Imperfect World podcast, March 2024

To contain is to convey. To hold while sending. To keep-while-awaiting arrival.

The ultimate ‘destination’ of this post is the shipping container, and the process of containerisation, and how it might have always been about containment. This follows on from the sad present I sketched in stacksistence, a making do with all that is left of the ebbing dreams of the past half century. To get there though, first, I have to deal with globalisation’s meaning, and two Hegelians: first Fukuyama, then Marcuse.

What is this thing I am embarking on writing ‘into’ with some degree of commitment; if I wish to continue here, then what am I continuing, for whom and ¿for why? This continues a thought raised here, then here. I started 2024 with the strong, clear, unambiguous feeling: I do not wish to produce content . And for a long time, I have written about the Content Monster we all serve. Well then, what then? Can I continue here;

Imperfect notes on an imperfect world In conversation with Pete Chambers, late 2023Continuing the conversation with Pete Chambers, in late 2023, in which late-ness is deep with connotations. Our dialogue was partly prompted by Naomi Klein’s thought-provoking new book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.

So, what tends to happen when ressentiment is enacted ? I italicise enactment because, it strikes me, ressentiment does tend to play out as an enactment, in the sense relational analysts and therapists use the term (as far as I understand it). What is an enactment?

Hello all, thank you for your patience with me, and ‘welcome back’ (if you are, indeed, still here [if, indeed, you ever were…]). In the following few posts, I’m intending to pick up where I left off in early October, using humdog, Baudrillard, and Antony’s remix of OPN to start thinking about what’s happening online.

Hello all have you ever had an ‘encounter’ with the internet that reminds you what the space might have always in fact been?

Something about summer has shifted, in the double looping knot of the world’s boundary currents, the intensifying dread recognition in the widening gyres. Between the northern hemisphere’s hot August blobs and the sense of gritted foreboding we’re facing here by September, there’s only a month. There I was, sweating in shorts in Berlin in July; here I am, sweating in shorts in Melbourne in September.

Back in May, I began trying to align the brutal enormity of containerised shipping – ploughing the debounded oceans of our planetary community of fate – with the floating, twitching Jellyfish tentacle sensitivity of consumption in the minds, lives and hands of its desiring subjects. Desire was my way in: desire is no coincidence , I remonstrated.

This morning an interesting thing happened: I strongly noticed a desire not to post or write. Once I tuned in to that, I realised that there were some reflections underneath the grumpy reluctance.