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.
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