Moment of Ethnographic Writing as Departure Point of Recollection

Lefebvre says that there are moments that stand out out of the flux of points in time that construct their temporal space on the principle of homogeneity of one point with regard to another. He further contends that these moments fall into relatively finite number of kinds so that there are moments for reflection, moments for change, in other words moments for welcoming the qualitatively different into the eternal repetition of the same.

The infinity of the eternal, from the mathematical point of view, meets these moments as countable events that however many will always be less than the infinity against which they may impose structure on experience. Each moment of directed reflection, with all its eddies of recollection, blindalleys of mental maps, and dust of random words that our past pellets our minds with, can become just another such countable moment that stands out from its self-identical neighbor by virtue of its faulty repetition of the epistemologically privileged moments where ideal, or arche-, type, cracks into the surface of our lives.

There is something uncomfortably collective in generalizing, royalizing, plural pronouns that while extending the shadow of this text to more than the mind that authors it puts under doubt the very stand-alone qualify of this moment of reflective writing. In any case, the gaze of my memory is trained on the iMax marquee that looks over the artificial sea that rather than being oversize aquarium pretends to repeat the delirious realism of the next Disneyland one can reach from discreetly privatized spaces of international airports. Disneyland is also a virtual space say blanket billboards that literally cover horizontal and zigzagging at right angles surfaces of the local LRT.

Surfaces of our lives are entirely rented. That seems to be the latent message of contemporary urban advertising that semiotically carpetbombs our eyeballs wherever they turn. Retinal capitalism strikes back and forth in the movement of amateur flaneurs through the non-places of our late modernity. Our modernity of artificial flowers, mechanical animals, and preprocessed memories.