one of the primary means by which the body was subjected to a disciplinary
order was the alignment of a series bodily gestures and actions with
increasingly smaller partitions of time: a durational protocol based on
division and accounting where the 'goal' appears to be an increase in speed
and efficiency of productive action and a corrolary reduction of 'wasted
time'.
pacing back and forth in a room becomes the willed deployment of this sense
of disciplinary time. the regularized beat of the footsteps serve to
ground and frame the body in an automatized rhythm so that the mind is
liberated for the act of thought. yet when this sense of pacing intersects
with the sense established by "technological devices and systems, to which
embodied rhythms are increasingly annexed", that which establishes a ground
for thought becomes a contested ground: "between squirts of Windex she
glimpses tv"... which activity becomes the ground upon which the other
figures?
i'd like to suggest that in the multiplication of simulataneous duarations
that constitute contemporary conditions of pacing, the grounding of
activity is perpetually negotiated and reconfigured across the various
environments we navigate daily. the regularity and consistancy (and
subsequent invisibility) of the footstep becomes supplanted by a series of
polyphonic beats - produced both by subject and environment - which
themselves frame a figurative action within a series of other figurative
actions. figure/ground becomes figure/figure/figure; the 'footstep' no
longer a marker of time but a duration (however small), the mnemonic
resonances of which ripple through the activities which it bounds or
interrupts...
within this environment, disciplinary time (and the focus of attention it
produces), is displaced by a flood of stimulations, each ordered by thier
inherent frequencies. here the signification-form becomes established
through the course of navigation. no longer "this is...", rather: "this
AND this AND this AND..."
how might this SOUND?