Episode 1: Individuals. from Individuals Eccentrics, Weirdos, Monsters, Pests, Creeps, and Alfreds.

Individuals, Eccentrics, Weirdos, Monsters, Pests, Creeps, and Alfreds:

Or; - On The Delicate Art of How Not to Have a Conversation

Episode 1 of 7

An Individual

I’m so well-mannered I’ve perfected the debonair flourish of making everyone feel awkward (1).

I suppose it’s one of the things that makes me… an individual.

At February Torture Garden, my pal Ruthy says, ‘Don’t worry, Peril, pandemic, innit? We’ve ’ad two years off. We’re all outta practice, mate!’

I think she’s being generous.

At Torture Garden in May, my pal Tony says, with customary frankness, ‘Well, when ya meet folk the first time, ya become a parody of yerself. Seen ya do it. Ya go supah-posh, ya go all, “Air, hair, lair! (2)”’

It’s true. I go all, ‘Oh, I’m frightfully sorry to block your free and easy passage through this slippery narrow corridor’, - and whatnot.

These kind of sentences, in a fetish club, tend to raise an eyebrow.

Lessons learned.

Since then, I’ve become super-friendly and said farewell to my old pompous self. I bound around. I flame amazement (3). I’m genuinely excited and excitable:

‘Hello! Hello! Hey! Hi! Woo-hoo!’ I even fly down the stairs at the Electrowerks, pointing at people, and say, ‘Ooh, you’re that amazing designer! (4) Woooaaah! Make me an outfit!’

But there’s always a snag, you see:

Just because we inhabit clubs full of individuals, eccentrics, weirdos, monsters, pests, creeps, and Alfreds (5), we could be lured into thinking we’re exceptions to the rule. We think we’re different. But we have to negotiate the interminable dilemma of the politeness-tug-of-war just like everyone else.

Yes, the politeness-tug-of-war (7).

Stand back from others, mind your own business and let them mind theirs, and you earn a reputation of being the stand-offish one who looks down a violently twitching nose. In a phrase, you’re ‘up yourself’! What’s the alternative? Be super-friendly to people who wish to be left alone and you’re the person whose inanely grinning face is right in their mouche (6). The right to privacy, eh? Move away? Move towards? Snob or pest?

I've toned down my ‘Sir Snobbismo’ (8) role recently, but instead I bump up against the opposite problem of chatting to people who just want a bit of peace.

There might, of course, be people who I leave alone who would be friendly. But I don’t talk to them.

I’m still learning the art of how not to have a conversation.

I’m pleased to say I experience many plain-sailing conversational encounters, but they’re not entertaining to talk about. Positively dull, darling. So, fuck those. Those convos aren’t getting a look-in.

Maybe I should carry on regardless but just turn the volume down on the friendliness factor?

Be friendly, gently. Gently friendly. Friendly gently.

If I don’t, I might earn the reputation of being…

An Eccentric

So…

Off to Wraith Club! Let’s do the whole phatic communion stuff, gently.

Remember: friendly gently.

[to be continued, rhizomatically…]

The Infamous Footnotes:

Some of my cult followers, and there are so very few, have told me behind-the-scenes, how much they enjoy the footnotes. They are becoming a thing. So there might be cult following of footnote fanatics within my cult following…

If you would like to waste your time, do have a look at them, and I shall be happy to waste yours. There’s even a delightful remix of Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ in one of the forthcoming notes to Part 4.

So, I proudly present you with these observations that you will neither read nor follow-up:

An Individual: Footnotes

1. The exordium, the premise, the prologue, the principium, the ad nauseam. [Return to text]

2. If you say ‘air, hair, lair’ very quickly you’ll hear ‘Oh, hello’ in an old-fashioned accent known as Marked RP (Marked Received Pronunciation), an accent similar to the art critic Brian Sewell. (He, like me, doesn’t drop his yods. He’s an infamous yod inserter. So am I. The sound refers to the -y- consonant that can be sounded in ‘suit’ (so you hear ‘syooot’ instead of ‘sewt’). I could phonetically transcribe this, for the sake of accuracy, in IPA (The International Phonetic Alphabet) but, frankly, I can’t be arsed dicking around searching for symbols on my keyboard, as technology frustrates the fuck out of me.)

Those of you who are interested in the features and sociolinguistic changes surrounding Received Pronunciation can consult a vast array of studies by Peter Trudgill, but here’s a free and incisive account of them on the UCL website: https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/trudgill.htm [Return to text]

3. See Ariel’s speech on how he subdivided himself in The Tempest, 1.2.196-206, 2nd ed., ed. David Lindley, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2013). Ariel is initially associated with transforming into the element of fire, rather than air or water, and I wonder whether Ariel is hermetically the ‘quintessence’?

I use the pronoun he in my reference to Ariel, owing merely to convention, but I feel, very deeply, that Ariel is non-binary. I adore them. If they are the fifth element then it explains why they are able to heal Prospero (in the famous volte face), who endures such psychic suffering. Prospero is finally able to see that ‘the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance’; - see the beautiful interchange 5. 1. 17-32. I can’t quite live up to Ariel though, as you shall see in this witheringly droll tale. [Return to text]

4. I actually did say this, I believe, at March Torture Garden to an immensely original designer, ---- ----, who, rather instructively, hasn’t spoken to me since. I continue to admire her work. Aesthetic appreciation of genuine artistic skill must, after all, over-ride the pettiness of masculine insecurities. [Return to text]

5. I see these nouns less as static social categories, nor as Ballardian psychic roles adopted in psychodramatic scenarios (in contrast to my usual behaviour in fetish clubs), but rather as ‘subject positions’ which some of us might, albeit temporarily, inhabit within a social structure. If you would like to see how subject-positioning works linguistically then consult the stunning Language and Power (Longman: Harlow, 1989) by Norman Fairclough. He was able to combine the methods of M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar and the ideological work conducted by the school of Critical Linguistics at UEA, magically grafting it all onto Louis Althusser’s ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ which, in turn, can be found in Ideology, ed. Terry Eagleton (Longman: Harlow, 1994).

Fairclough’s methods became known as Critical Discourse Analysis, a politically engaged form of contextually driven linguistic analysis. Further advances on his methods have been undertaken in the field of Feminist Linguistics, see Sara Mills, Feminist Stylistics (Routledge: London and New York, 1995) and have also been adopted as the basis of reader-positioning theory. [Return to text]

6. I’m intrigued to find that the slang term ‘mush’ (pronounced moosh) for ‘face’, might have derived from the French term ‘mouche’ meaning ‘patch’ or ‘beauty spot’ which were worn in the eighteenth century. Oh yeah, and worn at Torture Garden. [Return to text]

7. This is the central concept of the whole tale and the problematic dilemma everyone faces in every social encounter.

Deborah Tannen shows that our conflicting desires for both ‘involvement and independence’ place us in a double-bind: ‘Anything we say to show that we’re involved with others is a threat to our (and their) individuality’ (their need for space – to be left alone), and ‘anything we say to show that we’re keeping our distance from others is a threat to our (and their) need for involvement.’ She argues that it’s not ‘just a conflict’, it’s a ‘double-bind because whatever we do to serve one need necessarily violates the other.’ So, if we conform to the rule ‘Don’t impose, keep a distance’ we necessary violate the other rule, ‘Be friendly, maintain camaraderie’. See Deborah Tannen That’s Not What I Meant: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks our Relations with Others (Virago: London, 1992), pp. 14-18, and 20-21. Notice, by the way, how her book’s title, in turn, echoes the famous line in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: ‘”That’s not what I meant, at all/That’s not it, at all”’.

The most linguistically rigorous analysis of these competing ‘face-needs’ is explored in Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson’s extraordinary essay ‘Politeness; Some Universals in Language Usage’, The Discourse Reader, eds. Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland (Routledge: London and New York, 1999), pp. 321-335. They distinguish between two types of politeness which correspond to the needs of involvement and independence. These face-needs are summarised as: ‘Positive face needs relate to the desire to be liked and admired, and are supplied through greetings, compliments and other direct expression of approval. Negative face needs relate to the desire not to be imposed on, and are fulfilled by accompanying requests with apologies, hedging expressions… and other indirect forms of expression to avoid a face threatening act’, in Janet Maybin and Neil Mercer in Using English: From Conversation to Canon (Routledge: London and New York, 1996, p. 9, as

The concept of ‘face’, and linguistic ‘face-work’, formed one of bases of Brown and Levinson’s analysis, and was discussed by Erving Goffmann in ‘On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction’, originally published in 1967, and republished in The Discourse Reader, eds. Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland (Routledge: London and New York, 1999), pp. 306-320. Here we have yet another tug-of-war criss-crossing the other tug-of-war, for ‘The combined effect of the rule of self-respect and the rule of considerateness is that a person tends to conduct himself in an encounter so as to maintain both his own face and the face of the other participants’.

I think we all might be in a jam. [Return to text]

8. I was fascinated to find in Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety, that the word snob, in its ‘earliest days’ was ‘taken to mean someone without high status [my italics], but it quickly assumed its modern and almost diametrically opposed meaning: someone offended by the lack of high status in others, for the word snob was said to ‘have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility) or “s.nob.” next to the names of ordinary students on examination lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers.’ See Ch.2 of Status Anxiety (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 2004) for a full discussion of snobbery. Snobs have existed through time but the term seems to have appeared in the 1820’s England.

I’m actually not a snob. At all. Not in any sense. Apart from contexts when other people claim that there are better post-punk albums than the first two by Gang of Four. Considering his Situationist politics, I can hear my hero, the guitarist Andy Gill, turning in his grave. [Return to text]