Thinking is amateur
If Modernism represents a split between worlds, as between the objective and the subjective, then Postmodernism represents the re-fusion; the unwieldy rejoining of these ‘two’ halves of life - which is the same as saying that it shows there were never - really - the two halves to start with. There is no hermeneutics of a world that interpretation can merely duplicate - it irreducibly already being an interpretation.
They knocked down Logie Baird’s house last week, subliminal vengeance perhaps for his visiting tv on the world, since inter alia the advent of tv is associated with alien invasion. The tv is the ’foreign house’ in the house: unlike the box of the washing machine, dishwasher or fridge, the tv is a box of indeterminacy, increasingly rude and mannerless. But make friends with it and it will be friends with you. Be angry with it, and find yourself forever shunned by human society, afraid to walk out the front door for fear that a dalek or something will be standing at the end of the garden path waiting to spray you with deadly fizzle, never mind the flowers or trees.
The ‘river’ has disappeared into a ‘washing machine’.
The glass porthole. The electric slurp. The feeling that things are going forward, that life is in motion, the feeling of a gently rocking boat on the flat shiny surface of a smooth flowing stream finding its way to the sea. Something is taking place; just as Mrs Tiggywinkle did once in expunging the world’s stain, so too does this imperturbable machine clean all.
One of life’s essential luxury items. It conveys the glamour of a fifties America, an open plain, there where the Thunderbirds reign: open the door and the future also opens; the light of permanence that your eyes wonderingly find illuminates the frosty body of perfection. A fridge is a box of weather. The first truly climate-controlled zone of the house, antecedent to air conditioning and the climate-controlled car. Edenic snow.
The mobile, the cell phone, displaces the speaker from their, from his or her, immediate environs. It does this to the extent that in projection the speaker seems to inhabit a kind of ’elsewhere’ nowhere, a kind of interstice that exists somewhere between the two in conversation, and so by this token not a place anywhere in actuality. It is perhaps some sort of reflex ideality that the two speakers compose, a sort of amalgam bubble of talk, or alloy speakeasy; a place that both would rather be (sometime). Someone walking a dog in a woods in Dulwich is speaking to a friend in north Italy (somewhere). The friend is driving her car through mountains, so that a zone neither woods nor the car on the Italian road exists but in that alloy of the ideality. Perhaps it most resembles an idyll - an ‘I wish I was there and she wishes she was here’; a but-yet-neither place in reality to satisfy that call into electronica and greet it with dismay. I speak into the phone and so am not here but somewhere on the way to the person to whom I - . And I do this not from a fixed address but from within myspace, which is wherever I happen to be.
A simulation is a ’story that is not a story’.
The year is 1918. The story is this. (It starts in the cockpit of a SE5a biplane.) You have been instructed to escort a flight of bombers scheduled to hit a German airfield behind enemy lines; the airfield some way over to the north east in Cambrai, about five miles beyond the broad muddy strip of no-mans-land. Dawn, the sun just on the horizon, the air sharp and cold. White fluffy clouds float in the sky where shadows darken the fields still. Behind, to the southwest, is a pretty town with its spires and houses. You are the story; sitting in a fragile box of plywood, piano wire and doped fabric - but in a way also you are the not-story; for it is not a story yet. And perhaps never will be. You take off, in flight you briefly test the .303 Vickers guns. The smoke goes puffing away. There are broad views on either side of the aircraft.
Later the enemy come to meet us amidst of dark spots of flak. I am shot down first shot by an albatross. There is nothing I can do. I hit the ground in flames and explode, and then in free camera view watch the ensuing air-battle take place without me. We do badly. I hit replay, restart, fast-forward to the same encounter, hoping to do better this time. So it goes. One can say that this, having these possibilites so created in the form of the simulation, takes the story represented - 1918, the RAF, the war in the air - that it takes this to pieces, and puts it back together in modular form, in terms that because they enable me to choose the ’story’ for myself create not something complete but on the contrary an open-ended field of behaviours, of roles that the story disintegrates into.
The story ceases, to be replaced by a kind of role-playing.
I awoke this morning, reluctantly, by degrees, in shadows, solidifying but not clear about who I was. A familiar anxiety hung in the air, partly sponsored by dreams, the anxiety that I wasn’t real; that I didn’t really exist; that I had never even been to school. Or if I had been in school then I had been unable to learn anything. I felt like someone in a literate society who has failed to learn to read. There was something basic in which I had failed to qualify so that I couldn’t actually be a meaningful part of how things were; I had this feeling, the same old feeling, but in this instance the anxiety seemed beneficial, something to relax into. I was not clear who I was and really I didn’t know where I was either, but what did it matter? So a fragile momentary state that I found I could linger on in, like a mood, replaced waking up. What house was I in? Did it have a stairs? Was it a flat? How were the rooms positioned? Who was in it? I didn’t know but found it a kind of benefit; for it seemed quite enough to know I didn’t know. It felt interesting enough to look into the fact itself, that I should be in this state to begin with; it was curious.
Not to have answers seemed a better bet then to be back in a world of actuality pinned to facts that failed to consolidate me.
One is ruled by a mirror image; I mean, by concerns about social appearance. This fact, well documented by novelists; since it forms much of their observational material that people are vain and trivial, raises the question of how then, is it so vague to us, how is it so ill-seen, such a cloud of nothing, that here lies the dictator, posing in the mirror? Its ‘triviality’ perhaps persuades us from acknowledging the power thereby hidden in that blank mistachioed sad face; so it is not factored in to the politics of life - that is, so that it doesn’t register as a reality. In any case it makes us impractical in how we think of ourselves that such oversight should be normal. There is almost no detachment from social self-image but within the supposition that that is irrelevant - !
“The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity. It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science. To question this is not to give in to racism.”
-Reported to be the words of gene scientist, James Watson
The understanding that all humans are born equal does not specify what they are equal in. Were that specification to be understood in finite terms, it would immediately be absurd. All are born into infinity. All are born blue-eyed apparently … But there the finitude of comparison ends: in that infinity. Size, weight, energy, physical condition, hair colour, strength - make all unalike. So if being born equal is not an assertion that all are born alike - well then .. well, you say!
What is the infinity of the human circumstance? Perhaps we should say that that idea doesn’t have a specifc sense. That if a value is to be found in infinity then it is through the agreement that no sort of finite criteria such as Watson understands are to be applied to it, for if those criteria are applied then inequality is the consequence.
In the context of equality we can only agree in infinity.
‘Watson’, speaking as reported above, stands the agreement whereby our words have a sense of values to one side. What is insisted on is ’science’: all sense, it is implied (’scientifically’) is measurable. It being a fact that some people are more intelligent than others, then, as a fact, that is a scientific finding - . As a fact it has to be admitted - we have to be honest. But is it a fact? Or how so? (For instance our voting system operates on the opposite assumption.)
To be brief … What we are looking at the question of where fact ends. At what the limits of ‘being factual’ might be.
Auge’s Non-Places argues that the concept of place has ceased to have a context identifiable with the place itself.
Out of South London, across the river through the Blackwall Tunnel up through the Lea Valley bowling through the maze of sunless flyovers and underpasses towards the M11, voyaging the concrete triple lanes. Their slab-sided walls are patterned to create a sense of movement but they actually produce feelings of Ballardian stasis and helplessness. There are disturbing quantities of litter everywhere, caught in the thin hedges and bits of grass verge. On all sides lie industrial parks, giant Fitness First centres, Multiplexes, Halfords, Comet, and so on. Here is a landscape that has ceased to be a place. It has become a kind of brute interlude to elsewhere. It is not somewhere to be; instead its ideality is as a zone - defined by something that removes it from itself: that is, by means of cars, fitness ideals, entertainment, travel (airports). The landscape is there but it is somehow not there too; for an imperial impatience replaces it with unyielding hallucination.
