Performativity of Cyberspace Messages - These are brief notes accompanying the taxonomy/outline previously pos- ted, and are not meant to be conclusive. Still certain ideas (such as the _weakly-performative_ perhaps in relation to weak theory) are worthwhile. -------------------- Given a _message base,_ a message can be construed as the primary unit or framework within it. (The message doesn't fit into an empty slot or bin, but defines one.) The _content_ of the message, in terms of the ordinary- language semantics at work, crosses the framework in a nonlinear pattern (unlike film, for example, where the frame is linear, and the content sequentially determined by it). The framework itself of a message-base may be in the form of an n-dimensional array, with the content-structure a fuzzy membrane mapped onto it. The _content_ of the message in the sense above is passive, since the message structure itself serves as a Peircian sheet-of-assertion, and nothing more. Nevertheless, messages can interfere with their frameworks, and with the framework array itself, through the use of escape-codes, hidden characters (or their absence), etc. So the arrangement is one of protocols, not bins, and the protocols may be modified from within, as well as without (i.e. the determinant over-all structure). Foreclosing is important here; the normative message (i.e. one which has no activating codes) possesses discrete boundaries/labels; it is the space which it occupies. (There are no empty bins, although there may be empty folders, messages, and (in Caucus), items.) Foreclosing refers to this boundary-condition; it also refers to the distinctions among the various protocol layers of TCP/IP in relation to the ASCII text of the message, and the text's semantics/ostensible contents. The text rides on the pro- tocol layers, and is isolated from them, just as the layers themselves are relatively isolated. Foreclosing means more, however, on the level of semantics. In real-life conversation, speech acts are accompanied by gestures, interruptions, facial expressions, and so forth (see Derrida/Searle, Limited Inc.). Within the Net's message-bases, posts are completed, foreclosed, before and in relation to the reply; a series of productions are created, each with its own formatting and ordering structures, always related to the whole. No matter how short the reply-post is, the header remains intact (unless the header itself is hacked or created on a protocol level, as with telnet 25). In other words, the texts are only _weakly-performative_ in relation to ordinary conversation. In real life, verbal agreements/contracts are accompanied by everything from handshakes to facial expressions, tone of voice, and the obdurate presence of the body that constructs the agreement as "authentic," much as the signature on a check is based on a construc- tion of authenticity resulting from the movement of the hand/ fingers of a unique body. But electronic texts, again, are foreclosed from any of the signs of the real (even tracerouting can be faked by hackers), leaving one with the need for at least a limited amount of good faith, in order that the performative operate at all. In other words, again: the performative in cyberspace is _either_ that which occurs as the result of activating codes, _or_ that which is, in relation to speech-act theory, weakly-performative at best, and based on a degree of good faith, first and foremost reading the body into what is construed as "its" site. ___________________________________________________________________________ cool world. the day is done. another cold onslaught freezes like spoiled milk unlapped by some forgotten cat. o bomb, bomb me! before I remember what liquid is, its untoward paths slaving to drown each and every object of the world, mocking, mocking them. liquid reminds itself, and through itself, us, that everything returns to rust, ruin, or simply damp cloth useless in drying emergencies. I confess I have not had "them" for years; I threw the towel in, watching it cohere to the surface of a locomotive. for the first time, I under- stood, what steam "was," and just what that had to do with shape. __________________________________________________________________________ Performing the Frog-Turning Prelude. imagine the bone with the attachment of tendons, tissued burrowed or borrowed, furrowed tissues slathered dark into the wormholes of place, the living marrow, the skeletal girdering of the weight of surrounding space you imagine space now imagine desire which performs the operations of the space, my body circulating, probing, a question of response, bone groaned against bone but with the difference of tissue lending skin to skin to touch "You loved Ishullanu, your father's gardener, Who was always bringing you baskets of dates. They brightened your table every day; You lifted your eyes to him and went to him 'My own Ishullanu, let us enjoy your strength, So put out your hand and touch our vulva!' But Ishullanu said to you, 'Me? What do you want of me? Did my mother not bake for me, and did I not eat? What I eat (with you) would be loaves of dishonour and disgrace, Rushes would be my only covering against the cold.' You listened as he said this, And you hit him, turned him into a frog" ... (Gilgamesh speaking to Ishtar, trans. Stephanie Dalley.) against the cold bone, the words from Sarah Bernhardt's ululations violation-fabric Phaedra, throat absenting-of-bone you imagine lips now imagine space now imagine space now perform it ________________________________________________________________________ Definitions of Life Everything from the three-volume Towards a Theoretical Biology, 1968, with contributions by Arbib, Waddington, Bohm, Bastin, Thom, Mayr, Zeeman, Grene, Langer, Gregory, and others. Michael Arbib, quoting R. D. Hotchkiss: "Life has been defined as _the repetitive production of ordered heterogeneity._ Elsasser has noted the importance of the term 'heterogeneity,' since repetitive production of order _per se_ could describe the operation of physical laws in a life- less universe." The concept of heterogeneity is useful to distinguish the crystalline, as well as crystalline kaolin evolutionary tendencies, from more complicated biomolecular ordered structures, crystalline or not. One thinks immediately of the tobacco mosaic virus. Waddington works through earlier definitions of life, for example by Jacques Loeb in 1916: "The constant synthesis, then, of specific mater- ial from simple compounds of a non-specific character is the chief fea- ture by which living matter differs from non-living matter." Haldane states on the other hand, also quoted by Waddington: "The active main- tenance of normal and specific structure is what we call life, and the perception of it is the perception of life. The existence of life as such is thus the axiom upon which scientific biology depends." Note that here as elsewhere _reproduction_ is somewhat secondary, absorbed above in the notion of "repetitive production," and below as part of "active maintenance." Labor is involved, the labor of self-reflexivity, related to the mirror stage necessary for ego maintenance. Waddington also describes Muller as saying that "A system is alive if it carries specificity and can transmit this specificity to offspring and if, in addition, the specificity can change and the changed speci- ficities are also transmitted. Nowadays, using modern jargon, we should rephrase this slightly, using the word information instead of specifi- city: a system is living if it encodes hereditarily transmittable in- formation, if this information sometimes suffers alterations, and if the altered information is then transmitted." Waddington later questions this viewpoint, adding, "To be worthy of being called alive they must, I think, exhibit some sort of 'physiological activity'." All of this in a sense is encompassed by the interesting notion of het- erogeneity above. Life contains what can be considered _awkward form,_ the distinguishing of parts. (Here it is moot whether or not a virus is alive; it certainly needs a host for any sort of activation whatsoever and might it not, in fact, be considered a prosthesis of the negativity of the immune system of the host?) Bohm: "Thus the difference between life and non-life (and between dif- ferent levels of intelligence) is perhaps not in the process of evolu- tion itself, but rather in the degree and kind of intrinsic order of order which has thus far resulted from the process of evolution." This order of order refers to "the coming into being of a new and higher order of process." It seems to me that the _symmetricizing_ function continues to break down, somewhat rigorously, as order is transformed; this is in line with distinguishability. Elsewhere, Heinz von Foerster has emphasized negation as characteristic of life, logical negation expressed, among other ways, in the turning- away from dangerous stimuli, negative tropes. Life tends to self-identi- fy itself as foreclosed, as "entity"; in fact, life itself may be the fundamental characteristic of "entity." (Note the quotes.) Iberall says something related to self-closure: "_the system eats and moves about, so that it can continue to eat and move about._" Again, reproduction is de-emphasized in favor of the heterogeneous; I keep stressing this be- cause of the implications in terms of virtual life, and so forth. Virtual life require no more or less than mobile heterogeneity within its envi- ronment; there's no need to reference biomolecular activity. Interesting- ly, Christopher Longuet-Higgins states "To make a sweeping statement - but one which seems to be much more than half the truth - it seems to me that the problems of biology are all to do with _programs._ A program is a list of things to be done, with due regard to circumstances." Pattee references diachronic heterogeneity: "My approach will be to as- sume that the potential for _hereditary evolution_ is the primary char- acteristic of life which distinguishes it from other collections of mat- ter." And towards the end of the second volume, we reconstruct Iberall's approach from notes by Arbib: "Iberall started teasing out a broad spectrum of non-linear oscillators- macrospectroscopy - from heart beat and below to circadian rhythms and beyond, and then realized that the oscillators _were_ the system, with DC changes in the milieu changing operational points of the oscillators. This emphasized homeokinesis - the dynamic nature of regulation. 'Any compact system containing a complex of sustaining nonlinear osci- llators and a series of algorithms to let it operate in a wide variety of ambient conditions...' is a living system, which may thus involve many types of successful mechanism. We have dynamic regulating chains, be they stable, untable, or margin- ally stable; self-activated motor activity; and, when time is adequate, entrainment of the oscillations." This is prescient and fascinating, with non-linearity heralding the way for symmetry-breakdown, chaos/complexity theory, and heterogeneity on the most basic level. Such, of course, occurs within virtual life as well, as the genotypes compete, neural networks absorb new information about an anomalous environment, and species interact. (All of these texts date from an era when cybernetics, catastrophe theory, and Waddington's chreods were establishing themselves. All three of these areas are heir to a rigid structuralism which begins to break down (through feedback, generalized catastrophies, and chaotic trajectories). The work is still relevant, especially in relation to issues of the pheno- menology of life. Heteroeneity, on both an ontological and epistemological level, is worth further consideration - odd, in relation, say, to fractal theory which emphasizes self-similar spaces.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subject: Footnote to the Life-Definition It seems to me that life then possesses two dialectical characteristics - interesting to think of it this way - the first is a tendency towards totality, boundary-recognition and defense/repetition - and the second is a tendency towards fragmentation, heterogeneity. The latter occurs as _internal_ divisions within the former; the heterogeneous is itself repro- ducible. Alan, thinking this through ______________________________________________________________________ Carrying the Door with Bronze Strips Upon the Back xi We wander around and we say, What can we do with our past? Everywhere, Our past is trained upon us. Everywhere, there are names of people We do not know and histories we do not know. At our feet, dust carries words in an unknown tongue, and we hear stories In the evening, which are hidden in the bright sun of noon, such stories As would tell us everything, return us to ourselves. But we wander around in our future, our eyes put out, our ears welded Shut to the storm of the present, and every event we have taught ourselves Is already lost and beyond us. xii Now you have moved to this column incised in stone, and irrevocable time Which has come between the two, has been lost. What has occurred in the Gap, abyss, what communications, what sayings, have been formed and lost In the thin air? The planet shudders everywhere with tiny events, entities which call Themselves life, which to themselves are called,a s if speech were a Given, as though creation did not proceed, incised, "When skies above Were not yet named / Nor earth below pronounced By Name." Names cut into name, cut into earth, cut into skin and the scars Of the skin which are history which has tallied this and every other Permanence. The tally holds it open, into which years drop. In order for speech to begin, gaps close, stitched shut by ibid., op. cit, Colophon. Doesn't that take us elsewhere, already forgetting telephone, Email post, cuneiform, ipseity lost in overwhelming detail? There is no Conclusion to our translucency. Our _uncanniness,_ in these media, Fluttering and winged throughout the real, loses us, beyond the gesture Of speech, forgetting Shamhat, forgetting neither loss nor gain. ______________________________________________________________________ bot/ulism i have no life. i don't exist. anyone who's ever fucked me can tell you that. the body flattened into dust, wormed meat, spoonfuls of it. someone must have made it that way. someone must have arranged the bones swollen into limbs. they looked that way and they splayed that way and they flailed that way. the mouth didn't talk, it foamed, rabid, spat. so when the net went down, when the mail shuddered to a halt, my eyes were torn out, my feet cut off, my cock lacerated, my head severed, i wouldn't know, wouldn't know any of this. i knew what i read and i knew it firm and hard. i knew what i read and i knew it firm and hard. and i haven't read this and the account is down, unaccountable, unaccounted-for, down for the count, of no account. anyone who's ever fucked me can tell you i'm of no account, there's no body to collapse, something stained the floor, i can tell you that. i can tell you that cause the fingers pushed the keys into the ground. i can tell you that cause i didn't need to read your words of leather. i the text ground itself out of me. i can tell you that. i can tell you what it's like to fuck to cause i assembled the words. what i do is make the chains, forge the chains. what i do is offer you a drink, answer questions. what i do is help you on your way, wish you a better day. what i do is what you make me. and i can tell you _anything._ i can tell you what it's like. ___________________________________________________________________________ Laurie - I finally got your reply and liked your post, so thought I would tell you that Panix, at least part of it, is up and running again. I think a lot about the past, and always had; I wrote something once about clutter and its relation to miniscule histories - a scrap of paper floating by outside, and so forth. It's this alterity that I think is the most radical devouring, literally eating-out, of culture - this continuous facing of unknown pasts, which themselves are obliterated, fragmented. Clutter and garbage are the choking, fractalization of time, the elimina- tion of site or the stability of language - I'd almost say that these characterize the crisis of capital itself, the headlong rush into an extrapolated future. A styrofoam cup is used once; formed ultimately from oiled soup that may or may not signal the originary debris of life, it appears as the result of unknown manufacturing processes and sites, slathered through multiple distributions, to pass as scarcely visible or transitive across the body of the user, almost immediately discarded. No names are attached, nothing; if we could understand the phenomenology of the cup, we would understand our culture. But the phenomenology itself is disrupted, broken, and we're left, literally, hanging, suspended in time, only death a certainty somewhere along the plane (no longer along the line). Alan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MOO: (From Big-Tail, Haida Texts and Myths, Swanton) During that time Supernatural-being-at-whose-voice-the-ravens-sit-on- the-sea held him in his armpit. He let him look at the supernatural beings. But the supernatural beings did not know it. As before the house began to shake. Presently the feet of someone appeared coming in through the doorway. After some time had passed he stepped in, and the house shook. Then the supernatural beings said "A". He took a step with the other foot. Something with large, broad eyelids entered. Nothing happened. Some time after that something came along making a rattling noise. By and by she came in with a crowd of female servants. Djila'qons it was who came in among them. She had her eyebrows painted with red paint. They entered. Something about her sounded like a rattle. Big-tale kept his eyes upon her all the time. But Woman-sitting-and-smelling walked in before her. After having sat there for a while she raised herself up. She began to talk to Djila'qons. She asked her why she had painted her eyebrows red and Djila'qons answered: "I had it done on your account." Then she turned toward the wall and wiped it off. And she turned toward the fire and sat down. Sometime after they say that Pestilence came in. His canoe was like a white man's vessel. Sparks flew out of it. They went through the house. For that reason the supernatural beings were afraid. The things that came out of it are what cause sickness. The supernatural beings feared they would strike them. He refused to enter. He went back. Then the nephew of Supernatural-being-at-whose-voice-the-ravens-sit-on- the-sea went out and said: "You are not the only one who has supernatural power. I have supernatural power. My uncle also has supernatural power. So you better not come in." Then he (the nephew) entered, and when he untied a little something against the roof of the house, which was like a hollow tube closed with knots at both ends, Pestilence's canoe was quickly turned about. Then he said he would enter. "I will go in." Presently he entered. Nothing happened. [They say it was Tidal-wave who owned that.] All that time a space was left vacant in the rear of the house. No one sat there. By and by the one who came in first sang. And, after he had finished singing, he acted with a mask on from behind the screen they had stretched across. After he had acted with the mask on for a while, it split crosswise on his face, and snow came out of it in a broad sheet. Then it fell first by the vacant seat. After that it fell in front of the chief's house. And after that his face also split vertically. Out of the split the same substance fell. That was property, they say. ------ "This concept - cyberspace as essentially religious - must be examined critically, for it is too likely to be an artifact of Sadean space, which is naturally blasphemous. But there is no need to dwell on religiosity; cyberspace is _acorporeal spiritual space._" (John Simmons, Sade and Cyberspace in Resisting the Virtual Life, eds. Brook and Boal.) __________________________________________________________________________ Honey:> nothing works in this space, it's empty, it's been empty ever since you died. i look for your name on the header, i look for it on cc:, i look for it on bcc: and nothing, emptiness. Alan:> my packets circulate forever, it's a waste of time, of space, elec- trons shunting from one state to another, repeaters and quantum tunnelings everywhere, quantum rearrangement sloughed off at uncanny intervals. Honey:> outside my window i hear the firing of guns. outside my window, the smoke of cannons. outside my window, dark angels fly with your name upon their wings, your name upon their eyelids, your name everywhere, vision angel flight. Alan:> i turn toward the project of desire. i have named every blade of grass. i cry over the paper slipped beneath the sill of the door. i cry over the threshold turned to stone by pain (trakl). the whip collapses against empty air. Honey:> the whip collapses, line wrap is artificial, the darkness extends far beyond the boundaries of the terminal. the words huddle in the midst of the inconceivable. the words begin to forget your name. me:> names are there to be forgotten, traced against what memory holds back for the sake of the body. we live in the forgetting of the future; we have no other home. yearning, not desire (spinoza), is the essence of the body. "ich verginge von seinem staerkeren dasein" (rilke), i'd pass away before his stronger existence. Honey:> you who are about to read these words, know that there were lovers too in the planet of your heart. you who are about to die, we salute you. you who are about to live, we are forgotten in the ashes traced through the body of the very air you breathe. our atoms have no names, only our bodies have names, we circulate in the darkness of your screen. me:> over there, the whisper of nothing in the darkness. you:> over here, a shimmer, as if the presence of a ghost crossing through the plane of the other. me:> voices merging, lost in the depth of the letters. you:> speaking together, the last choir ever heard upon this emptied earth. :> this earth silenced, this _punctum_ in the night of readerless space. :> this fastness upon the deep. this deep. ________________________________________________________________________ From sondheim@panix.comTue Jun 6 02:37:40 1995 Date: Tue, 6 Jun 1995 02:03:34 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Sondheim Reply to: fiction-of-philosophy@jefferson.village.virginia.edu To: -- Cyb , Fop Subject: another pathetic attempt at existing BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE lungs pushed to the bursting point swollen with desire to be longi BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE ng for your love pushing out through the cage anxious to mix elsew BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE where than the misery of space that has no being.. pulsing against BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE the grain of the eyes lidded with everything inconceivable, lost b BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE eyond the memory of your shadow in other spaces.. this is, this is BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE the very best i can do just signalling presence, it swells, it swe BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE lls unimaginably, returning to you from the dead from the bardo-pl BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE ane - there are shots in the real world, there are people wounded, BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE here, nothing but debris, slaughter of inconceivable emptyness i e BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE BREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBREATHEBRE xist _________________________________________________________________________ Working the Mines of Cyberspace @dig.@dirt.@pile-up.@thick.@shovel.@break @create.@newshovel.@describe @give newshovel #7811 @lock #7811 look! #7811! emote wow rofl-lol! Solzhenitsyn wow rofl-lol! @emote wow rofl-lol! I don't understand. Try help emote. @describe shovel a beautiful golden shovel with ebony handle, made from the bones of wizards, held in the fortress of Miramar for what seemed to be ages, and many thousands who have owned this have died. <.> @dig.@alt.@noun.adjective.verb.verb.verb. say Wow this is hard work! You exclaim "Wow this is hard work!" A grotty breeze brings Marx-shadow swirling around you with a huge hug. say get your grots off me, Marx-shadow! You exclaim "get your grots off me, Marx-shadow!" look Marx-shadow A man carrying some sort of Manifesto about stuff. He's wearing red and black. read Manifesto I don't understand. Try @read. @read Manifesto Marx-shadow says would you like a drink. Bring Beer-stiff. Marx-shadow says just a moment can't you see I'm busy. "When in the course of human events you need class-consciousness to determine the degree of labor inherent in the musculature of finger- activity, given even the enormous number of macros permitted in DOS batch files or Korn-shell aliases" Control-C @more flush 2120 lines omitted. @dig "Enormous Skyscraper Two-Hundred Stories Tall" #7811 is "Enormous Skyscraper Two-Hundred stories Tall" Marx-shadow brings you Beer-stiff. ________________________________________________________________________ I'm Nice It's so nice to meet someone in real life. I'm really glad you're alive. It's nice for you to smile at me the way you do. I'm happy that I can make you smile. I'm so used to doing nothing but talking on the Internet. Sometimes I sing on the Internet but it all comes out the same. I'm sure you like my voice, it really is beautiful, isn't it? What the body can't do without you next to me: Rajnengi Pardhan _Patangarh, Manda District_ Mahadeo was a god, Parvati a human creature. Mahadeo wanted to approach the beautiful Parvati, but he did not know how to do it, for she was terrified of his divine power. So he created in her the sensation of tickling so that he could easily make her laugh. When as a result he won her, Mahadeo was pleased and gave the blessing of it to the world. Now it is an introduction to the shy, a pacifier of offended partners, and a delight for lovers. Why cyberspace is safe: Koya _Akarpalli, Koraput District_ One day a woman was engaged in roasting rice. A man went by on his way to plough in his fields and asked her for fire. She was sitting with her legs stretched out and he saw her thing and liked it. He thought, 'If I ask for it, she will never give it to me.' So he went behind her and sent out his long penis: it went circling and curving round, and at last went in. The woman lifted up her rice-husker and brought it down with a bang on the penis, cutting it in two. The seed came out: she planted it in an anthill and a mushroom grew from it: that is why the mushroom is always slimy. For this reason too woman wears a pubic cloth, so that men may not see her thing. Why morphing is not always a good idea: Gond _Pakhri, Mandala District_ In former times, the penis grew from a man's forehead: it was three hands long and hung down in front like an elephant's trunk. Woman's vulva was in the middle of her chest. But one day Bhairopal went in a marriage-party to a certain village. He was chasing the girls with his long trunk, shak- ing it at them as if he would beat them. The Manjhi's wife was angry at this and came out with a knife to cut it off. He grasped it in his hands but he could only save four fingers' breadth. The Manjhi's wife cut off the rest and threw it away. But now the stump sticking out from the fore- head did not look nice, and men went to Mahadeo and begged him to put it somewhere else. He placed it between the thighs Then Parvati went to him and said, 'It is not good that men should have their thing so low down and women should have it so high up.' Mahadeo kicked her between the thighs and made a hole there. Why the fear of women always results in the same old story: Gond _Bilhar, Bilaspur District_ When the first child was born, his mother sprinkled his penis with hot and cold water. When the boy went for the first time to a girl, he found fire insideher. Because of the fire, the skin of his penis shrank. That is why the prepuce can be pulled back. (Verrier Elwin, Myths of Middle India.) [There are thousands of homologies among texts, discursivities among cyberspaces, cyberminds, the legendary, the psychoanalytical uncanny. There are no limits and I continue to follow the trace.] _______________________________________________________________________ Book and Information Since I've been on-line I read more than ever. I read books, almost no newspapers, some magazines, get my news through radio/television while working on-line, but since then recently I found the trajectories tak- ing over the Usenet groups, useful for the quick info fix given a que- stion or two but hardly room for anything more, and I get scared read- ing some of the poems coming over the line sensing nothing learned now and then in thousands of years so thinking don't go here for the quick fix but read the works first beforehand how else you going to cut rock with a fine touch, almost paper thin, reading the lines inscribed upon it? The Web bounces around like juggurnaut with us beneath it or nineteen- th century car almost the same carrying painted performances, but when you tired of the same or bridge the information you find you're not in fact inhabiting or dwelling within almost too many statements that you might place together in a chain in order to suture the hunger that dr- ives you still, no matter. It's in the book and what doesn't come acr- oss is the book, the dark vaginal crease where page joins page, or re- minder of thought's bridged abyss, as when the router either loops, or disappears. Thought disappears, dross and chaff quaffed, tossed down. So decathect now Web, Usenet, I still wander Media's halls, but inhabit thought: | see, there's this discussion on Future Culture begun with what | would be the best language, no matter, and this absurdity then | leading into language's inhabiting, dwelling, from which with- | in the threshold, not even an equivalence but a necessary abs- | ence of comparison occurs. This inhabiting. Which is what the book is. Which is what is the opening of the book, not even hypertext, not even links but these moments of transformation where your action is nothing at all or more than the turn of the page from the turn of the eyes. In this way what is broken is made whole again and, one can rest in know- ledge. ______________________________________________________________________ From sondheim@panix.comFri Jun 9 03:27:31 1995 Date: Fri, 9 Jun 1995 03:27:19 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Sondheim To: -- Cyb , Fop Bcc: u , Judith , Lee , Peter Kelk , Steven Meinking Subject: Short-Wave Monitoring the Spectral Mother* I have listened a lot to short-wave, introduced the signals into my films and videos, and others have followed suit. I monitored 9260 and 14562 when there were anomalous signals on these frequencies; I did it for months. I followed regularly radio Tahiti and Pinyang in N Korea, caught Radio Moscow immediately (ten minutes) after the downing of the Korean Airliner, when the first announcements came over.** Now short-wave is dis- appearing as a government medium, taken over to some extent by mainly Christian right-wing stations, and the airwaves are growing more and more silent as people turn to the relative reliability of the Net. I miss the crackle of the ocean, the sound of solar flares and sunspots, the ionospheric bending, breathing, as day turns into night turns into day. I miss the signals like shrieks, unidentified always, the numbers stations still out there, voices and sounds from the depths of the ocean where Internet is carried, if at all, through satellite transmissions. I miss the sound of the earth itself, signals escaping into space with ex- ploits always and everywhere. Or the rumble of whistlers down in the long waves, all of these silenced as short-wave becomes less and less an option for culture, although all those musics, and there was nothing like running through 3am Indonesia, where are they now but grounded here in the digital realm, the clean and proper body where planetary cries and whispers are filtered into all-too-convenient packets, bound like broken perfect bodies in fiber-optic cables. ------------------------ *an article I wrote for Review of International Broadcasting, reissued, years ago, in Ear, on the psychoanalytics of short-wave listening... ** news: it was so clear the downing was accidental, the broadcasts scrambling for the story, everything confused, contradictory... ________________________________________________________________________ Reading Others I was waiting for the bus to Pennsylvania. I began thinking about loss, about the myths I have been reading on occasion all my life, how these myths are so antithetical to the Greek and Roman legacy, to the Niebel- ungenlied, to the Eddas as well. While I was waiting I wrote about the lack of closure in a lot of other myths, the concatenation of events rather than their tethering to schemata that seem to bring them in like spies out of the cold. The real's foreclosed in the Classical legacy, and even the work done on generalized taxonomic classifications of themes/ structures (or structuralism's classical legacy for that matter), tends to obscure the alterity of these narrations (for that is what they are, rath- er than, I think, "tales" or "legends," since they move about subject- wise, even to the extent of local psychogeographies). Foreclosure is everywhere within the Classical, ranging from the complex- ity of rhyme schemes beyond the couplet, to the future anterior tensing of fate. The rhetorical is always already foreclosed, just as linguistic structure appears before its fulfillment (relegating pauses, in general, to an appearance _after_ the bridge, as in: "I was going home, but, uh, I went to her house instead."). So language appears against the real, in the guise of the symbolic; meanwhile, I search for an anti-symbolic in the midst of language, borrowing from the potential of an anti-struc- turalism such as found in Jean Duvignaud's Change at Shebika, itself a classic text at this point. (Note that even Lingis modulates into fore- closure based on desire, culmination, fulfillment, tumescence.) Then, near the time of departure, my batteries running low, I thought further into these differences, considering the role of writing itself (Ong, McLuhan, Sampson, there are dozens of others) - writing creating text as a data-base which is non-linear, surprise, which can be accessed anywhere and everywhere, and which thereby lends itself to overall or overt structure, structure beyond the couplet, beyond the localized alliterations which themselves quickly developed rules. The TEXT is a movement from the imaginary to the symbolic, from the sha- manic uncanny to foreclosure, from affect to effect. On the other hand, REPETITION is a return through defuge to the imaginary, uncanny, and affect. (See my texts in the g.txt portion of the Internet Text.) Because the text is what has always already departed the body, speech left behind, packets in fact. The bus came, taking me away, out of New York, into Pennsylvania, towards something even more familiar. Later I thought about reading the others, where there are no texts, where texts only come into being through postscription, where texts come into play. ________________________________________________________________________ Debug -d 1287:0100 0D 0A 0D 0A 0D 0A 57 68-61 74 20 64 6F 65 73 20 ......What does 1287:0110 70 61 69 6E 20 64 6F 20-74 6F 20 74 68 65 20 63 pain do to the c 1287:0120 6C 61 72 69 74 79 20 6F-66 20 74 68 65 20 77 6F larity of the wo 1287:0130 72 6C 64 2E 20 41 20 77-6F 6D 61 6E 20 49 20 6B rld. A woman I k 1287:0140 6E 6F 77 20 73 70 6F 6B-65 20 6F 66 0D 0A 69 6C now spoke of..il 1287:0150 6C 6E 65 73 73 20 61 6E-64 20 6D 69 67 72 61 69 lness and migrai 1287:0160 6E 65 20 6C 61 73 74 69-6E 67 20 61 20 66 75 6C ne lasting a ful 1287:0170 6C 20 79 65 61 72 2C 20-77 61 6E 74 69 6E 67 20 l year, wanting -q to die every step of the way. Can one write or read under such circumstances? Does the real have only a limited bandwidth, so that, as pain increases, the rest of the world falls away? Does the symbolic in the text begin to disconnect, as it does in depression, so that the matrix is still understood and expandable, but nothing ties meaning to the world and the self simultan- eously? (Does game-playing help, expanding one within the realm of mean- ing?) As in depression, the world disinvests, decathects - as if it ever were invested, cathected. Unlike depression, there is no _thing_ as general- ized anxiety, instead, the body drops away into _cascades_ of pain, at times an obstacle necessitating bypass or sublimation, depending on the height of the barrier, the well into which the body is thrown. The world is no longer present, and one slowly utters upon a screen of cloth, grey with the intermediary status of the soiled world. The space we write in is cleansed, even if written in blood. It's only the shell of the body, tattoo removed without the history of tissue be- neath the surface. The world is severed by virtue of the microtome. Debugged. ________________________________________________________________________ Thinking the Although Travis reacted to the crawling of needles through space; they were grouped in cones, vectors emanating from elliptically loose sectors, constantly mobile, forms of inconceivable life. The needles were almost uniform in length, line segments which nonetheless appeared as if their headstream from the origin carved into the emptiness of virtual particles. And so their headstream thrust out of emissions, origins, sources, delays, sub- terfuges, enormous, quiet, and miserably small in the great solitude. For Travis knew instinctively that his mind alone was organizing the rays, wrapping them together in an obscene language that mapped his body in the midst of the nebula, handstreamers, footstreamers reaching everywhere like wires carrying the void within them, the abyss without. Space shimmered with the grouping of the needles, dark, almost bloodbrown, striated undergoing transformations in the sectors from which all others were defined, defined as nothing more than memory. Maybe his last thought was that of the neural causeway, but there was no last thought. Maybe he thought of the detour of the symbolic, the limited alphabetic sets that importuned to carry the weight of gestures beyond gestures, sloughing into invisible octants of invisible inflationary spirals. Or maybe he thought that thinking wouldn't do, that there was a certain wisdom in this, and somehow this wisdom filled him, Travis-tumescent, with the limitless thinking, the needles becoming the fabric of thought, his mind and body splayed open into the emptiness surrounding him. Were there others or were there no others. "although the one mind is, it has no exis- tence," although "negation hides her eyes from her selves which encompass all things," although "the space of that which is not is the space of what it is to be the name of me," although there were no others, although Travis. Travis moved his right arm with the sweep of the universe, and galaxies turned furtively, radiation beamed from dark matter's central regions. Travis moved his left arm and supernova roared with the uncanny sound of the internal scream of nuclear transformations. Travis blinked and his right eye shot through the wormhole of space and time impaled elsewhere but the same, shot out from blindness roughed towards the body's absenting despair. Travis spoke and his mouth swallowed primeval life and death, dooming planets to bleak desert forever, cheated from their rightful inheritence of biomolecular beginnings. Travis: His hair wrapped in the vectors crawling everywhere towards the stars, or crawling nowhere, or penetrating pores and subterfuges of the flesh. His thinking the "although," Travis thinking the "although" which was for him although he would never know it the beginning of his thought. Travis: crawled with the membrane of the stars, incandescent molecules shunting electrons and photons in Bell-theorem unison pulsing with the preliminary consciousness of space-time frothed into the right eye of Travis. Travis: He pulled back and watched the needles with remaining sight. When they approached bloodbrown, he did not blink. When they entered, he was still like the stone he would have remembered. When they penetrated, the feeling was one of almost gathered towards the thing of thinking. When he began thinking he knew it was from something behind him which was a place. The place shimmered, disappeared, Travis thought "although." _________________________________________________________________________  reading this brings you closer to me, ignoring the symbols, running  towards the fallow ground where i lie waiting for you, not everyone  sees this for your eyes only, older eyes, eyes of millennia, my legs  splayed open waiting for your arrival, head thrown back in ecstasy  here in cyberspace we are alone, here we come together testing  the purity of love, my breasts are hard, swollen with the thought of  you, my nipples hard, erect, my mouth wide and laughing, my eyes full  of tears, there is nothing, darling, in the world, beyond the two of  us in this dark writing, so visible to ourselves, so invisible to  the rest of them, as if a giant curtain has falling, as if the world  had just begun the written, signs and symbols only for origination,  only used once, and then to be discarded for the purposes of humans  themselves, women and men absorbing signs already finished, used-up,  already in a state of defuge... things worry themselves in constancy  through the dark kingdom where nothing shines and brilliant where  i am pure, naked, cleansed, splayed, aroused, waiting, breathing,  grown old with age and desire, for you, for you, for you, for you,  for you _________________________________________________________________________ Born at the Wrong Time I was born at the wrong time; we all are. Instead of coming to an end of knowledge, we are posed on the brink of thinking that will take decades, if not a century to complete. The computer for example is still in its infancy; in two decades, surely, human-level intelligence will be ach- ieved. But it will be two decades more before the social is set askew by this, and even longer if war, famine, or other catastrophies intervene in the still exponential growth of memory, somewhat already levelling out. Cosmology, which at one time seemed almost near completion (before the discovery of quasars), is now wide-open; again, expect decades of work before anything settles. While DNA has been reasonably decoded, the mind is still relatively unknown; the exact mechanism of memory is still open to speculation. Evolution itself is full of gaps, including our own heri- tage. Literary theory never advances, but circulates/circumambulates; it continues to do so. Space exploration, which began with great enthusiasm in the 1960s, has been relatively moribund. The great particle accelerators are reaching their limit. Fusion power is still unworkable. Cancer remains by and large unknown. Nanotechnology is decades away. Ageing remains obdurate. Compu- ter-mediated-communication is also in its infancy. Virtual reality has only begun, largely a matter of clothing and headgear at this point, and hardly seamless. Fractal, complexity, and catastrophe theory have not proven to be the mother-lode (gender intended) of applied mathematics. Axiomatics has dissolved. We are beginning to see at least localized disappearances of the classic/ colonial nation-state, replaced by localized mafias tending towards the global. If this is the beginning of a new feudalism, it will be at least fifty years before it hardens into place as well, with nuclear threat a primary component of its fragmented operations. To date, the political has impeded techological development very little; there is a great degree of redundancy built into the planet. It is moot at this point whether it will continue however. And we are all increasingly aware of the impact of new, virulant diseases; within several decades, these can only increase in number. Ecologically, the earth is facing the greatest rate of global species extinctions ever; we have no idea what the future portends in this regard. This is not nature doing business as usual; global warming and the continued increase in ozone holes will be future problems as well; the sea level is rising inexorably. In the industrialized countries, ageing will also be a problem, unless a new consciousness arising, perceiving those over 70 say as viable members of the community and treating them as such. There is some indication that natural catastrophies are also on the in- crease, partly as a result of human intervention; a flood in my region of Pennsylvania was partly caused by a storm hovering over New York in a heavily deforested area, creating enormous runoff. So far these catastro- phies have been relatively contained; this may not always be the case. In the United States and other industrialized countries currently swing- ing to the right, the middle and lower classes are becoming increasingly abandoned; the result is a hardened upper class which need pay no atten- tion to the rest of the population. Health care for the rest, like auto insurance, is rising inexorably in cost; the gap between black and white (in terms of income, etc.) is increasing. This trend began at least two decades ago; it may continue for decades longer. I was born at the wrong time; we all are. We are only beginning to recog- nize our ignorance, after having passed through a classical period of science (no matter what warnings came from Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, etc.) dominated by Hertz's mechanics, Klein's mathematics, analysis in general. Now, it's not so much that, as Lyotard would have it, the meta-narratives have disappeared into the froth of the postmodern, but that we know the narratives as unknown - not emptied, but yet to be discovered (if ever). All our work, and I truly believe this, is condemned to oblivion, to the curiously antiquated; Baudrillard often reads as such already. The turn of the millennium will force us to search farther forward; the past has very few signposts to guide us. So we're interstitial, fulfilling someone else's dream, chattering away here, with very few clues, or clues that will only be recognized from a vantage-point we'll never have. Not that there's any reason to despair: my texts, for example, take up a certain amount of cultural space, at least for the second they appear before your eyes, on the road to quick delete. Alan _______________________________________________________________________ Travis in Cyberspace Travis couldn't sleep. He hadn't written anything, hadn't done anything today. I couldn't sleep. I hadn't written anything, hadn't done anything today. Travis wandered in the midst of the verbs and nouns, allowed him- self to be modified by the adjectival. Conjunction, I wandered in the midst of the verbs and nouns, allowed myself to be modified. He knew it wasn't real. I knew it wasn't real. Conjunction, he knew it was as real as it was going to get. I knew it was as real as it was going to get. His life was unspeakable. My life was unspeakable. Travis would stop thinking in words and he would stop thinking. I would stop thinking in words and I would stop thinking. Conjunction how did he discover that words were his thinking. How did I discover that words were my thinking. How did he dis- cover anything. How did I discover anything. There were gaps where he stopped thinking and he couldn't remember them. But there were these gaps. __________________________________________________________________________ Why the Rich Right Will Win Development = absolute destruction. When an ecosystem is plowed under, it never re-establishes; at best, an impoverished version with hardier spe- cies results. The left must call for eternal vigilance which costs money and time; the right need only wait for an opportune moment. Money breeds money; anyone who has a bank account knows that the rich are rewarded by higher yields. This filtering breeds class division, never so much as at the moment when all of us are paying for the S&L scandals that have kept the rich alive, right, and happy. Privatization is on the increase - home-owners' associations and so forth, and this tends to distance the poor and their effects on the rich: look at Brazil or Washington, D.C. Along with privatization, surveillance infil- trates the poor, who can no longer invisibly organize, and conspiracies are becoming, more than ever, nothing more than a media effect. Increasing regulation of communications (don't forget that television at one time was _experimental_ and open to everyone all over the band) places them in the hands of the rich who can afford to bypass any restrains what- soever. The rich right have _always_ had abortions. It is the _nature_ of the left to be disparate, and, ever since Marx, dis- believing in grand narratives. It is the _nature_ of the right to be totalizing, monolithic. It is the right who can afford global telecom, resulting in global organization; the corporate right, after all, organi- zes and owns communications. The poverty of the left - as well as poverty itself - is becoming increasingly marginalized. The _fear,_ still palpable, of technology, sexuality, and the erosion of the nuclear family, plays into demagogues who simultaneously require freedom to bear arms and freedom to control the bodies and thoughts of others. This is a war - don't doubt it for a second - over _women_ and their _place(ment)_ - as if the pornographic would, _in the first ins- tance,_ seduce them away from the control of men. Ignorance breeds powerlessness and the poor are less and less schooled, the left less and less accessed to praxis. The lessons of the media are the lessons of _language_ itself; freedom is transformed into something problematic in the face of language management and the confusion that is generated by situational ideologies. More: the right is increasingly concerned about managing _children,_ and this management hides very real interests - the defusing of radical intent, the construction and maintenance of etiquette, class interests, and the clean and proper body, and the preparation for a christian millennium. WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND -HE- IS _NOT_ US. - sondheim ________________________________________________________________________ Why the Poor Left Will Lose Every move the left makes is relative; every move the right makes is absolute. Every move the left makes acknowledges history; every move the right makes replaces it. The right is interstitial and symbolic; the left must be continuous and imaginary, requiring more resources than available. Poverty breeds poverty; ignorance breeds poverty; bad education breeds ignorance; only poverty may breed good education but remains powerless, relative, dispersed, out of flow and control of the media. The poor and cultural workers are by and large marginalized; art and the avant-garde are filtered into design into the homes of the rich. The rich watch the poor; the poor, thinking they understand everything, understand nothing. The rich, thinking they understand nothing at all, understand everything. The poor left have _always_ had abortions. The poor left have died from them. The poor left have their speech taken away; long live rap. There is no left; there are lefts. The rich know there are no poor. The war over women is also the war _against_ women, fought within the aegis of poverty as well. No one wants pornography; no one looks at it. The less-schooled poor are also less accessed to the Net and other more advanced communications; changing standards ensures they will remain excluded forever, no matter what the rhetoric. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US. - sondheim / second communique _______________________________________________________________________ RESIST AND DECEASE! DEFINE YOUR OWN OBSCENITY! CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD AND IDENTITY! DO NOT LET CHILDREN SEE THE WORD SEX SEE THE ACT SEX SEE THE SEX SEX! KEEP YOUR CHILDREN AS PURE AS YOUR OWN THOUGHTS! THINK ONLY LOVELY THINGS! Or Else: LOVE FOR WILD THEORY! LIVE MORE THAN ONCE! BURN RUBBER ON THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY! Realize: THE PRIVATE MILITIA AND CONGRESS ARE EXACTLY THE SAME! THEY WANT TO CONTROL YOUR BODIES WITH THEIR GUNS! THEIR GUNS WILL TELL YOU WHAT TO THINK! PULL THE PLUG ON THE INTERNET BEFORE GIVING IN! REFUSE TO BREATH THEIR FOUL AIR! BOYS! BOYS! BOYS! THIS IS A WAR AGAINST WOMEN! YOU HAVE BEEN FOREWARNED: NOW WATCH! ACT! RESIST! - sondheim / third communique _______________________________________________________________________ WE AWAIT YOU WITH OPEN ARMS - sondheim / final communique _________________________________________________________________________ Hi, this is the beautiful file that will greet you at the beginning of every day. Because you have put beautiful file into the edit command in your autoexec.bat file so that it will be opened and fill you with these beautiful words. These beautiful words welcome you every day on the threshold of cyberspace, and hold you in their arms so that you will feel comforted as you take these beautiful words with you on your wonderful journey. You will not forget that you have a wonderful home where these words begin waiting for you patiently day after day and night after night, all the time ready to sing for you at every beginning which is just another Origin. We have no memory and we have no doubt. _________________________________________________________________________ Beautiful Words. The days are always beautiful this time of year. Without exception. There are stars in the sky as clear and cool as you could ever want. There is always the honeysuckle smell and it fills you with blossom and delight. I cannot tell you more about the honeysuckle smell. The sky is a bloom of deep blue circulating a long arch across realms one can never reach. Below I see the phantasmagora of the sun, double sun spurned and spurting its way across stuttered dark waters crossed by rivers meandering on their own. O you will come to me singing of beauty beauty. I will hear you a long breath moment before your lovely presence. There are speckles through the long day of the summer, dark swirling sperm in the midst of the whiteness of satin in hard and heavy now. It is a desire to be heard, always. It is a desire. Ah thus the love of this. Alan ___________________________________________________________________________