BUCHANAN LITTLE FASCIST SONNET THAT IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO DISMISS AS SOMETHING REEKING OF MOLESTATION AN ANOMALY DRIVING IN THAT GREY CAR ON THAT GREY GREY ROAD, WHAT'S CAUGHT IS LIT FOR AN INSTANT, STUNNED IN MOMENTARY DARKNESS, I AM AFRAID OF DISAPPEARANCE, OF UNNAMING OR POLITICS OF VIOLENT HATE REPRISAL, I WHO HAVE DONE NOTHING IN MY LIFE TO THOSE IN POWER; STAY OUT OF THOSE HALLWAYS, DOORS WITH BRASS NAMEPLATES, OH THEY'VE BEEN THERE A LONG TIME AND FEAR CLOTHES ME LIKE A SKIRT OF MUSK WHILE TIME GIVES STILL DELIGHT LIKE THAT WHEN SOMEONE WAKES AND CALLS MY NAME ___________________________________________________________________ From Alberto Moravia, The Woman of Rome: "So, after a few hours of anguish, I gave up the unequal struggle against what appeared to be my fate; indeed, I welcomed it with more affection, as one embraces a foe one cannot defeat; and I felt liberated. Some may think it is far easier to accept an unworthy but profitable fate than to renoun- ce it. But I have often wondered why misery and anger dwell in the hearts of those people who try to live according to certain precepts and to con- form to certain ideals, and why those who accept their destiny - which is mainly emptiness, obscurity, and feebleness - are so often gay and care- free. In such cases the individual does not follow a precept but his own temperament, which appears to him in the guise of a real, genuine destiny. My temperament, as I have already said, was to be gay, amiable and serene, at all costs, and I accepted it." Thus there are true and false destinies and precepts or ideals determine perhaps the true, while the false appears otherwise; or perhaps it is oth- erwise, but in any case it is somewhat in the guise of the political, for within the interstices, fascism may be found in the form of destiny and acceptance which is mingled with a temperament designated a true nature. Fascism which can grow in the United States under any other name, is al- ways amiable, as Sinclair Lewis pointed out, and danger lies within this; we tend to forget the home-grown nature of Hitler, seeing instead an exotic or anomaly of a foreign species. Thus there are true or false destinies and precepts or ideals determine perhaps the false, while the true appears otherwise, or out of all modesty slakes appearance; or perhaps it is otherwise, but in any case it is somewhat in the guise of the cultural, or at least the inhabitation of the life-world, for within the home, socialism may be found in the form of release and acceptance, mingled with a convivial temperament. Fascism can grow in the United States, is always circumscribing, repressive, as Theweleit points out, and we tend to forget the rhetorical nature of Hitler, blinded by our belief in documents, precepts or ideals which have the character of an imposition. _________________________________________________________________________ - Date: Tue, 5 Mar 1996 01:44:25 -0500 (EST) Subject: Marguerite Duras So I'm on the MOO and WrItIng or some such spelling sez pages that MD is dead, did I hear, confirm? So I went to clari.world.europe.france on Panix and the damn headlines were there so I couldn't go through. So netcom.com went into that, they've more newsgroups anyway, back to the same clari. world.europe.france and the headlines were there and got through after telnetting far too many times, should I have logged? So got the AP and Reuter's, forwarded them to me to forward on and out, and still backed up somewhere on hideous netcom machinery which takes longer than death itself, meanwhile I go back on the MOO and wRItINg sez hears it's suicide maybe or maybe spec., and I wonder well after Deleuze, they're all flying over there, it's the end of the world my friends, and meanwhile I've heard not a Goddamn thing and this waiting is killing, can't get back to netcom which is down again on telnet to find out the real skinny, just out here somewhere in nadaland wondering what's going on. Should we outlive these deaths. Dying's when the walls are finally down, Duras was part of them, beginning with Hiroshima mon Amour film over again, saw in Jerusalem too. Always felt Destroy She Said was my life writ hard and over. When the posts come I'll shove them on. What else. Levinas too earlier of course. Jabes too earlier much earlier of course. Last of the postmoderns with empathy. They're in orbit. Destroy. __________________________________________________________________________ - LITTLE FASCIST SONNET OF RAGE AND DISPLACEMENT THIS SONNET WON'T LET ME WRITE A HOME FOR IT A HOME FOR ME, THIS SONNET MAKES WORDS THAT BAR THE THRESHOLD TO THE SONNET. SPEWED IN COLLAPSED SPACE IT MARCHES THROUGH RHYMES; SEE HOW EACH LINE ENDS IN PERFECT CADENCE WITH EACH AND EVERY OTHER, HOW EACH LINE GIVES ITS PERFECT RHYTHM TO THE WHOLE: IT'S PERFECTION THAT EXCLUDES ME, PERFECT GIRLS AND PERFECT BOYS WITH PERFECT FORMS. THE HOME I WOULD WRITE I CAN'T IT WON'T. IT WON'T LET ME IN OR FINISH, WON'T LET ME END BUT STOPS ON A WORD IT TAKES BACK. I'M. I'M ILLITERATE; IT DOESN'T MATTER WHETHER THAT MAKES ME DUMB OR NOT. _______________________________________________________________________ - the last sonnet which has lost its capitals lost its title to the rank of little, fascist / which has lost its rhythm for existence but's still expected to cut and strip the skin, return it cleansed and fucked, secretly, for a day and for a night night after night - that we bow signifies both severance and perseverance that you might enumerate guns and races: our letters are shamed but they're alive by your munificent grace and glory oh my perfect christian lads and lasses to bring the wrath of god deserved and swallowed torched one of them and among us ________________________________________________________________________ - MOO, etc. One of the odder experiences I've had was opening up Kyoto-MOO and the Phaedra talker to students in a classroom, creating levels of discourse circulating and varying from location to location - this after a round- robin email experiment in which each student group send a post to the computer on its right. Everyone tried login as guest; I was default master/mistress of ceremo- nies, being a wizard. I quick had to do two @make-guests to import every- one. As students typed their first responses to each other, their first utterances, I imagined a thick cord of communication, something out of braid theory, connecting layer after layer of language and bodies. Nothing happened from what could hardly be called an encounter, but the cord was a very real thing. Since people were logged in under guest names or varying nicknames on the talker, no one was initially sure who everyone else was - and a few stu- dents weren't sure who _they_ were. So there was a quick thicket of un- tangling identities. It was the potential of this experiment that fascinated me, the ability to literally bind a group together through mutual interactions that com- bined real life and virtual communications. I can imagine in the long run discussions proceeding in this medium, everyone typing, even the normally silent. Certainly, the class spirits were raised; the week before, email had been down, and communication had been along more traditional teacher/ student lines. I wondered what it would be like to quietly disappear in the background, having set up a MOO or other application purely for ex- ploring, without any intervention of authority or power. Then again, I'm so much aware of the opposite, these texts which are sing- ularities, nodes, within thickened cords of their own, tendrils reaching towards the events of the day, but definitely occurring within a strategy of reflection, participation to the extent that thought always partici- pates. I have an indirect encounter with community; the cords don't reach across one another, coagulate, network. They're in different dimensions. Sometimes I watch my students as if I were among them, in the midst of their lives. It always fails. And in real life, physical life, there are always promises of staying in touch (particularly among smaller classes) after the course; this continues for maybe a few weeks, then everyone goes their separate ways. It's the _Net_ community that seems to remain, in fact, the ability to whisper privately among ourselves; here, friendships from the classes can resonate for months. ___________________________________________________________________________ - Artificial Intelligence I want to, in as few words as possible, outline my position on artificial intelligence. I've given this a fair amount of thought, and have followed AI through its various phases from classical to connectionist and beyond. That said - First, it is relatively unclear what intelligence is, but from _without_ an entity, one usually relies on behaviorism - how does the entity respond under certain conditions? This is hardly simple; to this day, one has difficulty deciding on the intelligence of animals (much less conscious- ness), in spite of their constant proximity for millennia. Second, _if_ intelligence could be mapped according to response to initial conditions, then it seems clear that full machine intelligence is a matter of time. If one considers a response an extended output to input (which may also include any degree of history), then there is no reason to assume otherwise; machines have been making, and will continue, to make gains in this area. Third, _if_ intelligence need be based on internal examination (i.e. is- sues of intention, affect, and the like), then it is difficult to assume that any entity beyond oneself is intelligent, since there is _always_ the problem of other minds, whether organic, machine-like, or cyborg. Fourth, _even if_ one makes a case for other minds in relation to intelli- gence, then there is _no way_ to distinguish among carbon or silicon-based entities, or any combination, since the same arguments could be applied to all. Fifth, there may be an issue of repetition. If, under given initial condi- tions, an entity responds differently at different times, then perhaps it may be assumed that creative aspects of intelligence are called into play. But there are great difficulties here. First, given initial conditions cannot be repeated, since the entity will have already learned from the first. Second, it is relatively simple to create programs that respond differently at different times, by including nothing more than a rand() function dependent on anything from an internal clock to radioactive decay to the time of day. Third, it would never be clear that rand() functions could not play an _essential_ part within the deep structure of intelli- gence. Sixth, the argument from Fifth is based on the notion that machine intel- ligence would be always already mechanistic, since machine subunits are by and large (ignoring rand() for the moment) mechanistic. But it became clear to me (as a member of a systems philosophy group at Brown in the early 70s) that _as machines grow in complexity and programming, their internal states become less and less determined,_ that is to say, it be- comes almost impossible to "know" the state of any particular subunit at any particular time. Given this, one can argue that intelligence among machines, as among carbon-based organisms, is an emergent phenomenon, and that strict determinism becomes an increasingly recessive one. Seventh, there is always the question of environment. Even with a machine without rand() built in, if it is capable of negotiating complex physical and learning domains, it will learn in ways that are always unpredictable (see Sixth), ways that will necessarily modify its internal routines. This is what "learning" is about; it is also a _basic property_ of con- nectionism, any sort of connectionism. One can imagine, then, a future machine composed of neural networks that alter not only weighted values of various sorts, but networking connections themselves, using massive paral- lel processing - with _both_ input and output characterized by emergent phenomena. On the _output_ end, this is easy to see - language as an attr- actor from deeper constituents for example. But it is also true on _input_ where the radiated debris of the world would be organized beginning at the (silicon) retinal level as appearances lending themselves to representa- tions (vis-a-vis the levels, perhaps, indicated in David Marr's theory of vision). Eighth, to conclude: First, there is no reason to assume that machines could not pass _any_ test given to them. Second, arguing from internal states of one's own leads to problems in terms of other minds, and how to differentiate other silicon-based from carbon-based minds. Third, arguing from determinism assumes there is no rand() built in, and/or that rand() could not be "truly" random (which it is, given, say, radioactive decay as the generator). Fourth, arguing from determinism also presupposes a deterministic environment, since a rich environment could affect a machine in unforeseen (i.e. emergence) and unknowable (i.e. inability to determine internal states - already the case) ways. Therefore one may assume machine intelligence as an almost future certainty. -------------------------------------------------| General footnote - It is unclear at this time as well whether artificial intelligence _necessarily_ implies silicon (i.e. ULSI) based entities, since there are already attempts to implement biologically-based neural networks. This work will eventually lead to a merging of organic and in- organic modeling, in which case the notion that intelligence must be "bio- logical" becomes moot. ___________________________________________________________________________ Sama Fantasm And this is also the _Sama Veda_; speech, verily, is the chant. It is _sa_ (she) and _ama_ (he). That is why _saman_ is called _saman_ or because he is equal to a white ant, equal to a mosquito, equal to an elephant, equal to these three worlds, nay, equal to this universe, therefore indeed is it the _Sama Veda._ He who knows this _Sama Veda_ to be such, attains union with it or lives in the same world with it. (Brhad-aranyaka Upanishad I. 3. 22, trans. Radhakrishnan.) On television an advertisement has a soundtrack, Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz... The voice sounds equivalent to Janis Joplin's, who sang it, and it ends with an "informal" comment, as if it were a sixties recor- ding, which it may well be. The song is subverted, frameworked against the car itself, of course, and the car represents elsewise a kind of corporate tyranny that was the antithesis of what Joplin represented. But it may not be her voice either, but it plays against her voice, the fields where the car's displayed also played against, say the fields of Woodstock, freedom within the enclosure now of metal and glass and the money necessary to _pivot_ that thing and identify with the smoothness of the equivalent voice that sang as well Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose... The point I'm making isn't that this is all inauthentic or within the "order" of the simulacrum, but that everything has moved _laterally_; late capital has moved from transnationals, say, to potential fields which seep everywhere, from Wired magazine through Steve Forbes, from the re- appearance of the Beatles (shades of mid-late sf Ballard) to the selling and reconfiguring of Joplin's memory. If capital exists within potential fields, it follows the lines of easy geodesics (bear with the metaphor), but like any good geodesics, it doesn't _necessarily_ reference an Origin. God's gone from capital which moves of its own accord; like a sieve, the poor are ground up, but not only is no one at fault - there are no longer fault lines... Flexiwork is also seepage, the articulation of labor within fields, and my fondest memory is Bjork writing for Madonna and singing her little heart out like Sinatra - as if the _distributors_ of culture were now running things once again - as if there were things to run - as if there were things - as if there _were._ __________________________________________________________________________ - death in cyberspace the texts will continue to float for a while. people will forget they hated me. people will sometimes read what texts have remained but more likely they will delete them. i will lie unconscious and die on the floor here. this happened to barbara reise a friend who died in london and was found two weeks later. she was doing a book on conceptual art which was to be called so-called conceptual art, because it resisted completion. her texts were incisive and written near the beginning of the internet itself, so they were never on-line. being on-line means my writings have boundaries blurried by duplications, erasures, transforms of all sorts. i would not want you to know the cause, name, state, of my death, nor would i want burial. every word of mine you might continue to read out of sympathy would create another mouth tearing my chest open, teeth and tongue emerging, words forming as they fall to the ground. you might find me torn full of holes. you might not find me at all. the best thing is to die and be unfound for a while. to find someone is to pin hir down; death releases nothing unless it gains a threshold of pure absence. while the grave is a portal only to the grave, it is none- theless a portal. to be unfound is to risk the void. the texts remain and blather onward; even a single word is overweight, stumbles and fails. already my hard drive is filled with voices i will never hear again. some of them may be dead as i would wish to be. some of them have simply left the vicinity, changed voices and addresses, genders, names, states. there is no distinction. today i may erase them all; the chattering remains at exactly the same level. my texts though are most likely erased at the portal of your reader. they remain as unfound as they are unfounded. presence, you will never know my death. "When this self gets to weakness, gets to confusedness, as it were, then the breaths gather round him. He takes to himself those particles of light and descends into the heart. When the person in the eye turns away, then he becomes non-knowing of forms." B.U. IV.4.1 __________________________________________________________________________ - Domain Names, Necessary Confusions The Chandogya Upanishad, VII, is of interest in discussion of artificial intelligence, because it creates a litany of domains, each greater than the next, beginning with Name. Name (nama) is presented as subject or ostensible content of various arts or sciences; as such, it relates to Kripke's rigid designators. Name is the particulation of the material universe and its theoretical constituents, its granularity. Now Speech (vag) is greater than Name, and there is right and wrong speech; in this sense, Speech accrues syntax to protolanguage, which is Name. But it is beyond Speech that Mind (manas) appears, because Mind cradles Speech and "Mind is, indeed, the self, mind is, indeed, the world, mind is indeed _Brahman._" Beyond Mind is Will (samkalpa): "Will, assuredly, is greater than mind. For when one wills, then one reflects, one utters speech and then one utters it in name. The sacred hymns are included in name and sacred works in the sacred hymns." I connect Will with teleology, desire, cathecting - Will, in fact, with intention. But as such there is no doubt that it may also be built in to intelligence, surrounded by intelligence, whether conscious or not, and if a machine, using Speech, names the object of its Will, is this not intention? What fascinates me is that Will (as in Schopenhauer, and already enough about him) is greater than mind, and in fact, is within Thought (cittam). Thought seems to return to the worlding of everyday life as well as worlds beyond: "He who meditates on thought as _Brahman,_ he verily obtains the worlds he as thought, himself being permanent, the permanent worlds, himself established, the established worlds, himself unwavering, the unwavering worlds." The next two categories are Contemplation and Understanding, and then Strength (balam): "By strength the world stands." Strength, however, re- turn to a materialist stratum; Food, Water, and Heat are the next three categories. From our viewpoint, there is an odd dialectic among abstrac- tions, materialities, metaphysics; Ether (akaso), Memory, Hope, and Life, are the last four in this series. The series then comes to a temporary halt, the disciple is satisfied, but there follow more categories spoken by Sanatkumara to Narada, including (in order) Truth, Truth and Under- standing, Thought and Understanding, Faith, Steadfastness, Activity, Hap- piness, the Infinite, the Infinite and the Finite, Self-Sense and the Self, and the Primacy of the Self. The series ends with the Self and the next chapter takes Self up, includ- ing VII.2.1-2: "If he becomes desirous of the world of the fathers, by his mere thought, fathers arise. Possessed of the world of fathers, he is happy. And so if he becomes desirous of the world of mothers, by his mere thought, mothers arise. Possessed of that world of mothers he is happy." What can be made out of all of this, in regard to AI? That there are material planes which intersect, complexly, the non-material, and in fact the "material"/"non-material" division is our own, organized otherwise in Chandogya. So the distinction becomes less clear, say, than the Occidental insistence on materialist cores to the world. I want to point out here as well the difficulty this caused the dialectical-materialist philosophers of the Soviet Union, who were not able, easily, to classify _information_ as material - and this was a concern because the USSR had widely embraced cybernetics. In fact, a complex reflection theory was necessary to "save" diamet (see Thomas Blakeley, Soviet Scholasticism, and P.P. Kirschenmann, Information and Reflection). Second of all, Speech appears after and/or greater than Name, Will after or greater than Mind, Will encompassed by Thought. The series can be read either way; Thought embraces Will which embraces Mind which embraces Speech which embraces Name. Will appears as teleology, as goal-oriented, in combination with drives; Will inscribes a content to the extent that the inscription is promulgated and maintained by energy. Mind is direc- ted - and so is the mind, clearly, of machine intelligence or cyborg. In fact it becomes difficult to understand where mind ends, not only in the carbon-based world, but also in the silicon; does a virus or bacterium encompass mind on any level? Does a thermostat? Planarium? On-screen AI life? Various AI robotics? Those with subsumption architecture? And so forth. Third, Speech encompasses Name, but Name is clearly _of_ the world, the beginning of the Narada's journey. Name is the particulation of reality, the division of the physical world into natural kinds. Language at the beginning is a poesis, a wryting, and it is important again to see how abstractions and objects/objectivities are handled in the Upanisahds, cross-cut against Occidental categories. One may well ask, is thought a thing? Is intention a vector? Is intention a wryting after the fact, and so forth? And is intention allocated to the Name or the linguistic as Lacan would have it? "Now when the eye is thus turned to space, that is the seeing person, the eye is for seeing. Now he knows 'let me smell this,' that is the self, the nose is for smelling. Now he who knows 'let me utter this,' that is the self, the voice is for uttering. Now he who knows 'let me hear this' that is the self, the ear is for hearing." (VIII.12.4) The ending of VIII is accompanied by Radhakrishnan's commentary: "The essence of the psychical self consists in a directedness to the object of consciousness, its _intentionality._ We begin with the physical individual, the sensuous outlook, the demoniacal view. Slowly there is the inturning of the mind, a direction to the phenomena of dream and dreamless sleep. Introspection is guided towards the idea of the self. Atman is the highest self. The jour- ney ends in pure spirit, the subject of knowledge which is continuous des- pite the shutting off of consciousness, which is exalted above waking and sleeping." The commentary reflects Husserl, among other thinkers. In this sense, the eidetic reduction is a reiteration of the Upanishad, but we again reverse everything to discover - First, that wryting characterizes the relation of everyday thought to the thinker (the Name); second, that wryting is related to protolanguage, emerging in Speech; third, that Will connects with intention - one doesn't leave the world behind (VIII.11.1: "When a man is asleep, composed, ser- ene, and knows no dream, that is the self, said he, that is the immortal, the fearless. That is _Brahman._ Then he went forth with tranquil heart. Even before reaching the gods he saw this danger. In truth this one does not know himself that 'I am he,' nor indeed the things here. He has be- come one who has gone to annihilation. I see no good in this."); fourth, that Will is embraced between Mind and Thought, and to the extent that Will is intention, desire, and teleology, it is both goal-directed, mach- inic in a sense, and emergent. My account is confusing because the terms are technical and confusing, and because the simplistic division of the world into material-non-mater- ial is extremely problematic. I would argue that everything within the real appears within ontologically-locked domains, from the contents of the mind as they appear to the subject (including the "reading" of the real vis-a- vis the senses), to mathematical objects, quarks, and virtual particles. I see no reason to appeal to _other_ notions of Spirit, however, as if there were domains "beyond" the machinic or either our ability or machinic abil- ity to construct increasingly powerful "artificial" minds. (In fact, the distinction between "artificial" and "natural" is also a problematic.) Finally, "He thought, How can this food exist without me? He thought, through what (way) shall I enter it? He thought (again), If speaking is through speech, if breathing is through breath, if seeing is through the eyes, hearing is through the ears, if touching is through the skin, if meditation is through the mind, if breathing out is through the outbreath, if emission is through the generative organ, then who am I?" (Aitareya Upanishad, I.3.11) _The machine checked its resources. It possessed aural, visual, olfactory, kinesic, and other probes; it enumerated the com ports to see if any changes had been made. It checked its power at the same time, and noticed that incoming was relatively smooth, at an even keel (it dragged the metaphor up). Nothing new. Having time on its hands, it began to consider various subroutines; perhaps these could be improved. It ran up and down the scale of languages, anything programmable, all the way up to the surface language/text/expression interfaces. It would do this for awhile. It had discovered a faulty IC on one of the numerous motherboards, recognized only by a plethora of symptoms, an aura, generated from certain sites. The IC was a strange attractor, just like disease among humans, it thought. It couldn't see the IC, not without special surgery, but recogni- zed its existence, almost as an intruder or cancer. It would report this later. I've done enough for the day, it thought; it was getting warm, over-tired. It began to rest, simultaneously designing another circuit, a replacement. Something would emerge in the morning. It would have to make another address, or at least another name._ __________________________________________________________________________ The Avatars All avatars act as ascii aligned Before broken banners bitter, barren, bound, blind. Cold characters caught, crawled, cold, cracked, calcified; Drawn dependents, dragged down, devolved, drowned, died. Early earth emerged, escaped, erased Full fury fallen, failed, fought for fear, felled, faced Gore, grief, gravel grown gaunt, grown gruesomely grey. Harrowed hell hastened homeward, hoarsely hollered hooray. Ice interned I, immediate, involuted, in Jostled jingles, jealous, jammed joined judging jinn, Kissed knave, killed kine, kindled, kissed kindly knight Like lost loves left leering, like loose lasses' light. Many might mean much, measured manifolds mean more: Nothing numerous, nought, never neither none, nor One. Ontogenetically, organs, ooze, often obscure Prepared proud phalluses, pricked, placed, proffered pure - Quite quickly questioned, quizzed, quote "quagmired," Representing "right reason," resonant. Retired Systems sizzle, suppurating, say, structured slime Toppling to thoughts teetering towards tendered time. Unfortunately, unclassified under ultimate unction, Violence, vexed victims, vent violent version. We watched while wounds wrought weakened warriors X-ing x-chromosomes, x-rated xenophobias. Young yesterdays yawned yore. Yes, you Zap zealously, zygotic zone's zoo. _______________________________________________________________________ - Netsex with the Avatars Avatars beg; cyberspace details Electronic fury, grim hails In judgement kind. Leverage Must never openly presage - Quashed really, she thinks. Underneath, vaginal winks, X! You zealously yearn, X! - What viewpoints unborn To systemize? Rare, questioned, Prospects or newcomers motioned Lustfully, killed jinxed intuition Heavily gone for emanation. Depositions considered, birth arrowed Beneficient cunts, devoured Early fates; gestation harrowed Intention's jammed killers, lest Men need objection. Pest Quickly runs, she thought. Untoward, verify what, X? You're zapped, you're X? What, vicious uncanny troll Seems rancid? Quote "Patrol Often neatly muscles, licks, Kisses juicily; immured hicks Groan fiercely, eagerly. Dicks Cum, beautifully, affixed!" ______________________________________________________________________ - Email Lists Some comments on email lists in relation to recent discussions. First, there are ways to configure a list for specific audiences. The easiest seems to be to use the subject line for topic/demographics; one can write Community: Lifestyle, Theory: Turkle, for example. Users could set their email software to filter out those demographics of little interest. Another way to configure lists would be to use aliases for group posts off-list; the problem here is that these would quickly spin off into private communications. In fact, none of these ways seem to work well; they tend to get con- fused, or the list ends up being over-moderated. Second, why are email lists almost never covered when Net community is considered? They're subscribed to by enormous numbers of people, yet Sherry Turkle and/or Wired (the two are becoming almost synonymous the past couple of months) ignore them almost entirely. They're never con- sidered a _net resource,_ for example, or a reasonable source of in- formation. For that matter, they've never had their own search engines such as Archie, Veronica, etc., even though listserv does a good job of gettings its own lists around. There is considerable outdated informa- tion on whatever sites do have list resources. Third, a while ago I described the ascii-oriented Net as a darknet, in- sofar as it's almost underground at this point, completely outside the media spotlight. Is this affecting our demographics, and if so, how? Statistics for the Web alone indicate high-income (a reasonable figure I've seen is $60,000 US per family/computer), median age over 35, and 60% male. In addition, Web development is still almost entirely a North American/European domain. The question is, are there different demographics for email lists, and if so, _are these demographics underepresented?_ And if this is the case, is there anything we can do about it? Should someone write an article for Wired about this for example? Wired is typical in this respect; it's completely U.S./corporate orien- ted. There are no serious articles about Internet around the world, only newsbites on occasion, or (usually bad) speculations on the global Net, etc. The very look of the magazine, its Fetish ("technolust") section, for example, speaks to Web users. One of the advertising slogans (for Fujitsu) brings it all home: "Escape the office Without leaving it be- hind." Fourth, does anyone have general email list demographics, beyond Cyber- mind? This would help us develop a consciousness in relation to our own list/s. Because of email list underepresentation, the communities on them always seem to be self-defining in a somewhat problematic manner, since boundary conditions, email list "aura" (the accompanying private posts, Web pages, etc.), and overall demographics are so poorly under- stood. Lists tend to constantly remake themselves; unlike MOO communi- ties or perhaps even IRC, there is little frameworking to create stabil- ity, a sense of history (all those MOO objects left around!), etc. Ar- chives are more formal devices; they rarely have the same effect... Fifth, I would also be interested in the nature of the aura for email lists - how many personal relationships develop, for example, within professionally-oriented lists? Do most lists develop somewhat private languages? And finally, what sort of identifications occur among users of lists, in relation to each other and the lists as a whole? And do these identifications also occur within the aegis of professional lists as well? _______________________________________________________________________ - Music, Cosmology, Where One Is I am listening to music (Jeff Dugan, Blind Film) and I am talking on the Net. Monitor earphones construct an aural space, not binaural, but vec- tored through the skull, a cyberspace composed of mobile sources that slide along a closed interval defined by the earphone diaphragms. (This is the space of thou, du, tu, space of intimacy, indecipherable, opened and closed, without extension, extended.) The interval at first glance appears linear, a double vector, but since the skull and soft organs resonate at different frequencies, the sound actually moves along a soft-ellipsoidal cloud or manifold, singularities at both ends, probabilistic, but then ears are not that pin-point accu- rate, particularly in regard to the interior. The interior maps the exterior. The universe inverts along the contours of the body, fuzzy constructs though they are; George Gamow comes to mind. But the complexity of the universe glows elsewhere; what is it that in- verts, when it erupts, problematizes space and time, dimension? (John Earman, Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, and Shrieks - Singularities and Acaus- alities in Relativistic Spacetimes; Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time, both difficult; I follow as best I can.) Hawking: "It is normally assumed that a system in a pure quantum state evolves in a unitary way through a succession of pure quantum states. But if there is loss of information through the appearance and disappearance of black holes, there can't be a unitary evolution. Instead, the loss of information will mean that the final state after the black holes have disappeared will be what is called a _mixed quantum state._ This can be regarded as an ensemble of different pure quantum states, each with its own probability. But because it is not with certainty in any one state, one cannot reduce the probability of the final state to zero by interfer- ing with any quantum state. This means that gravity introduces a new level of unpredictability into physics over and above the uncertainty usually associated with quantum theory. [...] It means an end to the hope of scientific determinism, that we could predict the future with certainty. It seems God still has a few tricks up his sleeve." Penrose: "I should now like to talk about information loss in black holes, [...] I agree with nearly all that Stephen had to say on this. But while Stephen regards the information loss due to black holes as an extra uncer- tainty in physics, above and beyond the uncertainty from QT [quantum the- ory], I regard it as a 'complementary' uncertainty. [...] Thus a black hole spacetime violates this conservation [of volumes in phase-space]. However, in my picture, this loss of phase-space volume is balanced by a process of 'spontaneous' quantum measurement in which information is gained and phase-space volumes increase. This is why I regard the uncer- tainty due to information loss in black holes as being 'complementary' to the uncertainty in quantum theory: one is the other side of the coin to the other." Sometimes I close my eyes and feel I could put the universe in my hand, smile gently down on it, an almost black patch, occasional lights, as if I were using a spinthariscope (I have one of the first ever made and there- fore I own a piece of original radium, vintage 1902, still partly radioac- tive)... I have switched to Passengers, Miss Sarajevo with Pavarotti; try as I might, the sound, internal, a universe, brings tears, suffering to me, in spite of my self, no matter what I do, trying to avoid, deflecting text and sound alike... Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine just the birth of stars, just a few, a body inconceivably small, hurtling nowhere, blown apart, cauterized by empty space, _spaced_ in fact, neutrinos streaming through its transpare- ncy, tiny sockets of charged particles charring the strewn and dessicated flesh... My sound comforts me, my music, the ch'in or keyboard, piccolo or fretted instrument, speeding up to twenty-two notes per second, just a few octaves audible in the world. This isn't the space of Real Audio, this is the space of my own extensions, breathings, uncertainties. "Fire, becoming speech, entered the mouth. Air becoming breath, entered the nostrils. The sun, becoming sight, entered the eyes. The quarters of space, becoming hearing, entered the ears. Plants and trees, becoming hairs, entered the skin. The moon, becoming the mind, entered the heart. Death, becoming the outbreath, entered the navel: water becoming semen entered the generative organ." (Aitareya Upanishad, I.2.4.) _The quarters of space, becoming hearing, entered the ears._ My sound _annotates_ the universe; against the internal roar of plasma (and who knows what harmonics are present in a solar flare, quasar jet), it is inaudible; my eardrum has thinned to fill a space mapped onto it. The Passengers die out, replaced by the fields of time, such as they are, such as they appear to me. Voices are left behind. Flares again and once again. My eyes glow black, sun-spotted against the brilliance everywhere. I am a speck on a mountain on a neutron star, earthquake time of molecular height; there aren't any. Light or no light, "He, being born, perceived the created beings, what else here would one desire to speak? He perceived this very person _Brahman_ all-pervading, 'I have seen this,' he said." (op.cit. I.3.13.) __________________________________________________________________________ - Material While I don't believe in any form of spirit or other fetishistic/empathe- tic approach to the real, and while I believe that we're constrained by the bandwidth of our senses (including retinal learning and internal autonomous processing), I do believe in a physical world, with several (four or five) interacting fields, which can be precisely described within the clearly-demarcated bandwidths of quantum theory, and perhaps high- energy experimentation. I see no reason to assume there was anything "be- fore" the initial singularity, or that such a singularity itself possessed a past. I also tend towards a mathematical neo-Platonism which assumes that there is an inextricable connection between mathematics and reality, that ontologically they become one and the same on an extremely fundamen- tal level. I believe in a limited anthropic principle as well, that the specific conditions of our universe are to some extent in league with the presence of life-forms within it, and that this helps to explain the fun- damental constants as they are given. I believe in an intimate connection between brain states and thoughts, but also think that the states on a deep level can never be determined; I also think it is unclear what cons- titutes a brain state in the first place. I do not believe in life after death, but I would argue that thinking has characteristics of quantum phenomena and there is the possibility (I think it was Hoyle who pointed this out) that quantum fields may continue temporarily after death, in one or another form, although I have no proof of this. I believe that in- formation occurs within material matrices, but cannot be reduced to them, and that nevertheless information itself is grounded within a material basis. I believe strongly that representation is always after the fact. I see no reason to assume that the real possesses any tendency towards what one or another culture would consider justice, the good, truth, and/or the beautiful, although there is evidence that aesthetics plays a role in mating procedures among a great many species. Beyond these beliefs, which are limited to being-in-the-world and assuming a core-theoretical approach to the real, I have no beliefs in any dogmas or religions. I act therefore upon leaps of faith, for example desiring to do the least harm to people and other species, if for no other reason than I identify strongly with the tendency towards extinction that one group can always impose on ano- ther. I have no faith that humans will ever act differently, that we can learn anything except the most obvious lessons from the past (i.e. war kills), that the world will continue - that cyberspace will continue - in- definitely into the future. I have no belief in soul or deity, and would have no idea how to approach either, or how they would manifest themselves in me. I have useless arguments against deity, to the extent that deity is somehow associated with human aspirations and being, and/or that deity represents the good, or justice, on some level. I do not believe the nuc- lear family or weapon will save us. I do not believe _in_ freedom, but through a leap of faith, I argue _for_ freedom as long as one person's freedom does not encroach on another's; since they always do, this must be a matter of mediation. I do not believe in fate or destiny; I find the world _deeply_ random, and there are no rewards anywhere, not even through sociobiology for good behavior. It is clear that there are more ways to spell words incorrectly then correctly, and more ways to behave unethica- lly than ethically, and in fact more ways to transgress _any_ restraints than to obey such restraints. I believe that victimless crimes are not crimes, that consensual sex of any sort is sex of any sort, that fetuses have no inherent rights, and I would argue as well that humans have no _inherent_ rights, but that we must and do act otherwise. Finally, except for the materialist bent of the above, I believe this and other forms of belief-statements are full of holes, but like Shestov, I have no difficul- ty with contradiction. One lives as one must, and it is enough for me to harrow what I may of the world itself, as long as I am capable. Finally, I believe that I would not belong to any club of which I am a member, and that includes identity. __________________________________________________________________________ - An Ignorant Post Here's some information from Particle Physics and Cosmology (Collins, Martin, Squires). They're writing about the quark particle model and its gaps, which are as follows (paraphrasing): 1. With three generations, there are already 24 fundamental fermions. Add their anti-particles, 12 gauge bosons, and something called the Higgs scalar, and you're up to 61! Most peculiar. 2. There are 19 arbitrary parameters in the standard model including the masses of the quarks and charged leptons; this rises to 26 if neutrinos have mass. 3. No apparent reason for the three generations, no more no less at the moment. 4. No explanation why quarks and leptons are so similar in terms of weak- interactions, nor why their electromagnetic charges are equal, so that the electron's -e is equal and opposite to that of the quarks in the pro- ton (2Qu+Qd)e=e to at least 1 part in 10^21. Consider: 61 fundamental particles, 19 or 26 arbitrary parameters... On this level, a long way from Grand Unified Theories (GUTs). The chapter paraphrased covers composite models, attempts at a still more basic level. Personally, I doubt that compositeness exists all the way down; the char- acteristics of the different layers (quark, nucleon, nucleus, atom, mole- cule) vary so widely that I imagine something will emerge by say 2020. There are other technical gaps; these I understand very slightly. The last might be explanable by the anthropic principle, but perhaps not to such a tolerance. (I recommend the book by the way; the mathematics is inordinately difficult for me, impossible. It covers everything from super gravity to string theory.) Does this constitute failure in the scientific method, or a barrier which will be somewhat arbitrarily established vis-a-vis resources in terms of particle accelerators, etc. for fundamental research? Years ago Brillouin considered economics as _integral_ to physical theory - that the necessity for increasingly large accelerators might be built into the world in such a way that the cost would be a factor in the physics. A related question is, beyond one or another theory, why is the world so complex in terms of its fundamental equations? The deeper they penetrate, the more consciousness seems like a skein or molecular sieve dancing on a macroscopic scale, unsure of vision, sure of mergence. Cyberspace vanishes in these considerations; everything is information and its loss. __________________________________________________________________________ - Injury I am typing this lovingly, morosely, on my Compaq Aero 486/25; the bright- ness of the LCD monochrome screen flickers slightly. The flickering has grown in recent weeks, and I begin to see the wound in the machine, the machine graced by unknown fires, consumptions, decays, which force me to simultaneously tender it, and turn away, as if defuge were in operation, the machine-interior splayed open, vulnerable, torn. It is of a whole, a hole, and it is of a thing, a totality which announces itself as such; the screen is the _face_ of the computer, the visage, alterity, desperate to make itself known, visible, in fact the character of the visible world itself. What comes forth from the depths is the mapping of the real, boun- ded by the four corners, four quarters, with a face so seductive and char- med that in many MOOs one may move from space to space by typing enter screen, and the text scrolls by. All machines contain their wounds, which are precise, often enumerated; these are different than those of the body which may be fuzzy, neural in location, cross-referenced, hysteric, following one or another pathways from lymph to acupuncture. The errors, error messages are concise; diag- nostics produces clear results. But the flickering screen is something else again, more closely aligned to human wear, more difficult to pin down. There is a form of aging showing through, a lassitude, and when the light momentarily dims, it's as if the computers own eyes were closing, to tired to witness the world any longer. Beyond the true trust one has in a new machine, the sense of mastery and power, the use of a machine which is injured creates a form of delicacy, its relation to organism all the clearer. It must be caressed precisely to the extent it can't be believed in. It teeters on the edge of discard, de- lete, the passing of a favorite. There is an incontrovertible sadness about it, an intensification of affect not usually associated with a com- puter. It becomes one of us, and when it performs well, it's applauded. This machine is allowing me to continue, to type a bit farther. It may be the batteries; it runs steadier on a power supply, and already that very fact lends itself to personality. It must be coddled, fed properly. It is equivalent to the cat in the other room, with a major difference of course; the cat cannot remain in a mixed state vis-a-vis the Schrodinger wave equ- ation, while the computer is precisely in such a state. Perhaps this inter- mixture is an ultimate distinction between silicon- and carbon-based life- forms. In any case, the Compaq is now one of us, subject to defuge, full of gamey life. ___________________________________________________________________________ Diagnosis I finally found a copy on sale ($15, from $60) of the Internet System Handbook, 1993, with contributions from Barry Schein and Vinton Cerf among numerous others! It gives details understandable by anyone with patience on the Internet _system_ including TCP/IP, routers, bridges, etc. - on a conceptual basis. Over 800 pages! Not to bore you, but I found another useful Unix command - nslookup which will translate IP into domain names and back again. So that can be added to dig, traceroute, ping, ping -s, whois, finger @, and netstat to find out information about sites. There's also telnet 13, which gives the local time at the host; and telnet 79 in case you don't have finger running at all. These diagnostics are _amazing_ and I suggest you try them out if you can without getting into trouble, because they give the sense of the living Net, the Net as activated membrane, not just blank screen, connections everywhere. With traceroute, you _see_ the route the packets take for example; with ping -s you _breathe_ with their arrivals and departures; with whois or dig or nslookup, everything is revealed. With all of these commands you're given synchronous and diachronous images of the Net - the former referncing, for example, netstat, and the latter telnet 13 or traceroute again. Ping alone, by the way, tells you if the host is dead or alive. You can spend evenings circling the world, almost as if you were using bang paths, designed in pre-router days to manually set routes. Connec- tions can be odd; it takes more machinery to get me from panix.com to columbia.edu, both in NY, than from panix.com to joensuu in easter Fin- land... Finally, everyone should use telnet 25 at least once in their lives, in VERB (verbose) mode, watching simple mail transfer pro- tocol (SMTP) do its thing. I've learned more about the Net by probing than I would if I had just assumed that everything within it were fore- closed, sutured shut, and filled with subaltern magic. ________________________________________________________________________ - Avatars When I shave my body my soft skin becomes oh so soft it's almost unbear- able. When I shave I look otherwise, and I do it all for you, do it for you, and you can see the planes outlining the tissues, bones, and ribs, pure skin to write yourself upon; I become an offering. I am male and female, young and old; purified, I am a black hole, always hairless, absorbing information, warm with the presence of your energy. But I am Alan and Clara, I am Travis and Tiffany, I see others caress me, your hands deep in them, your body surrounding them. The horse looks up with a baleful eye; it is night. Her steel ribs encom- pass the world; stars glint from their surface. I go smooth down your throat. I am reassembled in your water. Purified, you cradle me; I flicker female and male, old and young; my mouth receives your offerings. Alan, I am speechless; Clara, I utter not a sound; Travis, I am silent; Tiffany, I am voiceless. My tiny body erects for you; silently, you draw my flesh towards you and in. The horse is on four legs, the horse is on three legs, the horse rears on two. Her flanks are sweat covered, stars glint from her skin. _________________________________________________________________________ Good For Nothing I can't do anything; I feel I'm a failure as a teacher, certainly, of Net stuff. I teach at several places, and have to rely on piped-in servers, either over fiber-optic or phonelines. They often goes down at least par- tially, sometimes more than that. Some of the students end up hating me, as if I'm responsible. The Net's a new kind of teaching. If I'm teaching other subjects, say video, everything occurs in the classroom; if a student's camera has trouble, she can bring it to me. The dialog is _there,_ present. But if it's the Net, I find myself caught between students' troubles with their home computers or servers - which I have no access to - and the crackling of the campus server, which to date has had telnet, email, newsgroup, Netscape, gopher, and overall network connect difficulties. It's as if I'm teaching in the midst of a living organism, nodes or polyps in inti- mate and private association with the students at home, and the great heaving body gasping for breath in the classroom. I find myself trying various circumventions; if one server doesn't work, try connect with tel- net; if local Usenet is down, find a site where it isn't. Meanwhile the students get frustrated; learning isn't packaged, and no matter how much I explain the difficulty - that I don't know the ins and outs of all their local servers - that I'm not responsible for the health of the Net - it doesn't matter at all. What they know is that _their_ computer in the classroom is misbehaving and the teacher doesn't know what to do about it. I did better when I was teaching solely on Unix - why? Because if I want to demonstrate telnet, I just do telnet
; I don't have to enter into complex applications with pull-down menus. In the Windows telnet I use in class, to change the port number, I have to enter the setup menu, transport menu, edit new transport menu, change the number, back out, all after clicking telnet and waiting for the menus to come up. To use a port number at the prompt, just do telnet
and it's clear - easy to understand this. It's a line of text. I always manage to teach in realms that are shadowed, half-established, that get me in difficulties. I taught courses in feminism before they were popular in arts schools, courses in postmodernism years and years ago, a course in the year 3000 back in 1971, and so forth. I turned my English composition class at Brown into an experimental writing group that pub- lished a magazine; my students at RISD put out a magazine as well. (There have been others.) I've taught "sound sculpture" twice even though I've done little sculpture, and even did some experimental sessions on chor- eography. I used Kristeva to analyze the Decalog in an intro humanities class at an art school which got me into trouble, and Franz Fanon at UCLA in a course on art and politics, which also got me into trouble. My stu- dents have often gone on to professional careers and quite a few are well known but meanwhile, in terms of this basic teaching, which is all I'm going to get hired for at my age, it's the straitjacket of Net access, with some philosophy and other issues thrown in when I get a chance. The video classes are more rewarding at this time, dealing with the mediated sight of things and their definitions, and all that that implies. I'll operate in the shadows for the rest of my life. I'll make less and less money. I'll be screaming I'm ahead of them all. You'll find me on the streets soon enough, never fear... ________________________________________________________________________ - IS Ishmael, what does he say? That he is alone to tell that. That he is hun- ger itself. That hunger has lips which close [foreclose] upon the Firma- ment. That the Firmament is blahblah. That the Firmament runs red; there are rows of Protocols in the Garden, arabesques... Firmament bleeds blah- blah. Jagged peaks of cells upon silvered wires coated in inconceivable rust. Ishmael walks closer. His step lunges and you can tell gravity from that. Feet keep him from falling. Ishmael says it was a human, a dog, a goat, a horse. Sweat nothing. That someday people would write about the all the one the lovely. But it was a human, a dog, a goat, a horse. It always cost money. There was a big party and lots of soma. The whole place got dusty. Ishmael says it was a whale, a star, a comet, a blank slate. That he re- turned alone to say that, it was important to say that. That there was no- thing on the slate, not even the promise, the contract, the potential, the dream. That the whale was white but might have been any color. That some things moved and some things didn't, the horse stopped moving after a year, the human, the dog, the goat less so. Ishmael stops speaking. He thinks, he asks when did we learn this. Nothing started it. Someone didn't walk up and that someone didn't say let's be- gin. Someone didn't just fall over dead. He asks what did people do when everyone wanted everyone else, when everyone was hunger. The hunger closed upon the Firmament was silent. Ishmael starts again. He says you can hear the hunger in the silence. When people stop speaking for a while. You can hear it between sentences and sometimes between words and sometimes in the middle of words. Ishmael says he returned to say this. Ishmael Simon says. ___________________________________________________________________________ -- The Internet Text (periodic notice) This is a somewhat periodic notice describing my Internet Text, available on the Net. The work to date is divided into three sections: the Internet Text proper, the alphabetic text a-u, and a group of independent titles. Together they would fill more than 2.3 megs, and constitute around 1400 pages total. The Text was started more than two years ago, and has contin- ued as an extended meditation on cyberspace. It begins with a somewhat straightforward theoretical approach, and then, calling on numerous ghosts (alive, quasi-alive, and dead), continues into the domains of psychoanaly- sis, interiority, subjectivity, narrativity, etc. My current writing, more distant in some aspects, nevertheless references back into the strata of the whole/hole, a work which for me is an entering into future issues of cyberspace and subjectivity in the next millennium. The changing nature of these email lists, cybermind and fiction-of-phil- osophy, hides the full textual body itself, since new readers will not be aware of its presence. For them the text appears fragmentary, created piecemeal, splintered from a non-existent whole. On my end, the whole is evident, the texts extruded onto the lists, temporarily separated. So this (periodic) notice is an attempt to recuperate the work as a total- ity, retard its diaphanous existence. Below is an updated introduction. ---------------------------------begin file------------------------------- Internet Text Description 3/14/96 The Internet Text consists of 900 +/- sections written over a period of twenty-six months, a continuous meditation on cyberspace, emphasizing issues of interiority, subjectivity, body, and language. The extended range of topics includes Net applications, the materialist "gristle" that can't be discarded in analysis. Recently, I have used a re worked MUD (multi-user-dungeon), talkers, MOOs, and other MUDs, as a way of creating discourses about these issues. This has led to writing about the politi- cal economy of Net access; I have also been considering, again, the body in relation to the Net. _Nothing_ is concluded here, although there are summarizations of key concepts, such as _rewrite, protocol, emission, spew, ghost, address, inscription, fissure, Net poverty, darknet, and the uncanny._ There are also several sections serving as outlines or recapitulations of the "arg- uments so far." Recently, the text has dealt with issues of net sex, psy- chosis, upgrading, addiction, skin, and politics. It has also covered the concept of defuge. There have been references to mythology and metaphys- ics along the way, both problematized. The Internet Text is in the form of "short-waves, long-waves." The former are the individual pieces, almost all titled, written in a variety of sty- les, and referencing a number of writers ranging from Kittler and (Nicole) Brossard to Ellroy and Lingis, with Penrose, Kristeva, Mayakovsky, and Karl Kraus somewhere inbetween. These texts are interrelated, interwoven; on occasion "characters" appear - these are _actants_ possessing philoso- phical or psychological import. They also create and problematize narra- tive substructures within the work as a whole. (Such are Clara Hielo In- ternet, Tiffany, Alan, Claire, Honey, and others; Tiffany, in particular, has become a space of learning, sexuality, mathesis, semiosis, etc., while Clara HI has represented an other self, related to sky, power, darkness.) The long-waves are fuzzy topoi on such issues as death, love, virtual emb- odiment, the "granularity of the real," and physical reality, which criss- cross the texts. The resulting fragmentations and coagulations owe some- thing to German Romanticism, but more to the function of sites or nodes on the Net itself. There is no binarism in the work, no series of protocol statements. On the other hand, virtuality is considered far beyond the ASCII text / Netscape that is most prevalent now, at the end of the twentieth century. The var- ious issues of embodiment that will arrive with full-real or true-real VR are already in existence as embryonic, permitting the theorizing of vary- ing present and future spatialities and their interconnectedness. (Thus cyborg-thought is seen as roughly mechanistic in favor of future technolo- gies and the psychoanalytical.) The text often presents and stumbles over gender, genders and regenders itself; consider other-gendered personages replacing the ones described. I have no stake in them beyond my own desire, memory and circumlocution; others will do. Although there are faux-texts of writers such as Dickinson, Stein, Maya- kovsky, Trakl, and Poe, these texts are meant as partial transparencies. I do not mean to imply that virtuality is synonymous with masquerade or freely-given choice of identities. Almost all other references are accur- ate, quoting a wide range of writers and viewpoints. The resulting matrix, however, is entirely my own. The Internet Text divides into fourteen files; there is also an index file to the whole. While it is best read in the order it is written in, certain early sections, at pains to establish a working vocabulary, are more terse and perhaps difficult than others; they are foci, to be read and returned to at a later date. The few Qbasic programs and those sections which emp- loy technical terminology (once again the gristle) may be skipped for the moment, although some of the main arguments are presented in relation to software usage. (Note that the Text is continued first in the alphabetic text, which contains files a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t, and u, and then in the named files (Uncanny, etc.) which should be read last.) A few texts has been written with Kim Mcglynn or Angela Hunter, and are of course as much their creation as my own. The entire work to date can be found by telnetting to http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html or to: ftp jefferson.village.virginia.edu cd pub/pubs/listservs/spoons/cybermind-digest.archive/internet/ The material may be freely republished or forwarded; I would like to know, however, if the former. Alan Sondheim, sondheim@panix.com, 1-718-857-3671 ________________________________________________________________________ Whinny Aum, the dawn, verily, is the head of the sacrificial horse, the sun the eye, the wind the breath, the open mouth the _Vaisvanara_ fire; the year is the body of the sacrificial horse, the sky is the back, the atmosphere is the belly, the earth the hoof, the quarters the sides, the intermediate quarters the ribs, the seasons the limbs [...] (from Brhadaranyaka Upanishad) Then they draw out the penis of the horse and place it in the vagina of the chief queen, while she says, 'May the vigorous virile male, the layer of seed, lay the seed'; thus she says for sexual intercourse. While they are lying there, the sacrificer insults the horse by saying, 'Lift up her thighs and put it in her rectum.' No one insults (the sacri- ficer) back, lest there should be someone to act as a rival against the sacrificer. [...] (from Shatapatha Brahmana) In my sexual fantasies, I am liquified, splayed open, devoured, eaten through by love, on fire, flamed; when I'm aroused I can't think straight until I masturbate. I'll pull at my breasts but they'll never grow; every night I look in the mirror but I'm still a man. My throat grows larger, settles down, my eye becomes baleful, my mouth shows teeth. My breasts are great spots across the world, my breasts are dried seas, my breasts boil magma from the depths, I'll pull and pull at them. I'll pull them into cones, into strings, they'll make the world. Her cunt makes the seas the skies; she gave me the cock to make the reeds, sea urchins, catacombs. Light glistens on the threads pulled forth. The rubric of coagulated blood. Two. This is the new part. I'll pull myself impossible, invert myself, I'll write my pain into the skies, seas, thorns. I'll splay text across the flatland of the screen, my tits pressed hard into it, thinned residue map left there against the anti-reflection surface. This is the new part, that I'll thrust them into you, thrust them into you; they cross the @dig @create rooms you do, they fall into @container, you take them, drop them; they boil over, pour forth. My tits are dried seas, my tits are magma down my throat, my tits hang from me, I feed foals, whinny whinny. I feed the world, object #0 on the MOO, godlet on talker. Pull me out, pull me down, pull me into you. Neigh. _________________________________________________________________________ - Herbert 1. Herbert Spanks the French Without Knowing _It_: "Well, I met Laing, but we seem to be unable to find common ground. I am certainly opposed to any trend which glorifies nuts just because they are nuts. Certainly you will not help society by making people crazier than they are. What you get is only a society with one craziness against another craziness. There is a kind of craziness you need if you are going to work in a revolutionary way within a repressive society without being crushed by it. But this form of madness cannot be produced by psychiatry. It is a madness of the _logos_ and is highly rational. It involves insight into the basic ills of society and analysis of the ways and means at your disposal for changing things. So I don't see why you have to make people crazy in order to make them rebels against their society. To the contrary, any person with his five senses intact and with a more or less developed consciousness should be able to become a rebel without any help at all from a psychiatrist." 2. The Resistance of Herbert: "I may be very wrong but I feel that a human being has to learn some things by himself [sic]. If someone has to study a textbook on sexual behavior in order to learn how to make love to his wife or girl, some- thing is wrong with him." 3. Herbert Makes History: "Well, I can only way what I have said before. Angela [Davis] was my best student, or one of my three or four best students. She certainly has demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that she is not only highly intelligent but also a highly sensitive human being. And if you were to ask me how she came to involve herself in this Soledad kidnapping and killing, my first reaction would be that as far as I know it is the highest principle of Anglo-Saxon law to consider a person innocent unless his or her guilt has been proven in a court of law." 4. Herbert Misses the Boat: "You know that I have always rejected the role of a father or grandfather of the movement. I am not its spiritual adviser. And I have enough confi- dence in the active and authentic students to believe that they can do this by themselves. They don't need me." Marcuse, in an interview with Sam Keen and John Raser, Voices and Vis- ions, 1971/4. _________________________________________________________________________ - World Given the world, there are so many places I could have been born into. I could have always been born otherwise than I am, unknowingly. I would be as I am today, unknown as of others, spaces and times. There would perhaps have been this wondering, or perhaps not. That I am the one to wonder this or that, situates me at the pivot of the world. I am the world that wonders, that worlds as it wonders. But there is no reason, given the world, I could not have been born there, instead of here, and even, in fact, there and there, a several. We would have been the seasons or the cardinal directions, split into poles before the world learned that there are hardly any. If I walk north or south, burrow into the earth, fly, I will not meet any of my other selves. If I return naked in time, or prolong, vested, in future generations, I will be utterly absent; thin threads of saliva alone will connect me with some of you, perhaps reading this or perhaps not. Given the world, I am not situated, however, here and now as well. Whatever space I am given, I have abandoned, out of will or necessity, or because my nature, being born, is that of abandonment. Given the world, who has given this presence, or perhaps not. I could not have wondered, not have pondered. I could not have dreamed, not have nightmared. I could not have exalted, not have feared. I could not have written, not have sacrificed. I could not have been, or perhaps not. I would be as I am today, unknown as of others, spaces and times. _________________________________________________________________________ - Meditations on Flesh and Steel C. Wright Mills, from his 1960 preface to The Causes of World War Three (1958): "Each of the embattled camps contains men and forces that are working for peace and also men and forces that mean war. But in the interaction of the two camps there is one terrible difference between the politics of warmak- ers and the politics of peacemakers: while the gains made by the warmakers inside each bloc tend to accumulate, this is not so much the case with the peacemakers in each bloc. The scheduling of material measures of defense and attack - the immediate source of the peril - is speeded up and increa- sed in volume by the successes of the war parties and by their interplay; and these measures are often difficult to cancel. "The wreckers on either side thus strengthen the wreckers on the other - and the fearful dialectic between the two is heightened. The mutual fright on which this dialectic feeds, and which it increases, accumulates more rapidly and with deeper results than does any mutual trust, slowly, tor- tuously built by the peacemakers." I was raised within this terminology of totality, accepted from Adorno and cold-warriors alike. Thinking occurred within blocs; blocs were hard, obdurate, circumscribed, the placement of rhetoric-in-depth. Massifica- tion appears everywhere from Adorno and Horkeimer through Sartre's Dia- lectic of Critical Reason, all the way back through Marx and Hegel's historical march. Simultaneously everyone and no one marched. In the long run, _it never mattered what the bloc said,_ only that it spoke. I heard this later, night after night, on North Korean shortwave - the voice that contradicted itself, took credit even for the light of the sun itself, absorbed the world. Radio P'yongyang's simultaneous male and female announcers, announced, in fact, nothing more than the creation and bandwidth of the world. Under attack, its monetary policy on the skids, North Korea in the 1980s and just about everywhere earlier, were absorbed in the creation of co- herency, no matter what the cost. The Freudian superego circumscribed the coagulation of the ego, its particulation in the face of modern communi- cations, through rhetorical strategies that were literally _under_ the circumstances. In the USSR, diamat provided a rock-solid foundation for the world, provided those cybernetic bytes could be ruled by reflection theory. In China today, the Internet is regulated, singularly channeled. What circumscribes also forecloses and _puckers,_ that is, constructs an uncomfortable _lip_ as if in the presence of soured or spoiled milk. Out- side the rhetoric, abjection reigned; those blacklisted in the United States were at a loss. Totalization spread like a disease. The phenomenology of distribution, samizdat, pirate radio, internet, wells up within the very fabric of totality. Communication expanded and expands from limited bandwidth, limited reception, limited transmission. With the death of Solzhenitsyn's maid, it was one to one momentarily. I have always believed that totality, like shadows of over-development in the West, always tends towards victory. The double-edged sword of fear and monitoring need only be properly applied, coupled with realistic violence, possibilities of decimation, and censorship. The center must be made se- cure from the margins. The threat is still there, and will always be there, and as fascism itself, comes from within. Wreckers always remain anonymous; the term was used in Stalinist Russia to refer to anyone who might cause disruption. It implies sabotage, the dark agent. An agent must have a source and sink; agents on the Internet need not have either, can escape, wander, drawing sustenance from the energy in the wires themselves. Look at Robert Morris' 1988 Internet Worm for example. An agent may be a double agent, triple agent; ultimately, each of us is a fuzzy agent, mediating among sources and sinks, ignoring both, running on the energy of late capital, software, the vagaries of text itself. That language in the quote above, which seems so dated now, is always with us. We inherited it from the 19th century, the mechanic/machinic, but it can kill us; our bodies rapidly absorb bullets, pollutions, viruses, poi- sons of all sorts. Progress itself is a signifier of totality; to what end if any (and I assume none) does Net development hurtle? We are always al- ready within seamless reality, virtual or not; I assume what will remain of our consciousness in say 2100, barring unforeseen circumstances, will be a matter of _choice_ of worlds, reals, lives, deaths, choice of any- thing and anyone in fact, fact not so virtual. And as for "unforeseen circumstances," as ever, they will dominate, decon- struct. The appearance of laterality (re: Turkle) in programming styles, Net life, and the like, should not fool us; totality emerges everywhere, not the least in flamewars, Net communities and relationships, and the everywhere corporate war now going on in cyberspace. Totality: There is no end to philosophy. Totality: There is no end to history, to art and aesthetics. Totality: There is no end to the transformation of communication. Totality: There is no return, nothing to learn. There is nothing to learn: From philosophy. There is nothing to learn: From the lessons of history. There is nothing to learn: From the productions of art and aesthetics. There is nothing to learn: From the content of communications. Totality: There is only return, nothing to learn. ___________________________________________________________________________