NORMAL

That is not normal. Everything else is normal. Like a normal day. A normal person. A normal piece of pizza, a normal movie, a normal idea. Normal is a horizon (vague, exterior, without distinct limit) that conditions our attention to the particular, a technique of the imagination.

Normal. As if that were clear. Normal to whom, normal to how many, normal to majorities measured in what way, normal in what sense, normal in terms of what factors. Specific technical criteria prescribe what is normal. Normal psychology and anatomy. They may use terms of proportion, limitation, average tendency, familiarity, or any other metric in their machinery of discrimination, to reveal what is not normal and repress the treatment of what will be counted as normal.

Normative because things tend toward a norm, because things are pushed toward a norm, because there is a norm, because the norm carries moral force, because the norm is a desired goal. Normalize because what it regularly produces otherwise lacks repetition, the capacity for unproblematic integration into a function. Normalized mp3s, normative time, statistical convergence to the norm. Conformity can be many things, but conformity to the norm is the one people worry about.

A paranoid vision establishes an imposing, smooth, unflinching, ‘basically’ undifferentiated surface that is the normal. A conspiracy, organized, understandable, directed by intent (perhaps an asubjective one). The visionary understands what is special amid the huge and unending repetitive, natural, machinic, normal of the status quo, everyday, usual, undifferentiated, rest of things.

Sometimes what is considered normal ceases to be normal in another context. A normal Iowa boy on Mars, a normal jet engine in your bedroom, a webcam used for normal portraiture. Aside from whether we consider it normal or challenge it to be outside the norm, to be classed as normal is not a lifetime guarantee.

SCALE

From a distance, it was nothing at all, not even a speck. Closer, it not only took on shape, but became many parts, joined in particular ways. (The observer can enter into its complexity, not just know that it’s complicated.)

When it was small, I could not see that I would interact with something so slight. For snails and insects, that meant I might crush them. In scalable polygon-count objects in a 3D world, that meant they need not be rendered, and perhaps need not even be made to exist. Forks and pieces of sushi cease to exist as the ball becomes large in Katamari.

When something is too small or too large, we become numb to it. Perhaps unable to detect it, perhaps unable to affect it. Tinier than my measuring tape’s smallest marking, it eventually stops counting as any quantity at all.

This numbness does not foreclose all interaction. The sharks could not bite James’s giant peach; they couldn’t open their mouths wide enough. At different scales, different things can happen to each other.

Scale is extension/reduction or movement negotiating commensurability. The negotiation part - that is scale. As scale changes, different things change at different speeds. Five miles over the speed limit is minor at 80, but huge at 10. Scale changes, changing the segmentation of each input’s sensitivity. (How a tree feels global warming is not how it feels carbon dioxide or warmth.)

THE VUTURE

What are the qualities of those things to which we attribute the characteristic of futurity? A futuristic cell phone, a country that makes our own look behind the times, a reassuring image that all will remain familiar and human a thousand years from now (Star Trek). Yet, it is something alien for which we cannot fully extrapolate a world, explicate a mechanism, or respond with any confidence.

The future threatens to destroy the present, replace it, restructure what we understand as here present: into something different. Not always something original, usually there are electronics, lasers, new ways to fly, altered feelings of repression and freedom. Some future is our destiny, but disjunctive possibility describes the futuristic in a way it does not for the historic: there are many contradictory 2020 scenarios and many established facts about the 1920s. At best we can navigate between alternative futures, at worst they will force themselves upon us. In other words, we expect others to face our futuristic as their future, as a threat subject to their choice.

McDonald’s is the future, limited data plans, renewable energy, consolidation. Current trends extend or come to an end. Problematics with which we are familiar are worked in new ways. Often that’s how we know it’s the future: cold fusion works, computers are intelligent, or genetic discrimination has been institutionalized.

Futurity is not just a name. It is also a feeling. The opening of Star Wars denies that it is our future, but we know in some way that it is.

EMPIRICISM

It’s the sun, finally back and warming my face. It’s global warming, it’s weather patterns, it’s all in my horoscope, it's going to put him in a better mood today, it’s a reason to go outside, it’s yellow light, it’s the way the world will end, it’s an excellent source of Vitamin D.

Empirical thinking is not just a preoccupation with particularities, details, materials and things. It doesn't mean you just notice more things. It’s a continued interest in things as examples, as beings insofar as they may be becoming-evidence. Not as facts, motives, niceties, unexplainable singularities, background, or parts of a body that is mine.

Empiricism “reduces” things to their evidentiary function. Reduction in the sense of focusing, rather than eliminating. Empiricism attends to things as participants in the construction of a theoretical summation. That summation may be a long standing project, modified by the new measurement, or still unformed. It may be stodgy or inventive, reflective or unthinking.