A play of distance

Can you run the line and run past it too? What is a line? A delimitation. It does not appear to be forward thinking but maybe it is. A marker that you trip past. A catch in the road that becomes your propellant. Maybe in the run of things you would land on your face. Some kind of catastrophe or defacement in any case. But it never gets resolved- the arrow never reaches the target- your face stuck to the ground is never even forwarded as an idea. Because each trip and the fly it provides- the shove from behind is certainly a jolt but it is collected mid point and mid point to that at a point between a point, then let go of again- a kind of hammering of stop start drill. So that the convulsions it throws up are actually you walking. You on a good day. Tumbling down the street, using the slight incline to your advantage, to get somewhere you have never completely arrived at. Throwing yourself past the line is an act of defiance, an ideation. Because there is nothing concrete that you are heading at.

So in that moment of suspension- a strange regurgitation of breath as the intake and the outtake get mixed up, do you really know where you are going? You swing round on the principle of your own forgetting- levering off the line, the foot-hold, the obstacle- some kind of surface of resistance and flying out, expansive after that intensification through the impact- the squashing of areas into one another and the bolt out of the blue. This is happening through out your body that modulates, shudders and re-distributes in the space surrounding.You are gliding like a bat sending out cries in the dark that bounce back at you off the walls so that the empty space begins to configure and differentials of loud/ soft, hard/soft, drive and release begin to thump against each other. So becomes the line. An interface.

It is a marker. A start in the composition of something. Something that you move through. Those momentary locks and openings create a kind of traction of affect- you swing along in and out of resistant niches. Some kind of curvature between the two that is impossible to describe because the bearings are always changing.You are the departed, the returned, gliding between those holds that swivel orientation and it is that which you are thinking through, that your body is forming through, squinting through, reconstituting through which is all it ever is and is and can be. Not the fully formed residue of a day out, a body in full view; shock of the stature but the actual workability of it that is not available up front.  Only that you know, you feel it in the way your body works, this grasp, release, this jamming and setting free, this working up of thresholds that are used for locomotion or for agitation in one place or in more than one.

You are thinking these thresholds as you are doing it but it is in that split second- actually half a second- where there is a glitch in control. A mismatch between something caught on to, collided with and the repelling out from that. That double move so loaded with positive and negative on the social scale could be an embrace when looped into an on-going moveability that is so on-going that it appears still.- backed on to itself. An embrace that is never recognised or called as such in the social ( as a bracketted animal) though the social is really a derivative- a kind of on-going tincture- of all these mutual and dissonant levels of activation. Of this unsettlement. There are these whirls and shapings that glide ever onwards as one area is affirmed, another erased, a swing from tree to tree. From touch to touch.

And it is the idea of the passage that really gets us going- not the individual moves broken down into anatomical compartments, oiled and limbered into contortions as a still life that are then meant to equate with the up and running version. Yes every possible trajectory of the arm raising the knee bending the hip swivelling have been practised and gone over. The pieces must equate a running body- a walking body. Nothing is missing in the jigsaw.Except the mis-match. The fault of lines. The glitch in getting from here to there where there is a black out- where the body is sent on, through the thought of it, the idea of it. The interest to see what becomes if it. This could be called play. The implications for learning are very strong for where this mis-match is effectively closed, the lines brought together in a harmonic clasp that is too fully choreographed, more and more bodies will find themselves thrust outside of that charmed procedure of recapitulation and their flaying attempts to re-institute some kind  of innovative delay will be taken as malfunction or in any case perverse.

Moving on. Moving is an ideation and ideas come from the open-ended nature of the workable lives in which this roaming attention exists that only in the glitches describes the value which is unlocatable- somewhere between one point and another. This is another way of saying that preemptive representation is not always a means to an end but an impossible opaqueness that attracts flight like moths to a light sticking them there so that it does away with all movement in the instantaneous burn-out affect that that carnivorous attraction involves. Trying to grasp everything all at once in one plane of integrity-filling the body up with light- with impossible visibility-substancing it at every turn with all that is seen to be missing. Adding compulsively all this stuff even as it drains away. More icing on the cake. Doing away with the pauses, the glitches, the minuscule half seconds that indeed do add up in the collectivity of an action filled with holes. Each hole is a fractional delay in which a skewed bearing is the thrust of the conscious into the unconscious, of the unconscious into the conscious. Of the multiple flexing of an intelligent multi-bodied and variable bodied system. Doing away with all that is doing away with the traction that keeps distant things at play. Those holes that individually do seem dispensable one by one as the clearing away of symptoms of lost time could be the jolt in time- the trigger for a thought-movement; the sand particle around which the crystal is growing*.

Perhaps autistic people in some of the more populist behavioural "cure" programs of targeted functionality where reward and discouragement try to shape actions as a hand shaping the maleable body, overload for that reason. Actions without ideas can't sustain themsleves. A question.
A problem. Create a problem- a stoppage; activate an action. The body will begin to envisage itself around those actions, thickening by degrees like a tongue licking away at toffee, coating itself. Acumulating.

There is always the play of differentials between where we are and where we might get to. It is never resolved because it is a juncture of slowness performed where many possibilities of direction, of response, of bounce, of absorption come up against one another and for that indiscernible of time measures create a lull, a cancellation, an incredible slowness right in the speed of it all. It is out of that  that actions find a course sustained by the novel idea of that stillness at the heart of an on-going life. A life that is lived differently at every instance- that calls for split second choices faster than we could arrange our limbs, decide on what is appropriate. In the pause, the glimmer, the stand-off out of which actions run. For we are weaving designs in the virtual space beyond our moves as delimited acts, beyond our bodies as sealed entities, beyond our thoughts as scripts of definite authority. These occur in an interaction- in a wider depository-a shifting field of influences that are occurring simultaneously and recalibrating the choices we appear to be making even as the act is being carried out. That is our inter-relating impossible to trace except where it runs out on itself. Our positionality in and through everything we touch- everything we pass through. Everything that re-aranges us.

Awareness is this tension of ends that do not stack up. So that a problem is being continuously posited and the affects out of which that problem hold are re-distributed in the looseness between falling and holding. Something that catches in differently each time through that jolt of uncertainty that is coupled through and through with the certainties we hold so close to us and that plays on and off of these. A constant dialogue, a constant interest- an activation re-performed with the material that comes to bear in order to further the pattern. Our lives- our communicability- and the worry and wonder that wrap around one another- that fold in and out of one another- to make thought patterns with trajectories of flight and return. This uncatchable value that bleeds into all of life out of the moment just before landing impossible to inhibit, to delimit. Because it is not of any single habitable location. Not in a body. In no known dwelling. Bodies no longer move without that. Indetermination cannot be deleted. It is crucially already the missing factor.

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This piece is written whilst being in the middle of reading Brian Massumis book, "Parables for the virtual"

 *This is a reference to Simondon's theory of Individuation where a problem or interuption in the running of something- whether organic or inorganic- is an excuse to recalibrate it within and out of that fault-line. That engagement in the midst of a problem of continuity is what furthers the uniqueness of a pattern as a spontaneous composition or becoming. It is upon that niche or fault-line that the recursiveness of an awareness takes hold.