everything is an utter pain to get up and running. I spent ~5hrs setting up the blog [proper] and blog [the rest] integrating them with the main page and what have you. A, what one might call, considerable and embarrassing amount of that time was spent attempting to troubleshoot a date formatting issue that lay squarely with my utter stupidity in failing to consider something that looks for YYYY-MM-DD might be confused by something such as 2023-11-6.
If the issue isn't immediately apparent to you I appreciate the empathy and offer a "where might a '0' go" to help you along the answer. If that issue was immediately apparent prod me appropriately. There were a few more silly detours but in interest of kvetch-minimization that is all.
In any case, all this preparation, fiddling, setting up, preparing, making a place--an adequate space--is a complete pathology. Nothing more than impotence cloaked by a container fetish. "everything is an utter pain" and following it's being set up the horror! use it? god no.
We are judged harshly in this regard by Satre and find an empathetic ally--albeit in the form of one who attests to getting over piddly impotence--in Guattari.
Satre was prolific--that is plainly apparent (for better or worse) and attested plainly in the bonified tomes that glower at us in the form of vaporwave-colored Satre's LOOK. [unless you got the new lamer looking covered edition that in any case seems very interesting given some editorial things ]
Turn only a couple of pages in [accomodating those of us who haven't finished these tomes] and his prolific stature is worn with pride. Well, indirectly so in the form of Proust, another greatly prolific writer and in turn affording us a bit of modest distance:
-
The act is everything. Behind the act there is neither potency nor "hexis" nor virtue. We shall refuse, for example, to understand by "genius"--in the sense in which we say that Proust "had genius" or that he "was" a genius--a particular capacity to produce certain works, which was not exhausted
exactly in producing them. The genius of Proust is neither the work considered in isolation nor the subjective ability to produce it; it is the work considered as the totality of the manifestations of the person.[1]
The tome tells us that greatness lies in the tome, not in your elusive perhaps questionable potential. The tome, not the tome alone as a "work in isolation" but that which stands, glowering, as gathering and attesting to the act as manifestation.
Of course, situated across our pathologies this is a damning. Container fetish retreats upon itself toiling upon the frame waiting for the moment such that the work itself may remain possible. No one is surprised by this. It is a "bad habit" that we partake in consciously as if doing it so and calling it such improved the matter.
In this way, Satre's condemnation appears not revelatory but an annoying reminder of what one knows one ought to do yet continually fails to do.
"yes, yes, I know."
Before the beginning of Anti-Oedipus, we find Deleuze prod about Guattari's impotence similarly in an early letter:
-
... The idea that conditions are not yet right to do it, either because things are not going well in the current inferno, or that you yourself are not doing well, seems false to me because it is the same as saying that one can only truly write when things are going well, instead of seeing writing as a modest but active and effective factor in getting out of the inferno for a moment and in feeling better oneself. It is true that I am passing judgment from the outside, but it seems to me that the moment may have come for you to do this theoretical development. I would add that if you pursue the project to have your articles appear as-is, you will not be able to tell yourself that you are only putting off the perfect development until later, you will have made it impossible for yourself, having the impression of having to go back over something that has already been said. However, if you think now that this work of construction is impossible (nothing would be better than prison to do it, in the old militant style), the other solution, publishing the article as-is becomes desirable and better. I hope to be in better shape soon and that we can see each other, and I send my friendship... [2]
Tracing Guattari's habits regarding writing is an interest unto itself [one that ought to be discussed elsewhere]. He was an understanding ally. A self-admitted not-writer before the collaborative efforts with Deleuze he describes the process as a rather arduous being corralled to the writing desk. Of course, we may hedge this partially by the fact Guattari had written works such as Machine and Structure by then but understand the spirit of the statement nonetheless.
Of course, what this letter holds most is the great, and apparently convincing giving its successful rouse of Guattari, wisdom of Deleuze. To write as a "modest but active and effective factor". What else could be more measured yet rousing? Deleuze the gentle shepherd and Sartre's scornful face?
Where do we stand at all? Maybe not all that differently.
"Yes, yes, I know."
It is perhaps this reason that what is needed less is a revelation concerning the lazy error of one's ways but a mantra that in daily repetition might heave us out of bed. In this regard there is the first, among other, temptations to be read daily featured in Simon Weil's diary:
-
Temptation of Idleness (by far the strongest): Never surrender to the flow of time or put off what you have decided to do.
It is perhaps the single banner of "New Sincerity" that it is better to do and try than to not. DFW insists upon this. In The Broom of the Systemit is the great cacophony that is the situation itself, the story. The story is a conglomerate of facts about Lenore Beadsman's outlandish situation. All that is of the story, of Lenore as such, is the play of these facts, of the suspicion of these facts, the outlandishly coincidental, the friction of simultaneity. It is the heat of activity.
In The Pale King it is the endemic of wastoids. A do-nothing attitude armed with deflationary cynicism ready to make a last stand on the television set and sofa, to dissapoint fathers and be smarter than so and so without even trying--in virtue of not trying. In virtue of impotence.
Yet here one does not in writing the great work but in a quiet devotion to their work at the IRS. In the service that will never receive acclaim or prestige but one does dutifully, with great precise enudring attentivity. This broaches the machinic in a manner not entirely transparent, I think, to himself [DFW]. The theme of the mundane and enduring the mundane in attentive focused work is discussed directly in authorial notes as in the text itself. Moreover, the role of the human is vis a vis the machine in computerization is also dwelled upon.
Humanity suffers it because they must.
Humanity is not entirely sure if they must.
Humanity finds themselves defending that which they must uniquely bear.
John Henry suffered from a bout of machinic frenzy and was martyred for it through ecstatic annihilation. There is a beauty to this--this is a given to any story's folk stickiness. Yet its source is overdetermined. Surely one is to try, John Henry attempts the machine. The attempt wins in trying, is vindicated even more for trying against the odds and failing. Hence one is the venerated vanquished.
Yet is there more? Is there an intensity to the machinic of the frenzy and not the being vanquished of John Henry? Perhaps the annihilation of John Henry attests to more than merely being vanquished. Perhaps it is only through annihilation that the machinic is nascently intimated.
For Michel Serres, the machinic--technology, develops in tandem with humanity in gestures of shedding and becoming more virginal. Deposits of our flesh on the roadside we bury oral history in writing pads, arithmetic in calculators, and our legs in the bicycle.
Did John Henry, in racing the machine, try to beat it or attempt to attest to it--to bear witness? Perhaps the machine may only be known in one's inability to wrangle oneself from it in the annihilation that marks the attempt.