Well, not really. Justin Beiber is wherever he is. But have you ever wondered how someone or something you’ve never heard of before suddenly is EVERYWHERE after you hear about it for the first time?

Mimes (from the Greek memisis – to imitate, represent, mimic) are things that, for lack of a more sophisticated definition, ‘stick’ with us (both the singular ‘us’ and the collective ‘us’). But where were they and what were they before they were memes?

Let’s leave aside the notion of coming into existence for the moment, it’s too dark outside for metaphysics today. Let’s also assume that when you ‘discover’ something, you don’t just conjure it out of thin air. It was there before you found it, defined it, and made it part of your repertoire. But if you didn’t know about it before, lived a long life without knowing about it, could have lived a longer life without ever knowing it (Justin Beiber works well in this example), how come after you ‘discover it’ you feel like it is everywhere?

I suspect it has something to do with consciousness or more likely awareness. There are only so many things to which one can pay attention. Attention is something that comes in ebbs and flows. For a time you might end up doing one thing repeatedly – make the same foods, visit the same people, attend the same places – and then you stop. Who knows why, but you stop. 

For that time that the thing that enters the active level of your awareness it seems considerably ubiquitous. It’s everywhere and then, poof, nowhere.

Invisibility is the ground from which that thing emerged and is the ground to which it will return as it ebbs and flows in and out of awareness. Public Relations and ‘brand management’ is one example of human intervention that tries to circumvent this natural cycle, but is in many ways distinctly anti-human. We are want to travel in and out of cycles of awareness, visiting and abandoning the obscure-sublime-obscure. Plucking consciousness from the context of invisibility, out of the ether, making it ‘real’ and then relegating it to a distant memory – returning it to invisibility.

I just hope the Beib returns to invisibility safely and with his bon coif none the worse for wear.

The short answer is probably – the medium answer is ‘it depends on why they are private.’ The long answer is, well, long.

What I’m talking about in terms of the specific private things I have in mind have to do with click and view tracking, otherwise known (to me at least) as Google Analytics.

If you’re reading this you probably know about the CFP I have on-going. What I can say is that I’ve had a lot of interest and views from all over the world. I can even reveal where and when people viewed the information. It’s fascinating and a bit of an obsession. But it’s the kind of obsession that can’t be shared ‘in mixed company’ I suspect.

I’ve never been one to know what not to say. I say what’s on my mind. Not entirely in the loud and obnoxious way, but in the way that if something is supposed to be uncomfortable and private, it doesn’t make it unimportant or unworthy of discussion. 

Back to google analytics, I’ve had some responses to the CFP to date and some additional inquiries and a few weeks yet to go before the deadline. Apparently someone (or a group of someones) in Berlin love what I have to say and visit my CFP almost daily. Until I hear from them, private they will remain.

This past week there was a stranger abduction of a small boy in my province (though not near by where I live). This is a very unusual occurrence in Canada. There are cases of children being abducted but it is most often by a family member or relative involved in a custodial dispute.

What was interesting is that the boy was returned to his family yesterday, unharmed, and by news reports, almost entirely unaware that anything bad happened. 

The specific details of this case aside, I was reminded of something that comes up with research ethics when it comes to longitudinal studies involving children who one might want to track into adulthood. Ethics boards are often remiss to allow researchers to engage with children and then find them again later and engage with them as adults. In the first instance their participation is largely a matter of substitute consent (parents agree for their child to participate) and the follow-up is of direct consent (participant agrees for him/herself). The trick and interesting thing is that children don’t always know they are in or were part of a study to begin with so asking them for follow-up is only slightly removed from asking them for the first time.

Why don’t they remember? Is it that they never knew they were part of a study? How could they not know that they were part of your data set?

The fact is that we forget many more things than we actively remember. But forgetting, of course, is not total or absolute. It is always relative and much more like dampening than erasure. 

Perhaps the boy who was abducted will respond by way of behavioural changes or react to triggers that he was not aware of. Perhaps he will never know again because he interpreted this experience differently from the inside than we do from the outside. Or perhaps forgetting is a way in which to integrate the things that are not instrumental in our worldview or daily lives – relegating them to the structure of invisibility (maybe even what Bordieu called habitus) that informs how we confront the world.

I know for me, my childhood plays out in my daily life despite the fact that I’d be hard pressed to recall any specific details of anything (let alone major events) from any time before I was about 7 or 8.

I’ve been discussing a research project with a colleague who is an historian. She’s trying to find the right ‘hook’ to demonstrate the importance of a locally (regionally) prominent figure in history and wants to find a way to articulate it in a ‘new media-ish’ kind of way. Let’s face it, new media gets more money from granting agencies than ‘general history’ these days so who can blame her. 

While we were discussing her idea I asked her if she’d considered demonstrating how this historical figure is in/visibly present in the contemporary geography of this place. By that I meant that it was interesting how many things were named after him and how he intersected so much of this region’s development.

This got me to thinking about the invisibility of history that comes from its everyday induction in a society. What was once a tribute – naming a street or landmark after someone – becomes an everyday and uncritical/invisible thing many generations removed from its point of origin. In the case of my colleague, the person who she described was fantastically well articulated in the development of virtually all aspects of this region and I only had heard of him by way of hearing his name as a street name or the name of an organization. He was honoured and invisible at the same time.

All around you there are these visible but invisible vestiges of history, stories known but to a few, but implicated in our daily lives. If you can think of any, send me an email with the story (and a photo if you can grab one) and I’ll post it. 

I have a photo of my own to post but I haven’t quite figured out how to get it yet. It’s of a 2 story tall gnome that sits on the side of the highway at a gas station. I never quite understood why it was there until last week when I finally asked – and received the rehearsed answer from the station attendant. I’ll post the story when I find a safe place to stop and take the picture.

It behoves me every time my children say the word ‘Kleenex’ to refer to the generic category of ‘facial tissue,’ to correct them (particularly since we aren’t quite stushy enough for name brands most of the time). But why is it that ‘Kleenex’ has come to stand for all facial tissues? My suggestions is that it is both a matter of marketing success and an implosion through ubiquity.

Ubiquity, it seems, is a double edged sword. On the one hand if you or your idea or product ends up being everywhere (i.e. ubiquitous) then you enjoy a position of prominence. On the other hand, once your ‘brand’ becomes synonymous with or is used as a substitute for the generic category then you run the risk of dissolution as a unique entity. That is, through ubiquity, your unique character becomes invisible. 

Through the history of packaged products and brands you can see many examples of this. The most famous of which is, perhaps, the Hoover brand for vacuums. The same thing is now happening with the verb-ification of the name Google to stand for searching for things.

Ubiquity breads invisibility in that, after a while, the point of origin is precluded by Louis Althusser’s always already-ness. At the same time, when things become more ubiquitous they become more powerful in the generic, and less powerful in the specific.

Invisibility is, if nothing else, the precursor to (and perhaps the opposite of) classification.

Almost 20 years ago when I was a younger man (I’m not sure if I’m old but my students keep getting younger) my father died when he was hit by a car while crossing the road to get to work. I faced the unenviable task of viewing and identifying his body at the hospital – all by myself.

The simple question: Do you recognize this man. My response: That’s my father (okay, it might not have been quite that way since I was in somewhat of a state of shock).

To me it was clear. He died because he got his by a car.

To the coroner who examined his body following the accident the official cause of his death was one simple word: torsion.

I asked what that meant and they said that he died not exclusively by being hit by a car but because his body was twisted violently by the transfer of force (inertia?) from the forward motion of the car as it supposedly slowed down to avoid the situation. 

Medically he died because he was twisted to death. I’m not sure why it was necessary for that one word to be used to classify the circumstances of his death but I’m told that the specific circumstances as classified by a medical examiner could mean the difference between degrees of insurance settlement – torsion, it turns out, was legitimate where other simpler explanations might have been less so.

It seems bizarre to me but to an extent we all need classification systems to make sense of the world. But the context of all systems of classification is a state of invisibility. Classification, it must be remembered, is the result of transformation. One must transform information from it’s ecological place, affix meaning to it, and identify it as fixed and immutable. But that information still resides in a system of invisibility in which it can be reinterpreted by another system of classification.

In the end, this explains why one person’s misadventure is another person’s noble deeds. While at the same time, it does not preclude the possibility that taken in the context of invisibility it is not an either/or question but a both/and until and unless classification is imposed and order stands in place of fluidity.

In Canada yesterday, a great person died. Why a great auk? The great auk, as a book I’m reading tells me, was a powerful, gentle, flightless bird majestic yet unsung – spectacular and humble.

It’s not often that I feel deeply about the shifting fortunes of politicians, personal or political, but in this case I felt compelled. Jack Layton was a wonderful person, deft, convinced, clever and true. He was what politicians ought to be – sincere, strong, and humble. 

I’m not entirely sure how his passing will change the politics of my country but I’m sure that his life changed them for the better. There are many politicians with whom I have disagreed. With some I respectfully disagree. With others I am loathed. With Jack, I have nothing but admiration.

He is the first or perhaps the last of a particular type of politician. Starting first in municipal politics he was not shy of the camera. But he knew how to be known – not just by the camera, but by the people who needed to know him, some of whom could only be known through the camera. It was, in a way, a necessary mistress for him. 

Later, as he became the leader of a federal party, particularly of late, his always smiling face seemed to preoccupy him. The one thing that I respected the most of him was that he was not one to shy away from anger – respectful and helpful directed anger. The smile sometimes seemed to force his anger to a shadow.

There is, to my mind, altogether too much glad-handing, over-gleefulness, and condescension in politics masked by smiles and hiding anger, disgust, and duplicity. In my feeling, not by Jack. Though he smiled more than he ought to of late, I think part of it was because he was on a high of success, but also because he needed to fit the needs of the machinery – he was a politician after all. But it never seemed fake or forced. Never just for show.

It is this show that troubles me most of politics. Like the last post, one is not meant to see what goes on behind the scenes of the show. But politics is not entertainment nor is it entertaining and stake-less. For better or for worse, Jack let us in on the invisibility of politics, helped us to be heard, and used his last public efforts to inspire us to live better as a country and members of the world of humanity. 

Though I never met him personally, I feel as though I have known him for nearly 2 decades. I will miss him as a person, but more so, I will miss what he was for us as humanity.