While reflecting on this week’s reading and thinking back to Chun’s ‘The Wonderful Creepiness of New Media’ (and picking up a little bit on my last post), it appears that one of the chief values of critical making is that its in-progress, DIY, don’t-know-all-the-circuits ethos foregrounds failure as a means of consciously approaching inaccessible regions of affective life. Specifically, by not knowing all the circuits, one resists/evades/delays the habits of mastery, and in so doing one dwells within failure - here the failure to develop a habit. This failure to develop one’s habitual relation to an object is also a failure develop a habitual form of one’s subjectivity, at least insofar as a subject is its capacity to do and be done to as a function of how, to whom, and to what it engages. Where Jentery Sayers argues for a critical making that dwells within the indeterminacies of one’s tools, I would argue that the suspended subject formation of interrupted habit is one of the inherent indeterminacies of a critical making practice. Further, I would argue that dwelling within this space of failed subject formation is a kind of dwelling within the impulse to complete a behavioral circuit. This impulse is an accessible analog to the otherwise inaccessible space of potentiality that is affective intensity and deleuzian-massumian virtuality. Thus, by creating a space in which to dwell in failed habit formation - in which to dwell in what one is not yet - critical making creates a means of residing alongside what is otherwise utterly remote.
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