Driftwork

I’m still not sure that the piece on post-humanism will end up being written, its not that the multiplicity of ideas don’t work, because with the research review I’m carrying out as I prepare my notes demonstrates and confirms that, but that the time necessary to turn them into something concrete doesn’t seem to be there. The actual world sits on the margins of the text, the keyboard even and demands more attention…

Some years ago a place I worked in received, in the morning mail sack a bomb. It was sent from some Yorkshire based fascist group and contained enough explosive to maim or kill. In the moment of panic and virtual violence we called the police, along came the bomb squad and some armed officers, and they set about disarming the bomb they then disappeared leaving us to be interviewed by a second set of information gatherers.

Prior to this I might have thought of the police less ambiguously but after that moment of employment…. [’ur… please come we’ve got a terrorist bomb…’ ‘Ok we are on our way’] I realized later that after that moment and a few subsequent burglaries that Serres is correct in his analysis that they are our employees, people who we employ to carry out specialized tasks so that we do not have to.

So the question to ask about these functions is what do I want to do ? Become an expert in explosives ? Have to spy on my neighbour in case he’s abusing his wife ? In case she is abusing her children and animals ? Evaluate and judge whether this person should be allowed to work with children ? Evaluate which path should be relaid ? Judge whether Socrates should be accused ?

We could go on. But the point is that what might have been everyday actions have become roles and tasks carried out by others so that we don’t have to do them. You can interpret some of these roles as oppressive, the police, judiciary, politics, management and so on, but when the bomb arrives though the post who are you going to call ?

This may have the smell of liberalism, it smells of consequences, of course it does. But it is an alternative way of understanding what the chief of police does. The alternative is to nostalgically believe that these people are leaders who expect you to follow them like the main character in Celine’s Journey to the end of night blindly into the abyss, when you should be saying ’sorry, you work for me, don’t think the abyss is a good idea…’

Another memory goes with this. At Cowes, one summer day, on the yacht which was moored in the harbour, side by side with all the other yachts. Father and Mother had gone on shore, and the men had gone on in the dinghy to buy things to eat and had not come back. Yesterday they had brought me a pair of new shoes. The dull brown leather shoes with a strap and a boot button, worn before the days of sandals, before the blessed summer nakedness of children today: at a time when two kind of drawers and two kinds of petticoats, a pinafore and serge frock imposed, as I can still remember, a very real strain on one’s vitality…. Mary Butts

“It is fascinating” n said “how you went from a slim quite weak but broadly Keynesain state in the 1960\70s, to an extrordinarily strong and almost dictatorial neo-liberal state, the ideologies of which were built on…”

“That’s surely because they lost… or at least believed they did”

That first night I slept on deck, with a blanket and a sleeping bag. I couldn’t stand the cabin again. I showered and went on deck without any anti-sun cream in the late evening as the sun set. I watched the coast approach the bow of the yacht. We changed course and began to run parallel with the shore. I could see the little ports that made up the beginnings of the slide drifting by one after the other. The coast was as dark as it had been the night before. What had been ports and tourist towns with strings of lamps in the streets and boulevards lighting up the sea were all dark. Paul could make out flickering candles and the smouldering barbecues cooking, but all I could see was the dark outline of the coast against the sky. After a while I went to sleep. I felt I was no longer capable of thinking about anything. Only the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about the woman who was asleep in her cabin, stopped me from lamenting the passing of the information society. But I could do nothing but think of her below me. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to hold out against my desire for her much longer. I’d have to speak to her soon. I woke around dawn. We were a couple of kilometres from the shore. Different towns were passing by. Smoke drifting up into the sky the only signs of the re-commencement. The sun was beginning to rise above the horizon.

I went back to my cabin. Collecting some hot chocolate to drink on the way. She was there. Beside her a half empty bottle of white wine. She must have waited for me a long time and then fallen asleep. I sat down on the chair and pulled a blanket over me. I couldn’t bear the thought of waking her. And slept. I woke before she did and went up to the dining room and drank coffee and ate some fresh rolls for breakfast. When she came into the dining room I gave her some hot chocolate. She smiled at me as her glasses misted up. She asked me whether I thought things would recover. I told her to drink her chocolate and to stop romanticising the past because she used to be rich. She laughed and told me that she still was.

She said later. “I always liked waves, change and difference. And hated the way the that coastal waters were turning into pea soup… look at it… I always like the bigger animals, fish. The worst affect of that system was the way life was shrinking.”

“ That’s crass Darwinism isn’t it ?” I said.

She looked puzzled.

“… And besides it makes it harder to eat doesn’t it ?”

“You could say that.” She laughed. “Never got this far south then ?”
“Don’t think so…” Seeing the look she gave me I explained. “Don’t know where I am you see.”

“Disorientated ?”

“No, just gone nomadic and given up worrying about where I am..”

She didn’t tell me that the coastline used to be Italy, later that day we anchored at Sete to collect fresh water and provisions. We stayed for three days helping rebuild a local power plant and a water wheel before sailing south.