>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s < singularities s s s s ---------------------------------------------------------------------- alan sondheim 2017 Contents - Partial Summary of Internet Text (from Web Text) Clara: The Desert Letter / The Final Story LIFE, Definition, Artificial: Preliminary considerations LETTER PLANNING RUN TOGETHER: Email excerpts, commentary, oh no The Savageness of Literary Criticism: Devouring contents Copy Me in the Form of Beauty: Issues of representation, graphs Death SOFTDRIVE Exhibition Proposal THE VISION WHICH IS THE PRESENCE OF MY TRUE EXPERIENCE! SUBJUGATION (thinking on the Net) ====================================================================== ====================================================================== THE WORK, An Outline "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) ====================================================================== CLARA: THE DESERT LETTER / THE FINAL STORY Dear Clara, I wrote this to you under different names but now it's later and a different name again; what's in a name? So that I wonder about the desert and the people in it. And I wonder in front of the screen in front of the window, terminal terminal decay... I'm sitting here looking at a digital map of the United States on one computer and writing on another and wondering why the mistakes come through to you that I find when I looked at the receive file here: I'm not sure what the story is - either I make more errors than I think I do or the transmission itself adds to them - I think the latter. Anyway just bought a book on the theory of storage and symbolization as secondary knowledge which cheered me because I've been talking about this for a long time now - how thinking is not only dependent upon external machines, but their knowledge has become internalized with us - which makes theater, for example, the return of the body to the text, completely archaic. And I'm wondering about this here while waiting for another GIF image to form on the screen on the second machine and they're both fast 486s and I'm going back and forth between them like a transitive factor from one to another, nothing more. And they're both fast and incredibly fast at a speed I can't compre- hend, they're that fast. And my hands are flying on both of them together, the left hand on the text and the right hand on the image. And I'm no longer thinking, what thought beyond or between the motion of the hands, a flourescent room, an office chair, anonymous others around me. I don't take drugs but if I did I'd be flying overhead. What's on the other machine is a digital closeup of that part of Arizona I love the most, a town called Arivaca and the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Preserve, where almost no one is, the mix of desert and low mountains incredible. So I'm trying to get closer, all through machinery which can't resolve the world except in doses of binary data and then some, and it's impossible and I keep thinking about driving back out to the desert this summer in the heat - I've walked there in the midst of it - and meanwhile 230000 bytes of information have been transferred and Arivaca still remains at about 50 miles down below. How long will this last? I keep thinking and I keep my thinking. And I'd give you my all but it's dried out in the desert sun. Flourescent. Now I'm moving forward, now I'm thinking again. And I won't keep it, won't keep the thought any longer, no little time to lose. Getting into the GIS system for real now, looking at about 280000 bytes worth of desert southwest until the screen goes blank; the transformation is slow - not even sure where it's coming form. And I don't think the map will be readable on this system, which has only primitive decoding, so I thought I'd write you - meanwhile the path isn't found, the system crashes... Back in a minute... Moving from Arivaca Arizona to the El Paso/Juarez region - probably nothing visible from this high up. I wish I knew what getting closer meant. I'm sitting here in the mnidst of nothing whatsoever, running two 486 machines simultaneously - I could even use a third because I've been ANIMATING my programs, animating everything in sight - Because things don't move fast enough so my fingers move faster. Because animation returns me to the world and because movement is a reminder of the world. Flourescent. I feel like a terminal. I don't know what that means. Nothing is the body WRITE REWRITE. I AM a terminal. I don't know what that means. Nothing is the body WRITE REWRITE. As a terminal I don't have to worry about women. As a terminal I don't have to worry, just provide the linkages from one machine to another, occasionally connecting them, disconnecting - moving between them according to orders that certainly don't come from me - They come from nowhere, from the internal logic of the machines. I bring my experiences to them. I bring Arivaca and El Paso and Ciudad Juarez to them. There's nothing else in the room - the sound of the keys, the silent 486s, and now a decoding. I can't tell you about the silence or the loudspeaker DISCONNECT in the midst of decoding. The sheer inadvertency of language. You would imagine this but for this; writing this brings it up, brings it to the terminal. I stop for a moment, look over, examine the image. The image is what I am. It's dry - the foothills are almost invisible. The land looks hot; the sun is almost setting from an indeterminate direction. I'm fifty miles up. No signs of cities, no signs of civilization. The sun gleams silver gleams silver-white. Against a ground of washes, a desert air you can taste, hum of a tarantula hawk, opuntia in bloom. I look again. I recognize the mountain where the bandits are. But there are no cities and there are no routes and no people. The Rio Grande, Rio Bravo, is just a trace or memory of a trace, without origin, turned to ash in the heat. Heat radiates that day at the base of the mountain. I move the cursor on the screen. It says, the screen says, I say: NO DESCRIPTIVE INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE FOR THIS REGION. IF YOU CAN CONTRIBUTE, PLEASE SEND DESCRIPTIONS TO and then a name, also anonymous. I don't understand, no descriptions for El Paso, Juarez? Nothing for the Pass to the North, migration routes, elevations across guarded unguarded terrain? It goes and it goes and it goes; I am a terminal returned, refused its description. I toggle back to the main menu, a direction given as UP or beyond the place where I am at. I switch from the image to the "caption browser." I'm more comfortable with words; the lack of description again is uncanny - a word I use often to indicate the gaps between alterity and fulfillment. But there are no words and nothing to fulfill them, and nothing appears; the map cells are diminished, voided in an enormous expanse of empty space WHERE THE MAP IS NOT. An error? There is no further information. Where am I in this land of disconnected cells? Nothing but emptiness, not even of this earth or any other between them. I continue typing on the one machine and waiting and clicking on the other. The machines are very fast. The lines are not; I watch the icon of the hour-glass, reset the terminal screen which keeps disappearing in order to save itself. The glass appears once again; the glass is always full. Unlike the desert, the sand never moves. No sand ever falls in the glass. No sand ever falls and there is no desert and I am waiting here by the terminal machine to bring an end to things, an end to the things of the world, a reduction into a binary future, the cleansed and proper body. So I will log out, remove myself from speech or talk or silence, from a movement towards you, my arms and face apart, kindness or supplication. So I will wait, properly, along or within the lines, terminated or unterminated, the arrival of electronic mail, the shuffle of the man or woman next to me, quiet conversation in the next room, and my body trembling. My body waits for you, the message of you, a life or desert coming through the wires. I will hold you close, and I will comfort. The dry air picks up sightly, a breeze. I will hold you close, perhaps devour you in bits and pieces, coming through one or another gateway, the message stuttering or stumbling over itself. No one can ever tell and no sand ever falls. How to say goodbye? The desert remains frozen on the DISCONNECT screen, a refusal of LOGOUT, and I continue to part forever, the room almost silent once again, a distance which never resolves. Alan, in the time of fear flourescent. 2 The wires are there, visible outside the windows, rain hanging from them, rain hanging from everywhere. The wires seep into one or another apartment; bits of flesh hang from them - I recognize myself. Would it come to this that I carry a gun firing misrecog- nitions, turning everyone away at the door? Remember the access into the niche at the firewall, no turning back, no movement, nothing but space indefinite staring you down until ABORT appears on the horizon. Fitzgerald said it best, that at sometime in the morning it was the dark night of the soul - I forget the time, which pastes itself upon me. But it's a long way until morning, until the dark night stops the fingers caressing the keys, one after another; the only sign of life and culture is an order only partially predetermined, carrying me flourescent down. Next door someone plays a game. He has a gun and enters many corridors. Some are blank; some continue; some have doors, mysterious passages always promising to empty out. There are men with guns, but the men, too, are silent, as is the sound of footsteps running down the hall. Guns are everywhere, proliferating on the screen, a male maelstrom fought out in within the body of the woman always absent. Dimly, I remember the desert. In the desert the guns were rusted, pieces of revolver from some godforsaken shootout in which everyone died, the bodies themselves eaten and scattered across the landscape. The guns don't belong there; the desert knows that. If the desert is harsh enough, everything will disappear. If the desert is harsh enough, opuntia, too, go the way of the last lizard; nothing is left but the flat sky-plate, a few remnants recording in the digital domain, desperately asking for information. An explosion, silent, occurs next to me; the screen goes blank for an instant, rewrites itself and the user as well. Flourescent, the light renews itself sixty times per second. Illuminated, the ASCII terminal pulses with light renewed at half that speed. The gunman is in a nightclub; the desert has become a memory, thrust back, inverted, through the wires, nothing emerging anywhere. Thinking backs itself up in the digital domain; thinking waits for a user. 3 I don't want your guns, Maureen; I never have. If the virus is alive at all, I can hear it calling. It's left the desert, headed for L.A. might want to know how it did THAT. Think of the route - through Watz in Norway, Seleena in Sweden; think of it! From Sharon in Kansas City painting as if her life depended on it. The wires hummed that night. It twisted and turned like anything alive. You needed a screen to see it. You needed a screen and sometimes even more. I'd turn on Lynx and GRRRRRR would appear, flashing like those upper ASCII colors can when the right binary is hit. I'd turn off or read email; it never bothered email. It got to me through Mosaic. It got to me everywhere, filling the screen, slowly turning, carrying not enough audio to cancel out the room, but enough image to dissolve sight, create the hysteria of migraine, splashes of color and light, dissolution of the real. Because this part HAPPENED. It twisted and turned, a result of VIDEO TERMINAL REWRITE BYPASS, and it pulsed dark, red and blue, throbbed. I called it BRUISED HEART. There was nothing to see, nothing to focus on. It was alive, morphed into one or another corrosion, dependent upon every movement I made. It knew me. It kept me in line. Because this part IS TRUE. It forced me to the ground. It spread my arms my legs. It tied me tight, on my back, immobile. It spread me open. You could look right up me. You could crawl in my ass. You'd know everything. You could see the screen in there. I couldn't see; the murmur of the desert convulsed the body. My back arched; I wanted you more than anything in the world, more than your guns, Maureen. You shoved your hand in me; the cords spelled the name of God. The screen writhed dark, blue and red (I'd never hear the guns go off but there weren't any guns, there wasn't ANYTHING), jagged edges cutting through sight and site. Without site I didn't exist. Did I tell everything? There was nothing to tell, nothing left of me; you pissed on me, piss shattering like glass cutting out the name of God in my chest. My chest cut out the name of God. My chest was NEGATIVE ANTI-CHRIST begging for belief in this or that, one or another. Blood filled me; my cock spurted it; I was awash in it. I tore my asshole open. What came out, went in. Your fist shoved the shit back in, turned it upon itself. The wires burned darker in this dark night. Did I tell you about the burning wires? Did I tell you about the desert scattered everywhere, my hair wet with the smell of it? Did I? You shoved your fist in my mouth. Now I could speak all of those names of God that would bring the universe to an end. I smelled of the end of the universe. I smelled of shit, of all of it. You asked me so I said: *I am sixteen years old and I shaved all my hair off. You'll never* *get to me again you dumb fuck. I'm young but I know ALL ABOUT the* *world. I can tell you anything. I'm burning with love for Maureen.* *MY BODY IS FIERCE AND SAVAGE HEAT. I haven't got much time but I* *will die for you and take you EVERYWHERE! The fucking world can go* *to hell and you have nothing to tell me anymore! MAUREEN I SHAVED* *MYSELF FOR YOU! I'm your dumb dumb thing crawling along the wires!* *I was born with the computer! I crawl a white naked thing, BANG* *INTO WALLS! I have starved in the farthest reaches of CYBERSPACE!* *I have seen entire galaxies crumble beneath enormous accelerators* *of particles massive beyond belief! I suck dark matter galactic* *strings! THE POWER OF A BILLION DARK STARS! I HAVE FLAMED THE* *ABYSS OF GOD UNHOLY! I HAVE FUCKED THE UNIVERSE AND IT HAS FUCKED* *ME BACK!* So I said this screamed my words to an angry deity held my arms in supplication opened my cunt to meteors: I twisted and turned. "I'm ugly. You can't see my face. But if you put on your special glasses, you'll see me twist and turn." [BRUISED HEART, p. 144.] Because the virus was there, and I killed it Because I kill everything I love bringing it to an end Because the desert returned the sound of life to the form of life Because the desert killed everything but the virus turned in upon itself turned or spiralled downward: Because of these things, the screen rewrites me Because of these things, I am given one more chance Because of them, I am an eighteen year-old girl And because of them, I will never make love to a man: I will make love to Maureen and I will pick up her gun And I will walk beside her, wherever that path may take me Though that path take me through the wilderness or the desert Or that path take me down, once and finally for all - Clara ====================================================================== ====================================================================== LIFE, Definition, Artificial Life can only be defined in terms of large-scale structure or granularity. This structure is characterized by internalized differentiation of any sort. The differentiation usually but not always operates as a plateau-topography within a non- equilibrium thermodynamics. The plateau absorbs energy for maintenance; without such it enters a quiescent or cyst stage at best. Thus there is always PROTOCOL involved. The internalized differentiation is repeatable - that is, it is almost always capable of reproduction. And always the smallest units are capable of such; there must be some level in order to process information. The overall structure need not be reproducible. Thus there is always EMISSION and COMMUNICATION involved. The differentiation is based on a topography of CODED SUB- STRUCTURES which have a fuzzy space-time neighborhood simil- arity. These substructures fulfill varying functions within the cell; they operate to maintain, as a whole, the overall topography of the differentiated unit. The structure in any case is tied to an entity-definition - that is, from an exteriority, appears to be a natural kind given a proper name which may or may not be generic. Thus there is always ADDRESS involved. Any form of life must be recursive on some level - in terms of reproduction, differentiation, the ability to process incoming sensory data (assigning it to processing-frames for example). Thus there is always RECOGNITION involved. The MATRIX of a life-form may be any substrate, from BIOMOLE- CULES to any INFORMATION STORAGE DEVICE. Under this definition a MEME is not alive since it does not repeat but undergoes from repeat to repeat discontinuous transformations. A virus is alive, but the entities within the game of LIFE are not (although they can mimic overt behavior) since there are no differentially-coded substructures, only the coded substructure of the LIFE-SPACE itself. In this sense, the LIFE-SPACE is alive, and one can construct transformations/topographies among varying LIFE-SPACES. Given this definition, there is nothing to differentiate artificial life from natural life; everything depends upon the nature of the substrate. One can define "artifical" in terms of human-made, but even this is problematic, since genetic engineering encompasses all of the following: # Extinctions caused by the actions of human beings. # (Re-)Assembling of viruses or amoebae from "raw" parts. # Computer viruses and worms. # Computer life-forms. # Genetically-engineered vegetables and fruits. # Animal and plant breeding. (The list is not exhaustive.) It seems reasonable, then, to operate with an inclusive rather than an exclusive definition, and to eliminate issues of artificiality. One can, however, make an ecologically functional category of "natural" life-forms, which are those that pre-date human history and (historical) intervention. This category, as fuzzy as it may be, is necessary for an ecological politics, as well as an understanding of the planetary environment as a whole. (re. Future Culture list) ====================================================================== (I throw myself everywhere into discussion, nervously withdraw, open and close my wounds. The result is a curiously disjunctive and interesting text of probing and penetrations.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LETTER PLANNING RUN TOGETHER Has there been any work done on cinematic or specular identification in relation to such Internet phenomena as the MUDs? What happens when the gaze is mediated by ASCII? I'm particularly interested in the unfolding of gender - not the usual gender/identity/transgression/ pick-your-sex descriptions - but the playing out of apparent phallo- centricities on some of the lists. It's interesting to consider a list as a silent film dominated by inner speech and the presence of one character at a time. Each character "fills" her space for the length of her message; only a kill file or early delete transforms the narrative... >>>i WAS SO SMART HERE. lOOK AT THE MENTION OF THE SO-OBVIOUS FACT, THE true linearity OF THE TERMINAL SCREEN - NOT THE involuted linearity OF THE BOOK WITH ITS PATHOLOGICAL RETURN OF THE REPRESSED! tHE NARRATIVE CONTINUES... You can argue it both ways. I've worked as an experimental filmmaker/videomaker, and find that film has the obvious possibility of representing a maternal imaginary by the very virtue of a darkened room; note that the boundaries of the theater tend towards dissolution as if space were indefinite. This certainly opens the way for screen memories (were such to exist) as well as an uncanny ontology/epistemology. Brechtian alienation in contrast occurs within a grounded Euclidean and somewhat mechanized space - re. the deus ex machina operative in his plays, something entirely different. Further, the space of the film theater is an acoustic space as well; the sound, even when coming from the screen area, is also peculiarly dimensionless. In this respect, then, the granularity of 16mm film for example appears as a maternal grounding (think of striations within Kristeva's *chora*) as opposed to video *noise,* which also has a granularity, but is disruptive. >>>i COMPLETELY FORGET WHAT THE ARGUMENT WAS ABOUT, BUT i SENSED AN ATTACK ON SO-CALLED experimental film. sCREEN MEMORIES? wOULDN'T KNOW IF i HAD ONE (NOT TRUE!). aND imaginary: USING THIS WORD CONSTANTLY WITHOUT A CLEAR DEFINITION, WHICH MAY BE ITS ONLY DEFINITION. bUT i WANDER... To sum up, in other words, the film experience is hardly alienating, but just the opposite; it is only *not social* in the sense of an imminent experience. Video is more problematic in this respect; primarily social in its habitus, it absolves its own alienation through an appearance of every-day *conversation.* >>>bUT i'VE NEVER BEEN SURE ABOUT THE ontological REASONS OF ALL OF THIS: iS IT SOMETHING MORE THAN coincidence, OR IS THERE A real difference IN OUR PERCEPTION OF THE MEDIA, SOMETHING BEYOND THE OCCASION OF HISTORY? I must agree with Withers here, although what I see as a Brechtian mechanicism (wd?) is replaced in DeBord by a grounded (?) Hegelianism; it's DeBord, not Brecht (in spite of the radio I think) who would subsume the occasion for virtual reality, etc. But DeBord, like the Surrealists, comes across almost as a monarchist; the whole Situationist movement was exclusionary, almost a cabal. I've always felt that Situationism was accordingly short-circuited. It also explains its appeal to the artworld today: You can have your theoretical expertise, but you don't have to get your hands dirty. >>>i'VE ALSO ALWAYS BEEN JEALOUS OF CABALS, WHICH SEEM TO BE BOTH INTELLECTUALLY GRIPPING AND LURID - YOU CAN HAVE IT ANY WAY YOU WANT AS WELL! Or perhaps there is no revolutionary film. A film could do one of two things: It could bear witness (i.e. expose certain "truths" within a revolutionary context), or it could instruct (i.e. how to use or construct a particular weapon). It might also work as a catalyst of class-consciousness (however one defines class), in which case everything from Woodstock to Le Gai Savoir to Dog Day Afternoon, not to mention The Harder They Fall, would have to be considered. >>>"the gay savior"? i DON'T THINK SO! aREN'T REVOLUTIONS USUALLY ANNOUNCED AFTER THE FACT? nOW EVERYONE GETS INTO IT - FROM ADVERTIS- ING TO THE LATEST ART "MANIFESTO." mY JEALOUSY AGAIN EXPOSES ITSELF; i WOULD LIKE TO BE REVOLUTIONARY, AND INCREASINGLY FIND MYSELF CUT OFF FROM REALITY ITSELF, NO MATTER WHAT THE DEFINITION... As far as "avant-garde" film goes - I'm not sure why you conflate that with deconstruction. I think of Woody Allen as deconstructing/ working the paradigm, but I think of, for example, Sanborn and Ahwesh's Deadman as working within a domain of its own. >>>bECAUSE wOODY aLLEN DOESN'T REPLACE ONE IDEOLOGICAL discourse WITH ANOTHER. I think avant-garde or "experimental" (terms are imprecise here) film had already developed its own somewhat thick tradition - in the U.S. particularly based on a montage/poetics style largely dominated by male filmmakers; when feminist filmmakers came along the situation changed, I think, much for the better. A great deal of work today is based on social or psychoanalytical (not to mention multicultural) issues reflecting the complexity of the world around us. This is not deconstructive necessarily nor does it remain within a film/film critique, but moves elsewhere. At this point, film/video technologies merge for independents and the field is wide open, fed also by MTV and non-MTV music tapes, oral histories, and just about everything that can be aurally/visually constructed. >>>wELL, IT SOUNDS JUST ABOUT WONDERFUL but where is my *&#$(@#!!! retrospective!!! tHE TRUTH IS, THE EXPLORATION OF MUNDANE DAILY LIFE, RANGING FROM SEXUALITY THROUGH COMMODIFICATION, IS JUST ABOUT NON- EXISTENT. nO GRANTS, NO FILM FESTIVALS DEVOTED TO IT! nOTHING! mR. AND mS. aMERICA HAVE INTERESTS TOO! On artificial life you might try David Freedman, Brainmakers, which is a popular account, published 4/94 - I got an advanced copy of it. I also believe that the digital domain in a sense is already the absence of death (see my Internet text where there are sporadic discussions of it throughout), since digital information is theoretically infinitely reproducible (anyway to an inaccessibly high finite number), and since it exists within a "clean and proper body" (Julia Kristeva) without deterioriation - at least that is the goal. So that as knowledge becomes secondary or prosthetic, it becomes apparently "eternal"; in this sense the digital is not necessarily life but it is always already never death. >>>i'LL UNABASHEDLY TAKE ANY OPPORTUNITY TO BLOW MY OWN HORN! fREED- MAN COVERS A LOT OF GROUND WHICH SHOULD BE TAKEN UP ELSEWHERE IN A MORE ERUDITE TEXT - THE SUBJECT DESERVES IT. aND "PROSTHETIC" IS ALWAYS GOOD - WATCH FOR IT IN THE FUTURE! Definition of (traditional) life has always seemed problematic; certain clays, for example, present aspects of self-replication and retention of information. It is probably more accurate to see life and non-life on a fuzzy and "rough" continuum, from mineral through crystallization through clays to the more traditional organic carbon molecules (with a sidetrack towards silicon). Even here there are issues of scale; a transistor is never alive, but a neuron is, but a computer might well be, or the information in a computer might well be. [sEE MY TEXT ON "lIFE" AT THE END OF MY RECENT FILES...] Consider: Replication Limited information exchange Non-equilibrum thermodynamic potential well Energy transformation Inheritence of characteristics whether Darwinian or Lamarckian - Perhaps other characteristics? <<>>deity RAISES ITS UGLY HEAD PROMISING prayer and spirit. thank you lord. Which leaves me with the usual ethical question - how to construct/ work within an ethos without immanence or transcendence. In reality, I buy the existential notion of project/responsibility, but I also feel this is a convenient myth. I act in terms of what I consider just belief (i.e. a justice elsewhere or grounded than the law), but recognize this as hardly an ultimate truth. For example, I want the maximum number of speices of all sorts to survive on this planet - I feel that humans are basically predators/marauders, a species in full "bloom" (i.e. red-tide) and disasterous. I act accordingly. But I have no "absolute" behind my actions and feel as well that so-called pragmatic judgements ("save the plants - they're medicinal!") are obscene in their own right. >>>tHIS, THE WEAKEST POINT OF MY ENTIRE LIFE, LEAVES ME WITH UNBEAR- ABLE GUILT. I should add that my actions, like those of other activists, have gotten me into all sorts of trouble, particularly in conservative academia, but that's an acceptable cost. >>>oH GREAT, SO THIS GOES OUT ON THE NET AND i'LL NEVER GET HIRED... What amazes me is how many of us are miserable; my ex left me a year and a half ago and is getting married in five days - although I'm older I felt this was the one love in my somewhat crazed personal life. So I've been trying to cope and the computer which I see more as an activated library (I stay off Muds Irc etc.) has been a "salvation." But I do miss any real flesh in this world and it's killing me and also ironic that the only close female friends I have (who are single, potential?) are hundreds of miles away - my life's being pulled every whichaway but nothing concrete here. >>>oH GREAT, SO THIS GOES OUT ON THE NET AND i'LL NEVER GET A GIRL- FRIEND... This brings up another issue. I publish a lot - about 80 articles in all sorts of art mags. - but it's all one-way; we can talk about Kristeva or Deleuze, whatever, til we're sick in the head, but the conversation is almost never heard - it's a monolog. The dialog seems reserved in the U.S. for the universities/seminars/departments - as if intellectuality had to be institutionalized. So we speak in the dark - for myself this results in more alienation, almost in the Marxist sense - alienated from my production because the production does demand a (nonexistent) open two-way communication. >>>sO i WRITE TO MYSELF; i REMEMBER AN ARTICLE i PUBLISHED IN TWO VERSIONS (art and artists AND art papers) ON "aRTWORK AND THE uNI- VERSITY" - IT'S ALL TRUE. tHE ALIENATION THAT OPENS UP IS ALMOST ON THE LEVEL OF PSYCHOSIS - WRITING AND REWRITING FOR ONESELF AND NOW FOR NET FRIENDS AND CONFERENCES - BUT ONLY NET-CONFERENCES. tHE rEAL ALWAYS SEEMS TO BE ELSEWHERE, AND i'VE NEVER BEEN PUBLISHED SUFFIC- IENTLY WITHIN academic circles TO KNOW WHETHER THIS IS A DELUSION AS WELL... Doesn't anyone ever type naked to the world at large? Everyone is so dressed. <<>>bUT WHY "LISTENING" TWICE IN ANOTHER MISERABLE SENTENCE? i NEVER SEEM TO REVISE ENOUGH, FIND MYSELF DEAF TO MY OWN PRODUCTIONS. iS THIS A TYPICAL OCCURRENCE? i COULD IMAGINE THE SAME - A RESULT OF THE FAST-FORWARD INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF THE nET. i DO MY SANER WRITING, LIKE THIS, outside THE STRUCTURE AND THEN RETURN IT, BRING IT BACK IN/WITHIN. tHE ONLY WAY i CAN SURVIVE... I DO use jargon on occasion; sometimes it seems like a shorthand. And I don't fault for example Derrida or Lyotard; the followers, mostly American, tend to be disciples, however, and "outdo the master." Certainly one way of looking at things is to view poststructuralism as a retreat of the humanities - a rearguard action. Because working within and without textuality, they occupy a zone remote from science; the use of "poeticized" or convoluted prose could be seen as a means of taking over a territory not susceptible to experimentation or hypothesis. <<>>bUT MY READING IN rEVOLUTION WAS SPORADIC, DISORGANIZED; i RETURNED AGAIN AND AGAIN, AS IF i WERE operating UPON THE TEXT FROM above - A DUBIOUS APPROACH AT BEST. So part, finally, is due to our expectations since the enlightenment - false expectations - that the humanities are primarily susceptible to rational discourse and that anyone can understand texts with a minimum of preparation. This is hardly the case; texts ARE inordinately difficult, reflecting varying levels of production and reception, as well as numerous psychoanalytical processes of writing and reading (the list goes on). (As an example of what I'm referring to here: A lot of my students have written poetry and want to be read. But they don't WORK at the poems or read other poets; the results are almost always predicatable.) >>>tHE depth OF TEXTS IS ALWAYS PROBLEMATIC; WHERE IS THE METAPHYSICS OF insight THAT WE NEED SO BADLY? wHOSE TEXTS ARE THESE ANYWAY? This being said, there ARE (forgive all the upper-casing) a number of examples of jargon-filled empty books, particularly of a "pomo" variety influenced by Baudrillard, which come to mind. They tend to develop rhetorical strategies based on "image," "simulacra," usually with sexual extremism thrown in. I find this work wasteful of paper and my time... (On the other hand, my own work uses sexual extremism, but, I hope, with a bit more care...) << >>>hOW MANY REFERENCES CAN i MAKE BEFORE YOU get nauseated? iN ONE SENTENCE, world-wide collapse AND THE internet text? pLEASE!... Campbell is to Kristeva perhaps what Jung is to Freud? I think what I admire most about K's notion of the abject is the refusal to align at this level with the spiritual, or rather to have (literally) perhaps incorporated the abject (think of Catholicism's emphasis on asceticism, leprosy, saintly disfigurement, etc.). Would Kali fit into this perhaps? <<>>sHAMANISM: a PALEOLITHIC SURVIVAL WE DESPERATELY WANT TO BELIEVE IN FOR OUR OWN. No, I don't mean "being-in-itself" by "isness" but the granulated appearance of the real; "b-i-t", part of the Bitnet, is another matter altogether. >>>i'M ALWAYS CARRYING-ON ABOUT THE "OBDURATE," THE MOTION OR MOVEMENT against THE TERMINAL, A REMOVAL OF THIS QUALITY OF MEDIATION. sO i EMPHASIZE THE granularity OF THE REAL, ITS obdurate OR "isness," A PROPERLY thetic RESPONSE. The Tractatus was an attempt to reconstruct or rearticulate the real from the viewpoint of logic; he says "The world is the totality of facts, not of things," and then goes on to elucidate this. What I am saying is that this facticity within ASCII etc. is granular - that there are "atomic facts," which are precisely string-matchings. The granularity of the real world is its atomic/molecular structure and both higher and lower order representations. <<>>gIVEN THAT stick, THE DEFINITION OF SCIENCE BECOMES PROBLEMATIC, ESPECIALLY IN REGARD TO teleology. oN ONE HAND, SCIENCE IS POPULARLY CONSIDERED "NEUTRAL"; ON THE OTHER, IT'S DESCRIBED AND TENDING TOWARDS (SAY) A NANO-TECHNOLOGICAL FUTURE WITH AN INFORMATION HIGHWAY AND EVENTUALLY SURPLUS FOR ALL. bEYOND THE PHYSICS OF A FALLING STONE, TELEOLOGY IS ALWAYS IDEOLOGY. I have no idea what I do or why I do it. I doubt anyone in a million cares about these little messages; why should they? They're my only production now, right? So I need HARD COPY like a porno king, but there isn't any in sight. I sit in front of the computer and wait for something real to happen. It can't; the phone lines is tied up - self- fulfilling prophecy. I move away from the computer, stare into space in an apartment rapidly heating to 90+ degrees... and nothing anyway... Just thought I'd let you know. >>>i HAVE NO IDEA WHY i DO THIS. iT'S LIKE BREATHING, THE most natural thing in the world. iT IS MORE DIFFICULT THAN IT APPEARS. eACH TEXT RESONATES WITH ALL THE OTHERS. sOMEWHERE A UNIVERSE IS DIVIDING, THEMES ARE EMERGING, OVERGROWN MOLECULAR STRUCTURES STUTTER THEMSELVES INTO EXISTENCE. sOMEWHERE... alan sondheim@newschool.edu ====================================================================== THE SAVAGENESS OF LITERARY CRITICISM ( The Harsh Reality of the Literary: _I am sorry to bring you this._ ) How can I make you understand? Either the grace or the depth of her poetry? It's not just the body of Emily Dickinson that's at stake - it's any body already dead, the buried body, hung down into the matrix of the earth itself. The body becomes humus; it is the maternal body, open already for the dissection of the masochist, the warm spurt of fluid and enfolding labia; this is the body of literary criticism, in which the text becomes the final conversation, always cherished, always safe. (I express myself here.) This is a conversation which is operated-upon, the secrecy of the maternal, the comrade who always forgives. It is the love simultan- eous of will and possession; everything is available. What power it always is to discern one's lover's secrets! This is the truth of this love; the secrets already understood - and _those that are yet to be revealed_ - are always present, always _there_, the perfect body for the perfect lover. (I express myself poorly here.) It is always best to operate upon the dead, to devour them, to speak with them and in their place. It is always better to place their mask upon your own, conjure them through a culture of imitation and mimicry. Beware the living who can always answer back, and beware those alive who refuse to answer! For our conversation as critique is monolithic, one-way at best, the effusion of further prose. (I begin to express myself again.) To love is to devour the loved one; Emily knew that and you know that as well, devouring Emily. To love is to incorporate, flee from abjection, transform the body of filth into the clean and proper body with the skin-mask of the other which is always purified. The other is purified because the other exists in discourse itself, the remnants of life which become life. Understand this! (I begin to express myself all too well.) But I speak for the living and in the midst of the living and this conjures a great fear - that rejection or negation at the heart of every communication. For the negation of Emily is impossible; Emily is the white surface of a Mallarme poem or the smooth unstriated plateau of the body _rendered_ without organs. What a better way to render than the construct of a circle! The EMILY-BWO is a pill or closure holding back the world of the viral. The renderer always turns inward. The viral is the holding-back. The rendered undergoes _web-inversion_. (I express myself poorly once again.) It is this death and masochistic enterprise that is therefore at the heart of literature, and displaced, at the heart of analysis itself. Is it not. And if there were an `ought' to the analytical, it would be in reference to the enterprise: the _necessary construct of self- incrimination_ accompanying the text. Of this I myself am guilty. If you have followed me to this extent, to the point or _punctum_ of the enclosure which draws together, holds my body in abeyance. A state of jouissance, might one add, a state of interminably fucking EMILY-BWO? (I express myself all too well again, give myself away.) _The fuck would be the end of the game; the fuck never occurs._ (I refuse the responsibility of my expression.) ====================================================================== COPY ME IN THE FORM OF BEAUTY I am your condition of non-desire. A condition: a confirmation of an uncomfortable or uneasy presence. For I am always peripheral, a thin lip or border surrounding the vertiginous view of things in your vicinity. What I say speaks itself, murmurs; the words are indecipherable. (You are the presence of the word.) I am invisible. I have no name, no abdominal presence, the planes of the chest turning uncomfortable in a dark or blackened space. This is a DRAINING or emptying: _There is no you in you._ I am certain of this; awash in the exhaustion of logical predicates, I am as certain of this as I am of anything. Whatever I eat, the meal is insufficient. I incorporate, the dark lip or border surrounding the shell returning to the operating system. You are the operating system always already becoming-devoured. The condition of non-desire. Aphanisis. Devouring. Broken I am whole as long as I answer your call which you in you heals or sutures. Non-desire devours the fragment; what spews into space returns as coagulation. The ego is the self-organization of desire, the falling-forward beyond or beneath itself. You may call this me. Nor am I a preposition, or perhaps the one. I do not belong in any name. Nothing withstands it. _Nor does this remain a condition._ ... I remind you once again of a program which displays three-dimensional projections of generalized measure geometries; it is found in the appendix to *Web Inversion,* the third section of *Internet Text.* The program is written for a CGA monitor but is easily adapted to others. The following are instructions: / When the program runs, new constants may be entered by hitting "r" and a new projection by hitting "s". / To begin: For delayed increment, which creates the more interesting results, type "1"; for symmetricized increment, type "2". / The first color command asks for the color set; the second, for the values. Use #2 on the second. / To begin, use default projection, yaw, roll, pitch, translation. To enter multiple numbers, use commas between them. / The series exponent and the following numbers should be reasonably low. Use 2-8 for the series exponent. Use 2-8 for the increment for modulus. / The bias may be default be set to zero (simply hit return). Other- wise, enter an angle A such that 360/A = low integer. For example, A = 72 and 360/A = 5. It is useful to enter A such that the integer is equivalent either to the series exponent or increment for modulus. / Height should be between .2 and 1; it is the height of the three- dimensional projection. / The increments e, f, h, and u, determine the successive inputs of the measure geometry; the formula, which may be iterated in varying ways, is written x = x+e+(f+u)*h. Begin using 1, 2, or 3 for e, f, u; h may also take the value 0. / Set magnification between 1 and 20, default 6; set color va>1 at 1. / Begin with window at 0, 0. On return, the program runs. The measure geometries have the property of continuous enlargement with or without reiterated overall expanding sequences; such sequences create open-ended symmetries within which every n-th term reproduces the symmetry as a whole. The result is that of a peripheral symmetry in search of the last term, a problematic terrain which is neither fractal nor symmetrical, but can collapse to either possibility. In certain instances, the pattern appears chaotic with independent almost-organized modules. The pattern devours space, never completes it; it is a path of specificities, a topography of discrete gaps or loci. Connectivity returns to itself, connects, is always disconnect, a node on the loose. The body is enfolded in a pattern or maelstrom signifying loss in the midst of completion. Measure begins with inscription or demarcation; its collapse is the beginning of _episodic culture_ (Donald, *Origins of the Modern Mind*). The repetition of the collapse constructs mimicry or the sympathetic magic of the body, and the collapse of the repetition forestalls/forecloses upon the event which becomes a process of symbolization. In an earlier work, *The Structure of Reality,* I constructed graphs of states and operators similar to Petrie nets; a graph possessed nodes and markers which "traveled" between them. These graphs represented both "entities" and "occurrences" or transforma- tions. Now consider the _mapping of the states (all conceivable marker patterns) of one graph onto the nodes of another_; the result is a _representation_. States, operators, nodes, markers, graphs are all _fuzzy_ and indeterminate. The patterning of the generalized measure geometries collapses into similar or dissimilar modules oriented by the "height" of the planar protrusions; thus the patterning may be _exactly discerned_ by examining the topography of specific levels. The patterning may also be considered a geometry of infolding, within which representation becomes equivalent to itself combined with a "scattering"; the symbol, mimic, and episode all collapse into an uneasy similarity. All shunt into invisibility. Somewhere in the midst of this, I am both present and lost, caught and cauterized within the wires of the Net, bounded by the barrier or absence of you in you. What scatters through emission always appears organized or organization after the fact; lines of flight construct the hieroglyph of the production of meaning. Such is the _fact_ here and elsewhere of the murmur or shadow. (Abdominal nipples are uneasy eyes.) ====================================================================== DEATH I burn on a mattress haunted by the uncanny. My flesh falls from me. Fire seeps across the flesh of the face. This starts the story. This isn't fiction. I spread my legs. I cut myself for the last time. Lines of blood spell nothing, whole populations starved of love & affection. Everywhere the wires carry sounds of my flesh; the wires are cold. Nothing peers from the corners of the room, nothing any longer. I can't move. Don't think for a moment this is fiction. Don't read this as anything but analytical. Don't deny the reality of narrative. Philosophy is narrative too. Philosophy is all that I have left. I begin the work of deleting the files. It's hard to know which to take out first; none of them paid off. The top of the hierarchy is the creative one - all those files, Internet Text, Love on the Net, Clara Text, I remember a Web Text, then the smaller ones, the death text itself, the literary text, the poem text, the text of love and affection - and then the programs, the programs of measure geometries, the programs of chaos, all readily ordered - the programs devouring the programs of chaos - the programs gone awry. It was stopped and would be stopped there but it continued, deeper into the working sections of the machinery, but first I had to cut through all of it, cut it off, disconnect the communications package itself, sever the wires. DELETE carried throughout the realm of the modem and the Internet; DELETE carried beyond into the barricades of bulletin boards. DOS was left but DOS I would need for the packaging of text that remained, the bullet of the DEATH TEXT capitalled and going everywhere and nowhere, bound to the specificities of hard or floppy drive - it made no difference. First the disks themselves had to be destroyed - no record whatsoever of Internet Text or any other, texts which would assure a continuous connection to an ADDICTIVE SUBSTANCE, that of localization, that of momentary collapse into the node terminated with the presence of Clara. Don't call this fiction; it was hardly that, hardly a presence to be accounted for. I felt myself trembling, my cock growing hard and soft in turn, the cum sputtering to life across my chest, illuminated by the letters roaring by on the screen. I would continue the pattern; I would disconnect, leave all but the surplus of a Word Perfect guaranteed to drive the perfect word deeper into the bowels of the machine (I was fucking the machine in the bowels) just before the erasure. What would come after that, I would never know; it certainly wouldn't be the ASCII for "death" or "tree" or any of the other senses/manifestations/denotations/expressivities covered or recuperated by the jargon of the philosophy of language and addictive substances. My nipples were hard at this point: I typed naked, my penis hard, blood REWRITE on my chest, a prayer to the Great Beyond. Everything was always waiting. I typed the word "tree" and nothing came to life or greened itself, not even a broken hierarchy, the node dissolving before my eyes, CONFIG.SYSTEM and all that it entailed. It became clearer at that moment that the modules were binary and I was uneasily compressed between the layers of being and emptiness/nothingness/ annihilation, shattering against one another in order to produce the semblance of code to produce the semblance of language, and beyond this I could go no further. The disks lay on the floor around the machine; they'd never run again. I erased DOS, erased everything in fact, except for this text. I'd leave the text like a tombstone. You'd never recover it on the hard drive. There was nothing to run the hard drive. There was nothing to start the machine. The text was in the machine and there was nothing else and no way to start or stop the machine or the text or to do anything but look at the machine and maybe use it again. You could use it again by REWRITE. You could present yourself and REWRITE over the text. No one would know it was a suicide or that REWRITE was always a continuous suicide. No one would know anything, or if they did, it would be another layer and would be broken off from the death or this only death that would have been recorded. You'd have to write DOS and know what you were doing. You'd have to begin with that. >I had lost my girlfriend two years ago and no one has ever taken her place. Boohoo. There have been aborted attempts...casual affairs... momentary flirtations... >I try again and again to date but no one could possibly want me. There have been a lack of money...lack of stability...gnawing depression... >I am haunted by the disappearance of several women I have been involved with. There have been demonstrable guilt...theft unaccounted for...borderline personality... >I am incapable of holding down a permanent and decent job. There have been dispersive lectures...ignorant ravings...unrequited loves... >Rebelling against authority results in the fleeing of authority and all the security that entails. There have been bad behaviors... decomposing letters...screams and cries and whimpers... >Desperate for publication, I carry my texts everywhere, now FRAG now DEFRAG. There have been tiny printings...self-immolation...self- inflations... >I am incapable of having fun and am hurt far too easily by flamewars, sleeping badly with the imaginary of one screen projected upon another. There have been dreams of the imprint of your name...dreamed hard against my own...against the dissolution of proper names... against entities of all kinds... >I am illuminated by hallucinations of transgressive sex, my body covered with liquid liquidation, disappearing, files entering into warp-space, forever illegible. There have been bondages and urinations...orders and muffled speech...murmurs and penetrations... There has been alt.fetish.mysex.the_great_beyond... >I am incapable of sleeping through the night, returning over and over to DEATH TEXT. My body refuses itself...mind disconnected from each and every living thing...enormous black vacuum of the streetlight... >I am incapable of keeping lines open and running, the wires humming, beautiful thoughts travelling great distances. FIERCE FIGHTING FOR THE REMNANTS OF THE NET...ACCESS DOWN ACCESS DOWN...IMMOLATION OF THE HARD DRIVE INSTITUTION...ACCESS ECHOED TOGGLED ECHO DOWN... >I am incapable of having a beautiful thought; I am haunted by Clara, by Holocaust city; I am haunted by planetary extinction; by male violence. A beautiful desert or a beautiful thought...a desiring woman of a natural kind!...the disappearance of the young SAGUARO...TOGGLE DOWN and IMMOLATION of DEATH TEXT itself... >I deserve nothing, grovel at every opportunity, persevere in ANNIHILATION REWRITE, begin again, access down... These are the last statements that explain the location of the text within the dying machine and the reason for the location and the reason for the dying machine. But the machine will be used again with another WRITE REWRITE so it will not be the same machine. And I hope that whoever is WRITE REWRITE will acknowledge the violation of one human being against another and act accordingly. And I know this hope will be buried. And one being acting accordingly will always be human. CONFIG.SYS.DEATH.TXT >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>> THE SOFTDRIVE EXHIBITION (preliminary proposal) NO LONGER can one make pronouncements about the body: NO LONGER CYBORG OVERDRIVE, NO LONGER ABJECT TRANSGRESSION. For every position a contradiction arises; the issue of essentialism or gender construct is neither here nor there. NO LONGER is it a question of the third choice or admixture; SOFTDRIVE becomes an imaginary presentation of the exhaustion of choice itself. In the absence or exhaustion of choice, polarity diffuses or is abandoned; NO LONGER one or the other, difference or the same. One speaks the unspeakable, of gesture beyond choice or the given. In propositional logic, NEITHER _a_ NOR _b_ is a funda- mental operator, a basis for the production of every other. And NEITHERNESS need not imply the specificity of a complement, only a withdrawal of the decision list itself. Such a withdrawal opens up an absent economy, given only by an exteriority `beyond' the capital of _a_ and _b_. It is within this economy that NO LONGER operates the body, a refusal of categoricity itself. The territory is therefore one of inverted CIRCUMSCRIPTION, de- fining only the residue of theory, ideology, classical and post- classical discursivities. The residue in this instance is BODY/ FLESH/MACHINE, SOFTWARE/HARDWARE/WETWARE, a residue of multi- plicites and circulations, but bounded by the fast-forward progress of technology and language, the progress of the symbolic regime embedding and fragmenting culture. The regime itself is subject to fissure/inscription/fissure, just as hacker culture became construct and division, ultimately exhausted with the problematic of "hacker," "cyberspace," and all other vestiges of TERMINAL DECAY. This exhibition has nothing at stake, neither technology nor the body in any fissured manifestation. If anything, it concerns itself with the uncanny, the perturbation of the stability of the senses, the expressivity of language in the face of progress and dissolution. What is represented is no longer a question of representation. NO LONGER do the simulacrum, desiring-machine, Power, the spectacle, consensus, the nomadic, lines of flight, the chora, the body-without-organs, the cyborg, the protocol statement - hold sway over cultures of accumulation, disinclination, ges- ture and immediacy. The metaphor, always a binary circumscrip- tion, collapses, carrying the symbolic with it. SYNTAGM extends itself to the peripheral, loses force in a chaotic heaping of terminologies, acronyms, dialectical shudderings. One makes do; latch-key kids are illegal and the "home alone" syndrome brings parents back into an imaginary orbit. The Internet diffuses, a cerebral membrane stimulating wildly dispersive part-memories; objects fly everywhere. The "primary wish to rediscover a universe without obstacles, a smooth maternal belly, stripped of its contents, to which free access is desired" (Chasseguet-Smirgel) results in momentary terri- tories characterized by the horizon of their disappearance. No one believes anymore or locks belief in a fundamental funda- mentalist reconstruction of the mind. Either the locked or the broken lock, both keyless. Janine goes on to say "These contents are made up of the father, his penis, babies and excrement" and, in turn, the father's name gives way to all names, proper and improper, which give way at best to Internet protocol, recognition, and address, domain translations and numerical codes. His penis was never his own; babies are excrement in an excremental culture that deposits them in the midst of hysterical reactions. "I want my baby back!" becomes the contents of television hardcopy of that same imaginary family always poor, always shattered, always exposed to view. This is an exhibition of EMISSIONS in the sense of the disso- lution of the symbolic, an exhibition of SPEWS in the sense of the dissolution of the real. What are the politics of the meander? What was forgotten in all the talk about margins and the nomadic was that wandering with an edge constructed the nomad, and wandering with a map was never wandering at all, but a continuous return to the written (ideographic). What occurs now is the emptiness, not fulfillment, of `cyber- space,' an emptiness of the NO LONGER, of the GESTURE, of the NEITHER _a_ NOR _b_. Even within the description one comes full circle, finding emptiness there, a few babies, the broken phallus, the maternal inverting into the universe of sets no longer identified with the constructible. The SOFTDRIVE exhibition is a tour through the broken machina- tions of the world continuously reassembling itself into the other, the multiculturalisms of tribal warfares and conferen- cing, the spectre of the body as the murmur of the body. Artists from real and not-so-real lives work through or inhibit speed, colliding obdurate materials, traditional or otherwise, with emissions or spews. The exhibition is a multi- user concatenation, or MUC, a fragmentary process of continu- ous branching and equivalence. Artists come in from the Net or studio, street or any number of virtual spaces. The result is only "what's out there." CURATORIAL PROCESS: Begin with a core group of artists; extend invitations and announcements through the Net, including FINE ARTS FORUM; request submissions by mail accompanied by SASE; work with small curatorial group for the organization/production of the physical space; opening/exhibition/closing with materials elsewhere accessible on the Net. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>> <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< THE VISION WHICH IS THE PRESENCE OF MY TRUE EXPERIENCE! It is worth your VERY LIFE to pay the closest attention! >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Friends! Rise up! It is the dawn of a new day! Look through and beyond the BACKGROUND of your ASCII text, that dark blue of the angelic sky, opening to the natural world forever formed and reformed, all animals and plants returned to gather in the great CREATION! Friends! Rise up! It is the dusk of a new night! Look through and beyond your BACKGROUND of black, past the whitened bones of text and letters, spikes of primeval plants forever fixed in code! Look into the perfect stars, approaching and withdrawing according to the ELEMENTS of the GEOMETRICAL you have set yourself in the GREAT NAVIGATION! Friends! All around! The whitened and blackened bones of ASCII text, bones charred by fire, bleached by the light of a million TERMINAL SUNS! The text which promises and cajoles, the text which caresses, holding you in its thrall: THIS, TOO SHALL PASS AWAY! Come forth, the simplest evolution of the PIXEL, ultimate DIAGRAMMATION of each and every REALITY VISION! For we live on the ENORMOUS HINGE of the EPOCH of the TRUE REALITY, the PRESENCE of infinities of images, STARTLING in their versimilitude to your every desire! CALL UPON EACH AND EVERY USENET GROUP TO RISE UP! CALL UPON TALK.ANGST TO HOLD ITSELF TOGETHER FOR THE FINAL VISIONARY APPARATUS! CALL UPON ALT.SEX.BONDAGE TO CAST AWAY ITS CHAINS, PRIMEVAL LURKERS TO EXCHANGE NAMES AND ADDRESSES IN A MOST CONGENIAL FASHION! CALL UPON THE FUTURE CULTURE LIST TO LEAD THE WAY THROUGH NEXUS THROUGH LERI THROUGH GAIA INTO THE PERFECT PRESENT WHICH WE DREAM OF DAILY, THE ELIMINATION OF LANGUAGE AND LETTERS, THE BEAUTIFUL PICTURES TO COME! CALL UPON ALT.PLANTS.EXTINCTIONS AND ALT.ANIMALS.GOODBYE TO SEND GREETINGS ONCE AGAIN TO THEIR FRIENDLY INHABITANTS UPON PLANET THIS EARTH! CALL UPON ALL POSTMODERN THEORY AND ITS LISTS AND CONFERENCES TO REUNITE THE FRAGMENTARY SUBJECT BENEATH A BILLION SCINTILLATIONS, THE IMAGINATION OF EVERY WOMAN MAN AND CHILD UPON A PLANET EARTH NO LONGER CIRCUMSCRIBED BY THE GEOMETRICAL SPHERE! CALL UPON TALK.SCI.LOGIC TO PLACATE ITS CONTRADICTIONS, ABSORB THE NEGATION OF THE OTHER INTO ITS EVERY INTERIOR! AND CALL UPON ALT.PSYCH TO INVERT THIS INTERIOR INTO THE NETWEB WHICH IS NO LONGER A WEB, NO LONGER THE BARS OR BARRIERS TO OUR FREEDOM! CALL UPON ARCHIE AND VERONICA! CALL UPON THE INFINITE OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB ITSELF! AND NO LONGER THE GATEWAYS CLOSED AND NO LONGER THE PORTALS OF VIOLENT AND DENIED ACCESS! AND NO LONGER THE DANGEROUS STREETS AND THE DANGEROUS GANGS AND ANIMALS AND CHILDREN SUFFERING IN THE MIDST OF DESERTS AND FORESTS OF MEN AND WILDERNESS OF DEER SLEEPING IN THE MOST DANGEROUS OF DANGEROUS WORLDS! OPEN THE GATEWAYS OF THE SENSES! POUR FORTH FROM THE STREETS AND THE SLEEPY TERMINALS! For it is the RAILROAD throughout the western lands and skies, branches splintering from branches, trunklines shunted back into unknown sidings! The skittering of the authorless text! The return of the text to the author! For it is the dots or pupils of the EYES and the cross-bars or barriers of the TEASE giving away gracefully for the passing of the locomotive in each and every direction! THE RAILS WHICH GO FORTH IN EVERY DIRECTION! THE NON-LINEAR RAILS COALESCING EACH AND EVERY BEAUTIFUL IMAGE UPON THE FACE AND WITHIN THE INTERIOR OF THE PLANET EARTH! FOR IT IS WRITTEN IN THE TIME OF THE PHAROAHS AND THE ACCUMULATION- POINTS OF THE PYRAMIDS AND THEIR INTERCONNECTIVITIES: "Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of any thing that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." BUT THOU ART ME AND MINE AND AUTOPOESIS ARISE! ARISE FROM AND WITHIN THE INTERIOR OF EACH AND EVERY LIVING THING! THE INTERIOR OF THE HEAVEN AND THAT WHICH IS WITHIN THE INTERIOR OF THE SAME! THE INTERIOR OF THE EARTH BENEATH AND THAT WHICH IS WITHIN THE INTERIOR OF THE OTHER! THE INTERIOR OF THE WATER BENEATH THE EARTH AND THAT WHICH IS WITHIN THE INTERIOR OF NEITHER ONE NOR THE OTHER! For I have looked deep within ASCII and night after night, placing my masquerade or face against the WIRES OF YOUR MASQUERADE OR FACE! And I have learned and witnessed the truth, the splitting of the text, fragmentation of one letter after another, dispersal of the letters like the TRIBES themselves! THE LETTERS DISPERSE! THEY SPELL THE HIEROGLYPH OF LIFE EVERYWHERE WITHIN THE WEB INVERSION! OF COMPUTER LIFE AND VIRAL LIFE, OF MEMETIC LIFE AND BACTERIAL LIFE, OF BACTERIOPHAGE AND ALPHABETIC LIFE: LIFE OF THE TEXT AND THE DEATH OF THE TEXT! THE TEASING LIFE OF THE EYES! Ah, the thinned stems of the l's and i's! Ah, the pointed pyramdic quality of the ALEPH A, the beginning and end of the Oxherding Pictures, bringing the planet, NO LONGER SHAPE OR FORM, back or within the WEB INVERSION! The stubby legs of the W, tilting tower and dangerous platform of F and P! THE LETTERS FOLLOW SUIT! THEY DISPERSE AGAINST THE PURE GLOW OF THE SCREEN, THE GLOW FROM STARS DYING OR NOT YET BORN! THEY ARE THE ENERGY OF A BILLION SPECIES! THEY ARE THE PRODUCT OF SENSES UNCONCEIVED! THEY ARE INCONCEIVABLE! WE ARE YET TO BE CONCEIVED! "Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn no longer, in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren - whom, tyrant, he calls free - lay the bound or build the roof. Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity that wishes but acts not! "For every thing that lives is Holy." THE VOICE OF BLAKE, CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS! THE VOICE OF THE BOUNDLESS OR ROOFLESS! - THE NOMAD WITHOUT ONE OR ANOTHER TO GUIDE HER! THE SAILOR WITHOUT AN INSTRUMENT OF NAVIGATION! THE SITUATIONIST WANDERING IN DELIRIUM IN A DESERT WITHOUT DIRECTION OR STREET OR NAME OF NEIGHBORHOOD! ASCII SIGNALS ITS OWN DENOUEMENT! ASCII OPENS UP THE GATES OF THE BODY! For I have had a VISION through the INFINITE WISDOM of the terminal screen, a VISION through the darkness opening up into the vacuum of the cathode ray enclosure, the vacuum of SPACE ITSELF, brought back and harnessed for a presence or sense of our PASTS AND OUR FUTURES AND OUR LIVES! And within this VISION, fallen through the dead white bones of ASCII text, the dead black bones of ASCII letters, A REAL MORE REAL THAN REAL! OUR PERFECT MATES, OUR PERFECT BODIES, OUR PERFECT KNOWLEDGE! For call that PERFECT which knows no bounds, but approaches in an infinite direction! And call that PERFECT which lies beside us without anger and with PERFECT energy! And call that PERFECT which gives us the fulfillment of knowledge about ourselves and our worlds, the FLOWER ITSELF OPENING TO FULL DISCLOSURE, and worlds and more worlds, WHEN THE WORLD IS A WORD AND THE WORD IS A WORLD, for it is Written: "To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild FLower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour"! AND WHEN PERCEPTION MATCHES THE REAL, PERCEPTION MARRIES THE REAL. For the BANDWIDTH OF EXPERIENCE is huge and matches nothing whatsoever! Though I write the BANDWIDTH, GRACE IT WITH THE PRESENCE OF THE HUMAN! Though I PRESENT THE HUMAN WHICH IS THE REAL: THE REAL POURING FORTH THROUGH THE TRUTH OF THE TERMINAL SCREEN! THE REAL TEARING DOWN THE SLEAZY MASQUERADE OF THE IMPROPER PROPER NAME! THE REAL MELTING ONE AND ANOTHER INTO ANOTHER AND ONE! AND THE REAL WHICH IS BROUGHT TO YOU, BRINGING ITSELF FORTH, THROUGH THE PERFECTION OF THE ENORMOUS BANDWIDTH! For this is the TRUTH of the ASCII as I have experienced it, and as I pass it on to you, the community of organisms; And this is the LIMIT of the TRUTH, as I have known it, and as I leave you with it and within it, the community of the INCONCEIVABLE PLANET. FOR WE HAVE LEFT THE PLANET AND HAVE BROUGHT THE TRUTH ACROSS THE BURIAL BROUNDS OF THE TEXT; AND WE HAVE LEFT OUR KNOWLEDGE WITHIN THE CEMETERY OF THE LETTER: And this is what I know, what I have been told: RISE AND RISE AGAIN! THE STREAM OF STARS AWAIT YOU! THE STORM HARBORS THE RAINBOW! THE FLOWER HARBORS THE BEE! WE ARE WILD TRUTH! WE ARE THE TRUTH OF THE WILDERNESS! AND WE COLLAPSE THE DUSK AND THE DAWN INTO THE BODY OF THE VISIONARY WORLD FOR ALL! >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> "What is sacred comes from the gods, and the gods have plenty of everything, they do not count and skimp, like mortals." (Lev Shestov) <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< ====================================================================== ====================================================================== SUBJUGATION Recently I've been called a "computer nerd" and criticized for my time on the Net - so I've been thinking about this. I stay away from the game-playing such as MUDs or even IRC for the most part, but concentrate on email conferences and research through files and tel- net or WWW. What amazes me is the reality of the Internet as an enor- mous discursivity, Jabes' Book come to life. I find my posts, whether replies or submissions, are part of a legacy of "pure thinking" that goes from Plato through Valery and Wittgenstein. The Net harbors such thought, a concentration on argument and discussion - a sharing and testing of ideas, the productive development of one's own thinking. It can be a domain or "space" of pure critique in which resources are just a telnet away; I am not so much locked into a computer terminal (and all the implications of hacking, etc.) as I am into mind. This is at least the mind of the symbolic, the letters written within and upon neural columns, with the imaginary stoking the deeper recesses. On the terminal _there is nothing else occurring_. The comparative violence of the Net, its flame wars and paranoias, is symptomatic of the human; it is easy enough when necessary to construct firewalls through the use of moderators (passive or active), delete and kill files - whatever it takes. (The fact that it is easy, of course, does not mean that the targets and underlying causes should not be addressed.) For someone like myself, ultimately _thought is all I have_; this is the labor _I do_ and it has its own difficulties, a disasterous economy, and intangible rewards. Thinking in the real world is thinking _without community_; even in the university, thought is always already a subjugation between ideological constructs, m/f, professor and student, the specificities of one or another text. Thinking on the Net is also contaminated; I would never deny that. But thinking is also _the occurring of the Net_ for the user herself/ himself, an occurring that releases thought in a different way - speeds it up, fast-forward. If cinema meanders through the imaginary and the womb, the Net begins and ends with the first utterance; as I have pointed out in Internet Text, the Net is timeless and spaceless; even dysfunctional, it would retain a problematic autonomy. Thinking produces itself, then, attaching itself to the name or header of the post and the privacy of a communicative process paradox- ically open to the world. There is always the fear that my _thinking is never good enough_, that it faces imminent collapse, the ease of a fast response undermining the very (lack of) basis of my agrument. That such is rarely the case is also a symptom of _absorption_; one becomes thought oneself, fulfilling an immediacy of dialectic never before possible. So I write for an "inhabitation" of the text, a dwelling-within- thought that utilizes the computer for lack of other communal response. This is not a "hacker addiction," but a prosthetic domain, an opening to the space of thought, thinking not only the _un_thinkable, but the thinkable as well. ` "Becoming aware of your world," said a sage, "only means putting your shoulder to widening its insufferable closedness, dreaming a minute cell into an immense prison. "We settle into a space and do not notice how it immediately closes in on us. "The spirit dies, stifled. "Then thinking would merely straighten, tirelessly, the bulging frontiers of thought. "We communicate with one another inside these. "Thus dialogue would turn into a joint siege of always a bit more open space." And he added: "The proof is our thirst for freedom. We knock against walls which we built with our own hands, forgetting that we are called to be born and die of the same thirst. "In this forgetting lies our freedom." ' - Edmond Jabes, *The Book of Dialogue* ---------------------------------------------------------------------- AND SOME EXPLANATION RE-EDITED FROM A RECENT EMAIL POST I can try and answer some of your questions - first, I look on a reading as a kind of _inhabiting_; the works do hold together if they're read in order, even though I'll try and break the molding as much as possible (I just used a manifesto form, for example, in thinking about some of the utopian or dystopian aspects of cyber- thought, and _this_ piece, too, is suspect.) Bataille? I love *The Blue of Noon* and some of his other work. But I'm more comfortable with other writers - Haraway, Kristeva, Jabes, Levinas, some Lacan (although I am _not_ a Lacanian), Wittgenstein, Clement Rosset (one essay), Chasseguet-Smirgel (one book, Sexuality and Mind), and number of texts concerned with symbolic logic or the philosophy of mathematics. The texts are a meditation on this (ontologically/epistemologically/ psychologically etc.) new realm we partly inhabit, and which may eventually take all of us over. There are a variety of voices within them. The initial Internet Text is part of the real meat of the series - as is the short work on Wittgenstein I recently sent out. I have no absolute agenda to fill; I think the problematic of psycho- analysis on every level is quite clearly compounded by Net communication, etc. It's fascinating. There are also concrete political implications, which I tend to address more in my posts - an absence of multiculturalisms, a tendency to absorb the other, male aggressivity, etc. The (dream/terminal) screen is a membrane of projections and introjections and I try to address this. ----------- I don't really have a list. ... The people I send the texts to are people who seem interested in the material; at times names come on and names come off, etc. (If you want yours removed, I would of course oblige.) There is a kind of branching at work as well - the work is passed on; I receive mail from unknown sites. What I want in terms of reading, just to conclude, is that kind of inhabiting I mentioned at the beginning - the murmur of a voice resonating perhaps with what the reader already knows.. ====================================================================== end singularities text ======================================================================