Ajouté au panier“All efforts to restore art by giving it a social function – of which art is itself uncertain and by which it expresses its own uncertainty – are doomed.” — Adorno
1
What better time than now, just as something like impunity settles into the as-of-yet non-posture of public cell-phone scrolling to find it, as with any lumpen teenager, a lawn to mow. For we who cherish the first page – if not just the first few lines! (the icing, the snake skin!) – lets us sing and with certain style lovingly rub our little magic wand things that now everyone, like food allergies and unfree time has, and extol the virtues of the pessimistic and peremptory (à la Adorno!), in whose spirit of condemnation we might with unabashed superficiality scan our artistic world of techno-bodies, and accord their digital entrainment the very “social function” by which we might doom the offending apparatus that we daily, nay minutely! wield and restore the gorgeous corpse that wields it, if not by decree, then by the triangulations hemimetric praxis, by which an erotics of the banal can pass the public hermeticism of small-screen searching through the transformative employment of the spasmodic anus of the contemporary (i.e. “social function”) and into the kitty litter of yesterday’s fashions. And thus it goes gleefully into the vocabulary of the passé, from which it might be freed to reform and practice yet smaller and smaller triangles of the retrograde.
2
In the unmitigated purview of others, contemporary people spend a lot of time looking at their phones, held with one hand about a foot and half from the face (though it is of course amusing to see the myopic, elderly and infantile inspect the screen from up close like old-style monocled jewelers), heads inclined between 30 and 60 degrees, just enough to droop the bottom lip and see that the masseuse gets paid for the head’s swooning servility at the expense of the neck, as echoed in the wrist’s tilt of the apparati, forming a misshapen oval that a Rodin might collapse the pensive cranium into the fist, outstretched and appareled with a rectilinear device, here expanded into a slim black book, elsewhere expended back into a shiny deck of cards. Bent and indexes outstretched they sift through their devices while walking, waiting, talking, eating, shitting, driving, and, many decidedly unsexy reports like to remind us, before, after and often when fucking. The camera function, frantic and strangely existential in its reproductions of lunch or our funny faces, is by and large giving way to brow furrowing and yet rhythmically idle perusing with an indecorous but lithe index. Having applauded our simian cousins for their agility in implementizing sticks, we genealogically preempt by regressing to the finger-as-stick, breathing rhythmically, in the entrained silence of others, less like the monkeys we are than pointillist monks, dotting our tiny canvi.
3
Having already cast into sepia the maligned figure of the loud talker, who in cleaving conversations in half enraged all in earshot by allowing them to assume themselves as possible unscripted and yet cued interlocutors, the solitary figure of the digital searcher appears with the ubiquity of defeated pylons on distracted corners, seeded among the laptopia of monastic cafes, or, and perhaps confusing for extraterrestrial sociologists, in drooling groups of like-inclined disenthusiasts. It is not only that in this dun pastoral that users create a seam- less and banal continuity between the public and private – so much so that I am surprised to see no-one lazily masturbating at their phones on park benches – but more so that the quietude of the posture’s reflective immersion is as infra-digital as the divining gesture is superficial. While a moralist might decry the shallow immersion of small-screen search, a sensationalist (that is, a semanticist) might decry the apparent inversion of social production toward the lonely onanism of the un-reproductive digital disentanglement (a sort of geometric mauvaise foi with fingers too straight and minds too twisted?), whereas your stooped writer, orthopedic in culture, horny in redundancy, thinks swansongly about posture and the steady banalization of optical and by extension, physical being, in the teleological sense that praxis makes perfect, and posture makes praxis, and fickle perfection obviates one posture in praxis for the next. For the way we do seems to evolve only by declaring the do a do not. In other words, we can’t shit out the mundane coagulate load of the contemporary unless we give it the intense fibre of posture.
4
Several thousand years of generative rendering leads us to the tertiary point at which we do not generate images (the do a do not!), and rather, in a series of minor and un-alert postures, we source them digitally (in at least two senses of the word). For steadfast Marxists and drunken evolutionary biologists alike, that the means of production are severed from the body and returned in a roundabout way to the a posteriori-like bond between the hand and eye that finds its apogee on a four inch screen, itches up the difficulty I have in believing, as an increasingly unfettered, and again, very tertiary consumer, that, for example, the flesh of farmed fish is not that much stupider but for its fattened redundancy in a super-abundant world of corn pellets and lazy backstroking (in a pond without what my baby brother always called Sarks, even as we traversed the smallest of creeks). Which is to ask: and of our idiot flesh? [ha!] Alas as the digitally scrolling fingerling, in all of its ostensible labor, no longer scans the shadows of our clement reef for Sarks, let alone fish of a fellow fin, and can exist unfettered and socially undeterred in the slightly bowing transfixion between eye and grazing finger, will this digital nimbleness take on a slightly more invigorating social function as a fair intimation of a posture that is posed, socially generative, figurative and yet physical, but most importantly, within the tropological handbag of evolving, and thus self-obsolescing praxis? If that is so, must this digital posture be clothed or stripped, ringed, toned, tamed and aestheticized into the image of culture?
5
A child of the 90s, I remember the social function of fingers. Back when the pubescent noblesse oblige of my mostly white mountain town wanted to bang more than ski, they flocked to join hastily named Asian gangs (who in our Beckettian blacklessness we rounded up to Californian Bloods and Crips), a friend – eminently a believer! – to whom we’d passed off to great effect laxatives as hallucinogens happily joined a group of preliminarily mustached ruffians whose initiation, at least in part etymological, required the ceremonial fingerbanging of the new recruits’ buttocks, a sort of erastes and eremenos for a burgeoning digital era, wherein the fingers became the proboscis, the ear, the mouth, and, in close-ups, the reality conferring and pleasure generating eye-genital. In much the same way the portmanteau-to-be-mashed took on ontological grandeur in a decade where we truly feared genital upon genital sex (as much as we now fear mouth to mouth speaking), we, taking leave of the alert body in favor of a shiftier, more downcast and digital one, we came to admire the fingerwork of videogame players, and then finger-flexing DJs, spray-painters (wherein the artist became an inky spiderfingers, ejaculating paint from his index), and, as the decade dwindled, the hunched figure of the boy-hacker, fingerbanging his way into the governments we already knew not to oppose by thumb, but by pointing and releasing a finger, to say nothing of climaxing nails which raked blood across male backs as mirrored on ceilings, or, and I think this most important, Michael Jackson’s galactic index, shot upwards and released to blackest space by the pull of his crotch.
6
That these fingers – pointing, pressing, scratching and pulling – have largely ceded their artistic-erotic dynamism and not insubstantial iconography to the more contemporary, and as of yet postureless (in so far as posture is when praxis becomes icon) touch, tap and swipe, without forsaking (save for the spaceward glance of an interstellar Michael) the downward tilt of the studious head, allows for a simultaneously less frenetic and yet more obsessive form of fingering, at once more engaged (for, quite literally, a finger need not be lifted) and yet also, by the whispering grace of their grazing more superficial, ephemeral, bored and also banal, not to mention, in all excess of digital vanity, rather out of shape. The contemporary finger, unlike its sinewy predecessors, bears no bicep in its slight bend, and wears its obsolescent arms like a netted and desultory farmed fish, suddenly tasked with catching and gutting itself. For unlike every action-posture – from the writer to the murderer – that has heretofore wielded its principal implement, the genetically-inverted iconography of the idle scroller’s largely limp arms allows neither for the engagement of
a living body, nor a facial expression in concert with the verbiage of the arms in action. Along with the inconographic avatars of every ideology – picture the communist flag sans sickle, but with a hammer-finger rapping on a tiny screen – we need the tropological-iconographic image of the arms to tell us if the body is necessary and if the face is justified. Think perhaps of Sid Vicious with his low slung bass, his simian and intravenous arms pale and explicitly pockmarked, as if the fingers are the body’s pens, then the arms in their bookish halves are the unfurled and character stained scroll which contain the cryptic code by which we defeatedly endorse the mystery of being. Place an iphone in those veiny hands and not only do we obviate the arms, but we efface the tension in his visage. We kill punk before punk has time – and, importantly – the muscular tension to kill Nancy Spungen and himself.
7
But I digress toward the image of tepid absorption that pictures the user, ostensibly urban invariably but whatever, head bent at a bookreading angle, but in being bookless, still, as with laptopists and their seriously studious ilk, in some postured imitation of concerted search and grimacings of a lonesome luminary’s minor discovery. How do these stars of he self sit, stand or walk along staring, mirror turned in like selfieing Bath-shebas standing in the shallow end of a bumper-car-kid-die-pool for clones? What do they wear to this occasion of themselves, and, a question for future romantic comedies as well as for proponents of real life sex: how do two (or more) people entranced by two little screen physically flirt hand and eyelessly, let alone meet and later fuck by the touchboard glow of their infra-digital devices? Whither sex in the city, or need we merely touch hot phones to expedite the inconvenient growth of the tumid body from its primordial and blemishless screen?
8
Everyone wants to live near water, and in a city of screens we can uber-Atlantis right on it. Topographically speaking from the dial-up 90s into the flotsam of now, the seer and Saint Vilem Flusser likened interactive city life to the “wave trough in an image flood”; an “intersubjective field of relations” “spun” into “oscillating” troughs. I can only imagine, unlike the semi-constant standing waves that sometimes occur in rapids, that Flusser’s city-trough would continue to “knot” and intensify, to thicken, quicken and deepen. Only Flusser couldn’t predict how dull life in the net would be, and how much the Hubris enthusiasts (sadistic moralists?) among us might imagine the wave collapsing into a scuzz of floating plastic and broken internet dreams, drowning the drones and extinguishing the bloodied lampposts that needlessly lit the “connected” city, which however mean it sounds, was only, without looking up (up!), only a city in name.
9
And yet it is only by insisting that device users physically arrange themselves into yet more complicated postures of urbanity that we might dignify their unseen setting. We must, in order to banalize banality to death, insist for a time that the banal conscripts of the contemporary practice the insanely banal postures of the iphonic. For even the rosier-glassed proponents of the cyber city as we vaunt it would probably admit the rather sudden hyper ubiquity of screeny digitalia, as it has evolved from decades of steady fingering, bangs very little, and turns our ocular towns, turreted with screens, into the infinite interface for a monastic and onanistic individuals, grazing with a finger that obviates the hands, the arms, the body and the face as they sink beneath the surface of the frantic short waves in the trough of tall glass towers – the electric basin of the contemporary – through whose leagues we sink, feeling we see further, until, as with Eliot’s Prufrock, we are detritus languishing with dead sirens, who fatally think to open our unused mouths (and ask for a social function? A posture? A first page? Paragraph?).
10
All of which, from the view from the bottom, leads me to selectively unspool my three muddled points: the art of being (in public) loses its social function unless it enters, however superficially, into the vocabulary of the aesthetic, and that, secondly, in a gestural sense, contemporary postures are entrained to devices operated by a smoothing, grazing finger as opposed to a muscular organism (made of interrelated parts), and that, finally, this rampant refraction, which in all of its obliqueness forsakes both the “social function” (again, even in the most superficial of senses) and the body from which the distended fingers are severed, and additionally severs from the hand-finger-device from the correlate image of the city.Which, though it might suggest it doesn’t matter where we live, may also threaten, in senses ontological and Star Trekian, not mattering if we live. Having crassly recited so many clichés, I feel little discomfort in re-appending yet another: whatever we agree to not let go, however dispiriting its apparent permanence in the standing “wave trough” of the contemporary, this putrid back up, this reject from rejection, can be postured, should be postured and will be postured, and in so being postured, eventually obviated (or graduated as passed fashion), for how else could this grizzled luddite hope to “doom” that which offends by universal acclamation and practice, if not by social purpose, posture and selfsame praxis? And thus it goes gleefully into the vocabulary of the passé from which it might be freed to reform and practice yet smaller and smaller triangles of the retrograde until it is but a cheesy little tattoo above either elbow.