If I were to write a novel… If I were to write a book… Is a sentence hanging over my life. Like a boulder of responsibility to all the expectations, hopes and excitement, weighed upon the textually precocious child that I was. I have yet to do them anything like justice.

If I were to write a novel… You see the problem is that I really don’t like characters. In fact I rarely read fiction. I think perhaps I over did it, nothing but it, for long years of tortured adolescent escapism. Nowadays I don’t like that feeling of losing myself, losing my own life’s time in pursuit of some constructed neuroses, hopes, and aspirations. I want to be doing my own striving, conversing with the present. Perhaps that is why my favorite form of writing by far is the essay. J’essaie. I try. I think in conversation with the world.

If I were to write a novel… all the characters would be essays. When I think of a character like this, as a style of conversation with the world, a particular kind of rhythm and grammar, a way of winding toward the subject, around and back, then the idea of setting out upon a novel excites me. I guess the fiction writers that I like the best are also very much essayists. I think here of Kundera, and Musil and I suppose, to a certain extent, the slow Russian tableaux of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky that I gleaned from my parents bookshelves in those years of nothing but books. However, at least in Kundera and Musil, whom I have read more recently, the characters seem not like essays, but rather like structural foils in the overarching essay of the novel, or bridges to reach between islands of meaty philosophical reflection that get me salivating as I brake from my characteristic speedy gulp to a slow chew.

Other than a character bridge, what else could be used to join these essay fragments? Can a novel function like a slow formalist film, where the character just exists and the time passing, and the camera moving and the light and texture of the image – the vital conversation with the world – is hung together around nothing but this fact of existence? Who would have the patience to slow down and read a novel like this now?

I am just existing. Is the goldfish bowl of realtime a slow formalist novel in which we all try to span together meaty philosophical reflections upon life?

I return full circle on my own elegantly constructed neuroses. I will try for another fragment next time.

Fishing to sink the hook into a line of thought, I glanced at the list of drafts on my blog Admin home page; half finished fragments I had once thought that I might get back to, some of them now years past their use-by date. ‘The language assembly line’ caught my attention and I opened it to re-discover this quote archived in the midst of lecture preparation for a class I taught back in 2008.

Alphabet letterpress printing, in which each letter was cast on a separate piece of metal, or type, marked a psychological break through of the first order. It embedded the word itself deeply in the manufacturing process and made it into a kind of commodity. The first assembly line, a technique of manufacture which in a series of set steps produces identical complex objects made up of replaceable parts, was not one which produced stoves, or shoes, or weaponry but one which produced the printed book. Walter Ong

‘And first there was the word’. Pure semantic capital. Disaggregated from body and ritual, the speaker and the spoken-to, the hand and the page. Trade up and trade on. Walking down Bold St, Liverpool, there is a T-shirt in one of the shop windows that catches my attention every time I pass by; ‘Cocaine and Caviar’ white letters on black, can’t get clearer than that, or more aspirational irony in one of the poorest regions in the UK. Not much further up the same street I happened upon a pair of ‘PhD’ branded socks advertising their philosophic credentials to the world. If the book represented the industrialisation of language, the brand is its re-ritualisation, the concerted attempt to load a word with so much meaning, such a dense commodity-semantic association, that it becomes heavy and seemingly solid in a world whose indexical relations are now so complex that they float free of any material certainty. They are the tokens of gravitas with which we festoon ourselves as we try so hard to be anything but a replaceable part.

The theme of this year’s Liverpool Biennial is The Unexpected Guest. Perhaps it is to be expected then that the best ‘work’ I have witnessed thus far was an unexpected addendum to a trip down to the docks to see some of the official exhibitions.

After exiting the Cunard Building I heard loud drumming down closer to the waterfront. I went to investigate and encountered six bus loads of Indian people from Leicester celebrating something to do with the god Ram. There were several groups of men wearing different ‘uniforms’ organised around the colour orange and dancing to the drummers at the centre of each group. I didn’t want to intrude too much so I never found out exactly what the occasion was, but as I stood watching a fantastic intercultural collaboration began to emerge… the video says it all.

Please excuse the terrible sound quality – my otherwise great smart phone does not have a levels control or an inbuilt limiter…

Diotima knew that one had to let oneself tumble headlong into radical changes in one’s circumstances and wake up amid one’s new four walls without quite knowing how one got there, but she felt exposed to influences that kept her wide awake.
Robert Musil. The Man Without Qualities. p461

So many gems in this novel clustered so densely that I can only digest a Chapter or two at a time. Second year of reading so far…

I’m sitting staring into the middle distance of my beige veneer desktop and gritting like crazy against the tide of email sludge rolling into my inbox. Maybe if I turn the music up another few keystrokes I might be able to force a narrow bandwidth of my consciousness to concentrate on the administrative tasks at hand.

I can’t.

My mind wanders. I begin to wonder ‘how the hell does anyone do an administrative job without going completely bonkers’. And then I hit on it. Sex. Regularly orgasmic sex satiates the novelty seeking dopamine engine. You can then proceed, in a dampened state, to answer emails from 9 to 5 and shimmy on home to your spouse for some lights-out excitement. Just enough to stop you from wanting to introduce anything too exciting into the lights-on part of the day. Of course if you don’t have a willing spouse and you are sitting in front of the screen all day, our great online pornucopia is a receptacle of all that must be excluded from a well managed life.

I look around me. All the world is calmly typing.

And therein lies my problem, I have neither a willing spouse, nor a lust for novelty that can be satiated by any virtual experience. I have a physical need to be excited by my work. Does this mean that if, at some point in the future I were to get more regular action, I would acquiesce to my emails more easily? Or that my stimulation threshold might be lowered enough to focus on administrating myself a career?

As it stands, I am entertaining myself with the excitement of ideas, prurient textual connections, and the lure of another saunter down the hall.

Cleaning off my desktop after months of neglect I came across this fragment of text by Thomas Mann on the subject of German fascism:

This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervishlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstacy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face. (From ‘An Appeal to Reason’ in Thomas Mann: Order of the Day, Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades, p. 57, trans. by Helen T. Lowe-Porter, Knopf (1942).

I suspect I probably ‘archived’ it as an equally apt description of American politics.

Elsewhere is not the same as nowhere. It is not everywhere, nor somewhere, nor here. Elsewhere is the place where you are not. It might be a place that you long for, or a place where you store things out of sight and mind. The past is elsewhere. The future is elsewhere. Elsewhere is in the present; over there, or here in the moment of your longing.

In Australia, where I come from, culture is elsewhere, the world is elsewhere, and the blame is laid elsewhere. It is a nation defined by a foundational elsewhere, the colonial elsewhere of out of sight, mind and territory and, for the forcibly displaced convicts, the elsewhere of home. The waves of post-war immigrants and regular tide of refugees and international students draw the foundational elsewhere of home into the present tense. Because home is elsewhere, the responsibility for history also lies elsewhere. The indigenous population are largely elsewhere anyway and the outback is a mythic elsewhere that most Australians have never seen. A pilgrimage to experience culture elsewhere is a middle class rite of passage and success in any cultural field is only real if you achieved it elsewhere, or you are able to make it happen elsewhere.

In the art world being from elsewhere can give you credibility. Because of its evacuated sense of cultural identity Australia is not a very interesting elsewhere to be from, but an elsewhere that is inaccessible to the West, that is ethnically exotic, or at war is particularly attractive. It also helps if that elsewhere is currently featuring in the international news, if it is an elsewhere to which many people are regularly directing their imagination. For example, being from Iran gives you top marks on the elsewhere credibility scale.

Being dead means that you are always elsewhere, can never be here, are a pure fantasy for the pleasure of the market.

Elsewhere is a tantalising counterpoint to the everywhere of globalised non-places, a marketing oasis. At the same time this creeping sameness of the no-place-every-place is in fact created by the imaginary evacuation to elsewhere. Airports – characteristic non-places and physical evacuation portals – are full of advertisements for elsewhere. An always longing for being elsewhere, happening elsewhere, feeling elsewhere means that you are never here. And when you are there you are sold nostalgia for the elsewhere that you never were.

Elsewhere is a colonising imaginary and it is also a material repository of all that we would rather not see. When we buy something new it arrives from elsewhere and we send our waste to an elsewhere that does not feature on bilboards. ‘That kind of thing doesn’t happen here.’ That kind of thing happens to someone elsewhere.

In ‘summary of the year just gone’ style a recent article in The Guardian points to the massive increase in the use of camera phone generated content by news providers in 2011. The Arab Spring is cited as being the ‘tipping point’ both in the central role that citizen media played in the international community’s access to the events as they were taking place and also with respect to the fact that photojournalists are now using the ‘less intrusive’ and ‘more authentic looking’ cell phone cameras. The industry continues to feel the pressure of new delivery models as photojournalists are laid off and citizen media, while emulated for its ‘authenticity’, is decried for its lack of interpretive authority.

Michele McNally, assistant managing editor for photography at the New York Times … said citizen media was an “instant document” of an event rather than a replacement for skilled photojournalism. She said: “Most amateur footage does lack the real smart interpretation of what it’s like to be there.”

I’m wondering if a more appropriate analysis might be that the proliferation of amateur footage, and the increasing use of video in place of the still shot, has changed the way in which ‘being there’ is experienced, or understood, by the remote viewer. Being in a conflict zone is no longer framed with a head to camera introduction. Being there is not a freeze frame. The beauty of the ‘being there image’ (and yes I do think that the question of interpretive legitimacy is an aesthetic judgement) is not the poignant victim, the brutal power, or the grizzly remains. It is the blur and pant of a running camera forgotten under a sniper’s gaze, or the rush of a climbing tsunami. It is not beauty in the way in which it has been understood in a modern framework – with the space of contemplative distance – but rather the beauty of immediacy, of a palpable body/identity/presence conjured by the three dimensional motion of the viewfinder.

The way in which ‘an event’ is created by virtue of the presence of a camera has also changed with the proliferation of camera phones. In all spheres of life there is now a constant performance of ‘eventness’. The camera phone is less obtrusive as an instrument of documentation because of its small size, but also because it is just one among many. (Inter)national politics becomes micropolitics, a battle enacted not day by day, but minute by minute, blow by blow, through the massing documents of a multitude, in a flurry of video instants, for the capture of a global imagination.

And as the imagination is captured, so it is sold. Over this footage of a Syrian sniper taking aim at a young child, there are advertisements for sim cards and broadband.

The semantic structure of international news is no longer built within the broadcast frame. Rather it is articulated by the connective logic of the advertisement that offers access – an ability to participate in the production of political spectacle and to feedback more connections, more visual fodder for the attention of a capitalisable audience. I am curious to see how this semantic function of the advertisement will develop as You Tube rebrands itself with a more overtly commercial tone.

I have a bad habit of keeping tabs open for months as a guilty index of all my undeveloped thoughts – current count at time of writing = 44 tabs. “Must think about that further – keep tab open” is CPU intensive procrastination. Eventually my browser crashes, I load them all again and cull a few to keep the system happy. If a tab avoids being weeded for long enough it creeps towards the left and comes to sit not far under my webmail in the attention hierarchy. While this may itself qualify as a mad logic, it is also by way of introduction to a persistently recalcitrant tab from The Guardian entitled ‘Anders Behring Breivik and the logic of madness‘ (29th of July would you believe – yes I’ve had it open for 5 months!!)

Now other than the evocative title, what exactly was it about this article that kept it from being filtered? The quiet between Christmas and New Year lends me time to have another look…

Written by psychoanalyst Darian Leader, it describes the ‘discreet psychosis’ of the paranoiac as being one that engages “a rigid system of beliefs with explanatory power, according the subject a fixed place in the world”. What is ‘wrong with the world’ – that which is the object of paranoid focus – is always outside of the subject. In this sense, it seems that what Leader is saying is that the boundary conditions of the paranoid person are co-defined with boundary between right and wrong; ‘I am right – the world (or some aspect of it) is wrong’.

The most noble and charitable of pursuits thus often share something with the most tyrannical and murderous: to remove an evil presence from the world…. The madness lies not in the content of the beliefs here but in the person’s relation to the belief. If certainty about the belief replaces doubt, we are in the realm of psychosis.

So does that make all religious people psychotic? There is definitely certainty about belief, but interestingly, or at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition with which I am familiar, that belief is one which holds the individual to be inherently ‘wrong’ or ‘evil’. The ‘rightness’ is in a transcendent figure with which the believing subject cannot ever fully equate themselves. Perhaps this assumption of transcendence is what makes someone psychotically paranoid (as opposed to ‘normally paranoid’) and leads in turn to the magnetic, cult inspiring, quality of the psychotic:

This certainty will often spawn enthusiasm, forming groups or movements. Neurotic people are unsure of their aim in life, and sex, death and existence are open questions. Encountering someone who actually knows the answer to these questions will exert a gravitational effect. Breivik, like many others, will probably attract his followers.

This nuances the old-fashioned idea that the subject is only responsible for a crime if he “knew the difference between right and wrong”, since the central feature of paranoia is precisely that the person does know the difference. That, indeed, is why they are psychotic: they harbour not doubt but utter conviction that what they are doing is the right thing.

So I guess my question, and the reason why this article has persisted for so long in my index of incomplete thoughts, is: is madness abnormal? Clearly it is not as there are a lot of mad people in the world. In fact one could even go so far as to suggest that without madness of this nature – individual assumption of transcendence, action without doubt, the phenomenon of psychotically charismatic leaders with mass followings – politics as we understand it (national, public, corporate) would cease to exist. Perhaps more to the point would be the question: if madness is not abnormal then how is it useful as a category? Madness, as it has been psychoanalytically and psychiatrically constructed over the last 150 years, is deeply connected to a juridical framing of the citizen subject, of the relationship between individual rights and responsibility, right and wrong. Madness provides the loophole, the give in the system, so that we can continue to believe in the national-juridical absolutes of right and wrong in the face of human mess.

If someone deviates from the collective and acts to kill without the backing of the State they are evil or mad. In collective form they may be terrorists. With the backing of the State it is war. Could we say then that the boundary conditions of the nation state are co-defined with ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and if so is the nation state as we have known it a psychotically paranoid entity?

I know I am skipping around on well worn theoretical territory here without the slightest bit of background – Foucault perhaps, didn’t he have something to say about madness? (Insert jokey parenthesis). I guess thats what gets me reading though. Follow your thoughts long enough and you’ll always end up at someone else’s book, or at least a few more tabs (current count = 47), and perhaps even realise something about the book you have already been reading: The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil – an amazing meditation on the modern subject and its relationship to nationhood in the early 20th Century. I just realised why one of the main characters, who thus far seems to be somewhat unintegrated with the other narrative threads, is a madman on trial for a murder – because of the constitutive relationship between madness and law when it comes to the definition of the citizen subject, and because power over life and death is a defining factor in the relationship between citizen subject and State (Foucault again), and of course because its a novel not a theory text so the character is a central mechanism of thematic exploration.

Now enough meanderings. I’m off to close some tabs and get to work on the next chapter.

Another long hiatus in cyberthinking can this time be accounted for by a project blog disastertourist.us, in which I documented my Great American Road Trip and eventual departure from the States to England. Liverpool bring it on!