I woke up in the middle of the night from a commonplace nightmare. I was running through a tunnel that was either sinking or closing in. In order to keep my body afloat I stood up in my bed, still delirious, and started clapping in beats of two, hoping that the gesture would lift me to ground level. Some (an unknowable amount of) time had passed before I stopped and realized I was conscious. My bedroom was pitch black and unreliable. The tunnel went away shortly after. In the morning I was left with nothing but the memory of a bizarre instance of sleepwalking.
Two weeks went by and that remained my best moment. I treated it as a dance exercise, freeform, “Express yourself through a series of movements.” The truth is my everyday motions are quite controlled, often restrained, because of my awkward gait and bad posture. Clapping in panic was refreshing. If only I had held onto the details when they were readily available. It became another reminder of my receding memory - not from advanced age by any means but a natural regression from peak functions. Not unlike the 40,000 milestone on a travel vehicle. The capacity to recall oneiric motivations had nothing to do with short or long term memory. Different faculties of the brain, I imagine.
The day after my episode I told my assistant what happened. When I arrived at the office this morning he handed me a lavender folder,
“Anything new?”
“No”
“No dreams?”
“No”
He nodded and left.
My work revolves around the accumulation of capital. Information, financial, cultural. Not long ago It occurred to me that the nature of my assignments was corrosive. Information, when absorbed in large quantities, becomes devalued by its abundance. It possesses a special kind of causa sui, unable to exist without the very act of its own accumulation. After our crunch at the end of last year I began having trouble recalling the names of common plants. On our servers were thousands of clusters, pivot tables, latent variables, laid out like an electrical grid, completely flat; in hibernation, beckoning for a polyglot from the future who can decipher and disseminate the lexicon my colleagues have constructed. In a different time my profession could be described as cultural anthropology. We deal in systems of exchange and symbolic operations. Our primary clients are mega-conglomerates and statist institutions, entities that thrive off of the future.
The lavender folder contained photos of traffic patterns observed last week in Lagos. They were gathered by local traffic engineers for infrastructural maintenance. The data has no ostensible value as the city is not prone to conflict. I was to transcribe the patterns using our algorithm. Traffic jams tend to occur at cloverleaf interchanges. A shape found in industrial nature. Traffic jams on four lane highways tend to form an hourglass when observed from above. The aggregation of these aerial shots generate motifs. The cloverleaf is no longer a cloverleaf but a recurring element, alluding to meaning that has yet to be assigned. The lavender folders become text awaiting exegesis.
I brought the assignment to my boss. She is forty-five, a careerist, favors Jil Sanders suits and clear acetate frames. She was on the phone and motioned me to sit. It was a personal call. Five minutes went by. I stared out the ceiling height windows behind her and saw the first drops of a summer shower. The sky appears lower and thicker in polluted first-world cities. She hung up, smiled at me as if I shared her frustration, and asked about the folder.
“Where are we on this?”
“It’s almost finished, I just have a few questions.”
“Shoot”
“How do our clients want the charts presented?”
“Neatly”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. They are first-timers. They do not have a preference.”
I looked down.
“What is this for, long term?
“To improve infrastructure …To create a narrative …To fortify the panopticon.”
She paused.
“I’m kidding about the last part.”
I didn’t react.
“Do you really believe that?”
“I have very few beliefs, most of them are aesthetic. I do think they are unsure about what they want it for, only that information is important to have.”
“Right”
I thought for a moment, got up, and left.
Our offices sit directly across from the Gaussman plaza. The exterior looks like a Brutalist Berghain. The interior is lined with black cinder blocks. The walls of the atrium are covered in oversized projections of news broadcasts. My office is on the upper floor. The lobby below houses a bricolage of vintage Roche Bobois furniture next to a row of enormous tapestries held together by metal trusses. The synthetic fibers of the tapestries, woven together, digitized, serve as a bulletin board. The directory is displayed on the center canvas. The tapestries on either side by the entrance are programmed to show a single word, the same word, enlarged and with a neutral typeface. Today’s word is “Parallax”. My boss designed the layout. The proposal mentioned wanting to evoke a sense of reverence.
After a weekend of rest I went to work the next morning and remembered the tunnel was endless. My assistant had already asked about the design. The substructure was standard - reinforced concrete, steel railings, pedestrian walkway, commissioned to free up traffic from the roadways above.
I suspect that the dreams come from a collective unconscious conceived out of lavender folders. I know this because I’ve examined many tunnels and culverts, passages above and below. The motifs can be found in every assignment. The Mayans and the Manchu both shared the same symbols for fertility. Our datasets have their own collective archetypes. Aside from the physical design of the bridge ramp, why does rush hour traffic tend to form a cloverleaf?
JewTurk wrote:Anyone read Stoner by John Williams? I can't see what the fuss is about. The sexism is a bit much/I'm not seeing the point in it.
kickingthefly wrote:-reads a bit grad student-y, even 'cerebral' writers (say, tom mccarthy, elvia wilk) do a lot more 'show not tell', yknow? like tom was once saying he thought about making the protagonist of remainder an artist- but then the whole thing would just be a normal day's work. if you make the surface more blank, it might force you to 'see' more interesting stuff too.
popcorn wrote:snip
INNIT wrote:the common conception of deleuze as "philosophy's last great bogeyman" is somewhat misleading. a lot of weird gatekeepery deleuzians propagate this myth even though, imo, deleuze is actually much easier to engage than derrida, heidegger, hegel, etc. i think that most of the confusion surrounding deleuze comes from the fact that he was inspired by early 20th century process philosophy (simondon, bergson), ... you start to realize that deleuze, like any philosopher, is just offering creative interpretations/reworkings of the philosophies that he was inspired by. e.g. deleuze's cinema books (which are imo his best books and probably the best place to start) are essentially just very sophisticated interpretations of bergson's philosophical trajectory. the "introduction to deleuze" that i recommend to most people is: elizabeth grosz's explanation of bergson in "the nick of time" (unless you want to read "matter and memory" and "creative evolution") and then "the movement-image" and the "the time-image". but, obviously, if you're enjoying anti-o stick with that; experiences of deleuze may vary.
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