Double Metaphors

I've been accepted to present a paper at What Happens Now: 21st Century Writing in English – The First Decade at the University of Lincoln in July. Provisionally entitled "'Zombies of the Interrogative Mood': Contemporary Theory, Fiction and the Question of Questions", I'm going to be writing on Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood and William Walsh's Questionstruck: A Collection of Question-Based Texts Derived from the Books of Calvin Trillin and wondering whether the question-based text is a particularly apt form for our uncertain times.

When searching for a title, I flipped through Powell's book and found the zombies quote. I thought it was cool and would catch the conference organisers' attention. Which presumably it did. After I'd submitted it, though, I began to think that the zombie is another curiously apt metaphor for contemporaneity. The zombie is neither alive nor dead, and that's pretty precarious if you ask me! Then I remembered Paul Krugman's "zombie ideas" and thought how apt it is for capitalism - it's not working, but it's not dead. It's in this precarious, limbo-state; everyone knows something has to change, but no-one's doing it.

Interestingly, Krugman meant to point out the lack of imagination in economic policy making - zombie ideas are ideas that keep coming back, as per the common imagination of zombies in computer games and films. He wasn't specifically referring to a precariousness (or precarity, as I've heard people describe it) but it was implied. That's a common thread in contemporary theories and writing: the conditions are talked about, perhaps even uncertainty is mentioned by name, but no-one talks about it as precariousness, as something that isn't just in politics or economics, but filters down from those apparently "lofty" disciplines to everyday life. That's what I'm interested in.

So, the upshot of all this is that my 2000 word paper now has two guiding metaphors, which is one too many really. Either the question-as-concept is (the openess of the question, something that opens up to the unknown and therefore precarious) or the zombie is. Haven't quite worked this out yet.

Benjamin H Brattan @ Postopolis

Dan Hill has posted the whole of Benjamin H Brattan's talk at the end of Postopolis on City of Sound.

It's a fascinating collection of musings on the economic crisis, the internet, design, space, politics; essentially a collation of thoughts on 'the now' from an avowed "out of the closet theorist".

Reading it, I found myself linking it to the things I've been reading recently about the altermodern, and low and behold!, Brattan mentions Bourriaud about half-way through the talk. Lucky then, as I was busy connecting thoughts and intuitions between them and creating new thesis ideas along the way.

There appears to be a considerable dialogue emerging - probably accelerated by the "credit crunch" - looking at the ways we live in the twenty-first century, about the possibilities and opportunities for change but also worries about not taking those opportunities. Do we have the right people in charge to take those opportunities? Does the concept of people in charge inherently damage a possibility for change?

All are in agreement about the growing out-dated-ness of postmodernism. It has reached saturation point, a moment in which postmodernism is becoming passé, washed up; irrelevant! Of course that doesn't mean we are in a post-postmodernism. It just means we are in a gap between post- and pre-. That is what Brattan's talk focussed on.

The main idea I've taken away from it, from a literature/art point of view, is an idea of the "afterimage". The designation "post" is used, Brattan notes, "to name a particular state of things that is somehow eclipsed but not entirely done with." We are in that moment now, a society creating afterimages. Afterimages of what, though? After postmodernism, after politics, after economics? No-one knows. Because we haven't entered a stage that can easily be called "an ism", we are left flailing in a limbo, using up yesterday's leftovers but not cooking a new dinner. Unsettling as this all may be, these sorts of conditions tend to be fertile ground for exciting art and ideas. This is emerging as the topic of my dissertation...