1999: sample text
Discussions among friends
From the novel “1999 – Vienna and the world” by Johannes Themelis
As an introduction: We become witnesses of a discussion between a fictitious Austrian author and a fictitious German publisher. They argue, under which circumstances or whether at all the manuscript „1999 – Vienna and the world“ could be published and thereby stroll again and again to completely different topics (by the way: many thanks to all poets and philosophers, who made a contribution thereto, without have been quoted correctly!). What the two do not know: The fictitious author simultaneously is a real author, who actually wrote a novel with that title, and in this book the two interlocutors appear as characters.
„Each past, present, or future situation cannot be described with scientific means, Themelis. Think for example of a historian. How should he approach with the instruments of his discipline to the fact that for an Egyptian of the second pre-Christian millennium the Pharaoh was not only the king, but also a god? The expert can trace the political developments, as far as they are to be deducted from the sources, he also can describe the social conjuncture, the remaining artefacts, the philological findings on the contemporary texts, the radiographical condition of the mummies dated to that period (and you see, I permit quite a series of subsidiary sciences). Nobody however is able to open the seal of the horizon of motivation of an individual human of that era!“
„But we know that for long, director! The scientists deceive us. They try to fob us by half-truths, while their true activities aim at preserving the most extensive autonomy (and herewith privilege power) for their own social class. Even at the point, where the world system stays presently, they still want to suggest to us, that a further dynamical upward trend of production, income, and capital formation is possible, although we thereby head, without brakes, for a crash, because resources will be exhausted with the same high acceleration. Each normal living system passes through growth phases only during a transition process between different stationary conditions. If exponential growth continues beyond the inflexion point, destruction is the result. However, even under favourable a configuration swinging into a higher stationary condition requires new, more visionary forms of organization than we have so far. That means, we have to say good-bye to our familiar habits. But those people try to cheat us further, director, they even have sold us a wrong compass! They want to talk us into the misbelief, that all our doing only aims to the preservation of total capital, as if the composition of this capital (be it man-made products, nature, the state of health and education, as well as our institutional and cultural basis) was insignificant. The concealed criterion however, let’s call it philosophical sustainability, demands the preservation of each individual capital form.“
„That’s your chance, Themelis! You can open this buried secret of existence with the metaphysical methods of the artist!“
„I suffer from that, man – pardon, director! But I don’t open anything. I scratch at the opening – at best and possibly at the correct one. If one glow of the secret at all shines through there, I will perhaps know somewhat about how I am now, but still nothing about how I was, and least of all about how I will be.“
„I see your point, Themelis, I, and I’m your publisher. But I am afraid, we, the understanding are diminishing!“
„I daresay you are right, director, but I have to make another step forward: Is it possible to use the term ‘we’ still between the two of us or, if you like, between anybody? According to the well-known wave theory, on which the historical epochs are understood technologically as start of the organized agriculture (10,000 years ago), as industrial take-off (250 years ago) and as break-through of information technology (now), our social structures are deconstructed just now. You can recognize that, if you strive not to succumb to the siren singing of the mainstream (something that you, director, are demanding authoritatively of literature). The polarization progresses, without caring about our embosomed internal peace. The transition from the first to the second wave brought revolutions against the ‘God-given’ orders, that from the second to the third wave meant the disassembly of the conformity principle, of uniformity, of steep power pyramids. The second wave created mass society, the third wave splinters it. The equations of the second epoch are not sufficient for solving the problems of this structural break – for instance the conventional employment measures cannot help the new proletariat of the non-knowing against the new class of the ‘cognitariate’.“
„Sweet, Themelis, you want to tell me that my computer is too ingenious for just being a distinctive facet of my lifestyle! However, what will follow the world of cyberspace? You already know that?“
„You are perfectly right to ask: The historical waves don’t lap in distances of thousand or maybe hundred years any more. The fourth wave is already on its way. It will bring a combination of information with genetic engineering. Not Orwell’s Big Brother will threaten us in the future, but the private economy, which knows everything and masters everything, and holds the method to manipulate all of us, politicians or voters.“
„Before this happens, Themelis – offer me guarantee for several thousands of readers, and your book will be printed at once!“
„Don’t make me laugh! You are requiring from me one legion you don’t have yourself, against the countless legions of the radical right-wing populism, the washy conservatism, the early retired socialism! To say it clearly: The role of the Austrian intellectual in Austrian decision-making, in the Austrian public can be described easily – it’s irrelevant. Deeply involved in party politics, in exact labelling of any area of life, in anticipatory obedience to power since the days of the disastrous Vormaerz, which never was redeemed by the orgasm of a bloody revolution, that draggled the corpses of the rulers through the roads. Neurotisized between the unquestionable creative power (resulting from the lucky mixture of so many ethnical groups) on one side and an .unremovable dominance of alpine dullness on the other. Fraught with the repressed responsibility for the humiliation of so many single lives and again and again also for the ragging destruction of so many individuals in the continuous cacophony of the ancient, the older, the newer and the newest fascism. One would have had to change all that radically, this country including its people. But this change would have had to begin in the heads, because this heads are distorted by the fathers and other authorities from the outset. Meanwhile the masses, as you can see, already looked for another Fuehrer, who sniggles them with the same clichés as always!“
„Themelis, you make me mad, because I feel you are right, but you destroy any hope, and I think that I must keep you away from that. What about your zest for life? You cannot keep your groove private and unload your frustration on us, the public!“
„The joy of life, director? I did never suppress my desires! To start from the scratch: a Leberknoedel soup, stuffed peppers with tomato sauce, in addition a glass of red wine, and as a dessert a Sacher cake with whipped cream and some white coffee – all that is the dearest in the world for me. Where else than in Vienna, for example in the Café Kaisergarten, would I get that? Where else the waiter would serve these pleasures to me with an elegant ‘Enjoy your meal, professor!’ (he actually knows that I am a real Ph.D., contrary to his other guests, who are apostrophized by him at a doctorate level undeservedly)?“
„Neither I generally understand, what you want to tell me thereby, nor all your specific Viennese terms!“
„What I mean is: Where else if not here, where the intellectual territory was largely vandalized and emptied for centuries, one could plant these beautiful gardens of savoir vivre? Not to mention the decadent feeling of this old culture to have been the first of all, and emanating from that an inexplorable self-confidence, a momentum of structural ungovernableness!“
„Don’t you contradict now what you said earlier?“
„Obviously you begin to understand, director! Contradiction is part of that culture. It is therefore similar to the Indian, which also lives well with the divergences of a filleted divinity.“
„Apropos India, Themelis. You really were there?“
„Who knows? Anyway, it’s irrelevant for us here and today!“
„I wonder if everything you wrote about it in your book is true. Especially, whether you really made those particular experiences.“
„If I mount, recalling the words of my ‘holy man’, here and today a vehicle of the subconscious, a mandala, or concentrate on that chakra, that you already know, I am able – though thoroughly corrupted of Western life – to dare this excursion still. It leads from the death of desire by means of (at least temporary) abstinence into the sphere, where each movement of feeling is switched off, where one forgets everything except breathing. The spirit eludes from all sensual objects and concentrates on one single idea. Continuously repeating the syllable
The publisher is not as easy to crack: „I would like to call that your self-exaggeration, Themelis.“
„Let’s leave the issue to agree that I learned to affect myself and at least parts of the surrounding world by paranormal means. But again concerning the pleasures of life, director – for example the memory of the hours of security and luck in the childhood…“
„Shall I get toothache, Themelis?“
„This time did exist, however. My mother had a quite beautiful singing voice, which could have pushed her into a professional career. But she only sang for me, always completely low and always this sad cradle-song, and I fell asleep in a mixture of elation and melancholy. Or Christmas Eve – one would have to invent it, if it did not exist. Or a cartoon, where always the good ones triumph. Or the classical education in high school, which seems really glorified from the distance of a McJob!“
„But how does that fit into your social criticism?“
„It’s downright the root of my social criticism, because I wonder, how rather normal children become boring adults, or victims, if not even actors of inhumanity.“
„Again concerning the zest for life, Themelis: Are there still the legendary Viennese girls?“
„What you want to hear, director, that has not already been told in the actual manuscript?“
„I just remind you of following intellectually already for hours, wherever you want, but you are not inclined to give any leeway for practical amusement to me and the other readers (if there are any to be)…“
„It’s not difficult to produce entertainment, actually it’s easier than it was ever before. Meanwhile we live at the turn of the century, although this seemed so far away once. However, there are no Viennese Maedels any more. Also in this city you can only see the babes of the world culture, who developed from the pre-stage of the girlie type of woman. Fact is that femaleness of the post-modern era is defined by a form of semantic reduction, or fixed to an ideological regression, which manifests itself in terms of fashion. Nearly nobody, neither the trend snoopers nor the PR guys would have expected that. It was a stormy development: At first mini skirts returned, and in a blink baby-doll figures populated the roads. The display dummies became alive and with perfect styling seduced to what was once reserved for virile dreams only – the rendezvous with a bitch.“
„And which role men like us play thereby, Themelis – men, who are rather out of their teenage time?“
„Maybe it’s a problem for you, director. I myself am that timeless that I can have a hype with such a being at any time. Don’t assume this a labelling fraud, because the label itself is the reality. You don’t wait for the event even-minded, but bring it out missionarily, professionally organized, orchestrated and executed: As it works in society, culture, or politics, it also functions in your private framework. The characteristics of a hype are artificiality, fugacity and aggressiveness: You conceive your event cross-linked and globalized, complete it excessively and regardless of scattering losses. That is the true, for a long time already conjured triumph of appearance over substance, the final reversal of cause and effect, better: the maximization of effect with complete suppression of possible causes.“
„And everyone can take part, Themelis – me as well?“
„You don’t need a major name or an outstanding family background, only a laptop, a mobile phone, and blue eyeglasses, not to forget the special cigarette brand, and the certain soft drink and the appropriate outfit – and here you go with your maximum personal hype with a (maybe Viennese) babe. If you are not capable to sleep with her, or don’t want to, possibly because aids is a worry to you, just make her flutter around you, force her to allow one or the other glance at her more intimate sites, invite her to examine the effect by a grasp to your fly. Next day (she probably still goes to school, don’t ask for her birth certificate) she will tell her friends about the cool trip with the celebrity!“
„I don’t come along with your argument.“
„Here we are, director, instinctively you have chosen the correct language. That is the central moment of the hype: You cannot elude. Don’t you know everything about Madonna? Didn’t you at least read Madonna’s book ‘Sex’? Didn’t you at least masturbate while listening to Madonna’s album ‘Erotica’?“
„Beat it!“
„I beg your pardon, but didn’t you at least inhale Madonna’s film ‘Body of Evidence’? With this multimedia trinity all valid taste and genre taboos were eventually broken – it was the exemplary hype with the ultimate broad effect. Nobody could go back behind Madonna any more: generation X, new man, dinosaurs, political correctness, gay outing, family values, supermodels, punk revival, Brent Spar, techno, Windows 95 – all these events were mounted as supraregional hypes: Forgive me, but next to these the products of your publishing house look anaemic. Of course, not everything that is hyped does become a success automatically, but in the context of information highway and 500 TV channels you can only bring your message about, if you submit it to a merciless hype.“
„Then let’s get out with your book, Themelis! We organize a hype!“
„Our conclave would have to end quite unusually, director, if something like a hype shall emerge from it!“
„We could install secret hints to the unconscious of the consumers in television shows and video games, like ‘I love life’ or ‘I am relaxed’ or ‘I like my sexual energy’. One fiftieth of a second is sufficient for the computer game Endorfun to deposit a subliminal message, while at the surface coloured cubes have to be brought into the correct order and arbitrary music is wafting from the PC speakers.“
„Buy ‘1999’?“
„Everything can be manipulated, I’ve learned from you only recently, even political convictions. Therefore your country can call itself a democracy still without shame – the result of an election is simply no problem any more. You have outlined the basics, and I think I understood very well, Themelis: We hold it already in our hands, that drug for the 21th century!“
„What could be proved at once, if for example an Endorfun player runs amok, and then it is stated, his unconscious had mistaken the hidden ‘I am strong!’ message.“
„Some pages still, Themelis, then we will be through with your work.“ A single loose sheet falls from the manuscript.
FROM THE LITERARY WORK OF AMÉLIE ALIAS „AGENT DREAM“
Documents of a possible existence, carefully edited by Claudia Themelis
Fuck off Gentlemen
The aborted Indian girls
are no more than
a last proof
– no question of opinion
– also no controversy
It’s war between women and
men
war between worlds, far as stars
away from each other
you didn’t intend
something else
– intend?
Fuck off gentlemen
.
The publisher looks grey: „Is that perhaps the message of a new era? The philosophy of these babes? Don’t you are strangely affected? Perhaps – as you will reaffirm in a moment – this poem is not yours, also not written by your wife, but by somebody else, curse him, that has to do something with you!“
„Would be beautiful, if it were from me. But I never had the right to write it.“
„By and by, I really wonder, where these loose sheets between your manuscript pages are really coming from. Are you sure that they did not fiddle them into at one of your café attendances?“
„Yes, somewhere, certainly.“
„This unimportant for you? Strange – because contrary to me you cannot drive home again from this odd country. Perhaps, Themelis, the so-called Public Security Division is already up to grill you?“
„I don’t care a pap for it, director!“
„Nevertheless you blab state secrets in this book.“
„You make me laugh…“
„Take this lesson from me: The darkest secret of each ideology, reserved to the high priest alone, is that its sanctum is empty. Never the believers shall approach to this truth.“
„Nothing to concern me!“
„But you will have to give in to the consequences, Themelis! Whether you care or not, you’ve done it: You tore the curtain of the temple in two, from top to bottom, if the metaphor is permitted. You dismantled everything, left nothing to remain. In addition, these texts, which are allegedly (or actually, from your point of view) not yours, for instance this poem. Is it not your illuminated unconscious that sends a subliminal message to us? Never I did understand more than today that there is no possibility to glue all these broken pieces together again.“
„I would not be pessimistic that much. Trivially, we only have to begin from the start again, director.“
„First however, read to the end, Themelis.“
The discussion ends fatal, and in this sense as a hype – however, we cannot reveal exactly the finale yet.