If Aenglish Were a Language (Part Five)

Scraps & Sync

Despite the multiple intricacies with regard to how literary elements operate in Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts (1941), it is probably the narration that is the most captivating one. However, one cannot think of narration in the narrowest sense of the word. It can simply not be perceived as an isolated aspect of the novel. The observation might appear to be addressing a more than obvious fact: any reader with a tiniest interest in getting a grasp of a literary work one encounters could make the same, or, at least, a very similar remark in relation to any piece of writing. And yet, applied to Woolf’s prose, this common wisdom acquires slightly modified meaning. To support such a statement by emphasizing the role of the tone in shaping the narration is nothing new. Perhaps, it is not spectacularly informative either. But, although reading the dialogue between them in Woolf’s storytelling might not be an entirely fresh approach to a novel, it certainly does inform the reader’s perception of the fictitious world presented.

Few are novels that parallel Between the Acts in terms of the elusiveness of a narrator. Fewer dare to allow such a seemingly unreliable polyphony to carry the structure of the narrative. Seldom could a book written at the time Woolf wrote hers be said to have ventured into the adventures Woolf’s did. But, what, one wonders, could it be that which constitutes such a specific conversation between and among the storytelling layers in Woolf’s prose?

Partly, it is for sure the way poetic components spike the prosaic tissue. Partly, it is how those minute connective lyrical ingredients sparkle from the solemn easiness of her fiction. It is quite possible that more than each particular nutrient, the interconnectivity between and among them is what constitutes the cornucopia of the literary diet sustained within and by Woolf’s filigrane, yet bold, signature. Specifically, the most stunning effect the narration can have on a reader comes from the nearly paradoxical, almost sublime strain in the voice overburdened with the quotidian. It is perhaps precisely the aloofness exuding boredom of a dispassionate engagement in daily chores that emanates a profound emotional charge from the layers underneath the tasteless everyday.

Even an event as extraordinary as a pageant provokes reserved responses of the participants. For example, while preparing the stage, Miss La Trobe meditates upon the audience. Due to a touch of a unique remoteness in the tone, her thoughts can scarcely be taken at face value. Way too deeply immersed she seems to be in the shadow of history, maintaining a distance from the audience for whom her consideration borders on carelessness, albeit not exactly verging on either disrespect or neglect. Therefore, neither does a single page of this astonishing novel signal a slightest possibility of leaving the reader with a sense of indifference. Such is the quirky dynamics with which one comprehends and responds to the seeming disinterest the tone in the book at times tends to incline towards. One would be prone to assume that the audience in the novel might mistrust the apparent lukewarm attitude demonstrated in the characters’ organizational maneuvering.

Is it, then, one would ponder, solely the dialogue between the narration and the tone that imbues in Woolf’s singular poetics the streak constitutive of the signature? Quite possibly not. One can hardly think of the tone without rightfully crediting the characterization. This opens up a whole new avenue to muse about the way the flux of history shown in the novel conditions the fluctuating character of the protagonists. How trustworthy is their elusive presence? How praiseworthy is the manner in which they win autonomy and guard themselves from multifarious voices of the audience. How incredibly the tone thereby serves the characterization, all the while strengthening the narration in the most delicate and dignified of manners allowing both the story and the reader to breathe freely.

`           La Trobe might be perceived the way the Rev. G.W. Streatfield observes in a postclimactic tone preaching with a look directed first towards the audience, then towards the sky: “He looked round. La Trobe was invisible” (Between the Acts 191). And yet, absent she is not. It is perhaps how one sees the pageant that can inform hearing Miss La Trobe’s presence. It may also be a perspective from which to contemplate how history is told. It is to ruminate about the quizzical relationship between continuity and syncopation. It is to see the current moment in the looking glass whose acoustics consists of the imagery not so much visual as it is semantic. The closing scene of the pageant is loaded with kaleidoscopic pictures and fragmentary voices. The characters in the pageant leap, jerk, skip, jump, dance. The scenery is flashing, dazzling (184). The audience seems to believe what the play is communicating:

Look at ourselves, ladies and gentlemen! Then at the wall; and ask how’s this wall, the great wall, which we call, perhaps miscall, civilization, to be built by (here the mirrors flicked and flashed) orts, scraps and fragments like ourselves? […] All you can see of yourselves is scraps, orts and fragments? Well then listen to the gramophone affirming…. (188 italics in original).

Only Manresa’s conduct radiates the perception in a subversive key. She powders her nose (186), after which a voice asserts itself. The Reverend was to speak shortly. But, before he does, the audiences are confronting the looming, ominous sites: “And the audiences saw themselves, not whole by any means, but at any rate sitting still” (185). They seem to be listening to the gramophone affirming (188). For them, it is still like an echo of the brooding scratches the music is being dashed with: “The music chanted: Dispersed are we. It moaned: Dispersed are we. It lamented: Dispersed are we, as they streamed, spotting the grass with colour, across the lawns, and down the paths: Dispersed are we” (95-6 italics in original).

First Manresa (96), then Isabella (96), followed by Mrs. Swithin (103) murmur and hum a consensus about the portrayal of who they thought they were: “The hands of the clock had stopped at the present moment. It was now. Ourselves” (186). Anxious indifference, stupefyingly unsettling is the aural aspect of the perception of the play. They ask. From the question, an answer arises: “Was that voice ourselves? Scraps, orts and fragments, are we, also, that? The voice died away” (189).

            Having been deprived of the acoustic component, they seem to be increasingly perplexed by the shadow overhanging from a displaced, almost unidentifiable comment on the discussion Oliver and Lucy have about time. Isa distracts the debate from the lofty realm towards the awareness of temporality. An interjection emerges from the crevices in the conversation: “The future disturbing our present” (82). All is fragments. All is abysmal hollowness threatening to sweep daylight from the eyes of the audiences. All is noise, the troubled history-lovers seem to be suggesting: “Here came the sun—an illimitable rapture of joy, embracing every flower, every leaf. Then in compassion it withdrew, covering its face, as if it forebore to look on human suffering” (23). One wonders if the gramophone affirms.

            Instead of a response to the query, the signs of the times were revealed via the emissaries of modernity: “The word was cut in two. A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead. That was the music. The audience gaped; the audience gazed. Then zoom became drone. The planes had passed” (193 italics in original). Little room does it create for doubts about the eras bygone. Fewer a suspicious thought can conquer the mind when the music of the planes outvoices the sound coming from the gramophone. The audiences seem to believe the music they listen to. Music as the signs of the times. Music as the signs of the historical narratives about traditions seemingly floating along the flux of Chronos’s tales. As if each attempt to tell the world that once upon a time a world existed that spoke a different language were a walk across the bridge tricking one to suspect the solidity of the ground beneath.

Sometimes, stories coming from the depths of history bear witness to the worlds so irredeemably incommensurable with current cultural vocabulary that one doubts the linguistic unity underpinning the prolific descriptions. How arbitrary is such a verisimilitude, one would like to know. How comprehendible is a story borne out of polyphonic flows? How hostile is the past that resists deciphering? Traditions : either as a succession of disposable linguistic variants—a centuries-long pageant of differences dissolving into a tasteless indistinctiveness, or, as a linguistic rigidity of a privileged vocabulary excluding the validity of playfulness.

The rule of absolutely random morality or robozombism seem to be the choices on offer. We don’t buy such a dichotomy. We don’t buy deceitful binary opposites. We don’t even care about the number of the components in the debate, we don’t care how many oppositional parameters constitute the edginess of a critical / creative narrative. But, there is no way to argumentatively defend such a seemingly controversial attitude. Sometimes we wonder like the characters in Between the Acts do: “’Were they like that?’ […] ‘The Victorians,’ Mrs. Swithin mused. ‘I don’t believe,’ she said with her odd little smile, ‘that there ever were such people. Only you and me and William dressed differently’” (174-5). Sometimes, one wonders what the sound of the versatile attire in question is like. One wonders how the gramophone could affirm a response to such an inquiry. An answer seems to be coming from the characters in the play: “... All passes but we, all changes…but we remain forever the same…” (139 italics in original). The same fragments? The same broken beat voices? The same kaleidoscopic imagery? The same noise? Possibly. But, most probably in the way calling for a different combination of those scraps & syncopations. To say the very least.

The reverend makes a point about the congregation : each individual is part of the whole (192). One could hardly resist taking his observation as a clue for a literary analysis. The metaphorical charge of the remark is suggestive of the idea that just as the members of the congregation make sense only as nodes interconnected within a web, so do literary elements in Woolf’s novel become articulate only when they are put in conversation with other constituent parts of the web in question. Only then are they fully animated. Only then are they reintegrated. Only then do they resonate with the sound coming from the gramophone: “Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken” (120). Such moments might even be capable of disclosing the dissoluble character of bewildering historical flows, of disambiguating deceiving mirror images, re-animating the linguistic anchorage underneath the deafening “easy pluralities”: “But somewhere, this cloud, this crust, this doubt, this dust— She waited for a rhyme, it failed her; but somewhere surely one sun would shine and all, without a doubt, would be clear” (61).

            Rather than isolated particulates, what was believed to be irrevocably alienated pollutants in the communication channel, one would preferably accept the perception based on transformative potentials of music. Translated into the language of theory, it may be illuminated from the angle presented in Sucking on Words: A Documentary about Kenneth Goldsmith directed by Simon Morris (2007). Goldsmith points out the following:

What are you going to do, take a grain of sand and chop it up even further or are you actually going to forget about deconstruction and begin some sort of re-construction acknowledging and re-building this vessel. Acknowledging the cracks in it. We’re not going back but instead we have to, kind of, look at wholes again. I’m not interested in rips. I’m actually interested in wholeness. (Sucking on Words)

            History can be oppressive. Historical narratives can be confusing. The imperial grandeur of western empires might be history : huge chapters in history books long over. And yet, some tales endure. Neither nostalgic nor somnambulist : neither lionizing the idealized past nor projecting into a romanticized future, the poetics of the remix perseveres in DJing in the intersection of the time axes : recuperating the past, reimagining the future, and resurrecting the present.

If Aenglish Were a Language (Part 4)

Punk Rock Mafothers

Caryl Phillips reveals blind spots of investing in solely economy-based means of social restorative potentials (The European Tribe 127). Perhaps, it is not official politics, but something that can be characterized as a sense of the era bringing about a cluster of issues that started burgeoning at the onset of postvictorian / postedwardian world and were later to be further transfigured into the polemic constituent of and shaped by cultural vocabulary of the twentieth century. In Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 (1986), Terry Eagleton focuses on the peculiar dialogues between modernism and postmodernism to portray an aspect of the modern day discussion:

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. (146-7)

Again, rather than participating in the acceptance of a distorted projection of how ideas can relate to cultural flows, Eagleton proposes “the emergence of a transformed rationality” (Against the Grain 147) as a means of solidifying the conviction in the vibrancy of roots. Although such an insistence might invoke an inclination contrary to docile, amorphous polyphony of cultural vocabularies, it is important to acknowledge its focus being on criticizing hypocrisy and superficiality. Accordingly, in his book Theory After Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory From 1950 to the Early 21st Century (2010), Nicholas Birns points out deceitful streaks within “an ethic of indiscriminate tolerance” (317) and “easy pluralities” (317). Likewise, in Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009), Terry Eagleton  observes:”A culture which results from the active participation of all its members is likely to be more mixed and uneven than a uniform culture which admits new members only on its own terms. In this sense, equality generates difference” (153-4).

How repulsively uniforming individualism is. How incomparable with its linguistic false pair. How, conversely, unity resonates in the key of individuality. Distinctive enough to cleanse the blurring boundaries threatening to sweep the distinction between the very notions of difference and sameness. McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011):”The twenty-first century is the culmination of two forms of individualism. In the first, individuals are all the same; in the second, they are all different. The first is classically bourgeois, the second distinctly bohemian” (11).

A typical “rationalization” of such an unfolding of historical narratives is an explanation based on the belief in revengeful historical shifts and turns. However, such a personified causality infused in historical flows does little good to history and is even less beneficial for either storytellers and / or audience of such tales of history. McKenzie Wark presents to the reader kindred resistance:”Capitalism or barbarism, those are the choices. This is an epoch governed by this blackmail: either more and more of the same, or the end times. Or so they say. We don’t buy it” (The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International 1).

We don’t buy the cacophony aiming to delude one to think that there is no disparity between the words difference and sameness. We don’t buy cultural realities imposing on one a deceitful idea of one-way communication being a proper articulation of fruitful exchange. We do not accept usurpation. Neither do we agree to be persuaded in its skillfully variable verbal mimicry. Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985:

The depthless, styleless, dehistoricized, decathected surfaces of postmodern culture are not meant to signify an alienation, for the very concept of alienation must secretly posit a dream of authenticity which postmodernism finds quite unintelligible. Those flattened surfaces and hollowed interiors are not ‘alienated’ because there is no longer any subject to be alienated and nothing to be alienated from, ‘authenticity’ having been less rejected than merely forgotten. (132)

Among the sounds constitutive of Temple’s documentary is punk rock. Once a musical and subcultural vocabulary frequently perceived as a genuinely novel expressive mode, which some of its factions claim to be, it can be more comprehensively and adequately understood in the context of its constructive dialogue with the legacy from the past. The conversation between and among fresh, highly energized, socially and politically engaged, emotionally charged, lyrically laced punk rock sound on the one hand and, on the other,  reggae, ska, dub, rock steady, pop, rockabilly, and other interlocutors belonging in countless genres speaks for itself and is a truly genuine specimen of hybrid narratives engendered in the intersection of the time axes within the communication channel as noisy as it gets, and yet, quite clearly articulating agendaless politics firmly anchored in powerless strength.

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.