So, for a moment forget that there will be hours and hours of NBA basketball to watch tonight, tomorrow and on a glorious Easter Sunday as well as the fact that your plans tonight probably aren't that great and just sit back, relax and let Mark Jack make some sense.
Until next week, my Puddlers.
Change the Subject
Mark Jack
There is far too little time now to recommend you to the structures of the world.
Bach continues writing variations on unworthy themes and the pens of the best and the worst writers are merely filling in what little space is left on the page. Best, I think, to bide our time until the ink is everywhere present, then perform a sort of negative collage. What I mean is, we are all, to begin with, such multi-layered beauties, but there are restrictions and over extension is a problem we too readily approach, and maybe it would be wise to stop short of theorizing a continuation of self into and through every artifact we create or simply handle. A little nakedness, I’m just trying to say, behooves us. It is the certainty of this, perhaps, that calls into being such thoughtful packaging.
However, the multitude is not so much fickle as it is brutish and the atrocities, first suggested by a few men’s speeches, are given coherence by the audience. I do not want, therefore, to extend and fracture my personality through device, though nor do I wish to essentialize the unity of my self—poor back, weak knee, slow and ambling mind. There is no clear remedy here and so I refuse to name a problem, but like all bodies, we must orbit something.
So, there is a tyranny of self in all our digital outreach. Even as producers, it seems we want less to provide content than produce audience, or, rather, subjects.
Yet I feel cheap and formal and unitary and forlorn.
Soft departures from such subjectivity are the hallmarks of bourgeois expectations of a continuity that is in reality more of a siphoning off of forcefulness. We have, then, two strange actions towards distinction: one is the unity of self, performed by a faux anonymous gaze and the immediacy of polling, and the other is the diffusion of this falsely unitary self through the channels of specialized intent dug sluice-like to accommodate easy, undisruptive flow. We are created falsely, then drained.
In Egypt, bodies are still throwing rocks while the internet revolutionizes calmly, democratically our outrage which we express by following Twitter feeds. The free flow of information is not revolutionary without the critical responses of embodied agents. The still somewhat rhizomatic structure of the internet is only misleadingly revolutionary as it refuses to acknowledge the terrified, fortified, embodied disjunction that is one existing physically in the world. We must not neglect the ethical imperative of spatial and temporal living for the false freedom of digitization.
The limitations of physicality coupled with limitations of such as a metaphor for self require of each subjectivity a recognition (at least) of the ethical dilemma of establishing, for others (as mirror), our subjectivity through events that are not directly reducible to language, as language through said events and others must, and unavoidably does, bend and shift. We must, therefore, rely on points of reference only partially held in common so as to triangulate the location and importance of traumatic/formative event. This is not ignored in the various protests of the last few months, but we approach a haughty ignorance of it here in the west. We place an importance on the arena of organization where the protesters seem to operate with empowered freedom, but they do not truly exercise this misnamed right until they fill the streets. My only question is whether we in America have recourse to the same forceful physicality. It appears that the Wisconsin protestors were, in their physical presence presented a less ethical preponderance, but then in our civil society, our supremely late capitalist society we have so many outlets for our meek anger. The last time any one lost their temper was Seattle and a lot of the people on the street there were simple assholes; I met quite a few.
Love,
Mark
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