Something washes over me as I go to a downtown credit union to cash my paycheck--guilt. Some whiskey-eyed old black man often stands inside the bus stop, scanning the passersby for willing donors to his pass-time.
Why do I feel guilty? I suppose he has less than me, but I cannot readily judge that other than by what I see, which is an old, black man with a winter coat pulled up such that only an aging smokey face pokes out, accented by bulbous chapped lips that have buffeted many a winds and many a 'no thanks.'
I was preparing myself for such an encounter then a wave of indignation washed over me. "How should I be the shill for this guy's habit?' That among other emotions and their justifying sentences belted out of my mind's mouth. At their core was a "shared" experience with poverty. I place the word in quotes because all is highly subjective--even the state of poverty. And in the politics of signification and the mobilization of words, "poor" and "poverty" have had found themselves lobbed like so many Civil War cannonballs among the indignant and the indigent. And their supporters, that veritable army of social workers, weekend philanthropists, and Sunday apologists, who toss their pie-charts and pathos into the litany of opinions about poverty and how to address it, force a schism in my thoughts about my vacillation of feelings.
Here I stand. Here I drive, edging closer and closer, city block by city block, until I see that familiar navy blue figure standing at the edge of the bus shelter. He is staring at me. I quickly avert my eyes and try to emphasize my own filth from work and the DIY repairs showing on my car. I am but one star in a grand constellation that I'd identify as poverty. But between you and me, I had choices, and therefore I am not yet completely a victim of circumstance. After all, I am white, male, educated, and I work for my older brother at a steel mill.
Hold on a second. Where did I go wrong? Shouldn't I have used that big brain of mine to go into finance so that I could scan markets, create exotic derivatives, sell trading packages, and make and lose lots of money really fast? A job like that requires a lot of communication skills--not only phone calls but face time with potential buyers. I could have been a whale by now, literally swaying markets by my vast and purposive imprint upon them. I could make solar big, or buy up a small web company that specializes in providing a small, yet handy tool for social networking sites.
Hold on a minute. I went to school and after about 2 months all of my doubts drowned out any opinion I had otherwise. By my second semester I was riding on auto-pilot, and was getting better at it. How strange that is. Then I proposed to throw it all away by going to junior college. That plan was shouted down by lots of 'monied' relatives. And by 'monied' they threw a couple grand, collectively, at my 'indecision.' A lot of good that did me. I still owe a rather stubborn 15 grand in outstanding tuition.
I am digressing from my point. I had chances and choices, the kind that are made available by one's placement within a network that isn't one's design. I was born into a family that had a modest income and the wherewithal to push me toward academics. I did just that, but I saw it as an end in itself. That was my first bad choice. Instead of choosing classes for their intrinsic value to my personal interest and enrichment I should have done what any self-respecting middle statistic male does: go away to school, join a fraternity, and go into a relatively straightforward profession, then use the ties gained via the fraternity to land a first or subsequent lasting job. No, I went commando, solo that is, into higher education only to find myself in my junior year, by course work, without a major and with a serious existential crisis facing me. I had to pick a major. And what did I do? I did what any self-respecting student does; I sought out student career services. The first thing I did was go take a lengthy Myer's-Brigg Type Indicator on the day after I got so drunk that I smashed by car into a telephone pole. That test indicated that, among a slew of potential careers, I was made for urban planning. Aha! My Simcity playing payed off! The career counselor sent me onto the MBA track.
I started out in the business course track, took some computer courses, and fell quickly in love with the early software and internet mark-up language. That was 1997. I was at the threshold of another exploding career track. I jumped out of business into computer science, and landed my first substantive course--Java Programming. The teacher was completely not there. He showed us a Sun Microsystems CEO talk about the web of the future and how we would be basically using computing appliances, not the free-standing cat hair collectors we were using then. And the program we had to run was on CD-ROM. I didn't even have one on my computer at home. When I tried to find time in the computer lab no spaces were available. At the zero hour I went to my cousin's place and fired up the software while he and his buddies played D&D in the other room. I got nowhere and soon found myself dropping the class. "W" showed up on my transcript, and I once again reshuffled my career choices through my degree options.
I settled into Communication Studies. What a vague concept that one was. It worked out. I stayed on the cusp of obsolescence, studying old-world journalism and editing, while scanning photo slides into a digital dark room called a photo shop. The whole thing was laughable. I graduated with a CD showcasing my ability to time the swapping of low-resolution hockey pictures to the tempo of a Sepultura song. Wow. That is all I did. I really had little to show other than that. I had no interest in turning my passing interest in this ability into an occupation. Once again, it was the job that dogged me. Nothing sang to me. Nothing. And so I did what any self-respecting white, male did. I applied to graduate school. That was an easy one. My advisor during my undergraduate education more or less secured a spot for me. Another sure-fire window of opportunity was opened for me, and so I went back to school for a Master's Degree.
I didn't regret a second of my Master's Degree, nor did I regret much of my Doctoral studies. Times got tough, sure. I doubted myself, like no other. But when it came time to finish up, I choked up. And here's where I am now. I was scheduled to graduate in 2006. It is 2012, and I work in a steel mill, ABD. I studied cultural studies, social theory, technology studies, communication theory, and critical theory. Now I apply these skills as I stand in place with a blaze orange and yellow reflective blazer--much like what crossing guards wear--and watch fire. Yes, I watch fire. I watch to make sure that a one-in-a-thousand accident doesn't happen while my co-workers are on break or are leaving for the day. Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer eat your collective Jewish hearts out. Here I am, the dilettante of a million little things with no real, substantive thing to show for my education other than some alienating and obsolete vocabulary.
And who is to blame? I could blame me. I could finish my dissertation and find a fitting job at a university. Damn, I hated my last one. I fucking loathed it. The whole ugly apparatus of higher education showed its milky sac of marketing, its wreaking caudal of efficiency education, its waxy reproductive opening of community, and I worked with the whole rank underside knee-deep in its malodorous smart classroom. Day-in, day-out it was a low point in my life, so low in fact that after I quit my job I basically took to drinking and playing a fantasy video game to avoid the reality that I knew for a whole year. Once again, I had the luck and wisdom of white maledom to save me from standing at the bus shelter in my navy parka staring vaguely, teary eyed at passersby. No that won't do for me., I had money saved up, and so I watched from atop the perch of a 30-beer cube of Busch Lights as the economy went into a second notorious depression. It was nothing but notorious and depressive, for even from the haze of 13-plus beers an evening I saw nothing great about it. And it was hardly recessive, no goddammit, this was its dominant trait.
So in my long journey down a memory trace I have nothing truly substantial to show for my vagabondage other than it shared a similar root to all forms of slavery, be it self-enforced by a routine, other-enforced by an oppressive whip, or simply a consequence of one's Dasein, of one being thrown into a situation well out of one's control. No one blames the child of poverty, the crack baby, the child of alcoholic parents, or the serially molested foster child. Why blame the man at the bus shelter just because he is drunk? Maybe he drinks to cope like so many others?
And so like the serially molested foster child whose ass became a fistula and must shit into a bag at his side, I too am a victim under a milder set of serially abusive situations. And most of these were of my own creation. At the moment that I made meaning of a challenging stimulus I retreated to a depressive state of self-doubt. And so, I ducked in and out of opportunities and only stayed until the water reached so high. This explains why I am currently the fire watch for a small maintenance crew repairing steel beams around a larger power plant inside a steel mill. There, I freeze my ass off, and am quite luckier than the bus shelter black man, for I make 22 dollars and hour, plus some time and a half for waiting after my colleagues have left for that one-in-a-thousand fire to start. Hell, I've never even used a fire extinguisher. Perhaps this life is truly a scam of the highest order. I can either find hope in the scam filled life to grant me a reprieve, or, like the bus shelter black man clad in navy, I can go about slavishly within the bosom of my circumstances and etch out a routine. I will call this range of awareness and opportunity 'reality' and my reaction to it will be 'common sense.' For there, I and the bus shelter black and his navy blue coat and split lips share destinies. Perhaps we share these destinies with countless others of various stations in life. We find within our situation a range of capabilities that come to our awareness by feeling out these surroundings, call it 'life' and judge our actions 'agency' and reflect upon the persistent facts of our life our 'common sense.' And where our lives intersect others we each retreat to some kind of pidgin that both secures our ego-identities while granting us some kind of performative space to either engage the other for money or sneer at them with indignation. I am finding the most common pidgin is to pretend like a person is not even there.
We are all victims of that envelope of awareness of our situation that one may objectively call consciousness. This situation is the fount from which we came; it serves as our context; and our interaction with it forms our sense of agency. Nothing new has been said on this line or on any of the others above, for each word is itself a victim of sense-making. I cannot wrest from these things anything that hasn't been said before, nor can you understand why I write what I write. Even if you fool yourself into thinking such, all you have done is entertained some discourse genre that you've taken to living with as a credo. And even the tidiness with which I call someone's constellation of knowledge and vocabulary for talking about certain things in their world is an illusion that I cannot begin to completely put to some kind of empirical test. And we perch upon the precipice of a multitude of abysses. And their realness is a mirror of our convictions to the words we believe by and the signifying to which we put them.
I am not to blame. That man at the bus shelter is not to blame. This world, in all its buzzing confusion is a vast orchestration of many actions begun before us that will continue after us. We are machinery in this type of world. We don't speak its words, they speak us. Communication is ventriloquy. I am its dummy.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Thursday, December 6, 2012
running away
I recall a vibrant moment in my life back in the summer of 2002.
I was planning to move to a new state, meet new friends, start a new program. And I had the naive idea that I'd start a new life.
Namely, I wanted to drop my porn viewing habits and perhaps commit to less TV and more books, more coffee but less of the pot. I quickly found that one can only run away from what they leave behind, but they can never leave behind themselves.
I recall a very depressing and lonely moment in the Fall of 1995.
I was attending a university, on the premed track in my freshman year. The first week was stressful, mostly because I dragged every book that I had to purchase to and from my Monday classes. They were back-to-back lectures in college algebra, biology, and chemistry. I through I'd test out of the math. I ruefully accepted chemistry. I embraced biology. During some evenings I went to my job at the grocery store. There, in my solitary profession of refacing shelves, I'd fantasize about walking away from it all. In this little solitary fantasy I planned to begin walking somewhere, I'm not sure, north perhaps. I just wanted to walk into a town where I had no money or obligations other than to live. There, I would start over.
Why I so quickly turn to a fantasy of leaving behind one's stressful life I don't know. This stress management option was quite stressful in and of itself. Why would I consider running away from a life, from friends, from loved ones, from a warm home and inviting bed? The choice is extreme to turn one's back on a life, a job, friends, loved ones, and to arrive 'new' with tattered shoes and dirty clothes in a strange town. It's not a practical stress avoidance option, but it's the one that returns like a siren's call every so often.
Where has it been lately? I am unsure what happened to this desire to leave. It has matured perhaps. Yes, that's what has happened. Instead of me wanting to run away I acquire some skills and parlay them with previous skills into a new profession. I am finding what I could be in a world that seemingly doesn't want me. I intentionally avoid preparing for a big sell, yet at the same time I could envision myself as a decent salesperson if the need were to arise.
So now my current dream is to return to school. Why? I like to learn. Most of all, I like to dream, and what better place to do it in an academic setting built around your future? Colleges are dream factories, places where I can dream, places that will eagerly slurp up what funding I can acquire to return to school.
I guess I am unsure what will come of these choices other than more deferment of a life trajectory worthy of a retirement portfolio and of a socially traded datum of class, occupation, and consumer profile. I aspire, as we speak, of being a non-entity. Or rather I want to disappear from here and reappear there, and never ever settle into one profession for life. I suppose I could grow weed all of my life, if I could get away with it. As of late, I have been unable to do even that.
Now the final question is what does this tell me of my neurology? I know that is a somewhat passe question, given how brains are one of many readily tweaked and state-adjusted concepts-entities that consumer society caters to with its speed drinks, vitamin cocktails, and "brain growing" puzzle sites. Two questions emerged. First, why does talk of the brain with any definitiveness raise my hackles? Secondly, what could one say about my neurology given my desire to constantly shift out of routine?
I'll tackle the second. This should be easy. This notion that the world out there reveals something about the world in here is nothing new. It would suggestively support a dual recognition of the importance of both the world in shaping people and people in shaping the world that shapes people. Somewhere in that dual process entity you will find an answer to the question I posed. In such a world lacking worn routine I would suppose that changes are a way for me to 'reformat' some area of my brain, to force me to rethink and relearn my world, reestablish an umwelt, and the such. I have nothing against routine. In fact, I am a slave to my routines, but I am also slavishly aware of my routine's effect upon me. So in that sense, the breeding ground and proving ground for my neurology is in forced changes to my routine. So now that I have both engaged in one of my pet peeves and explained one aspect of my own self I will conclude and move on.
The conclusion I'd draw about my neurobiology is that I want to shape it through ruptures in routine. I don't want to allow neuronal networks to establish around a paucity of data. Rather, I'd like to put them networks to making sense of new environs. Now, what does this tell me about my peeve?
My peeve is connected indirectly to the way I posed and answered my first question. I'd rather change my brain behavior through forcing change upon myself than through some 'brain teaser' puzzle housed at a website that touts its credentials about how your brain works. And that's it. I think the way to interface and making changes to one's brain, qua one's self, is a personal and fully challenging endeavor. There are no Matrix-style pills and quick training tapes to put one up to speed. No, the change takes effort, sweat, stress. Secondly, we live in a world where brains are the medical synecdoche for human behavior and the self. Owing at least partly to the means available introduced by medial terminology, people are swayed by these expert discourses and their ability to alienate a person from his own soul. And to add insult, the expert sells back to the alienated a brain training program as well as a set of drugs for enhancing some aspect of the brain the expert tells you you never knew existed.
And that's the subtle play upon subjectivity qua enunciative modality that I see occurring. But I'm running away from that as well.
As a wise man once read from his character's dialogue and said: "No matter where you go, there you are."
I was planning to move to a new state, meet new friends, start a new program. And I had the naive idea that I'd start a new life.
Namely, I wanted to drop my porn viewing habits and perhaps commit to less TV and more books, more coffee but less of the pot. I quickly found that one can only run away from what they leave behind, but they can never leave behind themselves.
I recall a very depressing and lonely moment in the Fall of 1995.
I was attending a university, on the premed track in my freshman year. The first week was stressful, mostly because I dragged every book that I had to purchase to and from my Monday classes. They were back-to-back lectures in college algebra, biology, and chemistry. I through I'd test out of the math. I ruefully accepted chemistry. I embraced biology. During some evenings I went to my job at the grocery store. There, in my solitary profession of refacing shelves, I'd fantasize about walking away from it all. In this little solitary fantasy I planned to begin walking somewhere, I'm not sure, north perhaps. I just wanted to walk into a town where I had no money or obligations other than to live. There, I would start over.
Why I so quickly turn to a fantasy of leaving behind one's stressful life I don't know. This stress management option was quite stressful in and of itself. Why would I consider running away from a life, from friends, from loved ones, from a warm home and inviting bed? The choice is extreme to turn one's back on a life, a job, friends, loved ones, and to arrive 'new' with tattered shoes and dirty clothes in a strange town. It's not a practical stress avoidance option, but it's the one that returns like a siren's call every so often.
Where has it been lately? I am unsure what happened to this desire to leave. It has matured perhaps. Yes, that's what has happened. Instead of me wanting to run away I acquire some skills and parlay them with previous skills into a new profession. I am finding what I could be in a world that seemingly doesn't want me. I intentionally avoid preparing for a big sell, yet at the same time I could envision myself as a decent salesperson if the need were to arise.
So now my current dream is to return to school. Why? I like to learn. Most of all, I like to dream, and what better place to do it in an academic setting built around your future? Colleges are dream factories, places where I can dream, places that will eagerly slurp up what funding I can acquire to return to school.
I guess I am unsure what will come of these choices other than more deferment of a life trajectory worthy of a retirement portfolio and of a socially traded datum of class, occupation, and consumer profile. I aspire, as we speak, of being a non-entity. Or rather I want to disappear from here and reappear there, and never ever settle into one profession for life. I suppose I could grow weed all of my life, if I could get away with it. As of late, I have been unable to do even that.
Now the final question is what does this tell me of my neurology? I know that is a somewhat passe question, given how brains are one of many readily tweaked and state-adjusted concepts-entities that consumer society caters to with its speed drinks, vitamin cocktails, and "brain growing" puzzle sites. Two questions emerged. First, why does talk of the brain with any definitiveness raise my hackles? Secondly, what could one say about my neurology given my desire to constantly shift out of routine?
I'll tackle the second. This should be easy. This notion that the world out there reveals something about the world in here is nothing new. It would suggestively support a dual recognition of the importance of both the world in shaping people and people in shaping the world that shapes people. Somewhere in that dual process entity you will find an answer to the question I posed. In such a world lacking worn routine I would suppose that changes are a way for me to 'reformat' some area of my brain, to force me to rethink and relearn my world, reestablish an umwelt, and the such. I have nothing against routine. In fact, I am a slave to my routines, but I am also slavishly aware of my routine's effect upon me. So in that sense, the breeding ground and proving ground for my neurology is in forced changes to my routine. So now that I have both engaged in one of my pet peeves and explained one aspect of my own self I will conclude and move on.
The conclusion I'd draw about my neurobiology is that I want to shape it through ruptures in routine. I don't want to allow neuronal networks to establish around a paucity of data. Rather, I'd like to put them networks to making sense of new environs. Now, what does this tell me about my peeve?
My peeve is connected indirectly to the way I posed and answered my first question. I'd rather change my brain behavior through forcing change upon myself than through some 'brain teaser' puzzle housed at a website that touts its credentials about how your brain works. And that's it. I think the way to interface and making changes to one's brain, qua one's self, is a personal and fully challenging endeavor. There are no Matrix-style pills and quick training tapes to put one up to speed. No, the change takes effort, sweat, stress. Secondly, we live in a world where brains are the medical synecdoche for human behavior and the self. Owing at least partly to the means available introduced by medial terminology, people are swayed by these expert discourses and their ability to alienate a person from his own soul. And to add insult, the expert sells back to the alienated a brain training program as well as a set of drugs for enhancing some aspect of the brain the expert tells you you never knew existed.
And that's the subtle play upon subjectivity qua enunciative modality that I see occurring. But I'm running away from that as well.
As a wise man once read from his character's dialogue and said: "No matter where you go, there you are."
Thursday, November 29, 2012
new star song
The Mountain Goats had a song on their "Beautiful Rat Sunset" EP that became synonymous with loss. The song was called "New Star Song," and it's about a person's search for a lost other. The song's narrator goes to another town and hunkers down outside a sheet music store. The narrative was subtle yet at times powerfully emotional. I first thought of a Far Side comic where a boy posts a lost poster of a rather large snake. But the song ultimately made me think of you.
You is Amy Metcalf. I call her the one that got away. She is married with kids and some kind of high-powered executive job now. Time flies. We got along so well. That was my impression. She was simply very accommodating. We'd bounce macabre humor off of each other. It entertained my idealistic and precocious late teen self. We stayed in touch for a few years after high school, but that only lasted so long. I moved away. I didn't leave for long, and some like to look upon my return as a retreat from potential success.
But a body with no job to which it must report becomes a restless one. And that is why I came back to thinking of you.
Do you think of me?
You probably think about your kids more than anything these days. Some parts of your day are probably punctuated by work deadlines.
Does anything in your life remind you of me? I can only dream that somebody thinks of me.
But that's an old habit acquired from years of being alone, unattached. Now I am attached, but it brings me very little in the way of passionate outcry.
You is Amy Metcalf. I call her the one that got away. She is married with kids and some kind of high-powered executive job now. Time flies. We got along so well. That was my impression. She was simply very accommodating. We'd bounce macabre humor off of each other. It entertained my idealistic and precocious late teen self. We stayed in touch for a few years after high school, but that only lasted so long. I moved away. I didn't leave for long, and some like to look upon my return as a retreat from potential success.
But a body with no job to which it must report becomes a restless one. And that is why I came back to thinking of you.
Do you think of me?
You probably think about your kids more than anything these days. Some parts of your day are probably punctuated by work deadlines.
Does anything in your life remind you of me? I can only dream that somebody thinks of me.
But that's an old habit acquired from years of being alone, unattached. Now I am attached, but it brings me very little in the way of passionate outcry.
Bridled contexts
I am trying out different words for a societal trend that is especially popular among youth. It is defined by "being random."
Now randomness, in and of itself, is nothing new. The use of the non sequitur has had a long enough standing in comedy routines, but something new is occurring that can only be an offshoot of indexicality, of mixing and matching and speaking through and about different media forms, genres, specific texts, and the like. Media, after all, are extensions of our nervous systems.
I suggest that being random is a function of a new grammar that is arriving through the mixed, multiple, and simultaneous use of media. Along with this experience qua landscape, an individual is having spontaneous reactions while engaging in phatic conversations with one or more contacts via one of the perhaps many readily available interactive information technologies. What crops up in these contexts are, as I have mentioned, real-time reactions, or cogitations upon media events while narrating those events to another person who is, perhaps, just as distracted by a thousand other windows. Thus, a being random moment is something akin to trying to reveal in narrative form with another what one has experienced. It's a haphazard and messy affair, but the attention spans required for such 'being there' are rather gnat like in their life span.
But this emphasis on being random perhaps has its detractors as well as its practitioners. "That's so random" can be an admiring assessment as well as a harsh criticism. My niece made an attempt at being random by calling her father, sister, mother, and self by other names as she giggled mischievously. This was a funny moment at the playful abandon of being in non-identity using an arbitrary set of terms from a readily accessible discursive background that make up the random information events in one's day.
But is being random something so dependent upon the atomized participation-saturated media landscape or does it merely afford its navigators an attendant sensibility to its expansive yet flat potential? Perhaps it's a little of each. I have little to back my hypothesis. I merely like to attach things that I dislike to the scapegoat of a media form that I don't much appreciate. But that's merely me.
Now, let's discuss what bridling contexts means.
To bridle is to put a saddle on a horse but in this case it's contexts. I would not dismiss the importance of the latter word's plurality too hastily. I think that's a key component of the whole ensemble. But one isn't saddling contexts to ride them. One saddles to place oneself squarely upon more than one context in order to facilitate code shifting and mixing for purely random effect.
But I like the non sequitur as well, and I have been known to use it effectively for laughs. Perhaps I am just being the martinet that I am for criticizing 'being random' while it's merely a rose by any other name. I am sure the spirit of the non sequitur would not mind letting its doppleganger masquerade in the minds of another generation as some rhetorical vision, a genuine hallmark of having had been there and done that.
But before I leave this post in its hasty prose I want to emphasize a very important consideration. People participate in their realities to a greater extent than ever. We can owe some of this to the media in use, their affordances for usage, and the habits of those that get involved. What I trascribed above is an interior vision brought forth for the sake of its logic breaking, yet logically native potential. And all this was something that required the participation of many times, places, and windows of information to bring that forth. Along with this comes the search strategies, likes, and social networks that also help to perform what makes up one's world. 'Where do you want to go today?' has increasingly become where you went yesterday. Why? I think this answer is simple. People can get addicted to interaction if it presents itself as an appetite to be satisfied. If we sent mail, we wait to see if someone responded. As we wait, we pore over our writing and look for potential gaffes. We look over previous messages to spot trends in the mail relationship one may feel one had created with the recipient of this current mail. The list of potential situations spawned by interactive information technology enumerate along lines such as these. And just as sturdy of a foundation of empirical data I presume to have collected to satisfy my vision another may come along and negate my efforts. After all, the interactive technology user I characterized actually cares about his or her messages. Not everyone does, nor does everyone fret over the tiniest detail in one's veritable Library of Congress holding of interaction histories readily accessible and a keyword away from remembering strictly along those lines.
I get rather giddy about these kinds of things, but I blame the coffee. I am in a coffee house trying to showcase my publicness and feign ignoring the public around me. I fancy being surrounded while it is my imagination that surrounds me, and that is the thing from which I cannot escape.
Now randomness, in and of itself, is nothing new. The use of the non sequitur has had a long enough standing in comedy routines, but something new is occurring that can only be an offshoot of indexicality, of mixing and matching and speaking through and about different media forms, genres, specific texts, and the like. Media, after all, are extensions of our nervous systems.
I suggest that being random is a function of a new grammar that is arriving through the mixed, multiple, and simultaneous use of media. Along with this experience qua landscape, an individual is having spontaneous reactions while engaging in phatic conversations with one or more contacts via one of the perhaps many readily available interactive information technologies. What crops up in these contexts are, as I have mentioned, real-time reactions, or cogitations upon media events while narrating those events to another person who is, perhaps, just as distracted by a thousand other windows. Thus, a being random moment is something akin to trying to reveal in narrative form with another what one has experienced. It's a haphazard and messy affair, but the attention spans required for such 'being there' are rather gnat like in their life span.
But this emphasis on being random perhaps has its detractors as well as its practitioners. "That's so random" can be an admiring assessment as well as a harsh criticism. My niece made an attempt at being random by calling her father, sister, mother, and self by other names as she giggled mischievously. This was a funny moment at the playful abandon of being in non-identity using an arbitrary set of terms from a readily accessible discursive background that make up the random information events in one's day.
But is being random something so dependent upon the atomized participation-saturated media landscape or does it merely afford its navigators an attendant sensibility to its expansive yet flat potential? Perhaps it's a little of each. I have little to back my hypothesis. I merely like to attach things that I dislike to the scapegoat of a media form that I don't much appreciate. But that's merely me.
Now, let's discuss what bridling contexts means.
To bridle is to put a saddle on a horse but in this case it's contexts. I would not dismiss the importance of the latter word's plurality too hastily. I think that's a key component of the whole ensemble. But one isn't saddling contexts to ride them. One saddles to place oneself squarely upon more than one context in order to facilitate code shifting and mixing for purely random effect.
But I like the non sequitur as well, and I have been known to use it effectively for laughs. Perhaps I am just being the martinet that I am for criticizing 'being random' while it's merely a rose by any other name. I am sure the spirit of the non sequitur would not mind letting its doppleganger masquerade in the minds of another generation as some rhetorical vision, a genuine hallmark of having had been there and done that.
But before I leave this post in its hasty prose I want to emphasize a very important consideration. People participate in their realities to a greater extent than ever. We can owe some of this to the media in use, their affordances for usage, and the habits of those that get involved. What I trascribed above is an interior vision brought forth for the sake of its logic breaking, yet logically native potential. And all this was something that required the participation of many times, places, and windows of information to bring that forth. Along with this comes the search strategies, likes, and social networks that also help to perform what makes up one's world. 'Where do you want to go today?' has increasingly become where you went yesterday. Why? I think this answer is simple. People can get addicted to interaction if it presents itself as an appetite to be satisfied. If we sent mail, we wait to see if someone responded. As we wait, we pore over our writing and look for potential gaffes. We look over previous messages to spot trends in the mail relationship one may feel one had created with the recipient of this current mail. The list of potential situations spawned by interactive information technology enumerate along lines such as these. And just as sturdy of a foundation of empirical data I presume to have collected to satisfy my vision another may come along and negate my efforts. After all, the interactive technology user I characterized actually cares about his or her messages. Not everyone does, nor does everyone fret over the tiniest detail in one's veritable Library of Congress holding of interaction histories readily accessible and a keyword away from remembering strictly along those lines.
I get rather giddy about these kinds of things, but I blame the coffee. I am in a coffee house trying to showcase my publicness and feign ignoring the public around me. I fancy being surrounded while it is my imagination that surrounds me, and that is the thing from which I cannot escape.
Monday, November 19, 2012
a David among Goliaths
To assume the mantle of the blue collar laborer you make bodily sacrifices. And paramount of all you must keep your mouth shut about the pain and discomfort you may feel from your labor. To reveal this is to be branded 'cunty.'
'Cunty.' It's a rather funny word. It reflects the heavily masculine coding that undergirds the culture of blue collar work where I practice it. At the core of this symbolic world is a body at work, and its relative place among other bodies engaged in the same or similar practice. The eyes are averted from the body per se, but the body is on display because it's the body's fruits, its labors, that are a means of judging the person.
The nature of the labor that I do is a grab bag of heavy lifting, holding oneself in stress positions, walking along precarious perches high in the air, and exposing oneself to general environmental dangers requisite to the type of work done and the tools used: fire, heat, vapors, combustible materials, electric shock. Granted, the majority of the work I perform isn't done under a stopwatch nor does it entail much heavy, repetitive lifting. Sometimes it does. In fact, just about once a day I may be required to lift something that is heavy. And with zeal I jump to it or am forced by the seniority of others to perform it anyway. This is where I am on display and pitifully so.
Into the cauldron of blue collar work I place my weakened and only mildly calloused body. I gingerly walk about high spaces. I grunt and strain under normal loads. I am the first to drop a collaborative carry. In all these instances there I perform my inadequacy, and there my colleagues register their vocal judgment of my abilities to do my job. I simply am not as big, nor as trained in the performance of these duties, duties that most of my colleagues grew into through circumstances stemming from their social settings.
Not me. I was sent to a wall of encyclopedias 30 years ago, and with some zeal I began to read. I loved those damn things. Strangely enough, the ideas and information contained within has, by many accounts, become outdated. And the medium itself has been supplanted by search. But I digress.
I am a small person among big people. Some of my colleagues enjoy my idiosyncrasies. Others set me up to fail for their own personal enjoyment. But on the whole, my body is on display. And through my work it is forced to engage in a ritual performance of labor. In that dramatic space I find myself straining both through age and a long tenure of mental work, and in doing so engage in producing the struggle. I suit up with all my tools and stumble over half of them, some of which I've hardly if at all used. I am learning a lot at my job about my job, yet at the same time this is a space of relative lax enjoyment for the majority of my colleagues. The magic word is "T and M," time and materials. Jobs bid by time and materials are not nearly as strenuous or time sensitive as those bid by the weight of the steel being put in place. The more notorious of the field's jobs are those requiring a multitude of reinforcing bars of varying weights and lengths to be tied into mats in place.
What does this brief discussion of my job and blue collar work tell me about the profession I am in, labor in general, or about me? I suspect is says a lot but not a lot worth discussing per se. The body says it all, and the basic tools of judgment employed by my trade 'brothers' more succinctly address the issue while simultaneously enacting a barrier for my 'graduation' into either proficiency with the tools and the trade or to the general conditions of my work. In a sense, they help to perform my inadequacy as my struggling body could have pointed to something else. Perhaps I am merely engaging the body in underused ways and my struggles reflect the learning curve required to acquire proficiency.
But so long as I am the short guy with all the education under his belt I will continue to labor under the stereotypes that both bring for the men that populate my current trade. They are ironworkers. I am not, at least not yet.
'Cunty.' It's a rather funny word. It reflects the heavily masculine coding that undergirds the culture of blue collar work where I practice it. At the core of this symbolic world is a body at work, and its relative place among other bodies engaged in the same or similar practice. The eyes are averted from the body per se, but the body is on display because it's the body's fruits, its labors, that are a means of judging the person.
The nature of the labor that I do is a grab bag of heavy lifting, holding oneself in stress positions, walking along precarious perches high in the air, and exposing oneself to general environmental dangers requisite to the type of work done and the tools used: fire, heat, vapors, combustible materials, electric shock. Granted, the majority of the work I perform isn't done under a stopwatch nor does it entail much heavy, repetitive lifting. Sometimes it does. In fact, just about once a day I may be required to lift something that is heavy. And with zeal I jump to it or am forced by the seniority of others to perform it anyway. This is where I am on display and pitifully so.
Into the cauldron of blue collar work I place my weakened and only mildly calloused body. I gingerly walk about high spaces. I grunt and strain under normal loads. I am the first to drop a collaborative carry. In all these instances there I perform my inadequacy, and there my colleagues register their vocal judgment of my abilities to do my job. I simply am not as big, nor as trained in the performance of these duties, duties that most of my colleagues grew into through circumstances stemming from their social settings.
Not me. I was sent to a wall of encyclopedias 30 years ago, and with some zeal I began to read. I loved those damn things. Strangely enough, the ideas and information contained within has, by many accounts, become outdated. And the medium itself has been supplanted by search. But I digress.
I am a small person among big people. Some of my colleagues enjoy my idiosyncrasies. Others set me up to fail for their own personal enjoyment. But on the whole, my body is on display. And through my work it is forced to engage in a ritual performance of labor. In that dramatic space I find myself straining both through age and a long tenure of mental work, and in doing so engage in producing the struggle. I suit up with all my tools and stumble over half of them, some of which I've hardly if at all used. I am learning a lot at my job about my job, yet at the same time this is a space of relative lax enjoyment for the majority of my colleagues. The magic word is "T and M," time and materials. Jobs bid by time and materials are not nearly as strenuous or time sensitive as those bid by the weight of the steel being put in place. The more notorious of the field's jobs are those requiring a multitude of reinforcing bars of varying weights and lengths to be tied into mats in place.
What does this brief discussion of my job and blue collar work tell me about the profession I am in, labor in general, or about me? I suspect is says a lot but not a lot worth discussing per se. The body says it all, and the basic tools of judgment employed by my trade 'brothers' more succinctly address the issue while simultaneously enacting a barrier for my 'graduation' into either proficiency with the tools and the trade or to the general conditions of my work. In a sense, they help to perform my inadequacy as my struggling body could have pointed to something else. Perhaps I am merely engaging the body in underused ways and my struggles reflect the learning curve required to acquire proficiency.
But so long as I am the short guy with all the education under his belt I will continue to labor under the stereotypes that both bring for the men that populate my current trade. They are ironworkers. I am not, at least not yet.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
seeing me
A million spiders crawl the web
Spider is a metaphor for what these search algorithms do. They scan, parse, and index this site, my words, my thoughts, the evident,viewable content that I pretend to handle through my keyboard.
Strange isn't it? I am considering the interface with this site as I write. It's writing. Such a strange creature to hone one's skill at pecking words in a predefined constellation that was determined in a gilded, steam-powered, mechanical era--the 19th century. That's when according to one James Beninger, our society grabbed hold of one of the technologies of central control--writing. And in setting type through typewriting machines, communication was standardized. That revealed its other kin--information.
I only pretend to handle my keyboard and reveal some historicity to this communication, qua information-production, interface. As I said, I only pretend to handle my keyboard because as flights of fancy occur, I am tethered to a now that wasn't predetermined by my sitting down. I need to grab a hold of this writer inside my hands and wrestle him to the ground. But I digress. I like the notion of a writer not thinking of his writing but of considering it a spawn of the nervous activity of his hands. That was the characterization that Philip K. Dick arrived at and I find it a quite lovely one. His world is one that I find myself within in my ideas and stylings and ravings. I like this notion that a sub rosa reality controls that which we call consciousness, common sense, 'my world.'
But as I was going to say. A thousand, or was it a million? Yes, a million spiders crawl the web, and they are the ones, the only ones, reading my missive to no one, issuing from a no one about no thing.
So here's to Google.com and Yandex.ru. I hope that finding a meta-tag in your 'crawling' causes some kind of recursion bug to rear itself and render your bug a mute pigeon carrying the note of a long-dead man.
After all, GNU is Not Unix.
The software creators get a guffaw.
Spider is a metaphor for what these search algorithms do. They scan, parse, and index this site, my words, my thoughts, the evident,viewable content that I pretend to handle through my keyboard.
Strange isn't it? I am considering the interface with this site as I write. It's writing. Such a strange creature to hone one's skill at pecking words in a predefined constellation that was determined in a gilded, steam-powered, mechanical era--the 19th century. That's when according to one James Beninger, our society grabbed hold of one of the technologies of central control--writing. And in setting type through typewriting machines, communication was standardized. That revealed its other kin--information.
I only pretend to handle my keyboard and reveal some historicity to this communication, qua information-production, interface. As I said, I only pretend to handle my keyboard because as flights of fancy occur, I am tethered to a now that wasn't predetermined by my sitting down. I need to grab a hold of this writer inside my hands and wrestle him to the ground. But I digress. I like the notion of a writer not thinking of his writing but of considering it a spawn of the nervous activity of his hands. That was the characterization that Philip K. Dick arrived at and I find it a quite lovely one. His world is one that I find myself within in my ideas and stylings and ravings. I like this notion that a sub rosa reality controls that which we call consciousness, common sense, 'my world.'
But as I was going to say. A thousand, or was it a million? Yes, a million spiders crawl the web, and they are the ones, the only ones, reading my missive to no one, issuing from a no one about no thing.
So here's to Google.com and Yandex.ru. I hope that finding a meta-tag in your 'crawling' causes some kind of recursion bug to rear itself and render your bug a mute pigeon carrying the note of a long-dead man.
After all, GNU is Not Unix.
The software creators get a guffaw.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Noteworthy discussion
In the comments section trailing a discussion about a failed Black Sabbath reunion line-up and tour I found this gem.
I kinda half to agree w/ Half_Idiot. BS is in a level rivaled only by a precious few. Surely, songs about Whiskey and Friendship aren't in the same league as songs about Satan pointing directly at you while you are in your bed.I normally find this aspect of news distracting and reductive in scope and capacity to share information, but sometimes the comments sections brings about some worthy commentary among fellow readers qua content fans.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Themes from blue collar work
I am getting my first taste of the phenomenology of blue collar work. If there's one kind of labor that is performed it's the sometimes hard, and often times tightly regulated and time-coded work of the blue collar labor. I am a union iron worker.
Let me trace out a few themes:
The body in pain. This characterizes not only the constant struggle against the iron, which produces joint pain and muscle pain, but it registers the labor. Tools enter into this context to either mitigate the pain, but ultimately the trade's outlines are traced in the body's pain. Twisting rods, welding, connecting, and the like all require some constellation of body muscles to perform their functions, and they coalesce into trade knowledge, which has been bled from the iron workers union agreements with other trades and employers for decades.
Another body in pain references another interesting component of labor. The injured body is a body of legal evidence, which leverages legal judgments in the favor of the injured. These large financial settlements indicate that American human life is still at a premium, and employers do whatever they can to avoid them. The numerous recent safety protocols promoted by employers not only try to mitigate the number of injuries but they also regulate the actions of the workers who abide by them. They also are elaborate CYA policies that reduce the effectiveness and ultimate productivity measures of workers for the sake of reducing financial liability for the remaining workplace hazards. I also suspect that these are an in-road into the trades themselves. The more paper work that one must do in order to complete a job reveals the pace and function of each task done, such that every risky move as accounted for.
I am also considering a larger issue about who controls the meaning of work. I sense and hear a lot of pride in the work union iron workers do. "Ratty" operations, as they're called, tend to sacrifice pride and quality for quick work.
Let me trace out a few themes:
The body in pain. This characterizes not only the constant struggle against the iron, which produces joint pain and muscle pain, but it registers the labor. Tools enter into this context to either mitigate the pain, but ultimately the trade's outlines are traced in the body's pain. Twisting rods, welding, connecting, and the like all require some constellation of body muscles to perform their functions, and they coalesce into trade knowledge, which has been bled from the iron workers union agreements with other trades and employers for decades.
Another body in pain references another interesting component of labor. The injured body is a body of legal evidence, which leverages legal judgments in the favor of the injured. These large financial settlements indicate that American human life is still at a premium, and employers do whatever they can to avoid them. The numerous recent safety protocols promoted by employers not only try to mitigate the number of injuries but they also regulate the actions of the workers who abide by them. They also are elaborate CYA policies that reduce the effectiveness and ultimate productivity measures of workers for the sake of reducing financial liability for the remaining workplace hazards. I also suspect that these are an in-road into the trades themselves. The more paper work that one must do in order to complete a job reveals the pace and function of each task done, such that every risky move as accounted for.
I am also considering a larger issue about who controls the meaning of work. I sense and hear a lot of pride in the work union iron workers do. "Ratty" operations, as they're called, tend to sacrifice pride and quality for quick work.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
creativity
Why is creativity this fleeting moment book-ended by robotic, motion-dependent banality? Can I put much stake in the structure, the mechanics of creativity? I cannot help but think of those scenes from "32 Short Films about Glenn Gould" where the artist is either taking medication for his pain or is soaking his arms up to his elbows in cold water. One cannot discount the destructive capacity of human activity in mashing the ivories with precision, power, and utter determination. The desire to transcend the physics of music production at moments like these make one forget one's body.
Until the moment ends.
Then the pain comes back, perhaps first as a numb fingertip. The tendons, like so many living piano wires, contract and extend at such rapid pace to render sensible and virtuosic the fingers of the player that one forgets that they're sheathed under the flesh and under much duress. This body in pain reminds the player that they're merely vehicles for an idea, that of music. And music, being a parapet of high-culture, requires the enslavement of the body to its ideal. But maybe we should take a quick step back. Let's recognize that not all cultural elements require such a privation of human comfort to exist. Yet this displacement does occur, even in the smallest. The only difference between reconstructing Bach on a piano for an audience is that it takes much greater a toll upon the body than say hitting bongos rhythmically, high on some plant, until the wee hours of the night. There, the trance-inducing rhythm never escapes those of the body's potential rhythm. Perhaps that "native" ritual tells us something about the subliminal space of its faith that's contrapuntal to the fugue-state of other expressions or explorations of faith.
So let us not forget that there's a physical component to the coincidence of cultural activity and a body in its servitude. But what have we come to at this point?
Time.
Time is a component of all of this. And it is so in a way that is almost tautologically bound or totalizing in its descriptive potential. Time has an important element to it. It's being conquered by symbol use. Because words and ideas are these haunted tools for thinking and engaging with the world. They're something other than us in our use of them. That's because they're invested with a history. It's easy to say that they don't have to be. Yet, there's something impossible to avoid in the notion that while one can continually affirm that they have freedom to re-brand the meaning of words, but to do it alone risks a sort of social suicide, one marked by a solitary individual speaking gibberish. If one is to be successful in this re-branding one must get buy-in from others. One must sustain a marketplace of meaning from which to derive meaning-value and render the re-branded word into social currency, one that can be coined for social cohesion, rhetorical visioning, and practical use. That takes time.
Until the moment ends.
Then the pain comes back, perhaps first as a numb fingertip. The tendons, like so many living piano wires, contract and extend at such rapid pace to render sensible and virtuosic the fingers of the player that one forgets that they're sheathed under the flesh and under much duress. This body in pain reminds the player that they're merely vehicles for an idea, that of music. And music, being a parapet of high-culture, requires the enslavement of the body to its ideal. But maybe we should take a quick step back. Let's recognize that not all cultural elements require such a privation of human comfort to exist. Yet this displacement does occur, even in the smallest. The only difference between reconstructing Bach on a piano for an audience is that it takes much greater a toll upon the body than say hitting bongos rhythmically, high on some plant, until the wee hours of the night. There, the trance-inducing rhythm never escapes those of the body's potential rhythm. Perhaps that "native" ritual tells us something about the subliminal space of its faith that's contrapuntal to the fugue-state of other expressions or explorations of faith.
So let us not forget that there's a physical component to the coincidence of cultural activity and a body in its servitude. But what have we come to at this point?
Time.
Time is a component of all of this. And it is so in a way that is almost tautologically bound or totalizing in its descriptive potential. Time has an important element to it. It's being conquered by symbol use. Because words and ideas are these haunted tools for thinking and engaging with the world. They're something other than us in our use of them. That's because they're invested with a history. It's easy to say that they don't have to be. Yet, there's something impossible to avoid in the notion that while one can continually affirm that they have freedom to re-brand the meaning of words, but to do it alone risks a sort of social suicide, one marked by a solitary individual speaking gibberish. If one is to be successful in this re-branding one must get buy-in from others. One must sustain a marketplace of meaning from which to derive meaning-value and render the re-branded word into social currency, one that can be coined for social cohesion, rhetorical visioning, and practical use. That takes time.
Friday, March 9, 2012
interview for a war veteran
Interviewer:
"I see that you were in the Iraq War from 2003 until 2006. Tell me, how has this experience equipped you for this position?"
Iraq War Veteran:
"Well sir. I believe I am uniquely qualified for this position. I can fly a fifteen million dollar weapons platform into the heart of a city, receive kill commands from a lawyer in Miami, and successfully identify, target, and eliminate enemy heat signatures 1000s of yards away on the ground. Sir!"
Interviewer:
"Do you know your way around a cash register?"
Iraq War Veteran:
"Each of these missions cost in excess of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in logistical support, weaponry R & D, fuel, training, and armaments expended. Sir!"
Interviewer:
"But are you ready to manage the most demanding-yet-successful Huck's Food and Fuel Mart in the metro-east I-44 corridor?"
Iraq War veteran:
"Sir yes, sir!"
"I see that you were in the Iraq War from 2003 until 2006. Tell me, how has this experience equipped you for this position?"
Iraq War Veteran:
"Well sir. I believe I am uniquely qualified for this position. I can fly a fifteen million dollar weapons platform into the heart of a city, receive kill commands from a lawyer in Miami, and successfully identify, target, and eliminate enemy heat signatures 1000s of yards away on the ground. Sir!"
Interviewer:
"Do you know your way around a cash register?"
Iraq War Veteran:
"Each of these missions cost in excess of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in logistical support, weaponry R & D, fuel, training, and armaments expended. Sir!"
Interviewer:
"But are you ready to manage the most demanding-yet-successful Huck's Food and Fuel Mart in the metro-east I-44 corridor?"
Iraq War veteran:
"Sir yes, sir!"
Thursday, March 8, 2012
it's bigger than you
There's a problem I run into from time to time. We use a lot of words to varying effect. Sometimes we conjure up wise old relics with our usage, and it is there that the idea conveyed is bigger than you.
This is when something strange happens. You are quickly alienated from yourself. Perhaps you spoke in a way that makes you appear 'too big for your britches.' Perhaps you spoke in a way that makes you appear more foolish, more bigoted, prejudicial, or otherwise unsavory even to yourself. There's no reason that this should occur other than it does, and it demonstrates how rhetorically weaponized meaning happens through our uncovering of history with words, our invading of homes with our words, our invasion of the interior lives of others with our words.
How violent can an "I love you" be? When it achieves an absolute measure of death as its ending. Can or should anyone love that much? Is it fair to you or to me? It's as the author in the book lying next to me would say, slavery to formalism. We become enslaved to a lot of things. An idea in our head seems like an unworthy king for a court of one. When we function in a world on the basis of our idea of that world then perhaps this king leads none. Ideas are, in fact, no things. Yet we invest so much in them that we'll fell a forest for the greater glory of this no thing. And what better way to demonstrate it's no potential than for this no thing to command an army and obliterate something, to erase it totally from existence. This notion of erasure is a sacrifice upon the altar of no things.
This is when something strange happens. You are quickly alienated from yourself. Perhaps you spoke in a way that makes you appear 'too big for your britches.' Perhaps you spoke in a way that makes you appear more foolish, more bigoted, prejudicial, or otherwise unsavory even to yourself. There's no reason that this should occur other than it does, and it demonstrates how rhetorically weaponized meaning happens through our uncovering of history with words, our invading of homes with our words, our invasion of the interior lives of others with our words.
How violent can an "I love you" be? When it achieves an absolute measure of death as its ending. Can or should anyone love that much? Is it fair to you or to me? It's as the author in the book lying next to me would say, slavery to formalism. We become enslaved to a lot of things. An idea in our head seems like an unworthy king for a court of one. When we function in a world on the basis of our idea of that world then perhaps this king leads none. Ideas are, in fact, no things. Yet we invest so much in them that we'll fell a forest for the greater glory of this no thing. And what better way to demonstrate it's no potential than for this no thing to command an army and obliterate something, to erase it totally from existence. This notion of erasure is a sacrifice upon the altar of no things.
bodies and minds
We are not unique.
We are all trapped within a universe of our making. To consider for a moment that our awareness is our ability to fix time and that this is uniquely tied to our ability to store memory in word, what makes our condition so freeing yet so utterly trapping.
That's the issue. We see the end to our abilities within the framework of our abilities. To language is to bring meaning to the world, meaning that accrues the sediment of history. And that history defines what and who we are. Sure each moment is filled with the potential for freedom from this history, a new beginning. But what are we beginning? What first step are we taking and from what do we step? We're still tethered to a polestar of meaning, and it is that familiar patina of interpretation through which we see everything, even ourselves. Our consciousness has a flatness. We're trapped on a mobius strip of historically constituted awareness. Out of what it springs is an initial desire for speaking into the world and at that moment the full creation of the world as spoken rushes in to fill a void, a void presupposed by meaning, by position in semiotic space.
We're trapped along this oddly flat dimension of awareness, and it is that awareness which enables the awareness of being trapped. When we recognize the potential for a new beginning we see it's contours. When we see the same thing differently than another we recognize its dimensions. In symbolizing we usher in a reality that is symbol based. We mine the potential of our thought, and in that thought we fall as it were an abyss.
So being is an issue of symbol using and symbol using traps us in world of our own making. No, a clarification is needed. Our entrapment is in chasing for that chimera of significance, meaning. What a flag means to you and to mean can be utterly different yet a flag remains before us. Now what is this triad? It's simply a condition for recognizing the potential for meaning making and its utter failure. We may use the same word but it's meaning to us is often fleeting. We can draw an assumption that the two of us are in agreement concerning meaning, but that assumption, once again, gives rise to the perennial breakdown in coordinating action.
Yet we somehow find ways to continue our progress together or alone in some kind of working construction of social organization. How does this happen? I for one can speak to the ability to put my body through pain in order to exact money. Granted these jobs are fleeting, they insult my intellect, and my physical abilities insult their meaning of hard work. But that body in pain brings to reality something that was always there but lost sometimes in the world world of symbols. We've only granted ourselves a modicum of levitation from the real by the symbolic world, but that's all that's required. And given this modicum of levitation from reality we recognize it all too often when world comes crashing through word.
The strength of the base of a foundation is a body in pain. That's an investment in labor--a necessary condition of creations that transcend time that--once the bodies that have sacrificed to create them are gone--become artifacts in time.
Nothing new emerges from this writing that hasn't already been said and thought of in a million different ways--some better, some worse. I wonder why I do this.
We are all trapped within a universe of our making. To consider for a moment that our awareness is our ability to fix time and that this is uniquely tied to our ability to store memory in word, what makes our condition so freeing yet so utterly trapping.
That's the issue. We see the end to our abilities within the framework of our abilities. To language is to bring meaning to the world, meaning that accrues the sediment of history. And that history defines what and who we are. Sure each moment is filled with the potential for freedom from this history, a new beginning. But what are we beginning? What first step are we taking and from what do we step? We're still tethered to a polestar of meaning, and it is that familiar patina of interpretation through which we see everything, even ourselves. Our consciousness has a flatness. We're trapped on a mobius strip of historically constituted awareness. Out of what it springs is an initial desire for speaking into the world and at that moment the full creation of the world as spoken rushes in to fill a void, a void presupposed by meaning, by position in semiotic space.
We're trapped along this oddly flat dimension of awareness, and it is that awareness which enables the awareness of being trapped. When we recognize the potential for a new beginning we see it's contours. When we see the same thing differently than another we recognize its dimensions. In symbolizing we usher in a reality that is symbol based. We mine the potential of our thought, and in that thought we fall as it were an abyss.
So being is an issue of symbol using and symbol using traps us in world of our own making. No, a clarification is needed. Our entrapment is in chasing for that chimera of significance, meaning. What a flag means to you and to mean can be utterly different yet a flag remains before us. Now what is this triad? It's simply a condition for recognizing the potential for meaning making and its utter failure. We may use the same word but it's meaning to us is often fleeting. We can draw an assumption that the two of us are in agreement concerning meaning, but that assumption, once again, gives rise to the perennial breakdown in coordinating action.
Yet we somehow find ways to continue our progress together or alone in some kind of working construction of social organization. How does this happen? I for one can speak to the ability to put my body through pain in order to exact money. Granted these jobs are fleeting, they insult my intellect, and my physical abilities insult their meaning of hard work. But that body in pain brings to reality something that was always there but lost sometimes in the world world of symbols. We've only granted ourselves a modicum of levitation from the real by the symbolic world, but that's all that's required. And given this modicum of levitation from reality we recognize it all too often when world comes crashing through word.
The strength of the base of a foundation is a body in pain. That's an investment in labor--a necessary condition of creations that transcend time that--once the bodies that have sacrificed to create them are gone--become artifacts in time.
Nothing new emerges from this writing that hasn't already been said and thought of in a million different ways--some better, some worse. I wonder why I do this.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
a day in the 'life'
I got up today at 5:15. I told myself I was going to dress up in dirty clothes and hang out at the Ironworker's hall. A union hall located just off of St. Louis Road in a small area incorporated into East Saint Louis.
Instead, I began working on my classwork. I told myself, "as long as my phone is working, I'll get some classwork done." Well, I finished up the class in no time. I was done with it by 7:30. My father had recommended that I get down to the Hall by 6:30 as that's when most work goes out. I didn't. I decided to play school teacher this morning.
I finished up my school teacher routine and was looking at about 7 papers and 2 group assignments to grade. At this time it was about 10. I spent a little time between 7:30 using the bathroom and watching theme tunes from 80s television sitcoms. I found the one that I had heard at about 7:00 on the radio. It was Hill Street Blues. Owing to this website, I found multiple links, so I watched several 10-minute-long tributes to a show that I used to watch called, "Spenser for Hire." After that, I watched a few videos about Avery Brooks, who played Hawk in that show. This ultimately led me to Deep Space 9 fan videos, and quickly to images of a member of the show, Nana Visitor. She was a short, well-built actor who I felt like staring at that moment. Then I quickly turned on my computer and scanned through videos to download. Finding none, I went to my pile and began watching until I came. Then I went to bed for 2 and a half hours and here I am--2 beers in and one paper half graded. It's now 1:15. I don't know how better to discuss time other than to demonstrate that distractions are quite time-consuming. Yet they're everywhere, when you work from home. And even with the best intentions going in, I ended up getting sucked into that vortex of bad habits this morning.
Oh, and I watched about 30 minutes of interview footage with a professor who inspired my entry into a doctoral program. I was looking for something and in its stead found quite a bit of inspiration for the last few responses to students that morning.
That was my day. It's hardly a day. Some work harder. Some think less. Most at least are required to remain in a employer-sanctioned location for 8 to 9 hours a day. I am not, nor do I feel obliged to go down to the Hall and grub for work. I'd rather just spend it at my house. To my mind, I have things that I can do here that are part of a job anyway, so I may as well do them here.
So there you have it, that's a day in the life. Now that it is 1:18 and I have yet to complete even one graded assignment, you can see how poorly I can manage my time sometimes. This kind of behavior is virulent within higher education. The first thing I did upon taking my first job was to completely and utterly give up on research or any activity of any kind. I had absolutely no heart, no interest, no perceived effort in it. All I liked to do was to read books of my interest. And that I did. But now I have nothing to show. I never finished, nor am I finishing what I set out to do today. That's a simple view of a day in the life of me. I cannot find a better pigeonhole into which I can situate an activity I'd rather not do, so the pigeon squirms it's way out, hour after hour, day in, day out. And eventually I get everything done at the last minute.
Congratulations.
Instead, I began working on my classwork. I told myself, "as long as my phone is working, I'll get some classwork done." Well, I finished up the class in no time. I was done with it by 7:30. My father had recommended that I get down to the Hall by 6:30 as that's when most work goes out. I didn't. I decided to play school teacher this morning.
I finished up my school teacher routine and was looking at about 7 papers and 2 group assignments to grade. At this time it was about 10. I spent a little time between 7:30 using the bathroom and watching theme tunes from 80s television sitcoms. I found the one that I had heard at about 7:00 on the radio. It was Hill Street Blues. Owing to this website, I found multiple links, so I watched several 10-minute-long tributes to a show that I used to watch called, "Spenser for Hire." After that, I watched a few videos about Avery Brooks, who played Hawk in that show. This ultimately led me to Deep Space 9 fan videos, and quickly to images of a member of the show, Nana Visitor. She was a short, well-built actor who I felt like staring at that moment. Then I quickly turned on my computer and scanned through videos to download. Finding none, I went to my pile and began watching until I came. Then I went to bed for 2 and a half hours and here I am--2 beers in and one paper half graded. It's now 1:15. I don't know how better to discuss time other than to demonstrate that distractions are quite time-consuming. Yet they're everywhere, when you work from home. And even with the best intentions going in, I ended up getting sucked into that vortex of bad habits this morning.
Oh, and I watched about 30 minutes of interview footage with a professor who inspired my entry into a doctoral program. I was looking for something and in its stead found quite a bit of inspiration for the last few responses to students that morning.
That was my day. It's hardly a day. Some work harder. Some think less. Most at least are required to remain in a employer-sanctioned location for 8 to 9 hours a day. I am not, nor do I feel obliged to go down to the Hall and grub for work. I'd rather just spend it at my house. To my mind, I have things that I can do here that are part of a job anyway, so I may as well do them here.
So there you have it, that's a day in the life. Now that it is 1:18 and I have yet to complete even one graded assignment, you can see how poorly I can manage my time sometimes. This kind of behavior is virulent within higher education. The first thing I did upon taking my first job was to completely and utterly give up on research or any activity of any kind. I had absolutely no heart, no interest, no perceived effort in it. All I liked to do was to read books of my interest. And that I did. But now I have nothing to show. I never finished, nor am I finishing what I set out to do today. That's a simple view of a day in the life of me. I cannot find a better pigeonhole into which I can situate an activity I'd rather not do, so the pigeon squirms it's way out, hour after hour, day in, day out. And eventually I get everything done at the last minute.
Congratulations.
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