DEATH ON THE NET PING jefferson.village.virginia.edu: 56 data bytes ----jefferson.village.virginia.edu PING Statistics---- 29 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss 1 xenyn-eid-E0.nyc.access.net (198.7.0.126) 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 2 sewer-S1-T1.nyc.access.net (166.84.64.10) 5 ms 4 ms 3 ms 3 transit.nyc.access.net (166.84.0.98) 5 ms 5 ms 4 ms 4 144.228.2.193 (144.228.2.193) 12 ms 12 ms 12 ms 5 sl-dc-8-F0/0.sprintlink.net (144.228.20.8) 18 ms 17 ms 15 ms 6 icm-dc-1-F0/0.icp.net (144.228.20.101) 29 ms 29 ms 13 ms 7 icm-fix-e-H2/0-T3.icp.net (192.157.65.122) 25 ms 109 ms 38 ms 8 sura9-fix-cf.sura.net (192.203.229.9) 17 ms 13 ms 18 ms 9 sura8-ext-cf.sura.net (192.221.252.8) 24 ms 14 ms 13 ms 10 wtn8-sura8-c3.sura.net (128.167.212.2) 17 ms 14 ms 15 ms 11 ctv-wtn8-c3mb.sura.net (128.167.3.2) 24 ms 22 ms 22 ms 12 uva-ctv-c3mb.sura.net (192.221.3.18) 41 ms 28 ms 27 ms 13 acc-router.ver.NET (137.54.200.12) 24 ms 24 ms 26 ms 14 garrett1-router.acc.Virginia.EDU (128.143.226.4) 26 ms 27 ms 25 ms 15 * * * 16 * * * no answer from jefferson.village.virginia.edu Packets spew into the space, absent themselves past any conceivable timeout. Traceroute exhausts itself flailing uselessly at the doorway to eternal hell, damnation of black-hole event horizon where bytes transform into noise, heat, the far side of the chaotic domain. The bell tolls for Thomas Jefferson who, refusing enlightenment, does not accommodate this dark date in Cyberspace, this December 18 1994 of Cybermurder, tinymurder, which shall be forgotten forever and ever. Beforehand, there was mail-collapse, waves of temp files, waves of exiting processes, long languorous waves-becoming-membrane, almost the fluidity of space itself, wash-down of the wires, supplement of the signifier. But not quite, as the gag covered the mouth, the machine was raped, stuffed with anonymity, empty dark messagings, the gristle showing through. If you read this, if it arrives, you're shape-riding, riding the gristle, going for it; if you read this, there hasn't been a resurrection, you're just not part of the chaos, destruction, tinymurders and o lucky you. Alan Sondheim ________________________________________________________________________ sondheim@panix.com From sondheim@panix.comWed Dec 21 21:22:33 1994 Date: Wed, 21 Dec 1994 21:21:50 -0500 (EST) From: Alan Sondheim To: -- , dionzeek@aol.com, fiction-of-philosophy@jefferson.village.virginia.edu, Paula Davidson Subject: Analog/Digital Noise and Reception I still want to get back to issues of noise and reception in their relation to community. When I communicate in analog and the channel is noisy, I find myself leaning towards meta-communicative strategies; I no longer _inhabit_ the diegesis or conversational trajectory, but constantly need to recuperate the ostensible language itself. This requires hard listening (as in an Altman film by the way), and at times I simply ignore the communication, which "slips" away. Digital permits no such strategies (except perhaps for mistaken terminal emulations, hi/lo ascii translations, etc.) but creates an annihilation- operator; either the channel _is_ or _isn't._ Unlike the real world, one gets used to on-line clarity, exhausted and nervous when it disappears (see the material on addiction in the Internet Text). And when it disappears (through poverty = diskcrash or surplus = meltdown), there is no recuperation; strategy floats uselessly in the air, since the perceived ground itself has disappeared. The type of community that results here is based on clarity and disappearance of course which touches always already on the issues of embodiment that keep coming up. But the ghost-in-the-machine, the uncanny (what I called _indexical embodiment_) implies a _partial_ presence, as if the analog were (equally always already) a reconstruction. In other words, what is fullness when absence is a continuous play at the margins? Finally, on a superficial level, this is a reminder/remainder of biological death as well; the conversation is haunted by its shadow. Analog is full of hope and presentiment, since the potential for recuperation is present, but the digital, like death, gives us a bleak choicelessness in the face of infinite choice. Alan ________________________________________________________________________ The End of Motion in the Future of Motion Electronics sublimate enormous levels, trains of gears, cams, everything to construct variable intensities, sites of motion, one or another mech- anism accreting parts to itself, to the parts of the other. Nineteenth- century mechanism operates from the spinal column, belted wheels descend- ing from loftspaces, driven by enormous motors or the motion of water. Calculation implied the manipulation of rods - enumeration, the tallying of rotating dials moving from one discrete position to another. Motion. It was the century of motion. All centuries were thus, the translation of bodies themselves upon local topographies, later coordinate systems. Markers left behind were objects as well. These were the centuries of objects. The centuries of substance, earlier, were indeterminate, inchoate. Earth and water ruled. There was some thought of them, though quickly forgot- ten. There were events whose oral histories exhausted themselves. The electric motor harnassed magnetic lines of flux, rotation. Switches constructed the deployment of power. Everything was brass, bakelite, copper, held in place by screws. Coated cloth or rubber insulation held the double wires of circuitry. Earlier, they followed separate tracks along the house eaves +/- clearly visible leading into the mains. And later the capacitors involved complex pulley/belt systems, plates turning, tuning in the air. Even the vacuum tube glowed with electron expulsion, the grid plates laid out in an internal dimensionality that was easily configured, readable. Early electronics were textual, object- oriented; the tube could be brought to the local store, plugged in and tested. Magnetic tape and disks, pools of mercury, ring-magnets, held information in the midst of objects, mobile objects, grid-objects. Self-enumerating, early electronics warred with analog systems, more belts and pulleys, cams and always one or another surface sliding or turning by virtue of worm gearing. Built for specific equations, these were by and large un- programmable, heavy, mass stuttered and sutured against mass machined to unbelievably clear proportionals. Not so the electronics, which began quickly to retreat, diminish, further and further towards the microscopic and still not ever at rest. Nor will ever be, this continuous descent or twisting into transformative substance, thinking substance whose residue is the inertness of the screen; motion becomes a matter of vector, solely a matter of transla- tion. In the far future, the earth will be possessed by an uncanny still- ness, thinking itself through thought itself. The natural will say noth- ing in this emptiness, and there will be speaking going on. _________________________________________________________________________ Talk of the Internet When privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will be private. When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. When your friends are dead, only the dead will have friends. When sex is a crime, only the criminals will have sex. When numbers are indeterminate, only the indeterminate will have numbers. When the network is really down, only the really down will network. When Clara desires, only the desired will have Clara. When the watch times, time is watched. Where land is scarce, the scarce will land. When death is cured, only the cured will die. Where bandwidth is lean, the lean have bandwidth. When only the good die young, only the old have evil. Where we are silenced, the silent speak. ________________________________________________________________________ Core-Dump Ruminations...two degrees of anality...retentivity, of course, all that toilet training: _what have we here_ but the clean and proper body, pro- tocols freely functioning, packet delivery on-time, assemblage of frag- ments proceeding on schedule...this anal eroticism based on _closure_... the cutting-off of the body, abjection from the body, the presence of mucilage within the fecal matter, coherence, cohesion, language, mouth... ...listening with the anus, the other degree, the _sheave_ of the writ- ten, emission or spew...the cloaca of cyberspace...stuttering of in- choate letterings, the core-dump of one or another word\these memories appear, desublimate, cathect around a complex of syllables...I must tell you everything... But where is this...to what purpose...if not on the level of the message stream...leave well enough alone down there...proceed without failing... there's still time...the datagrams properly formatted carrying this... this _matter_ crumbling, fissuring, gleaming and lubricated from within the interior of the id...the _it_ which is the other side of the Kris- tevan _thing_...Heidegger's _one_ or _Man_ riding both surfaces...Unix always _man cat_ for example...the maw of the IP address...are these complexes, these anal openings, these core-dumps of secrets lost, expo- sure of secret gristle, the marrow of the TCP/IP or the marrow of pass- ing for the soul, what is this passing, the nature of the passing... ??? What could write would be the _instrument of passion_... would be the assemblage, machinic or otherwise, cam-operable, constituting the foun- tain or ball-point pen, each with its phenomenology, the latter clogged by the testicular (I kid you not), the former a stain upon the shaft of the penis, quadruple roils of labia, fissured flesh and the surface of disembodied writing, rolled up into one, core-dump or lubrication of errors gliding past, elisions, doublings, misspellings, faulted punctua- tions serving only to bring things to a halt, that closure again, final as Unix _rm,_ a loss _without a doubt_... ________________________________________________________________________ The Beauteous Text of the Holiday Spirit The pillars of Solomon glowed maroon and turquoise in the heat of summer dusk and the stars began to appear above the swollen breast of the land studded with pebbles of brilliant colors. O was I far from home, waiting for the appearance of the omen, my young face covered with tears as I hugged the trembling earth to myself, the city distant, almost a memory, beneath me. The galaxies of man and woman collided with the wheeling storm of light glinting from years ago, star-swarms flooding the sky dashed with meteoric spoors. I could hardly see, would hug the earth for all time, for all space, the tiniest creature carried forth against the heavens with their air cooling, creatures scurrying among the rocks. Here, there would be the presage of my future, I was sure of it, an omen waiting to happen, an omen in the works, in God's plan for all of us. Not now, not until later, I would whisper to myself, holding my breath, my body shuddering, overtaken by forces that yet had no name, even now are nameless. It was not until I returned to the capital city, to another dusk on the outskirts, covered with brush and scurryings of greater intensity, that I received the sign I had been awaiting all my life, the thin and vectored presence of a silver fox running across my path, this fox which was the fox of God, this omen, predestined to announce itself to me. For I knew then that the fox and omen (I could not separate the two) existed only to announce themselves, prophesizing the appearance of still greater future and more miraculous occurrences. And as I have aged, each event in my life seems part of God's plan in this fashion, another sign, announcement, filled and fulfilled with longing, part of a greater pic- ture which has yet to reveal itself to me in its entirety. I read script after script, each leading me onward; the fox has long since disappeared, is long since dead, and still my eyes fill with tears in the evening dusk, waiting, waiting, against the onslaught of those oh so brilliant stars... _________________________________________________________________________ Begging (Gifts, which are sociobiologically determined, which involve degrees of reciprocity, gifts which are those of the spirit, those of the flesh; which are those of one or another economy. Abject, gifts are always a dissolution, possessed by neither one nor the other, external to the hardened monetary economy of equivalences; your gift surrounds me, breaths you into me, pervades me.) What I say to you is that I am always open to your suggestion, even begging to be corrected, supine beneath you, the language of this body at the mercy of your own, your thinking through or across my presence: and what would be transgression when the entire world is criss-crossed or countermanded?... This attitude of delicate correction, purveyed by tenuous connections, these ligaments of cyberspace, almost a tumescent membrance of thought, thinking huddled against the vaginal opening of the gaze itself... _I am always already an offering,_ my mind a gift to you... (to the body of your thought, your thinking body, at one with the translucency of my speech, long parole, the length of a release) - as if words ex- plode into the air, as if history were the memory of explosions. But what I say to you is that, like Shestov to Berdyaev, I am awaiting your corrections, I welcome them gladly, and they mean nothing and everything to the world to me, as I am one with waiting upon thought, an entrance or portal to theory, the enumerations of worlds (or if you like, domains, or if you like, languages, sememes as well). But I am one with you, blend with you, my intercourse part of your own, my body arched back, thrust forward, for your reception, if you like, if it meet your pleasure, and for whom is the recipient, who is the gift, for whom is the giver, and for whom is the body. Think yourself through me, strained by the tenuous nature of my texts; my body is a sieve, thought only through your thinking of it, poor material world, not of my making, and, if it be your pleasure, not here, not present, at all. ________________________________________________________________________ To my Future Descending If I die, I want to die here, in this space, the cenotaph in flux, rota- tion of myriad circuits, slow fields ascending through galactic motions, the delicate filigree of molecule and universe. Inscribe the circuit as helix, skein of possibilities forever divided by the abyss that opens at the heart of the digital, blank absence granted meaning only by the sur- rounding corral. I embrace you, exhale language moaning, even the words carry no children but the words. What I would give you are the words. No longer speaking of theory, of presence or absence within this untoward realm, nor of the writing that chimes in with announced existing, I turn towards the sun refusing light, turn towards nebulae in the depths of space unprotected from surges of current; thinned out and inconceivable, this body recuperates death. I would have thee remembered with me and unto me, cleaved close to the heart of things, cut from the heart and returned to the heart; I would stitch the abyss with wires, surgical healing of unrecuperated division. The stitches spell the name engraved in the flesh of the wires; the stitches spell the name, forwards and backwards, all permutations of the name, the gaze upon the wound read- ing such letters as they present themselves, as they come forward in white light against the abyss. The circuitry carries this local event, its time-cone, light-cone wheeling against stars forever closed against me, whole universes I shall never come to know; the flesh wheels itself invisible and forth- right. Thus I come to you in the tomb of cyberspace beginning, huddled against the possibility and prostitution of all meaning, as _if_ I die turn _when_ I died, possibility always already refusing itself as such. You only have to go a degree, close, into the future. You only have to turn around from the degree, wheel yourself, your eyes into the sun, peer down throughout the degree; I am no longer there. You only have to remember my name, tomb, grave, memorial, cenotaph, none of these, none but the dim horizon of the shape-rider. Becoming-shape-rider, my words melt into you, words never heard nor read, words present in this space, filling and fulfilling this space. Becoming-shape-rider, you understand a darkness surrounding this, and the letters so white, so very white, they engrave me forever on galactic rim, looking deep into galactic hole, riding all the way down, forgetting the name as tidal forces draw being itself apart, as there's no room for nothing thought. (My future descending, I leave you this, all shape-rider, all beauteous, all thought.) ________________________________________________________________________ Moon Wedding Wetting myself with your blood, I lie supine beneath you, my face within your hole, the world a dawn of rose-red creation. Trempez m'avec votre sang, je ment seul supine vous, mon face dedans ton trou, le monde une aube de cr‚ation de rose. Trempez [votre] de [m] a chant‚, [je] [ment] [seul] [vous] de [supine], [moon Faites face … dedans] [trou] de tonne, [monde] de [le] rose [une] de [de] de cr‚ation de [de] de [aube] Trempez [votre] [de] [m] un [chant‚], [je] [ment] [seul] [vous] [de] [supine], [moon Faites figure … dedans]] [trou] [tonne] de [de], [monde] [de] [le] Rose [une] [de] [de] [de] [de] de cr‚ation [de] [de] [aube] ________________________________________________________________________ Ciel L'aube de la belle jeune fille a e'te' vif dans les permissions des arbres solennels dont lumie"re a luit pareil ‚tinceler d'une vague fa^che' de oce'an. Elle veut maigre en avant, son corps un re^ve de gar‡ons locaux dormir a" midi, et un pas de travaillerait quand elle veut sourire. O verger de ses dents blanc, O fore^t de son cheveux de noir! Le ciel veut sourire sur la, agiter guerre contre a^ge, et maintenant tout ce reste e^tre me'moire. O Suzanne, tel bonheur je porterai avec pour toujours! - P. Verlaine ________________________________________________________________________ Rancor Sometimes a message comes over the wires and it feels like my throat is cut, thin, the seat of repression, seat of speech blocked by the body itself. My breath dissolves in those words which are _present_ by virtue of what appears to be a primary expulsion, although written - words which are forced from the self-same throat of another, oneself. The force of a blow. The force of a blow which can never be deflected; spoken by the blank- ness of cyberspace, it reflects its own reception, resonates with it. As if one's tomb were designed by another, inside of oneself. As if one, I, faced me through you, through your present absence, subterfuge, mas- querade, the art of deceiving the enemy. The words are spoken by me, the reading of the message, and I hear my- self, my inner speech in them, a repetition of the external words, mnemonics of chanting, the short-circuiting of secondary narcissism. What do I return to this? I return poorly, full of rancor, of bile, eaten out by speech from the interior. A flame not only burns; it dissolves the view beyond, lights only the imminent with its light which is shoved aside as the fuel runs out. The only alterity is that of language wrapped around itself, chok- ing itself like the _throat._ Because the words are print and because there is no granularity, they are cleansed like the surface of a purely disruptive body, one that has made its peace with abjection; I have not. Because the words scroll, an epitaph runs by. As if granite is carved by the expulsion of letters. As if it were translucent. Rancor churns within; unlike anger, its direction is an emission, like heartburn. Involuted, the mind burns to no purpose whatsoever. The reply is a residue or scat sloughed off by centrifugal energy, the torsion of anxiety rent to the breaking point. The flame has no point of entrance or exit; the flame is tattooed on the skin itself, simultaneously dis- tanced. All these contraditions increase the tension. The only resolution is time, which does not heal, repress, or sublimate, but simply substitutes; loose chains or concatenations drop one thing for another, there is only so much time in the day. The very obdurate bracketing of time opens the throat to fresh wounds and woundings. What passes for language in these spaces continues, more and more exhausted. What is to be done. "It took my breath away and left me with this highly charged speechless- ness, this inability to speak when beset by strong feelings, which re- minds me that _Love_ (or is it an _idea_ of love) is located, among other places, in one of the two spots in _his_ body which Freud describes as the seat of the phenomenon of _repression_: in the throat. (The sec- ond, for Freud, was the lower opening of the body.)" (Klaus Theweleit, Object Choice, trans. Green.) _________________________________________________________________________ Dylan, "Cybermind" There are some things I'd like to tell you When the leaves fall, off the trees There are some things I'd like to tell you If you'd listen to me, If you'd listen to me That the road is, hard off the trees, that The road, becomes a path That so hard becomes the turn to, turn to the right, turn to the left That the path comes to a bridge burned In the springtime, in the fall That there's water, always falling Beneath the path, If you were the path That the sound is, not the voice is, that The winter, brings the trees That the highway's, always dusty That your sound is What your sound is That your sound is, from the trees that, Brings the road, curves back to you, That so hard you, turn to the left, you Turn to the right If you were right That the leaves fall, in the autumn, Gather summer, in their arms That have lost their way now, lost Your body From your body There are some things I'd like to tell you When the fall leaves, trees behind You to remind me, I would tell you If you had a body If you were a body ________________________________________________________________________ Bitterness (All gall is divided into three parts.) Two things come to mind: blame, and the anecdote. For nothing is ever my fault, it is always the Other, this one or that one. The Other is construed as the agent of downfall, vengeance against the innocent. And this plays out through the anecdote; there are always stories to tell, myself blasted to the margin of the feasible. Always culpable, I never admit to culpability. One thing comes to mind: that it is always a dispersed vector or spew, unorganized core-dump. The real _appears_ obdurate to the bitter, who sense the impervious. In this regard, the bitter, like the depressed, see the truth and react to it without the slightest wavering. But not always with truth's return; Dostoevsky's hero in Underground is deceit- ful, violated, violating. (For the truth of the world is bitter and depressed.) The bitter require a return to their investment, end up with a small circle of friends mirroring their forsaken state. They never get any- thing right, always get everything right. They refuse to recognize one another. Falsity. But La Rochefoucauld says the evil we do brings less persecution and hatred upon us than our good qualities. (The remark of a bitter man? Hardly, but one _playing to the bitter_ in this regard.) The bitter are content to humble themselves. They ensure it. Even in cyberspace, they twist and turn, strike out with eyes blanked from too much sight. They curry the favor of no one, which is given for nothing. But it is always somewhere else, and in cyberspace, it is always the real among us, that is to say, nought. Those who lean into the space, mock. Those who play it like billiards. (When I am bitter, I am doomed to repeat; obsessive-compulsive, the stories and missed conversations accumulate, scroll - an inner speech dragging on forever. Always I triumph; my evidence is perfect, my demeanor rational. Whispered perfection, in fact, is mine; in scroll I am known for reasoned argument, a combination of empathy and uncanny coolness. But these missed conversations return again and again; there is no escaping them, no granularity to ground them in a vincible alter- ity that in fact brackets my existence. Rewrite demands return, if only in the pleasure of the text, one's own, scrolled across a _screen,_ real and obdurate. Without the return, communication mingles with help- lessness, and the phantom of the other opera borders on psychosis.) ________________________________________________________________________ (the sweetness of the dawn of the year at terminal velocity) Sweetness Devouring darkness, eating putti, pastel colors with the scent of skin moved slowly, happiness beneath the youngsters' blankets, Betty-Page emerge with Kent wishing the light on perfect skin. Sweetness is never abject, always melting, flooding one with iridescent lightness, the flux of syrup dissolving the skin, florid inscription effacing inscription with oh so soft a touch. To fall in perfect sweetness is to fall forever. I've chosen tonight to pass the sweet gifts Margaret had given me during the two and a half years we lived together. The inner life of cathected objects shudders ontology to a halt; what can be seen through tears exists less than cyber-presence, often a gift or sweetness of another kind. This is the filigree of space, the comfort of the secrecy of messages, the sense of belonging, of communality. These screen-memories are our common- ness; uncharted, they are the beginnings of a surge which will pour into years, decades, centuries future - the ripple or back-crest of a wave transforming thought itself. For the question may be no longer that of body, but that of thought turning upon its own, already an awakening in the slurry of this space. How much sweetness there often is in lurking, in which void and presence commingle, in which the eye softly wanders throughout insistence and intentionality, as in the framing of a perfect picture. Gender settles like a light cloud across postings and lists, recuperating new terrain from the old, and gender hovers in the midst of lurking, like messages opening beneath all of us to uncharted screens of mesmeric night. The sweetness that one is called is often defensive or a silencing smile, but the sweetness that one is may garner mind or memory, the marker or speculum of something always already blemished, the anecdote of the partially-seen, what emerges from the corners of the room during the first moments of sleepiness, sleepy-time. The only thing we remember is what might have been. Forward, choiceless, words unencumbered by body, by thought, sweet words on wings of mercury, thin sheets coalescing and dissolving in the windless, beating, sky. _________________________________________________________________________ The Whining God "The Mind of the Father whined as he thought, with a powerful will, the Ideas of all forms, and from one source they all sprang out; because from the Father both intention and accomplishment did come at the same time. But once they were separated by the intelligible Fire, the Ideas split up into intelligent Ideas; because the Sovereign made an intelligible end- less model exist before the manifold world. The latter followed in its disorder the first and appeared with its proper form, shaped by every sort of Ideas. There is only one source, from which other Ideas whining spring out. They are divided, inaccessible, and are shattered on cosmic bodies; they are similar to swarms and gather around a terrible breast, shining around from every side and very near, in all ways, as intelligent thought which robed with abundance, from the fatherly source, the flower of fire, in the highest point of restless time. It is the original source of the Father, perfect as such, that let these primordial Ideas spring out." (From Giovanni Reale, The Schools of the Imperial Age, A History of Ancient Philosophy, edited and translated by John R. Catan, SUNY, NY, 1990, p. 286, The Rediscovery of the Incorporeal and the Transcendent, The philosophical doctrines of the _Chaldean Oracles,_ quoted from E. des Places, _Oracles Chaldaiques, avec un choix de commentaires anciens,_ "Les Belles Lettres" (Paris, 1977), fragment 37, p. 75ff.) Now the locus of meanings around "whine" all specify a ululation of sorts coupled with complaint, the song of complaint which is emitted from a neural source than that of speech itself. Yet it is not only song, but the sense of an _unutterable wrong_ through which the inaccessible swarm appears, and if we can ignore the paternality of the quote for a moment, might one not whine in _this_ space, in fact, that the springing of pri- mordial ideas (almost as a passivity or sense of a _sprung motor_ that no longer operates correctly) are posts cleansed and shining with a furious light reflected from the breast? Might not these cleansing posts give shape to the breast itself, pendulous and full, reflecting the gravity of the situation, the source of screen-memories (screen-mammaries) through which our writing itself takes on the characteristics of a cold and ter- minal fire? Are we witnessing the consuming-fire of our bodies, as the beginnings of a new speciation falter their way across the earth, the Net itself only a castoff or residue of artificial intelligences combining with viral nano-technologies? I whine, my place is lost here, groundless; nothing holds the letters in their proper (= legible) place but a cyclic distribution of voltages and circulations: packets and protocols, elec- tron gun beam displacement energies casting their spectra before me. "By mid 1956, the FBI had a total of 141,231,773 fingerprints on file, of which 29,215,596 were in the criminal files section representing 11,336,- 712 persons. In the civil identification section there were 112,016,177 cards each representing 60,753,062 persons. And one particularly inter- esting card in this latter file carries the classification: 15 M 9 R 000 18 ------------------------- L 19 W 000 These are the symbols in President Eisenhower's fingerprint card." (From Don Whitehead, The FBI Story, with a foreward by J. Edgar Hoover, Pocket Books, NY, 1958, p. 166.) _________________________________________________________________________ Evil An enormous boulder breaks loose from the side of a mountainside in the Alps, rolls down a slope taking trees and shrubbery with it. Small goats quickly jump out of the way, but the sleeping villagers below are not so lucky; hundreds die in the mayhem and resulting fires as a petrol tank ignites and explodes. A disaster for those who mourn the passing of each and every human life, but can evil occur without intention? Neither man nor woman nor sprite released the mass; what occurred was the result of a chaotic disposition. An ignorant child dislodged the boulder by accident. Deliberately. A man sent it plummeting without knowledge of the village, the trees, the goats. A man sent it plummeting with precisely this prior knowledge. A woman in despair, Phaedre, her eyes swollen in ecstatic tragedy, leaned harshly against the side of the stone, sending it downward; she did not know what she knew. (She knew what she did; she did not know what she did. She knows now; she does not know now.) Or is evil always a question of impinging upon another's freedom, as a Russian might have said? Clearly to obstruct suicide is evil. If a child desires consensual sex with an adult, is this evil if reciprocated? Whose evil? Does a child know what she or he is doing? Does Phaedre? Perhaps there is the question of the contract; what is evil is procedure against another without a contract, civil or otherwise. Then evil is a unilateral process within a system. Is birth a contract? If I am required to serve in the armed forces, is this evil? What have I done, what do I believe in, that my life is necessarily at stake? (Who is competent to sign a contract? What passes for the bandwidth of normalcy? Is it normal to do evil? If it is not normal to do evil, then everyone is innocent.) In cyberspace, a boulder results in a meltdown or spamming, perhaps the loss of an account, perhaps a job, occupation. More often, it results in an interlocking of texts, writing struggling against writing. Where is evil within this? Does not every text open up to still another, part of the chain, I would say, concatenation, of differ_a_nce? But do not texts leave their own residue within the real, that of physical-material action - for example, the perpetration of hate crimes as a result of hate posts? There are no contracts within this, just as there are no contracts within the reception of almost any post, the presentification of novelty. Or should evil be differentiated _only_ within the contract, a convention defined, perhaps, by performative statements and punitive compensations? In which case justice is left out in the cold, up there on the slope of the Alps? Or in fact, is justice sited elsewhere than the issue of good and evil? Certainly one leaves fate out of the equation, since fate is always a posteriori and a judgement itself. Derrida 1: "Obliquely, as at this very moment, in which I'm preparing to demonstrate that one cannot speak _directly_ about justice, thematize or objectivize justice, say 'this is just' and even less 'I am just' without immediately betraying justice, if not law (_droit_)." [p. 935] Derrida 2: "I will leave these problems aside for the moment, along with the affinity between carnivorous sacrifice, at the basis of our culture and our law, and all the cannibalisms, symbolic or not, that structure intersubjectivity in nursing, love, mourning and, in truth, in all sym- bolic or linguistic appropriations." [p. 953] Derrida 3: "Justice, as law, is never exercised without a decision that _cuts,_ that divides." [p. 963] Derrida 4: ..."deconstructive discourses as they present themselves in their irreducible plurality participate in an impure, contaminating, negotiated, bastard and violent way in all these filiations - let's call them Judaeo-Greek to save time - of decision and the undecidable." [p. 1035] From Jacques Derrida, Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundations of Authority," translated by Mary Quaintance, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Cardozo Law Review, July/August 1990. The violence of a flame in cyberspace kills someone through the force of language, and is this a question only of degree? Are cannibalisms possi- ble in cyberspace, the devouring or trembling of text, those issues of uncanny desire I continue to emphasize? Clearly language and symbol are appropriations themselves, in-themselves. What is being circumscribed? Will the rock ever reach the village? Will "the rock ever reach the vil- lage?" Without transcendence, is evil mitigated by the mediation of the symbolic itself? Can there be evil without justice, justice without evil? And again, in _this_ space, site, citation - How is evil performa- tive here _as an interiority_? Or is cyberspace, in fact, nothing more (as some have insisted) than a communicative (sub)domain contingent upon the real? And then where does the contract reside, where is justice be- yond the purely interstitial (contract/contracted)? ________________________________________________________________________ Travis VR Travis moves through the worlds, there are consoles, moves to the con- soles, crosses the levers. Travis pulls the levers, there are jungles and clouds, thin sprays of ocean in summer breezes, flying fish, the jagged terrain of the moon Miranda, his childhood home, the molecular surface of an unknown plant. Tired Travis releases levers, moves back- wards, these dials mimicking old analog, feels the return to the sur- face through backup, always the pleasure of backup. Forgotten worlds rush by, consoles swimming, floating, air-borne in the midst of the vacuum of space beneath the surface of the earth. Dim memories stir Travis, taking a while through the backup, feeling an emergent end, nearly there, always nearly there. Was there noise in the worlds, the appearance of the new, hardly. What fit was the backup, what did it was the backup, but an end, there was always that, lip or rim of phys- ical reality, the One he'd say to himself, now almost there. A strange creature slid across an orange sky turned hyperspace. Another pull of the lever and things seemed all too familiar, was this the lip at long last, but there was the lever to pull. He felt, well if this were this, just one more backup. Felt just one more backup was okay. Felt it was near and might as well backup. Backed up one more time. Was almost there. ________________________________________________________________________ The Blind Spot of a Certain Life within the Body Late at night, I recline, nude, upon the bed, search my body for signs of embodiment, an inhabitation that slowly withdrawns, ends with the fulcrum of death itself. My glasses bring my body into view, into focus, sharpening outlines, creating a three-dimensionality which has always accompanied me, my thinking, the sheave of conflicting processes that constitute the ego. I run my hands across my flesh; my nails on my right-hand fingers are long, cut for a musical instrument. Half culture, half nature, they signify variously to others, separate my fingertips from my skin, minutely. I think to myself, this flesh will do. The play of narcissism, of images, fantasies, begins, narratives from everywhere inhabited by women, by organs, by history. Surrounded by discursive for- mations in various stages of dissolution, the tenuous signifier further appears to dissolve as I approach climax. Through my glasses, I note my penis straining vertically; I feel the cum across my chest, slightly cooling it, and hurry to clean off. An internal flow, impossible to describe, has quickly started and stopped, accompanied by a slight sen- sation of heat. I think to myself, I must return to work. All of this is through the matrices of language, culture, _glass_ (and the restoration of purified vision, however defined), fingers shaped for music. I am embodied, sunk into the bed, into the hysteria of the unrav- elling of sexual discourse, the climactic moment when everything falls away, as I imagine it must upon, say, a stabbing. And it occurs to me that embodiment is defined by _withdrawal_ of the body, of everything except for the localization long-waves or solitons of processes that later are perceived as defining: the orgasmic-body, stabbed-body, dead- body, angry-body, enraptured-body. Embodiment then always already splits at the focus, an acculturated body or a narratological body, and only in withdrawal does it become the classical moment of embodiment philosophically spilled everywhere. The withdrawal, however, is a special case, a tagged-body, and this tagging (as those acquainted for example with Tantric sex will know) is also a matter of acculturation. I would exclude death alone as a fundamental physicality; it is the always the horizon of withdrawal (and even here culture interpenetrates). So I would say that embodiment is withdrawal and a discourse of with- drawal - the former, effacement, and the latter, the narratology of effacement which varies widely. And I would say as well that to the extent that narratology plays any role, cyberspace/cybermind are trou- bled precisely because the discourse is present without the withdrawal itself (delete/kill _functions_ have no role here within/without the privacy of the body). This is where the difficulty comes in. I imagine in the far future, the difficulty will further disassociate, as thought- without-a-body becomes possible (there is no reason it should not), so that the soliton processes, the tagged-bodies, become themselves purely representative (again touching on Lyotard's essay in The Inhuman). Thought-without-a-body does not imply one way or another the necessity of an external physical matrix, by the way, although I assume something would be required. But given our limited knowledge of physics, exactly _what_ is impossible to say. (Perhaps I am saying nothing more than the signifier is trapped within the body, that the body is always already split/disembodied into parts, in terms of representation - and that the one current horizon here is the various formations of withdrawal, including sicknesses, orgasms, amputations, deaths, and various ecstatic states - none of which, except death-beyond-memory, are purified themselves of cultural interweavings. It seems clear to me why questions of ontology and epistemology become immediately clouded in relation to computer-mediated-communication, and why those involved in it are occasionally troubled.) ________________________________________________________________________ -------------------------cut and lowering framework--------------------- Spirits If I feel the spirit move within me, what is it that is moving, so they say. What is moving within the moving, what is the moving moving within. So they say, the spirits, that they move within me. What are they, that they move, that they move within me? What is it that they say? They say that mankind and womankind are sick. They say there are species and the species are sick. The spirits are sick, no one says them. They say they are unsaid. They are sick with the unsaying and the European nations are sick. The European nations are no longer European, nor are they nations. They are spirits moving, spirits moving across me. My eyes close upon them, these movements of mankind and womankind sick with spirits, the sickness of European nations. They chant the nations repeating the spirit within them moving, so they say. What is moving within them, the nations are saying, that they move within them. What are they, these movements within them, me, saying the sickness that is the saying. Language is sick with the saying of it. There is language and language, there is more language, all of it saying and continuing to say. The spirits say there is language, but I do not feel language within me. I feel the language in the fields and in the neighborhoods, I feel the language in the neighborhood of nations. There is ocean-mountain lang- uage and desert-prairie language. I feel the language of the dunes and wadis, there I feel the spirit. I feel the dune-wadi language and return with the spirit into the sick- ness of the European nations. Go figure, they say to me. Whatever, they say as well. Go figure, whatever. Backwards and forwards through the gateways of simulated worlds, there can be suffering beings in all dimensions. -------------------------stitched and uplifted framework---------------- Broken Posts, Sustained Thought these daily texts, so simplified, and each must tell the whole story. i am a coward. i have said i am a coward. that doesn't change anything. nothing builds on nothing. terms fly out as ontology decompresses, signs disappear. shorter texts are aphorisms, wobbling their way into deletion; the longer hang down uselessly from the headers, articles never appearing as such in these readers; they're limp, exhausted, even as the screens scroll down. threads stitch together nothing but a name. like the world i have a certain style. like the world i offer pills to you, pills to myself. pills for everything in the world. i'm out of it. beyond being you, i am no one. you would not remember my history, the history of these posts, their interconnections. concatenations, they exist by virtue of seriality, nothing more or less. this is the trouble with posts; this is the trouble with them. my thought is sustained every waking moment of the day. I cannot escape it, cannot for a moment stop, collapse within the body. the thought meristemates, roots itself (what other roots are there), and it becomes _the_ thought, the neitherness of thought, expulsion. it expels itself from itself, taking its roots with it. the posts are bound to time, to the arbitrary time i have set for them. they are linked to time, to the masochistic that contracts their content before any sort of conceivable development. hysteric, they exist only by virtue of their symptoms. the symptoms are empty at the core, emptied of the core, disembodied. they surround furiously the breast of the creator, gone from this or another post. they surround lovingly the breast of clara hielo, the presence of a return or something forgotten in the long three hundred. the long three hundred have followed one another, collapsed. they are the numbers that are remembered. but the numbers are not the sustaining and the threads are torn, just as history is a later unravelling of the face of god. that is to say, an unravelling that roots itself, protrudes through the outer layers of the skin into the skull whitened for every conceivable purpose. the penetra- tion of the skull from trepanning on is the glue that holds everything together, the cum on the spear-tip. it is here that concatenation be- comes a binding through the onslaught of prayer. it is here that posts and sacrifice are later discarded, a distraught body whose name is al- ways already forgotten or hidden. so that there's very little time left. so that each must tell the whole story. so that each must insist that there's a story to tell. ________________________________________________________________________ Deer Felled by the Dust at the Doorways to Cyberspace Sometimes I think all I have to do is move further into the realms of ideas, deeper into the sluices of cyberspace, cast-off the fishing netting running through the slurry of minnows cast off collapsed on the decks of boats submerged forever o beautiful divers relegating then looking around at these o so impoverished surroundings, one thin screed of paper enough to black out the terminal desires muted digital symphonics construct at the drop of pin or skirt nothing here beyond the dust making sense leaking out from every pore of the skin which what. which collapses. now this space of absent harts, deer, every singular animal pounding its hooves into my chest blessed or wounded our wounded sailor, or the wires short out, wires bundled molten into one another soldered real _things_ in this real soldered space, your eyes stitched wide for the telling of them the _blessing_ as I said of the dust which felts the embrace of air required by dogged computations, dust against the daily reminders against the atlas of european nations against the text of unix command-line performance of the wounded sailor alone but for the fish when his skin slits open for the emergence of eyes alone but for the haze from factories boiled below where the busses stop alone but for the paper threatening the monitor screen, sirens, my ears my hands my fingers blinded I am dying of comsumption of dust, pneumonias with tuberculor lungs rotted through the bleeding gums of degenerated tissues and longing dying as the cotton coats the tongue, eyes filmed over with the promise of invisible and silent real sleep "Dust!" she screamed: "Damn you, it's all dust! DUST!" ________________________________________________________________________ Fuck Me Fires cross ill-fated equally star-crossed lovers in cyberspace, delving the depths to find out everything about one another. Fires burn measure- ments of cocks, breasts, cunts, churn through past-histories as mutilated bodies appproach one another, smashing through screens, ripping apart clothing, tangling with the cyber-junkies already on the floor behind the computer. Protocol serial parts connect one another in daisy-chain links, parallel ports glue couples and trios to local-area-networks struggling to make a name for themselves. Loneliness rules cyberlanes, don't kid yourselves, as I offer my address up like a whore intent only on writing the truth of cyberspace, its spews, floods, emissions - its stutterings and rattlings as the last vestiges of the body fall away revealing the meat, bones, gristle beneath the meat, bones, gristle. How many times does the virgin disappear always bouncing back; even the Doctress Neutopia was deceived with much apologies. The only magic here is scars on my nipples devoured by pure writing, the writing of teeth against the flesh, writing of mouths against smooth translucent skin. Take my hair, shave it, place it in a curse. Take my flesh, cannibal; it will make you strong. Take my eyes; they will see no more than your own, nothing but the ascii on the wall. Take my ears, cannibal; they hear no more than the sound of keys, the whirlwind running of disks and fans, mute circularities bringing the self back to the self. I would be yours, whore for you, offer my self up to you. But you must come and take me. Loving Wires Fogs cross lucky equally sophisticated lovers in cyberspace, climbing the heights, forgetting everything they know. Mute fogs photograph arms, legs, shadows of smiles, flowing from past to future as beautiful bodies dance and move apart, reflected in terminal screens, sewing lovely warm clothing, always in the pronouncement of a healing function for the very sad. Protocol parallel ports form lairs, caverns, webs, where serial ports make new born beings pulsing, glistening everywhere, embryonic and nameless in the midst of the widest of areas. The tribe loves you and me, as our privacy remains our own, protected by the protocols from the lies and truths of cyberspace, its posts, its texts, its sounds and images, as the wondrous body is made from our newness, our caresses, our eyes, hair and delicate fingers weaving on tender looms. How much knowledge we gain in amazing space; even alt.society.neutopia flowers with thinkings sublimely intertwined. The only darkness here is within my sight, creat- ing pure writing, the writing of lips against the eyes, writing of hands holding my body against your own. I grow my hair for you, talisman, spell or fabric. Place it within a locket; you are weakened. I would see with your eyes; they see the world and more, everything through the door, the window of the soul. Listening to you, I hear the rustling of the world, the quiet tenderness of hands lightly touching hands, breasts, the widest of hearing. Two in one, one in two, we violate the laws of capital, ours, yours, mine, for the taking. ________________________________________________________________________ Scroll-Dream of the Shape-Rider After months it has happened, previsioned two days ago with a dream of nanotechnological beings in dire warfare, one drilling the other upon a plain of stainless steel indefinitely extended; I was glad to have been given an isometric view of the whole. The boring was intensive, the stinger, black, yellow, silver, red, fluxing mechanically upon a viral appendage, one to another, a vortex through the machinic. Waking upon this, I found an uncanny softness to my surroundings within the real. Last night it began, the scroll-dream of the shape-rider returned to the surface of things, the scroll-text beginning white letters on black background, the color of the monitor-torah spilling inchoate scriptures, one after the other. I lost myself in my desire for and through them, nothing but the letters backgrounded by letters, each a shadow of itself and other, each simultaneous, but always in movement, whether or not read, whether or not absorbed or comprehended. The hysteria of langue continued through part 1. of the dream; troubled, I would awaken, guage my obdurate surroundings (bed, ceiling, books), return to the state of scroll. Nothing interfered, was allowed to interfere with the call of language, distended graphemes struggling through themselves to reach me, senseless or not. Then through part 2. a continuation, change in color, now fuzzy bril- liant white against darker blue, but a dark powdered blue as well that sloughed from the screen, as if contaminated.[1] Through this, message after message poured; I leaned into the terminal, forfeiting life, fore- closing upon a body which had no place in the universe, none at all. Would that have been all. In the midst of typing myself, typing-myself, an interrupt appeared; 183 new messages arrived, and I realized some- thing was wrong. Hurrying, I exited to the index, and immediately a non- sense address made an appearance, as in lksdjfwer rsperjd, one of those so recently discovered in the real life of the Internet on alt.2600, a hacker group itself hacked. I crashed out of the account; dark powder- blue backgrounded brilliant white faded as I rushed to the telephone, in order to call Panix.com, my server; I had to have the account closed. Someone was after me - rather some wild graphemic process, alive in the interstices of cyberspace, headless, tailess, untraceable. At this point life awakened me, the scroll and its cancellation faded, but the room never returned properly, as the walls remain askew, and inked blackness appears in the ill-fitting cracks opening up everywhere in the world. I realize I have been given a rare premonition of my textual future, when breathing itself will cease, when you will find me here, and here only, when reality is nothing more than the flesh made word. Consciousness ceases as it continues to present itself; representation abjures the culture it describes with greater and greater finesse. This is not the life I would call myself, but this is what is written in the interior of stars. --- [1] Later of course, vision itself will disappear, all these colors, the _shape_ of alphabetics, even the silence. ________________________________________________________________________ PLEASE NOTE PLEASE NOTE: TO EVERYONE!!!! CHILD PORN PERVERTS SEARCH THE NET FOR YOUR KIDS! Lurid sex-starved children advocate free sex with ancient men! Her teats hung down until the lap of little boys was filled with them. His hair- less body reached through the screen accosting the previously-perfect twins. Friends, crime on the Internet knows no bounds! Their thin waists were grasped by the terminal itself hurtling color pictures of wide-open holes. Wee-wee on your mommy and daddy. I will come and kill your entire family, Mr. President, and their families too! This is an ascii bomb, burning your hard-drive: Beware! PCP fumes will kill within five seconds. If we are not allowed to keep our guns, we will march on EVERY CAPITAL BUILDING IN THIS UNITED STATES. SHOOT TO KILL!!!!! Come here, honey, and sit on my life. The formula for crack involves a free radical easily reproduced from common baking-soda. Your girlfriend has a small twat, I should know. I will shoot every goddamn Russian who comes within ten miles of Peoria. Perverts Cruise the Internet Taking your Children from You. Friends, you must HURT THEM where it counts, in their pocketbooks and between their eyes! Here is a list of private phone-numbers of invalids. You have $14321.24 in your bank account and your husband is with one Susanne Francis. Congratulations: I have just destroyed your operating system! Do not reboot or this machine with never work again! Cock piss shit fuck I bet you can't stop me! Come suck my dick! If you so much as write me again I will shoot you through the window you know which one I mean looking out over the schoolyard. MY IDEA FOR PERFECT WORLD SALVATION IN WHICH I WILL TELL YOU ALL THE ANSWERS THROUGH MY RESEARCH WHICH I HAVE CARRIED ON FOR ONE DECADE. I want to hold you, honey, go to your telephone, go to your telephone now. That's right. Now when it rings, when it rings, pick it up! You don't know me but I know you! Now look behind you, out the window, the car parked down the street. Wouldn't you like a picture like this? Isn't this a silly picture? Wouldn't you like me to take one? If you can't get the fucking manual, you don't belong here! Fuck you asshole! Clara, I just fucked your hus- band in the ass. I got your whole family, asshole! It's people like me who have to protect people like you! I didn't think they allowed Jews here. Is it true what they say. Pull your pants down and pull your little thing out, now isn't that better? Aren't there any pictures of kids with kids here? THE NET IS A PLAYGROUND FOR ALL YOUR DESIRES. I READ IT IN THE PAPERS, SAW IT ON THE TELEVISION! FRIENDS, THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY IS REAL AND IT BRINGS CRIMINALS AND PERVERTS TO YOUR VERY DOOR, INTO YOUR HOUSE, INTO YOUR BED! FRIENDS, THE WIRES DRIP WITH PERVERSION AND EVIL! THE WIRES FUCK YOUR CHILDREN AND YOUR WIVES AND HUSBANDS! HIDEOUS MONSTERS REACH OUT THROUGH YOUR TERMINAL SCREEN AND GRAB YOUR COCK! HIDEOUS FORCES EMPTY YOUR BANK ACCOUNT! DON'T TURN AROUND! THEY ARE WATCHING YOU! GET OFF WHILE THERE IS TIME! GET OFF WHILE THERE IS STILL TIME! "A Friend" _________________________________________________________________________ Protest-Talk in Cyberspace I am talking about the issue of protest in relation to the body, in particular the necessity of protest at a time like this, when the left moves towards the right, and the right consolidates its power. I am talking about protest because there is still time to talk, and talking is what we do. ----------------- Perhaps (again) it is the lack of body that makes protest seem improbable in this medium. The New Yorker has a short article about Ronald Reagan's announcement that he has Alzheimer's Disease; it was hand-written, some- what sloppily, as a result of the beginnings of degeneration that had set in. The announcement, a brief letter, was reproduced. Reagan knew that his mind was closing down, could watch to a certain extent as the world became increasingly incomprehensible.* The article points to the sheer physicality of the note, its obdurate (grainy) presence in a world of typing, memos, and modems. The writing-body makes an uncanny impres- sion: ink flows where the hand moves; sweat curls paper slightly; the surface of skin moves slowly above, touches, then out of reach or beyond, what it inscribes. I think that is still the value, for example, of pain- ting, in a world of absolute encoding - that a certain resistance re- mains possible. Resistance is what the world itself did best; harvesting required sheer physical effort, and making a hut from mammoth bones was an obviously long process. Time was a commodity that went on forever; look at the pyramids. And inscription itself, of any form, seemed to imply a cutting-into or demarcation upon, a surface. But that is the way the world was and the world no longer changes with its markings. For the computer changes everything, recreates inscription as _packet-sub- stance,_ and our words are formed according to predetermined characteris- tic signatures and protocols. This isn't a secondary effect; it is pri- mordial within cyberspace, and humans therefore turn around and create ulterior ontologies within the bandwidth of this representation, we who inhabit Cybermind or Fiction-of-Philosophy, Future Culture, etc., friends, enemies, and lovers. But these are technologically fragile, and there is always already the packet-substance in the background, the sub- stance of the sheer weight of this communication, simultaneously weight- less and full. It is this substance that makes protest so difficult, so problematic. It is this substance that is no substance at all; fluidic, protest seeps, and without the slough of granularity, its appearance is translucent at best. The substance is all signifier and image, all simulacrum. Models of resistance and opposition imply force, power, drawn from the material world: _when push comes to shove._ Like embezzlement, the pack- et-substance is a flux or shuffling of markers, no more or less serious, no more or less ideologically-bound. Like violent physical crime in rela- tion to embezzlement, physicality in relation to packet-substance makes the latter, not immediately a site of the world itself, problematic under any category in which the former is prosecuted. The prosecution of the physical returns a model of resistance; the prosecution of packet-subs- tance emits flux, the capital of speech at several removes. We are weak- ened at the very source of our language, and protest may appear nothing at all. Isn't this, finally, the true liquidity of capital, detached from every source and standard? True communication at variance, no wonder psychoa- alytic processes play such intensive roles, once the user is detached as well from data-bases, cast adrift in the imaginary. The force is in the dreaming of it, and it takes the real, or its semblance, to make it real, it/s/self. --- *There is a world in this knowledge as well, this shutting-down of the feed-back loops of self-reference, extending outward, elsewhere. I leave it to someone else to develop the topic. ________________________________________________________________________ Access Ftp: The screen curls away; the commands operate against the impervious wall absenting recognition. Download before reading. File arrangements are familiar and unknown, users and publications dominating. There is always a foreign name or two. Promises are always late as the files ring adultery, the surface of one machine beckoning to another. Telnet: These are false lovers, since you're almost always led down a path to something desired, the small end of a funnel bypassing the enor- mous kernel working against all odds. You don't know where you are; the screen curls towards you. This is the domain of the grid. WWW: Already the promise of a neighborhood built on the backs of gophers and ftp, but the communal remains in the future. This is the generation to come, eliminating blocks of information and history; with everything linked, nothing is impervious, and transparency gives credence to the inauthenticity of being. Its foundations are maverick hacker-worlding, easy for marks like me. Gopher: The venetian-blind world turning up menu after menu, each label- ling something a vast distance from something else. So much remains dis- connected, but it _seems_ as if the geography were real, as if God her- self alphabetized existence. One is drawn in forever and a day beyond the text; the text is all there is. Usenet, Email, E-Lists: Here the voice struggles to be heard, procure a site for its absent granularity. Psychoanalytical processes dominate as text is taken for real, data for the outlines of beings everywhere in the world. We are speaking of organism speaking here, the realm of the imaginary or uncanny. It's as if Usenet described the world, E-lists commented on it, E-lists or their inhabitants, waiting for release. Mbone: Swollen, to come, dinosaur lumbering with something approaching _presentation._ The disappearance of text will result in withdrawal, perhaps the pleasure of the face which is always other. IRC: As if speaking were the final thing, or chats where you have sex pretending you don't, or even thinking you're touching or moving an emotional battery. MUDS, MOOS: Where you're touching or moving objects, always there in worlds which need continuous construction, no further epistemology. Where there is always space, there is always surplus; where there is always site, capital loses its hold. TALK: The frenzy of knowing who you are, revealing yourself by your typed, effaced mistakes, errors crowding the screen hurtling towards you at unimaginable velocities. In TALK, MUDS, MOOS, you begin not to know the weather, you find yourself at the end of a brilliant other. FINGER: You find yourself at the end of a brilliant other, locked-in, locked out, always the screen closed down, cauterizing sexual pleasure. What does it say but you do or don't want to play. Image: All download images, set standards for decompressions (so it breathes easier), create a lapse constructing voyeurism. The lapse is when the machine runs, processes, begins the unarduous task of pimping the naked screen. Images break, fall apart; a woman's head appears upon a man's torso, everything else transformed into noise. The screen shatters. Other forms, Archie, Veronica, Wais, Jughead, ride the protocols as ftp itself doubles the process. Everything transforms into everything, but an address remains just that, not necessarily devoured by access, not necessarily accessible. It is in fact the _inaccessible_ that may be of greatest interest, those untraceable telnet locations for example. Here the backbone meets the gristle, and only a few may apply. ________________________________________________________________________ Learning to write the united states Anarchic gangs roam around the united states, meeting in corrals, fight- ing their way across rocky landscapes, marauding gangs of police have their own headquarters as well, backwards and forwards there's a slurry of individuals, organizations, these are the united states, no plan of action, nothing, no law, this is why the rest of the world fears us, we've got no idea what we're doing, no compunctions. But we've got money and I hear the color's going to change, tell one bill from another, blue one green five, maybe yellow two or a ten. So they'll circulate, these abstract numbers and we can learn adding just as well, one-ten make green five, what have you. But we have no regard for this. We have no regard because there will be no history of anything otherwise different, because as I've always said, our history's in the future, and is whatever we'll say it will be, unless someone else says something different, and that's okay too. We have the space to draw lines in the sand in the grass prairies across the mountains, still the space, and the groups there to draw it. What clashes is languages, but the languages, all of them, are getting smaller and there are new ones every day, everyone speaking all the time. But why listen when there's nothing to say and it's all reported and there's too much of it; which is why there's a focus on Mica-Madonna, Simpson-Silver, which is where Ballard was right before he copped out on telling the truth about the present. But you can have any truth you want. What you have to understand is that this isn't even anarchy, it's not a lack of organization, it's just that organization doesn't figure into it. Nothing figures into it, nothing but those moments when you trace things walking a path across a national park, which is all there is here, designed and very dangerous for we have guns. We have the aces up the sleeve as well. So you've got to understand it's not government, big or little, but that's a page of it, and it's not one or another party, but that's another page - and it's not outlaws, nothing like that. It's the names that are given to things which are weakened and fall off things, and that falling off is the united states and maybe america too. Like there should be an ending, like a description which curls round itself, completes something. What we keep telling you is everything is equivalent; this is what we used to tell ourselves. First we told our- selves, and that was the eighteenth century. Then we listened, and that was the nineteenth century. Then we tell you, and that goes on forever. Like I said as well, there's no then we are told, only the telling of the future and we're good at that. ________________________________________________________________________