Postmodern Light Switches

A postmodern light switch, typically a ‘rocker’ switch, is a light switch that doesn’t have a specific click for on and off; instead the switch position is unreadable or ambiguous.  It is a light switch for which the function of turning the light on and off is too simple: sometimes for example, an ‘off’ instruction misfires; a companion light switch for the same light but on some other wall has been used so that you turning the strip on leaves it burning at 30% of normal luminescence because it thinks an emergency has occured.  The light is on for three hours; as a kind of emergency default (just in case you should need emergency lighting) but on the other hand neither does a on resolve the semi-off-ness; the situation remains intermediate and beyond instruction.  The system needs rebooting maybe.  One thing is clear, it is not obvious; there is no old-world bi-polar diffusion of light and dark; when off is off or on is on is like a sub-divided pie: quarters, fifths: of an electric pie. 

Like everything else a light-switch has a narrative function; like everything else it tells us what the world is - this or that.  The world stands in its image.  Screwed to the wall, the wires inside can be traced up to the bulb in the middle of the room, which hangs inside a shade, a fly blown skeleton but attenuated into an imaginary plasma that casts actual light, an opaque energy saving virtual ‘tube’ for which off and on are relative terms, for this device is controlled not by the switch itself but by a central computer somewhere in the depths of the house; symbolic of the loss of hierarchy endemic to our postmodern condition: who is in charge?  Not the light switch operator, obviously, but some sort of external ‘mind’ is.

Faint, the outline of the flying insect, a man with thick notched lips, at play on the vertical walls of the shade, casting shapes on the ceiling that flap endlessly to a quick fluttering sound.

Trainers (2)

One can see the popularity of wearing trainers as part of the common impulse, which we share in through a kind of cultural indavertence, and which can be seen with other things too, for getting back in touch with our instincts.  Since we seem to be ‘out of touch’ with the body ways are sought of reaffirming its importance but (and here is the difficulty) within a context that is not very real, which is dominated by televisual and magazine images and corporate iconography: identity that is quintessentially disembodied being its embodiment. 

The Weather

“nobody ever rioted for austerity”  [George Monbiot, Heat.]

But have nots have rioted against haves (at world political summits) so ostensibly that is their object.

Global warming is the ultimate postmodernist thing.

It is not - seemingly - a thing but a dilemma: an - ‘is it or isn’t it a thing?’ - thing.  “It is a thing” - “But no it’s ectoplasm yet.”

It has become the play-thing of advertising (see Monbiot’s chapter ‘The Denial Industry’).  Adverts dictate the ‘reality’.

There is no solution.  I once read an interview with William Boroughs in which he asserted that action was useless in the attempt to change any of this.  That politics is like the weather.  That the decline of the Roman Empire couldn’t be avoided.  Just as the decline of the American Empire cannot be.  One way or another it is going to happen.  Like the weather.  One way or another it is going to come about - true enough, I admit sadly; I would say because of our homelessness and absolute incapacity to admit this. 

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, 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. 

What it is it isn’t

Call it the ”postmodern moment.”  Is it true to say that it is to the instrument and not the thing in itself or the end in itself that the expression now most applies: It isn’t what it is -? 

That is, to what used once to be art’s territory, almost exclusively.  Once, only art said this.  Now (we might say) human reality is beginning to utter it back, unprompted.

Two immediate examples …

1. An Amnesty Interntional flyer with the Guardian carries the instruction: “Throw away this flier.”

2. On the back of the Guardian, a Nigel Slater ad.  He is standing with a knife and carving a roast.  That’s all.  Couldn’t be more direct, factual, straightforward: it is an ad for the service he is providing.  Except that closer inspection shows that this professional act of carving belongs to a woman; as if they are his, a woman’s arms are reaching inside Slater’s almost invisible black-sleeves, so that, yes, it’s clear that he is not actually doing what he is ‘doing’. 

In The Village

* The postmodern object is an object that isn’t one.

* Like an advert.

* A story that isn’t a story tells us a ’story’. 

* “You are Number Six” - like the rest of us: he is not a person but an imposter among his fellow imposters.

 * “It does exactly what it says on the tin.” - It does exactly what it says in the advert.

* The advert says exactly what it doesn’t say. 

* Exactly what it doesn’t say it can’t tell.

The Prisoner

Maybe it is possible to describe the essence of an advert  … In so far as it is about using the viewer rather than finding imagination, so that the viewer becomes its instrument; or in so far as it is a kind of video tool for anaesthetising a mass audience, for purposes of merely occupying their time in a way useful to it rather than you, tv (advertising) is a kind of divorce.  It presents life as of a moment other than the one that is actually being occupied; just as a person might treat one thus.  You are not in their world; or you have ceased to be in their world.  It amounts to the same thing.  You are persona non grata; a person not in the world that is; in a place that isn’t because actuality has to be elsewhere.  One of the things that struck me about The Prisoner when quite by accident I happened on it, when it first came out, was that it incorporated the event of viewing television into its plot and made it a questionable and also a mysterious act.  The other resonance was the boundless mockery the series made of the concept of normality, rendering the ‘real’ as actually merely a kind of manipulative tool for enforcing passivity.  As a child I found all this subversively reassuring in the face of endless adverts and their contextless, storyless ’scenes’.

Disaffection Chanel 1

Motherless, Fatherless

The object of one’s affection, through whom one’s world - effectively the world - was sustained, is gone; he or she has been revealed to be an instrument of other forces, foreign to all affection.  Would it be absurd to look at tv in this way?  Specifically, for children.  Spiritually, a child is a fully formed human being.  A child is a quick study.  As much as to anything and everything this ability in the child applies to its perception of tv and the picture of the world that comes through it and the effect that this picture has on the ideas and feelings of the child regarding sense.  An advert for a toy requires, through the child’s liking for the toy, that it participate in an act of commerce, money, debt and exchange.  It knows on some level that it is being used.  That these tv adverts are about the use of the viewer more than - say - merely providing information about availability.  It divorces the child from its innocence: teaches it that this is how things are got, through manipulation, cajoling and pestering: all the things that an advert does.  An early cynicism is thus created.  Disillusion rapidly sets in about the reality of a world other than this place of adverts (since here is everything!) - especially if the things advertised remain persistently out of reach.  “The world is not interested in you; on the contrary, it is only interested in what it can get out of you.”  This is the message that’s put across.  Affection finds itself pushed into the margins, a secondary consideration at best.  Affection is not good enough.  It becomes grubby.  You find yourself willing to search it out in the cold interstices between demands, a furtive, ashamed, inadequate shadow of the first illusion, given that here nothing works as an end in itself.  Nothing is reasonable!  Everything is an affront!  An outrage!  A steal!  “Not what I was looking for.”

Perhaps it’s like that line from David Thomas.  He tears everything out of his house in a rage.  Leaving only the four bare walls standing empty.  What is it that remains?  What is it that remains when nothing remains?  “I searched around for something else to tear out … I reached - deep.”  The world wont go.  You stare at the tv and the place that’s real remains.  You can’t divorce that place.  It is always going to be there.  So what is there to be divorced?  What remains when one can’t divorce that thing that makes one crawl all over the ceiling - ?  Can a divorce from the self be instituted - ? 

Fitting In

Conformity.  The clothes by which one fits in.  A suit.  T-shirt and jeans.  Brogues.  Pointy toes.  Trainers.  Sandals.  Court shoes.  A skirt; a dress; a hat.  Pfft!  It is what everyone wears.  Not exactly of course, but a smart or attractive, colour coded variation.  It sounds invidious.  Everyone conforms.  Even acknowledging that there is a world implies conformities.  The wider sense of what the planet is is not objectively neutral, that idea is a chimera; instead it is the reflected truth - more or less - of human life and technology as a currency (I mean that also in the sense of current).  The lap-top, the ipod, the t-shirt, the mobile phone, the ad … The world that we respond to is built from them.  So it doesn’t mean that this says that we are therefore silly, in being so ‘conformist’, that we shouldn’t be like this, that instead we should be more individual, more ‘ourselves’, and objective, detached, and so on.  For it has to be asked, what is there besides fitting in?  Indeed it can be argued quite oppositely that it is the very cult of the individual that has produced so many of the things by which this world that we live in exists in the first place.  The PC came out of a Californian dream.  This is what interests me, the constructive power of conformity, as well as the destructive side of it.  People who are slavish and fetishistic about their laptop or mobile - aren’t they pursuing the same thing, that same cult of individuality even if in doing so they behave exactly like everyone else?  The ’statements’ of life-style that make us different from each other are the common ones.  Commonplace.  Like names.  And so everyone is the same!  (If ‘individuality’ is a resource it appears to have been exhausted.  It is like the endless connurbations of those trying to live ‘in the countryside’.)  The circumstances in which an identity and certainty are acquired are borrowed from the human melee.  One thus becomes part of the human power structure that makes the world be (since to repeat, this world does not exist just by or in itself): one is able to act from this ground and being so able one is therefore creative, in whatever way.  It is a scramble up a muddy bank.  As with phrases for example.  They have to be able to catch, to fit one into, a particular moment.  Phrases like: “Well …”  “Come to think of it …” “You know …”.  One scrambles desperately; and because there is a subtext, that is the idea for example, “I am nice; listen to me; give me what I want” … the world gains a flavour.  Again, this is all reflexive behaviour; where in so far as it is reflexive it stands outside judgement; you can’t judge someone for blinking or scratching, and no more is it sensible to criticise conformity (it results in a kind of self-delusion that this is possible; as if the speaker him or herself is immune to the need to scratch or blink).  So is it to do with something we can do nothing about, except to become aware of it … So that dressed in the suit, in the jeans, donning the surplice, the uniform, the oufit, the hat, I fit into the human story. 

So, but there are things that fit into the human story by not really doing so, that fit into it effectively by destroying it - contradicting it, obliterating it.  Like one of those tv programs; the journalist introduces himself and the viewer to a ’rare tribe’ - but in doing that, by that invasion, destroying the very thing that the program was seeking to preserve or cherish.  (As differently in Iraq.) The aboriginal, wanting to fit in, wanting his head-dress, mask or whatever, to be admired, plays to the camera.  Inadvertently he acquires the values of those on the other side of the camera, a manner, a gesture, a point of view, a species of vanity, and so thereby loses that quality that the camera was pointed at him for in the first place: which was his strangeness.  He becomes perfectly ordinary.

What comes next is this thought: the things that enable us to ‘fit in’ in the modern world tend increasingly to be things that actually fail to achieve this and that have this failure built into them as part of their very nature.  (See next below.)

List

Fish out of water objects:

The mobile phone

The logo t-shirt

The ipod

The trainer

The 4×4.  The Mall.

The tv.  Advertising. 

The computer.  The supermarket.

The book - ? The washing machine.

The newspaper - ? The fridge.  The vacuum cleaner

The comic book hero.  The office block.

The science fiction novel.

Not all the things listed are necessarily postmodern.  Some are such by specific use.  Books for example.  A postmodern book would be a celebrity cookbook let’s say.  Or a sports or tv autobiography.  The signifying factor is the lack of context or place that the book has.  The way that it is the vehicle of a projected - and unreal - personality.  It is this unreality that is the key in so far as it more or less defines the book’s content; the writer and reader only exist in fantasy; neither is what they are presented as.  The reader is a ‘fan’ for example; in some measure congenitally delusional or they wouldn’t be a ‘fan’ to start with; so they both exist only through a delusional other, enabled to participate in a shared fantasy that yet seems wholly factual and real in being about ‘real things’ - tv life, life on tv, and life before and after tv (for example).   That is, the reader participates in a story that is not actually, really a story at all, but something like an advert, something wholly a construct that gives only the appearance of being a story.

Here the theme is: the destruction of human manners.