Situation

A situation is an ‘animated suspension’, a state of things in which something that will matter is unfolding amid the usual activity of life. Online, the situation is spatialized as much as it is temporally distinct.

Compare and contrast the situation with Badiou’s “event”(1); that exilic element in the situation that elaborates the potential for a radical break from what is known. The situation possesses an anti-sovereign effect which potentially undoes the subject. Left to loiter on the side of the information superhighway and swerve the algo- our rhythms build the chambers that reverberate. Our speedy relational improvisations towards new forms of living-on grift bytes that feel bodily. A snippet from Lloyd Addison’s poem of intimate couplings Umbra is reminiscent of this blurring relationality while making the measure of oneself:

“This body’s conjunctive circuit is On somnambulist current continuance of attraction

Into the flow of this river tittering ruthlessly”(2)

The delirious concatenation of bodies skipping between identity and becoming is similarly spatialized online- the changes that occur fundamentally alter the space in which they occur because the aggregate situations unfolding constitute the place in which they exist.

1 Badiou, Alain, Being and Event. London ; New York : Continuum, 2007. Print

2 Addison, Lloyd. The Aura & The Umbra. London: Paul Breman, 1970. Print.