WORLD-SPORT: Act 1, scene 4

PAPUA NEW GUINEA, 1942

TINTIN:
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____: [aside.] It’s like ETA - they grab you in a crowd and shoot you in the back of the head. If they come for me first I’ll be quiet, then employ staff writers. They’ll do the work and I’ll get to control the ethos.

MILOU: If we are living in a farcical historical moment, does that therefore mean that we are constrained to be actors in a farce?

____: This question can ask for at least four different kinds of answer. I’ll assume that as you’ve already employed the aesthetic predicate ‘farcical’ as being categorically available to history, you are not asking (i) whether or not we are ‘in’ a farce (as a ‘yes’ here would amount to little more than tautology). You have already effectively stated that we are in one, i.e. that that dramatic means of patterning ‘experience’ suffices to ethically describe something as grand as a ‘moment’. You must therefore be asking whether (ii) we are actors in this farce, and if so are we actors by dint of some kind of constraint (issuing from the objective farce external to us, presumably, our theatrical employment contract) (iii) then “is this constraint there and to be evidenced by the fact of (a) the farce and (b) our being actors,” or (iv) whether the constraint implicit in the farce forces us into being actors. I’m having a hard time identifying the deductive poles of the question.

MILOU: I leave the nuances of verse to you.

____: Ok. In order to foot the bill this kind of terminal pessimism runs up for itself in terms of moments spent in the already-reality (as not yet conclusively believed to be a hermetically determinate superstructure but afforded the possibility of being such by the credit-system of the unknowability of whether ‘proof’ of such determination is ever unideologically knowable), it has to provide a pretty good punchline in the qualifying infrastructural-historical explanation. I mean, that is, if you want St. Peter to click “enter” you’d better make him chuckle.

MILOU: Oh?

____: Well, I mean. Action or even acting doesn’t have to mean lobbing a brick through the AmEx lobby. Why don’t you get a subscription to FT?

[Milou considers fainting.]

____: And anyway, isn’t this starting to reek slightly of a kind of clockwork determinist model? Are you trying to force me into saying something nauseating about the script of this farce being unwritten? Or is the choice of ‘farce’ - as the language in which the contents of the ‘future’ (yes, what a trite entity) will inevitably be spewed up - enough to finally replace immanence as a necessary precondition of sense-valuation with a kind of auto-pessimismo fuelled by AESTHETICISM of all things?

TINTIN: Yeah, someone get him a cola or something.

ARCHANGEL TOAL: Bumbo claawt Iyah.

TINTIN:
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