[-empyre-] week two I

[Jonathan Marshall]

Firstly Thanks to Alan and Sandy for inviting me to participate in a great topic – hope I can live up to it.

I’m more than overwhelmed by what people have been describing and referring to. It was a privilege to try and read. My writing is not on such a scale, it is about online life as an affective process, about everyday pain (and joy); perhaps what some would describe as comfortable pain or middle class pain.

This is not to diminish the pain, but nevertheless it is to acknowledge the difference between the unbearable, that which obliterates, and the mundane unavoidable and everyday; although clearly the unbearable can also become everyday. So I stand back a little in respect, after all there is a sense in which words are insufficient, and their insufficiency is pain or lack of empathy, yet words are all we have, and while that is a reassuring song chorus, it thus misses the point while making a point. Words are many things, empathetic, persuasive, forceful, rivalrous, bonding, excluding, wounding, and creating. They enable us to manipulate (and are embedded in us manipulating) the world and people; they enable and restrict our understanding and action and so on.  Words impose and open, they seem to point at bodies and effects – words have to be embodied.

I’m never sure what we mean by ‘virtual’, so for me that distorts, and distortion has effects/affects. Words distort and distortion can be pain, although not all pains are the same. The signifier hurts not at all, it is what it does, or what is done with it. It is the consequences, possible consequences, its use, or its missing that hurts, and that cannot be divorced even from even the empty signifier, although perhaps no signifier is empty, just misdirected.

Much of what follows is historical and therefore dismissible. We are all too wise now.

jon

Some formal writings gathered at
http://uts.academia.edu/jonmarshall

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