The ‘Ambitextrous’ (Overtone and Undertone)
Multiple meanings in literature, marketing, politics and even within the interactions of the day to day and the face to face are nothing new. They allow for the creative person to explore the human imagination, the wordsmith to get a kick, or the passive aggressive personality to take a shot. Playing deliberately from both hands, however, the ambidextrous text presents to us a more calculated version of the double intent. The more so, such ambitexterity seeks not to be revealed, and this is its chief departure from the coincidence, pun or clever play on words. Here, the merely clever slides into the sly, the amicable wink into that of the leer. It is particularly evident in marketing and politics that the ambitextrous is being employed, but beyond any specific usage thereof, there underlies the very ability for it to be used in the social structure as a whole. While the essential polysemy of language in general presents an overtone – something that desires to be known and thus attempts to take the fore – ambitexterity occurs as a converse to this, as in fact an undertone.
One of many possible examples of the former in popular culture, amicable, clever but in an inoffensive manner, a wink only rather than a wink followed hard on by a nod, occurs in album titles. One need only recall to mind The Who’s 1971 Who’s Next, wherein we ourselves acknowledge the sense of it being the band’s next release, perhaps the implication that they as a band were in line for something or other – given all of the famous deaths and breakups of the period, for instance – as well as the visual jape of the band members themselves urinating on a concrete pillar and having done their business, asking the simple question of the consumer. A decade later saw the release of Rush’ live album Exit…Stage Left, where no less than three possible senses may be taken; the band leaving the stage, the stage itself has been left by the band, and the stage as a space is what is left over after the band’s exeunt. Hundreds of other examples might be cited, but the point is self-evident: such overtones of polysemy are meant to be understood and quite consciously so.
It is otherwise with the ambitextrous. Though its use might be regarded as value-neutral, its underhandedness in both its method and its goal sabotages any possible ethic that could have seen to be arising therefrom. Given that I had the idea of the concept through writing what I hoped was no flippant flop – an oversize narrative with which I took great literary pains to avoid being a novel; the end result was more of a failed novel rather than something radically new – I also realized that a calculated effort to move the reader into another space of meaning through the unmarked vehicle of a canonical prose form was nothing more than a deception, however sophisticated or no. This instance can serve as a cautionary device for those future readers of St. Kirsten - sub-titled ‘the last novel’; and here there was authentic polysemy; at the time it was to be the final novel I myself would write, or if not, it was that previous, the ‘last’ one, the one beforehand, and thirdly, it was meant to be the final novel ever written by anyone; a concerted conceit but also a well-advised critique of the novelist in general; in a word, after this point there could no longer be a novel written at all – due out sometime in 2025. In principle, the creative effort must remain as the most focused, but also the smallest, version of the ambitextrous.
For its truer homeland is that of propaganda, and in all of its forms. As Zizek has suggested, ‘only when one comes to believe in the truth-value of propaganda can it itself taken for the truth’. The latter is not as important as the former; one has to value the very idea of being misled. Why would anyone so value such a force? Does it seek to ever provide a suitable and tolerable veil for an oft-intolerable reality? Not quite, as this is rather the function of the social form itself, and we have understood this general principle at least since Durkheim. He suggests that ‘the air is no less heavy for the fact that we do not feel its weight’. Point taken: socialization is the most successful form of ‘propaganda’, if we are uncharitable. But if we are more objective, we understand that in order for any society to function at all, its cultural apparatus must be accepted in the majority by the majority. Its symbolic forms betray their function when investigated by either the native speaker or an outsider – even if the tools to ply such a trade must be learned formally and institutionally and are not, and never, a part of any culture’s primary socialization – and thus there is no enduring mystery about their presence. Much of historical analysis rests on these same pinions, and it is thus but a short step from dissecting a society of the past to one extant in our own time.
The ambitexterity of ‘society’ as an abstraction rests in its ability to maintain a loyal fellowship, not a sycophantic follow-ship. Society and its polis are thus not ‘political’ in the specific sense of them being geared into the desire for power. Society has a power over us because we grant that authority to it through upholding cultural norms and participating in their corresponding forms of life. Culture trumps society just as history trumps morality. We are vehicles, in daily life, of both the passive symbols of our shared culture as well as active expressions thereof. This is why adolescence itself has at least two functions; it hones the adult’s skill in ‘maintaining the right’ in the face of youthful challenge, but at the same time, youth allows adulthood to make necessary adjustments to the social order, and in a most ad hoc manner. In this way, culture cleaves to itself the fluidity it needs to survive historical changes. It needs rebellion as much as it needs revolution, and it is up to the adult to winnow the one from the other other since the very incompleteness of socialization to be found in the adolescent disallows such persons themselves to make that same distinction.
So far, we have seen the ambitextrous as a false mimesis of polysemy, as a calculated creative effort, and as an effect of how society itself functions through its symbolic forms. None of this is particularly underhanded, but in each of the foregoing examples, the undertonal quality is, nevertheless, present. Now we are better prepared to examine the purely propagandistic effect of the ambitextrous; this is not only its authentic practice but as well its highest self-regard. If successful in hoodwinking us into imagining that our way of life, our manner of unthought, our sense of right and our suite of prejudices are not simply the best way but in fact the only way for human beings to live, then it has served its highest master. Propaganda is least effective to any of these regards when it is served directly from the State. We are generally aware that this or that politician seeks to gain power and thence maintain it. Secondarily, the status of being someone who actually makes decisions is also in play. The vast majority of us have no such power, no such authority, and this is the majority explanation of why we tend to treat our children, and especially, our adolescents, so badly. Contrary to a fashionable script, this includes almost all white heterodox males as well; no power, no authority. The stage is thus set for the ambitextrous to take firm hold.
Its leading edge is advertising. No matter the product being shilled, it is the landscape into which this item is set that holds the truer sale. We see non-whites, recently in a super-abundance which reflects nothing of their demographic ratio at large, but what are they doing? They are adding a pigment to an otherwise utterly Bourgeois setting. We see non-whites driving cars that in reality they cannot afford, living in gracious executive homes that are purchased by an insignificant number of their peers, spouting off in a tongue foreign to their ears, and driving their faux children to distraction by their ambitious social-climbing, made to look second nature in ads whilst in reality being a desperation of anxiousness. Just so, in order to remind us that this social order being portrayed is after all white at heart, we are yet called to witness white people doing all of the same things but mustered up with a sense of panache that non-whites are yet to master. With a salacious Schadenfreude, parents curb teenage desires in killjoy compartments, while very much in the background a reliable automobile is so noted. Reliability is itself being sold, in this sense, since teens are notoriously unreliable and in every way, and it is thus an adult’s responsibility to introduce them to a general responsibility, which apparently includes never even kissing one another before one marries. Being married is thus likened to driving a reliable car; the commodity fetish in this case is not about the product at all, but rather about a sensibility.
The ambitextrous sells what is taken for common sense, all the while actually being a sensitivity over against both change and to the human imagination. It is a fear of desire, an anxiousness over personhood. It compels obedience not to the State nor even to society, both of which have their own, self-authenticating mechanisms of symbolic persuasion, as we have seen, but rather to our own worst selves; the self that masks selfishness with both a self-absorbed consumption and an aping role-play of the martinette, the one who mimics an authority he does not actually possess. That children are the chief victims of this masquerade troubles us not at all, for our own memories of childhood which have survived at all and which are not diluted by the sentimental – the major function of the ambitextrous in advertising is to present family life as the very home and hearth of human happiness, another unutterable lie given the abuse statistics, for one – remind we ourselves of being chattel. The fascism we endured was only overcome by us converting to the fascist figurehead. We now not only live the lie of ambitexterity, we are that lie.
In this, the ambitextrous has successfully merged propaganda with socialization. In all of the efforts of the Tyro of the State, nothing political has ever come close to the rate of success to be found in contemporary advertising. And though we can find other spaces in which the ambitextrous is present – the schools are the most obvious example – in none do we find the sheer shameless showcase of purveying sentiment in the name of mere commodity. The latter is only a bauble, a representation of a hobby or the stuff of the dilettante. It is an ongoing astonishment, for the thinking person, to weekly witness the witless wonder of a way of life based upon so contented a self-delusion.
G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.