#and often includes engaging other senses in repetitive actions in order to occupy other parts of the brain

[russilton]

What George’s saying is probably important but I’m transfixed by Lewis fidgeting with his toothpick between glancing at George— his ass is trying so hard to pay attention

What I’m saying is, I stim too, king.

[queernuck]

Information without Borders

“Information functions by always being in motion.”

Lain, speaking to herself during the final episode of Serial Experiments Lain, after establishing memory as a mere “record” that implies a drifting Heideggerian present, seems to pick up on the continual means by which the Wired is represented as a kind of rhizomal structure of power lines and devices, one that is hauntingly familiar specifically because it leads to a reminiscence of our approximation of certain digital encounters in the supposed-Real, the blurring line between mobile and other modalities of computing (perhaps stationary computing, if it could be called that) and exactly what function “presence” serves within the larger “Real” and hyperreality in linkage to it. One of the most famous images of Obama as the Commander in Chief is of him distinctly at a remove, observing as Operation Neptune Spear played out in Abbottabad. The importance of drone warfare to contemporary geopolitics, how Obama left a kind of impact upon the use of the Predator drone that specifically acts as a rearticulation of digital presence in order to systematize presence in the virtual, is inextricable from his presidency. Often associated with the aesthetics of the Obama years due to her own support of him, Beyoncé’s most recent and perhaps most impressive achievement comes specifically as a Virtual performance, one that relies on the hyperreal of Coachella in order to expand beyond it.

The previous appearance of a Tupac hologram at Coachella has largely been turned into a punchline, or aptly seen as a kind of commentary upon the means by which the digital reduces black artists to objects of white consumption. This indicates not only “white consumption” as a certain and specifically realized sort of consumption-production, but moreover the digital object, the projection, the hologram as part of a means of embodiment beyond the self, beyond the will at hand. Rather than being a cyborg, in these cases, these holograms are of a different sort, are a kind of augmentation and prosthesis for white artists engaging in a manipulative resignification of black art. This leads to the rumor that Justin Timberlake would use a similar Prince hologram at his performance during Super Bowl LII, which he thankfully had the sense to avoid. However, he still used Prince’s image in a fashion that comes rather close to the hologram presence of Tupac at Coachella, and for this reason the distinction between the two is rightfully blurred, through these means of analysis we see that the exact manifestation of the holographic in the “Real” is contingent specifically upon an affect, upon that with which it is interacting, and “presence” as realized in a phenomenal discourse of encounter, the phenomenological account. 

The fundamental problem with Prince appearing in hologram is not that this appearance is not genuine, but rather that it is coerced: understanding the hologram of Prince in terms of relation that imply the same embodiment as a “Real” vocabulary allows the development of the body as a singularity of expression and interaction important both to Serial Experiments Lain and to larger questions of digital presence, exchange, computation as part of the structure of producing-production in the age of the blockchain and bitcoin. Prince had been interviewed on the subject of holograms and presence through the digital, harkening to a less digitally advanced realization than that presented by Timberlake but one that shared the same Virtual character. He specifically rejected it because of a sense of presence, of memory and the creation thereof, that remembers these legacies as past, as dishonestly re-created by a certain sort of appropriative turn, and coercively bound to producing-production that relies specifically upon presenting these artistic realizations as genuine and entirely of the present, rather than of a kind of projected-future where the collaboration could be sublimated into a singular whole, where the gap between artists would seem so insignificant that it would eventually be understood as if it were a “Real” collaboration. This refusal by Prince leads one to encounter a fundamental collapsing of the Real as separate from the Virtual, which is a misunderstanding at best. However, his development of separation even in relation to the Virtual is still important in that it refuses the alteration of capitalist historicism, of capitalist reterritorialization of bodies in time, of memories and the remembering of the body, that overwhelmingly work to serve certain interests.

The way in which this is dealt with in Serial Experiments Lain, the process of embodiment and presence in memory that echoes Neon Genesis Evangelion, the Heideggerian presence in Dasein, the embodiment and encounter formative of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, requires a specific sort of meeting with another, and moreover the development of a process, a phenomena of memory and calling-to-mind connected with the creation of that person. Lain’s existence is embodied in such, is realized through a specific kind of development of memory, such that her existence within the world, outside the Virtual of the “Wired” within the series, is specifically in memory, in the contingencies of memory as formative of structures of encounter, ideation, imagining of a potential body and realization of it in memory as a result. The hologram that Lain often manifests as, that Lain in many ways “is” results not simply from the Wired as a digital interface, but rather the Wired as a digital representation of the Virtual metaphysical space surrounding human experience and its repetition, realization, the continual mythmaking and resignification necessary for encounters to become meaningful, for memories to pass from memory into remembering-as-act, the contingency and plasticine nature of memory as altered, specifically reterritorialized by Oedipal processes of appropriation and resignification. That Lain has a close relationship with her father, that one of the students is the victim of grooming by a teacher, the way in which Lain’s own creation of self involves a kind of imagery of vulnerability and childishness that hides her own Oedipal realization of self, the way in which she knowingly un-knows herself, how the parallel realizations of Lain’s existence flow through certain digital machines (including bodies) leads to a certain matching of difficulty with importance when reading exactly what the flow of information at hand represents. 

The devices present in Lain and known as Navi are in many ways reminiscent of present-day computing devices, despite the difference being more readily discussed. That the series was working from an aesthetic standpoint of the late 90s, with limited knowledge of future developments of the digital, but still supposed a kind of personal and portable ability to connect to a certain digital protocol shows the development of such desires before devices that meet them, the realization of a possible Virtual interfacing before it is met, the rhizomal machines assembled and simply unable to flow until the later realization of Smartphones as nexuses of development. The importance of this is in that it shows the machines through which information may flow, the binary machines of interfacing arranged in a schizophrenic network that exists before the realization thereof allows it to direct, start and stop, certain series of flows. The way in which memory, in Lain and Heidegger alike, includes futuricity, includes the creation of past and present and future in a certain singular field like the Deleuzean notion of an eternal capitalist present, the Derridean critique of the ontology behind Fukuyama’s End of HIstory, specifically develops into a point at which the antipostmodern, anticommunist critique of history as a field, as an epistemic series of relations, becomes clear. That there is a singular concentration by supposed-scientific inquiries upon the postmodern as a modality of influence upon history in academia, in university spaces, due to the proliferation of critical theory or Foucauldian anti-history as a means of critique is a specific defiance of even scientism’s own epistemic grounding. The revision of dogma due to advances in methodology, the questioning and resignification of understanding that seeks specifically to do away with the frameworks of colonial control, of a priori anthropological development necessary for these sorts of judgments, the singularity of Western Civilization and its globalizing sort of Orientalist disparity-making, the location of history in a very small part of the world and a very small interpretation thereof, represents a kind of ironically earnest embodiment of exactly the sort of attitude that postmodern thought is being accused of.

The reterritorializations necessary to these discussions, the means by which one begins to seize upon a kind of codification of what is possible, meaningful, worthwhile to conduct within the digital is continually challenged by actions like those of Beyoncé, who has perfected the art of the Virtual performance, the Virtual as indicative not only of the space at hand but rather a larger schizophrenic reception of her performance that is just as much a part of it as the immediate reception, if not more so. Apart from how she specifically takes the pop necessity of the DJ, of the remix and mixtape and mix between songs in order to create the kind of post-Girl Talk Musique concrète that is often replicated but never quite duplicated, uniquely realized in her work due to the proliferation of influences she embodies in performance and studio catalog alike, she has taken the enormity of her audience as part of developing the space within the Virtual she occupies. Just as Lain appears to everyone as a kind of grasp toward becoming God, Kami within the original Japanese, Beyoncé plays with images of Christian belonging, fertility, becoming-goddess borne out by her own transcendence of any particular apprehension as one sort of celebrity or another. The devotion with which her fans meet her, the way that her Coachella performance is a groundbreaking and transcendent vessel that exceeds its staging for the digital of the crowd and the cameras by becoming Virtual, a kind of reversal of the holographic such that it does not appear on stage for consumption but rather is projected from and of Beyoncé, the Beyoncé of the Virtual, forms a kind of embodiment beyond the body. 

This process of extension, of embodiment within the Virtual, is part of the linkage to the ideation of the Drone, the Presidential ordination and ordering of war crimes as his own handiwork, the libidinal pooling of reactionary ideology around forces like Seal Team 6 or figures such as Tanto (a surviving operator from Benghazi) leads to the kind of supposition of the historical as a space in which development occurs from the top down, in an arboreal fashion, rather through knots of rhizomal interaction within arborescence. As America wages proxy war in Syria against Russia and Assad, the means by which it takes the ideology of Democratic Confederalism as a sort of curiosity, rather than as a genuine anti-capitalist threat, should be seen as foundationally disheartening for Rojava in the same way that critique of the ELZN is often disheartening. These struggles last because either they present useful means of justifying and describing state power in relation to organization outside of capitalist producing-production, or because they are distanced enough from it that they pose no logistical threat. The way that, conversely, having an enormous part in the cocaine trade lead to the importance of FARC and the ELN in the latter parts of the 20th Century, the way in which the ZAD infringes upon a fetishized commercial instinct, how blocking pipelines and making apparent the violence necessary for information to flow through them in the form of resources, oil, the kind of flows of bodily fluid represented by those in the pipeline, leads to the structuring of numerous questions of struggle and development against hegemony and the successfulness thereof. Certainly, to use the ELZN as an example, fostering organization outside of capitalism, demonstrating rhizomal means of creating and continuing to support community stands as an important influence upon other radical actions, and the success of the ZAD, of other movements against hegemony and arboreality are notable even in failure. However, the way in which reterritorialization and rearticulation so readily leaves these groups vulnerable, creates the means through which previous allegiances become either their betrayal or their own turn toward reactionary ideology, is part of developing empire away from itself, neocolonial investment in a memory of future, the knowledge that tomorrow’s problems are realized today and that intervention must be staged, justified, and carried out in such a fashion as to match with certain liberal-democratic metapolitics of anti-democratic violence. It is a certain sort of fascist ideation that is in play here, and it is absolutely necessary to the realization of contemporary globalized metapolitics. The body of the drone, the holographic quality thereof, its mixed embodiments and the more-than-human, all-too-human body it represents thus becomes part of a larger structure of violent subjectivity. 

Information, the Virtual and its flows, are often hard to quantify specifically because there is no coherence to their realization, they are realized not only outside conventions of what is necessary to the producing-production of certain services and goods, but often in direct defiance. This leads to a kind of paradoxical development wherein the developing of a subjective space is itself the repetition of Oedipal subjectivities, already flowing and defined, such that the future and past are part of a static and codified eternal capitalist present.

[lilybtaylor3]

Program note for a dance I did in year 10

I got no guidance for this so it’s probably horseshit but may be of use to somebody- also don’t think it ever got marked, fun fun fun

I choreographed my dance based on the stimulus of 'a mode of transport'. I wanted to create a piece that would showcase a variety of movements and gestures in order to engage the audience from start to finish. I chose to focus on the Jew transportation trains during the Holocaust for my dance as there is a very present contrast in atmosphere and actions between the trains and their occupants. The idea of a train tends to generate images of fast-moving wheels and diverging pathways like different routes and tracks. They embody simple movements like spinning and shooting and a repetitiveness that I have used and developed throughout my piece. These ideas are then contradicted by the situation of the Holocaust victims occupying the carriages as they were cramped and penned in with often 150 people in a 50 cow carriage. Quotes from Holocaust survivors speak of the journey as a traumatising horror where '..the doors were shut, leaving us almost in darkness. The grills, too, were closed to prevent escape. Air only entered through the cracks..' And '..in order to make room we are forced to stand with or hands above our heads...' Creating an atmosphere of stifling terror, psychological despair and anxiety.  

To represent the repetitive spinning wheels on the train I have incorporated a lot of rotation into my dance including arm circumduction and full body turns. One moment in particular that happens between 0:23 and 0:34 in the piece showcases the spinning wheels using four turns on the spot which are then fragmented using the arms outstretched to represent walls closing in and being locked away.  Another moment during 0:44 and 0:54 uses similar fragmented turns only with the arms hanging loosely down and with the head over one shoulder, signifying an uneasiness and a sense of trepidation. 

There are also parts of the dance that echo the previous quote about having to contort the body in order to have adequate space which I tried to recreate using a mixture of arm and leg positions. During the climax of the dance from 1:04 to about 1:15 there is a specific movement aimed at this where I take two very exaggerated steps with pointed toes and angled arms and elbows towards diagonal downstage right that was formulated through the idea of trying to weave through an overcrowded train carriage. That movement is then followed by a series of others that are specifically facing stage right, upstage then stage left signifying the four walls and the growing distress of being restricted and trapped, pushing the occupants to succumb to claustrophobia or lash out.