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!

I have recently become quite fascinated with a Nivea advertising campaign that I first encountered in England and France and just hit on again in the States. Below is a photo of the first billboard that I encountered at a train station in the English Midlands.

Have your say on Facebook about what exactly? It struck me that not only is this a rather clumsy attempt to get in on the act with social network market everything, it is also, more interestingly, an attempt to engage the access economy model at the somatic level – between bodies. In the ‘age of access’ (after the Jeremy Rifkin book of that name) one rarely ever buys anything outright. Rather, one buys access – think cell/mobile phone plan, car care plan, internet service. This means that consumers are always tethered to the market, with small incremental payments everywhere for everything. Social networking extends this model to friendship – or at least tries to monetize social relationships through advertising – and indirectly it is also played out via other gateway technologies such as cell phones and internet service providers. This Nivea campaign is an attempt to embed itself within these same social relationships, to make itself necessary. But how does a material product begin to approach anything like the social necessity of Facebook, for example, to make us closer than ever before? It addresses the relationship between body and self.

“The conscious and calculated management, maintenance, modification, and manipulation of our somatic existence throughout the course of our lives and through all vicissitudes has become … the hesitant potential basis of a new ontology. In this sense, our bodies have become ourselves, become central to our expectations, hopes, our individual and collective identities …” Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, p105

Nivea, with its 100 year old wisdom will continue to nourish the surfaces of our bodies, our skin, our interface with the world and with each other. It will provide us with the material solidity that we feel is dissolving around us, and at the same time it will be the conduit to new experiences and forms of participation. It is not between us in the informational ether, it is at the interstice between my body and yours, my life and your life, when I reach out to touch you I touch Nivea first. Hmm that felt good. Get on Facebook and tell the world about it.

But its not sexy, its product lighting clinical – like ads for tampons and toilet paper. You are a product. Your baby is a product. Life is a product. Maintain your product – keep clean, stay touchable.

Another thing that I thought was interesting about this campaign is the placement of the advertisements. In England and France I only ever saw them at train stations. In Paris they were at the entrances to Le Metro, where you enter the zone of transit which is at once the portal between different locations and sets of social relations, and a space in which you are in close proximity to many strangers.

In the States the only advertisement I have seen was covering the anti-theft ‘beepers’ at the entrance to a store. On one side was the ‘two people close’ motif, on the other was Rhianna. If you are virtuous in your use you might even get close to someone famous. Your body is your access pass to fame and fortune. Keep the door open, get closer – buy Nivea.

I have decided to use the rising wave of panic I’m feeling at having to organise and pack up all my worldly possessions to help me overcome the lesser panic of blog avoidance. I have a mental list of ‘blogs waiting to be written’ that has been generating excessive pressure somewhere in my frontal lobe and occluding the flow of action to the finger tips for quite some time. But now the fear of packing has surged on through and I’m running type across the screen as if there were no tomorrow. At least it is a temporary respite from the circular path I have been treading around my workspace stopping to stare in long intervals at one pile of disorder after another.

Looking back over the spotty history of this blog I notice other such moments – can’t pack, blogging. There is also something about having to sort through the accumulated detritus of ones life that lends itself to a ponderous state of mind. For example, why is it that I tolerate certain habits of attachment and not others? My collection of fabric scraps, patches and buttons that I insist on dragging around the world with me, occasionally replacing one scrap with another, but rarely using. And the Thai oboe I bought 15 years ago in Bangkok and never play? The box of audio cables and adapters that seem to get used more often by friends than by me? Why not the items of furniture, or ‘objets d’art’ that other people seem to hold onto? I guess the simple answer is that furniture is usually too big and art, well who needs it…

But more interestingly I start to construct a psychic self-analysis based on my material attachments. There is a great book that I read for a class last year called The Comfort of Things (Daniel Miller) that constructs ethnographic ‘portraits’ of people based on the way in which they relate to their material possessions. Ever since then I’ve been wishing that the author would do the same for me – it was such a fascinating perspective on the way in which we construct ‘selves’ and relationships with others through our things.

Apart from the small personal things that I keep (like kids drawings and cards) most of the things that I hold onto are ‘useful’ – they have the potential to be activated in some way, or made into something else. And they are fragments of places I have been, clothing I once wore, projects I have undertaken. They are elements of a narrative that have the potential to be reanimated, or woven back into new narratives, new ‘doings’ in the world. And they are small and portable – they are bits of the world easily carried along on new journeys. Other life props (like furniture) are easily acquired and discarded back along the side of the road as the need arises.

The nature of my attachments also have much to do with the patterns of relation to the material world that I established as a child, when the sewing box provided hours of entertainment and there were always musical instruments lying around to be fiddled with. Furniture for my poor and (in the early years) peripatetic parents was also something that you came by rather than chose, or got too attached to. The decor and furnishings changed every time we moved and always felt somewhat extraneous to the action of living there.

I would like to think that one day in the not too distant future I will stay somewhere long enough that my collection of useful, and used, objects will sediment into something more conventionally recognisable as home. Although I fear the overabundance of empty plastic containers and bottles which even now accumulate faster than functions can be found for them.

I have a list of ‘things of interest’ and some half written posts that I never got to finish. Perhaps if I were really part of the Facebook generation I would be better at sending scraps into cyberspace, but the old dame in me still craves considered text. And where does the time for some quiet consideration hide out these days?

Instead this collection of longed after thoughts, loosely woven:

Australia pays big bucks to advertise itself live on Oprah Winfrey – corporation trumps nation in the global bazaar. A great coup for Tourism Australia as, at measly price of AUD 4 million, Australia gets the PR boost of a decade. I know the idea of nation branding is not entirely new but this has really got me thinking about the extent to which it is now the exigencies of maintaining the global brand not the idea of ‘national essence’ that drives the political process. From that wonderful source of wisdom,The Age:

AUSTRALIA is viewed as the ”dumb blonde” of the world, attractive but shallow and unintelligent, according to a visiting British branding expert. …

”What you have is an image of a country that is considered to be very decorative, but not very useful” … ”Rather than waste time fiddling around with promotional campaigns, what Australia needs to do is to invest in the sectors which demonstrate its seriousness and its capability and education is one of them.”

Another such area was culture. Mr Anholt said Australia was unusual among developed nations in not having an organisation devoted to the promotion of culture, such as Germany’s Goethe Institute or France’s Alliance Francaise. Mr Anholt said the US did not have such an organisation, but arguably did not need one because of the global reach of its entertainment industry.

‘Attractive’ is important for the tourism industry – the dumb blonde obviously enterprises-up well. However, the essence of a good brand is not its surface sparkle, but a sense of depth, longevity, excellence, quality – all of which inspire consumer confidence and loyalty. But confidence in and loyalty to what exactly? Australia as a good business destination? The Australian Dollar? Invest more in education and culture to develop the depth of brand Australia and add buoyancy to the Dollar as it fights its valiant fight on the high seas of the global currency market.

And if at any moment one should feel like the odds are too high for one’s brand of choice, merely stop off at the local gold vending machine to exchange some flaky currency for an older more reliable brand – “something real”. Yet not real. A spectre of the gold standard tailored to meet the market demand for individual security in the swirling maelstrom of globalisation. Something solid, material, weighty, to hold on to – a psychic anchor – that, despite its tangible dimensions, is nonetheless just another piece of flotsam on the same seas.

I am reminded, in this instance, of the SI base units – those things to which we anchor all our most real and proper calculations of the material world – and in particular the beautifully poetic standard for the ampere:

“The ampere is that constant current which, if maintained in two straight parallel conductors of infinite length, of negligible circular cross-section, and placed 1 metre apart in vacuum, would produce between these conductors a force equal to 2 × 10?7 newton per metre of length.”

Our world is built teetering upon the impossible and the infinite.

Now I wouldn’t normally consider myself to be part of the Facebook generation – online all the time, do not exist when phone is turned off, can’t remember before the internet – but when I finally log on to half a year of no posts I do get to thinking ‘and what have I been doing, exactly? No document = no claim to existence.