A refrain? A routine? A mechanism?

I just got the copies of What is a Life? in the mail. Thanks for sending them. It looks good and as always I'm happy to be part of it and wish I had more to contribute than "fuck yeah!"

I was looking over a hardcopy of the thing today (it's great how a hold-able object is different than a computer screen), then read the stuff on refrains in the earlier post. I'm curious if what I'm about to describe counts as a refrain.

I'm rather shy by inclination. I've worked a long time in different affective labor and in these - in particular my time working for one of the business unions - I got a lot better at managing socializing, and coming off as confident even if I don't feel it. Partly this is because I had to mix in with lots of different folks than I had before and do so successfully (as measured by rather draconian bosses) and I got to feeling a lot more confident as a result. But also because I had a framework: there's an agenda to the conversations. Figuratively (a goal, usually to get the person to convince themselves to sign a union card) and literally (broken up into five sections). Successfully navigating the agenda means asking lots of questions, getting the person to talk, knowing when to ask a follow up question ("I haven't had any major run ins with the boss." "It sounds like you have had some minor ones, though. What are some of those?"), etc.

After I did this for a while I got a lot better at situations, like being at parties and so on. "Where are you from? Where do you live? How long have you lived there? Where do you work? How long have you worked there?" Etc. Folk generally like the attention, and begin to feel like "this guy's listening to me, he's interested in me." It made social interaction way easier for me. Not quite a refrain, I think, so much as a key or a scale or a chord - a few things one can do instinctively. The goal is to get people to tell stories, and to elaborate on those stories, and when appropriate tell corresponding stories, and if one does it enough one establishes a few techniques (which form an ensemble) one can use with some measure of success and confidence. It's a way to provide one of the shapes required for a flow to happen in a social setting, since without any form or channel there can be no flow (just dissipation at infinite speed). It's also ambivalent, something functional for positive as well as for negative ends, like the business unions' instrumentalization of this mechanism.

There's also a particular enjoyment of interacting with folk in a visit, sharing a refrain - the same feeling as in playing music with people, being in synch in time together, someone makes a change and it just fits and you make a change with them or in response. It's complicated in this model, though, because the organizer has the agenda consciously and the other person doesn't.

Space of Flows

I really like this photo. A friend who suggested it illustrated smooth space sent it to me. If you look at desert part though it's not smooth like a pool table but is marked by the flow of sand. It's a space of flows but unlike the striated space on the right which has a transcendent grid imposed on it, the deserts dunes are self organised according to an immanent logic. It's the flow of energy, transmitted as wind and gravity, through a substance whose cohering traits lead to the formation of dunes.

The overlaying of the body of the earth with a grid relates to a wider hylomorphism and paying attention to the self-organising traits of matter is the difference between an architect and an artisan for Deleuze and Guatarri. Sometimes when you're flying on bright days you can be really struck by the gridding that marks the body of the earth. Flying over towns and villages is the only times that you get an architects eye view of town plans, the viewpoint (and judgement) of God. I remember flying over Spain on a clear day and seeing a wind farm on a mountain range. It looked quite unlike a man made design, a very odd shape. Then I realised that it was about harnessing flow and it had to take the dynamics of that flow into account in its design. So the wind turbines were positioned at highpoints that had uninterrupted wind flow and this dictated the shape of the roads servicing them. Of course all assemblages are mixed and the wind farm still had an architect who was bound up by wider flows of capital and indeed the flows of our struggles and desires. Anyway nothing ground breaking but a couple of pretty pictures none the less.

Collective Writing

This post is in the spirit of tidying up the blog and making it intelligible to any poor bastard who happened to stumble across it.

The Free Association is, amongst other things, a collective writing project. The way of working that we’ve settled on is to decide on a vague area for a project and then blog on topics that seem related. We then have a discussion meeting on the general area. We record that discussion and then transcribe the recording, précising it a little as we go. The last few entries on the blog have been such transcriptions, which is why they don't make much sense.

What we’re aiming for is a boiling down process where we discuss the previous transcript, transcribe that discussion and then discuss that. This goes on until it gets to the stage when someone has to go away and write a first draft, but when they do they have a lot to draw on. It always seems to be that we’re struggling to grasp the problem we’re approaching and it’s only during the actual writing process that it starts to become clear. For many years we were a reading group. The book we were reading was the object around which we transformed ourselves but making the move to collective writing makes the transformation much more active. Although, the turn to collective writing was bound up with a more interventionist, re-engagement with social movements on our part, so I suppose that inevitably would be more active.

Anyway the piece that we produced is here; it’s sort of the final installment of a trilogy. We’ll now return to occasional posts on things that come up.