>to a certain extent, i think we've internalized the skills to cope
>with Simmel's hyper-fragmented urbanism when we encounter the
>proliferation
>of 'picture-in-picture' televison screens in the suburban living room,
>cellular telephones attending and distending dinner table conversation
>within the space of a restaurant, and so forth. yet just what kind of
>subject is articulated through this navigation between psychological
>states of both divided attention and multiplied distraction? how are
>existing structures of signification realigned through the (sometimes
>rapid) alternation between these different states?
AND suggests that the act of pacing provides an opening for this
inquiry, as pacing suggests a durational structure that is both imposed
upon us, as in the rhythms of technological implements, as well as
imposed by us, as when one paces back and forth across a room, and
this interplay between the passive and active "offers an alternative to
both distopic scripts of a technologically determined environment as
well as utopic visions of a technolgically empowered (and purportedly
liberated) subject."
And it does open up a realignment of signification-structure. What
would this be? In pacing, a subject is mobilized between diverse
modes, according to various rhythms, which might be imposed or
initiated. It does not browse, and the itinerant seriality of that figure
vanishes. A tensional space is positioned, wherein frequencies and
movements are intertwined in various embodied modes. When you get
to your feet to pace back and forth in a room it is in order to in/habit a
thought-formation. It's as if you move or walk through information,
grounding and embodying it, through the agency of a physicalized beat.
Pacing generates a beat that informs cognition. But it also undercuts it:
at the same time that it physicalizes and locates, it also abstracts the
boundaries and relationships between body and space in a kind of
visual delirium. You are "opening yourself up" to the angles and
positions that might emerge from this abstraction, getting out of yourself
while locating yourself. This sense of pacing is met with the other
sense--the pacings of technological devices and systems, to which
embodied rhythms are increasingly annexed. There is a calculus at
work, operating like an exercise instruction manual. To be aware of
pacings is to be aware of the vectors that initiate and encode
mobilization. Would these vectors constitute the signification-form? It
seems that pacing marks a zone of liberty or a zone of
commodification, though of course the distinctions aren't so easily
made.
>still, as we accept an increased pace of daily events, we find
>ourselves faced with accepting either a decrease in the possible
>duration of any given activity or an increase in the number of activities
>ocurring simultaneously.
This is the field of operations. It's a condensation and implosion that
funnels out into some kind of invisible landscape.