Beyond the Techno-Cave: Guerrilla Writer's Guide to Postmillennial Culture

Harold Jaffe is a talented, provocative writer, who rather than retreat from the harrowing issues of our day like most writers do, has forged ahead here in stories and essays that tackle even the most unseemly political, social and cultural manifestations, be they in the U.S. or abroad. Chapter titles such as Gitmo, Schizo-Terrorist and The Writer in Wartime certainly convey that notion. While the subject of "extraordinary rendition" might more commonly refer to a critic's praising of the latest performance of Pavarotti, in Techno- Cave it of course refers to the U.S. military's practice of debriefing "illegal combatants" (once-called POWs) charged with acts of "asymetrical warfare" (read: guerrilla) any which way they can. The Orwellian way in which our government has co-opted the English language is chillingly clear, but in Beyond the Techno-Cave, Jaffe beats the administration at its own game, exposing it through its own words. Socially engaged writing, especially among American writers is a lost art, making Beyond the Techno-Cave a real find for those who enjoy a dose of critical thinking with their reading material.

More overtly than any of Jaffe's work since "Guerrilla Writing," this "Guerrilla Writer's Guide" addresses the responsibilities and opportunities of the contemporary art-maker. We get manifesto, docufiction, and a range of hybrid texts in between. We get theory and praxis (though this sounds a little dry--maybe praxis-play is better). We get magic and the magician's hand, and with any luck, we come away equally ready to perform the unreal, immoral magic of the revolutionary. The term "magic" seems particularly appropriate to me given the visionary current running through the collection. The unreal, or perhaps what is beyond the rational, appears repeatedly throughout Techno-Cave. Jaffe looks at once forward and backward, outside the boundaries of the culture, to new spaces for movement, play, delectation. Dream and dance. Panther and Thai "artist." Imagination as compassion as spirituality as art as resistance.

In his "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Frederic Jameson writes that "...this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and terror." Via his trope of colonization, used throughout his new collection "Beyond the Techno-Cave" Harold Jaffe demonstrates a profound and thorough understanding of the ways in which the processes of cultural mediation Jameson indicates are at this historical juncture total, and perhaps terminal. Jaffe's praxis, though, as indicated in his motifs of dream, wilderness, compassion, internal exile, and the guerilla fighter's cagey exploitation of institutional weaknesses, priviledges consciousness and culture in a way that eludes a strictly economic critique, and owes perhaps more to Gramsci and Benjamin than other thinkers in this particular lineage. That said, the realization of the dialectical process in Jaffe's "Suu Kyi/Giacometti," is simply masterful, and suggests one of the many ways in which this collection might be useful to college-level instructors and students seeking to access oppostional strategies to the official culture while still functioning within its co-determinants. Even by the high standards that regular readers of Harold Jaffe have come to appreciate, this is highly satisfying fiction collection. The addition here of three highly topical and provocative essays serves to clarify Jaffe's views of the ways in which artists and writers might stage interventions within a postmodern culture literally defined by its processes of appropriation, and serve to widen his already considerable theoretical range.

Harold Jaffe, in his latest book "Beyond the Techno-Cave," expands his critical commentary to include artist's role in an anesthetized society and does so in style that has a rich, evocative clarity. The writing, purposefully lacking of fashionable literary pyrotechnics, makes up by employing a very particular rhythm, language and provocative narrative. Fourteen brutally honest texts, full of acute observations and calculated speculations, transmit Mr. Jaffe's own brand of social anthropology. He calls these texts "docufictions." The book works on many levels, but its main premise highlights the simple fact that more often than not writing about the truth requires not inventiveness but sincere depiction, and staying faithful to truth demands a morally uncorrupt writer. Sincerity of the writer depends on his veracity and this veraciousness calls for untainted morality. The chapter, titled "Slash & Burn: A Narrative Model for the Millennium," effectively sums up Mr. Jaffe's dissatisfaction with larger mainstream culture and his antidotes to cure the society's ignorance to the assent of totalitarianism. His diagnosis is that of intellectual forces and artists losing ground by either choosing to immigrate inwards or adopting the rules of the system in order to fight from within but becoming the mouthpieces of the endorsed ideology. He is especially disillusioned with today's literary productivity, besieged with "ivy league fecal fetish underwritten by a grant from..." Then, "How can art subvert the existing order... How can the artist create unacceptable images?" Mr. Jaffe's propositions underline the importance of morality of the artist that is considered immoral in today's scheme of things. If dissidence requires subversion, then the process should start by subverting the sterilized morality. Courage helps the engaged writer with finding the concealed truth, but bringing it out to the masses requires a healthy dose of "guerilla writing," which operates by "defamiliarizing official ideology." Rest of the texts in the book repeatedly point out the lethargy inducing solipsism of the global art community, restate the responsibility of the artist in "post-millennial culture" and call for the adjustment to the prescribed morality. If you are an engaged reader, tolerant of your cultural nerves tested, your morality checked, and in need of your principles rekindled, "Beyond the Techno-Cave" is for you.

Go spelunking in the Techno-Cave with author Harold Jaffe as he takes you underground to expose the duplicity and double standards of corporate entrenched American media, culture and politics. Once again Jaffe's genius examines the socio-political post-Millennial culture as it corrodes before our eyes, the final step before sliding finally into the abyss. Jaffe performs his careful micro-surgery with sharpened katana blade held high and bright-beamed spotlight aimed directly at the hypocrisy of the present American administration. And, at a time when few have the courage to step up and speak the truth, Jaffe subtly and skillfully indicts the American power machine as it struggles to maintain its ever-increasing death grip of domination on the globe. As always, Jaffe's style is elegantly varied yet remains on target. The eloquent, almost heartbreakingly poignant style of "Dance" resonates with a dulcet music all its own, while "Gitmo" is a searing interrogation of the horrifying, deplorable and shameful war crimes that continue to this day at Guantanamo, Cuba. In "Suu Kyi/Giacometti," two seemingly unrelated figures are aligned together to ultimately dovetail in a moving testimony of endurance. Inside the Techno Cave Jaffe's melodious prose sings out like a mystic shaman against oppression, against the neo-cons, against sameness and conformity. May Jaffe long continue his virtuosic performance-prose. It is fortunate that we have his voice for comfort in the vast void of what passes for culture these days; "reality" shows, self help books, fast food, Prozac...for anyway you look at it Dear American, you are not free, your life is owned, owned by the very entities that Jaffe rails against. Do you "own' you cell-phone, house or SUV? Or do the phone/mortgage/car companies own you? Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer voices like Jaffe who are gutsy enough to stand up and interrogate the mean-spirited mess of our post Millennial world. Tanya Shannon Belfast, Ireland