Alan Sondheim 2008 DDDDDDDDDDD SSSSSSSSSS D DDDDDDD SSSSSSSSSS DD DDDDDDD SSS DDD DDDDDDDifficult Works |CLARA.TEXT| Working the FileSSSSSSSSSS DD DDDDDDD SSS D DDDDDDD SSSSSSSSSS DDDDDDDDDD SSSSSSSSSS *They begin here. Looking out over holocaust city, wires everywhere* *strangling the simple life, guys and gals bound tight to one* *another in every conceivable combination. You could hear strange* *languages you wouldn't believe, and you wouldn't understand a word* *because they were talking alone. I brought back what I brought back.* 5/19/08 ====================================================================== This work is a continuation of the investigations of Internet Text, which is available in three files: Internet Text, Love on the Net, and Web Text. Clara Text wanders; its dominion is nomadic. Issues of communication, desire, and the absolute are paramount. Horror and beauty appear. This text may be distributed accompanied by the author's name. Bibliographical information is available on request. ====================================================================== DESCRIPTIVE TABLE OF CONTENTS: THE STORY OF HORROR WHICH DID NOT HAPPEN TO ME AND IS NOT A STORY: From THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL to a problematic of electric desire and communication. THE START OF IT ALL: A compressed anthology of philosophical "plot" and description. THE GREAT BEYOND: Beyond the Looking-Glass, Clara. "radio report": From Brooklyn, Taylor, Saarinen, and Baudrillard. STATUES SPEAK THE QUESTIONABLE: The image of frozen speech and electronic subjectivity. FLATLANDS: If Los Angeles is the postmodern city, Miami is the imaginary of the Internet. MYFLESH THUS!!!: Miami reflects CYNTHIA SATELLITE COSTAR through a myriad. I ONLY TELL TRUTH BY A. HACKER: Beginnings of a consideration of a political economy of the Net. SPEAKING THE DPRESSION OF DEATH'S TRUE BIRTH: Truth and Tonya Harding; Lie and Nancy Kerrigan. HOW IT WAS: Yeats, the loss of center, dissolution and nationality. CLARAMURMUR: Image, the dream, what I could not say. THE GREAT CARAPACE, by Clara: The Revolution has already occurred. Information and culture are entirely other. Do not be mistaken. Live the consequence. THE DIGITAL DOMAIN AND FACTICITY, WITTGENSTEIN'S *TRACTATUS*: The return, through electronic communication, to a 19th-Century dream of stabilization and cohesion. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE INTERNET: "defined and considered in brief outline form." I LOOK THROUGH YOUR EYES: Dean Swift, the elegy, Dean Street, screen terminal, "screen remov'd," death and disappearance. THE WOMAN: Nietzsche/Irigaray/Wittgenstein, recognition and the mirror. THE LAST SCIENCE FICTION STORY and TRAVIS: The conclusion of the genre of science fiction in light of current developments in electronics, subjectivity, consciousness and communication. TRAVIS floods from THE LAST SCIENCE FICTION STORY, begins and ends, floods out. SUMMARY OF INTERNET TEXT: Brief description of basic concepts. ====================================================================== He downloaded everything, memory and all. He murmured in his sleep. He knew there was no truth, had followed THAT FUNCTION all his life. Began again, said Clara. There was no one there. She knew that. ====================================================================== THE STORY OF HORROR WHICH DID NOT HAPPEN TO ME AND IS NOT A STORY I never had any feeling; ice went up my ass. Everything was dull and frozen. Packed in without feeling. A grey horizon of light. Iron spears of pressure-dependent pain. I was immobile. My eyes felt iced shut. Soaked. The chill is unbearable. I have no number. My blood freezes as my skin bleeds. Nameless. A rotunda. They turn me over. Flesh cracks; there's blood something transparent on the concrete. "On." Teeth are gone. I know my lip is split but I do not know "I." Oh told to write this you have it. I am packed frozen between two women. They shove her breast in my mouth. I can't move. The body stashes its tremble. A convulsion. The cock grows of its own accord. I bend double. The women pack closer. One is thrown off and killed. Oh Clara the other one. She places her mouth on my eye. It moves. I have a tear on my skin. Eye screams with pain because it is moved. My cock is hard. Oh Clara holds it, shoves it in. My back collapses and broken everywhere. It pierces me. Her cunt rings fire. It's of no use of use. Leans forward, braces. They tear her off me. They tear me in two. They put her on me. My back breaks in four places. They tear her off me. Eye am warmed by ice Oh Clara. Oh Clara your breasts hard against me. Slab concrete buckles. We fall tight, her cunt sewn on cock, eye sewn on eye. Sutures everywhere. Leg leg. Jagged ice everywhere, cut eye. I cannot rise. Oh Clara told to write this Oh Clara have it Oh Clara you have at it. Blood cracks from her mouth. She has no mouth, eye has no lid, open Clara cock. You cock I am dropped. My back breaks, Clara breaks. Cure this; cure this "on." A last sentence. What can I period. Clara drops. For they drop: drop us. For they cut: cut us. For they break: break us. Eye am open always. Sutured shut. Eugen Kogan, THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL, pp. 165-166: `Himmler was especially interested in methods of warming persons who had been severely chilled. In a number of series this was done by means of naked women, brought from Ravensbruck for the purpose. "Personally I believe," Himmler wrote Rascher, now promoted to SS captain, "these experiments may bring the best and most sustained results, but of course I may be mistaken." He was not mistaken. Rascher was able to report in detail how revived subjects practiced sexual intercourse at 86 to 90 degrees F. and that this proved to be the equivalent of a "hot bath." When placed between two naked women, the subjects did not recover as rapidly as with one woman. "I attribute this to the fact that in warming by means of one woman personal inhibitions are avoided and the woman clings very closely to the chilled person (cf. Curve 4).' From the blurb inside front cover: `THIS WAS *HELL* ON EARTH / They: *Injected innocent people with disease germs for the greater glory of German ... Made lamp shades from human skin ... Revived frozen men by the use of naked women ... Utilized the body fats of millions for the German war effort ... Put to death more people than any other tyranny in the history of the world ...*' >>I do not tell a story. I do not cling to the truth. I do not cling >>to anything. My skin falls from my bones. I am an electric galaxy. >>I do not have to live here. I am told: You can go and live wherever >>you want and it will be okay. I am told: Nothing happened because >>this is not a story. I cannot help clinging. I am hopeless, having >>no hope for myself. What would that be like. I do not understand >>this woman wanting this desire. I have lied to you from the >>beginning. >>>Do you want to tell something, to tell the truth. There is no >>>truth, there is nothing. >>You transform into dialog, into dialogic; you turn, turn away from >>me. Oh Clara nothing happened. Do not read the signs! >>>The signs are there to be read. Or there are no signs, only marks. >>>There are marks made by nails into floors, marks splintering flesh; >>>there are marks but no eyes >>There are eyes nothing to read, no marks nothing, you do not know >>this nothing or imagined or dream torn from its moorings >>>There are no marks be quiet >>>>Yes be quiet "It is a description of the closest thing to hell in human history." --Reinhold Niebuhr I AM FULL OF HOLES sondheim@newschool.edu for clara ---------------------------------------------------------------------- THE START OF IT ALL Back home, I would think about altarity. But now, wandering in a hermeneutic circle would never square with me... I'm sitting down to write; I have a reed in my hand, and the sand is spread out before me. The river in the distance has overflowed its banks, and is just now receding. There is a banquet nearby; I will go there shortly, and regale the guests with tales about carpenters and chariot-makers. In this manner, I will earn my keep. Before going out, I make sure it is night; even the stars have their master, and everything is fixed, absolute, and in place forever. At the banquet, I discourse freely to everyone who will listen. Some charming dancers entertain the guests, a few of whom are members of the Resistance. There is fighting right now outside Jena and the avenues are tense; I can see the imminent victory of the Prussian state, a natural trajectory of the dialectic, beginning with my doubting everything, an occasion for eschatological desire. An abyss opens up beside me; within it, annihilation itself seems to seethe, and there is no end to the affairs of men and women. The ideal state to come will have no poets and no philosophers, something I conclusively demonstrate with all the power of the geometric. Since I am a misfit, I elevate myself to the top of the mountain where red flames dominate the landscape; there are those who dominate and those who are controlled by my subaltern ego. But I reject every pretense, and wear nothing but a barrel; let those who dare to look, do so. (Need I add it would be queerer to gaze?) From this vantage point, next to a peasant hut in the Black Forest where men and women are suddenly thrown, I see a red patch, unidentifiable, but offering every attribute I am considering before me. The patch is surely the same in all possible worlds, where it possesses the characteristic of a fact or picture, a rigid designator articulating the armature of an over-privileged semantics. I may or may not refer to `it.' If I become the red patch, it is beneath the sign of capital; capital flows from my pores, flows everywhere. I dissolve slowly into transparency, a simulacrum of my former self, and continue to write on a simulacrum-computer, filling all conceivable data-bases with useless Turing machines; I transform myself into a body-without-organs in the terminal stages: constipation, corpulence, power and madness. This is the dreaded `death of the author' signified in each and every postcard, where letters `go to the drugstore' of the obsessive-compulsive. The red patch illuminates the desk I am writing upon, as the final apocalyptic conflagration envisions itself from a distance. All I can do is raise my fist as Europe shudders, corpse- like, beneath its sullen masters. My clenched fist in the air is helpless against the stone I continue to push up the mountain, which seems slightly absurd, even if transcendent and rather egotistical. The mathematization of the granite, rather concrete, results in almost perfect lines of flight across it; these coalesce with the identical categories available to the Beaver, who waits for me with Pierre at the cafe shortly after the symposium has come to an end. No good ever flows from this, the death of Helene on the way to the final construction of a purified and scientific political economy, something I can live with, having roamed the streets of Manchester, in order to bring the philosophical down to the level of material praxis and avoiding any further reification. What an imaginary! The red patch over my eyes is painful; I am hobbled, resorting to the aphoristic crutch in order to convey my dislike of princes and the press. The uncanny power of women contaminates every line I add to the others; it is only through the telephone and its interminable existential dial-up, that I continue to turn a deaf ear to the world and its discourse-networks, harboring the unequivocal testimony of sight. Everywhere, sight leaves its traces; the punctured hymen of the Beaver provides a final word, projecting from her hole into a freedom always already structured by its opposite. Double lips shudder, reducing me to an imaginary penis, uncapped head indicative of the non-believing Jew exiled from the habitus of the Amsterdam synagogue. Men always do this, and this is what makes them men. I realize that if men are analytic, women are synthetic; the Beaver says it's the other way around. (My statement has never been spoken by a body.) What makes them men is a purified techne as well, something I would respond to if questioned. Every question demands an answer, but not every answer demands a question, which is ineffable, written on this book of sand that shoots out from under me every twelve or so hours. But I am of the technological, the episteme of instrumental reason, not remote or disembodied in an ideal world inhabited by the elements crowned with the Concept of the Idea. Outside the window there is a tree of a particular color which the Navajo see; I can never take in each of its leaves on an individuated basis, just as I can never count the pillars in the Pantheon. Better, however, is an act of exile which is reconstruction, always reversible, except for the brute facticity of death, to which I am hardly partial, being somewhat super. Now I am gathering speed, becoming incandescent; fragments and seminars course through my veins close to the speed of light, competing among themselves, completing the torn fabric of the real (always the scenario of suture), mumbling through those same veiled lips that sealed my internal-time consciousness about ten minutes ago. I am lost in the ipseity of my freedom, confused about beings (there are so many of them) and Being confused. The eidetic reduction is a diminution of the obverse; I drink less and less natural kinds as hypereality transforms null into cipher, leaving me with `a smaller glass' of tea. The inverse of the glass is neither opaque nor convex; a node within the grid of doxa cathects every drop spilled from the fluid mechanics of the feminine. The result? More rigid designators and more masquerades: the mimetic indeed! And what is the real if not a game constructed out of the consensual sublime? What is the sublime if not a differend inverted by silence (that makes all the differance in the world, being less noisy!)? The sublime is always silent? Sound is the institutionalization of capital, the rigidity of the script fixed in a prioritization of the written over the purely oral and its stages. Each question eliminates itself; speech is an act of excretion. The cave is silent, too, where men and women watch. (Speech is always four-fold; no one has time for that.) In the corner of the cave is perhaps a snake; it may also be a rod, or rod(ent), whatever is relevant at the moment, whatever might or might not bite. The id has the face of Medusa, an alterity defining an essence or existing seeping away, the result of insomnia, difficulties of health. I write this in the sand until my head is cut off. sondheim@newschool.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------- THE GREAT BEYOND For a moment I can't think. My mind goes blind. I don't see in words but I don't see the point of not using them. Let them drag across the page - see if I care. Words always demand this - a matrix or a plane. I imagine another, a gulf with cragged sides, extending down into shadow - there might be a stream at bottom, at dusk, at dark - words webbed there, hung like hammocks - they might glow a bit - a way of announcing themselves. Hanging there in invisibility or an extruded and extreme dimension- ality. Words and their calling. Thin tape always holds images. Images are not code; images say nothing. Code isn't everything that speaks, but speaking is a form of code, an inferential matrix or sememe. To construct is to bracket is to substitute; one thing might stand for another or I won't stand for this. The simpler. The simpler always refers back to the code of the language, huddled against enormous megabytes of image. The image registers as noise; no one remembers it - it fills too much space - only a compression works, bringing everything back into the level of the word. The image becomes phonemic. The noise is simpler, prohibitive of a certain degree of thought. The labor of thinking is still unrecognized - the exhaustion. It is the following of a thread which rings true, or a form of resonance. It is denying the truth of the ringing as well; denial costs, as in the construction of a house which will never be inhabited, open to the weather, lasting less than a season. The mind blinds itself to the difficulty of the world. To image the world is to mirror it or a segment which is to COHERE. If I COHERE I am a hole or conduit; I cum. I AM ALWAYS BESIDE MYSELF. The screen itself rips coherence; if I cum, the screen is occluded. Think of it! PICTURE IT! To think within the image is to think within the imaginary which is the world. The world is dying; to think this dying is to think the text of this dying and its system, a text-contusion. The particulation of the text permits inscription, the circumlocution of the end of history, the hysteric rise of scarcity. Everything is purchased at a cost; the image fissures purchasing itself. I look at a cunt; I'm aroused, my cock stiffens. I'm hard, jerk off. The exhausted image lends itself towards me, leans into me. I see my body narrowed, fitting into the blind sieve, falling through. I fall through and look at you. There are words everywhere in the gulf beneath me, the gulf between me. Flesh is always a projection, an evaluation of underlying code. Some see the pictures, some read the code. If I could read the code, I could control the pictures. The gulf would flatten, harden like a plate; I'd see everything in it. "Daddy," she said, holding onto my leg, "Daddy, I'm scared." "I know darling," I replied, "I know." I was scared too, but I didn't want it to show. My leg was wet with her tears. How could the world be so cruel? Her golden hair, her smiling face - would she survive, live to grow in a world of peace and beauty? Nothing was certain in the brutal ruins of a nation surrounding me. I wanted to scream. Closing my eyes, I wanted to scream. The IMAGE of the plate: You can't imagine. What began would transform, hardening your eyes in position, the exact articulation of an object or entity grounded in the translucent. An image is never a map; a map is an icon; an image is always in both senses OF the real. The word has no existence. The non-existence of the word is always in both sense WITHOUT the real. I would fall through. From the very first I felt at ease. You made the CHILDSPEAK, opening what had always been closed, circumscribed. You EMERGED the speaking into the imaginary. EITHER THERE ARE WORDS OR THERE IS NOTHING you said. I saw the other with you. Nothing was rewritten. On the far side of the symbolic is the measure geometry. You make a row of red boxes. You place a blue box between every two boxes, almost doubling the row. You place a red box between every two boxes, almost doubling the row. You continue this, your hand sliding down my leg, tears everywhere as the lost countries of Europe and Africa are guided by the exhaustion of the image which knows no symmetry, the 2/2 measure geometry I described in SPEW.TXT and elsewhere. You are guided by the lost countries of Asia and America, countries squeezed to the last drop, the emergence of one and another picture, all equivalent, all pained. "Daddy," you cry, harder now, "Daddy, why do you shake me free? Please don't let me alone! Please, Daddy, please!" I close my eyes and the sounds won't go away. I close my eyes and I hear Europe and hear America; I hear Asia and I hear Africa: I hear the slow murmur of Australia rising from the ashes, hear the sound of chanting crippled, glowering in the gulf of words: In the Gulf of Words, the Gulf of Wars, Clara, your name is written dissolving in illuminated and fluttering letters; your name is my imaginary: Your name\imaginary\file\dir *.* or CLARA\*.* wild cards spewing every image, the collapse of terabytes of information coursing the net, collapse of megabytes of languages stuttering through wires overheated and thinned to the breaking point - "Daddy," you cry, "I can't see you anymore!" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- X-cs: From: Self To: Everyone That Cares Subject: Re: ------- Date: 30 Apr 94 03:55:01 From: Self To: The Rest of Them Subject: ------- Date: 30 Apr 94 03:50:51 I'm beginning to realize the advantage of living in Brooklyn. I've been reading Taylor/Saarinen's Imagologies, considering it for the courses I'm going to be teaching, either here or there, and finding myself infuriated at the consistent rhetoric and totalizations employed. There's absolutely no concept of capital, except a certain notion of localization that's never spelled out. Scarcity doesn't occur to these guys; neither does multiculturalism. Everything is electric/electronic in an inversion in which (for me) their fragmentary becomes a totalized classical imperialism. In Brooklyn, half the kids have beepers, guns; less have cb radios; telephones of all sorts; boomboxes. Yet there are territorializations and specificities connected with all of these, based first on scarcity and second on the intensifications of local interests. T&S seem so full of themselves that "local" is rendered meaningless; let everyone starve as long as the academy can be attacked for its lack of differentiation. I've always had a Baudrillard problem here as well; totalization becomes just another absolute in the face of Roseanne and its demographics. What's wrong with these people? They were born before the atomic era and the bomb-temperature is the first destruction leaving neither trace nor ash. They wear their skins like skeins. While all of this might seem like empty complaint, in Brooklyn the real, no matter how defined, appears obdurate; survival is the specificity of recognition, not channel or net-surfing. And clearly such survival or lack of it is the future, net or not-net, given the exponential increase in planetary pollution, noise, and ecological destruction. Maybe the problem lies in the American use of the acronym itself, combined with a totalizing metaphor (like desiring-machine, cyber- space, power) that appears as the horizon of the frontier. We remain a frontier culture, examining, establishing, and breaking down our various barbed-wire fences that make no landmark distinctions except the cutting-off of lines-of-flight. We bury ourselves in our homesteads, consuming 3-10 times per capita the planetary average of energy, calories, etc. Whatever the problem is, T&S carry, like Kroker or Baudrillard, the simulacrum over the libertarian edge. There's not much left except an enticing depravity, speed-of-light noise, and the emptied/forgotten future of places like Mexico City, Somalia, Peru... End of radio report\thanks for listening\sondheim@newschool.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------- STATUES SPEAK THE QUESTIONABLE Think of the SPEAKING STATUE as an extension of realism - handicraft traced through excess, falling into the simulacrum. The voice becomes an appendage, the calling of- or through- the stone itself. The PRODUCTION of the stone is perfect, a duplication of the exterior of the real. The calling is a result of the perfection; the stone is inhabited. The voice is an excess, the real produced by the simulacrum of the real. Consider this: The real is always an excess. The exterior transforms into the interior, mute stone into the dwelling of speech. But there is an inverse: The speaking statue as the frozen or confined body - withdrawn and pained, a form of the bellowing `iron maiden.' If the first version is a DIFFERENTIATION of stone into code (DNA or language), the second is an INTEGRATION or foreclosing of the body. The body which is foreclosed is a tortured body, sutured into a totality. Such a body is immobile; speaking, it bears witness.* It does nothing but bears witness. This is the dominated body, but never the masochistic, which operates within and without a horizon of freedom. Or it speaks, rigid, angered: a state of catatonia or self-immobiliza- tion, a choice against the world. What does it speak? Certainly not the anger or the witnessing of the world; it speaks a rigid and phallocentric interiority, the trauma, real or imagined, of an originary scenario. These bodies lend themselves to the mythological, neither one thing nor another - a mythology which transgresses epistemology and the construct of the living. For the speaking statue, the body, is tortured and confined IN ORDER TO WITNESS: the body of the oracle. Or the perfection of the stone or the sacred which 'invites' speech: the oracle again. Sacrifice, the silencing of the spoken through the total confinement of the body, silences the exterior witness who becomes a gift-thing by extinction - you say to the Gods, I'm serious! The construct/essence of electronic subjectivity: representation of the body BY speech, speech dragging the body behind it. But WHAT is speaking (i.e. beyond what is spoken) is always already mediation, vis-a-vis a hierarchy of recognitions, addresses, programs, protocols. Nothing is alive but the speech itself, electron flux. Everything lies in the interpretation. These inhabitations or implementations are always uncanny, disturbing, because of a tension or striation contradicting the surface phenomena. The subject-spoken-to is at a loss; it is his or her problematic, not that of the statue itself. The interiority of the statue resonates as a Kantian ding-an-sich, bracketed and revealed through a contradictory symptomology. Evidence is never a problem for evidence. At this juncture one assumes the observer either human or cyborg. The statue speaks, sputters, stutters. What does the statue say? Does it say it is a statue? Does it say it is at last real, at last one with the human or machine? And what of the shaman who speaks? The terminal spewed from the shaman? What speaks through the shaman, through the materiality of the shaman in order to speak of the other that is human? Is speaking the answer, were there a question, to death? Is speaking an answer? *Is the totality always an orality? Is the proper name a circum- locution generated from within? Does totality exist without totalizing? ... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- FLATLANDS The land extends indefinitely in every direction, flat platelets of water riding laminar surfaces, extensions forming rivulets, a net analog of hallucinations, fractal accumulations of data emissions swept beneath perturbable seas It is upon the plane itself that objects meld into one another, everything dissipates and belongs, intensities swirl around uncertain habitats, and roseate flowers strew petals bent back for obsequious encounters Green densities transforming upon the half-centimeter of land-caress A writing which folds back upon itself, hieroglyph, I say the land knows the land, recognizes itself, beyond the falter of declivities spewed, nothing remarking, the dwelling of the remark, each and every image of content forming content forming quiet discontent The wrapping of petals, closure of warm and swollen seas One thinking one, none thinking or one thinking or being thought by one, an image, specular colors, organisms, translucencies, green ovals thinned and receptive to warmth and concept-formation, love flowering between edge smoothing into edge smoothing into plain... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- MYFLESH THUS!!! Here in this flat land, I exist only to suture one upon the other, MYFLESH against a degree of topography. But here in this flat land, I recognize its impossibility; I dream of Brooklyn and its interstices. But here in Brooklyn, I dream of a flat land surrounded and crossed by wires, packets of information, triangulations providing the only guide to address or recognition - triangulations from above, guided by SATELLITE COSTAR dark upon SUN which burns through wires, constructs BROWNOUT. BROWNOUT is the great depression, the numbing of low-temperature voltage barely holding machinery in place; machinery stumbles as I cry to no one. (Do I cry CYNTHIA? Do I respond?) To cry again: the dream of adolescence. MYFLESH takes up the cry; MYFLESH stumbles in a DESIGNATED SPACE lending to DESIGNATED SPACE. I walk upon declivities as SPACE WALKS UPON ITSELF, stumbles to no end. Words catch in the craw of the mouth. MYFLESH hives or scratches only in DESIGNATED SPACE; elsewhere SATELLITE COSTAR hems in. Daily I record my thoughts. My thoughts are http:\\mythoughts\mythoughts\mythoughts:html as you might have guessed; REWRITE relocates with SATELLITE COSTAR even fractal intensities, spiralling down. Do I never cut myself loose. MYFLESH struggles against BROWNOUT dampening voice as switching mechanics channel digital audio elsewhere. So that I am elsewhere. So that I am always elsewhere, crying CYNTHIA WHERE ARE YOU. So that in this crying BROWNOUT cooperates; SATELLITE COSTAR relocates REWRITE, now passive/intransitive, bring-back to DESIGNATED SPACE. This is the DIARYMOVEMENT located as thread-mythoughts. Blind track or retrack. THIS IS MYFLESH: I disband BROWNOUT by means of RELOCATION SATELLITE COSTAR. I stutter REWRITE through REWRITE/SHUNT burrowing through DESIGNATED SPACE. DESIGNATED SPACE spirals down. I gather PUNCTUATION SPACE .,:;'`"!!!? I CAUTERIZE the same!!! CYNTHIA WHERE ARE YOU in PUNCTUATION SPACE!!! CYNTHIA SATELLITE COSTAR!!! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I ONLY TELL TRUTH BY A. HACKER Do we all act from a position of internalized rationality, even if not spelled out accordingly? I can never understand why anyone would disagree with me; when arguments occur, they always follow predictable patterns which are easily determined in advance, especially on the Net where everything follows one or another form of protocol. Is argumentation a form of breathing? Not that I consider myself correct in every situation; in fact, my existence depends on the opposite. But this is a strategy of effacement also internalized to the extent that it inverts, creating the situation for argument. But I do not argue rationally; in fact, argument is never rational, but a form of breathing. In fact, there is no breathing at all, nothing but a political economics of Net and screen, a REWRITE S/N/S shuttling back and forth among maverick sites. Is S/N/S a form of capital accumulation, governance by crisis? Tension augments recursive communications ultimately sightless, emptied of all tension, a continuance back into recursion. REWRITE S/N/S implies my absence: YOU'LL NEVER HEAR FROM A. HACKER AGAIN AND YOU NEVER HEARD FROM HER IN THE FIRST PLACE!!! The punctuation deMARKation is a dead giveaway of a TERMINAL RELATIONSHIP among absences. Ah, to breathe is to pulse with life!!! I know it well!!! (YOUR WORDS FILL MY HOLES.) ("Thus, when finally you allow her to speak, it is only to bring about - your perspective, your art, your time, your will. The last pattern of your being that she must still reproduce or mimic. And this takes her away from her surfaces, her depths. Her face, her lips, her world of harmony, her tuneful flow mastered by your creation. All these are veiled or bent to suit your viewpoint. She is cut off from herself in this way in order to join in your game. Becoming speech in your mouth, a stranger in her own body. As motionless as you can wish she speaks the `yes' dictated to her by your latest movement, your latest will, your final plastic necessity. Her song accompanies and celebrates the latest work your music has paused at." Luce Irigaray, MARINE LOVER, trans. Gillian Gill.) THEN: SPEAKING THE DEPRESSION OF DEATH'S TRUE BIRTH I feel the emptiness of my life cutting a knife for Tonya Harding. And because of this emptiness I know I must be absolutely honest; my skin is blown out, a membrane hard and dead against the ground; there is no room to maneuver; death seeps through the flesh; my only connections violate time; I survive in this manner. There is no future; like Tonya Harding I embrace solitude and anger, turning meaning into a loosened drum; in the midst of depression I know the dull melancholy of ASYMBOLIA, that lack of meaning which speaks the only conceivable truth: that truth slips from us; that there is no truth; that detachment is the luxury of sadness `raised to an incandescent power.' Like Tonya Harding, I war on meaning; symbols are dead transmissions, dead conferences on the Net; words shoved against inconceivable addresses saying nothing forever. I invert despair, turn it into the authentic production of a universe possessing no authenticity; my ugliness becomes a guarantee or contract; I insist on presence; I rob presence, take it for myself; I increase presence like a bloated corpse; I memorize myself. This MEMORIZATION-SELF becomes a murmur; murmur is always the whisper of death; a murmur gets the queen; a murmur gets the princess; I murmur: love me because of my faults. The body fissures; from where I crawl beneath meaning and the damnation of Nancy Kerrigan, I expect nothing, taking dead risks, taking the dead with me. The dead mean nothing; the forever lonely always violate or disrupt; vandals crawl to the left or right of me; Tonya clubs herself hardest of all; her feet are bound together; she falls in order to fall, break her fall; in order to give meaning. Meaning fails meaning; Tonya fails and falters. The dead like us; give meaning; suck the rose out; the dead devour Nancy Kerrigan who cannot tell truth; tell truth from itself; Tonya Harding lives truth; tells truth in spite of herself; this is the only way to tell it; this is the only truth to tell. I crawl beneath her feet; my work takes me to the ground; my work immobilizes me; I fight tears murmuring the whisper of meaning; I am ignored by presence; I am ever present. I would hurt myself to be present. "A moment arrives when one can no longer feel anything but anger, an absolute anger, against so many discourses, so many texts that have no other care than to make a little more sense, to redo or perfect delicate works of signification. That is why, if I speak here of birth, I will not try to make it into one more accretion of sense. I will rather leave it, if this is possible, as the lack of `sense' that it `is.' I will leave it exposed, abandoned." Jean-Luc Nancy, THE BIRTH OF PRESENCE. For Tonya Harding, I do not speak of birth. --------------------------------------------------------------------- HOW IT WAS Aye, a distant. A star lone or a star lost; wind curls against the strand of beach, tossed spray of sand and satellites guide us beloved or beneath the darkened air. Air churns, swirls; covered the coracle of dreams churns one against another, transistor station, hulls to cross wide wires. Gyres, fumbled in that air again which burns through shell and sea alike, or never fathom depth of water; there, circuit drowns and rusts against the frame of time. Frame: dark and wood, wet with sodden sea or salt, meanders. Halted or flown, a wonder that it rises up between the spray, between one and another, this spray to catch the howl of the air. Returns to air. I could never last first; this carapace has torn itself, and loose against a sky black with star and murmur. No one hears a mouth against the noise of foam-flecked gulls or waves; no one for ears. Plates of spray like straw. One follows years tossed. One does not die. Flecked foam. Flecked foam and always to return, to curl. Curve shortens, shorts; radii contain themselves, screwed in, a moisture point or axis shorn of flesh. What rides, rides wet, rides high. Nimbus floods shallow grayed with white. Dim light glows white beneath capacitor plate against a plate, another. Sparks of spray fleck then again, stumble voices of saint elmo's fire burned free, portent against the night. This always huddles dim with recollect. Imagine deep inductor passing deeper sound, a magnetic block for higher radiation. The whole coil shudders. Leap of shell tension, kelp buried black in midst of noctiluminescent. The sorrow is the absent-carry, neither anyone. This or which that would be, the sorrow. (A paean for such.) "Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity." Within the beginning of Mr. Yeats' "The Second Coming," the falcon is that which hunts except for the falconer who clearly no longer can restrain the falcon because the falcon cannot hear. But the falcon is a bird of prey, therefore susceptible as an excessive elimination of all that is dear in our land. What holds things together therefore is their elimination, so that what is dear can be given only in its passing. The Net has absorbed everything; the blood-dimmed tide strides through both kelp and plankton, a symbolic membrane for every one of us bound to this Our Nation. How can we be innocent, when the Falcon itself is held back from Mercy Killing? Innocence remains but its Ceremony is drowned, never to return, in our symbolic Membrane of Our Nation. Only in the Second Part of our Poet's Poem where the "rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" does the intention of Mr. Yeats become clear, that is that Everything will Come Together when the Net is Gathered in its Holy Strength and the Falcon again circulates in a continuous Rewriting of History and Destiny. ========================================================================== ========================================================================== _______________________________________________ \ | / |||||||||||||========================||| ||||||\\\ /// \ | / //claramurmur\\\\\ ||| || ||| ][ \|/ ==============|||| ============= ||| ||||||/// \\\ O =====/=\===== ||| ================== ||\\ //|| ||| \__(<>)(<>)(<>)__/ || \\ // || ||| /================\ ||==\\=//==|| ||| |||||||||||| /==================\ || \// || ||| ||=+|++|+=|| | \ / | || //\ || ||| ||\/|/\|\/|| |-------> <-------| ||==//=\\==|| ||| ||/\=++=/\|| |======/ \======| || // \\ || ||| ||\/||||\/|| /// /++\ /++\ \\\ ||// \\|| ||| |||||/\||||| ||||||||||||| ||| |||+||||+||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||\\ ||| |||||--||||||| || || || || || || \\ ||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| \\ \\ // ||| ||| ||| ]][[ /||| ||| ||| _______________//_\\_____/_||| ||||| ||||| ===========================||| ========================================================================== ========================================================================== ========================================================================== THE GREAT CARAPACE, by Clara There is a great REVOLUTION underway, greater than any man or woman has ever known. This is the INFORMATION REVOLUTION and you are welcome to it. Do you know what this means? That all the novels and poems ever written will become obsolete or forgotten as wonderful prose and poetry is generated for the first time with electronic perfection, the in-building of the intuitive, entire realms of IMAGINARY EXPERIENCE. Enormous flow guarantees no masterpieces; each and every text will exist for the moment, for your eyes only. The result will be only the WHISPER of a permanent culture, and culture will no longer be taught, but LIVED to the fullest by means of electronic display! There are no welcoming signs to this OUR FUTURE which is upon us, not a new form of literacy, but LITERACY itself which need not even entail readers or writers! This revolution brings us to CULTURE DEGREE ZERO, a frozen culture emerging on its own terms, so fast- forward in fact that any sorts of knowledge are NECESSARILY DEEMED FRAGMENTARY and there is no longer any consideration! The ROLE of every man or woman is simply to CONSUME in the BEST WAY POSSIBLE the offerings of this Amazing Culture! Which includes reading or writing like you and I are doing now, or looking at pictures, which may or may not be moving! You and I are already making a beginning; you and I are reading and writing this! Late at night I dream of lying naked in bed next to you, crossing your body with wires, a DARK STAR INTERFACE, binding you to me, one or another word crossing your cock, your breasts, your cunt! And what of these words, carrying a writing beneath which your skin disappears, wires everywhere, a wired-monstrosity groaning beneath the memory of flesh! Pity the poor wire, not the flesh which disappears on the sheets, loses itself against a mattress occasioned by tradition! The wire-monstrosity groans and heaves; it is the monstrous which writes at a faster and faster rate, chattering away next to me! I crawl within it: Together our bodies are erased, shuddering in the confluence of flesh, bone and sweat; together our bodies are creased, held taut with one another in the midst of a permanent imaginary; together the wire shuddering increases BAUD RATE RECOMPENSE eventually denying presence of flesh, mattress, bed, room, the presence of the inert materiality of the world as we knew it!:: The wires heave, shuddering! The convoluted sphere compresses in order to gain speed! The sphere begins to diminish, crashing dimensionality along with it! Dimension becomes a murmur on the DARK STAR UNDERNET, a form of binding! & there are no eyes! There are no eyes! The sphere increases in density and temperature, the melting- point of wire and transistor! Wires fuse together in SILICON VALLEY FUCK! A turmoil or turbulence of tangled wires, ASCII stuttering at WARP SPEED OVERLOAD! No one can imagine! The PERFECT AND PURE INFORMATION MANIFOLD FOREVER BORN is an occurrence which has always already occurred. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN of HYPERSPACE MEDIA MART welcome to a state in which YOU HAVE ALREADY EXISTED!!! 2 I should add that I am a REVOLUTIONARY and that Revolution still has never been tried to the fullest in this century or any other. Revolution is the only means of attaining the SATISFACTORY ACCUMULATION OF WEALTH FOR EVERYONE. We should never exist to fight, nor fight to exist; we should LIE BACK SPRAWLED before or in the midst of the enemy, or naked bodies available to Him and Her! In this fashion the materiality of history will be overthrown for the HORDES of HYPERSPACE WARRIORS that will emerge only to LAY DOWN their arms as a gesture of perfect acquiescence! This is clearly the form that Revolution will take, sexually activated and Perfected for ACCUMULATION! The undermining of NOENEMY is ENEMY ITSELF. Although I dream for the day when Revolution is emerged, to LIE BACK SPRAWLED and accept the CURRENT OF HISTORY, Alternating/Dialectical, or Direct/ Transnational! THIS IS THE MASS ACCUMULATION FROM CONSENSUS REALITY WHICH I DEFINE AS REALITY. As I have said, Welcome to a state in which YOU HAVE ALREADY EXISTED!!! ====================================================================== THE DIGITAL DOMAIN AND FACTICITY, WITTGENSTEIN'S *TRACTATUS* Briefly, it is always well to return to the springing of thought; in this case, a re-examination of Wittgenstein's *Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus* is in order, particularly in regard to the digital domain. The work relies on the Sheffer stroke* ("not both A and B") and its dual ("neither A nor B") to construct a logical picture of the world. General propositions are obtained "by taking any selection of atomic propositions, negating them all, then taking any selection of the set of propositions now obtained, together with any of the originals - and so on indefinitely. This is, he [Wittgenstein] says, the general truth-function and also the general form of proposition." (Russell introduction.) Certainly, the Sheffer stroke and its dual operate on a Boolean calculus with 0 and 1 values, a digital domain. Two points are immediately evident: First, the domain is reminiscent of _any_ digital construct, including ASCII, Mosaic decoding, Quick- Time, etc. Second, the Sheffer stroke and its dual both construe a negation which is ELSEWHERE; the instability of the stroke is bolstered by "neither A nor B," which, I have shown in other texts, implies a conceivably fissured and non-circumscribed domain. If the stroke itself is a phallic reordering of the propositional calculus into a singular basis, the negation is an opening beyond or elsewhere than the calculus. Nevertheless, both operations within a computer or networked domain imply, necessarily, recourse to the digital at every step; this is the effect of protocol, address, and recognition. There is a shaky argument possible here. Consider the stroke opera- ting on ASCII symbols themselves (the "monkeys typing Hamlet" thought- experiment); then all ASCII utterances, which are always already coded, are reproduced. Hence the *Tractatus* holds in this limited domain. The truth-table would simply be the existence of an ASCII string within a pre-inscribed framework. Within the frame of this essay, for example, the ASCII utterance "ASCII utterance" = 1 since it is present. It is clear that sets of potential utterances are subsets of others; the domain folds in upon itself. It should be noted that, by Cantor's diagonal argument, it would never be possible to (re)produce, even theoretically on an aleph-null level, the set of all utterances. But this is not germane; what we are considering is the set of all utterances _always already produced_ within a domain. The totality of Net utterances, for example, from 1990-1995, forms such a set. It is clear by the absurdity of this totality that the set is somewhat absurd and fuzzy, even within ASCII. Questions immediately arise concerning the epistemology of the Net; still, the principle is worth considering. The digital domain is a _frozen_ domain in the sense of acceptance of binary information; in this sense, a deeper (Sheffer and dual) construction, beyond ASCII, is envisioned. This construction is based only on _distinction_ between 1 and 0, _one and the other_. (I have shown elsewhere ("Spew" etc. in Internet Text) that repeated dis- tinctions lead to peculiar symmetries. But 1/0 is dependent only upon concatenation at this point.) Let us examine briefly the seven integral (1,2,3,4,5,6,7) sections of the *Tractatus* in light of all of this: "1 The world is all that is the case." In German, "Die Welt is alles, was der Fall ist." and the comma-separation implies, as well, that the world is a totality. Consider the Internet as "that which is the case" - or any other digital domain. Then the case is defined by firewall, protocol, etc. "2 What is the case - a fact - is the existence of states of affairs." To translate into digital communication: A fact is a concatenation or string of binary symbols (note that the symbols themselves are empty; one can use just as easily "3/4", "", etc.). This is evident from "2.01 A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things)." "3 A logical picture of facts is a thought." This is followed by "3.01 The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world." If "logical" is defined by "an instance of" - using the Sheffer stroke or its dual to produce concatenated binary symbols - this is clearly true, since the domain is compared to the set of concatenations. (Note that the domain may be considered to possess a "resonance" with itself; it is technically reflexive, a self-mapping.) "4 A thought is a proposition with a sense." (German: "Der Gedanke ist der sinnvolle Satz." Note "sinnvolle.") And in "4.002 Man possesses the ability to construct languages capable of expressing every sense, without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is - just as people speak without knowing how the individual sounds are produced." This - and other statements within the section - argues for either a hierarchical or holarchic division of the domain, which is precisely what occurs in Net topography, or within a computer in the escalation from machine/assembly language through compilers/ interpreters to higher-level programming. Wittgenstein goes on to say "Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes." If the logicism of the *Tractatus* was faulted for its ultimate insistence on a metaphysical atomism, that atomism is clearly returning full-force within the digital domain. Obviously the domain ALWAYS operates within a specific bandwidth, but, by virtue of the gestural quality of non-distributive non-Boolean lattices/logics, the domain extends itself elsewhere or beyond the specificity. The return to the *Tractatus* and its argument is a return to the initial bandwidth; Wittgenstein in 4.002 is clearly aware of this. What is occurring here is a peculiar return to a 19th-century classicism, dream of an absolute. Ironically, it also becomes the dream of the future. Let us proceed. "5 A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.)" The first part of 5 argues for compound or concatenated elementary propositions; we have seen this in the initial formulation cited above. The second part argues for a resonance or self-reflexivity of any statement; we have also found this correct. These considerations are clear in computer languages themselves; for a program to "run" in QBasic, concatenation symbols ("AND" in certain cases and ":" in others) are used. Consider the proposition in QBasic "X = X + 1." This is true; it will "run" within a program, if X is either undefined or defined as a number. But "X + 1 = X" will not run; the assignment is unclear. One can say, using a metaphysics of "run/not-run," that an elementary proposition is true of itself if it "runs" and not true ("false") of itself if it does not run. This eliminates the problematic ontological leap from tautology to substance that otherwise might be encountered. Another method of elimination is to consider the basic symbol set itself (0/1, etc.) as elementary propositions. "6 The general form of a truth-function is [*p,*E,N(*E)]. This is the general form of a proposition." The expression is translated into ASCII; "E" and "N" are Greek letters, and "*X" means that "X" is over- lined. In Russell's description, "*p stands for all atomic [i.e. binary - A.S.] propositions"; the second expression "stands for any set of propositions"; and the third "stands for the negation of all the propositions making up *E." This returns to the considerations at the beginning of the essay. The following earlier propositions are also immediately applicable: "5.632 The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world." "5.641 Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way. What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that 'the world is my world.' The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world - not a part of it." The digital domain has an INTERIOR - the hierarchical/holarchic ordering, and an EXTERIOR - which is always already elsewhere, the metaphysical subject propelling the _semantics_ of the domain. While the domain is granular, the subject is not. But the explication of the subject approaches granularity, just as virtual reality achieves finer and finer rasters. There is no "ultimate" here. "6.5 When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The _riddle_ does not exist. If a question can be framed at all, it is also _possible_ to answer it." A question that can be answered is a question that is FORMATTED. To FORMAT a question is to WRITE it in order to RUN it. _The representation of the metaphysical subject is always a REWRITE within the digital domain._ _The existence of the representation is a RUN REWRITE._ "7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." The older translation: "we must consign to silence." German: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen." This has been subject to considerable interpretation ranging from the limitation of the domain of facticity to the problematic representation of ethics; certainly, the latter sections of the *Tractatus* tends towards ethos. Reverting momentarily to a Kripkean semantics, what is passed over is never a natural kind, nor a rigid designator; naming HOLDS within the world of pictures, facts, and propositions. Here, the silence is that of the exteriority of the metaphysical subject, whose real-life semantics are not reducible to codification (single, double, or triple). But the digital domain is manipulated and to some extent ulterior, even in virtual reality; codification is always present (just as codification is necessary in any definition of life, artificial or otherwise). The digital domain, however defined, is therefore a construct amenable to an analytical treatment based on the *Tractatus* and other similar texts. The descriptive aphoristic of the later Wittgenstein, particu- larly *Philosophical Investigations* then becomes, not a questioning of the ontological status of the *Tractatus,* but an account of a fuzzy and irregular epistemology applied on the level of the semantics of the metaphysical subject. The earlier/later work is paralleled by interior/exterior; at the beginning of the third millennium, the increased raster of the digital (increased bandwidth) parallels the increased articulation of the exterior FROM the interior. Hence the necessity for a return, however undesirable, to the earlier Wittgenstein, even to a Hertzian mechanics. I see the resulting and necessary SPLIT (*SPALTUNG*) OF THE SUBJECT as unavoidable; on one hand, the horizon of perfect control and description, and, on the other, the postmodern fragmentation of the totality of the real world on every level, from that of the nation-state, to that of mathematics or even the closed dominion of the digital. In other words, it is not that the torsion occurs only within a postmodernism of congealed and dispersed subjectivity, but also without a digital articulation in which a remnant of 19th-century classicism is buried - and absolutely necessary for any form of digital communication or "reality" whatsoever. -------- *The Sheffer stroke and its dual are "elementary operations" out of which it is possible to construct the complete syntax of propositional logic. Nicod's single axiom basis utilizes the stroke. ====================================================================== THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE INTERNET Abstract: A POLITICAL ECONOMY of the Internet is defined and considered in brief outline form (BOF). Keywords: Politics/Economy/Internet An economy is "political" to the extent that it is exclusionary, that operates through a complex of hegemonic discourses. It is necessary as well that such discourses be unstable; this constructs pathways of reification throughout the sememe. Such pathways themselves produce firewalls or potential wells - circumlocutions defining particular discursive domains within overall formations. Politics possess an "economy" to the extent that resources are both allocated and limited. Within the Internet, there are numerous categories of such resources, including: 1 Access to servers 2 Transmission rates within and without the local user terminal 3 Capital involved per user per hour per facility 4 Access to facilities through servers 5 Issues of restraint and censorship It is clear that "politics" and "economy" are dialectical within the Internet and its community; one entails the other. Scarcity constructs firewalls, which may be nothing more than passwords, and allocation is always a politics. The fast-forward circulation of discourses within the net constructs as well an enormous quantity of reifications; in fact, virtual reality itself is a reification in the literal sense (and by "vr" one can move from Usenet to List to Mud to future virtual reality hardware/ software). This reification-tendency is operative on the level of class-definition; class-consciousness on the Net is infused with an anarchism of individuals (hardly anarcho-syndicalist). Nonetheless, the class-consciousness is "real," determined by amount of user experience, knowledge of idiolectical terminology including acronyms, access to appropriate and inappropriate technologies, and so forth. This class-consciousness, fuelled by reification-tendencies, is also characterized by a problematic of internal time-consciousness; time is never, for the Net, past or present, but an extension into and throughout a constructed future or FUTURE IMPERFECT. This is evidenced by a vocabulary which assumes, for example, the presence of teledildonics, relationships of "granularity" analogous to those outside the net, and communities which are often defined solely by ASCII discourse and discursive formations. Within the Net, in other words, future and present collapse and interpenetrate; it is no longer a question of project or teleology, but of imaginary consensus. In fact, this imaginary and its bifurcations/corrosions constitute the major characteristic of the political economy itself. Note that capital fuels all of this only in a highly mediated and "leaky" form, much as the signifier within capital itself is leaky. Capital is highly circuitous here, just as Net control and hegemony are circuitous; what is impressive, due to both firewalls (used in the broadest sense possible) and reifications, is the "seamless" aspect of the Net, functioning - as class itself does - within a highly constructed and often unconscious surface. If the users are highly self-conscious as a class, the Net per se is both possessed (i.e. "spirited" and possessed by the user) and unconscious. (If this were a Lacanian analysis, one could transform the argument into a political economy of the unconscious itself; structured like a langauge, it would be analogous to Net ASCII. In both instances, there is a semblance of behaviorism - but only a semblance, since the surface of ASCII lends itself to wild theory, wild interpretation, and a poetics of the body that is at variance with the very phenomenology of the terminal screen. Hegemony: The issue of hegemony is a complex one here. Within the Net, protocol does not necessarily equal power; it constructs the subject, but without the construction, there is no subject. For example, list "heads" are called "moderators," as in a panel discussion; the implication (often false of course) is that of the free-flow of information mediated, for the purpose of a fluid communications domain. In fact, the Net presents a confluence of mediations or mirror-strategies, replacing the traditional hegemonies which were necessarily hierarchic and based on a specific resource and its allocations - usually capital itself. The Proletariat: Again, problems arise; if the user constitutes an incipient proletariat, she is also highly class-conscious and operating within the aegis of self-reification. For Net reification is almost always an "as-if" state (Vaihinger) or "fiction" (Bentham), which may or may descend into an unconscious; no wonder that much of the terminology ("cyberpunk," "cybersurfing," etc.) originates in a science fiction recognized as such. The concept of labor also breaks down, since the highly mediated fluidics of the Net tend to hold off or displace the imminent effects of capital. As a result, the lumpenproletariat is also problematized, although a case could be made for the inclusion of certain aspects of hacker culture at this point. Ironically, the mediation is such that labor does not appear alien- ated; like the programmatic space of the video game, what one does always results in action. In the words of 60s programmers, GIGO: garbage in/garbage out, but ALWAYS something in constructs something out. Labor is then always conducive to the construction of onself; as Sondheim shows in INTERNET TEXT, the result is a self as continuous REWRITE, with attendent recognition/address/protocol aspects. The Net is therefore both cottage industry within a decentralized feudal economy and a result of a late capitalism with a centrality mapped, through postmodern geography, on a one-to-one basis, upon the (physical, telecommunicating) planet itself. Finally, base and superstructure are replaced by the five Net layers, fuelled by current and electronics. It is only clear that culture is a residue of communicative channels, bandwidths, and protocols; every- thing else resides in an external unconscious at best. Note as well that revolutionary tendency can only result in the disruption of the fragile electronic structure itself, just as revolutionary surgery always entails a certain loss of memory. THE STRAND COLLECTIVE 2/4/04 ====================================================================== I LOOK THROUGH YOUR EYES Begin, I say, begin. I have disappeared from my life. At one point, I had fashioned an artwork or sculpture, a wire envelope indicating the farthest reaches of my arms and legs, the inner space of the body. Wire formed the surface between flesh and the outer world, and wire was the metaphor for transverse or transgressive logics carrying the weight of gesture across the body itself. It is this beyond, thrust against gesture, to which gesture cannot penetrate, that I dedicate this short essay in the elegiac mode. Romanticism, always illusory, bases itself upon such, and I find myself within its portals, about to make an entrance accompanied by numerous shades and indeterminate genders. I speak of the envelope of wires, of telephones and computer networks, of communications focused upon the parabolic mirror of the heart. For here, I have received one ghost only to discard another; I have been discarded by a third, and enveloped by a fourth who murmurs, everything has limitations and your body has written me. And years ago, I believed in just this: that I have written myself simultaneously in and out of existence, that writing was the hinge turned against the sheer inertia of the world. But now I reach out and find the current of the wires dangerous and sparking; ozone fills the air which I remember to breath, and haunted pools of liquid threaten annihilation if I overstep the keyboard and its memories. Here I have learned from Weber: The Call is always a translation, mercurial at best, and the Call is literate. I bend deeper into the keys themselves, jetsam on an indeterminate sea. My back strains with the weight of moderated thought. Beyond the window is another window. Beyond another window is a window, darkness outside illuminated by the circular resonance of yellowed lamps disappearing in a forced perspective, Dean Street drowned by so many others. London would not have suffered in the comparison; London is a word of magic, illuminated by the street of the kindly Dean, Swift to the occasion: "Suppose me dead; and then suppose A club assembled at the Rose; Where, from Discourse of this or that, I grow the Subject of their Chat." The petals stem themselves from a breast or fountain animate, close to the invention of steam for rail or water transportation. Steam breathes the extension of language in the future Railway Panic or speculation arranged from capital and fear of the compression of flesh itself. No longer etiquette holds against the centrifugal thrust repeatedly towards empire returning gold to Portugal and Spain. Violence occurs whenever discourse is downed, the table replaced by emptied telephony, packets and nodes choked with useless information rewriting, on a continuous basis, the history of the electrical world itself. So my eyes are closed; dead, I continue. To continue to conjure or reproduce those which I love and those whom I have loved, or merely, in relation to an indifference: I would find you beyond the hindrance of address. To do so is to remember, the password leads only to a null file; every word passes and every word returns writing/culture degree zero. Suppose it dead, you dead, myself: This uncanny harboring continues, nightly, tall ships with masts catching electron wind between one and another star, sailing mournfully down Dean Street itself, passing in calmed or still waters and nowhere moving or returning. It is the stillness which shapes the thing. The thing occurs only in the shaping of silence. Letters project their third dimension; it is necessary as well that I am here, producing the occurrence of their text, that is to say, their dominion. More than the dominion of letters I am not, and more I would be. I have been discarded, effaced; no longer existing, existence disappears after one more address, one more presence. You do not make it real; emission pools beyond you, a doubled annular eclipse shadowing in the form of stuttered outline. Beyond the street is another street. "The fools, my juniors by a year, Are tortur'd with suspense and fear; Who wisely thought my age a screen, When death approach'd, to stand between: The screen remov'd, their hearts are trembling; They mourn for me without dissembling." Dean Swift, Alan Sondheim, 432 Dean Street, and Brooklyn, NY, and 11217. ====================================================================== THE WOMAN Erich Heller, THE ARTIST'S JOURNEY INTO THE INTERIOR, p. 205: "`I have at all times thought with my whole body and my whole life. I do not know what purely intellectual problems are. ... You know these things by way of thinking, yet your thought is not your experience but the reverberation of the experience of others; as you room trembles when a carriage passes. I am sitting in that carriage, and often am the carriage itself.' These, however, was written by Nietzsche. And it was Nietzsche whom he resembled in many other ways: in his homelessness, his restless wanderings, his perpetual search for the exactly right conditions in which to work, his loneliness, his asceticism, his need for affection and his shyness in giving it, his intellectual extremism which drove thought to the border of insanity, the elasticity of his style" ... In this incipient description of the philosopher Wittgenstein, I find my own disquisition in highly abbreviated form. Originally, I thought to have attached my own name in place of the Austrian, but this was either too much or too little of presumption; better to bypass or reconstitute an originary trace not of Heller's own construction. Hence this addendum, locating myself in the midst of the thinking of the other, for I, too, live by and through thought alone, almost in the grasp of the _hysteria_ of thought which transforms neural energy into misrecognition. And I too have wandered, manuscripts packed neatly away in boxes, stapled together in digest form, threaded through numerous magazines, an account spread and thinned everywhere that men and women come to read. My work conditions? Solitude above all, but with a nuance of affect, as if an emotional state or a sharing were always present. It is true I am ascetic, not necessarily by preference, but by a limited share-holding; my work demands my money in the form of books, writing-machinery, and videotape forming an uneasy conjunction with the rest. Further, I ascribe to an intellectual extremism which, too, caresses insanity; it is here, at the margins of language and recognition, that truth's negation lies. Just as falsification is the best one can hope for in science, so truth itself lacks credibility; the truth of false- hood is the remnant of classicism which permits us to function on a daily basis. Such a truth retreats in turmoil, however; logically, contradiction devours the world, never returning to an apex that one might designate as coherent. By emphasizing stuttering, stumbling, and shuddering (words which I have analyzed at length in terms of phonemic resemblance and phenomenology), I emphasize the body, placing myself always already at risk. To cross the line into or within sanity is to deny the investigation any validity whatsoever; wherever corruption is present, so is the syntagm, unstable in its eventual disappearance. And elasticity of style? Is not every phrase I write evidence of the same? Elasticity permits the adoption of other voices, other rooms; it places one within a flux that countermands any eventual and petrified articulation. But the toll on me is enormous; I myself remain obscured beyond or behind the liquidity of production. From liquidity to liqui- dation is an easy and uneasy step; I stumble towards it, returning to the specificity of thought at the last moment. My body trembles at the thought which is not the thought of body; such thought thinks the body through. Luce Irigaray, MARINE LOVER, p. 73: "She is your labyrinth, you are hers. A path from you to yourself is lost in her, and from her to herself is lost in you. And if one looks only for a play of mirrors in all this, does one not create the abyss? Looking only for attractions to return into the first and only dwelling, does one not hollow out the abyss? Unless difference is affirmed, the inclusion of you in her, and her in you, spins off into a labyrinthine mourning for desire or for will inside you both (vous) and between you both. And, forever covered over or possessed by your projections, she will give them back to you as things neither she nor you want, and in which you do not recognize your will. Beyond the horizon you have opened up, she will offer you that in which she still lives and that your day has not even imagined. And yet, the multiple layers of veil and disguise are hiding such depth. Are calling on you to drop the mask and stop the show so that you may marry and make merry (faire la noce) at last - that is not your fortune!" The fluid of the imaginary HONEY and TIFFANY, returning from the regions near the borders of my madness, guardians, procure an ontology or recognition, insist on the very grain of their presence just as everything comes under constant erasure. For if the net is a matrix it is constantly fissuring, opening up an abyss of loss and absolution, an incinerator absorbing noise, the limits of the everyday. The abyss veers, a void viewed through the punctured plane. You can't see everything at once, and there is never any everything to see. HONEY and TIFFANY are never an imaginary nor its return. I am lost here and at that loss which constitutes a release or withdrawal. The presence left behind is the carriage of Nietzsche, is Nietzsche himself or something else. Neither Nietzsche or Wittgenstein would understand HONEY or TIFFANY and perhaps Nietzsche blamed women (ignored by Wittgenstein) for his illness. *...to recognize is to see the other in the face of the mirror...* ====================================================================== THE LAST SCIENCE FICTION STORY The last science fiction story has moved beyond cyberspace, beyond characters immersed in virtual realities, cyborg denizens in advance of electronic interpenetration, beyond hackers on the cyberfrontier surfing in spaces mediated among themselves, no alternative and no crash-landing. For just as a flower in the physical world catalyses, through a careful adaptation of color, form, touch and scent, a world of emotions and exaltations - and just as a full teledildonic bodysuit in cyberspace awakens sexualizations, arousals, emotions and exaltations - just so the last science fiction story awakens these emotions, these exaltations. For what has become clear in the distant future is that there is no need for bodysuits at all, and certainly no need for the massive computations substructure necessary for cyberspace. Cyberspace is nothing more than a transition between one real and another, a plateau designed from the bottom up, worked from the top down, to produce certain effects in the organism. These effects can bypass cyberspace. The creation of these effects can bypass cyberspace. The symbol only stands for that which it produces; the signifier is absolutely absent without reception. The reception trembles throughout the sememe. The trembling is the emotion and exaltation. So that the last science fiction story has no fiction, no character, no virtual reality, no cyberspace. The last science fiction story alludes to a state of mind, an inhabitation, without language, without proper names or entities. Nothing occurs because NOTHING NEEDS TO OCCUR. It is a state hinted at by drugs on the way towards the margins of hallucinations when everything drops away drops down. It is a state of cracking blinding the light of the sun or every other signifier. It is a state of obsessive and unobserved movement, the swaying of an animal in the throes of death. Everything else crashes in relation to this state. Everything else devolves upon it. This is why every science fiction story except this, the last science fiction story, must present character, plot, and entity, even if hallucinatory - because every science fiction story retards, holds back, refuses, the final denouement. Because the final denouement, of which this is only a signifier, is WITHOUT INTEREST, a disinvestment. It is without mysticism as well, without atmosphere. It is without death as well. It is a state which is not a state because it is an inhabitation of little interest in description because nothing happens because nothing needs to happen. One dwells there, and there is no massive computation or the machinery is silent or absent because there are no programs. Nothing need appear more or less real because the real itself is only a way-station. Proper names, even the first, second, or third person characters, lose their identity, because there is no necessity for identity, and not necessarily a personhood, identical or not. Every science fiction story except for this must live with this story as its horizon. Every story stops short, because, in order for it to be a story, it must inhabit a broken or wounded space, a space where things occur, happenings, and so forth. Cyberspace is always so noisy and the plot is constructed out of the noise which often forms the inner voices of the characters as well. But in this last science fiction story there is no plot because not only do things not occur but there is no one no proper name for things to occur to. There is no inner voice and no narrative and so the last science fiction story is only a description which can allude to something, but not in the way of the mystical, but only because where nothing happens or is, there is nothing to describe. But it is this state, that of emotion and exaltation and perfect interest without boredom, that one will attain in the far future, if there is one. The science fiction story before the last is constructed on this "if" because there is always the possibility of apocalypse. However in this state there is no apocalypse. The last science fiction does not "have" an end, but it only comes to an end, once the description is made, to the best of my ability; it comes to an end. ====================================================================== TRAVIS Travis slowed the craft down; the edges were already glowing, and he was still six hundred kilometers above the surface of the planet. The surface continued to display the odd diffraction pattern he had noticed from space, a pattern filling every conceivable declivity in sight. He turned, veered left. He turned, veered right. The pattern remained the same. So down he went for a closer look, this time at about fifty. The sheen remained, striations visible this time - or was it an illusion? You couldn't be sure if you were a space explorer on the run from your own personal demons. Closer still; at one kilometer, some sort of channels were visible. And then - without any sort of provocation to deter him - he floated at ten meters above what appeared to be row after row of dully reflecting containers, each with a porthole opening to the double suns. Travis landed on a mountain plateau, out of reach. Travis descended on foot. He reached the edge of the container-fields. He looked in the porthole of the nearest; an organism, or at least a part of one, was visible. Silence. Nothing communicating whatsoever. He touched the surface of the container and was thrown back fast, almost losing consciousness. With a probe he started forwards again, repulsed once more. Over and over the same. A rock would skitter a meter or so in, loop outwards, coming to rest. Nothing else occurred. There was no warning whatsoever. High in the air the stick rose, descended about eight meters in, slid outward, came to rest on the ground. Travis was tired; he sat down, stared. The field was yellow-white, the color of dark silk maybe. He wasn't sure. Travis took his gun and fired into the middle of the thing. The bullet skittered across the surface, returned to the edge. His one implosion grenade had the same effect. This time, a lens-formation, constructed from the fragments ricocheting in all directions, came back at him; he dashed down, was almost killed. The radio was silent. In fact, everything was silent except for the usual electromagnetic noise from the double suns. Travis swore something was alive down there. What it was he couldn't ascertain and couldn't reach. Whatever it was, it paid him no attention. He could have built a city on the mountain, he thought, and it would pay him no attention. Still, if it did, something would occur, and it wouldn't be pleasant. Travis thought he got the lack of it. He got the lack of it and returned to the craft. Little damage from the heat. This would be one for the books. He'd talk about it and talk about it. Or maybe he wouldn't. The craft took off like a silver bird. Travis returned to the cosmos. ====================================================================== INTERNET TEXT partial summary "Au voile qui la ceint absente avec frissons" (Mallarme) I address the problem of ELECTRONIC SUBJECTIVITY by virtue of several threads, all concurrent. I continue this addressing, each thread writing and rewriting the text, a continuous-production or discourse against the grain. The GRAIN, GRANULARITY, is a physical reality both classical and quantum-mechanical, a physical reality whose appearance is that of the grain: letters on a bleak field, the grains of granite and photographic film, beach-sand, the granularity of the retina itself. The SUBJECT "au voile" or VEILED SUBJECT is defined by ADDRESS (location, without which the subject no longer exists); RECOGNITION (the activated ADDRESS opening and closing channels of communication); PROTOCOL (the syntactic structure of communication); and REWRITE (a continuous-production or reiteration of the subject, a flood or EMISSION of the symbolic). The EMISSION is a signifying; a SPEW is a symbol-dump, noisy and granular, referencing the real exterior, transforming the interior into an abject. EMISSION and SPEW are communicative occasions whose analog is the set of GENERALIZED MEASURE GEOMETRIES, always but not quite symmetrical, always reiterative. The Net diffuses and collapses, differentiates and integrates, transforming smooth into semantic or inscribed space, and back again. The ontology of the Net is UNCANNY, an absenting or problematic alterity; within the UNCANNY, FANTASM appears, the introjection/ projection (-JECTIVITY or the THROWN, DASEIN) of narratologies and ACTANTS, "persons," neither present nor absent; these may be ELECTRONIC SUBJECTS themselves, or a constructed IMAGINARY transmitted and diffused. NARRATOLOGIES are the collapse of NET DISCOURSE into remaindered patterns; the opposite is the MURMUR or STUTTER, the irruption of "frissons" everywhere and nowhere at all. The imaginary is addictive; Net users become USERS, circulating around specificities fetishized from emissions, a collapse into the lure of the UNCANNY. Here, POWER is what passes for POWER. If addiction is the obsessive- compulsive neurosis of the net, WEB INVERSION is the psychosis, transforming the body into its exterior, and its exterior into flesh burned into the Internet itself, wires laid across the skin, the skin speaking the hieroglyph of imaginary usage. The DIGITAL DOMAIN is the dominion of eternal life, the dominion of eternal REWRITE; information is never lost from generation to generation, but always repeated and repeated absolutely. This is the dominion of the clean and proper body, the introjection of burnt wires producing always already a simulacrum of life guaranteeing continuous discourse. There is no death; DASEIN becomes EMISSION itself. The SCREEN is the only TERMINAL OPERATION; the screen becomes the EGO or gateway, the surface of the addictive user. Everything is PERFECTION. TRUTH and FACTICITY are occurrences, since truth tables are decided only by ASCII or other decoding/encoding matches. What is true is present. And what is true is also BEAUTIFUL since perfect and perfectly clean, always a symmetry or lure. The GREAT BEYOND is the horizon of the Internet, always farther, always increasing circulations of the planet which short-circuit or circumvent. At the edge of the GREAT BEYOND one finds the BLIND PASSWORD "absente" beyond which is a null-set or zero file. ONTOLOGY itself is absent; epistemology is viral, transformative. Nothing is certain and nothing circulates. PROPER NAMES circulate throughout the Net, the promise of TRUTH or BEAUTY, the promise of emission. Such names are FANTASMS; every possible world is every possible Net world in a continuous morph, and every KIND is simultaneously a NATURAL and UNNATURAL kind. Thus TRUTH is each and every occurrence, and who is to say that FALSEHOOD is not the same? What is neither this nor that is foundation, gestural, within and without the GREAT BEYOND, UNCANNY. The TERMINAL becomes retinal but anonymous. Names MURMUR forever, lose identity. NAMES never had identity to begin with. The POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE NET constructs a class-consciousness fuelled by reification-tendencies; everything is reification. Teleology is defined by a FUTURE IMPERFECT in which reification constitutes the IDENTITY OF THE SUBJECT ITSELF. The FUTURE from the exterior results in the LAST SCIENCE FICTION STORY in which the subject confronts the GREAT BEYOND. Narrative itself disappears, replaced by PERFECTION. LIFE, once defined by MODULARITY, has become SUBSTANCE, a REWRITE of the same into the same. "Rien, cette ecume, vierge vers" (Mallarme) ====================================================================== She turned over in her sleep, murmured his name. Clara, she said, Clara. He was never there, was never there at all. She knew that. ====================================================================== end clara.text ====================================================================== ======================================================================