c25.incubator

switch to tumblr

2010-06-24T18:57:00.001-07:00

http://superactually.tumblr.com/

I've moved to tumblr. I'm moving the whole archive too, using this tool, with the help of and on the recommendation of my friend David. This is a maybe a good idea. Maybe it is just a summer project, just to have one.

I'm learning a lot about blogs. Blogs are like jobs.

the incubator continues to function at http://superactually.tumblr.com/

I may even begin to consolidate and interrelate the stuff I put here into something cohesive and more structured than occasional

BAD EXAMPLES

2010-06-21T13:09:00.000-07:00

Bad examples can ruin a case, or point to another dynamic.

Good examples reduce a thing to that one aspect an argument needs from it. Needs it to appear as.

Good examples make use of an understanding we already have (or could easily accept) without being able to claim from the example any evidence. The interpretation is baked in: because we already regard everything about Nazism as bad, it can be used as an example of any tendency or negative trait.

Good examples illustrate a point and are part of the form of a particular rhetorical presentation (a speech, a text); examples are not the body of a claim.

Evidence warrants claims. How do examples fit in? Examples cannot serve as warrants for a claim without suggesting a concept, principle, dynamic, mechanism, or texture that exceeds the example (that is more general than an actual event). They cannot be evidence because they don’t represent anything more than themselves (they are anecdotal). They are not a claim, or the example would itself have made the claim entirely by itself. The example may have already made something like the claim, but in a different context or in a more obscure way.

Bad examples introduce uncertainty, confusion, and doubt. You say everyone is angry about it, but your example is of a person who is always angry, or is exaggerating for the camera. Is this anger the current form of anger that is ongoing? Is this anger intensified by opportunities to be heard?

The bad example is more than lacking. It’s suggestive. It points another direction, adds a twist to the moral it is being asked to stand for, confuses what we thought was being discussed with something else that maybe we should be talking about instead, pushes the audience back out of the grasp of persuasion into the crossroads of doubt or apathy.

FOREIGN WORD

2010-06-14T16:47:00.000-07:00

There remains, in our experience of foreign words, a quiet memory of our own unfamiliarity with the word. Crème Brulee, we suspected it would have cream, but did not know.

The fact that the name was foreign hinted that it was nicer. Crème de la crème and elite: how rare, how nice, how smooth the words sound. Like pastry.

But why are foreign things nicer? Because only the very nicest ones make it all the way here. Immigrants from India who can afford to relocate and can find visas and work.

The fact that the word is foreign also suggests that it cannot be properly translated. Machismo. Bourgeois. Kangaroo. Dharma. Kamikaze. Czar. To understand the meaning of the word requires more than a dictionary definition, it requires some familiarity with the social, environmental, religious, or political realities involved. The very sense that one does not know these things remains an association for such words.

OLDNESS: A NEW IDEA

2010-06-07T10:40:00.000-07:00

In one sense, the explicit output of academic work is the production of new ideas, new theories, methods, findings, and conclusions. Yes, new stuff.

Yet, what is old is a major source of power (and pride) for academic work. It has become almost axiomatic that the creation of newness only happens by the creative appropriation and re-application of things that already existed, e.g. sampling and remix.

Sometimes scholars argue that our obsession with new things has gone too far. Social scientists enter into contemporary debates which forget that what is new remains connected to what is old. With historical perspective, they argue that the Internet extends telegraphs, radio was wireless before there was wi-fi, youtube is in some ways like VHS, images made of pixels are like mosaics. Indeed, the very absence of historical perspective in these discussions is telling, they argue. This obsession becomes pathological when we, in our love for what’s new, forget what is now old, forget the way “old” and “new” function as labels generally, and ignore the connection between what is new and what is old.

So the argument goes, everyone is too obsessed with things that are new, and should really pay more attention to the past.

I’m reminded of the scene from The Dark Knight when an employee figures out Bruce Wayne is Batman and then announces his plan to blackmail him. If he’s right, then he’s wrong. (Don’t fuck with Batman.)

To diagnose our obsession with newness and offer historical perspective as a corrective should itself be seen as a new contribution. A retcon. It freshly re-visions history with sensitivity to the current world (in approximately our current terms). Arguments against newness, in specific contexts, are making new interventions.

Example: David Golumbia finds a way to doubt the goodness of computers by declaring all of history to have been an information age:

We have always lived in an information age; we have always relied on networks for communication; we have always used computational systems for the management of large-scale aggregations of human beings, material things, and whatever we want to call information; it is only by focusing almost exclusively on the tools we have in front of us that we can imagine the products we are using today are revolutionary.
The Cultural Logic of Computation p. 215

The pose of newness, or its effect, is strategic in discussions that have grown old and which insist that the old is always old and only the new ever new.

WHY WRITE 1

2010-06-01T11:29:00.000-07:00

Why write? The cause of an overwhelming habit is rarely clear to those in its grip. Do plants know why they grow, do musicians truly understand why they play? These doers are, however, familiar with their habit enough to muster ample evidence that might be used to establish a reason for what they do. I turn to this evidence to understand why I write.

I would like to write for others and not just for me. There is, for my writing, no seated audience, only scraps of attention like dappled light touching the inner leaves of a tree. The responses to my writing that come from my own reading remain my largest influence; I judge my writing as I read and I write to cater to this evaluation. (This is its own separate reason to write: humming refrains for myself.)

To me, my writing is best when it is lively and precise, does not overstate or underestimate. When it feels right about what it describes or when it challenges me to change how I feel about what it describes. Would it be enough for me just to scribble, talk, and draw? Something I like especially about writing is that it, like sculptures or big paintings versus beauty I have seen with my eyes closed, goes beyond me. In this process, it also challenges me. Creative realization adds something that imagination cannot.

I hope to provoke thought. All writing demands some thought in the process of reading, but sometimes mine is very demanding of thought and it is rare that a person wants to do this thinking at the moment they happen to be reading my texts. (I do try to encourage them a bit.)

I do think it matters how you talk about things. Yet, I think it is more important what you do than what you say, how you respond to talk than the talk itself. I know I cannot control who uses my work or how.

I do think ideas are aged by poor treatment and, with success, become more a part of the problem than part of the solution. I do not think this is because the ideas were bad at the time. I do not think there is any way to prevent this.

I do think there are more people going to college in the US than ever, and that this gives academic thought entrée to common sense, or more than before. I think some examples of this are obvious: cultural relativism, the idea that gender is performed, and the sensibility (if none of the technicality) of deconstruction. The Israeli army uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of smooth and striated space for urban warfare, business gurus quote Virilio, union organizers think about Marx. But more importantly, policy makers presume Walter Lippmann, cashiers channel specific techniques of math, journalists appeal to justice of particular kinds, programmers implement best practices of design.

The greatest impact of writing is its echoes. I do not think that citation and quotation are the main indicators of the influence of ideas. I do think that what is acceptable or exciting or backwards is understand to be acceptable, exciting or backwards exactly because of the strength of habit of a logic. Writing can directly engage these habits.

I know the university system is one center for the incubation and refinement of thinking that does its tiny part to preserve or change the world; it changes what the world is and what we know the world must be and what we treat the world as and it does this by thousands of specific operations on things that we cannot but eventually imagine as the world. Of course, it does this most thoroughly to those closest to it.

Everyone forgets most of what they read. Students in particular. I do think graduate students (and, to a lesser extent, professors) have a large role in spreading the gospel as well as maintaining the vigor of the theology. I do think new ideas are useful precisely because they are slightly newer, and therefore responsive to the ideas that came before them (this is like fashion).

The reason to write is to produce ideas that might be useful in an environment of other ideas. This is a goal of writing as a craft and a justification for it as an activity

TWO WORDS

2010-05-24T13:10:00.000-07:00

If you can find a distinction embodied by two different words in a language, perhaps in a language other than your own, you have a robust history of use that differentiates the terms and develops the meaning of each.

Connotations, everyday uses, idioms, phrases, titles, dictionary definitions, and etymologies all accrue to a word. These become material to strengthen each term and the relation between the two words. Are they substitutable? To what extent, in what cases, with what effect?

Example: the Spanish words “vez” and “tiempo.” “Vez” is a turn, a time, a go, a chance, an occurrence, an event. “Otra vez” means again, “de vez en cuando” means sometimes, “a la vez” means at the same time. “Tiempo” is time, duration, period, era. “A tiempo” means on time, “buenos tiempos” means good times, “tiempo” is also used to talk about weather.

The English word time does not lend itself to the distinct aspects of temporality the two Spanish words show. There is a time of opportunity and a time of duration, called Kairos and Chronos in Greek. There is a singular event open to chance and there is the duration that can be treated as a length or number. Events can be repeated or triggered again, now and then, or can be simultaneous (perhaps effecting one another, but always without one preceding the other).

GAME GLITCHES (MACHINE ELVES)

2010-05-20T23:27:00.000-07:00

In video games, there is one set of rules that are explicit and diegetic and another that is mechanically enforced and never described fully. The first set is how you would describe a game to someone else, or what would be in the manual, or the set of rules for a game that a video game is based on. The second set is what the game will actually let you get away with, what it will visit upon you, what will be the actualities of the game world. There is a discrepancy between these rules.

Glitches in games have changed with changes in technology, ways of rendering graphics, and types of gameplay. Once, players at consoles would complain that they’d been cheated if the game called something a hit that looked to them like a miss. If the game didn’t register a button pressed, something had gone wrong. The game was being cheap. These glitches show the game to be an object of player efforts, resisting them, and not just an instrument for them.

Other kinds of glitches have no impact on gameplay, but can end the game. Some events in a game are so routine they become invisible as glitches. Players game the system. In GTA, I like to jump on the roof of a moving car, shoot the car, and get a fast ride from a terrified driver.

Glitches show that the game is software grinding away behind the scenes. Yes. Glitches also show the nature of the thing with which a player had come into such an intimate relation.

The character of glitches, which soon becomes understood as the character of also that which was not a glitch, is arbitrary. Chosen. One cannot avoid a feeling of coherence or relation and totality to these arbitrary decisions. The game world is an orchestration of game elements in conspiracy to entertain and enter the player, to engage and influence the player. Glitches feel chosen, but that doesn’t mean players feel a person is tormenting their brain in a vat, or that there is a vast political conspiracy, or an economic necessity to their situation. What is the character glitches-as-choices create?

Terence McKenna writes in a different context of something he calls machine elves,

So beings are making objects, showing you objects, the objects are turning into beings and making other objects, these beings and objects, they jump into your chest - and then they jump back out. They jump into your body and disappear into your body, and then they jump back out, waving these things, just throwing this stuff in all directions. They are - the word that comes to mind is: they are Zany. It's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, uh, gone mad. And all of this energy - they are elves. This is what elves are. It's this weird thing, where they love you - or they like you a lot, but you can tell that their sense of humor is Weird …
this place is... somebody very weird... it's their idea of a reassuring environment for a human being! It's like a playpen. It's this warm. well lit, secure, womblike environment, and when I break into it they these things, the elves and the toys, are toys! These are things to amuse me. The way you would hang, uh, cubes and blocks above a cradle... a playpen, you know? Because children are supposed to coordinate shapes and bright colors. That's what these things are: they are toys to try and get me to coordinate my perception in this place. It's a holding area of some sort - someone's created this and is watching me.

This is the sense of care and attention found in TiVo’s iconic tv/elf, and the kind of fun and playful neutrality Google’s web applications sport as visual style. With an awareness of the kind of visual-affective construction of games occurring at this level, the world of the video game more easily ceases to require an outside real world for it to be constructed as a stylized reference to. It is a set of colored blocks rather than a city.

The style of games implies machine elves. Beings that make objects, jump into you and back out, wave crazy things at you that, like toys in a crib, orient perception for the world. All for you, all at you. These weird things teach geometry, motion, the solidity of materials, a game’s physics simulation, camera angles, scripting, and how bodies move (e.g. in animations). These weird things are rarely specific to just one game, they are about as general as a FPS engine or a convention for group-selection.

Machine elves are not so much the actual set of processes previous to a video game as they are the thing-behind implicit in the video game as a mask. They are hallucinations occasioned by actions, but the beings are like elves, they cannot be caught and held. They are a virtual machinery, the processing apparatus invented to explain the miracle of a thing whose production must be explained: the character of glitches in games

MASKING / SEPIA

2010-05-18T02:32:00.000-07:00

Masking. Consumer electronics mask the extreme inequality at work in their production, or in capitalism generally. Organic labels distract us from the fact that meat was factory farmed, not produced locally, or is unhealthy. The lying bastards. We find it comforting to believe that plausible denials and media spin are necessary, that practices without some kind of defense given or gentle excuses made would be untenable. That the duplicity is necessary, or at least strategic. That it has some reason.

Sepia tones suggest something old. The lost world, the past is a foreign country. To see sepia, we see the inaccessibility of what has been but no longer is. Regular color photos have a less nostalgic feeling; color camera phone images continue to feel like the world we live in now. Like black and white, sepia feels different. Yet sepia tones can be produced by many means other than age. Sepia lies?

Sepia seems to mask some thing that is real, but to which we have no access. Sepia suggests that there might be some lost referent. The years that degrade a photo to sepia tones have also visited dramatic changes on the thing photographed. Yet it is not these years but sepia itself that suggests to us some lost thing behind the mask.

The vocabulary of masking draws on western secular traditions (that come from Christianity, among other places) that see other religious and magical practices as fundamentally hollow. In this vocabulary, to cover with a mask is to hide, to worship is to misplace reverence, to believe is to misunderstand, and articles of faith are limits on free thought. For such thinking, masks stand between the viewer (e.g. ethnographer) and the one who ought to be viewed (native). It is from this point of view that masks seem to hide the face, rather than reveal, translate, extend, multiply, or transform the face. Batman’s mask does not hide his real face, it is his real face.

Sepia tones imply that what we see represents some absent thing that we cannot see properly, and to which we have little access at all. This is different from generic questions of representation (e.g. how a commercial represents a product) because sepia is not the content of a sepia toned image. It is a stylization that implies the existence, quite unlike our own, of a place, dimension, period, or thing. Sepia often does not stand between our view and the object we look to, but to the extent we treat it this way, the objects and properties it implies attain a reality that is not just sufficient for deception or necessary to manage popular impressions. It produces a reality from a special effect.

NOW PLAYING THE GAME

2010-05-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

The Game depends on word meaning and our understanding. But, the first time I read the rules, I read them several times, felt like I understood what the rules were, and didn’t realize that I had already lost until about the 8th time reading through. The Game is about logic, but it feels to me like it’s even more about computer programming.

If you comprehend the meaning of words at the time you read them, as you read them. (Instant implementation.) If you refer back to the meaning given to a term by previous sentences as you go. (Consistent antecedents.) If you are clear and focused when reading, in just the right way. (Proper interpretative practice.) If you know immediately what it is that you’re thinking about. (Self-aware rational consciousness.) If you understand words by turning them into an elaborate set of rules that must be enforced, even against yourself. (Automating algorithms.) If you stay on topic. (Dedicated resources.) You lose The Game.

Isn’t this how computer “languages” seem, to some, to be the same as natural languages? How the world seems well described by procedural representation? How meaning seems clear, inarguable, and necessary in a proposition?

Very importantly, there is no pride in being a winner at this game. By playing The Game (and this really means to play it properly), you lose. You are unable to beat the system whose function is to force you into a logical conclusion.

FORM OF TIME IN CIVILIZATION

2010-05-04T00:23:00.000-07:00

Finish a game of Civilization and the game will show you a recap. Playing the game is long and hard. You lead a civilization through thousands of years of (alternate) history. The Sioux from 4000 B.C. into the 25th century. During your turns, there are so many units to move and options to choose from about how cities will develop or research should proceed. Save, sleep, come back, load, and continue. While playing, you only know what you can see, what you’re in a diplomatic position to hear about. There a lot of cities, units, actions, and situations they can all get into.

In the replay, all activity becomes a series of states (change between them must be inferred), only a few kinds of events appear, turns where these events do not occur are not shown, and your view is no longer limited to what your units can see. This yields something like animation.

Animation shows the position of objects in motion in still images that switch so quickly they blur together into movements. Each frame is a slice of time, and the audience will see them as invariant intervals. (If things change faster in the first hundred frames than the next hundred, we will see movement as faster then slower. We will not recognize the interval between frames has varied.)

Civilization’s replay shows a surfeit on information; it summarizes in a minute everything that happened in hours of play. It simplifies by showing each frame, and moves through these frames like a fast slideshow. The pace of time attempts to find the upper limit of the user as information processor, concealing the reality that this time is arbitrary and causeless.

This form of time does not depend on perspective, is simultaneous for the entire system, marks events with a year (deploying time as a tag), and is just one possible way to display the dataset that gameplay generates for the purpose of this recap at the end.

It’s hardly time at all. It does not conceptualize temporal relationships. It is strictly external to the events it describes. This time does not come from rhythms of action. Software generates it from information it has been recording as you played the game. It represents this information as history, in its strange form of time.

CYNICISM AS METHOD

2010-04-25T14:12:00.001-07:00

Method does not happen once, it is not content to rest, but can be applied recursively, reflectively, repetitively, ridiculously. As a method, cynicism reveals wisdom and knowledge we did not know we had by drawing it out with statements we will come to recognize as false.

Confronted with a question, I take a first reaction, usually one that’s snarky. Snarkiness, without reason, is irritating and indefensible. In responding to a thing, it assumes that thing is wrong. The brilliance of cynicism (and snarkiness) is that it suggests a new reason that it might not have known before. This reason appears, and is the place where work and creativity begin.

Thing One: Cars are important to people and the way we get to the places that we’re going.
Thing Two: Cars are really fantastic and everyone just loves them! They’re important to places that need people to get to them, and cars place people in important goings.

Like an algorithm that needs random numbers, a first response must appear. Here, instincts in the face of uncertainty improvise a creative response. There are many tactics and they share with comedy the originality of language that disappears in written texts. Off the cuff remarks. Becoming overly excited about an idea, taking it too far. That is one tactic. Another is wordplay, turning verbs into nouns, swapping subjects and predicates. There are others. They can be silly, they are often trendy (adding the word embodiment), they are sometimes well-respected (etymology).

Thing two (above) suggest a line of argument: Cars let places command people while giving those people the impression that they’re very important because they are the ones who are mobile (an idea they like). Cars are probably not a good experience for many people and are very poorly understood as “useful,” perhaps because their function tends to be given rather than chosen. (It would also be misleading to say that a heart or ID card is useful; they are most useful to those who steal them, and simply necessary to most of us.)

Apply the method again: Are you so ready to accept that we’re dominated by an invisible and unidentified force that you would deny our palpable, if inconsistent, enthusiasm for automobiles? How can a place “command” anything?

This method is, like deconstruction, always concerned about being too naïve. This method is, like dialectics, obsessively involuting theses. This method is, like improv comedy, always ready to throw everything out the window and take the next step. This method does not guarantee full coverage; not once in this discussion of cars did it come up that they are deadly.

EXCESS OF DREAMS

2010-04-16T14:26:00.000-07:00

Capitalism demands an excess of dreams. It crushes dreams, provokes others; it finds a use for dreams that are healthy as well as those that are dying.

Perhaps we are naturally over-productive of dreams. Then capitalism puts those dreams to use. A dream is something to work for, and is therefore also a reason that can be given for work that takes places. Dreams retrospectively account for what you are doing with your life.

The American Dream gives hope or comfort or an excuse. There is not, in the end, any way to tell whether it has been achieved. Yes a white picket fence, but the garage is falling apart. How much is enough? What was it that you really wanted anyway? Becoming wildly famous is a dream we’re interested in, although few are actually interested in working for it, we’re game for watching celebrity, contemplating it, smiling at its happy parts, and feeling torn apart by bad parts. We pay for pop music about pop stars, reality TV about people as random as those that populate our everyday world who can become famous, tabloids of celebrity gossip, and video games that tell the same stories of legendary heroes.

The dreams you choose not to pursue are dreams we enjoy in entertainment, and entertainment can be found in almost every consumer product. The dreams you choose, are they dreams of success, accomplishment, confidence, comfort, splendor, nobility, and kindness of the very best kind? These dreams can be put to work, and capitalism is the economic system that will put them to use.

SOMETHING SO WRONG

2010-04-12T18:20:00.000-07:00

I like to hear something incorrect when it makes me immediately want to correct it. People with good IQ scores are smarter and therefore more valuable to society.

What’s impossibly hard is to hear something so wrong that I forget what is right. The very wrong thing blocks access to what is right, and, feeling that this is unfamiliar territory, my position in conversation is to accept (“provisionally”) what is grossly wrong until I find why it is wrong. Otherwise I disagree without being able to explain why.

Something that's wrong often resembles something right: it feels familiar, it applies anesthesia to the area.

Don’t throw your knife away! A life for a life. It will blow your pants off. India was better off after colonization than it was before. The first rhymes with something true; the second uses a mathematical/logical structure to justify the (very unequal) death penalty with equality; the third is wrong, but can you remember the correct expression? The fourth example suggests a very complicated discussion about world history and local changes over several centuries can be reduced to a before and after comparison, but then, lacking another ethical approach, isn’t this an insightful and true comment?

Something so wrong can do more than false information or illogical construction do. It can weaken the listener so that something that could have been said before is no longer accessible. Is it ok to throw away a knife? Is the death penalty fair? What is an expression for great shock involving the word blow? Was colonization a good thing for India? These questions, unlike the wrong statements given above, are much easier to respond to.

A statement can be phrased to deny dialogue with another person’s (often well-trained) instincts. This is a powerful thing about saying something so wrong. Let it strike others as wrong, but watch as they fumble for an answer.

MONEY, POWER, GRADES

2010-04-05T20:04:00.001-07:00

We look down on students obsessed with their grades. “Don’t they understand,” we ask one another, “that, beyond a certain baseline, all that matters is learning?” Unless they are going to apply to graduate school. (Unless they are like us.)

Say that companies structure power relations between employees and employers so that employers own and control the actions of employees, as best they can. The medium of this control, in a very significant way, is money. Of course, there are other reasons workers work: shame, pride, or personal satisfaction. But power makes workers work when they don’t want to and power inflects almost every single employee action. Workers might send the report anyway, but it is concern about money that will make the formatting correct. So money is important, alongside benefits, work environment, and other things.

Like jobs, classes are very strongly structured by one medium of power: grades. Students may want to learn, at a given place and about a given topic, but they may also want to sleep, doodle, chat with those next to them, or zone out. Most do not want to offend the professor, out of a well-trained sense of respect for elders, teachers, and people in front of the classroom. Most do not want to get into trouble, whatever that might mean. Most would rather keep their time in class as simple as possible, and minimize the amount of time they spend outside class working for a course.

Grades are what students risk when they step out of line, and grades give the instructor authority when things come down to it. Some students try not to worry about grades, but, for different reasons, have little in their life of clearer importance. Many are living in a total institution, others depend on parental support that’s conditioned on grades, many have not tested the bounds of their current lives and doubt there is much to be gained by trying now, others are proving to themselves that they have self-worth. Many will say they do not care about grades, or have already decided their grade in the class doesn’t matter. Even they still ask about grades and even in them we can incite worry by invoking grades.

We tell students not to worry about grades. It is a part of the instructors’ game of power to suggest students forget the grade and look to learning or good use of their time this month. For students already concerned about grades, forgetting about grades imperils their grades, and is not worthwhile. For students open to the idea, teachers ask them to act for self-improvement rather than out of regard for the major medium of power in the classroom. This is quite a request. Have the students ever really done this before? Acted for self-improvement rather than out of obedience? There are so many things one might do in a day, what should a student choose if the goal is learning in life rather than getting grades in a class? What should a student be interested in?

Asking students to learn for love of learning is like asking workers to work for love of working. As long as the grades (or, for workers, monies) are in order, it's a fine reason. But a person’s love for learning can point in a very different direction from what the teacher would like to see from student behavior, and then grades will drop and students will need great faith that learning is a proper goal. It is much easier is to believe in obedience to a system than to take the risk that its mission might be a good goal in your own life.

The one exception to this, of course, is students who can be creative and still get good grades. Such a student works for grades in addition to their free learning, and therefore has the resources (free time, strong background, “natural talent”) to secure comfortable grades AND pursue learning for its own sake.

LEARNING RACISM

2010-03-29T00:13:00.000-07:00

How do we learn about race? How do we learn not to point at someone who is pale, whose eyes are narrow, or whose skin gets ashy? How do we learn to understand and respect differences, and how do we learn what these differences are? We have to learn both racism and racial tolerance, which are not distinct topics.

Asian-Americans often live in relation to the common impression that they all want to be doctors, know kung-fu, are good with numbers, or have a special connection to laundry. To understand Indian people it would help to know something about what is commonly called their traditional family structure and gender roles.

When you learn that most Chinese people have straight, black hair most of the time, you’ve learned a stereotype and begun to learn how to be sensitive about the whole hair thing. When you learn not to insult white people openly for their careless disrespect (but indefatigable curiosity) for other languages and cultures, you’ve learned how to do your part in the continuation of racism.

The two tend to overlap. But one can learn racism without learning how to be nice about it. The reverse, however, is not really possible.

MONEY FEELINGS

2010-03-19T19:23:00.001-07:00

Still from Throwdown (Johnnie To, 2004).

People care about money. Of course, we all care about things that money could buy or that we do just for the money. But we also care about money, which seems at some level to be a bare intermediary whose only quality is exchange value and the funny looking presidents on the bills. In addition to standing in for values, money is a thing, a substance, a style of representation. Like evidence of glass or the austere sincerity of print journalism, it is not just form and content but a thing.

Money is gritty and tactile. In affective registers, we fetishizes it in just the opposite of the usual Marxist sense. Marxist “commodity fetishism” describes the regularized understanding of things as exchangeable objects, the reduction of craftsmanship and historical particularity to potential exchange value. Selling something on eBay, we present it as a thing that is worth money, usually stripping it of unsightly backstory about where it came from and what we did with it.

We fetishize money in the sense that money itself gives us feelings, commands attention, interacts with us through other intermediaries.

When we imagine money, we feel bitterly its slipping away, long for its embrace, and fear its sinister excess. For some of us, it’s best not think of it at all. That’s the promise of a full-time job with good pay and solid benefits, using debit cards, having an accountant, or Forrest Gump investing in Apple. Fiscal stoicism. Does it not elicit feelings in you to see someone get paid, throw away a dollar bill, or blow $500 upgrading a car in a way you can hardly notice?

Money is a medium whose material forms (cash, numbers on a screen, quantities spoke or calculated) we feel strongly about. Money can feel like ambition: cash money millionaires. Money can feel like corruption and soullessness: addicted to money. Money can feel like an everyday struggle: the paper chase. Money can feel like subjugation and misery: bills, debts, and poverty.

ARROGANT WE

2010-03-12T12:57:00.000-08:00

The plurality implicit in the first person. I could have been, I might already be, I barely avoid, I am sometimes, I know myself truly to be, I feel I would have been (if conditions had been different). Are you and I so unalike? Or, Haven’t we gone through some of the same things? This is a first person plural that writing ought to speak for, speech ought to represent with a pronoun rather than a name or noun: we. The plurality implicit in the first person can be phrased as a first person plural. We who believe, we who work together, we who care.

There is an arrogance to this. It is a formation speaking for others who it only takes a moment to imagine through its own terms. It presumes to represent things that it has grasped in only an instant, people it has named by one single trait. The terms are unilateral. We, good citizens.

The significance of this arrogance is not obvious. Is it the useful presumption by which leadership can secure something for the represented that they would not have otherwise? She makes promises about what we will do and wins us a contract; she says what we feel and changes policy for the better. Is it the haughty presumption of someone who thinks they know, but really does not? Intellectuals say things about our culture that a person can’t help but disagree with. Is it the self-serving presumption of one who claims to represent others to strengthen his own position? Corrupt politicians.

DIVERSITY: ORGANIZATION

2010-03-05T16:58:00.000-08:00

Why promote diversity? University of Chicago: For diverse and competing perspectives, because these spur rigor and encourage better practices. Firestone Tires: For a corresponding diverse audience or community to be better served and represented (or more comfortable with their representation and service). Also, diversity is a moral good.

Diversity is better than the discrimination we now see as preceding it. The changing meaning of “better” no doubt plays a part in this accomplishment. Better means more appropriate and effective with less associated problems, which is not new. What better cannot mean is that what diversity protects might matter to anyone else. Is it possible a gay employee could ever hurt business? What about a white employee at a black run business? Officially, differences of race, class, and age are strictly harmless as these categories are superficial social constructs that have no real meaning. Harmlessness means that harms are not legally recognized, and are therefore someone else’s problem (eg psychological problems of vicious racists). This also means all protected categories of diversity must have zero impact, none positive and none negative.

Diversity systematizes a scheme of differentiation whose reactionary terms minimize problems. There need not be diversity by height or favorite color, which are trivial categories and not protected classes. There are uncertain cases that are not always categorical, such as weight or (dis)ability. The scheme of differentiation turns things that are different into differences between specimens, usually as a reaction to politicization of the topic by those who would be members of a class. Organizations don’t sit around inventing new categories; they add them when they must. This usually means they protect the old before the young, proud before ashamed, and organized before disorganized. Categories promise a language that can be leveraged to deal with specific situations (we hope to use rights), but often function as dimensions of variation from a normalized center (you are black and/or a woman, but there is nothing special about being both).

These dimensions of divergence all count as metrics of diversity, and any one of them can be used as evidence to the world that an organization is diverse. Liberal arts schools have geographical diversity (including lots of international students with money), which resolves the question of whether or not they are diverse before anyone discusses economic or racial diversity.

We can use diversity to justify something that is different and harmless to others. We cannot use it to champion something that is different but impacts others, unless that impact is expressed in terms of the promotion of diversity per se. We can also use diversity to defend a carefully engineered system of homogeneity.

Diversity in these ways is closely related to multiculturalism, and is another case of liberalism’s insistent openness working out a compromise. The concept, however, appears many other places.

VIDEO GAME MONSTERS

2010-03-01T00:03:00.000-08:00

Some of us play video games and kill monsters. Why does anyone enjoy this? The idea that we suffer through nasty and unpleasant fighting in order to reach some distant happy goal, like beating the game and watching its minute-long video, is obviously wrong. I think we take pleasure in fighting the strange bestiary of each game. Fighting is exciting while scary, challenging although each victory is very likely, aggressive without rage, and quite technical while looking and sounding spectacular. What about the monsters themselves.

Monsters can be concepts. They are aliens, personifications of a gate, wild animals, brought to life by evil magic, technologically enhanced bodies. Or, they can be meaningless challenges defined by nothing but their scores in generic traits: rate of movement, number of hit points, type and strength of attacks, and specific weaknesses.

Not all monsters are scary. Players learn that even the horrific ones have a functional definition for play. A zombie is scary, stupid, green, and fast. But, for those who want to kill the zombie efficiently without being hurt, they are a kind of machine with specific function, or artificial intelligence operating according to limited rules. Such a player reduces the terrifying living dead, who lurch forward, defiant of the laws of nature, evidence that God has abandoned us, to an algorithm. The creature becomes patterns of attack, movement and weakness. A location that sends out attacks and can receive damage. The pattern becomes a rhythm and the player learns how to dance. That’s what it’s like to fight a boss. Hide on the side, run back and forth in the middle, then jump over the sweep attack, and attack the top of the head. It’s almost like DDR. Operationalizing monsters, players regularly turn monstrosity, horror, and terror into patterns to dance with.

This reduction is additional to other representations and not just destructive of them. The monster is an algorithm and more. It’s important to remember that monsters can be very impressive. Some are taller than you had imagined the game could allow, some are beautifully colored and covered with extra organs or equipment that serve no purpose, and some are too fast to hit with normal weapons. Monsters look different and can act different. This is not just diversity; it is an art of living things. Sculpture of artificial life of one kind. These living things are monsters.

The avatar spends time with no one but monsters. For players, monsters are not our friends, we do not hear their side of the story (or miss it), and we do not respect their wishes. Yet, this relationship is how we who play look at and communicate with monsters. If there are pleasures here, they involve an appreciation of monsters’ character and characteristics, a changing and complex respect for their power, a comfort in taking some of their damage, and a smugness concurrent with aspiration that we will soon be able to kill them.

REAL TIME

2010-02-23T00:03:00.000-08:00

When it’s up to date, when it’s constantly changing, when it’s never a minute behind, when it ticks as the clock tocks, it’s real time. This phrase is no longer a colloquial adjective modifying an abstract noun; real time is a technical phrase and its own temporal construct that’s going into effect all over.

Real time is data exchange updated sufficiently often that it seems constant. Traffic updates, tweet hits on live search, bus tracking apps, and on-the-fly data processing. They scrape data from a source, tearing it out of context, putting it into a new micro-timeline. The current entry is now, the previous entries get time-stamped and recorded in log files as the past, or are forgotten totally. The future comes from automated data acquisition routines and the data source.

These updates are never continuous. They’re a series of states running on underlying cycles so fast that they blur into continuous changing. Flicker fuses. With this blurring together of specific states, real time provides sufficiently superhuman updates that people experience real time at the same continuous pace they experience clock time. More important than overwhelming human sensation, real time can provide functional continuity for systems sensitive to any number of state changes per second. It just has to go a bit too fast for them.

Blur allows real time to appear simultaneous, but the present moment with which real time promises functional simultaneity is only that of real time itself. Lacking real time updates, the present is strictly local. Tying my shoe, fingers passing by, laces twisting and pulled. Real time makes a representation of any present moment interoperable with other real time situations, and this leaves us with the feeling that there is here and now, a present moment shared by others, which we can keep up with in real time. Yes, real time lets us keep up with it, but then real time also creates it. And while this technology, in a particular case, probably did not exist ten years ago, the constantly updated present of automated data exchange is now a natural property of the real world, and the most obvious statement about time.

STULTIFYING THEORY

2010-02-15T23:25:00.000-08:00

Sometimes social theory stultifies the possibilities of a concept or a thing. Sometimes with good reason. Racism means social and historical reality, not just stereotypes or insensitive words. The internet means connectivity, more than image viewing or a new computer platform. Sexuality is a specific discursive construct that emerged over a number of years in Western Europe. Software is something used in everyday life, not just a stretch of code unbridled by dominant use or interpretation, infinitely open to anything. Birds are basically animals that live in nature and not just drawings, sound effects, pets, or sources of meat.

Renaming is one technique of theory, and one response to it. Other names may remind us why researchers are “knowledge workers” or elephants are “charismatic megafauna”. But theorization is more unrelenting than renaming is. Shifting attention to other things is another key trick: a movie plays in a particular theater, a recipe resembles lists and receipts as a form of writing, a flavor has certain effects that define it better than its creators can. Aligning a thing with other concepts of it can be quite powerful even when working with materials that are no match for a theory’s conceptual apparatus. Oppose psychoanalytic practice to animatronics; compare anthropological and humanist concepts of culture to yogurt; respond to Cartesian dualism with My Bloody Valentine. (Three examples from Doom Patrols.) These are possible responses to theories that make concepts tired and nail down what is always moving.

Stultification makes a thing available to other things. It reduces (as a sauce is reduced, or as knife cuts make something smaller) unspeakable complexity that is without a name or words to a thing. Usually to a kind of thing. An ideal case, a diagram, a practice, a set of general rules, or perhaps to a procedure. That a thing is of a known kind helps us process it, although different types act differently and different methodological moments have treated their reductions differently. 60s American academic Marxism made objects of research into parts of Capitalism’s function as a system. 90s postmodernism made topics fluid, multiple, and open to profound change by fresh interpretation. Deleuzian concepts are potentials actualized in creative new ways for each case.

When I want to say what a thing is, I want to prepare it for use. But what kind of use? A miniature for a diorama, an algorithm for a process, an image for a collage, a name for a list, a set of lines for a network, a model for simulations. Stultification makes one thing part of a broader interpretation, and thus constrains the one thing (to relative fixity) in order that other things might move and change. Or, stultification finds a set of things that are larger than what we began with, and on which we will now ride out to meet the sun.

The production of banners (backed by intricate representing-machines with many moving parts) is not always such a bad thing. Responses abound, and to every simplification complexity can be reintroduced. Indeed, adding complexity is exactly the mechanism of simplification, for theory. “Making it more complicated that it has to be,” streamlines it for function. There are also those who claim that stultification is an error that can be avoided, a limit that can be transcended. I will reduce them to another case of the same dynamic: this rhetoric of truth always promises a new means of verification, a new truth procedure, a new play set where we can put reductions suitable for it. Usually by envisioning a new object or manner of charting, summarizing, reduction, representation, and stultifying what remains in our reach but beyond our grasp.

FAMILY TREE

2010-02-07T23:01:00.000-08:00

A family tree diagrams offspring of reproductive pairings. Mom and dad, united, produce children, who may join partners (who appear miraculously) and then produce children in the same manner. Environmental and social effects are generally not noted; adoption, marital status, date, location, and age are among the conditions the diagram does not address. The point of a family tree is not to visualize everything at once, but to trace a single kind of relation: child-creation. The skeleton is always the same, but each is applied and brings particular kinds of data into relation. On the lines you might write in details of relation and circumstance. At the point we could include names and traits.

The family tree describes the world in a single moment, describing currently existing children and all relatives that can be remembered. It is timeless, rarely dating childbirths or putting relationships in any historical context. It shows the outgrowths of great men and old couples: rather than illustrate the funnel of genetic material that goes into a single child, kids sprout out of a reproductive pairing. The up-to-date family tree of the present moment gives body to the lineage that would like to envision what it carries and how it can act. The diagram is an abstraction, a glyph, a tool of augury, a channeler, a power symbol: the bare tree is in contact with the family as a process of child-creation, of lines linked and forking.

Another approach to following relations more varied than child-creation is to consider the topic as a rhizome. Cousins who argued, children raised by an aunt, inheritance or alcoholism move wildly, making connections between elements. Aren’t these connections ultimately their own strange network? The goal of rhizomatic thinking is not another network. It is to see that networks are full of movements, drama, matter and meanings of many kinds. Connections are not permanent and are themselves things that must be perceived or enacted by someone. Movements (often called relationships) make elements, retard or encourage others, and are of very different kinds: meaning is use.

Movements have no definite points and what connects them is rarely ever just a line. There is no general rule for what a relation is or how to understand it. Stories about the family, jewelry passed between women, childhood homes, family sayings, trusted recipes, and characteristic mannerisms. We hear ourselves all talking about the same thing: networks! But varied movements do not amount to total diagrams with known limits. They tend to carry things on a bit further than expected, catch on something, or change the agenda of the one for whom they offered vision. The create passages that lead elsewhere.

ZOMBIE SEXUALITY 5: SUPERACTUAL DEFIANCE

2010-02-01T01:02:00.000-08:00

James Dean from Portraits as Living Deads

Zombies are abject, but watching them we become aware of their odd potentials. The anti-intellectualism of zombie movies is an opening to these other ways of being or becoming. Zombies have no social relations, ceaselessly crave flesh with the force of a desiring machine, move in unruly crowds, undergo constant mutation, and are a shock to thought. They violate all the rules, and their powers of idiocy and ignorance make them suited to the objective correlative of suburbs and malls. These potentials are the life force of zombies, and therefore of what they are made to serve. As signifiers, as a metaphor, as minions: zombies are the unruly animation of what was supposed (by those who would use them) to be instrumental.

Zombie movies are cynical, showing always the failure of technology, plans, virtue, and intelligence. The old tools do not work anymore, and we can’t get new ones. But there is also a tone beside cynicism, because these are movies we love and find both funny and scary. Zombie fiction is not just a series of snide remarks, as video game zombies make especially clear. The tone is superactual: a redoubling of cynicism after a cynical recognition of the limit of sincerity. It’s sarcastic and serious; it says something stupid because there is nothing to say that wouldn’t be stupider. Even though it knows to doubt, that in its expression it symptomatizes a problem, it still ventures its unhealthy comment. Hummus makes chips food.

For instance, why do zombies die when you shoot them in the head? Because the brain controls everything a body does! Obviously. Well, the joke is that the brain is an organ fetishized even more than the penis, and that we can’t help but believe that the brain does control the whole body, even of the inexplicably walking dead. Zombies are animate corpses here to tear apart and eat the flesh of the living, and they will really do it.

Survivors, as the object of zombie sexuality, live out fantasies of attacking without need for a license. Shoot everything that moves. Survivors enact the everyday dream of outsmarting idiots, making these ordinary people one of the few remaining cases of amateur violence in a world where extended violence (“action”) in movies is almost only carried out by cops, martial artists, and soldiers. A zombie crisis provokes a dilemma of authority, which is scarier than the zombies in Romero’s films (Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead especially), but a reminder of our human bond in some European movies, such as Zombie Lake.

On the whole though, survivors die. They have their moment as cowboys in the post-apocalyptic setting where “the world” comes to an end, but ultimately demonstrate that it is zombie potentials that win out. The zombie’s body technology, their ongoing mutation, their asocial, mutation and unwisdom are defiant. They do not resist, in a relation of force, but exterminate the terms of such a relation, and carry on in their wailing hunger that cannot be sated.

ZOMBIE SEXUALITY 4: BODY TECHNOLOGY

2010-01-25T17:26:00.000-08:00

"To describe an organism, we do not try to specify each molecule in it, and catalogue it bit by bit, but rather to answer certain questions about it which reveal its pattern: a pattern which is more significant and less probable as the organism becomes, so to speak, more fully an organism. … We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves."
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956) 95-96.

"The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body."
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (NY: Pantheon, 1977) 30.

Zombie flesh decays, the human body spoils. Becoming a zombie is an ongoing mutation that begins with infection, and usually requires passing through death. Some animals become infected. Some bodies appear with new proportions. Zombies do not hunt in packs, and they are not solitary. They are without social relations that might be known by kind and which would amount to social organization or even a society. They form crowds, with no central decision making. Contrast this unruliness with two self-respecting monsters of pop culture.

In Dragonheart, the dragon is a master subject. Its flesh is never weak. It lives in harmony with the code, that orders not just the people, but also the animals, the seasons, the mountains, and the flux of magical forces just beyond our perception. Its voice is charismatic and knowing. Its heart, strong enough for two. Its body is a war machine. Its tail can cut a tree, its breath can burn a field, its wings can lift a catapult, its claws can snatch a shooting arrow. Yet all it seeks is tranquility, comfortable sleep, cheerful merry-making in idyllic nature.

Vampires are players in a world where every thing is significant. The vampire interprets, and gives meaning to events. All things in its domain have a cause and effect, exist in passage between their well-studied history and weighty implications. Intrigues everywhere. Everyone is, to the vampire, a character amidst narratives. The vampire lives among signifiers, but cannot be reduced to a signifier (invisible in mirrors, masters of subterfuge, uses bribes and intimidation to remain unknown). Dracula dies when subjected to ruthless mechanical discourse processing. When trapped as the referent of an address on a road, a place on a map, a set of records, a particular body that can be processed his terror can be brought to an end. Some vampires have not been of this kind, with foul bat-like bodies they are driven by their bloodlust like beasts. Even in vampires, we see some zombie potential.

Whereas vampires are immortal, zombies live indefinitely. No one knows the zombie life course. Vampires play games of signification, and dragons embody the world’s transcendent order, but zombies are blind to such high-minded concepts. Dragons and vampires express a continuity of being in their powerful bodies, actions, history, and plans. For zombies there is only the present, with a deeply ambivalent lack of vision for the future. Because zombies express no message of the universe and no pattern of an organism, they’re a shock to thought. Survivors wonder if there’s no more room in hell, or if God has forgotten them.

All three monsters ultimately exist in a medium: their image is drawn, their descriptions written, their being constantly reasserted by artistic production. Films, novels, comics, TV shows, stories, jokes, video games, and so on. The zombie is an animation of a human body, it occupies this medium and makes it violently stupid, threatening but unexplained. A vampire may appear in different forms (mist, rats, a bat), hears and sees things at a distance, and has a presence that exceeds its body. Count Dracula and fire-breathing dragons reappear in stories today because they are more than their bodies and more than the particular comic they appear in. Zombies, on the other hand, are always reinvented. They rely more on each particular representation than do vampires or dragons, and are therefore more open to change.

Zombies are not agents that make use of technology; they are a technology. They do not act from the perspective of an agent that plans or knows; they are action. Their body does not serve their goals or perpetuate the organism as a pattern; it is falling apart. Zombies subsist in a medium of representation (a body, a dog, a film) and show what it is capable of, in a mutation that strengthens and weakens, in a crowd that forms and trails away, driven only by the constant, unsatisfiable "hunger" for the flesh of the living.

ZOMBIE SEXUALITY 3: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM

2010-01-20T15:03:00.000-08:00

Zombie movies are anti-intellectual. They require of knowledge a pragmatism it can hardly ever offer. Characters that talk smart usually die soon. Even the word zombie is a technical term, which is rarely used in a zombie move. Theories of zombie physiology yield too little and are too late to control the flood. Epidemiology is just as useless: a zombie crisis scenario would require recognition and drastic action immediately. The zombie body does not correspond to a truth of the world, examining it will not help you understand what is happening or why. It produces truth spastically and what it reveals does not enter a field of discourse or provide a confrontational principle to spark dialogue. This anti-intellectualism is an opening.

It is an opening to zombie potentials abject from human subjectivity, to what humans regard as a “zone of uninhabitability” (Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 3). These potentials yield lines of flight (developing directions of unexplored combination and change) that make up the genre of zombie movies. Different movies pursue different lines: the comic zombies of Shaun of the Dead, the sexualized zombies of Shivers, the vicious athleticism of reanimated bodies in 28 Days Later, the controlled zombie infection of Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the goopy flesh zombies of Braindead, the animalistic zombie sexuality of Zombie Strippers, or the way zombies create camaraderie for the living as they destroy all hope in Zombieland.

That’s the genre of zombie movies: many lines of flight of zombie potential. Does the genre reflect contemporary fears? The cause of a zombie crisis is a handshake with an enthusiastic audience to suspend their disbelief and get over the lame sci-fi premise in exchange for crowds of decaying bodies lunging at characters only to be smashed down with improvised weapons. When someone makes zombies result from plugging into the matrix or linking with an avatar, let's just admit this isn't interesting social commentary.

Does the genre show historical progress? Different zombie potentials are more interesting to us now than others. I doubt sexy zombies would have been a hit in the 30s, but voodoo drums and zombie powder could be cool in a movie next year. Audiences' attitudes toward zombies have changed, but zombies remain in comedy-horror, as they have since their first appearances in drama-horror movies. But, even then, zombies have had no real History. Or, to put it differently, zombies have many temporary histories and most have none at all.

The history of zombies is not worth repeating. That is one of zombies’ most endearing characteristics! Instead, a movie or a game tells a history of its zombies, that is never linear, canonical, or institutionally supported. There is no Count Dracula for zombies, only a few slightly older traditions of telling stories about flesh eating badmen of the night and bodies back from the dead to work a sugar mill. Each zombie story tells its own history of zombies, and survivors take what little they can from it.

ZOMBIE SEXUALITY 2: REPRESENTING

2010-01-14T13:46:00.000-08:00

Watching zombie movies we become aware of strange, zombie potentials. This coming into awareness need not be explained in terms of psychoanalysis or ideological critique. Such methods segment our perception of zombies so they appear as a particular meaning, a meaning designed for a critical engagement that has (in making zombies a symbol) amplified local conditions that demand critique in the first place.

Examples:

Psychoanalysis says zombies represent the horrific cannibalism of the family that must be repressed but, therefore, nevertheless returns. The critique gives form and power to “the family” and its horrific cannibalism adding to its cogency and force.

Marxism says zombies represent exploited workers, reduced to abstract labor and in perpetual debt. This perspective finds an analogy between how zombies are used and how some segment of workers is used, but its focus on the similarity fails to explain the rather more significant differences at the level of agronomy, anatomy, and self-organization between zombies and exploited workers: it fails to see zombies as anything but another (metaphorical) case of capitalist exploitation.

Ideological critique (which seems to be not just a standard part of discussing movies, but of watching them too) says zombies are a parody of our own consumerist life, hungry for more things, or wandering aimlessly through capitalist “public space,” the only place we feel comfortable anymore. The mall, this critique claims, is only a space of consumerism, and shouldn’t be considered a social place, nor is it changed when overrun by zombies instead of Christmas shoppers.

Zombies get used. Zombies are not signs of something else. Or, even as zombies are continually used for such projects (made to work, made to mean, made to kill), they are also an undead metaphor that does not remain loyal to what they symbolize. They become the primary life force of what they were to represent. They stand in for, but in doing so, they actually replace. Simulacra replace the object they are taken to represent. Represented, zombies are the defiant object that cares nothing for how it’s been represented. Representing, zombies (like corrupt politicians or skywriting) order the form of what they represent according to their own rampant sexuality.

They do not resist and are not co-opted; they defy themes larger than themselves.

ZOMBIE SEXUALITY 1: ABJECTION

2010-01-06T14:24:00.001-08:00

I've gone over a paper I wrote in 2005 on zombie sexuality and want to reproduce what I now take to be its core arguments. This will be a series of about 5 posts.

“We all know those shuffling, idiot bodies, wailing with a hunger that can never be sated, listlessly tearing apart the flesh of the living”
Steven Shaviro, Connected (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003) 171.

Zombies are animate bodies, usually revived from the dead, in various states of decay. They crave human flesh. They are the noisy silence of a machine doing its job in perpetuity.

Zombies are abject subjects. The possibility of being a subject (in the general sense) exists by many means, one of which is counterdefinition. Subjects are defined against things that do not make the cut. The general sense of being a subject is a concatenation of grammatical agency (subject-verb-object), humanism (man is the measure of all things), common law concepts such as competency and standing, and all manner of cultural material. This has all compounded historically, yet is performed together again and again, day in and day out. This opening for subjectivity is historically and culturally specific, just as it is gendered and raced.

The abjection that forms gendered subject excludes zombies for a few reasons. Zombie gender is murky, they are difficult to treat as individuals because they usually appear to us as a crowd, their condition as zombies is part of an ongoing mutation, and, finally, because they are zombies, and this trumps other gender markings (e.g. a feminine figure). Each of these exclusions not only shows why zombies aren’t humans, but also illustrates ways of being that exceed what is imaginable by the ordered production of subjectivity. At minimum, this means that zombies show limits to academic discussion of subjectivity, but, if we take such academic discussion seriously, zombies also show a kind of turbulence at the edge of subjectivity and a rather different system of gender and sexuality that lies outside it. One that refuses the heteronormative defiles of sexual representation.

COEXIST

2009-12-30T01:29:00.000-08:00

Be! Together! The two commands merge in one word. You ought to be! You ought to be together! Whatever is in a thing that excludes others need not be. A pacificism that rejects Catholicism shall not be. (However, a non-violent position, conversant with the Catholic concept of just war, is addressed by an imperative to exist.) The call to coexist involves both what is (or how it is related) and how it is understood (or how it is related).

Some American Christians hate this bumper sticker because the cross should not be placed next to other symbols. The cross is the way to heaven; Islam, Wiccan, and the peace symbol are not. What people think and what people do. Insofar as they are Christians, they may have opinions, but insofar as they are Americans with a bad attitude toward diversity, their existence is not compatible with the slogan: coexist.

Who is to be together? Individuals? Peoples? Religions? Belief systems? Sentiments? This is different from the universal relativism of multiculturalist or colorblind politics. There is no generic term that each symbol is one example of. It therefore does not make a generic representation of units, as in the multiculturalist process. The character of its representation is to accentuate the compatible at the expense of what does not or cannot harmoniously join.

Religious practice is fine, but not with any theology that would do the work of refusing other practices too seriously. Is this a free pass for the Church of England and a refusal to Baptists? Even the Episcopalians are anti-Israeli. Or does that not conflict with the injunction to coexist? (What about Episcopalian parishes leaving the U.S. Episcopal Church because it fails to privilege heterosexuality?)

Coexist. Defer to the authority of coexistence, and oppose nothing that might be named a tradition, ideology, or religion. The benefit, for those onboard with this secular position, is that they appreciate the diplomacy involved in playing “coexist.” We allow the free practice of whatever thinking and belief, until our laws are broken, or our interests opposed. Then we coexist by individualizing the practice, treating it as deviant or pathological, a personal quirk and thus entirely optional. Then we allow others to exist, but have them do it elsewhere. As soon as a problem arises, however, we are looking for a way to re-interpret their tradition to increase compatiblity with our own.

If the failure of coexistence is already clear, this is a liberal impossible-dream fantasy, suggesting hope for the future. Coexistence is not the future, and is no more inevitable than the power of liberal government around the world. Coexistence is one way of handling some different things that can be uncomfortably lumped together. It is strategic for some things, but those who do not aspire to coexistence are not behind the times. They do live in the past, because that time before we want to coexist is our own history.

HOW ARE YOU

2009-12-18T12:01:00.000-08:00

When someone says, “words don’t mean, they function,” isn’t it a performative contradiction? Doesn’t that sentence depend on words meaning? It could, or it could also not. Consider a case where words function rather than mean and, yet, also may still function by meaning.

How are you? "Fine" means things aren’t quite right. "Good" means we don’t have to talk about it. "Great" means there’s some story or good news. "Not so good" means we’re compelled to talk about it. Attacking the question is too mean, because everyone knows the question is not a literal one.

Literalism has almost nothing to do with it. What does the question literally mean? In what manner, for what reason, with what meaning, to what effect, by what name or title, to what degree, in what condition, at what price are you (doing)? It would be dumb cynicism to accuse the question of lacking literalism. “How are you?” really means, “this is your first chance to indicate to me that your disposition should be recognized to influence our interaction,” and, “I’m transitioning politely from greeting to conversation.” It is not an information request as to your present state, we are not really going to discuss your mood now. Instead, if you’re in no condition for what is about to happen, let me know now. Otherwise just say "good."

We all understand how to work the system, though I doubt we’re all conscious of the situation as a language game, or of the words' specialized meaning within the context. How do you resolve this? Do the words mean or function? Do the words mean something, which is so specialized it hardly resembles their definitions in any dictionaries? Or, do the words function in social situations, in a way we need not understand in terms of signification or meaning? And, if the words do signify in this case, their actual meanings still remain unsaid.

Foucault on Domination

2009-12-08T17:22:00.000-08:00

In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversal. At every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between adversaries. Equally, the relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment, give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power. The consequence of this instability is the ability to decipher the same events and the same transformation either from inside the history of struggle or from the standpoint of the power relationships. The interpretations which result will not consist of the same elements of meaning or the same links or the same types of intelligibility, although they refer to the same historical fabric and each of the two analyses must have reference to the other. In fact it is precisely the disparities between the two readings which make visible those fundamental phenomena of "domination" which are present in a large number of human societies.
Domination is in fact a general structure of power whose ramifications and consequences can sometimes be found descending to the most incalcitrant fibers of society. But at the same time it is a strategic situation more or less taken for granted and consolidated by means of a long-term confrontation between adversaries. It can certainly happen that the fact of domination may only be the transcription of a mechanism of power resulting from confrontation and its consequences (a political [*319] structure stemming from invasion); it may also be that a relationship of struggle between two adversaries is the result of power relations with the conflicts and cleavages which ensue. But what makes the domination of a group, a caste, or a class, together with the resistance and revolts which that domination comes up against, a central phenomenon in this history of societies is that they manifest in a massive and universalizing form, at the level of the whole social body, the locking together of power relations with relations of strategy and the results proceeding from their interaction.
(Power/Knowledge, p318-319)

I take this to mean that domination appears as such from a perspective arising in the confrontation of two groups, as a kind of historiographical residue of a historical struggle. Like a battle at the level of history. But then F continues to say that domination is very real, and might be a fair characterization of power relations in a given society. That's fine but also cedes ground to the marxist & anti-imperialist theories that it's supposed to critique. Maybe that's strategic, as this is from 1982.

I think that the word transcription here is like DNA transcription, or reterritorialization in D&G. So in the case of invasion, things are transcribed in a way and there are consequences of that transcription. It could be the word translation or, maybe, transliteration. But the point if imposition.

I think that the last sentence absolutely makes possible the top-down history of bourgeois domination that F claims he avoids. Anyway, he is always on and on about how he is not giving us a method or a theory, but just answering his little pet questions in his little backyard garden.

TYPICAL

2009-12-07T15:18:00.000-08:00

I am typical. And this typification multiplies the power of my action. I spend most of the day sitting at a chair, I like to eat salty snacks, I have a mobile phone, use my debit card often, ignore things that seem distant and unimportant, don’t like war but do little to stop it, try to save money, like good music, forget to dust the living room.

The power (social or political) of being typical is not the agency of my free will. In being typical, I do not stand alone. I am not unlike the others. I am not out to have my voice heard. I am not the agency of my opinions. The power of being typical is exactly the power that lies in my apparent passivity. In my easy-to-ignore humdrum banality. Like dharma or Tao, it appears bland or conservative, but is also active and infinitely intricate. Paradoxical and incomprehensible, the typical is not hard to summarize. It is too easy to summarize.

Norms and demographics represent what is typical. They will often order and stand in for the typical. They supplant the typical. True, but this portrayal is like saying that a window is a barrier that keeps out the cold. It is also representing something. It is a surprisingly effective creature at letting us know, in its strange way, what is on the other side of it from the viewer.

It is the typical that norms aim to discover, and shape. It is the typical with which government programs, the work of art, and corporate consultants must negotiate. It is the typical that we accomplish in our least individualistic moments, although our most vain attempts to be unique may amount to the same thing as well.

The typical has been known by other names, such as ideology and cultural politics. These also organize the humdrum of everyday life into a mixed form of action and meaning, held together by repetition, truth effects, and hegemonic deployment. But the typical is also accessible to me in everyday life in another way than observation and theorization. I can back into it. I can express the power of those who appreciate graffiti by turning a blind eye to its creation. I express the weakness of the DMCA by getting music for free online. I embody the rain’s strong suggestion that I not go outside.

I am a point of contact between political projects, cultural change, the weather’s power, and my everyday life. I am an articulation, insofar as I am typical. I do the work of making immanent translations of transcendent tendencies: I am a focus group.

Practical Reflections on My Death

2009-11-29T18:02:00.000-08:00

When I know how long I have left to live, then I can know what it is I will do in my life.

I know already the approximate date of my death. 2060 or sooner. It’s the opposite of an expiration date, because there is no guarantee and there are no preservatives. Although the cause of one’s death always comes from outside, we are born to die, and death frequently punctuates my life. A little bit of me dies. That night something about me changed. The one you know who did those things has gone and can never come back. For those deaths no one mourns. Often we’re happy to see such death in others. With that part of you dying, you’ve improved. You quit that job, lost those friends, stopped hoping for something, stopped hating some part of the world.

The tragedy of death is that it portrays a totality that was me and announces that it has past, in its entirety. Death is surprising because we don’t interact with whole persons of the kind death renders. In life, one matter to others only in fractions. Death creates a totality that it declares dead, which everyone then must read back into each case of the one who has died. The case of his finances, the case of his forgotten friends, of his secret misdeeds, unspoiled leftovers, and of his remains. These all become parts of him.

When I die my name will not be deleted from all databases; it will, in most cases I think, be added to my record that I am dead. My organs may move to new hosts. One hopes to die without passing on debts, but passing on is what death is: the dispersal of matter, the transfer of control from one to others, the movement of some self that had never before existed out and away from all that we know.

Pictures of me will not be impacted in any serious way. That which I have will be disposed of as my relatives and friends see fit. I, as a project developing along the course of my life, will be in their hands. That I has long been something I promise (“I will never lie to you,” or “I will have my revenge”). It has also been claimed as my property for description (“that’s not what I meant,” “you don’t understand what I was doing,”). This I will require other animations, which will, as bodies inevitably do, fail too, in time.

When I die I will no longer enjoy the burden of accounting for myself, I will become more virtual than events and become voiceless. I will not see hear touch smell or taste anymore, even if forms of experience do follow the experiences of life. In some ways, I will break from the inertia of everything that ever happened to me. Insofar as I am incorporeal.

Some very sad people will have to clean up my room and throw away my stuff and sell what they can and I hope that from all of that someone else gets my speakers and sharpies and eats the snacks I keep in my room. But I also have, in the consideration of practical confrontation with my own death, a calm sense of ethics with a less vivid sense of cause and usefulness: please throw away my bad art and old magazines. Ironically, the books and furniture that were only props to my performances might be useful to someone else, and even make them think of me.

Should you think of me again? I hope to be shaken off like a dream whose lingering makes the day hard to begin. This feeling may be impossible to bear when living, as it is life that insists on living. But, in death, I feel sure, thinking of me will matter to me not at all. Think of those other things, and do what you will with my remains with the confidence that you have more of me now than I do. That you have had this much of that substance I call me for a long time already.

BLOCKS OF SENSATION

2009-11-22T23:51:00.000-08:00

Blocks of sensations are units of what can be experienced or felt that may have limits but are not necessarily defined by them. (Similarly, a forest may end abruptly at a lake in one place, but peter out into brush elsewhere.) Affect, in the sense used by D&G is sculpted of blocks of sensation.

Sometimes, often when half-asleep, my fingers feel wide and fat, my hands feel heavy, there is no detail to their sense of touch, they are ham hands, but warm and strong, almost unbreakable, as if made of rubber. Certain sensations are blocked out: if the fingers have fallen asleep, the feeling of pressure, what they are touching. Other are blocked together: the warm temperature, their own mass, the fingers’ nearness to each other. It’s the same way with armor or blue jeans, there is always some numbness in the segmentation of perception (as in scale).

Affect, in this sense, is a content (like a fortune in a fortune cookie) that is a substance (like clay) which gives form (like wavy hair). Affect may be a flow or a pulse, a mass or a modicum. (Continuous or discrete, a field or particle.)

None of this vocabulary aims to quite represent emotions that are fragile and delicate. Critics worry this vocabulary forces the indescribable texture of reality to shrink even further from thought, by exposing even it to a language of logic and signification. I disagree. This is a way to describe throughput, institutions, planning, zones, mediums, masses, uncountable liquids, immeasurable solids. A single cell protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. It fetishizes machines.

The language of affect function as a consolidation and strategic misrepresentation (codeword) of human feeling, to deterritorialize it from molar formations* (theories, formulas, Hallmark). Real emotion occurs interpersonally and its representations (molar forms) are as important as whatever affects subtend it. Affect may be a kind of material input for machines, but it can also be a stimulus for intelligences, or impetus for thinking. Pick the metaphor that challenges you more, and imagine affect that way, because it still aims to challenge the imagination.

It does not capture our most intimate particles in the staid and imperial language of logic and scholarship, subjecting it to that cycle of fashion, standard of rigor, infighting, bickering, and criteria of clarity and teachability. Although, if theorizing affect could simply be called a step, it would be a step in that direction.

A block of sensation is also what keeps one theoretical understanding of a topic from letting the topic go, from relenting in its interrogation, in its pursuit of the truth presumed to lie within the topic. Given a theoretical approach, new developments confirm it, deny it, evidence changes within it, suggest redistribution of its components, or shifts in its proportions. Thus, changes must be historical ones, and they result in increases and decreases, or shifts, but never in the release of something. The old terms have become, not just jargon or pig-paths of thinking, but the blocks of sensation by which the affect of the thing to be studied can reach us. This is the bucket over our heads within which we can see the stars.

* One aspect of a molar formation is that it may be a block of sensation, which is an apt description of that happiness which in others we are always attempting to probe.

Thoughts on Unit Operations

2009-11-13T16:13:00.000-08:00

I’m going to respond to Ian Bogost’s Unit Operations. I read his more recent Persuasive Games two years ago, like it very much, and always meant to get around to this book. Yesterday, without intention, I read it. What are unit operations?

Unit operations are practical routines defined against system operations and things that are not operations. An operation is like a subroutine or a macro, it is triggered and executed. This is a procedural unit, a function that a program calls or a series of actions that can be relocated arbitrarily in a broader set of events. In cooking, chopping vegetables is an operation. In an airport, to wait is an operation.

For Bogost, this concept of an operation is a post-structuralist alternative to the systemic possibilities of structuralism. A text is not an expression of a culture or an insular moment of resistance to a structure. Transversal resistance or defiance becomes the new way to think about refusal. Expression must be understood as articulation or repetition with difference. Any operation can be repeated, it is a procedure, but is neither deterministic nor totalizing.

The word unit, which appealed to me because it sounds like units in Real Time Strategy games, lets us envision the generality of “unit operations.” The word is generic, but has a particular resonance with Badiou, which Bogost develops with care and respect. His use of Badiou hinges on three key words: situation, count-as-one, and event. A situation is a set of things, that happen to be there. The situation itself is not a member in this set. When considered as a member of a set, a situation becomes a count-as-one. Trees count-as-one in the situation of a forest, and a forest can itself be counted as one in a map of a region. To exist is, in this model, to count as a member of a set. An event is something that radically reconfigures a set, changes what counts as a set. Thus it directly alters the situation, and forces everything that was before counted as one in that set to find some other place to be counted. If a fire destroys a school, the students no longer count as one in the situation of that school. To review, situations are the master term of beings which belong to a situation. Situations do not count in that set, but name a set. Events change situations, or, effectively, defy the title of the term that held the place of situation. It rocks the boat, or flips it over.

The schema imagines scale in a useful way so that a unit operation is both one routine and is potentially made up of many other things. I see this as an alternative to Deleuze & Guatarri’s assemblage or rhizome, which has a very different account of the relation between parts and the whole. For them, the whole is also a part, which denies a sharp distinction between situation and count-as-one.

The book fails to deliver exciting applications of this term, although it clearly does do something that bridges theory of computing and post-structuralism. I’m not won over, because I still feel that both the unit/set and operation/system distinctions are not compelling.

Operations make and become systems, just as systems are themselves operations. Žižek writes about anti-essentialist account of capitalism’s heterogeneity:

of course capitalism emerged from a contingent combination of historical conditions; of course it gave birth to a series of phenomena (political democracy, concern for human rights, etc.) which can be 'resignified', rehegemonized, inscribed into a non-capitalist context. However, capitalism retroactively 'posited its own presuppositions', and reinscribed its contingent/external circumstances into an all-encompassing logic that can be generated from an elementary conceptual matrix. (in Contingency, Hegemony, Universalization, 2000: 225)

Contingent, local operations amount to something that has a quality of necessity and universality. I was happy to see Bogost discuss Steven Wolfram, who previously designed an influential program for math and sciences, and has more recently proposed a new approach to science based on small-scale algorithmic actions whose input and output are totally local. For me, Wolfram’s theory is another example of how lots of small operations and a global account are not strictly differentiable. Likewise, Bogost’s discussion of Delezue & Guattari reduces their work to the connective synthesis (ignoring the conjunctive and disjunctive). He sides with Badious’ critiques (echoed by others) that D&G make all relations productive and additional, always “this and this and that and…” without any other connection possible but affirmative ones. I like to imagine that using the conjunction “and” and is not a literal imperative, but is a slogan, which might prod us in the right direction. A law that we will follow in spirit but break in letter.

So I don’t dislike the book, but have yet to figure out a way to put it to use. A unit operation could be a game mechanic, motif, or character. Those are things I'm interested in, but does it help me to understand them?

Book Review: This Gaming Life

2009-11-06T01:23:00.001-08:00

Rossignol, Jim. 2008. This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities. University of Michigan Press.

I’d hoped this book would be an ethnography of three cities and their three gaming cultures. Instead, it uses two locations to discuss different aspects of gaming, while fomenting possible lines of response to some attacks made against gaming broadly. These attacks say that games are a waste of time, teach us the wrong things, and make players docile. A game player turned game journalist, Rossignol mounts a fascinating defense of games on exactly the grounds of wasted time. He argues both that to relieve boredom is a worthwhile function of gaming (saying something about boredom in present society), and that players get more or less out of games, depending what game they are playing, with whom, and for what reasons. Guitar Hero champs playing for a crowd before a concert, women Wii-boxing at an afterparty, players designing mods to turn old games into new ones, professional Korean gamer celebrities competing for money and fame, and entrepreneurs bringing the joint stock company's infrastructure of capitalist democracy to an online galaxy. Does gaming just rot your brain? Perhaps it can do more, and perhaps Rossignol can make good on his decision to turn from games as leisure (long nights of Quake) to games as work (culminating in this book).

Alongside other productive applications of the dominant orientations of ludology and narratology in video game studies, Rossignol attends to the euphoria of simulation to illustrate the basic kernel of pleasurable play that links his diverse examples. It's not the Princess, or the Kingdom, or Planet Earth that matters; it's running, jumping, rolling, shooting, dodging, and precision landings. Why is it those things? In his best moments, Rossignol sees how players, who vary in most every other way, cultivate such euphoria in their preferred games, making their own stories of alliance, betrayal, death, and friendship with their own style, reasons, time, ethos, mods, or companions. To call all of these people "gamers" is to recognize either just how empty the word has become, or in what a peculiar way the word "gamer" circulates now in Euro-American gaming cultures.

The closest thing to an ethnography of a city’s gaming culture, in Seoul (South Korea) another possible course the history of gaming might have taken, if it were not nerdy to game, if alcohol were a less popular diversion, if caffeine were more, if we used computers in Net Cafes rather than consoles at home, and games could get airtime on TV. Then gaming might be more about diligent management, repetition, accumulation, multiplayer network play, player-versus-player mode, and efficiency than about violence, virtuosity, drama, hilarity, and hanging out drunk for a few hours before going to bed (England). In South Korea, Starcraft remains the standard for real-time strategy games, even though it’s more than ten years old.

In Reykjavik, a convention brings together some of the more than two hundred thousand users who regularly populate the single multi-user galaxy of EVE Online. This is the ultimate sandbox game, for Rossignol, because the environment and game provisions do allow and deny certain activities, but there is no vision of success for each player, and no guarantee of stability for the overall world. There is opportunity and constraint. This invites comparison with Second Life, which seems to basically lack the scarcity, necessities, and consequences of EVE. Second Life is an infinite art gallery, a multi-user CAD program, where everyone can fly or teleport and no one has to die. No one mines the asteroids, no one works as an assassin, no one ever need suffer. Although we might consider Second Life a very open and free gaming culture, to the extent it’s a game at all, Rossignol admiringly prefers the scale and complexity of player actions in EVE. In this game, an individual user does not just play by the rules set up in advance by the game’s programming, but also plays on the basis of social, political, and economic organization that has emerged over the years in the player population. Rossignol notes that familiar usernames from his time with Quake 3 were sometimes spotted pursuing the more violent lines of work available in EVE (assassins, soldiers, or enforcers). Players themselves have made these occupations possible, and it is players themselves whose ethos guides their decisions in play.

At Carnegie Mellon, another project for incorporating humans and computers is afoot. Assistant Professor Luis von Ahn sets up games to repurpose human play into the work computers should do but can't. Humans playing games will label images, identify objects, and read distorted text from old books. Rossignol is a bit scared. This is not the function he envisions in gamers' experience of play. These are not familiar considerations for his understanding of the lifeways of gamers. For that reason, von Ahn’s work comes across as quite alien and rather threatening in this book. Is there work that players are doing for others just by playing? At this time, usually not. Gamers probably risk doing more harm with the appropriation of their surplus labor by their day job than with a mouse or controller. Still, Rossignol reviews just enough serious games to recognize gaming could be put to use, and sometimes is, despite the commercial paradigm of escapism. Although the inclusion of the serious games topic is welcome in the book, it feels peripheral to the ethnographic conjuration of gamer cultures which the overall project uses to question how we discuss or debate gaming. That is to say, Rossignol is interested in gaming and gamers, in all their variety, more than types of games that could someday be brought into existence.

Throughout the book we see evidence for Rossignol’s hopeful concluding remarks. He shows how games change lives and give some reason to live. Games change how we imagine the world, just as movies and novels have done. And, he foretells, the golden age of gaming is yet to come. We do not hear much of the negative side of this, perhaps because the negative power of games has always garnered more respect than any potential for good latent in them. This has always been a classic challenge of the gaming literature, and one the author handles well: how to use arguments that have vilified gaming to defend, praise, and uplift it.

NOT TO KILL IN GAMING

2009-10-25T19:58:00.000-07:00

So it’s a violent video game. Yeah, I wonder too if it it’s going to habituate aggression, if it’s a way for players to indulge in something naughty, or if it’ll maybe be cathartic.

Video game violence offers something else than excitement, something a bit more unique. The opportunity to control a power that is totally outrageous. To kill a hooker, take the money, and never look back (GTA3). Not just to shoot in a gun range, or with paintballs, but with ridiculously overpowered weapons of the future (Unreal). To run and jump, with infinite endurance, killing creatures that, while able to hurt you, could also be left alone (Mario).

Some games make it a theme: hurting non-combatants takes away points! Others make it a point to cause carnage, giving points for needless collateral damage. Most allow more destruction than is necessary, without it influencing the score. What happens sometimes that not everyone likes to say in public is that the violence gets old. More killing? So boring.

To learn how to handle incredible power is X-men’s theme that seems most targeted at pubescent readers: the young mutant has to figure out how to deal. With his bones replaced by metal (Wolverine). With her skin sucking the life from any being it touches (Rogue). With lasers that shoot from his eyes (Cyclops). With the thoughts of others mixing with her own (Jean Grey).

It is so easy to kill in most games. Life is so fragile, your powers of destruction so inordinate for the task at hand, for the goals you supposedly have, to the pleasures that you seek in the game.

To kill a prostitute in Grand Theft Auto is excessive and maybe twisted, but to speed across town without killing five pedestrians is downright hard.

BUZZWORDS

2009-10-18T19:31:00.000-07:00

They are words that buzz, rattle, loose their meaning, inspire connections based only on presence of this word, again and again: affect.

The word infests utterances, texts, keyword lists: postcolonial. Why not? It sounds hip, it sounds right, I don’t want to get cut out because I’m not up to date: best practices.

The word inflects the formation of arguments, provides orientation towards as well as away from: postmodern. It’s not certain yet whether the word is or is not appropriate, when its buzz is still fresh, two texts can even apply the word in opposite ways to advantage: mobility.

There is, so far, nothing to lose in using it, no real claim it can be identified with that someone will come along and prove wrong: memory. The word would need a more certain meaning, it is not yet in a state to be opposed: client oriented.

It turns out to describe surprisingly well what has come before, because its uneven universalization is a journey and because it is what we find interesting in our interpretation of most anything: trauma. The word doesn’t name something altogether new, it just has a more clear vision of what the thing is that we are naming: deliverables.

By its connective tissue, everything appears related, tagged the same, commensurable, related to the particular concerns of each in a community: temporality. All scholars turned out to have studying meaning, whether they knew it or not. Business was always about optimization, monetization, and the low hanging fruit.

Sometimes the word is more specific, it comes from somewhere and bears the mark of a tradition, a world of related concepts, a corridor of interpretation: rhizome. Sometimes that history disappears: win-win.

Yet the word means less and less. In its journeys, its character becomes diffuse, its mechanism uncertain, its reputation sullied: culture. Sometimes we don’t even realize that we are no longer talking about anything, that the thing to which the word once referred has left, even though the word still buzzes: power.

THE VARIABLE

2009-10-13T18:26:00.001-07:00

The position I disagree with states that the number line is fundamentally visual and gridded. That it reduces variation to a set of possible points, cuts and divides, counts identical units, and that variables obscure what cannot be measured.

Imagine that the variable is being used to represent something in particular, a known unknown. It is then a deferred decision about what number to give something. Solve for x!

The variable that is the sign of this deferral, however, is a domain, a motion, a blurring together of possibilities, a potentialization of the expression that contains it. It is the solutions that are not yet ruled out, it slides around on different surfacing bodies in the process of being examined, it remains strictly agnostic about its nature, it allows for new possibilities in the expression it inhabits.

Likewise, the number line is not itself points or emptiness between marks of the grid, but is composed of a misty homogeneity, an uninterrupted solid, a smooth space of movement, a stripe of traffic of motions running in many directions at once, or a very austere fractal. At all levels it resembles itself, between 1 and 100 or between 1.001 and 1.100, yet lurking within it are irrational numbers, occasions of discontinuity, and an unpreventable slippage into numbers that are imaginary.

This is a virtualization of numbers, into the shady realm of a number line. It is a radicalization of a particular value by its substitution with a variable. If we were to understand a particular number as the product of this process, as the actualization of these maneuvers, numbering does not obscure motion, substance, or transformation between points, but tracks it.

This does not mean, however, that the number line is always right and variables never make mistakes, just that they do not cut up and segment quantities as a matter of course.

EVIDENCE OF GLASS

2009-09-26T17:02:00.000-07:00

I know that I can see through glass. I know that it’s transparent. I know that that transparency has a materiality and character. I find that character placid, familiar, and clean.

Windows don’t only remediate views or art. They are not a substitute for a mountain vista or a landscape painting. They are a kind of wall, or break in the wall, whose visual impression on us is not an image. The visual impression of reflectiveness, glare, shine, a slight warbling in older glass, a tint, a bit of dust or dried rainwater. Evidence of glass.

IDENTIFICATION

2009-09-21T00:41:00.000-07:00

“I watch gangsta flicks and root for the bad guy / turn it off before it ends because the bad guy dies”
-50 Cent

Sometimes I’m watching a movie and realize that I hate the main character, definitely. And whatever bad things might happen to this character, bring them on. Especially likely in horror movies.

Not in all cases is identification a procedure securing a self that is mine, although appropriation and belonging are important terms in its function. Identifying can also be a kind of empathy or sympathy, sensitivity, solidarity, or means of evaluation. Identifying with a police officer shows the difficulty and banality of violation and enforcement of “the law.”

Identification gives you a new perspective: the Grand Theft Auto games show me a stereotype of who I am, what kind of car I drive, and what music I listen to – but they also show me how to navigate a city during an outrageous high speed chase.

Identification can strike you but without guiding you: I want good things to happen for Chameleon Street, but that doesn’t always mean I want to act like him.

Identification may work by inspiration rather than mimicry: I feel like MIA is onto something and want to know more about her, but don’t quite identify with her image in “Paper Planes.”

I know Scarface is a bad guy, but I’m sorry to see him die. But I don’t care when his colleagues fall. I identify with the movie’s sense of how the world turns. I have never adopted the perspective of Batman, but my understanding of his interests do preoccupy me. I can identify with a project (ending this senseless war), a person (the main character), a tone (dark sarcasm in Dr. Strangelove), or a style (gangster movies). Can I identify against something as well (the “Jew Hunter” Hans Landa of Inglourious Basterds)?

AUDIOVISUALITY'S INTEGRITY

2009-09-11T16:14:00.000-07:00

It’s surprising how comfortable many people are with this assertion: anything that can happen in real life can take place in a movie. This power of representation goes even further with computers, which can even show us things that can’t happen in real life.

The integrity and singularity of vision and sound guarantee the sufficiency of computers as sensory experiences. They don’t have to reproduce every other experience, of sitting in a garden, glancing down from really high up, watching someone you hate walk by from a distance, playing the piano in a friend’s house, looking at paintings in a museum, reading the newspaper, or watching a movie on TV by yourself in the afternoon.

No. There is one thing called vision, its domain is the visual, it involves images, brightness, movement, and color. Therefore, with sufficient graphics processing, all possibilities of vision can be exhausted by the computer, potentially. The screen blacks out a portion of your field of vision and replaces it with anything at all.

There is one thing called sound, it is representable as a wave of varying frequency and amplitude, it is heard in each ear and bass tones elsewhere in the body. Stereophonic sound must be able to produce any sound you could possibly here.

MIRROR STAGE

2009-09-01T18:12:00.000-07:00

Identification is not just a “transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image,” as described in Lacan’s account of the mirror stage. For Lacan, this child is a complex mess fixated on an image, which becomes an ideal version, for the kid, of who he or she can be. The mirror is only one example of where we can find ‘images’ with which to identify.

“Image” theoretically indicates any representation, but Lacan uses the interchangeable format to guarantee an equivalence between images of others and of ourselves, and to ensure that identification fails because the other is only apprehended as a still image, which is not a sufficient representation of an other and is impossible model for a person who puts pants on one leg at a time. (Possibly, someone might live in order to become an image, but this is distinct from the exploits of the subject, which is Lacan’s topic.)

Hearing a recording of your own voice, watching yourself in a movie, or reading your results on an online personality test are all images by which this process of identification directs the subject.

Sinthome explains Lacanian identification as “an identification with a particular gaze from which I see myself being seen.” Viewing your own Facebook profile, you know this is who you are to other users. The fact that you cannot know how others perceive Facebook profiles (e.g. reading only their Wall, or skipping around through the Information, or checking only if they are cute & single) sets up the subject, split between an image called me and a self that never matches this image, for failure again. In another vocabulary, this is exactly the method of molar being, which is constantly at play with molecular becoming.

Do I identify with an image of the other, and thereby site an ideal? Generally, I don’t identify with a single image. When I’m interested, I want to know more and hear stories with this person in many poses. I want pictures, recordings, other people’s opinions. Sometimes my enthusiasm depends on my mood, or falls off as the image-stream becomes less appealing. I am guided in a changing direction with varying force, depending on my own state. This could, as a minimal departure, allow multiple ideals to develop, but none of them might be 'ideal'.

Further, there are those identifications that strike me, but do not guide me at all. I absolutely identify with supporting characters in Iron Man, but this makes no difference in my life.

Finally, there is, in the “particular gaze from which I see myself being seen” a whole world of other things to which I respond. Looking through Facebook profiles, I become more familiar with those who use Facebook, and generally with Facebook style. These are paths that lead out of the circuit of Lacanian identification, which are therefore excluded from many discussions of the topic.

I remain a complex mess, and continue to look in mirrors.

SAGACITY TEACHES WISDOM

2009-08-28T15:24:00.001-07:00

The inarticulable is the habitat of wisdom. In the realm of the unsaid, in regular contact with that which exceeds the imagination, living among things done which can only be spoken of as memories.

It does not come from experience or reflection alone. At times, sagacity teaches wisdom. In this case, what is the mechanism by which a lesson is learned? Teacher gives explicit guidance for well-named possibilities, but the truth of the name of a concept cannot be understood without particularities which can find verification in the student’s own examples.

Lessons:
-You treat people you know now as characters from your past.
-“To the extent that metaphor can be thought of as a language of desire and as a means to recover what is absent, it is essentially anti-poetic.”
-“To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.”
-“Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.”

A full example for a concept cannot be provided because a proper and compelling interpretation of each element and relation in the case must already inhere in it, which would require the example, in fact, be the principle which it would demonstrate. Effectively, learning wisdom requires the transformation of one’s own sense of how to understand an example so that the example demonstrates the particular principle. This cannot be forced.

Imagine pretending to do something, recognize that you have just done some thing, and now deny that you have pretended to pretend to do some thing. You have in fact done it, and only you believe that you merely pretended. Or, you have in fact done one thing, which shows that your act was only a gesture at a serious attempt at pretending. Or, perhaps, both are wrong, but it requires thinking.

In this way, being smart may help the student imagine illustrative examples. However, this quality may also encourage the student to distort the principle, or find other ones – and not all principles are equal.

A significant variation between different practices of imparting wisdom is the degree of confidence the practice has in representation. Some lessons mean what they say, but in others it is the meaning of the terms, the interpretation of language, or the voice of the lesson that the student must come to a new understanding of. Zen koans are an extreme case.

Sagacity tutors thinking that has not yet found comfortable expression. Wisdom does not make arguments or put feeling into words. It re-orders feelings and thinking in a way that makes a difference both when put into words and in the semi-lucid living of your life.

KNOW YOUR TOOLS

2009-08-22T12:04:00.000-07:00

No, I don’t know how the engine works of the car I drive at 35 in a 30 zone.

They say that we use technologies we don’t even understand, which is a problem of modern times. Did the caveman, the original masculine generic of the tool-using human (i.e. the active subject), understand the stones so popular in the Stone Age?

Conchoidal fracture makes obsidian and flint easy to sharpen, because that’s how the stone breaks. Other stones break in basically flat planes, but small conchoidal fractures can be added repeatedly to produce various shapes, and sharp edges in particular. Wikipedia still doesn’t have a definite explanation of flint formation, which gives the stone its relevant properties. But this is how the stone breaks, and tools can, for whatever reason, be made with it.

No, we don’t all understand the tools we use. Probably never have. A new question: Why do is it sometimes suggested that we should?

POST APOCALYPSE

2009-08-17T13:35:00.000-07:00

Like a snow day, I want the buses to stop running, the radio to go quiet, weeds to overtake the streets, downtown covered in rubble, locals to loot the supermarket, unrepaired apartment buildings to falter without water and power, new social formations in the shell of the old world. I want vacation to come to me.

After the apocalyse, school’s out forever. What world is it that ends when the world ends? Somehow, by our desperate and unfailing efforts, we’ll be comforted by a cowboy lifestyle at the end of the world. Kill or be killed, just me and the open plains, a time for rugged survivalism and new ways of living. This is transgressive fantasy. Picture me out there with all that old world civilization long gone. This is also an alluring way to feel about my self now.

Consuming post-apocalyptic representation allows we who have homes and jobs, who benefit from the infrastructure the apocalypse would destroy, to vicariously enjoy exposure to an unforgiving landscape, from the comfort of our own homes. A tradition in American literature.

A momentary hesitance about our life commitments, when compared with how we spend our days and years. It lends us a special moment of clarity in which we can perceive “the world” that might end. The world as infrastructure, order, convenience, safety, ergonomics, purposiveness, and practices. In this moment, the world that would end is not geography or even a whole composed of particularities (everyone you know, every item that exists), but a quality slightly beyond words. It’s easy to show, in the duration of a film or story, the scoundrel beauty of apocalypse.

And this is also why it’s not the risk of the world actually ending that’s so terrible, but the refusal of the world to end (despite unsustainable war, financial meltdown, and endless signs of doom) that performs true tragedy, for its appreciative audience.

PATHWAYS

2009-07-22T13:11:00.001-07:00

Sometimes they want to build paths that follow the routes people actually walk. Then the walking that we do anyway will happen on their paths: slightly faster, without damage to surrounding landscaping, appearing as if our behavior and their design match.

Sometimes they want to build walkways for other reasons, as part of a pretty design: pathways that encircle spaces, mark a perimeter, connect paved areas, cut the lawn into four equal pieces, permit wheel-chair access. Then we make our own shortcuts, we walk on the grass, cut corners, step on flowers.

What the pathway always does, though, is suggest (advise) a path along the basic routes people actually walk, in the general direction of pedestrians coming from one point and going to another. The pathway negotiates your walking onto its specialized surface.

A walkway does not just offer a route, as do boulders strewn along the slope of a mountain, but displays a design that inspires in us a confidence: we might fit into this plan. It is not just a matter of our convenience, we do not walk through rubble, wilderness, or enemy territory. There is an institution, an owner, people who maintain the grounds, architecture prepared into which our entrance has been anticipated. Will we be best served by the design? This is the point at which walking along walkways depends upon trust, effects a quotidian loyalty, or is a tactic of your own life.

DREAMS AND DAILY LIFE

2009-07-19T23:42:00.000-07:00

Michel Gondry says that dreams don’t represent the unconscious, they’re just stuff that happens in everyday life put into a blender. (Bricolage)

Slavoj Žižek says that everything that happens in everyday life is only intelligible because of the symbolic network which is also present in dreams. (Structure)

I’ve always been skeptical that dreams take place at all, that they are so distinct from our memory of them.

In this sense, it’s not dreams that are made from the day’s experiences. It’s from these experiences that we can salvage a vision of the dream.

AMERICAN COLOR

2009-07-09T16:53:00.000-07:00

The constancy of color in dominant American palettes depends on paint chemistry, dye processes, printing technology, and powerful, everpresent cleaning agents (which are often toxic).
This practice of color admits variation with lighting and in the form of artistic intentionality (print, pattern, gradient, tie dye).

Any deployment of color can expect to be surrounded by red lipstick, white socks, blue collars, striped ties, egg shell business cards, silver watches, brown cardboard boxes, and indigo blouses.
Tie dye, color that’s faded and cracked, highlighted hair, and vintage fabric emerge as marked dissidents in the regime of color and to this difference owe their sense of charm and character. That looks so unique!

Because colors abut others, rather than blend between them, they take on distinct identities as things. These things might also not have ever been: fire engine red. Animals with more specialized eyes do not see more colors than us so much as more possibilities within and between colors, more shades of red. Even with roughly the same biological capacity for vision, some people can name more colors or are more aware of their associated meanings.

Colors do emerge as things, and these things can be scary, comforting, excessive, connotative, denotative, disgusting, out of fashion, appropriate, or useful. Yet they still function, whether they are things or not, by modifying other colors (bringing out the red in my skin), reflecting light, illuminating objects, or affecting that which can see.

HYPE

2009-07-05T14:46:00.001-07:00

It’s something in the air. Pure hype. Everyone wants a browser, a bundle, to get their toolbar installed with an opt-out provision on the software that transforms the HP Pavilion some guy bought for cheap in a package deal into the computer he was hoping for. To monitor. To know where you go, what links you make, what cookies you accumulate, what search terms you enter, how much time you are online, how long you stay at a site: a complete record of online behavior. To figure out how to profit. They don’t want or need or even hope to control the user, not at this time; that will come on its own. They will convert investor money into personal riches, wealth for the company, charitable donations, steady streams of income.

The hype will make good. It won’t just be advertising supporting advertising, it will be etailing, ecommerce; the infrastructure for our way of life will move online (as it has) and they will be the Mall to our suburban teenage social scene.

A grand plan, a long shot, an inevitability whose realization they work assiduously to ensure. Until then, there is hype. In the fullness of time, in the next age, in the near future, in the next moment of consumer capitalism, it won’t be hype. It won’t be the future, it will then be the present.

Hype functions to pave the way for this realization, but is also the primary nature of the industry at this point in time. It is potential, where things might go, a direction or a kind of latent energy. The hype has sustained itself for years, through many companies, between business models, amidst devastating evidence to the contrary. And it isn’t primarily a dream, there’s no necessary or single utopic model in the hype, and little reason to believe those dreams will ever take form as the hype suggests.

Hype nominates something as cool. When we see something cool, we do the hype. When we hear the hype, we might want to check it out. I suggest to others that they enjoy what I have enjoyed, I expect that they will do the same for me.

Hype is auditory, it’s a hubbub (Twitter in 2007), it emits wild screams (M.I.A. between albums), it can only sometimes be heard from far away (Thaitanium), it echoes (it is “viral”), it surrounds something which is real, but it has no body: it is a vibration, a disturbance, a real phenomenon, but lacking substance or materiality in the sense of traditional sculpture. Permanence, solidity, presence, opacity, form, and weight? No.

But the hype coordinates, attracts, incites, deforms, deters, guides, influences, questions, popularizes, neglects, denies, or lifts. It is not a body hewn of earth, but it may be a prevailing wind.

Hype tends to build on non-knowledge, ignorance, misunderstanding. How excited we are about bright fresh new things with which we’ve not yet spent long hours getting familiar.

Hype predicts what will be the future, and so enacts the arrival of an immediate future, that is thereby also the present rather than anymore the future. Bigger shoulders, bright orange for men, neon for everyone, netbooks, and Michael Jackson mashups. Expecting them, they take form already. Knowing them, they are no longer the future but just trends in the present.

NORMAL

2009-06-26T18:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-17T20:50:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-11T19:50:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-02T19:36:00.000-07:00

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.

METAPHOR & CONNOTATION

2009-05-28T10:39:00.000-07:00

What’s something ancient? Ruins. How would you describe ruins? Ancient.

Metaphors use familiar feelings to describe something that’s hard to say. Metaphor “applies” one concept to another, provides a different lens to see something, or turns one term into an adjective/modifier for the other. Identity theft. Red handed. Farsighted.

Insofar as metaphors function by interaction, the effect a metaphor has on another thing leaves marks. Metaphor conditions that which it has many times modified, as brushes do to hair.

He’s a bear of a man, and a hell of a guy, and this bears on man itself, just as lucrative does to investments. And association connects both ways.

MULTIPLE WORDS

2009-05-19T11:21:00.000-07:00

We use multiple words in the spaces of subjects, predicates, verbs, prepositions, or adjectives because our discussion(s) is (are) multiple. It is of many things, responding to many things, open to contingency. Yet we do not say everything at once, do not necessarily include more voices, and we still make an intervention that is particular.

We engage many discussions, many ways of imagining the topic, many vocabularies, to the frustration of perhaps each of them. For it is to each that our lists mark what may be called our disloyalty.

It is confusing and hard to decide which option to take seriously. At my usual reading speed I skip most of the options. Such multiplicity forestalls the making of a clear case, yet the options continue on as a form of knowledge. Hard to remember, useful to quote, good replay value, evasive of rejoinder, less certain, more complex, less comfortable to summarize.

“Deduction” [domination expressed in killing, taking, and demanding] has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.
(Foucault, History of Sexuality: Volume One, 136)

MP3

2009-05-15T16:15:00.000-07:00

Not vinyl, not tapes, not CDs, mp3s. It’s not an optical medium, it’s not a magnetized strand wrapped up in a box, or a specific shape of plastic with a spiral engraving. It’s a format for the compression of data for signal processing, a format which can be reproduced on different computerized devices, with different compression specifications, and encoded with different codecs.

You can’t curl up with them or touch them, they’re tiny little stretches on the terrain of a storage medium. You don’t need boxes and can’t use mechanized changers. There’s no mainstream slang term for it. Its name is its file extension.

Mp3s. Little files you’ve left all over the computer, which don’t bother anyone else. You can play them from the computer, copy them onto a portable mp3 player, burn them onto a CD, send and receive them online. You’ve got mislabeled ones, some without ID3 tags, some at a painfully low bitrate and in mono, ones with pops and clicks, ones that are too quiet, ones you never really liked, ones you can’t remember how you got, ones you’ve copied more than 10 times, and maybe the better among them you’ve backed up somewhere. You can listen to them, but you can also use them in slideshows, multimedia presentations, videos, or as a ring tone.

Rewinding is easy, skipping tracks simple. The artist’s choices do not extend beyond each track. The mp3 player organizes music into albums and artists, track numbers, or not at all. Playlists can keep things together, arbitrarily ordering mp3s whose location on the computer is all the playlist need record. To the playlist, all mp3s are equal. To the playlist, there are no instruments, acoustics, songs, or words. There are filenames and encoded data characterizing the file.

The discrete charm of the mp3. The newer ones are probably encoded at higher quality than the ones from the 90s, the best encoded ones probably aren’t mp3s at all. You know that some people still don’t use mp3s. You know that bands with worse distribution can only count on mp3s to get listeners beyond their shows. You know that, somehow, some of the little files, that maybe are only processed into audio output once in a year, are songs. Songs with moments, breaks, build-ups, melodies, lyrics, choruses, silences, stories and rhythms that you love. Songs whose importance you can never express adequately. Which you juggle between mediums, which you would be devastated to lose, which you could probably find again if you really had to.

MANAGEMENT OF AFFECT

2009-05-07T21:18:00.000-07:00

Recently we were feeling trapped and, hoping not to be overheard by the system that corrupted our every move into data, we moped:
What is not information? What exceeds information, is not codable into data?

Affect! We have found a compelling and general answer. Human emotions, sure, but the affect of any bodies on others. Affect, realizing, everywhere.

Performance of government to TV audiences. Fast food to satisfy your cravings. A car for your need for speed. A park for mental health. After school activities to keep the kids out of trouble. Charles Schwabb to make money comfortable. Claritin so allergies don’t ruin the spring.

Emotion and reason are not two contradictory elements in the human in this game. The sum of components and actions makes up the (human) actor. You continue to buy gasoline and pay rent. These actions are real, but your personal reasons for them are considered to amount to nothing.

We are very consequence oriented, very concerned with whether things work, with how they will play out, with what something new or strange can do. And this is obvious in our ethics.

If it’s about acting virtuously, the virtues are themselves understood for their practicality, efficiency, expansionist self-perpetuation, organization, and outcomes. If principles matter, it’s the same. “Best practices” guides abound.

In this ongoing stylistic pattern, it’s not important what something means.
It’s not what something is.
It’s not what something should be.
It’s how something functions.

Management provides the logic for interaction, control, prediction, thought, planning, and concern. Affect describes in a very general way relationships, movements, and particularities which matter.

Taking this as an underlying theme of the present suggests some critical inroads. For example, by caring more about how something functions than what it is, we are actually attending to what the thing is supposed to be, insofar as its function is anticipated and depended upon, and what it is, insofar as its functional aspect has a particular role in a process.

DESTRUCTION

2009-05-05T19:42:00.000-07:00

A bullet does not negate every fiber of your being, but it does end your life, thereby constituting a complete biographical subject who didn’t exist before, and is more integrated and coherent than ever. A piercing weapon, a slashing weapon, or a blunt one. None need vaporize an entire body to destroy. Each must do just enough to be destructive (a threshold of destruction). Touch the wing of a moth, shoot the zombie in the head, put a stake through the heart of a vampire, rain on a parade.

The destruction is of humans and property. Not flames shooting out into the air. Not seagulls scorched by the sound miles away. Not pictures taken of smoke and terror. What can be destroyed is our sense of security, our comfort, our community, but the violently manic patriotism thereby produced cannot be destroyed by a blast.

Destruction is an effect that makes a system retroactively of whatever becomes, in destruction, a structure broken. It disrupts flows, rather than takes lives. It is phrased negatively, though its function is also positive. (It's positive function is more obvious in the systematicity by which destruction is a regular process, e.g. deforestation.)

To destroy infrastructure starves the people, ruins their power lines, smashes the roads, saps the bridges, prevents trains from running on schedule, fells grid structures, and reterritorializes the smooth flows of water, power, and transport with broken construction materials. It does not temporarily obstruct, but undoes the integrity of what composes the structure. Denies functionality even if the roads were cleared and river restored to its original state tomorrow.

That which now exists is not the same as that which might in the future be said to have existed after becoming destroyed. You never know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

Destruction’s creativity is not just retrospective, for it is also by destruction that ground is cleared for grasses to grow. That we realize dependencies and connections beyond our previous understanding. (A keystone species, or a breakdown in one small part of a nuclear reactor.)

This all amounts to a technical connotation of destruction that appears when I semiotize by pragmatism. Break things down into units and operations in the production of (semiotics would here put the word meaning but instead the word is) functionality. Instead of sign = signifier + signified, the formula is: thing = aspect + function. In the first: bridge = word + reality. In the second: bridge = weight-bearing wide flat surface + traffic driving over.

SUPERACTUALLY

2009-04-30T16:16:00.000-07:00

Irony flaunts what it symptomatizes. “GI Joe is a real American hero!” Satire performs symptoms so that its audience recognizes the problem through their shared revulsion. A Modest Proposal. We find ourselves as the audience that recognizes together. The Colbert Report.

Failure if we don’t recognize. Failure if we are not repelled. Failure if we just enjoy.

A peculiar kind of vanilla sincerity presumes to be healthy, to express itself without symptomatizing something else.

Irony toys with heightening claims of veracity: I’m so serious. That’s how you let them know you’re not serious, repeatedly insist that you are. Further degrees of irony are possible by adding inflections and ostensible commitments to this formula.

“No, I’m not joking, The Little Mermaid is really my favorite movie ever, I got a tattoo!”

“I’m serious that I was joking about not caring about dressing right”

“There’s no meaning at all to this fine-art gold sculpture of Michael Jackson”

Satire denies its place, forgets the world, and turns its topics virtual. We are engaged in a consideration of potentials, without agreeing on a specific underlying message which is real. I think what The Onion means is that airports are alienating, confusing, and always Kafka-esque. Though I’m not quite sure what that means, which airports, or how we experience this on most flights.

A post-ironic intensity symptomatizes as it expresses. It is superactual, a redoubling after a cynical recognition of the limit of sincerity. It is sick but keeps on living. It performs commitment to its explicit actual content (context suggests much of tone), yet encourages the audience to recognize its inability to overcome that which it symptomatizes.

Satire says what it does not mean in order to show what it wants very much to think. But it’s often only possible to feel this confidence with ironic distance. Somehow, we know that GI Joe is not a real American hero, or that America and heroism are vapid terms capable only of describing GI Joe, but we need not agree with each other or ourselves to appreciate the ironic comedy.

The superactual tone includes ironic interpretation, cynical reactions to it buzz around like parasites, it does not silence them, but surmounts their signifying semiotics. It is an alternative, a solution, a practical plan, yet also a kind of seriousness which many would-be satirists find themselves enacting.

TOTALIZATION

2009-04-23T20:01:00.000-07:00

What is "always" or "only" commits us not to never encountering exceptions, but to a way of attending to things by which our commitment can be honored. There are no definitive counterexamples for unshakable faith.

If all objects are fundamentally temporal, eyebrows, birdsong, ice cream, and mountains take on a temporal aspect. Totalization is not total. It’s an incomplete and ongoing process of universalization from particularity.

The future, past, and rhythms of eyebrows, all very important. Rapt attention.

NAME

2009-04-19T23:26:00.000-07:00

To have your name replaced with a number, to have your identity recoded into something your parents did not choose for you, something unfamiliar, something suited for data processing by machines, surely it would destroy your very being.

What does your name mean? You first name, your middle name, your last name. There is a legal requirement that, for you to appear, there be a first and last name for you. Often, there’s a limit to its length. It must be composed of roman letters, its capitalization may be lost or determined against your wishes, it cannot contain numbers. (There are actually many more legal rules for names, especially in some European countries.)

Names from India, transliterated for native English speakers, are often too long. Names from East Asia become unpronounceable and may be replaced, just to make life a little bit easier. Esther, Eunice, Sally.
The last name of many African-Americans comes from those who owned enslaved ancestors.
Spanish naming customs become a confusing mess in the US paradigm.

Ellis Island renamed thousands of families after their country of origin, or for ethnic identity. The concept or image, by which one’s child was to be addressed, disappears in the American system of formal names, which only identifies by strings of letters.

Names from most anywhere lose their pronunciation, they are “butchered”. (To slaughter in an indiscriminate manner, not to carve meat into cuts.)

The stock of common American names has become boring and yet a kind of elementary privilege. Not a weird name, but a regular one: Lauren, Matt, Aaron, Joe, Leslie, Owen, Emily, and Charles. Yet the very nature of the arbitrary system by which we are primarily identified as individuals provides a means of variation. Change the spelling of the name: Britni, Izabella, Joshwa, Konner.

And yet, on a regular basis, many feel that their names identify them well, reflect where they come from and the choices of their family before them. That such a name is most appropriate, the best balance of a unique and truthful manner of addressing one another.

INTERPELLATED

2009-04-06T19:41:00.000-07:00

Lovers and friends are usually quite meaningless details. In the family photo album.

“Who is that?”
“Don’t know, not family, though.”

What’s it going to take before you take an interest in family? How long will it be before you learn to shut up and enjoy it, to love and be loved by your family? The family will be the truth of your life, the position from which you can understand your self that has grown up, aged, changed, and, in turn, taken up its self as an entrepreneurial project. You must return to the family and perhaps you will come to see its beauty. You have many many chances to come to understand.

There is a different story that we tell about your place in the family.

You were expected by the time you were born. You were interpellated at birth, given a name that had already been decided in advance. Anticipated and expected. That is the origin.

It would be from this start that ideological subjectivization and its failure, or power and resistance, or systematicity and irregularity separate. And, at this exact same moment, that complex material relations, which you could chart as a dialectic, play out the hybridity by which the distinction wrought by a theory of interpellation diffuses.

Hybridity. Like how boysenberry bounces playfully as it recalls thorns all around it and you read it on the menu and it is in waffles and you wonder if they will be too expensive and then if they would be too sour. Connotations from childhood now associated strongly with family, significance from financial independence, a feeling from the stomach to the throat.

If there is childhood, stomach, and Quicken, interpellation could be one more force in the overdetermination of every situation. Ok. But that there is an ongoing process of negotiating identity does suggest that interpellation as a theoretical mechanism establishes retroactive continuity by subsuming varying negotiations under the name of interpellation.

AUTHOR CELEBRITY

2009-03-29T23:42:00.000-07:00

Looking back, my post on the ad hominem covers most of what I’d wanted to write now about authorship as celebrity. This is what I’d like to add:

Perhaps we could do without this interpretive reference point. The artist, the author, the chef, the genius, the president, the inventor, the man himself. But we do not do without it. This is exactly the importance of restating authorship, to be able to respond to discussions as they occur.

Images of authors give grounding to the historical context of reception and to the process of production. Concepts of who the author was inform our interpretation of their ouvre, what they would not like, and how their work might be treated in such a way that both particularizes the products which we understand as, in some originary sense, theirs (don’t read Joyce as you would read Crichton, that’s a fine way to hang a Warhol but not a Pollock) and extends the mode of their work to which we are drawn (what would Jesus do?).

NATURAL

2009-03-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

Fashion isn’t natural.

Natural isn’t just a concept or category, it also signals and requires a degree of imprecision in thinking. (Perhaps mysticism.) Naturality requires a suspension of artifice, a forgetting of the arbitrary changes wrought upon one by another.

But what it offers is immense. Essences to play against accidents, reformulation of the basic matters and forces with which we intend to enter into action. Maybe even a teleological inevitability to processes.

STRANGER'S FACE

2009-03-10T14:52:00.000-07:00

We gaze upon a face in its own world, of which we are barely any part at all. The face need not regard us. We’ve never met. We have nothing to do with one another. We happen to be nearby, and that is all.

We enter into relation with a face that knows us, that sees us, that responds to our looking, that reacts upon noticing us. This face is part of a sensory system that broadcasts and reads, showing a face and collecting reactions to it. This sensory system exceeds the head. Clothing can be part of such a sensory system, as can hair or makeup: any thing which we put time into because it will influence how others see us. Because I’m aware of how my hair looks, who is likely to notice my glasses, what it looks like when I bite my nails, these devices give me social orientation.

They are not themselves channels of input; my hair cannot see you. (Though it does detect humidity, wind, things that brush past or through it.) They are components in some of my sensitivity.

When someone recognizes me, talks to me, engages with me: our sight touches, our postures chat, our distance orates position statements, our arms backchannel while our throats and mouths form words. The face comes to life, takes on characteristics that it varies in conversation. It gives a performance in tension with other passions of that person.

HETEROSEXUALITY

2009-02-25T14:26:00.000-08:00

Do you believe people when they say they aren’t gay or straight, they just like people, whether those people are one thing or another?

If a boy kisses a boy, does this make him gay, is this a gay act?

Star Trek's Captain Kirk found his "best gratification in that creature called woman". For others, there is no substitute for that one person whom they love. Racial fetish discriminates in a different way. Or, again, cougars are not just looking for individuals or men, but pretty young men. So, potentially, there is attraction to anyone, only people of a certain kind, or only one person. (The obvious instability, and romanticization, of the last option is exactly what I would like to suggest about and recover from the others.)

In a psychoanalytic perspective that attends to the social construction of the unconscious, individual particularity can be reconciled systematically with “social forces”, such that her comfort in his strength, and his pleasure in how excited and distracted she is, speak for sexist stereotypes, cultural norms, patriarchy, or commercialized sexuality.

Maturation into heterosexuality depends on the virtualization of desire whose actualization is rather ridiculous. This virtualization can occur through the cultivation of desire for a kind, of which individuals are different specimens (Playboy magazine), or through the development of a generality that emerges by noticing things in common between many relationships, attraction, pleasures, or experiences (learning what you like). The two processes probably happen together and modify one another. It might be simplest to describe of it as a process of universalization from particularity, by whatever means that may occur.

Actualization of heterosexual desire exceeds the central images of heterosexuality. Also important are the detailing of lingerie, the scent of a young man, bras drying on the line, lipstick tubes, long hair, long eyelashes, denim, abs, a kind of laughter, collarbones, cologne, showers. The "marks of gender" that sometimes fail to report back to a unitary construct of gender.

There are other kinds of purposes to be found through heterosexuality, such as marriage, a real woman, children, or a partner for life. None of these things need to appear through heterosexuality in particular, and the appearance of many jeopardize the clarity of heterosexuality, e.g. orgies or raising young children. In this sense, heterosexuality does not even name a sexuality, but a kind of absent referent for a discursive preoccupation. Sometimes, the aim of heterosexuality is its own negation, and heterosexuals know this.

These instabilities are substantial, and for this reason, homophobia’s work is never done. Ever vigilant, it must detect and handle challenges and contradictions as best it can. But, is homophobic practice a sufficient explanation of the many cases of perseverant heterosexuality pursued by individuals who we would consider accepting, or allies? If it were, then all heterosexuality is homophobic, which drsatically saps the power of the accusation of homphobia. "You're homophobic!" "Yes, heterosexuality is always fundamentally homophobic." (A solution here is the word homohatred, but perhaps a larger problem is in the deployment of phobia as a part of the theoretical machinery)

Yet, there is a pursuit of heterosexuality despite the instability of pleasure, desire, and attraction that have been articulated through mostly heterosexual means (an aspect of heteronormativity). All I can say at this point is that this dogged pursuit of heterosexuality despite these uncertainties needs to be accounted for, in a manner that makes clear how queer heterosexuality is, without claiming to have thereby effected its undoing.

CIRCLE

2009-02-24T19:17:00.000-08:00

A circle is a constantly curving line that culminates in the same location from which it starts.

A circle is the complete set of points in a two dimensional space at a given distance from a central point.

A circle includes any point in a two dimensional space whose y value is one of the two possible solutions to the equation (x - a)(x - a) + (y - b)(y - b) = r*r

A circle is that shape with the maximum ratio of volume to surface area.

A circle is the complete set of points at a given distance from the center of polar coordinates.

MULTIPLE PERSONALITY

2009-02-17T19:56:00.001-08:00

maybe...
Multiple personality disorder is a disorder of repression. What but repression permits a person’s hosted personalities not to blend into one another, not to talk incessantly, not to make little deals amongst themselves, leaving a scene where the bullying, by some, of the more delicate ones goes unopposed.

DISCRIMINATION MACHINE

2009-02-10T23:24:00.000-08:00

It is not coherent, unified, regular, or functioning quite according to plan. It is a machine. It is doing the job, because it is doing a job and that is getting something done which we will say was the job we should have expected anyway.

Discrimination takes place by processes. Comments in the street. Responses to your voice on the phone. Laws controlling rights and privileges by home address. Hiring children of friends. Making police officers want to let you off this time.

A discrimination machine filters, by mechanisms, sorting out what might continue and what would be redirected.

A suit is not just a costume. It’s a costume kept alive specifically for its power as a discrimination machine: who can get the best one with the nicest details and, above all, the best tailoring. What does best mean? Are you up to date, sufficiently traditional, overly French, generally respectable, comfortable, careful with money? Exactly questions the machinery offers as opportunities to distinguish your good taste.

Natural selection is another such machine. The effects of discrimination depend of course on sorting. What is selected for and against? The discrimination machine does not do all the work here, there must be forces that align behind the different directions contents can travel. Reproduction, population, heritability, death.

We don’t just say that species with greater reproductive success are more fit. It isn’t really important if people speak of fitness as good or bad. The problem appears here as the force of life that keeps the living together as life on earth. In a catalog of all species that ever were, fitness doesn’t matter. In that underworld where the dead collect, fitness is a curse extending bit by bit the suffering of life on your children and children’s children.

Moralizing about evolution, or even taking pride in having been selected, is, in this way, to confirm the processes of discrimination. Insofar as you’re proud to have made it while others fell, the machinery of discrimination chose well.

Yet, some people are very proud to be survivors.

PARKOUR

2009-02-05T23:53:00.000-08:00

Parkour. Scribbling all over mundane masterpieces. Works of construction and architecture whose targets are first that world for which the human body is the measure of all things and second that world of photographs taken during the summer of crisp edges, regularity and improvisation, sculptural qualities and the poetry of straight (but broken) lines in perspective.

The rail was to prevent children from falling, to discourage the wild ones from taking risks at the edge, for liability, to catch those who slip near the edge, for ADA compliance. The rail was a pre-fabricated design they had painted black to look like a silhouette in the sunlight.

Athletic, acrobatic, energetic, young people, whose bones and bodies can still withstand the blows, who have trained for years at gymnastics, martial arts, dance, or for strength. They will make themselves an exception. The untapped potential of the training they have received, in a tradition they may have left behind, will blossom freshly in this discipline. These people will climb and jump, run and grab and pull and chase and turn and hop and leap and stabilize themselves. And fall to the ground and get up and try this spot again a few times next week.

A staircase just wide enough for two average bodies to pass, going in opposite directions. A ledge just high enough to you look down from it, but too high to think to sit on. A wall wide enough for two strangers to sit back to back. A tree planted for the shade it gives that makes the whole patio feel peaceful and relaxed, with a breeze from the canyon.

Traceurs are not whole, everyday people. They tend to be 14 to 26 and male, with a background in something else that they make relevant here, each in their own style. They tend to meet up for more interesting practice in groups, but exercise and train alone during the week. When they do this, when they use the techniques which they understand to more efficiently allow them to get from point A to point B, when they jump down the stairs, landing in a roll, when they swing and hang and make a precision landing on a pipe, they are traceurs.

Traceurs will make themselves an exception to that institutional reality of humanism that orients itself not to the spirit, rationality, self-interest, freedom, diversity, mind, or identity of humanity, but to the individual, flexible, particular, material human bodies which are primarily distributed around an average, yet also include a few legally protected outliers.

Parkour finds the most direct route from any arbitrary point to another: point A to B. Not from the patio to the bathroom during lunch, or from the grass back to the parking lot when the park closes. Practice doesn’t focus on particular points, but techniques for increasing the efficiency with which particular (kinds of) obstacles might be overcome. Ways to straighten lines that probably haven't any other reason to be drawn.

We tend to walk in predictable, curved, wide paths which can be cropped or cut or turned or angled by the provision of paths. We tend to walk and talk and sit and stop and lean, see, lie, bend, and turn in sufficiently normal ways, all of which can be understood and responded to with wood, asphalt, steel, plastic, drywall, glass and whatever it takes to manage the human freedom of bodies in space.

Traceurs are not ignoring the rules written into the built environment, they are putting the measurements to completely different use. A 6 foot drop, 12 stairs, rail to rail, a long cat crawl, a good spot to practice a technique. The basis of their practice is bodily motion that diverges, that climbs instead of keeping its distance, that leaps across instead of walking between.

LESSON LEARNED

2009-01-27T21:27:00.001-08:00

Testing does its own teaching. The Socratic method does too. We learn how to learn, we learn to be able to stay around to learn. There are many kinds of learning that happen from each other to each other. Clearly: the explicit content of a lesson is not clearly transmitted to those who then comprehend it. Probably “getting it” is a better construction than “understanding.”

The learned is always beyond explanation at the time of learning.

Our classes are on many topics with specific texts and theories, but what the students get is more simple and reliable.

Don’t say different cultures are unequal and don’t say they are the same! If you aren’t sure, it’s probably socially constructed and historically specific, takes part in the formation of identity. About the construction of meaning.

Why?

These things that students learn are not intentionally drawn out of them, as is the goal of education, nor imposed on them, as is the critique of education. These are ways of dealing with the teacher and classroom that students have figured out under harsh conditions rather than according to explicit instruction. These lessons are not learned by what we hope takes place in a student’s studying.

EMO COMFORT

2008-12-30T18:11:00.000-08:00

Alienation, as if it were alienating to recall the horrible fit between the world that confronts us and how we like things to go.

Groundhog Day. Awaking every morning in the same terrible world provokes Phil to drinking, suicide, even learning to play the piano. He is alone in repeating this day, and all the universal throb of humanity in which he finds himself again and again only reminds him that this is not where he belongs. Until he discovers that this day belongs to him as it does to no one else who lives it.

Donnie Darko. Aware that the world will end soon but not in any position to change or improve anything, he has just his private fantasy: our soundtrack, his hallucinations, the things his lame hypnotist does not want to come across, the things his insipid gym teacher can’t understand with her self-help paradigm authored by a fraud.

The secrets of our hidden pain in emo are open secrets not worth trying to explain to those who don’t understand, not worth trying to talk over with mom. And also not worth getting over, because they’re our relaxation, our community, our trademark.

A GRAIN OF SAND

2008-12-24T12:28:00.001-08:00

To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower,

hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.

William Blake

To see, in the slightest gesture of another, a world of desolation, betrayal, hopelessness, and a sense of purpose so embittered it denies any longing for better? Why would anyone put that shit on the fridge? Would holding infinity in the palm of your hands be so rosy? How many eternities are in an hour of suffering, desperation, and fear?

Accessing another dimension, on your own like Alice through the looking glass. Why would this be uplifting and sweet? First, there seems to be one account of who we are and what we are doing. I am driving to go shopping for packing tape and lightbulbs. In practice, we have to deal with a few versions of most stories. I am part of a consumerist culture driving a polluting car to exchange my wage for trinkets I will soon throw away. I am a stand up guy for getting this done right when it’s needed. The traffic lights are doing their best to slow me down.

These animate different world-frames, but navigating the differences between such visions is a habit for us. So they feel similar by virtue of our regular exercise of their commensurability.

We are subjects, if that relation might be descriptive in this case, of a few imaginations. And against this feeling of being totally incorporated into one story you might not even like, you might want to see heaven in a wild flower. The appeal of this image is that we are so dominated by the same stories, that a rogue fantasy heroically presents the possibility of something else. It does not have to help us break away from our condition in the dominant fantasy. It gets us with new terms, forgetting what came before. Is the new fantasy better? The standards seem to be pretty low, since we’re amateurs in the new imagination, still surprised we can fly. We don’t spend much time in it, and have a superficial relation to everything there. Better than vacations, there are no expectations, so there are no disappointments. Better than changing what you get up and do every day, there are no stakes, so you can’t lose anything there.

Visions of reality are not something we have to believe. One of our most powerful resources against them is ignorance. Not understanding why we are members of a global community that requires us to maximize our own utility can be a powerful means to frustrate and defy that logic. Social sciences that study how actors choose make the opposite assumption: only by understanding your position can you hope to have any power in changing your place in it. Many argue that it doesn’t matter what you think, as long as you participate in the system (whatever the system is), this will come to be as their vision of your reality compels others to acknowledge and follow it. When its echoes resonate and amplify its compelling dominance.

Some argue that by paying taxes you are a slave. Do you feel like a slave? It’s surprising how persuasive it can be when someone tells you that it doesn’t matter what you think because they are sure.

APPARENTLY

2008-12-15T07:47:00.000-08:00

Apparently he was angry about it. Not that it matters to whom he seemed angry. We could talk about why. But what the word asks for first is confirmation. Appearances function as truth, which is why the construction does not ask for the audience to deny false impressions. Instead it asks for alliance against a social reality for which the appearance is not false.

A paranoid pact against those others who see wrongly and believe through how things merely seem. A respectful and knowing glance to those who will agree to deny what is apparent, from a body that turns back to those visions it struggles constantly to deny but never can. An idealism that envisions our rebel alliance against their flighty and weak tendency to believe.

But also, the suggestion that maybe we can make something of this appearance, that we need not dismiss or forget it.

OUTCOME

2008-11-20T16:13:00.000-08:00

I always thought it was a fair answer that when I grow up I will be dead. More people probably end up dead than in any other profession. Alas, the people I was young with grew up not to die, but, more often than anything else, to work in insurance and real estate.

Outcomes fuel standards for the consideration of arguments as tools: does this help us understand better, does this settle an empirical question, does this predict consumer behavior?

Of course there are also mechanisms by which we understand things to have been the outcome of a process. The Marxist idea of fetishism depends on an insistence that all things result from the same sorts of processes, are outcomes, the residue of purposivity or the target of a purpose. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton, 2005) insists upon all strange candies as the product of even stranger processes of production: oompa loompas at the controls of Wonka’s secret and incomprehensible machines.

Outcomes tend, in this register, not to come about by work so much as by the realization that the thing is a miraculous outcome, the outcome has somehow emerged from whatever is understood to have preceded it (which is one kind of causal account).

A particular form of duplicity in this miraculation occurs in the shifting configurations of outcome and purpose. Outcomes are only meaningful relative to ethical programs, political agendas, styles of strategy. Yet, outcomes act in the formation of arrangements in which meanings, among other things, are worked through.

Tools, unlike mere ideas, are useful. They let us do things. We can accomplish outcomes, and this utility authorizes the concept. By outcome, or by reference to outcome (which is different), economics can make claims about human behavior without either psychological or philosophical rigor.

Looking to its accomplishments, how sternly can you denounce first wave feminism?

ANCIENT

2008-11-11T20:50:00.000-08:00

Stargate, 1994.

A desert on another planet, where a powerful alien keeps thousands of humans in serfdom, is the one place left in the universe where ancient Egyptian language and culture remain. Where the ancient ways persist.

Athens and Rome are not ancient. Ancient India, ancient Egypt, and the ancient civilizations of the Tigres-Euphrates valley were not contemporaries in any sense of time beside this one: they are ancient.

Ancient is not a particular time, but a manner in which time passes. It flows with the patience of eternity, across the ceaseless years of particular human lifespans, in the magical domain that comes before the times of movement from whose first person singular we find ourselves as plural instances.

This particular allochrony incarcerates these moments in a temporality so foreign that to even make a comparison between present living conditions and the ancient ones is offensive or at least suspicious.Because we are not timeless, we are historically particular, mobile, and copresent in our contemporaneous realtime, living in relativistic times connected by the speed of light.

CLAIMS

2008-10-27T21:23:00.000-07:00

The film made some strong claims about identity.

This is the gateway to ideological critique. What has transpired is rife with claims, definitive statements which are advocated and behind which the thing itself can be understood to stand, in support. An interactive surface of claims, wherein we can locate the actual position of a work of art.

Vicissitudes of intention, duplicity, expectation, outcome, expediency, character, affect, and voice line up in a claim. Claims follow from warrants, which, themselves, assemble evidence. But claims are not only the end of this logical chain, they open outward to argument, strategy, chatting, discourse, and boredom.

In the diagram of ideological critique, all movies and games, texts and art can be assessed. Identify claims. Remember that the thing is on the other side of the claims, that they unstoppably issue forth from that thing itself. Abduct those claims into a political discourse. Make the thing answer for what it’s said. Don’t stay quiet about it; you are contesting its cultural work in a material manner by performing your critique. So stick with it!

First there is the claim, then there is a spatiality of positionality, then a discourse into which claims can be entered. In the first stages is the objectivity of a modest witness. With translation of claims into a discourse (which is also a political terrain), lines of flight transform this objectivity into the modest heroism of an everyday activist. An oppositional reader.

THE UNTHEORIZED

2008-10-17T17:56:00.000-07:00

“…I have a theory.” That is the diagram.

In the past that is a virtual time distinct from the present with its opening into a particular imagination of the future, there is a wild past preceding the theory, which must be a pragmatic systematization of intelligence. This past virtualizes a theory’s present, but also demands its coming into being. It is the time from which the theory emerges, and it is an ornate history for the theory.

In the sense that the theory is contemporary, all else is its past; on the map that this temporal function effects, there lie dragons. Those who understood, saw clearly, worked within their conditions towards what change lay within reach. Those who practiced what the theory calls for, before there was the theory to name its calling. Those theories, mighty enough in their own times and places, against which the new theory is to be considered an improvement, an update, a redesign.

An extra moment for this last movement: a theory remembers its past as other theories. Before my theory of the discrete charm of automobile commuting, there are others. Aside from the Marxist theory of imprisonment, there are folk theories. Everyone has a theory of the self, at all times. These moments, sometimes having pronounced themselves as theories, but usually not, are no longer the untheorized when accounted for in this way. They are competitors for the niche of the theory. They would occupy the same site, service the same connecting cities, be used with the same supplies.

We present subjects, each ourselves in the first person, but pluralized by the universalization of the theory as a mode of practice, each animate the theory by presenting, recalling, caricaturing, deploying, modifying, or teaching its system. Each I of the we meets the everchanging present with the theory’s division of latent and manifest, knowable and forgettable, expression and content. Likewise, this we has a way of not knowing its past which, in the voice of each speaker whom the theory rides, segments perception of the past with a numbness to the untheorized.

For that untheorized that is not equal to its representation in a theory’s entourage, there is no we that gives it voice. Who might defend the omnifarious perspectives, techniques, knowledges, and practices which are presently imagined by the theory as that for which it substitutes. The untheorized does not amount, it does not amount to anything, it is scraps that are not fragments of one whole between them all, but of many events in the occurrence of which the untheorized subsists.

Take the untheorized core of a discourse. For others, it is easy to ask what meditation is. But for those who meditate, theorization of this question is at best a point of departure or an appropriate explanation for others of what is only another gateway to the practice of meditation. In this case, as in the question of humor for comedians, the untheorized cannot be plausibly reduced to a historical landscape that lacks thought.

There are other approaches to the untheorized than its summary formulation in diversity with a central tendency. And in this chaos that is full of structures, the chaos of the untheorized, are the practical wisdom of many treatments that have been sufficient, effective, clever, unjustified, and striven for their own purposes in their many times and places, in their many ways.

WAYS OF NOT LOOKING

2008-10-08T12:27:00.000-07:00

A strategy of visualization depends on not being seen in certain other ways. Not having the pixels counted or not being shown for a quarter of a second in a fast slideshow. Sometimes it really needs a context, sometimes it hates one.

CRUSHES, BEAUTY

2008-07-26T17:23:00.000-07:00

Uninterested, no activity, nothing worth doing – a face in the back of the bus. A pair of shoes in the corner of the room that grow out to legs and a whole instant of persona, look, vivacity. What she’s worn today, what particular self she’s fashioned out of the elements that, drawn from freshly each day, constitute her self.

He is cute, is he looking at me through those large, dark sunglasses, does he notice me looking at him?

He’s just a cliché of homosexuality with his tasteful high quality earphones, ironic and sophisticated shirt, intelligent shoes, truly appropriate socks. How plain his performance of chic cosmopolitan masculinity.
His nose is shaped wrong and his hair quite ordinary.

It is an idle interest, nothing fancy, nothing worth remembering. A familiar gesture, a face that reminds me of a co-worker I met twice and liked, one nice looking outfit, a well curved shadow. It’s nothing, really. Or only a bit more than nothing, an embarrassing willingness to like what is nearby because it is nearby. We are quick to forget about it, forgive the imagined chemistry; when everyday life means dramatic exceptions and thousands of experiences as incommensurable as possible, you have to let images go as fast as they come.

Out of the boredom that crushes grow, refining the numb fantasies that they plead with, cultivating an apathy to the failure of these affective nestings, an unforgiving sense of beauty. Slower than lust and more realistic about its potency, but looking from less perspectives: someone truly good-looking.

RESOURCES AND CONSTRAINTS

2008-07-15T19:00:00.000-07:00

“Whenever it’s a resource, it’s also a constraint.”

Don’t act like constraints are regrettable and resources are always good things. Someone else is going to get after your resources, and your constraints might be the only thing keeping your shit together. Armor isn’t a weapon, but it helps win battles.

Resources are a liability, an embarrassment, flexible like a door that flies open with every gust of wind. A resource constrains the use of apparently inferior alternative means (bring a knife to a gun fight), constrains strategy by its own strength (driveby shootings), functions by constraining what become its objects (hammer traps nail in wood).

Constraints enact the exclusions upon which activity depends (the floor keeps us from falling, the roof keeps the rain out), are the bones which joints and muscles move, are the waypoints between which strategy offers a route, segment units of action by providing numbness (people from different cultures are not the same, therefore pay attention to culture).

IMAGINATION + CREATIVITY

2008-06-05T21:50:00.000-07:00

Imagination is both wild in its absence of recognizable systematicity (his body sang like aluminum foil, all men on earth died instantly, dreams parading through each place put me to pasture), and domesticating in its terrible repetition of the same (dragons, robots, four elements, travel back in time but disturb nothing, machines have taken over, heroes, true love).

Imagination is not just a set or a faculty. Imagination is not just a personal trait (that daydreamer…) or the inventory of fantasy (D&D’s Monster Manual). Imagination mixes the available with the possible, it permutes thematics into possibilities. All the athletic shoes that could be made, every racist thing someone might say about Ethiopia, what would be conceivable to make for dinner. Some imaginations are explicit about their limits, such as Nike’s iD shoe-making web app, or the combinations of preparations on your Waffle House hash browns: scattered, smothered, covered, chunked, topped, diced, peppered and capped. When you can “get your burger 256 ways” it means 8 choices and you get as many or few as you like, same for hashbrowns.

Permuting thematics into possibilities. All this against an aspatial silence of impossibilities. These are not set off or experienced as included in their exclusion, they are also not given, and they are not strictly defined by their externality to an imagination. They are more like a sandstorm in a Lego Atlantis at the bottom of a pool. These impossibilities are unarticulated, not just by having no one to speak them, but more by having no air with which to speak.

Studies of a particular imaginary still hope that imagination is, in its fashion, the author of creativity. That its pre-figuration of possibility determines practices of realization. That it is its own virtualization whose legacy will be clear by its actualizations.

Imagination isn’t just the author restated as a diffuse social force. But we do often defer to the authority of an imagination and insist on creativity as actualization.

As a person is hosted in a human body and can thereby reproduce by means of bodies, imagination’s need for proliferation depends on its reproduction through creativity.

Creativity, unlike imagination, need not be thematic or consistent with itself. But because it’s wild like that, it’s treated as the ground, the host, the tool of imagination. This organization of actor and agency does not dominate creativity or obscure crucial social processes, but does let imagination take credit for creativity. And does participate in the telling of stories where imagination is the main character and creativity is the chaos with which it deals.

First, creativity does not just mean material affordances (film budgets and crews), but also tends toward empiricism as a method of inventivity (Michel Gondry’s homey props), and is the locus of much vivid artistry for which imagination must account. Creativity is creative and not just productive.

Second, audiences do experience imaginatively, which is why we may want to treat imagination as expressing itself through realization (the artistic vision brought to life by the hands of a master). But audiences, are not just experiencing imaginatively, they are also audiences acting creatively. And then of course there are “the same people” that do other things other places.

MARKS OF GENDER

2008-05-27T19:40:00.000-07:00

They’re not just marks of gender, territorializations of spectacle, nodes in a signifying system of representation. Kitten heels, platforms, stilettos, wedges, slingbacks, and pumps. Or: fur, silk, wool, linen, velvet, suede, cashmere.

Witness not the social but the passional construction of real men, whereby we, from time to time, recognize or come into contact with something more than just guys. Yet the yearning, awe, comfort, intimidation, or respect involved also reticulate a rhetorical system of regulative fictions in a culture of performance. Lip gloss could just be a marker of girliness, but it’s also a treatment of one’s own lips, a flavor for kissing, a small thing to buy or give or get. Lip gloss that comes out for some occasions and not for others, depending on concerns more particular and varied than gender.

This defiance of gender as a marking system both 1 expands outwards (or is based off gender’s mainland) and 2 marks out a rather different iteration of what the system is that they manifest.

1. Jeans rolled up the calf. A feeling of tightness, an exposure of skin, a framing of footwear, a practice of DIY consumerist re-appropriation, a solution for pants that weren’t quite the right length.

2. Other trinkets, retaining a strong traction to gender, wildly rewrite its systematicity. Earrings mark out a system of gender that is not capable of self-identity, that depends for its distribution on uniqueness more than repetition, that pertains to several family resemblances but does not chart a dimension for a continuum of expressions, that passes between friends, that we go shopping for, that tends to radiate less diversely through men, that has multiple piercings on the ear.

It’s not that earrings don’t function in the performance of gender. It’s not that projects of understanding gender ought to better attend to those other elements these ‘marks’ centralize (e.g. the “social life of things”). It’s that gender does not even function as one system, whose divergent marks appear everywhere, whose ever-present performance constitutes systematicity of a single kind.

Gender is not lucky enough to report back to single (post)feminist imaginations because their systematics are not ultimately united by reliable translators. Why can’t earrings be made to line up with a concept of women useful for opposing employment discrimination? Why can’t fertility enunciate a gendering whose position in respect to reproductive rights were more clear?

A post-signifying semiotic.

If once we wondered why women were in this position, and we then answered that there was a systematic treatment of a gender distinct from, but related to, sex and desire, we are now in the position of having greatest confidence in a kind of magic that rewrites women, position, systematic treatment, sex, desire, and who we would be bearing this legacy.

AND SHE’S LIKE

2008-05-20T17:15:00.000-07:00

Young people these days, inarticulate and illiterate, a preverbal imprecision we should hope will not seriously be the future of our fair planet. "I’m like", "he’s like", "she’s like". What’s become of the verb “to say"?

I’m like crosses the separation of what is said and felt, what is expressed and understood. I’m like is usually not what’s said, but when he’s like, “fuck”, then that’s the meaning of his enunciative position in the context of the story. Subject positions registering how affects effect them, effects affected, like an accent, by the charming character of a storytelling in which they appear.

TAUTOLOGY

2008-05-11T20:54:00.000-07:00

“It’s a good thing I don’t like spinach, or I’d end up eating it, and I hate the stuff.”
-Pierre, in Pierrot le fou

When it’s found out, as a tautology, is not the moment a thing falters and disappears. A tautology is the opposite of a paradox. A paradox simultaneously entails contradictory elements. The barber cuts all men’s beards who don’t cut their own. He both cuts his own as a barber, thereby not cutting his own as a man, and cuts his own as a man, thereby not cutting his own as a barber.

In a paradox the collision of these forces can be an impossibility, but usually is just a wreck. Most things are wrecks. If an opposite might be considered something the same in everyway except one, then paradox could be understood as the opposite of tautology. Or, a paradox mirrors tautology, establishing for it a heterotopia. Two elements that are the same because they include all of each other and nothing else, two elements that coexist yet exclude one another.

Tautology, syllogism returned to itself, or an argument whose conclusions and premise lack distance. These organisms encounter us as more than formalities. That a husband is a male spouse, that a person is a human being, that business is business. For each, there is a material supplement, activity that spirals alongside a tautology which turns circles.

Women are humans with female sexual traits. How many ways must this be enacted? The training of surgeons, the entire edifice of gendered markings, separate bathrooms, gendered pronouns, pornography and gynecology, neverending struggles to disentangle real women from artificial ones. The work that ensures this tautology is embodied and not always vicious or a cycle. Demonstrations by enthymeme are performative, not just following the ritual but enacting it.

All persons are united in their common experience of being persons. Except those humans who are not persons (the terminally ill, infants, the insane, that crazy motherfucker across the street) do not experience personhood, they experience their own form of exclusion from personhood. When we start with “person”, understanding it through one universalization, we materially repeat the exclusion of those who were not included in the first round by pushing them into the experience that they actually experience differently.

Or, to see it the other way, tautologies champion what already happens all the time. A defense for what we would do, a way to avoid eating spinach. In this form of structuration, sites of contestation become limited. There is more than the formal simplicity of a tautology to dispel; there is the substantive activity of an equation you’d have trouble resisting. Budweiser: King of Beers.

Would you argue that Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries cereal do not have the best Crunch Berry flavor? That Marilyn Monroe wasn’t a bombshell? That business is not business? Maybe you are thinking of something other than business.

DIFFERENCES | DIFFERENT ONES

2008-04-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

Difference is a relational condition. Difference is between or among, a unit of distinction. This is the difference of biodiversity and affirmative action. Differentiation subdivides what is known, classifies by categories, territorializes by strata, or appends to geometries of connection.

Biodiversity holds in relation necessary minima and maxima for environmental variables: at least this many black footed ferrets, no more than that many lionfish in the Atlantic. Likewise, affirmative action’s interest in reproducing demographic proportions of a population’s variation in an institution’s personnel treats variation along given lines (e.g. race and sex, understood by reactionary definitions that limit liability). Not an indictment of affirmative action.

Where might we put the taste of sugar that invents sweetness, the look of an animal from which we learn hazy caution, the variety and depth of our experience of beer or wine? To call it prior to semioticization would be banishment, and to understand it as parallel-to or networked-in understates the inequality of their powers.

Differents are different things prior to the semioticization by which their differences become clear or systematic. Mr. Ed the Horse, pineapple colored interior paint, pain, the gleam of utility, this, vanilla flavor, pages that are difficult to turn, jk3nssD, fixing the tongue on my cleats. Are these different things unable to remain different when listed together; is a sequence of terms with commas already units with distinctions?

Utopian vision starts from differences (no more racism, no deaths from malnourishment, a positive concept of peace) and arrives at an absolutely different ideal: city in the clouds, casitas in the woods, a world of nanotechnology. The lesbian island city would not have heteropatriarchy, and we won’t worry about its immigration policies or treatment of closeted heterosexuals. Let’s not get too specific, after all the demand for immediate alternatives when you offer criticism operates to return the problematic that we’re trying to work around.

This effect, the absolute vision of difference we end up with is, in its vagueness, immune to comparisons by which it would revert to relative differences.

I COULD CARE LESS

2008-04-22T18:16:00.000-07:00

People who worry about grammar has trouble with the phrase “I could care less.” If the speaker really does not care, shouldn’t they state clearly, “I could not care less?”

Clearly the use of idioms whose words do not parse into grammatical sense is stupid. One possible defense is historical, somehow this is a messed up version of a British phrase that once made sense. Another defense is that it is ironic, stating boldly something that is false, with the understanding that it is false. Waiting for you to figure it out so that the speaker can welcome you to the wonderful world of the unsaid.

Alternatively, it could be taken as superactual, and this is the usual melancholy seriousness with which the idiom’s performed. A snorkeling party with waterproof cameras? 8 year old beauty queens? I could care less. I am capable of a greater apathy than the minor form this topic calls for. My apathy is far from exhausted by this tiny plaything, which I could just as easily sustain an interest in as forget. So we could go there. If that’s what you’re into. However, and this is the sentiment communicated just by the tone of voice in which the idiom makes the speaker pronounce the word “care”, this is not something which excites me, or for which I have a weakness.

TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

2008-04-11T19:24:00.000-07:00

How do you make an accusation of technological determinism? Not just that there is more than one technology, but that there is more to be considered than technologies? How do you show that, in a history (of the past, present or future), technologies are doing too much determining? With what meaning of technology do you identify a subject playing too rough with its predicate?

With a strawman. A strategy of reading. Material and mechanical, technique and technical detail become one character: the technology. An account of the technology in relation to some things it’s not becomes a story of causation. An account of a (mechanical) cause. Step two, read this account as a denial of other accounts, for its ability to foreclose other rhizomes. Emphasize that, ultimately, the technological account has to be conjoined with other stories.

In this way, the technological, rendered as a mechanical capacity or relationality, can be put in its place. Returned to where it belongs within analytics responsible for maintaining an object for understanding. Objects such as social reality. In this movement’s crudest form, mechanisms are properly tools for man, understood through social or cultural descriptors. But the accusation of forgetfulness, of an “impoverished sense of causality”, could also be made from spiritual grounds. The plow did not break the native soil making way for our great nation, God provided for the faithful.

Most often it is social and political realities, cultural change and historical transformations that must not be forgotten. Whole dimensions of forces which dominate the socio-logic imagination like a nightmare.

In the literature of technologies, there is no direct translation of the charge of technological determinism. Soothingly, this literature imagines ideal mechanics, or conceives a limit to the mechanical dimension of forces.

Strikingly, the literature surrounding particular technologies fails to account for their overdetermination by other forces. This effectively isolates that discussion for experts only, and permits conditions from which applied technology would be a departure from certainties that fuel its syllogisms.

PASSIVE VOICE

2008-03-27T19:49:00.000-07:00

The passive voice also functions in games of concealing and revealing, to lay agency at someone else’s doorstep in the night.

If there is a fabrication of subjectivities, power relations of subjugation, patternings of subjective experience, discourses that articulate a subject-as-topic, architectures ‘realized’ in construction of subject positions, grammatical necessity to a subject, ideological definition of subjects to a master Subject, or a few of these in some combination. If these are not altogether different things. Entanglement.

Passive constructions are not a philosophical escape from a grammar infused with a metaphysics of the subject, wherein that subject is present and appears as an originary cause. (This power of the subject to take credit for miraculating predicates - theorized as free will debates, personal responsibility, cybernetic decentralization, or cellular automata – might be understood as a cause that, when viewed from the right angle, obscures other causes behind it.) Alternatives will not be found by the passive voice, but a reckoning may be forestalled. Subjectivity involves more than a grammatical subject that takes an object. Alternatives to the entanglement of subjectivity (or to some of its threads) most likely press out along different lines than a confrontation with a metaphysic present and alive “in language.”

Not the reckoning: to delay a reckoning means avoiding encounters, minimizing interactions, keeping away from people and places, remaining silent on some issues, denying a place at the table to enemies. This is not a strategy for resistance, defiance, confrontation, revolution, or politics. It’s a tactic, and a necessary one, for politics as housekeeping. The just man sweeps daily. Sweeping only moves the dirt around, and does not deal with the root cause of any of it.

Why use a solution if there is not a problem? The trick of passive voice to avoid an encounter is to provide wiggle room, to be slower to demand an answer. The point is that there is not a subject, or a thing in the place of the subject, no organization or individual, no single history or practice, that enacts fabrication of the entanglement of subjectivity listed above. But, how do we chronicle the implications of this agency without translating it again into a predicate in search of a subject?

CONCEPT, TOOL, REASON

2008-03-07T14:13:00.000-08:00

Talking of concepts, we become frustrated. What are they for? Let us speak only of a difference that makes a difference. Now our concepts will be useful. They have become tools.
Tools, unlike mere ideas, are actionable. They let us do things. We can accomplish outcomes, and this utility authorizes the concept. By outcome, or by reference to outcome (which is different), economics can make claims about human behavior without either psychological or philosophical rigor.

Looking to its accomplishments, how sternly can we denounce first wave feminism?
Mischaracterization, fallacy, or the play of concealing and revealing are essential to concepts or arguments. A death penalty supporter’s sign reads, “A LIFE FOR A LIFE.” By a displacement of what is nonsensical, we have a concept whose clarity and sense serve an agenda.

Economic science lets us do what we want! Excellent. But what do we want to do? More broadly, how are we to imagine what we want to do if everything we can think of is just a tool?

There is another power of concepts: they are seductive. There is a fatal power beyond what they offer for our discriminating use. When you have a hammer everything starts looking like a nail. Capacities become relations, tools are also artifacts, tricks of argument become reasons to do things. Ideas are reasons and not just tools. We get a purpose from what were supposed to be techniques and it’s not just a better mousetrap, it’s a new campaign of trapping mice.

Wait. Stop. Don’t let an idea turn into something else, forget its foreign affairs, its world to change.
Apprehended in their form, reasons are no more than concepts. They have internal relations, structure, substance, maybe consistency, and a logical method. They are little machines, movements, prepared strategies, manners, or elegant sculptures. If they don’t make sense, we might forget them. If they are ugly and wrong, incorrect and out of date, just move on.
But a concept cannot live by itself. Understandings of its form are not fixed, and often terrible, old white guy ideas are radical and life changing to those who have never heard them before. (ICite post)

In persuasion, or whenever mobilizing concepts and presenting understandings of their form, concepts become reasons. There is a reason to think what I say is true. We get a purpose from ideas.

Many thinkers hope desperately that their formulations become reasons, purposes, noble goals. Or that the ideas have, encoded into them, a political compass to collaborate with righteous goals. But more often, thinkers are arms merchants, perfecting their concepts only to have them appropriated for whatever against their wishes. Tool ideas fighting on the wrong side of surprisingly different battles.

Because ideas become tools in their use, reasons (which can be post-hoc or an impetus) convert many ideas into a set of tools for maneuvering or keeping an argument. A particular function apprehends things as a functional aspect. You are a pawn in her game; not a tiny flame maker but a cigarette lighter. The movement of reason interacts with a tool aspect of what is also just an idea.Yet, despite all this, tools and reasons can remain vulnerable to comments about them as concepts.

WE = MULTIPLICITY OF I

2008-02-29T00:25:00.001-08:00

Imagine instead a we that does not refer to a community I am a person speaking in. A we who is how hard it is to get a grasp what it would have been to know what me this I is. A we that is what makes I never final. A we of everyone I could have been, of every kind of person I’ve seen myself for a second as, but been unable to hold onto that horror of.

Not I, the grammar of a first person subject. That place has been cleared by a first person plural (which I would call a multiplicity). Not I, the avatar of me. That me is a different effect of writing that helps find itself through reading, a figure in the process of a reader reading something autobiographical (generative of an author from the writing).

I the instance of a we which is a non-uniform field of possibilities.

Opposite of this: The Individual 11. An individualist group who share the same views so completely they don’t even have to talk. Yet a group of identical actors playing out the program of a mind-control infection. The self-actualized, subject without anxiety, still fresh from the mint, and insistent on its own self-identity with its will. The person you would be if you could really Do What You Like & Like What You Do. Only violently individualist.

AGENCY

2008-02-18T15:17:00.000-08:00

Agency is a locus of attention, a zone with expectations, a body entitled to do things.

Theory gives you agency, tells you where and how you’ve an ability to act.

Paying attention to something, as in paying attention in school, means ignoring what you were attending to before.

DECENTRALIZATION

2008-02-14T00:08:00.000-08:00

Decentralization can be sought to extend and minimally distort an arrangement of power without requiring approval, because it already has participation. We’d rather add a team player who aids projects or even leads them than someone who would want to become a leader. A duke who would never become king.

RATIONAL THINKING

2008-01-28T01:14:00.000-08:00

Rationality is not thought. Or, rationality is not a kind of thinking experienced subjectively. It is a set of forms for creative output and thereby also an inspiration for an imagination. Don’t find reason in the brain. It isn't even in what we say about what's in the brain, it's a genre of creative production. Mostly stylistic conventions, but never without fragments of an interpretive community.

These forms for output (hypothesis-data, claim-warrant-evidence, etc.) might stay alive through expressions, but they are principally ground for critique. A bunch of mistakes you might have made, a uniformed service for some kinds of discourse. Rationality in business, rationality in parenting, rationality in social policy, rationality for restaurateurs, rationality for free inquiry.

This works whether you call thoughts expressions or something that happens before expressions. The experience is like playing Set, except add a diachronic plasticity to the rules.

THEORY, TRICK, VOCABULARY

2008-01-28T01:07:00.000-08:00

What good is theory!? Without practice? This a trap, a very classic and total quagmire for people worrying too much about thinking about worrying.

Theory is a programming device. A way to train us. An education of the body, of the spine, of the mind, of the warehouse, of the voice, or of lab equipment. Theory is about different forms of blindness, numbness, and prejudice.

Liberalism: ignore conflict and resolve everything with respectful difference.
Music theory: be numb to noises that don’t have rhythm and pitch.

Knowledge is formed like ignorance, but ignorance isn’t automatic or pre-social, it comes from somewhere too.

Forget for a minute the distinction between theory and practice. Not because the two are the same, but because the dilemma is a total diversion from the actual practices of theory. Theory happens in the moments when it is cynically deployed to justify whatever. Theory is there when someone gives a reason for something they are doing, and theory may have been the reason things started in the first place.

Theory consists of tricks. Fallacies are the bad ones and logic has a formal set of ticketty-boo favorites. Theories are techniques for getting from here to there. These techniques are tricks in the sense that they are used for the effect they have on other people. For example, theories use tricks to scare people away from one point. (Often the most obvious part of a theory is where it’s weakest.)

So these are just tricks. Yes and put enough tricks together and you have what we call a vocabulary. Break dance, parkour, painting.

Not everything is theory, we do not, as tempting as the metaphor is, go around with theories of what people are. Theoretical formulations are responsible to logical standards, push with rhetoric, can be taught, and usually must be defended. They contain premises and arguments, make a case and suggest a plan, can be expressed in different ways, and must resonate with an audience.

Hunger is not like this. Or, hunger would be better described in other terms. So would the desire to see a lot of cash on the table or the attraction of drunk people to salty fried foods. Different mechanisms.

Today we might still locate theory in language, lurking as a necessary possibility just as violence does in bodily presence and gestures. Both can emerge at critical moments to force a situation, but both are challenges which can guarantee nothing because they depend on how others respond.

INSECTOID HUMANISM | MAMMALIAN HUMANISM

2008-01-22T20:19:00.001-08:00

Basically humanism is anthropomorphic, turning totally different things into the same thing. An anthropomorphic concept of agency continues to present an official and chronic problem of humanism. Despite identifying other agents than those that are human or resemble the human (e.g. the state), the use of nonhuman visions of agency is still all too easily read back into humanist argument. You might tell a robot’s story about earthworms, but when other people pick this up and spread it around, it will be about people again. Vicious like rumors.

In the drama called the death of the subject, between those who would do away with the human and those who insist on its increasing and continued relevance, there are different renderings of what human being is. And it is here that we find the insectoid human, whose intelligence is as much genetic as swarm or hive intelligence. The insect which is an organism, a fragile living thing and a fragile life construct, in its pattern, in its systematicity. Insectoid tactics are becomings over time, of reproduction and camouflage, of defense and gathering food. They are not willed, they do not have main characters, but are all micro-actors engaged in activity with their environment rather than against or across it. Embodiment means many bodies, whole underground nests (as construction and not just architecture), activity that is between and not within the cellular automata.

Right, of course, what about caterpillars or other solitary hunters? The insectoid is a line of flight joined by the socialism of capitalist imagination (as in horror movies), traveled by cyberneticists engineering evolution as communication, prophesized by urban planners, mollycoddled by bio-ethicists.

This is different from that mammal humanism that emphasizes nurturing, warmth, a family of mated-pair plus children, individual subsistence, loyalty, creativity, and emotions. This is not that human who crosses plains of ice for food or covers itself in fur as decoration to attract mates or catches and kills animals for their meat.

In a way both visions are misanthropic comparisons of humans to what is animal that dissection displaces: the bestial. But they have different senses of what’s insulting.

DUPLICITY & BULLSHIT

2008-01-11T00:43:00.000-08:00

A challenge of entering adulthood is parting with casual sincerity. It becomes necessary to willfully misrepresent yourself, but that’s no longer how you should think about it. An applicant must be presented, a respectable adult must be costumed and performed, a friend must be performed, a colleague managed, a consensus reached. An adult body must be cultivated.

Bullshit isn’t the same as lying, and lying is hardly more adult than childish. Bullshit is multiplying the conversation, influencing it, or making it discuss more than one thing at once. Bullshit engages different registers of different topics where we are different kinds of people. “Spin” in politics allows people to say something that is, in one way, literally false, while, in another way, right on. To say there are two ways helps us imagine the dynamic of splitting and multiple engagements, but usually two is a simple case.

The duplicity of bullshit is the two-facedness of saying one thing that depends on what I know to be wrong but must treat as right in order to say something that we, then, no longer have the luxury of understanding as false.

Rarely can bullshit call itself bullshit, and that means denying other negotiations of the many terrains of discourse. Perhaps by calling them bullshit. Sincerity becomes incredibly difficult in adulthood, both as we fall out of practice, and as charting a course that remains true to our stance in each of many conversations becomes impossible, because we don’t remember which poses we got into for what reasons. How could an authentic and natural self persist without our constant efforts at its reproduction and continuance?

Bullshit did not invent duplicity. It responds to a neurotic reality: too many conflicting rules so that we must lie to tell the truth, as Picaso said of art. Honest communication of minds conflicts with self-esteem and confidence, describing a situation can change it, our own strategic map of relationships might lose its power when shared with those involved. Expressions cannot expect to be true or false all the time, because they are necessarily burdened with being more than that (thank god).
Truth and falsity depend on practices of verification to maintain their meaning, but those practices are themselves part of the world we engage in. It is not enough to say “words don’t mean, they function” or “meaning subsists in responses” because meaning is a function and responses traffic meaning.

COMMON SENSE

2007-12-31T21:26:00.001-08:00

Common sense. You know, that thing that smart people usually don’t have? You know, that thing that the commoners still believe in? Old wives tales, just plain talk, urban myths, just-so stories, what every man knows in his heart, the consensus bias would wrongly distort.

Here is an argument that has become popular: Common sense is worse than wrong. It is a protective sheath between our aware humanity and the part we play in hegemony, it is an everyday form of ideology. We need to get beyond common sense.

Let’s be polemical. Common sense isn’t one thing, there are many common senses, as well as uncommon and rare ones. Let sleeping dogs lie. That thing about 7 generations. Don’t mix business and pleasure. Between them, there is almost always a dispute, a contradiction, or a completely different perspective.

TV dinners are a convenient meal that lets you relax and watch your show. Just as much common sense as the critique that a sedentary lifestyle is unhealthy, as critics concerned that we have a body image out of proportion to our actual lives, as those seriously trying to scare us that American children are dying of epidemic obesity. There are plenty of obvious things to say that aren’t the same.

There is no central authority of common sense, no founding fathers, no primary texts, and no schools of interpretation. Logics that seem common circulate through people who will live and die by them at one time, and laugh them out of the room at another time. Organizations don’t just take actions, make rules, or maintain systems, but also think, and that means engaging opinions, and that means accepting some kinds of sense as reasonable and some not worth discussing.

Common sense is not just a rationalization of hegemony, though for being that it’s also a survival mechanism. It is more than a strategy or a mechanism, because, like capitalism, it is more than useful. Common sense is a purposing machine, that cannot be understood only in terms of accomplishing goals, because it also sets goals, it also inspires purposes, it also moves us.

The vulgar language of common sense is not a simplification or pidgin of the kind of proper academic prose that’s kept alive by highbrow intellectuals and writers. It’s the thickened, congealed, boiled down, necessity and opportunity of the everyday becoming of language out of things that are said over time by a wild “community” of speakers. It is a history of folks who’ve had a go with it, and all the things they’ve had to say and the ways they’ve gone to put things better.
Academic thinking, academic language, like proper English. Common sense thinking, everyday talk, like not grammatical or nothing. The vulgar is molasses, it goes between implication and clarity, even at the moment that it seems the most plain way you can figure on to say a thing. Because the thing to say itself is ambiguous, and not just because it has been articulated all fucked. It’s not one thing and it’s not the enemy.

RULES / SYSTEM / INTELLIGENCE

2007-12-22T17:07:00.000-08:00

A rule is a conditional statement, by which an event is defined and responded to in a set way. “There is no incest prohibition; instead, there are sequences of incest that connect with sequences of prohibition following specific coordinates” (1000 Plateaus, 176).

A system is an arrangement of rules whose enforcement, contradictions, and propagation follow organizational logics. Systems include rules. “Subjects are simultaneously bound in enmity and dependency, a contradiction smoothed ideologically by economic theories of the hidden hand, political theories of the benefits of interest group conflict, and philosophies of utilitarianism, each of which converts competitive self-interest into the common good” (Brown, Power without Logic, 84).

An intelligence entails a manner of considering, deciding, rulemaking, and executing that presides over a system, but also makes possible its transformation, recuperation from failure, response to exceptions, and approach to things unknown. “The value which an actor surrenders for another value can never be greater, for the subject himself under the actual circumstances of the moment, than that for which it is given” (Simmel, On Exchange, 52).

The point is not to phrase things so that you can always explain everything, but to be able to keep together a few ways of putting things by which we can negotiate with things we understand poorly.

AD HOMINEM

2007-12-02T19:56:00.000-08:00

Ad hominem argument attacks the enunciator rather than the content of the argument. It is a kind of logical fallacy. Since the structure of this accusation depends on splitting content from form, to say what is the legitimate forum for argument and what is off limits, one response is obvious.

The author of an argument matters because her position in a network of trust (which is also a community of knowledge) authorizes and qualifies the content of her argument. Conversely, the author of an argument, its supposedly prior and generative form, also accumulates from the contents of argument, so that we know Plato by his philosophy, and this often provides (or contributes to) a way of approaching argument (rappers giving interviews, presidential speeches, second wave feminists … genres).

With the persona of authors we can defend against the accusation that a book’s cover gives the wrong image of modern surveillance, that a particular lyricist can use the word bitch, that wolves can kill raccoons, that a social movement can stir up a little violent riot.

Supported by the arguments themselves rests a celebrity to their author. The dude in a suit at a book signing? He was on Cross-Fire last night and will be on Oprah the day after tomorrow. How we treat some arguments directly affects the persona of their author, and the producers are all hoping you get the association between work and author because, among other possible reasons, it’s a way of marketing the guy (as a brand) into someone who can get a decent income from this kind of work.

Yet the radiation of argument, the way it may be taken up by others, rephrased, presented in new contexts, permits new hosts for arguments. New authors for old arguments. When this happens the celebrity of old authors may follow along, or be brought into play in complex ways. For example, arguing that an old argument was only defensible within the oeuvre of its “original” author, and cannot sit by itself. Logically, this is a threat without an argument (tell me why I am wrong saying this here and now), but in the mud of recovering arguments from sources and putting them to work, the impression of a fragile transplant can be a significant caution.
Finally, the often nasty truth that 1 million customers can’t be wrong. They can’t be. I mean, what do you think you’re going to accomplish defending Hitler’s views on vegetarianism?