User:Ssstephen/Reading/On the Inconvenience of Other People
2: The Commons
L O V E W I L L
A L W A Y S F A I L
T R Y A N Y W A Y
T R Y A N Y W A
Y T R Y A N Y
W A Y T R Y
A N Y
W A
Y
1: Sex
once you let in the deaths, all that follows is life
but I'm so afraid of dying how is this possible.
concepts as tools with which to loosen other concepts. to loosen an object is to make it available to transition.
counterconcepts. what else can we do? where else can we go? can you describe where we are and what were already doing differently? can you draw different borders and make different predictions?
Christina sharpe, in the wake
[an infrastructure of feeling] confirms and solidifies the sediment of many proximate kinds of sociality, including pasts and futures as they express themselves in the present. to think infrastructure... is to focus on the generation of forms of life that broadly bind and extend relationality and the world seen as substance and concept.
infrastructure as the generation of life and its relations, world seeing as world building and poeisis.
a glitch is an interruption within a transition. a glitch is also a claim about the revelation of an infrastructural failure. the repair or replacement of broken infrastructure is necessary for any form of sociality to extend itself, but a few definitional problems arise from this observation. one is defining what distinguishes a transitional infrastructure from the ordinary relational scene that generates the ongoingness of the world through some cobbled-together inventive and repetitive activity; the other is about what repair, of the beyond of glitch, looks like both generally and amid a catastrophe.
crisis infrastructuralism as an epistemology emerges when we are compelled to understand that nothing from above or on the outside is holding the world together solidly; the emergent threads become manifestly loose and knotty and multiply while still reproducing some aspects of life.
aaaaaaaaahh 😬 where are we going what the fuck is happening?
terms for transition
this sounds lovely, as opposed to code of conduct or other behaviour defining laws. our terms are based on our boundaries and help us define a safe space together, they limit possiblity in a way that protects and encourages moving together like electromagnets in a cathode ray tube. there is something we are moving towards, we are a projection in a material sense.
later we learn that the place stinks, too, denoting not that people have died here but that they have lived. lived life had an impact on the room, and the atmosphere is thick with the enigma of what it all added up to and why it was abandoned.
is it? the room doesn't even seem that abandoned there are two people here and they might even be in love. i dont think LB is right to say what they are experiencing, which seems completely compulsive but without any obsession, is not a form of love. it is certainly detatched at some level.
Tom, like most romantics, aspires to tweak conventionality and call it revolution.
in the context of the film and this book this is presented as a bad thing, is it? do revolutions have to be intense to get your respect?
in these architectures of intermediacy, people experience the ways that they do not line up with their usual selves or identities. they are in transition: they do transitional things, eat strange food, consume strange media, comporting themselves unusually. they have suspended identities because they are somewhere amid what David Bowie calls "the stream of warm impermanence".
the erotic relationship as a transitory space or "non-place". this all sounds fun but also so disorienting. it could take effort to swim here but of course it would be better to simply surf the current. this means trusting and giving up control. and what then if the experience is still unpleasant, or offputting, or even hurting or causing damage? if it takes effort and control to make this not even better in the sense of improvement but better in the sense of tolerable? is it ever right to swim instead of surf, and when?
at stake is finding an idiom of reciprocity without fetishism, without building genealogies, kinship, or a "life"
desire for the transitional event itself rather than the effect.
that's the joke of the zipper, the donut, the sink, all form, insofar as form is not a thing but a relation.
2: the commons
its not only that you can't guarantee consequences in advance. its that you can't be certain how you'll feel about or be able to live on in the disturbance you created, that comes from the substantial challenge to subjectivity, reciprocity, and worlds that, in some sense, you desired. conflict is inevitable, reciprocity is always negotiated, all objects remain enigmas, and ends do not usually provide a sufficient summary judgement of a project's value.
i dont think it was meant in this way but this fits well in the context of creative labour or the creative process generally. or labour generally? where are the boundaries between acting and making and working? are those boundaries useful? being and becoming and skiing and skicoming. where does the dusk stop and the dawn begin? depending on the season there can sometimes be no true night, assuming there are seasons. are circles round? how round? what about the moon? what does it spin around? its axis or the earth or the sun or if you give it 270 million years maybe something further.
the practice of an aesthetics of interruption where any observation releases a pressure both to stay there forever and to refuse to become absorbed in the mirror of a suspension that refuses time.
Fluron tempting a life filled with treasure, but it's a waste of time: refuse, refuse.
desire to witness complicity sometimes feels like alchemical hygiene.
astral mirror holding a pure reflection. aparecio en el vidria la palabra "libertad". o swallow, swallow.
collectively, the dispossessed self-possess... their coordination not only counters the saturation of everyday defeat by work and absence of work, but also stages a becoming that might lead to belonging. if it works, the revised bodily habit of nonsovereignty creates a collective orientation, a shared subjectivity. it does not erase individuality but creates a mutually transforming affect-sphere where it has no "right" to be.
collaboration clears space for the common, which has no form but offers a point of return through the creative use of proximity, improvised synchronicity, and spiky kinships no less intimate for the ambivalence.
synchronisation is completely form though? how did we decide to be synchronised, are people recognising it, are we enjoying it should we celebrate it? where is responsibility in this, do people have expectations? wouldnt it be cool if i jumped and you caught me? but you will catch me right?
”we are in it together!" who is "we"? what is "it"? fantasies of democracy as the experience of collectivity equal exposure to vulnerability tried to establish a ground where there is no ground.
commons-ing means inconveniently building and feeling together within but against the standards and norms of capitalism and democracy as it stands. or what if we just. would be ok if i. if you dont mind were gonna. an episode that doesnt fit.
3: On being in life without wanting the world
the prolific splits of affect and attention in the face of disturbing events and insecure objects provide opportunities to hold out for life detached from the damage wrought by the usual ways that making up a life can use up a person.
If the objects are shattered then they will of course become affectively more confusing split or complicated. There is an emotional investment required for this undefining and refining. It is not something that should be thrown upon others or entered into lightly. And yet it escapes another more usual type of damage and using up.
the very spectre of self-induced finitude appears in a dissociative poetics when life as an x keeps on hitting the limit
sometimes it feels like I'm clipping
an exhausted, historically saturated being moves around life without unconscious fantasy or compulsive symbolisation filling up "the hole in the real". The protagonist's dissociative sensorium sees the world and is in it, and at the same time has turned elsewhere—because it must, because it needs to, because it did, or to test out ways of flourishing.
The obligations of being without fantasy and symbolisation, of not wanting to be here. The drive of being in an undesired world.
Here is another way of thinking about object loss: when an ordinary form of life is radically disturbed such that a subject's or people's sense of continuity is broken, what results is the release of affective enmeshment from its normative attachment habits. In other words, when one's attention is bound to something that organises one's energy or interest, that very relation, for good or ill, provides an infrastructure for understanding and moving through a situation or world... the energy released from a broken analogy... the freed energy and attention can be inconvenient, even frightening, because without the object organising your inconvenience drive or your fantasies of the stabilising object, you're now at loose ends that are threatening; at the same time, those energies are available for recomposing the world, causality, and possibilities. This is how dissociation can be at once a blockage and a defense whose cleavages can threaten and protect the attachment to life.
Oof sometimes this book gets really heavy it should come with a warning. It's so difficult to live without the infrastructure as it was and is. But it was and is unbearable. It has to be broken, it has to change, something's got to give.
the question is not how to lose an object but how to loosen it, how to make it available for different kinds of attachment, use, form, concept, scene, world... disintegrated existence as a thing in itself, an effect of subordination, a necessary transition, and sometimes as a confirming mode of being in a world defined by a menacing threat that is structural, if by 'structural' we mean the activity of predictable life within complexly knotted fields of force, resources, and activity that shape our imaginaries of value and of what it's possible to do about them.
Disintegrated existence as an effect, transition and mode of being. Disintegration as in not integrated, not part of the structure or at least a bit loose. Allowing new imaginaries of value and possibility. How do things disintegrate? This will damage the structure for sure (great, rock on) but there are people involved here be careful and caring.
if unlearning it isn't an explicit project of loosening one's and the world's anchoring objects, how else can one inhibit going along with things because of the sour realism "it is what it is"? Here there's an offering of how to construct and occupy the historical present.
I got you a historical present. Oh geez, thanks so much. I kept the receipt in case it doesn't fit. Ok I'll try it but yeah maybe.
saturated by the flashbacks that reminds him of Jim's sustaining love and insecure about how to proceed through space and the present, his flirtation with the possibility of a world would feel like a pretence and a defeat of the psychological, social, and political project of being frank about desire.
So which is it, do we be frank about it, is it all a pretence? I don't know the difference between the object and the objet a. And I don't really want to know the difference maybe? If the lack is there anyway why not just desire whatever you want who cares. Whatever makes you happy, in the hypothetical future. Time doesn't ever exist, never has never will. Fuck this shit.
what are we living for if our idea of being a protagonist is all wrong, overinflated in order for us to protect ourselves from our ambivalence about needing the world we receive and our confusion about what to do with tenderness and vulnerability to formal and informal power?
Ummmmmm. The answer in is fact other people but it's not a good answer. It comes from a place of personal insecurity and lack of internal trust. The ambivalence is absolutely in the sense it it meant in this book generally: an extremely complicated affect of not giving a fuck and being extremely dependant on. Ambi on the edges. Maybe something more centred would be better here but this is not my experience so far.
then what does it mean to give up plotting for life?... can the freedom from a plot and a sitting with the modal multivalences of affect provide space not only for resting and thinking but also for loosening up into dissociation's alternative prospects?
...vide space...
intense flailings at establishing patterns... traumatic formations... 'history is what hurts' and turns the sensorium into a survival zone that tries to defend against the damage of dissociation.
The world has been affectively destructured through catastrophe, it this attempt at connecting just an attempt at making sense? What the fuck is going on? What are you doing here Stephen?
for Caruth, any cure would involve converting dissociation into narrative, or whatever form of encounter would allow affective stuckness to get moved into a new pattern-form somewhere. It does not require a healing narrative that erases the symptom, but a virtually physical sense that the very movement of figuration is a movement of reconfiguration that can loosen the symptom into material for a better mode of existing. Adorno responds in a similar fashion to this imperative not to give trauma the last laugh, this time by reimagining lyric subjectivity. The lyric mode splits the subject into a symptom of the kinds of capitalist alienation that both provide an argument for work as a space of self-realization and allow for love of all sorts to perform a kind of freedom, whether in marriage or friendship. The time-boxing that constitutes the capitalist logic of the everyday forecloses the political resonance of life-reproductive action for reshaping the general world. A dissociated aesthetic, then, would be both evidence of damage and a pathway to an overcoming that does not neutralise being overwhelmed but makes room for affective creativity at the level of description and association, which in turn changes what the object is and can do.
I can't focus enough to take this all in right now but I can see there are things there for me. I'm distracted by my music and I'm tired and super emotional this week. I need rest but I also need to keep moving. I need to pay attention but I'm already doing it, more than ever before. I'm turning my skin into a map of everything inside it and I'm spinning the world is spinning around me is the the world around me is spinning around in the world spinning around me spinning. In a self centred way? Ideally. If I revolve then the world in a physical way revolves around me and I can locate myself: the blurry thing in the centre of the rest of the blur. A different type of dizziness that draws attention to the original one bit also covers it up. Maybe they're not different. The spinning mixes things up.
Christopher bollas describes mood as the affective leftover of childhood anxiety triggered into animation by an encounter or scene in the present.
something slower and more simple at first, more proximate to relief than repair, and that uses the meanwhile structure to generate a sense of the impasse and its potential transformation into next actions.
the very movement of figuration is a movement of reconfiguration that can loosen the symptom into material for a better mode of existing, but relief before repair.
drawing lines of association among what's been separated and deemed inconvenient builds a case for refiguring what passes as structure.
I suppose this is what I would like to practice, summarised quite well. Well that's handy.
Tompkins 'on the gelatinous'
the middle of life is an endless rhythm of incidents in the life... These episodes hit surprising limits: you never know when they're going to end because situations stop without achieving climax or closure, or anything we could recall as a shape whose causes are resolved in consequences... There are no beginnings, only scenes to be in the middle of.
Oh my god this is only the first paragraph I've read today and already so much.
Anthony reed thinks of the lyrical subject of her "I" as not needing to be self-identical not needing to be universal: local and on the move.
Anthony reed, freedom time
why resist puns when you are trying desperately to stay in life
puns break language; they're dissociative play. Agression and fun ungoverned... drawing lines of association among what's been separated and deemed inconvenient builds a case for refiguring what passes as structure
to squat and move around in the ellipsis denies norms their capacity to solidify the referent, to confront its uncanny substance as a gelatinous object of knowledge