Texts about Texts

Once I read a text about a story. The latter I know and admire. I had not read anything by the author of the former. The reading inspired me to think about the possibilities of commentary. The theoretical apparatus used in the text was strikingly different from the set of theoretical frameworks I typically rely on in investigations into the potentials of interpretation. Hence, every attempt to accommodate the text to my idiosyncrasies turned out to be merely an instance of indeterminacy of translation. And yet, there were so many things in it that required a thorough analysis, so I started laterally approaching the points of significance. Instead of discursively clearing up the misty spots in the narrative, I imagined the text interrogating an individual. The dialogue would be of the approximately following content:

You should turn on flash on your camera. But, I don’t take pictures at night.

In your house there is no shoe rack. But, I only wear sneakers.

You need to borrow some money in order to buy that fabulous perfume. But, I can’t smell.

You must learn the formula to express the relationship between mass and velocity at maximum acceleration. But, there’s no such thing as the mass/velocity/acceleration nexus in the physics I know.

When you drive, make sure you change the tires every five hundred kilometers. I don’t drive.

In order to be famous, you must live out the illusion of your own grandiosity. But, I don’t give a fuck about illusions.

If you want to understand something, you must be an artist. But, fuck off!!!

In order to be somewhere, you must create space in the fantasy prerequisite for your somnambulist grandeur. 

You must be inherently incorrigibly mutable if you hope to inhabit somebody else’s delusions.

No concept can encapsulate the greatness of learning.

I have no idea if I made the ideas from the text clearer to myself. I’m not sure I’m interested in further decoding it. I was concerned about the vague areas that might remain impenetrable for me. I was nearly desperate because there was a possibility to persist in listlessness regarding the superknots in the narrative. I felt I was getting increasingly hopeless because the natural density of the text will irrevocably deny me access to the beauty hidden where I cannot find it.

I’m not concerned any more. I don’t care about the areas I cannot reach. Not because I cannot, but because whatever could be found there is not what I seek.

Indeterminacy of translation again told me a story about storytelling.

Cynicism & Shadows

1. Shadows’n’Majorities

In The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011), McKenzie Wark states: “The essence of technology is nothing technical” (144). He goes on to ask:” But could it be something playful? Could it be a way, not of instrumentalzing nature, but of producing a new relation to it, as a totality?” (145). He wonders:” Is it possible to imagine collective human agency as productive of something playful, joyous, communal, even beautiful? “ (144).

Once upon a time, to be hip meant to be radical, radically revolutionary, revolutionary decadent, decadently intoxicant, toxically fiery, fiercely dedicated, decidedly transgressive. Not so long ago, in 2005, Stewart Home writes in his book Tainted Love  about swinging London, beats, and other revolutionaries heavily involved in the sweeping revolutionary tornado generously fueled by the underground pharmaceutical industry. He casts light on the peculiar dynamism resulting in the officialdom’s complicity in the criminalization of drugs, that, at a dialectical stroke, sucked the underground—up! On the surface! Namely, the authorities persecuted and prosecuted decadent revolutionaries, simultaneously amplifying anti-subversive sentiment that culminated in the latter day mainstreaming turn.

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 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 and used by reckless right wing politics as a means of social control (Gus Van Sant, Drugstore Cowboy 1989). Today, nobody cares about that fact. Why would they? Would you? When drugs have been mainstreamed, having found fertile soil in anti-subversive minds susceptible to legally available crutches—mental flux blockage aids’n’supplements. Consolation at anybody’s disposal. Silently sedated, accelerated, euphorized, dazed, hazed…you name it…according to one’s tastes.

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 is just that. Or, is it, indeed? One wonders if its rhetoric can define a choice: the words that spell out r-e-f-u-s-a-l to choose such freedom.

2. Formalities for Formalities Sake

In the empire of appearances absurd abounds. Absurd is fueled  by a powerful accelerating engine. Its seeming goal is efficiency ensuring betterment of the living conditions for the human kind. Its less obvious goal is time consumption. Its ultimate aim, or, at least, the effect, is depriving individuals of the time, space, and capacity to think. The ideology of such culture of distraction is desertification. It tends to transform humans into desert dwellers. Its most prominent manifestations are eerily dialectical pairs that include, but are not limited to, the following: immediacy/immanence, instantaneity/focus, sedentariness / peace, visual/ vision, euphoria/joy, political correctness/ humanness , uniformity/union, individualism/individuality, mass/fellowship, utility/solidarity, economics/politics, atomizing diversification/unified versatility, banalized sexuality/passion, robotic pragmatism/rationality, globalization/insularity, affectation/affection, sensationalism/beauty, possession/substance, formalities/civility.

3. Beyond the Hiyperline

“The flock of birds had spiraled elsewhere, and Jean-Paul was gazing at the empty sky, which had nothing left to hint about itself unless blue air knows something I don’t know.”

Dennis Cooper, The Marbled Swarm (2011)

Pressing the power button on an electronic device, more often than not, triggers a visual sensation. The focus of the activity is communication between the sense of sight and the brain. When that communication is initiated by a signal from the screen, the screen becomes a participant in the communication flows.  How that complicates the situation is encapsulated in janjagodzinski’s notion of the inverted gaZe . In Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media (2004), he investigates the effects of the exchange between the viewer and the screen. Despite the seeming activity, that in the cases of heavily addicted gamers nearly equals a round the clock engagement in digital adventures, a mutual effect on both “interlocutors” jagodzinski characterizes as interpassivity. 

Antidote against such robozomboid mentality should not be confused with the  activity as it is promoted in contemporary culture, which does not leave a single empty second, which worships passivity inhibitant placebo--self-celebratory muscular kinetics--which makes the world kingdom of somnambulism, which is a bottomless source of fun. Resistance against zombo-instrumentalization hides, among other places, in reconfiguring the subject-object relations neither via reexamining their political positioning in terms of narrowly defined power-relations, nor solely via redescribing their ontological statuses. Rather, by being “free to undo,” as high priest of the supreme imagination, James Joyce, teaches  (Finnegans Wake  208).

A possible trajectory of undoing that knot is by refocusing the debate onto dromospheric ecology, as Paul Virilio urges in Open Sky (1997). He stresses dromospheric pollution as an undertheorized and neglected aspect of life: “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” (Open Sky 22 emphasis in original). The reason for  such lack of awareness he sees in the blind spots of memory: “forgetting the essence of the path, the journey” (Open Sky 23 emphasis in original). Dromology is, thus, antidote against desertification resulting from dromospheric contamination: “the desert of world time—of a global time—complementing the desert of flora and fauna rightlydecried by ecologist” (Open Sky 125 emphasis in original). Dromology is an ecology aimed to recuperate the pace of life.

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 objective and subjective, it seems we have no room for the ‘trajective’“ (Open Sky 24).  Or, do we not, indeed?

Reflections about objectivity/subjectivity have lead to the insights into the possibilities arising from the repositioning of the categories in question within the communication in hyperreality.  Jean Baudrillard speculates about it in The Vital Illusion (2000). He aptly remarks that an unprecedented paradigm shift occurs in hyperreality. Arguably, hyperspace enables reconfiguration of the hegemonic position of the subject. Such a situation calls for a further elaboration: interrogating specificities of its impact on the object. Or, the subject. Or, the way human beings live: how objective the subject should be in order to recuperate human dignity; how the culture of distraction frees the object in the world of the dethroned subject; how free a value-free subversion is; how disinterested a value-free subject is; how victory defines itself  in the newly created situation.

Possible explanations to a great extent depend on the reading mechanisms utilized in reconfiguring vocabulary of culture. To simplify it without being simplistic, one is prone to see disinterested reading of subjectivity as somewhat similar to metaphorical blindness, meaning being metaphor-blind, not metaphorically blind. It also indicates an alarmingly high degree of irony-sensor scarcity. Essentially, it results from being desensitized to literary subtleties necessary for refining the remix.

That said, Virilio’s desertification trope is a helpful tool. It can devise a technique for describing peculiarities in the lacunae: to read ironically the triumph of the supposed subversive interventions and to understand such victory as an exodus awaiting the fruits of the promised land. After velocity, dromology. After the bewildering wilderness, purifying water. After the passage across the river, the radical light shift. After the oblivion-inducing desert, resensitizing to the power of metaphor.

4. Hips’n’Hypes

“There was a cleanness and simplicity about these machines.”

 Terry Eagleton, Saints and Scholars  (1987)

If I were a computer, I wouldn’t expect from myself to be a digital Dorian Gray version of my humbly imperfect humanness. Neither would I expect from it to be a confirmation of my erroneousness and, thus, humanness. Unlike the imagined robotic variant of myself, I have embarrassing, illusory hopes—half-hidden even from myself—that one day there will be a laptop that does not freeze, a desktop that does not eat files, a printer that does not run out of ink. I shamefully cherish a desire that that day were now.

Most of the time I forget about such secret aspirations. And just keep living. As a human version of my digitalized mirror image. While in that hyperworld, I wonder if not to be hip is to be hyper now. In that democratic fairy tale called the web, one might experience a tremendously liberating effect of the communication freed from a Father’s sanctioning voice. Hence, one is free to chat, search, play, prey, loot, seduce, flirt, have sex, read, create…you name it…on the Internet.

In an age when faith in science evokes a gambler spirit, unbelievers sinfully seek answers on the net. Moreover, technology, in a broader sense, offers reasonable responses for numerous conundrums. janjagodzinski, Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media: “Consumers are told which foods are likely to cause cancer, and then which foods can help prevent it! Given that nobody knows for sure, we invest more and more authority in technological solutions like Viagra, and mood drugs like Prozac to avoid responsibility”(182).

But then, one wonders why that recentering of authority is necessary to comfort one’s doubtful soul. Isn’t the whole enterprise called hyperreality so appealing precisely because it frees one from the sense of authority? Eerie dialectic, indeed.Shifts nothing short of the creepiness of the land of shadow readers and robocops in Jeff Noon’s novels. Inhabiting hyperspace bears semblance to wandering through the labyrinth of empty spaces in the mind deprived of dreams in Pollen (1995). The air we breathe, marbled with an invisible telecommunication jungle, is sometimes heavy. As if it were saturated with the particles of the dispersed vurthayfever bomb. The same sneeze bomb that haunts vurtual Manchester of Noon’s imagination.

Seemingly, terra digita is the land of opportunities that requires no strenuous moral efforts. And yet, it is hard to imagine effortless round the clock hyperreal networking. Even if freed from all ridiculous ethical burden, threatening to overshadow the light from the screen, at least one unpleasantry  remains: that one has the body. Another one is that there is an unstoppable activity of the mind. jan jagodzinski: “ Such technology has made all of us walking cyborgs. So where is the ‘No!’ to be found?” (Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media 186).

In this cyberspace there are yet other cyberspaces, as McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto (2004) inspires one to think ([389] square brackets in original). And it is this one, called vurtuality. In Stewart Home’s book Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010), communication is relocated into the language of the ones &  zeros binary coding and decoding. Interaction reflects isolation of the characters whose words are disassociated from the bodies.

 Afflicted literature:

‘Abstract literature implodes in a subdued fashion, like a slow motion reversal of an explosion or some other catastrophe. It absorbs all energy generated by writing as a cultural practice and neutralises it. Abstract literature is a billowing series of syllables followed by an eruption of color. It is usually red with purple flashes…’ (Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie 5).

Since abstract literature does not exist, one provides a definition. What one does with words in the world which denounces possibilities for an interaction outside vurtuality. It seems that words are being dismissed and invented without much consideration about their relationship with the extralinguistic. One of the words that has undergone such a hasty handling is alienation. Reflecting upon the thematic within the dynamic of postmodernist culture in Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 (1986), Terry Eagleton observes: “[T]here is no longer any subject to be alienated and nothing to be alienated from, ‘authenticity’ having been less rejected than merely forgotten” (132).

In the world that dismisses and conjures up words with close to no concern for the everyday, communication acquires properties of “imperceptible passages of distant galaxies through hyper-space” (Stewart Home, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie 6). If there is no such thing as alienation, one wonders how to call an unpleasant feeling of isolation that some human beings experience in the cold communication channels. One would be prone to suspect if, perhaps, it is the word communication that calls for reconfiguring. Alternatively, one reimagines human interconnectivity on the communal level in the way that would ensure genuine exchange and relieve one from disconnectedness.

In Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, communication is  limited to overpouring spam emails. Ads promoting aids and supplements for sexual performance come in shapes and forms that could be appealing to any male concerned with his social status. In such a world of advertising, physical potency strangely plots power relations narratives, cultural constructs curiously conspire with the vocabulary of carnally conditioned hierarchies. In the world of male supremacy,  it is only the names of female artists that help define the type of pleasure a male will be able to provide once he gets a “bigger and better cock” (Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie 7).

In the world that casts aside the concept of representation, representational arts have been gotten rid of, as well: “Theatre is dead. Cinema is dead” (Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie 10). Such culture of of denial and deception wants one to believe that literature abandoned readers-writers: “Literature is dead. Time and space died yesterday. You eat dead food, you fuck dead men, even your words die in your mouth. Your sentences are rolled into the ebbing waters of modernism and then wash back like a bulimic’s forced vomiting” (Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie 10).

To say that we now live in a technologically advanced age is more than obvious. To say that cohesion of the human community is disproportionate with technological development might be disputable. To define the disparity in terms of  narrowly understood causality and conditioning would be crude reductionism and not a precise articulation of the solidarity of fellowship. It clearly calls for the remix in order to reawaken the union of the community of reindividualized humans.

The poetics of Home’s novel inspires a response to the fashionable cynicism of contemporary culture. It provokes resistance against dispassionate acceptance of delusional thinking. In the world that threatens to erase distinctions among individuals in the blurry, massifying, sweepingly objectifying, amalgam, there is still hope to reanimate the half-forgotten dromology. In such a world, to be hip is not to be hip. To reject what  nihilo-cannibalist culture packages as free thinking for  free-minded individuals. Beyond hips & hypes is to choose. To choose resistance against deceptions. To refuse to be absent from the abundance offered to human kind. To persevere in resensitizing to literary subtleties. To sustain dromology in the service of language. To accept to hard-headedly endure in being present in life.

Political Philosophy of Poetry

 “There was a cleanness and simplicity about these machines” (Terry Eagleton, Saints and Scholars 37). Reading could be decisively different from what it is like now. Instead of an overheated outburst of interpretation, it could be a coldly conducted vivisection of literary fiber. An understanding of the character may purge the confusion imposed on the  musings about it.

 The character finds oneself amidst the global crisis of just about everything. The historical context of the occurrence is blurred by the emphasis on the beauty of Cronos’s unimportance. That complicates understanding. Because the character comments on the notion of Martian-Saturnalian ethnicity and the observation triggers the initial reaction in a celebratory key of the antinationalist tone. The first response to such blatant political illiteracy is that it must have resulted from another  blind spot. Namely, in the scene in which the character is choosing attire for the evening at the theater, random thoughts reveal that the current existential situation is a far cry of the solid middle-class background. The economic degradation discloses another unexpected fact--an aspect of life typically not linked with economic potency. More precisely, the fewer the items in the wardrobe, the greater anxiety and insecurity takes hold of the life of this shivering, unprotected being just about to set out to spend early evening hours immersed in the enchantment of the stage.

“The city was glutted with crap and garbage and screaming to be purged” (Terry Eagleton, Saints and Scholars 36). 

If there is political philosophy of poetry, one imagines it as a logical colossus standing on the four gigantic pillars of what is reasonably salient: (1) solid causal base; (2) empirically testifiable propositions; (3) correspondence between the conclusion and its consequences; and (4) practically justifiable application of  their interpretative ramifications.

If these four giants hold the structure steadfastly, they spell out the following ideas about contemporary culture:

1.      The idea of safety must be equated with the frequency of visits of club goers to the hottest dance hubs in the city;

2.      Job must be understood as anything an individual does in order to support the development of small and medium businesses;

3.      The concept of job,  thus, includes the not-for-profit sector, thereby subverting traditional perception of employment;

4.      Equality must be understood in incremental class terms;

5.      Military-entertainment complex must be read in a freudian key;

6.      Peace must be tightly woven with, but at the same time diametrically disproportionate to, inflation;

7.      Tradition must be either smashed at a stroke or preserved within a fortress-like bubble;

8.      Art must be either totally free or there will be none;

9.      Citizenship must be a matter of(f) the bloodline, unquestionably founded in legislature;

10.  The degrees of humanity must be implemented in the health program  defined in architectural terms.

Wiered to a Maze: Pixel Saturnalia and Refacementi (Part Three)

To Be Human: Noises & Voices in Ye Land of Ye Olde Folks

[i]

The following reading of Stewart Home’s novel Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton (2004) focuses on reanimation of redemptive silence through the remix of noise. The remix includes, but is not limited to, acknowledging the silent layers of storytelling and render them accessible: the unuttered literary tissue, cracks in the discursive, lateral paths of cultural remixing.  In Stewart Home’s novels, a social commentary is both overtly presented and implied in the interventions manipulating the genre and literary elements such as characterization, tone, and setting. For instance, the characters, featuring emotional sparseness and awkward ways of socializing, are sketches of nihilo-cannibalist culture. Insistence on compulsion and aggression is a caricature of a human being in a soulless world. Disorientation and confusion, presented in the text and coupled with what is infused in the subtext, add up to a sketch of a fragmented culture of robozombies. A sense of isolation, dispassion, and destitution is accentuated through the broken beat plot. Syncopated rhythm patterns make manifest, rather than explicate, how it feels to live in an alienating culture in which fetishized labor relativizes the notion of the everyday in a highly undesirable way, as Terry Eagleton remarks the state of affairs in Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate: “Truly civilized societies do not hold predawn power breakfast” (11). 

In Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton, Home portrays the character Eve in a minimalist fashion to suggest detrimental effects of capitalism on an individual, as he states in Bubonic Plagiarism: “[I]n this world we are all prostitutes. It isn’t really possible to jump in and out of commodity culture” (62). Eve explores the transformation of quantity into quality, the distinction between art and crime, the pleasure-pain divide (Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton 13). Among her clients is Adam, who is interested in investigating into prostitution and its cultural aspects. They engage in a joint research discussing contributions of certain cultural figures to intellectual history.  Part of the thematic is proliferation and commodification of art: “Needing money to pay off debts, I resolved to transform prostitution into a form of arts” (Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton 27). Further implications in political terms can be imagined along the following lines: “Crime became art and art became crime” (15). This casts light on the novel’s problematizing mutual conditioning between the authorities and the mainstream culture on the one hand and, on the other, criminalized social margins.

What makes this social commentary specific is that, as much as it is overtly stated, it is also delivered through the silent cracks, mainly integrated into the characterization and the tone. The character of Eve, for example, is the epitome of the stigma against junkies and prostitutes. Home makes a point about stereotyping that masks politics of exclusion: “[T]he condemnations that are sometimes directed towards junkies and prostitutes should be deflected back against the alienated social relationships that produce prejudices” (Bubonic Plagiarism 61). Hence, the characterization constitutes tacit cultural critique combined with what is uttered. The fusion of the verbal and what punctures discourse tells a tale about the world in which afflicted solidarity engenders individualism instead of individuality. The culture of self-absorbed, commoditized humans is depicted in the thematization of prostitution between a choice and necessity, between privacy and spectacle: “To begin with transformations. I decided to throw away my own rules. I planned crimes against grammar by immersing myself in the grammar of crime” (7).

     In the context of the interlaced social and discursive realities, the Jack the Ripper conspiracy delineates a parallel between the nineteenth century and contemporary culture’s sensationalist susceptibility thriving on insatiable hunger for the euphoric. Closely related to such sentiment is the idolatry situated within the obsession with celebrity culture. Thus, among the candidates for the identity of Jack the Ripper are the characters based on cultural figures such as Henry James and William Burroughs, just as some of the prostitutes’ clients are Martin Heidegger, George Sorel, Albert Camus, Gilles Deleuze, and Jim Morrison.

Such characterization creates a platform for the scrutiny of power-relations within the cultural establishment and a critique of institutionalized knowledge.  The novel features obscenities in educational institutions, thereby questioning morality within the mainstream culture. For example, a promiscuous university professor seduces a student and exposes his sexual frustration in a violent erotic act. Images of graphic sex and violence are deployed in order to make prominent corruption and social relations based on exclusion and dominance. By depicting an alienated bodily experience and vulgarized sexuality, the novel makes an implicit commentary about body politics as a form of socio-political control that disguises questionable morality under the language of political correctness.

Hypocrisy is also problematized through the critique of global politics and the state of affairs in the European Union based on the Old-New Europe divide. Many of the prostitutes, for example, are from the former Communist Bloc, which emphasizes the problems of inequality and inhumane treatment of disenfranchised demographics. Expanding on Marx’s critique of alienation and exploitation in capitalist and allegedly socialist/communist societies alike, prostitution is used as a metaphor for social and existential dilemmas. For example, the character of Eve is portrayed as a well-educated, well spoken artist-prostitute-crackhead. Along with a class reference, crack, as the drug of “choice” of the impoverished, also metaphorizes prevalent affective patterns of our time, characterized by addictive behavior, instantaneous gratifications, and superficiality in human interaction that clearly dissolves solidarity.

The novel shows an individual as dehumanized, bewildered commodity. Through this is addressed the question of freedom under a threat of the military-entertainment complex. The symbolism of the occult demonstrates the characteristics of such culture. Literary techniques, used in the novel as means of an experimentation with the genre, accentuate the cultural critique in question. Home comments on the approach as follows: “Above all, and like all my books, Down & Out is about the impossibility of separating form from content within human expression and the ultimate futility of genre distinctions” (Bubonic Plagiarism 59). Insisting on one hundred words being the exact length of every paragraph, Home aims at subverting the distinctions between poetry and prose (Bubonic Plagiarism 59). The first part of the novel mainly follows conventions of traditional storytelling. As a parody of a bourgeois genre, the novel features “the odd elements of realism” (Bubonic Plagiarism 60). As the parody progresses, elements of goth aesthetic, portraying occult, ritualistic, phantasmagoric scenes, supersede the elements of realism—the narrative is moving from sex to death, again to convey a social commentary: “So the book becomes utterly fantastic and this is one of the ways [he] accentuate[s] [his] interest in the cultural construction of the relationship between sex and death” (Bubonic Plagiarism 60). 

In this stylistic spin-off is instigated the idea about cultural constructs as means of control and oppression. Esoteric context is suggestive of manipulative social mechanisms carried out via persecution and prosecution of the social margins. This addresses realities of prostitutes’ activities in gentrified areas, where they, “dressed in widow’s weeds […] are able to solicit business unmolested by cops” (Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton 153). Simultaneously, it reiterates the critique of discursive realities and cultural constructs: ”The reversibility of sex and death is never more apparent than when whores turn tricks in a graveyard” (Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton 159). Such a picture of the modern world inhabited by robozombies deprived of their own will, having projected on their brains “series of pictures with bright and vivid outlines” (Down and out in Shoreditch and Hoxton 166), evidently references the dilemma of living in media-saturated realities. Similarly, artistic circles are reminiscent of mystical orders in which objectification maintains social relations based on domination and exclusion.

With an exception of Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010), London is typically both the setting and a character in Home’s novels. The portrayal of the character of the London in Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton charters the changes in the area between Bethnal Green and the City. Cultural context indicates a mute collaboration and a mutually conditioned relationship between the authorities and the ghetto via the sustenance of tribulations within the neglected communities and/or neighborhoods. Partly, the problematic can be understood in the context of Habermas’s thought about the politics of distraction. In “Modernity--an Incomplete Project,” he writes about a populist reaction to neoconservative cooption of communication infrastructure. Different forms of resistance to modernization and science in the service of capitalist economy are suppressed under the flag of progress. Habermas reveals the underlying motives for modernization and the resulting socio-political dynamic. Precisely, he implicitly discloses the truth about the scapegoating of certain cultural segments and practices in the name of advancement of the cultural spheres by nature detached from the communication in question. Simply put, it might translate into seeing the key role of economic factors in the circles and activities whose primary interests are of the different character:

But the occasions for protest and discontent originate precisely when spheres of communicative action, centered on the reproduction and transmission of values and norms, are penetrated by a form of modernization guided by standards of economic and administrative rationality – in other words, by standards of rationalization quite different from those of communicative rationality on which those spheres depend. But neo-conservative doctrines turn our attention precisely away from such societal processes: they project the causes, which they do not bring to light, onto the plane of subversive cultures and its advocates. (8)

In this light can be read certain aspects of Home’s novel depicting modernization in urban areas. Focusing on architectural reconfiguration of the cityscape and cultural restructuring, it discloses instrumentality of modernizing policies in the criminalization of the dispossessed. Put differently, the impoverished neighborhoods are being gentrified, while the denizens are being continually marginalized. The underprivileged in the rejuvenated areas cannot meet new economic demands, so they not only remain culturally excluded, but are also forced to relocate  to the areas where affordable housing disguises the class divide. In order to endure the hardships, preserve day-to-day living, or, simply to support certain lifestyles, the dispossessed frequently opt for illegal acts. In such cases, the supposedly life-preserving choices are also destructive and degrading. Paradoxically, the authorities keep a blind eye on some aspects of crime because of their own complicity, at the same time not shying away from criminalizing those same social strata on a different basis, thereby sustaining the vicious circle.

Accentuated is the impact of the so called modernization turning the city into a jigsaw puzzle[1] of fashionable facades, bizarre galleries, grotesque shopping malls, olympic villages, and slums. Home elucidates hypocrisy behind such urban policies by pointing out that, contrary to the presentations in the media and arts of the urban transfiguration, the reality shows little evidence of easing social tensions.[2] Rather, they have been intensified through racist exclusion with regard to employment and housing opportunities. The distorted image of cultural realities in the East End of the mid naughties Home comments as follows:

The yuppies really changed the character of the area and have made it a lot worse for the predominantly Muslim local population. At the same time I’d be reading stuff written by art critics in which they’d be going on about how gentrification had solved the problem of racism in the Brick Lane area. This was complete nonsense, since community self-defence against fascism had addressed the most blatantly criminal aspects of this. However, institutional racism remains a massive problem in the area and gentrification has exacerbated it in terms of housing and jobs. (Bubonic Plagiarism 59-60)

 New money, thriving on unfathomable valences of economics, a manipulated image of power, and the affinities for sensationalism generates the logic of pricy cheapness that seems to be spreading beyond the East End, as suggested by the title of Home’s pamphlet Bubonic Plagiarism. As it is, it is reasonable to believe that, simultaneously, a web of resistance against those overwhelming corporate threats is spreading in the overlooked, forgotten, masked, parts of the city. One is prone to imagine that the authentic flavor of resistance can still be felt around slightly damaged facades in the originally Huguenot immigrant neighborhood in the Brick Lane area, in the unmowed grass in Weaver’s Fields, in the charming, supernarrow passages off Whitechapel High Street, or, in the buildings to be  rebuilt in the King’s Cross St. Pancras area.[3] There is the 5 Caledonian Road radical haven at Housmans bookstore. Lateral alleys of resistance can be found near Bunhill Row. Just off Bunhill Fields, the historic cemetery, where non-conformers such as William Blake are buried, there is a potential to inspire the dormant song of the chimney sweeper. In Finsbury Square, Occupy London calls for vitalizing the cleansing capacities of the remix.[4]

Literary playfulness, contesting cultural conventions, demarcates the ways of resisting cultural impositions, at the same time reconstructing the communal being and reinventing individuality, as Home suggests: ”The one thing I know is that we have to work this out together, no one in isolation and acting on their own will find the solution” (Bubonic Plagiarism 64). In the interstices of text, one finds creative spaces for cleansing the communication channel, for purging it from dehumanizing obstacles. Those recuperating energizes constitute the redeeming power of creation—the source for the remix, an inspiration for a reanimating intervention on behalf of the DJ.

Literature  shows both what language can and what it cannot do. It certainly reaffirms that it is not possible to step outside of language in order to verbally express something. However, not only the verbalized is what makes literature literature. There are literary elements, such as tone, characterization, and setting that deliver a message unutterable in and impenetrable through language. That is how silence punctures discourse. As much as cultural constructs condition freedom, they also enable a contestation of the constructed boundaries. Constructiveness of cultural realities makes them reworkable. The remix can generate unifying energies for the restoration of vital ingredients of fruitful communal exchange.

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[1] ResT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0AbIjKlbdE&feature=plcp

[2] This is particularly prominent in the area bordered by Brick Lane, Bethnal Green, Bishop’s Way, and Hackney Wick; between Dalston Junction and Hackney Central, and all the way to Liverpool Street; and the Bethnal Green- Bow Church-Whitechapel triangle (the information and impressions based on my research trips to London in June, August 2008, July, August 2009, and July, August, December 2010, January 2011, and May 2012).

[3] At the crossroads of Pentonville Road and Gray’s Inn Pl. there is a building usurped by the real estate. To my knowledge, there has been at least three years during which absolutely nothing has been done at what is supposed to be a construction site.

[4] The information about the Occupy activities is based on my research trip to London in May 2012.

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[i] Remixable. the intersection of Commercial  Street and Elder Street, London, 2009.

Wiered to a Maze: Pixel Saturnalia and Refacement (Part Two)

Towards the Remix

Were the Vurt sneeze bomb sent to our world, as it was in Pollen, it would come in the form of a bewildering massage. Its facelessness would be impressed on the human face. Its noise would mute the human voice. It would result from the assumption that corruption is what constitutes human nature. Svetlana Boym portrays part of such a dilemma in “Nostalgic Technology: Notes for an Off-Modern Manifesto” drawing the parallel between erroneousness of technology and human fallibility. The frustration and constraints one experiences on a daily basis confronted with technological dysfunctioning, in a way, proves the fact that to err is human. In other words, technological imperfection is remindful of our own. However, as much as it forces us to encounter the corruptible, malfunctioning aspects of our existence, technology, paradoxically, provides a platform for thinking and living differently. It informs our capacities to take advantage of what is typically perceived as a weakness and turn it into a potent device for walking the lateral paths. On “a margin of error” (Boym no date, no page number), occur encounters with such possibilities. Such erring is, as Boym sees it, neither high tech nor low tech. It is broken technology that she takes to be a basis of art’s new technology.

In Boym’s parlance, margins of error open up an off-modern avenue for neither quixotically fighting the technological Goliath nor sheepishly following its commandments. Put differently, it presents us with a possibility to see the world afresh if we opt for off-modern alleys. She devises the option instead of the terms modern, postmodern, antimodern, or hypermodern. According to Boym, choosing the off-modern mode, one it is possible to reclaim the uniqueness of the cities threatened by the global uniforming atomization. It also enables one to see the human face again. By extension, it expands and clarifies the understanding of what it means to be human. Based on Boym’s off-modern thinking about moving laterally, through the “exploration of the side alleys” (Boym, no date, no page number), one is prone to note that “it’s only human to err” should not be confusedly equated with “to be human is to err.” Because to simply be—to resist the mindless “progress” rush--is part of what it is to be human as well.

Lateral alleys of exploring such possibilities concern critical thinking, cultural practice, and reconfiguring the communal. Wark points out that in gamespace critical theory is, like sports or porno, yet another specialized, precisely regulated vocabulary. It becomes “’pornography of the concept’ […] a mere subset of gamespace, a hypocritical theory, with different specialists, playing by different rules – equally worthy of the Marquis de Sade” (Gamer Theory [151]). Perhaps. But, as it could be inferred from his further observations, the critic, too, inhabits the gamespace. S/he can choose how to play: take the red pill, “playing for the real” [019], which also means proliferating the unreal. But there’s also the blue pill that allows one to “play within the game, but against gamespace” [019].¹

The absolute power of gamespace is a misconception parallel to that of the totality of discourse. Notwithstanding being thrown into the maze, gamers can look for the channels to reclaim play. What Wark describes as a hypocritical position comes as a result of trying to step out of the game in order to confront and conquer it. It entails further multiplication of (un)realities and keeps a gamer captive. Conversely, playing within, yet making choices through the cracks, lateral alleys of gamespace, enables disambiguing its totalizing tendencies. It means to “be ludic, but also lucid” [151]. In Noon’s idiolect, it translates into the following:

Allow them play […] All the underachievers, the desperate and the wild; the users, the losers, the self-abusers; the closet queens, the wardrobe kings; the mix-masters, the fixers, the mix’ n’ matchers; dead-enders, big spenders, low enders, pretenders to the bone; the pros and the knows and the job-blows; the drunks and the skunks and the hunks; the survivors, the suiciders; the morticians, the mathematicians; bimbos and criminals; rich men, poor men, beggar men, thieves; the nameless and the gameless […] All citizens, good and bad. Allow them play. Allow them numbers. (Nymphomation 320)

To allow them numbers means to bear in mind that “If everybody looked the same/ We'd get tired looking at each other” (Groove Armada, “If Everybody Looked the Same” lines 1-2). The question is essentially about coping with the difference-commonality dialectic:”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” (Terry Eagleton Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate 153-4). The reason for occasional perplexities caused by such tensions of peculiar dialectics often lies in amnesia. We sometimes forget that the deprivation of rights, liberties, and freedom is not limited to one’s own marginalization and exclusion, but is rather concerns oppression and dispossession in general terms.

Consequently, the mechanisms originally fought against are being perpetuated because such a war disables crossing cultural boundaries and keeping in mind that one cannot be emancipated at the expense of depriving someone else of their liberties. This calls for the reanimation of the authentic faith in freedom and rethinking social power dynamic that defines heterogeneity as a danger rather than a wager of solidarity: “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” (Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia 3).

Those who are inspired by the European spirit and refiguring its invaluable heritage also find invigorating the love for the anti-American Americana because it is faithful to the original American dream which disseminated cultural gems from gospel, via jazz, the blues, to rock & roll. For such a hybrid mindset has been nourishing unstoppable restorative potentials of the heritage. They say there are no second acts in American lives.² Or, is it wherever war on terror is being waged instead of war on culpability culture, whenever hypocrisy engenders alienated social relationships and occupies the human face?

For that reason, novels like Nymphomation, Pollen, 69 Thing to Do with a Dead Princess, and Downand out in Shoreditch and Hoxton inspire imagining different living conditions and sentiments. This includes love freed from the need to obtain, contain, and possess. Such an understanding and experience of love does not necessitate reaching out in order to find the missing part. Paradoxically, it is about reaching out to give (because it is not about having) and to receive (not to take). Because: “Love is receiving what one does not have and giving that of what one has no power” (Critchley, 2009).

Refacement: Rebirth through Subtonic Hi-Fi

 Redemptive Power of the Alternating Cycles of Noise and Silence

ⁱ

The reading of 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess in this chapter is focused on an intertextual exchange and its potentials for reanimation of human solidarity. It is concerned with vocabularies that favor glamour over human relationships, advertisements impersonating a genuine exchange, porn ventriloquizing an erotic experience, games that supposed to pass for spontaneous creativity, lionization of celebrities, and the fetish commodity aiming to compensate for spiritual fulfillment. The problem of discursively defined boundaries of freedom is read in light of resistance against multiple oppression. In the context of an exchange, oppression is noise in the communication channel. Resistance to it is pivotal for the remix of noise.

Among the questions the book explores contemporary culture’s susceptibility to sensationalism and instantaneous gratifications. Specifically, it addresses conspiracy and glamorization of the death of Princess Diana as a means of control through the fabrication of desire in a faceless cultural amalgamation. Perverse indulgence in the lives and deaths of celebrities is a picture of a displacement, uprootedness, and neglect of the innermost needs. The novel implicitly addresses the issues related to reactionary aspects of British politics and English supremacy. The critique references the complicity of the social segments across the class in replicating the politics of exclusion. At the same time, given the social engagement of the Royal Family and their participation in charitable organizations, the symbolism of Princess Diana in Home’s novel inspires thoughts about economic inequality, the public-private divide, and the possibility of bridging the gap between the upper and the lower social strata, the ruling and the dispossessed.

69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess is a metafictional travelogue presenting a journey around Aberdeenshire inspired by the alleged true story about the death of Princess Diana written by K. L. Callan in his book of the same title. Home, essentially, focuses on the social aspects of the historical events that reveal the culture of spectacle vultures perversely indulging in a tragedy and private life of celebrities publically exposed. In such a society, constructs ensure both emancipation and impositions. Discursive constructs both enable destigmatization of the social margins, but they can also proliferate cultural realities that cause confusion—noise in the communication channel. Amidst such noise—between coercion and liberation—the characters in the novel are trying to detect the voices of truth, as the epigraph suggests quoting from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria: “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.” Immersing themselves in a quest-like endeavor, they find themselves intent on devouring books, as suggested in the other epigraph quoting from Karl Marx’s letter to his daughter Laura: ”I am a machine condemned to devour books.”

A man whose names fluctuate from Alan to Callum comes to Aberdeen with an intention to end his life, but needs someone to assist him. He lives in an inherited apartment full of books. He spends his days reading them: ”Alan wanted to become a machine” (69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess 24). One day, he meets Anna, a student who is also engaged in exploring the world of books. They eat and drink at restaurants, all the while discussing literature and theory. Once Alan reveals his obsession with K.L. Callan’s book 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, they together decide to test veracity of the story.

According to Callan’s narrative, the official version of the accident in Paris is fake. Alternatively, Callan claims that Princess Diana was “strangled to death Thugee-style at Balmoral by an unknown assailant” (69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess 67). In fact, her death was a result of the failure of the security service to guard her. Out of embarrassment, the security decided to dispose of the body. For that purpose they delivered it to K.L. Callan in hope he would find a way to manage the difficult situation. He did come up with an inventive solution. He took the body around the Gordon District Stone Circle of Trail. Within the itinerary, originally including eleven and later being extended to sixty-nine ancient religious shrines in Aberdinshire, the body was decapitated and dismembered.

In order to test the feasibility of Callan’s narrative, Alan and Anna set out on a bizarre trip, indulging in randomness of discursive and sexual games. With them they take Dudley, Alan’s ventriloquist dummy. First, he is only a prop. Later, he becomes an active participant, gradually taking an active, occasionally dominant, role in the confusion of discursive self boundaries, sexual fantasies, oneiric desires: “The body of a dead princess as a metaphor for literature” (168). Their heroic pilgrimage (67) embodies fetishist affinities in contemporary culture. Alan and Anna epitomize discursively defined identities in a battlefield of power. They are wandering through the maze. It seems that their search brings no (dis)closure. Such an anticlimax happens in the world desensitized to revelation. The sacred stones turn out to be everything but holy. Rather, they are sites in a wasteland in the military-entertainment complex--the society of dispirited physicality and discursively determined selves.

The sound in this anti-novel is the beehive buzz of a multitude proliferated through abundant banality of discursive carnality, “the orgy of history” (22). Masturbation symbolizes noise in the communication channel in discursively minded culture, self-absorption in the circularity of transformations “from semen to semantics” (8). The concept of rape is used to criticize dispossession and aggression. From the perspective of power relations, language games do not always appear to be a free play of the signifier and signified: “Alan had been raped by those who’d forced him to constitute himself as a bourgeois subject but his tormentors had been similarly abused” (57). Unlike masturbation and/or rape, the sixty-nine pose is suggestive of communicational reciprocity. Sexual intercourse is constitutive of the versatility of carnal games in which partners, blindfolded, indulge in sexual experiences without much need to actually “talk” to “interlocutors.” However, their identities cannot be reanimated through the depthless buzz of discourse. In spite of visiting religious sites, they can’t be enlightened. Partly, such an anticlimax can be understood in terms of George Steiner’s critique of the broken contract “the contract between word and the world” (Real Presences 132). In response to the world of empty signification, the characters in Home’s novel turn pages and turn away from them: “Living out the death of these fantasies in blasted and blistered night, we were consumed by the turning of the page…” (69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess 168).

Aberdeen of today is not desensitized to communication. Its streets are welcoming and friendly. Its denizens responsive to inquires. The city is being gentrified and not entirely averse to an entrepreneurial sentiment. Consumerism and mammonesque idolatry are evident in the Granite City’s peculiar eclecticism, particularly in the vicinity of the Trinity Centre, the Kirk of St. Nicholas, and casino iconography in a gambler paradise near the Beach. Fortunately, the brooding fiscal fog cannot conquer the gleam in the sand, the breath of the caressing waves, and the overarching blue dome that on the odd day happens to be bright too.³

Thus, one is prone to read cultural critique in Stewart Home’s 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess as an inspiration that vitalizes thinking about the potential for recuperation of the everyday. It stimulates ruminations about the communal restorative capacities in an age of media-saturated realities and possibilities for living fulfilled/fulfilling life despite aggressively manipulative and dehumanizing politics. Disaffection and dissolvement of authentic needs, primarily love and freedom, in commoditized superficialities are crucial parts of such critique, providing a platform for reimagining solidarity through the reconstitution of the human face. Endurance in resisting hindrances to fruitful exchange and creating a free culture based on love and trust enables reanimation of solidarity and refacement--rebirth of the human face through the remix of the alternating cycles of noise and silence, loops of disintegration and the reintegration of the subtonic layers into the wholesome sound of creation.

Whose Remix It Is

Genuine exchange and its redemptive power on vocabularies and the everyday can further be explored via Felix Guattari’s refiguring the notion of subjectivity in the context of: “ethico-political articulation – which [he] call[s] ecosophy – between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity)” (The Three Ecologies 28). Painstakingly outlining purifying tactics in the three spheres, Guattari looks at the problem of diluted individuality, polluted morality, the distorted political realm, and unwholesome environment: “social ecology, mental ecology and environmental ecology” (41). The tripartite cultural paradigm shift is envisaged through the channels of genuine exchange. One of them is a transnational conversation called rock & roll. Its transformative impact on fragmented, alienating, and faceless culture in the Integrated World Capitalism Guattari presents as follows:

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. (33)

Guattari calls for resingularization, as opposed to individualism. Such individuality invigorates communal cohesion because it is based on a new perception of subjectivity freed from dominance-ridden relationships, “heterogenesis, in other words, process of continuous resingularization. Individuals must become both more united and increasingly different” (37). They might be pseudo-identities, but the transnational character of rock & roll and its capacity to ensure a sense of personal autonomy, individuality, and privacy can be perceived as an impetus for refacement--rebirth through the solidarity of resingularized, selfless fellow-humans, engaged in enduring creation of a free culture based on trust and love. It also reverberates with the tension between uncertainty and the underlying stability throughout the remix

Postfuturist emphasis on communal cohesion at the intersection of the time axes understands refacement to be resurrection of the present by redeeming the past and recuperating the future. As such, it engages in disambiguing a misconception of the totalityof discourse and its tendencies to colonize the everyday. Taking into account both the limitations and potential of language, this aspect of the remix, celebrating both silence and sound of creation, focuses on silent disruptions in the discursive, thereby making the unuttered communicable. It also accentuates resilience of language. Due to its conventional character, it is remixable. By extension, it is reasonable to believe that culturally constructed realities we know are not immune from remixing either and that, consequently, one is free to think and live differently from current cultural impositions.

To a high degree, all of it concerns living with fellow humans. In this context, I rely on Jean Baudrillard’s idea of radical alterity illustrated on the example of Japanese culture as the epitome of “true exoticism […] based on a back and forth between recognizing the Other and returning to oneself” (Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism 64).⁴ Radical alterity, as presented, ensures recognizing in the other what is different from ourselves, accepting, and loving them for who they are. Baudrillard praises Japanese culture for living out the belief that “everything comes from the outside” (Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism 69). Accordingly, the input received from the outside is appropriated by the host, making Japanese a culture of hospitality, not imitation.

It is worth acknowledging that in each individual case different remix is created out of the input received. The remix is a manifestation of refacement making manifest the potential of creation in idiosyncratic idioms. Reading them in the key that fuses the elements of quest and activism, reveals their capacity to not only address the problem of oppression, but to epitomize its repressive effects. Consequently, they inspire responses. Many of the stories that demonstrate, rather than describe or explain, the problem of discursively defined identities and dehumanizing cultural realities call for the reader’s resistance. The reader’s subversive affinities, in such cases, help devise both linguistic expressions and an actual manifestation of resistance to oppression. Such responses are instances of refacement that reanimates individuality and reintegrates communality from the ashes of objectified everyday and, consequently, melancholy-induced soulful life.

1 A similar prospect for subversiveness can be found in Jameson’s (1982) remark about the space for it in fictional works dealing with imaginary totalitarian societies: “if these Stalinist masters dispose of some perfected scientific and technological power, then genuine freedom of inquiry must exist somewhere within this state” (156).

2 In Michael Winterbottom’s movie 24 Hour Party People (2002) Tony Wilson (played by Steve Coogan) references Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.

3 The information and impressions presented here are based on my research trips to Scotland (Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen) in August 2009 and August 2010.

4 Baudrillard’s idea about true exoticism is based in the presumption that there is nothing intrinsic that welcomes input from the outside. Without claiming the opposite, my weak postmodernist remix does not entirely embrace the postulate.

i Fiscal Noise and the Sound of Creation, Aberdeen, 2009.