For all its cachet and global recognition now, I grew up hating Bollywood films. That’s not a terribly original thing for a ‘South Asian child of immigrants’ to say, but there you go. When I was young, I think I disliked them because I was relatively sure Hindi films were mostly comprised of middle aged women crying — every other scene containing a melodramatic reading of “Lekin, kyon beta? Kyon?” (But, why child? Why?) Aaand cue the histrionic weeping.

But when I got older and started to form opinions on culture and art, it was the lack of realism that bothered me most. While to this day I am no film connoisseur, it is still realism that appeals to me. My favourite films of the past few years (save Transformers 2) have all been largely understated, quiet, and most definitely unlike the typical spectacle of Bollywood.

And for whatever experiments in postmodernity and historiographic metafiction that have swept through literature, western film still seems generally committed to a vision of ‘realistic truth’ – or, in the case of fantasy or sci-if, at least internal coherence. To witness a mainstream Hindi film, then, with its generally blatant disregard for verisimilitude can be jarring for the western viewer. When one sees not only a song erupt mid film, but the characters move inexplicably to the Swiss alps, the B.C. Rockies or the streets of New York, it upsets one’s suspension of disbelief. The penchant for melodrama, the ‘absurd’ deployment of deus ex machina, the black and white construction of who is good and who is evil – all of it commits that great sin against realism: it abandons the everyday for the exaggerated and unbelievable in the service of spectacle.

But all of what I typed above also commits its own sin: it attempts to judge the aesthetic output of one socio-historical context by the standards of another. This is, generally speaking, a mistake. But though art and entertainment can occasionally be universal, they are mostly not, more often instead being products of the time, place and thought of the culture(s) from which they sprung.

Part of this has to do with the function a given work plays in a social context. Here’s Nirpal Dhaliwal in The Guardian (quoting a Sony India exec) explaining why Bollywood can seen so sprawling and scattered to non-Indian audiences:

“[Bollywood] has to appeal to a very wide demographic here. It’s not a finely segmented market like in Britain or America. Each film has to appeal to grandparents, parents, and children of various ages. Cinema is often the only entertainment choice Indians have, so it has to appeal to every member of the family as well as to different income, literacy levels, and various regional and language groups. It needs to please those who pay £5 in the multiplexes, but also those paying 10p in the lower stalls, who want overemphasis in the story and the acting, who want to whoop and clap.”

This need for inclusivity means that a typical Bollywood film is a romance, comedy, family saga and action movie rolled into one. That, Shridhar acknowledges, gives westerners the impression that they are “loosely written, meandering and don’t make sense”. But Indians are instinctively forgiving. “People will watch a film and know that the next 15 minutes isn’t going to be for them. It might be a dance sequence, or a ‘hand of God’ scene that’s for the grandma sat next to them. Bollywood films are more like a live circus or a variety show than a western three-act concept of a movie.”

That’s a little ungenerous, given how sophisticated the plotting and acting in mainstream Hindi film has become. But it does point out that the big Bollywood film is not ‘Indian Film’ as much as it is a genre or style, like the summer blockbuster or issue film. It is meant to perform a function in society, often becoming the common, shared space through which the Indian public processes issues, change and ideas. It also has to cut across demographics, the divisions of which in literacy and lifestyle are essentially inconceivable to a western audience. Understand that millions of  Indian cinema attendees also can’t rely on regular electricity or read the signs at the door when they enter. (Edit: and that hundreds of thousands arrive at the cinema in new, air-conditioned cars carrying iPhones and Blackberries.)

But there’s something else running under all this too. What does the commitment to realism get us? Why do we want art to be ‘truthful’?

That is of course far too large a question for me to answer. But it’s one that has permeated western discussions of art since Plato famously banished the poets. And one current that has consistently appeared is that art should ‘hold a mirror up to reality’, and in being shown the reflection, we recognize and learn something about ourselves and the world we live in.

But what underpins that idea is as straightforward as it is complex: there is an important relation between what is shown, what we see and what is true. We do, after all, ‘see the truth of the matter’ – not hear or smell it. The visual counts. What is true can be shown, and therefore, to show the true is important. It’s also based on the idea that, even within postmodern pluralism, we believe an honest film can show us some small something of what it is to be human.

In order to understand why this isn’t a culturally universal idea, I’m going to be a bit crazy and quote the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy’s take on the concept of two truths in various facets of early Buddhist, Indian thought. Honestly, you can skip the quote, but it seems right to at least put it here:

To sum up, though this entry provides just an overview of the theory of the two truths in Indian Buddhism discussed overview, it nevertheless offers us enough reasons to believe that there is no single theory of the two truths in Indian Buddhism. As we have seen there are many such competing theories, some of which are highly complex and sophisticated. The essay clearly shows, however, that except for the Prāsaṅgika’s theory of the two truths, which unconditionally rejects all forms of foundationalism both conventionally and ultimately, all other theories of the two truths, while rejecting some forms of foundationalism, embrace another form of foundationalism. The Sārvastivādin (or Vaibhāṣika) theory rejects the substance-metaphysics of the Brahmanical schools, yet it claims the irreducible spatial units (e.g., atoms of the material category) and irreducible temporal units (e.g., point-instant consciousnesses) of the five basic categories as ultimate truths, which ground conventional truth, which is comprised of only reducible spatial wholes or temporal continua. Based on the same metaphysical assumption and although with modified definitions, the Sautrāntika argues that the unique particulars (svalakṣaṇa) which, they say, are ultimately causally efficient, are ultimately real; whereas the universals (sāmāṅyalakṣaṇa) which are only conceptually constructed, are only conventionally real. Rejecting the Ābhidharmika realism, the Yogācāra proposes a form of idealism in which which it is argued that only mental impressions are conventionally real and nondual perfect nature is the ultimately real. The Svātantrika Madhyamaka, however, rejects both the Ābhidharmika realism and the Yogācāra idealism as philosophically incoherent. It argues that things are only intrinsically real, conventionally, for this ensures their causal efficiency, things do not need to be ultimately intrinsically real. Therefore it proposes the theory which states that conventionally all phenomena are intrinsically real (svabhāvataḥ) whereas ultimately all phenomena are intrinsically unreal (niḥsvabhāvataḥ). Finally, the Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka rejects all the theories of the two truths including the one advanced by its Madhyamaka counterpart, namely, Svātantrika, on the ground that all the theories are metaphysically too stringent, and they do not provide the ontological malleability necessary for the ontological identity of conventional truth (dependent arising) and ultimate truth (emptiness). It therefore proposes the theory of the two truths in which the notion of intrinsic reality is categorically denied. It argues that only when conventional truth and ultimate truth are both conventionally and ultimately non-intrinsic, can they be causally effective.

Now this is all very complex, and only a tiny snippet, and I can’t at all claim to understand it in any thorough way. What you can get a sense of reading through it, though, is that the idea there is a one-to-one relationship between what we can be shown in reality and what is ‘ultimately or ‘unconventionally’ real is not the same in ‘Indian’ thought as it is in ‘Western’. The very fact that the theory is called ‘two truths’ is itself already a sign that we are working in a very different set of rules, one in which immanent, experienced reality is not the same thing as ultimate reality. If you’ve ever wondered why, as Pankaj Misra said in Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime, that Hindus can believe the immanent world is nothing, yet still be great capitalists, there you have at least the beginnings of an answer.

This, I admit, is a very circuitous way of saying the following: cultures are complicated, and the ways in which they construct their art are related to the ways in which they have constructed their thought. What constitutes the good in art or even entertainment is something that is part of the swirling, unstable mess that is a cultural context. And it’s not like culture is ‘a thing’, fixed and unchanging. It is an ongoing set of practices, beliefs, languages and ideas that all together form a dynamic force that is itself both a product and producer of history. And if how you judge art is about what you like and what you think is right, then judging is is mostly a culturally specific act. Bollywood, like any cultural product, is working within that specificity — and, when possible, should be treated as such.

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My favourite Indian film is one many NRIs (Non Resident Indians) have been chattering a lot about lately. It’s called Udaan (Netflix link), and is a story about a teen boy who gets kicked out of school and has to deal with his demanding, stern father, whom he eventually resists. It is an understated, quiet film – much closer in tone to the early work of David Gordon Green or, perhaps more accurately, Satyajit Ray, while still owing much to modern Bollywood technique. It’s very much my kind of film: simple, mostly about people talking, and focused on a small set of characters.

But if you are looking to understand what the ‘anti-realist’ nature of Bollywood film does best, I have two suggestions: the massively successful 3 Idiots, and the lesser known but great Khosla ka Ghosla. Both, when judged by western standards, are fragmented, ‘over-the-top’ and ‘unrealistic’. But, in a way that’s slightly hard to explain, that over-the-top-ness is necessary, as each film tries to articulate something about how India is changing. It’s almost as if the complexity of both the sub-continent’s history, and its emergence into a nation state composed of radically disparate elements in only 50 years, makes the over-the-top-ness a narritival and experiential necessity.

Now, especially in India and its film, is not the time for subtlety. The changes occurring are too vast, profound and seismic in nature for small shifts of light or facial expression to matter very much. You could, in fact, probably argue that the Western aesthete’s emphasis on subtlety as a goal is itself a product of relative social, cultural and artistic stability and uniformity. It is a luxury that history is yet to give India.

So as the IIFA awards descend on the city, and with it a slew of commentary about Bollywood, good and bad, if you can, embrace the melodrama and give up the fetish for realism — all the while, keeping in mind that as the waves of modernity crash into the walls of history, it helps when they’re really really big.

This post is part of The Ethnic Aisle, a blog about race and ethnicity in the GTA

A couple of weeks ago, I half-seriously started yammering on about ‘Project FNDL’ – that’s, er, ‘Project Fix Nav’s Disastrous Life’, for those not in the know. While it started as a bit of joke with my family (and, of course, Twitter), it became a little bit hard to ignore the frustration – perhaps even desperation – that elicited it. So, yeah, I’m trying to sort my shit out.

But lest you think this is becoming a self-help blog, I mention this in part because some of this process involves trying to find better ways to deal with my own ‘attention economy’ – and the relative place of the forms and technology on which we both read and write.

Partly, it’s been simple stuff I’ve been doing to help myself focus. That has meant Freedom. It has also meant enabling Freedom before heading out of the house – and then popping my SIM card into my trusty five year old cell phone, the simple aim being to keep the temptation away.

But, largely through coincidence, I got a tablet computer recently too. And, though I was quite apprehensive that I’d wasted my money, something that quickly became apparent was that it worked really well as a reading machine. Surprisingly – perhaps even a bit ludicrously – I found myself placing it in front of my monitor as I worked. Suddenly, I had two screens, each for a distinct purpose: a reading machine and a writing machine.

Neither, of course, is exclusively either. It’s just that each generally works better for reading or writing. So I tried it out. On the PC, I had Word, Scrivener or WordPress open; and on the tablet, just a browser or Kobo to read PDFs. And it worked really really well. (Until you gotta copy and paste a link or a quote, of course). It was a definite improvement to how I was able to focus, because of that odd mental division in which you use each device for different tasks. Somehow I was able to pay more attention to each.

But the other thing I’ve noticed about the tablet is how its portability and – well, I believe the technical term is ‘holdability’ – seem crucial. It reminds me a lot of what Tim Carmody says about his go-to way of framing reading revolutions:

My favorite reading revolution, though, isn’t very famous, even though it was conceived by the very famous media theorist Walter Benjamin. It’s the shift from vertical to horizontal writing, and then back to vertical again. He lays it out in his 1928 book One-Way Street:

If centuries ago [writing] began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking itself to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisements force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular.

This is a revolution that encompasses the entire history of the book, from manuscript scrolls on papyrus to industrial paperbacks. It also takes the broadest field of reading possible, from graffiti on the walls of ancient cities to silent movies and children’s scrawls on a chalkboard. It sets aside all of the inside baseball about technological achievements and the inherent properties of the medium.

Perhaps more than anything, I’ve noticed that this horizontal/vertical distinction in writing can also be applied to reading, particularly in the way it is also about the body. Vertical reading asks you to orient your body in relation to it. Billboards, blackboards, signs, desktop computers are all fixed things that demand you move around them. Horizontal does the opposite, adapting the form of reading to the body, as in the book, tablet, magazine etc.

This is why the laptop is still ‘vertical reading’ to me. You can place it on your legs or carry it around, but its bipartite nature means that it never quite works – you are constantly shifting yourself around it, especially for crucial, philosophically fundamental things like ‘reaching for your cup of tea’.

The tablet, and of course the bound book, do the opposite. The tiny little shifts in your body don’t affect it as, all McLuhan-esque, it becomes an extension of the body. The slight changes in angle that occur when you read on the couch, or on a chair, or in bed are all easily adjusted for, and unlike the furnace attached to a screen that is the modern laptop, it isn’t uncomfortable to hold or rest upon you.

That different relationship to the body of the tablet seems to meld the benefits of the electronic screen – like its capacity to become multiple things – with the strange ‘behavioural ease’ of a book or magazine. I guess this is why it ‘feels’ right, because all this time, the convenience of the computer has been oddly hampered by the need to sit at a desk, use a mouse, rest your hand on keys etc. It was great for writing, but once it became a tool to read as well write, it was always like we struggled somehow to make it work.

I was worried the tablet was wrong for me, but it has fit into my life (and #PFNDL) quite nicely. The size and portability, ease of browsing and apps like Flipboard make it feel like the right reading machine for the age. Meanwhile, that functionality has made the seemingly idiotic act of using your tablet on while working onyour computer seem like an incredibly natural thing, and separating reading and writing machines has really helped me. (NB: Yes, I am also aware that a book and a PC is also a convenient reading and writing machine distinction…)

So there we go. Weird, if neatly arbitrary distinctions about tech – reading machines/writing machines; adapt your body to it/adapt it to your body – seem to be a step in the right direction.

Though I do try to keep the ‘links to writing I’ve done elsewhere’ to a minimum, I think (or hope, at least) this one may be up of interest to SiW readers. At the Standard, I wrote about the both our past imaginings of the future but also… our inability to imagine the future, I guess? Yeah, it’s messy, but hopefully not quite so weird and vague that it’s not worth a read.

Oh, it also includes an interview with Matt Novak, author of Paleofuture! So at least there’s that.

Update: An earlier draft of this posting incorrectly labelled the singer in the last two videos. His name is Sain Zahoor.

Years ago on this blog (which, if you can believe it, has been around in one form or another for over 5 years now), I’d link to things I’d discovered through the network of connected, culturally-savvy bloggers I read. Today, I bring you something my 72 year old father sent me from his iPhone. It’s a brave new world, people!

The Coke Studio is a Pakistani television show that features live performances from an array of musicians, usually in the form of some kind of  ‘fusion’ that blends certain aspects of Pakistani and Indian music with what you might usually think of as Western instruments. Sometimes, that emphasis on (ugh) “old meets new” does result in some rather cheesy 70s electric guitar. But at other times, you find some really remarkable creations.

Some examples: Sanam Marvi going all trippy with the reverb, but also showing off her incredible voice. Wait until the break at around 3:40 and wait for the track to build again.

Here’s Aik Alif Sain Zahoor who initially seems like he might be a fish out of water, but just owns that shit:

And another with Alif, but this time with Saieen Zahoor and Pakistani rock band Noori.

It’s a pretty amazing resource.

It’s also hard not feel like there’s something to be said for reminding the world that, while Pakistan might have its troubles, its traditions in poetry and music (which overlap frequently) are pretty incredible.

Yes, clearly, it’s more important that Aaron is writing things like this about what is going on in the country. But, in the meantime, a little joy never hurt anyone. Enjoy.

Update: It now occurs to me that saying “Pakistan’s music is awesome, but yeah, that place is fucked up” was a dumb thing to do. I suppose what I’d like to say is that when the only version of Pakistan you get on the news is ‘crazy people in the desert’, you forget the complex history and culture that the news elides. The kind of music presented here is, if you will, an aesthetic connection to or reminder of that complexity.

If you had to make a list of “Things that got huge in the 21st century and were kinda’ a big deal”, you’d pretty much have to include the internets. Maybe even the webs, too. So why, then, do there seem to be so few movies about it?

There are some great films that really grapple with some central questions about technology. Blade Runner cut to the core of what might or might not distinguish the technologized self from the organic one. 2001 wondered about technology’s role in human evolution for better and worse. But where are the great films about some of the web’s central concerns: of disembodied or virtual identity; of the restructuring of hierarchies; of the rise of non-linear thought; or, hell, I dunno, porn addiction.

I’m sure they’re out there. I just can’t think of many. Avatar is on some obvious level about embodying other identities through a technological change; but its potential seems deflated by framing it in a traditional colonialist narrative. It didn’t really present the new; it’s just used a technological plot device to reproduce a trope we could probably do without.

So SiW readers, what are the great films about the internet? Or, at the very least, the films of the last 10 or 20 years that speak to something about the web’s impact on how we think about ourselves and our relation to the world?

Here’s what I’ll throw into the ring:

• I’d like to submit something for your consideration: Me, You and Everyone We Know is the first great movie about the internet. I think this clicked for me at a specific moment in the film. Amidst this story of people attempting to connect – with virtual selves, with ideals, with expectation – there is a clip of Christine’s moment of direct honesty in her audition tape. She cuts through and stands out through some kind of concordance between her ‘true self’ and her projection on film. Shortly after, she is shown circling random letters in a book called “Going to Pieces”. To me, it was a moment in which the fragmentation of language – its reconfigurability – was put side by side by technology’s capacity to do that to self. More to the point, the film is itself an aching portrayal of, on the one hand, alienation, but on the other, points of connection between people that seem entirely unorthodox – as if the network that connects individuals has somehow been tampered with.
• Coraline. This isn’t about the web as much as it is games, but: a young girl is beckoned into another world by a smaller version of herself that appears in doll form. If she were to lose herself there, she would adopt the eyes of the other place. But instead, she must pursue a quest in which she collects red orbs, to then travel back to her own world transformed, grown, changed. There’s something here, I think – particularly the conduit between the two worlds.
• The other day on Twitter, I wondered if Ratatouille weren’t also a movie with ‘web-like’ concerns i.e. what, on the surface, looks like the collapse of the distinction between expert and amateur, but is in fact about the increased likelihood that expertise can come from new, unexpected places.

There are others. Inception is, I think, about the feeling of risk of ‘other worlds’ you can venture into. Fight Club is probably the movie about occupying a provisional, virtual self in order to move to some kind of self actualisation (a ‘trend’ that was followed in novels like Londonstani, and Kunzru’s The Impressionist and Transmission and, I’m sure, many others).

But what else? Which films capture something about some of the unique changes brought about by the web or related technology?

As I watch updates from Libya pour with sickening frequency through my Twitter feed, I found myself wondering about how one might ‘help’. This is, I freely admit, futile and abstract and stupid. Still. Here are the thoughts that just flashed through my head:

States are composed of networks of various kinds: ideological, intra-state (bureaucracy), inter-state (diplomacy), economic – generally, what good ole’ I-went-crazy-and-killed-my-spouse Althusser called Ideological State Apparatuses and Repressive State Apparatuses.

These networks, despite their multi-faceted, ‘immaterial’ nature, are also circumscribed in behaviour by a kind of simultaneous material-ideological limit: the border. It is within the constraints, both physical and mental, instituted by a limit at the edge of the state (of many kinds) that allowed for the functioning of parts within a whole. Again, maybe it’s dumb, but my go-to example of this is The Wire: the bureaucracy of the city is both its failing and success.

Within this material-ideological limit of the border of the nation-state, then, is another crucial network of the political kind: that of representative government. That is, after all, the only way to navigate these networks, unless each person is to have an equal capacity to change them.

These networks allow for two sorts of representation: of the elected political figure who stands for/speaks for a riding (see Spivak’s breakdown of the difference between darstellung & vertretung) but also another in a synedochic figurehead, in which ‘the government’ or ‘the Prime Minister’ stands for the state’s role in international affairs.

The issue with this kind of ‘representation’ is that all action by the figurehead is symbolic and thus is subject to the same level of interpretation any symbol is: to wit, its reception is always contextual. Currently, any American intervention in the affairs of the middle east takes place under a cultural-ideological framework of not only global American hegemony and economic neo-colonialism, but also the morally ambivalent war in Iraq (did I mean abhorrent?). Intra- and inter-state networks work in an often zero sum game of political economy.

But as I, referencing Bruce Sterling, discussed with Wikileaks, there is some sort of a disconnect between the networks of the state and online networks in that the ‘immaterial’ (not really) nature of online networks destabilises/challenges/fucks around with the unity caused by the border. It’s like the effects air travel or long-distance calling writ large. It’s of a different scale because, unlike those previous technologies, what the web does best is aggregate individual action into a collectivity (of sorts) ‘independently’ (but never truly) of material limits. There is an immense difference between an immigrant’s differing conception of space after phoning home, and 30,000 people noticing the aggregation of their politics on a thing called ‘a Facebook page’. Locating the self within the im/material networks of state becomes less one-dimensional with the advent of the web.

This, Sterling (and I?) said was markedly ambivalent. It was good because this capacity of form networks (of admittedly ‘loose ties) potentially destabilises corrupt networks of power; but they’re bad because if radical transparency and other ‘network effects’ (heh) fundamentally shift geo-politics, stuff would happen in which people would, ya’ know, be displaced, starve, die etc. If the web actually changes the world, it won’t be that we’ll all get iPads; it’ll be that before than change happens, things will get really really bad for a while.

But my point in all this rambling is this: we’re witnessing violent eruptions in Libya and elsewhere. We know, despite our very careful egg-shell tip-toeing over ‘radical difference’, ‘epistemic violence’ and le differend, that when people aren’t being brutally repressed, their lives are somewhat better. This, even the most committed anti-colonialist would agree to.

But foreign intervention – particularly of the West to East sort – is a no-no. It mis-shapes indigent uprisings because of the historical context in which they take place. It is, for the moment, impossible to extricate aid and colonialism, fostering democracy and Imperialism. This is, to descend into silly leftist hyperbole, Bush’s legacy.

But that resistance is pinned on the synecdochic functioning of material networks of statehood in which the figurehead stands for both the materiality and ideology of the state.

So here’s what I’m wondering. how or can ‘we’ – not Canadians, or Americans or ‘Canada’ or ‘America’ – aggregate ourselves into non-state groups that might do something to assist people in situations like those that exist in Libya now?

Put another way: if the web excels at aggregating non-state actors, is there a way for a group of privileged people to assist (for example) people in Libya in a way that isn’t always discursively sublated into a ‘global significatory system predicated on the materially-rooted synecdoches of state’ (ouf!) such that it is possible for a sort of neo-quasi-Marxist global collectivity to aid people in Libya and not be seen as Western imperialists?

(I know, I know – I KNOW! But this was like a burp – it felt better to get it out rather than not.)

Edit: So, this started out as a conversational post, but descended into academic-ese, ’cause I got excited, and that’s just what happens when I do. But! As it turns out, Joanne was thinking along some similar-ish lines and has, in a way far more eloquent than I ever could, expressed some ideas about beginnings, networks and creativity over… here.

So, this is a bit of a blast from the past, but I’ve been thinking a lot about something Rex Sorgatz said recently.

A while back, Joanne from Tomorrow Museum put together a panel on that looked at the notion of ‘curation. The term, I’m sure you know, has extended beyond its familiar use at museums and galleries to describe the numerous ways in which people collect, gather and repackage information and present it to the world online.

Thought 1: It is no surprise that that Tumblr came up.

Thought 2: It is no probably no coincidence that this took place under the auspices of an organization called rhizome.

So, at one point in the vid (edit: it starts at 36m 25s), Rex extols his new argument that “blogging is dead”. By this he means, that blogging as a publishing platform is starting to wane. As to why this is so, Sorgatz suggests something happened when platforms like Twitter and Tumblr presented you with a window in which you both read and write simultaneously – that what were once at least materially separate practices came to occupy the same visual and mental space. Twitter is both the place one inscribes but is inscribed upon at the same time. It’s like a much smarter version of the now-cliche idea that “media has become a conversation”. It’s more like discourse has no starting point.

I like this idea.

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I often think of this blog like one long, ongoing text. It’s sort of my home on the web – my starting place. From here, I am connected to other blogs and people that form my online universe. But it’s this blog that is sort of the beginning – and then I add things to it, whether other blogs or videos or whatever.

My personal experience of Twitter is very different. There is, in a way that is simply more immediate to me, no starting point. I enter into conversations – often more than one at a time – as I also pulse out my own half-formed thoughts. As opposed the additive nature of my blog – which I add post upon post to form something resembling a cohesive whole – conversations on Twitter always begin in medias res.

The distinction, of course, doesn’t hold in the abstract. This blog is like that too. But this blog or many others don’t force me to experience it that way. This is just how I ‘do’ Twitter, each moment the n-1 of a constantly moving dynamic whole.

n-1 is a concept that I came across in the introduction of Deleuze & Gutatari’s A Thousand Plateaus. The chapter is a determined attempt to both challenge binary, dualistic thinking, but also to force readers to think about the kinds of distortions produced by dualism as an analytic perspective – of the way it encourages us to think about things in isolation, whether materially, ideologically or temporally.

n-1 is a gesture to the notion that, rather than starting with one point and using an additive approach to arrive at a conclusion, ‘reality’ – this collection of experiences, people, texts, images etc. – is this impossibly complex network of relations that is constantly in flux. Like some infinite matrix, each node represents both a possible starting point or end point, and each ‘entry’ itself into the network configures one’s path through it.

This has always been my experience of Twitter. But in less visible, if slightly obvious ways, it is also a perspective easily applied to blogging, printed books, science or whatever else. If our experiences of the world – including subjectivity itself – are always produced as a singular, unrepeatable moment from a plurality of possiblities, then all moments of analysis are 1 subtracted from an infinite n.

Deleuze and Guattari always expressed this as the difference between roots and tubers: trees start from a seed, split and the network that arises branches off from a single root; tubers or rhizomes can grow roots from anywhere – none is original and none are final.

It is for this reason I have always said that the internet could not have simply ‘arisen’ and ‘made sense’ without the related and concomitant changes in thought in the late 20th century. The rhizome finds its home on the web, as the web found its explanatory model in the rhizome.

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Perhaps, then, I should return to an old nugget of mine: things that often seem ‘metaphorical’ in post-structuralism find an ever slightly less metaphorical manifestation on the web. The matrix of relations we usually call intertextuality become more visible in hyperlinks. The n-1 of rhizomatic thinking seems less abstract when thought of like an ongoing Twitter conversation.

These ideas and phenomena aren’t new. But it seems important to note that their immediacy is - that one might not have experienced ‘the rhizomatic’ (if one can do such a thing) with such ease prior to the technologies of the internet. A rhizomatic or intertextual understanding of texts was something that always had to be teased out through recuperative readings, ones that ‘save’ texts from Enlightenment dualism, colonialism, patriarchy or whatever else positions itself as normal and true. n-1 as an analytic perspective was always ‘there’ – but it was never so obvious or, um, ‘natural’ as web pages or tweets or conversations that have this visual gesture to their linkages to others.

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The sign of the end of… well, that thing that came before postmodernism was highlighted by those cliches we all know: pastiche, plurality, subjectivity, fracture, difference and differance. But part of the job of academics for the past half-century has been ‘revealing’ how those things were there all along.

In a sense they ‘were’ and ‘were not’, not least because they made rhetorical gestures to the contrary. Because one can read Jane Eyre as a text that concerns itself socio-material limits of femininity, it doesn’t mean the text isn’t working to foreclose precisely that reading. Write/read, I/O, tree/tuber. It pushed you one way.

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So what I’m wondering is this: what if blogging as a synedoche for, on one level, ‘publishing’, but on the other, a kind of rhetorical force to writing as a ‘fixed, ‘closed’, temporary aggregation of matrical nodes – this text that tells you, ‘forget all that other stuff, this here is the beginning, a singular thing that stands alone’ – will be destabilized by a medium that deliberately works to lay bare the always potential non-dualistic underpinnings of how stuff is connected to other stuff, and because it’s always in flux, is always connected to other other stuff.

Here’s the thing: people say all the time ‘x will die because it’s not social enough’ or ‘it has to be a conversation, man’. But what if that social-ness doesn’t just represent a change in how people find information, but is bound up in a shift that sees the ‘death of dualism’ find a home not simply in the academy or aesthetics, but in a medium that is itself structured so that ‘starting points’ seem irrational and impossible? That additive analysis feels off?

So that ‘the social revolution’ is not only about Zuckerberg or Twitter, but is itself endemic of the epistemology of the web ? Or, at least, whatever ‘age’ the web is itself but one part of…

Out of what I imagine is the same slightly morbid curiosity that others have experienced, earlier this week, I ate at least part of KFC’s Double Down.

But while it might be, if nothing else, entertaining to offer my thoughts on the sandwich as an aesthetic experience  – perhaps describing the feeling that as it moves through your sysetm, the salty, fatty mess, as if it were an intelligent parasite, is slowly absorbing nutrients you had previously consumed – it was difficult not to think about the question that plagues anyone who, due to a variety of poor life choices, has spent far too long in academia: yes, but what does it mean?

The obvious thing to say, of course, is that KFC’s offering is a sign of excess, unhealthiness and the problems of 21st century society – the blend of corporate marketing and This Is Why You’re Fat extremity crystallizing into the perfect sign of the ills of a historical moment.

But the obvious is not only a bit yawn-inducing – *sigh*, fast food leads to, like, obesity and that’s like totally ruining everything dude – it’s often very wrong.

See, the Double Down is fascinating not as an object: it’s simply the same KFC chicken you’ve always – well, given this readership, probably looked at from a distance – but now with a bit of sauce and cheese and bacon slathered on top, largely, one imagines, because  this is the kind of sandwich that was developed in a boardroom but never actually taste-tested. When it actually came time for it, KFC executives shook their heads and claimed “what we’ve created here is a conceptual project; it doesn’t need tasting”.

No, the Double Down is fascinating because it is the pivot for the swirling mess that is the contemporary relationship to health.

To say it has people intrigued would be to engage in litotes. There was live tweeting and video of its consumption. Entire news articles were dedicated to its Canadian arrival. There was even briefly chatter about it being banned because it represented such a gross contravention of all that was good and holy and true.

But here’s the thing: the Double Down ‘works’ as a cultural symbol precisely because it flies in the face of the ways in which we’ve begun to speak about health. It’s the fast food equivalent of the orgy in porn: that it’s deliberately ‘so much’ is exactly the point. The mess of dripping cheese, superfluous bacon and – I use the term sceptically – ‘sauce’ is not only meant to be an orgiastic celebration of fat, gluttony, and fuck-it-all indulgence, it’s also a consumerist avenue for the expression of those ‘resistant’ values. Far fewer people participate in orgies than watch them on screens. The Double Down is the mass and mess of limbs, genitalia and bodily fluids made manifest in a junk-food sandwich. And if the orgy is the ultimate fuck-you to a kind of Victorian sexual prudishness, then the Double Down does the same thing to early 21st century discourses of health.

To be sure, the broad public turn toward health – at the first point in human history when billions of people can consume far more calories daily than they need – has myriad benefits, both personal and social. But “Health” is also a discourse of self-policing and self-denial – of the late-capitalist gaze turned inward, turning health from a concern into a personal responsibility. It is not so much that we want to be healthy; we want others to be healthy too. We want to see them being healthy. And we feel sad when they’re not.

But what is also crucial is that we perform our relationship to health – why go to the gym if you cannot slip into your new outfit? It’s the fit body as the performance of the late-capitalist work ethic. And as if on cue to support the idea, take this utterly disastrous Marie Claire column in which the author, talking about new sitcom Mike & Molly, gets grossed out by the idea of larger people making out:

So anyway, yes, I think I’d be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other … because I’d be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything. To be brutally honest, even in real life, I find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room — just like I’d find it distressing if I saw a very drunk person stumbling across a bar or a heroine addict slumping in a chair.

[...]

But … I think obesity is something that most people have a ton of control over. It’s something they can change, if only they put their minds to it.

(I’m happy to give you some nutrition and fitness suggestions if you need them — but long story short, eat more fresh and unprocessed foods, read labels and avoid foods with any kind of processed sweetener in them whether it’s cane sugar or high fructose corn syrup, increase the amount of fiber you’re getting, get some kind of exercise for 30 minutes at least five times a week, and do everything you can to stand up more — even while using your computer — and walk more. I admit that there’s plenty that makes slimming down tough, but YOU CAN DO IT! Trust me. It will take some time, but you’ll also feel so good, physically and emotionally. A nutritionist or personal trainer will help — and if you can’t afford one, visit your local YMCA for some advice.)

Right? Not only does it express disgust at the notion of obese people, you know, doing shit, it also frames it in terms of a personal responsibility, so that the author’s disgust can be prevented. Here, look, it’s just a bit of work, and we can fix you, and really, isn’t this better for all of us? You’ll feel better because being healthy is good – and I won’t have to look at you.

And so the Double Down is not only the orgy, it’s the cigarette: it’s the purposefully self-destructive act meant to become a personal (but market-based) expression of one’s refusal to entirely be subsumed by a notion of health. I’ll eat this thing, but it’s a laugh, I don’t mean it seriously; I know what the right thing is to do. The people who really eat at KFC, though? They’re irresponsible. They don’t care about themselves.

Yet, simmering under all this, there’s a slightly funny elision: the Double Down isn’t actually all that unhealthy.  Yes, it has an incredible amount of salt – 1.7 grams – but at 540 calories and 30 grams of fat (pdf link to KFC’s nutrition data) it is significantly less ‘harfmul’ than not only most ‘signature’ fast food burgers like the Big Mac or Whopper, it also contains about a third of the calories of a saag paneer roti at Gandhi’s (which, for those not from Toronto, is an obscenely good roti shop). Another sign: people don’t really know that much about nutrition; they perform their knowledge of it anyway.

So here we have a sign of both excess and gluttonous indulgence that, in many ways, is neither. Instead it, almost literally, is  an empty signifier for our desire for rebellious self-destruction, all of which has been instigated by a combination of traditional marketing and social media buzz, where much of the latter consists of claims of incredulity: at how unbelievably unhealthy and over-the-top this thing is, and how I’ll never eat it but, because there’s been so much hype about this ‘counter-cultural’ thing, you eventually do out of curiosity anyway.

So, yeah, if you were looking for symbols of the contemporary…