Animating individual fantasies, deadening systemic realities (fantasy is no coincidence, part one of three)
circulation's discontents, the decontainment of desire, the impossibility of boredom while sailing, and the (un)controllability of the world
Over the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about circulation: how and why things tend to be kept moving around as they do, what kinds of power relations and reward structures this canalises and incarnates, the momentum and path dependency this has for us, how this feels (at scale, in our lives and relations), and what kinds of psychosocial realities this co-creates and co-constrains.
Above all, my own attention keeps swerving toward the discontents of circulation, the emergent effects that no one designed for, intended, or wanted. Climate change is a case in point: there were 18C-onward ‘we1’, trying to stay warm, keep the lights on, refine mined minerals, and get places, and now look – several centuries where the weather wants very much to kill us all, unstoppably (some days-months, but not others). Imagine telling someone living in the coal stench, poo filth and street squalor of a Victorian city that, in the near future, the weather would be one of the scariest things. At the same time, I’m reading The Grapes of Wrath now (truly amazing, morally hefty, and nothing to do with haemorrhoid-induced anger, as it turns out) and it’s not like ‘we’ haven’t known where all this was headed for at least a hundred years.
One of the things that interests me most about the fantasy of AI that’s peaking (again) right now is this idea of ‘takeoff’: the threshold point at which an AI would become intelligent enough to control the fate of humanity. There’s a lot to unpack here. But to begin with, it’s worth dwelling on why anyone would want that (what is your boat, if that’s what floats it?). And if one did want that ‘all the way’ (or want ‘it’ ‘that’ way, like the Backstreet Boys weren’t afraid to avow), and the object of one’s fantasy appeared in the room, full of implacable will and drive, and with the metaphorical equivalent of a very relentless very big boner… would that still be your idea of fun? If the fantasy of takeoff manifested, would it ‘spark joy’? ‘Cos by then, you know, it’s too late, then you’re going through with it, whether you like it or not. When one takes up with a thousand pound silverback, one is never too tired to make love.
There’s a few ways to split the takeoff fantasy here. To take one line in one direction, we could remonstrate: “you’re not thinking this through. There’s a non-trivial chance of catastrophic consequences; you won’t like them when they happen”. Adjacently, we could notice the kind of anthropological or group-identarian social fact that those who are into this fantasy tend also to either not think things through, not be deep thinkers, or think their thought and fantasy is so great (and so big and so inevitable) that they want it all-the-more/nonetheless. Or even, like a demiurge, or big Other, or Wotan, wants it for them, ‘through’ them.
To take it in another two psychoanalytic directions, one could see this as the manifestation of death drive, man’s own ‘appetite for destruction’. This is also apiece with the ‘Wotan’ thesis (above); let’s ride this all the way to the terminus. The Mad Max series explore where and how White Australian culture would go if it ‘went there’ (Wake in Fright is somewhere at the ‘other end’ of this fantasy).
Or, on the flip, one could go in Adorno’s direction and say that, under the pervasive conditions of the administered world, reification means that people desire only the stereotyped mirror of their domination by the selfsame capitalist exchange relations, both because we’re lured into it, and because it re-aligns subjective and objective conditions, making it feel inside the way it already feels all around us.
In the former, the wish being fulfilled is the wish for one’s own dissipating discharge, and, by way of aggression, that of the world too (somewhere between the Manhattan Project and every Bond villain). If I can’t have the world, then the world must be destroyed. Hitler was a bit like that with Europe and Germany.
In the latter, the ‘wish’ is more like the (anti)climax of haplessly wanking to porn you don’t even like that much, ‘cos... (y tho). We’re now somewhere between Fight Club, and inceldom.
A third direction would be to emphasise: no, the takeoff people, they really want this2. They’ve thought about it consciously, and this is what they desire. The challenge then, is to have the courage to see such people as ‘people’ no different to us (they’re not crazy, not ignorant, not just willing their own/the world’s destruction, not duped by the reified world), and regard them with basic compassion. As with loved ones in the grip of an online conspiracy cult, or just stuck in some helpless rage and very sketchy politics and affects, this is extremely challenging – especially to remain a patient listener.
In fact, the psychoanalytic theories just summarised above are more comforting, in a sense, because they let people off the hook for expressing their preferences.
~
I thinking about desiring a desire for something that is probably really just inherently awful and going to turn out badly if it ‘goes well’ and still desiring it, my unconscious summoned the 1992 cult classic Candyman, in which Helen’s curiosity and scepticism summons said Candyman.
As one IMDB reviewer sums it up accurately (spoiler alerts),
‘College student... decides to write a paper on a slave... who was killed for simply being in love with a white woman. Legend has it if you call out his name several times, he will appear and kill you to avenge his death. Naturally (she) is disbelieving of this, but (once summoned [it works!] he)... starts butchering off all of her friends and framing her in order to make her believe’.
So like: it turns out that the Candyman was a silly and dangerous thing for Helen to want.
But as we know (if we reflect sincerely on our deepest darkest wishes), we do very stubbornly want what we want. Humans are as intransigent about what they desire as they are desiring. A stubbornly wanty and unruly bunch, we.
What does Helen want in her want, from her want, with her want, when she speaks the name of her desire to bring forth the Candyman?
Cultural memory tells ‘us’ that Candyman is riffing on ‘Candyman’, the blues classic by Mississippi John Hurt, which was kind of the ‘Ass-n-Titties’ of its time (1929):
Well all you ladies gather 'round That good sweet candy man's in town It's the candy man It's the candy man He likes a stick of candy just nine inch long He sells as fast a hog can chew his corn It's the candy man All heard what sister Johnson said She always takes a candy stick to bed Don't stand close to the candy man He'll leave a big candy stick in your hand He sold some candy to sister Bad The very next day she took all he had If you try his candy, good friend of mine You sure will want it for a long long time His stick candy don't melt away It just gets better, so the ladies say
Candyman is held together with the sticky candy of Helen’s desire: first for transgressive love, seduction, and nine hard inches of fucking, then
Candyman's desire: deadly punishment unleashed, a death-transcending wish for uncontainable rage and murderous vengeance, with a hook3.
So, of course, in being set in the US between a female grad student and a dead black slave (killed for the crime of loving), this is also a story of poetic justice, a b/bee-movie haunting on white guilt and Afro-American suffering, and the inability of two people to ‘be’ together, Romeo and Juliet + half a millennium of chattel slavery and racism4.
There’s also a transcultural lesson about taboo in play here, which anthropologists show us exist across all cultures. It is commensurately hot and deadly to bone the wrong person. As Elizabeth Mitchell sings so beautifully in Totally Mild’s Christa
It doesn’t matter what you do, it only matters who you do it with.
~
The deep paradox is that ‘takeoff’, like Candyman, is about decontainment. So many Pandoras, so many boxes, and the wish to open them and let ‘it’ out. For every Pandora, her box; for every Pandora’s box, Pandora’s curiosity. For every container, decontainment. For every sigh of contentment, its discontents.
In fact, this is also the key paradox of containerisation; it is about decontainment. As Kathryn Schulz notices (in her feature on how thousands of shipping containers end up in the oceans each year),
‘For an object that is fundamentally a box, designed to keep things inside it, the shipping container is a remarkable lesson in the uncontainable nature of modern life—the way our choices, like our goods, ramify around the world’.
All desires produce their discontents, in other words. There is a will to spill5.
(and in a community of fate where everything is at planetary-material-human limits right now, this means something urgently different, is my claim... I’ll return to this on Friday)
And so: the patterns of the discontents can tell us – after the fact – a little of the fantasy it was all along. When the forensics show up and ‘'dust' for semen’ (hello sailor), this is just the CSI fantasy being a little too literal about fantasy, which is how the CSI crowd likes its6 fantasy.
Containers spill; they go in the drink. In their thousands. Containerisation unleashed consumer desire, and what was unleashed cannot be controlled, but is controlling. Welcome to the winter of our discontents.
This is true of desire even when, with containerisation, what was a desired was not dark-deadly like Candyman, not colourful and ‘a bit of fun’ like watermelon, but rather: snowflake beige, bland, vanilla, ‘on the level’. That is: it’s easy to point to the takeoff bros and Helen in Candyman, or a prospective watermelon tent purchaser, and say ‘maybe don’t… go there?’. But containerisation was and is very much ‘just about’ rationalising transport for efficiency. Cheaper stuff, delivered sooner, due to fewer bottlenecks; what could possibly go wrong? Among the many – not-yet-widely-known, let alone learned – lessons of containerisation then is that even where a desire was designed, argued for, and rolled out to the nth degree by people who knew down to the last inch exactly what they wanted, how to get it, and thought very carefully about the outcome as they desired it (and desired it afterwards), it nonetheless produced something that neither they – nor any one of us – can control, or stop, any longer.
If it’s true that ‘your manias become science’, then ‘your desire becomes fate’, in ways you cannot predict or control.
~
So in looking carefully at emergent effects that no one designed for, intended, or wanted (which is the work of my writing work on campus, which, unlike this blog, is fully put under the harness of conscious control and comma placement), this month, I want to give some attention to our desires and to their animating fantasies (still thinking about involutions and excrescences and disintegrations). For it’s no coincidence that Helen is drawn to the myth of the Candyman (au contraire); it’s no coincidence that there’s a set of AI bros who have a discourse about takeoff called FOOM, without recognising how much that looks like DOOM and is just a re-arrangement of FOMO; it’s no coincidence that we have containerised shipping bringing us smartphones and screened devices and bungs and buttplugs and earplugs and USB plugs, along with their discontents.
Desire is no coincidence, whether or not we have the awareness and courage to recognise our wishes in the fantasies which are in every case our own. As Mary Douglas put it best:
‘It seems that our deepest fears and desires take expression with a kind of witty aptness’.
So, what do we desire when we desire the screen-mediated version of whatever it is the screen is mediating for us?
~
The ‘phone’ I reach for here is the passage in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, which I raised in relation to noticing VaporSpace. One could keep walking through the CBD at night, and keep noticing VaporSpace, and think really carefully about what it is that people want when they want that. But to this post’s ‘Cheshire cat’ point (insofar as it dis- and re-appears), what did we want when we wanted smartphones, iPads, and many other devices (all brought to us via containerised shipping and trucking)? Surely it’s not just, or not really about communication, connection, convenience; there are desires that animate and thus decontain in play here, and playing us here, but who or what’s been strumming our lutes as it spills everywhere?
For DFW, this pivots around dullness, aversion, diversion:
“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing's pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly ... but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everybody knows it's about something else, way down” (85).
In The Pale King, DFW explores this writhing aversion to dullness by way of taxation, the fear of boredom, the fact that most of us would do anything to avoid boredom, and that the person who is no longer afraid of getting or being bored is capable of almost anything, including levitation. The threading question to push this post would be: under what conditions does boredom become such a thing – an existential ‘stake’ – that one would very badly want musak, actual TVs, and ‘cell phones that attach to your head’ nearly everywhere, or provide such screens, without even feeling the need to ask if it’s what people want7?
In January, I spent a week aboard a yacht in the Great Barrier Reef, a 1%er experience that most people, including myself, do not ordinarily get. My covering phrasal summary? It was a weeklong acid trip, mostly because of the Dead Calm/ Cape Fear/ Misery tinges of being fundamentally stuck aboard an enclosed space with any group of other people for a prolonged period of time. L’enfer, c’est des autres.
But the sailing, and the Reef, the stars, the sunsets; they were.. well, have a look, will you:
And I nearly never experienced boredom – for the whole week. In fact, I would go so far as to say that sailing ‘solves’ the problem of boredom that DFW raises in the above senses, insofar as the experience of boredom does not enter into the existential condition one finds oneself totally in, aboard a boat. Some of these conditions are conspicuous foreground, like the the continual transformation and upheaval of the cosmic elements, the ocean and its endless arrival of waves, the way teeming life broaches the surface or flits beneath it, the constantly ebbing flowing air and its winds, clouds, squalls and rain, the movement of a boat under sail and the continual need to notice, pay attention, and not fall overboard and die.
On reflection, I’m exaggerating a little about ‘never once’, as boredom partly re-entered the picture when we were becalmed, had to be somewhere by a certain time, and (thus) needed to turn on the engine and motor to our destination. But this, actually, tells us what is ‘wrong’ with modernity, and its transcendental value, clock time. In making shipping reliable and efficient through the introduction of diesel engines, we created a rift between ourselves and existence, and existence and experience cannot be rushed or forced, and has to be ‘let’ emerge, if only because, aboard a boat, the world is completely the master and has total control over us, but in a way we can surrender, give ourselves over to, inhabit – and that can spark joy.
This speaks to the strong contrast: one cannot inhabit a screen device, or really ‘experience’ much of any depth or surprise, in VaporSpace. It’s much less likely. Aboard, fundamentally unlike DFW’s pervasive ‘dull or tedious places’, there was never that sense of squirming, writhing wish for diversion. Even if we had been within range of a signal (which we were not), the urge to take out and use one’s phone approached nil. Sailing solves the problem of boredom8.
– and then humanity solved the problem9 of sailing, with the diesel engine.
So we can have containerised stuff.
Which we desire...
...as we are so fucking bored (and so scared of that boredom).
The obvious co-relation to explore, then, is that VaporSpace and all its related spaces and atmospheres of surveillance capitalist existence actively generate boredom, aversion, and a contraption that provides almost magical escape from it (but that you can’t inhabit, and that won’t let you really escape, and keeps you in its thrall, most of which is second rate and shitty and really, like Candyman or takeoff, not even good or going to end well).
Our prevalent (sub)urban environments supply the booze, the hangover, the Panadol, the phone charger, and the swizzle stick to mix this metaphor (or stab it dead). And as I know from my own phone use and that of nearly everyone I know, and intensely so from those of my students who are on TikTok for 3+ hours of an evening and can’t stop, although they want to and they know it leaves them feeling empty, the more we use, the more we want to use; the worse we feel, the more we can’t stop.
What is the desire here, and what is its animating fantasy? What isn’t it, right? The desire for connection, love, recognition, affirmation; the desire for diversion, to escape boredom; the desire for ‘anything? anything!’, something cognitive or sensory to arrive to take our mindbody off the dysregulated way we’re already feeling; the sense that the ‘answer’ is going to be there when we pick up the phone this time, in the same way that, as Richard Seymour notices in The Twittering Machine, we go back to the empty fridge (we know is empty) and check it (again), to see if it’s still empty. And so it is.
~
Arguably here, the animating fantasy of the ‘so-called information society’ DFW leads us to think about is one of control, one where we have in our hands the ability to compel presence or absence, capture and compare the image of our loved one, meal, or ideally-lit projected self to comparable others (we lack), and manipulate the ‘reality’ of a world where we know in our hearts we are prosuming produsers whose only phone-grasping agency is to recognise in ourselves the lack that marketing is asking us to notice, then click to the place where ‘they’ can send us the commodity we can use to plug our hole, or ‘lease out our eyes and ears’ and the space between our ears to the narrative being shared and built by the online group our desire and boredom-aversion has led us to be lured by, and that, by our immersion in in the way it pinches our titties (or gives us the screaming meemies), the Tech Titans can scrape even more data from us and market us even better commodities (so we can keep feeling bored and empty and in need of plugging).
It's very interesting, in other words, that social theorists as temperamentally diverse as Bernard Stiegler, Hartmut Rosa, and Joseph Vogl have converged on extrapolations of control power and control society to analyse what is fundamentally happening to us – in our heads, in our hands, in our holes, in our lives, in our communities – in the five-decade US-dominated convergence of finance capital, pervasive computing, and surveillance capitalism.
~
& as I just hit 3,000 words, I’ll return and continue with this on Friday… because what these sites of analytic attention tend to leave out, is the heavy materiality of all this, the weather it’s producing and entrenching, and what we’re going to do when, suddenly, the diesel engine cuts out on us.
Sea you Friday.
The North Atlantic ‘we’ who disproportionately benefited from the grand Paleotechnic era we’re still living through.
As early 2000s Zizek would phrase it: ‘no, we *really* mean it’.
This is an interesting appendage, given that longshoremen slung hooks (they were big burly working men who carried hooks); I’m not sure if abattoir workers also slung hooks, but the abattoirs themselves were full of hooks, and Chicago had the US’ biggest abattoirs.
I also see deep parallels with District 9 and Alien, insofar as racist/interspecies contempt, and the stubborn desire (for knowledge, or a weapon system) that drives all curiosity, overcomes what common sense would otherwise tell us. Eddie Murphy riffed on the movie Poltergeist about this same suspension of common sense in Delirious, but, um, this is no longer a stand up set that I wish to platform.
And we are porous and leaky, too, especially insofar as we desire.
Which, I mean (not the first to notice this): femme females ‘fatal-ed’ in violent and sexual ways by male perps, over and over and over and over (like monkey with a miniature symbol).
‘Cos at my gym, for example… I tend to go outside peak times, partly ‘cos I can and partly to avoid other people peaking… and like: it’s always on Channel 9, and there’s always really terrible crossover house from the millennium playing…. to an empty room… I then wear earphones (and my own music) to block out the background…. but on the occasions when I’ve changed the channel, turned off the TV, or asked the owner to turn down the music, this is kind of (self efficacy!) is read as somehow impertinent or fucking with what the big Other wants when she is working out there, ?all the time? This is a problem writ large as a design-civilisational issue, wherever piped music and hard surfaces interact. The older you are, the more invasive this is; for neurodivergent people, it’s a sensory hell. And yet…
Of course, like all solutions, it then creates another set of problems.
A problem that was a problem for capitalism