Chapter 3: Praktic-Patrick Praxis
A play (in several acts?)
Patrick-Praktic: Thanks everyone for coming. What do we make of Pure Texture so far?
Voice 1: I like that it’s about art. Doesn’t it feel a little overly abstract and theoretical though? The project is ostensibly about “immanent praxis,” as the text phrases it: it’s apparently a political project, in other words, but the politics feels like an empty moral justification for what’s really just a passion project about art. A jargon-y excuse to get on a soapbox about what’s, in the end, just a kind of unorganized blog about art. I like art. But what is this really doing for us, in a substantive political way?
Voice 2: I feel the same way. It feels kind of gimmicky in general.
Patrick-Praktic: I would personally say that I made the website, yes, mostly as an excuse to talk about art online. You’re right: it is just a blog. The political angle is from the fact that I wanted the blog to be a model for building a more “rhizomatic” internet, which is, yeah, getting into the more jargon-y critical theory language stuff, but it’s not as though Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “rhizome” is that difficult to understand. All I’m really interested in doing is decentralizing power on the internet by being very conscious of where I’m placing my attention and not allowing it to be co-opted by the recommendation algorithms and overall pernicious designs of corporate social media platforms (which I also still use, but I feel I’m fairly conscious about how I spend my time on the platform now). Social media companies want to channel your attention---namely, your desire---into their “surveillance capitalism” profit machines. The less we’re engaging with these systems of centralization, the more we’re building a truly rhizomatic, which is to say, free internet.
Voice 1: That still sounds pretty abstract to me. You kind of lost me at a certain point in all the jargon.
Voice 2: Yeah, me too.
Patrick-Praktic: Fair enough. I’m still working on that. I think conventional language is very important here.
Voice 3: You do talk in strange ways a great deal of the time.
Patrick-Praktic: (forced) Ha!
Voice 1: I was trying to be nuanced with my criticism though. I like what you’re doing, ultimately: I just don’t get all this more jargon-y political theory stuff you seem to want to add on to it. To me, it seems mostly just a weird blog about art---really, just a weird blog about whatever the hell you want it to be. That’s fine, I might be interested in reading it. You just really lose me when you try tying this all into some grand political and ethical project. It feels insincere, is all I’m saying.
Patrick-Praktic: I can tell you that I’m utterly sincere about all of it.
Voice 2: That’s obvious enough.
Patrick-Praktic: No, but what I mean is that it might seem trivial, but I think a great deal of our issues could be solved if we simply… stopped. As in, stopped complaining about how we’re all miserable online, and actually did something about it. We’re miserable because our attention---and yeah, I do think of attention as a kind of desire, ultimately---is being co-opted by huge profit machines that have no interest in human value or happiness. So why not just… not engage with those machines as much? And not only that, but actually start building better online spaces?
Voice 1: It still sounds like this is more a personal thing than it is a genuine political thing. Okay, so we stop. We stop going on Twitter, we stop mindlessly scrolling TikTok. We all build little neocities blogs like yours and write about whatever esoteric interests we have. Then what? Shouldn’t we be focusing on, like, actual politics? I’m talking real stuff: grassroots organizing, mutual aid, all that. Healthcare. Honestly, it just strikes me as a distraction. Talk about art all you want. But don’t pretend you’re an activist.
Voice 2: I see what he’s saying about social media platforms though. The thing for me, again, is just that your approach to this feels really gimmicky and willed and kind of insincere. I know you think you’re being sincere: you clearly believe in the things you’re saying on a certain level. But I think you believe those things because they’re a safe little moral framework for essentially just doing what you want to do. My main thing is: Why all of the gimmicky self-eating metatext? It’s annoying and indulgent. The political project makes sense to me but you’re too grandiose about it. Why not just do the thing, instead of drawing so much attention to the fact that you’re doing it? You can still disengage from corporate social media and write a blog about art without all of this gimmicky metatext and formal structure.
Patrick-Praktic: How much time have either of you actually spent reading the blog, though? It’s small, yes. It’s okay if you’re annoyed with the metatext, but you have to admit, it’s not just a literary device. I’m trying to say something here.
Voice 2: What, exactly, then? That couldn’t be said without you putting yourself into everything?
Patrick-Praktic: It’s a small thing. I’m publicly reclaiming my desire, and trying to show others how they should do the same. “Patrick-Praktic” is a constructed persona, and he always will be. But he also is genuinely me. I’m trying to do both at the same time. Have you read any David Foster Wallace, by any chance? I’m just doing what he does in his unfinished novel The Pale King: he makes himself into a character in the text, the character of “David Wallace,” who just straight-up tells you what’s happening, in an entirely immanent way, in the text. He tells you to flip back and read the copyright page. The metatext is just a way to make all of the invisible bureaucracies that structure all of this visible: to draw attention to them. The whole problem is that we’re not paying attention, or allowing attention to be co-opted by these larger forces.
Voice 3: “Should”? “Trying to show others how they should do the same”? Are you not yourself trying to “co-opt” a little there?
Patrick-Praktic: (defeated) … fair enough.
Voice 1: I’ve read a little DFW. But like, what is your whole project here, again? You keep losing me. You can’t just pull out another reference like that means anything about what I was saying. You say this is a political project: how, exactly? And I mean, beyond you yourself just disengaging from corporate social media, which yeah, is a personally good thing. But beyond that?
Patrick-Praktic: Have you read “Good Old Neon”?
Voice 1: Jesus, man.
Patrick-Praktic: Fair.
Voice 3: I’ve read “Good Old Neon.” I listened to the bootleg audiobook on YouTube.
Patrick-Praktic: What’d you think of it? What’d you think of the ending?
Voice 3: It helped me through a dark time. I kind of feel like I learned the lessons I needed to learn from it. It’s been a while now, I don’t remember a lot of it.
Patrick-Praktic: The thing with that story is that the ending only works because of all of the meandering, in-bent, metatext-flavored memoir-ish prose that comes before it.
Voice 3: The childhood stuff, you mean.
Patrick-Praktic: I mean Neal’s whole life story as he narrates it in an extremely self-conscious, performative way, that also acknowledges its own performativeness while it’s happening. All the stuff where he’s going like “I know this is probably boring you”: always pre-emptively defending himself from judgement, from the actual reader’s judgment, which only becomes clear with the explicit “David Wallace” metatext at the end.
Voice 3: What does this have to do with anything?
Patrick-Praktic: I’m just saying it’s the same as the metatext in The Pale King, and the same as what I’m trying to do with my metatext. I’m very much not trying to be an overly Clever Author. That’s a sure-fire route for empty, dead art. The way DFW did it in those texts---it’s not just metatext, he transcends the metatext. In the sense that the metatext is directly relevant to what is being said in the story: he’s telling you, “Yes, I am a fraud… but so are you, and so are all of us, because what it means to be human is to have all this stuff stored up inside of you that nobody else can ever really see unless it actually ‘comes out’ through the little keyhole of language.” It’s the opposite of a Clever Trick. It’s possibly the most generous thing he could’ve done as an artist.
Voice 3: So this is just a justification for your metatext, is what you’re saying.
Praktic-Patrick: Yeah, I mean, the thing that DFW was trying to confront, and that I’m trying to confront here, is all of these loops of recursive self-consciousness. Wallace was confronting a legacy of “postmodernism” that had become ossified into a posture of literariness, not the really alive art it had started as, with authors like Barthes or Nabokov in the 60s. I’m trying to confront a legacy of all of us acknowledging the constructed artifice of our online and social media personae that has, likewise, become ossified.
Voice 3: Go on…
Praktic-Patrick: The essential thing is this: in both cases, there is a moment when critique is necessary: in the 60s, postmodernism was needed to critique, well, “modernism.” Should we define all of these terms, by the way? But then, the things postmodernism was critiquing didn’t actually really change and sort of only got worse as time went on, as the 60s died and we got the Nixon and Reagan eras. So postmodernism---stuff like metatext, irony, avant-gardism---became a product and a posture. I feel like the same thing happened with how we all pay lip service to things like “parasocial relationships” and the artifice of social media, but we don’t actually do anything about it: we become ossified in the critique and don’t ever move on, ultimately because we’re scared and powerless to actually change things. I’m trying to make the critique part and parcel with the actual work of doing and changing things. What I’m trying to say is what “David Wallace” and David Foster Wallace are both saying in “Good Old Neon”: that yes, this character is constructed for the entertainment and pleasure of the viewer and is, yeah, artificial in that way, but that this does not mean it’s not still meaningful. I like how a guy I follow on YouTube once put it in a short little video about parasociality: he just said, I don’t get why we make such a big deal out of it. We all know it’s happening, and it’s not bad to be aware, but isn’t this also part of the pleasure of the whole thing? (beat) I want to draw attention to the artifice while also doing as much with it as I possibly can.
Voice 3: … okay. Still seems like a lot of talk about something that’s still ultimately just a formal artistic device.
Praktic-Patrick: But that’s the whole thing! All of it is just empty form, that’s the place I’m trying to get to. It should just be art. It’s all just immanent praxis.
Voice 1: We should make it a rule that you have to put a dollar in an “unnecessary jargon” jar every time you say something like that. It’s not helpful. You have to establish these terms first. Nobody knows what you’re talking about.
Voice 2: “Jargon Jar.” The “JJ.” I’m all for it.
Voice 1: Yeah, maybe I’ll bring a Mason jar to the next meeting? You carry cash, Patrick?
Patrick-Praktic: Alright, you guys are getting a little mean. It’s just one word, and it’s an important one: immanence.
Voice 1: Inform us, O Wise One.
Patrick-Praktic: You guys are right. The blog is small and a shout into the void, ultimately. (beat, change in tone) I still think it’s how I ought to be spending my time now---mostly because, what else is there for us to do? And I mean this in a real, material sense. There’s this great book that came out a few years ago about a lot of this, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. What it ultimately comes down to, for me, is time. And that’s where “immanence” comes in. “Immanence” just means: presence, in the here and now. Immanence is simply about what is happening: it’s the opposite of “transcendence,” which implies another “higher” reality beyond this one.
Voice 1: Doesn’t that contradict what you were saying before? About DFW “transcending” the Cleverness of his metatext?
Patrick-Praktic: (ignoring the valid objection) What’s happening, right now? We’re all talking with each other and actually paying attention to each other as, like, actual human beings with actual beliefs and values. That’s not what I see on the internet: not in the ways I tend to interact with it, not in the ways encouraged by all of these hugely powerful, insidious systems of behavior manipulation. The internet is weighed down by these systems. All I’m trying to do is stop doing the thing that’s causing all the problems and treat the internet as though it were already the place I’d like it to be, a place that actually provides value and doesn’t just suck you dry while you sit at home with your “feed.” We all only have so much time on this planet. Why not use this incredibly powerful technology the way it could be used, right now? I can’t do anything about climate change. I can’t do anything to stop the fascists from taking over. I’ve been yelling about it for too long, and I’m tired. All I want to do is build community and pay attention to things I actually think are worth paying attention to, and share that love with others.
Voice 1: But see, this is what I’m talking about. Talk about art all you want on your blog. I’m sort of getting what you’re saying about how we’re spending our time in the here and now. You can do whatever you want with your life. But you’re honestly betraying some nihilism here, I think. Again, this whole “immanent” political framework just seems like a jargon-y wall to hide behind from doing actual activism and politics. “I can’t do anything about climate change”? Come on, man, you’re better than that.
Patrick-Praktic: You’re right. I shouldn’t have said that. I was venting a little.
Voice 1: (sighing, letting his guard down a little) Trust me, I’m exhausted too. But it’s still important. We can’t just give up and become addicts.
Voice 3: (doesn’t say anything, but perks up a little at the word “addict”: eyes Voice 1 with some carefully concealed curiosity)
Patrick-Praktic: (sincere, but you can also tell he’s expressed this sentiment many times in the past: just a touch of something performative or rehearsed about how he says this) I don’t know. I try to start from my own authentic desires and go from there. I don’t know any other way. ((a somewhat self-consciously performative) beat) And what can I say, I just like art a lot. I don’t think that necessarily negates all the other arguments I’m making here.
Voice 1: You don’t sincerely desire to do everything you can to mitigate the literally species-level-crisis effects of climate change?
Patrick-Praktic: Well, yeah, I care immensely about that. But no, I don’t “sincerely desire to do everything” that I possibly could. Nobody could. We’re human beings.
Voice 1: That doesn’t mean you have to go hide in a hole and just write a blog the rest of your life, though.
Patrick-Praktic: No. I would hope to do what I can about issues I care about---yeah, like climate change---with the blog and also outside of the blog.
Voice 1: Finally! You admit it’s not just all tied up in a neat bow. It has to happen outside the blog too.
Patrick-Praktic: I guess that just seemed obvious to me. Sorry I didn’t explain myself better earlier: really. When I talk about “immanence,” I mean treating the internet not as some kind of special realm that’s totally distinct from “real life:” that’s a very dumb binary to draw. Maybe a better word to focus on is just: pragmatism. I like John Dewey’s thought on this kind of stuff a lot: one of the “American pragmatists.” Actually concerned with democracy in practice.
Voice 2: Another reference…
Voice 1: Hey, I like Dewey too. So the internet essentially as a pragmatic means of increasing democracy, is what you’re suggesting? I still feel like you’re being very narrow and gimmicky with the blog and everything. Pieces are starting to come together---yeah, I care about people not allowing their consciousnesses to be taken over by the Zuck and Musk guys, I care about paying attention---but aren’t there more direct means of achieving this? I’ll give a concrete example, so we can actually talk about something here instead of getting lost in these abstractions. (beat: thinking) Why not spend more time going to local town hall meetings, school council meetings? Why not get to know people in your neighborhood a little more? If you care so much about decentralizing attention and making it all pragmatic, shouldn’t these, yeah, kind of mundane and conventional but still ultimately effective things be what we’re focusing on, instead of the Clever Blog?
Patrick-Praktic: Something like “increasing democracy.” That’s more like how I first phrased things, when I was first starting it. My thinking has changed a little since then. I don’t talk about democracy so much… I am still very much interested in pragmatism, though. I’m not against getting involved with local politics, far from it. It just seems like you’re saying I can’t do both at the same time. I would argue that one fuels the other. As in, the “passion project” side of it fuels the more conventional activist side of it and vice versa. Honestly, I could imagine doing some grassroots reporting of stuff happening where I’m living on the blog. The whole thing with immanence is that it’s all just the same thing: everything flows into everything else.
Voice 1: Are you doing “both at the same time” though? It seems like you spend most of your time by yourself, just off in your own world, writing.
Patrick-Praktic: Yeah, prioritization is something I have trouble with… I don’t know. I’m working on it?
Voice 1: But what I’m saying is you need to start from the other side, like what you were saying before. Start from the “conventional activist pragmatism” side, not the “passion project” side … (beat; next line is entirely sincere: coming from a loving place; maybe a little disappointed or exasperated) You’re just wasting your time, honestly.
Patrick-Praktic: (visibly nervous: defensive) But… I can’t? I can only ever do what I want. (introspective) I can’t will myself to will another way. It just doesn’t work like that. (beat; coming out of it) That’s Schopenhauer, that’s a famous one.
Voice 2: Can we actually fucking talk about what’s on the fucking blog? What the fuck even is “Pure Texture?”
Patrick-Praktic: (abstractly) Yes, what have I put on there by this point? There’s the David Lynch essay… some poetry… I’m putting up little essays on the online reading groups I’m going to now. There’s not much up there yet. Pure Texture is just a phrase I really like, for a lot of reasons. I don’t know if you were asking about the title or the blog.
Voice 2: The blog. It’s a catchy enough title. I’m sure you have your whole esoteric reasoning for it.
Patrick-Praktic: Don’t worry, I won’t be annoying here. “Pure Texture” is just a synonym for “immanence.” Like the title of Deleuze’s “Pure Immanence.” I like textures a lot. I like that it has the word “text” embedded in it. I like textured things.
Voice 1: Fucking Deleuze, I swear to God.
Patrick-Praktic: (propping himself up) Yeah, baby, I’m a Deleuzian through and through. I get it now. You’re one of these morality-poisoned leftists. “Enough with the craziness”! You’re like Noam Chomsky. I don’t disagree with you, but man, you guys can really be sticks in the mud sometimes. Can’t you ever have fun, go a little schizo sometimes?
Voice 1: I’m not saying Deleuze was a nut. He definitely enabled a lot of nutty ideas though, and you’re only proving the validity of my distaste with how you’re talking right now.
Voice 3: (exasperated, finally speaking up) You’re both being very annoying.
Voice 2: True.
Patrick-Praktic: Look, I know that Deleuze can be a lot.
… (we have a “reality shift” in the subjective “texture” of the cinematic world, a la Lynch: for example, the “reality shift” that happens in MD when we enter the void inside the “blue box” and exit out on the “other side” and the film becomes much more “realistic” (quotation marks because the realism still has a level of artifice/fantasy built into it: it’s Lynch, so it’s always both/and))
Patrick-Praktic is alone again.
Patrick-Praktic: Where…?
(long beat)
… those guys were on to something I didn’t fully have a grip on yet. I need to gather myself. They were right. Pure Texture is immanent praxis, but it’s fairly “advanced” praxis. I was getting a little ahead of myself. The Chomsky-Dewey guy especially: of course he was on to something, he was the “Chomsky-Dewey guy.” I need to be, like, just... walking around my neighborhood, looking up at people around me: very basic human stuff, and very basic stuff for Leftist praxis. Where my head is at right now, what I need is a praxis of simple care, for myself and others. That’s it.
(beat)
Like, very simple care. Just taking care of my animal needs first, and going from there. And being friendly. Paying attention.
(beat)
(Praktic:) (exasperated (with himself; some conspicuously repressed shame)) Like, just fucking cleaning up the place. Getting a haircut. Meditating (becoming more defeated as he goes on, maybe dissociating a little from what he’s saying; it’s clear he’s said all of this to himself before)... as in, “just sitting” meditation. Walking.
(beat)
Very simple stuff.
(beat)
(responding to himself/“Praktic”, “coming to”) … alright, that’s enough of that. I know what I need to do.
He sits for a while. Listens. Appears to be struggling to enter into a meditative state: lids closed, sitting still, but still a little fidgety and restless.
Sits for a while, and settles into it a little better.
Sits. There’s a moment when he decides to get up; he pauses, then gets up and leaves the frame without another word.
Next (last) chapter.