Month: February 2022

instead of “art ought to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable,” “art ought to radicalize the complacent and placate the radicalized”

the title of this post is a paraphrase of some of the things my mom tried expressing to me in the delirium of an extended personality-disorder-related anxiety attack that lasted all weekend. it’s none of your business what happened; she’s calmed down now, some. “pay attention, Cody, because the universe is trying to tell you things, always. words, phrases, sentences, numbers…if you notice patterns, that’s because you’re supposed to notice them.” almost parodically, I happen to be in the midst of reading Eros & Civilization, and if my mom weren’t so scattered I might have tried to rigorize her complaint about the world seeming designed to cast out as unacceptable such an outflowing of emotion. but theory and analysis don’t dissolve acute distress. far more likely that they exacerbate it.

a problem of our current situation is the primacy of information, which has led to the oversaturation of information. we are not equipped to handle the volume of data an average person consumes via the miraculous network that now dictates the terms of our lives. information chaoticizes; there’s much I find underwhelming about Byung-Chul Han’s thought, but he is right to point out that information does not help us feel grounded in the world, that information’s superabundance is responsible for the sense that concrete lived experience is disappearing.

Han, as I understand, argues that we must reacquaint ourselves with non-activity, what with neoliberalism’s demand for constant productivity leading to insidiously internalized forms of violence. this is a position I sympathize with, being myself a hyperactive workaholic who feels adrift when not absorbed in research or productive creativity (or sex). but non-activity is also a useful collaborator in the ascendency of fascism and other forms of societal brutality; Pynchon points out sloth’s reign in the years prior to the Nazi regime, and in the years prior to the Reagan administration, in his essay examining the deadly sin.

as an artist, I struggle with how to address these contemporary issues. Pynchon is my only real role model, because he implicitly acknowledges information’s chaotic nature without turning away from its proliferation. in recent years, literature has partaken in this turning away by reverting to “realism,” which, in my mind, is best exemplified by the neo-Kmart realism of the post-alt lit set. but believing it possible to return to “bare facts,” or “concrete/literal” description, belies, or maybe consciously covers up, the polyvalent nature of information; it is not possible to access the facts of existence as such, because such access always comes from a certain position, with its own blindspots and exaggerations. but I can’t just rewrite Gravity’s Rainbow.

additionally, I fear that, increasingly, information will appear free while actually being tightly controlled by the corporations whose power has been built on the accumulation of data. why should I trust Google to provide me answers to queries free of ulterior motive? why should I confide in Google which porn stars I find attractive? it’s not a problem that can be totally obviated by like, switching to Duck Duck Go or whatever either.

but, so, like, does the method of mimicking information overload through dense, research-heavy literary prose only participate in the chaoticizing of the world? no, because what makes such an endeavor art is the effort by the artist to shape the information into an aesthetic form. all art making, even in its most radical forms, is a reduction of chaos, an assertion of order in place of noise. which complicates the project of using art to assail sclerotic cultural norms complicit in the destruction of the world.

but to perform information overload requires overloading on information. and after fielding phone calls from my disturbed mother all weekend, I’m not sure how useful it is to flirt with paranoid psychosis, despite my Romantic tendencies. yet I will continue imagining, “as a joke”/”for the novel”/”metaphorically,” that I’m practicing espionage in a world where literally everyone is a double agent, where happenstance shines forth with meaning, where everything is about numbers and money and things written on paper.

The crudest, but also the most effective among these methods of influence is the chemical one—intoxication. I do not think that anyone completely understands its mechanism, but it is a fact that there are foreign substances which, when present in the blood or tissues, directly cause us pleasurable sensations; and they also so alter the conditions governing our sensibility that we become incapable of receiving unpleasurable impulses….The service rendered by intoxicating media in the struggle for happiness and in keeping misery at a distance is so highly prized as a benefit that individuals and peoples alike have given them an established place in the economics of their libido. We owe to such media not merely the immediate yield of pleasure, but also a greatly desired degree of independence from the external world. For one knows that, with the help of this ‘drowner of cares’ one can at any time withdraw from the pressure of reality and find refuge in a world of one’s own with better conditions of sensibility. As is well known, it is precisely this property of intoxicants which also determines their danger and their injuriousness. They are responsible, in certain circumstances, for the useless waste of a large quota of energy which might have been employed for the improvement of the human lot.

Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud

I’m tempted to “get back into” drugs. not in like, a problematic way—the drug I have a “problem” with I puff all the time, and I don’t like drugs with a high risk of habituation like opioids or benzos. I want to incorporate psychedelics into the program of self-derangement my █████ is a pretense for, and okay maybe “not into drugs with a high risk of habituation” isn’t totally honest, since I always wish I could handle a small amphetamine habit. of course, if I really wanted speed I could just convince a doctor I have ADD, because I probably do but I’m wary of psychiatric (over)prescription so I’ve never consulted a psychiatrist.

unfortunately I am too responsible. or maybe just too worried about appearing less than put together. this is a central struggle for me, because I am drawn to chaos and excitement but know myself well enough to realize I really crave stability and security. but problems arise when stability and security start to feel like a cage I’ve built for myself, and I begin seeking, sometimes subconsciously, ways to rattle the bars in the hope that they become unhinged.

naturally the cage is not entirely of my own making. I certainly tend to “play it safe” and would benefit from being riskier in general, but Reality stands as the border outlining experience even beyond those boundaries of habit, custom, tradition, civility, etc.

in my Romantic mode I think it the poet’s duty to determine the contours of reality by raging against its limits (I’ve been reading Rimbaud). which is to say I don’t want to “improve my mood” by “microdosing” to make me a better (ie more docile) functionary in the machine draining Eros from the surface of the earth. but I also have no illusions about drugs leading to anything like enlightenment; Deadheads who claim to have achieved satori while on acid earn nothing but eye rolls from me.

so what is it I really want?

the ability to “be right” (i.e. do immediate fact checking facilitated by the tentacular and increasingly sclerotic network owned and operated by, among others, a corporation that probably should have been distrusted the first time anyone previously uninitiated saw the words “DON’T BE EVIL” tacked onto its IPO, waiting to be read in disbelief by future historians accustomed to much richer forms of irony) interferes with the writer’s wont to spread harmful, half cited, misconstrued, but otherwise aesthetically (and therefore rhetorically) persuasive disinformation