Do you sleep while you listen to something?
I do. In fact, I can't sleep otherwise. I sleep with one earbud in — the side not touching the pillow. When I turn over, I search for the other one and plug in instead. When I wake in the middle of the night, that something is still blabbing on.
When I walk to town, my noise-cancelling headphones are on my head. Actually, the headphones are becoming part of my physical construct: I switch between headphones and earbuds alternately while the other charges. Both are noise-cancelling — shutting everything else out.
And I am consuming. Anything, everything, constantly.
One day I wondered if this was normal.
My friend said:
'Oh, do you do that too? Yes, I also do that – constant, non-stop.’
When did I begin being like that? Perhaps when I had a lot of stress and anxiety that I could not stop thinking about. I filled my waking consciousness with other stuff. Anything. I just needed something to occupy me so that I did not have to be alone with that nagging worry I didn't really want to face.
I said:
Is this normal?
I am losing something. Like, myself. I feel thin. I feel washed over. I don't feel myself so much anymore.
A philosopher named Félix Guattari gave me a language for what I was losing.
He thought that the self is being produced all the time — shaped continuously by our cultural environment, media, education, relationships, language. We don't own a singular ‘self’; we are always in the process of being made into one, and unmade, and remade.
While the self is produced and reproduced, Guattari describes two sides of the condition we are in, held in tension. One is the socius: the social machinery — collective forces, capitalism, media, ideology — all the systems that constantly produce identity in standardised, homogenised ways. The other is the psyche: the individual's interior life, their particular existential territories — the specific, singular way a person inhabits the world.
The problem, Guattari says, is that the socius overwhelms the psyche. The social machinery fills us before we have a chance to fill ourselves.
The ideal is a balance — but a dynamic, unstable, warm balance. He uses the image of temperature: the socius must be kept at the heat of inter-human relationships, not artificially cooled. When it cools, it rigidifies. When it is alive, it remains fluid.
The earbuds were doing the opposite of that. Not gathering light — dispersing it.
By constant consumption of media, I am becoming a homogenised social construct. More and more, every day.
For Guattari, art is a device for re-singularisation — the act of undoing what has been made generic and breathing the particularity of person back in. The artwork doesn't speak for you, but it creates conditions in which your subjectivity can reform itself around something new. Like light spots converging to illuminate a single point.
I am thinking: what if there were a quiet practice we could take up — without special conditions, without preparation — that could shift this cycle? Not a solution. Not a system. Something slower. Something that returns us to ourselves rather than dispersing us further.
What if such a practice could quietly re-enliven our curiosity — in ourselves, and in the actual life in front of us?
I am going to introduce silent atelier. project in the coming weeks.
Hope you stay with me a little longer.
— Shee
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