# Pawn Shop Fiction

## The Radical Aesthetics of the 2nd hand

I just love roaming around endlessly in other people's trash. A social decomposer, wondering in aisles of other people's clothes, other people's furniture, other people's electronics, things that they chose to sell, or give away, things that either they didn't like or couldn't carry. Thank god I am both a fucking hipster and a hoarder. Because these people don't know what they are leaving behind! They are giving away gifts and gems and diamonds for people like me to wear with pride, things that always have an aura, things that always are more valuable in the hands of a decomposer, who is able to recycle the joy of having a new thing into the joy of reclaiming a thing and recreating it again into something novel, a subtle alchemical art of turning shit into gold!

But instead of adventurous expeditions into pawn shops and charity shops and yards sales or greyzone marketplaces, the culture of 2nd hand seems to be something more than just consumerism or a Berlinesque hipster business initiative. There's a philosophical vein running through it and a cultural counterpoint to a world of endless production of more meaningless commodity, more single-use replaceable (no)things. In fact, the art of the past 3 decades has embraced this new 2nd hand culture. *What if instead of a composer of art, of music, of fiction, one was to be like the compost flies and the dung beetles, a decomposition agent?*

In music, especially in electronic production, we know this quite well. Sampling is the artform and medium that allows us to be decomposers, to take something that has been produced already and to re-use it, to break down into its constituent elements and recycle it. Samling brings unlimited potentials. You can sample anything! An amen break, a old decayed vinyl of New Orlean Jazz, the sound of a flock of seagulls, my voice, your voice, our voices smushed together. And then sample the sample itself, slow it down, speed it up, stutter it, cut it into pieces and throw it into a sonic soup, make it completely unrecognizable. And then use the samples in a drum rack, or a midi keyboard and play the urecognized lump of sound as a pianist. Or add the sample to a generative algorythm and make it play forever adding slightly more chaotric novelty each time.

This pattern is also known in the visual arts. The analogue of sampling is editing. Take a picture of anything, your self, your dog, a random dog, an AI generated dog, a non-dog and strecth it, splice it, colour correct it, use the lasso tool and tame it and turn the dog into a cat in photoshop! And then use an image of a mountain top and put it on top of it, then inverse it, put distortion and noise and mirror it 100 times to metastasize it into a Russian carpet pattern.

## Fictional fiction negates itself towards the Real

A common pattern in the above cases is a form of "artistic forgetfullness", an endless process of re-appropriation and the derooting, the decoupling from it's origin, an erratic fast-pasced dance of deterritorialization and reteritorialization. Our obsession with the preservation of origin and purity is shattered in the altar of 2nd hand aestehtics.

But this pattern is less present in fiction. Fiction is mostly about the telling of stories, of origin stories, from either a 1st person, or 3rd person narrator. And while we would expect for the 3rd person narrator to add a bit of distance that can allow space for more cretaivity in the use of the medium, in fact it is an even more priviledged God's eye view of the "true" account of how things ought to unfold. We need to move from persons to hands, an exchange into the hands of hands, from 3rd person to 3rd hand! It is this exchange that Borges started with his fictional works as retelling of real stories that never existed from distanced characters. It is like Duchamps "keyhole", his late work that urges one to voyeuristically look at a whole piece of art in its partiality, in mediated manner, through a tiny little hole like a pervert.

So I stand in virulent defense of 2nd hand fiction, stories told about fictional fiction, stories told about potential futures from fictional prophets, retellings, interviewing, autobiographies inside fiction. The worldbuilding allowed by such an instrument is intense and goes beyond mere fantasy such as in the worlbuilding of Tolkien or Frank Herbert. Its a worldbuilding that sound eerily like a parralel trajectory in the universe we are already inhabitting, the invention of new time rather than space. Because it is this form of ironic distance that allows one to look at worldbuidling as something that is not fictional and unreal, but fictional in fiction, a negation that neutralized back to base reality. It is in this adventure with the medium that fiction as an instrument can yield new secret powers and be part of the endless transformation of our world rather than a gnostic escape into another.

This is also the medium needed for fiction to break free from the dominating force of representation as other artforms have succesfully done. Rather than simulated and sublimated experience (i.e. the experiences of ficitonal characters) it can be closer to experience itself, breaking into the reality of consiosuness. Instead of reading the news on what is actual, you read the news on something potential. Anyway, in reality there is always something fictional about pure reality, it is filtered anyway and there is always something more in any non-fictional retelling of what happened, or what is the case, either in journalism, science or conversation. We are governed by an "invisible 2nd hand" and we bite it all the time without awareness. Spit and a finger or two might come out from your mouth.

Fake news are considered this taboo evil bestowed upon the world by the invention of mass social media. And this is indeed true when we do not realize the difference in mode when we talk about the actual and the potential. But isn't this because of our mindelssness in terms of the 2nd hand, our non-awareness of mediation, like fish on water not understanding what water is because they swim in it? I propose here something existentially radical; we can know the water we swim in, we can see it and even choose to get out for a little bit and walk on unexplored land. And we do this by new media that create buffering, distance and therefore create more spaciosuness, more space to inhabit. Mirrors do this, photography does this, writing does this, profiles do this and so does mindfullness meditation. But we can do more when we engage in "mindfullness mediation", a realization of the fakeness of all news and the importance of living in the situation if we wish to ever get in touch with actuality. Otherwise, when we can't have the opportunity of first-hand experience and action in a situation (be it a warzone, disaster, a big protest, emerging counter-cultures, revolutionary movements etc.) we are better of in the gentle caress of the 2nd hand.

So 2nd hand fiction is both ubiquitous and invisible in a way. It is an only few now that undertake it as a style in fiction, but many that undertake the same style in places where we would expect cold indifferent objectivity. It is a very ironic, tragic and hillarious situation. But the exhcange of hands and the wisdom afforded by this transfer and the new values, the new cultural ethos to support it, is underway. And so I offer my hand to the 2nd hand, to grab it and carry me away....