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I can’t think of a better description for the quality that is everywhere in Fisher than “impersonal care.” He talks about his own problems, his own life, in a distanced, Ballardian way, and he avoids the risk of sentimentality perhaps too carefully. But he cares. He cares about books, he cares about records, he cares about friends, he cares about students, he cares about ideas, he cares about the world. He cannot write indifferently. Even his repeated efforts to wrest something useful from Nick Land are an example of care: he couldn’t throw an old mentor in the wastebasket. Elizabeth Bruenig, in a beautiful tribute to Fisher, writes that his interest in even the worst of pop culture was an act of “intellectual solidarity” with regular people, although I’d add that this was not a strategy that he thought through consciously. Fisher simply cared about everything. He is the only person who has ever made me want to read Deleuze; he is also the only person who has ever made me want to watch The Hunger Games.
<3
That is the story! Who could live up to it? Not me, certainly. In the years between meeting and dating her, I had lost my heart a few more times, and I had learned the miraculous healing powers of irony, of laughing at your old selves so you could take the current one very seriously. Every several months, like a computer emptying a cache, I trashed my old selves. Ashley forced me to take seriously the sharpest and deepest experience I’d ever had of falling in love, an experience I had spent years ignoring or deprecating. (“Ah, to be emo again.”) It undid me. A man who is being undone is not always fun to be around. So many of our entanglements, in our twenties, are about the joy of being intimate, being intense, without having to be known; was I ready to be done with that most delightful form of self-harm? It’s a miracle that I didn’t break up with her in that first year—not because she was wrong but because she was so right that if I stayed with her, I would have to start to care what happened to me, and then to the embarrassing series of silly men that I lived in flight from having been.
But you have to have had the vision in the first place. In the time between meeting and dating Ashley, I had dated, among a few others, another woman who developed brain cancer early in our relationship, when we would normally be figuring out what we were to each other. After her diagnosis, I decided that I was obviously living in the story where I would devote myself to my poor, brave girlfriend because the alternate story, where she got sick and we broke up, was too sordid to contemplate. (I had also absorbed some odd scholarly notions about the newness and nonnecessity of companionate love between life partners.)
Of course, we broke up. For months I maintained the facade, to myself and to her, that ours was a great love affair, till one afternoon I couldn’t—I folded up like a tent. The effect of my attempt to be generous was mostly that she had to spend her last romantic relationship on an undiagnosed anxiety patient who was engaging in an attempt to be good. I denied her the chance to be fallen in love with. It may be the worst thing I’ve ever done. This may have been too eccentric of a mistake to be worth enjoining other people not to make it, but just in case: Don’t do this. It’s one of several reasons, too, that I’m depressed at how often single people, particularly women, are told to settle. Most straight men I know could stand to question their own physical preferences, learn to notice how often these are not indigenous to ourselves but overwritten on our sexuality by mass media and boy training. (“You like her? She’s a six at best.”) But otherwise, to them and to everyone else, I say: don’t settle. Marriage is hard enough. And it’s an incredibly contemptuous thing to do to another human being.
Ashley looks at this shambles of a person every day and sees someone else. She sees that person so intensely that I am renewed. I can never deserve this; all I can do is try to return the favor. When she has dashed herself against some bureaucracy for days and weeks to secure some small mercy for someone else and has failed to do so, I tell her, because it’s true, that I don’t know anyone else who does as much good for as many people as she does. I shovel snow. I clean the bathroom. Most of all, I see the more than there is in her that is in her. As she sees the more in me than there is in me that is in me. We will help each other remember it, till the error that is time is corrected and all those flickers stay in place.
<3
Such as it is, this is my poetics. It’s nothing too fancy—a person in a satirical mood might say it’s just a little Russian Formalist defamiliarization with a bit of mainline Protestant uplift thrown in. It’s also my politics and my ethics, such as those are. I try not to understand my students too quickly; I try not to thrust limiting assumptions on other people; I try to let people surprise me. I mostly fail at these things, and sometimes they feel irrelevant in a historical moment when so much of the evil around us is unsubtle and simple. But by that same token, if there is any hope for those who live in such a moment, it is precisely where, to my mind, literature and beauty have always resided: in the part that isn’t obvious, in the part you can’t see though it is right in front of you, in the calm mystery of what is.
sweet
To be a geek is, in one way or another, to be over-enthused, over-informed, over-excited, over-detailed. There is an awkwardness born out of a superfluity of an extraneous kind of desire that becomes a febrile quiver in the face of an interesting problem. To be geeky is to have too much interest in something to the detriment of comportment, code spilling over into a gabble, a liveliness found in something that a more reserved protocol would keep under wraps or avoid. To be a geek is to be a bit too public with your enthusiasms, to be slightly unaware in turn that these thrills may, to others, rightly be dull as dust dehydrated with a special process of your own invention. Its mixture of juiciness and dryness, being able to get juiced on dryness, perhaps gets to the core of the problem. Frankly, it's a ludicrous position to be in — it is after all a bit bewildering to find this stuff so fascinating — but it is one whose perversity puts it in a strange relation of proximity to fundamental dynamics in contemporary life.
Such a condition leads many geeks into precariously powerful positions. Companies founded and staffed by geeks rule the world in any ways. They fill institutions and create commercial entities. One can be both ludicrous and lucrative, a maniac for certain details that remake the cosmos by their syntax, or that found a new grammar of relation between things. Geeks created the internet and fight over its meaning. They govern and subvert governance, or keep it ticking over with regular incremental upgrades. Geeks produce extravagant contraptions that cement their positions in the most comedically venal ways, but they also make machines with panache that auto-destruct in deserts and car parks and servers; sometimes intentionally. They make games that provide the grounds of individualism for millions, and then find the wealth it occasionally brings depressing pointless but irresistible.
[...] the figure of the geek, as something both powerful and flawed. The geek tragedy improves on the traditional mixture of these two qualities by adding the figure of technology. This variant of the tragedy is there since that of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and melted his wings. If the traditional reading of Icarus is a warning about the hubris of knowledge in relation to nature and the inviolable space of the gods, technology folds in both violation and knowledge as constitutional factors. Any attempt to 'White Box' technology as a simple Good that needs no examination misses this fundamental transformative characteristic. [...]
need to unpack this more (esp the last bit)
Languages for programming computers [...] designed, in a specific context, as a focused part of a particular set of sociotechnical arrangements, a constellation of forces - machines, techniques, institutional and economic arrangements and so on. A programming language is a carefully and precisely constructed set of protocols established in view of historically, technically, organizationally etc. specific problems. [...]
not entirely sure why i wanted to save this. kind of a novel way to frame it i guess
[...] computational objects do not simply or straightforwardly tap into pre-formed capacities or abilities, but instead generate new kinds of agency, which may be similar to what went before but which are nevertheless different; secondly, that the agency that is created is so as part of an asymmetric relation between human and computer, a kind of cultivation or inculcation of a machinic habitus, a set of dispositions that is inseparable from the technologies that codify it and give it expression. [...]
[...] the deeply sedimented habit of using class libraries is clearly something that has resulted from the technical affordances of encapsulation. A far more finely grained division of the work of software development is made possible when the system or application to be built can be divided into discrete 'chunks'. Each class or class library (from which objects are derived) may be produced by a different programmer or group of programmers, with the details of the operations of the classes safely ignored by other teams working on the project. The contemporary trend towards the globalization of software development, with its delocalizing metrics for productivity, would not have acquired its present levels of intensity without the chunking of work that encapsulation facilitates.
cool way to link in larger economic trends