REVIEW: ERIKA SPRING - ERIKA SPRING EP

Erika Spring - Erika Spring EP
Cascine, 2012

Let's talk about fashion for minute: as an awkward, bookish, young white male, my understanding and conception of fashion is, to be far too generous, limited. Nonetheless, I do understand--or at least I am able to project--a certain sense of the signifiers of fashion, like glamour. Glamour seems to me to reside somewhere in the 1980s, to be most at home in the postmodern metropolis of global capitalism. The hollowed out subject that exists within this evocation of wealth and leisure (perhaps best exemplified by Christian Bale's performance of the cypher Patrick Bateman in American Psycho--and isn't it Bateman more than any other of his roles that suggests the origins of Bruce Wayne/Batman in his current cinematic form?) looks out from the screens and mirrors of capitalism into yet more screens, reflections reflecting back to (and on) themselves, and glides through the cities whose buildings are a perfect match for their subjects. Thus, glamour becomes a way for consumer capital both to s(t)imulate desire and to enjoin enjoyment. Given this (a big if: as I said, my knowledge and understanding of fashion is beyond limited; this is seen through a glass very darkly, if at all), the endless return to the aesthetics of the 1980s in the current moment makes a great deal of sense: what is the iPhone and its attached oediPodal (to borrow a word from Mark Fisher) operator if not a kind of perfection of this sense of glamour?

Erika Spring's solo debut is nothing if not indebted to the aesthetics of the 1980s, with the drums of its slick pop (she namechecks Bateman-favourite Phil Collins twice in a recent interview), synths that split the difference between banging electro and gauzier, 4AD-style dream pop, and--especially on "Like a Fire" and the Eurythmics cover "When Tomorrow Comes"--some particularly retro touches with the basslines and vocals. All of that doesn't necessarily sink the EP, as Spring is undeniably talented at these kinds of breathy, dreamy songs, but the most overtly retro moments are the weakest. "When Tomorrow Comes" is a well-written pop song, but it's not particularly subtle, and its inclusion here pushes the wrong buttons in terms of authenticity. It might not be intended to act as citation--indeed, in her interview with The Fader, Spring claims that "when I heard 'When Tomorrow Comes' the words just got me. . . . and I just wanted to say them--I just wanted to say the words"--but it feels like it, causing the spectre of pastiche to loom around the edges of the project.

Of course, others have noticed this and see nothing wrong with it. In her review for Pitchfork, Lindsay Zolandz writes that:

Spring gets points for reappropriating 80s synth pop and Kaputt-style soft rock in a context that's utterly devoid of ironic scare quotes . . . [She] displays a genuine interest in replicating the texture and aesthetic of the music she grew up with. The elements of pastiche are woven smoothly into her sound, which dances gracefully on the edges of past and present, of waking life and dreams.

There is, Zolandz seems to be saying, an inherent value to non-ironic replication, and while this isn't incorrect, it feels like a pretty hollow victory (though postmodern irony is certainly beyond tiring at this point). The reference to the critically acclaimed Destroyer's recent album Kaputt is important here--rather than reappropriating sounds and tropes of 80s soft rock, Spring's music reappropriates a reappropriation of those sounds; in the procession of simulacra, we're pretty far down the line at this point.* It's also calculated, though, and speaks to a cultural phenomenon that Mark Richardson discusses in one of the best pieces of music writing I've read in the past year, "the subtle Tumblr-ization of indie; music-making as re-blog." Richardson summarises the appeal of Tumblr as a further step in the purposing of pop culture in the construction of identity, an "intesif[ication]" of the same impulse that lead former generations to draw on binder covers, but now:

allowing us to re-purpose richer media. Not to mention making the whole process so much easier. So instead of scrawling a constellation of bands onto a blank notebook, you can instead host the band's music, post their videos, and present their most compelling photos. You can actually become a broadcaster of the media, rather than just commenting on it, and you can do it all with just a couple clicks of a mouse. The person posting can say, "This is me" with a click or two, and the media itself becomes part of the person's identity, not just the association with it.

 This is why the reference to Kaputt rather than to the actual (or original) sources of those soft rock sounds--even if those earlier sources are the intended references by Spring--makes so much sense. Like a .gif of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that is reblogged, the transaction that Richardson characterises as "Remember David Lynch? I do, too," the cultural analogue in which Spring's statement of musical identity makes sense is Kaputt and its rhetorical "Remember the 1980s? I do, too."**

That late capitalism no longer sells products but lifestyles (in a Tumblr'd and Pinterest'd age, it might be more effective and appropriate to say images) is not a new proposition, but the consumption of these images and the cultivation and purposing of media in the construction of an image via social networking seems part and parcel with the sense of glamour I tried to describe above. The continual "re-blogging" of 80s aesthetics across cultural formats feels like an obvious fit in this context. In his opening monologue in American Psycho, Bale's Bateman details his rigorous, fascistic regimen to control his image, and his constant readings of popular music like Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis and the News turns those objects into further screens and cyphers, marketing slogans and yuppie ideology acting as depth, as subjectivity, the cultural counterpart to his ruthlessly disciplined body. On Spring's EP, "Like a Fire" and "When Tomorrow Comes" are the songs Bateman might like, finding in them mirrors of his anomie, his murderous materialism, his amoral desire for exposure regardless of the absence of those sentiments in the music. Their musical signifiers are trappings of his ideology: the synth bass of "Like a Fire" combines with the glossy keyboards and plastic guitars to perfectly reblog the 1980s as an image as much as a sound (moreso even than her take on the Eurythmics' song), the triumphant upsurge of the song's chorus evoking music videos as much as music. 


Ultimately, what saves the EP are its first two songs and closer "6 More Weeks." Though these tracks work with a similar palette to the rest of the EP, they are more ambiguous, with inside and outside becoming confused. I can't help but be reminded by Kate Bush in some way. "Happy at Your Gate" is all cool glamour, but its seductive, breathy atmosphere is also charged with a nervous momentum, a tension carried over by the harsher keyboards of "Hidden," reminiscent of Broadcast's The Noise Made By People and the gloriously downer pop of "Come On Let's Go." Indeed, the repeating pulses throughout "Hidden" make clear that her mention of Terry Riley and Philip Glass in The Fader is not just attention-grabbing namedropping. If "6 More Weeks" isn't quite to the level of these two songs, it at least feels a more able synthesis of the avant cool chill of the likes of Broadcast and Stereolab and 80s synth rock than either "Like a Fire" and "When Tomorrow Comes." Or, put more simply, if the latter are pastiche, the former feels like a step away into a more personal vision of how to use these styles. Given this, it's doubtful that anyone will label Spring's EP revolutionary, but it is smart and endlessly catchy; on a warm summer night, it can be an ice cube on the back of the neck.

*As Baudrillard writes in that essay in reference to the recreation of the Lascaux caves, "It is possible that the memory of the original grottoes is itself stamped in the minds of future generations, but from now on there is no longer any difference: the duplication suffices to render both artificial."
**Though as something of a tastemaker given his status, isn't Dan Bejar's statement with Kaputt closer to "Remember the 1980s? I do, too, and they sounded like this"? Thus, musical "re-blogs" of that sound confirm Bejar's memory as the true memory of the 1980s, almost retrochronically creating the decade and its aesthetic in Eliotic fashion.

NOTES TOWARDS AN ESSAY ON DRAKE AND BAUDRILLARD

No, I'm not dead. And no, I haven't given up on this blog. Unfortunately, there hasn't been much time over the past month for me to write things here. I'll try and get back into the regular swing of things over the next week as I'm on a break for Thanksgiving. This post will be kind of piecemeal, something of a scattered collection of fragments that I hope to have time to revisit and turn into something more coherent over the next week or so.

Let's start with this: Drake's take on Tumblr and online life for "his generation" (which I guess would include me. I'm assuming we're roughly the same age--and after looking it up, I'm a little over a month older than him). From his October's Very Own blog:

I’m really scared for my generation, you know. The thing that scares me most is Tumblr. I hate what Tumblr has become. Because it like, it reminds me of those clique-y girls in high school that used to make fun of everyone else and define what was cool, but in five years, when you all graduate, that shit doesn’t matter. No one gives a fuck about that shit. Instead of kids going out and making their own moments, they’re just taking these images and living vicariously through other people’s moments. It just kills me. Then you’ll meet them and they’re just the biggest turkey in the world. They don’t actually embody any of those things. They just emulate. It’s scary man, simulation life that we’re living. It scares me.

When I first read that, particularly the second half, my initial reaction was "someone mail Drake some Baudrillard." His statement is shot through with postmodern anxiety of the kind that Baudrillard was so good at articulating--the obsession with the image, the screen, the simulation, all of it suggests that for Drake the hyperreal is the real (or at least the reality of his experience), and this realization, coupled with the ongoing attempt to live within the hyperreal, is not just disturbing, but frightening. And really, who better to live out these anxieties than someone for whom the internet has played a key factor in his successes? The fact that he originally gained fame for his acting, and so references to him for the unfamiliar are prefaced by "the guy who played Jimmy on the new Degrassi..." makes it doubly interesting: has Drake himself ever been anything other than a simulation, the simulacrum of Aubrey Drake Graham? Is this the specific anxiety of the hyperreal subject whose persona is constructed on a foundation of "being real?" His guest verse on the Weeknd's "The Zone" features his advice to a female (whom one could charitably call a groupie) to "Be you." Ambiguous at the best of times, the source of the advice--a musician who has generated heated online debate about his authenticity even as the very complexity of that questions has generated praise for him--renders it all but impossible to parse.

Perhaps even more interesting is the specific target of Drake's fear: Tumblr. The internet itself does not scare him, nor do Facebook or Twitter, but Tumblr does. Of course, five minutes browsing through Tumblr is enough to suggest some possible reasons. For one, it is the consummate form of online culture as curating: Tumblrs, by an large, seem to be about the careful development of an aesthetic (and possibly a persona in the case of more personal Tumblrs) that is reflected through content shared with the public. Crucially, the content is rarely annotated or captioned. The context for the content is generated by the content itself, through the interactions of the various elements selected for display and especially through the juxtaposition of high culture-low culture objects. When commentary is present, it's usually either ironic or bathetic. Memes, and riffs on those memes, feature heavily. This is not the rough and tumble, anything goes world of 4Chan, but the pristine and immaculately manicured lawns of the digital suburbs. It certainly seems like a short jump from Tumblr to "The Mold of Yancy." Of course, Drake's own carefully manicured persona, the self-consciousness, the realness of him, is very obviously reflected back by Tumblr. I'll leave you to draw the pretty obvious and reductive Freudian conclusion this seems to be heading toward and instead suggest that the anxiety stems from the as yet imperfect simulacrum revealed by its reflection in Tumblr. A reminder of the hyperreal's failure to totally triumph over the real. I haven't given Take Care enough of a listen to see how this all plays out in the music yet, but I'll try and get to that before the end of break.

For now, though, I'll do my own curating. Some Baudrillard that seems appropriate in light of Drake's comment on Tumblr. From The Ecstasy of Communication:

Today the scene and the mirror have given way to a screen and a network. There is no longer any transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional surface of communication. In the image of television, the most beautiful prototypical object of this new era, the surrounding universe and our very bodies are becoming monitoring screens. (12)

The private space undergoes the same fate. Its disappearance parallels the diminishing of the public space. Both have ceased to be either spectacle or secret. The distinction between an interior and an exterior, which has just what characterized the domestic stage of objects and that of a symbolic space of the object has been blurred in a double obscenity. The most intimate operation of your life becomes the potential grazing ground of the media. . . . The entire universe also unfolds unnecessarily on your home screen. This is a microscopic pornography, pornographic because it is forced, exaggerated, just like the close-ups of sexual acts in a porno film. All this destroys the stage, once preserved through a minimal distance and which was based on a secret ritual known only to its actors. (20-21)

We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. . . . It is no longer the obscenity of the hidden, the repressed, the obscure, but that of the visible, the all-too-visible, the more-visible-than-visible; it is the obscenity of that which no longer contains a secret and is entirely soluble in information and communication. (22)

The uncertainty of existing, and consequently the obsessions of proving our existence, prevail over desire that is strictly sexual. . . . What matters above everything else is proving our existence, even if that is its only meaning. . . . The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning. As a result, sexuality is relegated to a position of secondary importance, to an already luxurious form of transcendence, of a waste of existence, while the absolute urgency is simple to verify existence. (29-30) [This makes particular sense if the simulacrum is thought of as reproducing via the image, the point of its existence]

The solicitation of and voraciousness for images is increasing at an excessive rate. Images have become our true sex object, the object of our desire. The obscenity of our culture resides in the confusion of desire and its equivalent materialized in the image [Zizek's commentary on Occupy Wall Street, its purpose and the dangerous temptations to which it could succumb (i.e. settling for being the image rather than the manifestation of the desire of the 99%) seems interesting in this context]; not only for sexual desire, but in the desire for knowledge and its equivalent materialized in "information," the desire for fantasy and its equivalent materialized in the Disneylands of the world, the desire for space and its equivalent programmed into vacation itineraries, the desire for play and its equivalent programmed into private telematics. (35)

This withdrawal, which we know well, is that of the subject for whom the sexual and social horizons of others has disappeared, and whose mental horizon has been reduced to the manipulation of his images and screens. He has everything he needs. WHy should he worry about sex and desire? It is through the networks that this loss of affection for oneself and for others has come about, and it is contemporary with the desert-like form of space engendered by speed, the desert-like form of the social engendered by communication and information. (42-43)

That's it for now. I'll come back to this, though, and hopefully tie this (to a certain extent) to some of my thoughts on Facebook.

 

FACEBOOK AS REKAL, INC.: IT CAN REMEMBER YOUR SELF FOR YOU WHOLESALE

At its recent F8 conference, Facebook introduced some new features and announced its future plans. The presentation of one of the centrepieces of this new Facebook, Timeline, went like this. As I watched that, read a little more around the web, and listened to Chris Cox's presentation, a more appropriate introduction to the new Facebook came to me:

It's been a little over a week since I deleted my Facebook account. After the F8 conference and hearing Facebook executives candidly talk about their goals for not only users' experience of Facebook, but of the internet as a whole (see, for example, this account: "Facebook's goal is to become the social layer that supports, powers and connects every single piece of the web, no matter who or what it is or where it lives").* I decided that as I'd been increasingly unhappy with Facebook for a few years and had been toying with pulling the plug on my account for close to two years, last Thursday was the time. More than one person on the internet has compared the new Facebook to a digital panopticon, and while I can understand that comparison, I think there are slightly more interesting (and perhaps more accurate) comparisons to be drawn, ones that shed light on the active dangers that Facebook could pose (the video above is a good start). More on those comparisons in a second.

My immediate experience of getting rid of Facebook was one of relief. I'd done it: I could quit Facebook. Of course, conveniently, Facebook allows you to return to your account at any time. Just log back in. It's so seductively easy. For most of the past week and a bit, I've lived with a pretty constant, low level amount of guilt: I should be checking Facebook. Why aren't I checking Facebook? What am I doing on a computer if I'm not checking Facebook? Why did I delete Facebook? The first time I felt these questions welling up in my subconscious, I knew I'd made the right choice.

I'm not entirely cut off from social networking, though. I'm an active tweeter, and I have a Google+ profile (which, at least among the people in my circles, seemed to be slowly coming to life in the wake of Facebook's announcements, only to return to its ghost town feel by the end of the weekend). More knowledgeable men than I have pointed out that Twitter and Google aren't that much better than Facebook: really, "all the things that matter will be controlled and owned by a very small number of Big Web companies. Your identity will be your accounts at Facebook, Google and Twitter." Nevertheless, I feel more comfortable with my remaining social networking services than I did with Facebook. While Twitter and Google may yet be planning to dictate the way that I experience the internet, they've the advantage of not being quite so open, so proud about it as Facebook (well, perhaps Google is as proud, but in something of a different way).

My displeasure with Facebook had been growing for almost the entire length of my membership. I had been a late, and involuntary, adopter of Facebook when it arrived at my undergraduate institution. The initial round of excitement had faded and Facebook was not much more active than is Google+ currently. This state did not last--a new round of users boosted the amount of content, Facebook continued to develop its platform--and I became a fairly active user. However, when games, quizzes, and other apps started to appear on Facebook, I began to find it increasingly frustrating. Site redesigns seemed to make it impossible for me to get any meaningful content from Facebook. When you became able to block individual categories of posts (say, all those that had to with Farmville, to pick a particularly odious part of the Facebook experience) I briefly became more active on Facebook, but the inundation of information about others' lives (many of whom were, at this point, complete strangers to me, regardless of the educational institution we attended together) continued unabated. I realize the latter is partly my fault--the number of people I was "friends" with on Facebook was probably larger than it needed to be (though it never approached the thousands that others have--I think at its height my list contained ~180 people, and I'd scaled back considerably in the final few months)--but it became oppressive, and there seemed no standard social protocol by which to deal with that situation. Privacy concerns that were increasingly the focus of any and all news about Facebook and its services and Facebook's own push to convince people to document their lives in an increasingly up-to-the-minute fashion (much like how some people use Twitter) just became too much for me. I had come to the end of the relationship I was willing to have with Facebook.

Some of this has already been taking place on social network like Twitter, as Laura June points out, with the result that "the people Tweeting as they experience [an event] are not experiencing in the traditional sense: they are sharing as they experience the experience, which in turn alters the experience. If you always see yourself through the eyes of a perceived crowd, your experience is altered, as is your behavior." This, it seems to me, is the digital panopticon. As at any moment we could become the focus of the crowd, our experiences and behaviours could come under scrutiny, we must consciously modify our behaviour. Farhad Manjoo's complaint that "My problem with 'frictionless sharing' is much more basic: Facebook is killing taste" because "On Facebook, now, merely experiencing something is enough to trigger sharing" highlights the extent of Facebook as a digital panopticon: without being able to avoid sharing our experiences, we must be increasingly self-conscious of what experiences we are having. Complete surveillance means complete self-consciousness; or, as Joe Moon puts it: "removing friction from sharing just displaces that friction. If everything I do on the web is under the public gaze, I have to reflect for a moment before I take any action . . . It simply moves the friction from sharing onto the activity, in the worst kind of self-censorial way."

However, the new Facebook--and more importantly the Facebook to come--do not stop at this digital panopticon. For Facebook, even that self-consciously mediated auto-sharing leaves too much to an individual who may be unwilling to share everything. Mark Zuckerberg has been vocal about his belief that "'You have one identity. . . . The days of your having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. . . . Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,'" and it's easy to see the new Facebook as a way implementing this belief as a kind of social/cultural law or structure of power. If an awareness of frictionless sharing leads me to mediate my online behaviour--if I make sure that I'm only sharing what projects and maintains a certain image of myself--I am, in Zuckerberg's mind, demonstrating a lack of integrity (it seems like existentialists could--and should--be going to town on this idea).** The subject of the digitial panopticon, the digital disciplinary society, still needs to be disciplined and punished for deviance. There can be a private self that attempts to escape the strictures of that disciplinary society (until that private self is, and one should read this in Delbert/Charles Grady's voice, corrected). Thus, to return to Laura June, "The changes Facebook is on the cusp of making push us over that cliff, so that you don't even need to Tweet the experience; you're just along for the ride, with other people watching as you go. The experience isn't yours, not fully."

With the new Timeline and Ticker, two services that would on the one hand catalogue and organize our lives for us according to Facebook's algorithm--one that "understands that some moments have resonance that lasts through the years. . . . that comes eerily close to emulating human memory"--and on the other hand turn our lives into a real-time record of all of our web activity, Facebook is no longer presenting itself as a representation of reality, or even a manager of reality, but rather the creator of reality--a reality fed by our ids and projections, a reality we can only accept as existing when that very existence covers over the manufactured and managed nature of its construction (were Baudrillard alive to see it, I think he might call this the perfect crime). Thus, even if I attempt to mediate my online existence, Facebook will ultimately be creating my digital identity (one that it sees as synonymous with my offline identity). My identity will be my account at Facebook, and I don't even get to choose what that identity is anymore: Facebook will do that for me. At the moment I join Facebook, I become interpellated; I am a subject of its ideology and its structures of power, and I exist only within the rules of those structures: outside of Facebook, I am nothing because Facebook cannot see that and tell me what I am.***

The new Facebook is part of a control society, not a disciplinary society, to use Deleuze's terms. In place of the organization of time and space in rigid and discrete units that characterizes a disciplinary society, the control society is made up of controls that "are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry . . . controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point" (is there a better description of apps spread across the web that link back to Facebook?). Within such a system, there are no longer individuals or masses: "Individuals have become 'dividuals,' and masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks.' . . . The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network" (the button that invites one to share, that greets every web browser at the bottom of every web page [or so it seems]). Up-to-the-minute, frictionless sharing achieves the goal of the control society, knowing "the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant;" for Facebook, this is not just a physical position to be known, but a mental and a psychic one as well. In the face of this, Deleuze suggests we might "create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control." What that might look like in the context of Facebook's proposed omnipresent social layer is a question of vital importance, I think. Not being on Facebook will not be enough to create these vacuoles, these circuit breakers.

There are other dangers as well. This conversion of life into a machine-curated archive for which the present and future only exist to provide materials that will be constructed into a narrative geared for maximum emotional impact--one that "takes these thousands of seemingly inconsequential events, discards the irrelevant ones, finds the most emotive, the most visual, the most striking and emotionally touching moments and pulls them into sharp focus"--is a digital end of history. As Mark Fisher points out, via T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in his discussion of Children of Men: "the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past. . . . A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all. . . . .A culture of commemoration is a cemetery." Or, to put it another way, Facebook can remember it for us wholesale. Facebook wants to be our Rekal, but it's even better than a fake trip to Mars: Facebook will turn our lives into the exciting, arty, sexy things we've always wanted them to be here on Earth, no memory implants required (yet?). As McClane tells Quail: "'You're not accepting second-best. The actual memory, with all its vagueness, omissions and ellipses, not to say distortions--that's second-best.'" Facebook, through its instantaneous (re)construction of the event, gives us an impossible reality we cannot but accept as the real, though a reality we can only experience in retrospect. This is the seductive promise of McClane and Rekal, Inc.: "'You can't be this; you can't actually do this. . . . But you can have been and have done. We see to that. And our fee is reasonable; no hidden charges." There is of course a difference between these two things (the impression of having done something and actually doing that thing), but Facebook might be able to overcome that gap through its control over our identity; for Joe Moon, the archive model is "a conflation of the record of the event with the event itself, or even a privileging of the record over what gives the record its meaning and power. At the same time it (ingeniously) adds to the pressure to record all meaningful events on Facebook in order to make sure it becomes part of your identity."

Zizek notes that The Truman Show (along with PKD's Time Out of Joint) is an example of "The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy . . . that of an individual living in a small, idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lived in a real world, while all people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show." There is something seductive about this fantasy, though, which elevates it beyond simply belonging to the paranoiac: it is the scenario in which one is a star whose every action is invested with significance and who thus lives in a kind of narcissistic utopia in which he or she is the most important anything in the universe. We do not all live in a small, idyllic Californian city, though, so this fantasy can only ever remain just that.  However, consider the pitch made to Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in Total Recall (the film adaptation of "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"). The seductive promise offered by the new Facebook might be said to be the fulfillment of the fantasy of not being ourselves. "What's the same about every experience you've ever had?" Facebook asks. When we, just like Quaid, can't answer, it tells us: "You!" Something like Facebook's new algorithm for structuring our lives and experiences offers us that fantastic self and his/her idyllic consumerist paradise life--but only, of course, in retrospect. This scarecely matters, though, as only the Facebook version of reality will count as reality. One will have been Truman, which is enough to be Truman. In a society of control that is increasingly aligned with the needs of capital--even and above the needs of capitalism--the pressure is mounting to meet those fantasies for the denizens of this society of control. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher points out that one of the major points at which capitalist realism can be challenged is through an appeal to "the desires which neoliberalism has generated but which it has been unable to satisfy." The new Facebook, it seems, could quite conveniently be set to work satisfying some of those desires, removing a key form of resistance to capitalist realism and all it entails. Deleuze's call for vacuoles of noncommunication seems ever more important in this sense.

In the face of all the potential for messianism here--some kind of Morpheus figure to offer us a pill and set everything right--it seems much more likely that we'll be Rachel without a Deckard, never knowing if there is anything behind our digital selves or not. And if there isn't, what would we do?



*This, I think, sets up the science fiction scenario that capital has been waiting for the internet to deliver for some time. Facebook, as the sole social layer of the internet (should it achieve its goal), makes deals with companies to promote their apps on Facebook. Soon, as Adrian Short points out, it makes no sense to have a traditional website anymore--the real action takes place via a company's Facebook app. Given that frictionless sharing makes it impossible for a person to hide his/her online activities (provided that they allow an app/website access to their Facebook account, which seems like it will become part of the standard terms and conditions of any web-based activity before too long. In the process, frictionless sharing will become mandatory, not optional), and given that the new Facebook algorithms seem designed to know its users better than they know themselves (in terms of organizing content according to emotional resonance, significance, etc., etc.), capital will have unprecedented access to the consumer's life and experiences. If the goal of capitalism now is to sell lifestyles not products, Facebook's services essentially package its users as lifestyles-in-waiting. The spatial aspect of this is also fascinating: will Facebook (in becoming the social layer of the internet) become the sole space on the web? Will people surf? Will there be any need to leave one's Facebook page?

**Interestingly, listening to the Spice Girls is the example given of a piece of information that one does not want to share in virtually every piece about the new Facebook. Quite what the Spice Girls did to deserve this level of opprobrium I'm not sure. While their later career was perhaps not as successful as their earlier ventures, surely their reputation as part of the "girl power" movement in the 90s--however facile it may have been--should place them above the level of shame that requires one to actively hide or lie about the act of listening to them, shouldn't it?

***This calls to mind a chilling possibility. Michael K's terrifying statement "[M]y father was Huis Norenius. My father was the list of rules on the door of the dormitory" might be equally true for users of the new Facebook: their father is Facebook (and its terms of service, and its policy toward the internet and digital personas, etc.). Yet, if Facebook becomes the new "father" for its users, does its digital nature--Facebook has never been the body of the father that could be killed--always-already render it phantasmagorical, in contrast to the symbolic father of the Law-of-the-Father? As Zizek points out, such a figure projects a "phantom-like, spectral omnipotence," unlike the symbolic father, and is "perceived as uncastratable: the more [its] actual, social, public existence is cut short, the more threatening becomes [its] elusive fantasmatic ex-istence"--Facebook has, in some ways, never had an "actual, social, public existence;" is its authority of this phantom-like, omnipotent, uncastratable type?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME AND OTHER POINTS

This morning at 8:30 I turned 25. Happy birthday to me! Seeing as how one of my students told me yesterday that he's 24, this is probably a good thing: I'm still officially older than all of my students. The prevailing trend from friends who've wished me happy birthday today is something along the lines of "I can't believe how young you are." I'll take that as a good thing--a sort of maturity for my age--rather than a "My god, you look so terrible I'd never believe you're only 25!" type of thing. How did I spend my birthday, you ask? Scrambling to finish reading for class and giving a presentation. About the usual, then. Birthdays are usually good for flushing out a few long lost friends and reestablishing lines of communication, though, and that's definitely been the case today.

A few thoughts to make this post not a total waste.

1. I can't believe that no one has used this song in the opening scene of an action or gangster movie. It seems like any director with a movie set in an urban space who wanted to introduce his/her protagonist as some kind of tough, gritty, impossibly cool figure would jump on this. I can see it now: various quick-cut establishing shots of the city, a pause and a black screen for an instant, then at 2:12, BAM!, shot of protagonist walking down the street. Perfect. If there's a movie that does this already, I need to see it yesterday.

2. Pitchfork did an interview with Alan Palomo (aka Neon Indian) in anticipation of the release of Era Extrana today. It's a good read and confirms my impression (based on a five minute or so conversation with Palomo after a show) that he's a genuinely nice guy. I was particularly struck by Palomo's statements that:

I can’t pretend that I don’t subscribe to Internet music culture in that I discover new music and old music simultaneously. In order to generate something that’s indicative of the future, we’re trudging around this cultural wasteland of the past and finding these little pieces to play around with and recontextualize. It can all feel like one big collage piece.
But it was important for me to not use any pre-existing material and completely self-generate this album on both the audio and visual sides. You can’t always just put color filters in 80s aerobic videos or take stuff from public-access and look at it in this very ironic, self-conscious way. That only takes you so far. . . .
[A]ll you can do is ignore the annoying hum of the machine and focus on making art that makes you excited to be alive.  

and

Well, Era Extraña translates into a couple of things, but the thing that I thought was really funny was that the word in Spanish for "strange" is also the word for "to miss something." It’s rooted in the same sensation. And I do have this eerie feeling of rapidly-approaching singularity, or the idea that by the time that I’m 33, reality will not exist in the same plane as it did before. It's cool, but also a little creepy.  

On the one hand, this seems like the legacy of life after postmodernism: irony is dead and tired, we've murdered the real, history is done, there's nothing left but to make pastiches until the sun goes nova. On the other hand, though, "making art that makes you excited to be alive" and considering the combination of "strangeness" and "miss[ing] something" that the album's title conjures up seems to underscore the connection of Neon Indian specifically--and chillwave in general--to hauntology. I've only had a chance to give the album one listen, but I'm very interested/excited to see what it reveals on deeper listens.

3. I had a great meeting with a professor yesterday that left me feeling a lot less panicked about, well, everything. Sometimes it's nice to hear someone say banal platitudes like "it's not a race," "everything will be fine," "don't worry," etc., etc. I floated a vague dissertation idea that was well received (and somewhat backfired when I mentioned that I'd written my MA thesis on a similar topic--now the professor wants to see my MA thesis and I'm mortified at what the response will be. I'm really proud of having done it, but the thinking and the writing [oh god, the writing] is kind of embarrassing at this point), and after lying awake the other night worrying that I have no direction or purpose in my academic life, I now feel like I have a path to follow, even if it's shaky and not really constructed yet. It's enough to let me sleep, though, which is all that matters at this point.

A WORLD OF SCREENS: REFLECTIONS ON A JAZZ POETRY CONCERT

I went to see a jazz poetry concert last night put on by the group City of Asylum/Pittsburgh. It featured several exiled writers reading work, usually in collaboration with the band Tarbaby and the saxophonist Oliver Lake. I can't say that I'm a huge jazz fan--I like some Miles Davis stuff like In a Silent Way--nor can I say that I'm a huge poetry fan (I like some poets, but it's never the literature I turn to for fun or pleasure; I'm a fiction man, myself), so I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed basically the entire program. While Lake's soloing took a little getting used to, composed as it was of as many squawking and clicking noises as it was actual notes, I could immediately appreciate Tarbaby's ability to see totally free and trending toward chaos before suddenly shifting into moments of breathtaking ensemble playing. Hind Shoufani was the star poet of the evening, in my opinion: her performance enhanced her words--which would have been potent enough on their own--without becoming a kind of tedious or pretentious "performance" that detracted from the impact of the poem, which unfortunately could not be said for all of the poets.

However, there was one giant distraction that plagued the entire evening for me: an enormous screen behind the performers projecting the livefeed being streamed of the event. I kept thinking about Baudrillard's The Transparency of Evil and his discussion of the televised event doing away with the need for spectators, the soccer game played in the empty stadium with spectators only seeing the game on television. The screen last night, so much bigger than anything else, with the performers digital selves looming like giants over the flesh-and-blood performer was a temptation. It was so hard to continue to look at the person reading, at the band members playing, when the screen showed so much more of them: the angles would change, the performers would each get a closeup, etc., etc.   In the context of the concert--one that started with a pointed reminder to turn off all cellphones and to cease texting for the duration of the concert, while at the same time reminding us we could follow the events in real time on Twitter--the screen, the presence of the internet feed standing over and above the actual action, dominating the stage, the focal point of the concert, really, seemed obscene, in the sense that Baudrillard outlines in The Ecstasy of Communication:

Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusion, when every-thing becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication.
We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. Obscene is that which eliminates the gaze, the image and every representation. . . .
It is no longer the obscenity of the hidden, the repressed, the obscure, but that of the visible, the all-too-visible, the more-visible-than-visible; it is the obscenity of that which no longer contains a secret and is entirely soluble in information and communication.

At one point, the camera was pointed in such a way that there appeared an infinite regress within the screen, a screen showing a screen showing a screen showing a screen and so on until the image quality didn't allow me to see any more screens. The temptation made obvious in the language of the temptation, the visual: you can see so much more on the screen. . .

Everything about the screen, the constant temptation that was more visible than the events being shown on the screen (despite our seats being about ten feet from the stage), offered to manage our experience of the concert more effectively than we could ourselves. When several of the poets read in their native language, the screen became ever more of a temptation, projecting English words over the image of the performer. I felt guilty when I forced myself to keep looking at the poets, reading in languages I don't speak or read or hear.The screen would tell us who to pay attention to and when (by changing angles and zooming in on the person who was most important at that particular instant), but it would also help to transport the seduction of hearing language (even--or, perhaps more accurately--especially if it was a language you couldn't speak) into information and communication, converting possibility into fact, into something whose meaning, always already fixed, could be given to us on a screen. Even the interactions of the musicians with the poet, a force that would, in its impossibility to be fixed, aid seduction, was drained of energy. The flat, determined meaning of the poem on the screen reflected back on the music and coloured it with same meaning. Interaction, obscurity, spectacle, theatre were all denied. Baudrillard emphasizes the value of these in-visible characteristics to the process of seduction, the signs that won't signify, the words that won't give up their meaning:

All these terms, torn asunder at the cost of unbounded energy, are ready at any moment to extinguish one another, and collapse to our greatest joy. Seduction hurls them against one another, and unites them beyond meaning, in a paroxysm of intensity and charm. . . .
Seduction only comes through empty, illegible, insoluble, arbitrary, fortuitous signs, which glide by lightly, modifying the index of the refraction of space. They are signs without a subject of enunciation, nor an enounced, they are pure signs in that they are neither discursive nor generate any exchange. . . . As such the signs of seduction do not signify; they are of the order of the ellipse, of the short circuit, of the flash of wit (le trait d'esprit). . . .
Such is the gaze, whose force resides precisely in it not being an exchange, but a double moment, a double mark, immediate, undecipherable. Seduction is only made possible through this giddiness of reversability . . . which cancels all depth, all in-depth operation of meaning: superficial giddiness, superficial abyss.

On a night that promised so much giddiness, such an abyss to lose oneself in, to be seduced by, the presence of the screen was disappointing, one more browser window on my laptop, only now intruding into the rest of my life. At a moment when it seemed the Real might irrupt, the hyperreal appeared, once again, in its place.

DON'T CALL IT A COMEBACK: END OF SUMMER AND THOUGHTS ON ASIMOV

Well, summer is officially over for me. I am back in Pittsburgh, writing this from the desk of my new apartment. When I stare out my window, I no longer see student slums. That has to count for something. There are many things to do in the two weeks between now and the first day of classes (like finally getting around to writing that syllabus . . .), but I should hopefully have enough time on my hands to resume blogging with whatever approaches regularity for me on this thing. I've been working on the long promised post about chillwave (thesis [essentially]: chillwave is a specifically North American form of hauntology) and I hope to have it up (famous last words) by tomorrow evening. After that, I'll try and tackle my impressions of DFW's The Pale King--it really does seem to me to lend itself to a reading via capitalist realism--and some of his other later work.

Before I get to any of that, though, I've just finished re-reading Asimov's three Lije Baley/R. Daneel Olivaw novels (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and The Robots of Dawn). When I was younger, I loved all three, but I have to admit I didn't find them as enjoyable this time around (it's been probably five years at least since I'd even glanced at them). While I was impressed with the resonances between some of Asimov's sociological and psychological commentary and current social and political situations--particularly in the two earlier novels--what left me cold were the glimpses of the much stranger novels that got left behind in their adherence to fairly conventional mystery/adventure templates. In some ways, the humaniform robot R. Daneel Olivaw invites speculation on the nature of the human vs. the simulation, the authentic vs. the simulacrum from the first: he is introduced to the reader as a human, and is under orders to maintain his disguise as a human at all times (a deception he achieves much more successfully in the second novel, but which is rendered impossible in the third). Asimov is too clever to dispense entirely with speculation on the above themes, but he avoids lengthy digressions on the subject, preferring the issues to remain in the background (and to arise mostly as secondary or tertiary subtexts to other conversations or internal monologues by Baley). Indeed, Daneel becomes increasingly "human"--or is thought of as such by Baley--throughout the series, to the point where he is able to smile in the third novel (something he is unable to do successfully in the first). Whereas this would seem to be the point at which to push the distinction between the authentically human and the imitative robot to its extreme or to dissolve it entirely, Asimov does neither.

This is, ultimately, where the weirder novels that lurk just beneath the surface of the trilogy start to appear. Not overtly, but rather as the ghosts of what other writers might have done with this material, particularly Asimov's doppelganger in terms of hyperprolific American science fiction writers with an extraordinarily large influence over the field: Philip K. Dick. The Caves of Steel could become, with some minor tweaking, a dry run for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? What happens instead is that at the very point where Dick's novels and stories break into epistemological and existential chaos, at the point where the human and the real become impossible to locate or verify, Asimov's novel closes the door to that chaos through the relentless logic of Baley the plainclothesman. Where in Dick's hands Daneel would grow steadily more unnerving as he became increasingly human--and where Baley's shifting attitude toward Daneel (from fear and loathing to love and respect) would be matched by an increasing uneasiness towards Baley's own humanity--Asimov's Baley is already so machine-like, so rooted to cause and effect, to chains of logic, that he can point to Daneel's artificial nature and discuss that nature with the robot without ever really making the question of the human/robot distinction a live one. Baley's physical shortcomings (his agoraphobia, for example, or his need to eat, to defecate, etc.), what would on the surface seem to point to his very humanity, become affectations on par with Daneel's in the robot's attempt to be taken as human. The many references to Baley's long, glum face, a face that only rarely smiles, seem like deliberate echoes of Daneel's own grave visage and Baley's revulsion at the lifeless smile he commands Daneel to display for him in The Caves of Steel.

The two become mirrors of each other, but where Daneel's resemblance to/echo of everything that should distinguish Baley as the human in the pair should unnerve, should awaken exactly that primal fear Freud mentions in "The Uncanny," it fails to do so precisely because he has no one who appears to fulfill the criteria of the "human." This, ultimately, is the disturbing part of the series, and it is in some ways more deeply unsettling than Dick's questioning of the human. Where Dick worked hard to locate the "authentic" human gesture--"The concept of caritas (or agape) shows up in my writing as the key to the authentic human. The android, which is the unauthentic human, the mere reflex machine, is unable to experience empathy"--Asimov works with a similar basic assumption (the reflex in this case being a robot's unfailing response to the First Law of Robotics), but then undercuts them (the search for the Laws of Humanics) with a desire to make the human more like the robot, like Lije Baley, who is identified at the end of the third novel as the template for the "ideal" human to colonize the galaxy.

PKD AND I: MY FIVE FAVOURITE PHILIP K. DICK SHORT STORIES

So, I mentioned in my last post the difficulty I would have in picking my five favourite Philip K. Dick short stories. Ever since I wrote those words I've been mulling the possibilities over in my mind, and I think I've reached something like a list (although I have to admit I cheated slightly). Now, there are many things to criticize in PKD's writing: his dialogue is often stilted and rarely sounds anything like actual conversation or speech, his characters are rarely more than types (in the worst sense of that term), his plot structures verge on the formulaic (if you've read one of his stories, you have a pretty good idea how all of his other stories will unfold), and his character names and settings are shamelessly recycled from one story to another.

With that being said, reading PKD is, in my opinion, like reading no other writer. His ideas often appear extremely banal (“What happens if a man is late leaving for work?” to take the premise of one story), but he finds in these moments incredibly complex and difficult ways to grapple with reality and our experience of it. There are surreal and absurd elements to his fiction, but normally these things develop out of the metaphysical questions he asks in the story. The floor often drops out from under you while you read, but it's okay, because you find out there's nowhere to go: the floor and whatever is underneath it never existed in the first place. To borrow a phrase from Simon Reynolds (one that I've mentioned before on this blog), reading PKD is like having your brain set on fire, and for much the same reason as with reading theory: his work exposes and critiques many of our conceptions of modern life, existence, time, and the physical world.

On a more personal note, discovering PKD was just a really amazing moment in my life. For a kid from the suburbs who had already consumed most of his local library's science fiction section--but who had no grounding in philosophy or in any literature beyond Shakespeare, the Romantics, and uber-canonical stuff like The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, and The Catcher in the Rye--reading A Maze of Death (the first thing I checked out from the library by PKD) was a genuinely shocking and exhilarating experience. I'd read Robert Silverberg, and I liked the grittiness and sex in his stories and novels, but PKD was even edgier. I felt like I should be hiding it from my parents (not that they ever attempted to censor anything I read). This was nothing like Asimov, Heinlein, or Clarke: it was more philosophical than Asimov, less creepily right-wing than Heinlein, and way more fun to read than Clarke. What is more, PKD did stuff with the suburbs that I'd never read, seen, or heard anyone do before: he didn't just say that the suburbs were shallow or a cultural void, he asked what would happen if suburbs became the model of human civilization and traced out all the implications of that scenario. It was electrifying stuff for my teenage brain (and still is today).

I don't read PKD as much as I used to, but I can't imagine being interested in a lot of the stuff I'm interested in now without him. By the time I got to reading postmodern fiction, a lot of it seemed positively tame by comparison and didn't frustrate me nearly as much as it did some of my classmates. Similarly, I think I like magical realism so much because it feels the same to me as PKD in a lot of ways. Without further adieu, then, my five favourite PKD short stories:

1. “Stand-by”/”What'll We Do With Ragland Park?” - Yes, I'm cheating right off the bat; these stories go together, though. They share characters (and this time it's not just Dick recycling character names; they really are the same characters) and a plot. I can't really say why I love these stories so much, other than that, in typical PKD fashion, they touch on a dozen topics only tangentially related to the plot, but entirely related to his two big concerns (as he himself admitted): 1) What is real? and 2) What does it mean to be human?
2. “If There Were No Benny Cemoli” - What I love most about this story is the feeling that it is slowly losing control of itself. The reader knows the entire time that an elaborate fabrication is taking place, but the more detailed the lie becomes, the longer it goes on, the less real anything else seems to become. The world is untethered from the past, and the lie becomes necessary in order to create a history that will allow the present to keep existing. The title statement comes to be less a hypothetical statement than a desperate situation that must be prevented from occurring at all costs.
3. “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon” - Love, regret, childhood trauma, this story has it all. It is also one of the saddest stories PKD ever wrote. I think what's so poignant is the desire on the part of one character (Martine) to make herself real to another (Victor). Like most of the characters in PKD's fiction, she's up against a lot: reality is always failing to manifest itself, always failing to be there, even when it takes the form of the people we love.
4. “The Days of Perky Pat” - I wonder if Baudrillard ever read this story, because it seems like he would have a field day with it. I can think of no better way to explain the order of simulacra and the idea of the hyperreal than through the Perky Pat boards the adults play with in this story. The world does not need to exist--it can in fact be a post-apocalyptic wasteland--because we will spend endless hours recreating it in our fantasies and will make it more real than it ever was before it disappeared. The world as it exists is actually in the way of it being as real as it could be.
5. “Precious Artifact” - This story might be the archetypal example of PKD's favourite plot structure: 1) establish the setting of the story; 2) reveal that setting to be an illusion and present a new setting; 3) indicate that both the revelation of the first setting as an illusion and the establishment of the second setting are equally illusory; 4) catalogue the characters' responses to this chain of events and their attempts to determine what is real. What raises this above just a gimmick is the way Dick uses these revelations as a way to comment on the relationship between perception and reality. In this case, even though the main character understands that things are not as they seem, he accepts (though he must unconsciously know it is false) an equally spurious conception of the world because he does not want to actually know what is real, he just wants to find a more acceptable illusion in which to live than the one he currently inhabits. Again, this describes a ton of PKD's fiction. I like this particular story, though, because it is a chance to see him in full command of his powers and his unique vision: it's not quite as far out as his later novels (there's none of the heavily religious/mystical content), but it's more intellectually engaging than his early action-oriented stories. If you like “Precious Artifact,” there's a good chance you will enjoy PKD.

Honourable mentions, or, my next five favourites in no particular order: “Faith of Our Fathers,” “Autofac,” “Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked,” “The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of the Tree,” and “Retreat Syndrome.”

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT SILENCE AND DESPAIR IN PKD AND DFW

I should preface this by saying none of what I discuss in this post is an issue right now (or, it is an issue for an entirely different reason...) given that my landlord decided that 6 am on a Saturday morning was a good time to continue the renovations he's been doing for TWO FULL WEEKS now. Today's task involved using a power drill on the other side of the wall against which my bed rests. Sleep? Who needs that? Certainly not the boy who loves sleep more than almost anything else and who is "enjoying" the last days of his one week of summer. Anyway, on to more important matters: a new blog post finally (I haven't had much to say or much time to say it recently. At least this is a nice long post).

I've been re-reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? over the past couple days. I think it's a great novel (though slightly overrated within PKD's body of work*) and it features some wonderfully evocative passages. I'm particularly struck by the descriptions of empty buildings and empty apartments (I have something of a minor obsession with both of these things. That obsession, coupled with my obsession with nuclear disasters, makes the Kidd of Speed website--hoax or not--like fetish porn for me). I generally don't consider myself despairing or lonely--I try and avoid both of those feelings as a rule--but I have to admit I don't know the city I live in that well and I don't know that many people in the city, so there are times (especially when I've spent a few days in a row in my apartment doing work and not speaking to anyone) when I feel both despair and loneliness. The passage I've been giving a lot of thought to recently is J. R. Isidore's description of the silence in his apartment:

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn't worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-speckled ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it--the silence--meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came, it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.

The switch from silence-as-aural-experience to silence-as-aural-and-visual-experience is dead on. So too is the idea of silence as a living force that actively encroaches upon you. It gets to the point where I can see the quiet in the air. I seem to leave a trail in it when I walk from my bedroom to my kitchen and back. There are times I'm very sympathetic to the idea of bored housewives in the 1950s slowly going crazy in response to being trapped within a silent house for hours on end (and really, PKD is one of the underacknowledged masters of depicting suburban ennui. It is perpetually the 1950s in his fiction, even when the story is set hundreds of years in the future, and his characters are rarely happy). I suppose this is why some people have a TV, to be able to have another voice, another presence (even if only virtual) to combat the silence.** My mother has the radio on all the time. In fact, one of the things that's most likely to trigger an intense wave of nostalgia and longing for home in me is the theme music to CBC's As It Happens. I think this is one of the reason I like clocks. The steady tick of the second hand is at least one more noise--a noise I find comfortingly domestic--and it definitely helps at night.

The passage from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? reminds me of a similar one from DFW's essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again” (from the essay collection of the same name). In his discussion of a young man who had committed suicide on a cruise ship just before DFW had embarked on his own cruise, he touches on what the word “despair” means (and its relationship to the experience of taking a Caribbean cruise):

There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir--especially at night, when all the ship's structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased--I felt despair. The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture--a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard.***

I wouldn't say that my own experience of a silent apartment is quite this extreme, but I think sometimes--say when I've had a particularly bad day and I'm just not up to facing a night of quiet solitude, when even my bookshelves are no comfort--I understand a little bit of what both DFW and PKD are saying here. It has less to do with impending death, I think, than with that sense of smallness and futility as they become intertwined with silence (or maybe it has everything to do with a sense of impending death). I don't ever want to jump overboard, but I do sometimes have a desire to talk and talk, to never stop talking, so the silence never has a chance to come back.****

Maybe this is the source of my occasional resistance to poststructuralism: I can't stand the idea of my words leaving me and going to some nebulous world of text rather than to another human being. How would that ever be able to combat silence? It's one of the reasons that I like Stanley Fish's idea that the author provides “readers the opportunity to make meanings (and texts) by inviting them to put into execution a set of strategies.” Inviting someone to participate in an attempt at communication seems so nice, so essential, so human, somehow.

Anyway, enough gloomy thoughts. All in all, I can't really complain about anything right now (other than those renovations. I cannot complain enough about those). I just wanted to share/celebrate what I think is some great, truthful writing.

*I am a bigger fan of his short stories than his novels. One of my favourite stories by him (that would be a challenge, picking my top five PKD stories), “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon,” features one of the most beautiful conversations about love and regret I've ever read. A relevant passage: 

"Sit down," Martine said.

"Okay." Victor seated himself on the bed, beside her, but not too close to her.

"Won't you sit closer to me?" she said.

"It makes me too sad," he said. "Remembering you. I really loved you. I wish this was real."

Martine said, "I will sit with you until it is real for you."

**There's something to do with Baudrillard in here, I think. Silence as some kind of manifestation of the Real that must be evaded or contained by the imposition of the virtual (television) overtop of it in order to mask the horror we experience in the Real's presence. The idea of an action or event for which there are no words might be some kind of marker of an experience of the Real, an encounter with something that goes beyond what the Symbolic is capable of understanding and rendering into language (to switch over to Lacan). Baudrillard's discussion of terrorism would be interesting to think about in this sense.

***Even though several people have pointed out the folly of re-reading DFW's work as an extended suicide note following his death, it's hard not to read that paragraph as, in his words, unbearably sad. Indeed, the second-to-last sentence in that paragraph seems to me to be everything that his writing fought to overcome. The business of being a “fucking human being,” what he tried to figure out in his work, might be knowing that you are “small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die” and somehow turning that into a positive. Hence his emphasis (especially in “This is Water” and The Pale King) on paying attention to your thoughts at all times and choosing to think your way out of that despair. The existentialist gambit as it manifests itself in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century United States or something.

****This can at times lead to horrifying and depressing moments. It can also be quite embarrassing.