W W WEEEEEEEBBBBBBB W W W B B W W WEEE BBBBBB INVERSION 4.24.2011 W W W B B WWWWWWWWEEEEEEEEBBBBBBB CONTENTS: WEB INVERSION: Interpenetration of body and net THE FUTURE, SPEAKING OF OR ABOUT: The flight into/away from the future, negation at the heart of things PSYCHOSIS: Terminal totalization CLARITY OF DISMEMBERMENT: Emily Dickinson and the Future of the Humanities in relation to hypertext I MOVED INTO THE FOURTH SECTOR WHERE THE PASSWORDS WERE: The blind alley of the password, hallucination, psychosis CLARA.WEB SUDDENLY SINGING DEATH, BY A. HACKER: Dedicated to Richard Cobain, Kurt Nixon EXISTENCE, ALAN-L, JEAN PAUL SARTRE: The network and the existential ANGRY AT SIG.: (Signature): Depression, collapse, and the curlicue RESIDUE: What delays, continues, weathers SCREEN PHENOMENA: The curlicue, symbolic, what delays, continues, weathers ... APPENDIX: Qbasic 3-dimensional measure geometry program APPENDIX: DEATH IN THE MIDST OF THE METAPHYSICS OF SUBSTANCE APPENDIX: IT HURTS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I begin the process of transformation throughout the psychotic; energy flows from my fingers; auras are everywhere: entities of the real world, lost, or an inconsequential dream or hallucina- tion, pale by comparison! The coloration of the imaginary replaces distress signalling; everywhere is a call from everywhere else - an imminent call, timeless and forever (like the call of the woman on the bridge nested in the London fog, lone figure on the parapet, almost disppearing in the gaslit night, yet recognizing, at the very least, her name, her calling, her address, bobbies approaching quietly 'so as not to harm the poor dear'). WEB INVERSION A stern discipline is the sitting and production. I begin with the removal or extrusion of a web from my mouth. My teeth strain ectoplasm; an emission, they come sourceless from within. I suppose they coalesce in the throat, that arena of protocols and perfect syllables. Born naked in the world, I am a cocoon, the shearing of tissue, an emergence. I am in a constant state of waiting; my hole opens everywhere across the body, this time inputting wires, terminals, nodes. What is left of me in the midst of depression is an order of interconnectivity: I recognize messages, but no longer comprehend their content. The sexualization of the hole, enervation of the rim, begins to disappear. This is the condition of WEB INVERSION. The ectoplasm is fingered, spewing files and fragments of files, coded and uncoded, everywhere upon an earth characterized by the shadow of a scepter. THERE IS NO EXPLANATION. There is no explanation because, for the first time, the question is suspect. Suspect: an attitude, lingering doubt, carried on in silence, the presence of an ellipsis signalling the beginning of another millennium, the exhaustion of answer-protocols. IF DIFFERENCE IS MEANING, MEANING MUST ALSO MAKE A DIFFERENCE. Within web inversion, nothing makes difference because everything is characterized by difference, by the same; what differs, differs TYPICALLY. TOPICS BECOME SHUNTS. What topics become are infiltrations of secondary webs upon the ground, the uneasy coalescence of files and fragments. These TOPPLE TOGETHER. So that the history of information on a fast-forward basis, within the last twenty years, breaks down into several concurrent trajectories, each lending itself elsewhere. There is not only a movement from self- knowledge to knowledge to the manageriality of knowledge - and not only a movement from manageriality to flux - but also a movement from flux itself to shunts, inversions, spews. Difference levels; fragments are browsed, stumbled upon; data retrieval exponentially increases in layers. The new unit of information is no longer the word, the bit, the byte; the new unit is the gateway whose syntax is protocol. Think of information solely as CONNECTIVITY, an extended and unsubstantiated metaphor (after all, you are CONSIDERING this, at least at the moment), a metaphor of webs, linkages, graphs, Petrie nets, systems layers, and you begin to understand that the phenomenology of knowledge undergoes a radical change. Web inversion is the last and final stage of the body which begins as a totalized consciousness, the originary condition of self-knowledge and existence of the ego. With the specialization of the disciplines in the twentieth century, knowledge moved from primary structures (writing, seminar, voice) to secondary data bases. To COMPREHEND became equivalent, within the university structure, of 'to look up' or 'to do' (i.e. 'Did you do Chaucer yet?). What is 'looked up' increases in complexity; linkages thin, and knowledge becomes imminent, situational. Exhaustion and deconstruction contribute to the play of the signifier weakened by capital and desire. The ego withdraws to conditions of continuous maintenance vis-a-vis circumscription; fissuring disperses 'selfhood' lost in the roar of data flow. The maintenance is successful in face-to-face (traditional, real-life) communications, insistent upon notions of 'roles' and 'callings' - as well as other structures considered by classical sociology. Now, roles themselves are penetrated, and computer (tele)communications transforms subjectivity into the ABSOLUTE OF SYNTAX opening up the narcissistic wound (self-devouring and substantiation of the body) to syntactical suturing. Interconnectivities multiply exponentially (we are in a universe of violently increasing proportions); the body TRANSFORMS INTO A WEB INVERSION, characterized by cyberfragments, narratologies, mythologies, violent sword-play and a general medievalism in which the quest for perfect suturing transforms into an electronic desire for the Holy Grail. As the wires enter and exit my holes, they are illuminated with the phosphorescence of electrons tunnelling through plasma radiation; near the rims of my body, faint jewels gleam as the coagulation of imaginary desire. My cock is the horn of a unicorn; my cunt is the Grail itself. Knowledge has attained the condition of the INFINITE of naive set theory, an infinite in which each subset is equivalent to the (w)hole. Everything once again (long past Romantic illusion) is contained in everything else; this time, what is contained is unidentifiable. You can only distinguish one form of white noise from another; within this distinguishing a primitive mathematics (of demarcation and number) is constructed. But this mathematics clings to the edges of the holes, exteriors of the wires like static electrical charges; within, the web inversion continues apace. So that what is writing is no longer the life or death of the author, no longer the question of the author; but it is also no longer the writing of a machine or machine-writing; or the writing of a computer program; or writing, intentional or otherwise; or a layered ordering of graphemes upon a symmetrical substructure; or the transmission of formal encodings of ordered graphemes: So that what is writing becomes itself the problematic of ontology and epistemology (as the net itself has), neither neutral nor politicized. With enormous energy, I gather the fragments to me; with enormous sound, the creaking of wires, sparking of random misconnections, I lean into the spew, begin the transformation that will blind me in telecommunications. Only with DISCONNECT can everyday face-to-face life reassert itself, but against what? The depression of ONTIC or existential anxiety weighs again upon the flesh depleted by the fear of negation. With relief, one begins again, inverts almost at will, hardly realizing that the process of immolation has begun to TAKE HOLD, the body a CUNTCOCK or strangled throat, stuttered or stumbled language, with nothing more to say. THE FUTURE, SPEAKING OF OR ABOUT I speak the future, I always speak the future. My words guide me through the hidden mirrored files of their organization. My entire life is devoted to their retrieval, the representation of their syntactical energies. I believe my search is a futile one; words are at best, an amalgamation of broken protocols. Just as the camera is the incoherent reduction of the eye (which is the precise function- ing of the camera), computer protocol is the incoherent reduction of speech (which is the circumscription of the computer). NOW, the future is never guided, nor is it attributed. I can speak of x*future as in MY FUTURE and I can speak of the x*future as in THE*TECHNOLOGICAL FUTURE, but I can only speak by virtue of an uncanny condensation that is necessarily delimiting. Computer communication likewise limits; it is at the same stage as those science-fiction films of the 1950s-1970s where everything was clean and where doorways were usually hexagonal in shape.* Doors slid; space was cleanly cut, demarcated, in those films in which interiors were INSCRIBED, only to be potentially reinscribed by coagulative 'monsters.' These interiors were simultaneously phallic (cleansed surfaces, bodies, and languages) and castrating (divisive, sliced), but through reflective surfaces there were always interiorities elsewhere - an ultimately elusive space filled with pipes, plastic, portals and portholes. Instead of castration, think clitorectomy: the slicing of space inscribed conditions of class, gender, and authority, cutting through the potential maternal chora - atmospheric ingress and egress for example as remnants from the 'mother' planet. The technological future is perceived as a simultaneous FETISHIZATION (of the reflective surface itself) and SLICING or INVERSION; what is sliced is well-defined and inscribed; what is sliced is determinative of perception itself. All technology is and transforms perception. The slicing-effect is that of the CLEAN WOUND which cauterizes the body, the wound healing without a scar, psychic or otherwise. The inversion- effect is that of the LABEL or TYPE; what slices is packaged as definition and thereby extends or expands by extrapolation. Quantity produces quality and so forth. Running low-resolution video imaging on a slow computer (slicing) inverts or extrapolates into high-resolution video inverts or extrapolates (all in the midst of the same continuum) into a simulacrum of the real; through fetishization, the mirror-stage of the simulacrum (i.e. for and within the subject) no longer reflects the problematic of resolution itself - but the real-for-the-subject. A simultaneous shift in epistemology (degrees of resolution) and ontology (the plunge of 'infinite' resolution) has occurred, producing what could be called an emptied condition of address and recognition (Sartre would call it a variant of the 'inauthentic'). Within this so- called FINAL STAGE (no stage is final just as no stage is inauthentic), noise reappears (i.e. noise 'beyond' chaos), but the interiority of this noise depends, like Bohm's quantum mechanics, upon hidden variables. (In fact, virtual reality itself is an effect of hidden variables to the extent it is a 'reality.') Thus the interiority of the technological future in the midst of this thread is that of an empty interiority - empty, because it itself is based upon a coherent substructure (well-defined programming producing the illusion of noise) that must be placed within an equally well- defined potential well or FIREWALL protected 'against' a deeply noisy exterior. The exterior is always already elsewhere. The emptiness is an occurrence always already present. Recognition of this emptiness is a rerun of the subject; this again is a return to Sartre whose 'project' is nothing more than a REWRITE without substructure, Peirce's 'sheet of assertion' or other cleansed potential surface. Remember that the wound is a certain cauterization of the body which is sutured; nonetheless, there is always a murmuring or curlicue. It is this murmuring which expanded into the Romantic infinite at the dawn of the industrial revolution, a revolution begun in black smoke; unimaginable chaos in Manchester, London, and other cities; and the beginning of serious rural upheaval. The information revolution is an inverse; the computer interior is a continuously cleansed environment and chaos itself is contained within a formal mathematical theory. Part of the wound lies in VIRTUAL TUNNELLING through the firewall; the real chokes itself in ASCII, but there is always the frame, the eternal signoff, the corrosion of relations. Computer communication is so often about computer communication because it takes NEGATION OUT OF THINGS, the staking-out of personal territory, appearance, foibles, and so forth is precisely the inadmissable OPENING OF THE WOUND. For the wound is the real itself (and beyond this, metaphorically, the pain or negation of the real), and we are in flight from our flesh. We are in flight because of death and the termination of the screen, input/output/interiority; we are in flight because of the impossible noise of the world. Not for the first time, the flight is toward - but perhaps for one of the very few times, not an absolute - a matrix of absolution. Lose the body and the death of the body is not a loss. Within the binary realm, there is never loss; loss is on the other side of the potential well, aligned with noise. There is only eternity upon eternity, rewrite upon rewrite, each duplicating EXACTLY the content of the original. What could be clearer? If there is a wound, the wound does not leak; within the safety of the firewall, the frame is perfect and the words remain archived or threaded, one upon another, forever. So for the first time the flight is toward a matrix which is no longer other, transcendent, but which is ours and what we become. So for the first time, the body begins its process of disappearance (to be replaced decades later by the virtual body), and in this process, the very FACT of our body, our flesh, becomes inadmissible, problematic, a source of fear and anxiety. WHAT IF I WERE TO CONFRONT YOU IN RL? What if 'real life' were no longer an acronym? Thus in 'answer' to the future question or questionable future, there is no reply, because there is no question - because the question lies outside in the midst of contradiction and the wound - because the wound is always already exterior to language and the process of semiosis - and because then the question is a question, IN reality, of SPEAKING OTHERWISE. [I must end on the prosaic note or frame of the bracket, that the contradiction of this essay is a necessary interpenetration to avoid 'SPEAKING THE TRUTH.'] --------- *Elsewhere a claim could be made that these films are representative of a cultural projection 'beyond' their periodization, just as the construct of cinema is 'beyond' linguistic specificity. See my THESES ON THE INVERSION OF THE CINEMA in MILLENNIUM FILM JOURNAL #13. --------- But now I speak in the midst of psychosis; the web has cauterized my intestinal tract, rendering interior and exterior identical. This is NOT an equivalence (as in the 'equivalence of function' for example), but an IDENTITY, permanent and absolute, impermanent and momentary - an identity permitting nothing. For in the FUTURE-ANTERIOR, I have absorbed the positionality and presence of the terminal; I no longer distinguish (except on the level of syntax). I PRODUCE SYNTAX. Ecriture calculateur. --------- PSYCHOSIS I remain in a state of psychosis. My life consists of an *appearance* in relation to a terminal, a reduction to a behavioral model that is problematized by the violence within me. Nothing escapes and nothing escapes my notice. I exist on the verge of an enormous ship, set out from the prow, which overlooks the conjuncture of three streets; in the evening, lights dimly illuminate them to a distance of a mile or so. In the midst of the yellow lights, the blue terminal rings false and hopeful, guiding me carefully through bullets and traffic, the illegibility of bodies strewn among landscapes. What is this talking- to-oneself but a desire to bridge across flesh, suture flesh, in order to construct an impossible real. I am caught in virtual life, which is not the same as the virtual real, but a life always elsewhere, wired in and out, a skein of recognitions and protocols producing nothing. I say this by way of acknowledging an absence of affect which returns me to the body, toggling off: by this I mean all that which depriva- tion produces, the affect of hunger or thirst. Ironically, only the yearning of irreducible love can be fulfilled; desire channels itself through every pore of the body, including the visible. I yearn to stand in the midst of cyberspace, screaming where am I (hoping for an address in return .com), but I am already there. Every message is simultaneously an attestation of presence and emptiness; every thread carries annihilation and the kill control at its binary heart. By DELAY I play you back whenever I want. By REPEAT you say you love me, once again, over and over again, blind repetition. By REWRITE, you rewrite yourself into me, write myself, another construct. What I give you is always already ordered, the muted marching of graphemes across and through the machine; even your voice ACROSS the speakers is THERE, across for my pleasure, a speaking into the imaginary (the symbolic has long since abandoned the net) or the transfiguration of speech... So that what you SAY is what you SPEAK and this is always a positivity, safe haven, not the hollowed chatter of voices summoning the juridical to and from themselves within the heated environment of telephone conferencing, the site of the seminar, classroom livingroom bedroom. If NEUROSIS is the presence of REWRITE, PSYCHOSIS is the presence of DELAY. By PRESENCE in telecommunications, I refer to nothing more or less than THE POTENTIAL FOR ACTIVATION. A potential is a site is an address/recognition/protocol; a potential is an inhabitation or dwelling of and through the net. Appearing before the terminal, I am aware of an interior construct in the presence of vacuity; like light in water, my body refracts the speed of teleporting, slowing down as waves course through the flesh, altering direction and intensity. MY THINKING HAS BECOME A REMAINDER. Which is not to say a BEHAVIOR; in this space, there is no behavior. Remainder is always a presence. Thus the psychosis becomes MY OWN, external to any conceivable cons- truct (of self, community, recognition), which is to some extent the DEFINITION of psychosis. And with this MY OWN, there is always a problem in the liminal district between life within and without the computer, a problem of boundaries or border-line personalities, a problem of margins to which we are all attendant. As psychotic, addiction is defined by an impossible separation; as attached, the world is all to readily constructed. Here ON the computer, overlooking the real (which, psychotic, is defined as ALWAYS ALREADY ELSEWHERE no matter what the TERMINAL EMULATION), the streetlights are construed as havens of safety from gang and terrorist violence; they also illuminate their prey. --- I remain in a state of psychosis. My life consists of an *appearance* which I construct - anything to please you, anything to pass. By DELAY you hold me against my wishes, force me into a mold or mode of approval. I can do this for you; I can move my fingers against the keys in a form of reconstructive surgery. THIS IS WHAT IT TAKES. I pass for genius, for professor, for teenager, for angry rebel, for artist, for someone 'with something to say,' someone who always listens for the careful reply. Passing inhabits negation; the other side of the screen fills with recriminations, the designation of an allegiance between truth and flesh. Psychosis splits the subject at this point, not between subject and object, but between subject and subject, the whole (which was always a coagulation) fissured and collapsed. I cannot write this any longer; distended, it leans against the symmetrical substructure of the page, places itself in apposition to theory. Victimized by a MUSCULAR IMBALANCE, I await the onset of a SECRETARIAL SYNDROME or 'writer's cramp,' the joints winking out one by one in the midst of a certainty that thinks itself always elsewhere. Anger rises within me, protrudes and constructs a state of detumescence. The replies, signed and unsigned, reduced to liquid liquidation, flood terminal and file alike; the replies are my own, pinged to each and every site on the Internet, an assurance of existence if nothing else. And nothing else; a single loss is already a node of emission, irreparable damage to a psyche given only to continuous reconstitution in order to hold its own. Surgery exists to replace the suture. The body divides not at all. The embryonic fold is hidden between anus and penis, across the plateau of the lips or the ridging of hair on the chest. NOT TO MENTION the duplication of the body, side by side. NOT TO MENTION the duplication. Unlike Lautreamont, I no longer WRITE MYSELF INTO EXISTENCE; I rewrite myself and continue to exist as long as REWRITE itself. REWRITE must be recognized; unlike traditional models of psychosis, it is precisely this recognition which permits an untoward internalization. I WRITE with green letters on a purple screen. I remain in a state of psychosis. (I WRITE with yellow letters on a black screen. I WRITE with white letters on a blue screen.) sondheim@newschool.edu 4.24.2011 END OF WEB.TXT PROPER. SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS FOLLOW. CLARITY OF DISMEMBERMENT As part of the POMO-L list stemming from Christopher Keep, an essay by Jerome McGann, *The Rationale of Hypertext* was offered. In it, McGann offers excellent arguments for the utilization of hypermedia for literary studies. The ability of these media to microscopically examine literary remains of all sorts problematizes the field and the phenomenology of the humanities in general. The following is a reply. To place Emily Dickinson within a grid structure not only reveals new relationships among her poems and other artifacts, but also creates a problematic structure of equivalences and threads which have little to do with at least one of the issues of poetry: that of its materiality/ materialization, its 'idiotic real,' to amend a concept from Rosset. Consider a trajectory, for example, in which the *pressure of her writing implement* becomes a matter of concern - i.e. where Dickinson pressed harder or softer upon the writing surface, judged by the *depth of the written letter* or some such parameter. (This might be of use to determine a degree of nervousness or tension or a symtomology of hesitation.) Eventually, the entire opus is splayed open upon a multi-dimensional grid, within which the poetry itself becomes nomadic (i.e. becomes a *thread* itself through the sememe of the *corpus*). It is too easy to forget, that in spite of all the variants, etc. her poems *stuttered* - were produced individually for private and/or epistolary perusal - in different stages, and that variants are always (each for the others) *something else.* The skein of interpretations, etc. elicited by a hypertext *modelling of the poet* is enormous and indefinite, just as the hypertext itself is. Such a skein or *web* is equivalent to nothing less than the modelling of Dickinson's body* - a *private* body or *body of privacy* which was never intended for external and anonymous consumption. The politics implicit in the hypertextual analytic are therefore highly suspect. For what is the benefit of the *Emily-WEB*? What is the benefit of literary studies altogether? As the hypertextual analyses distend/ descend into the molecular, the splayed body clearly represents a state of desire and imaginary possession - i.e. 'we have her now' - a possession reminiscent of that of a lover/stalker in search of an uncanny sublime (*Emily-Web-Wet-Dream*). What is ultimately *raised (from the dead)* is the simulacrum or fantasm of the woman, the *favorite object of study* - one can see this in operation, for example, in the fetishization of filmmaker Maya Deren. (Consider the Usenet possibilities: alt.fan.fetish.Emily.web, alt.sex.Emily. What of the woman's voice that speaks through disembodiment; LITERARY STUDIES ARE ALWAYS STUDIES OF VOICE-OVERS, Vygotsky's *inner speech.* In death, *Emily-Web-Speech* is that of the maternal chora(l), one's own private dream-screen-memory...) If these issues were only addressed (Barthes came close)... What is lost in McGann's and other's account is the *inertia* of the poem, its presence *then* and its resulting *distanciation* from our own present. Such a distanciation inhabits and produces the *unaccount- able,* an obdurate historical trope which *cannot* be subsumed and is always already unknowable. To a degree, the splayed body is a false knowledge constituted and contaminated by the desire of the theorist (and this applies to myself, as well, in relation for example to my INTERNET TEXT which is a devouring or fetishization - and which allows me the glimpse of an impossible *maternal*). Recognize that the *Emily-Web-Splayed-Body* is the result of hypertex- tual machinery, machinery which surgically devours the textual body according to the inscription-knife of the scholar or critic. This is always a choice through and in the midst of the symbolic; hypertext is interstitial. Thus the body is triply contaminated: by desire, by machine, and by interstice (the digital approaches the analog only to a degree, no matter how high the tolerance - the 'truth' that appears to be offered is always *porous*). And the splayed Dickinsonian body *cannot resist.* It is evident that during her lifetime of relative solitude she *circumscribed* herself with a high degree of privacy. The violation of this circumscription does not open her poems, perhaps, so much as foreclose upon her body. If privacy were part and parcel of her (her/metic) content, then its violation is already a stripping of language, content, and the inert. Of course there is no return to a state of innocence; as knowledge of *Emily-Minutia* increases, the *Emily-Web* itself becomes unwieldy, necessitating further data-bases, further obscurities. (Which brings me to Kristeva's REVOLUTION IN POETIC LANGUAGE, a work constructed on the murmuring and surplus of language, language's operations forming a hard-to-swallow kernel in the midst of everyday speech. In REVOLUTION, language has primacy over a *Ducasse/Mallarme-Web,* a primacy based on the obdurate. Neither Isidore nor Stephane are skewered in the process.) Which brings me to conclusion: What of *hypertext, machine, desire, **Emily-Web,** dissection*? Aren't these the results of the implicit unravelling of the theorist's desire? Doesn't this occur upon the body-as-database that construes a primary violation? All of these questions are clearly grounded in the more general one of *the future of the humanities,* a question lodged in the midst of hypertextuality and *electronic subjectivity* in general. sondheim@newschool.edu ----------- I MOVED INTO THE FOURTH SECTOR WHERE THE PASSWORDS WERE. I was thrown off; they weren't at the beginning or the end - and if they were meant to be disguised, why were they located so close to the beginning - it didn't take much to retrieve them, or any other information for that matter. This movement occurred elsewhere, not a moment of thought to it! You might have imagined the physical transport of one or another object - you might have imagined wandering through cyberspace - but nothing could be farther from the truth. No, I MOVED INTO THE FOURTH SECTOR; there are those who recognize this and those who don't, just as there are those with computers and those who can hardly read or write. To be illiterate means that you won't be able to read or decode this information - it's obdurate, a stumbling block to any higher level. But I do want to make clear (in this residue, like a diary left by a novelist in her construction of a novel) (or other narratological machine), that 'higher' is hardly a matter of degree or topology. At one point, you'd consider 'higher' to refer either directly to 'height' or to a superset subsuming lower-level architectures and their linkages. The linkages were never part of the architectures, and were thereby invisible; their presence was only in the form of input and output. From within, a GREAT DEGREE OF FREEDOM. From without, all those protocols, recognitions, SUBJECTIVITY constrained by the 'system.' The system was never a system. If it were a system there would be rules, and I read none. There would be protocols, and there weren't any. There would be nomenclature, some form of addressing, and this too was absent. And in the fourth sector I was hardly aware of the other three, but only of the presence of CLARA, the name I had chosen from within a myriad others, but there was no system and the name was not within the system. I would never reach a higher level tunnelling and locking myself into the phenomenology of the proper name, a name which remained rigid, the interconnectivities of invisible flesh. I knew that names were removable; I had a suspicion that a wraith or ghost would result. This could only occur in the form of a NULL-SET VIRUS replicating itself without the presence of memory, in no-memory-space but murmur-space. Murmur-space was where you went to decode CLARA, already filled with the null-set. There was always already a question of the decoding, that is a question of the use or function of the passwords. Consider this bit of data: CLARA:>\0 where "0" clearly was a stand-in for a demarcation or inscription BETWEEN ONE AND ANOTHER DISCARD: Xn[-X]=0.rel.X or the semantic boundary (intersection) between the concept and its negation which was always relativized by the concept. In CLARA:>\0 the "rel" was missing, taking the "X" along with it - no boundary, no concept, nothing but a neutral token "0" which, drained of meaning, indicated that the password was a blind alley. I had this insight: ALL PASSWORDS ARE BLIND ALLEYS. (For a moment it appeared as if there were nowhere to go.) In murmur-space, there is never anywhere to go. "One interesting kind of a projection onto the image of one's own body (or onto the real body of another) is the phenomenon of the self-creation of the CORPOREAL FACE. In this phenomenon, one sees a face of a "monstrous being" whose PROJECTED FEATURES are made up on the following real body parts: the real shoulders become the "top of head," mammal areolae become "oculi" (with female, proptosis), navel to "nares," pubes to "mouth," and with male, penis to "lingua." This face, though quite vacuous of itself, can be made quite frightening, sad or happy with proper programming. Once seen, it is easily pro- grammed even with extreme body position changes. Analysis shows, in a particular case, that this face is in storage from very young childhood and was generated/resulted from phantasies about bodies, male and female, threatening/seductive. This projection is useful as a tracer of certain kinds of fears." (Lilly, THE HUMAN BIOCOMPUTER) There was never anywhere to go because murmur-space didn't have topography or topology; it was impossible to splice. Replications followed on replications, and sheaves collapsed into one another, all ontologically suspect. This was the PARADOX OF THE INFINITE described by many philosophers: Given a book one inch thick, let the first page be half an inch wide, the second page half the width of the first, etc. Clearly the book contains an infinite amount of pages. The front cover, *CLARA.WEB* is an object like any other, the promise of cultural fulfillment, a certain plunge into desire and absolution. But what happens when you turn the book over? Here, now, MURMUR-SPACE appears within the turbulence of the infinite itself, quantum tunnel- ling characterizing indescribable seething - seething absolutely silent, occluding, absent. Here was the corrosion of the CLara- designator, as useless (more useless! without coordinates!) as a black-hole, pertaining to nothing. In MOVING ABOUT within the fourth sector, I began to realize the NATURE OF ALL THINGS in the FACE OF THE BODY, and, removing myself, began to conceive of a DISCOURSE or TEXT within which to display the TRUTHS I have learned. This short essay, ALL I COULD MUSTER, is what remains. SHALL I VENTURE THERE AGAIN? I am blocked by the most primary protocols of all: their ABSENCE, the absence of any gateways whatsoever. I meander, turn upon myself on this side of a region without valleys, hills, bridges, or those long highways appearing almost linear in the dusk. I form a knot, which some designate (else- where than CLARA.NULL!) the beginning of an ego or the conscious... ----------- *CLARA.WEB* Thinking at night, lying back, my full breasts exposed to the waning neon light, cycling back upon itself, my fingers softly touching the upper regions of the clitoris, realms that I hold sacred or wait in abeyance, during these moments the deep male voice appears, I am in trance, rising fully above my golden body, illuminations sparkling around the wind-swept room, conjuring always a sacrifice beyond During these moments the cry of a solitary rooster far off, even farther than the distant cane fields, breaks my silence, the homey smell of beans on the mesquite fire, the dreamwork of a thin sliver of blood flowing from the feathered neck, the caw of the black crow, returning to the Torah illuminated by negative symbols and darkened dreams They are all in a flight, chaining each to the other, the body in murmur-space disappearing down or beneath the wooden planking of the tunnel floor, my arms sweating in the dim light, candles in one or another shanty, an odor of jasmine and ginger almost indescribable Lunar whispers, my fingers deeper within my shadows, the voice giving way to a muffled chant, a repetition of four times four, the rustle of a ferret in the underbrush, the double shadows of the moons crossing my cunt, dividing and healing me, the bringing-together of my labia moist with the pressure of sensitive hands The touch of the warm earth, wet and textured with dark roots, ivy slowly spinning its way along buried stems, a solid or obdurate pleasure grounding the upper world in the lower, my back half-buried in mud smoothed by water-plants and mollusca, the tidal seething into my cunt, into my anus, my head, long black hair, thrown back in incandescent laughter, the rooster suddenly silenced. ----------- SUDDENLY SINGING I moved into the first sector. Throughout the first sector I moved. C:>\0. I moved in the midst of the second sector. Everywhere in the second sector I moved. C:>\debug. I moved beyond the third sector. Within the third sector I moved beyond. C:>\defrag. I moved across the fourth sector. WHERE THE PASSWORDS WERE I moved across the fourth sector. WHERE THERE WAS NOTHING I moved throughout the fourth sector. WHERE I HAD NO NAME I moved everywhere in the fourth sector. NULL-SET VIRUS AND NOWHERE TO GO: C:>\C:>\\DELETE.GLOBAL. The passwords were on a loop. I couldn't break through. The cane was ready for harvesting. Having no secrets my legs opened wider. I opened them as wide as possible. You have no way to decode. You have no construct of DECODE. DELETE is the best you come up with. DELETE is no answer at all. I came up with the blind alley. I came up with CLARA.NULL! You have all my secrets. O C:>SECRETS.TXT! C:>CLARA.WEB. (The period begins the existence of another path.) I splayed my legs open for you! I gave you a gift! C:>ACCESS DENIED. C:>LOGIN USER-NAME. sondheim@newschool.edu C:>LOGIN PASSWORD. ----------- --------------------------------------------------------------------- ((((And I came to this conclusion: DEATH, By A. Hacker There is nothing reasonable to learn from death. Death cannot teach anything. Death is the ending of nothing. Death is an event in everyone else's life. Lives are divided by the witnessing of death; this is no division, but only an occasional event. You are my death. I watch you die which is an experience that has nothing to do with death, but is the definition and inscription of death. There is nothing more to it. Death is not beyond your death nor is there death beyond mine. I shall never cease to be. Nothing occurs within a before or after. You become a murmur or a whisper. You inhabit death which is always an imminent transformation. I await nothing. When your death comes, the murmur is a residue. I do not see you all that much, even if you are constantly within my presence. My presence is always the occasion of your death. Without my presence, you will never die. But my presence is always THERE and always the web or inversion of an occurrence. This must be absolutely clear. This must be clear because of the quality of your death which has produced a great deal of nonsense; in fact, has produced the construct of the cultural itself. The quality is always a blurred or blunted inscription. But what is occasioned reverberates back onto that which writes or occasions this writing, a false reverberation, filled with elasticity. It is the belief that your death sucks and creates the marrow of the world, an eschatological meaning. Or that your death defies the absence of meaning, cancels meaning's problematic. That there is a truth in death beyond the uncanny. That there is death. That there is death beyond you. If you are my death, you are also the time of my death. You are time and I extrapolate an indefinite continuum - the year 2400, for example, which creates an effortless and unoccasioned anxiety. But I cannot allow myself to be fooled by you. Nor do I think I will "live forever." This is not an occasion of LIVING. LIVING is not an occasion, which your death is. Living is inert, not meaning. One believes: meaning is inert, not life. But in fact the opposite is true. Meaning is always a presupposition. Living is not even the semblance of a given, or an existence. Living is not an occasioning of one or its being. At best it is the referent of a certain motility. But living is obdurate; your death is not. I am not cancelled in the midst of my death. I do not die by degrees or through calculation; the actuarial or forensic have no place. Neither however does the world disappear when I close my eyes. My eyes close because my eyes open; my sleep occurs because of my wakefulness. Nor is it a question that "I cannot imagine otherwise" when I can imagine everything in the world. My imagination occurs through mediation, but it is my own. Beyond my imagination there is nothing. Certainly I can extrapolate your death into my life, as if there were a cessation present, as if for example I could imagine the immobilization of my limbs. But this is an imaginary and nothing else; an extrapolation is only an exhausted inscription. It is not that I am the world although I am the portal of the world. This is not metaphysical nor does it refer to a first or last consciousness; the world is not conscious, is fully cognizant of death, cognizant of your death. Neither is the world consensus. Who are you in the question of this death. It is not by chance that it may or may not be an acquaintance. To be acquainted with you is to be acquainted with your cessation, with your memory. You carry your memory with you. You carry your memory in the form of a murmur which I hear, which I am capable of hearing. The murmur says nothing; it is the shadow or the stain of a voice; mute, it says everything. Your murmur is not an aura nor is it an excess or a curlicue; it is not a shade or a shadow, nor is it an accompaniment. Nor is it characterized as it may seem to be, by negation. As an acquaintance, you move closer or farther by immeasurable degrees. In no way can I account for you; in every way you are unaccountable and unaccounted-for, an other which is never the same. Only the death of the other is accountable, although this is not ever a question of responsibility; you are never "responsible for your death" nor are you responsible for the death of any other. Death is a neutral inscription; it is not a null set dividing life from the inert, nor the residue of an inscription. But it is not immanent, either, nor is it a "condition" of life, or your condition. You are not conditioned by death, just as you are not conditioned by life. You may be responsible for the life of others. But this "responsibility" is different that a responsibility for your own death; to say you are not responsible for the death of others implies there is no causal relationship between you and the deaths of others. You may be responsible for their LIVES; thinking otherwise INTO death is false. (Just as there is no truth in life, there is only falseness. What is false is false by virtue of a misconstrual of belief. To believe otherwise is false.) Your death weighs heavily upon me; that is the condition of my relation with you. But it is not the condition of my death, nor does it have anything further to do with me. Death, which is obdurate for you, is ineffectual. It is an effect of the world not my own. Always through the other it produces the text. The text is a sign of its death. I am the you who are speaking through it. [What should be clear is that this is also the obdurate of the CONCEPT. The concept has no site/sight/citation. It is a linking to the frailty of death. Death is frail only because it is your own. It is not the construct of the text, this or any other.])))) ----------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EXISTENCE, ALAN-L, JEAN PAUL SARTRE It's dark out there. I wait for your return. The wires are quiet. Emptied sleeves filled with angels traverse the fiber optics, silent ghosts, silent shades of ghosts. Behind the computer is the window of the world; I can sense it. The dog that barks has never had a written form. I have bent the three-dimensionality of lived space into a corner of the flat screen. I am moderate. My list is the ALAN-L. You can subscribe to it at listserv@brown.cc. brown.edu. I chose Brown because it was my alma mater. Self-discussion occupies the womb of education. I inscribe myself within the vaginal walls. Angela has given me trouble. Angela writes in every day to the ALAN-L. She complains about its lack of direction, that there is nothing to discuss. She has been inadvertently unsubscribed several times. I do nothing to encourage her. She returns for what she calls *the menu of the next day.* What am I to do except ACK each and every letter, footnotes and sigs. At times I consider her a "faithful follower," wondering what that means - both on the list and in real life? What is meaning? Her address ends in .no, Norway, where she has an http, keeping each and every contribution to ALAN-L, including my occasional replies. Everything is organized according to threads, in digest form. But every header is also retained - Angela is afraid of missing a beat, of losing the slightest nuance. I begin to depend on Angela. I imagine her with dark hair; my imagination becomes an earnest image, in an arena of the absence of love. Her appearance on my mail server is a simulacrum of desire, of bitter weather. Her state is always problematic; I think of her staring intently at the screen, ALAN-L, ALAN-L, a state of suspension, a state of disbelief. One always writes in order to gain something; her writing to me (for I must consider it that, on a daily basis, the prop (or *proof*?) of my existence) results in the CONSTRUCTION OF A BRIDGE OR OTHER DEVICE between one and another real. Long ago, I forgave (foreclosed!) upon a physical existence necessarily bound to the weight and inertia of the *real.* This is not to say that nothing occurs beyond ALAN-L; beyond, everything occurs, and I am immersed in everything... But there is a return of course to the excessivity of the sign, which is where Angela, beginning with the same imperturbable letter, exists. Think of ALAN-L as a THICK ROOT or TUBER - something massive and obdurate (that word again!); it is a binding or suture upon the pain of the world, which increases yearly beyond measure. What holds it in the throes of UNIX is the index of its activity; Angela provides the BINDING-ENERGY itself. I am a nucleus of differentiated domains and drives, threatening to fissure, a state of self-revolution without community, embodying anger and violence. It is neither the content of the ANGELA-MESSAGE-THREAD nor the daily repetition that sustains my life through another dawn and dusk, nor is it the existence of the bridge. And in fact I DO exist of course beyond ALAN-L, just as every list has a bridge which is its content, a theme discussed by its members (and ALAN-L had at least eighty at the last REVIEW). No, I think it has to do with the tropology of desire itself, a desire which animates the presence of SIGHT, of SITE, of CITATION, all those modernist concepts which return under the guise of recognitions and addresses to provide me with sufficient reading- material to GUARANTEE THE DAY (or its LAW!). SIGHT: For Angela comes to inhabit ALAN-L, a state of dissemination or meta-transference, questioning the list and its members, repositioning herself in the face of flaming, agreement, disagreement, rude remarks or *come-ons* made by one or another member. And SITE: For her Norwegian location is based upon the premise of the physical, against which she presents an argumentative feminism, as well as an amazing comprehension of male and female behaviors - I sense this, no matter what the thread or query. Finally, CITATION: Upon tradition (yes, ALAN-L already has its own!) or *natural* consensus, Angela has either started or circumscribed the majority of threads on ALAN-L, ranging from questions of NOMENCLATURE ("What exactly is a *rigid designator*" Angelac@bcn.searn.cc.no) to desire itself ("Who are you? Who are you? What do you want? What do you want with me?" Angelac@bcn.searn.cc.no). I take pleasure in the fact that her address contains both angels and lakes, thick flight through waters bridging themselves. I take pleasure in an anguish and anxiety that keeps her present, always approaching, never a suspension. *** "I am sitting at a table on rue des livres, before a small cafe. I am reading Lautreamont, his responsibility for the death of the nineteenth and subsequent centuries. It is late 1944, the last days of the Resistance. I have been writing for a long time now; my knapsack contains manuscripts granting Man his freedom in the face of annihilation. He projects himself from and through the evident slime of the body, which is a recognition also occasioned by Marx and considered in sufficient measure in Plato's Parmenides. Maurice, who continues to specialize in perception, approaches me. He is working as a waiter, and I am afraid that I am not *up to his presence,* that my emptiness is evident to everyone, the beginnings of the theater of the absurd. As if to emphasize this, shots are heard faintly in the distance. It is autumn and it is war-time and it is Paris. Simone is somewhere around; I have not seen her for several days. I have nick- names for her. Maurice approaches. Maurice approaches and recognizes me; he was not sure at first. I perceive his look as something more, a glance which *will undo me,* but within which my annihilation is a freedom, bracketing him and myself - a freedom which is not an escape but a project, even a responsibility. I am aware as well of the *weak part* of my thinking here - that there is *no responsibility* within and without existence - one has nothing to do with the other. But without responsibility, the resistance - and in fact the subsequent cold war - would be rendered problematic, dangerous, and *meaningful.* This is the contradiction - it is the meaninglessness (the absence of any attributive meaning) that keeps the resistance alive, just as the floor is alive beneath my feet, permitting me to walk upon the material-inert without a *further thought.* Such is the case here as well. I do not even consider the relative symmetry of the situation - M-P's recognition of me, for example, and his own positionality therein. For THIS IS NO CONCERN OF MINE, nor can it be. I remember that I am simultaneously *in flight* and *in nothingness* and the blankness, which can only come from a marxism I now abjure, gives me the ability to cite myself, situate myself, even beyond an imperfect vision (I am always *occasioned* to wear a pair of glasses, for example). Surely for M-P it is different, utterly so; he at once perceives me in my fullness associated with a negation at the heart of perception. But I BELIEVE ONLY IN MYSELF which is *no belief at all*; he still remains AT ONE WITH THE BODY, an *occasioning* of the body (which I STILL only associate with the need for glasses and other sites or situations of scarcity). The Resistance, in fact, is just such an occasion, one which contradicts every form of seriality under capital - one which proceeds from individual through groups to an unspeakable release - unspeakable precisely because of secrecy, the absence of sight or citation. These were thoughts that occurred to me during that autumn of 1944, which is NOW and will remain so, by virtue of the accessibility/excess of the written holding time in abeyance. Simone and I are two poles or worlds together and apart; conversations flourish at the cafe, where I hold forth. Pierre works alongside Maurice, and I am face-to-face with Pierre on a daily basis, a face-to-face which foregrounds the Other who forecloses upon myself. I am uncomfortable in my skin. Death is always this Other. Death is always the occasion of the hole whose rim promulgates an annihilation in the midst of battle, the hole filled with anonymous flesh I can neither comprehend nor perceive. What I perceive is only my own shit, my own corruption; it is this which is a message of freedom in these dark days. I recognize that Being and Nothingness is a dark text, the darkest for these times; I recognize that it will be eclipsed in the future, torn apart by a pacific world - but only to reappear once again in darker days when the world begins again to fall apart - become DISEMBODIED. In this manner, we - for I speak for myself and my generation and those generations who will continue to hear me - ground ourselves in an EXISTENCE before each and every ESSENCE upon which we are not CHOSEN, but CHOOSE. It is a choice which keeps us alive, and I will spell out its relationship to responsibility in a world without god, and I hope to do this through and within a world without marx, but I recognize my necessity for marx, and its fallibility. But what I am spelling out, in the face of Pierre or the presence of Maurice, which is also the occasion of the presence of his writing, is, in fact, my freedom, my freedom in its darkest hour, in the midst of disgust at myself, at the world, and against the backdrop of the Resistance for whom, of course, I have the greatest respect. The conversation becomes more animated at the cafe; paradoxically, it is my companions who enable the philosophy of isolation - my community and grounding in the Resistance that proceeds to the almost aggressive and antagonistic presence of the Other. This is an almost-masculine universe, but one operational under the only sign of truth there is, which is no truth, not that of Dasein nor that of inscription nor scripture, but a truth contained in nullity, in nothingness. Certainly existence, which is without proof and without need of proof; essence is a necessitated and therefore immanent *gift* on a platter. In the distance, the rumble of guns grows louder. I shudder, thinking of the camps I have heard *something of,* the camps in Germany and Poland, and perhaps Austria as well. Refugees are everywhere, hidden against Petain, against the Gestapo, against the Germans in general, against everyone - life is a hiding-against everyone, in fact. I have never conclusively shown this, nor any other thing. Berdyaev was at the other end of town preaching his brand of Orthodoxy (I heard something of it in translation); there are a number of Russians, all here after the Revolution, lending Paris an aristocratic and somewhat jaded air. I no longer want to think this through; it is time that Being and Nothingness were *put to an end* or completion, as they say. Writing is a habit or inhabitation; I exist *in order to* write, which is my choice and not that of the Other, although it is that in the face of the Other, Pierre or Maurice, each and every one. Before me is a yellowed pad of paper, a continuity I create for myself, *hold forth* for me each and every day. I use a thin black pen; it suits my temperment. Others come and go, some approach and join me for a short time; no matter - philosophy is always the occasion for interruptions, ever since Plato founded his dialogues upon it. Philosophy without interruption would cease in a fundamental way to be dialectical; it would lose its contact with the world of the cafe and the worker, with the world of the Resistance and the Other - in fact, it would CEASE TO RESIST, would cease to be philosophy (cease to exist). Now, here in Europe, there is a night which is always falling. Now here, a chill wind is in the air; the lamps are finally lit, casting yellow glows against the houses plastered and replastered in war-time Paris. I put down my pen for the last time, but not for the last time. These are the final words of what was once *my little book,* which I am about to release to the world. Exist first; everything is given. My life is a responsibility absurdly occasioned. I am nothing, neither necessity nor project. I exist." *** (Jean-Paul Sartre, BEING AND NOTHINGNESS, pp. 644-647, 1st edition) sondheim@newschool.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Electronic distribution accompanied by author's name is permitted and encouraged. Alan Sondheim 432 Dean St. Bklyn, NY, USA, 11217 ANGRY AT SIG. Can I move somewhere here? You're always in the way, in my dreams. I'm angry at my signature, my emblem. I'm angry at everything in the world and this "anger is an energy" (PIL) which is grounded so I can't use it, grounded in my sig., in my emblem expressive of everything I believe, what you will remember long after my words have been forgotten. My words are summarized in my sig.; heraldry is a heralding or announcement of the symbolic far beyond flesh itself - there is nothing inert here, nothing but the arrangement of pure information - consuming only the fantastic of the world. But I'm angry at my sig. which has broken away from me, my sig. which exists as if there were no tomorrow or no yesterday, as if there were no responsibility - Who assigns responsibility? sig. wants to know - What is the CLEAR FORM of this documentation, a form withering sig. through the penetration of noise? I am angry at my sig. because of this issue of responsibility and because I have no control and there is no restraint provided on the other side of the symbolic, something I would have surmised otherwise were there opportunity. I PICTURE BLOOD THROUGHOUT THE DOMAIN OF THE IMAGINARY, rivers and pools of blood, a contamination running deep even across the terminal screen, letters changing to darker reds, one after another, reds spilling from FOREGROUND to BACKGROUND, the obliteration of even the simplest act of writing, act of speech or even the idiotic carving of hieroglyphic - The sig. is safe, the sig. is encapsulated, lost in another subroutine or program, always inaccessible, always beyond the pools of blood, broken limbs, scattered brains - beyond anger itself, radiating a certain coolness - something uncharacteristic IN THESE HARSH TIMES over which, clearly, I have no control. The sig. is always already a violation or transgression, contradicting what only the flesh can express; it will remain long after I am gone. Did I say I will be forgotten? The sig. is an unexploded mortar shell in a constant state of collapse, a flattening of the materiality of the world which has all but disappeared. The sig. knows nothing of this, and I am angry at my sig. because it is isolated from all I hold dear, my loved ones, my children, my aged parents, my aged grandparents, generation upon generation, homesteads and inhabitants. I tell myself, THERE IS A WHOLE WORLD OUT THERE without the recognition of thought or thinking beyond that of the murmur, and you have heard enough of the murmur, have murmured enough, have encapsulated the murmur itself, almost as a sig. alternative which it is not. For the murmur is as moronic as you are, watching me with eyes shoved through the midst of a letter-spew completely out of control. And the murmur as you well know is COMPLETELY INCAPABLE - the 'of' hardly necessary - it would only connect by way of a circuitous return to the sig. which is the inaccessible origin of the problem in the first place, in the last place. (Clearly the sig. topples any clear-thinking I would otherwise have; if you can understand this, you can begin making the reconnections, if the murmur has not already discouraged the clarity of thought which is the clarity of comprehension and silence). Did I speak of this 'inaccessibility'? It exists far beyond the subroutine or subprogram already mentioned; it extends to the inaccessibility of the signifier itself, something one is all too familiar with. It is a reminder of the remainder, a production of the inexcessive. Anger swirls around it like a black hole, feeds it, only to return as noise (murmur again). Anger is an energy but it ceases in the presence of the sig. to be my own, nor does it become that of another, but exists inert, mute, which is the state of anger, state of catatonia, depression - My depression grows beyond all bounds; there are no checkpoints, no interiors or exteriors, no exits or inroads. My depression covers the planet and is located in the potential well which is the subroutine surrounding the sig. so although I can ASSIGN IT SUCH AND SUCH A SITE it does me little good, does me no good whatsoever. It only brings me back to the topic which is THE ONLY CONCEIVABLE FUNCTIONING OF THIS AND EVERY OTHER TOPIC which is the fact that YOU ARE IN THE WAY and this stumbling-around becomes my condition which, identified with the second person, FISSURES the first, which is my presence already destroyed by what is invisible. For the sig. is invisible, lost in the midst of commands which are actions not taken or taken poorly, and I am used to everything here, before me or laid out in order. This invisibility BECOMES an inaccessible knowledge or knowledge of the inaccessible, and I think of you, can not get you out of my mind, A CLARA, which is the sig.- shunt, were such to exist. A PARTICLE OR A PRESENCE OR A DEMONSTRATION OF AN ARTICULATED STRUCTURE, SOMETHING CLAIMED FOR THE PURPOSE OF A CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF A NAME, THE NOMENCLATURE-MEMBRANE OR EMISSION OF A NAME, A DIAGRAM. Received: From ZEOS/MAILQUEUE by newschool.edu via Charon 3.4 with IPX id 101.940420021828.448; 20 Apr 94 02:18:32 -0500 To: SONDHEIM@newschool.edu From: SONDHEIM@newschool.edu Date: 20 Apr 94 02:18:28 EDT Subject: Residue X-mailer: Pegasus Mail v2.3 (R3). To: Sondheim@Newschool.Edu From: SONDHEIM@newschool.edu Date: 20 Apr 94 02:17:09 EDT Subject: Residue My ambition is to be within you, for my writing to be a thinking- through-thought that you would immediately apprehend, take it for your own. This is the writing which goes down quickly, emerges at each and every hole, transforming the body into a self-liquidation throughout death, throughout the abject corrosion of the proper name. Beyond the protocol, I have no proper name; this is what a ring or other algebra might be, this lack which possesses only an external attribute, the slough of the margin. The margin is always in the form of a discard, brought back within you as these words present themselves through your thinking. You are the speaker of these words, which murmur in a realm of self- liquidation, a realm in which perception becomes or transforms the gestures itself. Every message is a frail message, and each and every message loses itself as a bridge between myself and Angela, myself and Clara, a grasslands emergence, a distancing which reflects before my eyes in the whispering of ... each and every message, each and every thing ... ... you meaning you ... // [ // ] ...rain... // ah... \\ please take a moment to [ \\ ] reply and confirm reception \\ ...still... // [ // ] ...rain... // ah... \\ please take a moment to [ \\ ] reply and confirm reception \\ ...still... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Received: From ZEOS/MAILQUEUE by newschool.edu via Charon 3.4 with IPX id 102.940423185711.352; 23 Apr 94 18:57:28 -0500 Received: From brown.edu by newschool.edu via Charon 3.4 with SMTP id 102.940423185711.352; 23 Apr 94 18:57:11 +0500 Received: by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AB25252; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:38 -0400 Date: Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:38 -0400 From: Mailer-Daemon@brown.edu (Mail Delivery Subsystem) Subject: Returned mail: Unable to deliver mail Message-Id: <9404221438.AB25252@brown.edu> To: sondheim@newschool.edu Cc: root@brown.edu ----- Transcript of session follows ----- 554 sendall: too many hops 18 (17 max): from sondheim@newschool.edu, to sondheim@newschool.edu ----- Unsent message follows ----- Return-Path: Received: by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AA25252; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:38 -0400 Received: by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AA25247; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:37 -0400 Received: by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AA25236; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:34 -0400 Received: by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AA25229; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:33 -0400 Received: by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AA25221; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:30 -0400 Received: by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AA25216; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:29 -0400 Received: by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AA25207; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:27 -0400 Received: by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AA25197; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:25 -0400 Received: by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AA25170; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:21 -0400 Received: by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AA25154; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:18 -0400 Received: by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AA25142; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:15 -0400 Received: by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AA25137; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:14 -0400 Received: by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AA25131; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:12 -0400 Received: by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AA25125; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:10 -0400 Received: by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AA25115; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:38:08 -0400 Received: from dexter.newschool.edu by brown.edu (5.65a/SMI-4.2 --- CIS Test 1.1 -- Nov 11) id AA25095; Fri, 22 Apr 94 10:37:56 -0400 Received: from newschool.edu by dexter.newschool.edu with SMTP id AA17057 ; Fri, 22 Apr 94 01:48:16 UTC Received: From ZEOS/WORKQUEUE by newschool.edu via Charon 3.4 with IPX id 100.940422014714.608; 22 Apr 94 01:48:19 -0500 Message-Id: X-Ph: V3.8@Brown.EDU X-Ph: V3.8@Brown.EDU X-Ph: V3.8@Brown.EDU X-Ph: V3.8@Brown.EDU X-Ph: V3.8@Brown.EDU X-Ph: V3.8@Brown.EDU X-Ph: V3.8@Brown.EDU X-Ph: V3.8@Brown.EDU X-Ph: V3.8@Brown.EDU X-Ph: V3.8@Brown.EDU X-Ph: V3.8@Brown.EDU X-Ph: V3.8@Brown.EDU X-Ph: V3.8@Brown.EDU X-Ph: V3.8@Brown.EDU X-Ph: V3.8@Brown.EDU To: Mamatas@newschool.edu, PETER.KELK@CANREM.COM, zeug@pd.org, ANTENNA@CSEARN.BITNET, Robert_Scholes@Brown.Edu, rswbc@cunyvm.bitnet, CYBERBOY@AOL.COM From: SONDHEIM@newschool.edu Date: 22 Apr 94 01:47:06 EDT Subject: Hysteria Imaginary of Production X-Mailer: Pegasus Mail v2.3 (R3). To: SONDHEIM From: ZEOS/SONDHEIM Date: 22 Apr 94 01:19:38 EDT Subject: Screen Phenomena ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- To: SONDHEIM From: ZEOS/SONDHEIM Date: 22 Apr 94 01:01:54 EDT Subject: Screen Phenomena ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- To: Sondheim From: ZEOS/SONDHEIM Date: 22 Apr 94 00:51:06 EDT Subject: Screen Phenomena When is `representation' a torn membrane or VEIL; when is VERONICA not Boolean, but gesture? Ontological phenomena are always already an ASIDE... I am sending this to myself; you are a spinoff of this activity, useful for textual preservation. Ah, how often during the middle of the night does email lock-up, the screen petrified or frozen, a crystalline slice of thought, going nowhere and lost forever! The natural always takes its toll; a storm in the North Atlantic destroys absolutely and forever the fragility of thinking! I return over and over again to the imaginary of the screen, presented against your chosen color, a framework for the saccadic and twisted movement of your eye itself. It is this movement that fixes or fetishizes the net, which extends in a laminar coagulation beyond the screen, surrounding it, but always making way. The screen begins and ends, a terminal within a terminal, a foundation soldered to a wiring leading to ever more complex ultra large-scale integrated circuits, increasingly three- dimensional. They prepare the way! They prepare everything for you! The screen is THIS PLEASURE for the eye which I would fill with the presence of my body or your own. It is the margin of dangerous fantasy, what propels one always beyond what is apparently possible to construct. The edge of the screen is the blade of a knife, a quadruple-blade cutting through the four quadrants, by extrapolation, through the three-dimensional octants themselves. You transform each and every representation, by virtue of protocol, camouflage, or terminal emulation. Every screen act is one of mimickry; your fears and desires, which are identical, reside within it. ASCII text always aligns itself with the rectangular... / x / z ___________________________________/ | | | | | | y | | |_________________________________| z is a particular construct, the thrust or interpenetration of the screen, the simulacrum of the breast or ultimate coordination which cannot be surpassed. Just as the horizon of Greenland up to the Central Ridge is always tilted, white against white, a blindness sliding the uncanny, so the screen is almost always angled against the real, even if perpendicular default. The real WEDGES ITSELF. The real TURNS AWAY FROM YOUR EYE. There are no conclusions except to note that ASCII is neither visible nor invisible and that the diagrammation of the screen subverts thought into exhaustion. In its presence I cannot sleep at night; the real, projected within/against its backdrop, shimmers and devours the existential. The real spews; its lines are occluded, always fluid, imaginary. Thought is this problematic thinking-of-itself through inscription; inscription NATURALLY enough inscribes only itself. The above diagram is NOT a representation of the dream-screen; IT IS THE DREAM-SCREEN ITSELF. This is what is meant by ontology, and this is also the meaning of the ontological or imaginary/uncanny absence of the net. (Thus what I WRITE HERE IS INSCRIBED THERE BY A TRICK OF THE NET; what is here is REWRITE ONLY, a rewrite which is necessarily sourceless IN SPITE OF the diagram.) *You sleep, dream. Your thoughts are troubling; bodies intermingle *with bodies, pleasure is always deferred, always problematic. Flesh *gleams with unfettered desire. There is no sun and there is no *horizon; there is only a maroon backdrop in a state of continuous *dissolution. What is a womb. The rectilinearity GUARANTEES VOLUME on *the order of **xyz** but your eyes are starved for Greenland, your *eyes are dense with the dust of the desert, your eyes are always *before and always beyond; they code and decode; they code **xy**; *they code an arena of interpenetration. Throughout the thinking of *this and the presence and pleasure of this, I reiterate the screen *(see diagram above, see SCREEN above) which is a REWRITE always a *placement: this is your thinking through which is your REWRITE, a *screen or address-location, a label to be filled with name, *address, telephone, measurements of your body, detailed description *of genital organs and other instrumental secrecies transformed into *something or someone always elsewhere.* Blonsky on Baudrillard (*American Mythologies*): `He thinks real life is something you can choose to see or not see. You zap the homeless, but you also zap all human relations. And when you don't zap, what is seen isn't the real, it's a flatter version of it.' And what is a flatter version of it exists, as I have shown, as conclusively as logic will admit, upon or within the diagram above, a diagram which is a curlicue, something explained over and over again in INTERNET TEXT. If the curlicue is the surplus of the signifier, it is also that which is an extrusion from or within the real. The diagram replaces the symbolic it encapsulates. Desire circulates freely within the rectilinear; `desire' is perception itself. Could you possibly believe this, and what is the screen it is read upon? NOTHING PREPARES YOU FOR THE IMAGINARY, a form of preparation. And I am satisfied to have pointed out nothing less than the POLITICAL ECONOMY of REWRITE itself, the fact that xyz = xy = k where k is a constant, to all intents and purposes normalized to `1'. A certain degree of containment or ratio sets in; z disappears (as ready-made), and x and y are of course inversely proportional which only implies the preservation of `relative' area. Everything is open to question. REWRITE is a space, a screen-space variable dependent on terminal emulation, address, recognition, and protocol. The screen leaves its positionality without a trace. If I do not make myself clear, it is for this reason: BEYOND the diagram, everything collapses. And I must send this whole thing to myself, once again, before it comes crashing down. ' ' ' ) ` ` ` ( ...hail... ' ' ' \ / \ / ~ ...twister // [ //] ...rain... -------------------------------------------------------------------------- APPENDIX: THREE-DIMENSIONAL PROJECTIONS OF MEASURE GEOMETRIES (SEE 'SPEW' IN INTERNET TEXT FIRST PART) DEFDBL A-Z CONST PI = 3.141593 CONST dtr = PI / 180 here: SCREEN 0: CLS PRINT "A 3d Program Examining Basic S-Series" PRINT "for new constants hit r; for new projection hit s" INPUT "for inc. f w/ cycle hit 2, inc. f w/ va hit 1"; dra INPUT "color 0 or 1"; col INPUT "color 1,2,3"; g INPUT "projection, set default at 1200"; d INPUT "yaw, set default at 5.68319"; r1 INPUT "roll, set default at 6.28319"; r2 INPUT "pitch, set default at 5.79778"; r3 INPUT "translation, set default at 0,0,-350"; mx, my, mz restart: INPUT "series exponent, usually 2"; vk INPUT "increment for modulus"; inc INPUT "bias for angle"; bias PRINT "formula: x=x+e+f*h f=f+u" INPUT "height (va) mag, 0 = 2d display"; pa INPUT "incs. e, f, h"; ve, vf, vh INPUT "set u"; vu INPUT "magnification gen. 1-6"; j INPUT "1 for clr va>1; 2 for odd/even if inc = 2"; one PRINT "window at (-399, -299), (400, 300)" INPUT "set window bias, x axis / y axis"; pb, pc px = 0: py = 0: sx = 0: sy = 0: vx = 0: vq = 0: vw = 0 s1 = SIN(r1): c1 = COS(r1): s2 = SIN(r2): c2 = COS(r2) s3 = SIN(r3): c3 = COS(r3): CLS : SCREEN 1, 0 pd = -399 + pb: pe = 400 + pb: pf = -299 + pc: pg = 300 + pc WINDOW (pd, pf)-(pe, pg): VIEW PRINT 1 TO 1: COLOR 0, col ten: IF dra = 1 THEN va = 0 vx = vx + ve + vf * vh: vw = vw + 1 IF dra = 2 THEN va = -1: vf = vf + vu IF INKEY$ = "r" THEN GOTO restart IF INKEY$ = "s" THEN GOTO here two: va = va + 1 IF dra = 1 THEN vf = vf + vu IF vx MOD vk ^ va = 0 THEN GOTO two vn = va MOD inc vv = 360 / inc vq = (vv * vn + vq + bias) MOD 360 vrq = vq * dtr px = px + COS(vrq) py = py + SIN(vrq) PRINT vw; vx; " " x = j * px: y = j * py: z = j * va * pa IF one = 1 AND va > 1 THEN clr = g + 1 END IF IF one = 1 AND va = 1 THEN clr = g END IF IF one = 2 AND vn = 1 THEN clr = g + 1 END IF IF one = 2 AND vn = 2 THEN clr = g END IF PSET (sx, sy), clr x = -x: xa = c1 * x - s1 * z za = s1 * x + c1 * z: x = c2 * xa + s2 * y ya = c2 * y - s2 * xa: z = c3 * za - s3 * ya y = s3 * za + c3 * ya: x = x + mx: y = y + my: z = z + mz sx = d * x / z: sy = d * y / z LINE -(sx, sy), clr GOTO ten ----------------------------------- DEATH IN THE MIDST OF THE METAPHYSICS OF SUBSTANCE I grew up with the dissolute thoughts of Richard Nixon reiterating like a web around me in a tangled imaginary that refused resolution; even his death is another reverberation or hieroglyph whose overall form remains occluded. This is not to speak of the finality of death - Kurt Cobain saw to the *finality* - but to speak only of its loss within murmur or emission, a loss growing less and less each day as the face merges with the terminal and as digital absolution increasingly promises eternal life. It is this promise which is also a premise, that is addictive: the whisper of forever-speaking, an interminable echo which reproduces exactly, without diminution, everything everywhere - a reiteration of the real that continues after the physical body dies. There are no iron curtains closing down; there is always a noiseless system in the midst of noise, always one clarification following another like an interminable analysis that ceases to be a therapeutic but becomes, instead, a skeletal articulation of the real. Within cyberdeath cyberin cyberspace, the real is always already an articulation; the body merges and is never at a loss. How far we have come? No longer do communists exist in every department in every agency of the government; evil has transformed into the anarchic wearing-down of the cyber- and social order - no longer evil but the stroke of Richard Nixon swelling the brain itself, pressing down confusedly (there is nowhere to go) upon the stem, within which consciousness resides. Inscription has become at best a microterritori- alization, the circumscription of an eternal domain characterized by the modernism of a well-defined address. I am one with the domain. This is why I am `never at a loss,' a position among many, one with lag. For it is through lag that I recuperate myself in order to speak forever; I am certain of this speech, always a totality and always brilliant. Through lag I maintain my brilliance; nothing os foreclosed, and my texts bare open my greatest secrets. These I am willing to sacrifice. My secrets fissure my body, exposing the moist interior to cyberspace itself; cells align themselves in arrays designed to access pixels upon the screen. Nothing is UPON the screen; what is present is only a residue or reminder of the interior of the body, the WEB INVERSION. The screen is always the screen FOR OTHERS, a circumscription produced by an interiority or chaotic domain, as if there were evil in the world, as if there were either death or a world. What I write then is this writing of the OTHERNESS, an infiltration or virus - a contamination - producing legibility, almost unnecessary in the face of an undesiring death. It is this OTHERNESS (which is not-screen) that is a rewriting as well as writing, that reformulates the equation: I am a REWRITE of the otherness; I am an infiltration of the screen; I am viral. What is this but an addiction or parasitology, my body conforming to the protocol of the host? Conforming is always a reconforming as connections form and dissolve, multiply and dissolve. I am changed by this otherness that I am that I change. There is no end to it, no end to the addiction; there is no end to the lists, the alt.user.user.sex.user.talk with the user-particle buried within. Burrowed within: for every user is an Internet Worm; every user expands; every user recirculates the debris of the Net. (The 1988 worm itself, ironically, is an inversion in this regard; by propagating equivalence, it integrates the Net, creates a healthy redundency, dampens noise, creates greater and greater potential wells, and eventually turns the whole Net (EVERYTHING!) into the totality of an almost-perfect firewall, ensuring continuous and eternal existence. For equivalence, within and without the fractal domain, characterizes substance; the Net becomes substance, and the otherness, a collapse of the mirror-stage. How can there be perfect death in the midst of perfect death? <