Immanent Domain

pawtistic

adjective for people who have an easier time coexisting & communicating with animals than with people.

Immanent Organizing

A favorite Daoist saying: Sages are like a mirror—They neither see things off, nor go out to meet them. They respond to everything, without storing anything up.

This reminds me of something organizationista David Allen says: that your mind should be like water, responding with appropriate force to whatever impinges on it, and then returning to a state of relaxed creativity.

He also argues, rightly I think, that to reach that state of “mind like water,” you need to get things off your mind. Or, more precisely, out of your mind, to store them in a trusted system that you know you’ll come back to. Allen’s argument makes me think of cleaning up my computer’s desktop, or any desktop, so that I can get some work done. Just concentrate on what’s in front of me without that nagging feeling that I ought to be addressing something else. Paradoxically, the more to do items I list in a trusted system, the less pressure I feel. They are no longer in my head, clamoring for attention. They are some place where I know that I will get to them in good time.

Well and good, as Allen’s book Getting Things Done is well in good, especially in the attention he devotes to creating a system robust enough to deal with interruptions, with the lack of control you may have over your day because life happens, and keeps on happening. What I couldn’t have imagined is how much of a difference technology could make in helping me spend more time in that creative, mind-like-water, zone.

However much of a technophiliac I might be, I’ve always been wary of time management software, afraid that instead of me running it, it will run me. But Omnifocus, a mac and iphone program based on Allen’s ideas, strikes me as different in kind. It has lots of the usual bells & whistles, but here’s the key difference: for every project or task you use it to keep track of, you also assign a physical context. Is this task something you do in front of your computer? Shopping in a near-by city? On the phone? There’s even a context called “waiting,” for those idle stretches in the doctor’s office or at the DMV.

So, when you find yourself in a given context, you can summon up all the items from all the lists that have to do with it. If I need to drive over to Medford OR, the neighboring, larger town, I can bring up all the to-do items that I want to get done in Medford. It might just be a tiny step in an out-of-the-way project, but it will bring it up with any other action item having to do with Medford. Using the iphone’s GPS technology, it will even draw me a map from place to place. Similarly, if I'm in front of my computer and ready to write some emails, it will pull all the emails I've listed as wanting to compose.

In other words, the contexts give the program the ability to respond to the world, instead of trying to force the world to respond to the program.

If whimsy and spontaneity are my ultimate goals, this is clearly the tool for me. It gets tasks out of my mind so I can respond to them on my own time, and according to the limitations and opportunities of wherever I find myself at given moment.

Daoist saying is from --Huainazi, 6 cited in Ames & Hall's translation of the Dao de Jing, 101

Omnifocus web site

Pure Shatnerity

I knew Billy's character was shaped in fistfights with hostile goys as a kid, but a grandfather named "Wolf?" That's more Kirk than Kirk. From The Encyclopedia Judaica, vol 18:

"SHATNER, WILLIAM (1931– ), Canadian actor-writer.  Shatner was born in Montreal. His paternal grandfather, Wolf Shattner, had changed the family name after emigrating from the Ukraine."

Due Diddlence

Obligatory sex. "She completed her weekly due diddlence with the hubby."

Post Mortal Experimentation

I'd like to set up a good wireless hot spot in a Cemetery and see how long it takes for a place of congregation to emerge among the tombstones.

Cryjacking

To constantly redirect attention to one's savored personal sorrows. Also cryjacker: one who uses one-downmanship to pull attention back to themselves.

You Are Not Your Pain

At tale’s end the protagonist endures, scarred perhaps by suffering and loss, but secure in the significance of their struggle and sacrifices. Surrounded by a reassembled family or not, happily ever after or in an abiding isolation, even dead or alive, the hero must sense that we, the audience of readers or viewers, empathize with the hero’s pain and value their sacrifices, that we recognize how this suffering has made them who they are.

How many claims for recognition are underwritten by just this sort of passion play? And how often does it assume an economy of scarcity—as if in the clamor for our attention, only the greatest or most compelling suffering will merit others’ recognition? We may bemoan an “Oppression Olympics” and the one-downmanship it inspires, but fail to appreciate its underlying framework.

If an identity or life narrative grounded in one’s suffering is an appeal for distinction, it also invokes a quantitative notion of pain as a common component or variable upon which our identities are founded and by which they can be ranked. It is as if the self were a marketable product and suffering the common currency that makes it exchangeable.

By this baleful calculus, rarely explicit but everywhere in play, personal significance can be gauged along a continuum. It is anchored at one end (historically and culturally) by Christ’s passion on the cross, and at the other by whatever blithely unscathed, unaware person is your own treasured foil.

Initially this use of suffering to consolidate identity appears to proliferate differences because pain and injustice come in so many historically and culturally distinct packages. But the demand for an apples-to-apples comparison obscures these very historical and cultural specificities, and evokes outright indignation at the suggestion that these sad experiences could be, in fact, incommensurate.

No commensurability, no justice—we might object. Is it not our common capacity for pain that makes empathy possible between us? If you prick me, will I not bleed? You will bleed, as will I. But what an odd, sad limit upon which to ground a common humanity: one great communion of suffering, one universal congregation of pain.

As an alternative, let us consider a narrative that refuses to use suffering to consolidate an identity that then cries for recognition, Elie Wiesel’s Night. Part of the horror and strength of Wiesel’s narrative is the many ways in which it is not his story. Or rather that anything so self-indulgent as a tale of identity-formation retreats before the atrocities through which the narrator unwillingly stumbles. Instead, he functions as a witness to the vast and malignant operations that surround him.

The self as witness rather than as marketable product is one response to the impossible paradox within which Holocaust survivors find themselves. A paradox that, as my partner and Holocaust scholar Liz Eckhart describes it, calls upon survivors to document what happened while fully aware that the extent and horror of it is unspeakable.

Indeed, to consolidate an identity around such suffering would be to, on some level, affirm or find value in the atrocities. Hence the refusal in so many Holocaust narratives of the redemptive moment of closure that routinely occurs at the end of first person narratives. After the Holocaust, our focus is not on the narrator who survives it, but on the enormity of the Holocaust itself.

Slave narratives like those of Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs also deploy the details of their struggles in order to highlight the larger institutions and forces that perpetuated them and the complacent beliefs that allowed those institutions to continue unchecked. How much greater are these narratives than some barren drive for vengeance undertaken beneath the banner of closure.  Attempting to rank Wiesel’s suffering vis-à-vis Jacobs or Douglass’s would not only be inane, it would be nonsensical. This is because their ordeals are as incommensurate as the political and cultural systems that perpetrated them.

Is it not these larger systems that should be the proper target of our narratives and testimonials? Our energies are misdirected if we acquiesce to the notion that our suffering is the key to our uniqueness, the painful grain of sand around which the pearl of our identity accretes. This marketing of our ordeals as the seal of our individuality and gateway to recognition from others, even a kind of status, is a diversion. Our energies should more properly be directed toward attacking or evading those structures and forces that prevent us from acting.

Dreadagogy

Dealing with the more tedious and unpleasant aspects of teaching. Note that it should be distinguished from "Dreadagogue": one who makes up for his own sense of intellectual inadequacy by bullying his students.

Birdinalia

Notes I scribbled between sets at the Andrew Bird concert:

Laura Gibson /

Buckethead /

Granola Skank /

continuous variation /

Subverts & also expands the single-shot commodity form /

AB is a deterritorializing WAR MACHINE

Velo-Hacking

Before my arthritis was diagnosed and treated, I used to go to bed hobbled by pain and have dreams where I ran along a street near my childhood home in seemingly endless, thirty-foot bounds. A variation on dreams of flight, I suppose.

Small wonder, then, that I took such solace in road biking. The stabbing pain in my heels (misdiagnosed as plantar fasciitis) was no impediment to biking. And if I also ached all over, well I just assumed that I was getting older.

Now that the arthritis is being treated successfully, I think it’s interesting that biking still feels less mediated to me than walking or running. I feel more physically grounded, in touch with my surroundings, on a bike than on a jog.

Lots of factors at play here: the smoothness of road biking, as opposed to being physically “jogged”; for me, the freer attention to concentrate on my surrounding; the speed; fewer decisions to make about how to proceed when one is on a country road; even that my head is closer to the ground than when walking.

Someone once wrote that the perfect pedal would be an axle driven through your foot. I think there’s something to this. For me, a bike ride feels unmediated when I’m both connected to the bike and to what I’m seeing. The smoother my cadence, the more I experience what’s around me.

Yet technology is everywhere in play. The better the bike and the more proficient my technique, the closer I feel to what I’m seeing. For others, a different technological assemblage might produce this effect—say with a fixed gear, or non-indexed shifting.

But they are all, of course, mediated. Short of stripping your clothes and rolling down the road, technology is going to be between you and the pavement. For an accomplished runner, the technology behind a running shoe may feel more natural than the technology of a road bike. But in the end, they are both (naturalized) technologies.

However, given this baseline of technological mediation, it would be cynical and stupid to suggest that these assemblages and experiences of biking (or of jogging) are equivalent or exchangeable. Rather I’d want to suggest that they may be different in kind, and these differences can be productive.

Here is where I think that I’m heading: biking as a heterogeneity of differences without a hierarchy governed by a single, naturalized norm. Road, mountain, stunt biking, the beater bike that takes you to the store, your first experience without training wheels … what if these aren’t variations on a theme but divergences producing assemblages & experiences that are different in kind?

Spinoza, in a statement oft-quoted by Deleuze, says that “we do not know of what a body is capable.” Is this not true of a bicycle?

Who could have guessed when bikes were first engineered that they would some day careen down mountains, sail though the air, and land on their independent rear suspensions? As with transforming motorcycles into choppers (literally chopping them up to reconfigure them), at some point people began to hack the bicycle, seeing what it was capable of doing without a limiting conception of its proper calling.

Is it a coincidence that this would happen with something so invested with childhood desire and experimentation as a bicycle? I hope not.

Skateboards, bicycles ... they are both relatively inexpensive (compared to say, a car) and offer young people in the US increased mobility and independence from parental supervision. We do not know of what they are capable, and for this I am grateful.