Tell me more. What is Document. Dement.?
Assemble, in a Frankenstein-like way, a grotesque ideology. Marks and masks, flesh and words, fragments and the whole truth, instantiated in documents and giving up.
Allusive, metaphoric, and undergirded by a contradiction: It could be theoretical or poetic, a work of art or a joke, and then refused or refuted. But the metaphor was always more real.
If William Burroughs read Louis Althusser while listening to a recording of T.S. Eliot reciting The Waste Land, and then imitated John Ashberry on a notepad while not paying attention during an economics 101 seminar at a mid-level public university.
The poetry in the works of Deleuze and Guattari (e.g., Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia) surpasses the naïvely life-like politics speechified in the free verse of traditionalist liberals, but D&G are too immersive, too deeply constituted in the vanguard of terminological fatigue, and lack the persuasive, illustrative Marxism, as turned into a profound pessimism, that dissipates, sickly, in The Frankfurt School (especially Adorno, lines sparkling in The Dialectic of Enlightenment).
Socio-economic critiques injected with some gelatinous substance I scooped up from the bottom drawer in the refrigerator. I stood over it and took a picture after it slithered past the tuna. And then it used a pre-installed editor, the basic version, to saturate me with nouns. Perspective is derailed because vanishing points have rails that guide the eye towards the center. De-centering was topical in the 1980s, but centrality was superimposed in a different way.
The programming improved as premium cable relied on big budget, multi-season story arcs. Harder to advocate for different interpretation when it is baked in.
Somewhere between biology and biography is a new kind of dysmorphia, which is a mimesis of escapism, much like ontology as it has been taught and practiced since the 20th century.
The novels of William Burroughs take place in Interzone, a hallucinatory alternate reality packed with drugs, monstrosities, and sex. The movie version of Naked Lunch gets categorized as Sci-Fi, not because the category suits the movie. Neither the movie nor the book is Sci-Fi, as they share so little in common with other productions in the genre. The movie is not mis-categorized, however. And, there is nothing inherently wrong with categorization.
There is a dystopia, and it is not in a parallel dimension; it is not Sci-Fi. Dystopia is at the atomic level of the mundane, the unseen structure, a demented psychology in the trivial and worldwide, that makes it a perfect fit. Fit matters. A good fit. Fitting description. However, all fits are unrelated. It doesn’t add up. A key enters and if it fits in a lock, the lock unlocks. It is the function for both the key and the lock.
But the key was made to fit. Emphasize MADE.
Radicals try to unmake things and throw away the key. If the key is lost, the lock is not forever locked.
Dystopia is growing. Imagine atoms enlarging. The sub-surface layer is engorged, a monstrous molecule that is going to consume us. It is a process, and as it is dementing us as normal, the process is driven into upheaval in the phenomenal, material-bodily, and pictorial sense. And as it happens, the mundane seems more alien, and so much more, it feels alien as it digests “you” within language yourself.
Dystopia is not permanent or constant. Growing, it overtakes, supplants, and replaces. And the transition is unpleasant but the stages are inexplicable.
Managing the metamorphosis is not advised but allow it because the repercussions are even better.
Complete change, or revolution, does not allocate a new, utopian version. What is contained in dystopia is not a place and it is not in the future, as much as the present is hell and every domination and oppression must be abolished. Come to find out, none of us are found here.
Aesthetics:
- Objective surrealism: Perceive and transcribe exactly what is happening. They are apt descriptions which could be said to transverse logic.
- Non-objective realism: Messages and referents seem familiar, and they are plugged in, but not according to their design. They are not as true to life.
- Narratives that start conclusively so they do not have to end.