The Stygian Wholesto

Reporting from the field (somewhere in Fiji):

I have not seen the language of the water yet. In a way, the prepositions would be too slippery. Too ready to not do their jobs. It's unconscionable... the feathery feeling of what's actually going on here.

I know Gnothin agrees with me. He doesn't approve of my using the Stygian as a tissue, but he knows I speak the truth. (Itself a lie... for one cannot speak with text.) When I read his recent posts, I became filled with a sense of panic. I could not control the language where it was positioned on the page. Is this the end for me? I don't seem to recognize where my past has been lately.

And where the fuck is that ass-clown Gibson? His mind must've tuned out & dropped off... another castaway... ex-property of the Stygian Wholesto. I will not allow myself to go the same cowardly route. I'll hang on for sacred life.

D'you hear me, Gibson?!?

Gnothin, you tell that scumbag I'm not listening to his absence any more.

To not “friend” someone in a social network space in 2010, when both parties are cognizant that these digital identities occupy the same virtual space, has become a deplorable act bound with a frenzied social-electric current that is ten-fold worse than any party-snub involving real contact. In sum, digital space becomes the hyper-real, a false-reality superseded by an impetus that reinforces and doubles social regulation and conformity. Today, you can know someone and never contact them by any means. You can know them and see them on a regular basis. You can know them, see them in a social space, and pay them no attention, and that’s fine. But, on no grounds, can you know them, even on a regular, informed basis, and not be attached to them in the virtual public space. Even if you communicate with a person for eighty-percent of your real, inferential time, you must also be interconnected in the world of make-believe with them or your real association may become strained via the unreal and unrealized association. We can draw upon the NY schools to really sense this derivable, overextended, monopolistic woe which homesteads on the nature of virtual reality. Postwar massification taught us that from our education circles we cannot abandon any cooption which does not render less enthusiastic reductions of resistance. There is no widespread reduction that forms a signified truth that bends around American “intelligentsia.” To prod a little longer with old theory for a moment, we learn that our own identities at an early age are not from the Lockean empiricisms that gesture us as neither associated sensory data nor the Kantian active consciousnesses. We realize we are subject and object and are mutually implicated as an emergent & shifting consciousness devoid of categorizing. The virtual space suspends the shifting consciousness of the real, bankrupts the credit that dwells within the intersubjectivity of intimacy. It becomes relationship in the monolithic form, which then, hardens its monolithic values back onto the real. It’s the one place where a real-world friendship can be severed without any change to the inherent friendship by merely shifting reality spheres. The real friendship with an imperceptible governing body that is always subjective, like the real personalities from which they emanate, become cold, analytical, (monolithic), and ultimately tyrannical.

This time it’s Bones, a pseudo-crime drama that tentatively adheres to logic, rationality and common sense. Dr. Bones is hot on a homicide case that points towards a pair of guitar “shredders” in the loosest of terms. Perhaps the forensic anthropologist hits better on human anatomy, but the blaring and insulting misses on guitar anatomy, guitar techniques, and American guitar heritage could have been reduced by at least seventy-five percent by executing a forty-five second Google search. But belittling those shortcomings would be useless and distanced from any philosophical or hermeneutic one-to-one correspondence the Stygian endeavors. The crime is when the great Dr. Bones and staff offhandedly begins when a character remarked the value of the murder weapon, the Silverburst Les Paul Gibson, as close to $250,000 based solely on the “music board,” “hardware,” and “wood type.” To follow up this magical thinking, the guitar is then shown being played at a speed, intonation & scale arrangement that was not physically possible by what the player had suggested with his half-ass impression. This grave misunderstanding, as laughable as it sounds, remains not the butt of joke. The joke remains with the viewer next to me at the bar who found the scene completely believable and accepted it as truth, as a complete confirmation of a reality that denied the thing being watched from all its utilitarian function. The scare here is that pop culture has not dwindled into where we thought it would go, not enthroned into a useless and mummified false art. It has become the opposite. Pop culture, particularly night-time drama has become pure deflection which changes and ultimately transforms any reality in its unmanned craft with wild, aimless guns.

From here we can only gesture towards a critical teaching that resists interference from intelligent passivity before these most aggressive modern assaults on reality. These subtle forces working the nightshift across living rooms in America have formed an ironical juggernaut unlike any other. The culture escapes into the sub-created world that idolatrizes brilliance in an escapist mood—See “House,” see any “CSI,” see “Bones, see “Criminal Minds,” see “Numbers”—these viewers worship this genius and the dramatized event of it unfolding on the television while the actual practical application of any of the ideas on these shows only yields numbed idiocracy and asinine generalizations. The irony is that while they bathe in the electric light of this pseudo-expertise, the nation, the real America remains complicit in its stupidity, a stupidity in accelerated decline. To question these said “shows” means one is pretentious and snobby, a know-it-all that doesn’t know shit. In the end, it’s a perfect numbing machine. It supports a prejudice over the intellectual, it supports the nation in which vandguardism and nonconformity have become terms of condemnation from mob-mentally inclined irrationals, it supports ideas that have magically converted outside-the-box thinking into inside-the-box thinking teeming with superstition, abstract assumptions and idealistic racisms and sexisms.

So how do we pull the wires on such a self-propagating infection? As a reader-hearer, we can only sadly create revolution by subverting the didactic potentials of resistance. Exuberant and innovative forms of thinking are only borne when time & history are refused. Those are the only positive potentials for transcendence through the application of any existential philosophy. Only through true consciousness of being might the attainment of nothingness become crystallized, and with the right humanitarian catalyst, move into a suffocating consciousness where utopian truths bring forth new forms of existence. In short, the physical has moved completely into the simulacrum of heightened reality chock-full of winners that idolatrize in them but attempt to paralyze those who are appropriate themselves as real winners.


As an end note, sorry for the long hiatus, again. Hassan and ideas of dismemberment have been terrible derailments. We are back for the time being.