Against Robozombism
Back to the reminiscences of David, Mark’s late
younger brother. Like those memories, alongside the triumph of the failure to
rob the plant, should be the gateway to “a kind of eternal childhood” with
which Mark claims to be rewarded (Welsh 2012, 530). In accord with questioning
the nature of the closing episode, one wonders whether it is so, or, perhaps,
if Mark and company are unaware of succumbing to oppressive instruments of
social control deploying a model of extended childhood as a manipulative device.
He might as well be one of Thatcher’s infantilized adults epitomizing
fetishization of youth pertinent to commodity culture sentiment, as presented
in Michael Bracewell’s (2002, 15).
Mark, a collage dropout, whose decision
to return to Edinburgh could be motivated by a need to pursue different kinds
of experience, other kinds of knowledge, might not be exemplary of fashionista
affinities. His choices can partly be perceived through the lens of Bracewell’s
remarks about the social climate during the decades portrayed in Welsh’s novels:
Now, since the
designer consciousness of the late 1980s has given way to the quest for
spiritual hygiene and social responsibility that pumps the heart of New
Labour’s New Britain, the nurturing of our inner child by any means possible
has achieved a new fashionableness – at the expense, perhaps, of our inner
adult. (Bracewell 2002, 124)
Welsh conjures up a hybrid vernacular combining
local slang with standard English, clearly indicating idiosyncrasies of a
specific subcultural milieu—an idiom of the outcasts. Demarcating the
intricacies of drug-related phenomena, the narrative technique invokes the
question of voicing out the predicament of the socially underprivileged. In an
age of the proliferation of social margins, this complicates the entrenched
perception of the center-periphery divide and the historization of the
distribution of political power. Mark’s streetwise scholarship provides him
with plenty of material for retrospective contemplation, as he writes in one of
his journal entries:”Life can only be
understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards” (Welsh 2012, 462
original emphasis).
Yet, neither backward nor forward fabrications
of cultural realities and / or selfhood is in the postfuturist parlance spelled
out either as a nostalgic longing for the times bygone, since no historical
epoch is worthy of complicity in the proliferation of inhumane social relations,
nor idealized future anticipations. Rather, firmly anchored in hic & nunc / anticarpediem turntablist
poetics, the remix seeks sources of storytelling, i.e., creative / critical
remapping of cultural realities in counternostalgic, antisomnambulist legacy of
punk rock mafothers : perseverance in the reemergence of genuine communication
in the key of humbleness invigorating solidarity within the community of
selfless, yet reindividualized, fellow humans enduring the hindrances to
patient, persistent creation of a free culture based on love and trust. Focused
on the existing vocabularies, always bearing in mind the inherited ones,
postfuturist DJs draw inspiration from selectively remixable tradition and
current stories, and yet, distance the inquiry from reestablishing social
relations based on inequity, austerity, and inhumaneness. On the contrary, the remix is recuperation of
the past, reimagining the future, and resurrecting the present.
In Skagboys,
the sources of
reconfiguring the conversation between change and preservation hide in the
least expected interstices in the intersection of the time axes. First, of all
the characters, it is Seeker whose random commentary becomes a basis for Mark’s
insight into a possibility that some of the acquaintances might be friendly.
Only, the attitude is severed by heroin’s emotional obstructiveness and the
capacity to hinder making a clear distinction between bonding and bondage.
However, rather than on the level of characterization, plot, or any central
literary element of the novel, a quirky sense of communality is woven in the
connective tissue of the storyline--the “Junk Dilemmas” interludes, diary
entries, casual observations.
Paradoxically, it is also infused in the whole
of the very last chapter, ambiguous as it might be. Unlike the prevalent high
octane narrative in the greater part of the novel, the very last scene poses to
the reader puzzling possibilities of interpreting the looks exchanged between
Mark and Simon and the silence saturating the atmosphere of the room—the
silence “into which all time collapses” (Welsh 2012, 531). Given that the
second chapter of Trainspotting is
entitled “Relapsing,” the paralyzingly “frozen second” defying time might not
be all that undecipherable (Welsh 2012, 531). As a symbolic device telling a
tale exceeding the plot of either the prequel or the evolvement of the
retrospectively introduced trainspotter narratives, the looks exchanged might
be a token of the victory that needs no explanation. If the former, the
possibilities for further inquires include wondering where in the age of the
onset of the legalization of drugs and politics of medicalization resistance
can be found. More precisely, unrecommendable form of countercultural activism
as it might be, drug misuse in habitually politically indifferent social
segments can be a visceral response against cultural realities that dilute
vision of the human face.
Nowadays, intercultural dialogues, including
intergenerational ones, appear to be understood in terms of economic
vocabulary. One might be led to think that such a subtext of power relations is
the only currency of social exchange. Furthermore, this could signal vulnerability,
nearly incapacity for wholesome resistance. Youth might find taking the stance
towards the situation to be of the highly delicate character. In culture
plagued by oppressive infantilization, superficial, forced entertainment is one
of the most prominent means of social control. Flawed/afflicted maturity,
(un)masked immaturity, and childishness oftentimes strangely conspire in muting
sound social responses against bewildering noise, thereby dissolving
communication capable of solidifying solidarity and generating refacement.
Alongside intergenerational dialogue, the
production of knowledge is clearly integral to discursively negotiated,
occasionally noise-infested, cultural realities. Paul Virilio’s antidistraction
theory, as presented in his book Open Sky (1997), may illuminate such
cultural flows by remarking pollution by velocity: “Alongside
air pollution, water pollution and the like, there exists an unnoticed phenomenon
of pollution of the world’s dimensions that I propose to call dromospheric –
from dromos: a race, running”(Virilio
1997, 22 original emphasis). The pollution is related to “forgetting the
essence of the path, the journey” (Virilio 1997, 23
original emphasis).
He proposes dromology as antidistraction
antidote against desertification resulting from
dromospheric contamination: “the desert of world time – of a global time – complementing the
desert of flora and fauna rightly decried by ecologists” (Virilio 1997, 125
original emphasis). Thus, dromology, an ecology recuperating “the pace of
public life” (Virilio 1997, 23), can be taken to have the capacity to redeem the
public realm void of communication, despite verbal content being the apparent
currency. In
that context, the center of the subject-object thematic is relocated into the
gap between them—on the path so persistently kept out of the critical focus:
“Between the subjective and the objective it seems we have no room for the
‘trajective’”(Virilio 1997, 24). Or, do we not, indeed?
Like skagboys,
wandering through the desert of trainspotter narratives, humans are perplexed
by superimposed
acceleration of activities, which more
often than not aims to engender quantified accumulation of material wealth, an
increase in bank statements, and
property values. Yet, it threatens to deprive individuals of the time to
think, enjoy, and be with each other. Work hours and workload are often
directly proportionate to consumer purchasing power, and clearly discrepant
from human needs.
Whirlpools of
frenzied time may feel like a syncopated rhythm in a jazz tune. Like knots in
time, they seem to tie the communication flow.
As if it were inhibited, not very gently prevented from continuing to
facilitate exchange in the communication channel. Syncopation like noise. Until
the strings sound resistance against captivity. The winds accept the call for
dissensus. The percussions agree, too.
One wonders how discourse can approach such
complexities. Based on Terry Eagleton’s ideas, one is prone to think that
cultural theory has an almost impossible task (Eagleton 2003). One aspect of
the problematic concerns the fact that cultural theory deals with art,
religion, subcultures, entertainment, to name a few. What Eagleton accentuates
is that each segment of culture constituting the subject matter of cultural
theory is part of human life, reflects how people live, and informs social
relations and communication / exchange among and / or between humans. Hence,
cultural theory may not be as troubling as it appears, should it sustain a
reasonable balance between heavy-laden, self-referential technicality and jargon-free
reductionism.
In other words, as a vocabulary reflecting how
people live, create, know, and learn, to name a few ingredients of cultural
realities, cultural theory should not be detached from the subject matter in
order to preserve an insight into the questions pertinent to it. Nor should it
lose a vibrant distance from what it explores and avoid identification with it
in order to ensure discursive status.
Of particular significance regarding the
academic aspect of cultural theory is that, as a rhetorical apparatus, it calls
for the aforementioned balance, thereby making itself comprehendible both to
the community of scholars and to those not fluent in the vernacular. If it is
not resilient to the nondiscursive influx, it tends to desensitize itself from
the vital themes comprising the field of study. By contrast, if it is
articulated solely in a jargon-free style, it might: (a) be simplistic and/or
insufficiently distanced from the object level; (b) be utilitarian; (c) not be
intelligible even to itself; and (d) not convey the message clearly. The crux
of the polemic calls for a response in an antibabylonian fashion, divesting
itself of the image of an ivory tower and remaining vocabulary in the service
of humanity. Just as cultural theory is and should be. Just as education is and
should be.
Based on Terry Eagleton’s insights in After
Theory (2003), invoking
McKenzie Wark’s thoughts from The Beach
beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist
International (2011) about the work of Alexander Trocchi and, more broadly,
the legacy of the Situationist International, low tech poetics emerges from the
reintegrating potential of the remix. Originating in music, the remix combines
textual, audio, and visual expressive modes. Creating a hybrid idiom, it puts
in conversation certain elements of high culture with a more accessible, yet
not oversimplified, not less rigorous idioms.
Firmly anchored in humbleness, it disambiguates the deceitful idea about
the totality of discourse, all the while investing in the capacities of
critical / creative reading-writing. Likewise, it objects to the delusion of
human omnipotence, simultaneously acknowledging the limits and power of the
human.
The counterpoint to an arena of self-centered,
competitive, solely cumulative erudition, nihilo-cannibalist rivalry,
indistinguishable, uniforming amalgam suppressing individuality and mimicking,
rather than containing, contemporary culture’s coercive, somnambulist,
massifying, monetarist dictum is the awareness that opens up an avenue for
thinking a possibility for reshifting onto the pattern that illuminates the
significance of humbleness. Disambiguating noise in
the battlefields of power—oppressive cultural flows aiming to distract
education from the pivotal playfulness—cultural theory may elucidate the significance of unity and individuality of
fellow humans within the questlike endeavors such as education. It also opens
up the avenue for the remix.
Language is elusive. But it’s also protective.
So is knowledge. So is education. At the moment, education is leaning towards a
cumulative pattern of obtaining knowledge. It reflects the model of progress
for progress’ sake, absurdly resonating with its supposedly oppositional,
utilitarian nature that humanity seems to have acquired, oblivious of the need
for disrupting such a logic with a friendly reminder that progress is and
should be in the service of human beings.
Furthermore, it can cast light on the angle
from which the pursuit of knowledge can be seen as the channel for genuine
communication invigorating solidarity within the community of humans. Building on
the symbolic in Jon Savage’s punk historiography, revealed is just how
incredible those sources of enhancement are:“The lack of an overall, defined
ideology was heavily criticized but, just like Punk was at its most powerful
when impossible to define, this is not a weakness, but a source of strength”
(Savage 2001, xvii).
The angle casts light on education to be
constitutive of a vibrant source of resistance against noise, and in the
service of the remix.
Weakness as strength. Language that eludes, but
also protects. Maybe only such epistemological knots can, in a quirky way,
explain why the struggle for power is not all education is about. Maybe they
can also highlight the distinction between education not being important any
more and a slightly altered nature of its significance. This can certainly be
indicative of the threat of noise to distort the message and preclude the flow
in the communication channel. Disentanglement of syncopations reawakens the
sounds muted in a frozen moment. Like the reconstitution of communal cohesion.
Like refacement : rebirth of the human face through alternating cycles of noise
and silence : reintegration of the subtonic layers preserving the wholesome
sound of creation.
Bibliography
Bracewell,
Michael. 2002. When Surface Was Depth:
Death by Cappuccino Other Reflections on Music and Culture in the 1990's.
Boston: Da Capo Press.
Eagleton,
Terry. 2003a. After Theory. New York:
Basic Books.
Eagleton,
Terry. 1986b. Against the Grain: Essays
1975-1985. London: Verso Books.
Eagleton,
Terry. 2007c. The Meaning of Life: A Very
Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Savage,
Jon. 2001. England’s Dreaming: Anarchy,
Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond. 1991. Revised edition. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
Wark,
McKenzie. 2011b. The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of
the Situationist International London:
Verso
Books.
Virilio,
Paul. 1997. Open Sky. Translated by
Julie Rose. London: Verso Books.
Welsh,
Irvine. 2012. Skagboys. New York: Norton.
Wilde,
Oscar. 2007. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1891. In The
Picture of Dorian Gray, A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Michael Patrick
Gillespie, 5-184. Edited Second edition. New
York: Norton.
