Atomization of Encounter

SEARCHING: reconfigures the self as simultaneously a new type of market segment (data) and a new form of discursive subject [selfhood].

PROTEST: reconfigures critique as mediated, the self weaponized toward an other, e.g. the state, haters of democracy [counterpublics].

LAUGHTER: reconfigures being with others as arrhythmic, mediated, nonplaces of interaction through a network (Galloway) [publics].

Each of these terms is both a literary instancing of the reconfiguration of an aspect of encounter (where encounter now means the coming together of self, public and counterpublic in potential) and a figure for that reconfiguration, e.g. laughter in separate bedrooms figures the form of the kind of public sociality I'm describing. The collision of form (figural relation of event to knowledge or history of it) and fact (literal relation to event, i.e. description) is siginificant for the way it marks the centrality of form to cultural analysis and of fact or the objective world to form.