Netscape.

virgin territory, smooth space, untouched, wild, unexplored.

I have just been skimming Sian Bayne's article entitled Smoothness and Striation in Digital Learning Spaces which Dave Cormier shared in the rhizo14 Facebook group.

For reasons beyond me, I am suddenly sitting here writing this.

This is perhaps a nomadic walkabout.

Why would I say such a thing?

I gathered together a few belongings and took flight. 

Where on earth is this heading?

I had better get a quote in here from (on?) Deleuze and Guattari:

"The space of nomad thought is qualitatively different from State space. Air against earth. State space is ‘striated’, or gridded. Movement in it is confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of that plane to preset paths between fixed and identifiable points. Nomad 

space is ‘smooth’, or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move to any other. Its mode of distribution is the nomos: arraying oneself in an open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself in a closed space (hold the fort). (Massumi, 1988, p. xiii)"

Quoted by Sian Bayne.

Phew, that's better, I have something to hang onto.  

I am already reaching out for words, for the words of others? to better express? what? myself?

I am not entirely sure. 

There is a sort of deliberate act here in my refusal at this moment to reread, to capture the structuring of Sian Bayne's thought.  That I am writing now is enough for me.

"We are the measure of all things." 

Protagoras

That is Protagoras, Wikipedia reliably (?) informs me, who said those words.

I am the measure of all things...

Yet, I am at a loss with out language, this is at a loss without Blogger, without wifi, without you. 

Yes, I am at a loss without you.

You are the measure of me.

You are the measure of the thing that is me.

You are the measure of the thing that is me here.

I am here now?

My point here, is dependent on my trajectory. 

My point here, is dependent on your trajectory.

My point here, is that I am not here without you.

"What is important about this conceptualisation of space is not so much the way the two types of space are opposed to each other as their tendency to pervade each other – for striation to appropriate the smooth, and for the smooth to emerge from the striated."

S.Bayne 

Yes, I am sewing together myself through this exploration, through these words, across this space, framed that it is.

I am supported in my human frame.

I am pointing my finger, I am indicating my presence, I am raising my voice, a cry in a wilderness.

What is this act?

How does it fit into a/the scheme of things?

I know not.

I am heading off into the unknown. 

Only looking back, only retracing my steps will my journey make sense.

I am writing narrative. I am a mapping story.

I return an instant to Sian Bayne's map.

I pick up a tracing of Deleuze and Guattari that she has made of a path across a thousand plateaux

"Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us." 

Deleuze and Guattari

No, as soon as I am confronted by this space, this void, I scratch my soul on a wall,  I yell my longing.

You are the measure of me.

I catch a flicker of recognition in an eye.

I am still here now.

I am saved.

I mean something now.

Yet that meaning will for ever be elusive.

I have left.

This is my point...

Look, we are beyond.

"to ‘navigate’ a space is, for Deleuze & Guattari, to begin the process of striation"

S. Bayne.