Daniel Coffeen

Culture neither progresses no regresses. It just morphs, always.

Sometimes, we get frustrated trying to express ourselves. We can’t find the right words. We end up sounding like we’re pissed off when we’re not.

It conjures truly exquisite images.

What makes flirtation so exciting, amongst other things, is that there is the risk and potential rewards of physical intimacy.

The world comes at all of us, all the time. There is no down time, only slower and faster, more or less intense. To be alive is to perceive, to have the world literally bear down upon you, inundating you with stuff — air, sights, sounds, feelings, affects, moods, ideas, people. It is relentless.

What is critical? It is a will — a desire — to question everything, to root out one’s own assumptions, to ask if this or that feeling is a feeling worth having, whence it comes, if it should be pursued or not.

To me, thinking is a practice in and of itself and hence is inherently practical. Thinking is a kind of doing such as, say, running. It’s an activity. Unless we say that running is physical masturbation as it’s not practical. After all, you’re not running to get anywhere such as the book store.

Often, we imagine the world is this static platform on which there’s stuff. And then there’s us who spend our time maneuvering around this stuff. But between the stuff and between us is, well, some stuff but also a whole lot of nothing.

I get a call from a friend asking me to go out and I think, “Well, I kinda wanna. But I’m tired. And driving’s a drag. And while I might want to go out, I’m not sure I want to go out with that friend — not tonight. But maybe it’ll be fun. And I should get out more often. And I haven’t seen him in ages.”

What I taught — at least, what I tried to teach — is how to see the lay of the land, how a discourse constructs itself, what its terms are, what the assumptions are, what the pivotal terms are.

No more saying, “Why do these things keep happening to me?” They keep happening to you because of how you go. Maybe you can discipline yourself to go differently; maybe you can’t. But it’s not you doing it to you (as there is no inner agent acting on you); nor is it the world doing it to you

Writing like this is what we call an essay — a try, an attempt. This is, of course, the etymology of the word — from the French, essayer, to try. This is not about creating a highly polished, clean, clear monolith. It’s about seeing how thoughts meet language and what kind of order might emerge.

Critique is generous: it engages the other on its own terms — or on terms of the event.  It lets the other do its thing and then wonders how the other can extend it and it, in turn, can extend the other. It is a glorious repartee.

So one day you wake up and for no apparent reason you’re thinking about your friend Jamie. You haven’t talked to Jamie in, I don’t know, 2 years. But there she is, her virtual self staring you in the face. Never mind, whatever, you go on with your day.  And then there’s that distinctive pluck of harp strings announcing a new text message: it’s from Jamie!

But the scent of the event has dissipated, its feeling gone. It is now a movie I saw ages ago — I know the story but I don’t feel the power of it anymore. In many ways, it might as well have happened to someone else. I don’t know it happened to me, not from the inside out.

The social web is a kind of always on camera, ceaselessly capturing text and image — capturing imprints of ourselves — our likes and dislikes, the pages we view and how long we linger, the Yelps, the tweets, the reposts and shares and retweets and so on and so on.

The decadence of yesteryear no longer glitters with either promise or romance. We are always already watched, always already judged. Throughout Somewhere, Dorff screws beautiful women simply because he can. It is neither depraved nor decadent.

The universe becomes uncanny at its core, always shifting and realigning depending on how you look at it.