Definitely Maybe

[lapsedmodernist]

There is a vague rhetoric that grows, with time, like an aura around certain memes. A succesful meme sheds its ontogenesis; a meme is a meta-signifier, so the original signified has to make room, like a quiet sacrifice, valuable because it is forgotten. Of course, we all know that an underhanded transition from history to mythology is one route to zombification. There is a reason why mythology is the opposite of history, even though the latter has always tried to conscript the former. Once a statement achieves meme status, inquiring into its origins can lead to confusion of contextual frames, of the who's on first/Odysseus' stunt as Nobody in his encounter with the Cyclop variety. Who is John Galt? How to answer a question that only gets deployed as an answer? What is the acceleration of deterioration? I don't know, who is John Galt? Is Salaam Pax real? Wrong, it's not a question anymore, it's an un-answer to be inserted into a discourse about media constructions and and the nature of information. A meme is like a virus, and the virus only spreads itself. Well, strictly speaking, a meme is a metaphor to begin with. Nevertheless, it's useful to peel away the metaphorical/mythological layer of memes, and un-meme them to their point of origin. Think about "Kilroy was here." I am surprised it has not been resurrected into the public consciousness yet, what our un-40s/un-50s baby decade. Isn't the moment prime and ripe for a zombie Kilroy, scrawled in oil across the Iraqi sand? There could be stamps for the kids, little and big ones, sold in holiday bulk together with the Deck of Death and the "We Got Him!" Saddam paraphenelia, like Saddam in a Santa hat. Mel Gibson could, like, play him in a movie, or something. It's the perfect meme. Who is Kilroy?? Does not matter. Some dude who got a trolley car for being Killroy at the end of the day, the point is, "Killroy was here" was the message scribbled all over the world by American GIs, as a proto-grafitti of sorts, the tag of the US Army. Killroy is the everyman of American Empire. I am afraid that 2004 will be the year of Killroy's return.



Kilroy by Peter Viereck

Also Ulysses once--that other war.
      (Is it because we find his scrawl
      Today on every privy door
      That we forget his ancient role?)
Also was there--he did it for the wages--
When a Cathay-drunk Genoese set sail.
Whenever "longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,"
Kilroy is there;
      he tells The Miller's Tale.
At times he seems a paranoic king
Who stamps his crest on walls and says "My Own!"
But in the end he fades like a lost tune,
Tossed here and there, whom all the breezes sing.
"Kilroy was here"; these words sound wanly gay,
      Haughty yet tired with long marching.
He is Orestes--guilty of what crime?--
      For whom the Furies still are searching;
      When they arrive, the find their prey
(Leaving his name to mock them) went away.
Sometimes he does not flee from them in time:
"Kilroy was--"
          with his blood a dying man
      Wrote half the phrase out in Batan.
Kilroy, beware. "HOME" is the final trap
That lurks for you in many a wily shape:
In pipe-and-slippers plus a Loyal Hound
      Or fooling around, just fooling around.
Kind to the old (their warm Penelope)
But fierce to boys
      thus "home" becomes that sea,
Horribly disguised, where you were always drowned--
      (How could suburban Crete condone
The yarns you would have V-mailed from the sun?)--
And folksy fishes sip Icarian tea.
One stab of hopeless wings imprinted your
      Exultant Kilroy-signature
Upon sheer sky for all the world to stare:
      "I was there! I was there! I was there!"
God is like Kilroy. He, too, sees it all;
That's how He knows of every sparrow's fall;
That's why we prayed each time the tightropes cracked
On which our loveliest clowns contrived their act.
The G.I. Faustus who was
            everywhere
Strolled home again. "What was it like outside?"
Asked Can't, with his good neighbors Ought and But
And pale Perhaps and grave-eyed Better Not;
For "Kilroy" means: the world is very wide.
      He was there, he was there, he was there!
And in the suburbs Can't sat down and cried.






from the Telegraph
Hawks tell Bush how to win war on terror By David Rennie in Washington
(Filed: 31/12/2003)

President George W Bush was sent a public manifesto yesterday by Washington's hawks, demanding regime change in Syria and Iran and a
Cuba-style military blockade of North Korea backed by planning for a pre-emptive strike on its nuclear sites. The manifesto, presented as a
"manual for victory" in the war on terror, also calls for Saudi Arabia and France to be treated not as allies but as rivals and possibly
enemies. The manifesto is contained in a new book by Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser and "intellectual guru" of the hardline neo-conservative
movement, and David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter. They give warning of a faltering of the "will to win" in Washington. In the battle for the
president's ear, the manifesto represents an attempt by hawks to break out of the post-Iraq doldrums and strike back at what they see as a campaign of hostile leaking by their foes in such centres of caution as the State Department or in the military top brass. Their publication, An
End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, coincided with the latest broadside from the hawks' enemy number one, Colin Powell, the secretary
of state. Though on leave recovering from a prostate cancer operation, Mr Powell summoned reporters to his bedside to hail "encouraging" signs of a
"new attitude" in Iran and call for the United States to keep open the prospect of dialogue with the Teheran authorities. Such talk is anathema to hawks like Mr Perle and Mr Frum who urge Washington to shun the mullahs and work for their overthrow in concert with Iranian dissidents.

There is a sci-fi book by the Soviet writers, the brothers Strugatsky, called A Billion Years Before The End of the World, translated into English as Definitely Maybe. The philosophical premise of the book is that the universe is, on some level, conscious enough to preserve, and fight for, the homeostasis necessary to ensure its continued existence. The characters who are on the verge of events or scientific discoveries that would eventually lead to the end of the world have their lives fucked up and turned upside down in seemingly random ways they only put together into a pattern at the very end, when they realize that they are up against the universe that is launching preemptive strikes. Of course, this idea goes against theory of entropy, this presupposition of a sustained homeostasis. But what if we were to entertain it? And history, especailly linear history is a Western narrative, but what an analogous idea could be entertained about history? That it requires progress? That repetition without difference, antithetical to progress would threaten this reified History because eventually it would collapse in on itself? Perhaps, like the Universe, History can fight back. After all, didn't Fukuyama throw down the gauntlet?

Comments

[emblemparade.livejournal.com]

There's an entire world of social theory lost to the "West"*: Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah, where history is cyclical, a narrative of rises and falls. Within three generations, history ends and begins again: repetition, with difference. There are Laws stronger than any human narrative, historical or universal. (and definitely stronger than fukuyama's tantrums)

I'm gonna read this russky book of yours. How difficult is the Russian original?

* = Ibn Khaldun's life was, in many ways, essentially Western. The invisibility of the Moslem foundation of Europe is one of the greatest intellectual tragedies. Seriously, it brings me to tears. What would Hegel have done if he had to respond to this work?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

of course, there are different constructions of history. obviously, linear progressive history is one of the first things to go when you are doing cultural anthro. but the idea I like entertaining (since I am fond of making my own syncretic ad hoc cosmologies) is, like, in "Master and Margarita" the Devil tells Berlioz that everyone receives according to their faith. If someone does not believe in afterlife, they are not going to get one. I'd like to think that the narratives of history could be consistent with the actors in such way as well. So, my little fantasy is possible, if the neocons really believe in linear progress, and believe we have come to Peak Fukuyama of it. i was just playing around with an idea.

w/r/t to the Strugatsky book--how good is your Russian? There books, on the whole, are sophisticated and subtle. The one I was referring to is, in fact, translated, although out of print. I don't know how the translation is. I've looked into other translations of their works (maybe 10 books or so out of, like, 50 are translated, including the one that was the basis for Tarkovsky's "Stalker") and some are okay, some are meh.

[emblemparade.livejournal.com]

My Russian sux. Any kind of sophistication will be lost. Bah.

What of a dialectic structure of history? It seems to contain something of your cosmology, although quite rationally. Yes, sometimes history really does comply with our wishful thinking, but there are material preconditions for it. But it's not as complete as your Devil would have wished... those very materieal preconditions also demand a turn of the dialectic.

A book that I would choose as a model for time (I keep finding my own synopses have already been done!) is Henry James' Turn of the Screw. At one level of reading, it is a complete account of human behavior.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Dialectics are tricky. In a Hegelian sense--sure, but I bow out when the didactics of dialectical materialism are invoked. I don't believe that the base always dictates the superstructure, at least not an economic base, not as a universal. Your response implies that there is some History that is close to my model, and I was not getting at it at all. My "model" was completely metaphorical in its metaphysics. I was reifying history, just for fun, and because it was New Year's day, and I was thinking about the neocon world order and was depressed.

I don't know that I agree about Turn of the Screw. It's certainly an accurate account of some facets of human behavior, but the kind of ambigous hysteria and paranoia has to be located in the synchronic moment that Gothic novels were being produced. Sure, there can be a "life lesson," like the truly damaging/terrifying ghosts are the ones in our minds, but that's also a platitude. So how is it a perfect account of how people behave? Is the Governess "everyman"?

[emblemparade.livejournal.com]

I took your game seriously, as my own game...

What for you is merely fun (reifying history) is a serious ideological practice.

You know I don't agree with you on dialectical materialism (we take very different things out of Benjamin) and I'm glad you at least called it "tricky." (Surely and understatement...) Your very use of the verb "dictates" (as opposed to "determines") may have been a fluke, but that's exactly where the relationship between base and superstructure becomes "interesting" (a code-word for "true"). When someone dictates to you, do you reproduce the exact words? Is your writing down the words a reification? Of what? Who is going to read them? In what ways? It's this relationship that Raymond Williams sought to complicate. (Marx barely mentioned it, except in order to wonderfully provocatively name it.) What came as a revelation to me is that all these questions are the ones that literary scholars have been asking for years, though often for the wrong reasons. "Life is literature," as my wonderful teacher Andrew Parker likes to say.

As for Turn of the Screw, it's not an example of life, but an explanation of it. The "metaphor" of the Governess is only the tip of iceberg of her role as literary device. (Damn you, Freud! You've undermined all my language strategies.) It deals with specifically those aspects of behavior we are talking about -- man as a character on the historical stage. As do all the gothics, including the work of Freud himself. Dora is simply the perfect gothic novella, and the scariest book I've ever read.

[mendaciloquent.livejournal.com]

If the goal of history is to justify the future, then I would say Fukuyama's world is ideally suited to the task, to be seen as the discovery of the social equivalent of the speed of light beyond which no other movement is possible. That is the running theme of the PNAC-era: one creates a better world by refusing to permit alternatives of any kind.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

The speed of light analogy is excellent. It's not an explicitly forbidding discourse that marginalizes alternatives, it is truly hegemonic, because alternatives become a misnomer.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

no, actually it does not come from lyotard or that theoretical discourse at all. the idea of "memes" came out of evolutionary psychology; the term was coined by Richard Dawkings. The idea was that a "meme" is an idea, or cultural unit of information that replicates itself in a way that is analogous to genes. A succesful meme spreads, an unsuccesful one disappears from the "meme pool." Even though unlike a gene, which is a biological unit, a meme is a metaphorical unit, people have used it to build epidemiology-based dynamic models projecting how succesful an idea can be, how far it can spread. People have argued that religion is a meme. By pure memetics, a prosyletizing religion is more "succesful" quantitatively, but something like Judaism has a very stable method of meme transmission by being inexorably tied in with family, lineage, blood, etc. Fashion, colloquialisms, cultural rituals can all be examples of "memes."