An Interpretation Of Zlomislic's Scar Tissue

Zlomislic's "Scar Tissue"; A Contemporary Look at the Gore of Existence 12:44 AM | Author: zxxzooz After reading through the April 08 issue of the CTHEORY newsletter, I found a piece that hit me pretty hard called "Scar Tissue" written by Zlomislic. At the topical level I found it interesting because it deals with a number of old theories on deconstruction, mettanarrative, abjection and the grotesque, but on a deeper level it explores issues of contemporary thought and existence of varying socio-economic levels, including issues of tradition, commercialism and consumption, the solace of death, social constructs of love and security, and of course happiness and its absence. I am going to paste the piece below and provide an analysis following. Briefly, here's what I would like to bring up as I explicate the piece. Zlomislic talks about the capitalist/technologist postmodern world in terms of facing the "Real" of death (a term Kristeva brings up in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection), the structured existence of millions of Americans and their hope for orgasmic release, the hope in a lastingly residual genius in our society, more of Kristeva's "Real" of the eventuality of death, and finally the futility of resisting it through social upheaval and reinvention. I believe this reinvention begins with Zlomislic's proposition of the mixing of high and low artifacts of culture to show their absurdity and illusoriness in the populist's psyche and hope for happiness. He causes the reader to question the ideal that one can create the perfect view of life using technology, ritual, and bought "things." Buying 'things,' then, becomes an act of quelling the chaos, and therefore empowers the inevitable commodification of and lionizing of goods that are espoused as the cure for sadness that these same goods and beliefs arguably cause, whether they be artisanal foodstuffs, cars, beauty products, holidays, marriage, or image editing computer software. Finally, Zlomislic satirizes the one thing that the postmodern human may still feel some solace in or have hope for: love; love, to Zlomislic is nothing more than a repeated construct of our cultural notions of safety (by extension I would say as a result of commodification, ie, you can't buy me love, but you certainly can buy me a beautiful house full of nice furniture, expensive audio/visual equipment, and complicated cooking equipment so that we can enact pseudo conversation using these items as a conduit for so-called true and heartfelt exchange). I am going to take specific stanzas of this piece apart and do a few readings using Jameson's notion of mettanaritives as they apply to ritual and commercialism, Bakhtin's notion of carnivalistic outpouring within a community, and Kristeva's theories of death and how people's notions of death provide information on their buying and consuming power. I feel that Zlomislic is proposing a wholly new, deconstructionist, and radicalizing way of thinking that hopes to shed the old methods of living, buying, consuming, and thinking that many people in the contemporary world sell themselves to and relish in without a second thought.