Brain is the new sexy

... at least that's what I tell myself, sitting here in leggings and an indiscriminate blue top-and-ladsy shirt-combination. It's not a good day for fashion. Nor is it a good day for anything, actually. Not even for spelling - the blog word-processor has to correct very nearly every second word I write. Plus the ones that remain undetected because the words exist, only do they not express what I want to articulate. Sea. You get it. 

I am forcing myself through the remainder of what used to be my Contested Culture notes, but is now a pitiful pile of coffee-stained, grey matter in a plastic folder with the additional neon highlight to communicate to the passing fellow-student that I have read some of it, and had even had the mind frame to highlight. Indeed I have read some of it, most of it, with the exception of a rather dull text of myth-theories - I could't lower myself to do that - now the crucial point is that I don't remember anything. In fact, I don't remember reading most of it. The library drains all spatial and temporal rasters out of my brain and transforms it into a giant pudding, sitting comfortably and uselessly in my head, waiting to be poured onto paper on D day. Also, instead of teaching myself how to crochet over Christmas, I should have started early learning all that rubbish. It's my own fault, really. Or is it? Am I not the victim of the very subject I am supposed to know an awful lot about? Take this blog, for example: it is part of what has been christened the social media, and effectively impedes me from learning. Then the TV Christmas specials (gotta see all of those, right?), they too kept me from expanding my field of knowledge. Add a bit of random facebooking, a couple of cinema sessions, a talk with an ageing Ralph Fiennes (not me obviously, some fat bloke in an ill-fitting jumper) and tada, the cultural and creative industries destroy their most recent offspring before it even glimpsed at the world comprehendingly. Maybe I am just a victim of post-feminist self-determination incompetence? It could well be, given that I cannot rely on a husband with an iron fist to impose his will on me; I have to go and tame the shrew myself.

(the same day, bed time, the protagonist is sitting in bed, typing instead of reading dull slides about culture - computer battery full, human battery in reserve)

I need stage directions for my life. How else am I supposed to know how I feel, where I stand, whereto I belong and how the bloody hell this play is going to end?? Despite the fact that I am possibly the world's worst actress, I can just about manage to be an active agent in my own life and portray more or less convincingly real emotions to my fellow actors. Coincidentally, this metaphor relates to what Judith 'Jude' Butler writes about gender performativity. Ok, well, not quite, but the basic idea, the performative element of life remains the same. A very clever leadership book has taught me that performativity is not the playing of a part like Rowan Atkinson does Mr. Bean, but like Rowan Williams does his long-standing performance of the Archbishop of Canterbury, soon in a church nearby you. Gender works in a very similar way: although it depends on sex in the sense that a sex is already inscribed with a particular set of norms and normative elements, gender is more or less autonomous and a way of method acting 'man' or 'woman' to oneself and to others. So, where are my stage directions? At the moment, it's Samuel Beckett rather than Tennessee Williams, plotless incoherence. Maybe I should try and compensate by becoming an obedient consumer, without an opinion, without a choice. 

Culture: contested!

An unusually fast follow-up; naturally, it’s exam time and anything to procrastinate. Not even a cancelled internet connection keeps me from spending my time in any other way than reading inconclusive and irrelevant articles about the theatre of Genet by some random French sociologist.

Screencap is courtesy of guardian.co.uk. I couldn't write something like that.

 Anything to keep me from taking notes about the nature of culture and the cultivated nature, webs of significance, passive consumers, active authors and dead cocks, in the literal sense. I do not see the point in learning something that by definition, cannot be defined, or has at least, so far, not been defined by anybody in a satisfying way. Essentially, I team up with Sisyphus and help him push his stone up the mountain, with the added bonus of having my liver eaten out every now and again – or was that Prometheus. My Greek mythology like my theory of culture is a site of convergence, like culture itself, according to Stuart Hall. Everything merges and flows and escapes (most of it escapes my memory, actually) to leave me with the prevailing sentiment of despair. I am not alone: Facebook tells me that my fellow students suffer equally as hard as I do, albeit in a more public way than I, excluding this rant, which I expect no one to read. Communal suffering than links perfectly with one of the many theories of culture: rumor has it that cultural texts are not created by the one, but by the many. Social practices are interrelated and together form what we understand as culture. Perhaps. The main reason for my despair lies in the ‘perhaps’ that precedes and follows every single theory I encounter – theories of culture come with a reservation, like Euromillion numbers, the reservation that there might be a mistake in the theory and that the lot could be deconstructed within the blink of an eye. Haha, very funny. I look at the pile of paper that is ten weeks worth of cultural bullshitting, and counting, and wonder whether this exam is not a way of justifying ourselves. Like lawyers and doctors, we are forced to write exams because it makes culture and theories of culture quantifiable. We finally can translate culture into marks and grades, mistakes and definitions and thereby legitimize it within the numerous fields of academic practice. We are told that the exam is not about expression, quotations or perfect knowledge; nor is it about grammar; it is about our understanding of culture.

Marshall McLuhan - The Medium is the Message

My understanding is that we’re given a couple of vague questions and have to formulate equally blurry answers to those, while remaining close to the canonical texts – and despite of what they say, they want clear formulations of what we’ve read. Generally I like incoherent, messy, and pointless tasks, but this exam seems a first class example in pointlessness. What they want us to reproduce is what Stuart Hall has called theoretical noise, a sort of Bee Gees-techno mash-up of Beethoven’s Ninth with vocals provided by Andrea Boccelli and a guitar solo by Eric Clapton. Not that I wouldn’t want to hear it, but the task seems futile and the assembly of the different components rather difficult. Mind you, Eric Clapton would do anything for money. The resulting noise then is nothing more than one strand of the culture theories, a speck in the landscape of philosophizing sociologists, literary ethnographers, empirical critics, and clueless students. The irony is that in a different context, namely my academic career, this exam is more than just a speck – it is the make or break of 5 years of academia. Everything I’ll do in the future, whether I graduate or not, depends on this exam. In a way, I’m being very barbarous about it, to say it with Bourdieu. I concentrate on the small details of my life and want to see every single one of my actions justified, so that I can feel better about my lower middle-class existence. So, where does this leave me? I have to write this exam if I want to gain my degree – I have a choice to not write it, but it is a false choice, to say it with Benjamin, I could not write this exam, but that would mean that I’d isolate myself and I’d loose all the privileges tied to my status as a student, and possibly a lot of people would just forget me without questioning that I ever existed. I’d have to find my way for myself, without the help of fellow students. Great, so it’s either exclusion or two hours of my life trying to figure out what on earth they want me to write. 

Thoughts on being a grown up

IT has dawned on me recently that all my efforts to remain an under-educated, under-estimated, under-no-obligations twenty-something old are in vain, and that even I have to grow up some time to take my place within society. Argh, essentially, it means shovelling my own grave, doesn't it? Dear anonymous, inexistent reader. I confess, the latest outcomes of my creative, semi-professional life did not include any sign of adult behaviour, ended cataclysmic in public embarrassment or included making pompoms out of plastic bags. The fact that I am writing this at 03:26 after a day's work and a visit to the theatre should emphasise the fact that regulation and routine are slightly off-theme. I do like my routines, ocd-ing is one of my favourite pastimes, but how can anybody expect me to be responsible, empathetic, and mumsy?????? Don't get me wrong, I like other people - well not everybody, but the broader mass - and I wouldn't want to live without them (apart from a few), I just don't always feel with others, care about others or try and help others. Most things I do are created out of unadultered selfishness, with added egocentrism and a pinch of narcissism. I heard or read somewhere that being an adult is when you do things, not for your own benefit,  but for the benefit of others. Right, complete fail on that front, then. But let's be honest, how many people can I name who reason according to this Ghandi-ish mantra. Maybe two or three, and even those have their slips, occasionally, and involve a lot of spirits, in 99% of the cases. I have realised over the past year, that being a grown up has nothing to do with age, it is more, and here I enter the nature vs. nurture debate, a matter of being born an adult, or not being born an adult. I consider grown ups another ethnicity, about half the earth's population is a grown up in addition to whatever else category we want to put them into, and you don't just grow up to be a grown up. Your mind is set to a particular function, and unless you're hit on the head quite hard as a child, or fall into a pot full of magic potion (one has heard of such cases), your grown-up-ness is determined from the start. Ready, set, go, and fuck Simone de Beauvoir, 'on ne naît pas femme, on devient femme' - whom did she date again?? Right, dating a cross-eyed French Nobel Prize-denier does not make you cool enough to judge on nature or nurture or both.

This post does not come out of nowhere, in fact, it's midlife-crisy territoire - the twilight zone, as I would like to call it, had twilight not gained unwanted spotlight through a rather popular film series within the last couple of years. (ironic, isn't it that twilight is now in the limelight - ok ok, my jokes aren't getting better with age). What I want to say, were I not a self-centred idiot, is that I am turning 24 in less than 24 hours. Birthdays don't bother me much. I don't actually like birthdaying, it's a bit of a bother, trying to accommodate other people's well wishes, I don't like saying thank you, I like it about as much as saying I am sorry, or making compliments. If you hear it from me, it means a lot of effort on my side, so it's worth a lot. Celebrating the date of my birth is a bit of a weird idea - I wasn't much involved in the process, almost 24 years ago, as a matter of fact, I was barely present. I couldn't stand, was covered in sticky liquids and screamed cryptically - like an average night out, without the hangover. I think that celebrating the few successes I had in life would be much more appropriate than celebrating that fact that I appeared. Not that I want to get all Tristram Shandy here, but I'd rather celebrate the efforts that I made consciously: graduating,  learning how to bicycle, learning how to drive, learning how to avoid driving on a night out etc.


(P.S. I post-scribe this on the date I publish the post, 12 days after my birthday, like any good underachiever. I still believe what I wrote then, but I have to add that celebrating other people's birthdays is an activity I quite like. Mostly because I can value them for what they have done, and what they mean to me. Celebrating myself, as much as I would like to enjoy it as a self-centred idiot, is just not in my nature, so hurray to all the rest of people celebrating themselves.)