event mechanics

A recent series of posts on the self-proclaimed PR and social marketing blog Mumbrella on the relation between Twitterer’s personal beliefs and their respective professional PR and social marketing personae indicates an interesting way that anxieties around mixing of public and private lives online are still manifest.

The first post was by (whom I assume to be) Tim Burrowes posting on his ‘personal’ section, called Mumbo, of his Mumbrella site on an exchange between a Twitterer, Natalie Swainston, and the SMH trollumnist, Miranda Devine. Burrowes apparently believes the exchange between Swainston and Devine was noteworthy, if not newsworthy, because he perceived that it was an “intriguing insight” into the tensions between “journo-PR relations”.

The second post was in the actual ‘news’ section of Mumbrella, perhaps because the second post was actually about a Twitterer tweeting something of professional consequence (unlike Swainston’s effort): a Twitter employed by a company that has commercial relation with a second company was critical of the environmental impact of the practices of the second company. Again, at stake was Burrowes view that “intemperate tweeting has caused issues for PRs”.

Burrowes makes it even clearer what is at stake in these online exchanges that he perceives trouble public-private lives in a comment to another blog post on the topic:

The problem with that suggested policy [of separate personal and professional online personae] is that it’s naive about how journalists would interpret someone’s personal vs professional persona.

“I’m tweeting in a personal capacity” may be a disclaimer, but it’s not a cloak of invisibility.

If what you say is relevant to your day job and you are identifiable, then you need to treat Twitter as you would any other broadcast medium.

If you don’t want your tweets public, then either protect them, don’t do it in your own name, or don’t tweet stuff that could get you into trouble.

The contradiction of course is that Burrowes is discounting the possibility of separate professional and personal personae for normal Twitterers, but when it comes to Miranda Devine’s trollumnist practice he assumes such a separation, i.e. as suggested by his aside in his first post “(although Dr Mumbo has always considered her to be a satirical creation)”.

So what is going on here? Why is this politically and socially conservative self-disciplined muzzling of one’s online persona being advocated and valorised?

An overly critical perspective would see Burrowes and like-minded PR and marketing types to be prostituting their self-image for the benefit of their clients and their professional interests. The expectations of the ’self’ are literally collapsed into the expectations of the client. Of course, critical perspectives of marketing and associated industries have long banged-on about how soulless the industry is. This, I think, you could describe as the worst case interpretation.

Support for this interpretation comes from Burrowes treating the two examples above as the same. In the first case the Twitterer had no professional connection whatsoever to Devine. In the second case the Twitterer was actually being critical of a client of his employer. Burrowes has collapsed the two different events into being examples of a general relation between personal and professional Tweet personae. One’s ‘public’ persona must to be disciplined so as to conform to any and all possible expectations of an imaginary client that could potentially be anyone. Therefore, ‘personal’ views – such as those on ‘public’ issues regarding politics or the state of the environment – must be kept under wraps and secret so as not to offend the sensibilities of this potentially-anyone client.

Although there may be some substance to view that marketing professionals are soulless prostitutes, especially when relatively minor skirmishes in the culture wars played out on Twitter are ‘reported’ as noteworthy, if not newsworthy, I prefer to read Burrowes’s anxiety around the public-private distinction as a way to grapple with the pressure of this tendency towards becoming an example of the worse case scenario. Burrowes is actually trying to find a way to maintain a sense of ‘self’ while under pressure to become a mere functionary expression of the imaginary client’s expectation.

It is a very good example of the way that people working within a given profession attempt to grapple with the ethical quandaries of having to satisfy a client’s expectations while maintaining one’s personal political passions. Of course I am not in marketing (the only thing I could market would be the revolution!) but I do know a thing or two about enthusiasm and what it means to mobilise people’s passions. Perhaps a more effective approach rather than a conservative and reactionary separation of personal and professional, to the explicit detriment of the personal, one should seek a better integration of the personal and the professional. Rather than PR and social marketers being disciplined to be worthy of clients, maybe PR and social marketing types should pick and choose clients that are worthy of their talents?

Most reviews of Up In the Air work hard to locate it in a romantic comedy framework, such as David Cox’s review at The Guardian. It is not a romantic comedy. Similar in some ways to Punch-Drunk Love, Up In the Air uses a constellation of romantic comedy tropes as a critical tool. Instead of romance and isolationist social relations like in Punch-Drunk Love, Up In the Air uses the romantic comedy tropes to problematise ‘loyalty’ in our privileged late-capitalist and post-everything cultural landscape.

Loyalty is no longer something built on trust or expectations of trust forged through shared experience. The function of expectation in this traditional sense of loyalty is important, because it introduces a temporal logic whereby one’s trust is demonstrated now by proffering one’s future trustworthiness. Within capitalist relations of exchange loyalty was therefore experienced as the goodwill developed from already demonstrated positive service experiences and the expectation of continued good service.

What Up In the Air explores is the inversion of the burden of loyalty. A capitalist enterprise does not produce loyalty in its customers or in its workers in a traditional sense of goodwill through positive social relations and the expectation of positive social relations. Instead, enterprises now produce ‘loyalty’ as the accumulation of the debt of good service that the company owes a customer (or worker). The company wants to owe its customers ‘reward points’; it is in the customer’s debt: hence, the production of an expectation and a formalisation of process and time itself. This is naturalised as a ‘reward’ for the customer’s ‘loyal’ patronage.

There are a number of relations of actual (dis)loyalty in Up In the Air:

1) Between businesses and their workers, who for the most part of the film are about to be fired.
2) Between various romantic couplings.
3) Between enterprises and their consumer patrons.

The virtual relations of loyalty — what I described in a previous post as “the virtual feedforward loops that cultivate and then harness anticipation as an affective or ‘felt tendency’ for guiding consumer behaviour” — are structurated by conventions of expectations. Beyond consumption is a mobile diffuse logic of expectation determined by capital, that exploits the affective conditions of trust that underpins loyalty.

Relations of actual loyalty have an inherent temporal dimension because loyalty is only ever actualised as a field of social possibility premised on assumed distributions of trust. I am loyal, because I trust, therefore my loyalty is trusted. The expectation emerges from affective relations of shared experiences as the world is endured together.

But we are increasingly atomised. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is absolutely solitary. He wants to inhabit a frictionless world; points of disjuncture are merely fulcra to propel himself further into the flow. He is the limit case of a process through which we are forced out into the world and alienated from solidarity only so we scrabble to consume formalised, ritualised cultural events together. Sport, the nation, the family. A spectator does not experience sport; ’sport’ is the shared experience of another’s affective implication in the potentiality of an entirely contrived contigency (shared with yet another’s affective implication…). The poverty of the formal dimension of these experiences breeds the need to push beyond the surface affectivity. Violence, hatred, hooliganism produce real contingencies in the world that must be endured together. The economy of respect in masculinist sporting cultures is an index of trust and its distribution. Other peripheral cultures have the same generative capacity. The limit case is perfectly described by Paul Corrigan in his short piece ‘Doing Nothing’ about the way working class youth in 1970s Britain used the street as a space of potentiality.

In capitalist enterprises there is absolutely no trust. Instead of a distribution of trust, there is a distribution of naked expectation. A perverse and obscene expectation of the worst. And at worst it is the expectation of a ruthless ambition to satisfy self-interest. The profit motive is a shared belief that gives discursive form to this expectation. Workers (anyone who labours under the expectations of others) are continually at war with the received infrastructure of alienated expectations by using humour and the potentiality of the workplace itself to generate shared experiences. Such bonding is tolerated by those that impose their expectations as a necessary condition of lived labour. The expecters have their own weapons, by making expectation mobile, by controlling the expectation of expectation through distributions of risk. Risk introduces contingency into the workplace. This is what the workers fired in Up in the Air failed to recognise. Their fellow workers may have endured the world of the workplace together with them and felt like family, or they may have even worked extremely hard to assume and inculcate the imposed expectations of management into their daily experience of the workplace, but this is not loyalty. The expectation of expectations can not be trusted. Workers have to be at war with expectation and exploit the mechanism of imposition (reception, inculcation, expression).

This made me lol!

(via transport)

It is the 19th of January and I have now lost just over 20kgs or just under 50 pounds since the 24th of October. I weighed over 124kg and now I weigh 103. That is two months and 26 days, or 87 days in total. 240g (1/2 lb) per day.

Over this period I went home for the Christmas and New Year’s break. It meant I had to contend with my mother’s enthusiasm for feeding me good food. I went to a wedding and many other lovely events that had nice, rich food.

So, how did I do it?

I dieted. With a bit of research I figured out it was easier to remove all fat and sugar from my diet than it was to do enough exercise to eat what I liked. Not that I ate too badly to begin with, but I did enjoy the odd pizza or burger binge.

Then I exercised. I started walking, now I am riding.

THE MATHS

The basic maths are something like this:

1. The basic daily metabolism or Basal Metabolism Rate (BMR) for an adult is about 2000Cal (8368kj). If you go to this nifty site at the University of Sydney it is a basic daily metabolism energy requirement calculator determined by sex, age, weight and height. When I started out at 124kg I had an energy requirement of 2516 Cal (10527 kJ) and now it is 2228 Cal (9322 kJ).

2. For each kilo of fat is around 39000kj. You also lose some lean muscle mass depending on what sort of exercise you do so it is slightly less than this. I use 8000Cal to make the maths easier.

3. The first couple of weeks of dieting I experimented with different meals. I don’t need huge variation. Mostly tuna and rocket/baby spinach wraps, then it became celery and tuna. Snacks were apples and then apples and raw sweet corn cob. The point is that I reduced my caloric intake to below 1000Cal per day. On a perfect diet day it was below 900Cal.

4. I would try to do at least 200-300Cal worth of exercise per day. This is the equivalent of an hour’s walk or 20 minutes on my stationary bike.

The maths basically work out. Needed 2500Cal for basic metabolism had a deficit of 1600Cal and would do 300Cal of exercise, so 1900Cal burned per day or a kilo of fat roughly every 4 days.

To help me figure all this out I have an application on my iPhone called iKeepFit.

THE DIET

The diet for me was an experiment in discipline and patience. I knew dieting all the time would be a total fail so I gave myself two meals off per week to be social. I started off eating what was obviously healthy food, and then began cutting elements out. The below are perfect diet days. I would’ve had about a dozen of these over the 87 days. Most other days were variations of the below. Some days (like Christmas Day!) were AWOL. Plus I had two meals off per week when I was normally eating out. I would often choose the fish option off the menu. A whole pan fired Barra is absolutely delicious!

1. First version.
In the context of an actual day of my early dieting, my diet to begin with was thus:
8x cups of black coffee 8kcals
mother energy drink 208kcals
Celery 6x stalks 62cals
Apples large raw 116cals
tuna in lite oil x2 466kcals
corn, raw, small 62kcals
spinach raw 2x cups 14kcals
corn wraps x6 389kcals
Total consumption 1325kcals

Base metabolic rate -2521kcals
Activity level desk job -504kcals
Exercise -429kcals

Net kilocalories -2129kcals
Weight/gained lost -304g

2. Second version.
I then started to refine the diet. A problem I had is that my digestive system was not agreeing with so much celery, so I introduced the yogurt for breakfast.
8x cups of black coffee 8kcals
Celery 12x stalks 124cals
Apples large raw 116cals
2x tuna in lite oil 466kcals
corn, raw, small 62kcals
Jalna Fat Free Berry yogurt 200g 156kcal
Total consumption 866kcal

Base metabolic rate -2269kcals
Activity level desk job -454kcals
Exercise -280kcals

Net kilocalories -2137kcals
Weight/gained lost -305g

3. Third version.
The third version is basically the same as above except I now add muesli to the yogurt and have kangaroo and spinach salads in the evening. The third version was required because I started to commute to work by bicycle three days a week, plus walking in the evenings and riding on the weekends, and was feeling a bit light-headed.
Spinach raw 120g 28kcals
kangaroo 250-500g 278-556kcals
Free & Fruity Monster Muesli roughly a cup, 100kcals

EXERCISE

I used to be super fit, about 2.5 years ago. I was going to the gym for two hours per day doing an hour of cardio and an hour of weights. It is all documented on my blog. I got my 2km ergo times down to the low 6:20’s, which should give you an idea of how fit I was. A buggered knee from my rugby days, now a buggered left shoulder from an incline bench press gone awry and crotchety ankles and joints from a decade and a half of heaps of junior sport means I need to do low impact exercise.

I realised that my previous extremely fit persona has helped me cope with doing exercise this time around. When you are super fit you rarely work at 100% intensity of your capacity (except for an ergo or something). Now I am about 80% capacity of fitness compared to then. So me working at 90% when riding for example is just over working at 70% of my previous level of fitness. The capacity for the work intensity may not be there but all the necessary techniques for working that hard still are. Here I mean things like controlling my breathing, doing stretches/prep, being comfortable with feeling the ‘burn’ in my lungs and legs, etc. A big part of this is the mental toughness not to have a breather or stop but to keep going. Already knowing that the level of exercise I am doing is 100% achievable makes it easy.

1. Walking.
I walk up to the local shops to purchase the evening meal and food for the next day. This would take an hour. Over Christmas and NYE period with plenty of time to kill I was doing a minimum of 2 hours walking per day, sometimes up to 3.5-4 hours. 220-800kcals.

2. Stationary bike riding.
I have a pretty good Life Fitness bike my brother bought off eBay for me for my birthday last year. I was doing anywhere between 20-40 minutes 2 out of 3 days. 220-500kcals.

3. Cycling.
I now have a pretty good mountain bike that my lady friend bought for me for Christmas. I have attacked riding with gusto. The previous few months of daily activity, especially the long walks over the holiday period prepared me for eventually commuting to work on my bike. My commute is 17.6km, so 35.2km per day, which is roughly 1200kcals each day. I also ride on the weekends for at least an hour or two. I am currently only riding to work for 3 days as I often need my car for work related meetings.

MENTAL
I am pretty hardcore when I do things. I put on weight when I am depressed, content to watch TV and play video games and basically don’t give a fuck what happens. Here are some things I have figured out:

1. Discipline.
As well as an experiment in weight loss, this has been an experiment in discipline. How much control do I have over my body? Over my desires? Over compulsions just to eat that biscuit? I can afford to be less disciplined now because of my bike riding regime, but in the beginning I would not vary from my diet. There was a strange satisfaction when every Friday my co-workers and I would go down to the local burger joint for Friday burgers. I would take my can of tuna and celery sticks. However, i would also have two meals off per week, plus I would often have some sort of variation to the diets. For example, I went through a week of trying protein bars as a supplement to my diet for my riding. They were too expensive however to eat all the time.

2. Enthusiasm.
I treated this process as a challenge and an experiment. I didn’t know what would happen. The basic maths seemed sound and I have been active enough in the past to already have a sense of how my body would react. I enjoy stepping onto the scales everyday and seeing my progress. The sense of satisfaction I feel because I have been disciplined enough to rise to the challenge makes me feel good and makes me feel like further weight loss and the required discipline is not only possible but achievable.

3. Mood.
I treat food as a drug and as a nutritional source. Sugar, caffiene and nicotine are mood enhancers for me. Plus I did not curb my alcohol intake at all, I often have a few very small glasses of red or a beer or two every few days. I will probably stop smoking shortly. I probably won’t give up coffee. Sugar was easy to cut out. The apple and corn cob contain enough natural sugar to enhance my mood during the work day. There is no point getting all cranky at work because you are starving yourself. Eat an apple or some other piece of fruit. The timing of my meals are designed to maximise and affirm my positive mood.
6:20am Yogurt and Muesli, Coffee
8:30am Coffee
9:30am Coffee
10:30am Apple, Coffee
12:00midday Celery and Tuna
1:00pm Coffee
3:30pm Corn Cob, Coffee
4:30pm Coffee
7:30-8:00pm Kangaroo and Spinach

4. Goals.
My first goal was 115kg. Then 110kgs for Christmas. Then 105kgs for my return to work after the Christmas break. Now it is to get down into double digits for my birthday coming up early February. Goals are important, but make them realistic. Again because of my previous experience I was confident in setting some pretty tough weight loss goals.

WHAT IS NEXT?
Next I am going to use my discipline developed as part of my weight loss regime to tackle my finances. I want to pay off my debts and save money to be able to buy a flat. It is going to require some different strategies. I am off to a good start because dieting and riding to work are already good steps for saving money!

When you hit your late twenties or early thirties it is time to take stock of your life and make changes, this is part of that process. You can make changes if you want to. So if you want to, make them.

View Larger Map

17.6km apparently. The bit near the end through Newington is wrong as there is a bike path there that avoids all the little stupid streets in Newington.

I will make a bikely map when I have time.

Anyone got any ideas for a safer route?

Outside it is almost too hot too move. Luckily my folks have insulation in the roof, which makes inside bearable. I am sitting here at the computer with the soft roughness of my t-shirt weighing upon my sun burnt shoulders. I’ve got burnt on my epic walks travailing the suburban Perth countryside. I’ve had a lot of time to think while I’ve been in Perth. My big walks have been for exercise but they have also been something of a mind clearer. Some relief, but I am also relentless, so something of a burden. My mind is probably just as fatigued and sun burnt as my body, and my thoughts also weigh upon my shoulders.

Open, public space is weird here. There is so much of it. Drivers drive like tourists, even though they are locals, because there is so much space and the rhythms of traffic seem anestheticised. Yet, there is a paranoid grasp for position within the space, by pedestrians and drivers, like the people of Perth are scared it might somehow all be taken away. The irony is that in cities like Sydney, where there actually isn’t much space, inhabitants quickly learn how to negotiate with strangers far more successfully. The question of space, and I mean beyond geographical space, and how to live with space ethically is a problem of realising that freedom (to move, to live, to be who you want to be) is enabled by constraints. I have been thinking about what constraints I have in my life that enable me.

Maarinke has a wonderful post up on her tumblr blog. She has been incredibly tenacious in her process of unpicking the web of relations between her and the world and assessing them. Most of the time it has been with patience and care, at least for as long as I have been on the scene to witness it.

Speaking with her about all the things in her post is a great challenge for me, and I mean that in an objective, intellectual sense. I have been lucky enough to be basically self-trained in some of the main concepts and philosophies of post-structuralism and for me it isn’t some professional pursuit. I live and breathe and act with a strong ethical commitment derived from all my favourite dead Frenchmen. What is this ethics?

Following Deleuze, it is an ethics of being worthy of the events that befall us. Events are not happenings that happen to things. It is within events that things are formed.When a tree greens, the event ‘to green’ is independent of the tree and in part makes the tree what it is, but it is an event that is repeated in different ways throughout the natural world. Yet, following Derrida (and to a certain extent Deleuze), when we start to enfold the world into us, just as we let the world envelope us in turn, our perspective on events plays an important part in understanding what I would call their majestic grace.

Our lives are a tapestry of events that we will only ever partially grasp. To shift perspective, a task which is normally exceptionally difficult, requires an extreme force of will to let go of those elements and relations in the world that grip us in an immediate and intimate sense and experience the serene tranquility of floating above and beside events. Maarinke’s process of self-reflexivity has been impressive to witness as she has been and continues to be tenacious in her pursuit of such tranquility. It means going to war against the world and against one’s self in the most patient and caring way imaginable.

Deleuze called this process counter-effectualisation. For him events were surface effects of the mixture of bodies and the passions of bodies. Bodies here means every entity in the broadest possible sense. To counter-effect the passage of an event means grasping the singularity of these bodies and their passions in a different way. The simplest way to explain this in the context I am talking about is in the example of the advice about arguing with one’s loved ones. Some people say you should always resolve arguments before going to bed. Other people say you should sleep on it. In both cases there is a relation between urgency and patience determined by one’s proximity to the event of the argument and the event of the argument placed in a much broader context, perhaps of a life or lives or a life shared together in a relationship. The point is that this homely advice attempts to get people to realise that they need a different perspective on the passage of events.

The post-structuralist philosophies that I enjoy and read provide conceptual tools for allowing you to do this in a radical way. We exist in a baroque architecture of events, like a haphazard set of networks seemingly without order or reason. We are part of events that we can trace from the past. Past lovers, past friendships and past responsibilities are all present, still, now, in the way they grasp us sometimes in their wonderful, but often in their terrible holds. We are sometimes doomed to repeat the way we process the world following the causal relations of our actions born of these past events. In this way we repeat the events in different ways with new people and new relationships. All this sounds horrifyingly nihilistic, doesn’t it? Ha! This is not the end of the story, however.

We are not automatons programmed by past events, or we might be, but we have the capacity, through self-reflexive practices, to change the programming of our subconscious even though we may not know what that programming is. The simplest way to do this is to imagine a different future, a future that is made up of events that begin here, now. You want a relationship in the future? That relationship has already started. We have not yet been programmed by future events even though they may appear to be on a continual differentially repeated line with the past. We can intervene in our repetitions. Work to create new events that enable us to affirm who we want to be and who we want to be with.

Here is the reading I wrote for the wedding I attended yesterday. It was a very good day. I performed my reading well. I think I have almost come to terms with my stutter, as I performed near flawlessly. Having delivered almost 100 lectures and taught countless (400+) tutorials has certainly helped.

Love and Temporality — Glen Fuller
A reading at a wedding is meant to do two things. Firstly, somehow relate to the couple about to be married and, secondly, contain a lesson that their nuptials can teach to us. ‘Us’ being them and everyone else collected here today.
The defining quality of Tom and Annika’s relationship is how long it has taken for them to get married. [pause]
Roughly 12 years has passed since they originally met and in all that time they have barely parted.

Along the way, we have probably all had a word to them about taking the next step and getting married, but they have always resisted – not in a petulant way but in way that suggested that the timing of these nuptials was always going to be up to them.

For Annika and Tom to stand before us today, shows that they have made the decision that the time is right – that they have so loved their life together that they know they will want it to always be so.

[slowly] In a relationship, timing is everything.

And perhaps what today’s ceremony should show us is that the question of timing can mean so many things.
We must step back to appreciate that timing can be qualitative rather than simply quantitative.
Annika and Tom have not decided to marry today because they have reached an expiry date or a deadline. It is not the date or the time that has made this ceremony.

Rather, today is the time to marry because there is something special and right about this moment that has moved Annika and Tom to take the step to declare their commitment before their friends and family.

[savvy, smile] The ancient Greeks would refer to the qualitative nature of this ceremony and the whole process of engagement and preparation as Kairos. Kairos refers to the right time, the time of opportunity, the time of creation. It cannot be measured. We recognise Kairos in our lives as the sublime moment when something new can be affirmed and brought into the world. Here and now we are celebrating within the Kairos of Annika and Tom’s love on their wedding day.

But it is not enough for the moment to arise. To capitalise on opportunity requires work and the lesson I would encourage Annika and Tom to take from my words is to recognise [pause] when these opportunities are presented to them throughout their lives. Whenever one of you is sick, may the other realise the opportunity to demonstrate their love through caring. Whenever one of you is tired and short-tempered, I hope that the other realises the opportunity to affirm their love through patience. And so on. Basically, to recognise that your love exists within a temporality of opportunity and embrace it. This way your love is re-affirmed and re-created in new ways for the rest of your lives together.

Tom and Annika’s decision to marry is also a lesson in timing to those witnessing this ceremony. Annika and Tom have asked us all to attend and witness at 5 o’clock on the 27th of December 2009 and we have all marked the date in our diaries and checked our watches to make sure we got here on time.

But when we look back on today, we will not remember the time or even the date.

[slowly] What we will remember is the kairos moment – the decision of these two people to marry before us all. So let us not pass today and the days in the future simply asking, “What time is it?” Let us instead reflect on time through the idea of Kairos and go further to ask, “What is this time for?”

Some photos from my first excursion around my old neighbourhood. I was feeling a bit diown being back in Perth. I basically didn’t want to be here and was feeling home sick for Sydney. A friend suggested I walk around to the various places that were important for my childhood. She was in Melbourne with her best friend and she was doing something similar.

There has been something slightly cathartic in touring these old sites and seeing all but traces of my own childhood. It at least kept my mind off thinking about missing my Sydney life for a while.

Here is a little diddy we created during our respective lunch breaks. Shall write up a review in a few days when I have time.

Where thee be,
Faraway tree,
In a faraway land,
On faraway sand.

They live in you,
With skin of blue,
Running through trees,
Running and free.

Floating rocks,
And dragon flocks,
Wisdom does grow,
With plants that glow.

But families, friends
It could all end.
These connected lands,
These connected hands.

A great war of all,
Saw thee tree fall,
Falling, fallen, lost,
Losing home the cost.

Yet united we stand,
To defend this land,
Guns against paws,
Bombs against claws.

Love unifies all creatures,
All their differing features.
An old strength is born,
On the new light of dawn.

By Maarinke and I.