Out of Water

The phrase ‘like a fish out of water’: this perfectly sums up postmodernism.  The necessary objects of a modern life-style for example, the SUVs, 4X4s, and trainers; the ipods, mobile phones and adverts; t-shirts and tvs; are examples of the postmodern condition.  Our condition is one of absolute displacement.  Walk around the hapless back streets of Marylebone, or Hampstead - to use these places as examples - really one can use anywhere in London - one gigantic 4×4 is upstaged by an even bigger one two yards past, which is upstaged by an even BIGGER one than that on massive dazzling wheels.  Unbelievable.  The absurdity of it practically knocks you over.  Streets patrolled by Humvees redesigned for the middle classes, refitted and with the kind of impeccable paintwork that a Merc has, only with twice or four times the acreage - this is the only possible outcome.  The mindset is of war; that we are at war.   A war that isn’t there.  

What we are presented with is an object designed for somewhere else, for mud, rough terrain, an object designed for something other than that which it is ‘actually’ designed for - in other words, what we have is an object that has lost its story, and moreover, that has no new story since the use to which it is put is so alien to its sense.  It is not that this Humvee style object actually looks at home in, fits, this back street in Marylebone.  Indeed it just looks, is, monstrous.

Trainers

Everything tells a story.  It is how we identify things.  We look at something and we know it by the ’story’ it fits into.  In essence, a story is a context.  A kind of temporally qualified instance - a thing qualified by what goes before it and what comes after it.  However, not every ’story’ is a story.  Some ’stories’ are non-stories.  Some ’stories’ actively contradict time, have no real - ”and then and then” … The trainer for example.  The trainer is a without-a-context object: a without-a-context shoe -.  Global footware.  A footware that makes present an impossible object, an America-that-is-not-here, like a t-shirt with ‘Yale’ on it which the wearer has no connection with and never will have.  We don’t know what we are supposed to make of a Yale ’scholar’ who perhaps - probably - doesn’t read.  Similarly with the trainer.  Ostensibly it is to be used for running.  But not for the typical wearer.  On the contrary it is to be used for not-running, that is, for ’casual wear’, a criteria which tends to fit with all situations.   The designs are increasingly random and gimmicky.   Go faster stripes are replaced by nets or pig-like cloven heels, or, at the front, toes.   This faddism being symptomatic of the hanging question of what they really are - ?  Perhaps we can say that really they are toys.  Their toy-like nature goes with other toy designs, for example tonka-toy 4×4s; they admit one to a play world where instinct can rediscover itself.  They invite the sense that by wearing them one is ’ready for anything’, for example; that in wearing them, one is ready to sprint off at the drop of a hat, flight/fight; go all-terrain.  Instinct is rediscovered as child-like.   Another aspect of this idea of a life-style life, might be to do with the way that it makes the concept of a holiday primary … Not of a HOLY-day but of the salutory fiction of one: the idea that only time-off is actually real, an inversion of childhood’s chronology, where the shoe-wearer moves back into a personal era in which time is never on.  Within this they are practical ’kit’.  They are his/hers.  They are about foot comfort.  They are about health, fitness, well-being, along with the occasions of youth.  They are a form of uniform that wants not to be a uniform.  A form of mild rebellion against uniformity, a flavour of the individual that’s finished up shapeless, provisional, because they insist by what they are that everywhere is outdoors; yet they say ‘nothing natural’.  But, as with all fashions, the more the fad is sustained the more things lose proportion.  They begin to resemble the alien objects from nightmares, imbued with autonomous life blurring all into an inerasable ugliness.

Narrative

Narrative is the only story in town.  Everything tells its story.  A bus conductor for example.  He, or she, as is, tells you a story.  The story is “I am a bus conductor.”  You look at them, you know their story.  You look at a fence; you know its story.  You look at a tree, you know its story.   You look at bird.  You look at a house.  You look at an arrow.  You know its story.

Relocating the Argument

It is no good where we are.  Not at all.   The argument needs relocating.  Just a few blades of grass survive, if that.  Sticking out of the cracks between the broken paving. 

The Spinning Atom

Walking from one end of Oxford Street to the other and at least in recollection seeming to see only one thing can be argued to be the obvious consequence of the abundance on display: the plenitude of things that are and that are the same even if they vary in detail.  Just as when one sees objects from a distance and they all merge into one another, into a single landmass, with nothing particularly distinct, just a vague outline.  This occurs not just in terms of the flow of people and objects but in what one is doing too.  What one is doing is what everyone else is doing; so is it likewise indistinct, a morass.  One becomes a part of the landmass of commerce.  Of retail intensity.  Perception is rendered exclusive to the instrumental moment; the noticed thing is the to-be-noticed; it is whatever it is that can operate as an interest in the context of this endless melee, whatever it is that plastic can yield to one’s iron possession in the lust of having, a motive rendered innocent by the bag supplied to hold the object on the journey home, with its convincing logo.  The shop that sells the object.  Coffee Republic.  HMV.  Gap.  River Island.  02.  The leather bag that is brown not black.  The slacks that are canvas, not jean.  The T-shirt that is short, not long.  Everyone is engaged in the same way, shopping, so nothing therefore is remarkable; or even if it is, it is all the same.  The act of shopping is all there is, people have disappeared into its solipsism and emerge only for seconds at a time to look into a window or stop for the lights.  The pinball moves down the street hitting a few targets, wizzing too and fro back and forth in order to expend itself on blank numbers.  As I do.

The paradox is of the exotic ordinary.

The techno-twee

The techno apple-twee.  Need I say more?

William Gibson is its president.   

Out of substance

The telephone exchange … bmm bmm; nothing.  Automatic voices.  Once I get through, finally!, speak to a real person, it is to someone in India.  I am not speaking to anyone with whom I can talk directly (as a corporeal equal).  There is a displacement. (A displacement in time and space, in culture and language.)  I interface with software.  A kind of computer subsystem inside another subsystem, a virtual substance: an inexistence so that I don’t exist, for it ‘is’ only as a fiction, as ‘awareness’.  Home is inside a nothing ‘not nothing’.

The Virus has been Quarantined

The grill to close the tense has storybooked its endstop with ants to feed questions as in: I’m unable to tell because it was before the I was here email was lost in May 1999 of LUCY.

 What comes out at the end is a lo-ve-p-o-t-ion.  Don’t use it! 

Please install the following

I phone the phone company to report a fault.  I get a mechanical voice with a menu of options 1-5.  I choose an option.  I get another menu of options 1-5 … - and so on.  Eventually I press a number in followed by the “%” key.   I put the phone back on its receiver.  In thirty seconds the phone rings and a mechanical voice informs me.  “We have been unable to find a fault with this line.  Please dial XXXXXX to speak to an engineer.”  Finally a human voice!

 Plain English emerges as unintelligible code.

A Virus in the Works

The modernist rebellion is a spanner.  The postmodernist equivalent is a virus.  In the works.  To see a car travel along the road is to see it move without any apparent means of doing so.  No horse runs before it.  It is like a living thing.  (No horse pulls a horse, after all.)  The modernist thrived by fixing our attention - so to speak - on the horse.  Looking into the cabin of a steam engine clearly showed a mechanism : the machine’s motive power was still transparent; its horse, so to speak.  The interface of a modern high speed train is ‘invisible’ .  It is a ’brain’ (in the form of a computer and subsystems).  There is no clear line between man and machine or between the animate and the inanimate.