation on behalf of the subject equivalent and accompanying that of the object.

The subject’s apparent lagging behind the advancement of the object can be understood as a consequence of the supposedly atrophying constituents, affect and style/signature being among them.  In a word, incongruence between the object and the subject in contemporary world is commonly understood as a result of the subject’s inability to follow the changes happening on the level of the object. However, it turns out that the subject is not all that disabled. And that what adds up to its idiosyncratic character (style/signature, for example) seems to be alive and well. More precisely, unlike in hyperspace, for an entity of a different shape, such as the style/signature, the subject does have a corresponding perceptual apparatus: a response is not missing. Thus, the death of the style/signature seems to be a make-believe reality that resulted from the fear of the loss of authenticity. Or, the fear of authenticity not being lost. If the former is the case, one mistakenly believed that what one feared would happen, actually, did happen. If the latter, one was misled to believe that something disastrous would happen, should have such a nightmare come true.  

Consequently, one lived a delusion of a deprivation of uniqueness, whereas death of the style actually never occurred. Even prototypically inauthentic postmodernist works speak in an unmistakably unique voice. Even those who dismiss the myth of originality create an idiosyncratic vernacular. Even those who decisively defer authenticity are quite unlikely to be mistaken for somebody else’s voice. Fredric Jameson:”[P]ostmodernism, despite its systematic and thoroughgoing rejection of all the features it could identify with high modernism and modernism proper, seems utterly unable to divest itself of this final requirement of originality” (Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present 152). One would be prone to say that whoever cares about authenticity and the related issues and expresses one’s concerns about them--regardless of the perspective--unavoidably does so in an idiosyncratic idiom.

            Therefore, death of the style/signature is, essentially, what makes postmodernist a culture of and/or discourse of denial. The proclamation of the alleged death comprises of a crass understatement, or, an overstatement about the life of the subject. Postmodernists are right to inherit a broken image of reality from modernists. However, such a picture should remain communicable or else the polyphony is merely a simultaneity of individual, disjoined cacophonic noise, disinterested in and immune to redemption. If this were the case, the adjective individual should not be mistakenly understood to be the stem for the derivation of the noun individuality, but rather of individualism. Further, postmodernists are right to claim that there are as many descriptions as there are idiosyncratic idioms, but this truth does not entail a presumption that all of them are tenable. Finally, postmodernists are right to believe in inauthenticity not because its opposite is untrue, but because a replica is an impossibility.

Along with the death of the subject, author, self, style, uniqueness, totality, postmodernism claims the death of history. In The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 (1998), Jameson challenges it: “But the notion of the ‘end of history’ also expresses a blockage of the historical imagination” (91). Similarly, other blockages preclude other kinds of imagination. For example, the imposition of the supposed multiple deaths overshadows the theoretical imagination--the right to remix and see the signature/style and solidarity as compatible. Impositions of that kind attempt to persuade one that something dreadful will happen to cultural polyphony if one lives one’s uniqueness. It aspires to overthrow one’s belief that, actually, there is nothing wrong with the subjects’ being individuals. And alive.

Such impositions threaten the creative imagination and the potential of the textual. Since the literature of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries has to a large extent been self-reflective, it has also been a form of denial of its potential and a delusion about its dead-end. In response to that, non-existent, inauthentic voices are heard as a call for reanimation of the tired body of literature and supposedly nonexisting readers/writers—subjects. Human, at that. Well, stories, to be sure, must have a say in that matter. [i]

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[i] All pictures by the author. This essay, in a modified version and entitled "Nonprescriptive Narratives: Disruptions in Discourse, Wellspring of Words," was published in New Formalism Of/On The Contemporary, guest ed. Nicholas Birns. Spec. Issue of Pennsylvania Literary Journal 4.1 (2012).

Reanimating the Signature from the Deadly Ashes: Like, Who Time It Is (Part Two)

2.1 Deadly Beat of Premature Deaths: Well, Who Said That…

To characterize the whole countercultural movement solely as commoditized idealism, however, is not to do justice to the original purity. In many of its instances one could find a demonstration of genuine resistance against the imposed models of living. One such NO is Burroughs’s remark about Ted Morgan’s characterizing the writer’s attempt to write his way out of the human condition as a failure:

Well, Ted said that. Possibly it cannot be done to write yourself out of the human condition because you are bound by the limitations of that medium. But he implies a final passivity without the possibility of transcending the human condition, which I don’t share at all. (Burroughs Live 749)

The attempt to get away from the deadening noise of financial oligarchies was inspired by a true desire to live differently through higher levels of human consciousness: ”Supposedly there are only two ways in which to reach the higher levels of human consciousness, either by devoting years of one’s life to arduous spiritual practice or almost instantly with psychedelics” (“Voices Green and Purple: Psychedelic Bad Craziness and the Revenge of the Avant-Garde” 141).

In Maria Beatty’s film Gang of Souls: A Generation of Beat Poets (2008), Marianne Faithful contends that intoxication was a way of gaining a spiritual experience. Yet, she also admits that such an attempt was  doomed to failure. Similarly, Jilly’s confessions indicate a kin inclination: ”In the pre-psychedelic 60s using opiates seemed like the ultimate reality trip” (132).  Much earlier, at the beginning of her involvement in the beatnik scene, she summarizes the roles of drugs and rock’n’roll for the formation of a countercultural mindset: “After drugs, Dylan’s systematic derangement of senses is one of the best weapons we’ve got in the fight against mindless conformity” (11). Naturally, it wasn’t only Dylan whose work inspired Jilly’s generation to rebel. She was also interested in film and literature. In the realm of letters, she was particularly intrigued by William Burroughs and Alexander Trocchi. Burroughs was already a living legend and an (anti) star, whereas Trocchi, from the period of his novels Young Adam (1954) and Cain’s Book (1960), was a promising literary voice. Sadly, it was soon to be muted by junk torpor. Even in that later period he was still among Jilly’s closest acquaintances, albeit more as a connection than a literary idol. 

Nonetheless, in both writers one finds an unconditioned investment in the scene’s momentum and its subversive potential. For example, in Young Adam, Trocchi writes: “It is necessary only to act ‘as if’ one’s conventional categories were arbitrary for one to come gradually to know that they are” (41).  Concordantly, Burroughs expresses the idea that creation is central to the totality of living experience: ”It is my conviction that the artists are the most influential and effective people on this planet. Without creation there is nothing” (Burroughs Live 747). In the Klaus Maeck film William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers (1991), the writer in an interview with Jürgen Ploog explains the role art plays in paradigmatic shifts: “One very important aspect of art is that makes people aware of what they know and not know of what they know…seeing things that are there…the artist expands awareness and once the breakthrough is made, things become part of general awareness.”

In that light, one notes both Trocchi and Burroughs’s involvement in the events such as Wholly Communion (June 11, 1965) and the London Arts Lab, a.k.a. Alex Trocchi’s State of Revolt (April 13, 1969). Both are referenced in Tainted Love (239) and Jamie Wadhawan’s Cain’s Film (1969). The former event, presented in Peter Whitehead’s Wholly Communion (1965),  is understood to be featuring the energies at the onset of the decay, while the latter was the embodiment of the spirit’s total disintegration in nihilism. In Cain’s Film, Trocchi explains his novel Cain’s Book to have originated in the belief in his life being an act of a serious game. He talks about a conscious choice of the identity of the junky, not only as a figure of the underground, but a social leper of the 1950s in New York. A Glaswegian, who found temporary residence in Paris and New York, and was forced to return to the native U.K. due to drug-related legal charges, sees himself as an alien in the society of conformers. He understands his art and practice to be a personal cosmology of the inner space.

Burroughs, who also participated in the London Arts Lab, acknowledges Trocchi’s pioneering role in gathering people of the same orientation around the Sigma movement. In the film, numerous are comments about his enigmatic, intriguing, and controversial personality. He is credited for his literary work, cultural activism, involvement with the Situationist International, editing the Merlin magazine in Paris, and generally attracting people of the shared experimenting affinities. This enthusiastic spirit of dissensus was fading as the bottomless drug habit was taking its toll.

The early 1950s in Paris turned out to be, in fact, the heyday of Trocchi’s creative and cultural activities. While working on his first novel Young Adam he was the centripetal force, maintaining the cohesion of the like-minded interested in objecting to the mechanisms of control. Having moved to New York, Trocchi continued working on his literary works (there he wrote Cain’s Book), but his charismatic pioneerdom was fading away under the domineering presence of drugs. Thus, his life in many ways reflects what is widely taken as the dynamics of the 1960s countercultural movements and scenes and their subversiveness.  

However, again to characterize the activism of the generation as a complete failure is to overlook and/or downplay significant details from the history of the movement. For example, impassion anti-war support was part of the agenda of the Beat generation. Among the participants in the scene, Home points out the significance of Terry Taylor, the author of the novel Barron Court All Change (1961) who is known for his excursions to Tangier, acquaintanceship with William Burroughs, an initiation of an occult  group in West London, and taking the extravagant demands towards the society and consciousness quite seriously. Terry Taylor’s collaboration with photographer Ida Kar, who participated in the anti-nuclear movement of the group The Committee of 100. Other partakers include Bertrand Russell and Gustav Metzger, who is a vital point of reference for Home’s work. In particular, the 1990-93 Art Strike was a decisive appropriation of Gustav Metzger’s strike proposal. In Home’s parlance,  Metzger’s anti-institutional activism and protest against commodification of art through the system of art galleries  become a demand for the abolition of art.

The troublesome negotiations between progressive ideas and energy, incoherence, dispersal of solidarity, and immersion in altered states of consciousness is summed up in the closing thought from “Voices Green and Purple: Psychedelic Bad Craziness and the Revenge of the Avant-Garde”. He there offers vision of the future as a platform for refiguring and reanimating tradition:

Psychedelic art must become an oxymoron. In a disalienated society the transformative power of our realized human potential will be such that all specialized categories will be dissolved within a greater and more universal creativity. It is the task of revolutionaries not simply to re-establish the social forms of the classless societies of the past, but also to re-appropriate (albeit at a higher level) their modes of consciousness – that is to say shamanic consciousness. The failures of the psychedelic fifties and sixties were a direct result of the endurance of class society. Psychedelics will play a role in the coming total revolution but they do not constitute a revolution on their own. (150)

Modern day mainstreaming brought an inversion of the criminalization of drugs as we know it. The anti-subversive climate has conquered the underground, which is now overground. What once was persecuted and prosecuted as the black market is now a sophisticated version of legalized, scientifically improved, medically tested, user friendly, technologically advanced range of pharmaceutical  and/or chemical products at anyone’s disposal. William S. Burroughs, that obscure prophet of divine toxicity, once claimed that drugs were going to be demonized, used in a reckless right wing politics as a means of social control (Gus Van Sant, Drugstore Cowboy): legally available crutches for the minds susceptible to mental flux blockage aids’n’supplements. Consolation at anybody’s disposal. 

2.2 Towards the Radical Light Turn: Refacement of the Postfuturist Signature

The remix of the revolutionary spirit is an intervention that implies rethinking the assumption that cultural oppression results from socio-political relations based on domination and exclusion. It is, to a large extent, reconfiguring the legacy of the nihilo-cannibalistic culture of competitors in which utilitarian primacy defines human life predominantly in terms of materialist possession. Such mentality that centers culture, life, universe, and everything else around self-aggrandizement, greed, and hunger for power. In this respect, the character of Jilly signifies the ways in which such a mentality affects creatively critical expressive modes: the playfulness that under a threat of the soulless, utilitarian world has been violated, recklessly commoditized, and deprived of the vivaciousness inherent to it. Therefore, the conclusion in “Voices Green and Purple: Psychedelic Bad Craziness and the Revenge of the Avant-Garde” reads as a hopeful voice that certain recuperation is possible. Presumably, the realization of it would be conditioned by the disposal of the notions of the author as the godlike untouchable, adjacent originality, authenticity, and other myths.

These ideas in many ways coincide with the theory of Fredric Jameson, particularly in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002), although certain divergences can be identified. The basic assumption is that the current cultural climate, which we tend (reluctantly so for a reason) to call postmodernist is largely conditioned by the dynamics of global imperialism, manifested in the politics of late capitalism: “American military and economic domination throughout the world” (5). Home’s remark in Tainted Love and elsewhere about the impact of American policy and economy resonates with Jameson’s stance. Similarity is evident in both thinkers’ insistence on capitalist economy channeling cultural production.

Reminiscent of the subtext of Home’s analysis of the London 1960s countercultures  in “Voices Green and Purple: Psychedelic Bad Craziness and the Revenge of the Avant-Garde,” Tainted Love and “A Second Bite of the Cherry” (2006) is Jameson’s observation about the loss of “the first naïve innocence of the countercultural impulses of early rock and roll” (19). He goes on to specify the deadly connection between the counterculture being massively normalized by the establishment:”[E]ven overtly political inventions like those of The Clash are somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it” (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 49).  Perhaps one may lay such a claim based on sweeping commoditization within the music industry, whose baptism into the entertainment industry symptomatically reaffirms anxieties such as that of Jameson’s. However, one should be constantly reminded of transnational conversation called rock’n’roll as a means of breaking the spell of fragmented, sedentary, and faceless lives in the Integrated World Capitalism:

As for young people, although they are crushed by the dominant economic relations which make their position increasingly precarious, and although they are mentally manipulated through the production of a collective, mass-media subjectivity, they are nevertheless developing their own methods of distancing themselves from normalized subjectivity through singularization. In this respect, the transnational character of rock music is extremely significant; it plays the role of a sort of initiatory cult, which confers a cultural pseudo-identity on a considerable mass of young people and allows them to obtain for themselves a bare minimum of existential Territories. (Guattari, The Three Ecologies 33)

Home is obviously aware of the consequences of a countercultural force’s losing distance from the mainstream. However, in his insider historiography of the movement, he does see punk rock as a cultural segment capable of actively communicating both with tradition and existing cultural realities: “’[T]he culture we've inherited is something to be manipulated rather than passively consumed” (Cranked up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock  122). In the language of McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory, that would mean taking the blue pill.[1] It could easily be the no pill situation, as he suggests in The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International  (2011), emphasizing that play, like work, has also been normalized (157).

Historically, Jameson understands the twentieth century to have featured two distinct periods and/or phenomena. The term modernism proper, or high modernism, signifies the art and culture from the beginning of the twentieth century, whereas late modernism covers the works of the fifties and the sixties. Afterwards, but also during this period ( i.e., 1950s and 1960s), according to  Jameson, a major cultural shift initiated postmodernist culture and art.[2] In his view, the turning point demarcated a move from the sentiment of alienation, solitude, isolation, and anxiety towards that of “euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity” (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 28). One notes that the opening of the new epoch borne a perplexing relationship between a destabilized self and atrophied emotionality:

As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 15).

Possibly. But,  based on his reflections about the depthless sublime ( Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism 46), Jameson seems to be well aware that there is the other side of the disappearance of a self. A possible form of such a present absence is kenosis. In that case, little doubt remains with regard to who does the feeling. Postmodernist hyperaffect is evocative of the 1960s psychedelic and sensationalist cult, nowadays manifested in diverse forms of simulated enchantment, compulsive affect, affective compulsiveness, affectation, and addictive behavior. Closely related to this is the susceptibility to conspiracy theory:

Yet conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt – through the figuration of advanced technology – to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system. It is in terms of economic and social institutions that, in my opinion, the postmodern sublime can alone be adequately theorized (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 38).

The contestable character of the period is evident from the different approaches to its spirit. It can be understood as (a) an escalation of the eroding totality that started at the beginning of the twentieth century, to which the modernists responded with an implosion of the fractured narrative; (b) as a substantially different sentiment from what the modernists,  perhaps, foresaw as a possible reality, or did not; or (c) as a combination of the unpolitical modernist art, uncritically understood modernist fragmented consciousness, and the avant-garde repudiation of the preceding vocabularies and altogether breaking away from tradition. Regardless of the particular specification of the boundaries, it seems that these versatile approaches share an understanding of postmodernist cultural diversity. However, unlike the common perception of culture as democratic, Jameson points to its oppressive tendencies:”[E]ssential to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate features” (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 4). This attests a paradoxical homogenization resulting from the alleged plurality of voices. It is also to suggest that, despite the reported plurality of vocabularies, in a genuinely pluralist culture, the dominant vocabulary determining the sounds of culture is that of multinational capitalism: depthless, contaminating noise.

In this grim theoretical portrayal of the present, one of the most striking tropes Jameson deploys is that of the waning of affect, pertinent to the culture of late capitalism, which he rightly relates to the disappearance of vital cultural ingredients: “But it means the end of much more--the end, for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive brush stroke” (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 15). Analyzing architecture, Jameson claims that the human subject has not kept pace with the mutations of the object, in which a new space – hyperspace - has been created, and for which one simply does not have appropriate perceptual habits. In other words, there has not been a mutation on behalf of the subject equivalent and accompanying that of the object.

The subject’s apparent lagging behind the advancement of the object can be understood as a consequence of the supposedly atrophying constituents, affect and style/signature being among them.  In a word, incongruence between the object and the subject in contemporary world is commonly understood as a result of the subject’s inability to follow the changes happening on the level of the object. However, it turns out that the subject is not all that disabled. And that what adds up to its idiosyncratic character (style/signature, for example) seems to be alive and well. More precisely, unlike in hyperspace, for an entity of a different shape, such as the style/signature, the subject does have a corresponding perceptual apparatus: a response is not missing. Thus, the death of the style/signature seems to be a make-believe reality that resulted from the fear of the loss of authenticity. Or, precisely the opposite: that authenticity has not been lost. If the former is the case, one mistakenly believed that what one feared would happen, actually, did happen. If the latter, one was misled to believe that something disastrous would happen, should have such a nightmare come true. 

Consequently, one lived a delusion of a deprivation of the style, whereas death of the signature actually never occurred. Even prototypically inauthentic postmodernist works speak in an unmistakably unique voice. Even those who dismiss the myth of originality, like Stewart Home, have created an idiosyncratic vernacular. Even Derrida’s decisive deferral of authenticity is quite unlikely to be mistaken for somebody else’s voice. Fredric Jameson:”[P]ostmodernism, despite its systematic and thoroughgoing rejection of all the features it could identify with high modernism and modernism proper, seems utterly unable to divest itself of this final requirement of originality” (Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present 152). One would be prone to say that whoever cares about authenticity and the related issues and expresses one’s concerns about them--regardless of the perspective--unavoidably does so in a unique way, thereby creating an idiosyncratic idiom.

            Therefore, death of the style/signature is, essentially, what makes postmodernist a culture of and/or discourse of denial. The proclamation of the alleged death comprises of a crass understatement, or, an overstatement about the life of the subject. Postmodernists are right to inherit a broken image of reality from modernists. However, such a picture should remain communicable or else the polyphony is merely a simultaneity of disjoined cacophonic noise, disinterested in and immune from redemption. If this were the case, the adjective individual should not be mistakenly understood to be the stem for the derivation of the noun individuality, but rather of individualism. Further, postmodernists are right to claim that there are as many descriptions as there are idiosyncratic idioms, but this truth does not entail a presumption that all of them are tenable. Finally, postmodernist anti-representationalism is a perfectly accountable stance not because nothing is authentic, but because a replica is an impossibility.

Along with the death of the subject, author, self, style, uniqueness, totality, postmodernism claims the death of history. In The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 (1998), Jameson challenges such necro-affinities: “But the notion of the ‘end of history’ also expresses a blockage of the historical imagination” (91). Similarly, other blockages preclude other kinds of imagination. For example, the imposition of the supposed multiple deaths overshadows the theoretical imagination--the right to remix and see the signature/style and solidarity as compatible. Impositions of that kind attempt to persuade one that something dreadful will happen to cultural polyphony if one lives one’s uniqueness. That kind of blockage of the cultural imagination presumes that authenticity is inherent to the dominant self/monolith subject. It is a blockage of the social imagination that would want one to equate individuality with individualism and, by extension, refacement with the politics of exclusion. It would prefer one to be content with an existence of a particle in the amalgamation of faceless, disaffected, disinterested, nihilo-cannibalistic  robozombies. It aspires to overthrow one’s belief that, actually, there is nothing wrong with the subjects’ being individuals. And alive. Humble, at that.

Such impositions threaten the creative imagination and the potential of the textual. Since the literature of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries has to a large extent been self-reflective, it has also been a form of denial of its potential and a delusion about its dead-end. In response to that, one reads Tainted Love and similar inauthentic voices as a call for reanimation of the tired body of literature and supposedly nonexisting readers/writers—subjects. Human, at that.

The accent is on the symbolic of the death of the heroine in Tainted Love. The unsolved mystery of the arguable suicide or the assumed homicide, Home explains reflecting on the nature of the riddle: “The perfection of suicide lies in ambiguity” (117). Implying the idea of a suicide by society, the trope suggests that the multiple factors contributing to the mortification of Jilly, Julia, counterculture, art, love, author, literature, etc. come from the inside as much as form the outside of the subject(s) in question. Facing the perplexities of such a high degree, one can hardly respond with a formulaic solution. With regards to endurance in such overwhelmingly complex circumstances, one is reminded of Burroughs’s reiterating the significance of simplicity as an answer to the bewildering times:”Certainly not commit suicide, no matter what you believe about life and death. Suicide is obviously not a viable answer. Not wanting to live anymore is a form of self-indulgence. You hang on to life as long as you can function” (Burroughs Live 751). Likewise, one would hope to find a wager for social redemption through a perseverance amidst what he characterizes as “the conditions of total emergency” (Burroughs Live 59).

2.3 Only with a Postfuturist Twist: Solidarity Beyond Pain

There is room for the postnihilist turn under such conditions. There is a wager for social redemption in the vocabulary of merciful relationship among human fellow travellers because charity, being tightly interwoven with humbleness and kenosis, disables necromaniacal self-indulgence in the possibilities of suicide, homicide, and forms of inflicting pain. Even if it’s sometimes necessary to go “all the way down to the blues,” as Jeff Noon observes in Needle in the Groove, one is reminded of the cohesive potential of the blue note fellowship.

Its communal capacities can be traced from Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, where the author elaborates on the concept of human solidarity. Originating in the neopragmatist philosophical tradition, his theory claims that there is no neutral theoretical ground to ensure socially acceptable behavior. This means that no theoretical apparatus can provide a congruence between the public and the private. Rorty goes on to suggest that we should strive to develop our sensitivity to other people’s experience of pain and thereby contribute to the community’s better functioning. This post-philosophical social critique sees feeling pain as the only possible common denominator determining us as humans, while it proposes human solidarity as the only imperative on the public plane:

Solidarity is not thought of as recognition of a core self, the human essence, in all human beings. Rather, it is thought of as the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation – the ability to think of people widely different from ourselves as included in the range of ‘us.’ (192)

Rorty’s liberal irony challenges the idea of  philosophy as a mediator, a neutral metaground  between personal idiosyncrasies and a common theoretical denominator ensuring the communal wellbeing -- between the private and the public. Instead, he understands the human shared ability to feel pain as the only kind of social glue. The liberal perspective of his theory is concerned with moral aspects of that common ground, without prescribing a theoretical foundation.

Time and again, one  realizes that hitting the blue note can, indeed, get us closer to one another.  It is also reasonable to believe  that it cannot leave one unaltered. Even if the dictatorship of discourse keeps one caught up in a constant narrative loop, then “you’ll need a bloody good dj, won’t you?” (Jeff Noon, Needle in the Groove 287). Yes. Because that is the way to remix one’s life into an act of constant gratitude for the life that relies on the source of power to ensure the cohesion of fellowship confronted with a challenging combination of uncertainty and underlying determinacy throughout the remix of the noises’n’silences. It is the unifying, peaceable/peaceful spirit of the Pentecostal fire, whose rebelliousness is the source and  the impetus to the impassioned commitment, fervent striving for reawakening cultural activism and regaining human dignity through soulful life. It is the radical light shift. 

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[1] The blue pill enables one to “play within the game, but against gamespace”[019].

[2] See A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, particularly in the chapter “Modernism As Ideology.”

Reanimating the Signature from the Deadly Ashes: Like, Who Time It Is (Part One)

1.1 Eerie Dialectic of Power

More than a half a century after its founding, even the thirty-year estimate seems modest. The SI refuses to go away. Perhaps it is because it speaks for a hidden God whose promise is now in the past. Perhaps we would like to think that the dead are safe, that even in this era of disenchantment, we still have a line back to another possible world, even if it lies along a historical path not only not-taken, but which had never even existed.

McKenzie Wark, “Secretary,” introduction to Guy Debord’s Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957-August 1960)

Once upon a time in Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill / Or, some such intergalactic corner / Our contemporaries / Somebody's contemporaries / Realize that they were born in the countries of the folks whom they see as kinship and aliens, comrades and an indifferent crowd, benevolent and hostile, neighbors and passers by, guardians of the cradle and scatter-brained wanderers, benign jokers and miserable parasites, generous givers and narrow-minded cripples, unconditioning providers and envious backbiters, warm advisers and unscrupulous upward-social-climbers, kings of laughter and emperors of solemnity, masters of the healing embrace and spiteful tormentors, torchbearers for the soul-saving wisdom and the experts in heart massacring, a fascinating source of uniqueness and blank back-stabbers, endlessly amusing and lame to the core, elated worshippers of life joy and embittered cynics of the lowest order, prototypically passionate and confusingly reserved: “History is made by those who say ‘No’ and Punk’s utopian heresies remain its gift to the world” (Jon Savage Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture 541).

They understand that there are countries that treat themselves as if the rest of the world were the horizon of disappearance. And the rest of the world in exactly the same way. There is the rest of the world that treats itself as contrary to everything else. And everything else in exactly the same way. There are countries that treat themselves as if they were an afflicted development of a prematurely born child. The rest is the world. Who sometimes judges one for misjudging the wrong turns. Those who observe these phenomena might think that the cultural consensus about rhetorical polyphony is way too aggressive for their genuine cacophonic taste. Therefore, they opt for practicing stylistic variants of saying NO in the subversive key of literary playfulness. In the service of language.

Today, what it takes for the human face to reemerge equals the effort necessary for freeing oneself from delusional thinking that being a faceless, unspecifiable particle in the amalgam called contemporary culture is all a human being is about.  To err is part of the human predicament. To be humiliated by the deafening noise of social of control is integral to living in the culture of competitors. To be denied the right to be an individual may mistakenly become a segment of human life. But to say NO to such enslavement is, too, what makes a human being human. To see one’s refaced individuality as constitutive of the life of fellowship means to  preserve the right to the signature.

A way of exercising that right is practicing stylistic variants of saying NO in the key of creatively critical playfulness. Such voices reimagine history as vision of the present in the service of redemption of the future. They are, in other words, the remix culture--the genuine phunkie DJ offspring of the postfuturist ancestors--that follow the radical guiding light of shadow talk in the spirit of refacement: rebirth through silence and solidarity of reindvividualized deselfed fellow-humans engaged in enduring creation of a free culture based on trust and love.

 Stories created through such interventions are autobiographies of other people’s lives. They transform confessional diaristic prose into an invitation to question the boundaries of privacy. They also create a polymorphous extravaganza of countercultural implosion, leaving a heap of hipster ashes awaiting a new voice to reanimate the signature from it. As Memphis Underground ends with the statement about “radical incompletion” (308), Tainted Love can be read as a continuation of such an attempt: “[h]owever, I want to justify my sudden and unexpected taste for the most bourgeois of literary genres – autobiography” (Memphis Underground 306). Thus, they emanate the light of the retrospective  dissection of the debris of the countercultural corpse:

I’m seeking radical incompletion. I want to combine critique, poetics and popular story telling. I want to combine poetics, critique and popular story telling. I want to combine poetics, popular story telling and critique. I want to combine critique, popular story telling and poetics. I want to combine popular story telling, critique and poetics. I want to combine popular story telling, poetics and critique. I am Death. I am Undead. I stopped living. Ad nauseam. (309)

Partly in accord with the voices in the novels, but at times subversively listening to them, this reading excavates buried questions, poses new ones, and explores the possibilities of  hope to recuperate life and regain human dignity. The reading is a quest for the refacement awaiting between the confusion of the colliding noises of the swinging sixties, punk-rocking seventies/eighties, and raving eighties/nineties, on the one hand, and the new chimney sweeper-DJ’s voice on the other. Again, seeking such a voice has nothing to do with an uncritical restoration of the past and has everything to do with nostalgia for postfuture. It is a NO to the culture of denial. It is also a YES to the call to the remix of the dormant spirit of resistance against the noise in the communication channel—to recuperation of human dignity. Periods of noise alternate with those of greened communication. But for the shift to happen, the remix is needed in order to reanimate  hibernated words. In the spirit of radical incompletion: ”There is no beginning, there is no end; this story goes on forever” (Tainted Love 248).

1.2.Jilly, That Obscure Mother

In Tainted Love (2005), Stewart Home, writing autobiography of his (m)other, challenges the postulates of contemporary culture, simultaneously criticizing normalization of countercultures. The book presents the collapse of the sixties swinging London hippie and beatnik scenes through an increased consumption of drugs and the authorities’ complicity in their criminalization. It is also a critique of the literary canon and an investigation of the possibilities of its redescription. The chapter contextualizes the themes within the cultural and theoretical frameworks presented in the books Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s (2005), a collection of essays edited by Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris, Burroughs Live (2000) collected interviews edited by Sylvére Lotringer, and Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).

            Home continues exploring literary potentials perpetuated through dialogue between and across genres and media. The creatively critical inspiration in question spurs poetic excavations and critical readings of cultural realities. In this book Home is still interested in problematizing manifestations of cultural domination and the consequences of oppressive social relations. The destructiveness of oppression is hardly ever limited solely to a cultural critique. It is always already intertwined with the question of individuality afflicted by dehumanizing forces of  profit-driven minds. That further complicates the thematic adding to the scope of a possible analysis diverse domains of oppression and, as a result, of human suffering. Such a point of intersections among these planes is the character of Jilly O’Sullivan/Julia Callan Thompson, the anti-heroine of Home’s (m)other’s autobiography.

At the age of sixteen, Julia Callan Thompson/Jilly O’Sullivan comes to London. The year is 1960. She starts working as  a model, a hostess, and a high class prostitute in respectable clubs in Soho, such as Murray’s Cabaret Club/General Gordon’s.  Simultaneously, she gets involved with Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove’s countercultural beatnik and hippie scenes—experimental circles engaged in mystical trials, esoteric ventures, and investigations of the occult as the ways of testing the levels, kinds, and boundaries of realities. She soon starts using opiates to ease the intensities of psychedelic experiences. Tragically, Julia/Jilly becomes addicted to heroin. She is trying to fight the habit with little success.

Soon after her arrival in London, she gets pregnant. She later finds herself heavily indebted and absorbed by self-destructiveness and crime, notably through the collaboration with Ronnie and Reggie Kray, the infamous underworld twins. Their homosexuality, colliding with the attempt to sustain dominant masculine personae of gangster kings, allegedly contributed to Jilly’s giving her son Lloyd to adoption. She has been tortured by the mob, abused by the police, and forced to spy on an institution for social work. Home casts light on the underground Swinging London when beats and other revolutionaries were heavily involved in the sweeping revolutionary tornado generously fueled by the underground pharmaceutical industry. The eerie dynamism resulting in the officialdom’s complicity in the criminalization of drugs was, at a dialectical stroke, sucked the underground—up on the surface! Namely, the authorities persecuted and prosecuted decadent revolutionaries as much as they amplified anti-subversive sentiment that culminated in its latter day mainstreaming turn:

[W]hile the Krays could be nasty, their influence and the purely economic level of their success have been vastly overestimated. Spot and the Krays were ultimately straw men, and even the movies on which these British gangsters modeled themselves were an outgrowth of American police propaganda that built various and relatively unimportant and archaic Chicago criminals into major figures of public menace, so that the state could appear all the more powerful when it crush them. (126)

Jilly/Julia died amidst the whirlpool triangulated by her personal limbo, abuse by the corrupt authorities, and criminals proper. The mystery of her death is unsolved. She died on December 02, 1979. Her dead body was found the following day by Marianne May/Mary Jane, whom Jilly/Julia met through Church of Celestial Awakening/ Divine Light Mission Event. Officially, her death was a result of a heart failure. Further investigations into the details of how her life ended were massively obstructed by the authorities in order to prevent disclosing the information about their involvement. Her reflections about the period of trial reflect the perplexing conditions within the oscillating countercultures: ”I didn’t know it then, but by 1969 I was already a victim of post-hippie burn out. By the time the 70s really began unfolding I was cursing my dependence on junk, since as a direct result of the corruption that was rife in the Metropolitan Police I was experiencing my own version of hell on earth” (Tainted Love 133).

            Jilly/Julia’s autobiographical accounts problematize the autobiographical in an autobiography through a constant play with semi fictitious interjections. For example, a film script is integrated within a film script; tape transcriptions of psychoanalytic sessions feature the character of anti-psychiatrist and a psychedelic devotee, R.D. Laing; cultural critique intersects with historiography;  metacritique-cum-historical fiction meets biofiction;  metafiction is crossed with satire;  thriller-detective story mashup embeds parody via tragedy and journalistic excursions into the  Cain’s Weekly magazine.[1]

The polyphony of genres is part of Home’s ongoing assault on the dictatorship of celebrity culture and the audience’s susceptibility to the charms of such simulacra. To this end, Home stresses how conspiracy theory operates as a means of control by providing the spectatorship with an illusion of partaking in the lives of celebrities, or, perhaps, taking even a greater pleasure in participating in the aftermaths of their deaths. In the vein of Fredric Jameson’s thought from Postmodernism, or, the Culture of Late Capitalism (1991) about the ways conspiracy theory creates a false sense of totality, Home addresses the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Paralleling the sensationalism accompanying the gruesome political shift is the case of Jack the Stripper, a serial murderer of London prostitutes in 1960s. These are, in fact, versatile foci of the spectacle triggering similar responses in the simulacra-hungry audiences. The thematization of the salivating spectatorship addresses what Jameson calls the hysterical sublime and exhilaration in gleaming surface. It is also a celebration of the limits of a fantasy of human omnipotence, as articulated in an interview with Anders Stephanson in the collection Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism (2007):

Dialectically, in the conscious sublime, it is the self that touches the limit; here it is the body that is touching its limits, “volatilized,” in this experience of images, to the point of being outside itself, or losing itself. What you get is the reduction of time to an instant in a most intense final punctual experience of all these things, but it is no longer subjective in the older sense in which a personality is standing in front of the Alps knowing the limits of the individual subject and the human ego. On the contrary, it is a kind of nonhumanist experience of limits beyond which you get dissolved. (46)

1.3 (M)others off (Re)invention

Julia Callan Thompson appears in the book as the character whose name is Jilly O’Sullivan.[1] The son, Lloyd O’Sullivan, wrote “Introduction: Bodies of Evidence” and “Afterword by Lloyd O’Sullivan: The Signifying Junkie.” Stewart Home  is another minor appearance among the characters and voices.  The cryptic characterization is epitomized in the metaphor of a parent as ever elusive, never graspable in one’s enirety: “A gifted impostor creates the impression that those they’re fooling know pretty much all there is to know about them, but cannily avoids providing any concrete details about their background which might potentially provide a means of catching them out” (124).

One aspect of the tripartite trope of the signifying junkie concerns the antiheroine of the book. The other plane of the symbolic is related to demythologizing of the hippie and beatnik narrative of Swinging London. The context emphasizes the afflicted  countercultural impetus partly resulting from a destructive impact of the drug culture, enabled and amplified by the authorities’ complicity in their criminalization. This is closely related to the third level of the signification. Namely, the legacy of such axes is manifested both in the corruption within the ruling structures and in postmodernist culture’s thriving on consumers’ addictive affinities, as pointed out  in Jameson’s  Postmodernism, or, the Culture of Late Capitalism.

Home’s vernacular challenges such tastes by subverting the very notions of representation and realism. The chapter “The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Oedipus Complex,” along with Home’s film of the same title and somewhat modified details (2004), remixes the psychoanalytic appropriation of the Oedipus myth, the affinities for sensationalism and susceptibility to simulated enchantments:

The cinematic spectacle has its rules, which are framed to ensure satisfactory products are placed in multiplexes and video stores. However, it is dissatisfaction that characterizes my line of flight. The function of narrative cinema is to present a false coherence as a substitute for a sovereign activity that is so blatantly absent where the bourgeois ideology of ‘realism’ still reigns. To demystify documentary cinema it is necessary to expose and thus dissolve the presupposed form. (117)

The chapter features the character of Stewart Home. He would be shot in the apartment where his (m)other died. He would be lying in the pose simulating a corpse, demonstrating death--the point of morphing of Jilly O’Sullivan, Julia Callan Thompson, Lloyd O’Sullivan, Stewart Home, and other doublings—as always already a fiction. Multiple freudian references highlight the age-long incestuous patricidal mania--the seed from which therapeutic culture  flourished aiming to impose on human beings a belief in irredeemable culpability.  Our time sees other avenues for the reemergence of human dignity. We now have a silver screen: “At the very moment Freud theorised the unconscious, his fantastic notions were rendered obsolete. Men and women were already assembling in the black womb of cinemas and their collectively realised and suppressed desires were being projected onto silver screens” (126). One feels it’s about time that cinema, too, was destroyed (117). Now is the moment for the posfuturist remix of the displacement in question: “Cinema becomes theatre and there is a much needed shift of emphasis away from cultural commodities and on to human relationships from which such products emerge” (127-8).

Home’s filmmaker manifesto presents an approach to reanimating the sedentary spirit of resistance against destruction and ossification. I read it in the postfuturist key that renders remixable both tradition and contemporary realities.

I am remaking cinema in the way I wish to remake the world, correcting the faults of older filmmakers and simultaneously demonstrating my indifference to any and all so called works of ‘genius’ by self-consciously using the cultural heritage of humanity for partisan propaganda purposes. Cinema becomes theatre and there is a much needed shift of emphasis away from cultural commodities and on to human relationships from which such products emerge. (127-8)

This is exactly what happens on the narrative level, where the investigation of his (m)other’s life becomes a revision on both personal and cultural planes. On the personal level, the morphing of Home and Julia within the becoming (m)other process is a reinvention of the following character: “As for me, I realised some time ago that in order to be myself, I first have to become my (m)other, and to complete this process I still need the information that will enable me to fully live out her death” (247).[2] Culturally, the remix of Jilly’s life and death symbolizes the deflated revolutionary spirit of the sixties. The two planes Home summarizes through his critique of the cinema and the aforesaid fabricated sense of totality:

What usually makes documentaries so easy to understand is the arbitrary limitation of their subject matter. They describe the atomization of social functions and the isolation of their products. One can in contrast envisage the baroque complexity of a moment which is not resolved into a work, a moment whose movement indissolubly contains facts and values and whose meaning does not yet appear. The journey I’m undertaking, an ongoing drift through the London of my childhood and youth, is a search for this confused totality as it manifested itself at the moment of my mother’s death. (131)

Kaleidoscopic image of endless atomizing doubling. Mushrooming of the fragmented facts and values makes a world a place overpopulated by islands. Surrounded by a desert. And yet, the dry spell of a fabricated belief is the temporary austerity that after which contrapuntal abundance of the imagination is released. Awaiting for the harmonization to the syncopated beat.

Once upon a time, to be hip meant to be radical, radically revolutionary, revolutionary decadent, decadently intoxicant, toxically fiery, fiercely dedicated, decidedly transgressive. To be hip is not to be hip. To be hip is to accept what a free culture of today offers to free-minded individuals. Only its self-proclaiming free character does not justify the underlying investment in nominalism. Or, does it not, indeed? Can its rhetoric define a choice: the choice to resist what it can offer?

1.4 Noises’n’Silences: A Second Bite of the Countercultural Burn Out

Part of the reason why Home channels his cultural critique via the cinematic realm is to stress the psychedelic movement’s complicity in a celebratory approach towards ocular-centered popular culture. The essay “Voices Green and Purple: Psychedelic Bad Craziness and the Revenge of the Avant-Garde” from Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s (2005) provides close reading of the pillars of the countercultural art of the period, focusing on genuine social provocateurs and experimentators. In contrast, flirting with semi-subversive vocabularies is scrutinized to show the ever-growing mainstreaming under the totalizing tendencies of the culture of commodity.

The study stresses a key role that drugs had in the countercultural phenomena of the 1960s. Drugs were a way for youth to rebel against the bourgeois values and the rat race. Yet, the criminalization of drugs, enabled the police to control and benefit from the profit made through drug trafficking. At the same time, the business put many of the insiders of the scenes to the situations similar to that in which Jilly found herself—in the limbo of mutually conditioned addiction and smuggling that threw resistance into the haze of oblivion. Historical contextualization of the countercultural movements of the sixties foreshadows the following decades, as Jilly observes in the Tainted Love:

The 60s are well and truly over: naked self-interest has destroyed any sense of solidarity there once was on the drug scene, and our little world is an increasingly brutalized place. I’m glad I’m not young any more, and I sincerely hope Lloyd is tough enough to survive this benighted era. Thatcher attaining power is a symptom and not the cause of the things that are wrong with London (224).

 Crucial for the collapse of the revolutionary impetus in the sixties is taken to be insufficient of solidarity that, eventually, enabled the political elites to reassert control. Power was effectively exercised through the fabrication of the scene’s independence. Specifically, in the sphere of artistic production, proliferation of the margins, more often than not, was a way of dissolving the edginess through a carefully  executed deals of the nature on which William Burroughs comments in the 1990 interview with Klaus Maeck:”A devil’s bargain is always a fool’s bargain, particularly for an artist. The devil deals only in quantity, not in quality. He can’t make someone a great writer, he can only make someone a famous writer, a rich writer” (Burroughs Live 750).

An equally ambivalent role and character can be ascribed to commoditized popular music that, coupled with the criminalization of drugs, from the initial subversive force, ultimately ended up in mindless profit-making. Home claims that the shift toward an irreversible collapse of countercultures was orchestrated and accelerated through the massivization of hard drugs, as they “migrate[d] from bohemia to the nascent counterculture, and from there by way of popular music into the proverbial teenage jugular vein” (“Voices Green and Purple: Psychedelic Bad Craziness and the Revenge of the Avant-Garde” 137).

 This is suggested through the title Tainted Love. Originally Gloria Jones’s song (1964), it is also known as Soft Cell’s retake (1981). Its poetic, along with its thematization in Home’s book, resonates with Burroughs’s remark from the 1964 interview with Eric Mottram. He ascribes to social mechanisms of control a role in the erosion of purity both on the cultural and personal levels: “I feel that what we call love is largely a fraud – a mixture of sentimentality and sex that has been systematically degraded and vulgarized by the virus power” (Burroughs Live 55).[1]

Endless cycles of alternating abundance and shortage--disaffection and an impassioned renewal of life-generating energies--is a historical path that humans walk. Sometimes the engine fueling one’s steps runs out of power, leaving the walkers abandoned in the desolation of the waterless landscape. But subterranean currents find a way to resurface and irrigate the soil, so it again softens and alleviates the suffering of the aching feet.

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[1] See Home’s short story “A Second Bite of the Cherry” from Amputee Sex (2006) for a further exploration of the innocence-corruption oscillations. 

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[1] According to the writer, the (m)other’s first name is a modified form of Julia, whereas her last name resulted blending the  names of  two lineages (Callan and Callahan – two distinct Irish family names, which were almost randomly used in the family: some of her brothers and sisters were Callan, while the others were Callahan). Similarly, her identity was created through a transposition of her real Welsh origins (born and raised in Newport near Cardiff) into the fictionalized Scottish background (born and raised in Greenock near Glasgow). Jilly’s heterogeneous ethnic identity is Home’s reference to the UK postcolonial reality(personal interview 2008).

[2] The concept was also realized through a series of photographs entitled “Becoming (M)other” (2004) by Stewart Home and Chris Dorley Brown. The images of Stewart Home and Julia Callan Thompson are combined to produce a blending morphing the two into a peculiar synthesis – the (m)other entity. Part of this deconstruction of the monolith self shows gender mutability. Shown within the Stewart Home NYC retrospective exhibition at the White Columns gallery (October 22-November 19, 2011).

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[1] Elsewhere, it is the  Eve’s Weekly magazine featuring  Julia Callan Thompson.