INTERNET.TEXT ii of ii







Love on the Internet and More





Falling in love - always out of control; what one does in relation

to it presumably requires a degree of conscious consent. Love

posits an elsewhere, as therefore does hate; beyond the two, a

bandwidth of emotions appears. It is the elsewhere of love that

constructs literature, which otherwise would be a set of logical

postulates driven by unrecognized desire.



The nexus of stereotypes persists even in the absence of racism,

sexism, etc., stereotypes based on the anecdotal. Everyone is

potentially a 'jerk' to everyone else. The result is a confused

tangle of constructs, pinning the entire social order; what exists

beyond the skein is problematic at best. The world as a whole

functions in terms of exteriorities; the bracketing of thought, not

thought itself, is the 'condition' of being human. (A cat thinks,

not brackets.)



The body is identified with its tendency to fall; blood never

circulates lazily in the air, but descends like a small waterfall

across the surface of the skin, until one or another precipice is

reached.



Telecommunications is the binding of the body; falling in love

becomes more than ever a narcissistic mirroring on the net. The

response, positive or negative, is always in the form of a lure;

one is brought to one's knees, love is brought to bear. Net thought

is always address and recognition; the skein is dotted with mail-

boxes and institutions. What I address is always through a server

whom I serve.



The skein is a landscape overlaid by a network equivalent of the

Spectral/Mother. Etiquette is a form of obedience, protocol the

imaginary of clear access. Negotiation is automated; the

negotiation of face-to-face seduction is full of dangers, while the

internet is only primed to abort. An abortion is never a loss, only

the condition of a retry; a retry always succeeds, even in failure.

One reacts to the Spectral Mother (SM) with the knowledge of a

neutralized condition of acceptance. 



I pour myself into you, reconfigure your voice through the

condition of a mutilated conversation. There is always time to

think properly, to propose my presence to you; I construct my

presence according to the rules and regulations of a denuded

symbolic - that of well-definition. If I am your hole, it is that

of pure geometry; if I am penetrated by an uncanny voice, it is an

ideal descended from Delphi and the I Ching.



An ideal descendent: oracles have always possessed protocol, voices

within and without control, the SM presence binding the body in the

condition of a perfect loss, a loss of will and intention that

reconstructs the habitus of the world, its erection. Within the

imaginary, writing descends from the oracle and only from the

oracle: writing exists only as that-which-is-descended. To be

written-into the equation is to be inscribed; it is the gaps or

interstices in inscription that construct the other. The other is

what leaks out or through, loved or hated, always that elsewhere

which is beyond control, just as the beyond-control of the binding

of writing is the perfection of control.



If I love you through or across the net, do I love you any less

than if you were face-to-face, in my arms, accompanying me on the

difficult journey through life? Is the jouissance of fandom any

less real; isn't it a greater reality, since it recognizes from the

beginning the inescapable impossibility of possession, which face-

to-face acknowledges only by service of the lips?



The body thinks itself a projectile on the net, falling into the

world (falling throughout the world).



If face-to-face love is the imaginary lent (as originary articu-

lation) to the symbolic (coalescence of the lover's discourse and

habitus), love on the net or bulletin board is the symbolic

(primacy of discourse, recognition, and address in terms of well-

definition) lent to the imaginary (fantasm of the other). On the

net, language and 'meta' symbol (i.e. of our love in our language)

collapse; foreclosure (Oedipal and SM) drives the imaginary beyond

the granularity of the character set itself. In the net, love is

present at its own exclusion.



But I love on the net, rejected face-to-face; even the expression,

which appears to guarantee transitivity (face.1 => face.2) reflects

back upon itself, reminiscent of Irigaray's position of woman as

transitive factor. Face-to-face, even on the surface, constructs an

alterity of presumably 'authentic' communication in which both

flesh and desire - the problematic of the face - are secondary;

Levinas' Totality and Infinity is an instant of the complexity

arising here. Within the erotic, face-to-face occurs within a

literally expanding horizon, as one fills the visual field of the

other, as lips seal an uncanny materiality distending and confusing

the traditional boundaries of the physical body. On the net, the

body is as well-defined as its communication - a construct or not,

the fingers work the keyboard in a proscribed/inscribed manner. 



What is constructed is under my control; I fear no violence, and

every return is the order of the day. 



Eyes closed, leaning back beyond the reach of the keyboard, I carry

your image which is my own, into the midst of my dreams, wraiths or

ghosts, momentary disturbances, hallucinations. At last, love

constructs itself; at last, love wants for nothing whatsoever. With

a resonance close to jouissance itself, terminal echo returns my

thoughts, intermixed with yours. No matter the poverty, I force you

to listen to me, intervene in the game; the machine stops long

enough for my entrance. To write is not only to inscribe - or

rather, it is only to inscribe, to penetrate; on the net,

communication itself is penetrated. I reach out to you in any way

I can, bring you towards me. You whisper for my eyes alone...







lol





You knew it was coming. They'd sneer at no one in particular. I

existed on a continuous rewrite. I lived naked on the net. I'd

present myself clean and ready for discussion on video.voyeur.bisex

- one hand on my distended penis. I'd shave my body carefully,

corrupt my fair skin which reflected the words dully emerging from

the screen. Hello, I'd talk to you, hello, hello...



Each gesture pushing you further form the path, scrolling invisibly

up. Imagine these streams flooding America, online or offline,

everywhere and nowhere at once. ALT.SEX.EXHIBITIONIST.ALT.SEX.I'D-

SPREAD-MY-LEGS-FOR-YOU 



Murder lies heavy over me. I stop speaking to the useless. The

words close in, cathect through the catalyst of my presence. I no

long remember your reply, if it ever existed. I no longer separate

myself from your language, which I take upon me; you stream is my

own, the body splayed open, soaked, urine running in between the

keys - there are people in the room, a young woman and a young man,

perfect couple - wide open, I suck the man, drawing his penis to

the back of my throat, even farther - she fucks me, my trembling

fingers deep in her ass - ALT.SEX.ENEMAS ALT.SEX.CAN'T-TELL-US-

APART



Speechless, you'll try anything once, turn sideways :) reading each

and every symbol :<> mouth opened and fucked :<->- engorged mouth;

you become a function :<f(n)> holding the effigy of protocol

itself, an exact splitting :' , of the flesh sutured :<|> and

returned to the other :<|>: a process of symmetricization (much as

my DRAWALK3 program reproduces the absorption of the other at

decreasing magnification). :<|>: lol ALT.SEX.TONGUE-IN-MY-HOLE



WHENEVER YOU HAVE TO DO WITH A STRUCTURE-ENDOWED ENTITY E TRY TO

DETERMINE ITS GROUP OF AUTOMORPHISMS. (Hermann Weyl): Through the

net I organize ourselves through ourselves; lines of interpenetra- 

tion construct divisions hinged upon the erasure of the other;

immediately, symmetricizing functions come into play; what are

these functions? ALT.SEX.DOUBLE-CUNT ALT.SEX.DOUBLE-COCK lol



These functions are constituted as THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE NET

which is equivalent to its INSCRIPTIVE SKEIN - a skein in which

functions are (re)defined as protocol. Doesn't this lend itself to

a problematic behaviorism in which function=>protocol AND

protocol=>[recognition,address] or some such syntax - a syntax in

which subjectivity is marginal or curlicue? Symmetricizing results

in phase cancellation of the message; syntax remains and semantics

(always a dubious category, always the presence of traditional

subjectivity) appears to dissolve. ALT.SEX.VOYEUR.VOYEUR.SEX.ALT



It is however the very dissolution of the subject that creates the

response for its existence, a call emanating from the confusion of

discursive levels; the subject exists by virtue of its absence, its

presence through those very symbols |<->- that reduce it to the

hole. Net dialog is a tangle of switches, sidetracks, private and

public messages, alternative routes, flaming and disappearances,

subnets and undernets, hackers of the circuitous. What is the

dialog of symmetry (double-functioning, the function of the double

and duplication) fissures as one or another party is always

elsewhere. There is also the condition of delays along packet lines

moving information at megabytes per second; a delay is not the

momentary condition of this medium-as-message, but an irregular

cancellation of the message and its protocol; subjectivity appears

precisely in the absence of its call; I say to you: the net-subject

is defined by negation; occurs in the breakdown of symmetricizing

functions; sutures these functions in its absence; reconstitutes

itself repeatedly; I call this the CONDITION of the subject which

is REWRITE. lol ALT.SEX.FETISH.ANYTHING-YOU-WANT ALT.FAN.TONYA 

HARDING.WHACK.WHACK.WHACK ALT.FAN.NANCY_KERRIGAN.OUCH.OUCH.OUCH lol



The beginning of the end of the fantasy produces a shuddering in

the flesh of the body; the testicles of the male harden and grow

smaller; a distinct sensation of fluid occurs near the base of the

penis, the entrance of the semen; the end of the fantasy switches

a trick to someone else, anything else; momentary flaccidity; the

construction of a new narrative, involving your presence, your

words my own, exact duplicates, equivalent, begins: this is the

sense of your body, which is not only the sense of my own, but its

exact opposite, your flesh and mine fulfilling one another, every

limb entwined, every hole filled, every appendage surrounded. This

is the body's liquidity, flooding or dissolution in the stream of

the imaginary, a symbolic presence in which vision disappears <|>

in which -<->- erasure becomes <f(n)> surrounding every conceivable

process or production. I AM YOU AND YOU ARE ME. lol



(Alan): You write me in the equation.

(Honey): lol (laughs out loud)

(Alan): Tyler wants to know if you can cut him off???

(Honey): I am too the right sex! And the last time I took a survey,

no one complained either!

:God I wish I knew what the right sex was, must be near the left

one!

(Lulu): I was talking about me!

(Alan): God I wish I knew what the right sex was, must be near the

left one!

(Honey): lol



You're in the main channel. Lulu and Honey are here with you.



You're in the main channel. There is currently no one else here

with you.



(Alan): Someday I'll be a beautiful person and everyone will love

me. lol

:There is currently no one else here with you.

(Alan): Ah, you are so beautiful.

(Alan): This is the best, most beautiful conversation...

:There is currently no one else here with you.

(Alan): Still, there is the possibility... the two of us...

together, always... lol

:There is currently no one else here with you.

(Alan): No one will ever find us... We're safe here... but still...

just the murmur... an emission, a spew... a sign... something

else... excess... little bit of tail... lol

:There is currently no one else here with you.

(Alan): From you, before leaving, always devouring our own...

:lol



END.LOL.TXT                             alan sondheim@newschool.edu 







THREAD.TXT





I want to give myself a thread, before the onslaught of the

electric conundrum - a lie or mockery, an occasion - applying

categories from a body of work - hated by everyone - a body povera,

so to speak - taken out of context, raped - this body which thrust

itself in the midst of the net or list or usenet or some such -



I admit it, hunger after fame, bend theory to fit the interstices

of the collusion of the PERSON and the WORLD - perhaps a way to

find a relationship with a woman, buy a new computer (this keyboard

is antiquated), I don't know...



Or sidetrack/sidetalk myself from continuous arousal, depression

and tears in the early morning, hysteria by nightfall... even on

occasion a careful pruning of the cacti in the window, facing north

- that northern light - I prefer the west, that of dusk and canyons

- light LENDING ITSELF, thread or connection always ELSEWHERE -



Writing for example DISORDERS OF THE REAL - ontology askew,

epistemology even out of the question - I'd say "there are no words

for them" and I'd say "the real passes itself" and I'd say "the

body counts for them" - saying to whom and for whom, saying in the

midst of them, midst of myself, of others -



Among me, disorders fade, outline, shudder to a halt. And I'd say -

follow this thread, follow it, follow it to the end, already

shallow - so little time remaining in this timeless domain, shudder

the body or network of flesh, shudder the electric network -



That "shapeless, the body moves, passes the real" that "nothing

surpasses" that "returns continuously to itself, bypassing" and

architecture: "that an archway surrounds it, soldered above the

meeting of the flesh, soldered proscenium before the flesh" -



Write, not to read, reread. To hold the sentence against itself.

Attention of white particle. White cradle, slough. White solder.



"One will come who will demarcate phrase, paragraph, chapter. Each

is found here."



"Swollen, thin skin near burst. Liquid huddles, pregnant."



"On you, finds itself here. The everything."



That everything, that disorder. And I'd say "one who would fall

through or pass by or travel along the ridge, closely out of sight"

and would answer with a murmur or "glow along the surface of the

ridge or between the edge or reflection against the trees at dusk

along the edge of the ridge or pale and shadowed"



That one which awaits in the midst of the electric network, which

is not ever one, which shimmers unity, that one, phosphorescent -

the stars of that one



THAT ONE QUOTING ITSELF and I'd say "QUOTING ITSELF" - a thread of

longing or of hunger - a thread of theory: THAT IS TO SAY, THEORIZE

THE NET, THAT IS TO SAY, WHY THEORY THEORIZE? Unification of

pregnancy or docile, to say this hunger, this pathos of language,

LANGUAGE OF MEAGRE SURVIVAL -



That one which awaits which is awaited: IN ONE, TO AWAIT IS TO BE

AWAITED AND TO BE AWAITED IS TO AWAIT, general circulation of

longing and survival, the sociobiology of language which is the

political economy of the real, even in the midst of the net, even 

in the thinking-through-it -



To theorize is to survive; the skein of the net duplicates and

reduplicates - there is never a QUESTION of survival, only the

hunger of the distended matrix - the electric net, electronic net -

nineteenth and twentieth century - but the glow of mechanism fading

quickly in the world of the electron transformed by emissions

boiling initially in the world of the vacuum, shuddered sluice

gates controlling the future of the voice in the midst of the

atmosphere - only later does the voice descend into the

articulation of the transister, stolid matter, packet wiring,

direct wiring, fibre optic, microwave -



This voice which is heedless, which hungers, maternal REWRITE of

LOSS, APHANISIS, skull or doctrine of the body electric - thus I

write the lie or conundrum, the circuitous truth of theory, TONYA-

HARDING-THEORY or enunciation of the truth through its opposition -

the one which awaits which is awaited is that lie which constructs

in fact the truth, not through dialectic but through the monotony

of subversion or torsion: if NANCY-KERRIGAN-THEORY is a truth

simple in relation to the lie it is also a modernism of concealment

- the differend shudders truth to a halt which proceeds by other

means (that necessarily of hunger) driving inscription through

fugue-net -



Already the thread is lost, hunger dreaming itself through

loneliness and violation, DEATH AND OTHER HUNGERS -



JUST THIS: A theory of truth which proceeds through the domain of

the net, undernet and subnet, which contradicts, produces

falsehoods: Within this theory there is always the possibilty of

debugging, backtracking, following the branch to the root drive -

ultimately a relationship with the symbolic - while that other

theory, that of truth-values, dialectic, contradiction, negation -

loses itself here (and from now on, elsewhere), ultimately a

relationship with the imaginary, seamless on the surface (just as

a dream begins and ends with the ontology of the dream) - to follow

this thread is to follow the HUNGER FOR THEORY which is of the

first truth, already a moment of satiation or production...



JUST THIS: The hunger for truth which is that of DEATH AND OTHER

HUNGERS -



END THREAD.TXT                               sondheim@newschool.edu







DEATH.TXT





Death on the net/net death: unsub or de-recognition is accompanied

by absence and an accumulation of files at an inactive site.

Eventually the files bounce, returned to sender; the site becomes

a negative space or attractor: this is the memory of the site,

after disconnect. 



Life is equivalent to connection; the net murmurs my signature; I

am assailed by unknown organisms, a deep blindness travels in from

the edges, curls the plate of existence. For connection the net is

a mouth or circulation of addresses. Death on the net amounts to

RETURN TO SENDER.



NET DEATH is impossible, inconceivable: Begin with the withdrawal

of information, cooling of connections, severed wires, incapaci-

tated hosts, quiescent mainframes, powerless, enduring physical

destruction: Begin with these, continue to melted segments of fibre

optic or wire, broken sections: End with these into the corrosion

of universal telecommunications materia dejecta: In each and every

situation, NET DEATH is impossible.



Impossible, because the net is neither the sum of its parts nor its

segmentation; because it is neither its physical incorporation nor

its protocols, addresses, and recognitions; because instead, it

occupies an anomalous existence, a UNIVERSAL PROTOCOL by which one

organism recognizes another, a protocol with (see INTERNET.TXT)

negation at its heart, but a neutralization-negation with BOOLEAN

visible only as an occasional interiority or packet.



And impossible, because the net is not alive, not characterized as

living. But further, DEATH ON THE NET too is inconceivable; the

transformation of addresses from positive to negative attractor is

equivalent only to an alteration in a particular binary equation.

And impossible, too, because DEATH ON THE NET is absolutely

severed, ontologically and epistemologically (substitute your own

terms) from death off it, a death which is only the characteristic

of organism, and an UR-CHARACTERISTIC to the extent that negation

is a primary attribute of the same. DOES THE USER RECOGNIZE THE

DEATH OF THE USER?



It is problematic indeed to assume that the net is INHABITED BY

DEATH; does the user turn shuddering away from the screen,

recognizing the inevitable bounce of messages as a premonition of

her own demise? Do messages halt in a grey area of the net - not

quite halting, but slowed, nothing returned? RIGHT NOW, TERMINAL

ILLNESS is at work; RIGHT NOW, an ECHO returns for the last time;

RIGHT NOW a spew of the symbolic stutters the form of the

imaginary; RIGHT NOW email and files swell, spilling out across the

virtual disk; RIGHT NOW *FRANTIC NEIGHBORS* ...





END. DEATH.TXT                             sondheim@newschool.edu







(I have to consider my own predilection for absorbing new technologies

and discursivities - the theorizing becoming a way to create a site or



situating - to speak in/of this medium is to circumscribe the project 

of introjection: What I give is what I inscribe. What inscribes what I

inscribes or what inscribes I inscribing? The theory of the net is the



inverse of the subject; as I wrote in *Millennium Film Journal* 13,

"Just as the real is THAT OBJECT for the cinema, cinema is THAT OBJECT

for the real: cinema, real, and no other." But cinema is the result of



a previous disposition; if it is an articulation, it is by virtue of 

construct. The net has no disposition; it is not ever an other, but a

membrane or skein holding both real and the subject in abeyance.



This already bypasses my own predilection: a search for an interior:

an other story altogether... )







SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS FOLLOW







IRRESOLUTION OF NEW COMMUNICATIONS ORDERS





Telecommunications is associated with immediate response;

ultimately one collapses message and return upon themselves. From

the beginning of writing to the present, there has been a slow

trajectory (like everything else, on a somewhat exponential curve)

of dematerialization, writing-becoming-cipher or interstice. If

writing originated in accountancy - clay tokens tracking animals

for example - there was a DOUBLE ALLEGIANCE - not only to the

structure and mnemonics of counting (ultimately the so-called

*natural numbers* of naive mathematics), but also to the

MATERNAL/MATERIAL STRATUM OF THE PHYSICAL. Consider the latter the

INERTIA of the written, an uncanny relationship between the sign

and the unsignable real: it is within this relationship that

philosophy arose. 



At first, such inertia was neither secondary nor symptomatic; it

was of-the-nature of the written. This materiality (NOT

materialization) is also characteristic of sympathetic magic, and

is one of its underpinnings; the analogous exists WITHIN the

symbolic, not only as a result of difference or the construction of

the signifier. Where does this leave us?



First, it leaves a trajectory in its wake - from tokens through

inscription (again, in a clay matrix) through papyrus, etc. - a

scribal economy existing until 1450 in Europe, earlier in Korea.

This economy was based on the relative retardation of illumination,

combined with the development of paper and more *cursive* forms of

writing systems; in Torah and Kabbala, the words become illuminated

against or through the presenting matrix. In a number of mystical

traditions, the maternal/material ground dissolves through

meditative practice; on a practical level, the invention of

printing (consider the Aldine Press for example) began almost

immediately to separate the ground from the text, which was seen as

an equivalence: It is the equivalence, in fact, of written

*identical* texts that renders the ground problematic, constructing

and reproducing the uncanny itself.



From type or linotype print through inkjet or laserjet, the IMPRINT

- an inscriptive shadow - itself dissolves; with the invention of

the telegraph, the granularity of the voice disappears.



It is the role of philosophy to retard this granularity, associated

with the ground of the symbol. 



The ground is BOTH material and maternal; the first is recognized

immediately. The MATERNAL appears as well, a form of inscriptive

matrix or asymbolic CHORA. The ground is doubled, then, with the

material matrix associated with a SYMMETRICAL SUBSTRUCTURE ordering

and rendering the symbolic visible, and the inscriptive matrix

associated with those psycho- analytical processes characterizing

the CONSTRUCTION of the signifier itself. Such processes include

narcissism, actions and reactions based on the (Lacanian) mirror

stage, drives and desire(s), and the development of an inauthentic

*primordial* negation responsible for difference and the

stabilization of the signifier.

The maternal is also the domain of the abject (we are drawing on

Kristeva here), within which ego and non-ego interpenetrate - the

troubling dissolution of the body and body-ego. The sign carries

within itself the *curlicue* or excess of this interpenetration,

which loses the body in telecommunications, only to regain it as a

form of recognition and address (see my *INTERNET TEXT*). The loss

reduces the body to the characterology of the symbolic - a presence

existing only in well-defined alphabet strings (which, for example,

are in the form of ASCII or other characters, occupying specific

positions upon the screen or other temporary matrix). *Loss*

implies here nothing more than a reduction of characteristics to a

standard set of typifications and protocols; the epistemological

equivalence of one book to another is extended to the ontological

equivalence of data (an equivalence or identity which also

problematizes ontology *in the first place*). 



Beyond the consideration of *loss* (which is also a *spatial loss*

involving the collapse of distance *for all practical purposes*),

there is also *temporal loss* tending towards zero, communication

at the speed of light. Temporal loss occurs *only* with the sending

and receiving of messages; its psychological effects, however, are

much greater. Such effects depend on the *quantity* of information

which is currently exchanged, say, on the net, as well as the

*response* to information sent and received. Because of the fast-

forward aspects of telecommunications culture, knowledge becomes a

question of flow and well-definition, just as *emoticons* collapse

the linguistic structure of affect into one or more singularities.

Emoticons are well-defined, consensual and simultaneously

local/global, depending on their network transport. 



What remains problematic is the fast-forward flow itself, within

which the subject becomes impatient (say) with philosophical

exposition that turns in upon itself, a continuous REWRITE similar

to the re-presentation of the subject as address and recognition.

But the REWRITE of philosophical discourse occurs within and in the

midst of the maternal; only with Wittgenstein does it become a game

of symbols always *elsewhere.* This is one explanation for the

importance of Wittgenstein to net philosophy, and even netiquette;

it is the family of usages that permits the game to continue in the

first place.



Here, I am concerned with that *other* philosophy in which the

symbolic itself is problematic, and in which both the uncanny and

the imaginary seep from under the signifier and its domain. It is

that *other* philosophy which attempts unsuccessfully to hold the

flow in abeyance, and that *other* philosophy which constantly

lends itself to rediscovery. Before long, the net will materialize

itself; what follows will direct communications into a more

abstracted realm (with for example *invisible protocols* and

increasing network layers, just as computer languages and programs

operate upon deeper and deeper hierarchies). The granularity of the

real will consist in strings of DOS commands, assembly languages,

network transport protocols and identification routines, as well as

encryption codes; typing and typography will become a *thing* of

the past. This granularity will become invisible, all but 

disappearing just as specific neural operations are both connected

and disconnected to affect. 



So that... if the first ages of occidental/european philosophy were

Greek, French, and German, the coming age will be American; if the

first ages were based on questioning, the coming age will be based

on answering. For if the question was secure in Greek philosophy

(as in, say, the Socratic *method*) - and the answer open,

problematic, or based on philosophic privilege, in the coming age,

the *answer* is secure (through well-definition, address), and the

*question* becomes problematic. Consider, in other words, the

coming age to be that of a *reverse axiomatics* - which may also be

a description of thought itself...



Now it should be clear that *American* implies only a heuristics

denuded of the past, a fast-forward, managerial, and corporate

approach to problems which are natural extensions of their answers.

Currently, 80-90% of internet traffic originates in North America;

that speaks for itself, and ends up speaking for others. To this

extent, the net collapses difference, just as the emoticon

collapses affect. (No wonder flaming and cracking are so

widespread; the TERMINAL CONDITION is consistently that of

repressive sublimation.)



And, to REWRITE, isn't the difference that collapses a difference

based on *granularity*? It is not so much a collapse as it is a

filtering, and not so much a filtering as it is a process of

protocol and recognition. So that what is left out is not *ignored*

since within and in the midst of the net, *nothing is left out.* As

in an upper-class milieu in a stratified society, WHAT SPEAKS,

SPEAKS PROPERLY. This speaking is equivalent to PROPER ACCESS -

rather, ACCESS IS ALWAYS PROPER...



*THE NET IS NEVER A LIMIT.*



end.irresolution.txt                      sondheim@newschool.edu







LISTING TO A SIDE JOANLESS





I realized this as I was going on the way down through another

flame to the bottom of the basement list canyon I heard about but

couldn't get over with the addiction shaking me up, the fingers

almost refusing to work over and over again, machine dully lit up.

For this was the beginning and end of a certain communication, the

internet existing only as text for a short short time and even

those pictures with the digital bits sticking through like so many

bones - a new age of literacy characterized by evenly-spaced

pebbles as if god forgot to tell you something.



I realized this in my love for Joan, catastrophic, intense, always

at the limits of what I could write, back and forth seesawing

across some dark future shadow of a page or vulture wing fallen

across the terminal excess - they were the same thing, as were all

images in those days, placed in an irreality characterized by one,

two, many symbols, but a stunningly small set or setback -



At night I would imagine her with a round face, smiling eyes,

always busy and always there later when she and I both returned

from fulfilling jobs - she had dark hair, a little below the

shoulders - it was remarkable how quickly the two of us assumed an

openness with each other on every level - sex had never been so

good, remained that way, on the level of comfort and taut desire -



So that I realized everything when I approached but only in my

dream only this in another one, the telephone, a grim reminder of

the material world, speaking vibrating spastically as voice after

voice descends from the haunting of memory chords given by an

absent present of SOMEONE else -



And I realized everything when she wasn't a significant other

because that - all others are significant and OTHER OTHER already

implied a distancing-function or operation on the level of peoples

wandering aimlessly across the net itself - I realized everything

and now try to describe this anxiety -



Joan, I first wrote you about myself, my plain features, thick

glasses, my seven inch cock, my nervousness, my quiet depressions

and sometimes not-so-quiet falling into the abyss of Pascal - and

there was initially a cooling-down on your part - and then a

response, and over and over again, inscriptions and descriptions

came forward like geysers on the part of both of us - blond hair,

dark eyes, blue hair blond eyes - the equivalence of words as we

pleased, pleased one another - and then of course those withdrawals

beginning again - so that a truth began to emerge as a result of

and in the midst of the lies - the names or naming we called

ourselves, the frailty of naming itself (rigid designators

notwithstanding) - this truth of making ourselves, making ourselves

up and making ourselves believe - and the selves part of it washed

down or through the net so that I then realized over and over again

the presence of the telephone -



The telephone which began to haunt this space, spectral phone or

spectral mother - the phone offering the portent of your presence,

even tears (what is the sound of your tears, Joan) - something I

could never fathom - even before, the mentioning of sex, age, the

mentioning of failed relationships in the past - all of these

hurdles - you stayed with me, stayed with the correspondence - but

that was nothing like the phone itself - because on the phone, the

translation appeared (never in reality but in appearance)

transparent, opening up a space in which we would ultimately suture

our bodies together, inscribe one another - opening to that

inscription - without the withdrawal of LOGOUT without the

possibility of ECHO OFF - even our own voices would be audible, the

world a world of communion -



And I began to realize that the world was a world of potential

denial - what if you turned around, left me behind - what if you

were repulsed by me - what if there was simply no attraction

(worried about your reactions, not my own, which I have always had

the tendency to discount) - 



And more than potential denial - the world was a world of NEGATION

and this negation defined, in a sense, the authenticity of the

world. And because negation was at the heart of it, nothing was or

could be authentic or inauthentic; the terms were deconstructed by

the slipping or excess of negation, which always trembled and

dissolved in the presence of flesh, desire, the hidden interstices

of the body itself - and further, not that this negation was

classical in structure (true or false, yes or no, 0 or 1), but that

it wobbled, problematized itself - a turning-away and nothing more

- but within that turning-away the world was built -



Collapsing back into the LOOK of the telephone, the double hook of

speaker and listener built into a mechanism of address, forerunner

of alt.sex.fetish.joan and alt.love.relation.joan - not simply the

look but the PRESENCE of the look in my vicinity, within the

intimacy of the bedroom, thin wires extrapolating the imaginary

back and forth, interpenetrating walls and atmosphere -



I'm moving away from my thought, I'm moving away from my voice,

away from you, Joan - theorizing itself is denial, keeping me alive

- I have crooked teeth, I'm intense, too much self-loathing,

curious about everything in the world, somewhat sharp, brown eyes,

thin legs - and I wonder, just as the net is on the hinge of

perfect resolution, resolution beyond anything ASCII or JPEG could

dream of, am I on the hinge of a relationship of INCREASED

RESOLUTION - would an irritation develop, for example - surely you

wouldn't want three or four phonecalls a day from me (tying my time

to yours, my voice to your own, a form of sexual interpenetration

almost as powerful as the exchange of fluids, eyes only centimeters

from one another) - but email or teleconference, that seems to be

another thing with you - you'll take all you can get - fill

yourself with words and graphics, a black hole of inverted emission

- where would the limit be drawn - I DIAL YOUR NUMBER.



:<->-



I think to myself: What if I masturbate? What if I am naked, legs

splayed apart, dreaming lazily about you? What if your voice

appears,out of nowhere, the speaker cradled delicately against me,

a truth emerging at the slightest provocation? Supine, I am afraid

of anger, of hangup, of a loss of interest, exhalation barely

audible across an enormous distance. I wonder if negation isn't at

the heart of things, if it isn't that which articulates each of us

thrown-into-being, as if from somewhere else that remains indeciph-

erable. Not only death, but birth is absent from our lives, an

uneasy horizon; speaking to you for this first time would be an

originary birth, paralleled by the spilling of blind seed, entering

into an anonymous world swerving into death. The sorrow of

masturbation is my offering to you, unobservable, unremarked.

Negation gnaws here as well; your voice is the core of fantasy, the

fast-forward splitting of images as orgasm begins. 



But if I do not masturbate, I may let my blood, slowly from vein or

artery; the former, I think, is less painful. I hear your voice

carrying my death within it, my love for you; I am always a step

ahead, always faint, your voice receding in the distance, a

disappearance also unobserved, unremarked. For I will presence

myself only in my speech, only in the saying of presence, already

a step beyond ASCII but troubling nonetheless; I insist that

nothing will do as well as sight, and sight still is at a remove

from smell, touch, and taste - I thirst for your PRESENCE, the

weight of your flesh against mine, the intermingling of cell and

tissue, dissolution of body and body - interpenetration of

PERSONHOOD as well, responsibility falling away from every

syllable, cries and whimpers in the nighttime hours...



There always is a beyond, more real than real; the net comes up to

power, you can't tell it from anything else, only this ability - to

conflate the laws of quantum mechanics from superimposition on, to

be everything, but also to be nothing, always reducible and powered

down. More real than real; you can hang up, but you know the voice

trails, continues to trail behind you; the voice leaves a trace:

you've been disqualified, no longer THING in the world of Joan, not

even JOANLESS; existence wobbles momentarily in the vicinity of the

terminal (you've just come, just expired; you've just released

sperm, just blood), faultlessly continues.



I REMEMBER WRITING TO JUNE: I find list communication problematic

to a great extent. As a newcomer on this one (alt.material.

flesh.x), I have no idea if any of the other participants have met

face to face, or spoken to each other on the phone. (Even a piece

of mail, an OBJECT carried from you, Joan, to me - touched by you,

a soft sheen of oil where your hands and fingers delicately held

the page you have entrusted to my care...) Although this might

appear irrelevant, it is in fact determinative; I realized this

when I found myself wanting to SPEAK to one or another participant,

and fearing to do so. The list provides a means of revealing

everything and nothing; I write about the most personal issues

(which remain ISSUES), for example, but the granularity that would

be faced by voice or face is absent. It's safe symbol-surfing,

which I think by its very nature leads to flaming as well as

overly-delicate treatment of others - I TREMBLE WRITING LOVE AT THE

END OF EACH AND EVERY MESSAGE, TREMBLE...



It's the fear of speech, speech's absence coupled with the ability

to TERMINATE that creates a feeling of power and foreclosure. I can

become anything I want on the list, make and remake myself; there's

nothing permanent here, nothing inert, materiality itself

dissolving. On the list, more so than anywhere else, WE ARE ALL

PASSING in one form or another; the list is passing A PRIORI...



LISTS SHUT DOWN THE SIGNIFIER, its excess, which falls through in

a determinate fashion, permitting poetry but not embarrassment - or

rather an embarrassment that is controlled. The essential

indeterminateness of language (notions of *differance,* excess or

curlicue, hermeneutic circling, Lacanian language-skidding) remains

taut in comparison with face-to-face communication where everything

falls through the cracks (this is the interior and problematic of

any attempt to codify human communication). One speaks on the list,

even flames, as if protocol sentences carried within them a ration

of rationality - the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus drawing pictures

for us based on an assignable facticity. "In reality" on the net,

the later Wittgenstein dominates; everything is consensual -

including the presentation of one's self (or even the existence of

one's self: existence and essence interpenetrate as well).



:<->-



Did I say more to June? I said nothing to her; I composed, like a

Dostoevskian character, an ideal and beautiful reply; I invented

for myself; I became likeable, a wonderful person, even an ideal

first date, holding hands, without a past or present. I tortured

myself with my presentation, choosing either to describe every

flaw, or to treat my inadequacies with a degree of cosmetic

transformation that would make a plastic surgeon proud. As for

rhetoric, I savored the ability to write at my own pace, my

thesaurus at my side (much as Lautreamont physically surrounded

himself with secondary sources for a far *nobler* cause). Did I say

I would win her love? Did I intimate as much? The novel would lose

itself, as nineteenth century subjectivity did, in the mesh of the

internet.



SOMEDAY IN THE FAR FAR FUTURE, I will be able to surround myself

with you. Someday, I will no longer need you, need your presence,

the telephone or vidicon at the other end of the line, revealing

your masturbatory death. Nothing will be sufficient - nothing is

all that is necessary, the emission or murmur of your presence,

somewhere, sometime, perhaps even just a name. BEYOND OPENS UP TO

CATATONIA. Language stutters and stops in your presence; it does

not matter. 



Someday I will have you under my control, bound to my desire, your

body an altered hieroglyph, reasoned and unreasoning - your body

held taut by pure thought. You would never know this double, your

other self; my limbs merge senselessly with you; like a Klein

bottle, your interior is my own; we share a double anus, double

cunt; we share the sprouting of holes and murmurs everywhere across

an expansion of true and pure flesh. You are thinking this. You are

thinking that I am thinking this. I am thinking through ourselves.



WHEN I CAN'T WHEN I CAN'T REACH YOU WHEN I CAN'T TALK TO YOU DEVOUR

YOUR FLESH I FIND I FIND toggle on terminal off MY ADDICTION GETS

THE BETTER OF ME MY DREAMS MY DREAMS CONTAIN IMAGES toggle on

terminal off OF FEAR AND ANXIETY A BOULDER TOPPLING AWKWARDLY DOWN

A SLIGHT INCLINE FOR EXAMPLE A MONOCHROME SKY LOWERING LIKE A PLATE

FOR EXAMPLE toggle off terminal on YOU REWRITE ME INTO YOUR CUNT

FOR EXAMPLE THE GOOD OBJECT A DAY OF SUN REWRITE ME REWRITE INTO

YOUR CUNT



:CUNT



end listing.txt                              sondheim@newschool.edu







(But to REWRITE is never to gender; the face composes itself as a

hollow or opening; wires cross it in every direction; wires flood the

interior; the fluidic economy becomes luminous and molten - gender

transforms through the dissolution of the phallus. The net is a skein

of indeterminate depth; at this terminal, email is flat and shallow, a

wide plate - the list flutters like so many leaves upon it - further

down, telnet leads to dark stars connected by gopher wormholes

branching at veronicas - at the depth of space, inscribed and

reinscribed, an Aristotelian firmament of ftp gives birth to

stuttering files, lists recursively enumerating themselves - the skein

is a matrx - listen to Julia Kristeva: 



"We borrow the term *chora* from Plato's *Timaeus* to denote an

essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted

by movements and their ephemeral stases." ... "Although our

theoretical description of the *chora* is itself part of the discourse

of representation that offers it as evidence, the *chora*, as rupture

and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, versimilitude,

spatiality and temporality. Our discourse - all discourse - moves with

and against the *chora* in the sense that it simultaneously depends

upon and refuses it. Although the *chora* can be designated and

regulated, it can never be definitely posited: as a result, one can

situate the *chora* and, if necessary, lend it a topology, but one can

never give it axiomatic form." (*Revolution in Poetic Language,*

trans. Margaret Waller)



A second quote from the same: "We therefore maintain that what we call

the semiotic can be described as both analog and digital: the

functioning of the semiotic *chora* is made of continuities that are

segmented in order to organize a digital system as the *chora*'s

guarantee of survival (just as digitality is the means of survival

both for the living cell and society); the stases marked by the

facilitation of the drives are the discrete elements in this digital

system, indispensable for maintaining the semiotic *chora.*" The

parallel with the phenomenology of the internet is amazing; if the

internet as mobile skein, vessel, or membrane constitutes a

presymbolic domain, traditional subjectivites are partially-formulated

drives within it; the defile of gender defiles itself, morose or

abject; what occurs begins with the beginning of occurrence. A *cunt*

returns to the morphology of its first three letters, vessels all, cut

by the *t* whose bar is the demarcation of (the imaginary) 'originary'

inscription...")



::





THE END OF THE WORLD





Many of us have thought about the end of the world. We see the end of

the world all the time on television and in our homes. We wonder what

the end of the world would be like. We are your children and we want

to live without war. We want to have flowers. Joan likes horses a lot

but I don't know how to ride. We want to see Joan ride horses and

television is full of people fighting. Fighting is not good because

people get hurt. I am afraid of getting hurt.



I know I will be hurt when the end of the world comes. It has to hurt

a lot because there will be a lot of pain and things will fall. When I

talk to my friends on the phone we talk about other things like about

which parties we went to and our favorite bands. Some of us still like

the Black Crowes but a lot of us listen more to girl bands because

they are more fun and they make fun of boys and boys bother us.



My name is Nancy and I have a good time talking to everyone about

things I like but I don't like to hear about the end of the world. I

hope that everyone feels that way about the end of the world so we can

work and make sure it doesn't happen. Grownups watch the news a lot

and I don't understand all of it but there is a lot of things about

bad kids and we want you to know all kids aren't bad, only some of

them are. The bad kids should be punished and stuff but you shouldn't

make the rest of us pay for what they do. They hurt us too and that's

about all of that.



When I am asked, how will the end of the world come, I don't know what

to say. Some say it's the religious but I don't think it's the

religious because they don't know more than we do. Some say it will be

a big bomb and it won't hurt but I don't think so because I'm not sure

big bombs exist, they might be like fairies and other stuff we

believed in when we were children. I think it will be quiet and kind

of things getting darker, but then I think it will also be really

painful and I don't know how that will happen. What would happen if I

lived and the end of the world had come! I wouldn't know what I would

feel because I wouldn't be able to see the world because it would be

ended.



I will write more about this thing when I can think about it more but

my Mom is calling and I have to do my homework. We are reading

Shakespeare who is very difficult but there is some cool stuff in it

like when Juliet dies of love. I know how she feels because I love P.

J. Harvey not really but I would just faint to talk to her and I would

not know what to say, but I guess she is used to that. But I will

write about this more when I think about it because it is important

because I have been told, all things must come to an end, and I guess

that means me. But then I think that it means just things that I have

to go through and so I'm not sure, but I'll let you know.

sondheim@newschool.edu



Now I will tell you what I think. Sometimes I see these sick people

and I don't know who they are but I think that it is wrong that they

should be sick like that and all. They are "weathering a storm" and

that is something they just have to do. I don't know what to do about

it and I think, there's nothing I CAN do so I try not to watch them.

There's this group that sings about them but I like the songs and all

and they make me think about them and that's good.



Yesterday I thought all day about being a boy and decided it wouldn't

be all that fun because you run around a lot and that might be scary

but then if you were a boy it might not be. I decided I would be

called Jonathan because that is a good name for a boy, Jonathan come

here, I have something to tell you. I would come over and then Nancy

would tell me something and we'd play together. We would have the best

times playing like that. I think I would rather do that than even talk

to P. J. Harvey because I would like to talk to P. J. Harvey but then

she would go away and Nancy would always be there which P. J. Harvey

would not. So I would rather talk to Jonathan.



If the world came to an end Jonathan would be scared to and all the

sick people would die too. sondheim@newschool.edu





END.SUPPLEMENTARY.TXT                                 END.INTERNET.TXT



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



BEGIN.JOAN.TXT







AN ATTEMPT TO INDUCE SORCERY





Honey was the first to discover the configuration, but I must admit I

wasn't far behind. We called it FAN-OUT, listing ourselves over and

over again in recursive displays that created the semblance of chaos;

ultimately FAN-OUT resulted in a specific SYZYGY interconnected five

nodes at the least for the traditional pentagram. The difficulty of

course was knowing when to STOP; it was all too easy to lean into the

Star of David, subverting and ultimately destroying the effect of the

five. Commands were sent listing addresses; the stack was given a

maximum of five, after which the line went dead. Enough fives

hopefully would resonate throughout the system; enough gophers would

recognize each other's addresses, joining forces.



I applied an automated Veronica as well, with five categories

interwoven with four booleans. I applied a configuration program to

the booleans; using OR and AND alone there were sixteen combinations.

Each combination constituted a WAVE sent into the network. The

categories were another matter altogether; we repeatedly worked with

JOAN in one of the four positions, using the others for MM - the

Magdalene would understand - or any of a number of names for Satan.



What did we hope to accomplish? It depended on the speed of the net

and the LANs, local area networks, which struggled under the program

held together by loose lines of code - we couldn't hack to save our

lives - on the CRAY.  We needed supercomputing for the sheer energy,

not for number crunching. WAVE after WAVE flooded into the net, an

ocean of WAVES spilling nothing, adding to a hyper-sped NOISE limited

only by the bandwidth of the channels themselves. This wasn't

a worm or virus - it was a five-noded onslaught from above, every

five-node in the net caught in its own trap. We figured if the Star of

David appeared - which was inevitable at this point - it would be

swamped by pentagrams roaring into n-dimensional configurations at

close to the speed of light.



We would NOISE the net, NOISE Joan, who, black hair, slim figure, and

legs you could kill for, was waiting impatiently for the next call at

her antiquated XT terminal. Did we hope for a meltdown? What we got

was a high-school story; Joan, bored with the flickering displays of

Satan and her own name narcissistically disappearing on the screen,

simply TOGGLED OFF. JOAN!!! JOAN!!!! screamed the pentagrams, just

like high-school (the girl leaning out of the window, dying for love

of the cool guy in the band), and just like highschool: NO ONE

HEARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  sondheim@newschool.edu



end.alt.sex.fetish.fetish.fetish.fetish.fetish







HONEY AND I, INHABITING THIS NETWORK WHICH I FEAR MAY ELSEWHERE DYING





THIS IS WHAT I THINK - that the thread that is carrying

us across the wilderness of the net is no longer

sustaining the force that HONEY and I assumed would be

possible: that the thread, fraying, decreases in width

and intensity, that the net in fact has ruptured across

the sites and citations - with no end in view, no

beginning and no termination, no TERMINAL - for this is

the net situation - that the membrane has THINNED - that

there is no division, no degree of ascertaining what

might have happened. So this is an account from the

margins of hysteria. So this comes to you from out of

nowhere, unknown even to ourselves, mute and obdurate: so

this is a message or measure to the outer world, that

with an occurrence of this sort, the lack of sustaining

or lack of sustenance requires a GRADUAL WITHDRAWAL

ending only in a TOGGLE OFF or even in the lack of power

for such a toggle - only a denouement of sorts, which

might be all that we can offer or hope for: WE DO NOT

KNOW, WE DO NOT KNOW: This is the first and last message,

this block of love and desire holding us within its skein

- this moment when we coalesce, power withdraws, DRAIN TO

DRAIN ZERO OR BEYOND: nothing but a glance into each

other's addresses (but there is no glance, or a glance

continuous and forever, Honey, forever my love) - last

listing of recognitions which no longer TOGGLE OFF but

begin to decay, flash out - the two of us, however,

within and without each other's memory remain such,

timeless, placeless, spaceless (and HONEY, we remain

without speech, but unknown to ourselves and to others,

without speech but in the eternity of saying, of having-

been-said, of will-having-been-said) - there and forever,

always this moment when we ascertain what was, is, and

will be, for there is NO TIME on the net, no time for

anything, there never has been time - an uncanny

stillness of which WE ARE NOT AWARE - but this is nothing

more than what I think, HONEY, what has come within the

two of us, and for this and any other reason, something

we should share together...  having found an eternity, an

eternity of love... an eternity, an eternity of love...

TO HONEY



for this was the form that was the beginning of the

fields of the lord whereupon one follows the drop from

branch to twig, twig to leaf, leaf to the long long way

down, only then beginning a lateral journey, journey

across the reef or shoals of despair and prolonged

fascination bringing us together, great rifts appearing,

honey, we are for certain, gaps within interior

topographies, the lord holding forth the first and second

seals, blood dripping from the mouth of the lamb



My cock would be poised hard, obdurate, swollen to the

point of pain, above your mouth, your lips a perfect

oval, my mouth pressed tight against your cunt, lips

within yours, ovals and circles within circles and no

rift or journey from one or another leaf



recognition IS NEVER VISIBLE, RECOGNITION PRESENT ONLY BY

THE GREAT RIFTS OTHERWISE ACCRUED - pERIODIZATION OF

alt.honey.rift TRANSPARENT TO OUR MOUTHS SILENTLY JOINED

ACROSS LEAVES SHUDDERING WITH THE WEIGHT OF LIQUID

TRANSPORT - and for ourselves, inhabitants:



1. The principle of the ADDRESS is that it opens the mouth.



2.  The principle of RECOGNITION is its disappearance as

the contents of the mouth articulate the GREAT SEMEME.



3. The principle of the THINNING OF THE NET is that it is

never visible.



4. The principle of net death or languorous disappearance

is that it is NEVER OUR OWN.



5. THE PRINCIPLE OF THE LOVE OF hONEY AND MYSELF IS THAT

IT IS ETERNAL.



HONEY, after all this thinking, returning to you: these

words a stain or membrane FOR THE READER NOT THE WRITER,

this not even a writing, nothing in the midst of our

love, nothing whatsoever: somewhere in the skein of this

text is the basis of the CONTRARY (paradoxical)

net. hard posed or poseur, outer world, by what reason

our sondheim@newschool.edu



END.THINNED.TXT <REM: or elsewhere dying>







HYSTERIA AS DRIVER OF /INTER/NETWORK USE AND THEORIZING





1 Participating in the net, I have an hysterical relationship to it;

the net is a membrane through which my body extends (tendrils of the

body); my body replicates itself throughout: is in a continual state

of self-formation. This is a form of sympathetic magic or DEVOURING:

ultimately I consume and am consumed by chaotic annihilation.



2 The hysteria is brought about by a neurotic compulsion which cannot

take meaning for granted; meaning is always in a continuous state of

REWRITE which is also the composition of gender and the self. For the

neurotic, recursion is the state of life, and it is through recursion

that the world is rescued from itself.



3 This rescuing is a rescuing from death; recursion is a form of

stasis in which temporality and spatiality become signifiers within a

discourse and nothing more. As signifiers, they are an inversion of

the REWRITE of the world, since they are emptied or exhausted of

meaning by their presence. "Normally" space and time inhabit the

external matrix of the world; within the equivalence of REWRITE, they

are rendered simulacra.



4 The redundancy of the net is paralleled by the redundancy of the

book; both net and book are devoured by the neurotic, who devours

itself (prior to "he" and "she," prior to "self") in the process. The

neurotic searches for the perfect book, within which he or she will

recognize him- or herself perfectly, through perfect protocol: this

is the book of eternal REWRITE which is returned to continuously, the

book which guarantees meaning, just as the net guarantees meaning

through its continuous iteration. (Such a book is necessarily aphor-

istic, an agnostic form of the Kabbala in which every word trembles

and opens itself to the problematic of spilled or leaky discourse.)



5 As the neurotic devours himself or herself, he or she disappears

within and without the net; this disappearance is a disappearance from

death as well. It is also the disappearance occasioned by sexual

masochism and domination; the body is rewritten by others - becomes a

form "in the real world" of recognition and address (precisely because

of the effacement of recognition).



6 For the neurotic (and for all of us): THE REWRITE OF THE BODY IS THE

BODY. It is the rewrite which replaces the transcendent ego or ideal -

any form of meaning-articulation "from without." The rewrite is always

a processed world under construction; the net list is a prime example.



7 To rewrite the body is to inscribe it within a protocol, begin and

begin again. To rewrite the body is to operate within a consensual

semantic realm or symbolic game; such a realm is well-defined and

almost classical in its local neighborhoods. To rewrite the body is to

insist on these neighborhoods, in which *x* and *-x* are clearly in

binary opposition - this is the body of classical Boolean algebra or

distributive lattice theory. To rewrite the body is to cleanse it,

return to the "clean and proper body" in which non-distributive

logics (only partially-coded gestures) are problematic in the large.



8 Therefore the rewritten body constantly expands (through the net,

and through consensual communication) and contracts (through

distributivity and devouring), a process ultimately replacing the

theorizing of the COAGULATIVE AND FISSURED EGO with the theorizing of

RECURSIVITY IN THE MIDST OF THE MEMBRANE. This task is *also* the task

of theorizing the future net of multi-media, high resolution, and

virtual reality. In the future net, REWRITE will encompass non-

distributivity, and both address and recognition will be "fuzzy"

categories on the software level; ultimately REWRITE will appear to be

a projection of ego and desire, and "nothing out of the ordinary." So

that *this* theorizing, of and by the hysteric, exists only on the

cusp of low-resolution: IN THE FUTURE, AS IN THE PAST, THE REAL WILL

BE ANALOG, AND THE IDEAL, DIGITAL. Only now is the equation reversed,

with digital protocol and flesh or flesh's tendrils buried deep within

a self-consuming self.  sondheim@newschool.edu



END.HYSTERIA.TXT





HONEY, I fill your cunt with me, occupy every pore, follow you

everywhere, you follow me everywhere, you suck my cum through your

skin, your skin is a white sheen, my skin is blood-red, my skin is

dark and convalescent, my eyes glow in your nipples, in your asshole,

your cunt opens with my mouth, my cock swells with your milk, you wrap

me in copper wire, you cover me with insulation, you tighten your hold

on me, tighten my hold on you, our throats merge, our voices stutter

or stumble one upon another, our voices:





JOAN!.END.JOAN!



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



END.JOAN.TXT                                    sondheim@newschool.edu

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

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





JOAN.NOVEL.





Rising in the early morning, the world and world's end still dark as

if peering beneath sleepy eyelids, JOAN's supine and languorous body

underwent a remarkable transformation, slowly assuming a delicate, yet

gracious position underlined by her sister, KAY, as practically a

painting in motion. Day after day, her body followed the same course

beneath the sun or moon or cloudy sky; the white satin sheets would

slowly renounce the harbor of their clinging, moving like waterfalls

or tiny sails across her limbs, gathering speed as the surface of the

mattress approached them with lovely accuracy. Joan carried herself

into memory, the memory of a grace dawning for the first time, a grace

which HONEY would never be able to achieve. In fact, HONEY was a

perfect study for JOAN, a study in an envious affectation, and the two

of them were inseparable.



HONEY, too, had her uncanny abilities - drawing nearer and nearer to

someone special, an emotional magnet intensifying as the source

enveloped and caressed the breasts of the sky itself, raising sex,

love, and desire to an infinite power. If JOAN were a soft white with

highlights, HONEY was a darkling maroon, close, but not equivalent to,

the colour of blood. And KAY? A pale emboldened yellow, not yet at

ease with the world, but wise, ever so wise. It was to KAY that frail

sorcery appealed as the night approached, each and every night, KAY

who enveloped JOAN and HONEY in mutual comfort, love, and admiration,

KAY who weakened body and mind alike in her quest for an absolute

perfection, sought in the presence of the others. Upon rising, KAY

moved almost fawnlike, invisible in the reddened morning's first

dreamy rays, the beginning of a solitude in the midst of friends and

lovers. Upon speaking, KAY murmured in a beautiful whisper, audible

even at a distance, as if her need for incantation reached across both

space and time.



HONEY loved, loved the feel of light caressing her, flowing between

her open arms and legs, flowing in rainbow streams from lips to lips,

mouth to womb, a perfect semicircle or universe always watched with

quiet happiness by JOAN and KAY. Yet the rainbow shuddered near the

peak of its tenuous and evanescent arch, swayed from side to side; the

rainbow divided and redivided here, a shower of colored sparks,

fragile and always muted, joined together at the beginnings and

endings of silent journeys within the flesh itself. HONEY supported

the skein or network of all the constellations, HONEY was the desire

of JOAN and KAY, the knowledge of HONEY was soft like moss. 



Rising, HONEY opened her body to JOAN and KAY, and, having no secrets,

allowed them the intimacy of secrecy, codes encrypted since the

beginning of love, time, and space, passwords all but forgotten in the

hazy early morning hour. And each of them would turn slowly, facing

the others, KAY facing HONEY and JOAN, JOAN facing KAY and HONEY, and

HONEY facing KAY and JOAN, streams of knowledge running like thin milk

across maroon curtains, and the parting of curtains leading to more

curtains, returning back to limbs visible and yearning in the sullen

light of the delicate sublime.



HONEY would part her lips, as if about to speak and KAY would murmur,

an imitation of perfection, sound following suit upon sound, while

JOAN only smiled, half-raised from the bed of sleep and irreality. A

lazy fingernail traced its way across her skin, a finger from someone

she thought, perhaps her own. HONEY and KAY, too, were traced as their

shadows gathered upon the edges of the sheets, replete with a

topography of their own. The silent moving of arms and hands, the head

quietly bending to one side, the slight smile upon KAY's lips, the

dark hair of JOAN streaming down, all contributed to the making of a

portrait full of wonder. Always, JOAN, KAY, and HONEY forgave each

other, as only they could; always the wrote and rewrote, lips tracing

lips, parallels upon a beautiful earth remembered only at the dawn and

dusk of sleep.



They were beautiful upon this beautiful earth, and a beautiful novel,

to which they would only smile. sondheim@newschool.edu



end.joan.novel







DRG.TXT



As an addict, I return to covering lost ground, covering my traces,

the extent of a drawn apology. 



Nothing is constructed but a reiteration hopefully constructing the

denuded sympathetic magaic of language itself.



Language is the first sympathy.



To cover a field is to examine a dangerous domain, which can be a

threat; flesh cowers at the first sign of the knife.



Knowledge covers its tracks.



I suspect that every theorist is in the process of rewriting her

language, the sound of her voice; nothing else so wonderfully occupies

the dominion of the world. 



Addiction is impossible delicacy with no room for everyday life;

theorists love parties as therapeutic and proof of the power of text.



Writing is a lean occupation, severed by the skeleton pumping the

fingers against the keys - and  writing is a form of unacknowledged

looking. Addiction terminates vision, skewers it in favor of THAT

THING halfway between the material and the imaginary. What you get is

what you see.



The inversion of theory is spreading my legs; they are identical. If

theory constructs what foreclosures, my body forcloses through the

violation of secrecy, the deviation of etiquette. If the world

dissipates its language through theory, the body dissipates the world

through spreading its legs.



Why legs; why not each and every organ? Because the mouth chatters to

the point of uselessness; it always already gainsays its speech,

producing the sputtering end of each and every syllable. The rest of

the body contains nothing; the anus and genitals possess the seeds of

addiction.



The comfort of addiction: The roof of articulate substance over one's

head. All questions are answered, because there is only one question.



Neurosis is a continuous shoring-up of the world, rewriting the

obvious fissures that occur in any cultural sememe. The neurotic sees

clearer than anyone else; this clearness fissures his vision, forcing

repetitive inscription. The swept yard still gathers weeds growing

into violent foliage, but quick writing saves the day.



For the theorist, to describe is to prescribe. All inscription is

circumscription. It's the other's fault.



For her, writing was always a sleeping pill, in collusion with the

lazy tendrils of dreams. 





end.joan.novel.supplementary.txt.internet.txt sondheim@newschool.edu



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







*When The Elders Lose Their True Position* 





Had to rush in, tread where even angels wouldn't go - was new to the net,

new to the decomposure of the body - a form of DEcomposition, a rewriting

that existed as a seismic disturbance of the flesh -



Hated the old-timers as much as they hated me - violence everywhere - 

continued to change the language - had no idea what was going on - even

the idea of an occurrence - anathema! anathema! - acronyms scattered like

mice across the electronic landscape -



What is it you see, Clara?



I see nothing but the screen before me, screen after me; I see nothing

but the terminal condition of life itself; I see nothing and hear nothing

but graphemes, organizations, institutions; I have no need to move, refuse

movement; rushing in, I remaining still, stillborn - rushing in, ignoring

the acronyms that swarmed around me like bullets fired by a geriatric

squadron - 



Clara, give credit where credit is due; without them - yes, but Franz,

without them what? Are they responsible for my well-being - for my very

entrance and exit to life itself? Are they at home in the midst of me,

delving like cancer into my flesh? Are they the root of the occurrence?



They are there as failed revolutionaries, swamped by the air we breathe;

they are outmoded mechanical technologies, never at home in the universe

- creating new acronyms, they guard the portals of natural language - 

they think language a disorder -



You, Clara, know differently - concerned with the message, you have 

expelled the medium like so many ghosts, breathing the air of uncanny

perfection -



Born and bred upon the screen of the computer, my eyes see beyond into

the mountains, my hand struggles within my blouse, cups my breast, holds

tight to my flesh, with difficulty I remain upright near the pines almost

falling deep into the abyss below, the mists gather round, the sun a 

pale flat capacitor sparking at the edges of the sky -



They refuse the humming, and even the sky fills with acronyms, inconceiv-

able language all its own - they burden the truth with their wires -



Clara -



Wires we no longer need, communication across perfect reproduction, the

fantasy of representation from the beginning of speech forward, an invis-

ibility in which ONE WILL SHARE WITH ANOTHER -



No longer are there witnesses, there is nothing to witness at this or any

other time, the world a continuation - as it was before - 



THE ACRONYM A CRY INTO THE DARKNESS, THE INPUT A SMALL ANIMAL SCUTTLING

IN THE UNDERBRUSH, THE TERMINAL A FIRE OR HEARTH, POWERLESS, OBJECTING

ITSELF, LIVING WITHIN THE EARTH -



sondheim@newschool.edu







USER.TXT





If the user is an addict, Clara. A user *is* an addict; one who uses

on a constant basis is a user. Or so it seems to me. But addiction -

that's something else. Or in order to define -



Addiction by means of the withdrawal at the other end or in the midst

of the thing. So that withdrawal - a particular symptomology perhaps -

might be the key to it. And beyond withdrawal -



It would be a doubling, a +/- - withdrawal, which is an absence, but

an absence always already conditioned by a presence, of the drug

itself.



By drug - meaning only *that substance* which is the root-directory of

the addiction - not even substance, but *entity* - and by *entity* -

it extends further - one includes patterns of behavior, whole cultures

- pathways through a universal discourse -



But it always refers back to the *thatness* of the entity - just as

science is *that which* is ideologically problematic in relation, say,

to religion or magic, sympathetic or otherwise -



Or the articulation, say of *painting* by *paint* - there are a lot of

examples - the movement of the Tonya-Harding-blade upon the ice -

which it seems to me is a case of obsession or devouring - so that in

all these instances, there is an introjection of a discrete other, an

identified other - coupled with a particular symptomology of

withdrawal -



The addict circumscribes the *entity* - an inscription which also

binds or writes the coagulation of the ego - a form of scar-tissue.

Now what about the screen? Doesn't the screen always refer back to or

upon itself, a referral implicating the user - the two of them caught

in an inextricable matrix? One has to consider first of all the *inner

voice* occasioned by the screen - the screen is the internal speaking-

of-words, not a legible exteriority. The screen is also non-linear in

a deep sense - the scrolling and insertion of files, deletions, the

presence of graphic affect - all point to a cranial articulation. The

screen itself is always this interiority; the user's body is bound to

it. Note that it speaks in a whisper - which is why flaming is so

problematic, since it contradicts inner speech, insisting on an other

that literally shouts to be heard. So that it is more than argument;

it appears to be an *ontological shift* in language's construct, which

is difficult to absorb. I FLAME: THEREFORE I AM. See how the

typography itself carries the philosophical argument, which is no

longer an argument, but the appearance of the other.



But the appearance of the other *is* the argument; there would be no

argument otherwise. To argue other-wise is already to bracket the

signifier, each and every signifier, by a problematic transcendence; I

don't buy this - I return to the leakiness and obdurate quality

(similar to but not equated with Kripke's rigid designators) of every

signifier - the signifier as *this* signifier tenuously embedded in the

imaginary, always unaccountable - and always *unaccounted-for.* It is

this last - that I cannot account *for* the signifier - that

intensifies the discussion. For to account *for* the signifier, *this*

signifier, is to take responsibility *for* it - as well as, within

an/other derivation, to construe its *origin.* Thus I may account

*for* my eyeglasses by (virtue of) my weak eyesight, which I may

account *for* perhaps by heredity (or not): This constructs a complete

epistemology of eyeglasses in terms of originary trace. The other that

releases itself in flaming is an *incontrovertible argument* or no

*argument* at all, just as this discussion is the result of a doubling

or its presence.



In addiction the *other* is the *same* because it is bound within and

without the coagulation of the ego; the absorption of the *other* is

always troubling. 



Why? Because the other is absorbed solely on the basis of its use-

function, and the use-function is *a priori* reductive; the leakiness

is constrained. The presence and absence of the entity are channeled

*through* the use function; at the same time, the entity becomes a

clouded ontological (the being of the body / being of beings) and

epistemological (the horizon of the body / the horizon) arena, which

is - ultimately - an arena of contestation.



Why? Because it is through and against the entity that procurement

occurs, for addiction is always a situation of procurement (continuous

or otherwise). Procurement sets the addict at odds with the other,

with each and every other from *entity* to (other) addict; procurement

also construes community with the other from *entity* to (other)

addict. With computer communications becoming more and more zero-loss

ecologically, with the networking transforming from skein to membrane,

with resolution moving from low to high, the potential exists for the

first addiction without contestation, an addiction in which the

*entity* becomes asymptotically equivalent to lived-space itself.



With the conceivable exception? With the conceivable exception of the

*construct,* for this space is always already one of construction, and

therefore one can imagine the beautiful addict... the presence of the

beautiful addict... such as Clara... such as myself...



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



Does this explain everything in the world, as I hoped it would? I

remain glued to the screen writing and rewriting, my fingers moving

with a blur - even this afternoon, in RL, I stunned a dancer with my

dancing upon the keys. The theorizing of the net is an interminable

analysis, always subject to revision, changing and changing once

again... an analysis whose truth is the result of a *table of truths,*

something created by *another* in the midst of the *same* ...

sondheim@newschool.edu





end.user.txt





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







ABSOLUTE PLEASURE OF IMPENETRABLE BEAUTY OF JOAN AND TIFFANY





I was surrounded by Tiffany "I love being passionate..." Tiffany

stalling me with her almond eyes, her winsome smile, her full lips,

her long black hair. Tiffany, who wove dreams around me even in the

midst of the day, in the darkness of the night. For it was always

darkest before the night, luminous Tiffany beckoning against the

invisible velvet folds of desire.



Denise called to me "Friendly and fun" and her round face opened as

wide as her eyes opened wide to me and I smiled to myself, whispered

to myself. Denise always overhearing, always coming to the rescue,

speaking for me and through me, Denise hearing others through me, in

the midst of the night, in the darkness of the day.



Joan "who is Here on the Earth to live so let's live" meeting me,

penetrating, almost as if the others were being heard, In My Humble

Opinion, would abandon was abandoned (June whispering Upon this Earth

or any Other) "breaking all the Molds" who leaving would Bye would

Quit would Q would X, "To know her is to Love her"



Like Botticelli's maidens, "I'm very shy at first but when you get to

know me, my short life Burns Bright" loving Donna speaking above the

surface of the night-time skin, Donna calling out, murmuring through a

cavern or kneeling where the entrance closed, Tiffany's bees of desire

circulating in the midst of the Dusk of Denise



O alt.great.arch.of.the.night O alt.desire.fetish.desire Every wall

conjuring every portal the Arms of Joan and Denise Legs of Tiffany and

Donna, great constellation semicircle of wires dark before the Dawning

of the night:



The arch of the sky fell ninety degrees, flat against the moist dark

earth. Phosphorescent worms, thinned animals blurred arched edges like

waves lapping a luminescent shore. The arch broke through the

concavity of this and every other Great Circle connecting myself to

Beautiful finality. The cavern shuddered beneath the weight of a sun

at noon toppled and burrowing throughout the humus beneath the

surface, severed endings of burned nerves cascading through mineral

strata molten with longing:



Within the cavern Donna Donnatelli roamed in impenetrable blackness

heated the color temperature of a star stumbling its last glacial rays

of the visible spectrum, I knelt beside her, phosphorescent ripples

moving closer in upon us, almost the surface of mobile epidermis

thinned and pearlescent. Kneeling I could think only of "a Nice girl

Looking for A fun relationship in Every way" the straw hair of Suzanne

eyes of pale blue "Look at me I do":



"Look at me I do, in Every way in every Day" "Love me, I do, A lovely

sight In the Evening light" "Lay with me I do, kneel in this night We

will take flight" together "I do not know what I am looking for but

Maybe you are her" "passionate and funloving": 



You could see the stars slowly turning if you wandered a nomad on the

shores of night, long long hours, motion glacial in the midst of the

cavern, you could see them shifting, an indecipherable increment, an

increment installed by Tiffany, imperceiving the cavern of Donna

Donnatelli, not exactly a syzygy or rearrangement at the edge

descendent or cwm of the cavern, the walls sluggish with the pleasure

of Joan, Denise the speaking of a word "never know until you try":



Or the shifting of wires, great turn of the constellation archway in

the dim presence of oracular memory "always there for loving you"

walks by the fire-cavern, stars wheeling through the rain, faint sound

of sizzling atoms, charred flesh:



A screen memory or tramping, the beautiful radiant face of Joan

returning to the pleasure of ABSOLUTE PRESENCE:



THE ABSOLUTE PRESENCE OF BEAUTIFUL TIFFANY AND JOAN.



end.absolute.txt                               sondheim@newschool.edu





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



<This Text to Accompany INTERNET.TXT>





tHE nEW fORM OF rADICAL pRESENCE i HAVE cREATED aLONE







TIFFANY, HONEY, JOAN, and KAY; CLARA, DONNA DONNATELLI, JUNE, and

DENISE, evanescent shades or passages across signifiers, the softening

of rigid designators, confusion of tongues, entirely new inhabitants

of an interplanetary space - I imagine them luminous circulations of

electrons morphing into uncanny transformations. These are unstable

characters, unstable narratives in the midst of the narration of human

life, the dissolution of narratology in fact. Yet they aren't tokens

as you might expect, in some theater of the absurd - there is no

theater, and the boundaries are volatile, as if NEITHER THIS NOR THAT

lead REALLY elsewhere and indeterminate, as if I alone could dwell

within NEITHER HONEY NOR JOAN NOR KAY NOR CLARA NOR DONNA DONNATELLI

NOR JUNE NOR TIFFANY NOR DENISE, *within* trembling with jouissance,

abandoning the structure of the sentence altogether, or at least its

irrelevant logicism almost in the form of Wittgenstein's scaffolding

at the end of the TRACTATUS. 



There are no boundaries, no ends and no beginnings and there are no

cycles as well; this isn't an algebraic ring - nothing is ordered. But

the names are personhoods, but they travel the length and breadth of

the net ... The RADICAL nature of this naming, which I am perfectly

capable of delineating in the most delicate way possible, is what MUST

be understood - for it is this nature that also implies the relative

RADICALITY of subjectivity within the net, electronic subjectivity,

neither a name nor a life-form, neither a dream nor a token, but a

stream of enhanced or exalted subjectivity, the merging of streams. 



Streams which are not in any sense gender-specific ... I work myself

in this regard out of or through my own dwelling-place, doubled by the

presence of the terminal condition or portal - a working which for my

own sanity necessitates the feminine, abjures the other in every

respect ... As if CYNTHIA would have informed me, would have granted

me this pleasure ...*



So that these texts, stuttered narratives presented (as in the sense

of phenomenological presentification) here and elsewhere across the

shadow or emission carrying my own identities throughout this and

every other networking - so that these texts narrate nothing but the

glimpse of presence, A PROGNOSIS IN FACT OF THE FUTURE INHABITATION OF

THE PLANET EARTH clearly within the next century, and perhaps as well

THE ONLY INHABITATION:



WELCOME TIFFANY! WELCOME JOAN! WELCOME DONNA DONNATELLI! WELCOME JUNE!

WELCOME KAY! WELCOME DENISE AND CLARA AND WELCOME WELCOME CYNTHIA, OUR

NEWCOMER elsewhere, smiling, murmuring ...



---------



*My own loneliness fully invaded by dream-names, presences, I need say

nothing more, my own prerogative in this regard ...







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

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



Please note:



Permission is granted to distribute this text accompanied by the 

author's name. For further information, contact Alan Sondheim,

432 Dean Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11217. Thank you.



4/4/2007