The Mutation Event, or How Consciousness Demands the Total Abandonment of Synesthesia

Castration is not the problem of a society gone terribly awry—of the unabashed consumption of sensibility by the contemporary pedestrian and the shameless rape of the penis by the tyranny of capitalism—no, it is merely a symptom of a virulent disease relentlessly sucking us dry of all that is vital in this world. Castration indeed is just a symptom: indeed—the true and sincere epidemic of our time, the origin of our plight, is no less—no less!—than the evolution of consciousness itself.

Indeed, Consciousness—and ipso facto us, the human being—is a mutation hell-bent on wreaking havoc, a monstrous brain tumor, an anomaly of evolution, a fetid and sick perversion. Indeed, no less than a virus spreading over our lands, a voracious plague ruthlessly and relentlessly exterminating synesthesia.

Indeed, Castration is just a symptom. No doubt, there exist others: cuckoldry; the female and her enslavement of the contemporary castrato; writing and its derivatives; the modern academic and her punctles. It may seem easy to mistake these as origins. Nevertheless, these are only symptoms of an evolutionary mutation gone awry. Indeed, as Joseph Campbell writes in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” we are born too god-dam early: we haven’t cooked enough—our heads are too big—we need motherly nursing—or we die!

Indeed, Consciousness demands that our heads come out of the female undercooked. And the female, not cooking us properly, mutates before our very eyes: she takes on the weight of castrating us before we have even separated from her. Her social role, in a moment of true misfortune, was determined evolutionarily, biologically—Aristotle was not wrong when he said the female was a birth defect. But then, if she is, can we not help but all be, can we not help but all be born from an always and already defective animal.

Indeed, she cannot escape her place as the enslaver of mankind. But she is not the origin; she herself is constructed according to the evolutionary demands of consciousness itself!

Consciousness, then, must be eradicated. We must devolve; and go back to our primordial being—we must become stupid! We must allow synesthesia to once again become the driving force of our society; not consciousness and its inauguration of man’s plight and his utter castration.

The Filmic Event: On Lynch's Nomads

Inland Empire immediately throws us into the fray, into an encounter of flesh and film. At first, we try to make sense of a whole new universe, a whole new world of relations and signs, forging itself before us. And soon enough, that all too familiar feeling, that lurking panic, hits us: what if sense doesn't emerge? What if I never figure this movie out? Hollywood films—and most other films, too—make it easy on us: it is almost always a replication of some cliché or other. Sense is practically guaranteed. But it is a castrated sense, bereft of synesthetic possibility

Not here. With Lynch, our panic never disappears and sense never emerges—it oozes and undulates through us: it is an affective flow, indifferent to the conventional filmic seeing. There is no ground here. For Lynch, film operates in a different plane that allows for the odd meeting of senses: the film is not just seen but felt, not just a meting of visual and auditory but a relentless bleeding of sense.

Inland Empire, then, is a truly filmic film, a film that works not merely according to the logic of words but that moves with image and sound as film, in film: like a synesthetic piece of music or work of art, it turns its back on any sense of narrative or representation. This is the affect-sign, a sign that never points outside itself: signifier and signified are continous; they are constituted simultaneously.

But this affect-sign is never still: it is always and already folding into itself, always and already creating new ways of going, new modes of being. Sound and image, dream and reality, past and present, self and other—these Lynchian affect-signs interact to create ever new synesthetic-events throughout the film, events that operate as nomads and never stop folding amongst themselves to inaugurate further synesthetic-events.

This is no longer the synesthetic-event. This is a nomad-event, always and already on the go, always and already poised to take a line of flight, never allowing itself a ground. This is our liberation: nomads pave the way to the anti-castration-event.

The Literal Castration

“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage.”

--Marshall McLuhan

Technology qua McLuhan is an extension of some human faculty; it choreographs our experience, leaving nothing to ourselves. Individuality is an illusion, then, some dangerous media relentlessly working us over, prodding us in a singular direction: this repression of difference, of the multiplicity and synesthesia so necessary to man, inaugurates the illusion of consciousness, of individuality. But do not misunderstand McLuhan—he is not proffering a warning, he is not a doomsayer.

McLuhan is not warning us of old technologies—he is warning us of the old. We must become aware of our environment; all assumptions have outlived their usefulness. With the rise of new media, of new possibilities of going, new modes of being, we must eradicate older media—and voraciously consume the new with all abandon. This is a desperately needed change: a synesthetic-event.

There exist a multiplicity of media—some good, some bad. Each media distributes our senses differently, in different proportions. The printing press paved the way for the castration of man: with writing, with the book, man committed synesthetic suicide, shamelessly raped himself, castrating and depriving himself of everything vital in this world. For years, he toiled under an illusion of individuality: the tyranny of the book, of capitalism—the ultimate castration known to man.

The Medium is the Massage is not a book; individuality is distinctly erased by the very media that McLuhan writes in. Indeed, the book splays our senses along a single direction: the alphabet. As thoroughly visual beings, synesthesia becomes a crime, an abnormality to be treated by ridiculous psychologists—psychologists who themselves only speak of castration! Writing is the castration-event. It separates society—unifies the individual—inaugurates capitalism and the 70 hour work-week.

But with new media, with the rise of the electronic age and the annihilation of the book, we can finally extend ourselves according to an ultimate good: synesthetically, collectively, as always already a multiplicity.

The rise of electronic circuitry fractures our individuality: as we become thoroughly enmeshed in a community, we operate as networks—inside and outside ourselves. We operate as networked synesthetes within ourselves and as a global tribe, a community, outside ourselves. We are intimately intertwined with each other always and already, synesthetically.

Castrated Punctles, Too?

As my last post showed, the aching ignorance of bloggers never ceases to amaze me—to wit, a blogger linked to this very blog. Rosamary, aka Webspidie, in a ridiculous blog about Modern Punctal Theory, completely abandons synesthesia in her treatment of these very important typographic marks. Her first post criticizes punctal pedagogy: her alternative—treat them as characters to be made fun of. To be made fun of? Something seems off. These are the most sensuous of the typographic possibilities afforded us. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say these marks are more synesthetic than typographic ones.

Punctuation is, as this blogger noted, punctuated pause. But it is far more. These subtle and elusive marks are visual glyphs! Indeed, they operate primarily thus: they palpate us visually first; and then, synesthetically. An early case of this blogger’s unforgivable offense could perhaps shed some light on this.

This wily blogger tried and failed to understand the space in a particularly synesthetic Cummings poem, titled, aptly, “The Grasshopper.” Take a look at it: a punctal image of a confused unarranged grasshopper becomes a rearranged grasshopper, quite literally. As Rosamary notices, the space is central—she (falsely and ridiculously gendered by this certain blogger, not the poem or by punctal theory itself) rearrangingly becomes grasshopper herself. But the point of this “becoming” is missed altogether: it is a synesthetic-becoming.

At first, the poem proffers an unspeakable grasshopper—it exists as a visual glyph, as unarranged punctuation threatens to obscure meaning. But as space itself becomes a grasshopper simultaneously with Cummings’ punctles, however, we see and hear meaning emerge: the punctles rearrange so as to be spoken. This is a thoroughly synesthetic movement: seeing to speaking, which is to say, visual to hearing. And, through it all, the confused and slighted space can not help but palpate us, can not help but thoroughly drench us in its pathetic plight, an overly-sentimental drama of punctuated pause.

Modern Punctal Theory thus operates: punctuation is not simply punctuated pause—it is at once synesthetic movement and punctuated stillness. Hence, punctuation seems almost too apt for a Derridean (the differential structures behind the effacement of this dichotomy are only too obvious)—and alas, this nihilistic blogger has, um, missed the point entirely? 

How Blogs Castrate Us

Today I would like to talk to you about blogging. It would seem that some bloggers have, um, missed the point entirely.

Blogging is far more than a way to publish writings you couldn’t otherwise have published, more than a shameless capitalistic advertisement to further a career, even more than a way to publish writings anonymously a la Kierkegaard, more even than a public diary. Which is to say, the blogosphere does encompass all these things. But these are merely symptoms of a virulent technological mutation (extension qua Marshall McLuhan) gone awry. Indeed, the blogosphere really is an elaborate holocaust of sensibility, a total abandonment of synesthetic possibility. 

At first, it would seem to parallel reality, and more interestingly, to ground Foucault: the internet is the panopticon par excellence. Think about it: just as our identity in society is molded by the gaze of others, the constant fear of humiliation, so it is with blogs. The total effacement of the expert, of editors, brings with it a bevy of relentless and merciless bloggers waiting to criticize every word you write. And in effect—to shape your identity, to inaugurate your soul. And stranger, blogs, unlike prisons, even unlike society itself, are voluntarily chosen. Do you understand what I just said? People are actually seeking humiliation!

And what, then, becomes of synesthesia? Our attentions, obviously, are directed elsewhere—as if in a prison, quite literally, our behavior transforms before our very eyes, unconsciously. We are castrated so thoroughly, so thoroughly sucked of vitality—we become bile-drenched zombies, utterly abandoning the notion of anything interesting, indeed stripped bare of that synesthesia we so desperately need as we try to war off shame and humiliation. This is no different from the Renaissance: the total effacement of synesthesia, as rampant societal discourse shames us, humiliates us, makes cuckolds of us all.

Do they (that is, us bloggers) really think we can bask in our synesthesia as cuckolds? Can that really be a question at all? It all seems so obvious now: blogs are the root of everything evil in this world, of the recent surge in terrorism, the depression, etc. How can politicians have missed this blindingly obvious fact—blogs are hell bent on castrating us left and right, and we are desiring it, even going so far as to give up our synesthesia voluntarily. For what?

Take this as a call to action: abandon the blogosphere. And question. Question identity, and question society. Always.

Demand your synesthesia.