INTERNET CONJUNCTION; THE SIXTH PART 2012 Herein are assorted texts on disappointment, pipelining, addiction, the dream-time of the user, and a proposal on the revitalizaiton of the alternative gallery. ====================================================================== ====================================================================== Descriptive Table of Contents SECRETS: Confluent corners of Internet communication, seepages, the anxiety of posting and reception, releasement and waiting. FRANKLIN FURNACE PROPOSAL: According to the international code of signal flags for ships, a proposal for transforming this alternative gallery into a Net node with a multicultural agenda and world-wide interconnectivity. PREPOSTEROUS JUSTIFICATION: What I am doing, the distancing of the texts, what is being written... THE TRUE-REAL OF THE DECODED WRITTEN: Unix sort/rearrangement of portions of Net2, Love on the Net, with a disordering order of reproduction... BOUND TO DISAPPOINT and THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF THE SECOND PART: Hiding within or beyond face-to-face communication, where I am bound to disappoint you; I would lose face, lose your love, efface. PIPELINE: Theory of Unix transitivity of processes applied to Net phenomenology. ADDICTION\ When the Server's Down: The Cypher at the heart of disquieting communication. CHAIN MAIL THEORY FROM THE VIOLENCE OF THE MAIL: rewrite of theory upon itself, cauterization of difference, source of the problem SUSPENSION (of disbelief): On Coleridge and ASCII HEART OF DARKNESS: The Disquiet Body of Electronic Communication: article on projection/introjection in relation to the imaginary representations of correspondents on the Net: Dreaming of love and desire... POOR TEXT (by the Sort Collective): REWRITE of INTERNET TEXT, renewing its relevance for contemporary (i.e. 2012) society. ====================================================================== SECRETS The space is filled with corners, replies coming in from the dark, animals beneath the bed, dolls whose eyes turn in, turn inward, follow us throughout the wires; each space opens onto others, decreasing or increasing in size (there is no size) - cobwebs containing memories of those who passed through one or another domain. Secrecy pervades the Net, anonymous Finland penetrating one list after another, the _azure_ of name or domain blurred at the edges, the comprehension of the imminent. And darkness awaits the illuminations of the Delete command as well; working towards the machine, half-asleep, I stumble to cleanse it, open an atmosphere of inconceivable events. What are devices here, but their secret names, poured over again and again, those SED and AWK blurring one or another distinction? Now consider this: the roots or tendrils of the symbolic domain, descending through one or more levels of protocol, until the hiss of the transistor itself is audible - a heated and continuous debate, meaningless except for the programming above, symbolic confluences in furious array. And ascension or the crown of the symbol, an equivalence: the murmur of discourse, whisper of that self-same debate, collapsed into the relative coolness of the lower regions of the air. The computer itself becomes a heat-engine or pipe, a smokestack cooling meaning by proliferating it. What rises, intensifies, only to dissipate - and only momentarily - is the lateral activity of the human user discernible, a brief transformation of the neurological, the sound of the voice in the room, dying upon the immediacy of birth. Secrets attach themselves among the levels, glimmers of recognition; at night, silent addresses label each other, claw greedily. In the EXIT mode, there is no EXIT, and the user waits with an increase of anticipation - who could be calling her at this hour? The margins of the screen fill with the symbolic order which, as I mentioned, pretends a momentary visitation and nothing more forthcoming. The margins on occasion extend further, as well - wrapped beyond the frame of vision, syllables, whole sentences, are cut off, never to return, or else to be reconstituted one after another after another. Does not all of this occur in silence? Words speak through me and I resonate with my voice as among no other; my voice is my silent speech of the keyboard. Anticipation reverts to response and further hooking of the reader and the writer, a merging of identities and constructs. Neither neurosis nor psychosis, secrets are the backbone of the Net, the communication which lures and lures intensely. It is not the evidence of the screen, with its cross-gendering and anonymity, that characterizes the user - it is lurking, rejection, negation, and the deposition of the secret beyond recall. What is given is only a vestige of an enormous web or sememe; what is given is a residue of the problematic flesh and mind hinged on the edge of the terminal. Lurking is ground-state of reception, even when the computer is off, terminal disconnected, with the user himself in the embrace of uneasy death. |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| PROPOSAL FOR FRANKLIN FURNACE, AN ALTERNATIVE ARTSPACE, ACCORDING TO THE INTERNATIONAL SINGLE FLAG SIGNALS FOR SHIPS ON THE HIGH SEAS >>> "We may produce an exhibition of ideas for Franklin Furnace's sea change in the Fall of 1994." (Martha Wilson, Founder and Director) `A. I am undertaking a speed trial.' Technology is moving the post- industrial world fast-forward through information bottlenecks at every node. The artworld as usual lags behind. It is necessary to break through the conception of the gallery as a SITE and reinvent it as a NODE both mobile and physical. It funnels the stationary planet into the WEB INVERSION, the topological reversal of the body into wires and fibre optic cables. `B. I am taking in or discharging explosives.' In order to avoid the exhaustion of art itself, art becomes packets of information; as flow, art becomes what it has not been, a focus of multicultural change and examination of the problematic. Instead of the artwork, consider the art wave-packet, an emission dissipating as soon as it is launched. `C. Yes.' There is a way to construct this. Consider a gallery consisting of a room with several computer terminals. The main one will be permanently locked onto a Mosaic hypertext containing emissions from Franklin Furnace - anything, including text, sound, and image, that can be transmitted. During the day, Mosaic will run for gallery-goers; the image will be projected through an LCD display coupled to an overhead projector - standard corporate technology. At night, the terminal becomes a World-Wide-Web accessible site with a URL, containing the same information for distribution. This terminal is on a dedicated $250/month SLIP connection and runs 24 hours. A second terminal is a daytime W3 site for outgoing, with different information. A third terminal is used to connect to various other gallery sites, and a fourth is set to Read Only for several list conferences and Usenet groups concerned with cultural matters. All computers are set to download to a Laserjet printer for 10 cents a page (text only). The gallery will function as a moderated list itself, sending out transmissions from artists to selected Net sites. Staff will be on hand to assist and run through program protocols. `D. Keep clear of me - I am manoeuvering with difficulty.' At first there will be bugs in the system, ranging from access time to typical moderating decisions. Eventually it should be possible to utilize macros to simplify commands; a storage capability on the Mosaic machinery of two gigabytes will hold a reasonable content. Animated images may have to be downloaded after a short period of time. `E. I am altering my course to Starboard.' A high circulation or overturn will result in a continuous community development, almost a MUD (multi-user-domain) morphing through art works and media. `F. I am disabled. Communicate with me.' One of the virtues of traditional art is its quality of the obdurate - the necessary recognition of the material of the work itself, its inertness. Unlike most Net communication, the gallery will continue this tradition by insisting on signatured works, retrospectives, targeted audience demographies, and email access to the artist herself. Works concerned with gender, multiculturalism, and the troubling aspects of cyberspace will be favored - works questioning the so-called Information Super- highway. Within the world of electronic subjectivity, we are all disabled, on the verge of the reconstitution of the body itself. `G. I require a Pilot.' I require a sysadmin to lead me through cyberspace so that I may face myself, reconstitute myself, suture the damaged life. `H. I have a Pilot on board.' But I become my own sysadmin, beyond technical support; I am my own imaginary. As an artist, I deal with the uncanny, the resonance of recognizing the uncomfortable aspects of existence and its everyday ontology. On the Net, I am object and subject; I abjure these distinctions. `I. I am altering my course to Port.' My course is chosen as a dialectic between wind and intention; as a node, Franklin Furnace increases its information flow exponentially, reaching viewers on an immediate and world-wide basis. `J. I am going to send a message by Semaphore.' In order to send a message or create a work, I observe the necessary protocol. I enter the address domain of Franklin Furnace; recognized by users, I format my work as a Net-flux. Through the terminal the user views the universe itself; Franklin Furnace becomes a transitive term, an inter- connectivity, both transparent and obdurate. `K. You should stop your vessel instantly.' The obdurate is present as a transmitted recognition. To stop is a radical act; the Furnace exhibitions stop one in his tracks, temporary terminal lockdown. It is precisely within the Net that the mandate of Franklin Furnace is realized - it is within the Net that the (multi) cultural politics of the future is played out. `L. You should stop. I have something important to communicate.' Art, like people, "passes" on the Net; a certain insistence may accompany the importance of a message, even with Kill and Delete files. What is ultimately communicated through Franklin Furnace is the CHATTERING of the multicultural realm, the CONCRETE problems of history and historiography in a setting of cultural politics and political economy. The Furnace is in a unique position to transmit the concrete as no other gallery. `M. I have a doctor on board.' Art has no message and no cures; to presume otherwise is the pretension of art. On the Net, one doctor meets another; what always emerges is dialogue, the possibility of language and images becoming transformative. On the Net, anyone can respond to an artist; personal style carries very little. `N. No.' And anyone can say no to anything. In a traditional gallery, the artist and artwork are subject to review; on the Net, they are subject to negation, to a dialogue constituted by rejection, displace- ment, and a consideration of the work by the viewer which rarely happens in a physical space. The terminal is the introjection/ projection of intimacy; the viewer responds at her leisure. `O. Man Overboard.' What is lost is the body of the phallocratic as flesh sinks into the sea; within the digital domain, reproduction is exact and eternal, repetition without end or signal deterioration. As with all dissipative emissions, works fade away into noise as they remain only in human memory or hardcopy, eventually removed from storage. But within the digital domain, they are perfect or perfecting - each copy identical with the original, ontologically equivalent as well. `P. _In Harbor_ (Blue Peter). All persons are to repair on board as the vessel is about to proceed to sea. (Hoisted at the _Foremast_ head.) _At sea_ - Your lights are out, or burning badly.' Because of the feed-forward speed of cyberculture, it is necessary that Franklin Furnace act quickly to secure its continued existence on the "frontier" of culture. In order to do this, it must simultaneously prepare to go on-line, and dissolve its existing structure. Although the Net is timeless, there is no time to lose. `Q. My vessel is healthy and I request free pratique.' With a minimum of effort, the transformation of the gallery will increase its viewer- ship by several thousand-fold. Unlike many of the on-line sites already in existence, the Furnace will create a _practice_ as well as a mobile exhibition-space. This will consist of: An emphasis on multi-cultural considerations; The blurring of the artwork itself by an aura of discussion; The resulting transformation of the work into a _discursivity_; The creation of a continuous dialogue surrounding both the work and its ostensible position or subject-matter; And the development of a liberatory transformative potential through education, the uploading and downloading of files, and extensive follow-through for any exhibited materials. `R. The way is off my ship; you may feel your way past me.' Paradoxically, although the new Furnace is more open to view than any public work of art, it does not possess the somewhat problematic and manipulative aspect of public art - that the public _must_ view it, like it or not. Instead, one may ignore the gallery altogether - or enter it at one's risk. Because of the potential circulation to 50,000,000 viewers, the gallery would nevertheless be guaranteed a larger audience than any physical gallery now in existence. `S. My engines are going full speed astern.' The gallery will be open to continuous monitoring, back-tracking, and change. Some of the changes will include potential expansions into the following areas: Low-power television and radio stations. Public-access television programs. Special-events accessed by remote monitors tapping into the SLIP account lines. Direct hookups to on-line chat-lines with the possibility of establishing a chat-line concerned with art and multiculturalisms. Establishment of a data-base of artists available on-line, replacing the traditional slide-files. Creation of on-line artists books and a date-base of relevant (physical) books from the past. Education in electronic access run through the physical premises of the gallery. "Screenings" for live audiences within the premises, using Mosaic and pre-arranged material and artists/users on-line elsewhere. Far down the road: Potential for exploration of virtual reality in transmitted form; potential for establishing a MUD based on arts- related issues (there may already be such). `T. Do not pass ahead of me.' In order to implement all of this, Franklin Furnace would have to immediately tap into the on-line services and arts forums already available, such as Anima. It is my experience that cooperation would easy and productive. `U. You are standing into danger.' The downside of all of this - rejection of the idea of an electronic nexus - is that traditional art is becoming increasingly irrelevant - NOT because of its power, but because of its dwindling audience and highly-specific demographics. With the Net, the endless arguments about regionalism versus centrism, for example, disappear: EVERYWHERE IS EVERYWHERE ELSE. The Net combines the ability to influence and create policy with a rough grass-roots politics; there is nothing else like it. `V. I require assistance.' Grants should be forthcoming from a number of organizations desiring to test their hardware and software; artists tend to use new equipment in new ways. There is tremendous generosity in the on-line world; a lot of bulletin-boards, for example, are free, and run as hobbies. Technical assistance is readily available as well through various Usenet groups and list conferences. `W. I require medical assistance.' Now things are getting serious. Franklin Furnace has been both visible and constructive in the current censorship crisis, and there are signs that commercial servers are already censoring incoming Net material. This is a highly active arena for freedom-of-speech issues, highly relevant to the Furnace tradition. `X. Stop carrying out your intentions and watch for my signals.' I am always open to giving advice, while remaining in a state of complete powerlessness... `Y. I am carrying mails.' From beginning to end, the complete trans- formation of the gallery should take six to eight months; beginning Internet communications should occur within six weeks. `Z. To be used to address or call Shore Stations.' To begin, the gallery needs to hook up with either a commercial server or a university system. The former are often Unix, but have inexpensive SLIP accounts; the latter have varying degrees of access. A collaborative effort with a computer department is in order... The above signals transform the gallery into a communications network combining both easy through-put and obdurate material. As such, the gallery can expect to remain relevant to the society at large, since it would no longer be bound to a specific form of physicality, but would commit itself, instead, to transform according to the protocols of the age... This is a rough draft of a proposal to Franklin Furnace (and for that matter other cultural institutions) to rechart their way line into a different sea altogether. Alan Sondheim 432 Dean Street Brooklyn New York 11217 718-857-3671 sondheim@newschool.edu sondheim@panix.com |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| PREPOSTEROUS JUSTIFICATION Perhaps because of the very nature of my work, I find it ncessary clarify what I am attempting to accomplish, nothing less than the establishment of a new approach to the humanities and the gist of the old characterology which has remained inviolate ever since the Biblical era. One moves from one place to another; the move- ments are tracked across the skies or earth or wires accompanied by an inviolate proper name, alias, generic name, or subterfuge. The wires, however, are a ruptured transformation, once beyond the accretion of the telephone switchboard, a new beginning of address DISCONNECT INVISIBLE. Then it was only the grain of the voice which mattered and which constituted the guarantee of authenticity; now, on the hinge of ASCII, it is nothing whatsoever that creates an equivalent condition. Without the guarantee, anything is possible; one exists within a chaotic and inderminate domain, writing to nothing in particular - in spite of the existence of domains, and writing only as a form of address and recognitions... Ah, but what is tracked, carried on one's nomadic back? And what is the back in relation to the front of the animal, sensory nub utilized only for the purpose of the garnering of visual data and its transformations? We exist in the world of double encodings, and this is already a future rushed ahead of one, plunging us headlong into streams of hysteria and darkness. Yes, I have been criticized for the hysteria and neuroticism of my texts, but these are in fact the bases for the transformation of the human, like it or not. The debate between humanism and post-structuralism, for example, fades insofar as the body is problematic, my body, your body, in a state of existence elsewhere and elsewhen. Encompass the dark! The Internet Text began simply enough with a series of numbered propositions, but then emendations became necessary, channeling further into the interstices, until a general rewrite was the only option. I could go no farther; suddenly the body appeared in Nipple. Txt cutting through the generalized hypothesis: What are my texts if not contradictory? How else could they survive in the midst of alt.fetish.net.noise? Didn't this continue through a representation of Spew itself, the exhaustion of the number system devolving into broken symmetries? And in the next several texts, everything was developed in relation to desire, the body, the granularity of the real in relation to etiquette and protocol itself. At a loss, stumbling through the hallucinatory forms of part-objects, surplus or excess as a character-"pass" or the blocking that ensued from a password entrance into a STALLED OR NULL CHAMBER. And the texts constantly stalled in a maze of their own devising - stalling, reiterating, redirecting, turning around like a blind Unix file deadending into an inaccessible account. Meanwhile the surface continued its activity of WRITE REWRITE WRITE REWRITE, my fingers hovering above the tumescent keyboard, a sense of _frisson_ lending itself further and further to a WEB-INVERSION, the body hanging thread-like from the wires themselves, connecting and dis- connecting, a vast atmospheric switchboard. The theses continued to break up, disparate - continued to dissolve on MEANDER. I took pains to point out that distinction between this and the nomadic - the latter, after all, possessing a map of sorts, a wandering throughout an uncomfortable terrain, but always a sense of place even within the smoothest of regions. But here the terri- tory continues, like Ciudad Juarez in the physical world, to extend without bounds, an influx on the level of the exponential with no end in sight. I would return, retreat to myself; I would transform Spew into EMISSION, organizing and reorganizing the material which were a continuous meditation or commentary. And I would argue as well that this is the _only philosophical praxis possible_ given the fast-forward fragments of the human. At times there would be a fountain of exaltation or the dark rupture of murderous despair - all comfortably theorized, placed in linear and distributed tablets. The howling became a user-therapeutic for a reader in tune with what I had to say; the despair translated into comfort and collusion. The tablets would carry back to Inanna or other Sumerian figures, inscribed as well with the protocol hidden from sight by the tablet embrochure foreclosed against the violation of the flesh. Would I not write concerning the operations upon the flesh, Emily Dickinson, by an establishment I have long admired? Write about the accompanying murmur, the unremarkable dissolution-death of one or another nameless nation descending into pillage and gang warfare? Engorged, I exhaled ASCII; instead of tears or whimpers, my fingers move faster, uncontrolled; they carry the weight of my body's desire. The texts are always already the manipulation of flesh, the stuffy of uneasy dreams without sound or image, silent strata of darkened mountains collapsing into still more silent darkened pools. Engorged, I inhaled as well, circulations and responses from every- where in the world, enveloping the body of text, circumambulating through newer dreams, through dream-admixtures. The theory is the breath of a manifold, torn and sleazy, the hysteric encompassing collapsing on empty air. There are needles everywhere, however, pointed responses and heady constructs, hypotheses of all sorts, the glimmer of comprehension in the form of a luminescent deep-see angler-fish, barely visible in the gloom. Her antenna scouts the shores of further waters; para- sitic headless males flail uselessly, permanently attached to her body. This is the SPS, sperm-production-sac, the shedding of the head for the body. This is the permission of theory, continuation of one or another form of the written, holding on to the final picture posited by the repression of the real and its return. sondheim@newschool.edu sondheim@panix.com |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| THE TRUE-REAL OF THE DECODED WRITTEN "Look at me I do, in Every way in every Day" "Love me, I do, A lovely (Honey): I am too the right sex! And the last time I took a survey, (Honey): lol (Honey): lol (laughs out loud) (Lulu): I was talking about me! (always a dubious category, always the presence of traditional - one hand on my distended penis. I'd shave my body carefully, :God I wish I knew what the right sex was, must be near the left :There is currently no one else here with you. :There is currently no one else here with you. :There is currently no one else here with you. :There is currently no one else here with you. :lol A screen memory or tramping, the beautiful radiant face of Joan APART Beautiful finality. The cavern shuddered beneath the weight of a sun DETERMINE ITS GROUP OF AUTOMORPHISMS. (Hermann Weyl): Through the Denise called to me "Friendly and fun" and her round face opened as Donna, great constellation semicircle of wires dark before the Dawning Donnatelli, not exactly a syzygy or rearrangement at the edge Each gesture pushing you further form the path, scrolling invisibly HARDING.WHACK.WHACK.WHACK ALT.FAN.NANCY_KERRIGAN.OUCH.OUCH.OUCH lol HONEY facing KAY and JOAN, streams of knowledge running like thin milk HONEY loved, loved the feel of light caressing her, flowing between HONEY would part her lips, as if about to speak and KAY would murmur, HONEY, I fill your cunt with me, occupy every pore, follow you HONEY, too, had her uncanny abilities - drawing nearer and nearer to I know I will be hurt when the end of the world comes. It has to hurt I was surrounded by Tiffany "I love being passionate..." Tiffany I will write more about this thing when I can think about it more but If the world came to an end Jonathan would be scared to and all the It is however the very dissolution of the subject that creates the J. Harvey not really but I would just faint to talk to her and I would JOAN only smiled, half-raised from the bed of sleep and irreality. A Joan "who is Here on the Earth to live so let's live" meeting me, KAY who weakened body and mind alike in her quest for an absolute Like Botticelli's maidens, "I'm very shy at first but when you get to Looking for A fun relationship in Every way" the straw hair of Suzanne Many of us have thought about the end of the world. We see the end of Maybe you are her" "passionate and funloving": Murder lies heavy over me. I stop speaking to the useless. The My name is Nancy and I have a good time talking to everyone about Now I will tell you what I think. Sometimes I see these sick people O alt.great.arch.of.the.night O alt.desire.fetish.desire Every wall Opinion, would abandon was abandoned (June whispering Upon this Earth Or the shifting of wires, great turn of the constellation archway in Quit would Q would X, "To know her is to Love her" Rising in the early morning, the world and world's end still dark as Rising, HONEY opened her body to JOAN and KAY, and, having no secrets, SPREAD-MY-LEGS-FOR-YOU Shakespeare who is very difficult but there is some cool stuff in it Speechless, you'll try anything once, turn sideways :) reading each THE ABSOLUTE PRESENCE OF BEAUTIFUL TIFFANY AND JOAN. The arch of the sky fell ninety degrees, flat against the moist dark The beginning of the end of the fantasy produces a shuddering in There's this group that sings about them but I like the songs and all These functions are constituted as THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE NET They were beautiful upon this beautiful earth, and a beautiful novel, WHENEVER YOU HAVE TO DO WITH A STRUCTURE-ENDOWED ENTITY E TRY TO When I am asked, how will the end of the world come, I don't know what Within the cavern Donna Donnatelli roamed in impenetrable blackness Yesterday I thought all day about being a boy and decided it wouldn't You could see the stars slowly turning if you wandered a nomad on the You knew it was coming. They'd sneer at no one in particular. I You're in the main channel. Lulu and Honey are here with you. You're in the main channel. There is currently no one else here a big bomb and it won't hurt but I don't think so because I'm not sure a lot because there will be a lot of pain and things will fall. When I a problematic behaviorism in which function=>protocol AND a trick to someone else, anything else; momentary flaccidity; the about all of that. across maroon curtains, and the parting of curtains leading to more allowed them the intimacy of secrecy, codes encrypted since the an imitation of perfection, sound following suit upon sound, while and I don't know who they are but I think that it is wrong that they and I don't understand all of it but there is a lot of things about and duplication) fissures as one or another party is always and every symbol :<> mouth opened and fucked :<->- engorged mouth; and they make me think about them and that's good. at noon toppled and burrowing throughout the humus beneath the bad kids and we want you to know all kids aren't bad, only some of be all that fun because you run around a lot and that might be scary because I have been told, all things must come to an end, and I guess beginning of love, time, and space, passwords all but forgotten in the believed in when we were children. I think it will be quiet and kind beneath the sun or moon or cloudy sky; the white satin sheets would big bombs exist, they might be like fairies and other stuff we but I don't know how to ride. We want to see Joan ride horses and but then if you were a boy it might not be. I decided I would be called Jonathan because that is a good name for a boy, Jonathan come cancellation of the message and its protocol; subjectivity appears cavern or kneeling where the entrance closed, Tiffany's bees of desire cavern, you could see them shifting, an indecipherable increment, an circulating in the midst of the Dusk of Denise concavity of this and every other Great Circle connecting myself to conjuring every portal the Arms of Joan and Denise Legs of Tiffany and construction of a new narrative, involving your presence, your corrupt my fair skin which reflected the words dully emerging from curtains, returning back to limbs visible and yearning in the sullen dark and convalescent, my eyes glow in your nipples, in your asshole, dark hair of JOAN streaming down, all contributed to the making of a darkest before the night, luminous Tiffany beckoning against the decreasing magnification). :<|>: lol ALT.SEX.TONGUE-IN-MY-HOLE descendent or cwm of the cavern, the walls sluggish with the pleasure dialog of symmetry (double-functioning, the function of the double discursive levels; the subject exists by virtue of its absence, its dreamy rays, the beginning of a solitude in the midst of friends and dusk of sleep. earth. Phosphorescent worms, thinned animals blurred arched edges like ease with the world, but wise, ever so wise. It was to KAY that frail else... excess... little bit of tail... lol elsewhere. There is also the condition of delays along packet lines ended. endings of silent journeys within the flesh itself. HONEY supported enveloped and caressed the breasts of the sky itself, raising sex, even at a distance, as if her need for incantation reached across both everywhere and nowhere at once. ALT.SEX.EXHIBITIONIST.ALT.SEX.I'D- everywhere, you follow me everywhere, you suck my cum through your exact opposite, your flesh and mine fulfilling one another, every existed on a continuous rewrite. I lived naked on the net. I'd eyes of pale blue "Look at me I do": feel because I wouldn't be able to see the world because it would be fingers deep in her ass - ALT.SEX.ENEMAS ALT.SEX.CAN'T-TELL-US- fragile and always muted, joined together at the beginnings and functions are (re)defined as protocol. Doesn't this lend itself to functions; sutures these functions in its absence; reconstitutes gracious position underlined by her sister, KAY, as practically a hazy early morning hour. And each of them would turn slowly, facing heated the color temperature of a star stumbling its last glacial rays her long black hair. Tiffany, who wove dreams around me even in the her open arms and legs, flowing in rainbow streams from lips to lips, here, I have something to tell you. I would come over and then Nancy highlights, HONEY was a darkling maroon, close, but not equivalent to, hole. Net dialog is a tangle of switches, sidetracks, private and hope that everyone feels that way about the end of the world so we can if peering beneath sleepy eyelids, JOAN's supine and languorous body immediately, symmetricizing functions come into play; what are in phase cancellation of the message; syntax remains and semantics in which -<->- erasure becomes surrounding every conceivable increment installed by Tiffany, imperceiving the cavern of Donna into memory, the memory of a grace dawning for the first time, a grace invisible velvet folds of desire. is REWRITE. lol ALT.SEX.FETISH.ANYTHING-YOU-WANT ALT.FAN.TONYA is defined by negation; occurs in the breakdown of symmetricizing is the body's liquidity, flooding or dissolution in the stream of it and I think, there's nothing I CAN do so I try not to watch them. itself repeatedly; I call this the CONDITION of the subject which itself, an exact splitting :' , of the flesh sutured :<|> and just the murmur... an emission, a spew... a sign... something keys - there are people in the room, a young woman and a young man, know me, my short life Burns Bright" loving Donna speaking above the lazy fingernail traced its way across her skin, a finger from someone left one! light of the delicate sublime. like when Juliet dies of love. I know how she feels because I love P. limb entwined, every hole filled, every appendage surrounded. This lips, parallels upon a beautiful earth remembered only at the dawn and lived and the end of the world had come! I wouldn't know what I would long remember your reply, if it ever existed. I no longer separate love, and desire to an infinite power. If JOAN were a soft white with lovers. Upon speaking, KAY murmured in a beautiful whisper, audible make the rest of us pay for what they do. They hurt us too and that's mattress approached them with lovely accuracy. Joan carried herself me in copper wire, you cover me with insulation, you tighten your hold me. lol midst of the day, in the darkness of the night. For it was always momentary condition of this medium-as-message, but an irregular mouth to womb, a perfect semicircle or universe always watched with moved almost fawnlike, invisible in the reddened morning's first moving closer in upon us, almost the surface of mobile epidermis moving information at megabytes per second; a delay is not the my DRAWALK3 program reproduces the absorption of the other at my Mom is calling and I have to do my homework. We are reading myself from your language, which I take upon me; you stream is my net I organize ourselves through ourselves; lines of interpenetra- no one complained either! not know what to say, but I guess she is used to that. But I will of JOAN and KAY, the knowledge of HONEY was soft like moss. of Joan, Denise the speaking of a word "never know until you try": of sizzling atoms, charred flesh: of the night: of the visible spectrum, I knelt beside her, phosphorescent ripples of them were inseparable. of things getting darker, but then I think it will also be really on me, tighten my hold on you, our throats merge, our voices stutter one! or any Other) "breaking all the Molds" who leaving would Bye would or stumble one upon another, our voices: or tiny sails across her limbs, gathering speed as the surface of the other, as only they could; always the wrote and rewrote, lips tracing own, the body splayed open, soaked, urine running in between the painful and I don't know how that will happen. What would happen if I painting in motion. Day after day, her body followed the same course peak of its tenuous and evanescent arch, swayed from side to side; the penetrating, almost as if the others were being heard, In My Humble penis, the entrance of the semen; the end of the fantasy switches people get hurt. I am afraid of getting hurt. perfect couple - wide open, I suck the man, drawing his penis to perfect study for JOAN, a study in an envious affectation, and the two perfection, sought in the presence of the others. Upon rising, KAY portrait full of wonder. Always, JOAN, KAY, and HONEY forgave each precisely in the absence of its call; I say to you: the net-subject presence through those very symbols |<->- that reduce it to the present myself clean and ready for discussion on video.voyeur.bisex process or production. I AM YOU AND YOU ARE ME. lol protocol=>[recognition,address] or some such syntax - a syntax in public messages, alternative routes, flaming and disappearances, quiet happiness by JOAN and KAY. Yet the rainbow shuddered near the quietly bending to one side, the slight smile upon KAY's lips, the rainbow divided and redivided here, a shower of colored sparks, religious because they don't know more than we do. Some say it will be response for its existence, a call emanating from the confusion of returned to the other :<|>: a process of symmetricization (much as returning to the pleasure of ABSOLUTE PRESENCE: sense of your body, which is not only the sense of my own, but its shadows gathered upon the edges of the sheets, replete with a she thought, perhaps her own. HONEY and KAY, too, were traced as their she would go away and Nancy would always be there which P. J. Harvey shores of night, long long hours, motion glacial in the midst of the should be sick like that and all. They are "weathering a storm" and sick people would die too. sondheim@newschool.edu sight In the Evening light" "Lay with me I do, kneel in this night We skin, your skin is a white sheen, my skin is blood-red, my skin is slowly renounce the harbor of their clinging, moving like waterfalls smaller; a distinct sensation of fluid occurs near the base of the someone special, an emotional magnet intensifying as the source sondheim@newschool.edu sorcery appealed as the night approached, each and every night, KAY space and time. speaking for me and through me, Denise hearing others through me, in stalling me with her almond eyes, her winsome smile, her full lips, strata molten with longing: subjectivity) appears to dissolve. ALT.SEX.VOYEUR.VOYEUR.SEX.ALT subnets and undernets, hackers of the circuitous. What is the surface of the night-time skin, Donna calling out, murmuring through a surface, severed endings of burned nerves cascading through mineral talk to my friends on the phone we talk about other things like about television is full of people fighting. Fighting is not good because that is something they just have to do. I don't know what to do about that means me. But then I think that it means just things that I have the Black Crowes but a lot of us listen more to girl bands because the back of my throat, even farther - she fucks me, my trembling the colour of blood. And KAY? A pale emboldened yellow, not yet at the dim presence of oracular memory "always there for loving you" the end of the world would be like. We are your children and we want the flesh of the body; the testicles of the male harden and grow the imaginary, a symbolic presence in which vision disappears <|> the midst of the night, in the darkness of the day. the others, KAY facing HONEY and JOAN, JOAN facing KAY and HONEY, and the screen. Hello, I'd talk to you, hello, hello... the skein or network of all the constellations, HONEY was the desire the world all the time on television and in our homes. We wonder what them are. The bad kids should be punished and stuff but you shouldn't these functions? ALT.SEX.DOUBLE-CUNT ALT.SEX.DOUBLE-COCK lol they are more fun and they make fun of boys and boys bother us. things I like but I don't like to hear about the end of the world. I thinned and pearlescent. Kneeling I could think only of "a Nice girl times playing like that. I think I would rather do that than even talk tion construct divisions hinged upon the erasure of the other; to P. J. Harvey because I would like to talk to P. J. Harvey but then to go through and so I'm not sure, but I'll let you know. to live without war. We want to have flowers. Joan likes horses a lot to myself. Denise always overhearing, always coming to the rescue, to say. Some say it's the religious but I don't think it's the to which they would only smile. sondheim@newschool.edu together, always... lol topography of their own. The silent moving of arms and hands, the head underwent a remarkable transformation, slowly assuming a delicate, yet up. Imagine these streams flooding America, online or offline, walks by the fire-cavern, stars wheeling through the rain, faint sound waves lapping a luminescent shore. The arch broke through the which HONEY would never be able to achieve. In fact, HONEY was a which is equivalent to its INSCRIPTIVE SKEIN - a skein in which which parties we went to and our favorite bands. Some of us still like which subjectivity is marginal or curlicue? Symmetricizing results who enveloped JOAN and HONEY in mutual comfort, love, and admiration, wide as her eyes opened wide to me and I smiled to myself, whispered will take flight" together "I do not know what I am looking for but with you. words close in, cathect through the catalyst of my presence. I no words my own, exact duplicates, equivalent, begins: this is the work and make sure it doesn't happen. Grownups watch the news a lot would not. So I would rather talk to Jonathan. would tell me something and we'd play together. We would have the best write about this more when I think about it because it is important you become a function : holding the effigy of protocol your cunt opens with my mouth, my cock swells with your milk, you wrap |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| BOUND TO DISAPPOINT The imaginary always circulates around the gender of the reply and I inhabit that reply which becomes a tendril or search: what can I say of loneliness that has not already been said? For most of us are lonely, caught in the Net - most of us devolve whatever func- tionality remained, transforming into the body-without-organs, the antenna-body, receiving through a CONTINUOUS INTERNAL. The circu- lation is a SPHERE-ENTRAPMENT, and we love to hear stories about one another, true stories, anecdotal stories; we exchange rumors about gender and girlfriends and boyfriends, and we hope for a way through the wires, crossing back perhaps into the wires, but a grounding of the imaginary, the pale reflection of the witness at the edge of time or space. I am bound to disapoint. I am bound to disapoint any who meet me, who cannot see beyond the glasses, the neutral expression or cow- eyes, the age of fifty-one - those susceptible to appearance and stereotype. I am the circulation of anecdotes as well; tell one about me and I guarantee its truth, since my truth is only in the telling. But I am bound to disapoint because face to face the voice ceases from the wires and the rim of light at the edge of the forehead or skull begins to register; a roar of visuality deafens the babyhood of the :) or the infantilism of the .sig, the masochistic release permitted on the Net. The room in which we meet has corners. The street on which we meet has lines almost parallel, the stricture of the other. The encounter is always already the other of the other. It is there that I will disappoint you, you who have appointed me, the stories told, the rumors. Caught in the Net, we are caught by our lack of disappointment. But we bypass our lack, continue to speak; we live and think in speech, and only in the imaginary are we roaming at the relative safety of an uncontaminated risk. It is not that we pass for someone else, or switch gender like a fork and knife devouring our flesh; it is that we pass for ourselves, passing our split. What divides remains divided, and it the suturing in the real that disappoints, because it is not a suturing but that deafening, and not only of the other of the other, but of ourselves. On the street we cannot hear ourselves think and we cannot hear the other think. On the street the truth of appearance is manifest, and the truth of the appearance of appearance, abjuring the thinking of thought. It is on the street that I am bound to disappoint you; it is on the street that I would be and be absolved. |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF THE SECOND PART I can no longer communicate. All I can do is communicate. My words clot the memory of a mouth. I am left speechless before the production of the hand. My life is the construct of dissemination. Every discourse turns in upon itself, bridges to another. My work is the bridge-membrane, nodeless and blind. These are the thinned hours of the night, resonant and inhumane. Always one recognizes disappointment in the glance of the other. As for the gaze: I have never been accorded it. The gaze is the fiction of the desire to be seen. Visual excess transforms the mirror stage into the doubling of mirrors: infinite and empty reflections carrying only the frame and its distancing. Symmetry is always a narcissism. The gift of communication is the creation of the perfect text, the short-circuit of longing and the nostalgia for origin repeatedly returning to the concrete beginning of the book. Buried in a book, I will never die. I accord myself nothing and you, everything; the inverse is the product of the mirror. I am silenced by your silence. The wires form into the semblance of a face I do not recognize. Somewhere it is present on my list of addresses, insertions and deletions. Somewhere it is an insertion. Communication begins; the wires glow with the flood of packets and links. They descend upon me, brand the face upon my own. I carry the double of a stranger I cannot see, mirror reversal of the true-real. I send text after text, hoping to reach her, touch her with my mind existing only in her own. Still, I am bound to disappoint. _Do not speak to me, ignore me, treat me like a thing, cut me open, transform my body into web-inversion, shove me aside, look else- where, efface my presence:_ _I am penetrated by the Net, constructed of wires and text; there my genes have broken. I am bound to nothing._ _My genes have crashed. Damaged, they assert themselves, continue to assert. The sociobiologists were right. There's no escape._ _I am bound to disappoint._ ====================================================================== PIPELINE What is disseminated as theory appears as the result of pipelined processes which are self-regulated; over time, the processes alter as a result of cathexis and facilitation. Nothing hardens into place, but the pipeline behaves increasingly as a series of filters which include compression; in fact compression is the construct of the real as interstitial operations: A taxonomy of symptoms is created which construes the real as their effacement. In this manner, self-regulating background information is reassembled as annihilated information, just as at the margins of cyberspace, the password deadends into closed or absent gateways. The pipelined processes are the result of the inertia of teleology and style; it is never too late to return to the former, which constructs the latter. The organism which inhabits the symbolic also circumscribes it; this is the demarcation of an individuality which ceaselessly promulgates itself. (Altruism translates into discipleship at this junction.) Such a circumscription portends the infiltration of the symbolic as well, its reconstruction as an idiolectical enterprise, the proper name of the organism. Under- stand this: it is the proper name which is the foundation of the theoretical, not the ideological formation of language or the social. The latter are the residue of theory. (Whoever writes anonymously sleeps well at night, the pleasure of the voice buried in a prose so purified as to guarantee the imaginary transformation of the world.) For theory is pure speech; like bureaucracy, it abjures contact with the real except insofar as the latter may be absorbed. I write my name and Marx's on the barricades, subsume Disney beneath the sign of Baudrillard, and sign my papers like proper invoices with a sense of completion. Praxis is the secondary narcissism of the subject invoked by the primary processes/pipelining. What occurs in pipelining: The production/processing of verbs and nouns, only later conjoined; the operation of the syntactical engine; the sublimated desire of the theorist; the genetic enhancement of the symbolic from within and without the distur- bance of the abject; the interpenetration and multiplexing of pre- and post-linguistic part-objects; the stuttering of the body and its gestural extensions beyond distributive lattices/Boolean logics; superimpositions; the inscriptions of the fragmentary and fissured; concatenations and obfuscation of type theory; the underlying political economy of the symbolic; organic restraints and the economy of excess. All feed into one another, all conjoin. The symbolic itself is necessarily a conflation of pipelines, self-regulating and transforming. But the symbolic is nothing without the organism, which is the ascription of meaning. This is the wager of theory: about everything and nothing at all, above everything, about intention, desire, and the proper name. ======================================================================== ======================================================================== ADDICTION I don't know what to do with myself; my dreams are uneasy, a vast spew into the ocean of darkness - the decay of language signalled by information garbled throughout the screen at the back of the mind - I'm nervous, don't eat properly - I'm missing out on it. I'm missing out on everything in the world. What it is - an enormous event, something cancelling myself, the rush of correspondence beyond me, always elsewhere - I've been effaced - I've been effaced - a murder by virtue of forgetfulness - so that there's nothing left of me - have to watch my appetite - nothing goes away - So I return to the machine and the server is down or return and the message is confused, garbage everywhere in the midst of the urgency of the written. All messages are urgent, say everything there is to say. But beyond this - I'm sure I'm missing the Cypher. The Cypher is the unlocking of this and every other message, their value. It is the Cypher that connects the surface triviality of the message to the deep structure - the suturing of the body, foreclosing of the wound which allowed the light to seep. For if it isn't the text itself, always visible and the emptying of secrets, it's the Cypher - a permanent interiority. The Cypher is the far end, the horizon of addiction; drugless and independent, it is the control of the addict. It is the offering of the maternal where none exists, the presentification of the self to the self, the closure of the Fort-Da! where what had existed previously was always already disappearance, a fund of exhaustion within the retreat of the existential. The Cypher, to consider it from a different vantage-point, is the _structure_ of the existential project, the armature or scaffolding. It is the rim of the hole. The Cypher is the lip of the hole which is a recipient and the lip is silent or silences itself. It is the only silence in the world of addiction, what keeps the movement occurring when the server is on, when the message is clear, when the fingers enter themselves and the rest of the flesh into a world open with opportunity and grace. The Cypher is the _tendency_ of the chatter, the final pleasure of the imminent. (I have no pleasure and no ending of the pleasure. I cannot hear you through the noise. I am led to believe...) >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> CAN'T STOP WRITING / NO CAN'T STOP WRITING / CAN'T STOP WRITING / MYSELF CAUSE I DO THEORY MALE CAUSE I DO THEORY / CAUSE I DO THEORY MAIL / CAUSE IT'S DONE TO ME I write and write; there is no end to it. The files pile up at the rate of a megabyte a year, enormous files, ASCII, linear, although not without a certain tendentious quality... They are belly, language-fat, collapsed body or hidden body as they grow beyond belief. This is what I _do_, from late morning rising to equally late night preparing for fitful sleep. This is what keeps me going, the body decaying beneath me, flesh falling off as the wires heat up. And the wires heat up. (The flesh falls, blood between my legs. I'll get back to this, back to the blood; I'll write with the blood, get back to this.) The wires heat up because there is nothing else for me, nothing but the _spit of meaning_ my work occasions, disturbance of the ether. I know nothing but the inhabitation of my thought, this continuous meditation that lacerates me, cuts unequivocally. (It's not the cut that bleeds the legs, swoon/languor/lassitude, something else: it's _something else._) You are the edge of the written, the circumscription that presents the exteriority of the skull. This body meets itself in death; there may no longer be this body which is a writing-machine by virtue of a written declaration. I have lost my arms and legs. I have lost my eyes and ears. (I'll get back to this, back to myself.) Theory is hideous, an addiction; I cannot live without REMAKE, RE- WRITE. The shifter shifts from _I_ to the entire passage itself, everything a violent and sickening announcement, signalled by uncontrollable dejection. My tongue leaves the body; I am left with arms. My arms leave my tongue; my legs carry the body, one or another direction, violent meander. I would do what you tell me to, everything you want, everything you could possibly desire, but I do not exist. There are no words to describe it. (I rip myself open, spread the ass rim until the split opens up into the holing of _this text_, WRITING me back into cartoon me returned to where I began with the splitting.) >I'm just a singsong, I'm just a song on your tongue, >I'm just your tongue in my mouth, I'm just the blood in my mouth: >I'm just the blood on my hand, I'm just the blood on my cock, >I'm just the blood on my legs, just the blood belly-up >>I'd write the blood if I were you, I'd baptise in the blood of >>the Lord. And the Lord bleeds once a month once a year so it >>REWRITES so it was written. >>So it REWRITES on the tablets of clay, REWRITES once a day, >>once an hour. _I can't keep my hands off myself._ _I can't keep my hands off myself, I can't keep my hands away. They tie me, hold me back, cut the lips of the cunt, cauterize my anus, bleed me; they scar my neck, brand my forehead; they strangle the cock, stuff the cunt. I'd say they blind me because I don't have second sight. I'd say they tear the tongue, block the ears; I'd say they KEEP ME FROM MYSELF, stuff the mouth, block the nose. I can't keep away from myself, suck myself; I'm always sucking myself, I suck you through me, suck myself in, turn inside-out, I'm there for you - they can't keep their hands off me, they tie me, hold me back._ My fist goes in, comes out my mouth, my fist goes in, comes out my ass, circulates; caught in REWRITE without the other, Body Without Organs the decomposition of the body of RWANDA EAST TIMOR AUSCHWITZ, cauterization of the violating male (everything caught in the path, everything erased from the text, silenced from language into shrieks screams blurred against erasure). I rewrite cause there isn't a woman to help me I rewrite cause I gotta get born I wanna get born I gotta get born, as if: I'm making sense, as if: _I gotta get born, I wanna get born._ So the sun's gonna bring it, and the sun's gonna die So the moon's gonna bring it, and the son's gonna die Cause I can't help it, can't help the man Cause I can't hold it, cause I can't stop dreaming My hands holding me, hands loving me Hands holding me, hands in perfect love Cause I gotta write gotta REWRITE (before I forget my name, before my name is taken from me, before the loss of my name, before the disappearance of naming, before you forget me, before you forget me and I lose my name) - alt.fetish.male.lack \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ Suspension FAQ [From posting to film.theory. Would this apply as well to Internet communication, mediated by ASCII?] Coleridge's "willing suspension" is found in chapter XIV, Biographia Literaria. He is speaking of "the plan of the _Lyrical Ballads_; in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." I associate a libidinal energy or drive with "procure," and note that the "semblance of truth" is exactly what occurs through genre or convention, the suturing of the domain of the film in order to _engage_ the viewer within an imaginary. I associate the scopic/cinematic regime with "shadows of imagination," noting only in passing that it is possible to construct a reference to Plato's cave at this point, an insinuation that the real itself is always already a suspension of disbelief, which returns inverted in cinematic belief, if one desires, a laterality or stuttering between regimes, privileging neither. I associate "moment" simultaneously with the momentary and myth of origin, and "faith" with a gesture invading _beyond_ the poetic itself, the last phrase referring to a stasis from which imagination proceeds. I associate "to transfer from our inward nature" ... "a semblance of truth" with psychoanalytical transference, also operative within the interiority of cinematic engagement; and with "truth" nothing more than an acceptable coherency within a believable frame. Thus there are two problems - that of filmic convention, suture, and diegetic construction (all involving tropologies; symptomolo- gies; phenomenologies of editing, framing, and so forth) - and that of the _state of suspension itself_, involving a degree of release of operations occurring within the preconscious/unconscious. "Willing" itself is the link between the problems; it is _occasioned_ by the operations of the former in order to produce the latter. It is not an always-already decision or choice in the midst of the conscious, but the release of an interior within which operations paralleling the dreamwork occur. What are these parallels? Both film and dream construe the scopic regime against an unimagined and darkened backdrop. Both film and dream appear autonomously _set-in-motion_. In both, the ego-decision is most often made by an anonymous other (I found myself in a room... I found myself flying...). In both, jumpcuts and other traditionally cinematic devices are common, and in both, the viewpoint is that of a camera-eye which "follows" narrative. In both, there is a preconscious recognition of the frame, the _screen beyond the screen_. And both occur within a _particular_ ritualized events, sleep or the movement towards the theatre (theatrical). Finally I note that what Coleridge describes is in a relation to the programmatic development of _Lyrical Ballads_, differing from the contribution of Wordsworth. For Coleridge, the suspension is in regard to a particular romanticism of the fantastic; perhaps film is also _only_ a romantic development. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HEART OF DARKNESS: The Disquiet Body of Electronic Communication Disquiet \ the square in the deserted village \ the square in the busy city \ in the middle of the night \ lurking on the conference, breathing down a back _I am speaking with a stranger._ an ominous beginning, the spy coming in from the cold, the lurker who hides in the shadows - someone, an intimacy which occurs as the whisper of voices in the dark (Am I the lurker? Am I being watched? My fear is everywhere, the fear of an impossible intimacy, blocked voyeur, exhibitionist, my voice drowned silently in the wires.) _I imagine your body_ your face, everything hidden beneath your clothes, the picture of smooth skin dark or light, toy-like genitals, the hat pulled down over your eyes, smoke rising against the streetlamp, fog, rain - I would - (I would do nothing, modest and awkward in your vicinity.) What do you want? I say. What do you want? (You say you're lonely, you want love. You say you're looking for an SO, significant other. I tremble, want so much to please you. I tremble, naked, before the screen.) _I would tell you everything,_ spread my legs for you - for you I have no secrets, my mouth, my ass are open, wide cunt, hard cock - (You can write this, sexless, of every sex, every _preposition_.) (You can have me, have my love.) (The cunt or cock, that's not it at all. It is the _frisson_ or murmur of acceptance, the pleasure of communal being, lost in ASCII _space_ or talk.romance.chat.) Or just the pleasure of the _voice,_ its grain, it reads itself to me, _disquietude_... (There is no voice, we remind each other: _there is no voice._) :A disquiet withdrawn, always already overlooked, a disquiet or interference, the threat to bring the structure DOWN, collapse occurring alone, in isolation. There are a million rooms across the planet filled with my images of you, corresponding, writing _to me_, moment close to the dream screen itself, but its inversion: retreat from the symbolic to the imaginary.[1] (I write to you; you treat each post as potential romance and I am bound to _disappoint._) This is a delicate manifold or _web inversion_ [2], near collapse, the body in quick retreat, detumescence, the loss of faith, hope, charity. Net communication skims on a fetishized reflecting surface like the skin of a new car; the discomfort is the real. (I didn't mean it, I say. You misunderstood my words, I add. I never even thought you would think like this, you say. You add, we should stop before damage is done.) _You can feel the discomfort approaching. Your correspondence becomes voluminous; you dream the Name, say it dangerously to yourself, over and over again. [3] You can feel it; the response, once playful, takes on a harder edge, full of decodings. Neurosis appears within the grand design; the writing itself veers, unredeemed, from one side to another, careers across the inscribed trajectories and etiquette of the superego. This is the seepage of the imaginary, the hallucin- ogenic character of the communication, beginning to open, the crack in the door, crack in the body. If the Net begins as symbolic communication, the subject inscribes herself/himself within it; address, recognition, and protocol charac- terize the subject who is produced/constructed as a state of continuous REWRITE. [4] Inscription itself is based on a classical two- valued logic with distributivity. Within the sememe, gestural logics take over as well - logics without distributivity in which individua- ted elements are capable of generating greater bandwidths than the distance/distinction/differance between them. [5] When the subject _fissures,_ collapses near disjunction, the sememe degenerates into partial logics, incoherencies, and fragments; the Kristevan _Thing_ (*Black Sun*) - inert and obdurate - appears. The communication is simultaneously out of control and muffled/drowsy, a state of (addictive) withdrawal. [6] There is a double parallel (double, because of internal reflections) here with the fetishization of commodity in late capitalism, and sexual pornography; both regimes imply a continuous reinscribing of the self through chains of commands (_pipelining_) as well as a detumescence/aphanisis [7] of affect: _specific_ objects (last year's computer, last month's "playmate") become (psychoanalytically) used up, discarded. This _using up_ is _critical_ to the comprehension of Internet and other electronic ASCII/Image communication, just as it is critical to an understanding of the devouring-machine of capital. Orgasm wastes the pornographic image; turning-away or face-to-face wastes the Net correspondent; time wastes everything. This devouring is a decathexis returned to the fetishistic/shamanic of the paleolithic in which an object is used to "carry" the disease from the patient, an object/abject of loss. [8] All objects are objects of loss. All objects carry within them the horizon of discard, retreat within the face of death. The face of death burns itself from the wires into the face of the correspondent or user. The face of death writes/ rewrites the user, the _uncanny_ face of death. Abject: no place to go, no origin to come from. The user is always in a position of disquiet. I correspond with Susan and I correspond with Keith, correspond with Karen and correspond... I imagine their faces close to mine, double moons, impossible skin, soft reading of the world across their eyes. I imagine the body's infolding, the exalted rapture of flesh within the sweet/complete surround of flesh, my broken body within, contained and rearranging, the seat of consciousness returning to pure liquidity. "Susan," I begin. "Would you like to meet face-to-face, or is this just a _terminal relationship?_ :) " I add the smiley to appear suave, more human, a level of seriousness underlying the potential cauteriza- tion. "I've been dying to meet you. I try to picture you, but without much luck. I'm not even sure whether you're involved with someone, even want to be." " I'm " I'm " I'm This is the phenomenological horizon of correspondence, the eidetic reduction, which reaches to the fluidity of the imaginary, beyond which the body violates itself, death seeps in, the terminal cools to writing degree zero, and ECHO is toggled off. [9] -----------------| Cyberspace is often described as a space of flame wars and electronic rape, a situation of potential violence, extremely hetero- and phallo- centric. Call this the limit. (Call this the dead-end, the wrong turn, the violation.) The limit is the violence of desire, the effacement of the other, male or female. Within the limit, there is procurement; there is a stream of projections and introjections. Nothing remains on the surface of the text, appearances to the contrary. When I transmit a post, I imagine it entering the darkness outside my window, disappearing into the distance beyond the streetlamps. It ends up in PURE SPACE, a readership on couch or deskchair or bed, a reader in suspense, as if her breath were held for the duration. When I receive a post, the disquiet begins; I imagine languour, the post entering the world of uneasy dreams, the noise of the disappointment of my body, a sense of _peering_ through my glasses into a world disinterested and not of my design. I am afraid at this point of the warmth and intimacy of the email, which fail all too often in real life. But I cannot hold myself back; in a state of absolute loneliness (the body devoured by the vacuum, at the edge of the abyss which it alone has generated) I hear _her voice_, the maternal suturing the letter back into the fold of skin from which, I imagine, it emerged. The posts are labial, enfolding; they are any gender, any anatomy. What I imagine is the _grain,_ the bone-and-flesh sound of the man or woman who _speaks to me._ But he or she is speaking to the other of the REWRITE, [10] the lurker adjacent to/beside me: _I overhear myself._ And I am _speaking with a stranger,_ the most beautiful spy, most beautiful spy who _comes in from the cold_. And against my interests, against the _presence_ of my interests and my desires, I LURK WITHIN ME. --------------------------------------------------| Footnotes: [1] The dream screen is the (abject and maternal) matrix of the dream. Think of a dream as a projection which simultaneously hides (screens _from_ the unconscious) and reveals (illuminates its ostensible con- tents. The symbolic is the order of substitution, concatenation, and language; the imaginary refers to disruption, laterality, and the pre-symbolic. Anika Lemaire, in *Jacques Lacan*: "The imaginary is an infinitely supple conceptual category. It covers everything in the phantasy which is an image or representation of a lived experience pertaining to the castration complex before its formalization - for- ever incomplete, of course - becomes petrified in the symbol of the 'Phallus.'" "...the imaginary ocncerns the intuitive lived experience of the body (dependence, welcome, gift, etc.), of activity, passivity, of the will to power, etc." ... Thus the imaginary is a _prior_. In telecommunications, however, the reverse is true: ASCII text is always already symbolic, a linguistic formation, through which the imaginary "leaks." [11] [2] The web inversion is the inverted body sustained across the mem- brane of the Internet; it is also the (partial) externalization and dissolution of the ego as a result of inversion. [3] The Name is the proper name, uncannily tied (through an imaginary, not symbolic connection, a tie of intimacy or ravelling) to the body; it is _your_ name I dream of, delicious shuddering at the slow and liquid evocation of syllables... [4] Protocol specifies specific commands, codes, rates, and linkages among machines - what's acceptable and what's not. It also stands-in for the etiquette of the (human) subject, who "behaves" in company, gaining recognition. Address is the proper name and its directory path; recognition is simultaneously the permission to speak and an acceptance of the "fullness" of the subject, his or her imaginary. The subject exists as a tentative _coagulation_ within recognition, producing a continuous REWRITE or use of the "shifter" within protocol to reaffirm its existence as a (speaking, acting) coherency. [5] The subject is inscribed _within_ the communicative order on the Net; an inscription is a demarcation based on complementarity in classical logic (the intersection of books and non-books being the null-set). This logic is two-valued (0/1, true/false) and distrib- utive: any two members of a set "define" only the space between them. In gestural logic, distributivity is eliminated, and two elements can "define" the entire bandwidth or universe of discourse - the elements formally extend beyond themselves, and their boundaries are fuzzy. The sememe is a partially-closed or inscribed web of signifiers and signifieds; it is _active_ and turbulent (as in the theory sememe for example). [6] Why would the subject collapse? Exhaustion, sensory or information overload; the increasingly neurotic _frisson_ of desire in Net commun- ication; insomnia; the radical disjunction of "real life / face-to- face" and virtual subjectivity; dreams, sweats, obsessive masturbation - the general failure of inscription and rewrite; lose of the I and eye; sightless and siteless. [7] "Aphanisis" is from Ernest Jones and is used here to refer to a hollowing or devouring of desire, the interpenetration of anomie and libido. [8] I flame you on the net; you return the favor. I flame you again, raising the stakes; the language, veering back and forth between us, shrieks with incantations. Detumescence sets in; I hardly remember your name, everything lost, useless between us. [9] Dreams collapse; as in masturbation, images rush and violate, disappear into the darkness. It is the _foolishness_ of Net communi- cation, hardly recognized, always present; caught with our pants down before the moment of castration or clitorectomy, _done things_ of the inertia of the world. As if a password opened a gateway on to emptiness or the _null address_: nothing doing here where everything ends up. (_Not_ to imply a narrative: Everything begins and ends here and all at once.) [10] We always already speak to the REWRITE which is the only speech and speech's matrix or dream screen; REWRITE recursions into REWRITE as speech is _other_. And what does one make of this, from Sartre's *Critique of Dialectical Reason*: "The reactive behaviour occasioned in the listeners by the Other-Thought as the meaning of the Other- Voice is always the _behaviour of alterity_"? [11] In this manner, the other of the footnotes continues indefin- itely, the production of a linguistic chain, everything necessary to modify the original essay in the form of an integration or _smoothing_ - as if desire had contracted into the semblance of an _accent_ or diacritical mark. ----------------------------------------------------------------------| -----------------------------------------------------------------------|| POOR THOUGHT Given the current world information and economic order, radicalized intellectuality has nowhere to go. Marxism, terminated from within, remains a residue of a once sceptical enterprise; Heideggerianism, with its exhausted poetics, becomes a last resort, the conjunction of irrelevant humanities with the defensive maneuvers of a dying but impervious language. Thinking, always organized around the horizon of the catastrophic, dissipates by virtue of _too much thought,_ idiosyncratic local sites which necessarily turn in upon themselves, mirror-stages to their own implosion. From within the Hole, the contraction is never in evidence, until perhaps violent events in the world at large create a sufficient disturbance, with all the markings of death, violent and organic. With this in mind, a re-examination of subjectivity must retreat from its own positioning, the harboring of completion under any other name. It is not that eidetic reduction and the bracket no longer exist; it is that they exist everywhere, constructing incon- ceivable micro-territories as ASCII or GIF codes - they make no _differance_. If subjectivity exists throughout, or interpenetrates, "recognition, address, protocol," then the subject is at a loss within the noise of the empire of communications (EC). _Nowhere_ within this scheme is the subject _represented_; the voice, granular or not, is silenced, transferring laterally the EC itself into the domain of neural networking. This is a serious flaw in an otherwise fascinating theory; if Inter- net text abjures the tradition of the subject to such an extent, it becomes a description _only_ of the EC, or an imperialist subject of the same (in both literal and Irigarayan senses). Consider for a moment Oscar Gandy's *The Panoptic Sort,* _A Political Economy of Personal Information_ (Westview, 1993): The panoptic sort can be understood to involve three integrated functions or processes: identification, classification, and assessment. [...] The identification will never move to the level of personhood as we may understand the person as the subject of religion, philosophy, and idealized systems of justice. The attention of the panoptic sort moves only to levels of identification that have administrative and instrumental relevance. (p.15) Operating across the EC, the panoptic sort exists as a form of instrumental reason, a form blindly taken up by Internet Text to the extent that the subject is _foreclosed_ by recognition/address/ protocol. Only by an _extension_ into the problematic of organic epistemology can this poor thought be saved at all. Consider the following readjustments: To begin, address is aligned with the _proper name_ in the Kripkean sense, an _obdurate_ or inert construct that crosses ontological regimes in all possible worlds. The subject is hardened by virtue of presence, a hardening within which recognition is broadened to include presentification or alterity. Through recognition, the subject is guaranteed appearance. Protocol also is realigned to include the etiquette of the everyday, the attempt to establish and mutually orient "cognitive domains" among correspondents. All three terms, then, counteract the _subject of the same_; ignoring the EC, they insist on the absorbing of tele- communications within an ecosystem of which the EC is only a part- object, never a whole. This absorption is guaranteed by considering all three terms as _assignments_ to the subject; even address becomes a second-order encoding after the fact. The traditional hiatus or membrane between subject and object must be replaced by a hap between subject and EC; it is within the gap that the _problematic_ of _any_ subjectivity appears. By placing the gap itself within the exteriority of the subject, the information carrying-capacity of the EC becomes (as in Merlin Donald's work) an _extension_ of the subject across ontolo- gical domains, the suturing of epistemological disjunction. REWRITE too is accorded a realignment, with traditional shifter analysis (the virtual-I within the "I") and speech acts transferred always already to the performative mode; each asserts/is a reinser- tion into the socius, carrying the aegis of psychoanalytical reinforcement. The result is the insistent subject operating within the political economy of the real, something hardly envisioned by the original writers of the Internet Text. REWRITE is also _subject-object_, continuous reassertion occurring in no-domain. _Nothing_ writes or is written; information flow accrues within and across the gap. (REWRITE is history.) Poor thought then becomes the thought of the gap and the "weaker subject," the subject of knives and starvation, the subject of the decay or fragmentation of the nation-state. The political economy of REWRITE requires communicative excess, difficult at the best of times, almost impossible in its absence. It is through poor thought, however, that Internet Text is renewed and reinserted into the necessities of contemporary thought. (By the Sort Collective) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sondheim@newschool.edu sondheim@panix.com alan sondheim 432 dean street brooklyn ny 11217 tel. 718-857-3671 ====================================================================== This text may be reproduced in full or in part, accompanied by the author's name. ===========================end Net6=================================== ======================================================================