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).

Tim Burrows has written up an account of the Toyota Yaris ad affair. The ad itself. Tim’s account follows the timeline of what happened and outlines it with a kind of decision-tree logic that makes it exciting and dramatic as we get to find out how this epic fail was distributed across a number of decisions. This is a far more productive way to account for failure than a juridical mode, which simply seeks to attribute blame (or minimize it) because these complex interactions across a number of actors in the affair (various ad people, agency people, Toyota people, etc) all contributed to the end result.

I posted a comment in response to another commenter, Schaden Freude, who ironically expressed caution about being too critical of the advertising campaign behind the Yaris affair. It annoyed me because it expressed a naïve position that social media was something that everyone has ‘experienced’ but was still trying to figure out. This is nonsense. My original comment:

Nonsense. Using social media is not some big experiment where the outcome is an enigmatic divination of public will and/or stupidity. ‘Experience’ in/with social media is not what is required. What is required is a critical understanding of the specific function of deploying the various ’social media’ tools as part of a well thought-out PR strategy and highly tactical management of these tools as a campaign unfolds.

Brands go viral in a media ecology, ’social media’ is a collective term to describe very different tools to manage the circulation of this brand in the ecology. Without the very active, hands-on tactical management of the virus-brand you simply have a bunch of people ticking boxes for a PR campaign recipe about what social media options they think are a good idea.

Think tending to a brand garden and not baking a brand cake.

Another commenter, sven, asked me to explain what I am talking about, which is fair enough with my mixing of metaphors and hastily-assembled text. (I am busy at work, now doing freelance!!) I don’t really care about the ad. My point is not about the lack of taste or the efficacy of shock-values in viral marketing. My point is about the lazy use of social media. Social media is not an ends, it is a means. (EDIT: Or here for a timely post by Neil Perkin.) What do you with social media? You can:

1) Host the conversation. Discussion about something between interested parties.
2) Extend the event. Off-line reality can be extended online, like friendship networks mapped on facebook, but more specific, so this night out discussed with the actual people that were there (or who would’ve liked to have been there). It gives the discussion an affective glue through an assumed shared sense of purpose.
3) Cultivate enthusiasm. Cultivate, yeah? Like a garden… Social networks online and off-line organise around people’s interests. When you use social media you want to tap into social networks. So you need to understand these interests or the stronger version of interest, enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a force, it is a resource, and what I wrote my PhD about.

There is little point using it for anything else when current techniques will suffice. Social media is used because the ‘media’ bit serves as part of the infrastructure of the ‘social’ bit.

So if the enthusiasm of people is a resource and harnessing it is contingent on extending their social events by providing the infrastructure for ‘discussion’ (in the broadest sense, sharing stuff, etc), then Toyota’s campaigner strategy should have been to:
1) Target the specific enthusiasms pertaining to the demographics of the market segment they were trying to capture.
2) Then target the specific social media platforms and niche groups of this enthusiasm/interest. Simply setting up a group on Facebook group is like walking into a newsagent and blindly choosing a magazine within which to run advertising. There is myriad number of possible ways to connect with the market segment.
3) Help encourage the rituals of sharing belonging to the cultural formations organised around these enthusiasms and other kinds of activity (producing, distributing, circulation of knowledge, etc.).

Why didn’t they target a niche social group where there is a crossover between rudimentary video production skills and a partial interest in the car? And if they don’t have the production skills? Why not set-up your own website with short video tutorials on how to make videos? Provide a resource that will catch people’s interest in the social media infrastructure of your own making. You could run two competitions. With the other being awarded to the best video about making videos. How many people would want to watch those? Have a forum where people can swap tips about video production, etc. Provide the resources to sow the interest and then cultivate the enthusiasm. Didn’t they already do this with a music DJ/mixing site where you could make your own tunes?

The Yaris campaign management did the complete opposite of this process of cultivation. Instead they ‘did’ social media by assembling all the ingredients assumed to be correct, i.e. Facebook and Twitter, without actually understanding the ‘social’ bit of ‘social media’. The use of ‘social media’ was completely ineffective.

Ressentiment is a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one’s own inferiority/failure onto an external scapegoat. The ego creates the illusion of an enemy, a cause that can be “blamed” for one’s own inferiority/failure. Thus, one was thwarted not by a failure in oneself, but rather by an external “evil.”

There are a few different conceptions of ressentiment and its wikipedia page is pretty good at outlining the different definitions. As the above brief description explains, ressentiment is a projection onto the world of a painful relation of one’s self to one’s self. Most people have focused on the question of identity, of the distribution of ill will and the construction of the ‘external scapegoat’. Deleuze isolates three characteristics of Neitzsche’s ‘ressentiment’:

Deleuze interpreting Nietzsche’s conceptualization of ressentiment discusses three characteristics. First, there is the inability to admire, respect or love. Second, there is passivity. Third, there is the imputation of wrongs, the distribution of responsibilities and perpetual accusation. (Deleuze, 1983).

I have encountered ressentiment in myself a number of times and I have documented it here in different ways. Here are the top posts from my blog. There are many other instances on the topic, but not in such a sustained way. It shows that I have not really changed the way I understand ressentiment.

1. Singular Complementarity, June 17, 2005

In this post I discuss how falling in love is not a relation between two people, but the folding of two already infinitely folded zones of intensity/sensation. In the second half of the post I warn of a danger.

There is a gamble in the meeting-gesture. This, of course, is the danger.

There are folds that are so worn and habitualised they become creases that scar the surface and will never be sufficiently folded in any other way again. They are the dead areas of the surface and within such proximities there is only darkness. Even if such dark areas are already infinitely folded they operate as blunt surfaces or jaggard formations of folds. These surfaces can become weaponised gestures that are weilded when the soft comfort of complementary folding becomes the acrimony of the crease. Each gesture ceases to be a meeting and becomes an attack of weaponised surfaces. The brightness of midday is eclipised by the shadows that form at dusk. In the end, the surfaces can be so dark even the attacks become empty and instead it simply becomes the meeting of shadows. However, here and now nothing is final.

Joy can only be reclaimed by a gesture, a meeting that forms complementary folds at the speed of sensation. If all one ever brings are weaponised surfaces that are blunt and jaggard and which carry the expectation of an anxious folding to be wrought upon and by the Other so as to render a complementarity, then joy is short lived. Eventually all that is left is a blunt and jaggard surface.

Rather than the meeting of supple folds, a love born of ressentiment is born of complementary dead zones of intensity. People turn these hard jaggard surfaces of themselves to the world as a defence. The only antidote is more love and the strength and courage to envelope an other’s folds into the supple folds of your heart.

2. Now, letting go, July 5, 2005

This post was inspired by pretty epic breakup (got dumped in the US) and the song Mr Brightside by The Killers.

Destiny is calling me
Open up my eager eyes
‘Cause I’m Mr Brightside

The Killers track captures in a beautiful lyrical manner the required disposition for engaging with the world again after having one’s heart broken and allowing one’s self to refold the world into one’s self anew. I am currently listening to this track on repeat as a kind of hipster mantra for warding off feelings of ill will. In the post I use the analogy of the Adam and God ‘just touching’ image of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and offer a somewhat heretical reading. What if Adam was ‘letting go’ of God? Anyway. ‘Letting go’ is a process:

Sure, part of you dies, and it is gone forever, only to be resurrected in un/pleasant dreams. But there is a joy in ‘letting go’. There is. The world is refolded into one’s self. Instead of a short circuit of desire between your self and an other, the circuit opens up to the world. Another part of the world is born and that is what needs care. The eager to-come of Destiny that never does, for it is always becoming on the bright side of our souls. [...]
The pain of letting go and the necessary disaffection that allows one’s self to let go of one’s past copy. We are always somewhere in between. Between two copies of ourselves. Letting go of you means letting go of my self. [...]
To allow ourselves to refold the world into our selves again. This is what I now welcome and care for, like a wandering stranger whom I have chanced upon: the new stranger of my self in the world.

Wow, that last sentence is killer. I am a pretty good writer sometimes!

3. produce openings on the world October 27, 2007

I return to the common theme here of welcoming the world into myself, producing openings on the world. I draw on the famous symptomology of post-war US culture David Riesman of three ‘character’ types: tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed. Riesman’s three character types are interesting because of their processual nature; they are not innate traits, but capacities of subjectivity evident only through interaction. I have large block quotes from the text to describe what these are, but the relevant bit is towards the bottom of the post, where I describe a woman of ressentiment:

Sometimes the clash between characters exists in a single person. How to produce openings on the world that aren’t filtered through the tortured, guilt-ridden ‘gyroscope’ of the ‘inner-directed’ character? It requires so much work and patience. Sometimes too much. Sometimes it is necessary to give up and accept the fact that being ‘inner-directed’ produces a resource of a sort of strength, which is entirely destructive, but which at least allows the person to exist in the world and continue struggling in impossible situations. When all recourse is exhausted then it is terribly sad especially when beautiful and intelligent people lock away the world from themselves and will never know what it means to be part of something much larger. It is terribly sad when someone becomes this character, and cannot face the world.

I do offer a description of a kind of feminist Übermensch (for purely selfish reasons, because they are as sexy as fuck):

There is nothing sexier than a woman who knows her place in the world. This does not mean she subjugates herself to patriarchal norms. Rather she uses that knowledge to orientate herself in creative and life-affirming ways. Normally this requires an infrastructure of education or the grace of intuition.

4. she left the bit with the most toast crumbs, September 5, 2009

In this post I explore the more complex problem of producin new openings on the world so as to enable new foldings of the world to ‘take’ or ‘develop’

Anyway, the counter-intuitive point I have been trying to think through is the way the development of new intimacies can awaken both old and new estrangements. Folding new and exciting elements of the world into the composition of my subjectivity has somehow made me reassess my solitary existence as instead being one of loneliness. When you meet new people or rediscover old friendships you are not simply becoming intimate (at whatever degree from romantic to almost sibling-like and everything in between) you do not simply form a relation with a person as an object, but a person as a fold of the cosmos and folds of folds, whole universes of meaning.
All of this has happened over a matter of weeks and is a bit surreal, so I have come to a number of tentative, but nevertheless sufficient stop-gap conclusions.
1. The miasma of estranged intimacies and intimate estrangements I am currently experiencing is a powerful force. ‘Miasma’ in the sense of the ancient Greek ‘pharmakon’ (from which ‘pharmacy’ is derived), which can be both poison and medicine depending on the measure. Ethically I need to harness this force and use it to soberly affirm something good in the world. In this circumstance, the ‘good’ is mostly personal in character.
2. I need to be brave to affirm this force. I am brave, almost to the point of stupidity sometimes, so that is ok.
3. I need to learn to appreciate new estrangements and new intimacies whatever their composition, both the potential (that is, imagined future states of) disappointment and excitement are part of this. I am trying to do this through measures of active ‘letting go’ and ‘embracing’, rather than a paranoid-reactionary ’slipping by’ or ‘clingingness’.

There is a complexity to this process, one that requires care and, above all, patience, to let the other person or people fold the world in their own time.

5. letting go, embracing, the world

So most recently, how to ward off my own ressentiment:

I am pretty hardcore when it comes to enduring what life throws my way. It is easy when I feel contempt for most of the world and all the stupidities that it contains. I guess it is easier to think about what I won’t do.

I offer a list of axioms for warding off ressentiment, the full descriptions of each of these are in the blog post:

I won’t stop falling in love.
I won’t stop rolling the dice.
I won’t fret about not understanding.
I won’t stop inviting people into my world.
I won’t stop listening to special songs.
I won’t stop writing my poem.

What I have forgotten about ressentiment is the temporal dimension. There is a contradictory movement of dispising the present while being incapable of imagining the future or past, because any kind of temporal relation is derived from a projection of the present, ie ‘This painful present will continue” “This present is a repetition of the past, nothing changes.” This is why it is so hard to imagine a new opening on the world and a different way of relating to the world, because you become literally locked in time.

To break free of ressentiment means to break time itself; to go to war against all possible futures and all possible pasts that suck life out of itself.

It is not human consciousness that distorts the reality of things, but relationality per se. Heidegger’s tool-analysis unwittingly gives us the deepest possible account of the classical rift between substance and relation. When something is ‘present-athand,’ this simply means it is registered through some sort of relation: whether perceptual, theoretical, practical, or purely causal. To be ‘ready-to-hand’ does not mean to be useful in the narrow sense, but to withdraw into subterranean depths that other objects rely on despite never fully probing or sounding them. When objects fail us, we experience a negation of their accessible contours and become aware that the object exceeds all that we grasp of it. This predicament gives rise to the theme of vicarious causation.

Graham Harman’s theory of vicarious causation has been copping a battering around the blogging traps recently. Rightly so. The example he provides of perceiving a pine tree is utterly contradictory. Why should the objectness of the pine tree be defined by the human-centric practice of perception? Surely the great pine tree philosophers equally misguided as Harman would lament our status as not ‘real’ objects because of our inability to ‘perceive’ the sun as a form of energy production. We only have a ‘reality’ and not merely sensuous objects when we become enemies of the trees and attack them with axes and chainsaws.

I agree with the first line in the above quote 100%. To pursue ‘objects’ from this initial thought is incorrect and leads to an impossible theory of causation. It is not human consciousness but relationality per se that ‘distorts’ or, as I prefer, produces the reality of things. There is only ‘sensuousness’ or affect and the capacity to be affected. Harman has inherited a conception of human thought as necessarily being an idealism; it is not. There is an affective threshold to thought. Thought develops through the body like an old photograph develops.

One last note, regarding this proposition from Harman:

CONTIGUITY. The various sensual objects in an intention lie side by side, not affecting one another. Only sometimes do they fuse or mix. Within certain limits, any sensual object’s neighbors can be shuffled and varied without damaging the identity of that object, as when drifting mists do not interfere with my focus on the tree.

‘Only sometimes’? How about ‘Only in reality as reality’? What I realised during my PhD and am now thinking about again for a book on ‘enthusiasm’ is that intensive relationality has a problematic contiguity. Proximity is not a function of spatial or spatialised-temporal intimacy, it is only in this ‘sometimes’ (that Harman speaks of), which is actually the temporality of Kairos (as per Negri’s essay), does reality ‘develop’ itself into a baroque architecture of events through various (virtual) threshold-singularities.

I have had an article in the works for a while now where I have tried to address how to write articles for enthusiast magazines with the example of enthusiast magazines that service modified-car culture. The problem I was having was with how to position it. I have some great material derived from my PhD and the many dozen articles I have written (I have written 55 freelance articles this year, about 30 in the years previous, and easily over 100 as a staff writer). Now I have figured out that the best way for me to pitch this in the opening paragraph is to compare it to the introductory scholarship on writing for the news media.

These are the core analytical points I wanted to convey in this opening first section:

1. Writing for enthusiast media is not the same as writing for news media.
2. The enthusiast media is designed to tap into an enthusiasm and use it as a resource; it is primarily an affective discourse. News media is primarily meant to be free of affect and tends towards an ideal of ‘objectivity’.
3. If the point of news media journalism is to convey the Who, What, Why, Where, When and How (5 Ws and 1 H method) in the lead sentence, then enthusiast media attempts to hook the reader by inciting a particular affective response.
4. The news media attempts to represent the world so the reader can implicate it in their own respective lives; there is some truth to the ‘hyperdermic model’ of media transmission. However, the enthusiast media attempts to implicate the reader in the event of enthusiasm being reported on.

The second section then goes on to demonstrate what is required to be able to write in the affective mode.

1. An understanding and appreciation of the enthusiasm is required.
2. To understand enthusiasm means understanding the challenges faced by an enthusiast. Here I am unsure if I should offer a brief account of the post-Kantian conception of enthusiasm developed in my phd? It is by engaging with challenges that enthusiast bodies are mobilised. Within modified-car culture, a co-enthusiast will ‘read’ a given car in terms of the challenges it inculcates. This demonstrates the capacity and skill of the car’s owner to ‘rise to the challenge’.
3. Understanding the enthusiasm does not simply mean knowing about the objects of enthusiasm or even only the practices of enthusiasm. Within modified-car culture a car is not merely an object to be incorporated into the ego to facilitate gendered production of identity (hegemonic masculinity model), it is a topology of challenges that enthusiasts ‘read’ and confer respect accordingly. The aquisition of know-how is a product of practices that engage with challenges. There is a correlation between know-how and respect within the scene.
4. The job of the enthusiast media journalist is to represent how the enthusiast engaged with a given challenge. The affects of enthusiasm are expressed through this process of rising to the challenge, such as frustration, confusion, trickiness (like ‘smartness’), satisfaction, patience and determination.

The third section discusses the relation between an enthusiast magazine and the given enthusiast scene.
1. A given magazine covers a certain niche market which more often than not encapsulates a subculture within a scene.
2. The magazine is in a relation with enthusiasts and commercial interests. Within modified-car culture the commercial interests are mostly workshops and performance parts suppliers, but also includes event promoters.
3. Coverage of the scene is a media event that seeks to translate the affects of a given event through enthusiast discourse in such a way as to implicate the reader in the broader affective mobilisations of the scene.
4. The content of the scene selected for coverage in a magazine is explicitly valorised, through publication, as being worthy of appearing in the magazine.
5. The political economy dimension to enthusiast magazine coverage of the scene is that coverage is shaped by commercial imperatives of ‘keeping the advertisers happy’.
6. Unlike normal media this is not that much a problem in that those elements selected from commercial interests are also worthy of being valorised. The function of the enthusiast media is not to change the enthusiast-determined heirarchies of value within the scene, but to segment and select portions of it according to the commercial imperatives.

The conclusion points out that niche-market media that services a given enthusiasm is the way of the future for media companies that are coming to terms with shifting from being print publishers to being online publishers. In Australia, just as many other national contexts with a developed media ecology, there are many different enthusiast media publications that target and service many different enthusiasms.

With my current regime of ultra-disciplined eating and daily exercise on a perfect day where I only eat what I am meant to and exercise on the bike for 35min I am actually burning up over 2000cal a day. I am sure this isn’t healthy. It means I am losing approximately over 300g of energy per day.

I don’t always do the perfect day however as this would be a shit life. Going out to dinner once or twice a week and a few nights on the booze balances it out. I am choosing my meals carefully to make sure they are healthy and contain very few calories. Plus I mix up my exercise and do sometimes more and sometimes less than 35min on bike (most of the time it is only 20min if I do less, then a walk). It will be interesting to see if it is accurate however, because it means that even including these ‘normal’ meals and a few nights on the booze with the odd slip up I am losing over 1kg a week.

If I was super-ultra-disciplined it would mean I would be losing over 2kg a week, but the regularity and relatively boring diet would drive me (more) insane.

Just so you don’t think I am starving myself, this is my diet and energy consumption and burning/exercise according to my iKeepFit iPhone app that has a database of all foods (and allows me to input ffod and beverages like corn wraps and Mother energy drink).

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

This is per day remember.

With five weeks to go before the wedding at which I am doing one of the readings, I reckon I might aim to meet my next weight goal of 115kg.

Above meals consist of an apple for breakfast, celery and tuna for lunch, corn stalk for arvo tea, corn wraps, spinach and tuna for the evening meal. The celery and the wraps fill me up and give me a satisfied feeling of having eaten so I don’t feel like eating any sugary or fatty foods. The celery in particular is magic at this. It contains bugger all calories and would almost use up more energy digesting it than in what it contains. There is hardly any sugar in my diet except for the apple and the Mother energy drink. There is basically no fat except in the minuscule amounts in the low-fat oil used in the tuna.

I enjoy being disciplined again. It gives me a sense of purpose.

Here is the original image on Flickr of a presentation by Christian Fuchs at The Internet as Playground and Factory conference.

I wonder where Christian is on McKenzie Wark‘s diagram of what Jodi Dean called his Grand Unified Theory.

Wark’s diagram represents social classes/subjectivities not in relation to the means of production, but in relation to the labour of capitalising on opportunity.

The title of this post from a poem I am working on. For me it expresses the way we form relations with the world around us both in terms of intimacy and estrangement. What follows is an improvised meditation on the way I am trying to grapple with a feeling of loneliness and relations of different intimacies and estrangements with the world, through Deleuze’s concept of the ‘fold’.
One of the most useful concepts in the complete Deleuzian armoury is the post-Kantian conception of the fold. The two main ways the concept has been understood is to think the fold as one way to grapple with the complexity of the event and the second is to rethink subjectivity as an extension of the cosmos. To combine them: We are each an event; that is, a fold of the cosmos that ‘develops’ (‘develop’ in the sense of an old analogue photograph would develop) complex intimacies and estrangements with the world as the lived duration of our existence. In different ways, we welcome and refuse, back and forth, over and over, various elements from our existential ecology on various levels that begin with the pre-personal all the way through to the most arcane and perverse fantasy.
A fold is not just a spatial gathering, each fold has a temporality. This is where it gets crazily complex. Derrida’s concept of hauntology captures some sense of the way we relate with folds that have endured long before we ever came into proximity to them. They have an existence that haunts the present with the duration of what has already been. Similarly the Derridean notion of the ‘to-come’ captures some sense of the way we sometimes come into proximity with events that have started happening but have not yet ‘developed’ into such a form that is definite. There is a sublime power of hope in the gap between the eventual and the event. The complexity arises once you realise that the temporality of events follows no discernable pre-established order, and certainly not some echo of socialised modernist, familial or ‘adult’ temporalities. The future of one event is already situated in the past of another of a different temporal scale and rhythm. Then you introduce the power of imagination motivated by the sublime hope of the eventual to embrace or discard various potentialities between events, and the distinctly human capacity to intuitively apprehend the patterns of potential and turn them into possibility…
Tonight I am thinking about the fold in terms of intimacy and estrangement, because as I have been writing a book review with all my tools of scholarly practice, my music, my apartment and my cigarettes to keep me company, I couldn’t help but feel the gnawing sense of loneliness encroach upon what is my relatively solitary existence. Solitariness has been discussed by various commentators as the withdrawal of communal efficacy in the day to day lives of most people; this has never much concerned me, community in and of itself is pleasant but often feels like a distraction. Instead of a simple dialectic of public-shared and private-restricted as being able to define the relation between solitariness and loneliness I have realised that I am very good at managing various configurations of intimacy and estrangment with the world around me. Recently there have been some disruptions to this, and I am trying to figure out what the implications are, of how much of the flow I should be going with.
For example, many of my friends and colleagues have noted that I share a lot about my life either on this blog, or my Facebook account, or now on Twitter. Some even imply that I overshare. But my sharing is a performative feint. What I share is view on some events of my life — what Deleuze in his book on Foucault would call the production of a visibility. (Very simplisitically, oversharing then is a kind of overexposure.) The composition of my sharing produces a kind of matrix of intimacy and estrangement in relation to and from me. On an affective level, I work to implicate readers in the event of my to-ings and fro-ings. I have often experimented, especially on Facebook, with different types of status update. All this may seem a little bit demented, even sociopathic, and maybe it is, but it developed almost as an accident of always being both remaindered as ‘other’ but included as ‘us’ at the same time. Lived experience is very different however, because it is not merely reportage on events, but the real engagement with future compositions of intimacy and estrangement with as-yet indiscernible folds of the world.
Anyway, the counter-intuitive point I have been trying to think through is the way the development of new intimacies can awaken both old and new estrangements. Folding new and exciting elements of the world into the composition of my subjectivity has somehow made me reassess my solitary existence as instead being one of loneliness. When you meet new people or rediscover old friendships you are not simply becoming intimate (at whatever degree from romantic to almost sibling-like and everything in between) you do not simply form a relation with a person as an object, but a person as a fold of the cosmos and folds of folds, whole universes of meaning.
All of this has happened over a matter of weeks and is a bit surreal, so I have come to a number of tentative, but nevertheless sufficient stop-gap conclusions.
1. The miasma of estranged intimacies and intimate estrangements I am currently experiencing is a powerful force. ‘Miasma’ in the sense of the ancient Greek ‘pharmakon’ (from which ‘pharmacy’ is derived), which can be both poison and medicine depending on the measure. Ethically I need to harness this force and use it to soberly affirm something good in the world. In this circumstance, the ‘good’ is mostly personal in character.
2. I need to be brave to affirm this force. I am brave, almost to the point of stupidity sometimes, so that is ok.
3. I need to learn to appreciate new estrangements and new intimacies whatever their composition, both the potential (that is, imagined future states of) disappointment and excitement are part of this. I am trying to do this through measures of active ‘letting go’ and ‘embracing’, rather than a paranoid-reactionary ‘slipping by’ or ‘clingingness’.

We are hiring a whole bunch of new people at work, I have been working on a scholarly article about writing for car magazines, but I now realise I need to write a far simpler version so it is useful for people who may actually become motoring writers. The following is based on my experiences as a writer for car magazines (must be close to 100 feature car articles by now) over about eight years on and off and my PhD research where I have read several hundred magazines. The below is a very basic account of the process and different writing styles.

What you will need, but won’t always have at the start of the writing process:
1. Tech sheet. This contains all the various specifications of the vehicle, pretty much every single major part. The owner/builder fills this out.
2. Photos of car. So you know what it actually looks like and/or to be used as a reference resource when writing.
3. Interview with owner or builder of the car. This is to clarify certain elements of the technical details and to also get an account of the build. The easiest way to find out information about the build is to ask for a timeline. Often enthusiasts will describe what they did in terms of how hard somthing was to do and how much of a challenge it was. Without challenges there can not be enthusiasm.

There are three main ways to write the story, and each story could be written purely following these different ways with the right information. However, you normally have mixed information at your disposal so each story will be a combination of these three main types:
1. Use metaphor/simile. This is the last resort for me.
2. Locate vehicle in the scene. Good middle ground when you have little information about the build.
3. Narrative form of the challenges of the build. How I write feature car stories.

1. Stories based around metaphor/simile are normally written when not much about the build or technical details of the car are known. This can be because a new owner has taken possession of the vehicle and actually doesn’t know much or perhaps the owner can not be contacted in time to clarify technical details before the story deadline. Metaphor is when you say thing A is thing B, such as “The WRX is a bomb ready to go off.” Simile is when you say thing A is like thing B, such as “The WRX is like a fashion model transforming the George Street cruising strip into a catwalk.”

The imagery of a bomb or fashion model is used in a similar way to poetry. It works to create an image of the vehicle for the reader that is associated with various thoughts and feelings. In feature car stories the central image organises the rest of the text. Most car builders do not like these sorts of stories because they diminish the role of the car and certainly of the builder in the story which is more about the poetic capacity of the writer.

2. If you have a clear understanding of the particular segment of the scene to which the given vehicle belongs, and you have good technical details on the vehicle, but without much information about how the particular build occurred, then you can discuss the technical details in the context of their socio-technical function in the scene.

‘Socio-technical’ is a term derived from academic philosophy; it refers to the way all technology is not only technical but also social. One way to think about this is in terms of the function of technology to complete or satisfy tests, i.e. performance. These tests are culturally specific. For example, if you are concerned about the environment then you want to know how a vehicle performs as technology that produces pollution. Or if you are concerned about the speed and acceleration of the vehicle then you want to know how well the car performs in speed and acceleration tests. Certain humanities scholars and social scientists would describe this as the discursive dimension of technology.

‘Performance’ here has an ambiguity in modified-car culture when thought in a socio-technical manner. Modified cars also perform when they are turning heads, cruising the strip as well as when they are being raced on the drag strip. By locating the vehicle in the scene and drawing on knowledge of the scene you can explain the performance of various modifications. How well does the vehicle perform tests of acceleration because of ‘this’ and ‘that’ modification? How well does the vehicle turn heads cruising or at a car show with ‘this’ or ‘that’ modification?

3. My preferred way of writing feature car stories is by writing up an account of the build. My signature modus operandi is to focus on the challenges of the build that demanded of the enthusist that he (or she, but normally it is a ‘he’) mobilise his (or her) enthusiasm. Real enthusiasts know that building modified cars is about facing the challenges they present. A modified car is a topological inculcation of socio-technical challenges that an enthusiast has ‘risen to’ and overcome. The subject of the story then is less the poetic form of the story or the car itself.

All three types of story are often incorporated into each story.

Structure of main copy.
Opening paragraph: I normally open each story by using imagery to create a tone and creating a relation to the scene by describing or implying the location of the vehicle in the scene.
First section: Describes the aquisition of the vehicle and how the project started.
Second section: Provides an account of the main features of the build and the challenges that they posed.
Third section: The remainder of the technical details.
Repeat: Sometimes vehicles have undergone more than one build, so repeat sections 1-3.
End section: What is the character of the enthusiast’s satisfaction, what goals were accomplished, and what goals are remaining (if any beyond pure enjoyment of a completed project).

Besides the main copy you will also need to write up a few different bits and pieces:

1. ‘Tech breakout box’. This is a separate box from the columns of the main text and it contains every major technical component that has been modified or replaced.
2. Owner profile. This is basic biographical detail about the owner and perhaps a few direct answer to specific questions.
3. Captions for photos. As the writer you are the expert about everything you are writing about (or should be), you isolate particular important elements of the car and make sure the photographer takes proper photos.
4. Possibly another breakout box depending on the nature of the car. Often you’ll use a particular fact, component or technique to expand and add another dimension to the story. I often ring up the engine builder or someone else associated with the build and get an expert opinion on some facet of the car.

That is purely on the writing side of the job. Before you start writing, you need to find the cars. This is the journalistic function of the job, to investigate what is happening in the scene and know when cars will be finished and so on. After you have finished the story, and hopefully spoken with the owner/builder, you will also have to supply ad leads to the ad sales department based on the businesses that did work on the car and are mentioned in the tech sheet.