Close Encounters of Unkindness I
Steven Craig Hickman, of Social Ecologies & Alien Ecologies (formerly Dark Ecologies, Noir Real) & Nigel McMillan, an old friend, locally, had an encounter of difference, under a joke FB post.
I’m not going to do a close reading of the encounter, which is not as simple as it might seem. Both participants have their respective positions & understandings of what took place. Depending on the context one chooses, different conclusions can be drawn. Rather than attempt to resolve a delimited encounter, theoretically irresolvable as an abstracted isolation, & susceptible only to the oscillations of irony, it is perhaps more philosophically productive to consider themes which arose during the encounter, & the larger contexts which they suggest; it’s a good chance to explicate the cultural forces lurking in the background.
In both encounters; there was a strong scatological theme, introduced by Nigel McMillan, with the signifiers, “shit”; & “piss”; continued by Steven Craig Hickman with “crap”; & “crapology”, all of these referenced with significant frequency. Whether such universal biological necessity is used as an alleged symbolics of democracy; or as stabilising metaphors of existential authenticity, the anchorings of anatomical waste amid the ongoing, globalised rush of intangibilities, idealisations, & dislocations, constituting the so-called Information SuperHighway; is a significant, sociological resonance.
In this, it is redolent of another semiology of individuation; the tattooing culture, & its inscribing of a personal history of events on the somatic skin-screens of Self; both marking spatiotemporal location, & thereby anchoring Self in such significant localisation, in the meanings of these personalised marks, wherein the body becomes a living monument of the ‘personalised Self’.
The same identifying technology used in tattooing culture, when recapitulated as the ‘Brand’ or ‘Branding’, connotes the various ‘enslavements’ of livestock, slavery, & corporate ownership.
If tattooing is a personalised inscribing of Self, a ‘Self-Branding’ indicating ‘Self-Ownership’; then, both the tattoo & the ‘Brand’, share in the same Hellenic culture of the glorified Name; whether the psychological ‘marks’ of self-reflection, or the imperial ‘marks’ of sociological regi-mentation, there is the same use of ‘significant surface’, as the inscribed interface of symbolic ‘rule’, & other various necessities, of the Name.
As the techno-logics of information increasingly infuse environments with the filigree of Control; the emergent technosensorium has taken centre stage. Always there; history of road systems; Highways of war; the Information SuperHighway, as entire global system, of Oneiric production, is a Dream Machine. Now, every cultural scene, every sociopolitical scenario, public & private, has been commandeered by the filigree of cybernesis. This world, an autobahn of affects; the conveyance & redistribution of engineered sentiments; driven circulation of carefully crafted emotions; in an onward rush of oneiric desire, the desperate transactions of “new worlds for old”, in shakedowns that never end.
It is precisely in such an onrush, one configured at every level by economic & political abstractions of profit governance; an Administration According to the intangibilities of an Asymptotic Idealism; that this regime’s functionaries are reduced to turning towards the rhetoric of the only unpriced tangibility left to them, that of their own biological waste.
Unwanted by the system; rejected & ejected, even & especially, by themselves; absolutely undesired; this last concrete authenticity, uniquely theirs, is the only substance definitively escaping ownership by Kapital & the global system of Oneiric production. As such it serves as the only palpable symbol of freedom & self-grounding, capable of obscuring their own internalised perceptions of desirability/undesirability; their own self-perceived statuses in the contrived hierarchies of Desire, arising from Kapital’s profit system; & of dispelling the Technosensorium’s continual emotional broadcast, the existential feeling of being “Lost in Hollywood”.
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Close Encounters of Unkindness II
I wrote the next section, “Close Encounters of Unkindness III”, as YouTube comments in September 25, 2009, in response to this: “Saintly Man? – That Mitchell & Webb Look – BBC Two”
I include the piece, as it gives an interesting ‘take’ on the British ‘sense of humour’, a ‘sense’ so strongly & strangely informed by the metaphorics of urinary transaction, in the phrase, “taking the piss”, a phrase which arose in the discussion, on & after, Steven Craig Hickman & Nigel McMillan’s ‘encounter of difference’.
For a contemporary exemplification of this culture, the television programme, “Have I Got News For You!”, is quite typical.
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Close Encounters of Unkindness III
“Funny sketch!
Of course, one could say that such humour relies (sic) on the tacit acceptance of a life-sensorium, lebenswelt even, amenable only to “capitalist exploitation” -‘let’s not be too clever, we’re English’, “the nation of shopkeepers”- and innately hostile to any human development beyond it’s powers. As such, the video “takes the piss”, and is merely propaganda for the spirituality of beer and football, which are more social religions and major contributors to the economy, too. Having said that, the guru business in India generates many millions.
Meditation has been practiced in all the major religions, they all have their respective traditions. The video, however, has two signifiers, attire and facial hirsuteness styling, that would seem to connote yogis of the Hindu tradition. Whether sitting on very high wooden platforms was a common yogic practice, I do not know. But it is plausible that two British comedians, nostalgically recalling Monty Python, and overcoming their immense erudition in global spirituality, would conflate stereotypes in order to appeal to a British public who, of course, know everything about everything, and can convert it into a one-liner, between sips, after “taking the piss” out of their mates, who “take the piss” out of them.
England does have a particular talent for marginalising abstract and speculative spiritualisations, so to speak, trying to reduce everything to “common” forms of understanding, the basest of secularisms. It is not alone in this, just the best at it, which is why it had the biggest empire. But that diabolical tactic, “divide and rule”, is at the heart of British culture (“taking the piss”), preventing the highest possibilities of culture from truly realising themselves, trapping the people in a bedrock of satanic negativity, undermining the impolite temerities of any authentic individuality. It’s a control system deep in the English psyche, paranoia of an island nation, perhaps. True indivduality is distorted, coerced into simplistic scenarios of dramatic conflict, endless and farcical replays of the same old emotional vocabularies, the same “variety show”.”
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Close Encounters of Unkindness III – Addenda 1
“aardvarkbilly says: September 25, 2009 at 1:43 am
You’re a longwinded tit aren’t you? I think the Empire had more to do with the policy of Naval Supremacy than “marginalising abstract and speculative spiritualisations”. I was going to ignore you, but this comment plumbed such depths of nonsense it reached my “bedrock of satanic negativity”.”
“derritrane says: September 25, 2009 at 1:43 am
Could “the policy of Naval Supremacy” have anything to do with protecting economic interest, or is that too much of a speculation? What was i thinking! It’s because “we do love to be beside the seaside… we do love to be beside the seeeeea”.
It is an achievement of sorts to be able to discern any sort of depth in meaninglessness. But yes, you are right, plumbing the depths of nonsense known as British culture one is then able to discern diabolic geologies. Thank you for confirming that.”