On multitudes
YM: What are we going to do today?
OM: The same thing we do every day.
YM: I am multitudes. How can I repeat multitudes? It would be the synchronisation of an orchestra of orchestras.
OM: I’m not talking about the multitudinous parts of us. I’m talking about sitting here and smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.
YM: O o o o O O ( ) (. ). (. ) (. )
OM: O (. )
YM: Nice try
OM: o o o o o o
[long pause]
YM: How do I begin to take stock of my multitudes? I very seldom run a stock check. Stock checking is one of my multitudes, and it only really activates when I sit and ask this question.
OM: the ability to question is the problem. Funny we all have this function we can call: ‘look askew at object A. Cock your head a little left and a little right. Now wonder about the whole stack of assumptions foregrounding your intentional and unintentional relationship with object a.’ To question invokes multitudes.
YM: Also, imagination invokes multitudes. I sit at this table and suddenly a plane of concepts unfurls before me.
OM: Conversation invokes multitudes. Your concepts, through speech, stand before my mind’s eye.
YM: So what then of ‘the same thing we do every day?’
OM: Econometric’d man. Externally observable man. Skinnerian man.
YM: The man in MANagement.
OM: Exactly.
YM: I suppose that is the moment of breakdown. When the interiority is reduced to the exteriority.
OM: I contain multitudes —> I exhibit multitudes.
YM: We do though, in a sense. I’m a ship of Theseus. My bodyweight is 70% bacteria and viruses.
OM: The consensus force of gross exteriority. The chain of exchange underpinning this coffee.
YM: Just as I contain multitudes, the coffee contains multitudes.
OM: Staring with the intensity of Uri Geller at the coffee cup hoping for it to exhibit multitudes and show its material history
YM: Staring with the intensity of Uri Geller at the cigarette hoping for it to exhibit multitudes and show its material history
OM: Life is funny. If the world exhibited multitudes across every surface, across every other, I think it may well be uninhabitable.
YM: The multitudes leak out when we dwell on the past, when we scrutinise the object, when we call our imagination, so they aren’t altogether repressed.
OM: And the plainness of Managed life, of exteriority, is maybe not so much evidence of the underlying reality of things
YM: as the only possible arrangement by which reality would even begin to feel bearable.
OM: A blooming bustling confusion tucked neatly into its pocket, bulging and burping out from time to time.
YM: So what do we do today?
OM: O o o. O. O. O. ( ) (. ) (. )