Antennae

I held out one finger on each hand in front of me, parallel, and the rest of my fingers naturally coiled into zeros. In between was what made thousands of bodies stay seated in thousands of chairs while Ludovico Einaudi played piano on stage. The sight of a nearly bald man in a black suit sitting for two hours, wearing glasses, shaking his gently head from side to side as if a typewriter. His fingers sneaked and sleepwalked on the keys. I was watching him, my upheld fingers tuning forks. I was surprised at my own fear of using the present tense, lest it slip away and no longer be known; at least this way, I could keep a memory, an imperfect imagination that would remind me later that I was there. Though I am scared, too, that when I remember, I will have forgotten about his shut eyelids, his elevated back rising and falling like his chest once did while a baby. Hence, the music between my fingers.

Arid Continents

He wanted to wait to find a longer word, for one to shred through her fingers and on the floor where he could catch it first. Once he did, it would be no one else's but his. For her, the most important thing was holding in between her cupped hands the secret of her worry which was invisibly scratching one palm then leaving a tickle there while it scratched and satisfied the other. He felt her concentration dim. So he pressed on, pressing his back into the grainy seat, his feet unrolling on the kept carpet, his eyelids held back as forcelessly as he could so the two earths inside would not revolve. Too long, and continents in daylight would turn into deserts.

She stretched out her fingers like a peacock would its tail feathers, but still held her palms together, the rolling stones of them holding.

She looked from the carpeted chasm between her shoes to him, earths to earths, oases to oases, bringing withering lands closer by centimetres.

Vigil of Own

I dropped a grape on a piano key
that was apart from its piano, just holding there its own potential for sound,
and when it hit, it made no sound
but the key spun into a cycle while the grape flicked away,
the key, turning a music
called "air" into a knot

then dash disappeared, 
and in its spinning mass there was unfurled
a mind upping to something,
suspicious at being watched
yet carrying on its silent carrying on
with I, voyeur,
suddenly regaining consciousness while watching it spin.

Courage

(I have just written all this out, and am amazed at the amount of thought activity that has gone into it - thoughts I had only half-had or quarter-had consciously, all pooling. Thankfully, I am not freaked out or worried or feeling guilty, though I am wondering how you will respond.)

I had a very peaceful morning from the dream-sharing, and then when you told me that the writing of mine you like most is when it is play, I felt reassured, confirmed. The day progressed smoothly. I finished the Murakami short story book, and the Reading for Writers book as well. I went outside, had some precious moments of being in the garden, and a metaphor arranged itself that I then went back inside to write:

"Dad recently cut the tree branches down so the trees looked like twigs tangled together in their own stumps, with hardly any leaves. The midday sun cast the tree's shadow on the grass, a veiny, neuronic shadow, and my walking on the recently cut grass felt like footing the top of a brain; and I wondered whether my weight was being felt as each sole of my pacing was pressing down into the grass. I felt like a fly landing and scuttling about on the hairs of my arm."

Something akin to that. Then I seemed to lose some lustre. I had a very inactive day, and I think that slowth showed itself in my emotions - I felt fine, but I felt increasingly... stuck. Inert. Unsatisfied by the things I was doing - my salvation, I thought, was going to be to write, but I tried that and I couldn't - I was stuck in a loop of doing-nothing-really. This, I recall, happened a lot during holidays. I had too much freedom, too much I could just procrastinate on, and nothing I had to do. No serious deadline to meet, I relaxed and had a lazy day. Fine.

But then it isn't fine because I don't like wasting this time. I am fine if its chosen laziness (i.e. relaxation), which it was for the first half of the day; then it turned to inertia.

I think this inertia feels worse because I haven't dealt yet with my emotions about what was discussed the night before. Attachment. That's better a word than clingyness. I realised two things throughout the course of the day which was spent with myself. I wanted that. But actually only the first half was spent with myself, the other half was procrastinating this inertia. So, the two thoughts I had. 

One) Seeing you often at university makes me feel less appreciative of you. In a way, I think that my mind has now normalised you enough to not treat with as much respect and empathy as you deserve. I do not think it is the fact that I see you often that caused this however, but, as I said last night, the lack of "quality" or rather focus on ourselves that happens during university time. I think that I enjoy hanging out with friends a lot more during university time because after a lecture, while I am processing, I enjoy going to the quad to just let the thoughts be sponged in and I can talk about things without needing to use my mind and emotion so much. Not to say I have not enjoyed spending time with you, but I wasn't always there fully present, because my mind was drained from university work and whatever thoughts those sparked. I mean I was still there, and right now I'm generalising, but I just feel like I wasn't giving you the whole of my attention, even though I wanted to on some level; my mind though wanted to do something else low-key, to be unstimulated. I think that's part of the reason why I didn't enjoy ritualising going home with you on Monday and Tuesday at 5. While it was a spontaneous decision at the start, I still felt like I could choose to go or not, and when I did, I chose it because I was able. But then I just felt like I had to, because those were the only times I would get to see you and I was feeling like you were now expecting me to come, so for the last few weeks of semester, I did. I didn't really want to each time, though, because I wasn't really choosing. When I was on the bus with you, the thought would go away, but then I would catch myself later on thinking that next Monday I'm going to go home with her. It was certainly not a dreadful thought, as I may be sounding it. It was irksome though because I wasn't entirely happy for that choice to have been made for me. And I'm aware that if I wanted space I could ask you, or if I didn't want to do it, I didn't have to. You have mentioned it to me many times. But at the same time, I still felt compelled to come with you. Despite your words, I didn't feel like I had the choice of it, like you still wanted me to come because it would make you happy. I went with that, thinking it would make you happy. And I thought also that if I said no and decided to go home with someone else or train, that I had to have a legit reason for doing that. My default choice switched from "let me think about what I want to do" to "go home with you." And I felt that was expected, and that you enjoyed it. I've said the same thing a few times now, just to get it sorted in my mind. Wall of text. nice. 

Seeing you often at university - as often as I came - built this expectation in my brain. I feel silly now for having had it, but please do let me know if you think there is any truth to it - if you actually did have any sort of expectation of me to see you all days. Those times didn't always feel like quality times because, as you said and I echoed, we were always doing other things, had other things on minds, and it was a bit too half-hearted - where I feel it was not supposed to be. I liked October 2nd because it was a full-hearted quarter of a day. And what I reckon is, that we ought to have tried to have more quality time dates instead of meeting up lots. I know we only had three times a week when we were both at university, but because of that timetable, I always felt compelled to meet you since that's when I came to university and that is when you got to see me and you wanted to see me each day I came, I thought. That's not an accusation, but I did feel like it was an expectation. The ritualisation was a mental thing, and I think that this halfhearted/fullheartedness is really mental barriering. But this is where my "suffocation" stems from. A mental idea. Feeling like I was following protocol instead of actually wanting to meet you. There were definitely times when I looked forward to seeing you. But other times it just felt part of the ritual - and you and I both deserve much better, much more heart. And the heart follows no ritual, save its beating, and its beating is constant, and each beat matters. I'm annoyed that my mind has buried my heart once again beneath its layers of thinking. And yet it's still intact. Hidden, though. Because I reckon you are more in contact with your heart than I am, so that is why I want self-time - and I have to properly do it myself - so I can reconnect with that heart.

Now the feeling compelled to be with you has been bubbling for about a month, and really it's not a devastating issue, because I have enjoyed being with you nonetheless, because when I am with you, the balance thing happens and then the thoughts disappear. But when I am away from you, that's when my mind is sabotaging me, inconstantly building quiet resentment towards you because my "freedom" is being taken away, or so it says. That's why I was saying that when you text me, the thought sometimes hits me that I am then supposed to reply. You expect me. It's the protocolness that irks me. You are not demanding of me, which is why I reemphasise that this is in my head, but I thought writing this may help me (and you) understand more where I'm coming from. I think the initial thought I had has evolved so perhaps what I was saying earlier no longer applies as much. And the protocolness happens when others text me, it's not unique to you. You just "happen" to text me most.

Oh there was thought two) which is that I feel I must reciprocate emotions even though you say I don't need to. I still feel guilty for you saying that you are going to miss me out of everyone else, and me saying I don't think I will. I feel like I have to justify my feeling, like it's wrong or something. I feel that unsaid couple pressure. It's like, as a couple, I am expected to see you more than anyone else, and not only that, I have to WANT that. But the truth of it is, I don't think of it this way at all. I don't ever consider if I want to see you or not, I either do or I don't. It doesn't happen mentally, it happens via the heart. So stuff like being missed, which would happen via the heart as well, if it were to happen even on a minute level, it would not occur to me as a thought. But after you said it, I thought about it. Because I thought I had to, and it was triggered. Even though I didn't have to. But it isn't a thought, and I know now that you are not demanding that I have the thought. It's getting late and I'm tired.

The truth is I don't really think about us as a couple. I don't like thinking about boyfriends and girlfriends and togetherness. I have the practical thoughts, yes, and you are my girlfriend and I am your boyfriend. It's established. But actually, besides sometimes having a mental countdown of how long roughly we've been going out (kind of like a milestone measuring mind operation), I don't think about us. I think I used to, when I had my analysis cap on, but I donned my balding look as of late and I'm much happier with the mental state. Thoughts about missing you and being a couple and clingyness are all thoughts from the cap, as if they are rabbits and doves and other magic things jumping out of it and into my mind. I would prefer not to have those thoughts, because I would rather not have the interference with the happenings of the heart.

Let me stress again, I am writing this to move through my emotions and to realise what I am thinking. I think I got to overthinking again, in a mild bubbled form. Signals progress in my mind. That was a pun. But also a cliché ("in my mind"), ew. I want to be free to be who I am. I am blessed to be with you, and I want to remember that in the present moment. I think if the heart has planned our life together, then so it shall be. I can't plan it though, not via the mind, at least not yet while it's still in overthinking habits. I don't want to plan it. It's not mine to plan. I don't want to think about expectations and clingyness and missing one another. I rather our relationship be from the heart, with the heart.

That is the courage I started this post with, and the courage I feel I have regained now, having cleared a path through my thoughts. Good night.

Writing Worth that Last Sentence

“A great novel is the intimation of a metaphysical event you can never know, no matter how long you live, no matter how many people you love: the experience of the world through a consciousness other than your own.”

I begin with what another slide of consciousness has projected upon the back wall of your head (and mine). With a similar stained glass-type of refraction I also think to begin writing for National Novel Writing Month which is coming up in 11 days. 

Two years ago I wrote in a shadow of a novel. As I was inking away rather pixellatently, a story began to articulate, a plot line that, when I was asked what I was writing about, I could actually verbalise. That made me happy. I should have realised then that that is part of my "writing process" - writing for understanding, and understanding what I write only after I write it. I backspace often when I write, because I am not used to thinking before writing or saying, partly because I find it difficult to keep many thoughts in my mind at once. Writing allows me to have it there for me. When I write an essay for university, I write it sentence by sentence, carving each as I go, having some whisperthread of thought as to where it is going but often losing hearing of it when my attention concentrates on trying to make one sentence echo what silence might be pooling in my mind. I can repeat myself in the same paragraph. My attention to my writing flickers depending on the environment I am in, so I don't find it easy to focus on one idea and charge with it if the environment allows me to get into habituated procrastination or several ticks I only do in private. Right now I have lost sight of what I was writing about. This is the work of concentration, this focus. When it is there, it is there, but I think often I zoom in so much that I forget - actually lose thought - of the larger idea. When I talk, this clearly happens. You hear me speak and I ramble incoherently in half-sentences, trip over demarcations between ideas, make faces at fences between thoughts, and overall tie knots in the conversation. My memory pops. In and out. Thankfully the interlocutor seems to be paying enough attention (thank you) so as to remind me which train I was on before I tangented. This gets them confused at times (sorry), but it's also kind of charming - there's an element of unpredictability, an always-almostness that grasses out from behind ideas. I say charming because I think it is so. It's a nuisance, too, it's harder to make sense. When I talk to the children at work, I tie myself in circles in front of their blank faces. Thankfully my boss trusts me and doesn't listen in on every explanation I give to them so doesn't quite know that I mumble and mix up my words. With adults, it is easier to converse - not because I stumble mentally less, but because I can tangent in quirky ways and circle back to my thoughts as if it's a show. I use odd words not because I'm trying to be funny or particularly comical but because in the moment, that is the word that I feel like using. That is why I make up new words - not to be funny, but to be more precise as to what I want to say. I am not then, an effective communicator, but I'm somewhat of a builder.

That paragraph was getting a bit long and there were a few ideas there that could probably be expanded upon but on I go. Thinking for me is like being a... bipedal light... in the process of walking along a long corridor of mirrors and trying to not shine everywhere. That's not exactly right, actually, I don't quite get that distracted. But my mind likes to focus, and it can - if there is one thing to focus on. If there are two, it cannot focus on both. If I am talking to someone, the environment will be one focus, them another, what I am saying another... and I cannot split that focus. It is just alight, and whatever it wraps itself in, it blazes with. Whatever is not within its light, remains in a beautiful kind of cold.

Writing allows me to organise my focus - to devote it where it is needed, as much as it is needed, then go on to the next thing, knowing that the thing it had just begun carving (like a laser) is not going to melt or disintegrate. Writing allows me to keep some memory of my thought that I have formed and that is necessary for me from another time or someone else to read and follow like a crucial detail on a sculpture. Writing gives me and you a chance to see that there is not just one dent (which is what I see when I write it) in this wood carving, but an actual wood carving of a thing full of dents in different places.

Where to place the dents, or where to ink the needlepoints is a question of craft to some extent. I have learned craft by going to university, and continuing to study writing, I will continue to learn the effects of different crafting. Reading gives me a chance to see craft at work in crafting a consciousness I borrow for the duration that my nose smells the pages/Kindle ink contained within a particular work. But it is more than craft, as Zadie Smith would agree (I feel) - she is the author of the quote at the beginning of this write. It's something other than craft, probably hand in hand, maybe. I haven't thought it through yet, which is evidenced by my sleepwalking/cliché use. What I am trying to say though (I have just reread the starting sentence of this paragraph and that has jogged my memory of what my point is that I am trying to make) is that when I write, I place the needlepoints not so much according to conscious crafting choice, but from nonverbal instructions from something else. If it is habituated, it will end up in a cliché and I will feel it a betrayal, a non-representation of what I want to say because it's not me that is saying it, it is a borrowing that is doing the saying for me and I want to use my own voice to say it. So I don't know what I'm going to write before I write it. I like that. Because that way I can't keep it in my mind, but in the act of writing, in the act of sitting and pushing keys, it waves and blasts and rummages through me, looking for ways to be known. So the advice that I'd been thinking I'd have to follow to "make it" in the world as a writer, to make up stories that people can relate to... I cannot do that consciously. If someone relates to what I write, beautiful. But I cannot write a story about New Zealand, for example, by thinking I have to write a story about New Zealand. The story has to surprise me. It has to be dented without me knowing, and then only partway through or at the end upon taking a step back will I note that... this is a story about New Zealand. The story has to surprise me with itself.

Now, I thought, of course, that is too hard to achieve. Writers that can rely on craft can write great stuff... I don't think I am one of those. I don't want to be. I want to be surprised. And I was very happily surprised by what I wrote in November 2010, that NaNoWriMo novel. The novel existed within me, unpieced by consciousness, and then during that month, it was woven into a text, in the fibrous sense of the word. Thoughts became threads, became text.

Novels, moments of unpieced consciousness, globules, whatevers, blurs, live within me. Like, wonderful haves in a haven of wow. I learned that whatever is written is a function of its writing system... so technically language is a filter that my thought will go through. As a filter, it is limited, and because it is limited, it is not going to be the end all. I write because it comes out. Zadie Smith writes because she stays awake through it. I empathise and experience that, too. I write because I cannot sleep - though I do sleep, it is not sound. Even though my language is rushed to get this post done and it's not all creative and it borrows so much from clichés and things you already know, and it's not revolutionary in the writing itself or anything... all of these are betrayals to those moments of writing, but they are betrayals that I accept for the moment so I can get something else out in the open... the idea that I feel writing. Reread the quote from the beginning.

“A great novel is the intimation of a metaphysical event you can never know, no matter how long you live, no matter how many people you love: the experience of the world through a consciousness other than your own.”

That intimation of a metaphysical event I can never know... that tickles me in a way that makes me want to write, to satisfy, to try and undoubtedly fail (I'm told I'm a limited human being) at transcribing or translating it into words. What I produce will never be enough of what I feel. But my standards are not, at this stage, perfection and wholetranslation. That's impossible. I don't really care to get to the paragon, because I won't get there by trying to get there anyway, since my writing has to surprise me. And I also don't care because it satisfies me to just try and get there. Getting closer satisfies me more, of course, but if Lacan's philosophy regarding jouissance is in order, then objet petit a is out of reach. Words aren't it, so they can't quite walk that far. But my God... beautiful it is when I don't know what I am writing about actually feels like something... and that something is felt by another person... as if there is another slide of consciousness on the back of their heads. Writing allows that accessibility because the reader has to pick up the writing and project the slide it offers onto their wall and see that world. That is their responsibility - to actively read, if they want to know what it is like to feel like they can be another.

I don't know what my first NaNoWriMo novel is about. Death, innocence, these are themes I can churn out... but it's something else too. It's not crafted well enough to be known as a text except by my eyes. It's blurry, too much so. But it's what came out of that contact with the light, it's what was burned. If the smoke ever clears around it, I will look upon it and see if any of that rawth can be salvaged and built into an ouvrage that another consciousness can hear.

I have a title in mind for what I want to write this year. Speckles of ideas. I honestly though am excited just because I want to see where the dents will be. What will I write? The beautiful, exciting, wonderful, palpable feeling of it is... I will never know what I have written. What it came from, I will always have, but what the writing will be will always be but a trace, a not good enough trail.

But what I want it to be is as good a not good enough trial as I can try make it be.

Techni-city

Re: Rama’s “The Lettered City”

The city is composed of two “super-imposed grids” – one is a labyrinthine unwritten knowing of streets and physical geography through encounter and exploration, the other is a labyrinthine knowing of symbols through writing, understandable through the “application of reason”. The systematic, structurising film placed upon the first physical, material film has come about through writing, the work of what Rama calls the “letrados”, and the city nowadays is understood through this layer of symbolism. As someone who has lived in Auckland for 10 years, for example, I have parts of its topology mapped out in my mind, and I am aware where places of interest are located, enough that I do not need to go exploring to stumble spontaneously upon them. Occupying and familiarising oneself with a space thus I deduce to mean understanding it in terms of symbols, meaning, power. I call the symbolic layer a sort of film because day-to-day it is indistinguishable from the physicality of the city, with its concrete and its corners.

The geography of Auckland 200 years ago lent itself to being written over, and by extension, built over by settlers (and Maori before that). The city’s pre-city physical geography then can be thought of in terms of Louis Armand’s “materiality”, and the idea of the city as an urban conglomeration and an economic seat of power comes from the “structurality” that is imposed upon it. Earlier, I referred to the latter film as structurising because when the city was written, construction began upwards, aiming towards the sky – hence we now have skyscrapers which are symbols of importance. The more tall buildings there are, the more important (and powerful) we consider the space to be.

(1860 - Looking north down Queen Street showing the site of the Bank of New Zealand, sourced from the Auckland City Council website)

Writing changed the physicality of the space – a beach became a harbour, a swamp became Queen Street. The physical geography had its own technicity – in a sense, it was its own techni-city. Settlers saw the place as ideal for the imported idea they had about what a city was, and they built up. Although writing is generally flat, it has terra(re)formic powers.

Viral Passivity

Re: Dean’s “Affective Networks"

Although the internet is a levelled playing field in terms of allowing users anonymity, it is questionable whether the unknown amateur blogger contributes anything to it besides the act of his own contribution. He posts something on his blog and accrues an “affective nugget” from having made himself heard, though potentially it is only in the inside of his own head that his voice echoes. In a crowded space like the internet, sound doesn't echo. The blog upon which this post is located can very well be read as that. Statistically, it has most views from my own clicking and re-reading. I keep it like an archival diary of my dabblings in writing and sense-makings. Even if there are great ideas or moments that are perched within these posts, they’ll unlikely ever be read by anyone outside of a select few, myself included.

Because the sheer size of the data-colossus that is rewritten and enlarged by participation in communicative capitalism, it is less and less likely that one blog or one voice will surface above the mass, even if for a short period of time. Success on the internet would be that ‘rising from the mass above the mass’, exemplified by the rise of amateur YouTube stars to celebrity status, like Justin Bieber, or the rise of viral cat videos that created their own momentum of cat videos. Success is thus quantified, mathetic, measured by view counts and the amount of attention paid. We contribute to the mass of information available, in the secret hope that what we have to say actually will be heard. But as Dean remarks, “contemporary communication networks are reflexive”, so by interacting, we are effectively writing the code for the approval of our writing. This blog doesn’t just sit in the ether of the internet; I have linked it to my computer and to my Facebook page; perhaps someone will stumble upon it and have a gander.

Dean further notes that communication for its own sake “turns our activity into passivity;” we become unable to do anything but communicate because before we act, we feel we must be informed – and with more and more information available to sift through (which takes patience, concentration, not to mention time), we end up either stopping halfway through being informed and risking action without full awareness of consequences (e.g. organising a protest march through a Facebook event), or actually doing nothing. In other words, we may be motivated by a cause, such as the Occupy Auckland movement, but there would be so much that we would have to become aware of before we could feel ‘able’ to act, that we probably would resort to clicking the safe “maybe attending” on the event and never actually doing anything about it. I think of this in Year 11 Economics 'scarcity' terms: we have unlimited wants but limited means. We are being asked to care about all these causes, but if the precursor to proper care is being informed, and the communicative network continuously extends that information flow, action derived from care seems to be perpetually deferred. If stuff does happen, it happens always with the risk of being uninformed, of not being totally aware (even though that total awareness, in itself, is an impossible – an objet petit a).

A Worthy Node

Re: Galloway and Thacker's "Nodes"

I can adopt the thinking that I am a node. I am connecting things together, and things are connecting to me without me being starkly aware of them. Imagining the topology of nodes, the network, I am a dot with lots of lines pointing away from me to other dots. There's a dot for my mum, a dot for dad, and two for my grandmothers who live in Romania. I can't imagine the rest of the dots but now that I am writing, I can imagine a dot for you, the reader. I am connected to you. My dot to your dot. It's love. Imagining you reading this augments my sense of purpose, like I am writing for you, even though I know so little about you. And by that I mean, I made you up, so I am going to take it slow. I don't want to rush into things, you know.

Anyway, I'll keep to some semblance of self-indulgent data entry. As a node, I am a carrier and enterer of data into the topology. It's all diagrammed beautifully in my mind. I input what I am feeling/express myself and the network draws lines to me according to the protocol designed to make me feel cared for. When this pops my blog, I'll feel accomplished. I need to write a blog entry about Nodes. Hey, there's a space for it. And it fills the space of my measurable requirements for completing English 364. Swell. I'm being playful which is what I've found has been a good approach to getting by in this course. Learning through experimentation/data entry.

Galloway and Thacker note that this is exactly how control societies thrive, how they make themselves "matter". By giving me a space to be validated, I am really subscribing into the protocol - and it doesn't even require anyone to really sustain that. I just have to put this writing out there, click "Post" and I will have done my part. A tick in the provided box and the adjoining feeling of me fist-bumping myself. Now let's hope I'll further feel the validation of getting an A+ if my data is deemed good enough by the rubric/system.

Post title

Stray: say, could happiness be modeled? Could our own "inherent" want of pleasure, joy, jouissance, enjoyment, fulfillment, success, be a thing "inherited"?

Am I stuck with the pursuit of happiness and fulfillment because I chose it? I watched a little bit of the X Factor 'Boot Camp' show tonight. One girl said she wants success like she wants to breathe. She is a teenager. She wants something she sees possible.

Could it be that everything that we seek is a copy of what someone has already achieved, then differentiated? When I am a boy, I want a toy; I want a toy because I have seen the toy. Even if I just saw it four seconds ago.

I don't know if the question ought to be why am I looking for happiness, but I am leaning more towards what is this happiness that I am searching for when I am searching for happiness?

A friend told me he wants four things in life. Marriage. Kids. [memory blank]. Happiness. Having all first three will give him number four. This is a model of happiness. Have these, have happiness. Happiness is desirable. It's also fleeting. But people are happy chasing happiness.

Happiness is capitalised upon by McDonald's and Coca-Cola. We are being sold what we have asked for. The number one dream we all have? To be happy. Is there a need in me that descend through to the fibre of my existence that wills I be happy? I don't think so. I reckon it's a behavior that we've learned, with a sentimental consequence we have habituated and learned.

Just like with what is immoral. Incest. Rape. Death. Torture. Terrorism. We have learned it is immoral. And if I declare it otherwise, I'll be immoral because I'm being amoral and I'm not caring about people who are suffering because their suffering is a blockage that prevents them from chasing their dream of happiness.

Happiness. Ever fleeting. Always chaseable. Never satisfiable. But we like the chase, don't we. Don't we. Don't worry, be happy. We've learned to want it. We've learned to learn to want it.

Think about it, what else can we aim to be, besides happy? Language allows us to say we can aim to be sad, or unhappy, or to just be, and all are definable and defined and valid. The impetus to move, to do, to go parks itself neatly into the car park we've languaged. Dream slots: happy, sad, fulfilled, enlightened, free etc. Each is a slot, we each have a coin, and we pick the feeling we're aiming for; most of the time, we pick happy, and on the way to the brief flashing of neon lights saying "You're happy now!", the coin travels through spiderwebs and sorrow and depression and apathy and whatever. I'm getting tired of writing this.

Tomorrow I'll wake up and want to be happy again. Even if I'm happy in the morning, I'll want it to continue. Happiness is always deferred happiness, isn't it, because we've learned to stretch it, to stretch it into the future?

I don't like this. I feel uneasy, like happiness should be free, should be wonderful and not sellable, but then I think this is an idea learned as well. Perhaps even my feelings are learned. Learned to the extent that they can be performed so I can have a full human experience which is probably learned as well. Maybe even intention is learned. Learned unconsciously. Maybe consciousness is learned, and it's just folding into itself right now.

I think, but I shouldn't think this, that my life matters only in terms that don't matter in my thoughts. Higher power? Happiness? A man in a white suit on top of a limousine. If I think not in cause/effect terms, then...

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Room with a View

What we see is a bottle of champagne in a metal bucket halfway spent with ice cubes and a white cloth for the holding. We see the sun in the water, ducked in reflections. I see birds soaring that aren't birds. Underneath the piers, the concrete pins, in the bowl of the sea, holding. I look away, and the tightness disappears. It must be that the trees and the walls don't feel anything, no sort of movement that would push them even a millimetre to the left. Contemplating is a sort of moving, clouds moving in the sky mutely watching the earth, and some corps there with a crepuscular existence is watching on. It's only in my watching, in my mental movement from here to anywhere other than here, that I experience a déplacement.

For a spiraling moment, a snapshot framed by fingers, we were in a room that gives on the sea. Made to order; made to remember, with the sea in front of me, ships, lights, gulls flying, clouds patching up the sky and unsewing themselves, colouring water, chopping it. The moment spun the ball on the turtle's back; the bacon streaks from ago in the water dissolved. The air flew.

It was as if in the stretching of living, in the spinning efforts of destiny weaving, in that simple act of being while going, I was given accolades by a smaller pair of hands to hold up to my head. We both held them there, your hands over mine. Without seeing (and without wanting to) the rest of destiny's drawing, I was given the gift of being here, on this couch, next to the only other person there is.

I think I love writing because I always miss what I am writing about. I go around it, through it, spin it, but I never stop at it because that would mean the words would foam behind me and dissolve in the rest of the sea, and there would be no trace. I'll never get to anything through it. There is pleasure in constantly missing it, in just going. In just going to New Caledonia.

You and writing. Remember what I said? In ten years, I want to still have both. But actually; I have neither you, nor writing. In ten years, I want to not have either still. I want to be in movement, in déplacement, to bascule entre subtleties, languages, words, to get here by moving through here, to jump, swim, walk, breathe to being here and then to keep going. I was not born a tree, or a wall, so I don't imagine I should be one.

Armand and Dean

Notes taken on Monday, 24 September, expanded, extended, hopefully simplified: First Armand, then Dean.

Stephen defined “technicity” last Monday as a “prepresentation of meaning in iterable form” and this Monday he reformulated that as the functioning of a sign, as in, the sign operation itself that exists that cannot be thought of in temporal or semantic ways. Technicity doesn't mean anything that you can point out, like pie or love, so is therefore not mimetic (isn't trying to represent things). I understand this as the process of the significationability of the sign, as in, the sign's ability to mean before it actually means something (although it cannot be thought of in 'cause' terms because before the sign means something, it doesn't actually mean anything). Technicity is inherent in signs; without the significationability, signs would have no potential to function as anything, and language wouldn't work.

Language is a filter. We understand the world, reality, materiality, through language. For example, we use metaphors to indicate things that are apparently unlike each other are similar in some way. Love is a red rose; we can say that because there is something about the rose that is iterable (its beauty?) and we recognise this same thing in love and we see a pattern and therefore meaning. Everything that is not language is thought through language, though, and Armand wants to expand this thinking. He wants us to forget about this linguistic determinism, that is, the quality of the language to divide things and state what they are in terms of language, and rather accept the fact that signification takes place without reference to our agency. We don't need to come in to signify; we are not coming into the room and determining that the chair is a chair – the technicity, the potential of significationability is there, inherent to the sign. So signification is not something we do as 'users' of language, defining things ; things are inherently able to be signified, to be in operation – technicity is there when we come.

Human thinking, for some reason, tends to situate itself in binaries. For him, this pair consists of structure and materiality. Structure concerns things such as physics, linguistics, culture, symbolism, artifices – basically, the way the world out there is striated/divided into parts. Materiality rather consists of orality, matter itself, nature – the world mush. Matter. To illustrate this difference further, think of a chair. The word chair, the fact that it's a noun, the fact that it has a function that you can undergo (sitting), that is all how humans have said it is – this is the structure. The structure is like a box that humans have put upon it to 'get' it, to differentiate it from something else that is boxed. A chair, in terms of materiality, is matter. If you forget everything you know about chairs, and you can suspend your thinking about chairs, then what you have in front of you assembled in such a way is the materiality – the label chair is added only afterwards to classify this cluster of matter that looks like that. The chair's undetermined existence, its ontology, its chairness is the materiality. If you get at the chair via its attributes you situate yourself in the field of axiology (values attributed to things: especially aesthetic values, which are the most conventional of all) – so if you think of a chair because it's sittable-upon or it's a noun, those are two attributes it has and that means you've divided it and the thinking operation occuring is then on the level of structure rather than materiality.

In terms of materiality, Armand uses the term “ambiguity” and “ambivalence” to suggest that the materiality/matter/beingness of a chair can be constituted in infinite ways – i.e. there are innumberable amounts of interpretations for the chairness of a chair. This is the ambiguity. It could be anything. And when one signals and says this object is a chair, structurality enters because the human has entered and signification requires an agent – in our case, the human. So by saying the chair is a chair, we are suppressing the ambivalence that it could be thought of in innumberable other ways, it is just this particular way that we choose to think it because for signs to work, they must pass through the noise. The ambivalence, therefore, could be thought of as noise – eg the chair could have been thought of as always having to touch a surface so it could have been thought of as one with that surface. The reason why the indeterminateness is noise is because it's effectively all matter and it's not distinguishable or separatable unless we sign, unless we pull something out of it; unless we sign. The sign is a sign because it's different from the noise, Language is a system of differences, and when we say 'chair' we mean 'chair' because we don't mean 'table' or 'shark'. But chairness, or the fact of being a chair, doesn't exist as different from anything – there is no chairness, really, but our language allows us to slot things in our minds and pattern them, thereby leading us to believe clusters of mattered arranged so are chairs. Francisc says here that “Armand would argue that it’s precisely chairness that truly exists: the essence of a chair as a manifestation of the essence of matter in all its appearances. What you seem to be saying here is that categorization of matter is a human skill (a linguistic ability). Thinking in binaries (like you say) is essentially human: thinking of chairness in terms of what it is not (the linguistic model of Saussure, where words mean something only insofar as they fail to mean something else).” - I understand this as my denotation of chairness as a word making me think there is no true chairness – so this is the linguistic ability/human skill coming into play – because I'm thinking the material chairness isn't actually real and that chairness is only determinable through language. However, Francisc refutes that, bringing in the idea of manifestation of essence. I didn't realise I could use this argument. So then the chairness of a chair is a FIRSTNESS MANIFESTATION of the essence of matter which can be and is everything. It's one example.

We can think about this in terms of Charles Peirce's thoughts regarding firstness, secondness, thirdness. If you are an alien from faraway planet X and you arrive on Earth and see a chair, before knowing that it's called a chair, and that there's many iterations of it in the world, that is the experience of firstness – its ontology, its being. Once you move around some more, you find another chair and begin to pattern the first chair and the second together and think they must be linked somehow – this is secondness – these things must mean something. Once you see several more, you begin to realise there is a larger pattern here. This pattern fits together and from there, assuming the alien thinks similar to humans, a law of chairs seems to form. Chairs need legs, you can sit your ass down on the top... things from then on can be classified as chairs because they fit into the system. Thirdness is this formation of a system, a law.

Firstness is the materiality, secondness and thirdness refer to the domain of structurality. Language, signification, operates in secondness and thirdness because it symbolises, it uses a sign to point to a firstness in something because the firstness is internally experienced and cannot be known by anyone else. Secondness and thirdness can be externalised.

Language has built within it a reflexivity, a recursion. There is no cause/effect relationship when signification happens because there is nothing in the firstness that leads to secondness or thirdness. A chair is not a chair because its materiality/firstness suggests sitability and functioning as a chair. Humans have thought of the function of sitting on it in a moment of technology, and have signed it as a chair. Before anything can be thought through language, there is only the prepresentation of technicity, the signifying function, the potential, I suppose, for something to be thought of as a chair. Recursivity comes in as a condition of technicity – we see of the materialness of a chair because the word chair points to it, but once we think of “chair” we cannot but think of the materialness of the thing we call a “chair”. The materiality thus doesn't cause the structure, and vice versa. That's why there is a reflexivity. Take another example from last week – consciousness. We cannot think of consciousness (even though we are conscious) except by signifying through the word “consciousness”, yet the word actually points us back to our consciousness. So we can't say we can be conscious because of the word conscious exists and we know what it refers to inherently, nor can we say that the word conscious exists because we are conscious. They circle around without end. This is technicity, the sign operation at work.

Signs and materials can be thought of in terms of a diagram of Charles Peirce. The sign, object, interpretation triangle. The object is the materiality of the chair. The sign is the word 'chair'. The interpretation is the viewer's putting together of the two. The triangle can be tesselated, however, meaning that I can make another triangle from the interpretation with another object and sign. So if we use the chair example, the first triangle looks like:

then the larger triangle set would look like:

Meaning exists bound to these triangles. No one part can be missing. Technicity, I believe, would be like the lines joining the dots together to form a triangle – all there put together marking the possibility of signification.

Misha Kavka covered Dean's reading in mind-mappable terms but I'm going to attempt to build up her argument so as to understand it. Her thesis is “Our participation in communicative capitalism does not subvert it. It drives it.” One can understand capitalism in terms of an exchange for surplus value – so you buy something from me, and both of us expect to gain something MORE from that transaction. i.e. I give you money for a pie, I gain more than what I had before because the pie will bring me satisfaction that money couldn't, and you will gain more because the money will give you satisfaction that it did not give to me. So in capitalist exchanges, an excess is always implied, gained. Communicative capitalism is this exchange of surplus value through our communication – in our technocratic society, this takes the form of our Facebooking, emailing, blogging etc. As partakers of these systems of communication, we are nodes (recall the Galloway lecture), dividuals (Deleuze's term), data caches (Stephen's term). We input information about ourselves and converse online with that information, and the network which we find ourselves in, eg Facebook, takes up this knowledge from all of its users/data caches, averages it, and “puts out an upgrade” (Stephen) to please “most” of us. From here we may feel like we are being cared for, but Facebook doesn't cater to the individual, nor the mass, which is a group of individuals; it caters “for is its own code: its protocol, or algorithm, which is the only thing able to generate surplus that is profitable to Facebook itself.” - Francisc said.

Our interactions on the internet can be referred to as an affective labour. Sometimes we join causes and are asked to sign petitions online to stop vivisection or to force some political action beyond the Facebook sphere – we feel good about ourselves if we do that. We feel affective pleasure; maybe we may think it's fun to click click and be part of these movements. This is a form of control, driven not by our emotional gullibility or affective need, but by the.. drive to communicate.

When there is a message sent over the internet, it constitutes two things: its content, and its contribution (the fact that it was sent). In communicative capitalism, contribution matters more than content – the sending matters more than what was sent. What you want to say gets superseded by the proliferation of messages, to the point that it doesn't so much matter what you say but just that you are saying it, whatever “it” is.

Dean distinguishes critical reflexicity from reflexivity in communicative capitalism. Critical reflexivity is like self-reflexivity, when you sit down in tutorial and discuss and try to unravel things from an outside point of view. Reflexivity in communicative capitalism is achronological – time is not considered, and therefore no order of thought is cared for, but rather that the message is bouncing back and forth. Misha called it levels of “drawing attention from”. So my FB comment on a photo gains another response and then another and other friends join in and it goes to the top of the news feed and other friends see it and they all talk about it. Attention is being placed not so much on my initial message but on the fact that there are many messages, and others may get an urge to post as well. Then we have a reflexive comment chain. Francisc added: “Dean, however, has one more meaning in mind when she talks about reflexivity, and that is the ability of the signal to influence the very meaning it purports to be reflecting on. Communication doesn’t happen entirely outside of meaning. Dean says that mere numbers (the hits or ‘likes’ you get on YouTube or Facebook) also contribute to the ways in which the text is being perceived. The very fact that we tend to consider more important a post with numerous hits is a proof that the meaning of the post is influenced by what we tend to consider mere communication for communication’s sake. This is the subtlety of communicative capitalism: to fool us into thinking that communication only happens for its own sake, when in fact it happens for the sake of a capitalist logic, to do with the circulation of capital (social or cultural).”

My comment may have been an important thing to say, say I was an expert, but that expert knowledge becomes reduntant. Someone with a different opinion can easily oppose what I say and then people may join in to oppose me and suddenly, even though I may be correct, the opinions take precedence over my knoweldge. This is where we have seen the rise of amateur knowledge, with things such as Wikipedia; the wisdom of the crowd is trusted more than the wisdom of the expert, because if many people think something is right then we think that it's more likely right than what one 'qualified or not' person says. In other words, mathesis (quantity of messages) matters more than mimesis (reproduction of meaning in messages - quality)

What drives our will to participate in this communicative capitalism, in these exchanges? Think about procrastination – Dean says we respond to blogs with anxiety about stolen enjoyment. If you could be doing something else instead of responding to blogs, like gardening or reading, you respond feeling anxious about not doing that which you could have done, not fulfilling the what if. This what if is a fantasy, though. The fantasy of enjoyment that is in the what if, offsets the enjoyment we actually do feel when we are participating in online communities, offering up our thoughts.

Dean brings into this Lacan, who says the subject enjoys by repetition. Dean distinguishes between desire and drive. Desire operates in the symbolic and by substitution (as a metonymic process). For example, if you want a book off Amazon, you actually want a feeling thatyou think it will give. So you get the book and feel good once you have it but then you see that Amazon recommends you this other book that is similar and you think … I need that book too. So you buy it also and it makes you feel happy but then you see a collector's item from that second book that you don't have. In short, attaining an object of desire but creates another lack, which is substituted for by the next object. What we desire is a objet petit a (a stands for autre which means other). This objet petit a, according to Lacan is unattainale; it is the thing that will quell the desire, that will not create another gap/lack.

S1 ? s2 ? s3 ? s4 ? … ? o.p.a.

The above is a metonymic contiguous relationship, as in, objects are juxtaposed next to each other, each standing in for the p.o.a which is perpetually deferred. Desire, then, is a system of built in frustration. You never get what you actually want, you just get more want.

Drive, on the other hand, is a movement, like an instinct, appetite, hunger. You want something but you don't get it. Drive is not concerned with the object, really, but the process of going for the object (and not getting it). Enjoyment derived from this circular movement of repeatedly missing the object is termed jouissance. The subject is captured despite their own sense of personal agency.

Jouissance then is surplus enjoyment, because it is not an enjoyment from satisfying a want, but from NOT satisfying it, repeatedly. Think of a spiral in the middle of which is the subject, you. You are not going to be satisfied by attaining a thing, and instead are being satisfied by the movement of trying to attain that thing. As such, you are captured by the movement.

In terms of Facebook and online networks then, Dean says that is what we are doing when we are interacting online – experiencing the jouissance/surplus enjoyment of click clicking and posting funny memes and looking at random things online. We enjoy the process of this interaction rather than the 'meaningfulness' of it. Each time we click, Dean says we receive an “affective nugget” and this only lasts a smidge of time. It's like a shot of pleasure that we receive, and it wears off very quickly, so we look for the next one, as if we were addicted. We accrue affective nuggets in a way, even though they are ephemeral. This is characteristic to deisre which is linear and cumulative in nature. When you think of drive, movement is not linear so much as circular, circling around the same object without progressing, really. We know the object is unattainable but we pretend we haven't noticed the object. So we keep circling around our object which we turn a blind eye to, and the pleasure we derive, which we find “beyond the pleasure principle” (Freud), turns into the pain of not attaining the object. “So while desires are resolved in a hedonistic frame (the repetition of the illusions of pleasure), drives are essentially unpleasant, or more precisely, masochistically pleasant.” - Francisc.

Dean goes on to say that the accrual of these affective nuggets, these shots of pleasure, creates a feeling community, but for Dean, this does not mean that community (like a Twitter community) is a political one. Therefore, through our participation in communicative capitalism, we are not undermining communicative capitalism but driving it, making it grow. It may not be correct to say that the feeling communities she describes aren't political, because they can definitely be. However, perhaps what she is suggesting is that whatever they are being political about is not important, because the message gets drowned out in the proliferation of other messages. “They are non-political because they don’t refer to the semantics of the relationships they stand for, but rather to the structurality of these relationships (to their networkness).” - Francisc Being told what to care for by so many messages, perhaps we don't so much care about any of them enough to make a difference.

Combo possibility: “One point of connection between Armand and Dean's texts is to be found, I think, in Armand’s claim about materiality as undetermined ontology. Dean too hints at the same issue when she says that online interaction doesn’t care about the meaning of the message but rather about communication for communication’s sake. This places a sign of relativity upon meanings (which are man-made texts) and stresses the importance of something that transcends semantics and is independent of human agency: the code of the programme, which works in terms of mathesis.” - Francis