BOURGEOIS CONVERSATION

By Blake Perry

            This one may get me in trouble. This trouble that may occur is a result of examining a principle universalized by trigger-friendly bourgeois intellectuals. That is, the principle of conversation. Conversation has been immortalized and mummified in our current political climate. Its essential qualities have removed from the inside out so that the bourgeois process of embalming and, thus, preserving the surface may begin. What are the nasty organs of conversation that rot and are not needed in the peace offered by the afterlife of an exploitative existence? The embalming begins with fostering a love for images used against the people one supposedly advocates for. It begins when the victim’s advocate calls for conversation and tolerance rather than acknowledgement of harm done. While true contrition is merely rotting flesh, the surface, the performance of conversation is preserved. The historical context and the functions of the removed organs are useless so long as one is able to read the performance of the tattooed and embalmed body. We play with the terms of reality in conversation and conversation becomes an empty word meant to suppress true action. Each time we attempt to really tap into what is within this “conversation,” we receive only the echo of the investigators’ tuning fork. It is all empty, the auditorium, the room, even the walls, hollowed in the moving company’s transfer of myths. In emptying the myth’s content, this company has trampled the owner’s intellect and deposed the structure of its integrity.

            Recently I was assigned a reading from Henri Bergson on laughter. In the work Bergson discusses why we find particular phenomena humorous. Humor is an aspect that Bergson states is only found within humans. In contrast, nonhuman animals are characterized by an automatic component that determines their behavior in a mechanical fashion; animals act upon instinct. The human predicament consists of an automatic component that includes our ability to eat, seek pleasure, and defecate. However humans have a dual nature, spilt between the instinct and the intellect (soul). The intellect is the creative aspect of humans that allows them to represent social constructs symbolically. It is also the aspect that allows human to critique and describe the conflict between instinct and social constructs. With this, humans are able to laugh because laughter is an action of the soul. It is an understanding of the center of what constitutes human life. We find ourselves laughing at the human who has tripped when walking down the street. We laugh because the tripping is a result of an absentmindedness and the inelasticity of the human. In this moment they have forgotten who they are and behave in a machinelike fashion. The momentum of behaving in an automatic fashion is what prevented them from observing the change in the concrete up ahead. They were unable to adapt to the circumstances in a soulful manner. They have become a machine.

            This explanation may seem out of place and you may be wondering why I would explain such a concept. All this is said in order to draw a comparison between the mechanical aspects that Bergson observed and the ones we see on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. The responses flow from these talking heads and their talking boxes automatically. As a dog knows to bark, a lion to pounce, a panelist from one of these stations knows to utter the word ‘conversation.’ In this context, conversation is meant to represent the principle of all ideas being equal. This principle is a natural extension of bourgeois culture’s superficiality. Conversation is merely a product of institutions. Conversation is to be consumed like a synthetically preserved twinkie. The wrapper and the twinkie itself wreak havoc on the intellect of those who consume it. If the twinkie itself does not eventually lead to an intellectual death, then the wrapper will contribute to the wasteland we find ourselves in. The benefits of conversation are rattled off as if they are irrefutable and we are to consume this greedily and unconsciously. Van Jones on election night will be provided with the opportunity of becoming our star black man! He will look his audience in their imaginary pixelated faces and micturate the necessity of conversation at this point in time. We are then called to imagine a safe space where we may discuss the impending doom of losing Washington D.C’s former black golden man’s legacy to the Kremlin. The issues of America may be solved by gathering around the imaginary table of equality where the standard has been perpetual stratification. You are not invited to the table if you do not have a pocket square, gaudy vocabulary that means absolutely nothing, a healthy balance of cocktails, Pennsylvanian Avenue addresses, and tenure at one of the universities we are raised to respect.

            Those who are seated at the round table of equality­— lest they offend anyone by having a head of a table (although all of their narcissistic tendencies that dragged them into this industry would have them contentedly placed there)—engage in pageantry. Words and phrases of safe spaces, equality, and garnering a conversation are articulated. The young students who unfortunately find time to watch the news instead of engaging their assigned readings begin to find the words fashionable. The words, conversation and freedom, begin to taste wonderful in the mouth. The students see the sense of empowerment and honor that the panelists exhibit when they say these words, and the student begins to mimic. The panelists are well trained in the art of deception while the students are not, due to certain distractions: a pending finance final, roommate quarrels over Mila Kunis’ worthiness to be in the top-ten women of all time, etc. Like a child, the imitations that they pick up are not completely understood. Rather their understandings are like the tattoos the millennials brandish as their scars of a painful past, all superficially constructed in the therapeutic narrative of conversation. The ‘trauma’ is thus repeated, reinscribing itself daily and trapping the tattooed in a masochistic playhouse. Is it not a wonder as to how certain personalities may be predicted? The prediction is possible because of the mechanistic quality of these personalities. The machine of bullshit is on a tight schedule, preparing us not for the dialectics that are faced in the literature but for the time-scaled punch cards of an internship over the past wasted summer. Students learn to argue for fostering ‘conversations’ in ‘safe spaces’ and ‘non-trigger zones.’ These personalities are secluded, manufactured, withdrawn in themselves against themselves in soulless apparatuses that eat, shit, and breathe ironic culture. These personalities are statues.

            The words that we learn to take on are in conflict with rigid personalities of misinterpretation. Conversation … within a trigger-free zone. We cannot have a conversation. Conversation is an exchange that carries with it the possibility of offense. The idea of exchange is articulated in the student’s psyche of promised protection but is absent externally. Students are under the impression that they hand over money to the universities so that they may foster a safe environment in which they can learn (exchange). However, somewhere along this line of thought the notion of exchange is left out of the equation. A contradiction without outrage surely suggests a meaningless or empty relationship. Conversation is a myth. This requires that we break it down in the semiological system. But I wish that my work be out of order like the minds that I am examining in this piece. I return to the idea that these personalities are machinelike and absentminded. We are able to note this when in ‘conversation,’ there is an inelasticity that Bergson noted. This inelasticity is made apparent when we are able to pass by the mechanical utterance of slogans and inquire into the meaning behind the political vomit. We are then met with a deer in headlights. The idea has not matured like the wine on their parents’ liquor shelf. The robot can only perform the operation that it was programmed to do. Van Jones has yet to do a segment on the question posed and thus has left his pupil defenseless at sea. This is where aggression ensues. Where in the demagogue’s lectures did he state that we must forget our primitive remnants and begin a hostile shouting match? You have shorted their circuit. The robot is unable to adapt to the circumstances at hand. You must now wait for the mechanic to fix the patch within a space that lacks sharp objects.

            I wish now to finally return to the semiological system discussed previously. Like all distorted and disorganized thoughts, they eventually return to the issue that they forgot to address initially. The word, sound pattern, or utterance “conversation” is a signifier. The message signified in conversation is an agreement for the possibility of change. That is, our ideas may be changed in the end if the intellectual makes the issues clear. It is an agreement to the terms of speech. This agreement contains the possibility of joy (the increasing of one’s ability) or offense, but what is crucial is the malleability of one’s position. However, this does not occur as conversation has taken on a form of bourgeois passivity. Conversation is only active in its aspects that are not bourgeois. It is active in the sense that it is not merely the demonstration of a collected vocabulary. In the bourgeois sense, conversation is stifling. Two opposed parties sit across from one another and spew out ideologies that are as rigid as the camera frames and Windsor ties being worn. One comes to think that mixing two opposed parties without any synthesis of these ideas will breed a dialectic. When it actually appears that they are talking for the sake of talking. Each goes home as rigid as the machine (institutions) that made them. Conversation becomes a way of auditing the opinions that are less formulated to a degree of sanctity. I am always tempted to tell the conversation robots that they have forgotten to tuck their wires, flowing with bourgeois principles, back into their empty, bloated and distorted corpses. They have been dead all along, and it began the moment they indulged in brie and olives in Cape Cod with the rowing team of Princeton.