In Moscow, on May 17, 2008, a flying, radio controlled cock-and-balls, henceforth known as a dildrone, barged into a hall where a press conference was taking place. In fact as early as 2006, a swarm of dildrones had already disturbed a presentation by a virtual real estate agent in Second Life. Regardless of the several political messages it expressed wherever, the irruption of the dildrone, on its own or multiplied, has inspired us to the following declaration.
For us the dildrone is a sort of anhypothetical principle for any speech situation, a principle whose value lies in its capacity to regulate discourse and action in a broad sense. If it were not a giant flying cock, it would just be another buzzing trope in the junkshop of everyday menace (cf. Damocles). But as it stands, the dildrone bears a double efficiency :
— Actually, as a defaming machine.
— Potentially, as a flusher-out of symbolic dominations.
***
Actually, the dildrone comes into direct competition with discourse, by covering it with a treasonous bombination. Its contestation of a dramaturgy of speech acts makes it a defaming machine (dis- + fama is the origin of the legal notion of defamation, defined as an injury to repute). The dildrone defames, dishonours, in that it endangers those discourses which bet everything on the audience’s simply assenting to a display of repute at work. It interrupts any complacent « performance of status » which hopes to reduce the discourse to its attributes of social penetration.
Dildrone spins the wheel. Dildrone sweeps the field.
The institutional legitimicy of place (cf. the height of the ceiling) is turned into the ally of a successful dildrone irruption. Height in buildings is a form of architectural intimidation, known to cognitive anthropology as « handicap signals ». These, the dildrone scrambles and neutralises. Its meandering frequentation of mouldings and alloyed false ceilings makes it a particularly tricky individual to show the door to.
***
O dildrone, organesque fly,
Half shaft, half drone, when seen from side
Like a salmon in the Rhône, or tired trout mousse.
O Hero.
Once, at the Creamlin, the dild did tilt -
Point !
Not the Creamlin. He. Helicious beast !
Drone slashed from air, prancing in risible
Fritters in front
Of the ennobled bubbles.
***
Potentially, the dildrone identifies that which exerts such indimidation in a given discourse, and strips it of it. Political discourse is obviously the archetype of an object calling for dildronic intervention – political discourse waits for the dildrone. But on the mezzanine level, where rhetoric has moved over onto the couch, the phallus is a function that owffyednfll regulates the degrees of symbolic intensity within a discourse.
The dildrone, being prosthetic, naive, bombinating, saucy, and a tad moralistic, unseats postures that slyly tighten the screws while playing down the appearance of authority, those that come on the scene in the guise of emancipatory discourses with their own accompanying dildremes in tow, that is to say, discursive tropes that displace the assent onto their performance of acceptable status.
The dildrone flies in to peck at, and thereby reveal, these anticipatory arrogations of its own effectiveness. Not in the slightest a jealous re-claiming of the upper hand, the dildrone is rather always already ready to pull out the rubber duck of matter and ridicule from under the self-secure bath of clean public speech ; it does not stand being sat down on for long. The really pusillanimous claimer of discursive power will always find, at the end the forest-path of assent, a dildronic brigand who lies in wait to strip all spuriously gathered medals.
Considering the above, we henceforth place all of our writing beneath the aspect of the dildrone. Any discourse into which the irruption of a dildrone could be damaging is, for us, disqualified. Any discourse which happens to be threatened by this irruption doesn’t exist for us (any more).
August 31st 2013, Berlin
Antoine Hummel, Jacques Praillon (augmented translation Sam Langer)
PRACTICAL EXERCISES
W’e’ve submitted the reading of several writers to the irruption of the dildrone. Despite the temptation to celebrate Rabelais, we’ve excluded him from this ranking, since dildrones, in his works, can proliferate like carbon nanotubes and exist like an ordinary fauna of bloomers amidst the daisies.
Gombrowicz and the dildrone, + + +
Bataille and the dildrone, + +
Proust and the dildrone, +
Dante and the dildrone, 0 (stalemate)
Roubaud and the dildrone, -
Valéry and the dildrone, – -
Blanchot and the dildrone, – - -