Blame John Law (and his reckless linking of ethnography to fractal geometry) for the following spew of unrefined semithoughts, which is really an unsuccessful attempt to digest what I’ve just read.

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There is no space in life. Everything happens in points on lines.

All of life happens on a single point in time that is sometimes a recollection of memory or an anticipation of some possibility or an absorption in a moment. That point projects time. And in the point is a point where we are. That point comes and goes and roams about with our attention, but it is always projecting space. And then there’s that weird thing we call “others”. In each other we project projections that sort of overlap with our own in some incomprehensible fashion. And when we try to imagine all these dots on all these twisting curving lines all together in some vast tangled-together unity, and we try to comb it all out, twist the threads together and try to make them interweave in some orderly textile pattern, we invent 3rd person reality, where everyone lives without anyone living there, really. We live on our thread, conceptualizing our contextile life-fabric. (By the way, that style of 3rd person conceptualization understood as somehow more real than the 1st person experience of conceptualizing it is the essence of metaphysical thinking. The reverse practice, of reducing the 3rd person to the 1st — describing the process by which 3rd person conceptions are produced and leaving alone the question of what-is-made-out-of-what — is phenomenological thinking. Or that’s how I understand it, anyway.)

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History is the 3rd person account of what nobody ever experiences except as an account of what happened. Yet most people experience history as the template for what might be happening now or in the future, though such things never ever happen. This is why we never feel a part of history.

And science is exactly the same way. Science happens on the thread, too, to individuals. Science, too, projects a contextile into which we imagine ourselves and all things woven.

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I think nothing feels truly real to us until it is ethnographed back into the 1st person realities we experience. To make them relatable, we have to take these amazingly ingenious abstractions we’ve made — things like great events, physical laws, economies — and show how each and every one of them occurs on the thread of a life, by relating them narratively, as events in someone’s life.

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I’m sorry about this post, but I’m not deleting it.