An Emphatic Umph

The web is an always on camera, or No wonder the kids today are so anxious

2012-02-12T19:10:00.000-08:00

Picture this. You're sitting around your living room with some friends and someone comes in, an acquaintance perhaps, and starts filming you. You're not sure why. Do you do exactly as you were doing before the camera entered the room? Or has your behavior changed — what you say, do, how you interact with others in the room?

Cameras necessarily shift social dynamics. How can they not? They are eyes, after all. Only they're the weirdest eyes ever in that they are the potential eyes of everyone, everywhere, from now until eternity. That's gotta have an effect, don't you think?

Now take the digital camera which is at once camera, processing, screen, and distribution: the time from click to world wide viewing is nearly instantaneous. Well, that's gotta have some strange effects.

The social web is a kind of always on camera, ceaselessly capturing text and image — capturing imprints of ourselves — our likes and dislikes, the pages we view and how long we linger, the Yelps, the tweets, the reposts and shares and retweets and so on and so on.

Suddenly, we are all actors, all writers, curators, critics, and photographers who relentlessly publish and distribute. We are all actors on the screen that is the web.

Think about it: We update our FB status with an insight, link, image, or report on the song we listened to or game we played. We comment on others' insights, links, and images. We Yelp and comment on others' Yelps; we tweet and retweet. We write emails and texts, mini-essays and haikus. We imprint ourselves on the collective social film which is a distributed, networked cinematic event.

And then we await judgement from an unclear, and at times unknown, audience: applause, boos, or indifference that take the form of page views, likes and dislikes, comments, shares, reposts, retweets, deletes. Google Analytics is an applause meter. I got 193 uniques today! 17 people liked the photo of my Halloween nurse slut costume!

This happens all day, everyday: we publish, we perform, we are seen and we are judged by an audience with unknown extension — and anything we do could suddenly "go viral" and be seen by millions. This is not just life in a panopticon as we are not only always being watched. We are always being commanded to perform — and then are judged for that performance.

No wonder the kids today are so anxiously and constantly checking their phones: Did they like that post? Did I do good? No wonder that the 25 year old girls who swarm our cities on Saturday nights are dressed like prostitutes: Gotta impress — and fast!

Indeed, there seems to be a very strange desire amongst the 20-somethings of today. They fancy themselves individuals — Look at me! This is my taste! — while at the same time they fear individuality: Do they like me? It's a crippling anxiety that leaves these 20-somethings stuck between safe sweetness (don't want to offend anyone) and merciless judgment (everything's a threat and a thin veil of anonymity affords casual nastiness).

While my generation, so-called Gen-X, has its own anxieties, this is not one of them. I may be happy or sad because some post of mine gets good or bad comments but, fundamentally, I don't give a shit. Like most of my actual friends, I have a life that precedes and exceeds my online identity such as a kid who doesn't yet check my status updates. I live in the old world where I don't interact with my real world friends online. And, like the anachronism that I am, I continue to publish to the web as if it were a printing press. Which means I don't publish pictures of myself at parties or eating breakfast.

This is not to say that I have a life and you don't. This is just to say that the web plays a different role in my life than it seems to play in the lives of the kids today. I can turn off the web. But the kids today can't, not really. They're like Neo, born inside the matrix: they were always already turned inside out, always already enmeshed in the ever-emergent text that is the social web.

It's the anxiety of being filmed or being an artist but now played out through all facets of life and identity. Artists have the relative luxury of only being present for their art work; the rest of the time, they can live more or less free of scrutiny (the paparazzi, of course, is the first Facebook wall). But the kids today don't have that luxury; they must produce just to participate in society.

The very conditions of identity, then, are the acts of being seen and judged by an audience of unknown scope and power.

A Mobius Play: On Douglas Lain's "Wave of Mutilation"

2012-02-12T11:42:00.000-08:00

I love pith. Douglas Lain's smartypants, hilarious little tome clocks in at 84 pages. That's my kind of book. Grab me, twist me about, tickle my fancy, move on! And it can be yours for only $7.95!

Let's consider the title. It is, of course, a reference to the great Pixies song. But so what? Well, for starters, it is an incredibly visceral, poignant phrase: not only is there mutilation but there's a whole wave of it! How absolutely terrifying! And yet, as Black Francis sings it, it's all so gosh darn cool. Bring it on!

And this is what Lain's book performs: the horror of reality unmoored; the joy of reality unmoored; and the unmooring caused by the joy of reality becoming unmoored. It's a mobius play.

Indeed, this title is complex. "Wave" is at once a term for collective surging (do the wave!); the periphery of the ocean's tumult; and a technical term for an expression of energy (distinct from the particle). All three terms apply to Lain's book as some nuclear testing seems to have fucked shit up triggering a collective schizo madess, leaving us tossing in the waves of a reality ocean sans anchor.

And the title dates the book, lending it an historical perspective that is critical to the book's argument: the era of we so-called Gen Xers, we slackers, children of the Greatest Generation — a turning point at which our tether to the collective began to fray and give way to a certain postmodern confusion-ennui (as distinct from, say, French post-war ennui — this is Linklater, not Eliot or even Camus).

And, as a reference (and not just a pretty phrase), the title seeks to reaffirm a tether to the real. That is, the referential function of language grounds us by providing a literal for the transient indifference of signifiers. Rather than words inaugurating an endless deferral of meaning, a relentless play, reference gives words a telos, a purpose, an origin and a destination.

But, as we've already noted, this title can be read multiple ways simultaneously, initiating the play that defers meaning ad infinitum. So the very title, Wave of Mutilation, at once performs the will to the real and the undoing of the real. The title does and undoes itself! It is a wave of mutilation!

Such is what Lain's book simultaneously explores and performs: the will to a collective real, to a ground, and its undoing, a mobius construction-destruction with the lingering possibility of a way out — or not — as the books asks: how can writing forge our collective narratives and orient us? Or does the very act of writing put our identities into play along with those slippery signifiers?

The tone of the book is non-chalant, dead pan, understated. And yet, right from the get go, things begin to careen, as if the world were off its axis — still spinning, sure, but a bit askew. The very first lines of the first chapter — entitled, "Solipsism by a Motel Swimming Pool," showing us that the book will relentlessly juxtapose banality and drama — these first lines read: "I'm carrying Samantha's old portable Realistic brand cassette player...."

Everything in the book, like Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, is loaded, each figure performing this tension between the real and undoing of the real. And as the book carries on, things get stranger and stranger and yet the tone stays even, cool, without being indifferent (the slacker's posture par excellence).

As the world becomes unmoored, Lain gives us some truly exquisite images — strange and beautiful and hilarious and thoroughly idiosyncratic. And through it all, he gives us this pithy performance, this exploration, of our collective — and personal — untethering, moving between the Bomb, history, breeding, architecture, love, and Portland nuttiness.

He even gives a fantastic read of one of my favorite books, narrated by the brilliant schizo muppet, Grover, "The Monster at the End of this Book." And yet, in Lain's book, the title becomes a question: "There is a Monster at the End of this Book?"

And that succinctly, and with great pith, performs Lain's fantastic little book.

The World Turned Inside Out: Judgment

2012-02-10T20:52:00.000-08:00

We are obviously moving ever more towards an inside-out world: we live on the outside.

Now, perhaps we have always lived on the outside — this is the argument of phenomenology. But the shapes of this outside can differ dramatically as the play of fold, shadow, and revelation can shift. So while life may always already be of the surface, the architecture of that surface is changing, becoming ever more flat, identity more splayed. I don't offer this as an eschatology, only as a comment and an attempt to understand what the fuck is happening around me.

What do I mean by we live on the outside?

I mean what you probably think it means: we expose ourselves, socially interact, in view of all (or many) via Facebook, blogs, comments, Tweets. This is not a great revelation. The line between the public and the private is being recast as surveillance probes the nooks and crannies of our lives — and as we, often joyfully, expose all to all.

Brianne Garcia, on Thought Catalog, wrote an essay arguing that the kids today are always already posing for the camera — they stand half-akimbo, leaning and gazing just so. Pictures no longer capture private moments; they repeat images that were public even before the camera clicked.

Just think of the digital camera for a moment. It is not just a camera but an entire production and distribution vehicle: pictures can be instantaneously shared with the world at large. But it's even faster than that: with a digital camera, you see the picture before clicking the button. They don't use viewfinders and lenses: they use screens. They literally screen their image before taking the picture.

Again, this is not a condemnation of this phenomenon; it's an observation of the conditions of seeing and being seen and the beginning of an exploration of the implications. And, no, none of this is a great revelation.

Me, I only want to point out one thing: the merciless, brutal judgment that this turn inside out has occasioned. Look at the way the kids speak to each other through Thought Catalog comments — either polite praise or nasty ass ad hominem dismissals. The seeming ease with which a commenter will call someone a phoney or an asshole is staggering — or else it's a mindless, if emphatic, nod of approval: "Love this!"

And what's even more surprising and downright odd is the frequency of the invocation of the pretentious and the poseur — "This essay was so pretentious I'm rolling my eyes!" "What a poseur!"

This, to me, is hilarious. Isn't this the age of the spectacle, of the put on, of the always and already play acting, acting to infinity, acting all the way down? Isn't this the age of Wikipedia, the overthrow of the expert, the posturing ad infinitum? Whence pretension as a pejorative? How can one be a phony? A phony what?

No doubt, my use of whence and pejorative and always already will incite such comments — surely, anyone who uses such words is being pretentious. And that is a different, but related, matter of the rampant anti-intellectualism of this country.

A few years ago, right here on this very blog, some anonymous reader had happened upon a blog I wrote in a different name and voice — that of my would-be novel's character, Henri. (Read her comments, and my reply, here.) She believed she'd discovered my true beliefs and threatened to expose me to the world. To this day, it's so strange to me: doesn't the internet mark the end of the tyranny of subjectivity, that need to be a real self?

And yet, somehow, the opposite has happened. We must be real selves, neither phony nor pretentious. And we can't be extraordinary selves — or else we'd be phony or pretentious.

Kierkegaard was right: we watch the skater on the ice, moving ever closer to the thin middle and with each pass we gasp — and then think, "What's the big deal? I could that." We cheer the skater and, in the same breath, hate him.

On Banality and Sofia Coppola's "Somewhere"

2012-02-07T18:21:00.000-08:00

SoI'm watching Somewhere on HBO andI'm thinking: really? This is thevision of debauched Hollywood? Where is Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant orthe over-the-topness of Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond? In Lost in Translation (I know a lot ofpeople like this film but I found it underwhelming even if quite beautiful and,at times, exquisite), Bill Murray might not give us a whole lot but his face,his posture, speak to a richness of experience and character — the romance ofbeing an individual. In Bad Lieutenant, Keitel is, as the kids say but don'tunderstand, epic: he's the stuff of myth.

ButStephen Dorff's Johnny Marco? He is so, well, bland. He's so everyday. In fact, there is nothing extraordinaryabout him — he doesn't dress flamboyantly; he doesn't have odd taste in sex(the strippers, well, they are odd but they just reiterate the banality ofconsumption); he doesn't throw fits or tantrums. He's just like you and me,only famous.

Fame,here, is not well earned. He's not an amazing musician (he's ok atGuitar Hero); he's not a great actor lost in his characters. He isbasically on American Idol or a viral YouTube video or he won Survivor. Thereis nothing fundamentally extraordinary about our stars today. It's all so,well, banal.

This,alas, is what the film gives us — the banality of consumption. SofiaCoppola is not, and could not be, Billy Wilder or Abel Ferrara. She is thespawn of a new age, even if she comes from old school royalty (can you imagineMarlon Brando's Kurtz in one of Sofia Coppola's films?) The stars of today are,indeed, so well behaved. It's the to the point where when Tom Cruise getsa little nutty and jumps on a couch, he's considered wacky.

Nowlook at Cassvates, Faulk, and Ben Gazzara:

OrAbel Ferrara on Conan — he is lit beyond belief, bigger and more deranged thanthe Spectacle (even if constituting it — it's the constitution of theunattainable, of the excessive):

Thedecadence of yesteryear no longer glitters with either promise or romance. Weare always already watched, always already judged. Throughout Somewhere, Dorff fucks beautiful womensimply because he can. It is neither depraved nor decadent. The girls arebeautiful. They all seem to have fun when screwing. And yet it remains banal, anon-event, a blip on the radar.

CompareCoppola's Dorff to the silly Vincent Chase of Entourage. The promise of Entourage is naive, the promise ofHollywood from the 30s with a hip hop beat: fame and fortune and women women women! Ain't this the life, boys? Johnny Marcois Vince in 10 years: pussy is pussy, there to be had just like everythingelse, so what?

Somewhereis banal, no doubt. But that is precisely what makes it so beautiful, sopitch perfect: it is of the banal, the beauty and banality of the banal. There's no ugliness. Reviews of the film claim it's just beautiful peoplekvetching (I don't think they used the word "kvetch," however). Butthat's the point — there is no ugliness. Dorff is the star of a new dayand while the romance, and fundamental enigma, of the individual hasdisappeared, our loneliness has not. The extraordinariness of the ordinary has vanished but that doesn't mean we don't get lonely — or that there's no beauty.

Coppola'schallenge here is monumental precisely because she doesn't have monuments toreckon.

We Are Infinite

2012-01-30T11:17:00.000-08:00

We are temporal creatures. And life, well, life is temporal: it just keeps happening. That seems silly when I write it as it seems so obvious. And yet so much of how we think about things excludes time, excludes change. We think about change as something that happens after the fact rather than change being the fact.

We are always and already changing, transforming, evolving at every moment in multiple ways — our bodies, of course, as blood and oxygen and shit pass through our veins and intestines and noses and lungs and skin is sloughed, continuously; and the rest of us, too, as moods and desires shift relentlessly. Just think about your day: you are constantly, relentlessly, ceaselessly thinking, feeling, becoming something different — or at least I am.

Now, geometry deals with shapes in space. But what happens when time enters the equation and becomes constitutive of space? When change becomes constitutive of a shape, of an object? That is the domain of calculus.

And calculus gives us something incredibly interesting: the infinite series. That is, it gives us particular trajectories of infinity, different things winding and meandering and drifting infinitely in their own way.

So think about this. As we are temporal creatures — as we are always and already changing — we are not set in stone. Our identities are not this or that per se; our identities are this trajectory of becoming, this infinite series. Consider someone's life, all the ways that person went, all the different twists and turns — of spine, mood, liver, skin, diet, attitude, career.

Time makes us unpredictable (within limits) and uncertain. But does it make us infinite? I mean, sure, we are a series but we end in death, don't we? What makes us infinite?

Well, do we end in death? And, no, I'm not talking about heaven or hell but I am talking about a kind of afterlife. I am talking about the way we live on — in effect, in affect, in the memories not only of individuals but in the memories of the world itself.

Think about it like this. A star explodes in some distant galaxy. This explosion sets off a series of events throughout the cosmos as matter is fundamentally realigned, even if only very slightly. That star may be gone but its effects live on, infinitely, as its very being has reshaped the cosmos forever.

Well, we are all stars and, yes, one day we explode but that does not mark the end of our series, only an inflection point within its infinite trajectory.

The Joy of Thinking (Differently)

2012-01-25T22:05:00.000-08:00

Here's an easy exercise. Look around the room and choose anything you see, anything you think of. Me, I'm looking at my set of keys.

Now start listing all the ways this thing — my set of keys — can be categorized, thought, imagined, all of its uses, all the ways it connects to other things. My keys, for instance, are little knives; symbols of discovery; symbols of enslavement; a literal weight on me; a plethora of opportunity and possibility; the limitation of my possibilities; envelope and box openers; a child's toy; a dangerous child's toy thanks to the lead; a collection of like things; a security blanket when I'm out and about, that jangle and jab tethering me to place and vehicle; the history of keys, of secrets, of private property; children's games of secret passageways; a sign of adulthood (my beast does not carry keys; at what age will he have his own key, I wonder).

What else?

Each thing — visible and invisible — exists within multiple categories, multiple series, multiple networks. Most things have a more or less prescribed use: this is what you do with keys, silly man, you open doors.

Inventors, of course, find different uses for known things. This is amazing: they find life, extend the thing, create new worlds from the old world. It is nothing less than a miracle.

Artists do the same: they literally have us see anew. Take something as simple as Starry Sky: doesn't Van Gogh teach us to see the sky — something we see everyday — again and anew, as if for the evry first time?

Reading — interpreting, perhaps, but I don't like that word for a number of reasons — can do the same thing. It can take a known object and make it unknown and then known again as something new. It is truly incredible: I can read some words on a page that make me see something I've always seen, understand something I've always understood, as if seeing it for the very first time. What was dead is summoned to life, to new life, to new possibility.

This is the way I experienced when I first read Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality v1. I was someone who believed that sexuality was a vital force that the powers that be repressed, beginning with the Victorians. Such and such culture or such and such historical period were certainly more liberated than we are. Indeed, like so many others, my understanding of sexuality was defined by the figure of repression/liberation.

Until I read Foucault who told me that repression was, in fact, another form of power — that power does not only restrict, it constructs. Look, Foucault says, look at how often and how much the so-called repressed Victorians talked about sex — relentlessly. They were so obsessed with sex they covered the legs of pianos out of discretion.

Oh, man, when I read that the whole world yawned anew. To have such a hallowed idea, an idea that I didn't even realize I had because I simply thought it was true, to have such a thing so completely re-organized, redistributed, a whole new sense of it forged was invigorating, intoxicating, making me delirious with possibility. The whole world — every thing, every idea, every person — could be read from multiple angles and perspectives, redistributed and recast and repeated and become something new. The universe becomes uncanny at its core, always shifting and realigning depending on how you look at it.

To think different, to think differently, is to create life. It is the ultimate joyful act — to read critically is to perform Whitman's great line: urge and urge and urge/always the procreant urge of the world.

If all things are multiple, are nodes with different series, then to forge or discover these series is to breed life.

What is Political?

2012-01-24T19:58:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, I was what I considered "political" — I read The New York Times, I was in touch with the Communist Party, I read Che and Lenin (sort of), I was a conscientious objector (under Reagan, to get Federal student loans, I had to register for the draft. How creepy is that?), and sought to lead a revolution in my high school (somewhere, there is video of me ranting into a microphone on a window ledge to a group of no doubt confused fellow students; to complete the picture, I had a substantial jewfro: see above).

Some time in my sophomore year of college, thanks to a heady concoction of Nietzsche, Foucault, and LSD, I abandoned this political stance. I may have had my formal reasons for doing so but it came down to the fact that is just felt false — because it was false, even if it felt so real. Bathos is a bitch like that. I was regurgitating ideology, repeating familiar narratives with their compelling but cloying sentimentality — Why can't we all be free?

As an adult — or whatever it is I am at 42 —, I once again consider myself political. But in a very different way.

At first, my politics began as local, everyday action. I began driving like there were other people on the road, letting in drivers pulling out of driveways. And I've always been civic minded — heeding line etiquette, giving up my seat on BART for anyone in need, offering to help the blind. But I began to see such actions as political, as shaping the way people interact — and isn't that politics?

But there are other things, too. In conversation, I try to avoid cliches or letting other people utter them, steering the dialogue into uncharted territory. Because it is cliche that shuts us down, keeps us in the familiar world of what was rather than the emerging world of what might be at every moment. I taught for many years, doing my darndest to foment the best kind of revolution: a revolution of generous multiplicity. I write, of course, trying to steer thinking into new territory — and mostly to foster a love, or at least an appreciation, for thinking differently.

(Writing this now it seems so, well, lame. Hmn.)

And then there are structures that coerce us, discourses that define us, often without our even knowing but just as often while thoroughly aware and annoyed and frustrated. I negotiate the discourses of masculinity, work, fatherhood, adulthood, son-hood, ex-husbandhood, etc. We are each nodes within networks that exceed us, ways of thinking and talking that are taken for granted as just the way things are, just what we do and hence are the very (insidious) structures of power.

This yields a very real politics of me, the politics that I am. I am — and methinks we all are — a veritable polyphony of voices, attitudes, beliefs, actions. Everything I do negotiates and distributes so many different factors — my sense of authenticity, my conscience, my desires, my fears, everything I've ever thought, been taught, believed. All of my — all of our — individual reckonings of our histories is a making of history, is political. Everyday, in multiple ways, we wrestle these discourses.

In the dating world, for instance, there are certain assumptions about what a relationship is, how it should proceed: drinks, a meal, sex, meet friends, go away together, move in together, get married, breed. Now, we may not all do this or want this. But you can't deny that this is an assumption which means any deviation from it becomes precisely that — a deviation rather than, say, the particular way a relationship may function.

Burroughs says that what we call politics is just the matador waving his red flag and, bulls that we are, we charge only to meet air. Or, if we're lucky, we nail the matador in the ass. But the bull fight doesn't change. Isn't it obvious by now that voting for one douchebag is the same as voting for any of those douchebags? (Douchebag is, without a doubt, one of the more hilarious words.)

If we see politics, then, as happening at the level of discourse — the level of how we talk about things, what we consider true and what we consider deviance — then art, film, the media in all forms is political from the get go.

So it's not that the political is solely personal or private. On the contrary, politics is the way the individual meets the world — meets others, meets ideas, meets him or herself.

This would shift political thought and political commentary rather dramatically. Rather than asking yourself, "Who will I vote for?", ask yourself, "What assumptions do I make as I wake and ready myself for the day? As I consider my future, my history, my love, my life?"

Philosophy and art and critique are the real politics. Which explains why they are never taught and are shit on so thoroughly.

Screed

2012-01-22T23:03:00.000-08:00

The most exhausting aspect of life — and the reason I spend most of my time alone — is the endless negotiating and parrying of the dominant discourses. Yes, I know my use of "discourse," not to mention "dominant," pegs me as an academic asshole (when, in fact, I'm just a quasi-academic asshole).

But, first of all, discourse is the right word here. And, second, that's precisely my point!

Everything we say and do positions us, vis-a-vis both ourselves and others, in some way. And this way is not thoroughly creative: we don't express ourselves from the well of our individuality onto a blank slate eagerly awaiting our words and thoughts. No, we speak within a field of expectations that are rarely explicitly prescribed — and are prescribed all the more ardently by not being explicit. They are the terms of discussion, the very manner we assume to address each other, imagine each other — not to mention imagine ourselves.

Just look at auto correct. I can barely write a word without the engine thinking I've erred. Just now, it turned "dick" to "duck." This is not a spelling correction — some Apple slave writing that program assumed that people don't use the word dick so, well, they must have meant duck. But you know what? Some of us never say the word duck but do say dick with some frequency.

Discourse is an infinitely complex auto correct program. If only I could fire the fucker who writes it.

Cursing is one of those issues for which I am often put on the spot to defend but the other asshole questioning me doesn't have to defend his lack of cursing. I, for one, am suspicious of those who don't curse. But that somehow only makes me more of an asshole.

Years ago, after being asked not to swear in the classroom by none other than the esteemed radical philosopher, Judith Butler, I wrote t his piece. Years later, I get a call from a reporter at CNN writing a piece about profanity on television. She had plenty of people to speak out against it — most notably, some creepy parents group — but couldn't find someone in favor of it. Her Google search yielded my blog and so I became the sole defender of profanity. And, to the journalist's infinite credit, she made me look like the responsible, good parent. A small victory! Here's her article >>

Now, look at this comment on a blog entry of mine that appeared on Thought Catalog: "Not voting," writes this discursive enforcer, "is painfully ignorant and irresponsible." Jesus! It was not an article about voting; it was an article about anonymity. But this bozo slips immediately into the accepted discourse about such things — voting is a matter of knowledge (hence my ignorance) and ethics (my irresponsibility).

Voting may not be the best example as more and more people are coming around to its futility (although the point in my article was not the futility of voting but the humiliation of voting). The discourse is changing, albeit it slowly. But my point is not that voting is good or bad but that there are ardently prescribed terms about the subject so that when I say something tangentially about it, it stirs the enforcers who don't have to say anything other than that one line: Not voting is painfully ignorant and irresponsible.

That's one of the great benefits of being enmeshed within the terms of a discourse: you don't have to work very hard. Why? Because what you say is so obviously true. The fuckwad who questions my cursing doesn't have to say squat but I have to defend myself.

To voice a different opinion takes an incredible expenditure of time and energy — and still inevitably ends badly. Foucault understood: the will to truth is the most insidious mode of power.

Now take romantic relationships. Think about all the different kinds of romantic relationships there could be. Now consider what you expect from a relationship — date, spend the night more and more, meet friends and family, move in together, marry, breed. I mean, it seems so obvious, right? Any attempt to alter this course means that the person is probably hung up, has issues, is afraid of intimacy, or the one I get all the time: I'm jaded. It's not that I've been through these things, that perhaps I know something. No, because I question the prescribed teleology of romance, I'm jaded. It's so fucking infuriating.

This is what we have to negotiate when dating — not a world of endless possibility but a tightly prescribed set of rules reinforced by an infinity of movies, songs, magazines, and people's true feelings. And that's what makes discourse so difficult to change, to combat: the believers really believe! And there is nothing necessarily wrong with this. What's wrong is when one trajectory becomes the only trajectory.

Of course there are some who follow different paths. But those people, and anyone who imagines a different order of things, are deviating. They are choosing what we call alternative paths.

But aren't they all alternatives? Can't we begin from a more generous place in which we create our own course of things? Can't one desire intimacy but not want to live together? And can't one just do that without having to justify, argue, plead, explain for hours on end? If one just follows the path, well, there's no work to be done — just stick to the treads. But, fuck, try to deviate and, man, it's exhausting! It's as Nietzsche says: saying no saps one's vitality.

This is the way of all things — the way we talk about movies, politics, ideas, travel, the way we talk about talking, tv, love, lust, porn, booze, drugs, life, kids, parenting, family, friends. There are such aggressively enforced rules about how we discuss these things, how we think these things, how we act. I can't have a discussion about some idiotic film and whether it was good or bad (thumbs up/thumbs down is the best we can do in the form of film critique?). I can't listen to casual jokes about "Republicans" — as if we're all on the same page, nudge nudge, wink wink. I don't assume that kids are the most wonderful thing in the world and should be paid attention to every moment; that tv is dumb and reading good; that the news matters at all; that my home team is the team I want to win; that Fox News is evil (it's all the same drivel to me); that tears are less aggressive than yelling; that I must have a career; that...that...that...

Travel is one of those things white liberal middle class folks just assume is a good thing. But you know what? I don't really like traveling. It's exhausting — I don't know the language, the money, where to shit, get a glass of water, eat. The most banal tasks of life become difficult and I am reduced to an infant. Don't get me wrong: you like traveling, go for it. My point is this: your love of travel should demand as much of a defense as my disinclination for it.

Constantly having to explain myself is simply exhausting. So I spend most of my time alone. And try, however meekly, to change the discourse to be more generous, to begin from a place less ardently prescribed.

No doubt, were this piece to appear on Thought Catalog, I already know what the comments would say: You're such a snob. You're an elitist. Hopefully, at least one would say, You're an asshole.

Goddamn, the anti-intellectualism of this country will be — nay, is — the death of me.

Feeling the Cosmos Seethe

2012-01-17T19:50:00.000-08:00

Everyday, all day, there are so many distractions — conference calls and meetings, bills, traffic, people. We get so wrapped up in our day-to-day nonsense — does she like me? What did that text mean, anyway? I pay how much for cable? Man, that driver's an asshole! Is that a bump on my lip?

It is tempting to succumb to this barrage and begin to think that these are the things that really matter. Maybe they're not distractions at all; after all, this is what life has to offer. If I can figure out what she means in that text or can let the asshole driver know he's an asshole or if I google that bump on my lip for the next four hours then maybe, just maybe, I'll feel good and be right with the world.

But, more often than not, these day-to-day thoughts and events are irrelevant anxieties — at least the anxiety is irrelevant. We — or perhaps I should just say I — expend too much energy a) on things that don't matter in the least; and b) on things that my energy expenditure cannot affect. In both cases, thinking about these things, negotiating these things in the endless babble in my head, is a drain on my vitality.

This is not to say that the day-to-day matters of life don't, well, matter. Of course they do. We live in the day-to-day world; we live with our desires and people and drivers and work and bills. We can certainly streamline the amount of bullshit we have to deal with but we'll still have to deal with some of it.

At so least once a day, I try to feel the cosmos seethe. I try to quiet my neurotic head and feel — know — that I am just so much stuff in the endless mish mash of stuff and that this mish mash is infinite, streaming from the atomic to the cosmic. All the nonsense of the day falls away like so much sloughed skin or like an ox who, with a shake of his rump, sheds the flies from his hide.

Now, this is not an earth shattering observation. People meditate. But, to me, this is different. It's not an emptying of the mind; it's not a stillness. On the contrary, it involves putting myself in the cosmic swirl, amidst its ebbs and swells, its harmonies and dissonances, its resonances, its complexity. I imagine meditation to involve a simplification of life (I will be the first to admit that I may be way off on this front). And there's nothing wrong with such a gesture — it's just not what I'm talking about now. What I'm talking about is mixing it up with the delirious complexity of it all, the infinite collisions and collusions, the ricochet and marbling of matter both visible and invisible.

It's as if I shed my humanity, for an instant, and participate in the world as dust and leaf and am suddenly privy to the infinitely elaborate mechanics of the universe. It's not that I become nothing; it's that I become this thing amidst the everything.

Anonymity Freaks Me Out

2012-01-15T13:20:00.000-08:00

The first and only time I voted was in the 1988 presidential election. I clearly remember walking in that little private wank booth and looking at this strange paper on which I was to mark my selection for this or that candidate. I remember feeling so small, so irrelevant, the process so dehumanizing. I was a nick on a prepopulated page, the same as every other: a nick in a series of identical nicks.

In an effort to overcome my reduction to a number, to reclaim my sense of humanity, I wrote in my choice for president: my grandather, Isidore Englander. It was reassuring to see my handwritten scrawl on this institutional document and to see a name so close to me, so absolutely idiosyncratic. I was confident that this would be Gramps' sole vote. This paper would not be one among many; it would be singular.

I never voted again. More than the irrelevance of the act, it's the demand for anonymity that turns me off. Give me a chance to stand up and voice my opinion, declare my decisions before the masses, and I'd consider voting. But walking into a beaded room bereft of the should-be carnal candy? Eeesh.

I have the same experience when buying things. The exchange of money for goods is prescribed in such a way that seller and consumer need not exchange anything else. This coldness, this reduction of ourselves to mere function, freaks me out. I just can't do it. I need to have some kind of personal contact — a quick joke, a non-consumer query, a smile, something that acknowledges our respective selves.

Mind you, this is not noble of me. On the contrary, it's often obnoxious and certainly narcissistic. Some checkout dude at Walgreens shouldn't have to suffer through my idiotic banter just to help me alleviate my angst.

Breaking personal boundaries is more difficult in the anonymous super stores. These places breed anonymity. Once inside, we become consumers, shopping to some prescribed algorithm. And the employees have no investment whatsoever; they barely acknowledge you. Their only desire is to get the fuck out of there as quickly as possible. What do they need, not to mention want, with my anxious interpersonal invasion?

Perhaps there is a freedom to such anonymity. By agreeing that we're just numbers to each other, we are left alone to do as we will— no need to pass moral, religious, or aesthetic judgement on others. You do your thing; I do my thing. And so it goes. There's no need for things to get personal.

This is one thing I enjoy about politeness — it allows strangers to be strangers with the least amount of friction. Sometimes, we need things from each other or, in this crowded world, we bump into one another — a simple "excuse me," "thanks," or "please" makes the interaction run smoothly.

Still, I have this deep seated desire to break through these barriers, to risk judgement in order to enjoy a whiff of intimacy, however slight. In that moment, there is the possibility of wonder, of the heartfelt and the hilarious, the witty and the surprising.

But that's not why I do it. My need cannot be justified by anything other than itself: anonymity freaks me out. It's as though I need the world to recognize me, not just this body, but me. Perhaps if those around me see me as an individual — not as just another customer, consumer, or constituent — then I'll be better tethered to the earth, less likely to slip into the ether unnoticed.

Ah, yes, this is it: anonymity smacks of death. And, egomaniac narcissist that I am, I believe my individuality will be enough to keep me alive. But only if everyone notices.

Teaching the Way of Words

2012-01-14T19:15:00.000-08:00

If words are not (only) tools to state facts and ideas but are themselves bodies that are as true and delirious as the world itself, then perhaps we need to rethink how we teach operating with words and how we operate with them.

Mind you, I taught comp at Cal for 7 years, more or less. I've seen what the kids of California have been taught about language, what they think counts as a good paper. Needless to say, I hope, this is not to knock my students of old. It's to knock the diverse powers that be who teach this nonsense.

Oh, man, I wish I had some say in the public school syllabus, in how reading and writing are taught. My goal would be to teach students to go with words, not just use words. I would teach that words are not there to express truth per se but to express life itself in all its glorious messiness.

First of all, no more outlines. Outlines are hierarchies that reinforce the view that words are just there to give flesh to truth, to ideas. Outlines show one logic, one way grammar — the grammar of hierarchy. And while hierarchy plays some role in thinking and writing, rarely is it a good master grammar. There are so many ways to present an argument, so many ways to make one's way through an idea or three, that to limit it to hierarchy is to limit thought itself.

Use, instead, what I call an argument map. The emphasis here is on the flow between points, how you move from one idea to the next. Notice that there's still some hierarchy as there's textual evidence for each point. But rather than cascading top down, this encourages a lateral movement through ideas.

Freewriting. This is such an excellent exercise. Give students a question, any question. And ask them to write immediately and without stopping for, say, 10 minutes or so. Oh, man, the prose and ideas that fall from their pens! All of a sudden, prose that was once stilted and awkward flows with vision and feeling. Ideas that were ill-conceived and half-baked take on a hue of wonder and discovery.

Read aloud. It's important to understand, to experience, the sensual resonance of words. An excellent way of doing this is to read aloud. And be dramatic. Let the words move you. Let them choreograph your breath, your emotion, your rhythm.

Teach sense, not meaning. The brilliant Lohren Green argues that the dictionary is an odd beast: it delivers the meaning of all words in the same voice. Butterfly, doodle, widget, concrete, robust, this are all defined in the same tone and timbre: cool, subdued, even. But does "any of numerous diurnal insects of the order Lepidoptera, characterized by clubbed antennae, a slender body, and large, broad, often conspicuously marked wings" really let you grasp butterfly? And so Green wrote a different kind of dictionary, a poetical dictionary, that defines each word according to that word. Bleak is, well, bleak; acrobat plants its landing; purple is verbose; glee leaps with delight; doodle meanders around the page.

To understand sense is to understand the many and diverse aspects of a word — its meaning, its connotation, its rhythm, its weight, its mood and character, its networks within language and beyond.

Imitate other writers. This is a classical exercise: write as others have written and, in so doing, find your own voice. I used to make students write like Ginsberg in Howl or Nietzsche in everything. This shows you possibilities of language, what's possible, by making your body literally move through different mechanics, different senses.

Listen to other languages. It doesn't matter that you can't understand the words, the meaning. William Burroughs says the best way to learn a language is to grasp its rhythm — everything else will fall into place. To begin with rules and meanings is to miss language all together. To hear a language you can't understand is akin to listening to music — you hear rhythm and tone and sound, not concepts and referents.

I, for one, love American English because it can be soft — tuft, symphony, loquacious — and hard — book, finger, fuck. French is so soft, all vowels, skipping quickly off consonants. This lets the French have a word such as jouissance but when it comes to angular anger, well, French must be content with a scowl: "va te faire enculer," while beautiful, just doesn't do what "you fucking fuckpig" does. There's that great scene in The Matrix 2 in which Lambert Wilson describes cursing in French as wiping your ass with silk.

The point, in any case, is this: words need to be reckoned, to be heeded, just as anything does. We have to learn to feel them in our mouths, in our minds, in our loins and bellies, see how they operate, hear how they resonate.

Effable

2012-01-04T12:59:00.000-08:00

There is a common perception that there are certain things and experiences that words can't touch. These things and experiences, we imagine, are sublime, tearing at categories and sense and hence words. Any attempt to speak such things, we presume, is not just futile but sacrilege — as if words sully the divine perfection of the experience.

But I think this view does not quite grasp what words are, what words can do, and how they stand towards and with the world. Words don't name things. Or, rather, they don't only name things. Words are themselves experiences that at once construct and tear at categories, sense, and perhaps themselves.

Words are not just the way we order the world. They are the way we re-order the world, over and over again. When we speak and write well, we are at the border of sense and non-sense, the world coming in and out focus, in and out of chaos, in and out of order.

I want to suggest, then, that while certain things and experiences may be unnameable, they are not ineffable. Words are events that interact with other events. When we speak some sublime experience — an experience that cannot know categories or concepts, an experience that is utterly itself, sui generis and infinite — we don't necessarily domesticate its unwieldiness. We don't necessarily categorize it, move into the realm of the known, into the realm of safe knowledge. We do not necessarily profane its sanctity.

Words are not just sounds and marks. Look at these words here. Look at the spaces between the letters, between the words, between the paragraphs: there is space. The same is true when we speak (at least usually; sometimes, I do drone on and on). Silence and emptiness is an essential aspect of language.

When we use words well, we put them in flow with the world — with its knowledge and its sublimity, its sounds as well as its silence, with its order, its chaos, its moods and affects, its things and facts. Language can be as delirious as experience. Isn't this one task of poetry? In this sense, everything is effable, even if many of the best things are unnameable.

What's Your Time?

2012-01-02T18:30:00.000-08:00

New Years Even, 7:40 pm, I'm standing at the ocean's edge which simultaneously marks the edge of this silly city. The ocean seethes as it will — it may be infinite and seem eternal but we see it fluctuate with the moon and the weather. We see its mode of temporality, how it distributes time: waves are a kind of metronome, keeping a cosmic beat.

Out in the middle of the ocean are several barges headed for the East. They move so steadily, so defiantly, so mercilessly — like the ocean, in a way. But in much more manageable, human terms. Where the ocean relentlessly verges on the sublime — precisely because it's relentless — barges I can think. I can grasp weeks and tons.

Above, planets and stars wink from past centuries.

Large rocks budge, a tiny bit, over centuries. To us, they just sit there, enduring. But slowly, they are eroding and moving. I wonder if, to them, time flies.

Dunes line one perimeter of the beach, coming and going with the winds but over months, years, decades.

There are people scattered about the beach, huddled around bonfires. They seem as though they're in for the long haul, relatively speaking — until the early morning. The barges are in for a longer haul; the dune and rocks, an even longer haul; the ocean, well, it seems to exceed the haul.

These bonfire people enjoy a time so different from the time of the commute when everyone moves with such purpose and speed. They'll kill you if you get in their way.

Make your way through a city any day and see all the micro temporalities — the strollers, the sitters, the sleepers, the coffee drinkers, the runners, the cars, the freeway. Cities are assemblages of so many different times, most accelerated but still with great, with endless, variation.

I can see Bergson's duration so clearly: time is not outside of us, an abstraction that moves steadily and geometrically around its circle. No, time is itself a dimension — I see it, know it at this moment: all these different temporalities, all these different durations, are time happening right now — a now that is all these different times, all these different nows, these nows that are different speeds and distributions of before and later.

Deleuze asks us to look at a moving image of, say, a man walking a dog by a river in the mountains. See all the different times: the time of the man, of the dog, of the river, of the mountains. All images have multiple times.

My friend, the poet Lohren Green, takes time to think, to write — it's as if he has bovine digestion, moving ideas through four stomachs. Me, I've always been fast: I write fast, think fast, digest food fast. When writing Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze was the slow one, Guattari already having moved on to the next connection, the next node. Neither speed is better or worse: they simply (or not) mark our respective temporal tendencies.

Time is all the times of all the different things, each thing happening in its time, enduring as it endures. Time is not a neutral abstraction. Time is an infinitely variegated becoming. This world and everything in it is in motion, happening, changing. This world and everything in it — including everything invisible such as moods — happens, changes, transforms, always and already.

In Burroughs The Place of Dead Roads, Kim Carsons advises would-be gunfighters, "Always take your time." It's not necessarily about being the fastest; go faster than your speed and you'll shoot your foot or fumble all together. Of course, if the other guy's time is faster than your time, you're done for. But then you were done for before the shoot out even began.

So the question is: What's your time?

Talking to Other People

2012-01-01T21:00:00.000-08:00

How are we to speak to others? This may sound like a silly question but talking to people who are different is difficult. We don't share the same codes or the same referents. Which is to say, we talk about different things and we talk about them in different ways. We all have different things we think are even worth talking about. And we have different ways we like to talk about these things — what's interesting, what's exciting, how much to speak about how shitty vs. how cool something is, etc.

Like some others I know, I often feel a bit removed from the facts of the day. I am conversant in the code of white middle class so-called liberal urban people: I know how to speak like them, more or less. But I don't share many of the same referents. We consume, metabolize, and discuss, different things.

I don't know much about what people call politics. I don't know the names of lots of countries. Which I thought I did but people keep saying names of places I've never heard of. It might be that all my geographic knowledge stems from fourth grade and due to various political events there are now different countries. Either that, or I really never knew. And while I do watch some of the television programs — man, there has really been a revolution in serial tv shows — I don't know many others and even fewer movies that are out now. And this ignores the manner in which people talk about movies and politics and such, what counts as judgement, as critique, as insight.

And so when I'm talking to people outside my thoroughly vetted community — a very small community, mind you, of approximately three people —, I often find myself at a loss as to how to speak to them, not to mention what to say to them. Just look at how people respond to me on Thought Catalog.

Now, for the most part, I can usually avoid speaking to people about anything that matters. This, however, gets trickier when it comes to meeting women. I often feel like Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm trying to pick up a girl in a bar.

But, despite my apparent if not rampant narcissism, my point is not to write about me. My point is multifold, so it's not really a point at all, I suppose. I am interested in how we can speak to each other despite our differences. And I'm interested in the ways an interest in what McLuhan calls the environment makes social life difficult.

Ideally, we would speak to each not despite our differences but with and of our differences. We'd approach each situation not demanding or assuming that it conform to our conversational standard. We'd not stick to our guns too adamantly. But nor would we abandon our likes and dislikes too readily. We'd be ready, poised for what of interest might come and what of interest we might add. We'd inquire; we'd listen; we'd instruct; we'd hold forth: we'd converse.

There is a beautiful and complex ethics here, a posture that demands we be at once sure and open.

But what's really tricky, the thing I struggle with the most, is finding the right tone of voice to use when speaking with other people who don't share this same ethical posture (an ethical posture I only sometimes wear, to be sure). When I hear someone talking about, say, Barack Obama, I'm not quite sure how to respond. But what I'm feeling are the following things, all at once: I don't care at all; I wish we would talk about something else; I have a bit of disdain for the conversation and those who are participating; I hope I learn something I don't know; maybe I'm wrong and they're right; I could do with another drink; Kierkegaard was right; what the fuck do I know, anyway?

How, I ask you, do I express all that?

Some Things I've Learned from Booze

2011-12-31T20:48:00.000-08:00

The world teaches. Everything instructs — cement, soap, songs, flowers, smells, glances, books, hobos, movies, golf clubs. Some things, like some teachers, resonate with you better, more thoroughly, more effectively. For 30 years, give or take, booze has been a great teacher and me, I've been its less than reluctant pupil (although I've not always been open to its pedagogy). Here are some things I've learned over the years:

1. Everything has its way. Scotch, after all, is not tequila and neither are gin.This is, of course, obvious. But I still find it profound and this seemingly simple dictum has had enormous repercussions in how and what I think.

2. The ways of things intersect and overlap. I love spicy, perhaps a bit mineraly, clean boozes that are a little hot, a little complex, and never sweet: St. George Terroir Gin, Fortaleza Blanco, Glenrothes single malt, Old Potrero Rye.

3. Things have internal borders that need not unify. The aforementioned boozes each enjoys, on its own, this fantastic array of flavors, each distinct — sun, fir, honey, black pepper. They don't have to become one.

4. Moods come and go. Over the course of one drink, you may traverse despair, elation, resignation, contemplation, each with an emphatic umph.

5. The now is historical, forwards and backwards. Drinking lots now can feel good now — then feel very bad the next day. Sometimes, this is ok; other times, it's not. In any case, there is a distinct correlation between this now and another now.

6. Everything has its occasion. I like my booze. I have a drink or two most days. But I don't always want a drink — a midday beer or morning shot can be great but more often than not makes me sluggish and dumb.

7. Some things have diminishing returns. Just because some thing makes you feel great doesn't mean you can enjoy it ceaselessly — some pleasurable things become less pleasurable when consumed in the wrong proportion or quantity.

8. Things can interact in surprising ways. Booze is one thing. Now add this or that — sex, hooch, medication, driving — and the way of booze can be synergistic, a catalyst both good and bad, to say the least.

9. What was once right is not always right. Starting in my early teens, I drank Jim Beam. A lot of Jim Beam. Now, I can't touch the stuff. I drink much less in general and rarely imbibe bourbon. My body has changed, wants different things, needs different things.

10. Categories offer infinite internal diversity. Bourbon is relatively well defined — 51% corn, from Kentucky, I don't know what else. But try Makers then Buffalo Trace then High West and you'll have three different, even if intimately related, experiences. Now take gin: other than juniper, there are no demands. Infinite variations is not only available but encouraged by the category itself.

11. Pay attention. One drink too much, or the wrong drink, can be disastrous. Booze has taught me to pay attention to what's happening, to how I interact with the world.

Reckoning

2011-12-25T18:09:00.000-08:00

"Make no mistake. It's not revenge he's after. It's a reckoning."

In Tombstone, Wyatt Earp and his brothers have a run in with the Cowboys, an organized pack of gangsters who end up killing one of Wyatt's brothers. In the aftermath, Wyatt goes on a rampage, hunting down every Cowboy and killing him.

In one scene, he seems to overcome all possible odds through sheer will, walking into the open to shoot and kill the Cowboys who shoot at him from the safety of cover. One of Wyatt's cohorts can't believe what he's just seen. To make sense of it — to make sense of such an extreme display of will, to explain what looks like madness — this cohort says, "Well, if they were my brothers, I'd want revenge, too."

To which Doc Holliday, a man beyond good and evil, replies: "Make no mistake. It's not revenge he's after. It's a reckoning."

A reckoning can seem like revenge in that it can be read as the settling of a debt — and, as Nietzsche taught, debt is guilt and guilt is revenge. But I think there is a more interesting way to make sense of a reckoning, the way I think Holliday means it in this instance. A reckoning is a calculating of one's position within a situation and taking the necessary steps, doing what needs to be done, not just coming to terms but settling that which needs settling.

If revenge is a confrontation with another, reckoning is a confrontation with life itself and one's place in it. Acting out of revenge exhausts one's energy — after all, he who seeks revenge spends all his energy thinking about and going after someone else. What a waste. A reckoning, however, is a revitalization of one's energy, a shifting of alignment into a place of great fecundity, of great power.

Look at Wyatt Earp in Tombstone. He's married to a junky he doesn't love. He tries to be a good man, a proper man, earning money for his wife and family. But after his brother is killed by the Cowboys, it's as if he wakes up. He sheds his wife and bourgeois propriety and enters the wild — the wilds of killing, the wilds of uncertainty, the wilds of potential poverty, the wilds of love. Where he was once not just introverted but involuted, closed in on himself, he is now extroverted, exuding vitality.

A reckoning is an inflection point, a juncture, a turning, a transformative moment that redirects one's flow of energy. A reckoning shifts the very terms of the apparatus: it is a metabolic realignment.

The brilliant Breaking Bad is the portrait of a reckoning. When Walter White is given his diagnosis of cancer, he realizes that the very manner in which he lives is literally killing him. He is a weak man. Nice, maybe, but he does little that fuels his health. His teaching is his only thread to life, giving him a flow to his passion, chemistry. Otherwise, every tic, every decision, every move he makes siphons his vitality.

He presumably begins to cook meth because he wants to leave money for his family after he's dead. But that turns out just to be a spark that ignites his reckoning, his coming into his power: the show tracks his metabolic transformation, the realigning of his energy distributions.

A reckoning is messy as it disrupts flows long established. Reckoning is painful and loud (even if silent) and sends ripples through the network as this node affects others — Wyatt's wife, Walt's family.

And it can look like revenge. But just as Wyatt does not kill the Cowboys out of revenge, Walt does not beats this asshole kid in the store out of revenge. He's not exhausting his energy: he's igniting it. Revenge is ugly, always. Reckoning, on the other hand, even though violent and even grotesque, is beautiful.

Knowing Things

2011-12-21T20:02:00.000-08:00

I like booze. I've spent dozens of years drinking different whiskeys and tequilas and, recently, gins. In some sense, I don't know anything about them. I don't know how they're made; I'm not sure where they're made; I'm not even sure what they're always made from.

And yet I feel, with utter confidence, that I know whiskey, that I know tequila, that I'm coming to know gin. I know the experience I want — the experience on my tongue, in my throat and belly, the experience I want from my buzz and how I want to feel the next morning. I love going into bars and describing exactly what I desire to the barkeep who is presumably, and hopefully, thoroughly versed in the various experiences this or that booze offers. Sometimes, they steer me well.

Now, this barkeep of course knows whiskey in a way that I do not — and in a way that I do not care to. The only reason for me to know regions and the production process and the variations of casks and different aging methods is to make the selection of the exact experience I want easier and faster. And that sounds great. And, over the years, I've certainly acquired more knowledge that has made choosing the right booze for my mood easier.

But, frankly, I like how I know booze. I don't want to know all the genera and species, the regions and vicissitudes of aging. I enjoy my mode of knowing that begins and ends, more or less, with my experience, an experience that is at once palpable and ethereal. Because, really, what else matters? I can't make whiskey; I couldn't buy it wholesale at a good price. Oh, but I can drink it and I can enjoy it and I do, yes, I do.

Am I saying that I know whiskey better than the barkeep? Does she know it better than I? What counts as better? Is knowledge something we quantify so that one can know more or less? Sure, sometimes, in some areas, in some circumstances. My point, I suppose, is this: there are different ways of knowing things and there are some ways of knowing that don't involve what we usually call facts.

When I was in college, over 20 years ago, there was a renowned class, taught by a renowned scholar, on James Joyce's Ulysses. Many of my friends took the course; I did not. They had all these names for each chapter that usually referred to this or that classical reference. It was as if they'd been handed some special decoder ring and could now decipher Joyce's arcane text. And the rest of us were just ignorant.

I read the book the summer after college and loved it — well, most of it. Not being a classicist, I missed the Homeric allusions. I am sure I missed hundreds of other allusions. On the other hand, I didn't miss anything at all. There are moments in that book that resonated and resounded in my very cells — and still do. And there are moments that passed me right by. I left the book feeling like I knew it just as I wanted to know it.

I am woefully ignorant of fauna. But when I was 16 and tripping on my first ever hit of acid in the Fall of 1986 and the leaves had vacated their trees leaving my lush little town to sit beneath these branches that were anything but bare, I came to know trees with a certain intensity, a certain intimacy. With nothing to mask their fine and endless articulations, the trees spoke to me. Alternately wise, witty, buffoonish, and deadpan, we conversed. The conversation lasts to this very day — not as intensely but as one might converse with any old friend.

I have plenty of friends who know trees better than I do — and better in every possible sense. They know the facts and they know the articulation of which I speak and they know so much more. I have a friend who would strip naked in the winter and head into the woods of the Pennsylvania Poconos and make a shelter with these trees. In a very real way, he made — and makes — love to the trees and to fauna of all sorts.

What is it to know something? Consider all these different ways of knowing trees: a child who loves climbing them; someone with allergies; a botanist; an environmentalist; a 16 year old stoner Jew on acid; a gardener.

I want to say that to know something, to really know it and not just know of it, is to go with it. To know, then, is not to know about something but to know with something, to be moved with that thing.

Anyone can look up facts on Wikipedia. And those facts can be great and may be necessary (or not). But to know something is to go with that thing. And there are so many ways of going with, so many ways of knowing.

The Deed, and Nothing But

2011-12-15T10:05:00.000-08:00

Consider seeing. Is seeing active orpassive? Do you see the coffee mug? Or does the coffee mug, in a sense, projectitself into you — into your head, into your body, the very vision of it fillingyou just as the coffee itself does as you drink it? Do you come to the world?Or does the world come to you? Or is this a false dichotomy? Is it that we cometogether, we become together, we are both stuffs of this world and we go andinteract as any stuffs in the world go — colliding, harmonizing,snuggling?

Vision — all perception — is neitheractive nor passive, is both active and passive.

The place of perspective,of reading, is the middle, between here and there, between you and me. Ithappens in what we call the middle voice. The middle voice is difficult tospeak, at least in English. English has subjects of sentences that standseparate from their actions — the verbs — which in turn act upon objects. “Ikiss you”: in this simple construction there is a distinct I, a distinct kiss,and a distinct you. There is an implied, and obligatory, distinction betweenwho I am and the actions I take, as if there were an I that stands apart from theworld, that comes before, or outside, action — as if there were a kiss that didnot involve me and you.

In some sense, all thereis is kissing — there is no I, no kiss, no you, just this cooperative event(hopefully!) of me, kiss, desire, love, you.

InOn the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes that when we say “lightningstrikes,” we are being redundant. Of course lightning strikes. What islightning if it doesn’t strike? Lightning is that which strikes; it isstriking, always and already. Take away the striking and you have nothing. Whenwe say “lightning strikes,” we put a doer behind the deed when, for Nietzsche,all there is is the deed. Nietzsche argues that one of the great moves made bythe slaves was to posit a subject behind the action who could be held eternallyresponsible for his actions — the bird of prey becomes guilty for eating thelittle lamb, as if the bird had a choice, as if the bird were not always andalready a bird that preys. The invention of this doer is the invention ofJudeo-Christian morality and its arsenal of ego, morality, guilt, and judgment.

Ourgrammar rests on such a subject who is distinct from both his actions and theworld. And so here we posit a middle voice, a way to speak that is neitheractive nor passive. In English, this demands that we make language perform insuch a way that the distinctions between doer, deed, and object areintertwined. We have to make language enmesh and touch and palpate.

Words

2011-12-08T20:32:00.001-08:00

I never cease to be amazed by the magic of words — these contrived scrawls, these guttural mutterings that somehow conjure, entice, explain, seduce, confound, convey, reveal. Well, I suppose sometimes I do cease to be amazed but that's only because I'm not paying any attention, am distracted by the obnoxious din of my own blabbering brain.

One of my favorite philosophers of language is Maurice Merleau-Ponty (a melodious name I do enjoy saying — it's somehow perverse and exquisitely so): "...languagenever says anything; it invents a series of gestures which between them presentdifferences clear enough for the conduct of language to the degree that itrepeats itself, recovers and affirmsitself, and purveys to us the palpable flows and contours of a universe ofmeaning."

I love that: "language never says anything." To think than language is a vehicle that carries our ideas, our facts, our messages is not just to reduce language but to miss it all together. A word does not stand in for something, for a real thing that exists elsewhere. A word is real, too.

Take any word, say, dog. The word dog does not stand in for the idea of dog or even for the asshole dogs who bark incessantly in my backyard. The word dog, the idea of dog, every dog I've ever known, the smell of dog, my faint dog allergy, my cynophobia, the movie Cujo, chien, mut, wolf: all these terms, and more, form a network. They exist in various and complex relations with each other (these relationships can be considered tropes — but that's another topic).

A word is a body — and a strange body at that. It's visible, in some sense, but its visible components do not convey very much. It is invisible, as well, drenched in affect, memory, and meaning. But its invisible components would be nothing without its visible ones, its marks and sounds.

A word, then, is this incredible assemblage point that is also a condensation point. After all, words are so pithy. Melodious. Cloying. Flabbergast. This. Hi. Foment. Singe. Fecund. So much in so little, each an entire world (pace Lohren Green).

And I love the different shapes they make — they can flow so softly, so gently, then turn on a dime and fuck your face, hard and angular before becoming knotted clumsy stumble. Think of Nabokov, then Bukowski, then Garcia Marquez, then Celine, then Ashbery....all these constellations, all these possible configurations, all these ways of distributing emotion, mood, affect, meaning.

We reach for a word, says Merleau-Ponty, as we reach for an itch. Language is not a tool we use. It's an element we prehend just as we prehend air and food. A word has a body, a density, a weight, an inclination. A word is a strange fluttering (or not) creature that houses an entire cosmos, suspended (or not) in the ether. When we declare or proclaim or inscribe, we enter its world. And then, it some sense, it speaks us.

But language, while insidiously coercive, is rarely so dictatorial. Words move with us, go with us. In fact, William Burroughs says they're a virus and humans, their host. There is a creepy aspect to this but there is also something beautiful, a symbiosis, a giving and taking — even if it's a relation rife with tension. We all know this tension — so-called writers all the more: we wrestle words and they wrestle back.

And then, sometimes, you find a beautiful rhythm with them — you reach, they reach back, they offer themselves to you and you offer yourself back, receptive to their fluttering, a mutual generosity, an intertwining of bodies human and linguistic. Oh, these are glorious moments, profoundly erotic, a making love — yes, love — with words, surfing the undulations of this strange body we call language.

Take a Peek

2011-12-08T11:41:00.001-08:00

Apropos of nothing, for those more philosophically minded among you, check out this podcast — smart, thorough, excited: http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/

And, well, they linked to my podcast on Bergson, too: http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2011/12/06/daniel-coffeen-on-bergsons-matter-and-memory/.

Examples and Repetition

2011-12-07T10:40:00.001-08:00

We use examples all the time. But what is the logic of an example?

Well, an example is an instance of something — a something that is presumably bigger or broader such a concept, genre, ideology, or idea. This model of exemplarity is hierarchical as the master term determines the identity of the particular.

Here’s an example of an example: “The books ofWilliam Burroughs are postmodern.” In this case, the oddity and tics and particularity of Burroughs are explained by, and reduced to, a meta-category: the postmodern. One could, on the other hand, say thathis books are not postmodern, in which case, Burroughs is defined in a negative relationship to a category — which is to say, not defined at all. Or one could take another example of postmodernity — say, Thomas Pynchon — and talk abouthow Burroughs’ paranoia differs from Pynchon’s in that Burroughs is notparanoid at all: to him, the world is at war hence one had better keep a goodlookout. In any case, in this model of the example, a particular thing is in a relationship with acategory either as an instantiation, a rebel, or a modifier: Burroughs ispostmodern; Burroughs is not postmodern;Burroughs shifts the terms of postmodernity.

This model of exemplarity takes all sorts of forms such as ideology critique in which we read something in light of a predefined“cultural” or “ideological” category such as gender, race, sexuality, Marxism,psychoanalysis. This is acommon assignment in college classes as Freudian readings of Vertigo,feminist critiques of Deep Throat, and Marxist analyses of The Wireabound.

What matters in this model of the example is the category as the difference of Burroughs is minimized or wiped away. This is a way of domesticating knowledge, of taming ideas that might tear at familiar and comforting categories. Because, in this model, the categories themselves remain unquestioned, assumed as givens rather than tossed into the fray with all the other muck. And the difference of this or that is ignored.

Now, I could say that there is no such thing as a category and that all there is is difference, particulars ad infinitum. And, to some extent, this is no doubt true (but in a different way for different folks). But it seems to me that things do coalesce, that difference does not mark isolation but a relationship. The question is: how can we speak about such points of assemblage without falling into the hierarchy of exemplarity?

Repetition. With repetition, each thing recasts all the others in its various networks, including the categories. Every chair is both the idea of chair and the instance of chair: it is both Chair and chair, chair again and anew, chair recast, reconfigured, recategorized. Occasionally, a chair takes leave of chair all together and becomes something else — a couch, a table, a cat's house. With repetition, there is no up or down, no firm vertical axis on which a hierarchy could establish itself.

With repetition, each thing is the center of its category (and of its world). Each thing is both category and instantiation. Each thing is an example of itself. And this is how I like to read the world — examples, nothing but examples, examples all the way up and all the way down, everything an example of itself — a world of pure exemplarity.

Moods

2011-11-26T16:09:00.001-08:00

My favorite quote from Emerson, and one of my favorite quotes in general, is: "Our moods do not believe in each other." What's amazing about this is it undoes the sanctity, the unity, of the self: if my moods are absolute, then I am wholly different depending on said mood.

We all know this experience. We get a little depressed, or a lot depressed, and everything looks like a huge pile of shit. When we picture every possible path to the future, each leads to a pile of shit, or death, or both. And there is no consoling that will deter us: we know that life is a pile of shit. Other times, we feel like everything will turn up roses: we feel smart and powerful and sexy and it's as if the world were our oyster there to be shucked and sucked.

Of course, there are any number of moods that are less extreme — confusion, anxiety, reasonableness, and so on. But the point is: each feels as though it were right. Even if one mood acknowledges that another mood exists, that other mood becomes, well, just a mood. And this present state becomes the truth, the way things really are.

Now, is there a mood of moods? A mood that knows that life is mooded? What might such a thing look like? And doesn't it just beg the same epistemological dilemma: Isn't the mood of moods just another mood with no privileged access to the real way of things?

I want to say that Buddhism tries to establish such a mood of moods but the result is no mood fluctuation at all — to the enlightened Buddhist, all is a steady hum. No manic highs, no manic lows: just a state of perpetual contentment. Which, I have to say, sounds pretty good. Sometimes. Sometimes it just sounds creepy and nihilistic, a kind of avoidance of the flux of life.

I had a roommate in college who decided that a diet of liquid acid, and little else, was a wise thing. After a few weeks, he became pronouncedly manic, convinced that he was the smartest, most gifted human being alive (and that the FBI was following him and bugging the walls). He was sure of it. I mostly wanted to punch him in the face. Why? Well, because he was fucking annoying but also because he refused to recognize that he was in a mood. But of course there is also a genius to mania, a willingness to commit absolutely to a mood. And not just any mood but a manic mood (Buddhists commit to one mood — a subdued, even if enthralled, mood).

I reach for a mechanism that allows me to navigate the flux of moods: irony. With irony, I can articulate the state I'm in while recognizing that whatever I'm saying is full of its own kind of shit. Irony doesn't take any thing that seriously because it knows that everything is flux, everything gives way to change — so to be adamant is to be foolish, to be ironic is to be wise. (I realize irony is often thought of as cold or nihilistic but it can also be warm, understanding, and profoundly resonant.)

When I was younger, I would commit — submit — to a mood more readily. I'd get carried away. And it was beautiful. These daze, I am less prone to get so enmeshed in one mood, this flux replaced by a more or less boring, more or less bourgeois, sense of propriety. Even when I get lit on this or that, my mood is tempered: I know I'm just buzzed and that it, too, will pass. My irony prevails over my adamance.

Sometimes, this feels like wisdom. Sometimes, it feels like weakness. It depends on my mood.

The Way of the Way

2011-11-24T17:03:00.001-08:00

Things have a way. This gin, for instance, is dry, spicy, rich — it doesn't want to be a martini. But it does want things that I don't know how to satisfy. So I keep it simple until I know more: two smaller ice cubes (more, and the flavor dissipates; less, and it's too astringent for my palate). But I was at this bar the other night where my bartender was doing all sorts of things with this gin. She knows the way of this gin, just as any chef or bartender knows the way of her ingredients: how each interacts with heat, tongue, pressure, bitters, and so on.

I love learning the way of a booze. Gin is new to me so I am trying to figure out how it can go — how much can I drink; how quickly; in what forms; and when. Tequila, I know pretty well. I can navigate blancos, reposados, anejos across a range of brands and regions. I generally know how it will hit my tongue, affect my mood, my digestion, my sleep. This is not a scienfitic knowledge; whatever I've learned about what tequila, technically, I learned from Wikipedia long after I'd learned the way of tequila.

The way to know a way is not to know its physical make up but how it makes its way in the world. When it comes to ways, experience takes precedence over facts — two different kinds of knowledge. Now, facts are good, too. Sometimes, facts are great: tequila, distilled in the old stills, needs no starter — it kickstarts itself. I love that. And it helps me to know the way of tequila. But to know the way of tequila, I began with experience, with what it did to me.

This is not to disparage other ways of knowing tequila — or knowing anything. I mean, my knowldge will not empower me to make tequila. It's just to point out that everything has a way and the way to know a way is to begin with experience.

Gin, I don't really know. I'm in the process of learning its way which, in many ways, is the most exciting time in the life of knowing something, like the early stage of a love affair: danger and ecstasy loom around every corner.

Everything has a way — chair, pen, pad, screen, song, nose, follicle, person, food, idea, shoe, sheet, window, whisper, stair, orgasm, lip, belly, breast, dream, kiss. Every chair is different from every other chair and every kiss is different from every other kiss. And yet there is something about a chair and something about a kiss and this something is many things and it changes and it includes the spine and lust and reverie and ass and the abstraction of how all those things can be.

This is what's strange about a way. It's always particular — this kiss, this chair — and general: kisses and chairs. I think this is what I love most about the way of ways: it takes everything. It's so generous. Got a fact? Great! Got a story? Fantastic! Got a theory? Let's hear it. All of these things make the way of this or that.

A way is never done — there is always unpredictability. But this unpredictability is not utterly without pattern or stipulation. Each thing tends to be unpredictable in the fashion distinct to it. A gin, for instance, is not all of a sudden going to be a whiskey, even it may partake of the way of whiskey every now and again (Ransom Old Tom? a little? maybe not).

A way is a differential equation: infinite, yes, but infinite in this way.

Think of the job a baseball shortstop has: he has to make sense of the way of a ball. He never knows exactly how the ball is going to go off the bat. But he knows the range of speeds, the range of motion, the kinds of ricochets it can take, the trajectories of line drives. But each line drive, every ricochet, is different within that general range. And then, once in a while, that range adjusts and the shortstop learns something new about the way of the ball.

The way of something is historical and contemporary, particular and general. The way of the way brings me great pleasure.

Experience

2011-11-23T10:56:00.001-08:00

"Inner experience responds to the necessity in which I find myself — human existence with me — of challenging everything (of putting everything into question) without permissable rest." — Georges Bataille, Inner Experience

After all the years of writing and thinking about events, reading and studying and writing about 20th century philosophy and phenomenology, I finally have my first glimpse into the profound oddity of what we might call experience. It was picking up Bataille's Inner Experience that set off this revelation — a revelation of confusion, not understanding. Which, in many ways, is the best kind of revelation: suddenly, I am aware of what I didn't know I didn't know. It's like a whole new world yawning before me whose laws and language and ways await me.

So I am going to try and use this virtual venue to articulate experience to see if I can make it any clearer to myself.

I can say that an experience is what happens to me. But that's not right at all. Say, for instance, that I am at a Cornelius concert. The music, the lights, the crowd: that might be what's happening to me. And yet that says nothing about my experience.

My experience is what I live through in the act of watching the concert, a living through that is at once physical and affective: my ears, my whole body in fact, vibrates; my affective state ebbs and flows — excitement, wonder, delight, annoyance, anxiety, love; my heart rate speeds and slows with said flows and vibrations.

But of course my experience is not those things either, as if the experience could be parsed into component parts. The experience is something else. Can I say it's the way all those different elements conspire, work together like an engine that produces....what? Me?

Experience, alas, eludes and exceeds all categories. It tears knowledge asunder without thinking twice. Experience is a surge, a plane of excitation that animates and inspires and destroys and creates, all at the same time.

Try and picture to yourself what your experience is right now. Not all the things happening around you; not all the things happening to you; but what you are experiencing this very moment. Where do you see this taking place? In your head? Your belly? Your nerves? What is it you see when you try to isolate experience from everything else?

Bataille talks about "inner experience" but this inside is not your soul or your self. "Inner," in this case, distinguishes experience from the outer events that surround you. This "inner experience" is mystical — which is why Bataille is interested in religious experiences, in ecstatic states.

Now, needless to say, experience is wound up with the world, bound up with the stuff of the earth — weather and pixels and friends and pornography and work and and and. And the way each of us experiences is determined, more or less, by the complex algorithms that we are — our bodies and histories and knowledge all working in metabolic conjunction.

But the experience is not reducible to any of these things. Experience is not me in that experience breaks the ego, breaks the self: the self as experience is not a self at all but a perpetually unbound this. The thing I call my self may be constituted by experience and experience may be constituted, in part, by my self (experience is constituted by all sorts of things including plants, animals, planets, dreams, films). But my self and my experience are not the same thing at all.

Experience breaks, bleeds, exceeds the self. The psychedelic experience makes this all too clear: we speak with trees, converse with the cosmos, see and understand and live through a connection between and among all things that could not possibly allow for something as ludicrous, as localized, as a self.

I feel like I've been blinded by the endless distractions of ego and society and such: my mind swirls with thoughts of laundry and bills and sports and television and fellatio and so on and so forth. Which is to say, I am distracted from experience. Of course, in all of these things experience wields its beautiful and unwieldy head — a beautiful pass, the surge of the erotic, the tiny death of the orgasm: these give us a glimmer of the plane of experience.

What happens if we — if I, if you — make experience the focal point? How would our lives change? Rather than trying to keep experience at bay, in its place, might we seek to amplify it? So rather than contentment or riches we sought the diverse kinds of ecstatic states? So rather than clinging to our egos and all that supports them, we sought out the destruction of our egos?

A Good Conversation

2011-11-11T21:41:00.001-08:00

A conversation is different than a discussion. A discussion is everyone talking about something — "Jane Eyre" or the latest Spoon LP or whether balding men really ought to shave the whole thing or not.

But a converation is a beast of another sort. A conversation is a relentless back and forth in ever different rhythms — one party holding the floor, followed by a brief interlude, only to surge forth again; then, later, a rapid pitter patter of banter, each urging the other one in a frenetic frenzy of excitement or understanding or revelation; and so it goes, shifting registers, rhythms, tones, and topics.

A conversation demands great generosity. On the one hand, it demands the generosity of listening. And perhaps not just of listening but of assuming that the other person is saying something of value, something worth listening to.

I will admit that most of the time, I am listening to other people — not friends, mind you, not persons vetted by experience — with a bit of hesitation, with imminent or silent judgment or assessment but in any case not with pure openness and generosity. I don't assume they'll say something interesting; on the contrary, I assume they'll say something familiar, boring, cliched.

Now, I may be right and perhaps that is often the case. Still, a good conversation demands generosity, demands that each party assume the best of the other. (The beginnings of conversations — say, at a party — are tenuous affairs, each sniffing out the other for signs of value, signs of a good conversational partner. I tend to use a few different techniques to suss out whether this or that person will give me the conversational goods. Probably, I just come off — or I am — obnoxious and the other person can't wait to flee.)

But the conversation demands another kind of generosity, too. It demands the generosity of your own lively intellect, your willingness not just to listen to this other person but to take what they give you and move it into new territory. It's not just a matter of listening but of giving — and giving wholly of yourself.

A conversation is what Deleuze and Guattari might call a bloc of becoming: together, the conversationalists move each other and, in so doing, create something new, a wave of the world emerging through the magic of their mutual generosity. It's as if the two — conversations are difficult enough between two people; add more and things get exponentially more complex — the two conversing become like a multiheaded beast — not fused but still sharing a common body: the body of the conversation.

A good conversation demands a certain strength — the strength to feel comfortable with someone else; the strength to remain in and of oneself even while being so intent on another; the strength to enter strange, new realms without getting lost. It demands that peculiar posture of poise, leaning neither too far in nor too far back but standing strong while always ready for what may come next.

It is erotic, yes. And musical. It is as physical as it is intellectual, even if seeming to involve only words (as if there such a thing as "only words").

Oh, man, a good conversation is a rare and beautiful thing.

The Society of Individuals

2011-11-08T19:32:00.000-08:00

I love this phrase — it's what I named my would-be think tank when I was 22: The Society of Individuals. Twenty years later and I still cling to, and seek to elucidate, what such a society might be.

In my last apartment here in San Francisco, I'd occasionally get a note slipped under my door, asking me to participate in the neighborhood group. I recoiled at such a prospect — partly for aesthetic reasons (I feared great tedium) and partly out of fear: I always imagine that I'm the one that will get run out of town by the barrio posse.

OK, you can call this paranoia. And no doubt it is. But it speaks to my greater issue with groups of any sort. Any time there is bonding around a common issue, it invites interrogation and condemnation for those who differ.

Take fans of a sport team. I, for one, like sports — at least some sports. But I'm not a fan of being a fan. It just seems strange to me: I want my team to win! But what makes it your team? And isn't a good game better than your team winning?

I've learned the hard way that this is not a popular position. Which is to say, I've learned not to watch 49er games in a bar. Jesus! The violence of that community is palpable, seething, imminent. The night the Giants won the world series, I was sure I'd get my ass kicked for not giving the right high-5 to a drunkenly deranged stranger.

My point is this: I imagine a different kind of community, one that is not united in sameness but which agrees to enjoy difference. I like having a neighborhood; I lived in the same neighborhood for 20 years and enjoyed the company of barristas, bar keeps, shop owners, and locals. But what I enjoyed is not that we are all the same. What I enjoyed is how different everyone is, all the quirks and oddities, the tics and predilections.

A society of individuals is a communality built on difference. Now, that may seem oxymoronic but it's not. It only seems that way because of the overwhelming prejudice for the sentimentality of agreement and unity. A society of individuals is a group of people who relish the fact that we are not the same, that we don't always agree, that we are different.

Nietzsche says he only wants those who sit atop their own peak — not those who sit at his feet on the same mountain peak. This is how I imagine the society of individuals: each on his or her own peak, strong enough to bear the winds and solitude.

I only want to cavort with such people — those who hold forth with their idiosyncratic beliefs about life and love and goats and gin; those who spend weeks naked in the woods, building their own shelters and tracking mountain lions while covered in mule piss; those who make insane, beautiful films that emerge from the interaction with the camera, and who contemplate love at the same time; those who write poetical dictionaries and text books on atmospherics because it seems so, well, obvious; those who write avant normal pop songs in their basements at night, weaving together Led Zeppelin, The Cure, and Thelonious Monk. I want those who follow strange, uncharted paths and have no shame about it.

My politics is dedicated to creating such a society.

The Intimacies of the Urban

2011-10-26T15:21:00.000-07:00

Paris je t'aime Tuileries by Narfouette

Life in a city is permeated with peculiar, oft overlooked, intimacies with strangers. Take windows. As you walk through the city, you may casually glance up and see someone on the phone, a father playing with his kid, a family eating dinner, everyone everywhere watching tv. You might see someone wanking his willy but he's probably doing that so you can see so that doesn't really count.

But it's not just windows. This intimacy is everywhere, all the time. You can smell your neighbors' cooking, are privy to their parties, their taste in music, when they wake and when they sleep and when they go out.

In Species of Spaces, Georges Perec has a great thing on apartments: you're eating your dinner and right on the other side of the wall is someone else's bathroom. Or mere feet from where you sleep, a stranger is sleeping, as well, your two heads almost touching. If you think about it too much, it will freak your shit out.

When we go to the bathroom at work, in restaurants and bars, in train stations and airports, we piss, shit, pretty ourselves, change clothes, groom our nose hairs as strangers come and go inches away.

In elevators, we spend time in an incredibly small space — with strangers and their smells and ticks! Which is a little odd!

On streets and subways and buses, we are inundated with the private selves of strangers — those hangdog faces, those looks of exhaustion or interest or exuberance or malaise. Now think of all the conversations we hear all day every day about god knows what.

For the most part, we pass through these streets with one ear and one eye, if that. We have to let this teem pass us by, even if bits here and there ricochet into our consciousness. I find it's usually the hilarious rantings of the insane that penetrate the veil. The mad don't know the rules of space, of sound, and so their private worlds collide into ours with more vigor. (I can still hear the old grey haired white dude, shirtless, ranting in the West Philly streets: "I'm gonna raise an army of lesbians and take over McDonalds!")

Sometimes, you catch someone looking at you longer than they're supposed to and with a bit more interest than is prescribed. It's always a poignant, if understated, moment when your eyes meet and the other person looks away. The speed of the encounter is everything — did they hold your gaze for a moment or did they look immediately away?

As a little boy living in Manhattan, my mother always told me not to make eye contact with strangers. Crazy things happen when strangers lock eyes; it can have the most powerful effect, tearing down protocol and inviting sudden intimacy: violence, sex, laughter, understanding.

When you think about all the lives that intersect us with surprising intimacy, it is overwhelming. It is an incredible skill we've all learned, this tuning in and out (mostly out), this ability to be ourselves within the impossible density of other people's lives.

I used to do my laundry at this laundromat on the corner. I'd sit outside on a bench as my clothes tumbled. A young woman — 20-something — lived in the apartment across the way. As I'd sit there, she'd saunter back and forth in less and less clothes until she was naked. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in the city, even if quite beautiful. But what was truly beautiful was when we'd see each other face to face, on the street or even in the laundromat, exchanging not even a glance but sharing this very strange kind of intimacy.

Sometimes, it's distance that affords a certain kind of closeness.

From a one angle, it may seem sad as if we're ignoring each other, turning a blind eye to humanity. But it's not sad. On the contrary, it's amazing and beautiful: to be able to live amidst such a swarm of humanity, taking in snippets here and there, all without being swept away.

What's an Image?

2011-10-24T21:06:00.000-07:00

[an exerpt from a much longer thingamajig]

An image is not an image of. Or, rather, it is also an image of.

An image, like a word, is a wayof going, of taking up the world — a face, a sunset, light, sadness, love,ambivalence, things — and assembling them just so. Like a word, an imageselects, inflects, arranges, and prioritizes. This is not to say that an imageis not intimately enmeshed with the thing in the picture. Of course it is. Apicture of me is a picture of me. But it is not solely a picture of me. It is another me, another thing in theworld, another way of going. The image of me is simultaneously a reading of meand its own thing.

An image is not are-presentation. It is a repetition. An image of me is me again and anew. Neitherthe image of me nor this me is the real one. Or, rather, we are both real butin different ways. Obviously, an image of me is not covered under the samelegal jurisdiction that I am: tear the picture of me in two and you will not bearrested for assault (but you may for damage to property). An image circulatesin its own network of economies — legal, financial, interpretive. This networkintersects the network that is me. Together, we inflect each other more or lessdepending on the node within the network, the junctures of the diverseeconomies.

In any case, I am suggesting than an image is not a derivation or asupplement of the real. In the logic of repetition, there is no original, nomaster term: we are always already supplemental. Or, to put it moreaffirmatively, everything is a point of origin, everything is the center of itsworld — just as it is a periphery in another word. All the terms arerepetitions that inflect each other. Isn’t this the way of fame — that therelentless image making of a person changes that person?

An image, like any thing, is a multiplicity, a more or less elaboratenetwork of affects, effects, speeds, intensities. It is a metabolic engine. Acamera doesn’t as much capture the world as it does digest it and reassembleit. An image maker, then, does not make a picture of the world. He proliferatesthe world, making more and more of it.

Passionate Indifference

2011-10-23T22:56:00.000-07:00

"Passionate indifference" is a phrase I've been passionate about for a while now. It came to me first after first watching Pulp Fiction. Here is a film that is cold, that seems to enjoy a casual brutality. We may feel for John Travolta but he gets shot, as an aside, while taking a shit. Uma Thurman takes a syringe to the heart. "Flock of Seagulls" is shot mid conversation.

And yet the film itself is absolutely passionate — every scene brims not with pathos but with vim, with verve, with vigor. It has a certain indifference to the plight of this or that character and an indifference to our identification. The film gives us something else: the passion of film making, the passion of the event, the passion of a humanity that is not mired in bathos but in the very flow of the world — or at least of the moving image.

The best of nature shows and nature commentators speak with passionate indifference. Nature, after all, is neither kind nor brutal: it just is. There is such intense drama — the large cat taking down a gazelle, hungry polar bears bearing the burden of an infinite winter, flora fighting for survival. And yet nature is absolutely, mercilessly, indifferent. We can hear this in the voice of the great nature documentaries we know so well thanks to PBS.

And we see it in the great new book by Matthew Deren, "A Forgotten Wilderness: Nature's Hidden Relationships in West Central Idaho." You can see this passionate indifference in the sub-title: the hidden relationships. For this is what Deren finds: a world that brims with ever-shifting relationships between animals, weather, insects, flora, man. There is no good or bad.

The ancient Native Americans, Deren tells us, came to the New World, found it over run with large beasts — mammoths and saber tooth tigers — and slaughtered them all in a matter of a thousand years or so. This, in turn, gave way to different environment where food was to be found in more elusive forms of deer and plants. Which, in turn, gave way to a culture of humility and interconnectedness.

Now, this is a beautiful argument. And one we are tempted to judge, to read through a moral lens. But Deren doesn't do that: to him, it — nature — and a nature that includes man — is simply, or not so simply, an ever shifting set of relationships. These may not always be obvious unless you know how to look. His book teaches us to see everything — the berries and birds and beasts — with passionate indifference, with an unbounded love and respect but utterly free of moral judgement, of bathos, of cloying human sentimentality.

There is a certain coldness that is, in fact, sizzling hot. It is cold to the insularity of humanity and its self-absorbed sense of self. This perspective grasps the bigger picture: man as one beast amidst the beasts, amidst the fray. And as our gaze takes in these "hidden relationships" that teem, we experience a surge, a vitality, a passion — a passion that is indifferent to the bullshit and utterly alive to life.

A Relationship with the Infinite

2011-10-09T14:07:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I was overwhelmed by the concept of infinity. I'd lie in bed at night, in the dark, and try to picture the infinity of space, each limit in my mind giving way giving way giving way until I achieved a kind of vertigo and my skinny little body would tremble as if in orgasm, a conceptual tantra. It was exquisite.

And it was the beginning of my conscious relationship to the infinite.

What is the infinite? It is the understanding — an understanding that is an experience, that is lived through — that this life is necessary, that there is no other life, that everything that happens resounds infinitely precisely because it happened, because there is no other way: there is nothing else but this. And this necessity makes every moment constitutive of the universe — everything you do, think, say, feel makes the world in this absolutely distinct way. Everything you do, think, say feel resounds infinitely.

Of course, we often think of the infinite as out there — like my younger self discovering the infinite in space. It is no doubt easier to experience the infinite without the distractions of what seems finite — traffic, jobs, pissing, eating, cleaning, what am I gonna do Saturday night, does Sally love me, my parents are insane, etc. So monks recuse themselves from the everyday and meditate day and night with the infinite.Kierkegaard called this "infinite resignation": one gives in totally to the infinite, putting aside the "distractions" of sex, of the right restaurant, of job, of car maintenance.

But for Kierkegaard, the trick is not to live in the infinite alone but to live at once in the finite and the infinite — to move into the infinite and back with each step (he call this person the Knight of Faith — see Fear and Trembling, a truly fantastic little book).

Nietzsche may serve us better. In "The Gay Science," he gives us a test, what he calls "the greatest weight": an angel — or daemon — comes to you and says: Everything that has ever happened and will happen to you — every thought, meal, pain, action — has happened an infinite number of times and will happen an infinite number of times. How do you respond? Are you crushed by its weight? Or liberated by the call of necessity?

This is to say, for Nietzsche, our lives — what we do here and now — are absolutely necessary. Fate and chance are the same thing. We are what we do; the universe is what happens (ontology gives way to becoming). When one lives as if this were so, as if every moment were necessarily perfect because there is no other way for that moment to be, then one is living in the finite infinitely.

Experiencing this kind of joy, having this profound knowledge of one's necessity, is difficult to maintain day in and day out. We get distracted by the humdrum, by the quotidian demands, by our neuroses and anxieties — what if, what if, what if, if only, if only, if only. When one says "what if" and "if only," then one no longer sees life as necessary but as contingent, as finite.

It's not easy to let go of the what ifs and if onlies. It is an on going job — well, at least for me it is.

And all I ask of those around me — my friends, my lovers, my family — is that they at least try to live infinitely, that they have a relationship with the infinite, that at least at some point in their lives they've experienced the necessity of this life, that they've lived through that trembling, that joy — and that that experience is something they actively seek and foster.

#OccupyWallStreet and the Question of Change

2011-10-03T18:43:00.000-07:00

One of the dominant critiques of #OWS is that it has no clear demands. And yet, as many in the movement have claimed, that is precisely the point.

Revolution is not the goal. We don't want to turn all the way around and find ourselves right back where we started. We need to take a line of flight, go somewhere else entirely, like Bugs Bunny being chased by Elmer Fudd. He doesn't run; he shifts the conversation.

And this, I believe, is what #OWS wants: a fundamental change of structure and of behavior. They don't oppose; they multiply.

And this means radical openness, different voices and perspectives. This means moving beyond ideology and its implicit violence, its us vs. them dichotomies, its righteousness. Righteousness is unseemly in every way.

And so a new way of coalescing. A way that does not have one, fixed agenda but has multiple agendas or no agenda at all. This is a performative protest, practicing what it professes.

Is that enough? Well, of course not. A bunch of people sitting in the streets stirring up shit and talking in round tables is not the end state. It's the beginning state. And it's an essential element — collective, non-ideological discussion fueled by passion, anger, frustration, need, and desire.

Individually, a lot of changes need to be made. People need to refuse to work 60, 70, 80 hour weeks without proper compensation. People need to stop shopping at convenient behemoths and support local business. People need to stop driving like they're the only one on the road.

We have to claim dignity and civility on an individual basis.

But there are enormous, powerful structures in place that need to change, as well. The flow of capital needs to be re-engineered. Right now, the game is rigged by a coalition of government and police that enforces these flows, ensuring the capital flows towards the top of global corporations.

This is not about liberation. That is a red herring. This is about the structural engineering of capital flow.

And so change must begin with dismantling the privilege and power afforded corporations. This means:

Taking away personhood from corporations. While this cannot happen overnight, it would be nice to have some economists begin mapping out how to do this without triggering a complete economic collapse.
As incorporating is a privilege and not a right — a privilege granted by the government, which presumably is by the people — put certain mandates on corporations that re-engineer the flow of capital. Now, it all flows up. So mandate that it must flow down, too: profit sharing with all employees. Don't like that rule? Don't incorporate.

What else?

Liberalism is Capitalism, or What is Freedom?

2011-09-30T10:27:00.000-07:00

The liberal state — the birth of the people, of "freedom," of fraternity — came with the beheading of the king. And who did this beheading? The bourgeoisie: they wanted a piece of the pie. So the end of hierarchy which kept wealth for itself came at the hands of the bourgeoisie who wanted some of that wealth. The liberal revolutions of the 18th century, then, were essentially capitalist revolutions.

Liberalism and capitalism have always been the same thing. Consider all the so-called liberation movements. What are they about? They are about creating consumers.

The most devastating fact that I learned in the documentary, The Corporation, was that the rise of corporation came out of the 14th Amendment, which nominally granted citizenship and property rights to blacks. But the overwhelming majority of cases heard under this 14th Amendment were corporations — previously recognized as persons — arguing for the right to do business, to own property.

Do you understand what I'm saying? The exact moment of the so-called liberation of slaves is the exact moment of the rise of a new kind of economic slavery. The Civil War was not about the inhumanity of slavery. It was about the inefficiency of slavery. Because a slave, besides costing money to house and feed, is not a consumer.

Now, I do not mean to downplay the cruelty of slavery. I am, by no means, arguing for slavery. I am just pointing out that the language of the "humane" happens to coincide, one to one, with the demands of capitalism.

Take feminism. I know it is a word that means a lot of different things. But I think we can agree: something called feminism argued for, and won, the right for women to work. Again: the liberal cause of liberation coincides, one to one, with the demands of capitalism — not just for labor but for empowered consumers. Which is to say, women may always have been consumers but now they have their own money to spend even more, consume even more.

Why is it that both sides of the American political spectrum — which is actually quite narrow — celebrated the so-called Arab Spring? Doesn't that make anyone suspicious? It's because the liberal cause of liberation and the capitalist demand for more labor and, even more, consumers are exactly the same demands.

Am I saying that I am against such liberation — of slaves, of women, of the Arabic states? Of course not. But I am saying: What is liberation? What do we mean? What do we actually want from this life? What we call freedom actually means the freedom to consume. But consumption, today, has come to demand a kind of slavery.

I see all the folks lined up every morning to get on their bus to Google, to Genentech, to Apple, to Yahoo. They are bussed in, fed, then bussed home to a condo or apartment that eats up most of their salary. The rest of their earnings go towards buying cars and and shopping at Whole Foods. And then their paychecks run out so they use credit cards. Which now means they are indebted and must work just to pay off the thugs at Chase. (When the mob does this, it's criminal.)

What makes this new kind of labor so great for capitalism is this infinitely fast circuit of production and consumption: we pay you to buy our shit. Which means we make all our money back and then some.

And you think you're free.

The Terms of the Discussion

2011-09-26T19:26:00.000-07:00

Entering into a conversation with someone you don't know is a complex process. You size them up: How do they make sense of things? And how will I figure out how the fuck they make sense of things?

The insidious thing about the news — about public discourse — is it plays an enormous role in how we make sense of other people.

To wit, I find myself, more often than I would like, in conversations where people casually make use of the words "Democrat" and "Republican" as if these were meaningful in and of themselves. Which, to me, they aren't. And then I find myself thinking : "Hmn, this person makes sense of things according to terms that seem to be prefabricated."

I will admit that I have a prejudice for those who make up their own terms. Or at least use terms I've never heard of. (Yes, I ended in a preposition. Which is just fine with me, thank you.) I wish I could enter into all conversations assuming that all parties involved were interested in exposing, and rewriting, the assumptions of the conversation. I wish the terms of discourse were part of the discourse.

It's very difficult — for me, at least — to navigate the social when this is not the case. I never know how to respond when people so knowingly make use of terms like Republican. Do I just nod along? Do I ask them what they mean (that seems like a disastrous route)? Do I change the conversation (yes!)?

I remember years ago there was some new Star Trek series and the big news was that the captain was a woman. This was deemed revolutionary, at least in some small way. And no doubt it was. But I kept thinking: Why a woman? Or a man? Or an African American? Why not an ironist? Now that's an underrepresented population!

If we collectively embraced the will to individual terms of discussion; if we all agreed to put aside the newspapers that speak as if there were mass agreement — and in so doing, create it; if we all agreed that thinking and speaking differently were a good thing; well, then, I think this life would be a lot more enjoyable. At least for ironists like me.

The Right Place

2011-09-18T20:16:00.000-07:00

I walked into a party last night where, tangentially, I knew only one person. It was one of these new lofts in San Francisco — modern and cool, it seems, but like an LA hotel that's trying too hard.

Just walking down the block to the front door of the complex threw me off — these too tall buildings forging a claustrophobic tunnel nestled next to the freeway. I immediately felt uncomfortable. The architects and planners had done a poor job; they had only focused on building their lofts, stuffing them with people, and skipping out. It seemed quite obvious that no one considered the space.

As I walked into the loft, the party, I found that people were huddled at the pass into the space. Which I found incredibly disconcerting — the space above (it's a loft after all) encroached while the far wall of the living space seemed oddly close. The flow was stilted, awkward, uncomfortable.

I am used to San Francisco living spaces, the way flats and apartments distribute space. So when I walk in a new place, even though I can't see the whole space, I can imagine it. But walking in this new loft, I had no idea how the space worked: the off-screen loomed heavy on me. It was like being in a Lynch film, that disconcerting feeling of not knowing how things connect, how space connects. Think about that for a moment: being inside, in a living space, and not knowing how the space connects with itself, where it goes, how it goes. It's creepy.

I excused myself from the entree greetings and sought a better place to be, a space that felt welcoming, open, ripe with opportunity but still a local home of a sort. In a relative sense, I sought what Carlos Castaneda calls a site of power.

When Don Juan walks Carlos into the chaparral and stops to talk, he asks Carlos to pick the right spot to sit. You can't sit anywhere. Different sites are, well, different. And hence have difference affects, different effects, are different nodes within the flow. A site can be an eddy, and abyss, an embrace, a conduit, a trap.

We all know this to some degree. We like certain seats in a movie theater; we return to the same seats in a classroom or train; we arrange our living spaces just so. What is that determines our choices? And what happens when we pay attention to such things at every moment?

I believe there is an assumption that place doesn't matter — not really. After all, we are people! We are sovereign over space! It's absurd to think that space dictates my mood! I dictate my mood!

But it turns out we are part of world. We go with the world. And space is such a fundamental component of that. Whether it's walking down the street, sitting on a couch, in a restaurant, in a park, it matters where we are. If you sit somewhere and it feels bad, move for fuck's sake.

The world is an ever fluctuating flow of affects and energies, pollens and powers. Just think how much shit flows through this world and has flowed for thousands of millennia, how much ill feeling, disease of every sort, ugly, menacing forces. You don't want to get caught in an ill constituted trajectory.

So next time you're at a party and things don't feel right, move.

Marriage, Infinity, & the Everyday

2011-09-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

I got married young for my class and generation — 27. At the time, I was terribly enamored of Kierkegaard (I still am but, alas, with some broader understanding). And so I imagined — nay, I believed — that to marry was to make an internal movement towards the infinite and back again.

What I mean is that, for starters, it didn't really matter who I was marrying. I know that sounds callous but that's not how I mean it. What I mean is that the movement into marriage — for my 27 year old self — was not a movement to another person per se but an agreement with another person to have the relationship detour through the infinite. The finitude of this or that person was irrelevant. From a purely practical perspective, most of the women I've dated were more or less the same — smart, cute, funny, educated, sexual. I could have married any one of them.

Except that I was not yet ready to make the internal move I had to make — that is, to the infinite and back. When I was, I married the woman standing in front of me. This is not to say I didn't love her. On the contrary, I was totally in love — and propelled to make that movement, that impossible movement. The act, however, had little to do with her and everything to do with me, with my existential fortitude.

What do I mean about moving through the infinite? When dating, we find ourselves enmeshed in the everyday, in the utter, aching banality of life — eating and shitting and sleeping and cleaning and working. This is not say there is not joy in the everyday. But to exist in the finitude of the everyday is, well, soul crushing (to me, at least). And so when a problem arises — you can't stand the way the other sleeps or smells or chews or talks to your friends — you have a real problem.

Now refract that relationship through the infinite. Are you going to remain angry over such things forever? Well, no. The everyday banality of this or that complaint compared to the infinite is nothing. And so rather than leaving, you stay. You overcome that complaint.

This is to say, you move from the finite — the way she chews — to the infinite and then back again. And suddenly her chewing is not so annoying. In fact, you can barely hear it over the exquisite hum of the infinite.

Move forward 14 years and I am no longer married. How, then, do I stand towards that movement I made? Did I forgo infinity?

I don't think so. I believe I've redistributed the relationship between the finite and the infinite. I want everyday to be exquisite. And if not exquisite then at least bullshit free. This no doubt demands a certain refraction through the infinite, a certain understanding that traffic or an asshole at work or a shitty date or an upset stomach are little compared to the infinity of the cosmos. On the other hand, I've embraced a radical practicality: I want to do the things I want to do, here and now, in this finite world. And this means I don't want to be married anymore.

I still firmly believe that marriage is an act one makes — with another person, of course — but it is finally a private act, an internal movement. There is no such thing as "I just can't find the right person — I guess I'm unlucky." That's horseshit. If you really want to get married, then you have to make that impossible but actual internal movement.

But you don't have to get married. There are other ways of distributing love, sex, finitude and infinity. I'll get back to you when I know more about them.

Seeing Concepts Seeing

2011-09-11T16:41:00.001-07:00

An image is a strange thing.

It is something we see, sure. There it is! Look at that image!

But it is not just an object, not just something that is seen. An image is a seeing, as well, a way of perceiving the world. So when I look at, say, a painting of Van Gogh's sunflower, I'm not just seeing a sunflower; I'm not just seeing Van Gogh's painting: I am seeing this way of seeing a sunflower.

When I look at those insane sunflowers, I am suddenly privy to an entire style of making sense of the world. I am seeing a metabolism at work, the way sunflowers and light and paint and canvas went in a system — let's call that system Van Gogh — and came out the other side.

But it's not just that I'm seeing this metabolism as if it were at a distance: I am experiencing that world view, literally seeing the world that way. Suddenly, I am Laura Mars and my eyes are Van Gogh's.

Now, I want to say that a concept is an image in this sense: it is not just something we see but is itself a seeing. This seeing is part of me, no doubt, but like the eyes in Laura Mars' face, this concept travels between people. As it goes, it literally remakes the world, redistributes it, makes sense of it anew according to its logics.

We make concepts much in the way we make any image such as a painting or photograph. We gather elements together and assemble them just so. This is to say, then, that concepts don't come prefrabricated; they need to be made (most do; some come prefab as cliches, just as images often come as cliches, too).

Becoming Inhuman

2011-09-08T20:27:00.001-07:00

We — me, you, everyone we see and know — are enmeshed in various and diverse networks. Or, rather, we are at once enmeshed and constituted by these networks — social, temporal, planetary, biological, affective, traffic.

By which I mean that we are quite literally made up of all these things — not just our genitilia but our notions of genitilia; not just our bodies but the networks that make it and run through it, from blood and nerves to air and food; not just the environment but all the elaborate and ever-changing dynamics of the weather and the sun (everyday I drive from the fog to the sun and back and with each transition, I am transformed); not just our jobs but the global flows of capital and technology.

But if you look at movies and TV, we certainly privilege one network over others: the network we call civilization. That is, other people. I, for one, used to be quite taken with the human condition — with character studies and portraits, with human history, with how people operate.

And while this is of course important — I feel silly having to say that — I now like to explore how I'm made up of the non-human. The weather, for instance, or the taste of tequila or the stature of a cactus or the poise of a tulip; the swell of an ocean or the tumult of a hurricane; the expanse of the sky, the tilt of a dog's curiosity, the wit of a ginkgo tree (take a good look at gingkos: they can be quite hilarious). This is to say, I see myself in things other than humans.

I do not mean to sound misanthropic. Clearly, my relationship to humanity is privileged. But I find a tremendous liberty as well as wealth of information from positioning humanity as just another network. So rather than my self being intersubjective, it becomes interobjective — or something to that effect.

Or perhaps we can call this identity chiasmatic: I am wound up with the world just as it is wound up with me. And so it is never self-identical at all. It is always marbled. Such, in fact, are the very conditions of perception: in seeing the world, I become (with) the world.

And so while I no doubt come to constitute myself in my relations with others, I'd like to expland this others to include the entire cosmos, visible and invisible.

Feeling Real

2011-09-04T11:06:00.000-07:00

Let's assume this: the self is not just multiple but in a state of perpetual flux (we all fluctuate with greater or lesser intensity and speed).

And this: the self is not hermetic but is always and already constituted by "external" forces — the self is run through with networks that exceed you and me — gender, class, race, sexuality, looks (place in what Michel Houellebecq calls the sexual hierarchy — I fucking love that), and so on.

This is all to say that there is no one self, no one mode of being, of we can say: "That! That's the real me. All that other stuff? Not so much." It is all you — or me, as the case may be. When I'm home alone surfing pantyhose porn? That's me. When I'm drooling and muttering as I sleep? Me. When I'm nervous and blushing and stammering as I try to flirt? Me, too. When I'm being a jealous, passive aggressive asshole? Hate to say it but, yep, that's me. When, despite being 41 years old, I'm a petulant prick when around my parents? C'est moi.

And yet there are times when we feel — in ourselves and in others — that we're being real (or know we're being phony). But what does real and phony mean here? After all, everything we do is real. And everything we do is who we are. So what makes doing one thing real and another not?

Well, as we assumed from the start, there is no fixed point by which to judge the realness of our being. We can't size up this self along the measuring rod of the real self. Everything is in motion; every state is just another state — the so-called measuring rod, too.

I want to say, then, that this state of feeling real (or not) is the result of a certain aesthetic reaction to a state of resonance. This is to say, the great teem of my being — we are a complex of systems digestive, emotional, coronary, affective, nervous and so on — this network of networks can sometimes harmonize in such a way that there is a kind of order (but a strange and precarious order).

Kant says that the beautiful is a state of perpetual agitation of the faculties — we cannot understand per se, cannot put the experience in the a conceptual bucket — but in such a way that there is discretion and proportion. When discretion and proportion are torn asunder, we enter what Kant calls the sublime. Ah, but the Kantian beautiful is, well beautiful: a state of flux that enjoys some kind of limit and proportion. I love that.

And that, I believe, is what I'm suggesting about this feeling of being real — it is a kind of pleasing resonance in which our complex of systems are working together to create precisely this state.

This makes the act of feeling real a) an aesthetic experience; and b) an act of systems maintenance.

But it's not an act of trying to maintain one state (which I sometimes fear is the Buddhist goal: to always have one state. But I don't know fuck all about Buddhism so forget I said that). This state of feeling real may, later, feel like it was phony. So this "real" state is not one state but is itself different states at different times (and that themselves are internally variegated).

A Network Life: On Marc Lafia's "Hi How Are You Guest 10497"

2011-08-30T17:54:00.000-07:00

Hi How Are You Guest 10497 from marc lafia on Vimeo.

At first, it seems she's alone. Indeed, we rarely see anyone else — at least in the flesh. She lives alone in a small Manhattan studio. There is basically no dialogue as she doesn't seem to interact with anyone at all.

And yet she is always interacting. We may not see her interlocutors, they may not be present as flesh, but that doesn't make them any less real.

This is a network life. In her solitude, she remains connected — however ethereally, however precariously — to the world around her. Only the world around her is more often than not a telepresence.

What we witness is a different way of going in the world, a different kind of identity, a different kind of social contract. As the title of the film suggests, traditional identification has gone away. She is without name and interacts with anonymous guests known only by their number or avatar.

There is no doubt a great loneliness here. But to reduce her to lonely is to miss so much of what's happening. Because as users of Chatroulette discover, once the meta-narrative of identity disappears — once we stop naming ourselves, stop declaring our social status, our taste, our social tethers such as work and education — we discover something else. Face to face — or screen to screen — with a stranger, free of all meta-discourse that would prefigure the interaction, we discover incredible intimacy. All there is this encounter, these desires, this moment. Within the presumed mediation of the screen, we discover the immediacy of the encounter.

This is not to say that the network life is a life of singular immediacy. It is, after all, a network; it is multiple. And so we see her try to navigate this multiplicity, this teem of possibility, these different ways of going.

And, in particular, the ways of women-going or woman-becoming. As she makes her way through these chatrooms — some are more explicitly sexual — we see her encounter the breadth of possibilities of how to go as a woman, as a sexual woman, in the network. Just as the internet brings us the near-infinite breadth of consumer goods, it brings us the near-infinite breadth of identities. Look at all these modes of becoming woman! Look at all these modes of the erotic!

When we see her dress and leave the house, it is in a man's tuxedo. With her short hair and almost boyish body — although feminine through and through — we are witness to a certain twilight of fixed gender, a place of becoming where labels will not stick hard or fast.

The gaze that would fix her as woman-object has been multiplied. If John Berger finds woman nude in the fixed point of the Renaissance gaze, Lafia finds her naked, criss-crossed with thousands of gazes. Indeed, the film performs this: we see her seeing herself be seen, the film's camera often behind her computer which itself both camera and screen. The gaze has been proliferated and, with it, identity.

One thing that makes this film so powerful, so intimate, is that we get the sense that there is no crew, no cameraman leering, no boom ogling. She is filming herself. And in this seemingly simple act, she has already multiplied herself, made herself something that is seen. But not as an object. This is not a voyeuristic film. We are not invading her privacy. She is not nude; she is naked.

Because this is a network life, a place where identity is always and already expressive, always and already enmeshed in the world, in the web of becoming-selves, in the endless criss-cross of gazes and exchanges.

The camera, then, does not excavate. It does not mediate. It proliferates and connects.

Drugs as Pedagogy, or Fostering a Relationship with the Cosmos

2011-08-23T13:34:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a couple of great teachers, I learned some things in high school. All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, I learned to write expository arguments. I learned the pleasure of reversal — flipping assumptions upside down. I read The Communist Manifesto.

And — thanks to combinations of marijuana, LSD, cocaine, beer, and bourbon — I learned to seethe with the cosmos.

We have this strange, ascetic tendency to think drugs are somehow external, that being high is not being real, that it's cheating. We ingest food and vitamins and supplements and kamboucha and Zoloft and penicillin without as much as batting an eye. But somehow things like acid and ecstasy are categorically different. I, for one, don't see the difference. We consume in order to thrive. And drugs, when well taken, do just that. If not more.

If nothing else, drugs taught me a certain sense of humility, that I am not in total control, that my ideas and vision and even my body can do what they want. At the same time, drugs have taught me that I can seethe with the universe, swell with its cosmic tides, surf and drown and frolic in its (meta)terrestrial waves. In the words of Rich Doyle, drugs taught me to be ecodelic.

And it's a good thing to learn young, before habit has begun to cement and weigh the body and self down. It's good to be 16, tripping on acid and seeing the invisible textures of the universe. It's good to be 19 and so lit that you can smell the stars. This prepares us for a beautiful life, plants the seed young that life is not defined by commodity and job and an A. It's defined by one's relationship with the universe.

Of course, there are all sorts of problems with teens — or anyone — taking drugs. They o.d.. They go schizo. They augment their depression.

But I don't think we can blame drugs alone for these things. Just as we teach kids to drive (far and way the #1 cause of teen death), we need to teach kids to take drugs well. Charlie Sheen is right — read the directions before showing up at the party.

We focus on teaching kids a relationship to the social — how to be polite, how to perform their gender, how to sit still in their seat and know their phone number and address. But we rarely teach them a relationship with the cosmos, with awe, with the infinite. On the contrary, we try to obstruct their view, prevent their connection.

It would be amazing to have a concerted pedagogy concerned with fostering a relationship to the infinite, a relationship with awe and astonishment. Drugs, of course, are not the only way to create such a relationship. And, when consumed poorly, drugs can impede a relationship to the infinite as much as any soul killing job.

But when consumed well, when incorporated well into a life, drugs can help people of all ages break the constraints of habit, of anxiety, of dread. I love the idea of drug manuals for parents, courses at high school and college, PhDs in ecodelia.

On Punctuation

2011-08-14T09:31:00.000-07:00

I tend to speak emphatically — I gesticulate, enunciate, emphasize; I whisper, accelerate, pause; I lean in, lean out, shout. These are as easy to come by as living.

But writing can tend towards the deadpan. Which is one reason I like punctuation so much — it's the emphatic and the gestural within language. Of course, punctuation is not the only means of emphasis and gesture. Word choice, rhythm, syntax: these are quite literally what make prose pop and move. Still, the keen use of punctuation can make the deadpan sing.

Here are just some of the wonders of punctuation:

The space: Well, this may be the most used but most overlooked piece of punctuation. The space helps define a word — otherwisethingscangetquitejumbled. Of course, not using the space can be powerful, forging an allatonce effect. Within the space, hide secret rhythms.

The comma: A momentary break in continuity, like a crack in the skateboarder's sidewalk. A tempering of breath and sense.

The period: Can go staccato or be the respite at the end of a breathy idea. Use of the full stop is trickier than it seems.

The indentation: Someplace to rest, as if dangling one's feet over a cliff before forging ahead.

The colon: The pull up headlights: the punchline.

The semi-colon: A period and a comma: how fantastic is that? Stopping and not stopping at the same time.

The em dash: One of the more gestural marks, as if putting up one's hands and asking the reader to follow a tangent — but only for a moment.

Parentheses: The more discrete and discreet aside, a visible whisper, a qualification, a tangent, a drift. As language wants so much to be linear, the ability to stop and articulate is more than a luxury: it's a necessity.

The ellipsis: The mark of a lack, of the invisible, the declaration that there is a secret without declaring the secret...the ability to skip over what we know: at once a shared assumption and a claim to privacy.

The exclamation point: Turns any phrase into an emphatic: Just watch! I find the exclamation point quite useful in virtual communication — texts and brief emails: they tell my reader that the seeming solemnity of my pixellated "thanks" is, in fact, a hearty, "thanks!"

The quotation mark: A crane that lets you lift language from elsewhere and drop it in your writing — an essential tool for the bricoleur.

The question mark: Uproots sense, leaves it open and wondering. Oh, I wish English had the upside down question mark!

Italics: Not sure this counts as punctuation per se but sometimes the words themselves need to careen.

The asterisk: Like a loose hair or dangling fingernail; or a tap on the shoulder; or, rune-like, a symbol that more resides elsewhere.

Feeding the Buzz, or The Circuits of Life

2011-08-12T11:18:00.001-07:00

So I'm sitting at the bar the other evening — quel surprise — enjoying my tequila (neat, bien sur) with a small beer back. I'd sip one or the other, ponder this or that, look about (I was sitting at The Cliff House, mesmerized by the infinite shades of grey and the dinosaur pelicans swooping by the floor to ceiling windows), then sip some more.

And, as is the way of a buzz, I began to feel good. And after not sipping but gazing, I'd want to feel good some more so I'd turn to the bar where I was faced with my dwindling tequila and beer.

How to feed this buzz? Well, sometimes I'd reach for the tequila, sometimes for the beer. The decision was made according to some obscure algorithm that includes history (my experiences with said beverages), thirst, knowledge of the relative intensity of each elixir, and my desired buzz state.

It's all quite precarious: too much of this, too little of that, and the buzz dissipates or turns sloppy.

But what struck me sitting there making these decisions was how engine-like we are. We take in; we propel and are propelled; we take in again. It's an open circuit. Or, rather, we are so many more or less open circuits — we take in air, glances, french fries, Uni, caresses, pot, smells, emotions.

The intensity of a the drug buzz — alcohol, pot, coffee, cocaine, LSD — is a highly condensed version of what's happening all the time: we are always feeding our buzz. At least, I hope we are. Too often, I suppose, we feed our sickness, we feed our malaise, we feed our weakness. These are nihilistic circuits that lead us towards zero.

But if we think about life — everything we see, do, smell, touch, think, feel — as feeding our buzz, perhaps we'll be more discerning. Just as each sip of tequila or beer, each drag on the joint, each hit of the blotter feeds our buzz, so does each glance, each kiss, each dumpling, each stretch.

I suppose this is all obvious: we are connected to the world, fundamentally. We are constituents within circuits of becoming, circuits of life. Once we assume that, I like this question: How best do I feed my buzz?

What I Want from Art

2011-08-05T15:15:00.000-07:00

We no doubt want, and find, different things from art — from images and films and books and such. Sometimes, it's nice to encounter something that feels like coming home, that makes you feel less alone. When I first read Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, I laughed so hard it literally hurt — it was so close to home it hit my exact vibration and nearly melted me. I feel the same way about Curb Your Enthusiasm. Both Portnoy-era Philip Roth and Larry David — not coincidentally, both hebes like me — speak my language. They don't teach me anything new; they don't lead me astray of myself. They make me feel at home and I love it.

But that's not the only experience of art that I like, that I crave, that I need. Sometimes — albeit rarely, I want an affective intensity, an emotional reckoning, an intensity of human emotional experience that makes me shudder in every fiber. Joni Mitchell's Blue, Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks: these have rocked me (when I was much, much younger; I find that kind of emotional intensity through art harder and harder to come by — because of me, not because of the art).

And then there is the experience I crave the most, the one that really turns me on. This is when the art creates a kind of vertigo as it cannibalizes its own frame, throwing structure and form into the mix. I'm thinking of William Burroughs, David Lynch, Godard. These are the ones who most push my buttons as they don't use the form to express themselves (as Roth uses the novel and Larry David, the sitcom). No, Burroughs, Lynch, Godard each refuse to take the form of their medium for granted. As they create, they assume nothing; they question everything; they make art a question, a questioning, about what's possible.

And this vertigo, this infinite play, moves me in profound ways. Perhaps I don't cry when I watch Godard's Weekend — although I could cry it's so fucking smart and funny and cool — but I am moved. How? I am moved by the interrogation itself; I am not allowed to be complacent as I watch the film; it never wants to confirm me. On the contrary, it asks what it is to be a viewer, what it is watch, to record and be recorded — just as Burroughs asks, with each sentence, what it is to write, to read, to speak, to be in and of language.

This is one of the greatest scenes from a film ever.

Burroughs, Lynch, Godard: they don't let me rest easy. They don't reassure me. And yet, in a funny way, they do — they let me rest easy knowing that they get it: they get that life is in flux, that we can't take environments (in McLuhan's sense) for granted, that life is best lived when it's not anchored, when it's set free to roam.

Cassavetes is interesting: he is a formalist who reinvents cinema by privileging affect over character. That is, he seems to give us representations of human beings. But that's not the case at all. His films don't shoot action in real space and then represent them: they use affect in the way Pollock uses paint. Frankly, this makes the casual or frequent watching of Cassavetes difficult. Rare is the evening I think to myself, "Well, perhaps I'll just kick back and watch me some Faces."

I like kicking back sometimes and watching some silly Hollywood narrative film. It's easy. And, sometimes, the films are very good — have funny moments, smart moments, a great line of dialogue (I am a fan of Tombstone, a film with a great screenplay).

But when it comes to art, I want more than a nice, easy experience. I want to be made to sit up and pay attention, to heed the moment, to reckon sense, to risk nonsense. I don't want to be distracted; I want to be turned on to life.

Omens

2011-07-31T10:55:00.000-07:00

You wake with a sense of foreboding — not just anxious but you sense the imminent is not good. As you make your way through your morning, things just keep going wrong — you stub your toe, run out of toilet paper, of toothpaste, you spill your coffee, bump your head (hopefully not all of these things).

Perhaps it's not something that's happening to you — you get a strange email from a friend, hear sirens roaring by, read a disturbing headline.

Of course, an omen need not be foreboding. Maybe you wake and everything falls into place. You feel optimistic, full of promise, of potential. The world yawns and brims.

What do these things mean? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps it's silly superstition. After all, how can something now foretell the future?

Well, time is not a point; it is a trajectory. The now is moving, always becoming, the past moving into a perpetual now that is always becoming the future. And this becoming, this trajectory, is in fact many trajectories, a whole series of virtual worlds intersecting (and not) — all the things you've been and done swirling through time (as time: time is not exterior to life — time is a dimension of life). This is to say, an omen is not one step within a successive series of events; it is an intersection of trajectories happening now — that same now that is itself a becoming past-becoming future-becoming now.

Things don't lead up to this moment. At least usually they don't. Time is not linear; events may be caused by something but not necessarily and even then the cause may only be local, relative. Time moves every which way — forward, backward, sideways. In fact, I'm not even sure what backward and forward even mean in this context. They can only be relative, local terms. Time is a network of moving trajectories, tubes of physio-affective flow a la Donnie Darko.

In some sense, the now is a moving node within an infinitely dense network of virtual and possible worlds. The now is a fold of time, an origami crane always being made into something else.

Time is permutation, everything always changing. Omens abound, not as signs of change but as change itself. This is not superstition; this is physics.

So of course there are omens. Of course things that happen now relate to the future. How could it be any other way?

One of Marc Lafia's multiscreen films from the series, Permutations. Time is permutation.

Networks, Capitalism, Corporations, & The Promise of Local Pants

2011-07-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

This may seem obvious to you. But I'm a bit slow witted so bear with me.

The anti-monarchy revolutions — the French Revolution, the American Revolution, etc — were bourgeois revolutions. The emerging business owners wanted a piece of the pie, a pie owned by royalty through inheritance. It seemed like a big jip that they were left out. So off with their heads!

In order to mobilize this revolution, they cast it in terms of the everyman — freedom for all, equality for all. But capitalism is not built on equality for all; it's built on exploitation: you work for me. Wealth flows upwards.

Of course, the promise of capitalism is that anyone can become the exploiter, the point of capital condensation. This sounds pretty good, even if silly. After all, the system could not work if everyone was an owner. Nevertheless.

And so culture moved from a hierarchy — a pyramid — to a network, a distributed system that flows multiple directions. This network, which is today quite prevalent, seems to hold the promise of those revolutions of yesteryear: everyone participating, all nodes equal.

But this network is not an emergent force of culture; it is not a contemporary phenomena. The network is capitalism.

Which means the network is not composed of equal nodes. Some nodes are points of concentration. This is as it should be, no doubt: the more compelling content develops a bigger audience and hence becomes a more prevalent node. No problem.

The problem is when this game, this network, gets gamed — when the rules are rigged beforehand so that certain nodes are more privileged. Enter: the corporation.

The corporation is itself a networked entity, a composite of a sort: it gathers many individuals under one name, one agency. It is only possible post-monarchy, post-pyramid.

But it becomes more than just another node in the network; it becomes hedger, game-rigger, of the flows within the network. Rather than capital and resources being able to flow every which way, the corporation ensures capital flows towards it. It is vehicle for the ready concentration of wealth and power. (How? Well, the corporation can buy up smaller businesses. This may seem like a right but it is quite strange: How can something that does not exist per se — namely, a corporation — buy anything? The rights for a corporation to buy anything came from the 14th Amendment — prior to those Supreme Court cases, a corporation was not allowed to buy things. So corporations systematically eliminate competition by either squashing it or buying it.)

So while the corporation is a product of network culture, it works against the promise of the network, the promise of equal nodes (or the equal opportunity for all nodes). And yet it continues to spout the same promise: participation for all and by all!

The Big Dupe is that the game was rigged from the get go. The revolution was always a bourgeois revolution. It was not the rise of the everyman; it was the rise of the owner who convinced the everyman that the revolution was good.

All this network freedom — all this blogging and Facebooking and tweeting — is the oligarchy's propaganda.

And yet the network may have a structure and possibility that belies the oligarchic interest. There is a rise of decentered nodes of production — local makers of goods, of food and clothing and soaps and entertainment.

Two modes of the network, then, at work: the anti-capitalist tendency of the corporation to monopolize, to game the system, to concentrate wealth. And the tendency of the arty individual to grow his own food, make and sell beautiful pants, to serve local communities.

The Experience of Making Sense

2011-07-24T17:38:00.000-07:00

There is certainly a kind of personal, affective, and somatic experience of having an idea. As the brilliant commenters have noted — we fidget, we are disoriented, we feel taken up, overwhelmed, the idea running through our blood and bones.

But I still wonder: What is the experience of having an idea? Not as much what happens to me when I think — although that, too — but what is happening when I have this idea?

One way to think about this thinking is to think about the experience of things making sense. I love this phrase, "making sense," because we use it to mean we understand a given idea when the phrase suggests we just created the idea: we made the sense rather than recognized it.

Anyway, what is this experience? I can't escape the architectural component: things — visible and invisible, historical and immediate, personal and societal, specific and general — seem to fit together in some scheme.

I want to say they fit like a puzzle but that's not right. There are hierarchies and contingencies that a puzzle does not have; this is not a flat database of pieces but a grammatical database with all sorts of rules. When I have an idea that makes sense, I have organized bodies with a series of logics — the logics of cause and effect and of hierarchy, of course, but there are other logics, too: the logics of sensation, of the varying flows of liquids, gasses, the materiality of things, the structures of other ideas such as Leibniz's monadology or Deleuze and Guattari's planes of immanence. All these things order, organize, distribute bodies — including my own body.

All of this shows me that the logics that I find immanent are, in fact, cultural and historical. But my next thought is that these things are not opposed: immanence and history are one and the same (sometimes).

And then there is that affective, personal experience — the exhilaration, the disorientation, delirium, waves, a feeling of being at once in control and out of control: the idea is driving now!

Having an idea, then, (which is different than an idea) is an experience that takes place between me and the world, between me and history, between me and ghosts past and present and future (surely an idea extends into possible future worlds, if not into actual future worlds; in some sense, the idea makes the future as it makes sense).

So I come back to my question: What is the experience of having an idea? It is a participating in the world, lending my body to the flow of different logics, logics that are material and conceptual and historical — all of it working within architectures and speeds, within moving shapes and how they might go together.

And then — boom — the idea. We are overtaken. We are gloriously delirious. But what's happened? Do I know understand the world? Does having an idea — does making sense of things — tame the chaos? Sure, to some degree. Having an idea is like being a very strange version of Moses — making laws of the land. But very private laws that nonetheless legislate everything. Yes, an idea is akin to a law.

But as we know the best ideas forge a certain vertigo, a delirium. A legislation, then, but one that wreaks a very special kind of havoc.

Is there a kind of achievement? Yes, there are great architectural feats of ideas — Kant's three critiques, for instance, or Leibniz's monadology, or D&G's thousand plateaus.

After having had the idea — after creating this moving monument, writing this weird law — do I approach the world differently? Yes, I imagine so. And this is what makes ideas so strange: they change the way we see and they change the way we act. As we said, an idea is a kind of law.

Maybe an idea is akin to a design — the shadow of an event, the ghost that moves between visible and invisible worlds.

Or perhaps I was right at the beginning and an idea is an image, a refraction of a sort. It takes up the world and gives is not just something seen: an idea, like any great image, gives us a seeing.

The Experience of an Idea

2011-07-21T15:29:00.000-07:00

I was sitting outside enjoying an espresso when I found myself thinking a thought I've had before: all this — all this humanity with its fears and loves and desires; all this pavement and blue jeans and tequila and American Idol: all this is the great swirl of stuff continuous with the gyrations of the cosmos at every level — from solar flares and asteroid fields and black holes to viruses and cells and strands of DNA. We are not distinct from the cosmos, actors on the stage of the world. We are stuff, as viscous as lava and hard as granite and moving along and with EVERYTHING.

And then I thought of what a friend of mine might say: So what? What does thinking this do for you?

And so I considered what was happening as I thought my thought. What happens when you have an idea? I don't mean how you came up with the idea or how the idea came to you. I mean: what is the experience of actually having that idea?

I believe an idea is a kind of image — an image of the world. When I sit there thinking about the continuous swirl of life, I see the world that way, I perceive it that way. And this particular idea — this particular image, this particular perceptive experience — thrills me. My heart pounds a little harder, my adrenaline pumps and my senses seethe. The experience of having this thought is exhilarating.

Is my thought, my idea, true? Well, it bears a strange relationship to the world. From an abstract perspective, this thought is of course part of the world. But it has a stranger relationship to the world than say, a mug, which is part of the world, too. An idea entails a kind of measuring up, an act of arranging and rearranging parts — history, human bodies, scientific knowledge, literature, all of civilization, astronomy, botany, biology, desire.

In this very act of having the thought — which is the very act of arranging and re-arranging parts — I am feeling for the thought's coherence, its tenacity, and perhaps its efficacy: Does it work? Does it literally make sense? This is all to say that having an idea, a certain kind of idea, entails a truth experience: Yes! That's it!

Do all thoughts demand or involve a kind of truth experience? When I try to make sense of someone else's thought — let's choose Descartes — do I size up the cogito to the world? I suppose I do and I suppose that involves a certain truth experience. I am not saying I believe or disbelieve in the veracity of the Cartesian cogito; I am saying that when I think that thought I can see — yes, see — how the world could be that way.

The difference between me thinking Decartes' cogito and me thinking about the continuous swirl of life is that I experience them in very different ways — much as I experience Van Gogh differently than I experience Warhol.

One thing that becomes clear — sort of — is that an idea is not a structure per se but the act of structuring. It is an event — and a strange kind of event at that. It is palpable, somatic, yet invisible. It is an image that has some of its own texture but borrows most of its percepts from the world.

Of course, there are practical implications of an idea. That is, if we think there is a true self separate from the world we act differently than if we believe that the self is how it goes. Foucault shows how an entire medical-disciplinary regime turns on such thoughts.

Am I dodging the question of thoughts vs. beliefs? I don't think so; I think — I think, yes — that I am trying to understand how a thought becomes a belief. A belief is a thought for which we have a truth experience that also feels good — which makes belief an aesthetic experience of an idea.

Am I too readily conflating ideas, thoughts, and concepts? Probably. I need to keep thinking.

Systems, Self, Thermodynamics, Change

2011-07-14T14:08:00.000-07:00

On the one hand, I like to imagine that I can make my world beautiful — change my circumstances, sure, but more importantly change my mind-set. I can choose to see the world as I want. To some extent, this is certainly true.

But I don't want to misread the role of self and mind in the world — for both mind (whatever that is) and self (whatever that is) are just that: in, and of, the world.

And the world is an ever swirling set of circumstances. We see weather maps and know the flux and flow of the universe. But at the same time we imagine ourselves exempt from this flow: nature swirls while we stand strong.

But that's just silly. We swirl along with everything else. This is one thing I loved about Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life" — it makes the events of humanity, its banality and wonder, continuous with the events of the cosmos. Just as earth and universe collide and swell and dehisce and conjoin and find synergies and repulsions and parallel lines, so do we.

This "we" is not distinct from this teem; it is constitutive and constituent of the Teem of Life.

There are systems — unsystematic systems, if you will, emergent systems — of which we are a part. These include systems of weather, planets and suns, markets and capital, genetics and disease, government and digestion and harvest.

To imagine that I can will myself out of these systems is the wish of religious transcendence. But I am of this world, with this world; I am worldly and don't want to transcend. At least, I don't think I do. Transcendence seems too close to death for my liking.

And so it seems to behoove me, to behoove one, to examine and know and grapple with the systems that exceed us, to understand how the flow of capital shapes my everyday life, how the construction of roads and laws and technology shape my dreams and desires and traffic patterns. And then it behooves me to try and shift the flows I don't like, that interfere with my health and vitality. How? Fuck if I know. I try little things to alter behaviors of those around me. I work as little as possible. I write my ideas, trying to foment whatever change I can in my tiny corner of the cosmos.

But then there is me. I — and you — have to change, too. I have to be affirmative, healthy; I have to not drive like an asshole, not be a douche to my kid, not alienate my friends and lovers. I have to heed the now, this very local world, this radical particularity of circumstance in which I find myself, moment to moment, day to day.

Systemic change must happen locally — but still be systemic. That, methinks, is the trick. To not just add a flower to the sty of life but behave in such a way that realigns the terms of flow. We are, after all, constitutive of the teem; we, in our way, make the teem along with everything else. So rather than just deodorize the stench, we need to hedge the flow of shit in what we do, in our lives, every fucking day.

This is not easy. The world has momentum — tremendous momentum. I will never cease to be flabbergasted by the things people choose to discuss amongst themselves, the assumptions people make as they head out into the world. Just like the pull of planets and the flow of markets, the shit people talk about, think about, has inertia. To try and hedge this, steer it otherwise and other ways, takes a lot of work.

Perhaps it's easier when people join together to make more of a wave, more of a wall, more of a hedge, more of a force. The risk, of course, is that said joining will birth its own unpleasant inertia. But I think there is no choice — not if we, or I, want to change things.

Change is really a matter of thermodynamics.

Some Things About Being Multiple

2011-07-10T21:39:00.000-07:00

A thing is one thing that is many things. It is an assemblage point — a gathering together of diverse elements in a particular way. A rock assembles earth, bone, leaf, sun, wind, rain, footstep, ant into a particular this:

A rock assembles other things, as well — figures, memes, memories. A rock assembles foundation (as solid as a.....), stupidity (dumb as a....), and so on depending on its situation, its locale, its place in time.

What we say of a rock we can say of anything and everything, including a human being. A human being is as an assembling of flesh, blood, desire, rice noodles, rye whiskey, love, glances, bacteria, bile, phlegm, gas, ideas. The very particular way you or I assemble things is you or me (this is called one's style).

I'm not sure a rock or a person, though, is an assemblage point per se. A point sounds like it doesn't move. But rocks move. So do people. So does everything, even if very, very slowly.

As each thing moves — the rock, you, me, a cloud — it interacts with other things. Said interactions change the very make up of the rock, you, me, the cloud. To move through the world — in other words, to live (and die) — is not just to change but to constitute oneself and be constituted. This is all to say, you are not first something and then interact with the world — you are the very manner in which you interact with the world. And not just interact, but exchange — consume and emit.

It's not you are what you eat. It's: you are how you perceive.

A thing, then, is never done. You are not as much this:

as you are this:

The Way of Things is Multiplicity

2011-07-07T19:04:00.000-07:00

Consider a human body as a text. It has so many complex functions not all of which can be reduced to totally physical behavior. I am blood and liver and hair and skin and desire and anxiety and love and dreams and eyeball and nose and kidney. And I keep changing — physically and affectively — as time passes, as food passes, as I interact with the world. I am teacher, writer, husband, son, father, friend — and each of these is multiple, each of these shifts as circumstances shift. I am this thing that is many things and that keeps changing, always and necessarily.

A book, a painting, a flower, a film, a meal: each is a more or less complex amalgamation of elements working more or less in tandem. Perhaps the colors or words or tastes fuse into a greater whole; perhaps the different words, colors, tastes ricochet off each other or ignore each other or forge distinct experiences. Tequila can often enjoy a distributed flavor palette, carrying itself along distinctive taste channels on the tongue — vanilla, citrus, pepper, grass, leather, sun. Bourbon, meanwhile, tends to be unified, falling across the tongue in a consistent ooze.

But if a text is multiple, what makes it a text? Well, this all depends on the circumstance. As a thing is writ with multiple elements, it is writ with multiple internal limits. So a reader could read one particular element within a thing, making that element the thing read. For example, my body is made up of my toes, nose, eyes, blood, liver, heart, desire, loves, needs, wants, dreams, fingers, lips, tongue, taste. But I may only read one of these things, say, my big toe. In this case, my big toe is the text which is itself made of multiple things — a nail, skin, wrinkles, hairs, cuticles, shmutz. The limits of this or that thing is configured by the reading event: who is doing the reading, where, when, why, how. A foot fetishist and a doctor would make very different sense of this big toe.

This, among other things, lies at the heart of certain debates about medicine: What are the terms of a body and its dis-ease? Some claim a holistic approach, that everything from blood to memory to desire affects the health and vitality of a body. Others suggest that medicine is basically all physical: let me look at your blood under a microscope, even if I never meet you, and I can tell you what’s wrong. Different doctors operate with different limits, internal and external, of a human body.

These limits may extend wide and far and remain nebulous. A martini glass is part of a network that includes whiskey glasses, shot glasses, pint glasses, neon signage, the Thin Man movies. The multiplicity of a thing, then, extends beyond its immediate physical boundaries; a thing contains its history and its culture. Jacques Derrida finds traces of other texts every time he reads, one text bleeding, echoing, quoting, ricocheting against other texts. (This is what has been called “intertextuality.”). The oeuvre of William Burroughs, for example, might include his “novels,” his essays, interviews, his readings of his novels, his shotgun paintings, his cut-up poems, his collaborations with Brion Gysin and Kerouac, his letters to everyone, most notably to Ginsberg. It might also include his diaries, pictures of him, all the writers and texts he references — Denton Welch, Jean Genet, Norman Mailer, Carlos Castaneda — and those he doesn’t reference but that certainly run through his writing — Rabelais, Philip K. Dick, even Nietzsche. Then again, perhaps I want to limit myself to his so-called novels (I qualify because I’m not sure what a novel is and whether the term applies to Burroughs’ books) or only his mentions of alien homosexuality or his rhythm.

A text, then, is a network of signs and effects, of gestures and affects, of moods, modes, and meanderings, of forms and functions. It is not just many things — many things that manage to cohere without unifying — but the very manner of taking up those things. A thing enjoys an internal process of differentiation that we might call its metabolism, its way of processing the world. Such is its way, a way that affords the reader multiple paths, diverse sites of entry or pick up, numerous possibilities for taking, cutting, stealing, borrowing, following.

After all, human bodies are presumably made up of the same stuff — blood, skin, organs, limbs, muscle, cells. But look around the room and see all the different ways these same elements hang together: this one slouches, this one jaunts, that one twitches. A thing is not the sum of its parts. A thing is the mode of putting all the parts together. A thing is not just visible and invisible stuff. It is temporal, as well, a four-dimensional text. A thing enjoys a style.

Reading In Between

2011-07-07T12:46:00.000-07:00

Making sense of the world from afar — sizing up a so-called political situation, interpreting a friend's girlfriend's motives, reckoning the Coen Brothers' "A Serious Man" — is no easy task. It demands a certain generosity, an openness, an ability to make multiple elements more or less cohere without reducing or simplifying ( hopefully).

Trying to make sense of the world from within the world — from deep within the proverbial shit — well, that is even harder, if not impossible. To me — and to most — it is incredibly obvious when a girl likes a guy, when a co-worker harbors deep seated angst, when a friend's friend is being a prick. But when it's me involved — when I'm the one who likes or is liked — I become flustered, confused, as stupid and lost as any moron (and I use moron affectionately here). I am blinded by the proximity.

Let's say I rant about this or that — say, San Francisco. Well, it's obvious that at some point my critiques are not just about San Francisco but about me in San Francisco at this moment. My position is just that — a position. I am — we are — always already situated. All writing is that position articulating itself, a position that includes the writer and his environment. Which is to say, all writing — all living — takes place in between, in that murky, beautiful, complex space between self and world.

Sometimes, this in between grayness becomes so murky I can't make heads or tails of what's happening. I see the complexity — I see all the different feelings I am experiencing; I see my history; my possible futures; my desires, at times contradictory. And I see her feelings, her history, her possible futures, her often contradictory desires. And I begin to drown and, worse, flail. It is humiliating for me — aren't I too old for this shit? — and it's not pleasant for anyone involved.

Life happens in this middle. As Deleuze and Guattari say, the middle is where things pick up speed. Sometimes, I am able to go with this middle, with this speed, to make it and be made by it at the same time and it is glorious. Other times, the tides overwhelm me. So what is it that separates these two experiences? What is it I'm doing when I go well and when I go poorly?

But is that even the right question? After all, this question assumes that it is me when, in fact, it is never just me. The in between — where life happens — is made of multiple strands each with its own speed, its own intensity, its own rhythm, its own metabolism, like a Matthew Ritchie painting. So maybe I can right myself amidst these waves but the waves keep coming and maybe, just maybe, it's her or the world that keeps knocking me down.

At which point, it would seem like it's time to bail. But heeding this moment — knowing the right moment, the propitious moment, what the sophists call kairos — is precisely what's so difficult when heaving and tossing about.

Perhaps, then, Eckhart Tolle — despite his creepy face and absurd beard — is right: stop thinking about it all and just be present right now, right here, right in the middle where life teems. Let it all wash over me. Let it all come down.

On Watching Films: Identification & Confrontation

2011-06-30T22:57:00.000-07:00

Watching Martin Scorsese's impeccable "Goodfellas," we are privy to the world of the mob through the character of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). He's our way into, and through, the film. He never lets go of us and we never let go of him. He is a site of safety amidst the casual violence of Joe Pesci and Robert DeNiro. Even when Henry gets violent — pounding a man's face with the butt of his gun — we are not put off. On the contrary, we feel he's justified — the man he beats sexually assaulted his girlfriend. So like Lorraine Bracco in the film, we don't shun Henry — we embrace him.

Most Hollywood films work through this mode of identification. They give us a character — someone safe, someone we like, someone we trust — and then throw us into the mayhem. We identify with someone in the film, as if the film were a representation of real action and this character was our tour guide.

It sounds almost obvious, doesn't it? Of course a film is a representation; of course we identify with a character. What else could happen? But identification is just one mode, one architecture, of the cinematic experience. There is real life; there is the camera that records; there is the projector and screen that plays it back.

Here, then, is a different mode. Rather than the film representing reality, it becomes an event in and of itself. So we don't identify with a character in the film; we don't move through action per se. Rather, we confront — and are confronted by — a visual event, namely, the film. The action then moves from an elsewhere that the camera captures and puts on the screen to the screen itself. The screen shifts from being a way to see what's elsewhere to being the thing we're viewing, that we're confronting. Instead of mediating reality and viewer, the film becomes an immediate experience.

Think of Cassavetes' "Faces." We never identify with a character; we can barely understand what the fuck they're saying. In some sense, very little happens — it is not an action packed film. The story, such as it is, is achingly banal. But, holy moly, the action is non-stop. The film moves relentlessly and at near infinite speed — not in real space but in affective space. The mood — of the characters, of the film — shifts at a maddening, delirious clip.

We don't identify with anyone in "Faces": we confront, and are confronted, by the film, by its relentlessly shifting affective terrain. (The face, for Cassavetes is a screen, always already playing the flux of affective resonance that is a life.) The film does not seek to confirm who we are and what we know. On the contrary, it is a different kind of event, an event of difference, an affective teem. We come to it and it comes to us and together we move somewhere new. As Henri Bergson might say, the film endures — it is itself a constitution of time and not just a record of another time.

Of course, the line between identification and confrontation is not so neat. Consider Abel Ferrara's "Bad Lieutenant" in which we intimately follow the titular character, played by Harvey Keitel, through debauchery to quasi-redemption.

The film no doubt entails a certain narrative trajectory, a recording of action through real space rather than a purely cinematic event at the site — as it were — of the screen. And, in some sense, we identify with Keitel, even if he's grotesque and morally questionable at best.

But watch the scene above. If it were purely informational, that is, just trying to move us through the action, the scene would be shorter and to the point. But it lingers just a bit longer than it presumably needs — she has trouble opening the door; it stays a bit longer on him rubbing his neck; she can't find her lighter; she re-fixes the pipe for him.

This is all to say, the film confronts us with the possibility, and impossibility, of identification. Within its filming of action, it drifts with affective flow, with a certain insistence: the action is all on the screen, right there — not somewhere else. At this point, it is no longer a recording but an event in and of itself.

Making My Way as a Misanthrope, or Writing a New Social Contract

2011-06-30T10:42:00.000-07:00

There are definitely different kinds of misanthropy. So I will say that I call myself a misanthrope in the same way one who's sensitive to light is called photophobic. Just as photophobia is not necessarily defined by fear per se but by aversion to light, my misanthropy is not a hatred of humans but an aversion to the social.

This aversion does not stem from a principle. I don't find humans inherently or even practically abhorrent (not in general, anyway; I find particular people abhorrent). No, my aversion is constitutional — it's just how I roll.

Crowds, needless to say, freak my proverbial shit (this is why I prefer Candlestick to the new Giant's ballpark — Candlestick was empty; I'd have a whole section to myself. The new park — whose corporate name I refuse to mention — demands I sit, eat, and piss arm to arm with my fellow man). But that's easy enough to avoid.

What's more difficult is social crowding. That is, when I have too many or extended social interactions, I become exhausted in profound ways. Just as a photophobe avoids too much light as well as light that's too bright, I tend to avoid the social. Which is just to say, not only do I spend a lot of time alone, I need to spend a lot of time alone.

Perhaps my constitution is more porous — too much leaks into me, leaving me waterlogged. Some people fare the social exquisitely — they are out and about non-stop and healthy as can be. Such is their constitution. Not me: I get inundated and then can't operate well.

The only time this becomes complicated is when there's a woman involved. Oh, man, dating as a misanthrope demands a lot — a lot — of verbal assuaging and negotiation. And, any way it falls, I come out looking either like an asshole or a freak — or both: either I don't want to be with the lady in question or I'm a neurotic.

This is the difficulty of operating in a different social logic. The prevailing logic is that the social is the assumed term; the only reason not to participate is health related — sickness of body or sickness of mind. Choosing to be alone is construed as not wanting to be with this or that person, as a negation of the other rather than an affirmation of myself.

This is my social logic. I always try to assume that everyone does — or should do — as he or she deems fit, as he or she is best served. And so if someone "blows me off," I don't care at all: I assume he or she is tending to whatever needs tending. Of course, it may be personal — perhaps she loathes me. But then what do I care? Who wants to be with someone who loathes you?

The difference is this: my social sense begins with selfishness, with self affirmation. This is not a selfishness that comes at the cost of the social but operates as part of the social — and, in fact, to me makes the social work better. But it only works if others enter the same contract — that is, they begin with their own selfishness, their own self affirmation. If the terms of the social contract demand that the social be sated, then the misanthrope such as I becomes anathema.

Now, I'm not talking about the selfishness that leads one to ignore the plight of others. No, I'm talking about the ethics of what William Burroughs calls the Johnson — mind your own fucking business but a) don't throw anyone under the bus; and b) if you can lend a hand, don't let the guy who's been thrown under the bus get run over. This is a social contract of respect: we assume individuals are individuals, affirming themselves.

My misanthropy, then, is not born of a desire to shun people but to roll with the social in a way that best suits me. And if others want or need to be social all the time, power to them — truly. Just don't assume that my solitude is a problem or says anything about you. Assume it says something about me.

Family and Friends

2011-06-27T10:51:00.000-07:00

Family, of course, is not something we choose. Family is not premised on activity — on anything we do — but on the necessity and abstraction of "family." It is something we are born to, damned to, tethered to. Needless to say, we can choose to ignore it: we don't have to interact with our families (my father left when I was 2 and I never saw him again — and yet, by definition, he remains my father; which is to say, his actions don't undo the concept). Family is, by definition, that which happens automatically, before and beyond any and all activity. Our relationship to individual members of our family is mediated by this abstraction: "You're my brother, sister, mother no matter what you do."

Friends are another sort of relationship all together. We choose our friends and they, in turn, choose us. There is no necessity. The relationship exists through activity by both parties (unlike family: a brother is a brother regardless of what he does). Friendship is active. It demands work — a negotiation of, and between, at least two people. (Family, too, involves work — my god, it demands more work than any friendship — but not by definition.)

Friendship, then, is not inherently conceptual or abstract. It is built from worldly interaction, by and within the behavior of all parties.

And yet both family and friends demand an unconditional love. But the conditions of this lack of conditions are different for family than they are for friends.

When I was married, my wife used to get frustrated with me for not calling back my friends — I often go weeks without returning calls. But, to me, that is the definition of a friend: a person you don't have to call back. Family implies a certain duty. Work, of course, holds a paycheck over my head — so I call back. But friends? Ah, friends are people I choose — and so I can choose not to call them back.

Indeed, far from being a rebuke of that friend, my decision not to call back is an affirmation of my friendship. If I feel obliged, then the friend is no longer a friend, no longer someone I choose to be with but someone I must be with — that friend becomes family. And I don't want my friends to become family. I already have those obligations, those duties, those very special forms of torture and pleasure.

No, what I want from a friend is all the complication and messiness of choice, of negotiation, of desire and will. I want to want to be with this or that person; I want that person to fuel me, vitalize me, just as I want in turn to fuel and vitalize him or her.

When I am being a real dud — when I'm slow witted, cranky, depressed — I feel it is my obligation to avoid my friends. My mother, however, is different: she can get my worst self. But not my friends. My friends deserve, need, my best self. And they feel the same way.

Of course, things are not always so clear cut. Sometimes, friends do become family and that can be beautiful — to have a choice become a necessity. This often happens with old friends — there's no longer that immediacy of vitality but there is something else there, an abiding love.

Other times, a friend may be feeling shitty but I can try to make him feel better so that I can get him back to his vital, witty, zestful self. Which is to say, the condition of love for my friends is different than the condition of love for my family. With family, I'm just "there for them." With friends, I'm there for them, too — but so they can get back to the on-going negotiation, that mutual fueling and enlivening.

Faces and Things and Such

2011-06-26T10:31:00.000-07:00

When I was younger, the only art I really liked were portraits. I needed to see a face. Something about that face let me reckon the work, make sense of it, be moved by it. I needed the human element, that inflection of distinctly human being, that sense that it could be me, that this was some variation of me, one possibility within the infinite variegation of humanity.

I was particularly fond of this Otto Dix portrait. I tried living in Paris after college (it turns out Paris is not particularly fond of 21 year old Hebrew hippies who, to Parisians, look Arabic — oy vey; I learned to carry my passport with me to avoid beatings from the thug ass cops) and this painting — I'd known it as a poster from a college friend's apartment — hung in the Pompidou. Having no friends and nothing to do, I'd often go and sit for hours in front of this hilarious, exquisitely grotesque image.

And then one day, it was gone. It wasn't even replaced by anything. Where there was once a painting was now nothing but wall.

Years later and I've come to read that moment as propitious: the movement from face to thing, from humanity to the landscape of life (not landscapes per se). What I would later come to understand is that everything — yes, everything — is a possibility of being. That I can go like a rock, a wall, a street, a mountain, or like that swirl of paint or very, very still video of the Empire State Building. I began to understand that art is not about representing possibilities of human being but of creating affective possibilities.

Suddenly, the world — of art and the world at large — yawned. Everything became an inflection of being and everything a possibility. The face then moved from a privileged space into being part of the landscape, an inflection point amongst infinite inflection points, human and not, organic and not. Humanity — and humanism — was limiting me, to say the least.

I began to see the world as an endlessly shifting landscape of visible and invisible bodies, all moving at their own speeds, in their own styles, ricocheting, merging, blending, drifting, insisting, dissipating, cohering. And the face became one moment, one shape, one style of this landscape (pace Deleuze and Guattari, "What is Philosophy?")

I Am Metabolism

2011-06-21T17:51:00.000-07:00

One of the great moves Nietzsche makes in "Ecce Homo" is to introduce the figure, the function, of metabolism. His view of metabolism is not limited to the digestion of food. Books, events, art, people: these are all things that we take up, that we consume, and that we metabolically distribute: we use this part, not that, at this or that speed, in this or that manner.

Our very selection of things — friends, recreation, location, literature — stems from our appetite, from our taste. ("Stems" is not quite right because it suggests there is a self before taste, which is not quite right. We are our taste; or our taste makes us; or we are our tasting.) Each of us desires — and needs — different things. We are drawn to different things. The strong, according to Nietzsche, are those who instinctively desire those things that fortify health, that enliven, that strengthen. The weak — the decadent — are those who choose things that make them sick and tired, that make them weak (a tautology? No: the weak are, well, weak — they perpetuate their weakness).

We know these people (usually in our families or jobs). We know this weakness in ourselves — we find ourselves doing things that are shitty. I don't mean things like drinking and fucking and getting high; I don't mean shitty in a moral sense. I mean shitty in the sense of how it affects our fundamental health. (A certain amount of booze, and certain booze, fortifies me for sure. There is a line between alcoholism and a certain metabolic need but this line can, at times, become confused by some.)

This, to me, is what's so troubling about watching someone absentmindedly eat through a bag of Doritos or a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of Jim Beam. Of course, there is the rare person for whom such things are in fact enlivening. But these are rare people. Witnessing such flagrant displays of bad instinct is painful (especially in oneself). It's watching someone — sometimes oneself — die badly.

We eat the world and, in so doing, make ourselves: a productive consumption. And metabolism sits at the juncture of self and world (along with taste — taste is the tongue and fingers of metabolism). We take in the world and make sense of it within the elaborate engine of our being, an engine that includes intestines and moods, erections and dreams, burps and ideas. Metabolism is the function of taking in and spitting out the world, of distributing the world in a particular manner, at a particular speed, making sense and making self.

All things have some kind of metabolic function. A rock, for instance, takes in sun and dirt and earth and bugs and rain in its own way. Different rocks do it in different ways and certainly in ways that are different than what you or I do — although certain people have rock-like metabolisms (not a bad thing, mind you).

We choose books, we choose recreation, we choose work, we choose friends and lovers just as we choose food. It's all a matter of appetite, taste, and metabolic distribution.

From time to time I like to pause and look at my life, at how I make my way through the day, through the week, through the year. I consider how often I find myself in distasteful situations — fighting with friends, with co-workers, with family members, cursing at cars (I never fight with friends — perhaps because I don't have any friends. Which may be why I don't have any friends. But I'm always surprised to learn that people do, in fact, fight with friends. This seems odd to me, But many things are odd to me). These are signs of a sickly metabolism at work and is a call for change.

According to Nietzsche, the strong are those who discipline themselves, who train their instincts (another great move Nietzsche makes: we can train our instincts!). The strong work themselves over like a piece of art, like a sculpture, chipping away the poor instincts, strengthening the strong ones.

To consume this life well — and hence to make oneself well — is an on-going negotiation. Of course, metabolism is itself the act of negotiating — which makes negotiating one's metabolism tricky. But such is this Mobius life: a hammer making itself with a hammer.

Storing Energy

2011-06-19T10:59:00.000-07:00

A good friend of mine, the inimitable Chloe Weil, made an interesting comment to me the other evening: "I'm not sure energy can be stored" — or something to that effect.

This comment emerged from a conversation about music — and, in particular, the modes of writing about music. A film, she said, has a way of staying with her, leaving her in a mood, affecting her for a period before passing. Music, on the other hand, passes through her: she may feel its pulse during its play but once over, so is the energy. She doesn't store music.

I've since been obsessed with this idea. What does it mean to store energy? In what ways can we say that we do, in fact, store energy? And how do we store different kinds of energy?

I went directly to the things I know: my philosopher and writers. I have my little canon. And each member runs through me, pervades me to a greater or less degree, with greater or less intensity, in ever varying shapes, potentials, and possibilities. Can I say that I store the energy of these writers — that I store Nabokov's alliterative play, Deleuze's folds and proliferation, Burroughs' vaudevillian dreamspacescapes?

I like that image: they give me energy that I store, that I make use of to perpetuate the functioning of this body, this mind, this life I call me. Of course, storing suggests limited supply, that I can somehow use up Burroughs and be left with none of him. Maybe that's right. Maybe that's why I return to the same writers again and again, why I've read "The Western Lands" dozens of times and will, every few months, pick it up again and peruse, snatching up phrases and figures: I'm refueling my Burroughs power cell.

Then I thought of visual art and of the way Calder and Klee and Matthew Ritchie and David Shrigley have shaped me, have provided me fodder for living, ways of going, modes of being, inflections of my own metabolic propensity. Have I stored the energy of them? Is this just memory? And vice versa: is memory actually the storing of energy from and of the world? I like that quite a bit.

So what of film and song? A film, as Ms. Weil suggests, does have a way of crawling inside and fueling the viewer in some way. I know there are certain films that, after watching, I am exhausted, as if it depleted my energy store rather than fueling me.

Song is trickier. A song can totally take me over, thoroughly transpose my mood. And that feeling may linger a bit but it does tend to dissipate. And yet my body is fueled, in many ways, by Led Zeppelin, by Ween, by Broken Social Scene and Jethro Tull and Bob Dylan; by The Smiths and Miracle Legion and even Beach House. Each, like a philosopher or writer or visual artist, gives me a possible way of going — a vital energetic thrust of living.

This is to say, a song may do this — but rarely. But a body of work — a series of songs — begins to take on a life as it becomes a way of going, as it becomes a possible mode of living (for me, for others). And this possibility is potential energy — an energy we store in our lives and utilize to continue living.

Suddenly, the world is all energy being shared, ricocheted, stored, refined, wasted, multiplied. The world does not just abound with energy; it is energy. And each thing is a way of storing — and making — energy. Just as a rock baking in the sun maintains its warmth for a spell after the sun has set, I maintain Deleuze-Burroughs-Ween-Dylan-my son-my lovers as I enter my solitude. These are the things that fuel me, that along with Uni and pork chops and coffee and tequila, provide me the energy of life.

We store the world for a bit. But we are always gathering more sources of energy — just as we are always (hopefully) producing our own energy supply.

Thoughts on Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life"

2011-06-14T17:02:00.000-07:00

"The Tree of Life" is an odd film that seems, like its arboreal title, to branch in different directions.

On the one hand, it seems to make a distinctly Bergsonian argument. The first hour or so of the film is relentless motion — the camera moves as it films movement. All is flux. All is change.

And human being, including its emotional complexity, is just another inflection of the great flux that is life. Just as fire and lava and water and amoebas and jellyfish and air and wind are the ever changing, ever moving stuff of life, so are human beings. We are not fundamentally different than any of these things — than air, fire, water, animal. It's all just stuff; it's all movement; it's all flux; it's all life.

In this sense, the film is thoroughly worldly. The camera loves this life, all of this life — even its brutality, its indifference. It's all so freakin' beautiful, relishing everything, even the banality of suburban life.

On another hand — there may be more than two hands here, there seems to be a transcendence that lurks and hovers. The camera pans up over and over again, as if there were a god in the sky overseeing it all. The mother says it at one point, in a near whisper: "God lives there," pointing to the sky. And all the worldiness, the lushness of the images? That's the power of God — a God who is different than those waterfalls, different than the Big Bang, transcending it all.

Indeed, the ending seems to give us heaven, resurrection, angels.

And yet we can read that ending differently — rather than transcendence, it gives us the power of memory, the fold of time on the banks of the great oceanic teem of time.

I love this ambivalence of the film — at once thoroughly of this world and transcendent.

Thoughts on Style & Comportment

2011-06-12T11:51:00.000-07:00

This is a snippet from a much longer piece I wrote a few years ago. I feel some odd obligation to proclaim this, as if Blogger were a priest of spontaneity and this my sin....

Style is not an essence. It does not exist prior to the thing. Nor does it reside deep inside, pushing the buttons, driving the ship. Style is not the means one adopts to liven up an otherwise boring performance. Style shows itself, or rather, forges its very existence, in the process of production, emerging at the point of contact between and amongst bodies.

Style is not just a heeding of the world. It is this manner of heeding the world, a singular mode of engagement with things. Style is what this body does with the world, how this body does with the world. Style is metabolic, a singular body's manner of consuming and distributing the world and, in the process, of creating itself: a productive consumption. It is the rate and mode of consumption and distribution, the manner and speed with which a thing takes up the world and put it to work.

Look around. See the different ways different bodies hold themselves, the different speeds and postures with which they tend, and attend, to everything around them — other people, information, light, hair, eyes, scent, air. Every thing consumes the world in its own way and, in so doing, creates itself. This is called comportment, the way a thing hangs in the world, the way it carries itself in the world. Comportment is at once a mode of interaction with the other things — an appetite as well as a touch — and the manner in which a thing holds its different elements together. A swimmer, a linebacker, a German Shepherd, a Chihuahua, a toddler, an adolescent, an elderly woman: each carries itself differently, assembles itself differently, emphasizes certain things and not others, leans more or less forward, more or less quickly, more or less upright, more or less attentive to different things. Each thing is more than a set of traits. Each thing is a way of going.

Style is not something done to the world but with the world. Our very perception of the world is already a particular configuring of that world; it is a giving shape to the many elements that present themselves to the perceiver. You and I are walking down the street. I notice some things, you others. And we do very different things with those perceptions. There is no moment we can possibly experience that is free of our styles.

Even so-called inanimate objects enjoy a style. Put any two drinking glasses together and you’ll quickly see two modes of making sense of beverage, container, and consumption. And these different styles, these different glasses, interact with other styles. Drink tequila in a whiskey glass and you’ll lose the delicate nose of the agave; drink whiskey in a tequila glass — tall and thin — and the whiskey will fail to open. This world calls for the right style for the right thing on the right occasion.

A thing — a text — is a multiplicity of elements, physical and affective, hanging together by the emergent, and ever singular, function of style.

Perverts and You

2011-06-09T13:00:00.000-07:00

My friend likes to play this game while walking down the street: As you pass each person — elderly Chinese woman, youngish hipster, middle-aged suit — say to yourself: "Pervert!" Suddenly, that person is transformed before your eyes, his or her entire being recast, as if perversion pervades all of his or her being.

The very premise of this game is that there is something, deep down, that defines us. There is a real you. And, thanks to the rise of a certain fear of sexuality, this reality is often thought to exist in one's sexual proclivities, in one's perversions. But perversions aside, we still assume there is a real lurking within.

I've recently come upon this in dating. I'm sitting there with some more or less random woman, trying to size her up and she tries to size me up. Usually, I'll say something no doubt inappropriate — or considered as such — and I'll watch as she withdraws. Suddenly, what was charming and safe about me has become suspect, refracted through the lens of being that kind of guy — a pervert, a player, a motherfucker of some sort. And, once so categorized, there's very little chance of escaping the box — "you are a pervert all the way down, you horny hebe" — and even my most generous, kind gestures become construed as perverse.

I, no doubt, do the same thing. "Oh, she's just this or that kind of woman," and I'll dismiss her nuance — and hence her very humanity.

But people are more complicated than just being this or that. I may be a pervert in this way but that doesn't mean I am a pervert in all ways. Which is to say, our assumption that there is a real self, some defining nugget of self truth, shuts down the complexity of what it means to be a human being. This insistence on truth, on authenticity, becomes a sledgehammer of judgement.

People are complex. We are different things, always. And we are different things to different people at different times. This doesn't necessarily make us fickle or false. It makes us human.

So imagine that people — you, me, your parents, friends, strangers — are made up of dozens, hundreds, thousands of strands. Don't look for the real person. Instead, enjoy (or don't) the experience of being with that person. Does this performance please you? Make you feel strong, healthy, vital, capable, beautiful, sexy, smart?

If we assume people are complex, that people are different things and don't have to be one thing, then perhaps we can become more generous in our judgements, in how we deal with others. And then perhaps we can enjoy a bit of perversion without the fear that it will overcome us like some alien invader.

The Real Put On

2011-06-07T08:53:00.000-07:00

The thing, for me, that makes The Beatles stand out from so much popular 60s music is that they enjoyed the put on. They didn't will to be authentic, to be true, to express express themselves (most of the time). Of course, others were doing this, too — Zappa, for one. But this is not an argument about The Beatles. This is an argument about the put on.

I love Joni Mitchell's album, Blue. Fucking love it. It's beautiful — thoroughly emotional without being maudlin or cliche. I will admit that when I was a freshman in college, I listened to it everyday.

But what really gets me going is not that raw, exquisite emotionality. What really gets me going is the put on, the doubling and tripling of self, a play that doesn't relent, that will never give way to a true self. For me, the band that follows The Beatles' legacy is Ween.

Ween puts on the world. They take every genre imaginable — from Philadelphia soul to Sonic Youth to The Beach Boys to Jimmy Buffet and so on and so on. Yet they don't just play that genre straight: they take it up and let you know they're taking it up. And yet this knowing that they're donning a disguise never gives way to a revelation. There is no true Ween underneath. Who would that even be — Dean and Gene Ween?

No, the put on never stops: it's play all the way down. I know this annoys some — understandably — in that it feels false, it feels cheeky, it feels insincere, it feels like some kind of false irony.

But what's strange to me is that it doesn't feel false. But nor does it feel sincere. Ween exists in a much stranger place in which all there is is a put on — and that put on is real. In fact, what would make it insincere is if we thought that it was just a disguise, that underneath it all there they were, winking. Then it would seem like a false put on to me; it would seem insincere. But there is no there there: all there is is play. And hence there is no falsity just as there is no truth: pure play, relentless play, disguise upon disguise upon disguise.

Recently, I've become more attracted to the rap and pop music the kids love so much. What I like is the play, the play acting, the posturing, the put on of it all. It's not music that demands sincerity; it's music that demands a posture.

I love this relentless put on, this refusal to expose oneself once and for all. The 60s and the psychoanalytic nonsense it spurred (not Freud but what was done to and with Freud) created this will to authenticity, to a version of self-expression that is focused on personal emotions — think: Anne Sexton (whose poetry I like, by the way).

But self-expression can be about more than one's inner feelings. After all, it's expression: it's outward facing. So to express oneself can be about how one takes up the world, how one puts on the world, rather than how one feels and reacts to the world. Self-expression, then, would not be an excavation of self — a turning inside out — but a hurling of oneself into the swirl of life.

Of course, things that ring false ring false — and who wants that? So I want to suggest that there is this other place of the real put on. What makes it real is that there is no wink, no revelation.

Does this mean I have to love every put on? Of course not. Certain things just don't resonate well with me. This is called taste and we each have our own way of making sense of things, of enjoying things. But my criteria of taste do not involve the distinction of authentic/false. I want to begin with the put on as the basis for existence.

I love Joni Mitchell and Anne Sexton not because they're emotionally honest but because their art is beautiful, moving, it resonates with me. In some sense, I enjoy them as a kind of put on — their way of putting on the world.

The End of the Subject is Not the End of Me

2011-05-30T12:07:00.000-07:00

There is no such thing as postmodern— at least not from the perspective of postmodernity. The will to take different things, group them together, and assign them one identity is precisely the will postmodernity critiques.

Postmodernity — whatever that is — is often accredited with undoing truth and the subject. But this is a simplistic reduction. Just as there are individual thinkers with individual world views — Deleuze is not Derrida is not Foucault is not de Certeau is not Guattari — there are different ways of constructing the individual.

Which is to say, just because one might suggest that there is no subject per se — that is, a subject that is self-identical, univocal, and metaphysical (an invisible Being) — does not mean that one is suggesting that there is no form, no identity at all. That would be silly.

The question is not whether there is a subject or not but in what ways can we conceive of the individual.

For instance, why not an individual that is always becoming? Becoming is not the eradication of borders; it's the putting on motion of borders. To consider the individual as a becoming rather than a being is to move the individual from geometry to calculus, from stasis to motion.

A becoming, then, is stipulated, a shaping, a trajectory: I go like this. Like what? Like this.

Let's begin, then, by considering the individual a differential equation: limited but infinite.

And why not networked? Just because I am made of different things, just because I am intersected by threads from elsewhere, doesn't mean I am not singular? I am this node.

Yet I am not just not a node. I am a productive cog: I make sense of these diverse threads in this way. Because I am a thread, too — a shaping of this world, an ever-moving zone of the cosmos, at once constitutive and constituent.

So just because I am not a fixed Being doesn't mean I am not me: I am this becoming node, this inflection of the cosmos.

Putting on the World

2011-05-29T21:23:00.000-07:00

I've long loved this phrase — putting on the world. I just found an essay I wrote on it for a journal; the editor, understandably, didn't like it. I'm not sure I like it but I like much in it, an attempt, often failed, to write that insane middle voice where inside and outside fold through each other and where clothes and flesh share a common territory.....

There is, alas, no naked body. Every fold of our flesh is an inflection, an argument, a stance — our skin creases in the way our bodies make sense of sun, laughter, wind, and words. The curves of our spine, the turns of our heals, the rhythm of our gait, the manner in which we comport are made by the world while in turn making the world.

When we squint in the glare of the sun, we are putting on a star. When, over time, we hunch to meet the endless demand of the screen, we are literally putting on labor and pixel. When our hair is mussed by the breeze, we are putting on the wind. And, in so doing, we become the world.

Our frames are looms. We are tailors, all; our bodies, drapes of being.

Skin, bones, clothes — every layer, every fold — are negotiations, intersections, encounters with the world and all its atmospheres: sex and heat and grass and age and speed and weight and love and angst and barometric pressure and desire. We are always threaded through varied networks — social, physiologic, economic, sexual, natural. We put on the world, or at least pieces of it, to make our way.

Every garment, ever wrinkle, stitches us to the fabric of the world, is a stitch of the world.

Now consider all the accoutrements of fashion, of label and style and purse and belt and cap and coat, and watch as they weave us laterally across and through the social fabric while negotiating very private experiences of temperature, gender, comfort. Every blue jean, sweater, sock, and underwear is an inflection of the cosmic network — a network that is as affective as it is somatic, as personal as it is cultural, as private as it is social.

Suddenly, the act of getting dressed seems impossibly complex. Yet being nude is being dressed, too, and so we have no choice: to live is to put on the world.

This and that adornment — and we are always already adorned — are weaves of the world. Tie, coat, shirt, shoe; smile, mullet, wrinkle, stain; posture, gait, temper, tempo: this is our fabric of being, a patch in the cosmic twill. Every layer of us — from pants to pore — is a putting on of the world.

The Pleasure of Proliferating Perspectives

2011-05-26T20:33:00.000-07:00

When I was in high school, my American History teacher — the late, great Robert Tucker — had us read Gabriel Kolko's essay on the formation of the USDA in which Kolko claimed that the USDA and its dispensation of approval — those assuring gradations of meat — were not born of consumer advocacy but were in fact a foil of the meat industry, an industry suffering due to Upton Sinclair’s "The Jungle" which exposed the grotesqueries of meat packing.

The USDA, then, was not only not there to protect my fellow citizens and me — it was in fact an elaborate abuse of governmental ethos, a ploy to move product, a product which may very well be harmful to the very citizens the USDA was nominally formed to protect.

At first, I thought I was attracted to this act of revelation, the truth unleashed from the dissimulation of authority. But that was not it at all.

What attracted me, what sent my heart a flutter, was the radical shifting of perspectives. Which is to say, it was not the new perspective per se which interested me: it was the very act of seeing things differently.

It took me some time to realize that I was not in accord with the revisionist Marxists. They wanted to reveal a perspective, their perspective. What I wanted, however, was to have that moment — that moment when the world rearranges itself before my eyes, reorganizes itself into new configurations, that glorious moment when the world is born anew, when everything I thought was the truth turns out to be just another configuration, that moment when the dead world is reanimated — I wanted that moment again and again and again.

And this is what I love so much about taking up new and different philosophers: I want to see the world utterly anew. I want to have everything I know, my ordering of the universe, to be reassembled — Nietzsche's biting reversals and insistent physiology; Hegel's schizo chorus comedy of errors; Kant's mad mad rational wacky architecture; Derrida's pedantic double gestures; Deleuze and Guattari's intensities, folds, and planes of immanence; Bergson's endurance and flash of intuition: I want them all.

I'm not looking for the right one: they're all right in their way. No, I don't want what's right: I want the pleasure, the delight, the delirium of all those different ways.

Each thinker gives me a different way of making sense — and the more I read, the more I digest them, the more this multiplicity plays through my head, through my eyes, through my blood and guts.

And so then I can see the world in radically disparate ways all at once, an endlessly shifting series of planes of understanding, the world aligning and realigning itself at infinite speed. It is a an exquisite vertigo, a thrill of relentless (re)creation, an erotics of the world folding over and through itself. And I love it.

On Assayas' "Boarding Gate"

2011-05-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

Olivier Assayas' "Boarding Gate" is exquisite, smart, and devastating. It is beautiful and reminds me of Wong Kar Wai's shots of Hong Kong — the lights, colors, reflections. Some might find the film difficult or slow; it does not give us the back story; things are not explained. We are privy only to the relations on screen, all of which assume events that have happened but which we will never know or witness.

The story, for Assayas, is irrelevant because this is not a story about people. It is a map of relations and the terms of the those relations. And the new terms, the dominant terms, don't give a fuck about sentiment or the past. The film gives us the malaise, the daze, of contemporary global capitalism — jet lag, capital exchange, identity blurred then phased out entirely. If it can't be exchanged, it isn't.

We're never quite sure what is being made and sold — what's legal and illegal becomes irrelevant: it's all the flow of money and goods. Such is the economy of quantity, of impersonal exchange, cash as the ultimate abstraction that effaces affect and, in the end, personhood.

And poor Asia Argento (Sandra) — the last stand of humanity, of passion, of affect. She feels, she longs, she loves, she pines. She is certainly immoral if not amoral. But in the world of capitalism, these things mean nothing. She thinks she's playing one game but there's another game she doesn't ever understand or even see — the game of capital exchange, the devastating indifference of it all, the even cool calculating will to more, to profit, to quantity.

In "Post-Cinematic Affect," Steven Shaviro does a good, thorough reading of the film. But he reads the end of the film quite differently that I do. For Shaviro, her restraint affirms her humanity over and against the dehumanizing will of capital exchange. The blur at the end is her choosing another line of flight.

I read it quite differently: the blur is her disappearance. There is no place for her passion, her lust, her rage in this world. The economy of quantity has eclipsed the economy of affect. She has been used; they are done with her; she is disappeared. The final shot of this film rips my heart and soul out every time.

The Terrible Truths About San Francisco

2011-05-20T20:41:00.000-07:00

San Francisco is, alas, not a city. It is a large, filthy village. Not many people live here. BART — the train that connects this podunk town to other podunk towns in what's called The Bay Area — stops running at midnight. At midnight, yes, that's right.

Restaurants close at around 9; they'll kick you out if you're still eating come 10.

Did I mention that this city is filthy? And I mean not just filthy but fetid. It's all the moisture in the air coupled with the astronomical homeless population: it breeds the most grotesque disease. The Bubonic Plague is back — in SF. I'm not kidding.

It's not a friendly city. As it is overrun with 26 year olds, it has that very particular post-collegiate angst. People go out in cliques. Rarely are these cliques penetrated. In my brief time in LA, everywhere I went, people would look up to see....if I was a star. Still, they actually made eye contact. Not in SF. Lord knows what might happen should you lock eyes with a stranger. (Now try being a single guy. In SF, the women prefer online dating to real space encounters. Eeesh.)

The whole city is organized like a college campus with its egregious sororities and fraternities. Somehow, if you live in a certain neighborhood, it means you are a type — a Marina girl, a Mission hipster, a Noe Valley yuppie (which is ironic as the new SF hipsters are the new yuppies — they don't work for banks, as they did in the 80s; they work for Apple — corporate lackies who party).

The thing about 26 year olds is that they feel like they're the first to discover whatever it is they've discovered. Raw food! French press coffee! Pho! While I enjoy the excitement they feel at their discovery, their self-righteousness undoes said enjoyment.

Of course, I came here 20 years ago, when I was 21 and it was amazing — cheap and filled with freaks. Now it's freakishly expensive and all those young 'uns? They work for Google (or Apple or Yahoo or Genetech; there is an endless parade of corporate buses barreling up and down Guerrero headed to or from the Peninsula on a daily basis).

Don't get me wrong. There are some things to love about this city. The sky, for instance, is fucking amazing — impossibly close and ever aswirl. And the ocean is right there. And, yes, there is a lot of good coffee. A lot. It's silly, in fact, how much good coffee there is — and each shop is owned and managed by those 26 year olds. And the food: I can get locally grown, organic produce, meat, and cheese on nearly any corner of the city. That is amazing and not to be taken for granted.

But, fuck, it's such a socially and culturally limited town that it distracts itself with 10 million breeds of kale and an equal number of coffee roasteries. If we keep eating, maybe we won't notice that we live in a filthy village of anxiety riddled 20-somethings.

Ah, maybe I'm just a curmudgeon. Maybe I've outgrown this dirty playground. Thing is, I'm stuck here. Suddenly, I feel like Joseph Garcin.

What, Where, and How is Power?

2011-05-20T09:16:00.000-07:00

My problem with conceiving of government as the source of power is that the government rarely, and only tangentially, coerces my body. Taxes, registering for the draft to get student financial aid (that was 1987: Reagan!), street lights, traffic laws in general: these are government actions that directly coerce my body.

But, on a day to day basis, there are a wealth of other sources that literally move me physically, affectively, emotionally. Right now, there are two dominant forces in my life that affect what I do, feel, and think on a near minute-to-minute to basis: work and child.

Work tries to occupy most of my time and head space — it wants me to think about it. This is why I have never had a job job — somewhere I had to be five days a week by 9:00 am. That kind of all consuming coercion seems completely insane to me. And yet this is what people do everyday: they go to work for somebody else, their time utterly consumed and defined by the demands of a corporation.

And it is these same people who read newspapers, follow elections, have opinions on things like capital punishment and abortion. As if power existed elsewhere! As if the real power was not right in front of them — in the alarm clock shrieking in their ear, in the blue screen that blurs their vision, in the demands for profit that drive the company and the culture as a whole!

The belief in a power that exists elsewhere — in Washington, for instance — is part of the power structure of business. The news distracts you from the glaring reality that your life is accounted for by your boss and the demands of Capital.

The other great source of power that defines what I think, do, and feel on a near minute-by-minute basis weighs 48 pounds. But it's not that the boy coerces my actions — although he does — it's that the terms of contemporary parenting coerce my actions. Of course I have to do certain things as a parent — feed the beast, take him to the doctor, get him to school, read to him, play with him. This is part of the power dynamics that flourish in any relationship.

It's the meta-terms of what it means to be a parent that drive me particularly crazy. I am referring to what Foucault calls discourse — the discourse of contemporary parenting. That is, the things that we can say, feel, and so as parents vis-a-vis our children. (That's for another post.)

My point is this: Power, as Foucault says, comes from everywhere. It is not something that exists out there, that comes from the top, that is enforced by police (although it's that, too.) Power is what makes you move, physically and emotionally. It's the relentless homogeneity of affect that streams from the news leaving people anxious and afraid. It's the relentless Hollywood cliches that leave people feeling insufficient (and bored! so fucking bored!).

This is not to say that we need solely to focus on the particularities in front of us — my kid, my job. No, it's to say we need to move from these particularities — what's right in front of us — to the structures and flows of power that generate this coercion. Our job is not to fight the Man. Our job is to look for ways to rearchitect the flows.

What is Politics?

2011-05-19T19:32:00.000-07:00

I was a history major in college. Mostly, this was because my high school history teachers were smart, Marxist revisionists so we read insane books. (It turned out I was actually interested in interpretation, not history, but it took me a few years to figure that out.) I entered college with all these AP credits in history so, well, I continued with it as a major.

But I was immediately disappointed. Every class seemed to talk about wars, treaties, governments, presidents, great thinkers, great books. It all felt so, well, wrong to me. I kept telling my advisor that I wanted a different kind of history — what people thought, felt, how they lived, dreamed, conceived of the world. The History of Great Men and Great Moments was so full of shit, so out of touch. Who the fuck cared what these rich motherfuckers were up to? And that was when I read Foucault and everything changed.

I've had the same frustration with the assumed model of the political. We imagine that governments do things that matter, that dictate how things go. They 'choose' a system such as capitalism, socialism, communism. And we live within this system. We might try to change it but this change focuses on them — on legislators and senators, on public policy and elections.

But I can't but think that this is just not how things work. I see a people — some population stipulated by place — as a networked engine, a system of production. What does it produce? Itself.

I am looking for a model of the political that sees the world in terms of thermodynamic flows of energy, distributions of desire, will, capital. Governments and laws and police and corporations: these are constitutive and constituent of this great social engine. But they do not determine it.

To focus on politicians as the source of power is, as Burroughs says, to be the bull charging the red flag only to meet air. It is a distraction, a diversion from the flows of power and desire and capital that actually define the everyday, that define and create the social body.

I'd like to see these thermodynamic maps of behavior around the world, map how these flows are distributed, what kinds of circuits and feedback loops there are, what kinds of temperatures and valves exist to make this or that social-body-engine.

We don't choose a system. We are a system.

This has enormous implications for those interested in changing the terms of this life we lead.

My essay on the end of times via "Inapprorpiate Thesaurus"

2011-05-13T21:42:00.000-07:00

There is an eschatologic strand that has run through our culture for eons and runs through our very private sense of self. There is a deep ambivalence about it: "Holy shit, I don't want it all to end!" And, in the same breath: "Please, let it come down — all of it. This life it too much."

Speaking of the end of times wreaks of nihilism, of a death wish — the ultimate death wish.

But of course it is obvious that the life we lead, here in the US, is unsustainable....

Read the rest here >>>>>

Memory Happens

2011-05-13T20:53:00.001-07:00

Memory and recollection are not the same thing. A recollection is an image that makes its way through consciousness somehow. Memory, however, is everything — from the millisecond to the epic — that has happened to you. And is still happening to you.

This is to say, you are not just this vessel to whom things might or might not happen. You are something that has always already had something happen: there is no pre-experience self. What it is to be a self — whatever that is — is to be something that interacts. The self, then, is an event — not a thing but a happening.

In this sense, a self is an infinitely vibrating collection of events — or the traces of events. I want to say that you are all the events that have ever happened to you as experienced by your particular constitution, your particular metabolism. What the fuck does that mean?

Well, it means you experience things — a meal, sleep, a conversation, eight million conversations, glances, whispers, sighs, dreams, burps, breaths, kisses, hallucinations, loves, fears, cuts and bruises. All of these things reverberate throughout your very constitution — some of these events move very slowly, some very fast; some in even rhythm, some syncopated, some in 7/4; some of these events resound, others tail off in a whimper. All of this activity — all of these reverberations, this incredible calculus of events — is memory.

And this memory is you.

Memory is not a past event. It is a present event. Or, rather, it is the persistence of an event. Memory is how you know how to tie your shoes, brush your teeth, how you know what you like and don't like; it's how you think and what you think. This is quite different from a recollection which is a more or less discrete and conscious event. Memory endures, necessarily.

And is in relentless flux. After all, all those events are still happening to a greater or less degree of intensity. Some events skip across consciousness, hitting down here and there every few years. Some are tightly knit balls that rumble and roll, day after day, through our very becoming. Some are like scents that drift by.

The very manner of these events is still being worked out — right now, by you, in you, as you. This working out is you. Which is not to say that we are always wrestling our pasts. No, it's to say that we are always living through our pasts right now — and that our pasts are living through our now, through us.

Memory is not something that is, some static repository. It's not a library; nor is it an archive. Memory is a living thing. Memory is something that happens.

Philosophy and Life

2011-05-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

The relationship between philosophy and life is not always comfortable. Sometimes, it seems like philosophy is some mad abstraction, an insane series of propositions that have nothing to do with life. Monadologies, disseminations, dialectics, moral imperatives: they can seem at such a great distance from eating, fucking, working, sleeping, at such great remove from day to day existence.

To this, I have two responses. On the one hand, there are those philosophies that — at least to me — are insane abstractions — Hegel, Kant, and the rationalists. They do so many bizarre, beautiful things, as if they're forging the most intricate Calder mobile ever, all gossamer and thought. In this sense, these philosophies are immediate in the same sense that a Calder or Pollock or Matthew Ritchie is. They insist as affective forces only the affect comes from concept rather than percept.

And then there is the philosophy towards which I gravitate — the phenomenologists, existentialists, and much of what's happened since. Bergson says he wants a philosophy that is absolutely at one with the particular thing, a philosophy that, in some sense, becomes that thing — or becomes with that thing. It is philosophy as drape of the world, not in the sense of covering it but in the sense of moving with the world's every move. A philosophy of agility and precision. A philosophy of infinite generosity, lending itself absolutely to the world.

Both of these visions of philosophy are quite different than an ideology or code — philosophy as mandate. That shit's just plain old strange — and, I want to say, is not philosophy. It's, well, ideology or morality. The question, then, is not: Does Nietzsche think I should do x or y? That is silly ideology. As Nietzsche says, the greatest gift a student can show him is to walk away or slay him. It is not to follow him.

When I taught MFA students, I did not teach them theory to be applied to their art. I taught them moves, possibilities, that were in the philosophy much as if I were showing them how Mondrian approached geometry or Klee the line. Theory, in this case, does not sit above the world; it does not explain the world: it is of the world, goes with the world, nudges the world and is nudged back.

After spending time at a good museum or gallery — after seeing, say, 3 or 4 works of art that rock your world — you see the world a little differently. Van Gogh makes me see the world as so much viscous: the world is thick with itself. Matthew Ritchie teaches me to understand the speed and complexity of the emergent world. A philosopher does much the same thing: after reading one, you see the world anew. And that is fucking glorious.

Philosophy is not something one lives by — that's religion, that's ideology. No, philosophy is a) something one might do (I do it! Sometimes!); and b) it is something that one goes with, one engages.

All These Possible Lives At Once

2011-05-04T20:27:00.000-07:00

I am increasingly aware of how much life takes place in the middle. It's something I've intellectually understood — or thought I understood — or even professed — but it's only just coming home to roost.

The middle is that place that is neither here nor there, that is both here and there. It is between you and me, between world and me, between words and me. Rather than understanding myself as either an actor or an object — one who does or is done to — I am beginning to understand myself as one who takes place in between myself and the world. I am beginning to understand myself as a sort of cog within a vast cosmic engine. (And, no, I'm not high right now.)

An idea comes over me (oh, god, I love that expression almost as much as I love that sensation — the erotics of being entangled, enmeshed, permeated, penetrated by an idea). It takes possession. And suddenly it — or is it I? — begin making connections between this and that. It — or is it I? — begins rereading the world, seeing it again, seeing it anew. To wit, the idea of the middle, of the in between.

Language, of course, always takes us out of ourselves, coerces us with its vocabulary — we choose words from what's out there; its structural grammar; and its syntax of sense. For instance, once you begin a sentence a certain way, there are only so many options left as to where it can go next. The grammar leads us down certain paths. So just as we speak and write, we are spoken and written.

Even the imagination takes place in the middle. And this never ceases to surprise and amaze me. After all, the imagination seems like that place of absolute control, that infinitely private domain where I am god and civil servant, able to carry out any deed in any fashion. But this is not the case, at least for me.

My imagination feels its way. Which is to say, it doesn't make its way. It usually begins with some kind of phantom that sits at the periphery of my consciousness — a flicker of a possibility, a fragment of an image. I go to it and begin exploring where it might take me — not where I might take it. Oh, I'll try and move it this way or that. And sometimes it seems to heed my will. But this is not an obedience to my will but an extension of that phantom, of that possibility: it goes like that.

This is so abstract. So let's take the example of an erotic fantasy I might have about a woman. In my imagination, the two of us can't do any old thing. The canvas of my imagination is neither blank nor limitless. On the contrary, it is highly stipulated. Feeling its way, my imagination tries to kiss her — but, no, no kissing here. But, for some reason, I can kiss her neck. On my imagination goes, seeing what's possible — a fondle, a grope, a lick. At each point, the scene works itself out, an ongoing negotiation.

But aren't I the director, actor, and producer of this scene? Well, yes, I am. But it turns out that being those things does not give me absolute control. A film is not that different from my imagination: it happens in the middle, between actors, writers, directors, producers, set designers, wardrobe, make up, and so on.

Even the subject of the fantasy, of the imagination, is not up to me alone. It comes to me (as it were)! And I love that — I love when I find a woman in my imagination. How did she get there? Well, through some kind of affective resonance, some kind of harmonic convergence. Perhaps she's an actress. Perhaps she's a coworker. Perhaps she's someone I just met in a bar. Perhaps it's someone I've known for ages. Suddenly, there she is. In my head!

This is all to say that I can't snatch any old woman, plop her into my imagination, and have my way with her. No, it is an event that takes place in the middle, between her and me.

I like to think that these negotiations in the imagination are real negotiations that remain virtual. And so the line that separates the real from the virtual is not the same as the line that separates the real from the unreal. Because the virtual is real, too.

And so I believe that imagination, fantasy, is a possible world in the Leibnizian or Borgesian sense of the word. It is a kind of virtual parallel (or aparallel, it depends) life. So rather than these limitations to my imagination being frustrating, I find them beautiful: all these lives, both virtual and real, streaming out of me.

All these possible lives at once.

Towards a Middle Voice

2011-05-03T21:41:00.000-07:00

Generally, I am quite enamored of the English language. It enjoys such a range of sounds and modes of expression, from the Romantic softness of herbaceous to the angularity of the Germanic finger. The French avoid consonants with a strange vigor: Va t'en faire enculer — which is deeply perverse in both meaning and tone but still lacks the satisfaction of a good ol' English Fuck you you fucking dickbag!

But English can be frustrating, as well. We have these subjects — I, we, you, he, it — who must do things — run, fuck, love, kiss — often to other things — him, it, her, them. As Nietzsche argues in "On the Genealogy of Morals," this posits a doer behind the deed, an actor who is distinct from his actions. He uses lightning as one example. To say that lightning strikes is to suggest that there is such a thing as lighting that doesn't strike — which is absurd. Lighting is that which strikes. (For Nietzsche, the invention of this doer behind the deed — the invention of this human subject — was perpetrated by the slaves (read: Jews) as a way to hold the noble and strong morally responsible for being noble and strong. The basis or morality, then, is subjectivity.)

English has a hard time speaking the deed, articulating the event. We can speak actively — I love you — or passively: I am loved. But it's difficult to speak in a way that is neither active nor passive, that is both active and passive: loving. Which is to say, it's difficult to speak with the world because either we're doing things to it or things are being done to us.

Rumor has it that ancient Greek has a voice that is neither active nor passive called the middle voice. I can't vouch for the veracity of this because I tried learning Greek one summer — 10 hours a day, 7 days a weeks, 12 weeks — but only lasted three days before I began weeping uncontrollably. I'm not kidding.

French likes to use the reflexive quite a bit — Je m'appelle (I call myself), Je m'assieds (I sit myself down). Reflexivity is not the passive voice but it is an odd construction that creates a circuit of subject and object wherein the subject is doer and done — but still not the need.

We do this in English, sometimes. One of my favorite expressions is: "I'm enjoying myself." What a beautiful sentiment! What a perfect circuit!

But, again, this is not the middle voice in which the moon moons (please, no Heidegger) or even better: just, mooning.

This lack of a structural middle voice doesn't mean we can't write and speak in this middle voice. It just means we need to work a lot harder. It means we have to make words do things, rupture their referential function and introduce their performative function. When done right, subjects, verbs, and objects give way to the very action of lightning, of mooning, of Danieling.

It's All in the How

2011-05-01T13:09:00.000-07:00

My friends I watched this as comedy. Even the cover is hilarious. The point being: a thing flourishes in its use, not its self-declaration.

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau argues that the notion that power works top down — the message is declared and people succumb — is simply wrong. He refocuses our attention on the singular moment of consumption — the housewife perusing the shelves for wares, the pedestrian walking the streets, the Native Americans praying. De Certeau argues that as individuals, we make use of the so-called system in creative ways, in ways that often undermine the claims of power, in ways that further our own being rather than the presumed agenda of power.

He gives the example of Native Americans under Spanish rule, forced to pray in a Christian manner. From the outside, it looks like the Natives have been subdued, converted, that they've seen the light. On the inside, however, they continue to prey to their own idols using the figures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

De Certeau's point is that power can declare any message it wants, disseminate its mandates through the media. But at the point of consumption, we do all kinds of things with these messages.

When I was in college, my friends and I would pick a movie and decide it was a comedy. The one I remember the clearest is "Clan of the Cave Bear." Holy shit! For the first 3o minutes of the movie, we laughed uncontrollably hard — it was, by far, the funniest film ever made. Of course, it did not see itself as a comedy. But, in our use of it, we turned it into one.

Why only the first 30 minutes? Because sustaining that diligence is fucking exhausting. The film just keeps coming in its inane seriousness and to continue to metabolize it as comedy wears the body down. Plus, the pot wears off. (Drugs are a very good, very important way of shedding habit to see things anew, to put them to new use. This is one reason for the so-called war on drugs — which shouldn't be called a war because wars end (Carver, "The Wire").)

This is the way we watch television all the time — we watch it ironically or as a kind of pornography or or or or.... Just because someone watches this or that says nothing about that person. What matters is how they watch it.

I was out with a friend last — smart, cool, all good things — who informed me that she hates the word "joy." It's too self-help, she said. Me, I don't hate any word; I love them all — even words I don't enjoy saying. What interests me is the way a word is used. Sure, shmucks use all kinds of words badly — so badly it's enough to make us hate them. But that's not fair to the word. The word is a person like anyone else. It can do all kinds of things — if you know what you're doing.

Don't blame the word. Blame the speaker. When you see a word being misused, rather than avoid it, you should swoop it up and save it, use it in a more interesting, more engaging, fresh manner.

After all, what is more glorious than a word or phrase, long hackneyed to death, suddenly sprung to life?

We Are Things Among Things

2011-05-01T11:27:00.000-07:00

In Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson claims that everything — everything! — is an image. That is to say, everything — everything! — is something that is perceived and made sense of. This includes our bodies, our nerves, our brains. Yes, our brains. The brain is not something that is distinct from the world. It is made of the same stuff of the world. It is stuff just as a piece of paper, a flower, a mug are stuff. Ideas, too — and notions, thoughts, dreams, concepts: they are stuff, too, even if invisible. This different stuff enjoys different properties, different ways of going, but they are not, in Bergson’s words, different in kind but in degree of complexity.

It's all just stuff interacting with other stuff. There are all kinds of interactions between all kinds of things — collisions and convergences, merges and synergies, ricochets and meldings.

At our best, we are productive cogs, productive nodes in the ever emergent network of the cosmos. We don’t want to be masters. We don’t claim to be experts. We aim to be amateurs at play in the world, Hunter Thompson spending a year riding with the Angels only to get stomped. We will get dirty. We are dirty, in the best sense of the word.

We often find ourselves nudged this way and that by the flutter and flurry of stuff. We are clumsy, more or less helpless, bouncing, ricocheting, drifting. But then there are those times when we somehow shift our posture while we are still being nudged — while we are still bouncing, ricocheting, drifting — and we are no longer passive. Nor are we truly active. At these moments, when we take on the world, when we take up the world, we are moving with the world, living through the teem and for every nudge we, too, nudge.

Think of it this way. A pool ball can simply be at the mercy of the cue. Or it can actively be moved by the cue, take its hits, live through its momentum.

Making sense of the world is not a matter of standing apart from things. We are things; things are things. Making sense is an encounter between such things. Just as wind rustles leaves and leaves, in turn, inflect the wind; just as concrete and a glass vase enjoy a tense relationship; just as light and lens interact just so to make images; just as coffee makes my body and thinking faster; so we go with the world, things and things together.

The reader, generously, lends the world his body. And the world, in kind, returns the favor. It’s all stuff going with the stuff.

Brilliance Under the Radar

2011-04-29T14:50:00.000-07:00

Find more Here Are The Facts You Requested songs at Myspace Music

I've been thinking recently about some of my favorite writers, favorite artists, favorite musicians — and how some of them have never "made it" in the traditional sense of the phrase. They are not renowned; they do not make money directly off their art. Most not only don't make money from their art, their art costs money to make.

If I write an essay about the films of Wes Anerdson, people may read it. If I write an essay about the films of Marc Lafia, no one gives a shit. If I quote Lafia in an essay I'm writing, the citation carries no weight; if I quote Deleuze, then I must know my shit.

But are these people any less great than the well-known, well-distributed, and well-paid? There is an alarming prejudice that declares that for something truly to be great, it must be well known. It must receive accolades; it must have the imprint of capitalist, popular success.

And yet many of my favorite artists, none of whom will likely ever be so imprinted, have changed my life in profound ways. Because they are fucking brilliant.

I am thinking of the great poet and writer, Lisa Robertson, who's written the downright devastatingly brilliant, The Weather and Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture (whose title alone is an entire pedagogy and is so smart it makes me want punch myself in the face out of joy). She performs a new kind of knowing, a phenomenology, a way of going that is at once physical and affective and exquisite.

And of my excellent friend, Marc Lafia, who's been making short films, long films, images, and experiences for 30 years and whose work has taught me what vision is and what technology is. He operates in this incredible space that always already considers the form of something, engages the form of something, while articulating it with an incredible intelligence and beauty.

And of my fellow rhetor, Lohren Green, whose Poetical Dictionary is one of the greatest contributions to literature imaginable — at once shifting the very terms of knowing, of speaking, of writing and doing it with the utmost grace and eloquence.

Or my favorite band, now disbanded, Here Are The Facts You Requested,who take on the entire history of pop music to create what they call avant-normal — incredible songs that interrogate the very nature of a song with every note.

Now I imagine writers, musicians, artists like this all over the world — this entire strata of outrageous brilliance hovering over this globe, a strata that rarely moves, that does not enjoy dissemination but that persists out of diligence and passion. When I imagine this, I am at once inspired and saddened — inspired by the thought that despite the overwhelming stupidity and ugliness of the world, there are these flares of brilliance everywhere; and saddened that I, and you, will never know them.

What Body Are We Breeding?

2011-04-26T22:27:00.000-07:00

I know I've written and ranted about this before, but it surfaced in my mind and in my fingertips so here it is again, in a different form....

The obligations of the day blind us. We focus on waking up and getting ready, getting where we need to go, negotiating work and family and love and bills and traffic and taxes. It's not often that we afford ourselves the opportunity to survey the world, its mechanics and mode of operation. You'd think the media would help us with that but the opposite is true: the media focuses on current affairs, rarely stepping back to critique the system.

Step back for a moment now and look at the mechanics of the world around you. Look at what's demanded of the body, how its movement is choreographed throughout the day. It's quite odd.

Our jobs not only don't ask us to move — they demand that we don't move. We sit at desks for hours upon hours, staring at a screen occasionally getting up to drink some coffee or chat with a co-worker. A body that moves, that flexes its muscles, an active body: this goes against the very basis of the information economy.

Meanwhile, we feed this still body poorly. Obviously, not all of us: some of us take the time to pack a nice lunch, to eat well, to treat this stationary, withering frame of ours. But, on the whole, I think it's safe to say that Americans at their jobs are not only not moving, they're eating absolutely terrible food, gut wrenching food, soul killing food.

And drinking loads of lattes — antibiotic infused, hormone drenched milk fat with some shitty coffee in it.

This world is breeding a body that does not want to move, a body that is not physically vital. Sure, there are gyms, these ghettos of movement. But I'm not sure mindless, concerted movement breeds a healthy body. Watching tv while working an exercise bike ensures that we remain locked into the information economy, to the exchange of the new capital: images.

And so, as a culture, we are being bred to manipulate pixels and words, images and icons. Capital demands a new kind of body, one that doesn't need to lift or heave — and one that doesn't want to run about, fuck, frolic. The industrial age is truly over; the informational body is being born.

And it is not pretty, this birth, this metamorphosis, this breeding. It demands a disciplining of our days that is unsavory — waking to the shrill cry of the alarm clock, slouching through maniacal traffic, being forced to sit at a desk staring at a screen for hours upon hours.

Marcuse calls this the body of labor. But that's not quite right because the very nature of labor has changed — and this new labor doesn't want a body at all. It wants a brain that can fill in the gaps between machines, between computers. I want to say: it's the antibody of non-labor labor. But that's a supremely ugly phrase.

The body of pleasure is being bred out of existence, leaving us literally impotent, popping Viagra just to continue the species.

And the shitty things is, this whole thing is gonna come crashing down and we'll need to be strong, really fucking strong, to survive. But by then we'll be shriveled, mere husks left to be blown away by the mighty winds that come.

The Business Suit is Liberating

2011-04-24T10:15:00.001-07:00

Ain't work cool? Why go home? Let's just keep working! All the time!

The jeans, t-shirts, and sneakers of today's work world are not signs of liberation. On the contrary, they mark Capital's success in co-opting every last vestige of personal life, folding our very selves into the will of production.

The business suit — a pain in the ass, no doubt, and rarely attractive — marks a clear line between home and work. It is a uniform that declares: "This is me at work. There is another me that is, frankly, none of your business."

In the old days, you couldn't get a job if your hair was long, your nose pierced, and tattoos covered your arms. Today, at least in San Francisco, it seems like a requirement. Capital realized that the maintenance of a personal life distinct from corporate life is not productive — for the corporation. All that wasted time making love to your spouse! All that wasted time reading, writing, strolling, thinking, eating drugs! You could be using all that time to write another PowerPoint presentation! Work, you drug addled freakazoid!

I watched it happen in San Francisco in the last 1990s during the dot com explosion. Suddenly, the work space was filled with bikes and skateboards and everyone was in t-shirts and jeans, tatted and pierced and, well, working their asses off. What a find for Capital! These little fuckers get shit done!

And the bars and coffee shops, filled with the same kids, became extensions of work. The cafe went from being a refuge from work to being the site of work. And thanks to microcomputing, we are always jacked in.

Now work permeates every aspect of the day, more or less. Every moment is a potential moment of productivity. Look at how the new corporate order functions. Google — and Apple and Genentech — bus their employees to work — oops, to campus. Now, this no doubt makes said employees' lives easier and reduces the dreaded carbon footprint. But, come the fuck on, can't we have some time to ourselves? And, once on campus — oh, the word creeps my shit out — you get free lunch! Just like in prison!

And we have foosball! And M&Ms coming out the yin yang! And, look, everyone's cool and wearing t-shirts and jeans! They're your friends! Isn't work great? There's no reason ever to leave — except that housing you is expensive so we'll bus you back to your over priced condo dorm — for which you pay a rent or mortgage that keeps you in a state of perpetual indentured servitude — before busing you here in the morning.

The genius of Capital is to have you identify yourself, once and for all, with the desire of Capital, to have your most personal selves be a source of productivity, of energy, for the capitalist engine. This is accomplished through branding, of course — "I'm a Mac," "I'm a PC" — but through an absolute identification with work, as well: employees wearing Google t-shirts.

This means we identify at once with production and consumption, the ultimate dream of Capital. It's an infinitely fast circuit — the kids working all day to make the shit, buy the shit (except, of course, for the real kids of the Third World — with them, we stick to good old fashioned exploitation!).

As our uniform stays the same from home to work, our privacy gives way to the Spectacle. Look at the modern office: no private offices at all. Even the conference rooms are all glass — so when you sneak in to make a call, everyone can see you. The open work space is the splaying of the private before the panoptic eye.

The suit that kept work contained in its office has given way to the bleed of denim and the continuous, always exposed, always-on work day.

The Radical Relativity of it All

2011-04-22T22:08:00.001-07:00

So the other day I take my 7 year old boy to a skateboard event in San Francisco's Tenderloin — yes, that's the name of the neighborhood and, no, I didn't make it up — sponsored by the city Parks and Rec. The Tenderloin, for those of you that don't know, is one of the more, well, poor neighborhoods of the city — black, Laotian, Vietnamese, and more.

And then there was us — the beast and me, a middle class hebe and his demi-jew spawn. Oh, it was a beautiful, if chaotic, event — loud music, people everywhere, and some professional skater in the middle of it all. My boy, needless to say, was a bit intimated — he had his board and his helmet but he was sticking close to his pops.

Seeing such a young one — he was certainly on the younger side — people were coming up to us to encourage his participation. One such young man introduced himself as Kevin. Kevin was a 19 year old black man. He explained to us that he'd grown up in the SF housing projects and that skateboarding had helped keep him off the streets, out of trouble, and in school. So he suggested that I encourage my boy to skate — you know, to keep him off the streets.

But for me and the boy, skateboarding is about putting more street, as it were, into our lives. We're not trying to avoid trouble; we're trying to get into a little — just a little, of course.

And this brought to light the relativity of social issues — for one community, skateboarding is a way to stay out of trouble; for another, it's a way of welcoming some trouble where there is too little. This disparity makes making sense of social policy insanely difficult.

Take the so-called issue of drugs. I love drugs! My friends love drugs! My whole life we've been dropping, eating, smoking, and snorting so many different things. In other communities, for other people, drugs have been devastating, laying waste to entire populations.

How can we have a conversation, then, about the role of drugs in our society? And, more complicated, how are we to legislate it? The same act — smoking some crack, smoking a joint, blowing lines — means very different things in different communities. But the law must apply to all, equally — at least nominally. We know, of course, that it is not applied equally — that there is enormous racial bias.

And yet I like the idea of police being empowered to choose when to enforce a law and when not to. Because the same act is not equal for all. I know, I know: our police, unfortunately, are not trained to do that. On the contrary, they are trained — perhaps implicitly — to enforce along racial lines. But I'm asking you to listen to what I'm saying: the equal enforcement of the law does not always make sense, especially in a country as wildly diverse as this one. As legislation can't discern, it's the job of the enforcers to do so.

The grand finale of this skateboard event was the giving away of 10 boards to 10 lucky kids, courtesy of this pro skater. When they announced the beginning of the give away, all the kids raced to where the new boards were lined up. My boy, sensing the excitement and wanting a board, began his foray into the group — before Dad yanked his ass back. And I explained to him that those boards were for kids who couldn't afford their own and, as we can afford one, he had to sit this one out.

Because while the law may apply to us all equally, this doesn't mean we are all the same.

Image Life: The Screen Does Not Mediate

2011-04-20T23:46:00.000-07:00

To see, Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues, is to palpate. It is akin to touch only capable of traversing great distances. I can only palpate with my hands those things in my immediate vicinity. But I can palpate things with my eyes that are tens, hundreds, thousands of feet away. It is odd that we might consider vision a cold sense, as if the spatial distance translated into a lack of affect or effect. How do I see something if my body is not touching it in some way? My eyes lay hold of it, take it up, weigh it, consider it, make sense of it in a way that’s different from, but akin to, what my hands do.

The digital camera and its extension — the interweb — is an extension of the eye, an amplification of its ability to palpate the world at great remove, across great distances. When we see an image, we may not have recourse to the other senses (although sound is a key aspect of the digital image) but the eyes are a quite powerful means of taking up the world. Imagine, for a moment, that rather than the eyes being extended, touch was and we could reach around the world with our hands and touch a person on the other side of the planet. Would we say the experience was mediated? Would we say the experience was not real? That it was “only” a grope? Why do we say this about seeing but not about touch?

When we interact in a chatroom with a woman in Romania; when we stare into the projected eyes of a stranger in Nova Scotia; when we discuss our deepest fears with a psychologist across town or across country: when we interact with these images, we move and are moved, literally. That is not a false encounter, a replica of an encounter. Nor is it a mediated encounter. It may not be the same as talking to someone standing next to you but the difference is not the difference between the immediate and the mediated, the real and the replica. Both are real. Both are at once immediate and mediated by our fears, memories, desires, language, eyeballs.

The point is this: the image is real, too, and makes for real encounters. Different than fleshy encounter but real nonetheless.

There’s a prevailing argument that this screen life, this image life, is alienating. Walk in a coffee shop, everyone’s on the computer. Wait at a bus stop, everyone’s looking down at a phone. Indeed, in the reviews of David Fincher's film, The Social Network, the most common comment was that the film articulates a great irony: a man with no friends creates a social network that’s supposed to be about friends. The implication is that Facebook friends are not really friends. Well, of course they’re not. A Facebook friend and a friend I see everyday, a friend I’ve grown up, are different things. Nobody every said they were the same thing. It turns out words have multiple uses depending on their context!

As for people looking down at their screens rather than each other standing at a bus stop, does this mean we are all alienated? Or might it mean we are connected to each other in ways that traverse immediate spatial vicinity? Everyday life turns in many ways who our neighbors are, on what’s happening directly in front of us. But this doesn’t mean we can’t also look down at our screens to see what others are doing across town, across country, across the globe.

Rather than looking at screen life as lacking something, as interfering with something, I’m suggesting we look at the communities it forges, the lives it makes. In many ways, screen life enmeshes the individual in multiple networks, in networks he or she might never have been a part of, to things and ideas and people he or she might never have known. The speed of the image reshapes and proliferates community.

And allows us to fold the world into a temporal origami. A friend in Thailand posts as he rises but we in California are fast asleep. I rise hours later, see the post, reply. There is, then, this very beautiful syncopated communication. Or, even better, this aparallel becoming, a moving with that is neither immediate nor mediated but that enjoys a strange temporality. We live in image time, in screen time.

The Will to Multiplicity

2011-04-18T21:25:00.000-07:00

This or that book, they like to say, is the definitive tome on James Joyce, on the French Revolution, on Monet. But why be definitive? What will propels such a desire?

It seems such a peculiarly imperial drive — to claim the territory, plant the flag, make the laws: this is James Joyce, dammit! This will imagines knowledge as a domain to be colonized with texts that are fixed entities, quantities to be exhausted and hence known — as if knowledge had an end.

But what of the will to multiplicity? What of the will that says, "This is my take on Joyce. What's yours? The more the merrier!"

The will to multiplicity doesn't mean writing with any less rigor (although rigor of research wields its own very special kind of tyranny). Nor does it necessitate hedging its bet (although there's nothing wrong with that — hedging is a complex art and science unto itself). One who writes with such a will is no less passionate, no less engaged with the material than the one who seeks to be definitive. I might even say that the will to multiplicity enjoys a certain intimacy with the material, seeking to see it celebrated, proliferated, extended into new territories.

Just because I recognize that there are other readings doesn't mean I don't stand by mine. Why can't I be passionate, emphatic, about what I have to say while simultaneously relishing the fact that there are other passionate, emphatic readings?

A text — whether it's a book, an oeuvre, a life, an event — is infinite. There are as many ways into a text as there are readers and more. I want to say that a text is all of its possible readings, including those yet to come, including those we cannot yet imagine. The more readings — and the stranger the readings — the more alive that text becomes.

The will to multiplicity enjoys the lack of finality, the impossibility of reaching the end. It knows no reading can claim the land because there is no land per se: the whole thing is in motion, a river, an ocean, a sky. It does not seek to exhaust a text because there is no exhaustion — there is nothing but the act of reading, of reading again, and again, and again.

The will to multiplicity is premised on love — a love of the text, a love for and of and with difference. It is a love of life in all its multihued splendor.

On Generosity

2011-04-16T11:08:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to be generous towards something — towards a book, an idea, a work of art, even a person?

It doesn't mean liking that thing. On the contrary, it means putting judgment aside in order to engage the thing, consider the thing, take it on, take it up. And what can be more generous than that? To consider something entails a certain intimacy, letting it play across you, with your ideas and memories, your blood and tissue and muscle. Generosity entails lending something else your body to see how it plays with your system, how it sets and where it settles — its speeds and intensities, its desires and drives, its shapes and trajectories.

And this means letting this thing have its way rather than making it conform to your pre-established ideals. Needless to say, you will make it conform to you. How could it be any other way? An engagement with the world is singular: this going with that, you going with that book, that word, that photograph. But this is different than making it conform before its had a chance to speak, before its made its way. The best reading is a co-operative event, you and thing together making something new: you take the thing somewhere it didn't know it could go and it returns the favor.

Letting something have its way demands great trust. And so this is another aspect of generosity: assuming the best from something. That is, rather than looking for how something fails, why it sucks, why you hate it, you look for what's great, what's interesting, what has possibility. Why spend your time, your energy, talking about something you don't enjoy, you don't respect? What a perverse thing to do! Generous reading seeks to proliferate a thing, make it as interesting and wondrous as possible! It doesn't reduce; it multiplies.

And, well, if you don't like something, put it down — stop eating, shut the book, leave the theater, click to another page. Life is too fucking short to spend it with shite.

Shed the shite! (Ok, ok: I'm a fan of Irving Welsh's, ergo, "shite.")

Does this mean there's no place for what seems to be negative critique? Does this mean you can't stand up every now and again and say, "This sucks shit"?

Well, I say: if you can walk away, walk away. Better to use your attention, your energy, your vitality on something that makes you more attentive, more energetic, more vital — on something that propels you in the healthiest, most robust fashion possible.

And for those things from which you cannot so simply walk away — things like capitalism — well, I say that in the spirit of generosity, try to make your critique as interesting and nasty as possible.

Teaching Thinking

2011-04-15T23:00:00.000-07:00

To continue in this vein for a moment — that's a phrase I've rarely written and, all of a sudden, I am quite drawn to it and repulsed by it — I love writing and thinking as visceral but the hypochondriac in me wants out of the vein — as I was saying, to continue this line of thought — a line that I hope suggests other lines, a line that meanders and twists and turns, a line that refuses to go straight except when straight is called for — so, yes, this line of inquiry: the academy remains premised on the silo which, in an age of the network, seems rather anachronistic.

Thinking today — and maybe thinking always — is about forging connections, not piling up facts in a closed domain. This is not to say there is not a pleasure in facts, a knowledge to be enjoyed in facts. Foucault would spend hours upon hours, weeks upon weeks, in the archives, discovering a peculiar erotics of the information splay. (Me, I've never been a fact guy. Even as an undergraduate history major, I found facts achingly boring and hence wrote my thesis on Foucault and models of historiography — anything to avoid facts! Which, alas, is not a critique of facts but a critique of me — not in the sense of criticism but in the true sense of critique. I like to move fast in my thinking and facts slow me up; I'd rather make shit up. But many of my favorite thinkers enjoy a very different speed. It all depends on your metabolism.)

How does one go about teaching thinking? How does one go about teaching the skill of making connections? Well, it's through example. See how Foucault makes a connection between jails, prisons, and schools; look how Deleuze makes connections between calculus, architecture, and Paul Klee; look how McLuhan makes a connection between the assembly line and the alphabet. These are not examples we can copy; they are not examples from which we can extrapolate a concept. No, they are examples that show how thinking can happen, the possible directions it can take, the types of leaps and bounds it can make.

Which is to say, it takes practice — practice in linking, assembling, deconstructing, proliferating, meandering meaningfully and not.

Writing, at its best, takes the reader on an unexpected tour of such lines of thinking, such veins of thought. The very movement of the words takes us along a ride through uncharted territory — and, in the process, lays claim to new domains — domains that may very well be sui generis.

One might say — am I saying it? Well, yes and no — that thought is the art of metaphor as metaphor, etymologically, means to transfer, to carry over (doh! a fact! a fact I love, relish, and deploy often). Which might explain the long historical ties between philosophy and poetry and why Lucretius calls himself a poet.

In any case, I wish the kids today learned more of this and less of that — or both this and that.

Amateurs, Experts, Education

2011-04-13T21:00:00.000-07:00

"Who's to say I can't talk about medicine unless I'm a doctor, if I talk about it like a dog? What's to stop me talking about drugs without being an addict, if I talk about them like a little bird? And why shouldn't I invent some way, however fantastic and contrived, of talking about something, without someone having to ask whether I'm qualified to talk like that?" — Gilles Deleuze >>>>

"Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to lose." — Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Massage"

What entitles someone to speak about something? Based on what authority do we speak, write, form our opinions, hold forth on this or that?

The university system is predicated on the structure of the expert — you must major in something. If you pursue gruduate studies, you're asked to specialize within that major: not only are you studying literature, you're studying British 19th century women's literature. Why such specialization? Because this is the only way to become an expert, to exhaust a field of knowledge, all the so-called primary and secondary texts.

But the expert is, by definition, a conservative: his or her job is to conserve that domain of knowledge, to say what gets in and what gets out. As Barthes argues in "Death of the Author," this pedagogy is built on the priest model: the expert is the conduit between the lay person and the Word.

The expert is a mortician, presiding over dead knowledge.

Ah, but the amateur is a lively bloke who pays no heed to inherited categorical distinctions. The amateur reads what he reads, writes what he writes, thinks what he thinks. The amateur makes his way on the fly without regard to official knowledge. He makes connections in surprising ways, traversing domains along trajectories no one could have imagined. The amateur strolls and meanders through the experts' various domains, creating new byways and through ways as he goes.

If the expert is an imperialist, laying claim to a domain, the amateur is a perpetual poacher, taking some here, some there in order to create new shapes and possibilities — that may very well be washed away as the tide comes in like an Andy Goldsworthy sculpture.

And this is what the network demands — the ability, the skill, to make connections, to cross domains, to traverse fields of presumed expertise. The academy and its experts are premised on the pyramid: a rigid hierarchical structure. But the new age is an age of the network, of every which way, of all ways at once.

The academy is an embarrassing anachronism. And its gatekeepers — the so-called stars of the university — are gravediggers, embalmers, and undertakers.

What, then, will be the university of the future? What is the education of the network? Well, it's based on skills, on how to handle information, not just memorize it. It should always already be interdisciplinary.

When I taught at the San Francisco Art Institute's graduate center, most students didn't study photography or painting or sculpture: they congregated in what SFAI called "new genres," a field that considers all materials fair game.

This is not to say that one shouldn't learn how to handle paint or cameras or learn about differential equations and chemical reactions. It's to say that such knowledge is not the end-point, not the goal. The point of network education is to breed perpetual amateurs, those who are always taking risks, making connections that risk madness and nonsense but that perpetually flirt with beauty and the delirium of the new.

Towards a Manifesto for Joyful Revolution

2011-04-11T21:40:00.000-07:00

I just found this in a folder on my desktop dated about 2 years ago. I don't remember writing it. I kind of like it even though it's a bit goofy and abbreviated. I'd love to continue it, perhaps collectively.

We affirm the quality of life over the deranged demands of “work.”

We believe pleasure is the goal and we are not talking about the pleasure of convenience, of commodity fetishism, of endlessly new things, of guilt ridden romps in rub and tug parlors. We believe pleasure is slow and permeates body and mind — as if the two were even distinct. By pleasure we mean enjoyment, not consumption.

We embrace complexity as we know things in this life are multivalent.

We believe it’s good to be singular, to enjoy strange and surprising views on things — and we reject, at every turn, the attempts of the media to reduce everything to one side or the other; of Hollywood to reduce the great human complexity to pat narratives that reaffirm the same old bourgeois bullshit of family, hetero love, marriage, work, death.

We affirm the right to move slowly — and in cafés that are not extensions of the workplace.

We believe in the pure gift, exchange without profit.

We believe in a basic public civility that respects the privacy, and strangeness, of people — unless it is only through incivility that we can find our strangeness.

We embrace change but reject the capitalist fetish of the new.

We believe in things — but not things that give a temporary buzz then break. We believe things should be respected as part of life, that they should be well made, well considered, and should propel pleasure, dignity, civility.

We believe education needs to be freed from the tyranny of the classroom and its state sponsored curricula and its petty pedantic academics. Education needs to permeate not just the day but the life.