“Anticonfluentialism is an artistic philosophy and postmodern film and literary movement coined by American author David Foster Wallace, who presents it as the invention of the fictional filmmaker James Orin Incandenza Jr., in Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest.
Endnote 61 of the novel describes it as follows:
An après-garde digital movement, a.k.a. ‘Digital Parallelism’ and ‘Cinema of Chaotic Stasis,’ characterized by a stubborn and possibly intentionally irritating refusal of different narrative lines to merge in any kind of meaningful confluence.
In simpler terms, anticonfluentialism is when a film or book plot has several separate story lines and points of view, which the reader is given to expect to intersect eventually, joining a greater centralised plot in the “big picture” of the setting, but instead these subplots never intersect at all, and their characters never meet. This idea exists in defiance of the narrative tendency to coax readers to willingly suspend disbelief at the unlikelihood of a given set of characters encountering one another, because it is normalised in literature that it is narratively necessary for all subplots in a story to converge on one eventual arch-plot.
It should be noted that the intentional “near miss” of two characters encountering each other is not an anticonfluentialist subversion of expectations, if their failure to encounter each other still results in a unified plot which is caused by the actions of both characters, and affects the interests of both characters at a later time. A plot is only anticonfluential if subplots genuinely never unify into any clear arch-plot affecting each other or caused by each other, even indirectly.”
Iron Nader.
“The bitch of the thing is you have to want to. If you don’t want to do as you’re told — I mean as it’s suggested you do — it means that your own personal will is still in control, and Eugenio Martinez over at Ennet House never tires of pointing out that your personal will is the web your Disease sits and spins in, still. The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who knows how many Substance-drenched years ago. It’s now shot through with the spidered fibrosis of your Disease. His own experience’s term for the Disease is: The Spider. You have to Starve The Spider: you have to surrender your will. This is why most people will Come In and Hang In only after their own entangled will has just about killed them. You have to want to surrender your will to people who know how to Starve The Spider. You have to want to take the suggestions, want to abide by the traditions of anonymity, humility, surrender to the Group conscience. If you don’t obey, nobody will kick you out. They won’t have to. You’ll end up kicking yourself out, if you steer by your own sick will. This is maybe why just about everybody in the White Flag Group tries so hard to be so disgustingly humble, kind, helpful, tactful, cheerful, nonjudgmental, tidy, energetic, san-guine, modest, generous, fair, orderly, patient, tolerant, attentive, truthful.
It isn’t like the Group makes them do it. It’s more like that the only people who end up able to hang for serious time in AA are the ones who willingly try to be these things. This is why, to the cynical newcomer or fresh Ennet House resident, serious AAs look like these weird combinations of Gandhi and Mr. Rogers with tattoos and enlarged livers and no teeth who used to beat wives and diddle daughters and now rhapsodize about their bowel movements. It’s all optional; do it or die.”
Have Himself hunch down to put a long pale arm around your shoulders and tell you that his own father had told him that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.
Have a father whose own father lost what was there. Have a father who lived up to his own promise and then found thing after thing to meet and surpass the expectations of his promise in, and didn’t seem just a whole hell of a lot happier or tighter wrapped than his own failed father, leaving you yourself in a kind of feral and flux-ridden state with respect to talent.
Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent’s unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play.
The irony is that this makes you very good, and you start to become regarded as having a prodigious talent to live up to.
“…I maintain that cosmic religiousness is the strongest and most noble driving force of scientific research. Only the man who can conceive the gigantic effort and above all the devotion, without which original scientific thought cannot succeed, can measure the strength of the feeling from which alone such work… can grow. What a deep belief in the intelligence of Creation and what longing for under-standing, even if only of a meagre reflection in the revealed intelligence of this world, must have flourished in Kepler and Newton, enabling them as lonely men to unravel over years of work the mechanism of celestial mechanics…. Only the man who devotes his life to such goals has a living conception of what inspired these men and gave them strength to remain steadfast in their aims in spite of countless failures.
It is cosmic religiousness that bestows such strength. A contemporary has said, not unrightly, that the serious research scholar in our generally materialistic age is the only deeply religious human being.”
Albert Einstein.
“In reality we can never legitimately cut loose from our archetypal foundations unless we are prepared to pay the price of a neurosis, any more than we can rid ourselves of our body and its organs without committing suicide. If we cannot deny the archetypes or otherwise neutralize them, we are confronted, at every new stage in the differentiation of consciousness to which civilization attains, with the task of finding a new interpretation appropriate to this stage, in order to connect the life of the past that still exists in us with the life of the present, which threatens to slip away from it. If this link-up does not take place, a kind of rootless consciousness comes into being no longer oriented to the past, a consciousness which succumbs helplessly to all manner of suggestions and, in practice, is susceptible to psychic epidemics. With the loss of the past, now become “insignificant,” devalued, and incapable of revaluation, the saviour is lost too, for the saviour is either the insignificant thing itself or else arises out of it.”
C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (157).
Groomed by technology and vision,
I am might.
Can Mankind pivot? Will the species make it out of these apparently dire straits? Has the die been cast, will its ambitions be the source of its undoing?
The questions linger in the collective consciousness, shadowed by the weight of an uncertain future. As we stand at the precipice of unprecedented change, the answers seem as elusive as ever. The clock ticks, each second a reminder of the fragility of our existence and the urgency of our decisions.
Yet, within this uncertainty lies a glimmer of hope. History has shown that humanity is capable of profound transformation. The same ingenuity that led us to the brink of catastrophe also holds the key to our salvation. It is in the hearts and minds of individuals, in the quiet moments of reflection and the bold actions of the courageous, that the seeds of a new era are sown.
Will we choose to foster unity over division, to prioritize the planet over profit, to embrace empathy over indifference? The path forward is not set in stone; it is forged by the collective will and wisdom of humanity. In this pivotal moment, the story of our species is still being written. The ending remains ours to shape, a testament to the enduring spirit that defines us all.
“New manners and a new morality are emerging as a result of this organic confusion between man and his prostheses — a confusion which puts an end to the instrumental pact and the integrity of the machine itself.”
— Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories IV
Smartphones, screens, and our little tele visions; windows to beyonds
“That was just another story. It’s in these ways that story both exposes and enables the worst traits in our species. We willingly allow highly simplistic narratives to deceive us, gleefully accepting as truth any tale that casts us as the moral hero, and the other as a two-dimensional villain. Stories are everywhere, and seduce us into believing that even in our hatred we are holy.”
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling.
“Every animal…instinctively strives for an optimum of favorable conditions under which it can expend all its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power; every animal abhors, just as instinctively…every kind of intrusion or hindrance that obstructs or could obstruct this path to the optimum.”
Nietzsche.
The ocean’s corpses
“All [people] lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they have themselves built and [most] die in silence and unnoticed behind the walls. Now and then a [person], cut off from [their] fellows by the peculiarities of [their] nature, becomes absorbed in doing something that is personal, useful and beautiful. Word of [their] activities is carried over the walls.”
Sherwood Anderson.
“Yuri Gligoric: a young poet, 22, had just come down from apple-picking Oregon…wanting, naturally, as a young unpublished unknown but very genius poet to destroy the big established gods and raise himself—wanting therefore their women too.”
