Open Journal Montreal

by Risa Dickens

In a recent post, Neil suggested that choosing “stupefying confusion” as yer axiom instead of clarity or fidelity might make for a good thought tactic. In a way this sounds like aiming low so as to not be disapointed, but this shift in expectation (which would seem to give up on successful communication with anyone but ourselves) is more like a shift in focus. By choosing stupefying confusion a communicator might actually be able to benefit from the fact of those mad amounts of detail that disrupt productive communication because they distract our gaze, shift our focus, and draw it out to surprising places:
“The particulate bits and deflections that deter much meaning-making across the commons (…) may be necessary for contact,” says Neil, and I think he’s right. “Communication is actually a compensatory enterprise that fails at the outset” say Neil and Virilio. I recognize that my communication is often flummoxed by the fact that I’m always kind of talking to myself. I get spun up in particulate bits and, according to this formulation, have always already failed.

I do sort of feel like communication is tangled up with compensation- in the sense that every communicative choice (fragmentary, half-assed, or sincere) can feel like a performance that’s prompted by (or compensating for) the fact that the other doesn’t already know what I know, or think as I think. There is a jarring gap between us, and we both need to be trying well to cross it.

All of our attempts at contact are like trapeze artists reaching out mid-air; or like martial artists trying to get their moves to connect in the midst of thundering motion, or like actors trying to find the way to say a thing that will make it spark for real. Or like a novelist trying to craft a story that will ‘create a light in the reader’s head’ (as Zadie Smith wrote in the sharp review of her own novel, White Teeth, and that Wyatt Mason quotes in his essay on her in the Oct. ‘05 issue of Harpers.)

Contact can happen in an instant, like when you’re sitting together and you’re making the kind of jokes that show you think and feel the same strange way about ketchup chips.

Or contact can happen slowly and complexly over decades and pages of texts and maps and plans. The ‘particulate bits and deflections’ might be pieces of larger patterns in other people’s or group’s communications. Fortunately, an out of context, brush-by communication or a bad performance still communicates something. Other people’s communication failure and success can help us shake out the bugs in our own thought systems- which is why Oprah, after decades making very public contributions to the commons, says she can feel when something has been said on her show that will save other people’s lives. It makes sense to me that someone in her position would develop some tacit knowledge of what large shifts from unknown to known feel like.

More then this though- failures (even small ones, like fashion choices that rub us the wrong way, like how Ugg boots or Oprah’s preachyness make some people annoyed, say) can make us realize that failure can be a question of perspective. Sometimes we are are just not the intended audience, and in these cases accepting ’stupefication’ or ‘confusion’ as our axioms, or just as an ok way to be for now, is a good plan. It leaves us open.

From this stance we have room to evolve: We can work to become the intended audience, if we want,
or work to convince the other to make messages that will have us as their intended audience. Or we can continue to widen our perspective, and attempt to access other layers of knowledge from the other that will be more succesful at connecting us then whatever the message system is that’s failing. (I remember, for example, as a teenager, realizing that girls who wore things like Ugg boots, and who could seem like complete airheads in social situations with boys around, could be capable of sudden, slammin’ articulations behind the gates and uniforms of our all-girls school. In new contexts, people say new things.)

Sometimes- in code or text, for example, or over long periods of time- we can micro-manage our way toward contact. And sometimes we can smile politely, give and get what we can, and leave that problem behind for now. Continue on our merry way, seeking out those people and moments of magical contact that make us happy or make us grow. Continue to prepare ourselves to be better at facing life and all its crazy complexity and unknowns.

Each moment of communication is part success and part failure, and the question then is what you do with the residue you accrue over time. And it is these layers of residue accumulating and shifting within each of us that are, for me (and Neil, Yohei and John Ruskin) the most interesting patterns to guess at, as well as the ones we are most likely to be wrong about.

The challenge with these slippery patterns (the sacred geometry of chance, as Sting called ‘em) is to remember what you have accrued in the past, and to improvise with open eyes in the present. This will determine whether you’ll be able to pull off a performance that you’ll be able to live with over time. Media, technology in general, are only extensions of the life-long challenge that’s going on in our own minds.
Any and every moment of interaction can either leave a mark on us that we’ll be able to build on and learn from, or it can slip like water off a duck’s back. And maybe the challenge of this elicits a micro management of technique. Or maybe it just names a tactic we already use. This is how our brain system works: together memory and improvisation constitute a kind of organic, hybrid resistance to the dominance of any one meaning. This is how we survaive the barrage of information that’s transmitted by the material world and gathered, amplified and exponentially increased by our media. In the ongoing formation of identity in our selves as we grow up, and in our societies this hybrid resistance is useful for everything from destabilizing a sense of superiority before it solidifies, to building a healthy personal morality.

And yeah, many of us feel we are able to summon this balanced brain state best when we’re communicating face to face.

In person-to-person communication we can receive and exchange waves of tacit information. Messages that are incredibly complex, and perhaps entirely impossible to transcribe are layered on top of eachother all around the material world and its inhabitants. Tacit knowledge is woven into gesture and tone of voice and the colour choices in a room. This fabric of tacit messages- this rhizome, if you like- is interconnected and changing over time. It is the atmosphere from which our more monstrously material communication networks have emerged, as well as all our great feats of understanding.

But that great contact that only happens face-to-face is just one example of a way knowledge gets adjusted (or distorted, or magnified) by a context (or media). There are other delicious kinds of contact that only happen in writing, like the novel that makes a light in your brain. If I were attempting to communicate the ideas in this post in the immediacy of a face-to-face situation I would have failed and succeeded in a whole series of different ways then I am failing and succeeding now.

I’ve written and erased each one of these lines many times. I have walked away, and sang along with the music I have on, and taken breaks lying on the floor. I have passed time looking at my own thoughts as they appear in writing, and watching them grow from half-baked to something with shape. They are moving just like ideas do everywhere, but in writing they leave a mark for others. And when I meet other people’s ideas in the personal brain quiet of written space they play on my emotions in an entirely different way. It’s like they’re stripped of something, and something is else laid more bare. There is space in text for me to ride out my personal emotional rollercoaster, and to get some perspective on my instances of knee-jerk defensiveness. There’s is time for me to catch myself in mistakes, and to lay down new evidence of subsequent attempts. And space for me to chew on things my fellow interactants have said, and to lay out the traces of some kind of response. And the ability to leave an idea when I’ve reached a logical end.

(i need to credit Paul Graham here- i have read his essay on writing and I borrowed the idea for the above ending from him.)

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[ originally posted on Saturday, October 29th, 2005 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Communication, Drafts, Everything, Media, On Places and Identities, On Texts, Writing. ]