A Modernism

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.

The TV

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 Washing Machine

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. 

The Fridge

One of life’s essential luxury items.  The glamour of a fifties America, an open plain, there where the Thunderbirds zoom Mainstreet: open the door and the future also opens; the light that your eyes wonderingly find illuminates the frosty body of a perfection.  A fridge is a box of weather.  The first truly climate-controlled zone of the house, antecedent to air conditioning and to the climate-controlled car.  Edenic snow.

One end of a conversation

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.

The Simulation

A simulation is a ’story that is not a story’.

The year is 1918. The story starts in the cockpit of an SE5a biplane with the instruction to escort a flight of bombers scheduled to attack a German airfield behind enemy lines; the airfield is to the north east in Cambrai, it is about five miles beyond the strip of no-mans-land. Dawn, the sun on the horizon, the air cold. White clouds in the sky where shadows darken the fields. Behind, to the southwest, is a town with its spires and houses. You are the story; sitting in a box of plywood, piano wire and doped fabric – projected on a screen – but also in a way you are the not-story; for it is not a story yet. You take off, in flight you test the .303 Vickers guns. The gun smoke puffs. There are views on either side of the aircraft.

Later amidst flak: the enemy. I am rapidly shot down. Nothing I can do. My plane explodes into the ground. In camera free view I watch the the remaining air-battles buzz and bang. We do badly. I replay, restart, fast-forward – the same encounter, hoping to do better this time. So it goes. One can say that having these possibilities in the form of the simulation, takes the story to pieces – 1918, the RAF, the war in the air – since its modular form deconstructs it and I am able to choose the ’story’ for myself. So I create not something complete but on the contrary open-ended with the story disintegrating into its repetitive panoramas. The story ceases, and is replaced by a kind of role-playing: but is that now the story?

Shadows

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.

The Outfit

One is ruled by image; everything is appearance.  This fact, documented by novelists; since it informs their observational material in large part; raises the question of how then, it is so vague to us, how it is so ill-seen, such a cloud of nothing, that here lies the dictator, posing in the mirror and setting out its terms of necessity.  The ‘triviality’ of it perhaps distracts us from acknowledging the power thereby hidden in its blank cheque of meaning; so it is not factored in - it doesn’t register – as a thing in itself – but is acknowledged to exist only in so far as it impinges on the social network that supports us, since – in such terms – it plays a significant dynamic role in the context of the values, judgements and decisions that politicians make on our behalf in so far as a kind of defensive manoeuvring is then undertaken on its behalf.

Many strange or baffling or seemingly inexplicable or obtuse political decisions can probably be explained by this dynamic.

Philosophy as Knowledge

“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..”

-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.   We are looking at the question of where fact ends.  At the limits of ‘factuality’.

The Concept of Place

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, under the river via the Blackwall Tunnel up through the Lea Valley soon bowling through the maze of sunless flyovers and underpasses towards the M11, voyaging, the concrete triple lanes, the slab-sided walls patterned to a sense of movement but creating stasis – everything is the same.  Litter covers the verges, the hedges, and trees, flutters on the meagre grass and the branches.  In all directions lie industrial parks, giant Fitness First centres, Multiplexes, Halfords, Comet.   Here is a landscape that has ceased to be a place.  It has become a brute interlude to elsewhere.