Hi guys if u reading mobile version on ur laptop can u use this link instead, looks better. also wish I had thought before of using a different font, like this 1! oh well xx jd So hello, I am Jesse Darling, glad to be here. I always preface these things with a disclaimer by saying that I speak as an artist rather than a theorist; by which I mean I’m speaking and thinking in a strictly subjective capacity. This is also a kind of politics; I reject the idea that there could be anything like an empirical truth, and in fact I reject the imperial apparatus of truth­speaking but maybe that’s a way of covering something up.

As is common practice among pseudo­academics, I’m gonna let Derrida speak for me real quick because he introduces some ideas in his own inimitable style ­ it’s worth noting that Derrida died 11 years ago, so in this regard he speaks to us from the great beyond, as a ghost or a piece of cinema. ← click here !

So I will come back to this idea of ghosts but I wanna build on what the D just said by trynna clarify what is meant by a ghost in this context. I think the easiest way to talk about it is to think about a body dispersed across time.

Right here and now, for example, I am a body in space and time in the old­fashioned way; being is all about being there, in a certain set of temporal­spatial co­ordinates, dasein. You know, usually I would prefer that you encounter my ghost, by which I mean, say, my facebook profile, if I absolutely must provide a body to support the notion of my existence. But really I would rather you encounter my dispersed body, the body of work; those sculptures I make are supposed to support the very understandable and reasonable desire for intimacy – to which I am very sympathetic ­ while protecting the geographically challenged physical body of the artist, which is already quite dispersed enough. But when I think of intimacy I tend to think of proximity, nearness, so when we’re talking about intimacy it seems appropriate that I actually drag my physical body into this encounter.

So, as opposed to our encountering one another as names on the event poster or on facebook messenger or whatever, this is really serious proximity that we are experiencing right now.

If one of you in the back row would shoot a gun in this direction you’d have a chance of putting a bullet through my physical body. I mention this because physical intimacy, by which I mean

proximity, has a connotation of violence, at least in my cultural experience; if someone gets very close to me I assume they mean me harm, or else they want to fuck, and these things sometimes overlap.

So how do we talk about intimacy without talking about proximity, or how can we see this kind of principle illustrated in our daily lives online? Do you feel this same connotation of sex or violence when someone shoulders into your mentions on twitter or messages you unsolicited on facebook? I feel as though facebook messages from strangers who explicitly do not mean me harm, do not want to fuck have this quality of “I’m sorry to bother you, but” – like someone tapping you on the shoulder in the supermarket or at a private view. There’s a quality – at least in the fairly joyless British and Northern European culture – of implicit apology for causing any break in continuity, for transgressing protocol. I’ve said before somewhere how online space is something like a practised commons – you know, following the modern spatial theorist de Certeau who said that space is a practised place, something you produce through doing. So if you imagine something like a shopping mall or an airport, of course somebody owns this space and profits from the foot traffic and whatever you consume, but if we all lived in that shopping mall or airport, worked there for 7 hours a day which is the amount of time the so­called average person is supposed to spend online, or at least did most of our socializing and organizing there then what happens, following my squatter’s thesis, is that the behaviours that arise from the practise of living will override the behavioral protocols around which the space has been designed – partially at least, or in certain areas.

I am an optimist in this sense: it looks to me like didactic, or you could say directive, imperative or even explicitly totalitarian design culture doesn’t actually do a good job of maintaining social control. All the architectures and choreographies and algorithms somehow fall short of predicting and therefore controlling human behaviors. There’s a theory that this is why there is no really convincing artificial intelligence as yet; despite all theses, from horoscopes to pathologies to myers­briggs types or gender roles, it just seems that the human animal does not yet understand itself well enough to reproduce itself as a machine.

So intimacy might also have to do with a set of behaviors that transcend those ritual protocols of sociality, through crossing over to the contingent realm of the relational, relative, interpersonal, even transpersonal. (I had to look up the latter, it means “denoting or relating to states or areas of consciousness beyond the limits of personal identity.”) And that sounds sexy as hell, doesn’t it? Not to imply that intimacy always to be erotic, but maybe intimacy always has a certain eros – an aspect of the life drive, a will to permeate, to propagate, to connect, to tesselate, to reach beyond yourself into the whatever of another.

Daily life is full of ritual social protocols, from the interaction at the supermarket checkout to the peremptory interaction between a sex worker and their john. If and when these interactions cross over into a different kind of space, when some kind of a meeting takes place – a meeting not just between market roles (of let’s say, buyer and seller) but between subjectivities ­ well, then you can start talking about something like intimacy. In post­fordism we are all very very subjective with one another: these market roles have eroded somewhat to the point where we are pretty much all walking commodities invested in trading and being traded in the general social stock market that is the art world. But although you might have 1000s of facebook friends and 100s of people you recognize from openings, how many people can you call when you feel like you’re going crazy, or when you get dumped, or when you need to borrow money? Sometimes it happens that there is nobody. People people everywhere, but not a soul to call.

I wanna talk about the intimacies without proximity that seem to belong with bodies who might not have other bodies to belong to; I mean we know about the intimacy of lovers, parents and their children, carers and their charges; these are bodies that belong to each other. You could say these bodies practise intimate protocols. I’m interested in those protocols very much because I am interested in bodies, but in this context I want to think about these ghostmodern intimacies, the connections between bodies dispersed across time.

I want to tell a story about one of these times in which I lived as a ghost. I lost my job in 2011 when the first wave of tory cuts went in (I worked in arts provision for disabled kids and the entire sector was effectively dissolved). I became homeless after a breakup and signed on for housing benefit for the first and last time before the cuts were due to hit a year down the line. I decided to take a one­year residency in my own house and try to professionalize as an artist. Back then, a single person under 35 could claim for the value of a one­bedroom apartment, so I rented a 2nd floor walk­up in Hackney above a crappy restaurant and set about applying for Master’s degrees, residencies and whatever other unpaid opportunities for exposure via the usual channels. I had no money, no job and virtually no friends, it seemed; or maybe loneliness just builds on loneliness. I’d been there about a month when the first cockroach appeared on the kitchen floor from the restaurant downstairs; I took a glass from the shelf and placed it gently over the little body, telling myself I’d put it outside later when I was feeling stronger. Some months later there were cups and glasses all over the floor. The first cockroach was still there, probably dead; I thought I saw it move sometimes.

The little flat was somewhere my body hung in space. I picked my way between the trapped roaches and drank black coffee and rationed out portions of stew. But my true home, my friends and lovers, my sense of self and self­expression, were all contained within the small bright rectangle I propped on my desk by day and carried into the bedroom at night. We slept alongside each other, the small bright slit on its carapace glowing brighter and then dimmer like breathing. Even as I despised the wickedness of such blatant affect­mongering anthropomorphism, it comforted me and I was glad of it. I friended people on facebook and wrote stuff on twitter. I gained a lot of followers who seemed to enjoy the rueful melancholy I put on for show, which had the dual function of keeping me company and making it sound like I was actually doing something with my life. I met a lover online who liked my twitter persona and who wanted to be as fearless as they thought I was. We exchanged a lot of emails and sometimes had skype sex. At the point of orgasm their face would collapse, corpse­like,

into a decomposing blur of mangled pixels. These kinds of images are ghosts, even as they appear in realtime from across the divide of different timezones. If you don’t have proximity, what you have instead is the space made by longing, which is quite literally a space of projection, the parallax view.

The strangest and sexiest it ever got with a long­distance lover was the moment at which they would go afk and about their business with the webcam left on, and I’d peer into an empty room washed in the light of a whole other daytime, a different o’clock, a bright window into a ghost world fully material in the juicy slick petrotopian is­ness of pixels and code. This permitted act of voyeurism felt exclusive, thrillingly intimate; something bodies in proximity take for granted, and even tire of. There is an intimacy to viewing something on the screen of one’s personal computer; the dramas staged on the theatre of the screen are played out for an audience of one at a time, as a rule, and sometimes not even one. Sometimes there’s this feeling of connection, or communion, when you see that a video has only a very few views, and that you yourself are in the process of contributing to this number; you might think about the person who made the video, and how they might see the views go up from five to six to seven. Quantified data never felt so full of pathos; the very milk of human kindness and frailty, happening right here and now in your own little box of photons.

Intimacy has a haptic quality, which means a quality of touching. The left­swipe has a real violence to it, like repeatedly pushing someone’s face out of yours; but the smartphone sits in your palm like a hand holding your hand and opens its bright face to you when you stroke it. Purring and chirping, all those notifications are signs of life. When your phone falls silent for hours, as anyone waiting for a text can attest, it’s a silence like death. The first time I encountered an iPhone I believed it would only respond to the touch of its rightful owner, like real smart technology, or a dog. It took me a while to get the hang of the pinch and slide that would throw the map wide open beneath my fingers; the world wide open, all for me. It gave me a sort of dizzy feeling, was perhaps, in retrospect, erotic.

Eros and thanatos – the life drive and the death drive – can’t exist without one another and this is why we can talk so freely about ghosts: the body dispersed across time is in some sense already gone by the time you encounter its image. Because we, the living, know nothing much about death except that someone is and then they are not, I feel like there is a deathly quality to the virtual. I used to think about gifs, for instance, as zombie media – undead, unthinking, half­decayed, spooling on their endless dumb loop in the wired cloud of unsleep.

It’s not for nothing, I think, that snapchat has a ghost as its logo. Does everyone here know what I mean by snapchat? No ­ ? So snapchat is the mobile sharing service dealing explicitly in bodies dispersed over a crucially limited period of time – and I’m not talking days, like WeTransfer, but seconds. You capture your little phantom slice of life with your little brainy phone­cam and you send this to your intimate friend, choosing how long you’d like them to see it. They get a maximum of ten seconds. Ten seconds, you’ll find, is a long time to stare at a single image. Ten seconds is almost begging for a screenshot, or else it’s a video in which something transpires (or should I say, expires). Personally I stick to the three second mark; two seconds if I’m sending a dick pic. It’s enough time to see, but not enough time to look.

I had a snapchat romance with someone I’d never met. Although snapchat is a crypto­erotic medium, our romance was chaste. Lots of cute selfies; every morning a self­portrait as we’d wake up alone in our respective beds, each in their own timezone half a world away, smiling sleepily; somewhat theatrically, too, as though everything was just a­okay. We got one another’s good angles and stuff but we also gave one another the kind of wretched you can only ask for from a stranger. Sadness doesn’t always want resolving; a friend might snap you back, ‘shall I come over?’ Your mother might worry. So when I received a snap saying “I kinda wanna die rn” I sent one back saying “Me 2 what shd we do”. There was, of course, no talk of going through with any kind of meeting in this world or the next. Once at a party with people I didn’t know well I found myself too drunk and conversing antagonistically with a straight guy in his late thirties who thought I was flirting with him. Maybe I was. He was enjoying himself, or at least it looked that way, you know; we were doing edgy banter, it was supposed to end somewhere. But I went too far, I crossed over into something, and his face closed up. You’re really hard work Jesse Darling, he said. I went upstairs to the bathroom and cried. I snapped my lover a video panorama of this person’s messy bathroom and brought the camera back around to my face covered in tears. Downstairs they’d turned the music up and you could hear the beat through the floor.

I wrote “solitude” in the text field and sent it. Almost immediately, a reply: a grey beach, flat sea. Solitude, it said.

There is an intimacy in immediacy.

The very existence of the grey beach at faraway noon was excuse and destination enough for my ghost to leave the party at once, and following a spirit in the salty rain of another country my physical body gathered the courage to leave shortly after that, probably without saying goodbye; which is a practice known, incidentally, as ‘ghosting.’ Here I’m quoting Jean­Luc Nancy, and it goes like this: “We ask: How are we to touch upon the body? Perhaps we can't answer this "How?" as we'd answer a technical question. But, finally, it has to be said that touching upon the body, touching the body, touching ­ happens in writing all the time. Maybe it doesn't happen exactly in writing, if writing in fact has a “inside." But along the border, at the limit, the tip, the furthest edge of writing nothing but that happens. Now, writing takes its place at the limit. So if anything at all happens to writing, nothing happens to it but touch. More precisely: touching the body (or some singular body) with the incorporeality of "sense."

So in the ghost world there is text, which has a liveness that the image somehow does not.

I met X because he was an invited speaker on some residency thing I did. He was in his forties, white, married, with a son. We were arbitrarily paired in an exercise where we had to stare into our partner’s eyes for fifteen whole minutes and observe our own reactions along with theirs. I didn’t enjoy it; although I freely offer up all my particulars as a tithe to the blue book of Zuckerman I felt in that scenario like altogether too much data was exchanged without my consent. His face swam in and out of focus. I was glad when it was over and thought very little more of it. I saw him a couple times after that; he liked my work and was sort of distantly supportive of the things I was doing. Every now and again we would exchange peremptory how­are­you mails which I understood as benign tokens of British politeness culture. We followed each other on Twitter; sometimes he’d @ me and say something nice, but so far so whatever. I didn’t really keep track. One day, out of the blue, I got a strange mail from X apologizing for his leaving twitter and assuring me it was nothing I’d done; he told me not to be offended or to take it personally, that things were difficult for him and he didn’t know when he’d be back. I knew, of course, that this was written in code; we had shared nothing, so I knew somehow that between the lines of this formal, surreal apology he was trying ­ perhaps unconsciously ­ to alert me to something. Over the years I have received similar mails, often from acquaintances as opposed to friends: and you always write back in the same formal style, all nice and polite like “hope you are well?” but gingerly, tentatively, because the true horror must not be spoken aloud by a relative stranger, so in the meanwhile you both play this game, and then the answer comes very polite and preposterously measured, everso gently put. But the sense of how those perfect metric sentences have been meted out gives off the reek of brain oil gone rancid, all those cogs grinding and grinding in the mind.

You can read psychosis in syntax; by you I mean me, and it takes one to know one. The way all simple facts start to look like proof nodes of a long system that goes deep into the brain of the world like a nerve center and the lumpy chunks of data that just don’t flow, stuck in the wet pipe of the everyday way of things like toys in the sewers,

millions and millions of them, or like a map on a video game, or like the roots of a tree that dont grow in a normal dimensionality but in every direction including

toward the past, and it’s a life’s work, this concept, archiving the structure of it all in your head

and in the spit cracks all over the asphalt, it’s everywhere like plastic,

dead bird scripture and the sign, the sign, the sign.

This is in the syntax;

in the stacking up of words.

So I say, my voice rising in the text very polite I say “have you spoken with someone about this” and you say “I’m fine,” and the text snaps shut.

When X tried to kill himself I happened to be browsing twitter. I knew there was something wrong because he didn’t punctuate, he didn’t capitalize. This is a guy in his forties; his grammar is hardwired, this slippage is like slurred speech, bad handwriting.

last meal he wrote, all lower case, no full stop.

X are you ok? In a direct message. Its too late he says. He’s using typos, not the cute alt lit typos of phonetic abbreviation that show this healthy disdain for imperial language. The

acceleration of things. It accelerated fast.

How did it come then that I found myself later that night on the actual telephone, talking this near­stranger out of swallowing the pills he’d massed up washed back with the whiskey he’d killed a half bottle of already?

Later he said: it had to be you, I knew you would know.

And this is the kind of thing one says when they find themselves up among it close and intimate at the jagged edge and wet mouth of thanatos; staring into the void is a sort of freedom, almost erotic.

But I did know.

And you know, of course, whether someone you message on okcupid will ever be someone to understand you; you know this somewhere, even if you like their pics, even if you talk for hours. The body is all through the text. There’s nothing more revealing, more intimate, than

working on a text with someone in google docs and watching the body of your collaborator type. Like sex,

like dancing. There’s a rhythm. The hesitation, the feint, the sleight, the flood.

When I thought of intimacy, I thought immediately of X and how I happened to be online that night.

X is still alive; we’re not in touch. I’ll let ghosts be ghosts and I won’t tell the whole story here, but if our ghosts hadn’t met that night out in the busy transit hall of twitter, I believe that X would be dead. Intimacy without proximity is immediacy; intimacy is erotic, contingent, a transgression of protocol. Intimacy has a tendency to go beyond the body, eros meets thanatos in the will to cross over, to meet the other, to become part of something or someone else.

I wanna end with another quote from JeanLuc Nancy, for which I’m indebted to my friend who’s in the audience there and who ­ unlike me ­ is a real scholar these days. He turned me on to JeanLuc. I feel like this quote is pretty much everything, could’ve just said this and left it at that, but I had to bulk it out a bit so I’ll just let him summarize the condition of intimacy in virtuality, or in what I like to call ghostmodernity.

Here goes.

“This areal body,

this video­body, this clear­screen body, is

the glorious materiality of what is coming.

What is coming happens to a presence that hasn’t taken place,

and won’t take place elsewhere, and is neither present, nor representable, outside of what is coming.

Thus, the coming itself never ends, it goes as it comes,

it’s a coming­and­going,

a rhythm of bodies being born, dying, open,

closed, delighting, suffering, being touched,

swerving.

Glory is the rhythm, or the plasticity, of this presence ­ local, necessarily local.”

JD 2015