or a Call-for-Action Manifesto[1]
That {men} points, disregarding all kinds of prohibitions,
the avenging weapon of the idea against the bestiality
of all the beings and all the things, and that one day,
defeated - but defeated only if the world is really a world-
takes the bullets from his sad rifles like a harmless fire.
Second Manifesto, André Breton
[Can’t avoid mentioning that I ended this piece with the obsessive flashing effect of the phrase “HUMAN RIGHTS” tattooed deep into my mindset; therefore, to the UN & Associates]
Hey Been trying to meet you Hey Must be a devil between us “Hey” by Pixies
I often find myself leafing through literary characters whose fictional destiny resonate with certain episodes of my life. The Unnamable (1953) by Samuel Beckett, for instance, constructs such a redundant Cartesian character, in which the obsessive and iterative monologue of the only narrative voice slowly builds a narcissistic tone that at the end of the novel cages the character in a world that has the exact shape of the head of the owner of that voice. Back in 1953, during a post-war period of multiple forms of reconstruction throughout Europe, The Unnamable appeared as a synthetic metaphor of the anxieties of a generation whose imagination was fueled with the fears brought by totalitarian regimes and economic instability. By the time I was finishing my PhD degree at UNC-Chapel Hill, the long-lasting effects of the financial crisis of 2008 whose epicenter was the United States put ahead of myself the possible fate of belonging to the top 2 per cent in terms of academic level but nonetheless having no job whatsoever. During the final stage of the PhD, while submitting job and postdoctoral applications, it was common that night arrived in front of my eyes with the computer flashing its continuous lights and the singing of cicadas making my senses feel slowly numb; it was perhaps due to the cicadas that my inner conversations followed paths that resembled certain passages of The Unnamable. Questioning even the way I was breathing seemed not only a natural analytical reflex but also a worthwhile endeavor to pursue in order to better understand – in the fashion of Heidegger’s existentialist phenomenology – the physiological meaning of being alive.
In a similar way, Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Á rebours or Against Nature (1884), even despite the chronological distance that set Huysman’s vital time afar from mine, served as an aesthetic model for certain tropes of my own character, such as nurturing a sort of childish devotion for certain artifacts that due to the practice of conviction seemed charged with magical energies that often brought moments of amusement during my boring tenure as both graduate student and faculty member. If back in the 1990’s the Decadent movement had been captured by proto-hipsters and Generation X’s to be translated as a set of cultural practices tuned by a somewhat unmotivated ennui, Á rebours’ decadent practices departed away from a socialized cultural realm to be adapted as a set of behaviors and misanthropic attitudes that created a reclusive and isolated kingdom where the same person was both king and servant, thus suggesting that the self was an ontological edifice that contained multiple layers – or even selves – that up until the wake of the 21st century we begin to understand as the most humane way of being. Or, as it happens to many readers of Proust, each time that I’m about to take a bite of a cornetto or croissant I reminisce that precise moment in which with a cornetto all’albicocca in hand I can see myself walking among complete strangers through Piazza Duomo in Siracusa, in southeast Sicily.
Furthermore, as my writing practices keep progressing as one of the artistic maneuvers to protect my self/selves from the “existentialist pollution” that constantly attempts to erode our integrity – even if the idealism of owning any degree of integrity appears as a narcissistic utopia, understanding integrity as the radical form of existing both ethically and artistically only within our very self without external interferences-, the simple act of beginning a new literary work makes me reflect about the aesthetic considerations that Miguel de Unamuno brought forward in his Cómo se hace una novela (How a Novel is Made, 1924-1927), a work that to put it in simple words suggests – following the Aristotelian axiom that states that the only way to becoming something is through practice – that the only way to write a novel is achieved by writing it. Back in the summer of 2015, when as a K. Leroy Irvis Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh I was assigned to teach Creative Writing, even though I had already published various works and had received even international prizes, I constantly struggled to transmit to my students a clear “formula” to write either a flash fiction or a short story. After completing the reading list, which included short stories by the kinds of Toni Morrison and Julio Cortázar and two chapters from Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988) by Italo Calvino, one of my conclusions as the instructor was the confirmation of what Unamuno began to do since the title of How a Novel is Made.
Therefore, how could one unpack the many selves that inhabit the subjective fiction of only being one single indivisible self? For those of us who have accepted literary fiction as one of the paths to search for existential meaning and aesthetic references, it wouldn’t be uncommon to engage in imaginative practices that aim at unfolding our personality as a complex, multiform, and polyphonic process of self creation that in the best case scenario would make us multiply our “human capital” in the form of expanding our subjective landscape. Once immersed in the meta-neoliberal logic that understands the self as a potential producer of human capital as each individual increases her/his production of subjectivities, the possibilities of self-transformation could seem virtually unlimited.
Under this meta-neoliberal light the concepts of Movement, Resonance, and Self-Mastery acquire a new dimension as we begin to add subjectivities to the repertoire of our-selves. I’m thinking about these concepts along Calvino’s Six Memos and as the theoretical framework of an in-progress theory of Self Creation under the “new” restrictions brought upon all animal species by Covid-19, which after more than a year of being launched worldwide I understand as a biopolitical and cultural construction whose ultimate purpose is to guarantee the constant coronation of the postmodern status quo through a subtle biological repression that on the surface seems to pitch against one another entire communities from the same social class, thus softening the historical tension between the so-called lower and upper classes. This process of social and biological atomization, whose underlying conditions make us overly and superficially aware of our genetic and social alliances, has triggered a global war of mindsets that on the surface seems a dialectical consequence of the world system global scheme that placed power in regards of both geographical location and financial strength.
Even though the concept of Movement already contains the essence of its meaning, I’m thinking about it within the broader concept of Cosmopolitanism in the sense that Kwame Anthony Appiah framed it in his homonymous book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), where he meditates about the ethical implications of engaging in a globalized identity-building process that goes beyond global tourism, among other neoliberal quotidian practices of consumption. While not every cosmopolitan individual in Appiah’s fashion may necessarily require to become a frequent flyer or a multilingual prodigy, it does require to become conscious about the fact that our 21st-century reality – thinking about it even at the community-based level – has become a bordered space of multifaceted interactions with what we usually label as otherness. Appiah doesn’t prescribe, however, any formula to become an exemplar cosmopolitan individual, but he does constantly point at the fact that cosmopolitanism and ethics goes hand in hand as global economy keeps pushing forward a neoliberal agenda that is constantly sold to the general public as the friendly face of globalization. Therefore, once we encounter ourselves immersed in an immediate reality where we recognize that we might be the ground-zero level of otherness, navigating through it with not only an informed but also a curious ethical compass becomes perhaps our best ally.
Seminario sulla gioventú (1984) by Aldo Busi has been the literary work where I first traced this individual cosmopolitan attitude within a post-modern setting. As it is the case of most coming-to-age novels, Busi’s most known work narrates the odyssey of a young character that through endeavoring constant locational movement throughout Italy he not only discovers the meaning of youth but also he comes into terms with his own subjective “local ghosts” that had placed in front of himself the possible fate of constant failure. In a form, once the main character of Seminario sulla gioventú ventures beyond the confines of his own nuclear geographical location he is finally able to be himself through the practice of various personalities that aids him to traverse the deeply bordered Italian social and cultural landscapes.
As for the concept of Resonance, since its conceptual nature is either sonorous or sonic, I employ it as a cultural weapon that allows an individual to acquire a new sonorous/sonic meaning within her/his communities of interaction. Life: A User’s Manual (1978) by Georges Perec is an excellent literary example of the various forms in which the life of an individual resonates throughout time and space by interacting on daily basis with the lives and afterlives of the others that exist next to us. Perec’s novel narrates in detail the life of all the neighbors of a Parisian building as if each of the characters was the sine qua non element of an existential puzzle of historical transcendence. It would be an exhaustive endeavor to focus on each of the characters that parade in Perec’s novel, but I would like to emphasize that the way the novel is structured suggests – often only by naming the existential contiguity of a neighbor – that the absence of a character would weaken the sonorous/sonic reach of the existence of the character that named that other that in turn happens to be a neighbor or a “sonic mirror” of ourselves. Each of us as members of a social edifice, regardless of the nature of its foundations or teleological purpose, constantly resonate throughout the desires, voices, and even the socialized actions of the people around us. Life: A User’s Manual, through a puzzle-like structure that intertwines the lives of people from very different backgrounds, is already pointing towards a cosmopolitan global future that unavoidably will witness the forced integration of mindsets, cultural practices, collective anxieties, and even the genomic struggles/configurations that in the wake of the 21st century have been exacerbated by economic inequality and the spread of global diseases, thus forcing our very humanity to resonate beyond borders and through possible parallel actions taking place elsewhere beyond our existential orbit as quantum physics – and its byproducts – begin to promise amid the current global crisis. Therefore, if we are meant to inhabit a vital space where we are constantly forced to engage in exchanges of different nature that will bear constant biological consequences to ourselves, life itself – drawing schemes probably developed by various forms of Artificial Intelligence – will be constantly producing rules of interaction, or “a user’s manual”, regardless of our intentions and purposes, posing ahead of us vectors of transgression that in the best case scenario will allow us to create artificial alliances that in turn will strengthen our subjective landscape, thus allowing our-selves to project throughout space and time indefinitely.
Such scenario will require not only the input of constant energy into each of the endeavors that our-selves overtake on constant basis but also a level of self-mastery, which as our inner landscapes keep increasing amid an atomized reality may seem a never ending activity. This kind of self-mastery is performed by the main character of Palomar (1983) by Italo Calvino, a novel that I read more than a decade ago in front of the turquoise waters of the Caribbean ocean while taking a year off from my university studies. Palomar is an Italian aging man that finds himself trapped in an upper-middle class lifestyle that has allowed him to nurture his intellect in a phenomenological fashion, but that due to the loneliness that he has endeavored suddenly lacks the motivation to keep enduring a future life. Palomar’s reaction to this somewhat fruitless scenario is indeed assuming a detailed-oriented attitude towards the situations that life brings upon himself; for instance, the beginning of the novel beautifully narrates, while Palomar is observing the sea, the birth of a wave and its development among the tide and other waves. This sensorial tuning that focuses on the sense of sight allows Palomar to initiate a personal voyage that takes him to different and heterogeneous spaces that ultimately makes him wonder about how oneself can provide happiness to our life while being submerged in an environment that may exhaust our sensorial energy as it is the case of Palomar’s personal voyage, which often resonates with some of the experiences that Jean des Esseintes – the main character of Huysmans’ Á rebours – accrues among his personal arsenal of sensorial experiences, such as tasting to the very last consequences the feelings that different kinds of combs produce on the scalp, as it happens in Á rebours, or capturing the smells, textures, flavors, and cenesthetic reactions that the different edible items of a Parisian delicatessen grocery store arouse in Palomar’s senses. This detailed-oriented attitude that could potentially lead to sensorial self-mastery, while it’s quite rewarding at the personal level, may appear as an attitude that only those with the means, the time, and the proper intellectual training could aspire to attain. Therefore the challenge emerges from the very functioning mechanisms of an economic system that not only progressively privatizes as many social spaces as possible from public life, including health-related services, education in all its forms, and activities framed as those which may potentially increase our human capital in the form of the acquisition of skills, the expansion of our networking capabilities, and other activities directed towards our-selves such as exercising and other recreational activities; the challenge, from this neoliberal perspective, poses in front of us what at first glace seems a total lack of desire to re-democratize those spaces of self and subjective development in spite of the integrity of our-selves.
Amid such environment, where the self has already been captured by economic neoliberalism and postmodern modes of personal production, I often wonder in close communication with my own selves that – as Michel Foucault claims in Society Must Be Defended (1976) – if society is understood as a fiction that allows us to navigate the outer world under the pretense of being protected by a “natural” social contract, what ourselves wonder is if that once global society has acquired the means to keep increasing its surviving modes of both production and exchange – as we also become more integrated into existential networks programed by privately-owned Artificial Intelligence platforms – society will gradually fade to open up a new human civilization that will unequivocally depart from the Japanese conceptual framework of Society 5.0.[1] From this perspective of possible atomic reversible transformations, the meaning of individuality may become an ontological relic of self disintegration; therefore, as an early Millennial that encountered 21st-century aesthetic innovations not only bitter – similarly as the way Arthur Rimbaud found beauty in Le bateau ivre in 1871 – but also, often against our anachronous utopian wishes, as an impasse that forced us – and keep doing so – to grow and expand ourselves within a global realm that is only beginning to feel the consequences of the unfriendly post-industrial modernity while also starting to understand the impact of both neoliberalism and post-modernity, I can only encourage ourselves – thinking about the initial quote of this essay as a call-for-action – to embrace our often unnerving battles as the maneuvers required to begin to feel the future that is awaiting for all of us who keep believing in the meaning of life on this planet.
If L.I.F.E. is transformed into a battle ground
We must be ready to fight
(“but only if the world is really a world”)
If We are reduced to elemental a\n\d\r\o\i\d\s
or deformed gestures on a touchscreen
We must be ready to redefine
Life · itself
-from ourselves,
and to the invisible committee
[and calling-to-action to our friends].
[1] DISCLAIMER: This is the first part of a two-part text. Note of the Author/s.
[2] For more details about this concept, consult the Japanese website: Science and Technology Policy. Council for Science, Technology and Innovation > Society 5.0
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