Academic literature on the topic 'Advent – Meditations'

Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that ranks among the leading causes of disability worldwide. However, many cases of schizophrenia remain untreated due to failure to diagnose, self-denial, and social stigma. With the advent of social media, individuals suffering from schizophrenia share their mental health problems and seek support and treatment options. Machine learning approaches are increasingly used for detecting schizophrenia from social media posts. This study aims to determine whether machine learning could be effectively used to detect signs of schizophrenia in social media users by analyzing their social media texts. To this end, we collected posts from the social media platform Reddit focusing on schizophrenia, along with non-mental health related posts (fitness, jokes, meditation, parenting, relationships, and teaching) for the control group. We extracted linguistic features and content topics from the posts. Using supervised machine learning, we classified posts belonging to schizophrenia and interpreted important features to identify linguistic markers of schizophrenia. We applied unsupervised clustering to the features to uncover a coherent semantic representation of words in schizophrenia. We identified significant differences in linguistic features and topics including increased use of third person plural pronouns and negative emotion words and symptom-related topics. We distinguished schizophrenic from control posts with an accuracy of 96%. Finally, we found that coherent semantic groups of words were the key to detecting schizophrenia. Our findings suggest that machine learning approaches could help us understand the linguistic characteristics of schizophrenia and identify schizophrenia or otherwise at-risk individuals using social media texts.

As in modernity appropriation has become more important than dedication and communication, the modern Narcissus, captured in self-relation, sees only his own projections. A change of the polarity of our attention is therefore necessary: from the human who appropriates to the God who communicates, who is himself a hermeneut. This means that neither Schleiermacher's nor Bultmann's hermeneutic of regression should be followed; both are shy of talking about the God who is not only already in us, but who comes to us – and this advent is mediated through creaturely means. God the creator is – in accordance with the Nicene Creed – the ‘Poet’, the one who does what he says, and says what he does. This communication needs a space of hearing and reading; its text vindicates the relative autonomy over the author as well as over the reader. The human being in its modern subjectivity ignores this and either transcends the text (Hegel and Barth) or goes behind the text (Schleiermacher and Bultmann). Instead, the aim should be to have a relationship, an engagement with the text, to have, quite frankly, ‘intercourse’ with it, as Luther translates ‘meditatio’. The crucial question is therefore not: ‘How do I understand the given biblical text?’, but ‘How does the given biblical text give itself to me to understand it – so that I am understood?’

Le commentaire que propose Merleau-Ponty de L’origine de la géométrie de Husserl en 1960 accorde une place privilégiée au langage, à l’écrit : l’étonnement peut être grand de voir Merleau-Ponty, dans la continuité de Husserl, penser la genèse de l’idéalité géométrique à partir d’une méditation sur la littérature. La réflexion de Merleau-Ponty sur la littérature a pris un tour ontologique décisif au début des années cinquante, dans le long commentaire de Proust notamment en 1953-1954. C’est dans cet esprit que le cours de 1960 accorde à la littérature un sens ontologique : l’idéalité géométrique ne peut advenir comme idéalité que par passage à la parole et à l’écrit, mais le sens même de l’idéalité scientifique ne peut se comprendre que si on la replace sur fond d’idéalités plus fondamentales que la littérature précisément dévoile, idéalités qui se nouent à travers le temps, dans le lien entre le passé et le présent, moi et l’autre. La littérature éclaire l’histoire de la géométrie d’une autre manière encore : elle met au jour l’entrelacement homme-langage-monde, condition d’émergence d’un sens vrai, qui advient dans l’histoire de la géométrie, et que la littérature, assumant notre être de parole, porte plus fondamentalement encore.The commentary Merleau-Ponty offers in 1960 on Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry gives a privileged place to language, to writing: it is perhaps a great astonishment to see Merleau-Ponty, in continuity with Husserl, thinking about the genesis of geometrical ideality beginning from a meditation on literature. Merleau-Ponty’s reflection on literature took a decisive ontological turn at the beginning of the 1950s, notably in the long commentary on Proust in 1953-1954. It is in this spirit that the course of 1960 grants to literature an ontological sense: the ideality of geometry can occur as ideality by the passage to speech and to writing, but the meaning of even scientific ideality can be understood only if one places it on the basis of more fundamental idealities that literature precisely reveals, idealities that are linked across time, in the connection between past and present, self and other. Literature clarifies the history of geometry in yet another manner: it brings to light the intertwining of human-language-world, condition of the emergence of a true sense, which occurs in the history of geometry, and which literature, assuming our being in speech bears more fundamentally still.Il commento de L’origine della geometria di Husserl proposto da Merleau-Ponty nel 1960 accorda un posto privilegiato al linguaggio, alla scrittura. Ci si potrebbe stupire del fatto che Merleau-Ponty, nel solco di Husserl, pensi l’idealità geometrica a partire da una riflessione sulla letteratura. Il pensiero di Merleau-Ponty sulla letteratura ha assunto un’inflessione ontologica decisiva all’inizio degli anni Cinquanta, in particolare nel lungo commento a Proust del 1953-1954. È proprio prolungando questa linea che il corso del 1960 attribuisce alla letteratura un senso ontologico: l’idealità geometrica diviene idealità proprio nel passaggio dalla parola allo scritto, ma il senso stesso dell’idealità scientifica può essere compreso solo se ricollochiamo quest’ultima su quello sfondo di idealità più fondamentali che la letteratura ci rivela, idealità che si instaurano attraverso il tempo, nel legame tra il passato e il presente, l’io e l’altro. Infine, è in un altro modo ancora che la letteratura illumina la storia della geometria: essa ci consente di illuminare l’intreccio uomo-linguaggio-mondo, condizione di emergenza di un senso vero, che si attesta nella storia della geometria e che la letteratura, in quanto essa assume il nostro essere già da sempre implicati con la parola, reca con sé in modo ancora più fondamentale.

AbstractThe recent advent of continuous intraocular pressure (IOP) telemetry has led to an increased awareness of the importance of IOP fluctuations, and theories have emerged that IOP variations could play as much a role in glaucoma progression as the mean level of IOP. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the direct effect of common daily activities on IOP-related profiles. Primary open-angle glaucoma and glaucoma suspect patients were prospectively enrolled from specialist clinics at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), USA. Patients were fitted with a SENSIMED Triggerfish (TF) contact lens sensor (CLS) and were instructed to return to their usual daily activities for 24 h. They were asked to record each specific activity or event in a diary. The protocol was repeated twice. The following events were recorded: “walking/cycling”, “resistance training”, “yoga/meditation”, and “emotional stress”. CLS measurements recorded 60-to-30 min prior to each event were used as a baseline reference, and all IOP-related fluctuations for 120 min after the start of each event were reported in relation to this reference. Forty relevant events from 22 CLS recordings in 14 patients were retrieved from the diaries. Walking/cycling (n = 10) caused a small but statistically significant elevation of the IOP-related profile during the activity (p = 0.018). Resistance training (n = 11) caused a persistent elevation of the IOP-related profile from the onset of the activity (p = 0.005) through 120 min after the activity was stopped (p = 0.007). Yoga/meditation (n = 4) caused a sustained drop in the IOP-related profiles through to 120 min, although this was not statistically significant (p > 0.380). Emotional stress (n = 13) was associated with a gradual elevation of the IOP-related profile from the start of the stressful stimulus. Both early and late variations were statistically significant (p = 0.038 and p = 0.021, respectively). The present study suggests that emotional stress and resistance training may be associated with persistent IOP-related profile elevation.

In the public domain of end, what is the real impact of endism on our cultural and political lives? Are the proponents of apocalypse and armageddon correct to assume that there is an impending divine climax to the system of human affairs on this planet? Researching in the world of endism, it is usually the extreme, often dangerous forms of endist belief which the media popularly exploit to define 'other' forms of 'endist' fundamentalism. Reading about the apocacidal (suicides for the apocalypse) tendencies of various cults and sects horrifies us in their acts of forcible manipulation. Yet apocaholicism (a mental state of intoxication on the endtimes) can not be limited to the extra-societal gathering in the outer suburbs that awaits an end with grim but enthusiastic anticipation and which makes the occasional evening news headline or Sixty Minutes exposure. Nor can a keen sense of apocalypse be situated as being primarily a characteristic of religious fundamentalism. Secular society itself, as suggested by this collection of essays, is drunk on different meditations of the 'end'. In film alone, from Deep Impact through Armageddon to The End of Days, a mainstream space exists for courting the end in public forms of spectacularisation and profit-making. In this use, the end creates revenue. But there are other senses of the end too in secular society. Within the broader scope of the public exist those individuals who comprise this mass, and who also experience an ultimate more personal end, death. Yet death is only regarded literally by the physical professions. In the more social sphere, this phenomenon is as highly constructed as any other cultural entity. For instance, death functions as closure to the individual narrative of life. In this place, it is greeted with wails of sorrow and remorse for the deceased, and it is for this reason that death is also constructed as a beginning for a transformed body and other world in some belief systems. This latter view of death minimises the importance of death by subscribing to a perspective, which postulates life as an ongoing series of endings - of childhood, education, career, hearing and physical existence. However, death manifests itself in many other forms, as this issue of M/C demonstrates. In this collection, twelve authors wrestle with the question of 'end' and interrogate the links between the character of 'end' and the crisis of definition in what exactly is an 'end'? Refusing to offer superficial solutions to defining 'end', participants from America, Australia, New Zealand and England maintain that the 'end' is never neutral, but that the totality of a given time, of individual personalities reading 'signs of the endtimes', and the question of narrative -- not just the benefits of charting an 'end' from a supposed 'beginning' -- must be taken into account. The two streams of public and private senses of the end have directed the flow and organisation of content within this issue of M/C. How we engage with private, often personal treatments of 'end' is as important as how we deal with 'endism' in the public domain. Yet, as became apparent in shaping this engagement for publication, these two spheres of interrogation are not similar and sometimes mutually inconsistent. In order to not favour public over private, we decided to arrange the collection into two sections: 'critiques' and 'perspectives', with the addition of two guided internet tours by the editors. Six writers examine the domain of end as public narrative: The critiques section feature article asks, 'the end of the world is near, or is it?' It can be suggested that endtime expectants are tied to doctrines of theology that define the 'end' in very specialised terms. The terms can be contradictory across theologica -- one religious organisation may understand Sunday worship to mark a sign of the end whereas another perceives something more immediate and apocalyptic in the ascendancy of smart cards -- but for endtimes believers their interpretative home resides along a single intellectual path: the 'end' is theological. With the layperson in mind, David Bennett marks out this theological landscape used to represent and define the apocalypse in Australia. He introduces us to an often hidden character of the armageddon script, the Endtimer, and reminds us that prophecy popularisation in Australia, if less visible than in our western counterparts, remains alive and well in 1999. How well received is the Endtimer within society? Nick Caldwell takes on another type of Endtimer, the 'spoilers and cheaters' -- those democratisers of access and evaluation to the 'end' of a film or game. He argues that since we cannot have an 'end' without narrative, we need to think about the textual strategies used when we try to locate the 'end' in a particular textual place and the reading strategies used to avoid this 'end' until its appointed time of authorial revelation. Nick re-evaluates the place of the spoiler or cheater in contemporary reading practices, though not without a strategically placed spoiler of his own... Extending narrative to medium, 'Bandwidth' is clearly a term whose time is here. But what would the reconceptualisation of 'bandwidth' suggest for its future? Axel Bruns interrogates the ways in which 'bandwidth' is created and defined by its users and controllers. In 'The End of Bandwidth', he considers the tactical implications of 'non-bandwidth' activity upon the media environment and suggests the migration of the term 'bandwidth' to the periphery in favour of a less commercially framed interpretation -- the intersubjective 'infinite' -- is more suited to a contemporary and workable understanding of the Net. 'Apocacides, Apocaholics and Apocalists' takes a selective tour through the landscape of endism that permeates the Internet. One must ask, 'why contemporary apocalypticism'? Certainly not because visions of extinction dominate private, popular and scientific imaginations today? Nor because the apocalypse is an interesting anecdote from scriptures past, a tale of postponed divine re-creation to be told from generation to generation of what might have been had Friedrich Nietzsche not spoken up? Too many expect an imminent literal end to the world as we know it for the detractors of endism to dismiss it so easily. The reasons for apocalyptism are often hidden, slippery in definition -- sometimes for the complex history of the endtimes narrative, other times for the less than enthusiastic responses it evokes in the non-Christianised world. Geoff Hoyte offers one explanation regarding the endurance of endism: hope. In a common-sense approach to the 'end', he relates a humble perspective of dignified courtship with apocalypticism and suggests a key to an even greater 'beginning'. Can there be a context for intellectual legitimacy of the apocalypse? Henry Lawton outlines a variety of approaches to endism and in the process positions as a central concern questions to do with representations of the 'end' in popular and intellectual work. From the discipline of psychohistory, Henry argues that it is possible to chart the development of endist perspectives. From a listener's perspective, Alex Burns examines the cycles of alien discontinuity, fragmentation and post-millennium foreboding within a gritty meditation on 'end', the album The Fragile. As a reflexive index of social-political realities, Alex argues that certain styles of music can be embraced within a space for Sadeian aesthetics and that the 'dynamic synthesis' Nine Inch Nails embodies within its music has wider implications for the nature and direction of contemporary global cultural shift. A unique subjectivity, 'The Machine is Obsolete' invokes a rarely-used, if sometimes impossible language of review: the description of musical form, an aural projection, via written text, the visual projection. Six writers examine the domain of death as a private narrative: The perspectives section's feature article comes from a New Zealand Funeral Director, Michael Wolffram. From this profession, he examines the manner in which the bereaved construct death through religious and secular belief systems. According to Wolffram, these views on death actually affirm notions of beginnings rather than the presumed endings -- religious frameworks discuss death in terms of an afterlife whilst secular paradigms present the advent of an altered state of life after death via the impact of the deceased's works in a community. However, Wolffram believes that the focus of death has shifted from the community to the individual more recently, with society marginalising the experience of dying by discarding traditional systems of support. He suggests that contemporary society has yet to produce a new system of support, which has, perhaps positively, empowered the individual to choose and own a framework of death -- be it already existing, individually patented or indeed non-existent. Philip Nitschke's article continues this theme of the individual's empowerment of death. Nitschke is an Australian medical doctor best known for his strong advocacy of euthanasia and its legalisation. He begins with a story of an encounter with an 85-year-old German woman who had survived a Nazi concentration camp. She was in good health, but was requesting the power to end her life. This is a common situation, along with the requests received from terminally-ill patients, according to Nitschke, and he further claims that statistics are beginning to indicate that individuals who are empowered with their own deaths achieve an improved quality of life -- be they terminally ill or well in health. He provides these statistics as continuing evidence in his crusade to encourage medical doctors to relinquish their potential sovereignty over the timing of death in these cases and empower the individual in this matter. Pain and suffering are relative -- or so Donna Lee Brien suggests in an excerpt from her fictionalised biography of Edith and John Power. As standards of life deteriorate under war conditions, Edith Power becomes aware of the value of life itself rather than life values, by which she once judged her existence. But as she begins to appreciate living, she learns of the immanent death of her husband, John. Once again what is held dear and valued in her life shifts when all she is left with is memories. "The virtual is dead! Long live online!" cries Lelia Green in her manifesto-like article, which calls for the end of the phrase "virtual community". Green revisits some of the negative criticism of online communication and communities, addressing these by presenting some negative attributes of 'real' life and the benefits of online. As we move into the next millennium, Green believes that the notion of 'virtual' with respect to online activity should die its rightful death, and that the term "online community", in its better reflection of the its environment, should be adopted. Philosophy has long held that one cannot experience death directly or first hand, but can only hope to gain a semblance of understanding through representation. Using Levinas and Heidegger, Laurie Johnson challenges this premise, proposing that personal death can be 'experienced' through Other's death. Johnson recounts his own dream of death to explore the narrative and character of death within this dream. The character of death is identified as himself and the death dream is equated with personal experience. The author leaves the reader with the question of the extent to which dreams can potentially be related to experience. Physical, individual end can be discussed as 'death', or less obviously as the rear-end, as Simon Astley-Scholfield has done in his article on Allen Ginsberg's 1986 poem, "Sphincter". Scholfield suggests that Ginsberg's poem indicates a significant point in his writing by marking a transition in this poet's construction of sexual pleasure. As Scholfield notes, "Sphincter" incorporates an awareness of wider social issues, for instance AIDS and age, and transforms anal-erotic joy from an act involving flesh contact to that of "safe sex". This transition and maturing of the poet is observed by Scholfield in the context of his larger body of work. Endism is in a constant state of creation and intense negotiation. The 'end' derives its power from the contestation over its senses and uses: Is the 'end' as understood within an apocalyptic framework imminent? What are the signs of its approach? Is the death of self ultimate and final? What experience, if any, lies beyond that final curtain each of us will one day face? Within public and private domains, the competition for meaning over 'end' is diverse and complex but one thing is certain: the 'end' is never here nor there -- it is always nigh! Jason Ensor, Felicity Meakins-- 'End' Issue Editors Citation reference for this article MLA style: Jason Ensor, Felicity Meakins. "Editorial: 'End'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.8 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/edit.php>. Chicago style: Jason Ensor, Felicity Meakins, "Editorial: 'End'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 8 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Jason Ensor, Felicity Meakins. (1999) Editorial: 'end'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture v(n). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

In January of this year, artist Christian Marclay’s 24-hour video installation The Clock came to Melbourne. As Ben Lerner explains in 10:04, the autofictional novel Lerner published in 2014, The Clock by Christian Marclay “is a clock: it is a twenty-four hour montage of thousands of scenes from movies and a few from TV edited together so as to be shown in real time; each scene indicates the time with a shot of a timepiece or its mention in dialogue, time in and outside of the film is synchronized” (52). I went to see The Clock at ACMI several times, with friends and alone, in the early morning and late at night. Each time I sank back into the comfortable chairs and settled into the communal experience of watching time pass on a screen in a dark room. I found myself sucked into the enforced narrative of time, the way in which the viewer – in this case myself, and those sharing the experience with me – sought to impose a sort of meaning on the arguably meaningless passing of the hours. In this essay, I will explore how we can expand our thinking of the idea of autofiction, as a genre, to include contemporary forms of digital media such as social media or activity trackers, as the authors of these new forms of digital media act as author-characters by playing with the divide between fact and fiction, and requiring their readers to ascertain meaning by interpreting the clues layered within. I will analyse the ways in which the meaning of autofictional texts—such as Lerner’s 10:04, but also including social media feeds, blogs and activity trackers—shifts depending on their audience. I consider that as technology develops, we increasingly use data to contextualise ourselves within a broader narrative – health data, media, journalistic data. As the sociologist John B. Thompson writes, “The development of the media not only enriches and transforms the process of self-formation, it also produces a new kind of intimacy which did not exist before … individuals can create and establish a form of intimacy which is essentially non-reciprocal” (208). New media and technologies have emerged to assist in this process of self-formation through the collection and publication of data. This essay is interested in analysing this process of self-formation, and its relationship to the genre of autofiction.Contemporary Digital Media as AutofictionWhile humans have always recorded themselves throughout history, with the rise of new technologies the instinct to record the self is increasingly becoming an automatic one; an instinct we can tie to what media theorist Nick Couldry terms as “presencing”: an “emerging requirement in everyday life to have a public presence beyond one’s bodily presence, to construct an objectification of oneself” (50). We are required to participate in ‘presencing’ by opting-in to new media; it is now uncommon – even unfavourable – for someone not to engage in any forms of social media or self-monitoring. We are now encouraged to participate in ‘presencing’ through the recording and online publication of data that would have once been considered private, such as employment histories and activity histories. Every Instagram photo, Snapchat or TikTok video contributes to an accumulating digital presence, an emerging narrative of the self. Couldry notes that presencing “is not the same as calling up a few friends to tell them some news; nor, although the audience is unspecific, is it like putting up something on a noticeboard. That is because presencing is oriented to a permanent site in public space that is distinctively marked by the producer for displaying that producer’s self” (50).In this way, we can see that in effect we are all becoming increasingly positioned to become autofiction authors. As an experimental form of literature, autofiction has been around for a long time, the term having first been introduced in the 1970s, and with Serge Doubrovsky widely credited with having introduced the genre with the publication of his 1977 novel Fils (Browning 49). In the most basic terms, autofiction is simply a work of fiction featuring a protagonist who can be interpreted as a stand-in for its author. And while autofiction is also confused with or used interchangeably with other genres such as metafiction or memoir, the difference between autofiction and other genres, writes Arnaud Schmitt, is that autoficton “relies on fiction—runs on fiction, to be exact” (141). Usually the reader can pick up on the fact that a novel is an autofictional one by noting that the protagonist and the author share a name, or key autobiographical details, but it is debatable as to whether the reader in fact needs to know that the work is autofictional in the first place in order to properly engage with it as a literary text.The same ideas can be applied to the application of digital media today. Kylie Cardell notes that “personal autobiographical but specifically diaristic (confessional, serial, quotidian) disclosure is increasingly positioned as a symptomatic feature of online life” (507). This ties in with Couldry’s idea of ‘presencing’; confession is increasingly a requirement when it comes to participation in digital media. As technology advances, the ways in which we can present and record the self evolve, and the narrative we can produce of the self expands alongside our understanding of the relationship between fact and fiction. Though of course we have always fabricated different narratives of the self, whether it be through diary entries or letter-writing, ‘presencing’ occurs when we literally present these edited versions of ourselves to an online audience. Lines become blurred between fiction and non-fiction, and the ability to distinguish between ‘fake’ and ‘real’ becomes almost impossible.Increasingly, such a distinction fails to seem important, and in some cases, this blurred line becomes the point, or a punchline; we can see this most clearly in TikTok videos, wherein people (specifically, or at least most typically, young people—Generation Z) play with ideas of truth and unreality ironically. When a teenager posts a video of themselves on TikTok dancing in their school cafeteria with the caption, “I got suspended for this, don’t let this flop”, the savvy viewer understands without it needing to be said that the student was not actually suspended – and also understands that even less outlandish or unbelievable digital content is unreliable by nature, and simply the narrative the author or producer wishes to convey; just like the savvy reader of an autofiction novel understands, without it actually being said, that the novel is in part autobiographical, even when the author and protagonist do not share a name or other easily identifiable markers.This is the nature of autofiction; it signals to the reader its status as a work of autofiction by littering intertextual clues throughout. Readers familiar with the author’s biography or body of work will pick up on these clues, creating a sense of uneasiness in the reader as they work to discern what is fact and what is not.Indeed, in 10:04, Lerner flags the text as a work of autofiction by sketching a fictional-not-fictional image of himself as an author of a story, ‘The Golden Vanity’ published in The New Yorker, that earned him a book deal—a story the ‘real’ Ben Lerner did in fact publish, two years before the publication of 10:04: “a few months before, the agent had e-mailed me that she believed I could get a “strong six-figure” advance based on a story of mine that had appeared in The New Yorker” (Lerner 4).In a review of 10:04 for the Sydney Review of Books, Stephanie Bishop writes:we learn that he did indeed write a proposal, that there was a competitive auction … What had just happened? Where are we in time? Was the celebratory meal fictional or real? Can we (and should we) seek to distinguish these categories?Here Lerner is ‘presencing’, crafting a multilayered version of himself across media by assuming that the reader of his work is also a reader of The New Yorker (an easy assumption to make given that his work often appears in, and is reviewed in, The New Yorker). Of course, this leads to the question: what becomes of autofiction when it is consumed by someone who is unable to pick up on the many metareferences layered within its narrative? In this case, the work itself becomes a joke that doesn’t land – much like a social media feed being consumed by someone who is not its intended audience.The savvy media consumer also understands that even the most meaningless or obtuse of media is all part of the overarching narrative. Lerner highlights the way we try and impose meaning onto (arguably) meaningless media when he describes his experience of watching time pass in Marclay’s The Clock:Big Ben, which I would come to learn appears frequently in the video, exploded, and people in the audience applauded… But then, a minute later, a young girl awakes from a nightmare and, as she’s comforted by her father (Clark Gable as Rhett Butler), you see Big Ben ticking away again outside their window, no sign of damage. The entire preceding twenty-four hours might have been the child’s dream, a storm that never happened, just one of many ways The Clock can be integrated into an overarching narrative. Indeed it was a greater challenge for me to resist the will to integration. (Lerner 52-53)This desire to impose an overarching narrative that Lerner speaks of – and which I also experienced when watching The Clock, as detailed in the introduction to this essay – is what the recording of the self both aims to achieve and achieves by default; it is the point and also the by-product. The Self as DataThe week my grandmother died, in 2017, my father bought me an Apple Watch. I had recently started running and—perhaps as an outlet for my grief—was looking to take my running further. I wanted a smart watch to help me record my runs; to turn the act of running into data that I could quantify and thus understand. This, in turn, would help me understand something about myself. Deborah Lupton explains my impulse here when she writes, “the body/self is portrayed as a conglomerate of quantifiable data that can be revealed using digital devices” (65). I wanted to reveal my ‘self’ by recording it, similar to the way the data accumulated in a diary, when reflected upon, helps a diarist understand their life more broadly. "Is a Fitbit a diary?”, asks Kylie Cardell. “The diary in the twenty-first century is already vastly different from many of its formal historical counterparts, yet there are discursive resonances. The Fitbit is a diary if we think of diary as a chronological record of data, which it can be” (348). The diary, as with the Apple Watch or Fitbit, is simply just a record of the self moving through time.Thus I submitted myself to the task of turning as much of myself into digital data as was possible to do so. Every walk, swim, meditation, burst of productivity, lapse in productivity, and beat of my heart became quantified, as Cardell might say, diarised. There is a very simple sort of pleasure in watching the red, green and blue rings spin round as you stand more, move more, run more. There is something soothing in knowing that at any given moment in time, you can press a button and see exactly what your heart is doing; even more soothing is knowing that at any given time, you can open up an app and see what your heart has been doing today, yesterday, this month, this year. It made sense to me that this data was being collected via my timepiece; it was simply the accumulation of my ‘self,’ as viewed through the lens of time.The Apple Watch was just the latest in a series of ways I have tasked technology with the act of quantifying myself; with my iPhone I track my periods with the Clue app. I measure my mental health with apps such as Shine, and my daily habits with Habitica. I have tried journaling apps such as Reflectly and Day One. While I have never actively tracked my food intake, or weight, or sex life, I know if I wanted to I could do this, too. And long before the Apple Watch, and long before my iPhone, too, I measured myself. In the late 2000s, I kept an online blog. Rebecca Blood notes that the development of blogging technology allowed blogging to become about “whatever came to mind. Walking to work. Last night’s party. Lunch” (54). Browning expands on this, noting that bloggingemerged as a mode of publication in the late ’90s, expressly smudging the boundaries of public and private. A diaristic mode, the blog nonetheless addresses (a) potential reader(s), often with great intimacy — and in its transition to print, as a boundary-shifting form with ill-defined goals regarding its readership. (49)(It is worth noting here that while of course many different forms of blogging exist and have always existed, this essay is only concerned with the diaristic blog that Blood and Browning speak of – arguably the most popular, and at least the most well known, form of blog.)My blog was also ostensibly about my own life, but really it was a work of autofiction, in the same way that my Apple Watch data, when shared, became a work of autofiction – which is to say that I became the central character, the author-character, whose narrative I was shaping with each post, using time as the setting. Jenny Davis writes:if self-quantifiers are seeking self-knowledge through numbers, then narratives and subjective interpretations are the mechanisms by which data morphs into selves. Self-quantifiers don’t just use data to learn about themselves, but rather, use data to construct the stories that they tell themselves about themselves.Over time, I became addicted to the blogging platform’s inbuilt metrics. I would watch with interest as certain posts performed better than others, and eventually the inevitable happened: I began – mostly unconsciously – to try and mould the content of my blogs to achieve certain outcomes – similar to the way that now, in 2019, it is hard to say whether I use an app to assist myself to meditate/journal/learn/etc, or whether I meditate/journal/learn/etc in order to record myself having done so.David Sedaris notes how the collection of data subconsciously, automatically leads to its manipulation in his essay collection, Calypso:for reasons I cannot determine my Fitbit died. I was devastated when I tapped the broadest part of it and the little dots failed to appear. Then I felt a great sense of freedom. It seemed that my life was now my own again. But was it? Walking twenty-five miles, or even running up the stairs and back, suddenly seemed pointless, since, without the steps being counted and registered, what use were they? (Sedaris, 49)In this way, the data we collect on and produce about ourselves, be it fitness metrics, blog posts, Instagram stories or works of literature or art, allows us to control and shape our own narrative, and so we do, creating what Kylie Cardell describes as “an autobiographical representation of self that is coherent and linear, “excavated” from a mass of personal data” (502).Of course, as foregrounded earlier, it is important to highlight the way ideas of privacy and audience shift in accordance with the type of media being consumed or created. Within different media, different author-characters emerge, and the author is required to participate in ‘presencing’ in different ways. For instance, data that exists only for the user does not require the user, or author, to participate in the act of ‘presencing’ at all – an example of this might be the Clue app, which records menstruation history. This information is only of interest to myself, and is not published or shared anywhere, with anyone. However even data intended for a limited audience still requires participation in ‘presencing’. While I only ‘share’ my Apple Watch’s activity with a few people, even just the act of sharing this activity influences the activity itself, creating an affect in which the fact of the content’s consumption shapes the creation of the content itself. Through consumption of Apple Watch data alone, a narrative can be built in which I am lazy, or dedicated, an early riser or a late sleeper, the kind of person who prefers setting their own goals, or the kind of person who enjoys group activities – and knowing that this narrative is being built requires me to act, consciously, in the experience of building it, which leads to the creation of something unreal or fictional interspersed with factual data. (All of which is to admit that sometimes I go on a run not because I want to go on a run, but because I want to be the sort of person who has gone on a run, and be seen as such: in this way I am ‘presencing’.)Similarly, the ephemeral versus permanent nature of data shared through media like Snapchat or Instagram dictates its status as a work of autofiction. When a piece of data – for instance, a photograph on Instagram – is published permanently, it contributes to an evolving autofictional narrative. The ‘Instagrammed’ self is both real and unreal, both fictional and non-fictional. The consumer of this data can explore an author’s social media feed dating back years and consume this data in exactly the way the author intends. However, the ‘stories’ function on Instagram, for instance, allows the consumption of this data to change again. Content is published for a limited amount of time—usually 24 hours—then disappears, and is able to be shared with either the author’s entire group of followers, or a select audience, allowing an author more creative freedom to choose how their data is consumed.Anxiety and AutofictionWhy do I feel the need to record all this data about myself? Obviously, this information is, to an extent, useful. If you are a person who menstruates, knowing exactly when your last period was, how long it lasted and how heavy it was is useful information to have, medically and logistically. If you run regularly, tracking your runs can be helpful in improving your time or routine. Similarly, recording the self in this way can be useful in keeping track of your moods, your habits, and your relationships.Of course, as previously noted, humans have always recorded ourselves. Cardell notes that “although the forms, conditions, and technology for diary keeping have changed, a motivation for recording, documenting, and accounting for the experience of the self over time has endured” (349). Still, it is hard to ignore the fact that ultimately, we seem to be entering some sort of age of digital information hoarding, and harder still to ignore the sneaking suspicion that this all seems to speak to a growing anxiety – and specifically, an anxiety of the self.Gayle Greene writes that “all writers are concerned with memory, since all writing is a remembrance of things past; all writers draw on the past, mine it as a quarry. Memory is especially important to anyone who cares about change, for forgetting dooms us to repetition” (291). If all writers are concerned with memory, as Greene posits, then perhaps we can draw the conclusion that autofiction writers are concerned with an anxiety of forgetting, or of being forgotten. We are self-conscious as authors of autofictional media; concerned with how our work is and will continue to be perceived – and whether it is perceived at all. Marjorie Worthington believes that that the rise in self-conscious fiction has resulted in an anxiety of obsolescence; that this anxiety in autofiction occurs “when a cultural trope (such as 'the author' is deemed to be in danger of becoming obsolete (or 'dying')” (27). However, it is worth considering the opposite – that an anxiety of obsolescence has resulted in a rise of self-conscious fiction, or autofiction.This fear of obsolescence is pervasive in new digital media – Instagram stories and Snapchats, which once disappeared forever into a digital void, are now able to be saved and stored. The fifteen minutes of fame has morphed into fifteen seconds: in this way, time works both for and against the anxious author of digital autofiction. Technologies evolve quicker than we can keep up, with popular platforms becoming obsolete at a rapid pace. This results in what Kylie Cardell sees as an “anxiety around the traces of lives accumulating online and the consequences of 'accidental autobiography,' as well as the desire to have a 'tidy,' representable, and 'storied' life” (503).This same desire can be seen at the root of autofiction. The media theorist José van Dijck notes thatwith the advent of photography, and later film and television, writing tacitly transformed into an interior means of consciousness and remembrance, whereupon electronic forms of media received the artificiality label…writing gained status as a more authentic container of past recollection. (15)Autofiction, however, disrupts this tacit transformation. It is a co-mingling of a desire to record the self, as well as a desire to control one’s own narrative. The drive to represent oneself in a specific way, with consideration to one’s audience and self-brand, has become the root of social media, but is so pervasive now that it is often an unexamined, subconscious one. In autofiction, this drive is not subconscious, it is self-conscious.ConclusionAs technology has developed, new ways to record, present and evaluate the self have emerged. While an impulse to self-monitor has always existed within society, with the rise of ‘presencing’ through social media this impulse has been made public. In this way, we can see presencing, or the public practice of self-performing through media, as an inherently autofictional practice. We can understand that the act of presencing stems from a place of anxiety and self-consciousness, and understand that is in fact impossible to create autofiction without self-consciousness. As we begin to understand that all digital media is becoming inherently autofictional in nature, we’re increasingly required to force to draw our own conclusions about the media we consume—just like the author-character of 10:04 is forced to draw his own conclusions about the passing of time, as represented by Big Ben, when interacting with Marclay’s The Clock. By analysing and comparing the ways in which the emerging digital landscape and autofiction both share a common goal of recording and preserving an interpretation of the ‘self’, we can then understand a deeper understanding of the purpose that autofiction serves. ReferencesBishop, Stephanie. “The Same but Different: 10:04 by Ben Lerner.” Sydney Review of Books 6 Feb. 2015. <https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/10-04-ben-lerner/>.Blood, Rebecca. "How Blogging Software Reshapes the Online Community." Communications of the ACM 47.12 (2004): 53-55.Browning, Barbara. "The Performative Novel." TDR: The Drama Review 62.2 (2018): 43-58. Davis, Jenny. “The Qualified Self.” Cyborgology 13 Mar. 2013. <http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/03/13/the-qualified-self/>.Cardell, Kylie. “The Future of Autobiography Studies: The Diary.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32.2 (2017): 347-350.Cardell, Kylie. “Modern Memory-Making: Marie Kondo, Online Journaling, and the Excavation, Curation, and Control of Personal Digital Data.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32.3 (2017): 499-517.Couldry, Nick. Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. Great Britain: Polity Press, 2012.Greene, Gayle. “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory.” Signs 16.2 (1991): 290-321.Lerner, Ben. 10:04. London: Faber and Faber, 2014.Lerner, Ben. “The Golden Vanity.” The New Yorker 11 June 2012. <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/18/the-golden-vanity>.Lupton, Deborah. “You Are Your Data: Self-Tracking Practices and Concepts of Data.” Lifelogging. Ed. Stefan Selke. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016. 61-79.Schmitt, Arnaud. “David Shields's Lyrical Essay: The Dream of a Genre-Free Memoir, or beyond the Paradox.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31.1 (2016): 133-146.Sedaris, David. Calypso. United States: Little Brown, 2018.Thompson, John B. The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. California: Stanford University Press, 1995.Van Dijck, José. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.Worthington, Marjorie. The Story of "Me": Contemporary American Autofiction. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2018.

There is, in our sense of place, little cognisance of what lies underground. Yet our sense of place, instinctive, unconscious, primeval, has its own underground: the secret spaces which mirror our insides; the world beneath the skin. Our roots lie beneath the ground, with the minerals and the dead. (Hughes 83) The-Home-and-Away-Game Imagine the earth-grounded, “diagrammatological” trajectory of a footballer who as one member of a team is psyching himself up before the start of a game. The siren blasts its trumpet call. The footballer bursts out of the pavilion (where this psyching up has taken place) to engage in the opening bounce or kick of the game. And then: running, leaping, limping after injury, marking, sliding, kicking, and possibly even passing out from concussion. Finally, the elation accompanying the final siren, after which hugs, handshakes and raised fists conclude the actual match on the football oval. This exit from the pavilion, the course the player takes during the game itself, and return to the pavilion, forms a combination of stasis and movement, and a return to exhausted stasis again, that every player engages with regardless of the game code. Examined from a “diagrammatological” perspective, a perspective Rowan Wilken (following in the path of Gilles Deleuze and W. J. T. Mitchell) understands as “a generative process: a ‘metaphor’ or way of thinking — diagrammatic, diagrammatological thinking — which in turn, is linked to poetic thinking” (48), this footballer’s scenario arises out of an aerial perspective that depicts the actual spatial trajectory the player takes during the course of a game. It is a diagram that is digitally encoded via a sensor on the footballer’s body, and being an electronically encoded diagram it can also make available multiple sets of data such as speed, heartbeat, blood pressure, maybe even brain-wave patterns. From this limited point of view there is only one footballer’s playing trajectory to consider; various groupings within the team, the whole team itself, and the diagrammatological depiction of its games with various other teams might also be possible. This singular imagining though is itself an actuality: as a diagram it is encoded as a graphic image by a satellite hovering around the earth with a Global Positioning System (GPS) reading the sensor attached to the footballer which then digitally encodes this diagrammatological trajectory for appraisal later by the player, coach, team and management. In one respect, this practice is another example of a willing self-surveillance critical to explaining the reflexive subject and its attribute of continuous self-improvement. According to Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club, this is a technique the club uses as a part of game/play assessment, a system that can provide a “running map” for each player equipped with such a tracking device during a game. As the Fremantle Club’s Strength and Conditioning Coach Ben Tarbox says of this tactic, “We’re getting a physiological profile that has started to build a really good picture of how individual players react during a game” (21). With a little extra effort (and some sizeable computer processing grunt) this two dimensional linear graphic diagram of a footballer working the football ground could also form the raw material for a three-dimensional animation, maybe a virtual reality game, even a hologram. It could also be used to sideline a non-performing player. Now try another related but different imagining: what if this diagrammatological trajectory could be enlarged a little to include the possibility that this same player’s movements could be mapped out by the idea of home-and-away games; say over the course of a season, maybe even a whole career, for instance? No doubt, a wide range of differing diagrammatological perspectives might suggest themselves. My own particular refinement of this movement/stasis on the footballer’s part suggests my own distinctive comings and goings to and from my own specific piece of home country. And in this incessantly domestic/real world reciprocity, in this diurnally repetitive leaving and coming back to home country, might it be plausible to think of “Home as Capital of the Region”? If, as Walter Benjamin suggests in the prelude to his monumental Arcades Project, “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” could it be that both in and through my comings and goings to and from this selfsame home country, my own burgeoning sense of regionality is constituted in every minute-by-minutiae of lived experience? Could it be that this feeling about home is manifested in my every day-to-night manoeuvre of home-and-away-and-away-and-home-making, of every singular instance of exit, play/engage, and the return home? “Home, Capital of the Region” then examines the idea that my home is that part of the country which is the still-point of eternal return, the bedrock to which I retreat after the daily grind, and the point from which I start out and do it all again the next day. It employs, firstly, this ‘diagrammatological’ perspective to illustrate the point that this stasis/movement across country can make an electronic record of my own psychic self-surveillance and actualisation in-situ. And secondly, the architectural plan of the domestic home (examined through the perspective of critical regionalism) is used as a conduit to illustrate how I am physically embedded in country. Lastly, intermingling these digressive threads is chora, Plato’s notion of embodied place and itself an ancient regional rendering of this eternal return to the beginning, the place where the essential diversity of country decisively enters the soul. Chora: Core of Regionality Kevin Lynch writes that, “Our senses are local, while our experience is regional” (10), a combination that suggests this regional emphasis on home-and-away-making might be a useful frame of reference (simultaneously spatiotemporal, both a visceral and encoded communication) for me to include as a crucial vector in my own life-long learning package. Regionality (as, variously, a sub-generic categorisation and an extension/concentration of nationality, as well as a recently re-emerged friend/antagonist to a global understanding) infuses my world of home with a grounded footing in country, one that is a site of an Eternal Return to the Beginning in the micro-world of the everyday. This is a point John Sallis discusses at length in his analysis of Plato’s Timaeus and its founding notion of regionality: chora. More extended absences away from home-base are of course possible but one’s return to home on most days and for most nights is a given of post/modern, maybe even of ancient everyday experience. Even for the continually shifting nomad, nightfall in some part of the country brings the rest and recreation necessary for the next day’s wanderings. This fundamental question of an Eternal Return to the Beginning arises as a crucial element of the method in Plato’s Timaeus, a seemingly “unstructured” mythic/scientific dialogue about the origins and structure of both the psychically and the physically implaced world. In the Timaeus, “incoherence is especially obvious in the way the natural sequence in which a narrative would usually unfold is interrupted by regressions, corrections, repetitions, and abrupt new beginnings” (Gadamer 160). Right in the middle of the Timaeus, in between its sections on the “Work of Reason” and the “Work of Necessity”, sits chora, both an actual spatial and bodily site where my being intersects with my becoming, and where my lived life criss-crosses the various arts necessary to articulating a recorded version of that life. Every home is a grounded chora-logical timespace harness guiding its occupant’s thoughts, feelings and actions. My own regionally implaced chora (an example of which is the diagrammatological trajectory already outlined above as my various everyday comings and goings, of me acting in and projecting myself into context) could in part be understood as a graphical realisation of the extent of my movements and stationary rests in my own particular timespace trajectory. The shorthand for this process is ‘embedded’. Gregory Ulmer writes of chora that, “While chorography as a term is close to choreography, it duplicates a term that already exists in the discipline of geography, thus establishing a valuable resonance for a rhetoric of invention concerned with the history of ‘place’ in relation to memory” (Heuretics 39, original italics). Chorography is the geographic discipline for the systematic study and analysis of regions. Chora, home, country and regionality thus form an important multi-dimensional zone of interplay in memorialising the game of everyday life. In light of these observations I might even go so far as to suggest that this diagrammatological trajectory (being both digital and GPS originated) is part of the increasingly electrate condition that guides the production of knowledge in any global/regional context. This last point is a contextual connection usefully examined in Alan J. Scott’s Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order and Michael Storper’s The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. Their analyses explicitly suggest that the symbiosis between globalisation and regionalisation has been gathering pace since at least the end of World War Two and the Bretton Woods agreement. Our emerging understanding of electracy also happens to be Gregory Ulmer’s part-remedy for shifting the ground under the intense debates surrounding il/literacy in the current era (see, in particular, Internet Invention). And, for Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow’s analysis of “Australian Everyday Cultures” (“Media Culture and the Home” 57–86), it is within the home that our un.conscious understanding of electronic media is at its most intense, a pattern that emerges in the longer term through receiving telegrams, compiling photo albums, listening to the radio, home- and video-movies, watching the evening news on television, and logging onto the computer in the home-office, media-room or home-studio. These various generalisations (along with this diagrammatological view of my comings and goings to and from the built space of home), all point indiscriminately to a productive confusion surrounding the sedentary and nomadic opposition/conjunction. If natural spaces are constituted in nouns like oceans, forests, plains, grasslands, steppes, deserts, rivers, tidal interstices, farmland etc. (and each categorisation here relies on the others for its existence and demarcation) then built space is often seen as constituting its human sedentary equivalent. For Deleuze and Guatteri (in A Thousand Plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine”) these natural spaces help instigate a nomadic movement across localities and regions. From a nomadology perspective, these smooth spaces unsettle a scientific, numerical calculation, sometimes even aesthetic demarcation and order. If they are marked at all, it is by heterogenous and differential forces, energised through constantly oscillating intensities. A Thousand Plateaus is careful though not to elevate these smooth nomadic spaces over the more sedentary spaces of culture and power (372–373). Nonetheless, as Edward S. Casey warns, “In their insistence on becoming and movement, however, the authors of A Thousand Plateaus overlook the placial potential of settled dwelling — of […] ‘built places’” (309, original italics). Sedentary, settled dwelling centred on home country may have a crust of easy legibility and order about it but it also formats a locally/regionally specific nomadic quality, a point underscored above in the diagrammatological perspective. The sedentary tendency also emerges once again in relation to home in the architectural drafting of the domestic domicile. The Real Estate Revolution When Captain Cook planted the British flag in the sand at Botany Bay in 1770 and declared the country it spiked as Crown Land and henceforth will come under the ownership of an English sovereign, it was also the moment when white Australia’s current fascination with real estate was conceived. In the wake of this spiking came the intense anxiety over Native Title that surfaced in late twentieth century Australia when claims of Indigenous land grabs would repossess suburban homes. While easily dismissed as hyperbole, a rhetorical gesture intended to arouse this very anxiety, its emergence is nonetheless an indication of the potential for political and psychic unsettling at the heart of the ownership and control of built place, or ‘settled dwelling’ in the Australian context. And here it would be wise to include not just the gridded, architectural quality of home-building and home-making, but also the home as the site of the family romance, another source of unsettling as much as a peaceful calming. Spreading out from the boundaries of the home are the built spaces of fences, bridges, roads, railways, airport terminals (along with their interconnecting pathways), which of course brings us back to the communications infrastructure which have so often followed alongside the development of transport infrastructure. These and other elements represent this conglomerate of built space, possibly the most significant transformation of natural space that humanity has brought about. For the purposes of this meditation though it is the more personal aspect of built space — my home and regional embeddedness, along with their connections into the global electrosphere — that constitutes the primary concern here. For a sedentary, striated space to settle into an unchallenged existence though requires a repression of the highest order, primarily because of the home’s proximity to everyday life, of the latter’s now fading ability to sometimes leave its presuppositions well enough alone. In settled, regionally experienced space, repressions are more difficult to abstract away, they are lived with on a daily basis, which also helps to explain the extra intensity brought to their sometimes-unsettling quality. Inversely, and encased in this globalised electro-spherical ambience, home cannot merely be a place where one dwells within avoiding those presuppositions, I take them with me when I travel and they come back with me from afar. This is a point obliquely reflected in Pico Iyer’s comment that “Australians have so flexible a sense of home, perhaps, that they can make themselves at home anywhere” (185). While our sense of home may well be, according to J. Douglas Porteous, “the territorial core” of our being, when other arrangements of space and knowledge shift it must inevitably do so as well. In these shifts of spatial affiliation (aided and abetted by regionalisation, globalisation and electronic knowledge), the built place of home can no longer be considered exclusively under the illusion of an autonomous sanctuary wholly guaranteed by capitalist property relations, one of the key factors in its attraction. These shifts in the cultural, economic and psychic relation of home to country are important to a sense of local and regional implacement. The “feeling” of autonomy and security involved in home occupation and/or ownership designates a component of this implacement, a point leading to Eric Leed’s comment that, “By the sixteenth century, literacy had become one of the definitive signs — along with the possession of property and a permanent residence — of an independent social status” (53). Globalising and regionalising forces make this feeling of autonomy and security dynamic, shifting the ground of home, work-place practices and citizenship allegiances in the process. Gathering these wide-ranging forces impacting on psychic and built space together is the emergence of critical regionalism as a branch of architectonics, considered here as a theory of domestic architecture. Critical Regionality Critical regionalism emerged out of the collective thinking of Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis (Tropical Architecture; Critical Regionalism), and as these authors themselves acknowledge, was itself deeply influenced by the work of Lewis Mumford during the first part of the twentieth century when he was arguing against the authority of the international style in architecture, a style epitomised by the Bauhaus movement. It is Kenneth Frampton’s essay, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” that deliberately takes this question of critical regionalism and makes it a part of a domestic architectonic project. In many ways the ideas critical regionalism espouses can themselves be a microcosm of this concomitantly emerging global/regional polis. With public examples of built-form the power of the centre is on display by virtue of a building’s enormous size and frequently high-cultural aesthetic power. This is a fact restated again and again from the ancient world’s agora to Australia’s own political bunker — its Houses of Parliament in Canberra. While Frampton discusses a range of aspects dealing with the universal/implaced axis across his discussion, it is points five and six that deserve attention from a domestically implaced perspective. Under the sub-heading, “Culture Versus Nature: Topography, Context, Climate, Light and Tectonic Form” is where he writes that, Here again, one touches in concrete terms this fundamental opposition between universal civilization and autochthonous culture. The bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness, whereas the terracing of the same site to receive the stepped form of a building is an engagement in the act of “cultivating” the site. (26, original italics) The “totally flat datum” that the universalising tendency sometimes presupposes is, within the critical regionalist perspective, an erroneous assumption. The “cultivation” of a site for the design of a building illustrates the point that built space emerges out of an interaction between parallel phenomena as they contrast and/or converge in a particular set of timespace co-ordinates. These are phenomena that could include (but are not limited to) geomorphic data like soil and rock formations, seismic activity, inclination and declension; climatic considerations in the form of wind patterns, temperature variations, rainfall patterns, available light and dark, humidity and the like; the building context in relation to the cardinal points of north, south, east, and west, along with their intermediary positions. There are also architectural considerations in the form of available building materials and personnel to consider. The social, psychological and cultural requirements of the building’s prospective in-dwellers are intermingled with all these phenomena. This is not so much a question of where to place the air conditioning system but the actuality of the way the building itself is placed on its site, or indeed if that site should be built on at all. A critical regionalist building practice, then, is autochthonous to the degree that a full consideration of this wide range of in-situ interactions is taken into consideration in the development of its design plan. And given this autochthonous quality of the critical regionalist project, it also suggests that the architectural design plan itself (especially when it utilised in conjunction with CAD and virtual reality simulations), might be the better model for designing electrate-centred projects rather than writing or even the script. The proliferation of ‘McMansions’ across many Australian suburbs during the 1990s (generally, oversized domestic buildings designed in the abstract with little or no thought to the above mentioned elements, on bulldozed sites, with powerful air-conditioning systems, and no verandas or roof eves to speak of) demonstrates the continuing influence of a universal, centralising dogma in the realm of built place. As summer temperatures start to climb into the 40°C range all these air-conditioners start to hum in unison, which in turn raises the susceptibility of the supporting infrastructure to collapse under the weight of an overbearing electrical load. The McMansion is a clear example of a built form that is envisioned more so in a drafting room, a space where the architect is remote-sensing the locational specificities. In this envisioning (driven more by a direct line-of-sight idiom dominant in “flat datum” and economic considerations rather than architectural or experiential ones), the tactile is subordinated, which is the subject of Frampton’s sixth point: It is symptomatic of the priority given to sight that we find it necessary to remind ourselves that the tactile is an important dimension in the perception of built form. One has in mind a whole range of complementary sensory perceptions which are registered by the labile body: the intensity of light, darkness, heat and cold; the feeling of humidity; the aroma of material; the almost palpable presence of masonry as the body senses it own confinement; the momentum of an induced gait and the relative inertia of the body as it traverses the floor; the echoing resonance of our own footfall. (28) The point here is clear: in its wider recognition of, and the foregrounding of my body’s full range of sensate capacities in relation to both natural and built space, the critical regionalist approach to built form spreads its meaning-making capacities across a broader range of knowledge modalities. This tactility is further elaborated in more thoroughly personal ways by Margaret Morse in her illuminating essay, “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam”. Paradoxically, this synaesthetic, syncretic approach to bodily meaning-making in a built place, regional milieu intensely concentrates the site-centred locus of everyday life, while simultaneously, the electronic knowledge that increasingly underpins it expands both my body’s and its region’s knowledge-making possibilities into a global gestalt, sometimes even a cosmological one. It is a paradoxical transformation that makes us look anew at social, cultural and political givens, even objective and empirical understandings, especially as they are articulated through national frames of reference. Domestic built space then is a kind of micro-version of the multi-function polis where work, pleasure, family, rest, public display and privacy intermingle. So in both this reduction and expansion in the constitution of domestic home life, one that increasingly represents the location of the production of knowledge, built place represents a concentration of energy that forces us to re-imagine border-making, order, and the dynamic interplay of nomadic movement and sedentary return, a point that echoes Nicolas Rothwell’s comment that “every exile has in it a homecoming” (80). Albeit, this is a knowledge-making milieu with an expanded range of modalities incorporated and expressed through a wide range of bodily intensities not simply cognitive ones. Much of the ambiguous discontent manifested in McMansion style domiciles across many Western countries might be traced to the fact that their occupants have had little or no say in the way those domiciles have been designed and/or constructed. In Heidegger’s terms, they have not thought deeply enough about “dwelling” in that building, although with the advent of the media room the question of whether a “building” securely borders both “dwelling” and “thinking” is now open to question. As anxieties over border-making at all scales intensifies, the complexities and un/sureties of natural and built space take ever greater hold of the psyche, sometimes through the advance of a “high level of critical self-consciousness”, a process Frampton describes as a “double mediation” of world culture and local conditions (21). Nearly all commentators warn of a nostalgic, romantic or a sentimental regionalism, the sum total of which is aimed at privileging the local/regional and is sometimes utilised as a means of excluding the global or universal, sometimes even the national (Berry 67). Critical regionalism is itself a mediating factor between these dispositions, working its methods and practices through my own psyche into the local, the regional, the national and the global, rejecting and/or accepting elements of these domains, as my own specific context, in its multiplicity, demands it. If the politico-economic and cultural dimensions of this global/regional world have tended to undermine the process of border-making across a range of scales, we can see in domestic forms of built place the intense residue of both their continuing importance and an increased dependency on this electro-mediated world. This is especially apparent in those domiciles whose media rooms (with their satellite dishes, telephone lines, computers, television sets, games consuls, and music stereos) are connecting them to it in virtuality if not in reality. Indeed, the thought emerges (once again keeping in mind Eric Leed’s remark on the literate-configured sense of autonomy that is further enhanced by a separate physical address and residence) that the intense importance attached to domestically orientated built place by globally/regionally orientated peoples will figure as possibly the most viable means via which this sense of autonomy will transfer to electronic forms of knowledge. If, however, this here domestic habitué turns his gaze away from the screen that transports me into this global/regional milieu and I focus my attention on the physicality of the building in which I dwell, I once again stand in the presence of another beginning. This other beginning is framed diagrammatologically by the building’s architectural plans (usually conceived in either an in-situ, autochthonous, or a universal manner), and is a graphical conception that anchors my body in country long after the architects and builders have packed up their tools and left. This is so regardless of whether a home is built, bought, rented or squatted in. Ihab Hassan writes that, “Home is not where one is pushed into the light, but where one gathers it into oneself to become light” (417), an aphorism that might be rephrased as follows: “Home is not where one is pushed into the country, but where one gathers it into oneself to become country.” For the in-and-out-and-around-and-about domestic dweller of the twenty-first century, then, home is where both regional and global forms of country decisively enter the soul via the conduits of the virtuality of digital flows and the reality of architectural footings. 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