The switchboard operator’s bad case of off-topic
I wander the web. Sometimes for hours on end. I read about something somewhere, then I click the links and move on somewhere else. Sometimes I read about something that interest me on one site, type a couple of phrases into Google, and move on, going wherever my fancy takes me. After a couple of hours I forget what started me on this wander in the first place.
Going off-topic
I had a primary school teacher named Mr Farebrother. He was also a character in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Mr Farebrother used to rattle on to us in class in a sort of stream of consciousness. He would famously go off-topic, constantly linking one thing to another, before he would stop and say, “Wait, what is it we are meant to be talking about, we’ve gone off-topic again.”
I loved that term. Off-topic. Offtopic. The guilty way he would say it. It sounded like a rare tropical disease that had suddenly broken out all over our skin. We would need to be rushed to the school nurse because we had suddenly gone offtopic.
As a 10-year-old I marveled at Mr Farebrother’s ability to go off-topic. He would wave his hands about like some sort of sorcerer conjuring up invisible chains that could link one thing to the next. We would start talking about mosquito larvae and end up talking about the dark side of the moon, yet it never felt we had jumped from one topic to the next, it was a smooth and seamless meander across the world of knowledge.
Off-topic is where I wanted to go. On-topic always felt like we were standing still. Stagnant. I wanted to wander out of the stuffy confines of the classroom into the buzzing laneways of the off-topic metropolis.
But I wasn’t allowed out. Off-topic wasn’t learning. Off-topic was wasting time. As I entered high school, I was coached into keeping on-topic in my examination essays. My essays would return with large blocks of text crossed out with red pen, sometimes accompanied with an ‘irrelevant’ scrawled next to the offending paragraphs, but more often than not, just a simple question mark. A question mark that queried why 19th century poetry was relevant to the escalation of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The switchboard operator
At art school I had a little more freedom, off-topic was even encouraged. My theory lecturer John Conomos would often say to us that as artists and thinkers of the 21st century, we needed to act as switchboard operators, taking up one idea and connecting to another idea across the other side of the board.
In his essay ‘The Moving Image and the Academy’ that was included in the catalogue to an exhibition I was featured in,’Who Do We think You Are’, Conomos elaborated on his imagery of the switchboard operator. Conomos says that a ‘mercurial interdisciplinary approach’ needs to be undertaken that resembles ‘Michel Serre’s multi-faceted comparativism that is based on the zig-zag pattern of a fly.’
This means having the inventive ability to traverse across many spaces of interference located between many different things making different connections. Serre’s distinctive indifference to temporal distance suggests that he can make unpredictable connections (all within the same time frame) between numerous authors, texts, genres and myths.
For Serres the past is never out of date nor is an artform like classical narrative cinema or video art: like Hermes (the operator who brings things together) Serre’s provocative concept of theory as a rapid reflexive time machine scanning texts and signs across different artistic, cultural and temporarl contexts implies a fluid capacity to treat complex subjects conceptualised to be the result of noise, chaos and chance with lightness, speed and simplicity.
We need to be switchboard operators across culture, space and time, border crossers without a passport, always questioning our own cultural baggage. Conomos (2005)
As I wander across the web I often remember these words of John Conomos. The era of instant information led to a vast scattering of knowledge. I always thought this new structure of knowledge, this surface knowledge, was similar to stretching across a spill. Knowledge had tumbled out of its containers. Jars that had sat on dusty shelves with labels stuck on, identifying this particular field of knowledge from that particular field of knowledge. In the past you could only open one jar at a time. Stay on topic. But now the jars have all tumbled off their shelves and we are left to play Twister in the puddle. Reaching one arm over here, splashing another leg over there. We attempt to join the big red dots and big yellow dots in the hope we can create a clear picture, but soon we collapse as we over reach. It was such a clumsy metaphor, in more ways than one, that I would always attempt to reframe my role as web wanderer as that of switchboard operator. As a switchboard operator I seemed to have some semblance of control.
When I began my PhD this year, the concept of finding a niche to specialise in terrified me. I had to make an ‘original contribution to knowledge’ and I felt it involved scouring the shelves of jars to find one jar that was still half empty. I could then get to work and fill it. Deep knowledge. On topic. It seemed arcane. The world isn’t like that anymore, those in the ivory towers have been usurped, for better or worse. So I decided to be a switchboard operator and work with what I know. Surface knowledge. Revel in the off-topic.
The danger is that the puddle will be too shallow.