2.82 __________________________________________________________________________ Sun . . Earth This is a recurrent image for me: a _period_ representing the sun, and the distance to the earth calculated by the rough angle subtended; I think here the distance is somewhat correct; the earth of course would be a mere speck, dustmote at the distance. So it goes in this universe of tiny ascii; with closed eyes, flares cross the space, radiation from the corona breathes and diffuses; the earth's shadow turns a thin nee- dle to the right. __________________________________________________________________________ Cable Life Having checked the addresses-com ports-IRQs-internal/external modem con- figurations, it turned out as expected to be a hardware problem, a cable running to the serial port from the motherboard. The cable's been rewired by the upgraders, and everything runs; somehow in the process I seem to have inherited a second internal modem, neither of which are installed. Analog synthesizers such as the MOOG, at least before the ARP, used ex- ternal cable connects, plug-ins with phone jacks eventually covering the board. Later, a matrix board was used; this carries over to video image- processing, with the Experimental Television Center using a 50x50 matrix to interconnect components in any order. The wiring necessary for the board is probably over a mile in length, running everywhere beneath the independent components. Synthesizers switched to internal connections, with a certain loss - it's no longer possible to send a signal in between any two devices; instead, you've got to use the standardized inputs and outputs. MIDI made sure of standardization, as did TCP/IP, and so forth and so on. Sometimes there's a bit of sloppiness, such as the ability to download with cat and vi in Unix, anything that spills text on the screen. I imagine a hugely multiplexed cable with input and output addresses for everything except perhaps power, a single connect using fiberoptics and huge bandwidths. This travels among thousands of happy components, each time-sharing at impossibly high speeds. There's no reason for this of course except the aesthetics of a light-pipe in action... Meanwhile, as the drive towards interconnectivity hits _this_ machine in macroscopic and inordinately complex fashion, my sexual drive begins to disappear; instead of remaining at the node, I have dream to travel, the body battered into bytes and bits along local highways, buses, out through modem murmurs into pure vacuum, virtual particles. The body stains, spins, resides, memory self-exhausting. In fact, think of body as memory-container, spilling its contents (into memetic pools if you like); now, it begins to shuffle, speed up, thrust, _intend,_ hurl the purity of lightspeed approach (time down, space up!), digital bandwidth on the increase, bytes and bits into curves smoothed to any degree. Oh, I'm sorry, apparently I'm reconstituted here for you, but I'm on my way, moving on, and I'm on my way and I'm sorry I'm on my way. My Body Is My Station On The Vast Highway Of All Living Things ________________________________________________________________________ (This is an updated version of a list of characteristics of postmodernism that I used in a number of courses taught from around 1983-92. It consists of a check list of processes and a brief addendum.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Postmodern Checklist From modernity to postmodernity, the following processes occur, primarily within post-industrial societies: Transformation of society from industrial to service to information econ- omy. Transformation from analog to digital processing technologies. Transformation from knowledge to knowledge management, and from knowledge management to the articulation of fragmentary flows of information. Exponential growth of knowledge and emergence of the knowledge industry. Increased ad hoc attitudes towards labor, coupled with vocational disin- vestment (i.e. flexiwork). Transformation from late capitalism to ad hoc transnational managerial capitalism and bricolage entrepreneurialism in post-industrial nations. Weakening of the nation state and growth of bricolage governance (local mafias). Replacement of essentialisms by constructivisms, combined with the hard- ening of essentialist positions as a rearguard action (i.e. backlash to the woman's movement). Breakdown of materialist/idealist distinctions. Increasingly reified ethnicities, political consciousness and symbolic capital stressing 'traditional' geographic boundaries (homelands), at times coupled with anti-development attitudes. Increased breakdown and reification of traditional models of public and private (personal) relationships (sexual, civic, social, institutional). Proliferation of entertainment forms tending towards technological ef- fect (representations, media, programming) and distribution channels re- sulting in the breakdown of network hegemonies (Internet diffused gov- ernance for example). Proliferation of information flows into the private spaces such as the home, the body, etc. Semiotic transformations from inscriptive (hardened, maintained, stable) processes to fissuring (weakened, stuttering, pre-oedipal/symbolic, de- stabilized) and fissuring regimes. Likewise from classical matter (stabilized signifier/sememe demarcations) to non-classical matter (problematic signifiers, significations). Increased leakage of the signifier (excesses, supplement). Increasing jostling of signifying regimes within information flows. Increased incommensurabilities, including languages, teleologies, and scripts. Problematizing of space-time and stable categorizations. Development of mathematics of non-classical spaces (monster curves, frac- tals, catastrophe theory, chaos theory, eccentric or abject spaces). Mathematico-physical inclusion of disorder. Development of "intermaths" (massive parallel processes (Bailey)), with a tendency towards discrete, computational, digital, mathematical develop- ment (four-color theorem, reliance on the computer, artificial life). Endocolonization everywhere, coupled with the manufacturing of romanti- cisms (not only among minority ethnicities but also among the left - i.e. the "radical" effect of Wired magazine). Increased gaps between richer and poorer, in terms of both economic and cultural/informational capital. Emergence of subcultural-noise cultural phenomena, simultaneously using micro-technologies (pirate radio) and abjuring technology altogether. Ecological destabilizations and managerial or fundamentalist responses. Intensification of apocalyptic and survivalist subcultures. Increasing rhetorical/idiolectical emissions and distorted communica- tions. Increased problematic or property in general (including the technology of reproduction, birthing; intellectual property; farmlands). Increased development of _discursive fields_ and their receptors, and their interpenetrations (hypertext, punk rock). Simultaneously totalization of universal (computational) languages and functional idiolectical autonomies, the commodification of idiolects (rants, serial murders, dualities). A = A (Shelling's identity, totality) replaced by 0 = {X: x not-= x} (the null set as equivalent to the set of those x not equal to themselves - displacement and slippage). Semiotic emissions of symbols which appear sourceless and undirected (Disneyland effect). Stabilized "rigid" objects replaced by part-objects, incompletions, fragments. Transformation from cultural hegemonies taken for granted (with their associated margins) to competitive multiculturalisms within hegemonic regimes. Advent of microelectronics expanding the tacit environment of the body, tending towards full (seamless) virtual realities. Seamless virtual realities as the current _horizon_ of the technological subject. Destabilization of world economies coupled with exponential population growth. Increased reduction of DNA variability, increased toxicity of the planet. Massive plant and animal extinctions. Deep pollution of local and usually urban environments. Increased "natural" catastrophies as the result of human interference (Mississippi flooding). Proliferation of shack cities (favellas, colonias) without sewage, water, electric, and the growth of world-wide shack cultures. Emancipation increasingly tied to communication and communicative strat- egies - including weapons and weapon technology as media - the void (of power, territory, language) becomes integral to the emancipated society which is cast adrift. World-wide growth of the Internet, including dark-net domains. Tendency towards "technology with a human face" by the development and proliferation of increasingly higher-level languages - tendency towards cyborg-regimes. Elimination of _master narratives,_ replaced by situational micro-narra- tives (Lyotard). Backlashing through an insistence on non-transcendentalist ethics among tight subgroups (survivalists, fundamentalists) coupled with a freezing of inscriptions (reliance on biblical word). Confluence of genders, transgressive sexualities operating within an _engendered field._ Increased problematizing of gender within queer/theory/feminist debates. Institutionalized transgressions, abjections. However, circumscribed abjections and alienations replaced by irreducible abjections. Traditional rites and rituals transformed into simulacra, combined with the exhaustion of tradition (interior horizons of tradition, and _tradi- tion_ replaced by _traditions_). Growth of technological vulnerabilities and parasitologies (manufacture of illegal domain names on the Net, hacking, cracking, pirate radio and television, phone phreaking, etc.). Art replaced by techne, and an exhaustion of traditional artistic/cultural notions of progress and development. Questioning of historic, geographic, anthropological methodologies and the emergence of self-reflexive discourses (Mike Davis, Michael Taussig). Increased serialities (manufactured "inauthentic" relations beneath and within the sign of capital). Increased cultural tourisms, relativisms, equivalences, beneath and within the same. Increased splitting of academic fields, discourses, languages. Commercialization of the university, alliance of business and education - i.e. _the business of education,_ _education of business._ The simulacra of desire's liberation and the potential of infinite choice. Replacement of the spectacle by the simulacrum (no longer strings to pull) (Baudrillard). Replacement of the body by the cyborg-body, of the symbolic by the imag- inary masquerading as the symbolic, of the real by the symbolic. Replacement of the televised real by the symbolic-real, the real-symbolic by the real. The perception of life as the _condition_ of the real (Mars-life, diffu- sionist theories). -------------------- A split among _postmodernisms_ themselves into _apartment postmodernism_ characterized by wealth, personal telecom terminals, and a mobile urban- ism; and a _postmodern poor_ characterized by nomadicisms, urban inten- sifications, information economies (de Soto), available tech/telecom strategies, and_electric media_ (loudspeaker, telephone, telegraph). The development of _postmodern geographies_ which include nomadic and telecom geographies (electromagnetic spectrum for example), body/gender territories, and noise culture domains. The development of telecommunications as a _third space_ beyond the _second space_ of time and the _first space_ of traditional geographies. Appearance of the _postmodern body,_ part-object, cyborgian, simulacra appearing as _transgressive logics_ across and within its surfaces, the new frontier corrupted by violent social/environmental decay (appearance of immune deficiency and other diseases, increased medical technologies, disappearance of the dead (Gulf "War," etc.). Entrepreneurship within the digital realm, realm of the body - the sub- tending of the real. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- The postmodern remains unnamed; what drives it, its drives, are unnamed. Names reproduce within the modern; their semantics are Kripkian, held in place as rigid designators true in all possible worlds (counterfactuals). In the postmodern, rigidity is problematic, deconstructed; worlds them- selves are fuzzy, interwoven, partial. Communication at the speed of light (Virilio) brings time to a standstill. (Postmodern poor: Postmodernism occurs within a critical space, a space of the catastrophic, emptied of symbolic legitimation and stability. Because of capital flow, emigration, and struggles for individual survival and autonomy, the space begins to "fill up," creating a cacophony of (infor- mal) regimes competing for cultural and economic power, gaslines, water, labor, prostitutions, and so forth. The resulting struggle produces com- peting domains in which the symbolic itself is at stake; nothing, not even communication, can be taken for granted. The zone is a chaotic accumula- tion of intensities, condensed matter and languages, a dead or deligimi- ized zone. The planet itself is becoming an accumulation of such zones. Poor postmodernism is life which skips modernism, and heavy industry, jumping when possible to radio, television, Internet - just a short dis- tance from the maquiladora poisoning the environment - the early post- industrial revolution of electronic assembly plants, tourisms, and small manufacturing. (But here too is a myth (and where is "here"?); unemploy- ment also grows, scarcity and desertification increase; but here, too, a telenovella...)) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Voyeur ii Two small eyes for this voyeur; first I was able to enter an adult reflector site (NO LURKERS HERE!) with a slightly misconfigured quick- cam; nothing sent, everything come in. A woman masturbated on a bed. A male masturbated and another male masturbated. The two men revealed their cocks and nothing more; the woman twisted and turned, exposed herself, fingers and dildo. The woman described a universe of affect; the men centered themselves on their axis. Later I did return to the primal scene, set my camera up on myself, chest down (emptied of all facial content, which I nontheless returned to periodically; I couldn't keep my self out of the picture). Wearing underwear of various sorts, I touched myself seductively - no replies. I typed is anyone there? No replies. I figured there was no transmission going on. I went to chat and asked; no replies. Everyone was intent on a woman X revealing her breasts. I went back to type on the image "I am so alone" "am I here for you?" "do you see my image"? No replies; I figured no one could see anything, but there was an edge to it. I was naked at this point, aroused by the contents emptying themselves on the screen, which were not facial, but everywhere. I masturbated, narcissistic to the end, my quickcam image echoing my body back to me in the midst of the relative- ly anonymous others. I walked away, dressed, returned to a more public Norwegian site, went through the same motions. Again I asked if my image were visible; in chat, I received several answers, yes; I confirmed this by running up my transmission rate until the reflector told me to cool it. So I was visible after all at the first site, fully exposed; everyone was quiet about it - the masturbators in the group, the woman included, going on with the production of the representation of the simulacrum of display, but in fact it was display for all that and real for all that and sim- ultaneously overwhelming (exposure before strangers! tickets! the win- dow goes up!) and fully prosaic... ii ii The men had the camera fixed on their cock, a singular position. The woman moved the camera; twice an arm appeared, indicating the presence of some- one else in the room. The woman developed a narrative of exploration; by the time I left the site the first time, she had the camera in close on her shaved cunt, which she opened, almost like an Annie Sprinkle perfor- mance. It was powerful and beautiful. The presence of a presumed partner, in the midst of what was most likely a heterosexual emission through the Net, is similar to the scene established in numerous swinger magazine advertisements - a female, accompanied by her male partner, fucking men and women, while the male watches. The tension, control, and split of power - as well as the subversion of jealousies and abjections - is intense. There is a hunger here, the subversion of homo- sexualities detoured (a la Irigaray); the opening of a "safe" and contrac- ted haven for pushing the body to its erotic edge; and the release of (La- canian) masquerade and (Reichian) everything else as the symbolic (cont- ract, division) transforms into the imaginary, and the flesh is carried further into the (Lacanian) real. I know _I would have done anything_ had I been asked, exposed myself com- pletely to male or female (in fact, I had done that unknowingly, but none- theless filled with desire); I would not, however, have given out my ad- dress or other information - this was too present for presence. I did at- tempt to locate one of the participants (domain names are given) and with that, I had, if I had wanted, already a beginning, almost a location, a real name (I was "empty" on the site), almost something beyond the slip- page of the signifier into the grain of the screen/quickcam. The images of all the participants needed constant tending; because of the nature of CuSeeMe transmission, the woman's body constantly fractured into sheaves. The male bodies were more stationary, stilled, as if it were enough for the cock to be raised, periscopic, checking out the terrain. There was pathos all around, but the _hunt_ for the image, occasional tun- ing and retuning, the periodic slow typing in chat or at the bottom of the miniature screen, only increased the body turned towards its improbably destiny; it became a form of gambling - even sight was involved, decoding the planes, returning the woman's body to itself, tuning one's own to the screen. This is far preferable to teledildonics; this is in the realm of the lurid (which I have described in terms of the nightclub, the torn, the abject, the half-illuminated), and the lure. The object which is just beyond the screen is between your legs; the gift offered by the male or female is matched by your own; and display itself is cathartic. It's as if control of control were acceded, as if the body shimmered across issues of con- tractual domination, into a realm where light coupled with pixels, where revelation itself was dirtied by poor resolution, and was such a relief! _________________________________________________________________________ Voyeur iii Bad Theory What is the _scopic drive_? I suspect this is hard-wired in, open to ear- ly imprinting, perhaps more male-oriented (the jury's still out). Is it a form of objectification, or does it sexualize the real through fetishiza- tion? The real bends towards the voyeur; s/he perceives obstacles, barri- ers, the lure/lurid beyond them. The real is always already an unveiling. *A: Q your setup needs to be 15 send and 28 recv...not 80 and 300 the way it is now *A: Getting 60% lost packets that way *B: A...it's an empty room anyway! *C: true, Q..please adjust your settings, okay/ Q is a woman. I tune to Q, see nothing; she's gone, on and off. My memory returns to OP of last night, obviously regulars. *D: F I see you have things well in hand again! *F: well............. The phallic image holds fast but I exaggerate; there are all sorts of males on all sorts of channels, often with the chest showing - either chest or full genitals. I find my sweater makes pretty patterns on the screen and either no one cares or I'm not transmitting. *A: Who can tell...80/300 is not going to send right anyway *A: Sure is *D: there goes Q Poof! *G: Q Hi *D: okay you're back huh!!! yeaah! *H: hello all.... *MN: Q *D: Poof!!! Q goes back and forth, the image appearing and disappearing; I think of the instability of the imaginary, the uncanny, ghosts always appearing on the periphery. *G: boring!!!!!! *G: it's a bad day *F: yeah *C: yeah...surf time...see ya all Nothing much is happening on the channel. Everything is quiet; there are long pauses between lines on the chat. *J: We need a little OQ! *F: they were here earlier *D: she already been here before *D: poor show they gave *F: there vid sucked *Y: bummer *Z: Hi all! Who are we talking about? *D: can't anyone bring his lovely wife over? I gather OQ are popular on the channel; they give a show, construct a narrative. Last night, O alone was visible and I have written about this. And I think it's genetic and the imprinting grabs hold of one really hard, and it's not the primal scene but the scopic scene, the way vision grabs you, and the imprinting is in dialog with features which make bab- ies smile and drives towards reproduction/sexuality are the visual/aural drives, and why wife? And where is over? *Alan: I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm already making moves here, building the narrative which is always a lure, lurid, torn - you're peering into a world, filling out the corners with people, bodies, de- sires, everyone wants to know more. In a Dallas swinger's magazine, a woman drank the piss of six men from champagne glasses accompanied by her husband; she looked abject and ecstatic. I sit at the computer and my pants are on my pants. Scopic drive: The last thing we have to get rid of is the _story._ (I'm struggling towards something that's too internalized, detouring the- ory, desiring the neurophysiological and its current mythologies. For example, here's Fenichel (The Psychoanalytical Theory of Neurosis), root- ing back towards childhood, but detouring the physiological: "In the unconscious of voyeurs, the same tendencies are found as in ex- hibitionists. The childhood experiences on which voyeurs are fixated sometimes are scenes that gave reassurance - for example, such scenes as the incident in the case of Freud's foot fetishist. More frequently, voy- eurs are fixated on experiences that aroused their castration anxiety, either primal scenes or the sight of adult genitals. The patient attempts to deny the justification of his fright by repeating the frightening scenes with certain alterations; this type of voyeurism is based on the hunger for screen experiences, that is, for experiences sufficiently like the original to be substituted for it, but differing in the essential point and thereby giving reassurance that there is no danger. This tend- ency may be condensed with a tendency to repeat a traumatic scene for the purpose of achieving a belated mastery." The screen metaphor is apt of course, as are the "primal scenes" if they can be untangled from _parents._ The hunger is there, but not, I believe, for the suturing of trauma. The detour is developed: "The fact that no sight can actually bring about the reassurance for which the patients are striving has several consequences for the struc- ture of voyeurs: they either develop an attitude of insatiability - they have to look again and again, and to see more and more, with an ever increasing intensity - or they displace their interest from the genitals either to forepleasure activities and pregenitality or generally to scenes that may serve better as reassurances than does actual genital observation." Finally, "The longing to substitute looking for acting makes persons who are in conflict about whether or not to follow some impulse long for someone else to perform the act. The release from responsibility which they ach- ieve in this way explains the effectiveness of the 'seducing example.'" Note that Fenichel's description itself waves, becomes unstable, covering itself, suturing the theory; what escapes are the _biology_ of the drives, the genetic components. Is narrative genetic? I think so, in the sense of foreclosure, completion - not that animals in general have a sense of plot, but that there are behavioral trajectories that begin the climb to story. Story as superstructure tangles with superstructural de- sire; everything escapes, including the signifier. We now return to the program.) ___________________________________________________________________________ From sondheim@panix.com Thu Oct 3 12:25:48 1996 Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 12:24:11 -0400 (EDT) From: your place or mine To: Cyb , Fop Subject: your place or mine your place or mine ___________________________________________________________________________ nothing [ to exclaim ] much sadness although ( a voyeur in memory of screen - neither white knees press outside into pants, nor arms move window knuckle rap-glass; nevertheless eye in shaved pussy / cock in knees... however shivered floorflesh pants in pants since my breath goes down your legs rap glass? ) but my breath goes up your legs nonetheless,... there's no other point to the real and Net sex sounds like everything else: either like a poem about it or a story. ________________________________________________________________________ Voyeur-Machine Hordes Groups of waiting males, nothing is happening here. Someone sleepily caresses his penis; no one says anything. Eyes half-closed, talk about ref surfing (reflector surfing, moving across CuSeeMe), languor. It's clear that connections are sometimes one-to-one, that private refs sur- round me like a halo. Woman Coming into the plain, and everyone goes polite. Someone smokes, someone else warns him to put it out, could start a fire. Please won't you let us see your breasts. Please what is your URL. Please I will take my _close_ off. Please you are so beautiful. You can see fire in the distance. Women Roam across the territory and it's new to them and the men. Everyone gauges the distance to their sex; everyone's wary, sitting in a circle. Almost-conversations are stillborn, aborted, literally aborted. The sky is a sullen grey. Scopophilia Structures virtual subjectivity, explodes: The very sight of them! The slightest appearance of an areola lends itself towards further paste; the territory is tried and found wanton. The drive silences and cancels; tumescent computer becomes breast, nipple, vagina, penis, frozen, melted at the oral stage. It's the mouth which faces, defaces, the screen. Deer And other animals cross the savannah, leaving spoors, traces, demarca- tion. Who will live by the smouldering plains, rain held off in the dis- tance, our machines curtaining flesh with flesh, ground to sky. Not so much a question as a period in our lives scuttled by charred bones. The fires have passed, past. _________________________________________________________________________ This is the outline I finally used on the panel on voyeurism at the New School. The evening went well. I talked about niches, that any area of the Net that has more than one person visibly on at a time, tends to develop community and sexualities. I also talked about CuSeeMe, Iphone, MOO, MUD, talker, communities - that the Net was an extension of human modalities (sensory and otherwise) not a replacement. Even the people who were critical were interested in further information; the discussion continued after the panel ended. Anyway, for what it's worth - 1. On the Net most communities use text-based applications. In text when you stop speaking, you're no longer present. When you are present, you're a construct. Writing takes on ontological significance. The interaction uses projection/introjection, "hysteric embodi- ment," the displacement of body onto writing a a symptom." 2. Net sex in text-based applications is largely exhibitionism. Voyeurism involves the illicit, peering, anonymity, virtuality. Exhibitionism occurs in theater areas of MOO. Net sex is consensual and overpowering at times: the narrative unfolds the desire of the other. Net sex is empowering, leading to realignments of real-life relationships. (Breakup of marriages, marriages, etc. - experi- menting with the body.) There are a variety of applications for private or public Net sex including chat lines, IRC (msg, dcc), talkers, etc. 3. CuSeeMe gets closer to voyeurism in the traditional sense. What is CuSeeMe? Reflectors. Less talk, situation of waiting. Female displays tend towards narrative, conditioned by males - male displays tend towards phallocentricity, the object. 4. Privacy and censorship: The private lines are almost inviolate to all but inveterate hackers. 5. Other voyeurism: Hacking into someone's account - worms and viruses (as opposed to SYN attacks, etc. - taxonomy of hacking). Being in someone else's account, becoming-other. 6. Inverted voyeurism: Net sex in the middle of a postmodern on-line con- ference, sending out Net sex texts, etc. 7. Contact me afterwards for further information. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Margaret and Kierkegaard "Quite strange! In one of my first talks with her when I was most deeply shaken and had been stirred to the depths of my being, I told her: that in each generation there are a few persons destined to be sacrificed for the rest. Most likely she did not understand what I was talking about, perhaps I didn't make myself clear (in any case, only about my inward suffering, really) least of all did I understand that it would start making her suf- fer. But precisely her spontaneous, young happiness in juxtaposition to my horrible melancholy, and in such a relationship as ours, compelled me to try and understand myself; for I had never before suspected the extent of my melancholy; I had had no true yardstick for measuring how happy a human being could be. "Thus I believed myself sacrificed because I understood that my suffering and anguish made me inventive in delving for the Truth which, in turn, might benefit others." (Diary) Of course it was Margaret who left me; the Truth is now the truth under erasure; I've never benefited anyone; I have not gone on to write book after book, but only drivel into files; and my suffering, if anything, produces nothing but a dark horizon beneath which thought and humanity suffocate. This is how literature lies; this is how you tell the truth to yourself. This is how you lie. _______________________________________________________________________ What the Trembling is About (CMC/sexuality/BWO) I dream of everyone, fantasize. Everyone is in my imaginary. The symbolic spews out the cloaca. I toss and turn; the images are nightmarish, un- bearably pleasant. They are degenerative, dis-eased; the body floods it- self in public, my fingers in your holes, we expose ourselves, I devour your secretions, we're on stage, you've stained your skirt brown and yellow, I'm covered in shit. As soon as one strange attractor exits, ano- ther takes its place. They're nameless. No sleeping position, fetal or otherwise, springs the body's real back to life. I'm lifeless; I move, tremble. I tremble in the chest area; the images cathect in the eyes, literally cathect. I'm aroused, but not towards masturbation - it's towards the denigration of the body, for example, the one time I cheated on a wife, shaking violently before hand (outside, cold, beer; inside, anal sex), the only time. As if the body burned itself alive, jetted out, spewed across the tarmac, headed towards the terminal where everyone was burned alive. Destabilized in house, job, lovelife, the body runs behind the herd, catches them unawares. It drowns itself, inverts, nests in shit (they're all shit anyhow). Images are as real as the words on this screen. I would do anything for you, meaning, at least that hooks into the flesh, buries the barb in. Turning solidifies them; what can I do but type. This isn't the kyber-exhibition/ist; this doesn't splay, display, spread apart, suture. This is turmoil, not BWO (body-without-organs), but BWO (body-with-organs, organelles), festooned. Trembling, I become St-Antoine without the signifier (see Flaubert) at the end; I am drawn towards, as someone did say, maybe voyeurism isn't the primal scene but eating. I will eat everything your body produces. I will turn into you, turn myself out. (But this is the primal scene, just another one, anus coupled to mouth, mouth coupled to anus, opening circuitry to peristaltic cycles, contractions, expansions. We/me, screen dreams, dream-screen, primal imaginary, coupled oscillators. _Resonance._ You could make a model.) The trembling occurs more intensely around the breasts; I fixate on nip- ples, want them smeared. They become writing-tools; drag my body, paral- lel lines of shit, blood, smeared across the screen. This is the _scrawl_ of writing's beginnings, emerged from cloaca/chora/chthonic, the c-shell of eunuchs to be. My nipples pulled off, holes gape; I become _pure_ text, skittering graphic energy, no signifier/signified. You read the blood of the body with your fingers. Holes plugged, fingers devoured, cut off; holes eat/themselves. Not-sleeping I awake; images continue; I move towards the _rails_ of dis- course, train-tracks guiding these letters. Cold as ice, _they carry what I carry._* (But suppose we glue our flesh together; would it tear at the seams, develop scar tissue, heal into a heavy misshapen fibroid mass? Would we know we were ever apart? Would we share blood, healthy or dis- eased, share desire's discomfort? Suppose we gnawed each other's nipples, fastened/fascinated/fetishized _there_ across the blandness of the termi- nal chest. Symbiotic trembling, self-cancellations, collapse, atrophy, death.) My candle burns at both ends; I am your candle. Day in and out I burn; the screen adds fuel to the flames. I am soaked with you, soaked with empty air; like a nova shell, I explode, only to find collapsed excre- tions matting my hair, eyes, face, mouth, body, over and over again. The shell roars, ear-splitting thunderquakes, heaving back and forth. I bury my words my hair my eyes my face my body in time. These letters. The let- ters I send to you. E/piss/tols. Until tomorrow sings. Shorn desire. _Drawn._** ------------------| *It was pointed out repeatedly, on the voyeurism panel, that text has no aura, no pointers, no other means of employment than itself - unlike spoken language, one person in the presence of another. But in ytalk the body is there, if only in the erasures, speed of writing, spelling mis- takes, corrected or uncorrected. And on CuSeeMe, there are images, text on the images, crude stuttered telephony, chat-line typing as well, peo- ple staring, looking isolated; even _husbandnwife_ teams have one or another protruding at the keyboard, the other remaining beyond/ behind. What's shared? But my fingers grope through their texts and pictures and oh we'd love to see each other's w/holes. **There's no language _of_ drawing, no language _for_ it.*** ***No language for _es,_ no drawing of the _id._*** _________________________________________________________________________ Why I love Amy Fisher "Little dabs of blood were everywhere. On my white Formica chair. My phone. My carpet. My desk. I called Jane again. Her father answered and said she'd left. I took deep breaths and hoped like hell _my_ father wouldn't wake up before she got there and helped me get rid of the blood. For playing with guns, I thought I would definitely be punished by my parents. "It never occurred to me to worry about the police." (From Amy Fisher, My Story, by Amy Fisher with Sheila Weller.) "A female informant described the Virgin to Nash as follows: 'Senora, I am going to tell you of the Virgin of the mineshaft. She is on top of the metal, on top of the gold that is still there in the mineshaft, under the church and the _pulperia._ Boiling water passes over this metal, crystal- line water that is bubbling and boiling. The Virgin is miraculous. The metal is liquid. It comes in very clean, and you can't move it at all. We went into the shaft under the _pulperia_ once...How beautiful it [the metal] was! It was like raw sugar.'" (From Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South Ameri- ca.) "Someone else put it this way: 'Amy, you have all the subtlety of a Mack truck.' "Yeah: a Mack truck loaded with lit dynamite, with broken brakes, going 120 miles an hour toward a brick wall." (Fisher.) (The screen burns and shatters; my chest is cut. I can't see "what I'm doing" - can't see my words; I'm silenced, remembering the proper key / strokes to send the message _out._) __________________________________________________________________________ A True Account I went onto IRC to investigate breathing/heaving through textual correc- tions and backups. I joined channel #zz as @Alan op. There was no one else of course. I began typing when "Helis" (changed the name) replied to me. Helis was not on zz, but was somehow monitoring it and messaging me with comments. This is precisely the origin of scattering/heaving - the breath- ing of the text here, beyond the control of _this_ writing into the domain of the _other:_ /j zz

#zz \|/ PhoEniX v2.25 \|/ *** Alan (sondheim@panix3.panix.com) has joined channel #zz*** Users on #zz: @Alan @Alan (+is) #zz \|/ PhoEniX v2.25 \|/ I want to Describig ng desire as it implements itself across the screen, whatreen, what Describing desire as it implements itself across the screen, what

I8AM @Alan (+is) #zz Lag ? - E/X E/X 'd refer to as breathing or heaving - which is an extension of the _text-t he _text-object_ I'd refer to as breathing or heaving - an extension of the _text-object_

into a symptomology, diegesis - thinking through the aura that rera that re- sults into a symptomology, diegesis - thinking through the aura tha t results

[Helis:440@urh.uiuc.edu] why do you think this?or thinking 9AM @Alan (+is) #zz Lag ? - E/X E/X at cross-purposes - as if: an action, i.e.: or thinking at cross-purposes - as if: an action, i.e.:

/m Mel is why not becua ause this is running in this fashion<-[Helis]-> why not because this is running in this fashion

/me worrying through the text and intrusion of the fourth -* Alan worrying through the text and intrusion of the fourth -

/whois Helis< P> *** Whois Information for: Helis*** Address : 440@isr0419.urh.uiuc.edu*** IRCNAME : NEKKED WOMAN*** Server : irc.ilstu.edu ([thor.cmp.ilstu.edu] Illinois State University)[Helis:440@urh.uiuc.edu] you are strange40AM @Alan (+is) #zz Lag ? - E/X 1 - E/X /m Helis i'd think so to be sure -<-[Helis]-> i'd think so to be sure -

/sc

Pub: #zz @Alan taking it further with the other coming into the sane taking it further with the other comin g into the sane

/me auratic, downtrodden...* Alan auratic, downtrodden...

/1AM @Alan (+is) #zz Lag ? - E/X l1 - E/X

*** Alan has left channel #zzAlan (+is) Lag 1 - E/X _________________________________________________________________________ Leaving, See You On See You, See Me, I find myself awkward; my self-hatred results in my covering up my window (Quickcam image) with someone else's. I lurk; who would want to talk with me? It's too similar to a party; it's much too real. After a while, I'll bow out of there, click X on the screen, and CuSeeMe crashes to a halt; the party's over. What's unnerving is the feeling that the whole world has just collapsed. It's not like exiting a MOO with @quit, IRC's /quit or /leave or /bye, talker's .q, ytalk's ^C. It more like a sudden exhaustion of air; the universe has just deflated. Now what's unnerving about this is how _real_ the stuttering images, sounds, and tentative gropings on the chat-type become. I see Rebecca getting ready for class and people saying good-bye to her. Or Don receiv- ing a call from someone in Iowa testing out the audio bar. They're all on first-names; I've walked into a late-night bar all-day long. So what's unnserving here is that these wonderful people all know and love each other! They challenge each other! They help each other with personal tech support! They're in love! Now I've just downloaded the demo of Enhanced CuSeeMe - have any of you used this? Which permits 1/1 conferencing, direct dialup if I can ever figure it out - and that would be unnerving. So call me up sometime at 166.84.250.149; chances are we won't connect (any more than usual). But at least we won't be strangers, just disconnected. ________________________________________________________________________ PUSH THE VIRTUAL UNTIL IT BREAKS IN PIECES AND YOU DISCOVER WHAT WAS TRULY REAL IN THIS AND EVERY OTHER WORLD AND WHAT was EVERY OTHER WORLD ______________________________________________ Some topics I'm thinking about for the Perth conference - Talking about _approach_ which needs to be both intervention and parti- cipation, background and foreground. Acknowledging software options, built-in issues of governance, filtering, connection bandwidth, user's hardware requirements. As participant, extending one as far as possible into the virtual realm vis-a-vis the application - working on the margins of the application in relation to deconstruction on one hand, hacking on the other. Associa- ting and disassociating levels (code, protocol, interface, phenomenology of user interactions, psychoanalytics of virtuality, etc.). Collusions of levels, for example traceroute indicating breakdown in oth- er realms as well; the possibilities of IRC and its interrupts signaling a relationship to the concreteness of the signifier within the textual domain, and so forth. The linguistic dispersion model of the Internet: floating applications, languages, communities, modalities. --- From the viewpoint of virtual subjectivity, issues of the "ascii uncon- scious," the signifier in Flaubert's St-Antoine or Hadamard's work as a concretion/coagulation a posteriori. Issues of hysteric embodiment, de- fuge, modalities of net sexuality. Making net sex real: increased phys- icalities of responses. Abjections, masochisms, empowerment, control. Life and death and Internet: mourning the impossible object. Leaving the "home" application. Address, recognition, protocol: establishment of presence. Bodies: Virtual, dismembered: dual regimes of fissure and dismemberment. Cathecting and decathecting: phenomenology of the _limb_ (new). Phantom limbs and limbless phantoms. The occasions of silent presence on CuSeeMe. Collusions of real, Real, imaginary, uncanny, symbolic: dissolutions of form within the realm of form. The construct of seamless virtual reality. Aesthetics in the midst of a newly-born realm (cuneiform antecedents). The poverty of technical art, the modernist/postmodernist trajectory. Geopolitical concerns: governance, Net povera, 300 baud phenomenology, recapitulation of hegemonies and divisions of the world. Surface, spec- tacle, display, simulacrum, specular: surfing. Where we are not, where we would not be, where we have not been (where we are not ourselves, where we would not be ourselves, where we have not been ourselves): The _not_ in cyberspace (deflection, kill, delete): shame, embarrassment, abjection. The nothing. ________________________________________________________________________ From sondheim@panix.com Wed Oct 9 01:21:00 1996 Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 01:20:11 -0400 (EDT) From: alan sondheim To: Cyb Subject: Message from FOP-L (Hello) ###### # ####### # ##### ####### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ###### # ##### # # ##### ##### # # # ####### # # # # # # # # # # # ####### ####### # # ##### ####### ##### ####### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ##### # # # # # # ####### # # # # # # # ##### # # # # # # ### ####### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ####### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ## ## ### # # # # # ##### # # # # # # # # # ##### # # # # # # # ##### ##### ####### ####### ###### ####### # # ####### ###### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ##### # # ###### ##### # # ##### ###### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ####### # # ####### # ####### # # # # # ###### # # ## # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ####### # # # # # # # # ## # # # # # # ###### # # ####### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ####### ##### # # ### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ## ## ### ####### ####### ####### ### # # ###### # # ## # # # # # # # # # # ##### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ## # # # ### # # ###### # # # # # # # ####### # # # # ###### ###### ### ####### ####### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ###### ###### # # ##### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ### ####### ####### _________________________________________________________________________ Phantoms, Bots, MOOs, Virtual Subjects, Devils "Of necessity, a commodity-based society produces such phantom objectivi- ty, and in so doing it obscures its roots - the relations between people. This amounts to a socially instituted paradox with bewildering manifesta- tions, the chief of which is the denial by the society's members of the social construction of reality. Another manifestation is the schizoid attitude with which the nmembers of such a society necessarily confront the phantom objects that have been thus abstracted from social life, an attitude that shows itself to be deeply mystical. On the one hand, these abstractions are cherished as real objects akin to inert things, whereas on the other, they are thought of as animate entities with a life-force of their own akin to spirits or gods. Since these 'things' have lost their original connection with social life, they appear, paradoxically, both as inert and as animate entities. If the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time and still retain the ability to function, then the modern mind can truly be said to have proved itself." (Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America.) ________________________________________________________________________ Face:It A Dewar's advertisement in the New York subway, B train from Brooklyn to the Waverly/Sixth Avenue Stop: "It's not so much the 'Chat Room' as it is the sitting-home-alone-by- yourself part that concerns us." There are six black and white photographs of a man and terminal from above; he's bleary, haggard. These alternate down the car with a color display (includes the name "Dewar's" flanked by glasses with icecubes) and other texts/images. You shouldn't drink alone. The ad catches _perfectly_ the very definition of "haggard" here; I've seen his face over and over again, on myself, on CuSeeMe males, and even the occasional woman. It's the face of waiting, but it's the face of ex- haustion. It's the face of trembling, but it's frozen, spasmed. It's lit by the screen. It's overwrought, immobilized. It's aged, furrowed, but it's ageless. It leers, displays itself, but it's sullen, withdrawn. It has nothing. It eats alone, drinks alone, sleeps alone. Its cock twists and ruptures. Its eyes are dead. Even the corporate is forewarned,, foreclosed, splits at the ad's wound. It's the mask of death, but it's the haggard mask. It's the mask of rage, but it's the mask of withdrawal. It can hardly see the bottle. It doesn't drink. It's _stuff._ It waits, empty. It blocks the phonelines with its machine. It pumps the phonelines with waiting. It waits for nothing. It's a waste, a loser, drivel, mush, shit. It's cloacal. The face rides the frozen subway. Tonight on the way back the train went no longer. __________________________________________________________________________ Kewl Hot and Wired CuSeeMe is the heroin of the Internet. Oh so sweet, milky murky colors where color is, slow coursing through the veins, eyes drawn back, soft as ever can be, later coldness and the need for sight again. Oh-oh-sight's an addiction, impulse, drive of the world, visual or aural, soft candy of the world, impossible sweetness. Oh, pay a price for the sweetness of the sweet soft world; hide the sugar chocolate wafers, gauge the price of soft junkie arms, sweet eyes burned through the bottom of the world's skull. Oh beautiful skin and sweet soft eyes everywhere on my world. You make them go on, they'll follow you anywhere, sweet soft world and you and your world coursing through their veins and always in the background. ___________________________________________________________________________ Weatherman to Tell You Which Way the Packet Goes The weatherman monitors the you-are. She ritualizes the health of site after site, traceroutes the veins of the world, unites families and home- lands, cauterizes lovers, breaks the psyche into two. She follows the vagaries of new countries, from megabyte to centibaud and back again. The weatherman with her laser pointer anoints the map of nodes and backbone penetrations. She is responsible. She is responsible for the _overall picture._ She determines the picture. She _is_ the picture. The weatherman is overall display, the protrusion of the there-is. The weatherman is the there-is-it, the for-there-is. She changes nothing. She wears no clothes. She is traced herself. She traces her traces and that is who she is. She monitors the you-are. You are glad to have her round and around. _________________________________________________________________________ I remember a conversation that I had in A. thirteen years ago with a young French pastor. We were asking ourselves quite simply what we wanted to do with our lives. He said he would like to become a saint (and I think it is quite likely that he did become one). At the time I was very impressed, but I disagreed with him, and said, in effect, that I should like to learn to have faith. For a long time I did not realize the depth of the con- trast. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 21 July 1944 ___________________________________________________________________________ To Faith To have found faith; to have founded faith; to have had faith foundered. The withdrawal of faith is not faith; it is done to one. I would say that this is a concrete act in remission. To have faith is to found faith; even broken on absurdity, it is a founding. To found faith proceeds from having found faith; the difference rocks heaven. To have had faith founder is to lose the founding, lose the foundation. To have found faith is faith's extension; faith becomes faith is every- where. Faith everywhere is a founding and a foundation. To have faith founder is to lose faith's foundation; faith breathes through loss and pure appearance. One loses faith through pure pictures. Faith is never found; faith is a having-found or a finding. Faith is a moment from faith-in to the purity of faith. The _in_ is the proper name of the finding. ___________________________________________________________________________ ii Can a pastor in cyberspace speak a Word not subject to eternal transforma- tion, transubstantiation? Can a word which is structured, dispersed, pack- eted, be a Word eternal and untransformed? Can one preach to a flock as hir words are taken from hir, from Hir? Who speaks here and for Whom, to whom? Who determines capitalizations, loci, cites and citations, excesses of Latin alphabet? Who speaks for the Other, oneself, oneself in Other, Other in oneself? And for others? 'And if not me, who then?' ___________________________________________________________________________ iii Love of God, racism, charity, sexism, are all _matters_ of faith. ________________________________________________________________________ sgniht talf daed era slegna gnipeels ma I nehw sdrow ym egnarraer ohw ekawa ma I nehw sdrow ym egnarraer meht esare sdrow ym etirw niaga dna niaga yas t'nac I tub wonk t'nod I gnihtyna tuoba tsuj enil eht kcolb yeht esuaceb slegna tuoba taht os ti egnarraer trohs ti peek reporp ro seman rieht evig t'nac _ti_ deggar snur _ti_ taht os sserdda gnihton ot steg ti resolc eht ________________________________________________________________________ My body do lie in a pool on the floor, my hand do hold a telephone, my mouth do hold a camera, do hold my feets a radio thing wired to my body do hold a microphone my chest do hold a fret guitar. Do I move boom boom boom boom screen goes lksjfd boom boom screen goes sdflkj My body do stand in a pool on the floor, my hand do hold a ring-phone gone ringing, my camera gone clicking, my feets sing wires do talk clatter My body do sit in a pool on the floor My body do stand it sit no more My mouth do cry out more more more My feets do play out boom dada whore boom dada boom dada boom boom dada boom dada boom boom dada boom dada boom dada boom boom dada boom boom data data data data dada data dad ringing clicking camera feet arms do feats of wiring singing simple radio clicking simple phoning playing simple ringing wiring simple arms and legs do in a pool lie do on a floor lie, do on _______________________________________________________________________ (precis for a talk, comments welcomed) The Future of the World: Internet Aesthetics and Reality's Cement Floor I'm going to concentrate on the Net of fifty years from now, in relation to under- and over-development world-wide. On one hand, we can assume a more or less seamless virtual interface and reality - on the other, we can assume that this interface is tied to corporate production and the cons- truct of a new subjectivity, based on consumption and desire. (So on one hand, the real is the Real, parameters in n-space replacing the free-floating noisiness of the physical. On the other, the parameters _cost_; like certain explosives, they come complete with steganographic corporate logos. The subject is forced into difference on the level of nanotechnology, corporate viruses penetrating the skin; the subject be- comes Subject, extruded.) (So on one hand, continuous upgrade, and on the other, debris-technology, bricolage, poverty-enclaves, home-owners' associations. On one hand, seam- less virtual reality; on the other, textual projection - see below.) I'm going therefore to examine a wide variety of Net applications and issues, ranging from low-bandwidth Web design to text-based "darknet" communities and CuSeeMe. The future is _now,_ and we, not our children, are _it._ (How communities develop. How first/second/third person sexualities occur with text/CuSeeMe/phone/etc. The arguments against low bandwidth, restric- ted speech - the _auraless_ world. _Timing_ and stuttering of speech. Hys- teric embodiment, reading the other into oneself.) (How bodies are stormed. How bodies storm: delirium. Dismemberment, re- assemblage, prosthesis. The textual other as cyborgian. Narcissism and echo: filtering returning the body through re-inscription. Elimination of negation in cyberspace: alterity as self-construct. Interstices of vir- tual subjectivity (extensions).) (The phenomenology of the cement floor: true grit, dampness, and the gran- ular.) (The infinite raster of the digital: the body returning to itself, disap- pearance of the virtual machine.) Disentanglement - the Borromean knot of the subject: We're virtually _there._ _________________________________________________________________________ Hey everyone, You should know about Travis. I'm writing because Travis can't write any more. I don't know what's happened to him. I don't see him like I used to. He told me to say this, all of it, even the bad stuff. I don't know what he's talking about. But he wants you to know it's not the wires, not the internet. It's not the freedom he found there, or the fact that his skin grew pale, dis- appeared in just about any kind of light. It's not his weight-loss and if it's addiction, it's a new type. Travis told me to tell you he's tired of thinking about addiction, that you've got it all wrong. If it's addiction, he said, it's addiction to reality, but you wouldn't understand this, just like you wouldn't under- stand heroin or anything else without becoming part of it. An addiction he said is just something you're not part of and you look in and you see something you're not. And you don't know what that is, what you're not, but it's over the boundary. Travis said the boundary's inscribed, like drug, sex, internet. Travis said there's always an inscription; you have to look for it, and it's something you created in the first place. And you put all your energy into the inscription, as if you've discovered something, but what you fail to realize is that it's surrounding a place, just like you're in your place. And he's tired of hearing about addiction, all his addic- tions, and he doesn't want to hear about your addiction, but it's there like an ugly real, Travis says. There's not a real but reals, and everyone knows the sun from the moon but some people prefer to inscribe their own illuminations. He says he is closer to his body than you're closer to your own, and so who's the addict here, who takes hirself beyond the pale. He says to tell you to look to your own, but I haven't seen him for a while, so I can't bring him back an answer. He says he's real and he's stateless, he doesn't belong anywhere. But he says it's more than that - he's in no-state, which you wouldn't under- stand, because you only understand institutions from the outside in, which is what institutions are, inscriptions and barriers just like the word heroin or the word bible. He says you can reach him on the internet, you can reach him on the telephone or send him mail. He says you know how to reach him or you can contact me and I'll get him. He wanted me to tell you this. He says he can send you his ip number for sleazy net sex or his telephone number just in case you have something to sell. He can send you his address and you can send him just about anything you want that's not dangerous and he wants you to know that he's not dangerous, he's just disappeared for a while. He says he's more real than you are and if you're real too you'll find him. love to everyone on these lists, Clara Since I was Born Rock and Roll Mircoelectronics Optical Storage Home Television Lasers Quasars Computers Quark Theory Strata-Embedded Life Internet Cellular Telephony Four-Color Map Solution Lunar Landing Breakup of USSR Commercial Jet Travel Life on Mars Genetic Code Bell's Theorem Solar System Mapping Beats, Hippies, Punks Chaos/Fractal Theories Systems Theory Digital Revolution Home Video FM Radio Cable TV Scanning Tunnel Microscopy Word Processing Photo Manipulation Space Stations Satellites Astronauts Trans-Uranium Elements K-Meson Anomalies Transistors Vietnam War Psychotropic Drugs Virtual Realities Atomic Bomb AIDS Nuclear Fusion Characteristics of Monsters Slow Dripping Inside-Out Just Like Us Mimickry Slow and Clumsy Abject Evil Psychic Big Eyed Clawed Tentacles Stingers Flat Voices Want Our Gals Never Laugh Have Slaves Sexy Women Medieval Governance Tunics Carnivorous No Pupils Never Pun Very Big or Very Small Toothless or Big Teeth Dinosaurs Brain-like Sludge Leave Puddles Roar or Growl Never Cough or Yawn Gooey Stare a Lot Fight a Lot Mother Ships ______________________________________________________________________________ How I'd Like to Speak, How I'd Like to Hear from You "What is distinctive and remarkable about the voice that Marx and Niet- zsche share is not only its breathless pace, its vibrant energy, its imaginative richness, but also its fast and drastic shifts in tone and in- flection, its readiness to turn on itself, to question and negate all it has said, to transform itself into a great range of harmonic or dissonant voice, and to stretch itself beyond its capacities into an endlessly wider range, to express and grasp a world where everything is pregnant with its contrary and all that is solid melts into air. This voice resounds at once with self-discovery and self-mocking, with self-delight and self-doubt. It is a voice that nows pain and dread, but believes in its power to come through. Grave danger is everywhere, and may strike at any moment, but not even the deepest wounds can stop the flow and overflow of its energy. It is ironic and contradictory, polyphonic and dialectical, denouncing modern life in the name of values that modernity itself has created, hoping - of- ten against hope - that the modernities of tomorrow and the day after to- morrow will heal the wounds that wreck the modern men and women of today." (From Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, quoted in Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music.) ___________________________________________________________________________ Show Biz MOO Draw on your life. Like they say, break a leg. There's no business like it. Sometimes you become your part. It's a wrap. _______________________________ Machine/Anecdote/Divinatio Tonight I have been trying for hours to teach someone basic commands for downloading/viewing messages on the Internet. Like a lot of my students, s/he hasn't read any background material, and won't. Teaching becomes a matter of listing commands, presenting them as literal protocol senten- ces, each independent of the others. The sentences function, not as sym- bolic arrays, but as ikonic; they're proper names, and the "dir" in for example "dir netscape/cache" is not the same "dir" as in "dir windows" - in fact, both "dir" are independent diacritical modifiers, if they're even that substantiated. This is the world of pre-Freudian psychoanalytics, going all the way back to the Questions of Aristotle - an accumulation of stories, symptoms, op- erations, non-systemic, or top-down systemic at best. Thus the humours are top-down, as are the astrological signs; they presuppose totalities - as opposed to bacterial classification, for example. The system that emerges is related to magic, fetishization, empathetic phenomenology - not to a generative or axiological ordering. Without this ordering, the totality remains impermeable, foreclosed; learning becomes a matter of rote or brute force. Not only is very little retained, but there is no room for error or anomaly. Now within tradition- al structures, anomaly and error are absorbed; the structures are fuzzy. Within the digital realm (without analog slippage), error can easily be the matter of a single bit, and even semi-expert systems are relatively uncompromising. Learning these machines becomes, then a matter of dialectic between top- down and bottom-up; on one hand, say, understanding the GUI (Graphic User Interface), and on the other, working through a knowledge - at the least - of data structures. With this approach, if something goes wrong, or if a new application is downloaded from the Net, the user will have some idea of how to continue. The totality will still be there, but it will be, on some level, systematized. Such is the passing of illusions of _divinatio,_ the computer as the book of nature, filled with wondrous signs. The greatest advancement in this sense is the well-defined statement descending from an axiom set, a feel- ing of regularity in spite of Godel, Tarski, Skolem, Church, and Cohen (and don't forget that Godel remained a variant of platonist). Wondrous signs are filled with excess, as we are here and in physical space; won- drous signs leak, exude desire, scent, and taste. In programming, there are no wondrous signs; statements are written according to the syntax or they don't compile, or compile badly, or produce something else. There is likewise no tolerance for wrong clicks spelling errors; there may be a decent error-reporting facility ("close parentheses") or you may be en- tirely on your own. We're used to the magic. A car doesn't just _go_ - it _surges._ Our cat thinks our thoughts for us. Current just _flows_ from the socket when a lever is turned elsewhere in the room. And most of us, myself included, can't tell exactly what goes on in the CPU. But you can't stop at the level of the interface - you've got to, at least, peel the tissues back, examine a bit of the nervous system, check memory and its management and short-term and long-term memory... Whole worlds are overturned. It's no longer enough to memorize Caesar. Gender becomes pheromic, hormonic, environmental, genetic, hysteric. God is a matter of cryptology or voiceover. The path not taken is charted by the GPS (Global Positioning Satellite). Good fences make good neighbors observed from the stratosphere and beyond. There's no conclusion here. For a youngster, the magic's still there and all the way through, and the magic's tied to power, systems-control and all things go. The system transforms into adolescent _urge_ - I've got that even now - maybe the only difference is that I recognize the compon- ents. And this is the legacy, in fact, of this entire century in our West - the _component,_ and the problematic phenomenology accompanying it (just as the assembly line and modularity characterized the 19th century, from which humanity and the humanities despaired and fled and tried, unsuccess- fully, to overturn, time and time again) ... _________________________________________________________________________ ecological resources space blushed towards the fall of language below just as esophagus demon now tears skin devours eyes nose breasts line edges nipples leak face beyond face down towards ecology of face space wasted its away around the turn of the century it s a new thing this field bearing roses oh and textual extensions appear to disturb ecology deconstruct the manifold of the screen they produce the spear of impinged meaning garner repetition observe clues it is as if the computer is comfortable with total collapse as if the body extends infinitely as I have calculated so many words or lines to the miles so many miles until an ocean or mountain is attained it s the precision of the form the audience gasp no one can absorb everything in the world hold presence in extensio like a clean bridge gone down through dark grey days deeper into the pit falling into whatever waters are dredged from the unconscious you shoot upwards into me it isn t your place not to shoot at the bottom of every line every text there s an open mouth what desire shoots us space falls like pits flat on the floor on the right take a tumble the effort of pulling the screen down repeatedly as if you are down on me as if I m down today what s your name nearing the second or third level nearing the fourth or fifth level nearing the sixth or seventh level nearing the seventh or eighth level nearing the sixth or seventh level nearing the fourth or fifth level nearing the second or third level the length of a rope beyond all measurement this is a text that space behind the eyes you descend dissolute clothes falling off as you near what would be the bottom of a MUD where you might be reborn alive again in a church specifically pray within Lars lpmud converted for my pleasure it s as if naked you arrive at the entrance where the pray re embodies you gives you some weapons maybe but we re all the same here I m wandering but I wander only in the way you know this down dismemberment phantom limbs and spaces devils grinning angels throwing everything they ve got hideous yes hideous faces I could leave you with face s memory my own or the odd imprint of my body there on the right of the screen pale mixed with your own reflection I would say a fountain not a pillar from blushed towards the fall of language below just as esophagus demon now tears skin devours eyes nose breasts line edges nipples leak face beyond face down towards ecology of face space wasted its away around the turn of the century it s a new thing this field bearing roses a pool and not from the tautness of a fabrication of skin flesh blood bones gristle what you would throw past the longing of these words blushed towards the fall of language below just as esophagus demon now tears skin devours eyes nose breasts line edges nipples leak face beyond face down towards ecology of face space wasted its away around the turn of the century it s a new thing this field bearing roses blushed towards the fall of language below just as esophagus demon now tears skin devours eyes nose breasts line edges nipples leak face beyond face down towards ecology of face space wasted its away around the turn of the century it s a new thing this field bearing roses blushed towards the fall of language below just as esophagus demon now tears skin devours eyes nose breasts line edges nipples leak face beyond face down towards ecology of face space wasted its away around the turn of the century it s a new thing this field bearing roses ____________________________________________________________________ The Renunciation of Travis I, Travis, known by my first name and pronoun, hereby and accordingly for an indeterminate amount of time, do renounce any and all sexual activity of a solitary nature, within which the respondent is apperceived of a partner or partners by virtue of various electronic media, including tel- phone, CB radio, Internet ASCII communications, and Internet video. I do not renounce the solitary pleasures of Baywatch or binocular. My reasons for such an action are the following: 1. I, Travis, have wasted countless hours bringing myself to culmination, being brought to culmination by another or others, or bringing another or others to culmination, without a positive indication of clear visual pre- sence within my otherwise physical space. 2. I, Travis, have had night tremblings, furtive masturbations, sly hand- gropings and finger insertions in attempts to sleep through late night or early dawn; my situation has become one of disease, discomfort, and more or less leaning to one side during ordinary (verbal) circadian physical discourse. 3. I, Travis, have found myself waiting with hordes of virtual males, on virtual fire, for one or another virtual woman to join our pathetic vir- group. I have urged on women, bringing them to culmination while I have waited without a clear and positive indication of pure visual presence within my otherwise physical space. 4. I, Travis, have been unable to renounce flesh for other pleasures in my otherwise physical space, having no other pleasures. My work suffers; my eyes sting; my ears ring; my penis leaks; my mouth speaks and no one hears. My scalp itches; my fingers twitch; my nipples ache; my arms quake. I do get wakened in the night's middle by phantom limbs tearing at my flesh. I do toss and turn with the burning-fire of sex soaking my holes, splaying my legs, opening my mouths, scenting my nose. Only a total and final renunciation will eliminate the dreams of fulfill- ment, the sweats, shivers, shudders, stutters, shakes; only a total and final renunciation will give me the space and place to write my piece. If I am a slight loss to you, I am a greater loss to myself; if I cannot see your flesh opened for me _here,_ I cannot imagine the sounds of laughter and weeping _there._ Please forgive me, and say no prayer, for there is no God. I, Travis, on this day forward, do a-knighting go. __________________________________________________________________________ Stigma* I'm out of the adult reflector site on CuSeeMe. I hadn't been on for a while because of the waiting-males syndrome, which I found uncomfortable (surely not-me...); when I tried to enter tonight, I found an ID number required. I didn't have it, so I went to the IRC channel sponsoring the reflector. The bot came on and stated that the ID number was given only to those who had a + by their names - stick around for a while, and I might be eligible. So it would have become a game of waiting again, becoming one of the boys or girls, which is quite understandable; the message read "due to abuse by some people," and the abuse wasn't specified. Was I the source of the abuse, insisting on the position of the voyeur (di/splaying my body, but clearly ill at ease in the group); was it a spam (I had, after all, left a while ago) of new people threatening or violat- ing an unstated contract? Did the friends of the sysadmin fall off the edge, was there a loss of identity involved? In any case, the site sealed itself off, shut, sutured - and identity, forestalled, foreclosed, became my own smashed issue; would I remain on IRC until recognized, join some other, less (or more) secretive group, stay marginalized, nomadic, moving on? Did I have any choice? Uncomfortable with groups in real life, I de- termine not to frequent them on IRC or CuSeeMe as well. (Alas, of course, my very damage renders fragile any such delusionary contract.) Thus my identity follows me; a couples of weeks ago, for the first time in months, I joined the IRC channel #truth, and was immediately banned. I had said nothing; the ban continued until I finally signed off altogether. What had I done, as a seeker after truth, not #truth, or perhaps that was the issue after all? In reality, I'm sure there was no issue; either the chat was private, or someone was fooling around. I churn in my own effluvia; it spatters, forms words, as if: here they are. *See Erving Goffman, Stigma, Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity.) _________________________________________________________________________