In my graduate course last night, we were discussing the idea of a particular subjective state, what you might call being “in the zone.” This is generally a sports metaphor, but we were thinking more broadly of an energetic, creative-cognitive state where your ideas are flowing, and taking you places. After class, Dean, one of the students in the course, mentioned a sports pscyhologist friend of his at Cornell who has spent a great deal of time disputing the possibility of “being in the zone,” apparently as something that lacks measurability and scientific rigor. From what I was getting, it would seem the argument would be that you might be successful and you might feel something that you call being “in the zone,” but the feeling does not produce the success. That is, I don’t think anyone could deny that we all have creative and productive streaks and that they can generate a feeling of exhiliration. But you might want to discount the idea that the feeling produces the creativity. However, it may be that the differences here are more fundamental. Presented with this objection, I would say that the error is stating that one can be in the zone. That is, the problem is with defining the affect of the zone as a state of being. When we are dealing with Barthes’ concept of the punctum as we are in Internet Invention, we are confronting an affect (a feeling) that’s intensity cuts across senses, that cannot be fully articulated in language (and here this ineffability ties new media to psychedelic experiences). Another philosopher, Brian Massumi, describes this experience, this feeling, of the escaping affect as the sensation of freedom, of free will. However, since we are looking at something that is ineffable, it is not something we can attribute to a determinable state like being. Grammar fails us here because we are seemingly stuck with the construction “I am _____.” However, conceptually, we can shift from the mode of “being” to the mode of “becoming” as Deleuze and Guattari do (drawing on Bergson and others). So becoming-zone, zoning out: an interesting juxtaposition as the represent heightened energy and zero-degree energy, but both rely on an extra-consciousness state. So the function of the widesite is not the be in the zone but to become-creative, to generate and participate in an an event of becoming-the zone.

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