The Quiet Men

2 days ago an anecdote was related to me about a personal encounter with a founding member of one of Australia's best known electronica acts, which Simon Reynolds has correctly identified in "Rip it Up and Start Again" as one of many inspired by Throbbing Gristle. As I am familiar with this individual, whose identity I protect through anonymity, I will simply comment that he has previously featured on this blog in the context of discussions of Weber's archetype of "sensualists without heart".

Unsurprisingly, evidence suggests that the song has remained the same since I last spoke to him. Left anarchism is professed as a more radical than thou doctrine, by an individual who has lived off state benefits for more than 20 years. I do not begrudge the ethos of being my "brother's" keeper, except where it is used to maintain a double standard; no action can ever be radical enough to meet utopian objectives, so nothing is ever done, no participation ever takes place. Any sense of reform or a "long march through the institutions", as Raymond Williams referred to "the long revolution", is simply regarded as a complicitous, hopeless bourgeois ideology (much in the manner committed socialists will oftentimes refer to sociology). The end result may be liberalism in another form, but the blinders put on make this something that can be lived with in a manner that does not overtly disturb the conscience.

That much should already be clear from the Weberian context. It explains a lot about the lifestyle; visiting a Thai prostitute once a fortnight, gambling on the horses at the TAB, with the rest of the time spent making tape loops and hunting down obscure electronic music in city record stores. The revolt by bohemians and social movements against bourgeois possessiveness, such as maintaining an exclusive intimate relationship, transmutes into an individualised survivalist creed, where autonomy is valorised above all else. Even the sex worker can be ridiculed by this client, because she doesn't meet the same gold standard of autonomy, namely of being in a position to choose who she has intercourse with. The client pays most of all for the privilege of an episodic encounter that makes no demands for reciprocity.

At such outermost limits, especially when the labor of the self is regarded not as the task of a cultural worker, but as somehow expressive of a unique "personality", or indeed the abandonment of such an implicitly disciplined structure, what is most revealed is how the quest for autonomy demands terrible sacrifices. This figure appears increasingly dissolute, seemingly unaware of its poor standards of personal hygiene, or the tendency to flap the arms around in a manner seemingly unconnected to patterns of thought or speech at the moment of utterance. This particular discussion ranged across footage of post-porn modernist Annie Sprinkle performing oral sex on 2 men simultaneously, in the context of the diverse range of dvds available in JB Hi-Fi stores, to the inverted snobbery of a questioning of the availability of such material in predominantly working class suburbs. Finally, there was a delirious sense of Hegelian recognition from past references in The Wire to this figure and his associate as "sound experimentalists", "I was in an allnight jam session last night, part of this side project I am developing". Meanwhile the witness is reduced merely to a host body to be colonised for the autonomous one to reproduce itself. What is hated most of all is the sense that any theoretical mediation of the activities can be presupposed, as this smacks of the dreaded formalism the anarchist tries to avoid. In other words, little critical awareness extends to the possibility of how there must be some agreement about the "rules" of the game, before play can begin. It might be suggested, once this notion is accepted, that the task of the critic involves the possible redemption of the work of art, and that this itself constitutes a form of creativity. This conception effectively undercuts the sense of the old adage, "those who can do, those who can't teach (or become critics)". A deconstructionist might comment that the adage is logocentric insofar as it presupposes a metaphysics of presence.

Invaluable as these counter-perspectives may be, what has attracted my attention most in light of the report of this encounter is a further dimension to the hyper-reflexive involution and abjection I have commented on before on this blog. I am thinking of the significance of the ressentiment and spite that frames the world view I have been describing. It seems to me that only Howard Devoto has addressed this in an acute fashion, in the classic Magazine song, "A Song From Under the Floor Boards". Anyone who reads Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground" or "The Devils" will quickly recognise the archetype, even while this means understanding an intensification and more general dissemination of this experience of tragic selfhood in the 21st century. What Devoto describes is but one step away from Enzensberger's archetype of "the radical loser". But there is more on a sociological level that needs to be accounted for. I was greatly impressed by an essay linking Houellecbeq's carnival of spite to Lyotard's "postmodern condition". The essay charts the transition to a knowledge economy, where contingency planning is used to control risk. The popularisation of this trend places individuals under enormous pressure to ensure that they have indemnified themselves against future losses, which leads to a productivist rationalisation of their time. Little time remains for reproduction, which helps to explain the appeal of sex tourism as a leisure activity. Those priced out of the marketplace of status, a social Darwinian universe of physical attractiveness, engaging personality traits and disposable income, have to risk manage by adjusting to diminishing expectations. Hence the turn of desire to those who are attractive, but have no other bargaining power, nothing to sell, other than their bodies. Such is the reactionary postmodernist condition as portrayed in Houellebecq's "Platform", (sex tourism in Thailand), which become subject to minor variations in his subsequent works.

I am aware that Slavoj Zizek has engaged with Houellebecq, but I avoid him like the plague as it is not clear to me that his thinking is amenable to comparative, deductive reasoning. His usual tactic is simply to argue that any criticism presupposes a blindspot that only Lacan can highlight. More generally, nothwithstanding Lyotard's applicability to Houellebecq, "the postmodern condition" may have become an exhausted term, and this might explain the more recent references to "liquid modernity". If I was discussing popular representations of this trope, even where it predates Bauman use of the term, such as for example in the work of John Foxx for example, there is no way that I would frame the discussion without reference to Anthony Elliott's careful methodological qualification of the former. The question I would want answered is this: is there anything in principle in Elliott's method that could not be used to examine Foxx's metaphors, and by extension, comparable characterisations such as "ballardian" (everyone knows by now thanks to Simon Sellars that Foxx has openly acknowledge J.G. Ballard as an influence)? If the answer is no, as I suspect it probably is, then theorists could benefit by applying the lesson to future variations of this theme.

But given the subject which this posting started out to address, I will return to that point by evoking Ultravox's! classic track "The Quiet Men" as a fitting epitaph for the character type who tries to move independently in a troubled time, where neoliberal ideology uncomfortably tries to cover over a growing globalisation, with all of the attendant interdependence and increased vulnerability this implies:

Waiting, we were waiting

As the traffic moved through all our hearts and our heads

But things were different then

For the quiet men

Shifting, things were shifting

Through the walls and hall, there were no walls at all

For the quiet friends

Of the quiet men

Oh, the quiet men Oh, the quiet men

Springtime, there was sunshine

Through the window panes, down all the English lanes

Where they walked again

The quiet men

Talking, they were talking

Of the times to come, and all the time that's gone

And they smiled again

The quiet men

Oh, the quiet men Oh, the quiet men

Listening, they were listening

As the season changed and all the reasons changed

And people came and went

By the quiet men

Walking, they were walking

Through the rainy days, looking at all the faces

But no-one ever noticed them

The quiet men

Oh Oh, the quiet men Oh, the quiet men Oh, the quiet men Oh, the quiet men

[PDF] Michel Houellebecq and the International Sexual Economy - all 2 versions »D Morrey - Portal, 2004 - epress.lib.uts.edu.au... Houellebecq, M. 2003, Platform, trans. by F. Wynne, Vintage, London. Klossowski,P. 1997 (1970), La Monnaie vivante, Rivages poche, Paris. Lyotard, JF 1974 ... View as HTML - Web Search

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