A<3 at your service.
What a strange way to market myself. It started as a Facebook thing. Any time I would add someone from plurk on FB, I would leave it as a personal message in the friend request so it acted as a kind of digital signature, a communication between networks signifying who I was.
I thought nothing of it.
But in the course of recent events (well, not so recent now, but recent enough that they're still fresh in my mind) with my classification as a "group mom" in this parasites sociality, I've realized that this is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's a deeply engrained part of who I am that I must find ways to serve, to show that I care by acting in the interests of others over those of myself. I wouldn't necessarily call this altruism by any means, because I gain something from this. Peace of mind, relief from my neurotic tendencies, etc.
It's taking responsibility.
Early in The Gift of Death on heresy, Derrida remarks, "It keeps responsibility apart and in secret. And responsibility insists on what it is apart and kept secret."
I'm still a little lost with this text sometimes, but the fact that I'm drawn to it constantly in almost all my other readings (both for classes and not) shows it is affecting me. It's growing in me and changing the way I think. And in changing how I think, it changes how I act. I've been infected by something, thanks a lot Tony (no sarcasm intended).
"At your service," implies an uneven power relationship. In this declarative, it seems to say, "I'm putting myself below you." Service conjures images of manual labor and the service industry, and in the extremes, slavery.
But in choosing this, in owning it, it provides strength to overcome that power dichotomy. I do this because it is my will to, because it stems from me, not because you asked, wanted, needed it, but because I choose to provide it.
To choose this is to then make it a kind of Gift. And as such it is to take responsibility for it and remove it from that power dynamic.
Who is serving and who is offering the service? Or to put it another way, "Who is speaking through you?" It opens the door to responsibility. Who is responsible? Why are we responsible, because to make oneself responsible is a performative, not in the sense that it is a performative in how Austin does things with words, but in that responsibility is a performance.
Tony: What I want to get at is really this idea of the whole theatrical component of it.
Me: So the performance?
Tony: Yeah, right, the performance. Is it the case of "fake it till you make it?" But what happens when it goes horribly wrong?
Me: Life is a performance, really. We're these minds parading around in these physicalities, in these bodies. As such, for things to go wrong represents the kind of unexpected intrusion, the interruption I'm talking about. To do it over, seems to me a mistake.
To make oneself responsible is to put ourselves at the service of a higher power, be that God, the establishment or rules, and it is these higher powers, whatever they may be, that speak through us.
"If you wanna be my lover, you have got to give,
Taking is too easy, but that's the way it is. "
So responsibility is a performance. And? Knowing this alone does nothing unless and until we take the next step. In taking responsibility, we know, we change our perspective, we change how we think. We've set the stage and are rewriting the lines in the middle of rehearsal, and now it is time to act.
How do you play out events and how do you think other people set them up? To block memory and future into; "Well I was at college, I got out, I met person (x), I got married, I had kids, kids go to school, etc....", does that not set up your own stage? These are your acts. Act 1: Childhood: *Curtains* *Eating dirt and rolling in the mud, the audience is introduced to little Alex*. - Spacecrook
Information is the first step in living a conscious life, in living a life where we can apply these deep concepts of alterity and deconstruction to making a difference in our lives and in our world. Once informed, we can make a decision. Once we make a decision, we act. In order to defy authority, we must first recognize that it is there. Like Alex was talking about in class, we must be literate.
"Rhythm science is not so much a new language as a new way of pronouncing the ancient syntaxes that we inherit from history and evolution, a new way of enunciating the basic primal languages that slip through the fabric of rational thought and infect our psyche at another, deeper level. Could this be the way of healing? Taking elements of our own alienated consciousness and recombining them to create new languages from old (and in doing so reflect the chaotic, turbulent reality we call home), just might be a way of seeking to reconcile the damage rapid technological advances have wrought on our collective consciousness." - Rhythm Science, DJ Spooky pg 71
Later on the same page, he goes on to quote pianist Glenn Gould who said: "The most hopeful thing about this process - about the inevitable disregard for the identity factor in the creative situation - is that it will permit a climate in which biological data and chronological assumption can no longer be the cornerstone of for judgments about art as it relates to environment."
Alex (Spacecrook) got to this point rather quickly when he started asking me about social networking. "[G]oing back to the way you choose to present yourself on Facebook, plurk, etc.. are you like an actor pulled between two stages? Is one like the act and one like the interview? How does having two of them service the other?"
As he said, "Nothing happens, without someone writing it first." And by writing, we can say that before action must come the thought.
This is where I was trying to lead the conversation on Monday when I asked the Parasites what's the point in changing how we think and what it means to change our perspective and awareness of perspectives. To act consciously, to act in such a way that creates something or to put it another way, to act with intention, requires that we not limit ourselves to one perspective.
We have to understand the consequences and effects our actions would have. That is, we must have a conversation with the Other.
Tony - How would it be if you had all of the plurk ids write this or a similar paper? How would they be able to talk to each other? OR how wouldn't they? OR what I am getting at here is that what can happen is like playing chess against yourself.
There's a scene towards the end of Saga of the Swamp Thing volume 5 where he does just this. Stranded on some alien planet after his psychic bond to the earth is disrupted, he creates copies of himself and literally plays a game of chess.
Each one ended in a stalemate.
And so to have this conversation with the Other, the alterity of Self, we must think creatively or face the possibility of stalemate. And so I say again, I put A<3 at your service. But in doing so, I have also put this identity at my service as well.
I put myself "out there" and started a game of chess, or perhaps the better phrase is dialogue. I have opened the lines of communication and so invited the Other in. And there is madness, but not without merit. I'm learning and that is the greatest service I could give myself.
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