Some Thoughts on Complexity

I want to say that complexity is an emergent — and, as such, unfixed — multiplicity that is not a chaos. Complexity is always on the cusp of order.

The univocal cannot be complex. However, one note or one tone that endured just so and reverberated just so might be complex in that it forges multiplicity in its singular wake.

As necessarily a multiplicity, complexity entails a quantification — not one voice but many voices.

But this "many" is not really a more as much as it's a differentiation (or is it differenciation? Tell me, all you mathematicians).

Complexity is a quality — the quality of multiple trajectories that don't unify or stay fixed and yet is not a chaos.

Complexity is not complicated. Nor is it convoluted.

This post, however, may be.

What is it about television?

My thinking about television is very un-TV-like — I think about it rarely, explosively, but not clearly. My thinking about TV is a Hollywood blockbuster movie: lots of fireworks without much payoff.

It's as if, due to its proximity, I can't get TV in view. It skirts my field of vision but remains, nagging, in my periphery.

So this is what I've been thinking of late. There are three main characteristics of the medium, each with sub-sets or modes of inflection: Duration, Repetition, Intimacy.

Duration: A television program, perhaps due to its intimacy, has the ability to endure. Because it's in our house where we have sustenance and because the cost is near nil, a TV program can stay on continuously. Movies, needless to say, do not have this option.

Visual art, of course, endures continuously. But TV and a painting repeat in very different ways, in very different rhythms, shifting the terms of their respective endurance.

To sound less, well, philosophical about it: a TV show can be on the air for a long freaking time. And this endurance affords it a series of opportunities and begins to blur the line separating duration from repetition and intimacy.

Escalation: A TV show can escalate — escalate chaos, intensity, time, characters — and it can do so infinitely. A movie has 2, 4, 12 hours at best. A TV show can never end. It can just keep ramping up — or down, for that matter — approaching its own dissolution but never getting there. There is a more, a quantitative quality, that's part of TV that's not in other media. Weeds approaches this technique, this possibility of the medium: How deep can the Botwin family get? How far out? Is it infinite? What sets its limit? Our attention? Its ability to hold our attention?

Complexification: Perhaps a sub-set of escalation, complexification is a TV show's ability to multiply relations. This can be a more but it can be an internal more, a splitting of the one into multiple parts, one relation into many. Think of Tony and Carmilla's relationship or Tony and Dr. Melfi's — it gets more and more complex over time.

Intimacy: Enmeshed in our lives, holding court amidst the kitchen and toilet, the couch and din of life, TV sprawls alongside us, moving with us. TV is deeply wound up with the economy of our mental health — it's how we relax, how we get excited, how we share time. TV is not a special event. It is domesticated, through and through. And this builds profound relationships between viewer and viewed: People gathered for the final episode of MASH, and wept.

Repetition: Everything repeats — everything vital, that is. A painting repeats: it keeps offering itself to us in an infinite series of uncannily fresh experiences. But TV has the ability to repeat differently, to put its entire self into the fray, to do and undo itself over and over again — like a lava lamp, only with more factors and colors in the mix.

One aspect of TV's ability to repeat is its opportunity for banality. Take Seinfeld. The show never escalates, no relations become more complex. It relishes its repetition of the everyday. (Needless to say, "banality" here is not a pejorative but a descriptor.)

Now consider The Twilight Zone. There is no continuity. Each episode is discrete. And yet, obviously, it's not. It is territorial, after all — it is a zone, a place. Only it's an odd kind of place, a place of perpetual transition, an in-between, a twilight. It's a temporal zone. Which is a way of describing repetition.

Intimacy: TV has an unbelievable power to forge intimate bonds between viewer and viewed. It can be drug-like: must see TV, as if it were crack or heroin. TV is not only in our lives. It is usually the focal point, quite literally, of our space.

And yet I still can't get the damn thing in view.

Modes of Habitation

I moved recently. And I had a long time friend over who commented on that fact that it seemed like every other apartment I've ever had — and he's seen at least eight different places I've lived.

Now, there is nothing particularly novel about this observation. We've all noticed it in ourselved and our friends, especially as we get older (obviously). A friend moves and he immediately replicates his old space.

We could say there's the same stuff, more or less — same couch, same table, same art. But that's not always the case. In my new place, everything is new. And yet it is still very much my space.

No, it's not that there's the same stuff, it's that there's a common distribution of mood — the same distribution of stuff, a common way of organizing chaos and order. We all have our unique thresholds for visual and aural disorder. It's not simply being clean or not, ordered or not. We each enjoy a distinctive signature of visual noise, an elaborate algorithm: pristine here, scraps there, piles, scattershot papers, stacks, a calculus of dust and dishes and noise and smell.

Don't underestimate smell.

And then there's light. We replicate the play of darkness and light, how the sun shines, how we light the space.

And I love this. I love that we each make sense of space in our own way and that this way forges a niche in the becoming of the world. Just as ants make their kinds of homes, moles theirs, birds theirs and so on, so do we each, individually, make this organization of the world, at least in the limited space we call home.

Publishing via Thought Catalog

For the next month, I will be publishing a series of essays via Thought Catalog. Here is my archive of TC articles to date:

>All I Want is Time to Enjoy This Life: A Series of Personal and Pissed Off Critiques of Capitalism

> Shopping for Sex Online, Web 2.0 Style

> That Limp Sensation: Web Porn and the Architecture of Desire

> My Fetish Jealousy (an audio essay)

> Tequila ‚ My Love, My Lifeline, My Teacher

> Television on the Wire: Extension, Expansion, Proliferation

> The Horror of Whole Foods, or The Obama Effect

> Five Terrific and Very Different Sexual Books by Men

> A Less Bloody Ethics: On True Blood

> Rethinking Environmentalism

> Inglorious Basterds

> The Scholastic Swindle: Quashing Adolescence