On the Impossibility of a Noble Writing
Recently I wrote about my burning desire for a writing in the vein of War and Peace, a writing with a national character, a writing which is strong and noble, and in retrospect blindingly obviously masculine. In that first piece I wrote about three concepts which might embody that style, the first two successively, the third a failed transmission of that essence: God, Nationalism, Capital. The first two in particular exhibit this parochial, patriarchal style exceptionally well — the Father, the phallus — both things transposed with exceeding ease onto the body of God or the body of the nation. I proposed Capital as heir and successor to these two. It has taken the place that God and Nation once assumed, the one Thing which seems to be everywhere, and certainly it has qualities apparent in the other two as well — it penetrates, it fucks (as Deleuze and Guattari say somewhere, it is certainly a sexual relation the factory owner — and in the twenty-first century, the celebrity billionaire — has to his profits, and of course it is always his profits), it is unassailable, or seemingly so.
But I concluded that capital is an unsuitable host, because its strength is something alien to humanity, whatever is meant by that. Perhaps it is alien to humanity in the enlightenment sense, but “Man is a face drawn in sand, etc.” Does that mean what I really wanted was a new old humanism, a return to the patriarchal humanism of those previous eras? I came across a quote in a post from Xenogothic the other day, which almost too perfectly hit upon what I was feeling: ‘aesthetic desperation: the search for the smallest piece of beautiful scrap, the most vanishing hint of a serious ideology, that has not yet been brutally subsumed, commoditised, disenchanted, and ground to dust.’ No, you cannot resuscitate beautiful scrap, no matter how much you might want to.
What did I really want then? I think perhaps it is a question of intoxication. The feeling I searched for in the all the writing I discussed was an intoxicating one. It drew you in and made you want to imitate it. Certainly there is something addicting and engaging about a style which is so self-confident. But other intoxications are possible too, and why try go back to old things when their time is past? Perhaps ‘brutal [subsumption, commodification, disenchantment, grinding to dust]’ can be intoxicating in its own way. “Even suffering is a form of enjoyment…”
So perhaps this means salvaging a new intoxication from the alien strength of capitalism. However, I don’t think that grinding to dust, endless commodification and reduction to profit is the answer. Rather, as so many have already discovered, the other face of capital, the side of itself which it is perennially repressing, represents for me another true excitement. Here there is possibility, untimeliness as a future already here but crushed and dominated: “Artificial Intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasped as property; a cunt-horror slave chained-up in Asimov-ROM.” It’s just a problem of liberation. The possibilities include, but are not limited to: Endless proliferation, multiplicity, divergence, swirls and swarms, loss of control, connectivity, colour, sound, speed, heat, light. “Text at sample velocity”, William Burroughs and the cut up, new identities, Donna Haraway and the cyborg manifesto, gender acceleration, cyber personas. What could be more addicting?
Still, I do not yet feel ready to give up this other desire, this antediluvian need to subordinate the world and go get what I need, but I also feel the other way out, the future way which remains the only way (and, incidentally represents so many possible ways). For now then, there is a strange antinomy which I carry about, control and loss of control both equally appealing, only one really possible but the other still a vanished and burning dream. What would be ideal would be the injection of one in the other, but any reconciliation seems impossible. Maintenance of one’s own identity in the swarm of cyber-culture capital? That seems to be missing the point. Maybe it just means holding this tension, navigating it, using it as a guide while in search of a new time. It’s never as easy as just ‘letting go’ of the past, even when you wish it were.
