Gunk Pastoral
A Cyclopedia of Conditions and Earnings
Everyone: I went to London and I discovered / invented gunk, queen of substances, empty ruler of the material universe.
Gunk defined: Gunk: Gunk is what exists instead of everything else. Gunk is the replacement for matter.
Gunk: gunk is not junk1. Gunk is junk’s junk. Gunk is smaller than junk and omnipresent as junk does not hope to be in its most godawful nightmares.
Gunk: ‘something, every proper part of which itself has a proper part’2
Gunk: gunk is not the opposite of relation. Gunk has infinitely many possible relations none final all subsumed. Gunk is the name for the continuous anti-psychological anti-point indefinitely futilely arrestable non-flux of the city. You could go on forever, if it were not for the blinding light of the gunk.
Gunk: in the Robinson films of Patrick Keillor gunk is at the edge of the frame the second after the frame changes3.
Gunk: gunklight streaming from streetlights, neither bright nor not-bright but bright only insofar as brightness cannot be consciously apprehended upon its immediate impression but must be (on the contrary) investigated and a determination consequently made and consequently as it is discovered to be ‘bright’ fails in the primary obligation of brightness, viz, self-revelation, and does not erase its ‘brightness’ for that reason. Gunklight is the gap in time or the charm of neural activity between impression and comprehension of the least clear and distinct clear and distinct idea. Gunklight is the non-absolute non-opposite of phenomenology and the perversion of matter.
Gunk: gunkflavour in the cheap candy bar that goes through the mechanics of satisfaction viz. crunch flavour-burst explosion of tiny particles of sweetness into the backs of the gums and crevices between teeth, travel to the soft palette and soft entry down the throat courting the epiglottis with a feeling of a faint stickiness which would at the very very most make one slightly unwell, but without any of the fact of satisfaction.
Pastoral: the complex into the simple4.
Gunk: gunk is that whose slip from the understanding is not due to its own merits but is the mere bad clue to its own featurelessness (including lacking that feature), so noticing its featurelessness does not either cancel that quality nor assimilate it to some idea of the sublime. Gunk has an infinity of relations, none of which exist.
Gunk: gunk is infinitely compressible and stretchable. Gunkcompressing and gunkstretching are identical. On a gunkish street the quantity of gunk may make motion impossible and reaching the end a limit of human potentiality, because the street is so short.
Pastoral: . . . and the seas of pity lie // locked and frozen in each eye5.
Gunk Pastoral: gunk pastoral is scary. I took these photos of it but I really didn’t want to.
The method was to look at something really boring and then to find that point in the photograph which has the least interest or attractiveness and move the image towards that. The difficulty is to prevent any sort of visual satisfaction from appearing, requiring constant motion and the taking of a photo before the beautifying effects of the camera have the time to settle on your retina.
Perceptions of the physically embodied nature of gunk, hitherto inchoate, will have been gathered from these photographs. The difference from junk is clear: junk, invented in 2002, is BIG, iconic, Debordian, fluorescent, branded. Gunk is not a matter of surface. Gunk is structural, it is a question of total urban environment. Thus gunk spreads to previously ungunky areas and indeed coagulates especially there. Architects and urban theorists have a terrible loudness fetish but do not realise that capitalism creates quietness as much as anything and that they need to stop being so cool or up-to-date if they want to understand anything about anything. The world is precisely created by the not up-to-date reacting to the genuine up-to-dateness which the actual date genuinely must possess. Not that junk does not exist – in Tottenham Court Road, what can one say except ‘über-junkspace’ – but junk is mostly subsumed into gunk. Gunk is no one’s orphaned intention as junkspace is the orphaned intention of theorists of megastructure. Junk is about anxiety; gunk is about the boredom behind anxiety out of which it is generated.
A red smear of a Robert Frank road blocked at its end by traffic lights; which are green; a good metaphor for gunk.
I go about it in this jokey way but this city, any city, it is so distended and locked out it makes me not want to, in this jokey way. It is so quiet but it did have some life in it, some colour; colour has not been drained but replayed, colour has a pastoral relationship to itself, it everywhere seeks to represent larger affairs, but scale them down, in such a way that flatters the nobility and the populace simultaneously. ‘It flatters the nobs by the vitality of their nobility and the proles by the nobility of their vitality’. A pacification of the eye which leaves the merest residue of what was violence in colour and might be freedom. Scrape off this mild, mild dew and you have gunk, which is what is so painful about the whole ordeal.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/779098
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lewis-metaphysics/
https://patrickkeiller.org/films/
https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/article/william-empson-some-versions-of-pastoral
https://poets.org/poem/memory-w-b-yeats