WHY I SHOULD BE KILLED


Tiffany says "You're taking it too seriously. Cultural politics is just 
that, politics!" 

You say "That's what I'm talking about. So I'm going to break out. I'm 
not following the form any more! Klaus Kertess, I knew him once! Let the 
man run on! Listen to him now:"

"What is being proposed here is not a return to formalism but an art in
sensuousness is indispensable - whether as play or sheer joy or the kind
of subversity that has us reaching for a rose and grabbing a thorn. Art is
a platform for experience, not a lesson. The artist's mind/body becomes an
instrument of the eye - an instrument that submits to and is orchestrated
by the requirements of the work being made. The interaction of the art-
ist's unique mental structure (even the most rigorous depersonalization
carries a monogram), the artist's culture, and the medium the artist has
chosen to embed with meaning is so complexly layered and cross-circuited
that ambiguity is, if not willed, certainly entailed." 

Later he goes on to explain about Sue Williams: "Williams subversively
pits the physical and verbal abusiveness of her subjects against the
physical gratification of her painting; and through the enjoyment of her
painting, the viewer becomes implicated in the messy goings on of her
subjects. There are no answers here, only questions about the nature of
pleasure. Williams' painting distills more than it defines; it seeks
meaning, know well there may be none; it alarms us into wonder and
wondering." 

Then he adds: "Art's alarm goes off on a slow clock. Even in times as 
disaster prone and obsessed as our current millennial moment, the artist 
must assume the arrogance of eternity."

This is Klaus' "Postcards from Babel" in his Whitney Museum 1995 Biennial
Catalog. The world is changing at an enormous rate; whole peoples and
species are near extinction; the classic nationstate is questioned
throughout Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa; the Internet is under
attack and increasing numbers of people are identifying themselves with
on-line communities: and Sue Williams' work is subverted into perennial
beauty and allegiance with Merleau-Ponty's essay on Cezanne. But Williams'
work is precisely content, ambiguous or not, and there is discomfort
there, art or not. 

Tiffany says "You're not saying anything, damn it! You're talking about life 
and death, about suicide/murder, _Lustmord,_ Jenny Holzer: What's going 
on here?"

You say "It's the language. It's everywhere. It's imperial. It's putting
the lid on. It's a rape of the truth. It's an insistence on truth. Listen:
Why _must_ the artist assume the arrogance of eternity? Don't you see, the
nuclear family in disguise once again, the strait-jacket of organized
religion, it's all there! Listen: "art in which meaning is embedded in
formal value." Not "embedded in form" but "formal _value_" and there you
have it, the circuitry of aesthetic capital, the circuitry of capital if
you will. It's not that I'm for politically-correct art or political art -
it's that there's a return here to effacement, to the 50s' disdain for the
discomfort of the social order until the beats came along. And then
there's the "ought" everywhere in this writing: "Art _is_ a platform for
experience, not a lesson." But why not? Why _should_ art be one thing and
not another? I realize he's using the copula, not the _ought,_ but the
ought is implicit; the sentence is performative - he's the perfect curator
for the 1990s! And there's the return to the inherent formalism of the
work - which is the fetishistic work of totality, the practice of totali-
ty, the artist's "mind/body" becoming "an instrument that submits to and
is orchestrated by the requirements of the work being made." I am reminded
of the orchestras, in fact, that played in the concentration camps, also
submissive - and I don't find the analogy far-fetched. The language reeks
of Kristeva's "clean and proper body," reeks of purified aesthetics, Leni
Riefenstahl. All this in the guise of "a snapshot of our contemporary
world and an exploration of the various visions it inspires." (Geoffrey C.
Bible, the Sponsor's Statement) -" 

Tiffany says "And you're angered, towards death, because you believe 
there is no progress, which means you believe in progress, which means 
you're already strangled -"

You say "Not strangled, not even believing in progress, but this return 
which is everywhere in our culture sutures over the wounds, from the body 
(look at what happens to Sue Williams in the essay) onward; if art is to 
be relevant, it need not be of course political (in the overt sense) or 
politically correct, but this is a call for disengagement, cauterization, 
in disguise. What's occurring in the artworld is an insistence on irre- 
levance, on interiority, metaphor (not the allegory of postmodernism, but 
the metaphor of disconnection), the beauty of the pristine..."

Emote self-strangling beyond the shadow of a doubt!

Emote being misunderstood as the gaunt and avant-garde artist he isn't!

You say "I'm occupying this space, filling it with words, broken like
splintered teeth against the almost-murder of Philoctetes. I'm the shroud
that holds blood in! I rage against cleverness, wit, the disguise of
Virgil, the stunted marrow of the Internet, I am martyred in the war
against language itself. My tongue is torn out by placid Europe's frozen
detonation of nuclear bombs raged across four continents!" 

Tiffany cries "That is not art! Hold the pen/write, pose your hands above 
the finger-board, strike the keys gently, make music with the words, wire 
your wrists with silver cords, bend your body into the inscription of 
disbelief, rise up into violation fabric!"

Tiffany cries "Fool them with your death. Become Lenny Bruce, Andy Kauf-
mann, Mary Magdalene, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, return beneath the
surface of the earth, strangle the paintings themselves with mold, with
scale, with rust, with fungus, with lichen: bacteriality of the worlds
destined to kill with a single glance of the infected!" 

Tiffany cries "Die to fool them with your death!"

Tiffany cries "Don't forget America-bomb, internal-ghetto bomb, don't 
forget body-bomb, don't forget terrible beauty indeed!"

Emote death-machinery eco-culture capital!

Emote caverns legs mouths liquid teeth of blood!

Tiffany screams "Die to fool them with your death!"

You beg "Klaus, kill me! Klaus kill me with your song! Klaus, I'm going 
to lead the armies against Troy! Klaus, give me the bow back! Klaus, make 
me strong! Klaus, strangle eternity! Klaus, down with the beauty meaning 
of art! Klaus, I'm raving at you! Klaus, I'm raving at you! I'm raving at 
you, Klaus! I'm raving!"


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Early, Cybermind, MOO, 900 A.D. Approx

 
From the Yogavashishtha, in Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism, 
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, editor/translator:

  Once upon a time there was a husky man made by a machine of illusion. 
He was a fool, with the feeble wits of a child, and he was exclusively 
concealed within his own idiocy. He was born one day, alone, and he 
remained right there, in an empty place. He was like the net-pattern that 
you see in space when your eyes are closed, or like a mirage that you see 
in a desert. There was no one there other than him; he was all that there 
was there. Whatever else there appeared to be there was a reflection of 
him, but that fool could not see it.
  Then he got the idea of expanding his wealth, and he firmly resolved, 
'I belong to empty space; I am empty space; empty space is mine. I will 
protect space; I will establish space firmly; and I myself will 
assiduously protect my cherished possession.' When he had made this 
decision, he made a house to protect empty space. Inside this house, he 
marked out an area and said, 'Now I have protected this empty space.' And 
he took pleasure in that space in the house.
  But in the course of time, that house of his was destroyed, as a little 
wave in the water is destroyed by a wind in the season of autumn. 'On my! 
My little house-space, you have been destroyed! Oh my! Where did you go 
in just a moment? Oh, oh! You have been shattered!' - this is how he 
mourned for that space. And when he had mourned a hundred times in this 
way, that fool built a well to protect his empty space, and he became 
obsessed with his well-space. But then, in time, the well, too, was 
destroyed, and when the well-space was gone he sank into grief; and when 
he had finished lamenting his well-space, immediately he made a pot, and 
he became obsessed with the pot-space through the illusion of his 
pleasure in it. But in time the pot, too, was destroyed; whatever part of 
the sky that unfortunate creature took, that too was destroyed. When he 
finished lamenting his pot-space, he made a bowl to protect his empty 
space, and he became obsessed with the bowl-space. In time, the bowl, 
too, was destroyed, as darkness is destroyed by blazing light; and he 
grieved for that bowl-space.
  When he finished grieving for the bowl-space, he built a great palace 
with four halls, all made of space, in order to protect his empty space. 
Time swallowed it up, too, and destroyed it as a wind destroys a withered 
leaf; and he became obsessed with mourning for it, too. And when he had 
finished mourning for his palace with four halls, he built a great 
granary in the form of a cloud, to protect his empty space, and he became 
obsessed with the space of that. But time quickly carried it away, too, 
as if it had been a cloud, and he was tortured by his grief for his lost 
granary.
  Thus time, whose essence never changes, outstripped his house, four- 
halled palace, pot, bowl, and granary. And thus he remained, powerless in 
his cave in a corner of the sky, coming and going in his own mind from one 
impenetrable house to another, from one misery, one cloud, to another 
cloud that had become a source of misery, deluded by the confusion 
between what had gone and what had never come.

___________________________________________________________________________


Later a bit of the truth.

Heh, Id like to say that my sister Claire has got the truth, but you know
one glass of wine and there's no stopping the cherries if you get, wow,
what was that. Something left the corner of his eye. No more tarry my
good lass in the fields of clover, before the hurricane comes in through
the ferry. So I was told and we would be merry. Pass the glass of wine,
but you know. Once there was this mountain set afire in Jerusalem, roar-
ing out of the double-haunched thighs of hills, alighting deep in the 
dank night, an atomic cannon if it was a day. Nothing set ablaze, don't
worry about the thing, the id will take care of it. The idea of it! I
woke in the midst of the knife being pulled against the throat, but what
did it matter, I threw him out. There was always a diamond, the only 
time I kissed a man, but he didn't come around the plaza for Claire. The
friend made stained-glass against the desert while she fucked everyone
around having children from every race while the nightclub owner let the
donkey in the bed, a stable relationship ha ha. Heh, I'd like to have
seen that, made it work. Pass the glass lass. There's a good one down
later in the cave where my cock hit the moonlight shooting through the
soda-dam but you made that one as well. My body ye old dark-o covered in
your monthly blood. I speared myself to the wall, that wine poured over
me, smeared across my balls as well. When I threw the bottle the res-
taurant exploded. Restaurant, taurus the bull, just shot through the 
broken bottles but the host was found wounded on the other side of town.
Oh what happened I cried. The guy turned out to be the uncle of the
assailant, knives all around as Clair and I skipped town. 

Later there was more in the green hills, boulders big as dozers where
druids lay moving them into the path of the solstice. This well before
Columbus, you'd hear the sound of chainmail rustled against willows and
beech. The light struck like an arrow against slime-mold turned towards it
down the dim dark wedge of the thicket. One more and I have to get back on
the road, one more, let it kill me. To drive sober's to roll over, there
is a little less life to it, lass, a little less lust. Pour me another I
won't be a bother. Later there'd be another and another maybe I'd tell you
about Claire before the whole deal went down. 


___________________________________________________________________________



Premature Notes on Philoctetes / Who Works the Details of the Fates?


The slash bars its way from the truth, gates the truth:

He's placed on Lemnos by Odysseus and others because they can't bear to 
hear him scream. He's got Hercules' bow. It's foretold he'll conquer 
Troy. They go back to get him. There are a lot of discussions. This is in 
Sophocles. The discussions last the length of the play. What's been fore- 
told, ordained. But are the discussions ordained? Back and forth they 
argue. It takes the deus ex machina, Hercules descendent like a testicle, 
to ejaculate Philoctetes out of there. The audience knew he was leaving. 
It's not even a question of the machinery, although what's foretold is 
always already of the machine. (The Greeks had problems with irrational 
numbers which appeared rationally, unaccountable, unaccounted-for, in the 
midst of reason.) In the play, foreclosure rules, imposes teleology; the 
machinic guarantees its operation. Pull the guy out of the sky.

It's an awkward play, teetering on the edge of the visible and invisible
which closes down _there._ It's as if the chora got itself straightened
out, out of necessity, for the labor of the drama, labor of history. It's
an awkward play, it's visceral; Philoctetes screams because of his
disease, gangrene in the translation, he's been bitten by a snake, his 
leg's rotting. Odysseus comes back for him because Philoctetes is needed 
in the scheme of things; there's promise of a cure. You can see why he 
wants to remain island-bound; Odysseus can't be trusted. But Odysseus 
brings the news of the foreclosure; he's an instrument of fate. Why him 
and no others, what tethers him to this positioning? Neoptolemos acts on 
his behalf, he's the son of Achilles, addresses Philoctetes: "You must 
then help me break the resistance of our enemies with your bow. This is 
the truth. I will tell you how I know it. One of our prisoners from Troy 
is Helenus - a great prophet there. He has told us, and we cannot doubt 
it, that all this is bound to happen." Belief embraces truth itself; the 
system, adopted, has its consequences. 

Who is speaking here? If Neoptolemos, then there is no truth, there is
only belief and its embrace; the audience escapes. If it is fate, then
there is truth, the audience is complicit. The audience cannot tell the
difference, can never enter into Neoptolemos and his discourse. Truth
emerges through slippage, through reportage, through the anecdote; in
spite of Euclid, this is millennia before the repetition of scientific
experiment. And then later, Broad, who was for a time president of the
Society for Psychical Research (London), writes about sporadic cases,
which must be accepted on internal evidence, since they cannot be
repeated; these cases, of course, include psychic phenomena, Hercules
descending sporadically... 

Philoctetes is the wager of artificial life, the experiment I described
elsewhere, closed within the computer program. There is an absolute break,
no virtual tunneling here, between destiny and will, between the spill of
speech (which chaotically can influence the real, material, environement)
with its appearance of free labor, and the construct of the will of the
Gods. 

The play talks its way through everything, as if talking to waylay the 
inevitable. I see this as a Heiner Muller play (and in fact he did a 
version), the machinery of Europe at work, the called-for destinies of 
imperial technocracies ranging from Hittite to Germany and beyond. The 
talk is surplus, rag-tag, as the characters leave the island.

Unless the machinic/ex machina is the contract, which is suspect: So that
it is the fate for example of young men (and women) to be drafted, the
talk a preamble or performative, psychoanalysis the guidance of fate to
its proper predestination. But that is not from the _clouds._ _Uncanny
Hercules_ descends from the clouds. The programmer appears in the midst 
of the program.

Is the programmer Odysseus? Listen to Muller (and we could do no better 
than to listen to Muller continuously, on the periphery of blood seeping 
from the signifier itself): "No other production which I have seen has 
solved the structural problem of the play: the transformation of tragedy 
into face, or into the tragic satire as it is called by Schiller, through 
the jump in Odysseus's thought from the irreplaceableness of the living 
Philoctetes to the exploitation of the dead one, so that a new species 
comes onto the stage: the political animal."

The political animal believes in destiny, in Volk. Not a new species, but
an appearance here, in agreement with Dasein, with destiny handled and
manipulated as an ad campaign. _If_ everything were decreed according to
the deus ex machina, by which I mean an ontic exteriority, then there
would be no need for Neoptolemos' subterfuge in the first place, his
deceit, _plotting_ (and plots are always a sign of ontic collapse) against
Philoctetes (at Odysseus' insistence). So that the fates are construed 
from within-fate by manipulation, capital (implied by the arrival of the 
(false) merchant in the play). 

Within this confusion, the body of the text transforms into gangrene 
itself, self-reflexivity, reflection, devourment. Nothing remains; fate 
spits letters between the teeth. This is the result of fate of any sort, 
however, this surplus of language recruited into the service of destiny, 
the material witness of blood sutured by the symbol, or the whole works 
sloughed down into the ditch of the imaginary. It is no longer truth that 
shimmers, but the word itself; whatever is harbored bordering our realm 
is no longer of any concern of ours. When Odysseus lands, we require his 
passport; when Philoctetes seeks treatment, we ask for mercy from Medicaid.
But this is not the fall of the gods, Gotterdammerung - it's nothing but 
the leaky nature of languaging become manifest, our relative freedom, in 
fact, to ransack Lemnos for whatever treasures it contains, Philoctetes 
among them. For myself, I no longer search for the gateway, but for the 
wall itself.

Muller: "The monuments will not bleed until the last battle."


___________________________________________________________________________




Artificial Life, Philoctetes, Revelation


...of course the truth of the matter is that illumination comes with the
realization that _it makes absolutely no difference whatosever_ whether
or not the words are preordained, whether or not one operates by a pur-
ified volition, or if, in fact, everything is worked out from the begin-
ning. And with this illumination, the wall appears, obdurate, the other's
presence, the knowledge that there is barrier in any case. The _in any
case_ circumscribes existence itself, inscribes existence, a double-
writing in which the boundary creates an imaginary and inchoate presence
that will turn out to be the self, parcelled out within the wall, dis-
membered, with the memory of a totality that comes from the wall itself.

__________________________________________________________________________

Frontiers of the Internet


Where are the frontiers of the Net - and by this I don't mean demograph-
ics or geography, but signposts towards conceivable futures? There are 
two broad areas that overlap, one connected with bandwidth, and the other 
with applications themselves.

With _increased_ bandwidth (mbone, atm, etc.), video and audio clips will 
become more prevalent. We can also expect MOOs, MUDs, and the like to 
enter into the pictorial domain. Language-processing will be available as 
a common option, establishing two-way communications through the home 
computer. The sheer _visibility_ of the Net will completely transform its 
impact, no matter how much the rest of us appreciate text. The number of 
text-based documents will continue to grow at an exponential rate, how- 
ever, and search engines, driving intelligent agents, will become more 
functional and compact.

In terms of applications, particularly the current state of the Net, 
there are three areas to watch:

1. Home-pages. The World Wide Web home-pages are becoming more and more 
elaborate, miniature audio-visual webs themselves, and the framework for 
all sorts of experimentation. By 1997, expect full immersive access.

2. VRML and similar languages. The virtual reality markup language is an 
early step towards complete immersion in seamless constructed realities, 
which will probably be commonplace by 2010 or so. I believe at least 15 
years are necessary to develop the enormous bandwidth such realities will 
require; whether all the copper-wire lines in the United States and else- 
where will be converted to fiber-optic (necessary for the bandwidth) is 
another matter altogether.

3. MOOs as research institutions, group meeting-places within which the 
Net is accessible by a number of geographically dispersed people at once. 
I see this area leading quickly towards the idea of an info-sphere; com- 
bined with virtual reality, information access, filtering, and function- 
ality will be commonplace by 2005.

All of these areas touch upon and interpenetrate the others; by 2000, 
expect the merging/morphing of various Net applications and content. The 
Net may ultimately be defined by sensorium/text and by lag/no-lag bases. 
The former is a division between video/audio and text/data streams (which 
consume considerably less bandwidth); the latter separates the document 
and message-base from synchronous transmission, conversation, and on-line 
group researching.

(By 2000 also, the Net might become a "lookup" facility, with search 
engines calling up other search engines; one might enter <subject> at a 
prompt (as in the World Wide Web Worm or Webcrawler), and a virtual page 
with links to content would be created. The lookup facility would search 
more than the Web, however, activating archie and other commands, estab-
lishing hypertext links with ftp sites, etc. The model would be that of 
the hypertextual encyclopedia, rather than that of the layered Internet 
with its gopher/ftp/etc. domains.)

Just some thoughts...

__________________________________________________________________________


Roots


I write because I can't come to terms with my past. I can't live past the 
60s, was slaughtered by the punks in the 70s, slept through the 80s, now 
my xy-chromosome generation abandons me. I've cauterized myself from 
every conceivable record of the past; traumatized by Vietnam, I would 
have fled, killed myself, rather than serve. That's not even a memory 
now, or rather, those upturned faces of the woman at Kent State or the 
Vietnamese shot point-blank. But the intensity, lines of flight of the Ho 
Chi Minh Trail, Patty Hearst's skittering across the United States, 
trails left by failed rockets, assassination bullet trajectories, smoke 
of burning refineries houses of unparalleled enemies everywhere, drugs 
dropped into the eyesockets of the dead: _play morris-dance across my 
chest,_ the nipples worn around the necks of imaginary soldiers: No 
matter say I, I'll not settle here. No matter, say you, there's no there, 
nothing but the talking, not even the stalking. I write because of this, 
because I can't stalk the past, shunt off the trail into the tunnels. 
Because that way madness lies. Because it may be a tissue of lies, but a 
tissue nonetheless, torn with the blood of future generations that won't 
know a trail of blood from the Unix path/net/u/6/s/sondheim home. Root 
for it, baby, root for it.

_________________________________________________________________________


Roots ii

Roots are lines of flight are tendrils, narrowing down, are rhizomes, 
what Koestler called holarchic, but the thinning into microtubules belies
the origins of consciousness in memory tightening its noose on the self; 
if you can't think, it's nostalgia that has blocked the way with perman- 
ency. The root flees from the plant; it's idiotic to think otherwise; 
tethered to an invisible sun, it seeks the darkness of nourishment and 
moisture, forgetting the presence of seeds and reproduction.

The root untethers, exposes lines of flight, rhizomes, for concatenations 
- chains collapsing near their weakest links, joined by the purely con- 
tingent, tangential to one another. The process of meristomation extends 
the cells towards whatever stimulus or trope makes its apparent appear- 
ance; what expands has already lost the semblance of a source. Caught, 
cauterized, blind, hold up on these objects.

Ghosts pervade the movement of molecular dirts, trammeled dusts thwarted 
in the presence of new life, residue of a trace or inscription; writing 
founds itself everywhere. Writing is a rooting of the socius from the 
outside, the outset; it returns transforming into itself, the implicate 
order of dirt, flight, line, rhizome, memory turned through circularity 
into a chaotic mix incapable of resolution. The sporadic instances of 
ghosting efface or frame resolution, filtering; ghosts traps disappear 
upon the onslaught of China, only to reappear once again and forever in 
the midst of missile fields, other lines of flight...

_________________________________________________________________________


deserted root iii

to be sure i found myself in the desert, rootless, or rather disseminat-
ing roots over a wide an area as i could possibly reach with the matter at
hand - their nodes or secondary processes extending upon the slightest
trace of absorption. 

on the surface, gullies and otherwise ridges external to the depths of 
which it has been said, follow them to the shore, but of which sea? for 
it is more than likely that of the shallow pool, baked and evaporated by 
the sun; there is hardly room to look further (and what would be visible, 
except for _other entrances_?). [that which it would be, the desert as a 
process.]

this is the presence of _contested land,_ the imaginary vacancy of euro-
pean thought, ecologies transformed by the millimeter of surface soil, the
roots thirst, tumescent beneath the violent temperatures of the solar
furnace, and, to the extent, of contestation, the presence of contract,
misrecognition _to be sure._ violation fabric, the disaster of theory in
the desert, languaging, burying the originary traces of routes, roots,
burrows, barrows. 

(tendrils which are tubules which are cybermind, chiasm. nostalgias which 
are dead messages, pools of messages, black holes of messages, loops of 
messages. languagings which are the skimmings of messages, application 
layers of messages, residues or stains of messages. contestations which 
are bandwidths. histories which are discarded, filed away, lost in cyber- 
space. meristemation which is the routing of messages, roots and thirst- 
ing of messages.)


_________________________________________________________________________


roots iv, envelope of the star

every number unique, virtual, violation fabric in the midst of stripped
particles, waves spanning space itself, gravitational, importunate,
granular

burned in the plasma of the solar annihilation, ashes, evaporations

unrecognized nominalisms, no universals except the broken manifolds of
conflagration, lustmord darkened with differentials, actions, truncations,
star-teeth

no searching for the lost or absent: no "one," as in the "lost or absent
one" 

there is no memory. there is no history. there cloaks the nude body of 
the woman lying on the persian rug. 

_the roots configure a random collection of nodes drowned in plasmas near 
the speed of light in vacuo, rhizomes project as tubules cauterized from 
the mother-lode charred into imminent disappearance. they flee the realm, 
burned sparks of dissolute forms shape-riding matter into total disap- 
pearance. _nothing remarkable._

this conditions the uninscribed center, alphabetic disappearance. absence 
of disavowal as well. _and nothing springs to mind.__

:this is the _ending of roots._


_________________________________________________________________________


The Defuge Rhyme


The word itself, the hymen or division which splits: Re: hymen, incapable 
of division. But rhyme returns, not the recall of memory, but reinforce- 
ment subjugating anomaly itself. That is, turning the language of the 
poem into sound, for which it materializes, that is, fetishizes, placing 
the semantic core in an inverted relationship to cybermind - where syntax 
is fetishized as the bones of the dissolute body.

Within neural networks, I think of rhyme as reinforcement, the construct 
of a gate to language resonating uncannily with the absence of meaning. 
So it binds meaning to the abyss, floods the body of language (posturing 
contractually against the rim of rhyme/chora, one would say a situation 
of bondage and domination). The mind learns the poem, defuses it; rhyme 
partakes of the exhaustion of pornography, turning-away from the image 
after its consumption. 

Such a turning-away is common, fetishization transformed into discard,
disgust, the image no longer working, _that_ body used up in masturbation. 
It is so common that a word is necessary here, the _defuge,_ defuse/refuge
deluge/refuse, de-light, de-flower. Rhyme patterns, frames, defuges; it 
is the defuge that draws the poem forward beyond return, the sonnet to 
the final couplet.

Rhyme materializes, and the materiality is subject to defuge, carrying
semantic content on its back. Defuge is a laying-waste, and it is not too
much to think it _through_ materiality, the gainsaying of substance,
effluvia. It is the substance in pornography that defuges;  there is a
constellation pornography/fetishization/rhyme, rhythm a stride or
measuring of substance against the body itself. The repetition of rhyme 
measures rhythm which of course is a return through a demarcation; such a 
return is the defuge of time, the striations of the medium as well. 

Defuge is the tumescence of substance within representation. "All objects 
are objects of loss." I am at a loss to account for defuge, these repe- 
titions, consumptions, exhaustions, laying-to-waste, discardings. It is 
not a question of novelty, but novelty plays a role. It is not a question 
of fetishization, although these half-way markings bridge sites in the 
unconscious. In pornography, it is the image on the level of the symbolic 
that materializes, that is devoured; in rhyme, it is the substance itself 
which unconsciously appertains to the unconscious. In pornography, the 
auto-erotic forecloses upon the image, which bears witness; in rhyme, 
neural networking frames and forecloses the substance of language. Rhyme 
bears witness as well, to the subtle fragility of language which subli- 
mates its sonic basis: the symbolic resides as a simulacrum upon, or 
articulated within/by, this material. 

Defuge produces the material as imaginary. Defuge is also located: in the
rereading of a novel which has never been finished; at the height of an
argument in which the trajectory appears as foreclosure; in Sartrean
nausea; in outmoded fashion; in expectorated fetishes; in rhyme upon
rhyme, Skelton's work for example. _Too much_ rhyme makes one uncomfor-
table, as too many exposed genitalia; a sweet, ruptured sickness, emerges,
and the decay of bodies is not far behind. (And just so, Emily Dickinson's
poetry is always near the abyss, near total collapse, the fragility of a 
feather.)

(Defuge is also fueled, in late capitalism, by fast-forward driving of the
commodity structure; consumption becomes introjected, always already con- 
spicuous, a matter of _sight_ lending itself towards _site._ But it is 
perhaps more interesting to think of the commodity structure as fueled by 
defuge, the circum-stantiation, circumlocution of the abyss: and too much 
talk, too much theory, is a primary example...)


_________________________________________________________________________


Defuge ii


Stephen Crane (Maggie, A Girl of the Streets): "A tall young man, smoking
a cigarette with a sublime air, strolled near the girl. He had on evening
dress, a moustache, a chrysanthemum, and a look of _ennui,_ all of which
he kept carefully under his eye. Seeing the girl walk on as if such a
young man as he was not in existence, he looked back transfixed with
interest. He stared glassily for a moment, but gave a slight convulsive
start when he discerned that she was neither new, Parisian, nor theatri-
cal. He wheeled about hastily and turned his stare into the air, like a 
sailor with a searchlight."

There is the exhaustion that _lends itself to death,_ the exhaustion of
the libertine, the implicate of fascism as well. (See Pasolini on Huys-
mans' A Rebours.) The consumption of fascism releases itself. In another
turn, the _fan_ releases him or herself in relation to the rock or film
star, who appears possessed within the imaginary, mediated by the symbol-
ic; no amount of information or memorabilia is ever enough, and each new 
item displaces the old. One can speak of _the motility of the fetish on 
unstable feet._

And here is Edna St. Vincent Millay's translation of Baudelaire's Spleen 
II which begins in French with:

"J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans."


The Sphinx

I swear to you that if I lived a thousand years
I could not be more crammed with dubious souvenirs.

There's no old chest of drawers bulging with deeds and bills,
Love-letters, locks of hair, novels, bad verses, wills,
That hides so many secrets as my wretched head; -
It's like a mausoleum, like a pyramid, 
Holding more heaped unpleasant bones than Potter's Field;
I am a graveyard hated by the moon; revealed
Never by her blue light are those long worms that force
Into my dearest dead their blunt snouts of remorse.
- I am an old boudoir, where roses dried and brown
Have given their dusty odour to the faded gown,
To the ridiculous hat, doubtless in other days
So fine, among the wan pastels and pale Bouchers.

Time has gone lame, and limps; and under a thick pall
Of snow the endless years efface and muffle all;
Till boredom, fruit of the mind's inert, incurious tree,
Assumes the shape and size of immortality.

Henceforth, O living matter, you are nothing more 
Than the fixed heart of chaos, soft horror's granite core,
Than a forgotten Sphinx that in some desert stands,
Drowsing beneath the heat, half-hidden by the sands,
Unmarked on any map, - whose rude and sullen frown
Lights up a moment only when the sun goes down.


(I love the Millay-isms or Americanisms of this translation, doing 
violence and recuperating something as well.)

Spleen, like boredom, figures into defuge; both play a role in Salo, in 
Sade, demarcating the libertine for whom freedom has become a paste of 
bodies, and for whom inscription has transformed into smears. Defuge 
occurs within the memory of memory, and it is not the boredom, but the 
nausea associated with the exhaustion, that is of interest, this turn- 
ing away in relation to the abject. The premise or promise of the porno- 
graphic image disappears during singular masturbations; it strikes of 
failure, of the consumption of flesh. I would not be surprised to find 
flesh consumed in each and every one of these cases, and perhaps the 
materiality that defuge operates through is ultimately cannibalistic. 

Here is Pasolini on Des Esseintes: "The mechanism of Des Esseintes is the
mechanism of an anti-bourgeois bourgeois who commits suicide by destroying
himself through an excess of his own culture. He finds himself in a moment
of history in which the genealogical tree of bourgeois typology separates
into two great trunks: at the base of one of these trunks you find the
signpost bearing Hitler's name, at the base of the other you find the sign
pointing to 'hippies.'" (Quoted in Naomi Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini,
Cinema as Heresy.)

And finally, defuge, from my Disorders of the Real: "Form, thrust away. 
For a moment. For a minute. For a second or longer until in full it falls,
cut off at the quick. Cut off at the bone. To char: it rolls on the
ground, without limbs; it moves against itself as bag splits within bag as
the speech holds forth because of (on due account) the split tongue
expelling its swollen particles of speech. Damned, as if something _was._
As-if _was._ No farther as tube rolls, suffocates: no farther as the
lungs corrode, body inverts, bag fills with faeces, all manner of the
outer airs. He gave himself airs: which means, he pretended he _was._ That
verb which has no right _to be._" 


___________________________________________________________________________




Defuge iii: the impasse


Defuge: involving disdain, trashing, embarrassment, turning-aside, humil-
iation, the loss of fetishistic power. 

In the pornographic image, the man or woman no longer offer themselves; 
their materiality becomes manifest: alterity.

It's as if masturbation or diegesis exhaust their content, and wouldn't 
this imply the defuge of narrative?

I've reached an impasse here. At what order does explanation operate? 
Within the neural network, overkill and increasingly tight frameworking 
(as in too many rhymes) creates networks with limited bandwidth; on the 
level of the symbolic, the assertion of alterity cuts into secondary 
narcissism, and the subject finds himself or herself literally at a loss 
before the alter of the image. (Perhaps this also has to do with the 
incest prohibition, the bleeding of the woman/text/image, _escape_ into 
alterity as well.)

"The dull compaction of the world thuds, in the foundation of the bottom 
of the text. The nether regions of discourse and language collapse in the 
nadir of bellowing sound, perversions of word and sentence. The basement 
of the ego drowns the abyss of the subject's grounds. The imploding 
tunnel of the uterine apparatus escapes into the thinned atmosphere of 
male, articulate and configured eyes, seminal sites, productions of 
belief gnawing at the periphery. My writing is a dull thunder. Lightning 
forms a disheveled paste across the sky. The flat bark of lightning. 
Lightning's chipped plate. Lightning's stain and the murmur of thunder, 
almost a word.

"The throat is chopped with its non-listening. 'I learned to speak with 
other holes.'" (from my Textbook of Thinking)

- abstract thought hidden within the laminar order of collapse -

The impasse exists at the boundary of Freudian decathexis, disinvestment, 
which is not necessarily an active release or discharge, but a loosening 
or unraveling as of the Borromean knot. The commodity is no longer oper- 
ative; something or someone is _used up._ Defuge is this using up, which 
occurs among worlds, the interstices or liminal realms of semiosis. Signs 
dissolve into the abyss of the substrate. One is lost in the midst of the 
inchoate accusations of the other; the trashed pornographic image is the 
content of nightmare. Defuge refuses...

_________________________________________________________________________




Defuge iv


When it begins to assert itself, draw itself forward like wounded 
Philoctetes, when you begin to notice the nature of its speech, the 
twisted turn of the track on the sand.

But not when you begin to think about the condition of the body, naming 
it Philoctetes, the whole sorry history toppling forward like wounded 
Philoctetes.

When synesthesia spans the sensory modalities, drawing the body forward 
across the registers and intensities of perceptions, when the body dis- 
charges itself in the reception of Philoctetes, when Philoctetes dis- 
charges the body.

When there is no investment in the body, nor disinvestment, Philoctetes 
not-yet-animal, when there is intensity almost bordering on disgust, 
flight from meditation, from speech-Philoctetes.

When fuck-Philoctetes strums, stumbles, Sister-Streaming-Blood, but when 
furrowed sand-inscription, but when swollen, not spelling out. 

Defuge when the repressed returns, crouching, anal spore wet above the 
spurted sands, when the lines break open.

Brou.

__________________________________________________________________________


defuge, fifth and final section, explanations:


defuge refuge refuse defuse: _r.d/fu/g.s/e:_ writing the words over and
over again. effacement/sublimation/repression / incest/expulsion/scapegoat
- what differentiates defuge is the peculiar passivity that accompanies
it, the supine body, the fragility of the exposed underbelly.

rhyme chokes in the throat; the image withers the genitals; the half-read 
novel distresses, vis-a-vis _ownership,_ the reader: give the novel away, 
and the affect disappears. so that defuge is also connected with intro- 
jection, with an _economic investment_ of/within the body. nearer, no 
clearer.

always a sense of _failure_ in other words, the _thing_ construing (as in 
the _thing_ of depression) alterity, catching the subject up short. so 
there is a need to deflect/defuse: by passage of ownership among other 
means. the subject _renders itself passive_ in order to avoid dismember- 
ment, (degendered) castration.

it is also the dropping of recognition, of the proper name, of the object,
of the framing-device, of inscription, of circumscription, of the symbol-
ic. it is also participant in languor, in lassitude, in the flaneur, in 
nomadic wandering.

in my own adulterated view, defuge is connected with the hunt as well,
with the ravishment and devouring of the other, with propitiation. what is
used up, in this sense, in rhyme and the pornographic image, is life it-
self; the word or image no longer speaks: vanquished, it dissolves under
the gaze, returns to the material substrate, presents the gristle to the
frightened subject who has been transformed into witness. the half-read
novel as well is left for dead, exhausted. (there is also a connection
here with novelty/play: the image is played-with, the mind absorbs its 
structure within/without a kind of game - a learning-process related to 
the construct of intelligence. once the game is mastered, the subject is 
_at a loss,_ but not only the loss of an activated object: a loss which 
places the subject _within the realm of the passive,_ an approximation of 
his or her death. surely this is part of it.) surely this is part of it.

(and defuge enters into theoretical burnout, cyberspace burnout as well. 
the analysis becomes self-reflexive, choking. the term is _critical_ to 
analysis.)

"A great roar of thunder will come from within the light, the natural
sound of dharmata, like a thousand thunderclaps simultaneously. This is
the natural sound of your own dharmata, so do not be afraid or bewil-
dered. You have what is called a mental body of unconscious tendencies,
you have no physical body of flesh and blood, so whatever sounds, colors
and rays of light occur, they cannot hurt you and you cannot die. It is
enough simply to recognize them as your projections.  Know this to be the
bardo state." (Tibetan Book of the Dead, translation Francesca Fremantle, 
Chogyam Trungpa.)

defuge: in which the body gives itself away by transforming possession 
into paste.

_________________________________________________________________________





	do you write to strangers
	do you write do you write

	trusting in the sound of your words i reach out and touch
	the sound of your words

	mystery posts, calls, cries in the night

crying, the voice situated in the upper registers, slow descent, 
are you there
 
	do you, do you, write to strangers
    i will return i will return to you 

	i will traverse your space of webs and filigree, there is the 
black-velvet darkness, there is the felt-darkness and black-leather
darkness
    do not abandon me to my selves, to presence you would you would
	never understand.
 
	the darkness surrounds you, surrounds the two of us. 

	if we could only touch through the darkness of the wires, always
this darkness, always the voice emerging, always the stuttering, 
the throat, or the calmness
  
	i imagine you lying back, languor, supine, dark maroons, 
	dark organ music, long o so low tones from darkened caverns
    who are you, who are you out there
  
	do you, do you
	write to strangers










		 stranger
 are you there, will you speak to a stranger
 i would come to you i would bleed for you
 i want you to know how much i care for you
 i want you to be certain of my love for you
 i write you in and out of the darkness
 i write myself in existence write myself out of existence
 you are my only existence
 i love myself in you forever and ever
 i love yourself in me forever and ever
 would you come to a stranger would you never be a stranger
 would you never ever be a stranger ever be a stranger
 would you love me no stranger ever longer
 do you do you speak to strangers be my stranger be my lover
 disappear for me in you swallow me alive
 disappear for you in me swallow me alive





naming the moon, naming the air of the moon

we're casting adrift, tethered by air, there is little room
in the glare of the sun as we walk north or west, naming the moon
or finding our way near mare crisium, the sea of crisis of speech 
and of storm, the pass through the north-west of tisserand b, 
into the mare yet unnamed down near the gallery of tisserand d,
towards the walls of tisserand's chora near macrobius, heading
the gallery, heading us off, macrobiu and macrobius t, we pass
near the floor of the circular crater, of tralles a on the way
down near macrobius v, once past newcomb g to the south now of
newcomb j, wandering the valley to macrobius' northwest, past
the triple galaxy of macrobius x, y, and z, no one lives here
down near the basin wandering the floor near macrobius l, a,
or b, and always a chance to approach near the south of the wall
casting a shadow on language or proper name, thrusting a pall
paling on impact on language's noun; we're wandering down, around
south of macrobius, there are unmarked ridges and rills, canyons
and wadis emptied from the beginning of spills of rocks near 
emergence of time: there's proclus j, x, y, z, four craters, 
in the highlands, badlands west of crisis, there are still words
to encounter, proclus somewhat smaller than smaller, proclus t,
not at all, yerkes nearer to the crisis, its eastern wall
bordering, from which picard appears, burrowing in the desert
barrows of the crisis. wandering through the firmament, names 
have, do they not, addresses tethered, lost forever in the moon's
hot weather. what jumps, jumps out at the nomad whose names mean,
and here no meaning names, no wandering ensues at least as yet
to catch the final denouement of words tumbling down into mare,
mare crisium, ready to seize them until tongues, mouth, and teeth
appear, until the empty air.

__________________________________________________________________



Future Dream of Future Lists


Tonight some of the moderators from spoon and others met and discussed all
sorts of things, and beforehand I was thinking about the future of email
lists; I'd like to start one that contained images and sound-bites (as
well as simple information on how to download and see/her them). And this
led me to think of the further possibility of a neural-networked list,
which would not only search through archives, but create part-objects as
replies. If you wrote a post with the title "net.sex" for example, it
would first explode the title through a thesaurus; it would also look for
other key words in the post, after eliminating a basic vocabulary of, say,
500-1000 words. (The search for keywords is absolutely critical, more
important than the top-down threading announcements.) The network would
then go through the archive, or a framed section thereof, of past
messages, pulling out the ones that apparently pertained to the same
subject; these would be rated. If there were a semantic parser present,
the network could remove what it would classify as key sentences, say
those with the least percentage of basic vocabulary. These would be
arranged by ostensible subject matter, correlated with the incoming post,
and attached as part-objects to the post. Further replies to the post
would also be correlated and so forth. 

The whole would work through a neural network containing a tremendous 
number of rules as well, and this rule-base would be constantly open to 
change, both from within (the network itself) and without (by the 
moderator or users with sufficient knowledge to program it). I think of 
the approach as a bottom-up taxonomy, instead of one starting and 
remaining on the level of the subject-heading or threading, which is 
top-down.

Eventually, of course, the list would be programmed to reply to itself; 
interspersed with human intercessions/interstitial posting, the whole 
would tend towards an evolutionary paradigm.

Ultimately, one might say that the list would presuppose _every_ post, 
setting out on its own, researching the contents of terabyte messages. 
But the truth of the matter is that human intervention, combined with 
list/program intervention, would be critical here.

In addition, images would be subject to manipulation both by the soft- 
ware and human intervention; discussion would proceed on visual, aural, 
and textual bases simultaneously. It would not be difficult to program 
particular visual distortions, for example, to accompany particular 
arguments within a discussion rhizome.

For the discussions would be, of course, rhizomatic, not threading - 
non-linear to the extreme. They would play across texts, programs, users, 
and sensory modalities. 

And there would also be a MOO-space for such a list, in which the sub- 
scribers could discuss things in synchronous time, coupled, of course, 
with various bots which would be fed program information from the neural 
networking, information that would eventually extend their textual ade- 
quacy in conversation. But that would be a long way off.

Topics? Cybermind, experientiality, the dissolution and diffusion of 
knowledge and knowledge-filtering, differentiation of knowledge as 
opposed to integration (the former spreads the bandwidth, inscribes it; 
the latter is a form of smoothing or filtering itself), communality, 
human-machine interfacing, the touch of the body or image or voice or 
soundbite or text...

All of this could be initiated by someone expert in programming, through 
Unix, perl, c++, etc. Cybermind would take on a new direction, that of 
the beginning-to-speak of the wires, and fiction-of-philosophy would 
spread like a stain, modalities collapsing into one another...

Alan

_________________________________________________________________________



Lunar Cybermeet


We wandered in the vicinity of the craters already mentioned, the famil-
iarity of unpossessed but imposing mountainous terrain, and so near the
Crisium. From there, the thinned rims of Peirce and Peirce B made their
gateway, this ancestor of cybermind with his constructs of the sheet of
assertion, that blank slate upon which everything from lunar dust to the
exegesis of email phenomenology (and the two are not dissimilar), might
manifest itself. Our attention would turn further eastward, however,
across the local clusters of Macrobius, secondary and tertiary craters,
towards an unmarked area; Littrow was not that far away, nor was Mons
Argaeus. This is a remarkable journey, defining wilderness by trails,
traces, inscriptions left by tumbling boulders and moraine debris aban-
doning the primordial matrix of the lunar subsurface. If we were there, 
we would have refused glances towards the earth-bound atmospheric cloaca, 
our planet itself staining the pleasure of the journey our weary vehicles 
and feet made through aeons of dust. 

So we have promised ourselves a look at Tsiolkovsky next time near 20 deg
south, 130 deg east, on the far side ignorant of the pull of the faint
blue-white disk, or rather imagining a presence beneath the feet, tunnel-
ing through the lunar mass itself. The trace always remains at a dis-
tance; nothing prepares one for the imminent exhaustion of the visual. 
Heaven sways the remnants of dawn and dusk invisible; what is postulated 
possesses but the horizon of truth and its intensity.

To that extent we have already traveled Tsiolkovsky, huddled against the 
image as if the _recent_ Mare Crisium opened its blank and swollen eye, 
tearing through the presence of an unrelieved, eternal, and always visi- 
ble earth. Tsiolkovsky receives rumors of the Crisis at best; rumors 
never form community. 

What would we, they, talk about. What would we, they, talk about indeed.

________________________________________________________________________



Order and Interference


This program presents a one-dimensional cellular automaton of the simplest
possible variety. What's of interest, however, is the random function,
which distorts the figure, which otherwise would be a fractal triangular
sponge. The image still develops large blank areas for the most part near
the apex of the triangle, evidence of order; these disappear as the figure
extends. What is the meaning of this? That as a social order develops, 
perhaps, chaotic processes evolve and intermix, deflecting large-scale 
processes, which could only be imposed top-down. So that a form of post- 
modernism, local narratives, prevails, and everything else is lost.

(Of course all of this depends on the definitions of "social," "order," 
and "narrative" ...)

If you run this, place the "IF...THEN" on one line; I had to collapse/
indent them in order to configure the screen. Note there are all sorts of 
possibilities to be explored here, including using the resulting figure 
as a seed for a two-dimensional automaton (with random processes or not), 
and seeding using more than the point (320, 1). For example, a horizontal 
or vertical line could be used.

Again, the if...then...else... rules can be changed. What I would like to 
do is alter these to _functions_ of the previous lines. And finally, the 
rules can be changed to disorder temporality itself, by referencing 
_future_ lines as well as past ones. (The characteristics on line z are 
now determined by neighbors on z-1, but there is no reason not to include 
action at a distance as well, using x-n, x+m where n and m are greater 
than 1.)

----------------------------------|

SCREEN 12
home: CLS
RANDOMIZE TIMER
PSET (320, 1), 15
z = 1
DO UNTIL z = 480
x = 4
DO UNTIL x = 638
q = RND * 1.02
IF q > 1 THEN g = 0 ELSE g = 1
IF POINT(x - 1, z) = 0 AND POINT(x, z) = 0 AND POINT(x + 1, z) <> 0 
 AND g = 1 THEN 
PSET (x, z + 1), 9
ELSEIF POINT(x - 1, z) = 0 AND POINT(x, z) <> 0 AND 
 POINT(x + 1, z) <> 0 THEN
PSET (x, z + 1), 10
ELSEIF POINT(x - 1, z) <> 0 AND POINT(x, z) = 0 AND 
 POINT(x + 1, z) = 0 THEN
PSET (x, z + 1), 12
ELSEIF POINT(x - 1, z) <> 0 AND POINT(x, z) <> 0 AND 
 POINT(x + 1, z) = 0 THEN
PSET (x, z + 1), 14
END IF
x = x + 1
IF INKEY$ = "r" THEN GOTO home
LOOP
z = z + 1
IF z = 320 THEN STOP
LOOP

(slightly fuller version below; it runs considerably slower - note that
using the vertical line as seed creates extreme order and relatively
violent disorder, depending on the random factor...)

(slightly fuller version below; it runs considerably slower - note that
using the vertical line as seed creates extreme order and relatively
violent disorder, depending on the random factor...)

SCREEN 12
home: CLS
RANDOMIZE TIMER
INPUT "type 1 for line or return for point"; b
PRINT "using binary coding 1-8, type 8 0s or 1s separated by commas"
PRINT "these will be used for the matrix; set first usu. to 0"
INPUT "do this now"; ah, aa, ab, ac, ad, ae, af, ag
INPUT "enter randomization constant, usu. 1.0025, between 1 and 2"; gg
CLS
IF b = 1 THEN
LINE (320,1)-(320,480), 15
ELSE
PRINT "type starting points, return for centered pixel"
CLS
PSET (320, 10), 15
LINE INPUT ; text$
END IF
z = 10
DO UNTIL z = 480
x = 4
DO UNTIL x = 638
q = RND * gg
IF q > 1 THEN g = 0 ELSE g = 1
l = POINT(x - 1, z)
m = POINT(x, z)
n = POINT(x + 1, z)
IF g = 1 THEN
IF l = 0 AND m = 0 AND n <> 0 AND aa = 1 THEN
PSET (x, z + 1), 9
ELSEIF l = 0 AND m <> 0 AND n = 0 AND ab = 1 THEN
PSET (x, z + 1), 10
ELSEIF l = 0 AND m <> 0 AND n <> 0 AND ac = 1 THEN
PSET (x, z + 1), 12
ELSEIF l <> 0 AND m = 0 AND n = 0 AND ad = 1 THEN
PSET (x, z + 1), 14
ELSEIF l <> 0 AND m = 0 AND n <> 0 AND ae = 1 THEN
PSET (x, z + 1), 11
ELSEIF l <> 0 AND m <> 0 AND n = 0 AND af = 1 THEN
PSET (x, z + 1), 13
ELSEIF l <> 0 AND m <> 0 AND n <> 0 AND ag = 1 THEN
PSET (x, z + 1), 15
ELSEIF l = 0 AND m = 0 AND n = 0 AND ah = 1 THEN
PSET (x, z + 1), 4
END IF
END IF
x = x + 1
IF INKEY$ = "r" THEN GOTO home
LOOP
z = z + 1
IF z = 480 THEN STOP
LOOP

__________________________________________________________________________



Little Editorial on Being-Thought


Someone gave me a copy of the Mondo 2000 User's Guide. Avital Ronell is 
quoted in a section called Deconstruction. She's wearing a necklace, 
staring upwards to the right. All theorists stare from the page left to 
the right; staring/starring in the other direction throws everything off. 
We learn from the Mondo staff that "Deconstruction is the program of 
taking texts or cultural phenomena and trying to see what they are really 
saying in a social, political, and sexual context. In practice, decon- 
struction is performing art, a process of systematically breaking set and 
setting to violate people's expectations, a bit like Dada, a bit like 
stand-up comedy." We learn on the next page about Jacques Lacan: "Jacques 
Lacan is a deconstructionist psychiatrist. One of his most remarkable 
inventions was 'the short session,' in which a person shows up for the 
hour of psychotherapy he or she has paid for and only gets five minutes - 
a brilliant con which gave Dr. Lacan more time to deconstruct."

This ignorance would be understandable in Answer Me!, but not accompanying
an article showing off Ronell to her best/worst. In fact, her photograph
becomes an image bite accompanying the sound bites, and what's going on
here is a form of integration, surfing/not sleuthing through the complex-
ity of contemporary theory. I really believe this is one of the most dire
consequences of the information revolution. _Thinking_ is inordinately
difficult - look at Merleau-Ponty dealing with vision, Derrida on writing
or Ronell herself on the telephone. To the extent the past is transformed
into media bites (currently, structuralism seems to be a victim) - to that
extent a certain violence of metaphysics appears. (For example, the sound
bite of deconstruction above reduces it to an analysis of subtexts, favor-
ing a conspiracy theory of cultural phenomena - coded references accom-
panying texts, for example, implicating one or another ethnic group.  It's
assumed here that there _is_ something being "really said," that there is
an _authenticity,_ in fact, to saying, which is revealed through careful
analysis. And this sort of authenticity leads to troubles, ranging from
the "truth about the Jews" or the "Jewish question" (which Jews have never
asked), to the assumption of a responsible and classified speech, always 
already required to be politically correct.)

On the other hand, as usual, the _politics_ of the theory of short ses-
sions are entirely omitted; they're turned into a joke of sorts. All of
this leads to the usual dismissal of deconstruction/Lacan (you name it):
how can anyone take these absurdities seriously? The photograph of Ronell
as image bite is a reduction of theory itself to Hollywood - it's all
media, it's all tinsel, it's all glamour, and it's all based on desire
which hardly needs deconstruction, but instead more faux-intense pictures
of "thinkers." 

In this world, everyone is heros, from hackers on, by the way - cowboy
Barlow and so forth - it's interesting that for the most part, even with
the current Wired, Gibson keeps a bit back from the heat and light. But
what I'm getting at: This heroics, this bite-production, is more than
gossip - it's wondering how to hold thinking _accountable,_ how to proceed
with thinking, in the midst of media onslaught, both Mondo 2000 and Wired
possessing pretensions to a reification of the sublimated radical that
clearly gets absorbed in hipness and post-hippy capital/ism.

The absorption is _political,_ it's dangerous, and it's engendering com-
munity under dubious signs, ranging from $ to quick-thought of some of the
neo-pragmatist tech stuff I've been reading lately - let's head to nano- 
tech which will solve all our problems, for example.

Finally, one of the things I like about CYB and FOP is that thinking seems
relatively otherwise here, always bringing the subject into play, if only
to report on the condition of birds in trees, coupled with further discus-
sions about cybermind and the cyberspatial body. This is important, this
re-engendering, continuous rewrite of self and other - which, come to
think of it, is a reasonable description of quite a few of Derrida's texts
as well (a certain practice of alterity). 

Alan

________________________________________________________________________




            it's after one
                   you must be sound asleep
                                  the Milky Way ...


Mayakovsky writes you, the sure sleep before death, candle flickering in
the dark room, he writes and thinks, no one understands me, for once he is
right, no one can take that away from him. Hounded by Stalin, Lenin, Stal-
ingrad, Leningrad, you have heard of them. The lines flow from the pen,
the candle's reflected in the computer screen swollen with other words,
distancing it. Everything in the screen is smaller than everything is, an
older screen. He wants desperately to speak with you, wants to win the
wager, those distorted or distraught words which seek farther like mine
into the future, where they meet and intertwine. He walks on the lower
east side, looking into the windows or barricades, wondering how to end
it, the poem, the gunshot which has followed him, myself, all his life.
His presence is the presence of rage; prescient, the year 2017 is his
contraption, his contraption alone. The wax gnaws at the candle. Nothing
is inside him; the bullet burns on entry. Later he would write that later
he would write. That you might not be asleep after all. That you might be
having a bad night as well. That bad nights were common in the future. 
That our writing would meet there but that survival was slim. That Lenin
and Stalin ensured his survival in the dissolute violence of European
blood. He writes of the Milky Way. You're home, you're worrying, there is
theater coming. You couldn't look into his face. It's always him, him, his
masquerade. The falseness of my beautiful body. I caress my breasts. I
look for him everywhere in the crowd. A single shot has followed me all
the days of my life; cowardly, I'd reach for the pills, bags, household
objects before doing violence. Violent death is convulsive, conclusive; 
at the end, I want nothing to do with it. Mayakovsky works darker and
later into the dark and later night. He throws himself on the bed; the
State rides him as the State rides nightly. What is the matter with him.
My work is condemned to oblivion. I have never lived. My hands are pure
blood; nothing drips from them. Blood fingers on blood keys, blood palms
against blood pens. They couldn't save anyone. The words are hour pre-
cious. 

Mayakovsky says, Nora, you've just got to give up things. There's no way I
can stay alive if you don't. The stage doesn't mean anything. It's not
eternal. But Nora says, Volodya, you're the one always playing games of
masquerade, nobody cares about poetry but you and I. A poetry slam is
nothing but another contest, so what if you tailor your inner violence.
Lenin won the contest and I've got to get on with my life. But Volodya
says, Nora, you just watch, that bullet's been following me, and you'll
have all these reminiscences that will make it into a book someday. And
it's going to be that way if you don't give up the stage just to be with
me and I mean forever and we'll live forever. But Veronica says, Vladimir,
just look at what you're asking me to do. Already I can see your beautiful
body, you can't kill yourself when you're naked. How many times have I
ridden you, and to what purpose? But Vladimir Vladimirovich says...but
Veronica says... but Nora says... but Volodya says, Mayakovsky now listen. 

LILA I DID IT FOR YOU. LILA LOVE ME. THIS IS WHAT I MEAN, THAT I'M RESPON-
SIBLE FOR MY DEATH. I DID IT TO MYSELF. YOU HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.

The perfect words dissolve on the screen as the computer freezes, holds
itself lost forever. I don't know why this happens; it just does. I can't
get out of the editor, I can't save anything, page up and down. I can't
move anything, delete anything, copy anything, paste anything. I can't
clear the screen, can't type one or another letter, not even the little
punctuations moving like bullets across the body of the text. I try a soft
book and nothing happens. But first I try escape codes with control and
escape codes with alt and nothing happens. I can't tell you enough about
this _stasis_ and the fear that accompanies it: catatonic language, lost
and present forever, until the battery runs out. So the only choice that's
left is a hard reboot, and because it's DOS, everything is lost; the sur-
face continues, smiling, but it's a blank screen now, no longer filled
with suicide, with despair, but the screen of Buddha, emptying out. No
matter; it's Bardo, and Mayakovsky supplies enough demons for the flick-
ering candle; no matter, it's not over until the bullet flees the gun,
head deep dark into the entrails of the CPU itself. 


_________________________________________________________________________





	there are people on this list should never know
	people on this list who should never know
	my name/or the air i swim through falling down
	falling down the stair: there's air down the stair
	i fall through a cradle down a crib: swallow me!
	lips of the air hear and obey yes they do
	lips of the air do right wallow me in the cushion
	of the air wired on the stair where the people stare
	who should never know what i do or where i go


________________________________________________________________________





queer cyberspatiality


                   so that more than recently I would identify myself as
hetero/queer, thinking of queer studies as encompassing or recuperating
sexuality as a potential field, including genders, physiologies, issues of
desire and control -

                     as fields are discursivities, heterogeneities in
cyberspace, words falling into place across genders transgendering genders
defined as textualities, physiology a matter of the performative or rather

                       that sexualities are inscribed, the performative 
evoking the body of the inscribing subject: consider hir sexuality as 
_fissured_ in the midst of the field, broken down at the margins of the 
body or where desire and control transform the rapture.

                          there are no givens in the broken line, it's 
precisely this that defines as well queers in cyberspace, which perhaps 
implies a certain intentionality of identification: if I state I'm queer 
- then what? if I state I'm queer and I'm not attracted to men - then 
what? when and where, what is the site, of _coming down to the matter of 
the text?_

                             easily, I could say, one could say, Inscribe!
writing across the domains of the two physiologies and the occasional
hermaphroditic / androgynous bridges, a matter of message routing however
_around_ a network embedding polarities, sublimating them (and I would say
at times hysterically searching for the other as well).  hetero/queer
however promugates the physiology? circumscribes it in an other that is
necessarily symbolic? difference? or differ_a_nce, deferring to the con-
trol of the other always already inscribed here? 

                                  what is difference a matter of? is there
the matter of difference? what's the matter with difference? with differ-
_a_nce? 
                                     the _ascii unconscious,_ _third sex,_
of which I spoke in the sense of a performative, the third or extruded
sexuality, the stain or residue of inscription, the transformation of text
vis-a-vis _defuge_ back into the body, the reading of the body through
hysteric embodiment - all of these sites constitute a queer cyberspatial-
ity. if inscription is the classical propositional logic, fissure is the
_elsewhere_ of that logic, the stain implied by the sheffer-stroke not-
both-a-and-b and its dual neither-a-nor-b -

                                           for whereas the sheffer-stroke
implies a _barrier_ that includes _elsewhere_ and its poles, the dual
implies an elsewhere which is fissured from the propositions entirely. and
both the stroke and the dual are _fundamental_ to propositional logic,
since out of either all of the logical operations (negation, and, or,
etc.) can be produced by a process of concatenation and substitution. 

                                              so that, speaking metaphor-
ically, out of the _field,_ the logic is produced _as a possibility,_ but
the field itself is fissured, in flux, and perhaps problematizing nega-
tion. in other words, given M and F, the stroke and the dual create the
discursive formation {M,F} but in fact, within the text itself, there is 
a seeping, what I would call the uncanny, conditioned simultaneously by 
neither M nor F, not both M and F, a residue or memory of the alphabetic 
division of desire
                                                  within which all of us 
must reinscribe ourselves, a matter of choice, a matter of power, desire, 
domination, habitus, chemistry, culture, physiology, psychology, socio- 
logy, cosmology -
                                                   - the logical excursion
entirely unnecessary. when I close my eyes, I imagine Tiffany, Clara,
Honey, and I do not imagine Tom, Peter, Henry, to the extent that name
often designates sex. I imagine penises connected to the physiology of
women. I imagine violation fabric, web inversion, binding, liquidity, and
hieroglyph. I imagine taut, worked out and through the wires. I imagine
the dissolution of the body, always engendered towards the female. I
imagine this because it gives me pleasure to imagine this, out and through
the wires. I imagine the wires immobilizing my body
                                                          in the order of
the inscriptive apparatus, glistening against the skin, in the order of
the fissuring of speech. until the point that I can no longer speak. 
until this or that point, _in other words,_ literally, when the writing 
stops. 
                                                            or more
recently

                          \__________________/


_________________________________________________________________________



my queer cyberspatiality, my Capital


i have holes everywhere in my bodies, fingers everywhere, i can't keep my
hands off, they ring the cock, enter the cunt, display the codex, pollina-
tion on the move, striations across the flesh, holes rimmed with luscious
moisture, pheromes spread across the interstices of routers, nipples and
sockets, equivalences, not identities. i'm swollen, my breasts are fields
of film, images dreamed as my mouths open wide, swallows them, the image
imaginary against the rib cage wired from beneath. vomiting languages
tongue your assholes (for what is mine is yours, split among us), "The
body wastes or 'filth' associated with Tlazolteotl thus represented not
just transgressions of the Aztec sexual code, but also the means for off-
setting them, for transforming or converting them into something healthy
and fertile." 

"This has to be the explanation for the curious name Tlaelquani, 'Eater of
Ordure,' and of all almanac figures who consume their own excrement." (1)
The words flood the wires in the incipient chthonic process of procuring
spherical geometries, mouths opening to the world's waste, bodies turned
against and within the text that generated it. 

and the bodies can't stand this, can't make up their mind about the text,
they're embraced by their consort. Watching themselves, knowing what's
coming. The gods did the work of the wires. They keep opening their
mouths, opening their mouths through the scarred and ruptured skin. They
fissure, split along fault lines, devolve back into protocols ready for
reception, flooded wires, eyes pissed open, caked mouths and eyes, turned
towards high-speed fast-forward nova centrals, entrails of dark-fire
nebula. 

they burrow down into me, split and swollen body, nestle against the
nippled concavities from within the chakras, "Then the _dakini_ absorbed
all the Deities into her body. She transformed Padma into the syllable
_Hum._ The _Hum_ rested on her lips, and she conferred upon it the Buddha-
Amitabha blessing. Then she swallowed the _Hum_"... (2) Then it collapses
and the sentences grow up capitals. Then the capitals are traced through
the text, the mouths of the text, textual _defuge._

Padma told me there's no theory here.



---------------------------------------------|

[1] Cecelia F. Klein, Teocuitlatl, "Divine Excrement," in Art Journal.
[2] The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, ed. Evans-Wentz.
_________________________________________________________________________




Taxonomy of Performativity of Cyberspace Messages (Email, Lists, Usenet):



1. description of external actions or states in the message
    [someone describes hirself as underage: is s/he really?]
    [someone threatens suicide: does s/he really?]
    [someone claims to be a male: is s/he really?]
     truth or falsity of the message
      [means of ascertaining information in cyberspace:
       intimations of uncertainty
       [clues as to differing identities, instabilities: reading
        for subtexts, deconstruction]
       intimations of certainty
       [header-checking, familiarity in real-life with the poster
        on-line familiarity with the poster]
         what would constitute certainty beyond a reasonable doubt?
         [community or individual consensus, the need for belief in
          most circumstances, disbelief in others]]
     legal responsibility of the receiver
      [current state of Internet or general CMC law: forwarned is or
       is not sufficient? who owns copyright, who owns words? the role
       of the _censor_ as proprietary - recent Prodigy case]
        what constitutes prior knowledge?
         [issues of intimations above. must posts _necessarily_ be
          believed?]
        what constitutes fair warning?
         [is prior _knowledge_ necessary for fair warning?]
2. performative utterance in the messages 
    [promises of the heart, business contracts, and so forth] 
     legal entailment of such utterances
      [traced-by-tracerouted utterances]
      [untraced utterances]
     taxonomy of such utterances
      [those which imply a _future action_: I will marry you.]
      [those that imply _current action_ or strickt performativity: by this 
       post I am marrying you.] 
3. escape codes or other activations within the message
     codes as content
      [ornamental codes: blinking, upper ascii, color transforms, etc.]
      [elsewhere-activating codes: bell ringing, etc.]
      [post-transforming codes: EOF destructions, viruses]
4. header codes or other framing activations across the message
     codes as content
      [telnet 25, changes across Columbia mail, telnet sites which strip
       traceroute information]
      [use of Bcc:]
      [hacking codes]
     the minimal necessary code for transmission
5. performative statements/operations _upon_ the message:
    outgoing: 
     [sending (to, from, cc:, bcc:, alias)]
     [forwarding (")]
     [replying (")]
     [duplicating/spamming (")]
     [deleting]
    incoming:
     [saving (to folder, in inbox, etc.)]
     [deleting]
      [message by message]
      [filtering (kill-file, folder structure, etc.)
       [passive filtering, automated from header labels]
       [active filtering, weighing headers/contents]]


---------------------------------------------------------------------


I originally thought I would write an article from the outline, but 
first, the general direction can be seen as-is, and second, fleshing it 
out would take more time than I have at the moment...

Alan

_______________________________________________________________________