[-empyre-] preparing to land

["Jordan Crandall" <jcrandall@ucsd.edu>]

The scene is a familiar one.  We're on a plane, descending.  Tray table
up.  Seat back upright.  The entire cabin is silent.  Live images of
moving clouds fill the video monitors (thanks to a camera mounted on the
nose-cone), affording us the spectacle of the very sky through which we
speed.  We are inside the plane's own movie.  Spellbound.

The passenger across the aisle, however, has diverged from this subtle
synchronization.  He has become increasingly agitated.  Nervous energy
surges through his body.  He jostles in his seat, rustling with anxiety,
his gaze darting back and forth across the cabin.  He has become a
disconnected bundle of rapid, uncoordinated movements, as if suddenly
plunged into a free fall.  Waves of tension ripple outward from him,
electrifying the space around him like a brewing storm.

His body now begins to stiffen.  His face reddens and swells as if he were
a volcano about to erupt.  As the landing gear begins to rumble into
place, he begins to emit a low, guttural roar, which seems to rise up from
the very depths of his being.  The roar vibrates in unison with the
mechanical rumble of the landing gear.  It resounds throughout the cabin,
a strange hybrid of human and machinic discharge.  One ascending from the
belly, the other descending from the hull.  As the wheels lock securely
into place, the man unhinges.  His guttural emission, having rapidly
increased in volume and pitch, phase-shifts into a wild screech that cuts
through the cabin like a knife.

In such situations -- when a fellow traveler becomes drastically unmoored,
his only recourse a primal screech -- one cannot be "caught" looking. 
Decorum requires a furtive, sidelong glance.  Stealing a quick succession
of such looks, I notice that the man's hands are clenching the armrest
with an iron grip.  His head is thrown back; his eyes are closed; and his
mouth is opened in a wild grimace.  Is it fear or delicious exhilaration? 
A roller coaster ride or a dance with death?

The atmosphere of the cabin has now radically changed.  Passengers shift
nervously in their seats.  Yet, strapped into our seats, subject to the
regulatory agency of air travel and of the social contract, there are only
three acceptable positions.  Our heads turned sideways, we look out the
window.  Our heads aimed straight ahead, we look at the monitors.  Our
heads lowered, we avert our eyes -- unsure of how to deal politely with
the outburst.  We are caught in some kind of elaborate choreography that
traverses body, machine, and social space, shaped by a regulatory domain
whose materialization is the plane.

In one sense, it's a choreography of power.  There is a machinery and an
institution that makes us adequate to see; that shapes the legitimacy of
our perspective; and that positions us as subjects.  And yet there are the
ways in which we SQUIRM within these machineries, maneuvering in their
substrata.  Thousands of stimuli impinge upon us, embroiling us in a
larger sensory network that spans the entire room.  Our bodies negotiate
this, but we're not aware of it.  We might sense it as "mood."  Potential
actions brew inside us, to be expressed outwardly or infolded inwardly. 
Our interior states push at the boundaries of visibility. They may erupt
at any moment.  Someone could sigh.  Someone could shout in frustration. 
Someone could gesture abruptly.  Someone could leave the room.  Like the
volcanic, erupting man, someone could "blow their top."

The technology and the rules of air travel do not simply enclose, contain,
and determine.  Rather, they network particular objects and machines with
the sensorial and physical capacities of the passengers.  They set forth a
particular compositional dynamic, interweaving programs, people, and
tendencies.  Objects tend to do things; people do too.  Objects tend to
afford certain behaviors; people tend to gather in clusters and, through
their behaviors, transform the vibe of rooms.  Unpack the abbreviative
term "airplane" and you have things-in-arrangement, programmatic impulses,
and tendencies to action.  You have the play of language, gesture, and
sensation.  Resonances are transmitted across bodies and environments. 
One becomes disposed for action in particular ways.  The body wiggles
within the ordering forces that maintain its coherency.  At any moment,
there is the potential of the eruption.

If power is the site of the REPRESSIVE, then this is the site of the
EXCESSIVE.

SPEECH, and the SCREECH.