Contact, Tactical Ignorance, and the best we can do. by neil
by Neil Balan
I am always-already guilty: when I communicate, I tend toward communicating – often unapologetically – with myself.
I have a tendency to be the one most impressed with my own words; I use words that I are pleasurable to my ear, that are bundled up with my desires, words that I want to deploy. I confer authority upon myself by activating words and phrases that hold some weight in my own brain, whether they be mine or someone else’s. I take pleasure in arrangement, but seem to miss the mark with touching others.
I’ve fumbled with this problem, thinking I have to “mature”
in writing and speaking and listening,
or that I have to stop being so jumbled and insular to the point of alienating anyone who comes into contact with my “I”.
I have resigned myself to thinking things will evolve (in the random, anarchic sense, and not in the misused sense when invoked as causal linear development ) but all the while, there’s a nagging voice
just behind me
asking simply for more effort.
I think, really, I tend towards
the place of the lethargic and lazy.
Perhaps coherence is had with clarity
and perhaps clarity calls for rigor,
which has little to do with evolution
and much more to do with the
micro-management of technique.
How do I speak? How do I talk? How do I write? Why do I need to qualify so much?
Paul Virilio has said repeatedly that communication (especially in, on, and across networks currently emphasizing speed and rates and space- and time-binding properties) is an act of compensation; that communication is actually a compensatory enterprise that fails at the outset.
Comprehension is less a function of transmission, reception, and the processes of encoding and decoding; it becomes more a matter of what one’s own self does with the act.
That’s kind of freaky. Face-to-face, gestural, side-by-side – regardless, we’re really talking to ourselves. That’s quite a blockage and it’s significant because if compensation is the case, then the substance coming your way really doesn’t matter, or rather all that matters is what you do with it.
I have to be careful in the cultural commons, then, wherever it may reside, because sometimes (with insight borrowed from Kathy Acker) I feel as though communication is impossible. Sometimes, I feel that my esoteric remarks have some clever corner
on a little patch of fuzzy stuff that no one understands.
In communication, I may be a self-congratulator,
impressed with my own heady stuff,
hedging my value on that lurking thought of innovation (or even lucid articulation) of something yet to be “fleshed out”.
This act, though, usually occurs and then is followed by the ridiculousness of having thought that very thought.
Comprehension washes over walls of words that require reconnaissance and, yup,
a large of amount of self-induced assumption in order to generate any sort of resonant meaning.
When the cultural commons is online, in text and script-friendly space, where those long chains of logic are perhaps more possible to express and elucidate (time, preparation, script),
the words matter;
the body and those other little things that belie or or
enable or
amplify or
betray or
confer what you may in fact say,
are momentarily put under erasure.
In some ways, the nullifying of these things is emancipatory and liberating: it enables a whole different domain of connection and conversation. Yet, as such, it also impedes the best communicating I believe I can reasonably perform, which is close-quarters proximity and contact. It’s when I am closest that I’m at my best, not because I can sustain long chains of logic, but because I can contact someone in ways that I can’t with words. I have a chance to get outside my own compensatory and inward-lookingness.
Reverse vicariousness and the capability to negate may in fact assist these kinds of communicative practices: getting along is not about getting along, really, but not really having a problem with what it is you may or may not be getting along with. It is tactical ignorance, in a way.
Instead of clarity and fidelity, perhaps the axiom of choice ought to be, in some cases, stupefying confusion. At least that would take the sting out of whatever loss we suffer in not getting it. It would dampen the need for fidelity we’ve trained ourselves to detect in the ways we seize, interpret, and conquer. The particulate bits and deflections that deter much meaning-making across the commons- and through the cultural and social thresholds of contexts, codes, and contingencies- may be necessary for contact.
This contact may become, following John Durham Peters, the best we can do.
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