Fake Fate

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeFake FateJan VerwoertJan Verwoert Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreCourtesy of the author.View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint1. Plenty of games are played to fake fate. There is little innocence in them. Pick a daisy and pluck its petals, one by one, as you say to yourself “He loves me, he loves me not,” Catch a fly and pluck its wings, one by one. What do you think you’re doing? To the flower, the fly, and yourself? You seal their fate while you play with the idea of what yours may be. Is your love life at the mercy of divine forces, or do you command them yourself? Are you crushed or elated by the petal count, or titillated by the rush of power that comes with making the insect die? Does it even make a difference whether you suffer or act? For the flower and fly, you’re the killer either way, and what does the daisy care about how you interpret the outcome of ripping it apart. It ceases to exist, regardless. What is it with the sadism at work in these games, irrespective of whether you play fate or toy with the sense of being at its mercy? Either way you have a little jab at the violence of existence, you get a purchase on the pull of irreversible events, of endings that will feel inevitable from the moment you start plucking. You tap into (what may strike you as) the original cruelty of life, and feel its force at your fingertips. Shudder.All the while, of course, you know fully well that you’re faking fate. Neither will the daisy decide on whether you get lucky, nor does killing a fly make you God. Better knowledge, however, doesn’t spoil the game. On the contrary, it heightens the pleasure derived from it. Je sais bien, mais quand même… [I know fully well, but nevertheless…] is not just a formula for the weakness of the will that lets you surrender to the fatal attraction of games and addictions your better self would forbid you to dabble in. No, that French phrase also is a veritable battle cry, as triumphant as they come: “Ha! Watch me pull it off!” Petals and wings for starters. Licking frozen metal poles for the more advanced. I’m 50 percent Catholic, so I know the joy of being a cheat and faking a deal with God on having the cake, because it excites me not to know if he watches or not, when I eat it anyway. But I’m 50 percent Protestant, too, and, that said, I would never be caught stealing. This doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t fake things. A hypocrite at heart, I will then simply invest all the intelligence my mind can muster into mounting resolute defenses: “Cake absolutely had to be had and eaten. Wasn’t me. Couldn’t be. I’m the law. My lawyer has the facts. Get back to him on it!”The kick the cheater in me gets from faking a law only to break it, the hypocrite derives from the strength found in steadfast denials of faking or breaking anything. Try me, I could keep on going till the break of dawn, building ever more elaborate theories on my constitutive inability to ever hurt a fly or fool around with flowers. The knowledge that I’m faking it will just add fire to the flame. It’s how you make a radical: Get me in a place of objective untruth and I will put unlimited pressure on myself to sustain the lie for as long as it takes to cross the river of no return, at which point, the path taken will, as inescapably as irreversibly, have become fateful. I know, I’d also prefer to sneak away and eat the cake with the cheater in me. Unfortunately, the other side beckons me to remain consequential and finish this thought, come what may.2. Are there games that lack the cruelty of faking fate? I don’t know, but maybe there are dances. Most games thrive on the thrill of partaking in the fateful ways a then irreversible ending is brought about. The dice are cast. Les jeux sont faites. Rien ne va plus. Dances are different. They don’t want to end, they want to be saved, even and especially if they should be the last one, for the night, there will be more coming, for the continuation of the dance is not just up to the players; rhythm itself is the dancer, and the beat goes on, like life does, because things go in cycles.Some of the most attractive dances indeed could be said to derive their power to draw you into their roundelay from the way they, too, magnetize the fundamental ambiguities of life. The perpetual flicker of the Love me/Love me not might be seen to render them irresistible too: On a beach in Calabria (technically the Southernmost tip of Italy, effectively its very own thing), I recall being pulled to my feet and amicably coerced into joining a Tarantella dance. The age-old tune, played on a fiddle, lute, and flute swayed back and forth between two harmonies only, like a pendulum in perpetual swing, GGDDGGDDGGDDGGDDGG…. The lyrics, my partner translated to me while dancing, matched the cycle of eternal return: “…met someone and we were very happy until we got married and it got horrible so I ran away and met someone and we were very happy until we got married…(and so on, till you drop)…”. For a moment still, I heard the voice of my better self scream in panic from the back of my head: “Achtung Achtung, alarm, watch out, it’s a pattern, break the habit, get help, see an analyst, at least change chords, take it to the bridge, any bridge, anywhere other than back to the start…” A moment later I lost my sandals, gave into my fate, went with the flow, and had a great night. The crazy thing about the Tarantella was how they played it, as if the tune was laughing out loud every time it looped back onto itself. The flute player briefly drew breath, only to plunge back into the rolling waves of the music with renewed zest: “Shall we do it again? Deep breath, hell yes!”Afterwards I learned that what makes the Tarantella a dance of life, in the most literal (and magical) sense of the word is the homeopathic, socio-medicinal role it originally played. When a woman in a village was bitten by a Tarantula, while working in the fields, she would need to dance the Tarantella all day and night, till the spider’s poison left her body, and the whole village would join the dance. To fathom which Tarantella did the magic, the flutist needed to try different tunes, in search of the one whose key clicked with the bite and emitted deep vibrations on the frequency needed for pulling out the poison. In the Middle Ages, Gary Tomlinson writes,1 the Tarantella was one of the very few cases in which the Vatican admitted defeat, granting exception from its monopoly on governing people’s fate, by officially acknowledging that the dancers of the South could do what licensed exorcists couldn’t: keep the community alive and dancing. Did anyone ever get bitten for real? Or did they fake the bite to start the rave? No way of checking. Who cares!3. It would be very tempting to oppose the dances of life to games of death. This is, if it wasn’t for the fact that dances and games have a lot, too much even, in common. Their attraction lies in the way they allow us to engage the fateful ambiguities of life. What does it mean to win or lose when, a winner today, may be a loser tomorrow, or it may as easily be the other way around? To keep on playing is the only way to know. Do you suffer love when you feel it, do you make love real when you act upon the feeling? What does the daisy tell you when, picking its petals, you pluck at your own heartstrings? What side of the divide between who eats and who gets eaten do you imagine yourself to be on when you slowly kill a fly to watch it die? What, if not both sides, that of the cruel God, and that of the struggling creature! Indeed, the sadism of these games does not so much lie merely in choosing to play killer of flowers and flies. It much rather resides in the player’s prerogative to entertain the possibility of switching sides, between suffering and acting. The player claims the privilege of enjoying an otherwise fatal alternative, as if it was ambivalent, that is, as if it was of no consequence, as if no one died in the game. The actuality of the flower’s and fly’s dismemberment raises the stakes, yet only insofar as it intensifies the virtuality of the sensation—of mild vertigo—which the players create for themselves. Love me/Love me not, Like/Dislike, Crush/Cling to life, Kill/Maim (as Grimes has it): Could be either, could be both—at the expense of whose body the game is played over.The virtual indifference between the fateful extremes of life creates a fast flat oscillation—Love me/Not, Kill/Maim—which the sadist player creates for their own entertainment. Perhaps this is the point where who counts as a player should be clarified. In sports, arts, and the circus, we relate to the athletes, actors, and artists as if they were the players of the game, when all who are not in the arena, on the pitch, on stage, or on view is considered the public. Any performer, athlete, or artist, however, who has felt what it means to be at an audience’s mercy, can tell you that this distinction is as ridiculous as it is to call the mouse the player, and not the cat. Considering the cruelty of the game, existentially speaking, there is only ever one player, namely the audience, treated to the prerogative of playing at being both and either: in the winner’s or the loser’s shoes, lover or unloved, barely alive or still kicking…. Those who perform for the player put their body at stake—they are closer to the ball than the score—for their fate to be decided, in the eyes of those who watch the game (play or show) unravel.Blaming the internet is for prematurely aged cultural pessimists, I know. Nevertheless it’s hard to deny that this medium has played a big part in turning more and more people into players, appealing to, fostering even that certain sense of cursory sadism in audiences. The “fourth wall” that used to protect theater-goers from the admission that what happened on stage did not just do so for their entertainment, this symbolic barrier of thin air has now become a solid screen. Safely separated from the fates whose twists I contemplate, why would I not feel like little Caesar, equipped with exhilarating powers—thumbs up/click/thumbs down/click—as, before me, the spectacle unfolds of on-screen gladiators fighting out between them who shall live to face my fateful judgement: “You’re fired/You shall live (to see the next episode).” A cable TV president for a troll nation of online Caesars needs gladiators to stay behind glass and readily offer their petals and wings up to be picked: winners, losers, losers, winners, lovers, haters, clicks prevail…. So it sends out deep vibrations, shaking the very foundations of cursory Caesar culture when performers signal that, if they are to put their body at stake in the game, their fate is not confined to the virtual realm of the public’s entertainment, but connected to the actualities of death on the streets.4. For cursory Caesars to get their kicks it’s imperative to be shielded from the fates they judge by the screen they gaze at. For dancers there is little joy to be had, unless their body actually enters into the dance. Flat oscillations generated for the judges’ entertainment occur around a skewed vertical axis, that is the dividing line between options: Like/Dislike, Love me/Not, Kill/Maim. Deep vibrations, however, travel across horizontal planes. Here I don’t only mean earth-shaking bass, but layers upon layers of sound, color, motion, memory, and meaning rubbing up against one another, quivering from within.Let’s take a tune that got major parts of the global population dancing: Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.” The euphoria that this song irresistibly induces—the way it makes you want to get up and live—I believe, has all to do with how it layers feelings and thereby makes the strata of existence deeply vibrate: Pharrell lays joy and pain on top of each other. How? The song is set in a minor key, yet to an upbeat rhythm with ample swing. Try playing it without that beat (better don’t) and the mournful tone inscribed in the minor will weigh the tune down (as many covers on YouTube show). But there’s still more going on. Pharrell gives a fair warning in the first verse: “It may sound crazy what I’m gonna say” Say what? Here comes the chorus “Clap along, if you feel like a room without a roof.” A WHAT? A ruin? A mind blown? As the lyrics set the brain reeling, the music touches the soul in a most ambivalent way: The harmony that opens the chorus literally layers a minor chord on top of a major chord. You hear the higher notes ring out in the song’s root key, a mellow soulful F minor.2 At the same time, the bass drops to C sharp which makes it feel like you actually also hear a bold C sharp major 7 chord, heading downward and onward, in pursuit of resolution.As, pushing up against each other, the layered chords of minor and major create a vibration between moods, modes, or attitudes, their ambiguity stretches the muscles of the heart like a chest expander. The major seventh note rises up against the higher octave, as if indeed to punch a hole through the roof, while the descent of the bass drops the center of gravity below the root note: Not only does this room do without a roof, its floor, too, suddenly gives way. As kids, I remember, we were once riding our bikes across a field. Lost in talking about music, no one saw the overgrown irrigation ditch ahead. But we certainly felt it, as the bikes went in, and got pulled out away under us, while we went on up, skyward, until we hit the grass beyond the ditch, laughing like crazy. If I was to try and say what happiness feels like to me, I’d probably gesture to this sense of elation, of being hurled out into space, between strata, earth pulling away below, heavens stretching out above. It’s what the opening harmony (and lyrics) of the chorus of “Happy,” I would say, by virtue of being ambiguously layered and alive with the power to make the soul’s strata vibrate.5. Power politics need people to partake in the presence of power, if only phantasmatically, to gain a semblance of credibility, yet on an existential level. It’s what gladiator games were always for: making people think that, with the turn of their thumb, they partake in the cursory choice over Death/Life, Kill/Maim which power graciously concedes to them. For people to feel like they have stakes in the way power works, even and especially when it actually works against them, an even more cruel game is needed: the sovereign himself needs to offer himself up as a performer for the audience to (play at) judging his fate. The axis of flat oscillation is his persona, a skewed vertical axis, around which a whirlwind of contradictory opinions can arise. Anyone who passes judgement, can thereby get the exhilarating sense of getting a direct purchase on the fundamental contradictions of fate, which they would otherwise be at the mercy of: Who’s a winner, who a loser, who’s for real, who a con? These are existential questions when survival is about the money. Now the sovereign performs for the population of cursory Caesars: Is he a winner? Look at his power and riches! A loser? Look at his marriage, where’s proof of the riches? Is it not all debt? King or freak? One of ours or of theirs? Donald or Pepe? Fascist or just a frown? Real as his Twitter account says? Or fake like the hair and tan, of a show and dance man, hopping round the fire shouting his secret name “Fake News, Fake this, Fake that, Fakelstiltskin, Don Pepe, here I am.” The oscillation couldn’t be faster and flatter. The silicon mask of power and money comes on and off, in one pull.In his incredible account of the postcolonial grotesque, Achille Mbembe has analyzed precisely this brand of performance as the cruel game of fake fate, by means of which leaders secure a semblance of legitimacy when their illegitimacy is obvious.3 The carnival dictator, Mbembe argues, foregrounds the fact that, not just his, but power as such, is a cruel joke, a joke, however, that no one can stop themselves from telling, hence spreading—or a luscious parade, you cannot not attend, because it would be stupid to abstain when the clowns comes to town. Cynicism seals its own fate. By the time everyone has laughed about the fact that their leader is a joke, they have thereby consented to the fate of being led by a joker, and that power is but a silly feast one must nevertheless celebrate. Call it the self-sealing fate of the big media grotesque: It is as inescapable to have opinions on the current U.S. president as it is to listen to Mariah Carey over Christmas.But I have no business here bad-mouthing Carey. On the contrary, I think she can help. Around last Christmas, I was on a writing retreat in a Dutch forest. It started snowing, and for one participant, coming from the Tropics, it was the first snow ever. Life vibrated, out came laughter and tears. “Quick, someone put on some Carey!” a second participant, from the Gulf, shouted, and, sure enough “All I want for Christmas…” rang out, giving laughs and tears a touch of the “festive,” as the diva herself would say. Neither did the song fake any feelings, nor did it make the flakes any more real. It just helped camp things up for an instant, in the absence of ceremonial protocols for what to do when experiencing first snow in a lifetime.Think about it, what do most ceremonies that commemorate turning points in life, like weddings and funerals, have in common? When feelings are so strong, that no form of expression could be considered “proper,” those forms that do channel a sense of the deeply fateful, tend to inescapably be, for better or worse, as camp as Christmas. I don’t think it’s a modern thing only. When the Greeks put on masks to enact fate on stage, they knew that it would make the Gods sob and giggle. I forgot to mention that disco divinities like Nile Rodgers do what Pharrell did in the chorus to “Happy” the moment their fingers touch the fretboard4: throw things open, in harmonies that vibrate with fateful ambiguity, not to confirm the cynic’s belief that life is but a joke, no, but to embrace the powerful sense that, as we have no way of knowing what will come, true love of fate, as Nietzsche insinuated, may express itself in the form of a certain exuberance, that is, in the key of a heartfelt dedication to life’s unfathomable openness, as he put it, the great perhaps.Courtesy of the author.View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint Notes 1. Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).2. Here I should say that the root key of the song itself is rather ambiguous. While the tune of the verse is set in F the opening chord of the is a the harmony which the chord of the chorus is a F which the of the tune back into F each time the chorus the precisely when the the word Achille On the University of Press, I for this in my Watch Nile Rodgers his way through a in in how he harmonies into the disco he Love is so existentially yet on point, it makes you want to with up and around with tears of in your Previous articleNext article by for the for and by The University of no articles this