Participatory Inquiry, episode 84: Timeliness

John Kellden
5 min readMay 9, 2017

“In a network, in transition, we fold and sculpt new
coordinates by constellating our unrealplaceium.”

@johnkellden

We need new maps. Our old codes and operating systems are growing obsolete. We need new coordinates, where we gather, fold and unfold our maps, re-aligning them with territories turning increasingly nature. More than mature people, we need nature people.

a more natural departure,
a more convivial arrival

Natural, thriving, convivial human beings. The change we seek, is one of dancing between the old and new codes, until everyone joins our joint departure.

When Is Now?
We also need timelines, that will provide grace periods, for our duration.

Long Time Ago
We have been migrating for one hundred thousand years. It’s been quite an adventure, a magnificent learning journey, exploring almost every corner of Gaia.

10,000 BC

“Every voyage is intensive, and occurs in relation to thresholds of intensity between which it evolves or that it crosses.”
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

we need to wield a new kind of magic
in order to contract a bout of nature

7,000 BC

“Political sovereignty has two poles, the fearsome magician-emperor, operating by capture, bonds, knots and nets, and the jurist-priest-king, proceeding by treaties, pacts and contracts.”
— Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

587 BC — AD 70

“It is language that is based on regimes of signs, and regimes of signs on abstract machines, diagrammatic functions, and machinic assemblages that go beyond any system of semiology, linguistics, or logic.”
— Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

Vaster Than Words And More Present

“We might say that the air, as the invisible wellspring of the present, yielded an awareness of transformation and transcendence very different from that total transcendence expounded by the Church. The experiential interplay between the seen and the unseen — this duality entirely proper to the sensuous life-world — was far more real, for oral peoples, than an abstract dualism between sensuous reality as a whole and some other, utterly non-sensuous heaven.

Thus it was that the progressive spread of Christianity was largely dependent upon the spread of the alphabet, and, conversely, that Christian missions and missionaries were by far the greatest factor in the advancement of alphabetic literacy in both the medieval and the modern eras.

It was not enough to preach the Christian faith: one had to induce the unlettered, tribal peoples to begin to use the technology upon which that faith depended. Only by training the senses to participate with the written word could one hope to break their spontaneous participation with the animate terrain.

animating
participating

Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air.

The air, once the very medium of expressive interchange, would become an increasingly empty and unnoticed phenomenon, displaced by the strange new medium of the written word.”
David Abram

1227

“In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of chess. The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis.

departure and arrival

The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere . ..).

Another justice, another movement, another space-time.”
— Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

1440

“Smooth space and striated space — nomad space and sedentary space — the space in which the war machine develops and the space instituted by the State apparatus — are not of the same nature. No sooner do we note a simple opposition between the two kinds of space than we must indicate a much more complex difference by virtue of which the successive terms of the oppositions fail to coincide entirely.

our journey one of
returning ecosystem

And no sooner have we done that than we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space.”
— Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

1730

“…the moment is not the instantaneous, it is the haecceity into which one slips and that slips into other haecceities by transparency.

To be present at the dawn of the world. Such is the link between imperceptibility, indiscernibility, and impersonality — the three virtues.

To reduce oneself to an abstract line, a trait, in order to find one’s zone of indiscernibility with other traits, and in this way enter the haecceity and impersonality of the creator.

riffing forth our
collective intelligence

One is then like grass: one has made the world, everybody/everything, into a becoming, because one has made a necessarily communicating world, because one has suppressed in oneself everything that prevents us from slipping between things and growing in the midst of things.”
— Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

1730 seems like a good scene and plateau for us to take a moment to reconsider, our riffing forth our collective intelligence, on a smooth and striated near infinite fretboard. The rest of the lyrics, a kind of closure that we haven’t happened yet, will be traced in a following post.

Unrealplaceium
Unrealplaceium is the lapis that constellates inside us, a new geology beyond yet including old layers of morals, a wild ethics that wields convivial behavior. Unrealplaceium is also one of the ingredients in our emergent coordination,

an unfolding synthesis, selfhood,
service synergism

an unfolding synthesis, selfhood, service synergism, instigated by a symphonic director-less movement, through, inbetween and among one billion units of unobtainium. A smartphone by any other name would enact as happy a descent of our always and already noosphere?

Participatory Inquiry, episode 84: Timeliness

Roberta Sorge

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John Kellden

Cards catalyzing stories, Conversations that mind and matter, Digital communities and collaborative narratives