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 In sum, digital space becomes the hyper-real, a false-reality superseded by an impetus that reinforces and doubles social regulation and conformity.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.

Please watch:

We look at these kids with curiosity and reverence for their ability and aspirations considering our own political milieu. Refuse/Resist, the song by the hard-riffing and guttural band, Sepultura, essentially was a praxis on Brazilian discouragements in the fading shadow of a notable Italian family. Closer in touch with ancestral roots (proof is in the next album Roots Bloody Roots), Sepultura fused Amazonian tribal techniques, some African, with American thrash metal with shades of Norwegian black metal. These kids could be Brazilian, and at times in the sub-par recording, we can hear Portuguese splicing. This song is often dubbed over the Tiananmen Square standoff in China, and there is, without a doubt, considering modern Brazil, these children fronting the same revolutionary spirit burning. The Stygian, though, (a probable pessimistic aside), likes to point out the irony of the video. The guitarist/singer, fronts a Pokemon shirt while thrashing to a song that wishes to climb upon the machinery and stand up, to refuse and resist, to say, “I am human and will not blindly adhere to your version of reality.” And as we know, children may want a visual oriented clothing, labels, etc;, but it is the parent who buys it, the parent who likely helped teach these children thrash metal, and the parent who is obviously filming this and has uploaded it to YouTube…

So again we have a faux deliberation, faux sub-culture elitism, a faux punk subversion, a faux anarchistic protocol towards hated moral-literary values. In terms of lubricating the revolution, this video re-assures us of tyranny and its complex intersection of intergazes, watching us all and calling itself the popular arts. We look towards change on our following generations. What we find to be a privileged space for fulfilled projects and a sequence of expressive clarity, of visionary truth without the didactic throes of culture, we only find the common, all too automated, poetic pressure of uniformed and trendy thinking. It is only a small step to imagine a “Go Green” slogan at the end of this video. The essential device of music is a separate metaphorical language full of linguistic elements and negative knowledge. The cover song here refuses and resists a real discursive approach on truth. It poses no explanation and is vacuous in its cause. It disassembles it’s original trajectory, and in turn, glorifies the thing, the machine, it ultimately wishes to destroy. It’s parasitic amateurism. Impersonal, unsound, nonpositional, and is devoid of what we determine as the historcality of consciousness.

Swamp – Wetlands

Medicine – Medication

Theatre – Performing Arts Center

Riot – Civil Disorder

The Dump – The Landfill

Constipation – Occasional Irregularity

Those are only a few of our euphemisms that the late great George Carlin brought to our rarely buoyant attention. George didn’t have heart attack, he had heart complications that resulted in his passing. One headline wrote it that way, so for George, his proof is in the proverbial pudding.

Our restructuring of images is inescapable, which makes George right—we are all diseased. Our linguistic sickness is not analogical despite our growing psychoanalytic and historical curiosity. The proper end of reification encompasses ancient rabbis and church fathers as well as electro-ignitions on the sweeping god-of-media’s frontier. Carlin said, “By and large, language is a tool for concealing truth.” The concealment thickens the more we try to thin. When we approach a text as a locus of fruitful inquiry, we like to primarily dethrone critics, scrutinize the images of women, respond to sexual stereotypes, scoff at fictional characters, and shit, the best we can, all over acts of literary mimesis, mainly, to make someone else smell it, and when that doesn’t work, rub the cultured guano right into the eyes. And this is what we often do, us bibliophiles, us language lovers. My colleagues and I have resisted our concerns with contemporary pedagogy and positioned ourselves within endangered rhetorics of exaggeration, omissions, oblique insertions and unreal orthodoxy. Somewhere in there, we identify with Carlin’s repulsion and antagonism toward the euphemism. The euphemism is not only dead language, but it is the basis for all dehumanized, antiphilosopy of art hostile toward objectivity, realism, truth (both the big T, and little t), politics and the remnants of an industrial society. The euphemism serves as a key moderator between conflations and linguistic corruption, folding the two in on themselves to yield a wolf-in-wolf’s-clothing technique, teeming with propaganda, and covertly ushered into our daily dialects. The euphemism is euthanasia of structural perfection, and lacks any human inclination toward the concrete other. When George said, “Tits always look better in a pink sweater,” he showed us that if we work hard, if we pay close attention to our imaginary activities and comprehensive judgment, we can move beyond our anemic referential and say something clearly. Thank you, George. Talk to you later.

In a Universe where nothing travels at light speed, the world suffers from infinite boredom. I have uncovered this Universal Truth while doing field research in Montana, the confirmed epicenter of boredom in our world. What does that make it Universally? I'd hate to consider it.

I'd like to thank Gnothin, my colleague and friend, for reviving me from an existence non sequitor. His recent e-mail and forward progress with the blog gave me the blast I needed. I was so immersed in work that I failed to see myself turning into the very substance from which language exists--the quantum foam of words if you will. From my pit of despair, I recognized the death of communication in a plastic bottle. It was none other than the saddest moment of my life, realizing that our hypermediated language has become so overworked that letters themselves have grown weary of operation. One day, staring at a Coca-Cola bottle nestled in prairie moss, I recognized the phrase CA CASH REFUND for the truth therein. The modern day presents such turmoil that words need not be stuttered by operators. Words are stuttering for themselves--evidence of linguistic slippage. I am a finger snap away from abandoning quasi-mitochondriasm as a viable means of literary study. All my research has come crashing down. Do I pick up the pieces?

Don't answer that. I don't know. I can't know. It would be too painful, and my existence of late has been dense with pain. It is tough returning to civilization with my good friend Gibson missing from academic action. Where has he gone? Where have all the good words gone? I am truly sorry. I will pull myself together soon enough... sooner rather than later if the words will let me.

During the Stygian hiatus the upsurge in criticisms of the project reached a critical mass, a massification really, many of outright dismissal. The best was a pseudo-glorification, one that celebrated the Stygian for its unintentional exposure of the purpose of academic writing: inflate fragile ideas, obscure the dialectic or any attempt at reason, and ultimately inhibit any perceptible clarity. So it goes…

But before I work to refortify the trajectory of the Stygian, I feel an update on the status of some of the members will provide apologies for the long hiatus for such a provisional beginning. My colleague Gibson was inducted into the coterie of European philosophical phenomenologists, a camp branched from Husserl in many ways. While Gibson’s work in existentialism and the consequent expansion of capitalism remained latent, his surveys of constituted knowledge gain against direct intuition, and the mutually implicated throes within modern language (his forthcoming book) was deeply applauded by the camp. Because of this Gibson has relocated to Malaysia to work closely with some editors and dictates. The workshop is somewhat experimental, and no electronics are allowed, including electricity itself. In short, we have lost contact until further notice.

Stallius, profound in his exploration on the impact of exterior substances (i.e. drugs) on language throughout history, notified me of his want to work independent (in Montana) to dabble with a series of visual arts committed to themes of boredom, death, despair, hate, disillusion, nonbeing and void. I expect an intersection at some point in the future, which I’ve found to be a possible, intriguing chimerical with my present work of post-theory and structuralism after language, its exemplary means, its vehicles, and how to predict our future linguistic fissures.

To rewind, the criticisms sequester some truths into academia and writing, but only as all things sequester some truths. We can remember how deconstruction was described as “new new criticism,” and we can remember the same antagonism and the same late 60s professors calling them philistines on sidewalks. To remain close to the heart of the Stygian project, I will definitely restrain from the abrasive rebuttals from those reminiscent frontier critics, the haters of antimimeticism and anti-intentionalism. But there is no denial that the Stygian, at times, impedes clarity and cohesiveness. “Inflating fragile ideas”…that is ridiculous. Most of our work is an extension of applied linguistic theory on the disjunctive techniques of modern poetry and fiction, or modern language, to broaden. Of course our language may separate from common human experience, from those of undecidability not invested in critical overproduction. Of course we run against the grain to a belief that language is devoid of obscure referentially, of unexplored renunciations, of the foul contagions of prefixes and suffixes. But we still believe language is our hope, our endeavoring, mundane acts which are most memorable, that we have independent readers and listeners, that our system renders infinite possible combinations—and somewhere—within the striated symbologies—everyone can speak, and read, and write, ad infinitum.