Willingness to be thrown by things
“To be a Dadaist means to let oneself be thrown by things, to oppose all sedimentation: to sit in a chair for a single moment is to risk one’s life.”
Richard Hülsenbeck, 1918
I use my first exposure to skateboarding media to carve a line across the terrains of countercultural, deviant, and homosocial youth practices that produce powerful, sensory encounters with global possibilities secreted into the situated present. This vignette from my own childhood is not reducible to a colorful anecdote, or even a self-reflexive introductory apology because this event continues its peripatetic work, crossing over multiple planes at once, existing as childhood crucible, unknowable future possibility, like Barthes’ punctum piercing outwards from the skin-surface of global dreamscapes interwoven with the relentless pressure of real accounts and accounting—the present transactions, the past investing in our deficit-debt. Cutting the flow like a surfer on that terrible rush of exhilarating repetition, the wave shaped from the depths hidden below, something irreducible to our enfeebled flock of terminology: -scapes, networks, globalized relations, intersections. Certainly I am indebted to all these, and use them greedily. What choice do I have? Despite these reductions to fumbling expediency, we continue to encounter the narrative, disciplinary, methodological, desirous strands spooling around and giving shape to discrete subjects: Japan (always in the vanguard!), youth, media, urbanism, globalization, bodies and their practice. This story carves over the concrete but permeable waves of these subject formations. In the motion of carving we experience the flow of transfer in speed, weight, height, intensity of motion. This thinking action through the particular spaces of Japan encountered in anthropological research attempts to shadow Rachjman’s summary of Wittgenstein’s challenge to linear time: “…when we think of the world’s future, we always mean the direction it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line, but a curve, constantly changing directions” (2001, 58). This carve into ethnographic space/time insists on a “move into a zone that is not logically predetermined, but rather ‘invents by differentiating’” (2001, 59). This project can only be this zone as a terrain of multiplicity as Deleuze imagines: multiplicity is “not what has many parts; it is what is ‘complicated,’ or folded many times over and in many ways such that there is no completely unfolded state, but only further bifurcations…” (Rachjman 2000, 60). This folding over is sometimes a tumble, sometimes a painful slam, transferring energy across surfaces and through (increasingly wrecked, always more open) bodies. We have no set coordinates here and together, in the form of this multiple story living on multiplanar, rhizomatic lines, we choose how to curve through the spaces of theory and ethnography. There is a repetition throughout as my questions find a perfect speed before collapsing into the gravity exerted by other planes of the project. Ethnographic passages may accumulate a shared velocity and in the heat of their connection, gather other skins of analysis, a momentary assemblage that seems to “make sense” but the slam is always virtually present amid cohesion. Anticipating the slam as always present should better be thought as our readiness to be thrown by things. If lines do not converge and my ethnographic carves and our thinking carves intersect with cataclysm, so what? The failure is an opening and a possibility. It is the virtual feature haunting all of my ethnographic subjects, from contingent creative workers on temporary contracts designing pachinko parlor banners or translating content for a website, to skaters who fail to secure a conventional, mature place in an economical austere while falling repeatedly on the streets, to the returnee children who assimilate multiple languages and cultural practices only to inhabit a weirdly risky and liminal category. Within each of these ethnographic zones, however, failure is matched by this capacity to be thrown by things, to carve a line that bends to failure, arcs through risk, slashes into precariousness, and wrecks the totalizing suspension imposed by teleologies of youth and futurity.
That failure is a consistent theme and perhaps is already suggesting itself to you in the faulty logics and hazy morphology of what you’ve read so far. It’s an inter-textual taste of the future, where our deepest fears and desperate desires are realized: thinking becomes a failed state. If you’re already lost, take this as consolation: “All losers are the heirs of those who lost before them. Failure loves company” (Halberstam 2011, 121). This is the point though, to lose track, to get off-track, to enter into the inter-zone of indeterminacy and multiplicity and thus dodge the law and avoid the fascist boulevards. With all the dodging, burning, and weaving, there are still pathways through and I’ve attempted to provide navigational channels and vectors while leaving open portals of departure to explore and unfold. The folding of this project should already be apparent, with the contacts and interchanges between Japanese architecture and American skaters, military bases, Max Headroom, and a beatnik baroque skate shop in a derelict bus squatting on the edge of a parking lot.
Richard Hülsenbeck, 1918
I use my first exposure to skateboarding media to carve a line across the terrains of countercultural, deviant, and homosocial youth practices that produce powerful, sensory encounters with global possibilities secreted into the situated present. This vignette from my own childhood is not reducible to a colorful anecdote, or even a self-reflexive introductory apology because this event continues its peripatetic work, crossing over multiple planes at once, existing as childhood crucible, unknowable future possibility, like Barthes’ punctum piercing outwards from the skin-surface of global dreamscapes interwoven with the relentless pressure of real accounts and accounting—the present transactions, the past investing in our deficit-debt. Cutting the flow like a surfer on that terrible rush of exhilarating repetition, the wave shaped from the depths hidden below, something irreducible to our enfeebled flock of terminology: -scapes, networks, globalized relations, intersections. Certainly I am indebted to all these, and use them greedily. What choice do I have? Despite these reductions to fumbling expediency, we continue to encounter the narrative, disciplinary, methodological, desirous strands spooling around and giving shape to discrete subjects: Japan (always in the vanguard!), youth, media, urbanism, globalization, bodies and their practice. This story carves over the concrete but permeable waves of these subject formations. In the motion of carving we experience the flow of transfer in speed, weight, height, intensity of motion. This thinking action through the particular spaces of Japan encountered in anthropological research attempts to shadow Rachjman’s summary of Wittgenstein’s challenge to linear time: “…when we think of the world’s future, we always mean the direction it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line, but a curve, constantly changing directions” (2001, 58). This carve into ethnographic space/time insists on a “move into a zone that is not logically predetermined, but rather ‘invents by differentiating’” (2001, 59). This project can only be this zone as a terrain of multiplicity as Deleuze imagines: multiplicity is “not what has many parts; it is what is ‘complicated,’ or folded many times over and in many ways such that there is no completely unfolded state, but only further bifurcations…” (Rachjman 2000, 60). This folding over is sometimes a tumble, sometimes a painful slam, transferring energy across surfaces and through (increasingly wrecked, always more open) bodies. We have no set coordinates here and together, in the form of this multiple story living on multiplanar, rhizomatic lines, we choose how to curve through the spaces of theory and ethnography. There is a repetition throughout as my questions find a perfect speed before collapsing into the gravity exerted by other planes of the project. Ethnographic passages may accumulate a shared velocity and in the heat of their connection, gather other skins of analysis, a momentary assemblage that seems to “make sense” but the slam is always virtually present amid cohesion. Anticipating the slam as always present should better be thought as our readiness to be thrown by things. If lines do not converge and my ethnographic carves and our thinking carves intersect with cataclysm, so what? The failure is an opening and a possibility. It is the virtual feature haunting all of my ethnographic subjects, from contingent creative workers on temporary contracts designing pachinko parlor banners or translating content for a website, to skaters who fail to secure a conventional, mature place in an economical austere while falling repeatedly on the streets, to the returnee children who assimilate multiple languages and cultural practices only to inhabit a weirdly risky and liminal category. Within each of these ethnographic zones, however, failure is matched by this capacity to be thrown by things, to carve a line that bends to failure, arcs through risk, slashes into precariousness, and wrecks the totalizing suspension imposed by teleologies of youth and futurity.
That failure is a consistent theme and perhaps is already suggesting itself to you in the faulty logics and hazy morphology of what you’ve read so far. It’s an inter-textual taste of the future, where our deepest fears and desperate desires are realized: thinking becomes a failed state. If you’re already lost, take this as consolation: “All losers are the heirs of those who lost before them. Failure loves company” (Halberstam 2011, 121). This is the point though, to lose track, to get off-track, to enter into the inter-zone of indeterminacy and multiplicity and thus dodge the law and avoid the fascist boulevards. With all the dodging, burning, and weaving, there are still pathways through and I’ve attempted to provide navigational channels and vectors while leaving open portals of departure to explore and unfold. The folding of this project should already be apparent, with the contacts and interchanges between Japanese architecture and American skaters, military bases, Max Headroom, and a beatnik baroque skate shop in a derelict bus squatting on the edge of a parking lot.
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