Vectors of Novelty: Co-Composing Selves in the Terminal Present

 

Iain Findlay-Walsh and Tristan Partridge

 

 

 

Abstract

 

This multimedia essay is part of an ongoing collaborative project that examines the porous boundaries and theoretical connections that link conceptions of self, temporality, and composition. Drawing on our respective fields of practice in sound art and social anthropology, we engage with Bergsonian ideas of the person as a “vector of novelty on the edge of the present” (Bordeleau 2019) and a range of critiques that urge a de-naturalizing (and de-narrativizing) of the self (Manning 2019, Moten 2017, da Silva 2014, LaBelle 2018). The work presented here comprises excerpts from collaborative writing, a short collage video, text-image fragments, and a compilation of audio voice notes, all in response to Erin Manning’s open-ended question, “How can we compose collectively, working both with past and emergent techniques, without holding fast to the security of habits, material or conceptual?” (Manning 2019). Our approach to (co)composition attends to the co-emergence of experience and connection. We explore composition as mutual processes of emergence and exploration that take shape within and respond to specific spatiotemporal relationships and media. Rather than seeing collaboration as a process of intentionally narrating oneself to collaborators, research communities, and others (both known and unknown), the methods and approaches emerging through this project are designed as ways of unsettling any notion of fixity in these relationships. In this sense, this research is developed as a series of methodological and dialogical experiments in living with these questions and is offered as a contribution to critical debates on issues of research process, coherence, and integrity. Throughout, we invoke the “terminal present” as a term for a contemporary condition of temporal complexity, precarity, and stasis that doubles as a name for subjectivities produced in and through such conditions.

 

Keywords: Co-composition; Temporal Experience; Sound Art; Anthropology; Selfhood

 

 

 

Co-composing

 

what is the usefulness of compositional method
of aesthetic sounding and listening
forming, mediating and sharing ideas

to a moment/time of

material crisis?

 

universality

of disaster language

climate, economic, social

masks the particularity of experiences of crises

the effects of which are felt now extremely unevenly around the world

(while you have been at the same time imploding)

 

engaging with this first question, here and now
“we is” as I in crisis, enacting and performing non-continuously
a difficult kind of conversation
sounding, listening, writing, dialoguing, co-composing selves as
unmakings

 

Animated Figure 1
(fig. 1)
Animated Figure 2
(fig. 2)

 

 

 

We Have Been

 

We have been discussing and exploring relations between sound, temporal experience, and life on the internet. This discussion is inspired by, and is in dialogue with, critical studies on time and subjectivity by Erin Manning (2019), Fred Moten (2017), Hito Steyerl (2017), Brandon LaBelle (2018), Denise Ferreira da Silva (2014; 2018), and others. We have been trying to maintain this conversation with each other while moving and living in spaces thousands of miles apart, across various time zones, through the shifting times of our own lives, each navigating periods of personal and political crisis. We have been continuing this discussion by improvising various ways of sharing ideas and talking together—online video calls, voice notes, shared readings, and research, shared media and recordings. We have been in this way generating a tangled, mediated, fragmentary, and temperamental mode of engagement with the issues and with each other.

 

During this time (years), our work to sustain this dialogue has produced a set of methods and a form of collaborative research through which subjecthood simultaneously co-emerges and diffuses. These methods (as well as the ways in which we sense and experience them) are absolutely determined by, while also being undone by, the very relations and contexts that we seek to critically engage with and understand more deeply. What began as a process of discussing activist listening in the times of the internet quickly destabilized itself, morphing into a critical engagement with digital media communications experiences and related (digital) temporalities of subjectivity, personhood, and personality. We understand identity and personhood as normative predicates for agency and action and seek to re-compose ourselves as non-selves that feel the flows of times of crisis, crises of time.

 

Thus, the media objects offered as parts of this essay are results of various attempts to reach towards each other, to mobilize everyday personalized communications practices and technologies in enacting and performing our relation—a relation that is the emergent and reciprocal formation of fleeting selves, moving in the direction of becoming plural, diffuse. Emerging methods include building a dialogue through the sporadic and long-form re-composition of any thought or feeling relevant to share in the form of recorded voice notes; gathering found audio and video from sources both named and unnamed; and transcribing, photographing, exploding, and reordering our Zoom conversations on personal and political time. Through this research, we attempt to collaboratively write, talk, and co-compose media objects in ways that trace (and wrestle with) the multiple, multiplying, conflicting, actual, and virtual temporalities that course through us, cohere us, and simultaneously obliterate the stability of persons that write, speak, and create in order to feel and understand.

 

What concepts and representative frameworks of temporal experience are assumed in order to maintain a sense of ourselves as persons who can explore, share, and learn about these dynamics? To what extent do internet temporalities frame and derail efforts to make sense of such dynamics from positions of agency and potentiality, individual and collective?

 

In light of these questions, we present this essay as a constellation of co-composed media and coauthored texts generated through methods of recording and disintegrating. In this way, we seek to deepen and share our engagement with the issues. What follows (and precedes and is now happening) is an experiment in us (Tristan and Iain) not-being-together with you in time.

 

 

 

Vectors of Novelty

 

 

The Terminal Present

 

“hey – trying to write about the terminal present, an anonymous present, perpetual departure, forever anticipated, effectively invisible… a form of the present that is non-seasonal, divorced from the sun, unaware of the moon, constantly constructing its own immediate exterior.” (from unpublished voice note by Tristan).

 

“How then to conceive of this tentative wholeness called personality?... The person, vector of novelty on the edge of the present, can’t collect the sum of itself from a self-assured and pre-constituted position… It is precarious and mobile, and the continuity of its interior life can never be fully objectivized” (Bordeleau 2019, 171–72)

 

We use the terminal present to refer to a widespread condition of uncertainty in a current global context largely defined by multiple forms of crisis and domination—a context in which any sense of normalcy or stability is consistently disrupted or undermined. Beyond the constitutive temporal dimensions of the terminal present, there are further overlapping political, somatic, and environmental aspects that give it shape, often emergent within processes of communication or critique. Structured within a universalizing, overwhelming fleetingness, the terminal present perpetually faces an evacuated future—compounding uncertainties in the present, rendering the space of What Is To Come hollow and void. Here, we lean into ideas and practices that connect this condition to overlapping temporalities of self—the temporal dimensions of experience, personhood, and agency—in an attempt to understand and feel political incapacity as a time problem.

 

In an essay on “Economies of Presence in the Art Field,” Hito Steyerl (2017) sketches a contemporary tale of being-in-time that resonates with this aim, of an art world under “digital globalization” wherein nothing is more valorized than the unalienated, unmediated presence of the artist-person, while at the same time such value is increasingly rendered impossible within economies of “just-in-time” growth. According to Steyerl, such ideals of self-presence stand in mutually constituting contradiction to the virtual self-proliferation practiced daily via social media, email auto-responders, “Snap streaks,” and semi-attended Zoom meetings, producing overlapping streams of being there, encountered by singular yet virtually dispersed subjects that act through a kind of paralyzing, performative time saturation. Junktime: “wrecked, discontinuous, distracted and runs on several parallel tracks,” as “the material base of the idea of pure unmediated endless presence” (Steyerl 2017, 24). Junktime is the groundless subject of bio-hypermedia (Terranova 2014), the temporal context and content of the person as “a pure absorption and resorption surface of the influence networks” (Baudrillard 1988, 27).

 

States of being within this endless presence are distinct from those described in critiques of modernity, wherein a homogenizing, newly unifying time of industrial production, grounded in globalized material extraction and racial violence, took over and excluded both the environmental effects of seasonal change and the personal effects of “individual hopes and projects” (Crary 2013, 9; Benjamin 1968).The terminal present exists within the 24/7 reality of uninterrupted consumption, of “permanent expenditure, endless wastefulness [and the] terminal disruption” of the nonhuman rhythms and cycles that support all human activity (Crary 2013, 9; Benjamin 1968). This perpetual present is characterized by “the sweeping abandonment of the pretense that time is coupled to any long-term undertakings, even to fantasies of ‘progress’ or development” (Crary 2013, 9). The terminal present is thus forever anticipated yet never realized, effectively invisible. A perpetual departure, the terminal present is a condition of excessive being. And just as the valorized figure of the modern person, the “transparent I, the universal subject who would make the world” should be understood as an “aesthetic conceit,” so too does the terminally present, hyper(a-)synchronous subject of the global-digital emerge as an aesthetic product, “indistinguishable from the expropriative displacement of ecological entanglement that animates (bio)history, and, further, tantamount to the capacity for aesthetic experience and judgment” (Bradley and Silva 2021). Together, we (Tristan and Iain) have committed indefinitely to meeting each other while vibrating in the emotional wreckage of this context as unimaginably privileged subjects without purpose, persons without consistency, selves without relation.

 

Part of this process involves re-encountering the emergent self as emerging in time. Theorizing selfhood in terms of a phenomenally transparent self-model—a conscious, non-representational process by which some information-processing systems experience themselves not as a part but as a whole—Thomas Metzinger has proposed the following:

 

Whatever I experience as the content of my phenomenal self-consciousness, I experience now. It is not only that a world is present; it is that I am a present self in this world. My own existence possesses temporal immediacy; my own sense of being in touch with myself in an absolutely direct and nonmediated way… From a phenomenological perspective, I am not only someone but also someone who is situated in a temporal order (2004, 301–11).

 

If the term “person” refers to a “tentative wholeness” (Bordeleau 2019) that perpetually emerges through processes of experiencing and contemplating a kind of continuity of consciousness in time, then how is such continuity, the consistency of subjective experience, troubled by an overarching and seemingly inescapable experiential context of time saturation? The sense of ourselves within this terminally present moment turns inward, to the neglect of future horizons. Life occurs as merely a form of existence “driven by a process in whose ever-recurring cycles things appear and disappear, manifest themselves and vanish, never to last long enough to surround the life process in their midst” (Arendt 1958, 134). A form of passivity–passivity built out of “utter uprootedness, exile, the impossibility of presence, dispersion (separation)… Time without present, I without I” (Blanchot 1995, 15–18). A recurrent sense of loss permeates, one which contains no memories and is at war with its own homogeneity. The past becomes, and remains, anonymous, both culturally and experientially. Amid the collapse of any identifiable connecting threads through time, each human being becomes an “angel of the instant,” only intermittently able to grasp a given moment and stripped of intent or resolution (Smith 1957; Jankélévitch 1968). All that remain are very distant promises of salvation (distant to the point where their perpetual unfulfillment goes unchallenged) or, conversely, the immediate pressures of sustenance.

 

Through this writing and making, we are searching for ways to confront such a condition—to voice shared efforts at speaking within, beyond, against, and in spite of increasingly hostile pressures that effectively minimize collective care. These layers of implication bring attention to the particularities of our own relationship, which become audible as what it is possible to say to each other. This relationship is thus emergent within temperamental communications dispersed across times, spaces, and media. Our effort to “reach toward” each other is an attempt to forcefully apprehend terminal presence through the nurturing and deepening of a trusting relationship. Erin Manning’s writings on immediation, and Fred Moten’s writings on blackness, have become invaluable to the task of considering these dynamics at the levels of experience and composition and also for finding new ways to explore, consciously live, articulate, and perhaps ease terminal presence, as “techniques of (active) middling” (Manning, Munster, and Thomsen 2019, 11). We are charged by Fred Moten’s affirmation when he writes of social responsibility and black subjectivity, citing Edward Glissant,

 

... because one is, nothing at all. It’s nothing. It ain’t no thing. Selflessness ain’t about nobility or even generosity. The substance of its ethics is of no account, no count off, no one two, just a cut and then people be grooving. It’s not about friendship with others, either. Society is not friendly association with others; it’s friendly association without others, in the absence of the other, in the exhaustion of relational individuality, in consent not to be a single being... (Moten 2017, 282–83).

 

 

Moten’s writing on the place and force of blackness is itself in close dialogue with Denise Ferreira da Silva’s thinking through of subjectivity and temporality, theorized in relation to the black experience as a site of fugitivity emerging in refusal of state violence (murder by police, mass incarceration) and symbolic violence (through anthropological discourse and colonial narrativization) (Silva 2018; 2014). For da Silva, as with Moten, the category and experience of blackness—that is, of being black—exposes post-enlightenment conceptions of time as unexplored, taken-for-granted axioms that lock down and normalize oppositional binaries of self and other, Human and less-than Human. For da Silva,

 

            Ending the grip of Time restores the World anew, from the position Blackness registers –

that is, the halted temporality that preempts recognition and opens the World as Plenum, becomes a Canvas Infinita, where the Subject figures without Time… (Silva 2014, 91).     

 

 

Following da Silva, the modern subject is understood as the product of white europatriarchal dominance, absolutely bound to notions and structures of linear time, to progress narratives. Thus, blackness, as refusal and fugitivity, emerges as an embodied reality and a set of practices for individuals and collectives to exist otherwise right here/now, offering a glimpse of intersubjective political identities to come.

 

Meanwhile, relationality re-emerges across correspondent contexts of difference, struggle, action, and interpretation. Erin Manning’s mantra of beginning in the middle supports a grounded and embodied exploration of relationality as a basis for refiguring time’s passing, for “making immediation felt” (Manning, Munster, and Thomsen 2019, 12). In appealing to each other in the terminal present, we reach toward the embodiment of an inter-subjectivity that can be, and that can deal with (not-)being groundless and out of time, toward a shared agency. To begin in the middle is to begin at a point—now—amid the endless, limitless state of listening (in any sensory or non-sensory interpretation of the word, as a way to notice our capacities to hear, to be heard, or to selectively pay attention). Writing on the political possibilities of listening, Brandon LaBelle proposes a focus on critical sonic practice and experience towards new forms of political consciousness and agency. Reflecting upon the “invisibility” of systems of financial capital and an attendant absence of political agency capable of confronting such systems, LaBelle asks:

 

How might one confront the deeply penetrating forces that wield great influence over one's life? It seems imperative to continue to think beyond traditional constraints of the public sphere and political world... (2018, 23).

 

before suggesting that,

 

… people must work across this new frontier, enacting an array of factions that interconnect daily life with global finance, personal desires with communications networks (2018, 23).

 

By dwelling upon, living through, and sharing time—with/out each other—feeling and showing and dealing with our times of crisis in the terminal present, we seek to become ourselves as intersubjective non-selves actively responsive to our saturated untimeliness towards new collective agencies and intelligences, thus,

 

The temporal dispersal of “who”

and the entanglement of ourselves

among all that time

is our relationship

is our subject

 

 

 

Animated Figure 3
(fig. 3)
Animated Figure 4
(fig. 4)

 

 

 

An Ephemeral Archive.wav

 

 

 

 

Dissolving Voices

                                   

Speak the thought into existence.

The opposite of waiting.

Why always at our limit?

 

Too acute.

On occasion.

Don’t even listen to the files.

 

Critique as congratulation, another colonizer language.

Destination a dispiriting

Home to no one.

 

The work lays abandoned.

Can’t wait.

Log in again.

 

Breathe in an idea: a self-consuming collage.

Nothing will move us that is designed to.

Inspiring others with zero intent.

 

The next fun thing the kids will want?

Freefalling through an unbounded and nihilistic

Hypertime

 

This misuse of autonomy.

Agency that asks very little of itself.

How to get the metals

out of the rocks?

 

Temporal plasticity.

Looping media, fleeting choices.

No event of consumption, no moment of encounter.

What is left is what comes from being allowed to matter.

 

The whole body collapses into intimacy and proximity making way for encounters and actions.

End point number one.

Beyond some kind of limit.

Now begins to write.

 

 

 

Vectors Of Novelty

 

The image shows a composite of symbols

Two blue checks, “You,” microphone, 0:10

                        something like:

                                    “sent and received,”

“You,”

recorded speech,

“10 seconds”

            The “frisbee” is thrown from the suspended ground of “You”…

 

The edge of the present is an impossible state, but a state nonetheless. Its proximity to nothingness is both precarious and familiar: such fleeting forms of presence directly reflect our fragmented and fragmenting selves. The question is one of continuity, which comes at a cost—imagining a series of states as an indivisible whole, committing to linearity, and forgetting differences in the process. What is lost is gone forever. Yet the dissolution of self is neither a real possibility nor a threat imposed, feared, or otherwise imagined. Interiority is not like recorded sound. Endlessness is a prerequisite for the former, an aspiration for the latter. The result of all this – and of our attempts to live within it—is seeing the existence of multiple forms of novelty (and of making novel, of reinvention) along a spectrum of impermanence: at one point, an ethical commitment to presence; at its opposite, the oppressor’s dream of intervention without consequence.

 

And yet, the terminal present is shaped by every act of love and labor that has occurred before now. Differentially, unevenly, all beings live among what artist-activist Ashish Ghadiali of the Radical Ecology collective refers to as the “historic presence” of industrialization, plantation, and exploitation (Ghadiali 2017). The historic presence of these destructive actions is terminal in how they perpetually force diverse beings to navigate survival within increasingly strained ecological relations. Living is not getting any easier. A dominant economic race toward maximization demands minimizing the spaces in which diversity might flourish. In the (terminal) present, such spaces (and their offerings of care and sustenance) are increasingly under threat.

 

This discontinual via extreme unregulated saturation

of notional cultural and embodied-experiential

past-present-future…

 

An empty future is a future that has already come and gone, quite unrelated to any intentionality in the present—a future that might never be changed, impossible to predict or control, yet still partly willed into existence amid the collapse of formal institutions and recognized modes of history-making (Berardi 2011). Are we, then, at the mercy of the future? Are we to expect more of the same, only worse? Is the terminal present slowly and rapidly deteriorating in real time? Or may the “terminus” of the present refocus intentionality (despite the idea of causal links having become so thoroughly undermined)?

 

Gathered around shared tasks and their implications.

Our bonds appear; participatory events.

The collective opening.

 

Even in the absence of a shared future, we are expected to relentlessly self-realize—to express and capitalize on the notion of self-ownership—in processes that imagine a temporal arc or identifiable trajectory (or which at least imply the possibility of causal interactions with audience/market, self/selves, difference/other, being/matter, and more ways of making [a] difference). But this all unfolds in a current time that has no such trajectory.

 

Care confronts hostility in part by undermining these dynamics and expectations. But the uncertainties remain in place. In the absence of escape, an individual treats their own symptoms while also transmitting their inheritance of inequality: many selves become both recipients and vectors of an infection of replication. Again, a spectrum: a collaborative embrace of being always emergent within immediacy, through to a concept of personhood as an undesirable and persistent disease of novelty. Perhaps the terminal present—embodied, practiced, and lived as critical and collaborative self-composition—re-orients the immediate moment as both means and end, rendering and reinforcing hope as praxis, as emergent, and as a form of presence.

 

Overdue.

Delayed thanks.

The signal keeps dropping.

Gaps to be filled, connections to be repaired.

Unexpected YouTube finds.

2003.

And some graffiti:

“Hasta que la dignidad se haga costumbre”

…’til dignity becomes the norm.

 

 

 

References

 

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. The Ecstasy of Communication. Semiotext(e).

Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. Schocken Books.

Berardi, Franco. 2011. After the Future. Edited by Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn. AK Press.

Blanchot, Maurice. 1995. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. University of Nebraska Press.

Bordeleau, Erik. 2019. “Immediation, Bergson and the Problem of Personality.” In Immediation I, edited by Erin Manning, Anna Munster, and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, 161–82. Open Humanities Press.

Bradley, Rizvana, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. 2021. “Four Theses on Aesthetics.” E-Flux Journal 120. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/120/416146/four-theses-on-aesthetics/.

Crary, Jonathan. 2013. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso Books.

Ghadiali, Ashish. 2017. While the sun shines. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/while-sun-shines/.

Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 1968. Le Sérieux de l’Intention. Flammarion.

LaBelle, Brandon. 2018. Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. Goldsmiths Press.

Manning, Erin. 2019. “Experimenting Immediation: Collaboration and the Politics of Fabulation.” In Immediation II, edited by Erin Manning, Anna Munster, and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, 361–97. Open Humanities Press.

Manning, Erin, Anna Munster, and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen. 2019. “Twisting Into the Middle 1.” In Immediation I, edited by Erin Manning, Anna Munster, and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, 10–12. Open Humanities Press.

Metzinger, Thomas. 2004. Being No One: The Self Model Theory of Subjectivity. MIT Press.

Moten, Fred. 2017. Black and Blur. Duke University Press.

Silva, Denise Ferreira da. 2014. “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(Ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World.” The Black Scholar 44 (2): 81–97.

———. 2018. “Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism and Refusal beyond the Limits of Critique.” philoSOPHIA 8 (1): 19–41.

Smith, Colin. 1957. “The Philosophy Of Vladimir Jankélévitch.” Philosophy 32 (123): 315–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100051949.

Steyerl, Hito. 2017. “The Terror of Total Dasein: Economies of Presence in the Art Field.” In Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, 21–31. Verso Books.

Terranova, Tiziana. 2014. “Red Stack Attack!” In #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, 379–401. Urbanomic.

 

 

 

Appendix: An Ephemeral Archive – Transcript

 

Iain: Hi Tristan, thanks for messaging me and no need to, no need to apologize about not getting back to me quickly. I have not really been thinking about this project recently either and I may experiment with… with getting in touch you and sending you a message not necessarily when feel like I have something coherent to say. Maybe there's a kind of like, I don't know like a bit of a self-rehearsal creeping into the things I've been sending you recently and perhaps in some ways that runs counter to what we are exploring through these sounds that we're sending each other. I've realized that I feel a bit detached from this project and I think it’s because in part I feel quite detached from a kind of like deep thinking about sound and listening and a deep thinking in general really like a kind of lack of depth which is to with having a really fragmented life at the moment for various practical reasons and just having to do stuff and make plans and think about how to make all the pieces fit which is obstructing my ability to think deeply and listen deeply and it’s also obstructing my interest in doing so. Like I’m not, I’m not really reading or listening and so in a way like my life at the moment doesn't have a sound. It doesn't have a sound ‘cos it doesn't have an engagement with a sound, like its soundless and so every time you send me a message I’m extremely grateful for it regardless of what's in it because it’s an invitation… it's many things but one of those things is an invitation for me to reengage with the sound of your life and my life and the life in between.

 

Tristan: Hey, trying to write about the terminal present, an anonymous present, perpetual departure, forever anticipated, effectively invisible, and I was thinking about a form of the present that is non-seasonal, divorced from the sun, unaware of the moon, constantly constructing its own immediate exterior, seeking a source of stimuli.

 

Iain: An engine for this study is a relationship with Tristan's voice, which is a relationship with Tristan, which is a relationship with myself, which is a relationship with the questions.

 

Tristan: I wrote all that down cos I can't store successive words in a sufficiently stable part of my brain.

 

Iain: When I send you a message on WhatsApp the software allows me to see if your phone has received it and if you've seen it, maybe even meaning, read it, and because of that I immediately am kind of involved in a, in a cycle of expectation. So, if you've read it when are you gonna get back to me? You know? I was talking to someone earlier today at an event that I’m still at about similarities and differences between writing and sending letter and writing and sending WhatsApp messages, and it strikes me that the difference in the way that expectation is managed and plays out is perhaps one of those differences and that a kind of impatience and insistence on being received and being responded to is written into the software that we are communicating with and so I wanted to talk to you about that.

 

Tristan: Imbalanced: look at it. read it. a log, a record. Established chronology, clear chronologies. This thread is an archive of absence. A living archive of presence. Every thread.

 

Iain: Voice note dialoging as a technique of immediation. It interrupts, acts, enacts, and performs thinking… inscribes it in material contexts, sounding contexts.

 

Tristan: Overdue, delayed thanks, signal keeps dropping, gaps to be filled, connections to be repaired, unexpected YouTube finds, 2003, and some graffiti… ‘til dignity becomes the norm…

 

Iain: And time goes by so slowly and time can do so much. Are you still mine? I need your love. I need your love, so speed your love to me.

 

Tristan: Really sorry to have neglected this channel of exchange for so long.

 

Iain: Here's a quick note on capacities for care before the coffee wears off: exhaustion generates embodied vulnerability, irritability that lacks compassion. Relentless work, social performance and lack of sleep combine to produce a cellular rage. Culturally, this is what my world aspires to, the neoliberal world, or the techno-feudal world. The capacity to care for others, for one's self, for the more-than-human and the yet-to-come, relates to a particular relationship with time, not necessarily a slowness, but a set of habits that guard against fetishized, accelerated overwhelm.

 

Tristan: Well, what I was going to say was, I no longer know it when I see it, or do we know it when we see it. Spend so much time immersed in the implications of representing others that the conundrum of self-representation appeals/appears novel or untested.

 

Iain: I should also share that I don't feel entirely genuine in the delivery of these messages because I find it hard to not think about a kind of other audience i.e. a research audience not you.

 

Tristan: Eh, just a general note I’ll try and avoid these eh, weird, radio 4 style voice in future… a regional accent.

 

Iain: Quoting Manning (2019), “the point is that there is no form-taking, no identity, a body is the how of its emergence, not the what of its form. the issue is one of engendering. How does this singular taking form happen, given the complex collusions of speeds and slownessess, of organic and inorganic tendings, or activities and movements that resolve into this or that body event.”

 

Tristan: Internet access for the first time in days - thus enabled. mc 1620. lecco 1659. varenna 1724. or get to the bus to lungolago marconi. bellano 1729.

 

Iain: When tired, which is often, I’ve been compulsively checking messages, feeds, email and the time, sometimes surprised to find that I’ve accessed again what I was looking at less than a second ago. This is mad behavior, a reflexive and futile habit of attempted auto-location in response to total digital overwhelm and hysterical lack of temporo-social agency. I’m looking for messages or signs that will orientate me in some kind of fixed sense of duty, purpose or even interest, but this is not what returns.

 

Tristan: I don't know why I’m finding it more and more difficult to do this but here we are.

 

Iain: Recovery is a process of acceptance. You can't rush it.

 

Tristan: Quote from Maurice Blanchot (1995), The Writing of a Disaster: “Passivity… we can evoke it only in a language that reverses itself. I have at other times referred to suffering: suffering such that I could not suffer it. If I had recourse to the thought of such suffering it was so that in its un-power, the 'I' excluded from mastery and from its status of subject (as first person) - the 'I' destitute even of obligation - colludes itself as self capable of undergoing suffering. There is suffering, There will be suffering, but no longer 'I' suffering, and this suffering does not make itself known in the present. It is not borne into the present, still less is it experienced in the present. It is without present just as it is without beginning or end. Time has radically changed its meaning and its flow. Time without present, I without I. This is not anything of which one could say that experience, a form of knowledge, would either reveal, or conceal it.”

 

Iain: When I woke up this morning, I checked my phone before I’d even got out of bed and I looked at the front page of The Guardian newspaper, and it said that the UK economy is in a, a doom loop and I was thinking about the notion of a doom loop and its relation to.. well, as a temporal idea. The kind of... I suppose maybe a combination of perpetual decline and repetition like a kind of over and overness of things getting worse caused by, perhaps, intentional, designed political incompetence and irresponsibility. And I suppose thinking about the Instagram loops I was just watching - pretty doomy - and the kind of loop of overproduction I feel myself also to be caught in cause I’m not gonna do fuck all about wildfires in Canada or rent strikes so what am I gonna do?

 

Tristan: A burst of activity, fragments of clarity.

 

Iain: These matters are connected because they are not connected. These matters are not connected because they are, they're connected.

 

Tristan: I’m remembering now the challenge of doing this, of eh, explaining, sharing, talking, relaying, inventing, getting by the skin of your teeth.

 

Iain: Hey Tristan, thanks for getting in touch. I enjoyed singing you a song earlier on, and I enjoyed listening to your responses. Maybe it’s getting harder to do because our communication is a little bit, is even more, kind of separated out or kind of inconsistent or something like that than it was before and we've not actually had a conversation for a while under than, other than this form so it’s not kind of supported by any deep dives it really is these kind of now-and-then messages, missives. I was singing unchained melody to you earlier on which I think lyrically has some interesting thoughts on time and the experience of time in a romantic context but kind of interesting maybe beyond a romantic context but when I was on my bike after sending that over I started reflecting on the title unchained melody and I don't know this like communication that we're having as kind of unchained and maybe melodic in some sense and then on, reflecting on the kind of materiality of chains as, I don't know, kind of like tools, material… like, kind of material tools for constrainment, Maybe made of metal, maybe designed to hurt or certainly to constrain but also thinking about chains as a connected series of repeated, notionally identical units, links, and maybe, I don't know maybe like chronological time we can think of as a chain and maybe in that sense we can think about the time of our communication over this medium as unchained and I wonder what good comes from that and I wonder what challenges the unchained-ness presents and maybe we can reflect on these when we come to consider what we have actually said to each other over the last few months.

 

Tristan: Even I don't know why I’m doing it.

 

Iain: Quoting Manning (2019): “Immediation activates the uneasy timings that exceed all takings form.”

 

Tristan: And so, sorry for the delay.