Symbols

Jump the tracks...

"That speculative art and fiction would be presaged by the reality it attempts to engage is not unexpected. The prescient author of speculative fiction, exploring near-future outcomes of technology with politically-expedient accuracy, is truly a public intellectual. Speculative work is hardly reducible to mere dystopic condemnation or fanatical futurism; it often forecasts and explores detailed and nuanced scenarios that would not be investigated as thoroughly without this speculation, nor with such a wide consumption among the public.

... Anxiety, suspicion, doubt, terror— all of these emotions are evoked in depth, piled up like so many New York Times cover pages saved for posterity. The problem with novels of this sort is the images become icons as they are cataloged and archived. As if in our recitation of these images, their symbolic power would allow us to heal. Writes Smith, “There was the chance to let the towers be what they were: towers. But they were covered in literary language when they fell, and they continue to be...” Rather than work through our psychological wreckage as human beings, we pile on the symbols, burying the site of our loss with symbolically overdetermined Freedom-Tower-style neurosis novels."
- Adam Rothstein

So, this is interesting. Another quotation before I continue:

"... locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but -perversely- of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth- each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, 2n possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his background as a Cantorian continuum of infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self."
- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

This particular backwards and forwards movement is not simply overcome; in the first instance there is the statement made that writers are not direct enough, and yet there is the admission that what they do is creative and possibly useful. The writer cannot, at the moment of inspiration, tend towards a complete outline and reality in the writing; it is impossible. As anyone creative will understand the process is indefinite and nuanced with vague terms and still stretching for a sense of completeness. Sometimes it is the easiest response to suggest that creative types lack responsibility, yet it is also important to recognize that the realities which they create would not materialize in people's understanding had they not written them, yet the realities they anticipated would have. It is the typical historian's/ human's dilemma of what if? The truth is that creativity is essential for survival not only materially but in dignified spirit. 

It is too true: people allow symbols to replace true understanding, and they project values upon events and conditions as though they had been anticipated by themselves, rather than Bradbury, Orwell, Huxley &c. But artists and creative types live to see and to speak, and though their abstractions can lead to unusual symbols emerging which do not appear to have confluence with events until they occur, the symbols are still relevant and obtain relevance if they are explored. The truth is, though, that unless authors such as David Foster Wallace here are understood in what they are actually trying to advocate; not a narrative of symbols but a potential amongst people to form their own understanding, to communicate and to anticipate. In essence, to create and to disavow the creeping surveillance and anonymous violence of corporate advertising and the disappearance of power (discussed by Baudrillard as The Aesthetics of Disappearance and even more frighteningly by Virilio in Negative Horizon), leading to spontaneous autonomy for all. 

But this is a new horizon, and it can only be deemed negative according to the perception we give to it. As Wallace subtly points towards the infinity inherent in nature and the containing principle in human society, in the politics of surveillance, the prison system (the anything system) are opposed to one another. In his symbolism he unfolds a certain human behavior which opposes the mathematics and infinity which it surrounds it; call it friction, maybe. He unfolds the glaring depth of possibility contained miserably inside one format, inside one framework, and at haphazard that depth is lost to human perception, yet still encircles the universe. If the question has always been so much larger, that is to say, what and where are we?, then is is becoming markedly more obvious that time does not matter, that symbolism (especially in the case of Marcel Proust who took twenty years to write A La Recherche du Temps Perdu) is vastly important in that it remains loose, and open to alteration. We must always remind ourselves that the symbolism and communication we look for is one with life itself, and that all the surveillance and systemic thought imaginable could not devalue or halt this process, otherwise those systems themselves will perish, for it is variation which allows survival.