event mechanics

My mate Clif on Insight in an episode about Sexual Consent

“Time becomes, in effect, palpable and visible; the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, cause blood to flow in their veins.” — Bakhtin, DI, p 250

The techniques by which script writers maintain interest in a serial television show all involve producing a spectacular architecture that distributes bodies in space and time. The space is in front of each viewer’s respective television and the time is every broadcast of the relevant show. This seems to be obvious. Clearly, people who make TV shows want people to watch the TV shows. I am suggesting something a little less obvious than, well, the obvious.

JJ Abrams is guest editor of the latest issue of Wired magazine and his editorial is entitled The Magic of Mystery. Think of the ‘mystery’ less as a simple plot device produced by a singular journey of discovery (or not) towards the truth and more as a device, a machine, for producing relations of futurity between diferent orders of time.

Skipping ahead [...] lessens the experience. Diminishes the joy. Makes the accomplishment that much duller.

Perhaps that’s why mystery, now more than ever, has special meaning. Because it’s the anomaly, the glaring affirmation that the Age of Immediacy has a meaningful downside. Mystery demands that you stop and consider—or, at the very least, slow down and discover. It’s a challenge to get there yourself, on its terms, not yours.

Besides sounding like a student of Paul Virilio, my interest is that Abrams defines the value of taking the time to be swept up in mystery as a form of challenge ‘on its terms, not yours.’ What he gets grumpy about in the article is the culture of ‘spoilers’ that has emerged in the context of globalised poular culture and the easy communicatability of the internet. Abrams is of course smart enough to realise that this culture of spoilers presents its own challenges. It is not an issue with the loss of challenges, and correlative waning of affect, but the loss of control over the challenges posed by the Abrams magical mystery tour and the capacity to cultivate the affects of interest and excitement in an audience.
Spoilers short circuit the chronotope of the serialised spectacle. Spoilers get people from in front of their televisions to in front of their computers. They get them downloading the latest episode of their favourite TV show and not waiting to be told when to watch it with a bunch of advertisements.
In Deleuzian parlance the chronotope is a type of abstract machine for crystalised time. It gives the incorporeal events of narrative fiction their materiality. It is not a thing, however, nor is it contained in a book; rather, it is a relation actualised in the dynamic of its affective resonance. When the blood pumps it really pumps, people get excited, they are incited to act, to be.
I am very interested in this question of temporality. I need to figure out someway to do some further work on it. I think it is what I really want to do. This is both exciting and terrifying.

So I went to the Star Trek World Premiere this evening at the Sydney Opera House. Yeah, I am pretty awesome. So was the flick… SO WAS BEING 5M FROM SYLAR!!!

STEAL MY POWERS SYLAR, PUHLEEEEEZZZZZZZZZZZZ!

It all started last week when I caught wind of the tickets going on sale the very minute they went on sale (9am Monday) as I was checking my regular enthusiast forums in the morning at work.

I promptly ordered two tickets, which weren’t cheap at $100 a pop. I just as quickly texted my brother in Perth to tell him he had to get time off work and fly over to Sydney to attend the world premiere of the new Star Trek movie.

By midday the tickets were sold out according to others on the forum.

My brother communicated a few days later that he had indeed got some time off work and would be heading to Sydney.

We only discovered yesterday that it was ‘Cocktail’ dress. I have some cool suits. None of which are suitable. I thought fuck it, I am going as a cool mofo in skinny black jeans, black zip front hoodie, white short sleeve and skinny black tie. See, BLACK TIE! The crowning glory of this little outfit were my eletric blue trimmed hi-top Nike Zooms for some scene kid(ult) I-refuse-to-accept-your-bourgeois-adultness-and-will-rebel-with-rabid-niche-consumption consumption.

It was always going to be a mission to make it from my work in Silverwater to the Opera House in the city. I made the decision not to drive and it was something of a pleasant experience. (Didn’t rain.) Except heading from work to the Opera House I imagine was not dissimilar to the nerves one feels when studious and waiting for an exam result… if you submit to such divisive modes of population segmentation.

Anyway, I made it to Circular Quay station at like 6:44pm and the movie was meant to start by 7pm. I rang my borther and said, Go. GO on (in) without me… All dramatic like.

But there was no need cause I made it from the station to inside the Opera House in like 6 minutes… Just as they were serving last drinks. So I scored a beer, which I drank perched against one of those high standing-at tables. I observed those around me. And took this photo of my bro:

And this banner sign:

And then entered the concert hall!

OOooooooh exciting!!!!

Our seats were down and at the front and I thought I had epic failed… EPIC TICKET FAIL!!! Super craptastic seats of the sort that would kill the romance of any date by giving you a crook in your neck. We waited and waited and waited…

And then the lights got dark.

And some dude came out and said some stuff.

And we noticed a group of people standing near where this dude had come from, only a few metres from where we were seated. And then we realised that the group of people standing only a few metres away were movie stars…

LIKE SYLAR!!! …SYLAR WAS ONLY 5M AWAY!!!

OMG

SYLAR!!

And then we watched the movie. It was good.

I am going to the Gold Coast for two nights and I am leaving in about 5 or so hours. I had to finish off writing my class notes for an online class I am teaching over winter school. It is my first postgraduate class situation and it is very fun. The class size is small and the students are very switched on. It is shit we don’t have more contact hours, but the course is designed for those who basically work fulltime.

Speaking of work, I have lined up a pretty solid amount of casual work for next semester. I need to get my focus back on my work and stop buggering around in the weird limbo space I find myself. In the winter school class we draw on Kate Crawford’s Adult Themes for the section on the shifting character of work. She raises the example of the Austrian village, Marienthal:

A famous study of unemployment and its sociological effects was based on a small textile factory village in Austria called Marienthal. During the 1930s, the factory hit hard times, and three- quarters of families in the village became dependent on relief payments. The study observed how continued joblessness slowly deprived the people of Marienthal of the patterns and disciplines that give life structure and meaning:
The workers of Marienthal have lost the material and moral incentives to make use of their time. Now that they are no longer under any pressure, they undertake nothing new and drift gradually out of an ordered existence into one that is undisciplined and empty.’
It was a groundbreaking study that detailed how devastating unemployment can be for individuals and for a community at large. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote that the people in the Marienthal study were dispossessed of routine, of the vital illusion of having a function or a mission and, ultimately, experienced a kind of social death.

So for the new precarious or ‘flexible’ workers, even privileged workers like casual academics, have to either continually reorientate their ‘routine’ in the warding-off-of-social death way that Bourdieu describes or find some way to incorporate workplace churn into their subjectivities. I have been doing the former and, well, failing miserably. I am already something of a amateur nihilist so it doesn’t really help to have to jump one’s mind set from the relative ontological security of the PhD completion process to the bleak prospect of 2-3 months maximum guaranteed employment. It is less a gravy train and more like an aerobics machine in one of the lowest levels of Hell, Tartarus (see Tantalus). A job is always just in reach, but a career can never be grasped. (EDIT: Hmmm, makes me think of both Adorno’s description of ‘spectacle’ and Whitehead’s concept of ‘appetition’…)

The Hell metaphor was a deliberate segue for bringing up the tv show Reaper. I think it is pretty good at problematising the workplace for post-youth, young adults, albeit in a weird US, non-class-antagonism sort of way. The main character works two jobs. One as the ‘reaper’ for Satan, capturing souls that escape from Hell. The other really is hell, working in some shitty ‘home depot’ type of store with a complete asshole of a boss… Worth checking out when it gets to Australia I think. From what I can deduce the second fifth of the season is a bit slow (first fifth, cool shit as Sam figures out what he is doing), but then the season length plot arc starts to have greater weight than the episodic dramas and the meta-level narratives begin to fill in the gaps.

Yeah… those pesky writers’ strikes… In the future can all consumers of popular culture agree that we demand that all shows cease and absolutely under no circumstances attempt to duct tape a rushed plot together to satisfy the demands of their capitalist overlords. I mean, seriously… ffs…

The end of Battlestar Galactica is both sad and exciting.