A posthuman temporal
In “Programming rhythmatic frequencies” Eshun considers drum machines as posthuman rhythm synthesizers. Posthuman tools making “humanly impossible time”, and posthuman becomings thrusting different bodies into their new temporality: “spastic pulses seize the body, rewiring the sensorium in a kinaesthetic of shockcuts and stutters, a voluptuous epilepsy” (79). Deviant electro-corporeal embodiments are shared through the beat. Eshun quotes Edgard Varese (composer/philosopher who worked under the principles of ‘sound as living matter’ and ‘musical space as open rather than bounded’) yearning for sound-producing machines: “I need an entirely new medium of expression”, anticipating the potential advantages of creating crossrhythms of unrelation and/or simultaneity, desire fractioned into subdivisions and/or omissions. I recall this frustrated and recurrent feeling that we need for new tools of thought; interdisciplinary methods, genres, vocabularies, formats, or practices to think-through the posthuman. Needing aids of imagination to make the unfolding of a world in a process of emergence — and all its constituent transductions and relations — sense-able and communicable.
With Eshun's drum-machines the humanist frame is cut-up, ventilated through the layering, division, fractioning, or crossing of time. Disrupting time does a lot to unravel the human — without stable time, no stable space, no stable way to bound oneself as a located subject. Applying posthuman verbiage to the idea of a clock or a calendar makes the task of envisioning tricky and maybe needing inebriation. Imagine the week ahead and try to think: transversality, imbrication, syntheses, knots, eruptions, enfoldings, depth-plunges, digestions, topological movements. Massumi once instructed attempts to imagine the virtual, “think of each image receding into its deformation, as into a vanishing point of its own twisted versioning… take the images by their virtual centers. Superpose them” (Massumi PftV 134). Visualizing potential this way might sound absurd because we’re not in the habit of twisting paintings or soaking them in juice, because we like to have imagery that represents, because we like a frame. Maybe Eshuns’ electro-rhythmic machines could do Massumi’s sort of thinking — they’re in the habit, “repeatedly overlap[ing] split seconds apart, creating a stratum of seething, prehensile tension. Signals interlock in a web of pulsations, a rhythm forest shower of screams and rustletime” (MBttS 79). Try to do this out from the watch-wearing body. Hard to think. How to slice up this round temporal structure, it’s so cozy.
The posthuman time of the drum machine ignites a shock to the body, one powerfully felt irrationality of being a body near a machine. This confounding of spacetime disallows the human from living settled in a singular form that can be delineated by its boundaries in a place or of a moment. These disruptions are relational, inciting a motion that passes-between bodies, and seconds too, it’s the entwining of states that can’t really be marked in spacetime. It’s all too agile. “This indefinite life does not itself have moments… but only between-times, between-moments; it… offers the immensity of an empty time where one sees the event yet to come and already happened” (Deleuze PI ). Within the immensity of the in-between, a ‘humanly impossible’ time belches posthuman difference. The drum-machine beating here is a thump punctuating gel or gas, a percussion resonating along twists and scissions, vibrating ‘all the way down’ (Haraway) and all the way out, and a bunch of other ways too. This resonance overflows from a moment — it’s the stretch or projection of a hit into other states, a going-beyond that ruptures or outstrips containment, activating the excess that is always virtual in the ‘moment’ measured by human time. Posthuman exchanges between bodies might not happen in a time frame easily sensed, making supra-clock attunement essential. “Information circulates universally within and between the totality of all existing things” (Serres), and so the within and between of a moment is what needs concentration, if a multi-agential, multi-directional creation is to be heard. Listening to the way exchanges happen between bodies needs you getting out of your rhythms. The time marks of observation from a human viewpoint might mostly be totally irrelevant; Staccato pulsations can’t live on a watch. A clock goes liquid and becomes a twist. The posthuman beat rides it’s soundwaves through weirded plural spacetime and weirded plural bodies too, “Electro like Techno affects nerves and muscles… resets the shapes of sensation, demands a new dynamotion” (Eshun MBttS, 81)... “Oscillations wince across the body in wave motion” (Eshun MBttS, 83). Convulsions, spastic reflexes, swells, endless twitches from multiple zones, transient itches, boneless, gutless, bald sensation. It all breaks the count. New discomforts, and freedoms from discomfort, come with emergence from some frame you’ve always relied on. Like the discombobulation of immersion in any new medium, not typical of the time-keeping day-counting human. “Immerse yourself in the destructiv element” (Eshun MBttS, 91) and see what the bodies can do.
More on Time, now : Looking for rocks as a posthuman practice
I can spend hours walking down in the creeks looking for rocks, partially because I enjoy these nasty sneakers I wear that I let get wet and how silly that feels, to have wet shoes, to invite blisters. But mostly really because I love how it lets me live on a new scale, some lithic register, tuned-in to the different swerves of ovoid shapes and honed-in on variation in grays and browns. Time slows to a strange melt because of this. To see the event of each stone is to capture one beat of a tune with imperceptible immensity. You’ll be walking so slow you’re barely moving, always pausing but covering a lot of ground because the eye-pace is skipping along at such a quick flicker. Loping my weight between heaps to balance on curved surfaces leaves my body perched at odd angles. It’s all very slippery, there’s no settling-down between the endless intra-rock intervals. The body is the vehicle, gotta let it get destabilized or slanted and muddy in order to make the eyes bulge-out into a time outside the tick tick of losing sunlight or growing hair or becoming hungry. Disruption that begets a type of seeing outside the tempo of the nervous system- out into the air, through leaves and bugs and trash, landing on and sweeping up minerals in the constellatory milieu. It’s a haptic visuality that never stops multiplying and spewing. The dynamism of this vision-in-motion involves my body with an ‘ecology of practices’, a wide continuum involving the rocks, the lichen on their surfaces, the flow of the creek, the critters living near the soil, the time of day, the temperature of the air, the season, the tracks, the tracings, the litter. Thinking-feeling in the act, walking out-of tempo as a methodology. Parikka tells me “These are forms of thinking that emerge in practice and their material situations”(CoEA, 42)... “ecologies of practices in landscapes which unfold in time…practices which are by necessity involved in rescaling the temporal” (CoEA, 56). Looking for rocks you need to set out a big expanse of time that is left open so that the body can slow-way-down to encounter enough tiny boring things that you may finally locate an errant one. All of this doesn’t match any clock or any type of day I know, and so I find myself out in the creek for hours, forgotten by the live world, abandoning all responsibility. Being undisciplined and also meticulously, fruitlessly disciplined, in one of the only ways I’ve found to escape the pace of the day. What time do we occupy, rock and I? Rocks can’t live next to a clock, that’s real irrelevance. There’s not a timepiece big enough to keep track of their slow emergence or presiding stagnancy.
In seeing one dense little sedimentary form you can imagine so many grounds it’s rolled along, so many creeks it’s surfed, so many possible worlds it’s gathered up, so many ways its particulates might have cohered. Seeing some fossil pressed into a limestone patch, you know it was once swimming and had comrades and meals and its own way of keeping track of a day. This resonance is good, meeting a “companion species.. Which might be already long gone and dead” through the palm (Parikka CoEA, 42). To make kin across time enjoins and embeds us in the strata. Finding a bit of chipped-up flint, you know that a while ago, probably nearby, in an entirely different type of Texas with differently punctuated days, someone else had held that flint in their hand and cracked away at it to shape it into some tool they needed. Something that fit their palm just right, which now sits just right in mine. Something like holding hands through time, very tender and impersonal… the lithic medium is the zone of contact, the spacetime in between bodies not-yet meeting, a zone which stretches way beyond whatever hand holds it in a moment. The rock body folds time and folds it again, and keeps going and retracing and so on, accumulating and assembling, picking everything up. Making sure to throw it all down again sometime later, somewhere else. It keeps the process going, keeps rolling and squirrelling-about among others. It transduces, “mediate[s] between different orders, to place heterogeneous realities in contact” (Mackenzie T:BaMaS, 18). Emulate the lively rock maybe, posthuman thinker, and this way the hours will come quick, or slow, or repeat in loops or never come at all, days will be punctuated silly, and you’ll be shifting so many things about you through your movements that you’ll never take the same set string of steps, it’ll never be the same route rooted. You’ll be an endless velocity of erosion and growth that keeps you alert and mutable, and always leaning on the world.
I think of the laccolith. A swell of magma that intrudes between layers of earth, forming a bowed-out lens of rock that pushes once-linear layers to take new curves. Rock time might push us out of sync and into new bents. A drum machine pummeled with rocks might make geologic music from the future. Dancing on a rocky surface might make hyperembodied feet imprinted with the indentation of a beat from the past.
When rock-touching, every year reduces and enfolds down through the stratum, and widens and tentacles up out into my pockets as I plod along, refusing that zoom meeting I have at 12 o clock. Wonderful, useless, an hour later I had twenty-four rocks and a few footed miles and a weighed-down jacket and five or eight words and had gotten nothing at all done but touched a whole lot of places and times that I hadn’t been before. Made contact across disparate planes by splitting the seconds apart into atomic magnitudes. Very good.
The lay-down sleep at the end of a rock walk, legs warble and feet pulse raw. Now I can also spend hours buzzed-out in bed sort of watching TV and thoughtlessly putting things in my mouth and really just waiting for things to tick-down before sleep. This is not like walking, its stillness, for sure, but feels all right for maybe the flickering my eyes and tongue do all the while. All these techniques of escaping time. I’m remembering there was this woman once who always wore a watch to bed and it would tick in my ear when her arm was tucked beneath her and while she was asleep I would listen to the ticking and be so aware of all the seconds I was having that she was freed from and I thought she was one of the worst women I had ever known.
All these efforts to really get rid of time, make a pace, have a clip, a determining gait. While really I think I might be comfortable with all this persistent driving-forward in time, the thump thump. When I catch the sound of my ploddings-on the rocks it’s like yikes check it out, take a look, you can keep moving in squiggly lines on your legs but you’re always really traveling around the circle of the day, like yikes you might really actually like that rotation, its comfy and encompassing, so I soothe myself shhh, quiet your lament, press your cheek against it, and hear the ticking sync up with all your little steps. Nah, Gotta rustle. Turn the TV on its side, swallow upside-down, go to bed at 7am and when you sleep listen to fourteen speakers. Immerse yourself in the destructiv tic.
Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual
Mackenzie, Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed
Parikka, Cartographies of Environmental Arts
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