If Aenglish Were a Language (Part Three)

remembrance / forgetting  should by no means be equated  either with  self-grandeur or deindividualization

In order for an obfuscated polyphonic communicational tunnel to be transformed into the green communication channel, it takes a glimpse of what constitutes cultural flows at a particular instant.  Britain’s capital, as depicted in Temple’s vernacular, is partly a story of the reconfiguration of political powers and repositioning in the world as empires have been being remapped from the inside and externally alike. British is among those whose cultural significance might not be proportionate with heyday of its supremacy. Yet, the way its postcolonial identity is being (re)shaped is likely to be in accord with its redescribed sense of an unrivaled political and economic giant. The image of the sovereign in the global arena of power colossuses has been massively informed by the postvictorian reawakening into cultural realities that required allowing dawns and sunsets in other parts of the world. Thus, it was duly revised.

Further, the unprecedented atrocities of the First World War brought to the United Kingdom an awareness that can hardly justify being so called, given the manifestation of its affinities to the patterns more related to denial and oblivion in encounters with global policies. It was after the Second World War when dramatic shifts in power relations occurred. For Great Britain, it meant facing the ruins in the aftermath of the four-year agony which climaxed in Germany’s merciless demonstration of the survival impulse: something that can be taken as an extreme version of how McKenzie Wark in The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011), albeit differently contextualizing it, observes the situation in which “[o]ne way communication has usurped the space of civil dialogue” (85).

More specifically Caryl Phillips writes about the reconfiguring in question. The collection of essays entitled The European Tribe (1987), is a travelogue based on his visits to European countries ripening towards what was later to be known as post-Berlin-Wall-Europe. The essay of the same title shows Phillips’s return to his native Britain after considerable stretches of time colored in bleak insipidness of hotel rooms, scarce communication, cultures in contact, individuals in search for a disposal of excessive skepticism, corrosive cynicism, and a scant sense of home. He sees newly arisen British socio-economic realities as follows:

Since the Second World War Britain has had to make a major reassessment of her position in the world. Empire involuntarily gave way to Commonwealth, which in turn gave way to Common Market. This reductive pattern appears to be causing much anguish in the bosom of the British nation, as it ushers in a new age in which Britain will have both collaborate and co-operate with others. This process of reassessing her status will continue to prove painful. Involvement in discussions about a Channel tunnel, a common European currency, and freedom of movement across borders is a sad step down from the aloofness of just two generations past. There are those, however, including people in the highest Government positions, who find it difficult to accept this state of affairs. For them it is useful to imagine that Empire still exists, in order that they may occasionally fan nationalistic pride and galvanize the nation, in war if necessary. (The European Tribe 120)

Thus, time and again, one is prone to wonder what nation it is that some individuals invest in with such an unthinkable pride. One would persist to ask what national identity they are so blindingly trying to reestablish. Needless to say, of vital importance seems to be the questions of the value governing the denial of the restructured powers after the Second World War, when the techniques of looting underwent a specific redescription towards more sophisticated means of obtaining materialist wealth. Or, so obfuscation in the communication channel speaks.

Part of the distorted message informing a nation’s positioning its body polity and political imagination is an image of a world’s leading military power sustained through the role of an ally of the military power supreme. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (2006): “Indeed, the evasive meanings of colonial history and its potential value to the multiculturalism of the future are pending inside the new global role of the United States as a successor to the European empires that were defeated and transformed during the twentieth century” (3).

As if the fading of its glory from the past were being desperately prevented from surfacing. Instead, it seems to still demonstrate  its significance, albeit in a somewhat shadowy fashion. Terry Eagleton,  After Theory (2003): ”Meanwhile,  the  craven  overseas  lackeys  of  United  States power, most prominent among whose ranks is an off-shore US aircraft carrier once known as the United Kingdom, are rather more coy and hypocritical about the whole affair (225).

It is no wonder that Phillips rightly recognizes the eroding glamour of what once seemed to be an uncontested rule of the unbeatable powers. Somewhat degrading positions and roles appear to be, in fact,  aptly regained modesty from the perspective of understanding one’s country as remixable as the other countries are: “Britain’s and Western Europe’s days of imperialistic glory are history” (The European Tribe 120).

Philips is prone to emphasize the falsity and selfishness of the history inherited through manipulative societal institutions (The European Tribe 121). Expropriation of history is integral to the omnipresent production of knowledge. Rightly so, it seems. As if as the whole globe was granted with the permission to host dawn and sunset, the sense of the four cardinal directions had been destabilized, at least where it was previously believed that the whole kingdom encompassed the world’s geography. Such a self-absorbed political profile could only be a result of an uncritical investment in imperial power. For that reason, it is not difficult to imagine west, alongside the whole of Britain, recuperating its shameful past. Yet, it may find itself engaged in quite probably an unnecessary enterprise. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:

The West, then, may need to come up with some persuasive-sounding legitimations of its form  of life, at exactly the point  when  laid-back  cultural thinkers  are  assuring  it that such legitimations are neither  possible nor necessary. It may be forced to reflect on the truth  and reality of its existence, at a time when postmodern thought has grave doubts about  both truth and reality. It will need, in short, to sound deep in a progressively more shallow age. (73)

Unnecessary because noone is interested in acknowledging its reassessment, or, just because there is no need for such a troublesome mix of a guilt trip and an abysmal sense of insecurity. Unnecessary because there are other, gentler ways of soothing the seemingly troubling interplay between forgetting and remembrance. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:

This is a pity, since unless the United States is able to do some hard  thinking  about  the  world,  it is not  at  all certain  that  the world  will be around  for that  much longer. This would certainly save us all the  unpleasant  necessity of hard  thought,  since there would then be nothing to think about;  but there are probably  less drastic  ways  of making  thinking  less rebarbative. (223)

Eagleton’s critique elucidates cultural self-centeredness manifested in a delusional idea of mythical grandiosity. Simultaneously, the thoughts presented exude a highly provocative invitation to resist such an attitude as a fruitful form of interaction with other cultures. One can read in such criticizing an appeal to oppose reductionist and / or deviant versions of the mutually conditioning relationships between discourse and cultural realities.

In an age when an objective standpoint is still ascribed to certain vocabularies, and yet, it is also being severely challenged by a plurality of truths, no vocabulary is a sacred cow, but none seems to be vigorous enough either to justify destabilizing of objectivity.  Traditions, speaking of the obsolete belief that there is or should be a privileged vocabulary in sync with the language of the world, is a remnant of a mistaken thinking that such affinities may exist. We’ve been told that such atavism merely reflects a blind spot precluding cognizance about there being no reverberation where there is no linguistic means to ensure it. In other words, there is no language of the world underpinning the convergence between the world and a particular description of it. Descriptions are many. Ethics is among them. According to the linguistic situation within which any voice appears to matter, but their interconnectivity is of a highly questionable character, moral values seem to have reached the level of arbitrariness that render traditions dismissible. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:

Not many thinkers are bold-faced enough to go entirely rela­tivist on such issues and claim that if torture happens to be in your tradition, then more power to your elbow. Most of them would claim, with varying degrees of reluctance and liberal guilt, that torture is wrong for such people, too. Most people, if they had to choose, would rather be seen as cultural imperialists than champions of cruelty. It is just that for the anti-theorists, reality itself has no views about whether torture is admirable or repulsive. In fact, reality has no views about anything. Moral values, like everything else, are a matter of random, free-floating cultural traditions. (57-8)

    Eagleton asserts the awareness of there being the necessary distance between the world and how we speak about it. His perseverance in portraying the indifference of the world to verbalizations about it is the statement against the tendency that in a psychoanalytic sense may be perceived as fetishization, in literary theory as personification, in a broader theoretical parlance as subjectification of discourse, while in sociological, or, even loosely taken marxist terms, it may signal dominance-submission based relations. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:

There is no need to be alarmed about this, however, since human culture is not really free-floating. Which is not to say that it is firmly anchored either. That would be just the flipside of the same misleading metaphor. Only something which was capable of being anchored could be described as having floated loose. We would not call a cup ‘floating loose’ just because it wasn’t clamped to the table with bands of steel. Culture only seems free-floating because we once thought we were riveted in something solid, like God or Nature or Reason. But that was an illusion. It is not that it was once true but now is not, but that it was false all along. (57)

Needless to say, such a bewildering conquest of false convictions caused a pervasive sense of unreliability, suspicion, and insecurity. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:”We are like someone crossing a high bridge and suddenly being seized by panic on realizing that there is a thousand-foot drop below them. It is as though the ground beneath their feet is no longer solid. But in fact it is” (57).

But, because of distorted messages, we sometimes seem to be oblivious of it. Thus, some are quite unshakably prone to maintain that because of such crude authoritarian impulses, traditions are worthy of being dismissed, to say the least. Terry Eagleton, After Theory:

This is one difference between modernism and postmodernism. Modernism, or so it imagined, was old enough to remember a time when there were firm foundations to human existence, and was still reeling from the shock of their being kicked rudely away. This is one reason why so much modernism is of a tragic temper. The drama of Samuel Beckett, for example, has no faith whatsoever in redemption, but presents a world which still looks as though it is in dire need of it. (57-8)

No nostalgia should be taken as a clue for reading history from the perspective of Eagleton’s critique. Because there is nothing to be longed for with respect to the epochs soaked in inequity. Because each voice matters, and yet, one could hardly claim that all are valid. Although the thought indisputably radiates the strong antisupremacist belief, there is perhaps no persuasive enough argumentative way to support such a statement. Perhaps, it is for this reason that Eagleton’s sublimely unpretentious remark speaks volumes.  Terry Eagleton, After Theory: “There is nothing retrograde about roots” (21).

As Phillips points out, it is probably in the realms divested of a demand for continuous reinstatement of political power where genuine source of social currency can be found:

The crisis of a second-generation black British community, with no viable alternative to offer in either language or religion, will deepen in direct proportion to the vigour with which Britain tries to ignore the gross inequity of opportunity, thus further aggravating socio-cultural differences by unwittingly encouraging people to waste precious energy on the cultivation of conflict, energy which should be harnessed and used in the cause of mutual understanding.  (The European Tribe 125-6)

There might be other, traditional names for the exchange in questions, as Eagleton observes elsewhere. Maybe it’s precisely those capacities to understand exceeding, yet not diminishing, the relevance of merely cognitive activities that can alleviate political tension and ensure resuming reasonable social dynamics in the light of the notion of wholesome roots, as Eagleton's  statement is suggestive of, not excluding, but rather enhancing the idea of the purity of aerials, as McKenzie Wark’s ruminations in A Hacker Manifesto (2004) inspire one to think.

If Aenglish Were a Language (Part 2)

Stories We Read-Write

Unlike in some of his previous films, it is not the Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren, the Clash, Joe Strummer, or Dr. Feelgood that occupy the central aspect of Temple’s documentary London: The Modern Babylon. Rather, the exhaustive survey of the historical magnitude of the city’s metamorphosis is what justifies the approach in the movie celebrating testimonials of ordinary people whose stories bring to the ear of the listener the colors of the eras hardly imaginable without the narrative aid that bears witness to the versatility of particular paths unified within the quirky oscillations between fragility and resilience.

It is not a film about London music scenes. It is not a story about the heroes of what created the sound of the city so vibrant. It glorifies no specific voice. Elevates noone’s oeuvre in particular. And yet, stories it does present. The experience of encountering the echo of the tremor of the early Jewish immigrants’ years in the East End is quite a distinct one. Unquestionable the fervor with which owners of small businesses strive to sustain their day jobs. The world might not speak, as Rorty suggests (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 6), but the people, with whom interviews are featured in Temple’s documentary, do.

Temple’s voice seems to be conspiring with the angle from which his portrayal of the city is presented. It is articulate, assertive, and unshakable. And yet, it invokes no traces of glamour, no authorship grandeur, no inclination towards imposing a particular view on the audience. At the same time, it lacks no attitude and is by no means divested of the signature. It speaks. It speaks clearly, despite the occasionally hindered flow in the communication channel. It conjures up a story constituted of narrative increments to be perceived either as a succession of moments along the historical linearity or a continuity of such miniature contributions to how they converge in the intersection of the time axes.

It is from the past that some of them bring to the light tales of suffering, tales of honor. It is from the future of the past from which they speak that one can in the here and now simultaneously acknowledge the vulnerability and praise the greatness of the human. Thus, Temple’s vernacular might trick one to view his creation with a nostalgic eye. However, the subtext of the narrative clearly indicates the persistent, awakening reminder that there is nothing to be longed for or wished to be revamped in the years that exposed humans to a variety of inhumanely designed systems, policies, ideologies, social, and cultural patterns. Such an awareness, at the same time, is in no way an invitation to an abandonment of what heritage presents one with.

On the contrary, Julien Temple’s film delivers the message in the manner constitutive of the vessel for the remix: sometimes indisputably present, at times, however, if not absent, then cunningly withdrawn, thereby merely providing room for other speakers, other vessels. By so doing, not only is the voice being reinstated, but it also epitomizes the periods of austerity, superseded by those of reintegration, reemergence from the ruins of history, reawakening from nightmarish echoes. Not unlike the remix engendering refacement : rebirth of the human face through alternating cycles of noise and silence : endurance in hi-fi subtonic resistance against the obstacles to the right to storytelling.

If Aenglish Were a Language (Part One)

How Speaks History

Not “tomorrow is another day,” but “tomorrow is another world” is what could be heard from Julien Temple’s documentary London: The Modern Babylon (2012). The archival material used in the film is seductive. Its enchantment inspires the viewer to wonder whether it owes the sense of naivety, exuding from nearly every single frame, to the imagery so unmistakenly different from that to which one is customarily exposed, or, to a sentiment entirely distinct from the modern day one.

Likewise, as it to a great extent deals with the question of diversity, especially in a multicultural society such as Britain, one wonders whether the panoramic historical overview is suggestive of Richard Rorty’s ruminations in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), where he advances the belief that different vocabularies, synchronically and diachronically alike, describe different worlds and are indicative of both the vocabularies’ and the worlds’ incommensurability. If so, it may imply not only certain incommunicability between and among the vocabularies and the worlds, but within them, as well.

By contrast, one is prone to entertain the idea Stewart Home presents in his novel Tainted Love (2005): “The Times Change and We Change Too” (217 capitalization in original), coupled with the thought from his exploration of the conversation between punk scenes and culture at large entitled Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock (1995):”We change and yet remain the same” (122).

Such dilemmas imbue the meditation with an additional layer of cultural critique, building upon what Temple suggests in the film. Clearly, it is a recklessly commoditized, worryingly violent time portrayed there. The Sex Pistols lyrics “pretty vacant” resonate with the footage of the August 2011 riots in several towns and cities in England, when the apex of the revolutionary spirit manifested itself in random looting of the nearby businesses. That may raise doubt about there being any pocket within cultural realities left readily available to be used as a source of wholesome resistance.

Dystopian as it may look, such a cultural climate may, nevertheless, provide a glimpse of the world whose languages might not be perfectly compatible, and yet, in accord with Home’s writing, in which humans can still be capable of communicating, despite an erratic nature of communicational content, hindrances in the communication channel, and / or alternating cycles of noise and silence.

Enduring Schooling : Against Noise, and in the Service of the Remix

I

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891): “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing” (42).

McKenzie Wark, “A Christmas Carol: Dedicated to Scrooge, and His Art Collection” (2012): “With financial capital in particular, it is not just that financial ‘products’ are like contemporary art. They are contemporary art” (par. 20).

or, so somnambulist logic would want one to believe.

Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction (2007): “If this sounds unpleasantly slavish and self-denying, it is because we forget that if others do this as well, the result is a form of reciprocal service which provides the context for each self to flourish. The traditional name for this reciprocity is love” (91).

II

How Significant and / or How to Say it

”History is made by those who say ‘No’ and the Punk’s utopian heresies remain its gift to the world.”-- Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (2002)

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, the remix proposes low tech poetics. 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 idiom.  Firmly anchored in the potential of 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.

if not getting paid for housework is regarded as a betrayal of monetizing labor, it might be a good response against the misconception about the logic of somnambulism

To build on symbolic in Jon Savage’s historiography England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (2002):”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” (xvii). Neither 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--neither backward nor forward fabrications of cultural realities and / or selfhood--is in the postfuturist parlance spelled out either in the key of longing for the lionized past or somnambulist projections into the romanticized future, disregarding the relevance of being present in the here and now.

Erratic Pathways of Power-Narratives

The remix--hic & nunc, anticarpe diem turntablist poetics--seeks sources of storytelling, i.e., creative / critical remapping of cultural realities in counternostalgic, antisomnabulist 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, DJ postfuturists 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 the recuperation of the past, reimagining the future, and resurrecting the present.

Against Robozombism

The counterpoint to an arena of self-centered, competitive, solely accumulative 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 the questlike endeavors such as education.