Heidegger Takes His Time "But prior to all calculation of time and independent of such calculation, what is germane to the time-space of true time consists in the mutual reaching out and opening up of future, past, and present. Accordingly, what we call dimension and dimensionality in a way easily misconstrued, belongs to true time and to it alone. Dimensionality consists in a reach- ing out that opens up, in which futural approaching brings about what has been, what has been brings about futural approaching, and the reciprocal relation of both brings about the opening up of openness. Thought in terms of this threefold giving, true time proves to be three-dimensional. Dimen- sion, we repeat, is there thought not only as the area of possible measu- rement, but rather as reaching throughout, as giving and opening up. Only the latter enables us to represent and delimit an area of measurement." The threefold, beginning, middle, and end, is built in to the Euclidean measure polytope, the line/square/cube/hypercube/ etc., so that for any dimension N, the polytope has 3^N elements, not unreasonably the binomial coefficients as well. If dimension is potential through reaching, giving, and opening (not unlike the reciprocity of the gift), then is it nonethe- less the harboring of time? What seems a misrecognition on Heidegger's part in the every day, seems true, however, in cyberspace, where spatia- lity is defined _precisely_ by reach, by wryting, by an opening that is equivalent with transmission. Transmission = epistemology oddly associates cyberspace with plasma, the normative state of matter in the universe. What separates the two are data-bases, temporary repositories of informa- tion, and well-defined binary modes of communication. __________________________________________________________________________ Body Parts "@describe Alan as gaunt, limbless, wryting texts" (PMC2-MOO construct, 1995.) "There is in the country a spittoon which belonged to Buddha, made of stone, and in colour like his alms-bowl. There is also a tooth of Buddha, for which the people have reared a tope, connected with which there are more than a thousand monks and their disciplines, all students of the hinayana." (Fa-Hien, A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms, A.D. 399-414.) "However, what the matter of philosophy should be is presumed to be deci- ded from the outset. The matter of philosophy as metaphysics is the Being of beings, their presence in the form of substantiality and subjectivity." (Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 1964.) "Let me be clear, then, that 'the feminine' represents more than an arrangement of specific bodily parts. Linked to the female genitals that invoked the dionysian realm of anti-organization, the metaphorical femin- ine denotes a defiance of the reality principle, the other side of civil- ization, a call to the outside of meaning." (Mary Caputi, Voluptuous Yearnings, 1994.) "Your limbs heavy and limp lay immobile like the body parts of another, of anyone at all. You felt the rain of her hair pass over your face, then falling in streams over your throat. You felt her warm breath over your ribs." (Alphonso Lingis, Abuses, 1994.) "Another person, with paranoid tendencies, upset by the sense of loss or displacement of organs, accuses a surgeon of having removed his stomach, or his heart, and of having put machinery in its place. He threatens, seeking to restore justice by the mortal revenge he is contemplating." (Henri Michaux, The Major Ordeals of the Mind, 1966.) "Meanwhile the woman closed all the chinks of the house. Then Xausgana entered. Raven put on his skin and tried to escape, but Xausgana caught him and killed him. He broke his bones to pieces and threw him into the latrine. On the following day when his wife went to defecate Raven spit upward at her genitalia. He took the body and struck it again, and he took a large stone and pounded it to jelly. Then he threw it into the sea. It drifted about on the water. One day many people went out in their canoe. When they saw the body they remarked: 'Why is that chief drifting about on the water?' And the body replied, 'A woman is the cause of this.'" (Raven Traveling, John Swanton, Haida Texts and Myths, Skidegate Dialect, 1905.) ________________________________________________________________________ God I couldn't believe it, I had this video class tonight and I went out with three of the women in it afterwords and we went to the Greenwich Village Halloween parade and there were queens just like those in Prisc- illa Queen of the Desert, and we had this great conversation and the class wants to keep meeting every couple of weeks after it ends and there were some great videos we looked at and I have this crush on this woman who was there and she was an extra on Saturday Night Live and makes these amazing- ly intense video tapes and I had a nice glass of red wine at the White- horse Tavern after walking the length of Christopher Street and I kept thinking every .45 block, what the fuck with cyberspace? Why all this pain and blockage when the night was drizzly and for the first time in weeks I felt actually happy and that things were momentarily the way I always thought they should be, at least every once in a while and for once I'll dream happy tonight and I thought think the hell with Spoons the hell with theory when it wraps itself around pain and politics and squeezes the hell out of life and that got me going so I could come home, capitalize "I" even, and write a post about intuitionism and natural numbers to Future Culture, staying with the subject, not the wryting dripping from the glass-glass screen - o wish this baby luck __________________________________________________________________________ the body parts what's next for the body parts? that they're preserved with care and tenderness. often they're wrapped in twine, sometimes cloth. conformal reasoning. then they're placed in wood or clay, sometimes gold, containers, and sometimes cloth. sometimes laminar, and sometimes mucilage, reflecting the dull black char of the world. they have the power of the ghosts who name them. they always have a calling and a hearkening. dried, they are bundles with surfaces that slide their touch against the man or woman. they impress themselves upon her and they are her memory. he becomes euphoric, a carrier, and will be known as a carrier. they are all one they. _______________________________________________________________________ Truth Truth is always mistaken as an exact concept, based on the principles of mathematical logic, truth tables, the results of Wittgenstein and Beth. But there is no a priori reason to presuppose the exactitude of truth, its foreclosing upon the case, even in the case of tautology A = A, which in fact may be rendered problematic in the physical realm, due to Heisenberg- ian principles, Bell's work, and so forth. I would like to proffer that _truth is always already poetic truth,_ that it is thereby tethered _concretely_ to wryting, protolanguage, body parts, and the fetish, that it is a _function_ thereby of wryting and not ideal- ism: that truth is its inscription. On one hand, there is no satisfactory _formal_ definition of truth, and on the other, there is a poetics of truth upon which the body is distended as a transparent membrane. Truth is always the harbinger of a politics of bodies; even A = A possesses a certain inertness, sturdiness. Thus truth as function of wryting is also a function of _intersubjectivity._ Even in an "obvious" situation such as "it is true that 2+2 =4," the truth of the statement is based upon a de- gree of consensus: the axioms of ordinary arithmetic in the small, con- ventions of language and symbol, dialog, and so forth. Like negation, truth is a _potential-in-the-world,_ a supervention or operation upon it, even in the case of mathematical reality. Such a potential brings mind, albeit abstract, into play - and even if certain truths are universal (the properties of natural kinds under equi- valent conditions for example, in all possible worlds), they are still processes of semiosis. Thus it may be that, through the mathematization and even technology of truth, that the body may be recuperated; it may be the machine which is producing the body, not the body extruding the cy- borg. In fact, I would argue that we are drawn forth by the machine which wrytes the body, that the body is always already wrytten, encoded _all the way down_ - but I would also argue that the body is not _machinic,_ offering a critical resistance to its truth. Thus poetry also wars on truth which is its dominion; it resists by the productions of negation and the lie, and there is more than a _certain_ truth in both. ________________________________________________________________________ Parmenides It arrives unannounced at the beginning of the twentieth century: It arrives unprecedented at the ending of the nineteenth century: the symbol of the car crash hurries to establish itself in its intensity nothing before 1922 squealed with the sound of shattered brakes bodies fell against gashes of 1895 steam: Concordia: Silence! every wire didn't glue to any other: in 1914 steam tiny copper ends searched for tongues attached to mouths! a program waited for its radio! Stagefright! Just so ectoplasms, dioramas, melodramas, daguerrotypes, table-knockings, produced those flags of which our sight was so grateful: Visual semaphore! Things occurred between signals, voices were conjured and recorded through the British Census of Hallucinations. Houdini, my brother! Arthur Conan Doyle and the faerie folk! German dwarf-sightings all the way back! She was tied down, clitorectomy to remove the impulses of masturbation; he was only whipped! Their little bodies carried us across St. Elmo's Fires! To this day, the smell of burning flesh around the corner, the Dodge and the Chevrolet: I saw three people die that way. When I was very young, the beautiful blond woman hugged me in the air! _They are where none are._ Heraclitus. _________________________________________________________________________ Abacus Among them I click five, click one; among them I click ten. Hollow, I echo five, one, ten; hollow, I am in demand, this one or that one. I carry the incisions of the earth tethered to the socius. The earth is the lower portion, the heaven the upper. I click myself upon the matrix. I participate in syzygy. Click, I tally among them. I tally among them because I tally among the nodes. The nodes configure 1/1/1/1/5 or 1/1/1/1/1/5/5, one or another system, binary and above. Among them, I click now and then, here and there. I shuffle the double position. The double position maps binary onto bases. The double position wrytes heaven and earth, portends a click against the upper or lower framework. The lower click is a release, withdrawal, decathexis; the upper places me in accountancy. The configuration is always all that is accounted for. My biography is the totality of positions, [o-] to [-o]. Sometimes a group of us move, [-oo] to [oo-], and in fact our community as a whole is limited to 8 or 10, as we say, on the line. The line is at work, clicking tens, hundreds, thousands, clicking ones, tenths, hundredths. The line holds; we hold the line. We wear ourselves out against the dust; the grooves deepen, the rock shines with the wryting of sheep, goats, grain, rice, papyrus, jewels, transistors. Against bamboo we make a stuttering sound as we speak the syzygies of mercantilism, the consensual tagging of species beyond what the hands grasp. (We are blind to the broad faces like suns that surely loom above us dreaming of lines extending the quiet fullness of distance.) Each shift opens or closes a space, a time, an object. The earth vibrates sonorously with tallying, spending itself through exhaustion and death as its products disappear, replaced by the foam of the new. Mines compress, extrude substances wielded and shuttled themselves across longer lines; the earth vibrates and vectors. The most beautiful thing is the shift constructing the cathexis of a space, a time, an object, the gift of foreclosure. The sounds which will occur at always the same rough intervals. _________________________________________________________________________ neck lace garnet how i became ghost (symptoms and indices) tourmaline murmur (sounds which muffled because they couldn't go thru the wires) topaz age circulations/looping (cause i die become forever looping) feldspar submerging (your colored letters your screen your reading this) fluorite nudity (inside out you read nipple liver brain breast) amber knowledge shared (you've got my knowledge all of it you've got me) emerald encodings (splintered packets out there bridged and morphing) opal disappearing translucence (cause my holes through my skin are space) ruby farsightedness thru the screen (filmy everyplace once) muscovite roar of the text (scattered reappearing in their future dreams) sapphire scroll (became ghost text falling from cherry autumn sky) rhyolite uneasy dreaming unwanted in the real (how i became ghost) beryl always dead (days count the days) jasper always you (how you become ghost, symptoms, indices, and dreams) jade calcite amethyst ______________________________________________________________________ Definition of 'Wryting' This neologism is used in my recent work to refer first of all to an in- scription which is necessarily performative, and constructs its own sheet of assertion (Peirce's term). It acts by virtue of its existence. Wryting is cross-ontological, cross-platform; it implies multiple communicative domains. As in some current theories of metaphor, it implies the body, and becomes related to suspect poesis, semiosis, and fetishization. It is used to describe the text/ure of cyberspace, especially in regard to issues of hysteric embodiment, which I have described elsewhere (reading through the text to the alterity of the other, a circum-reading which takes direct description into account as only one of a number of portents). Wryting relates to poesis, poetic-generation, since the words always run full in excess of themselves, referencing incantation. It relates to semi- osis, since it inputs into extensions of semiotic domains which are brought to a (previously) non-existent and inflationary space. It relates to fetishization, since it an inhabiting which becomes empathetic/magical, moving towards foreclosure, completion. And all of this is suspect, purely in the realm of text/ure in a space which cultivates, prohibits, and car- esses no /other. Wryting is the dismemberment of body and sign as well, the pure trace or hymen lost among spaces, body parts among a totality. Wryting is proto- language, feminin ecriture, the writing of the body, embodiment; Nicole Brossard and others configured wryting, as do those texts beginning with the W/w/ord. Wryting itself is the obdurate of the ascii unconscious, which also connects to verbally-transformed hypnotic states, identifiable eidetic imagery. It is procured from the imaginary, the chora; it is not _of_ the imaginary, nor symbolic. Wryting is a movement towards text/ure becoming autonomous and everyday, Merlin Donald's extensions of neural phenomena. Wryting is therefore al- ways in the process of becoming, a production among fuzzy and indistinct polarities. Wryting cuts through the body/textual body/body of the text; it produces _wrything,_ which is frisson/jouissance simultaneously of the cut, body, text. Wrything tends towards argument, aggression, pathos, empathy, flaming, desire, net sex - the psychoanalytics and submergence, fluidics of the keyboard itself. The screen already wrythes. So wryting is a term configured for _this_ space, extending backwards through the history of grammatology/inscription/graphemics, describing texts and their productions within/without cybermind. Irigaray, Derrida, Lakoff, Bickerton, Brossard, Eco, Barthes, Chasseguet-Smirgel, Lingis, and others come into play here; mathematically, wryting encompasses the abacus and phenomenologies of enumeration. In CMC, wryting is involved both in the performative of programs, and the performative of _any_ CMC inscriptions (i.e. as if in unix chmod -x is always implied). Wryting is the act of building, speaking, page, legislating on a MOO/MUD, but it is also the act of saying on IRC, of telnetting, of composing on-line. Wry- ting is its own sheet of assertion, information 'all the way down.' And finally, wryting is any and all of this, intensifications, territories always construed on the edge of cyberspace, co-extensive with that edge, which constitutes cyberspace, within and without. ________________________________________________________________________ Wryting-space "Starlight asked Non-entity, saying, 'Master, do you exist? Or do you not exist? He got no answer to his question, however, and looked stedfastly to the appearance of the other, which was that of a deep void. All day long he looked to it, but could see nothing; he listened for it, but could hear nothing; he clutched at it, but got hold of nothing. Starlight then said, 'Perfect! Who can attain to this? I can (conceive the ideas of) existence and non-existence, but I cannot (conceive the ideas of) non-existing non- existence, and still there be a non-existing existence. How is it possible to reach to this?'" (Chuang Tzu, Legge) _________________________________________________________________________ Request for Lovely and Ill-Gotten Fame I don't want to be safe, I want to be famous. I want my texts distributed across the Internet. And I don't care if I'm right and I don't care if I'm wrong. I want my texts forwarded everywhere and to everyone; I want the Net coated with effluvia from my fingers, my mind, my troubled thoughts, neurotic intentions. I beg you to accommodate me in this: Forward my wri- tings, my precious children, to everyone you have ever cared for, everyone you have ever loved, just once, just this once, as a gift, as a form of gratitude! I am frail, I will die! My skin will burst into a million pie- ces, the length of an unread text, length of a forgotten utterance. But I will come forward and not furious! But I will come forward, obdurate, out of this or any other safe place, I will insinuate myself into your think- ing. My writing will grow swollen with disseminated presence, with the dissolution of site, with the participation of the nomad, taking it one way or another, one or another node beyond you; already this reaches beyond you, as you, catalyst extraordinary, hurry it along, tag-team, relay-race, so that it takes me beyond myself as well carrying my signa- ture sondheim@panix.com immersed in the core of all of it, the perturbed soundings of the syllables of my name, Alan Eliot Sondheim, following suit. Such a long sentence! Such a long long begging! A long long prayer! Thus because of frail frail life, this must move from screen to screen to screen, and you may choose, any one of my texts is yours for the sending, the asking, texts accessible through http://jefferson.village.virginia. edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html - You will accommodate me if I beg you? You will send for one or another file, pass it onto a friend, say someone you like very much and want to please, give pleasure to, and you will think to yourself, you will think, this is a lovely text and I will forward it to my friend who will have much pleasure and will appreciate me, and my taste, and my kindness in forwarding it, such a lovely thought without recompense. And I am taking such a chance with you, I am no longer safe with you, I am just making this simple request, so that I may be famous, so that my texts will live a breath past my own, so that I may continue for a second a min- ute a day, so I may stop this somewhat serious degradation of my ambitions - this expostulation. And such a long long sentence! And such a short short request! _________________________________________________________________________ Simplicity of Wood and Silk Recently I was mini-flamed on PMC2 for saying that I actually programmed in Pascal or Qbasic. As some of you may know, I have been working on and off with what I call generalized measure geometries, which produce semi- fractal, semi-chaotic patterns that suddenly shudder into symmetrical forms - something like cellular automata, but not quite. Well, Qbasic and Pascal are excellent for the task, as are any formats that can handle things like primitive recursive functions - they all map the same classes, whether or not the languages are elegant. So this sent me back to the aba- cus again (approaching the void, simplicity, bamboo), which, as I pointed out here, can be programmed as well to work with any number base less than or equal to the numbers in any column plus one - the Japanese abacus then can handle up to base 10, and the Chinese, all the way to base 16. Well, it also seems that one-dimensional cellular automata of sorts can be prog- rammed on the abacus, although not in a particularly elegant fashion. So now I'm sitting working beads, Netscape for some reason inoperable this evening, listening to the clicking as columns are added and subtracted, a tiny music not unlike that I sometimes play on the ch'in, a Chinese medi- tative instrument I have owned for years. (Like the abacus, it is divided into heaven and earth, unlike the abacus, it is of the class of silk.) And I think to myself, forget Netscape, Qbasic, C: We are always, always, al- ways, moving towards the void (the ch'in is often played silently, some- times untouched...) - we are always moving towards the void, unmoved, and soon we will be ceaseless as well. _________________________________________________________________________ Extinguishing Extinction, The Violence of Living/Mechanism The violence of living (in which our lives are viral): The violence of being-alive (in which we are taken out once and for all): Everywhere extinction is: Given the genetic determination of life, given the principles of the sel- fish gene, viral memetics, empty apocalypse: as in the principles of socio- biology all the way down. But this occurs in the midst of the production of top-heavy nearly but not quite decomposable structures - free play everywhere, up and down. Lang- uage, religious, other domains; these are foreclosed. Truths strike like lightning within them; truths exist only within, veins on membrane surfaces. Bounding and bracketing within and without. There are always the questions of origin. Why would the possible manifest itself? (The preclusion of altruism is not the preclusion of altruistic content.) Call the genetic imperative, mechanism: Either mechanism is not the entire answer, or one proceeds from mechanism to nearly-decomposable realms which then, in reversal, fall fallow. So that there is no truth in them except the truth of the absolute vacated other. (Which may be defined as the absence of teleology, life-force, God, concepts that, imminent, immanent, recoil from the cleansed body which provides answers through their fore- closing.) (The preclusion of art is not the preclusion of aesthetic content, inde- terminate, stochastic, roughshod, symmetries and means notwithstanding.) Or how does it manifest itself? If it is a question of truth, it is a question of otherwise. It is not necessarily accountable. It is not necessarily accountable-to. It is not necessarily the case, then, that the case of genetic mechanism is all the case there is; the return no longer exists. It is this that is culturally productive, the lack of the return. (The preclusion of ethics is not the preclusion of ethical content.) If explanation tends to fail within the realm of the cultural, or at least fail in terms of mechanistic linkage, does it fail all the way down? Does mechanism change course, deflect, as other forms of life are considered? Is mechanism itself viral? (The preclusion of poesis is not the preclusion of the truth of poesis.) If information or programming, how does foreclosing occur? Striations tend to loop around themselves; dependencies are tethered at best, language en- compasses description past the amusement of Godel. Wryting problematizes the linkages. (Was Deleuze's line of flight a genetic disposition?) (The preclusion of language is not the preclusion of the ontology of the wryting of natural kinds, nor the preclusion of the ontology of writing.) Is the definitive blindness of the natural equivalent to the presumptive blindness of speciation, cultures beyond the human? Is excess the result only of chaotic dispositions? How does unsolvability work within the picture? Is the picture which develops from the negative, then, foreclosed, only to open on another truth which cannot be contained within it or any other domain? Is this a form of releasement? (The preclusion of religious dominion is not the preclusion of spirit.) These are not idle questions, asked in idleness. The question itself calls forth nothing but a shuffling of what would be constituted grounds; shuf- fling dissolves entity. (The content is not the domain. The domain is not the content.) _________________________________________________________________________ Experimental Prosthesis of the Real In 1975-77, I worked on a formalism that relates on one hand to the abacus, and on the other, to neural networks; while the details aren't of interest here, the phenomenology might be. The formalism consisted of markers which were always conserved within structures, and channels which designated marker flows; at every hypothetical clock tick (and synchronous behavior might or might not be necessary), the markers moved according to the channel vectors. The whole was describable by matrices. An additional and critical element was the gate; if a marker was in the switch position, the gate was open, and otherwise closed. An open gate facilitated a chan- nel; gates, channels, and markers constituted structures which behaved as neural networks, threshold logic devices, and the like. The threshold devices were of particular interest, since they could possess variable thresholds and connections, operating within continuously transforming networks. Additional structure divided into strata and meta-constructs; these all- owed the possibility of bound or unbound markers, and rules for creation or annihilation of structures. There was mathesis, but not mathematics, associated with these structures. The result, the formalism as a whole, appeared very much like fragmentary logical structures, accumulations, which could model in the small, associate and disassociate with each other, and so forth - somewhere among Minsky's society of mind, neural networks, and Petrie nets. A model of the life world and its interpreta- tion was the overall result. At the bottom of which, of course, was the marker and the channel - on the Net, the packet and channel. Unlike the packet, the marker was neutral, although I later considered addressable markers, what it would mean for one to carry a name, and the relationship among that name, language, and exteriority. What was the ontology here? Markers, gates, and channels were essential, as was the possibility of clocking. Stratification permitted "vertical" operations such as binding, creation, placing units in and out of memory. As the formalism developed, it became more and more baroque, eventually turning into a description of what was termed the "topology of intention," subjectivity positioned within the world. There were distinctions among strata of language, thought, and the real, but there were analogs, conser- vations, cutting across. Consider _conservation_ as a cultural foundation, in the sense of reasonably stable data-banks, limited syntactical rules, physical objects which possess a relative degree of stasis. Consider anomaly, forgetting and meandering, wryting and poesis, catastrophe and chaotic physical behavior, as driving force. One is not so far off from the "slaving principle," unstable modes driving configurations, as described in Klaus Mainzer, Thinking in Complexity, The Complex Dynamics of Matter, Mind, and Mankind. Consider conservation as circumscription among a small finite group of elements, and anomaly as the fissuring of circumscription. Wryting tends towards anomaly of course, and it is through the dialectical interpenet- ration of both that culture arises. _________________________________________________________________________ Thinking I was thinking, but then I was thinking I was thinking. It is enough that you were thinking. Honey: That it had been thought. Mind rolls on the floor, laughing. There is a joke about a rabbi. That it would have been someone else in the midst of the sea. Or that the sea had foam, forms across it. Pedicures, ripples. [Honey is no longer listening.] [Honey plays with the abacus.] Alan is reaching the point where he can use the abacus in place of the calculator. The beads take on identical configurations. It is but a moment from here Alan says "to the construction of distributed one-dimensional artificial life forms." Tiffany rolls on the floor, laughing. There is a joke about a farmer's daughter. Honey says "Why do you say one-dimensional artificial?" HELO sondheim@panix.com why do you say hello? Bang bang, there's death in the distance. Alan says "I opened up the camera, slid the TRI-X cartridge in, closed it with a satisfying click." Alan whirled off a few frames, cinema on the go; he thought she'd look good in grain black and white. He remembered seeing her loose in the door. Her name was Jocelyn. She was from Montreal. There is a joke about a madcap singer from Berlin. He waited forever for her. The two women struck up a friendship. It wasn't that she was in an asylum as much as an institution; he was impressed by the business of it all. Alan thought she knew science. Alan says "I knew you understood the basic calculations. I gave you my depression like a mineral." Dirty and smeared with blood, he wandered naked in the landscape of lepidodendron, sigillaria, stigmaria, calamites. Subluminary buzzing, the result of melatonin, was audible everywhere, continuous among the neuropteris. I was thinking of Tiffany among the neuropteris. Recently we felt close, were to meet where? Alan rolls on the floor laughing. Alan doesn't know. The joke continues, rolls on. The camera rolls on. Thinking rolls on. The floor is pineboard, one of the few to survive the flood - hardwood expanded, pushed out the walls of everywhere else. Like rain, the walls fell. Thinking pushes out against the brainstem. Honey says, "Well, Alan knows about the business of it all. It comes in cycles, following the Rossler attractor, an endogenous nonlinear system. But everything here is endogenous - it's the definition of all of us, Alan thinks." Alan .oO (incorrectly) The genal spine of the trilobite, either for burrowing, barbing against enemies, or a swimming foil. Tiffany had no idea; she would ask about it later. Being crazy is being a bureaucrat, regulations among the fields. In this world everyone loves science. There is a joke about a class of animals at a popular laundery-spot. The violent burst of gunfire decimated the harvesters. Burning iron falls from the sky. Lava rises from the pool. Everyone's eyes catch on fire, red-orange flames invisible to everyone else. Everyone's screen is orange and everyone thinks the same color. The color is all of everyone thinking. Thinking is what is going on here. We are all thinking, the process of thinking. We are coming-together, thinking together. We are thinking the same thoughts. The orange-red, red-orange has started to disappear. No one thinks the disappearance of absent color, that which as been annihilated as to root and stem, a totality by virtue of invisibility; here negation is no longer potential, but the collapse of worlds rendered Honey is no longer listening. Jocelyn... Suddenly, I am harassed by some difficult equation. Closing my eyes, several beads of the abacus seem to move by themselves. But the equation is nonlinear, and the beads shuttle off, fractioned, to the right. Eigenvalues disperse, the continuum shudders to a halt. The continuum is thinking here between everything. The continuum is thinking among us. Honey is thinking about Jocelyn. Honey and Jocelyn kill Alan. Honey and Jocelyn are eastern european and french and they have an understanding. They live together like adults. Someday soon they adopt Tiffany who no longer looks for her real parents after the war. Abandoned churches sur- round them. The cathedral of Durham is hard and harsh; the Brothers Asam remain dark in Munich, even among the rebuilding. Anglo-Saxon England is peripheral to Tiffany's thinking, even when bending over in a light spring rain on a cloudy day, her fingers tracing the runes on a stone cross still upright after all these years. Later, these will be known as the years of Tiffany, when she was coming into her own. A sad sweetness, smile, accompanies the inner world. She was Jocelyn. Jocelyn thinks lingulella possesses a somewhat vertical groove within the pedicle valve. Jocelyn from Montreal continues to think Honey thinks Jocelyn and Tiffany are thinking. __________________________________________________________________________ listen, there's this woman who is writing me: so that if thinking were ruptured conversation: listen, there's this woman I dream about: so that if thinking were assemblage-floods, part-objects, annealings--everything in this space forced into the verbal: listen, you should hear how she whispers to me on the telephone; listen, you should hear how she writes whisper whisper to me everywhere on the screen: if it is passed over by silence, it does not exist: if it is spoken, it is brought forward, a calling into existence, listen!: listen, there is this woman beside me, beautiful conversations throughout the day and night, sometime we are very silent: what is consigned to silence is annihilated--listen! what do you hear of this woman who is beside me, this woman who carries a gun? so much is lost in the silence, so much isn't language, so much chokes the mouth, the eyes!: listen! this woman with dark hair, dark eyes, this woman of fervour, this woman of deserts and blood: listen! __________________________________________________________________________ Current Reading Cemented "Let us continue: if we need a literary theory at all, it is a theory of playful discontinuity." (Ihab Hassan) [Rupture which relies on totality is hardly that; nothing fissures but words break, collapse, stuttering Egyptians:] "Na, Na, Na, Na, is thy name, Na, Na, is thy true name." (Leyden Papyrus) [Incantation rightfully restores discontinuity to the perseverence of the world's materiality, language or no language:] "The impossibility of re-evoking the foreclosed experience arises from the fact that the psychotic never really had access to the principle of symbolization: one signifier is put in the place of another which it is not." (Anike Lemaire) [Na Na Na! Who's symbolizing anything! Trip me up! Break everything!] {Part II} "What would Goethe have said about a mathematical model of his beloved metamorphosis? In this context, pattern formation is understood as a complex process wherein identical cells become differentiated and give rise to a well-defined spatial structure." (Klaus Mainzer) [Discontinuities arise from totalities, delimitations of pressure, anomalies, rhythmic dissolutions.] "Selfridge (1959) proposed a pandemonium theory of perception built on primitive constructs called _demons._ What's a demon? It's a rule, a procedure, an agent in Minsky's sense, that responds at once when appropriately stimulated." (Stan Franklin) [Everything breaks down! Everything builds up! Totalities arise from discontinuities, arrhythmias.] "My reasons for seeing the universe as meaningful lie in what I perceive as its built-in necessities." (Christian de Duve) [Compression/decompression agents are continuously activated. Need obviates totality, particulations, flows, granularity. Or rather these are needed after the fact, foreclosing on psychosis.] "When Heaven puts forth its power of putting to death, the stars and constellations lie hidden in darkness. When Earth puts forth its power of putting to death, dragons and serpents appear on the dry ground. When Man puts forth his power of putting to death, Heaven and Earth resume their (proper course). When Heaven and Man exert their powers in concert, all transformations have their commencements determined." (the Yin fu King) [Or rather, psychosis.] ___________________________________________________________________________ The sexual work we are engaged in. I can't believe that any of us who are normal would do this kind of work. Sexuality at the rim is composed of incidents that occurred very early in one's life, or a continuous battering or restructuring later on. We have only our bodies to offer. We have their uses. They come from elsewhere and impose themselves upon us. We stare at foreign landscapes branded with our names. We paint them, upon them, shed our skins for you; you take them, place them upon you. You wear our abnormalcy; you become the monsters we have always been. Soon there is no difference, and we can pass for anyone. __________________________________________________________________________ From sondheim@panix.comSun Nov 12 02:44:47 1995 Date: Sun, 12 Nov 1995 02:44:35 -0500 (EST) From: Alan Sondheim To: -- Cyb , Fop Bcc: u , Judith , Lee Murray , Peter Kelk , reality@unm.edu, Robert Withers , Steven Meinking , Kayo Subject: Future on the Net Where are we at this point of time on the Net? This is surely a time for Net histories to be collective - the machinery on the verge of decent video; I downloaded readers for Vdolive and Streamworks tonight and ran them successfully - on one, Finnish jazz, spoken word, and images; on the other - corporate executives. The former also had continuous Ottawa live feed on the audio only. Powwow is more advance; Iphone sounds good - all of this stuttering across the Net of course, not to mention MIRC, Global Chat, all the other competing forms. So this is the time for someone more skilled than myself to take a snapshot of all of this, including Worlds Away, all the MOOs, MUDs, Moose, Talkers, MUSH, all the machinery out there, all the Newsgroups, the beginning of tidalwaves of spams - the huge increase in gopher sites, email lists, Usenet up around 14,000 on Netcom alone - a swollen maw of language, images, sounds, shrieks, programs, and it's time that all this is recorded - someone running continuous download or logging of pictures, texts, someone running videocameras or gathering software as antique, someone capturing the deadspace of the MOOs. On PMC2 MOO there is a device called the Monopticon; everytime you blink in it, it takes you to another site; type "exit" and you can end up there. But PMC2 like other spaces has a lot of older disregarded abandoned machinery; it's more a house of ghosts, even with the surface life. Who or what is recor- ding this? Where are the necessary parallels to oral history? We are about to step into cyberspace, those crackling voices reminiscent of early rad- io, broken tiny images reminiscent of early television (Felix the Cat was the first transmission I believe) - soon we'll forget the origins, just as television-now is a land of forgotten histories, as we uselessly devour the new. We are about to step into cyberspace, and someone, somewhere, must record the footprints, abandoned, our always already forgotten selves. Alan __________________________________________________________________________ Turning Point At this point, there are more and more incursions into the textuality of the Net - the Web, audio, video, control-command factors. Communication is elaborated among software enterprises, each of whom, like Powwow, gathers a group of dedicated users around them. Communities like ecosystems, grow just about anywhere. As an early user on these systems, like Global Chat, I find myself at a loss for words - and on the audio systems, find myself sometimes speech- less, reduced to the usual platitudes of ham radio. I've written of this before. But these experiences of audio, video, alternative talking for- mats, are becoming more and more common - And to this extent, we are, all of us, becoming more and more consumers, placed in a passive position in relation to others' programming frame- works, some of which, now, are including advertising borders. So the question is: What is the Net delivering, at this point? And the answer, as indicated elsewhere, is that the Net is delivering _us,_ that we are engaged in what Smythe calls _audience labor,_ which ties into issues of consumption and capital almost immediately. The World Wide Web is an example of this, almost a caricature - because, here, _in order to see an advertisement, one must labor at it_ - one must connect, wait impatiently while the graphics appear... This is the world of Baudrillard, the world of the seduction, the lure, deferred expecta- tions, deference which is _not_ differance, but which is at the heart of orgasm, placing to one side, the lurid attraction of the margins. (And so we wait, then _gaze_ at corporate pages, products, promotional materials not unlike MTV music videos which serve to sublimate the revolution or what might be left of it, into capital as well. Look what we settle for! A relatively bland ad will hold our attention if it has bright and quick graphics - in print, we wouldn't give it a second's thought. But once on the screen, we are spell-bound until we actively link elsewhere, enter another URL, do _something_ beyond turning the page. Our computer be- comes the ad in fact, our bodies our selves; we're turned on by it. Not necessarily _this_ ad or that one, but as the _condition_ of advertising here.) The Web is not only packaged; it is packaging, packaged programming, just as all language, all programming, all creativity, is packaged. Tzara's Manifestos are hopelessly dated today - instead of breakage, they refer- ence the early years of the century - one reads them for clues of closure and not the splintering of bourgeois life no longer in existence (with little thanks to dada by the way). But the packaging on the Web is tight- er, more insidious, because it seems to proffer a freedom which turns, in the Sartrean sense, towards the inauthentic. In fact, one can go so far as to say (oddly in agreement with the Frank- furt school here) that the consumer is finally being refashioned in the guise of the avant-garde (Wired, hotwired rewired), that capital is beginning the final foreclosure upon the revolution. Or the final fore- closure, to be precise, within the technosphere, because elsewhere, things rupture, break apart, splinter, beyond even the conception of audience. In fact, what are at stake here and elsewhere, are _bodies just beneath the surface,_ and it is for this reason that, within microterritories, email lists and other "primitive" communications protocols are critical, forming, like notes left by refugees, the possibility of a certain resistance. [I want to add that, rightly or wrongly, it is ruminations and potentials such as I am sketching here, that makes a certain Net history necessary, not merely a luxury. Beyond the usual historiographic references, I would say that this history, collecting, is critical because it is _obdurate,_ because it offers the potential of a past which is _always already_ inert: we need the debris. There is no purity in cyberspace; there is a fallen purity that passes elsewise perhaps (and only perhaps), and this is beyond us. There are crucial problems as well in any gathering/collecting, oral historicizing, even of the present, but without the attempt, what then? For myself, I would love to see archives of early email for example - what was discussed in 1972? And what would that tell us today?] _________________________________________________________________________ You're out there, I know you're out there! Come in, come in from the cold! Write me, I know you're out there. Contact me; I've been waiting for you. If you don't write, then there's no there. If you write you draw me towards you. If you write you bring me in from the cold. I exist because you're out there. I exist to be drawn in. Write me, I know you're out there! ________________________________________________________________________ Loving Tonya I have been thinking about Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan, Oksana Baiul, particularly in light of a new book, Women on Ice, Feminist Essays on the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan Spectacle, edited by Cynthia Baughman. And in light of or critical reading of this book, which often presupposes a reading of artistry/athleticism/femininity at the deconstructive heart of things, I wonder instead if an alternative analysis could not be based on issues of lapse and control. In this regard, Baiul constructs the body; dancers I know (muscular athle- tic dancers from the Merce Cunningham company) admire her, not because of femininity/grace, but because of total control over the body, every ges- ture lending itself towards the other, no limb considered solely as weight or counter-lever. To the extent that Baiul constructs the body, she total- izes it, and it remains ironically external to codification and lapse; Baiul is simultaneously mirror-stage and mirror. Kerrigan is all linkage, moving effortlessly from one leap to another, but always in preparation for nodes, paralleling the World Wide Web. Like the Web there is raw power involved, media apparatus, princess-construct, and like the Web, money is an imminent symptom. Beyond the double image of grace/princess and soured speech, there is a Kerrigan we can't recuperate, the competitor, who is denied the "purity" of men's athletic discourse, and placed into impossible positions. And Tonya gets things done; like Unix, she evades the sum of her parts, turning her camcorder back onto the cameramen and women who tracked her down relentlessly. She problematizes truth, sexuality, the lurid, class - like Andy Kaufman, and just as genuine, she problematizes television and the publicity apparatus. Even now, her power is such that rumors abound as to what she is currently doing, from singing gospel to topless Japanese wrestling. I tend to believe in the truth of her movements, or her untruth which as I've pointed out elsewhere in these texts, deconstructs other so- called truths, those of linkages, lapses, and the body. Kerrigan, in fact, is become the odd one out, following a wedding-dream with the rest of us in darkness. And why should we know anything about any of these women? And why fault the feminine, the masculine, the American, the Ukrainian, the athletic, the artistic, as if these categories are not already late in the day, in the process of disappearing, or becoming politicized to the extent that bodies are everywhere disappearing? It is on this level, that of the fault, that we should be most grateful to Harding, who has brought the body back into play, from the knees of Kerrigan to her own difficulties with her shoes, to tears, resistance, rebellion, nudity, anger, intensity? I love Harding for this, the very real recuperation of body in one or another form of cyberspace - not the body of Baiul which lends itself, not only to control, but also to (Russian balletic) tradi- tion - but the body of waking, sleeping, eating, fucking, moving - not the body of the real, but as real a body as you're likely to get. ________________________________________________________________________ Index http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_text.html Net1: Internet Text, approx. 82k naively loving honey and tiffany Net2: Love on the Net, approx. 84k clara appears, so does travis Net3: Web Text, approx. 89k travis meanders, everything inverts Net4: Clara Text, approx. 86k a special text dedicated to clara Net5: Singularities Text, approx. 86k but working through programs Net6: Secret Text, approx. 82k carrying everything down and level Net7, approx. 82k headed, as if there were a moment when this was Net8: approx. 80k less than flood, was more than exhausting itself Net9: approx. 92k as I continued to write over less than two years Net10: approx. 80k and eight-hundred pages, but this first setting Net11: approx. 81k designed to think through the net, past first Net12: approx. 78k first love, first death, first sex, working in Net13: approx. 82k and out the index, heading towards the moment Net14: approx. 81k when things are broken, indexed, abandoned: INDEX : approx. 20k The Chora (gif) Where the speech emerges Chora/Tongue (gif) Where the speech retracts Choradrive (audio .wav file) Where the speech is The Text: alphabetical texts a : approx. 70k then starting over and over again, figuring, yeah, b : approx. 76k well this time the alphabetic text, tiring too c : approx. 73k quickly or not quickly enough, but this anyway will d : approx. 73k come to an end, collapsing - it was as if: lifetimes e : approx. 71k ago I had a life, now burrowing through text harbor- f : approx. 81k ing death again, a reiteration of the Internet Text g : approx. 77k long-forgotten, a misbegotten, in fact, child of the h : approx. 58k same or other, down towards the present when all i : approx. 71k this obliterates itself, the present which is hardly j : approx. 73k rooted in past and future, obdurate at both ends of k : approx. 83k a non-existent bracket: burrowed, I remain inert, l : approx. 67k fingers typing through the winter, adding cohesion, m : approx. 80k flow, flux, flood, fluid, flight, empty and gone, n : approx. 71k gone, gone This is my work! 'Don't be confused by surfaces; in the depth everything becomes law.' - Rilke /if all the world is a text, what sort of text is it/ /if all the world is a text all the way down, what about the levels/ /can the obdurate be deconstructed/ /i say: these are not all relativisms: i say: there is work to be done/ /that there are fundamental structures/ /mathematizations/categories and topoi/core theories/dna codifications/ /conservations/ /but that it is a text: becomes discrete, loosely tethered/ /collusion of continuum and particulation/ /and but that the psychoanalytics of introjection, translation/ /projection, morphing: that science regroups as a _thing_/ /that there are _traces_/ _________________________________________________________________________ torus into cybersphere because my body is a torus, if you fill my hole, you connect with empty space. you think you've got me, but you've just moved anywhere. i want the weight of your body onto me. i want that purple thing into me. i want to give with st. elmo's fire. i want to dance with st. vitus' disease. _you wear what you do to me_ _i am what you do to me_ my breasts burn for you! my nipples freeze for you! i'm your fish-netted stockings torn with purple! you do that! you put that thing into me! because my body's sealed! because you seal it! my body's lost a hand! it's mine! ______________________________________________________________________ Sentenced to Place I am typing this on my bed, leaning into the laptop, thinking about the loving effects of gravity holding everything in place. Gravity holds the computer against the white wool blanket, holds my naked body against the same; there is a river of wool between us. Gravity holds the skate against the ice, the mouse on the pad where the mouse was left, and the other mouse in the hole, fearful of the cat, relying on gravity to create a semblance of order in her world. The way to proceed is already deconstruc- ted: representation of a real-world site or citation transfigured into the textual realm (body, mind, intention, love, hate): in this case, bearing with Shakespeare and the gravity of the situation. Therefore to consider: gravity in cyberspace, the pull of the wires, thin shafts or beams of microwave transmissions across the bleak atmosphere, the bounce of fiber optic light, beauty of the pulsing of the world. Gravity plays little role; everything is held in place by direct addressing, surprisingly di- rect addressing. Everything therefore follows, not the geodesic, but the path of the matrix, discrete elements, markov chains, isolated instances, what C.D. Broad called "sporadic cases" in his analyses of psychic phen- omena. So there are grains, but no granularity as I repeatedly point out, and there are matrices, but no tensor descriptions of states-of-affairs, except perhaps within the electrodynamics of transmissions themselves. But not in the sense of the river of wool on the bed, not in the sense of what we have learned, and then applied elsewhere, off-line to on-line: that everything has its place, that place contains, that things remain in containers unless removed (all of which resounds with the echo of MOO programming), that in fact things _are_ places, and places _things,_ by virtue of gravity's solicitude - and, once accepting this, then an eti- quette emerges, gravity's protocols lending themselves to protocol suites, the idea of such suites, to the bed of the Net itself, TCP/IP or other- wise, not disparate, maternal as gravity's rainbow upon the woolen mam- moth of the bed/rock, but unified codicies, presences tending towards the communication whistled or whispered, _said,_ among the beings harbored by the lap of the earth, earth's quiet shout and recompense, each and every to its own, the challenge thereby built in, built inwards, as evidenced by rupture, still contained within the sweetness of the protocols, still witnessing, evidenced, presenced for us as soil, as the beds of verbs and nouns and gardens, as the beds upon which we open up to each other beyond address, beyond the _moment_ of address, silence seeking tongues. _________________________________________________________________________ Subject: Learning Tonya TONYA: True story badly told UNCANNY: I have always felt an uncanny relationship with Tonya; like her, I tend to err, bluster my way through situations, fear down my back, knowing all along the violence of the world. COINCIDENCE: Tonya was born in Queenstown, Tasmania, a grotty place of about 3000. This is where A- and I fucked for the first time and almost got killed in the process. STORY: A- was my fourth wife; we are still technically married, separ- ated for a decade. I went down to Hobart, Tasmania, to teach, after two years at UCLA; the job was supposed to last for three years, but ended after three months. A- and I fled Tassie at that point, living our first few days back in Los Angeles, underneath Kim Abeles' and George Stone's table. A- had bright red hair and lived with three people, one of whom has since died from AIDS. She dressed wild and I fell madly in love. She moved in with me on Bath Street; she was a student, not mine, and I had walked up to her roommates in the cafeteria asking to be saved - I couldn't take Tassie's conservatism. PROPOSAL: I told Moira and her other roommates about my feeling for A- and there came a time when a vacation occurred and A- and I decided to to join in thunder, to Queenstown Tasmania, little knowing that it had given birth to a then ten-year-old Tonya. Q-town had around 3000 people and a gravel Australian Rules playing field (the game is played in shorts) because these people were ockers and proud of it, mate. So to be sure we were warned by one and all not to go, the full eight hour trip into and through the mountains, because we'd be killed. OUTSKIRTS: The outskirts were orange, from sulphur fumes, the mines. They mined arsenic among other things. The mines were gone. The land- scape was out of Ballard, out of the wastelands of the moon. The moun- tains, there were mountains, were unbelievably rugged. A- came down in a black-purple wig and we wore ribbons, New Romantics veering into trash punk, getting off the bus on the way down into the place. STREETCORNER: Let off from the bus, we saw the hotel caddy-corner. We began to cross the street. THE CROSSING: Approximately four meters out, we were seen by the first few cars approaching the intersection. They pulled over and stopped. Other cars followed suit. The light changed. No one moved. The town was a silent town. SILENT AND FEARFUL: Silent and fearful we ran into the hotel, a victor- ian affair, where we registered, ran upstairs, peered out the window, undressed, dressed, primal prime-time. We went for food. THE FOODING: At the restaurant, we sat in the back. Everyone stopped eat- ing, sat silently, staring. A crowd lined up looking in through the win- dow. The fooding continued. DOWN THE STREET: We'd run down the street from place to place, scared with beautiful energy. We'd tell people we were fashion people, fashion photographing, but it was hard to explain to people who didn't know and didn't care but loved to point and stroke our hair. Did they want us. TONYA: Where was ten-year-old Tonya? Where were you? Were you part of the group screaming at us at the playground? Had you already left? I bet you were gone, there were relatives, there must have been Hardings? I need your life, Tonya, this explains my love for you. NIGHT: The night we went to a disco, everyone ran towards us screaming. Screaming always already happened in Queenstown. We escaped. NEXT DAY: We visited a house full of photographs and a mine train. We hid. We filmed some kids. They showed up in art later. NEXT NIGHT: We finally made it to a bar. A Belgian hairdresser picked us up, took us to his place, made out of discarded television sets. He kept buying us things and things, giving us everything. He would have given us his life. But the next morning the attitude was more threatening. The town was moving again, it had been moving for a day now, and it was gathering strength. Didn't we have to leave. BACK: Back, we had fucked, fallen in love or at least groped our way to something. Queenstown had the rep for the most redneck place in Tassie, all the way down. Employment was minimal. The isolation, in the middle of mountains so steep some of them had negative curvature, was total. REBACK: In one of the windows, all the clothes were gold lame. They looked like an ice skater had left them. The glitter was tough in this place, real in a landscape hallucinated from a Tonya Harding story. BOTH, ALL THREE: All three of us lost our innocence there. NOW: Bad stuff happened to A- back in the States. I curled into my work, and women went through me and they didn't care. A- went back to Tassie cause of everything and then went to the mainland where she is. Tonya went on to become something of a truth I learned. As Ellroy pointed out again and again, it's the truth of a wonder, and wonder is the only truth there is. ___________________________________________________________________________ Peering Minor technical considerations contribute to the sensation of spatiality in user interfaces. I want to point out first of all the apparent flat- ness of almost all Web pages, in lieu of the fact that they are written against white, grey, cream, etc. backgrounds, or wallpaper - the sensa- tion is almost overwhelming. In relation to them, those pages that use black backgrounds seem only, by virtue of default, to have change the color of the paper itself. On the other hand, telnet helper applications often use dark blue backgrounds, white lettering - or even more common, black backgrounds, white letter; these backgrounds appear to come from the depths of cyberspace, to be part and parcel of the mirror stage, exuding text; at the same time, they participate in the chora, the text alone, illuminated letters, riding the surface. _This_ is the sensation that has led to the notion of lurking or peering, something emerging from the darkness, chiaroscuro outlines of your body, the presence of seduction, the maternal beginning of the things of the world in relation to the humans who envelop them. In the Unix shell, and whenever possible elsewhere, I work with dark backgrounds; anger and sexuality, however, lend themselves towards black upon red, both swollen with the presence of skin and membrane, membrane stretched across the forgiving screen. Never, however, the queasy black against white of traditional texts: what would be the point of such arti- ficiality tending towards death and your absence? An opening: What configuration do you read this in; what are the effects? Alan _________________________________________________________________________ Opera Oppressions "Is this philosophy of language nad of the limitations of science pessi- mistic? It is not, because Lacan himself is pursuing his question for knowledge. But in his eyes it is without doubt pessimistic as regards us, the adepts, pupils and mere vehicles of the Master's thought. We are for him, during our brief lives, at least the clumsy links of history in which the golden ears are threshed. And if a little bran becomes mingled with the flour, that will not prevent a future genius from making bread if he uses the sieve carefully." (From Anike Lemaire, Jacques Lacan) "The real future, I think, manifests itself like a "thing," beyond the abyss that separates it from the present, beyond the value judgements of the present. For example, if a man from the fifteenth century could return to life today, would he consider the present hell or paradise? Whatever he thought, one thing is quite clear and that is that he would no longer have the competency to judge. It's the present, not him, that judges and decides." "In order to understand the future, it is not enough simply to be living in the present. We must be clearly aware that there is real evil in the very commonplace order of things we call everyday living. Perhaps there is no such thing as a cruel future. The future, properly speaking, is already cruel by virtue of being the future. The responsi- bility for this cruelty lies not on the side of the future, but on that of a present unable to accept the abyss that separates the two." "The most frightening thing in this world is discovering the abnormal in that which is closest to us." (From Kobo Abe, Inter Ice Age 4) Nothing will save us, neither you nor me nor her nor him, nor language. Time flies, it stops for no woman, such an imprisonment, man dies, no depth, the cruelty of the future devouring us. Obdurate future and obdur- ate past, blurred by the invisibility of a present _placenta_ which gnaws and grows, tumor-like, dissolves and decays. We are shunted by the ines- capability of language. Our bodies are sliced open, stretched throughout cyberspace; it has never been any different. What the wires make manifest is the uncertainty of a present measured close to, or slower, than any speed of light in any medi- um. Within time there is no explanation. Axiomatics are antiquated, heuristics. Platonism moves from the naivete of a table to the obdurate of imminent temporality. Evert Beth describes mathematical platonism (the unsolvability hierarchies among other things) as requiring a "Supreme Intellect": I say, not at all, only the ordinary fudged laws of the world. I say: Action does not require knowledge. Ghosts: Are the proper signifier here. Cutting through the past into the future, simply a less _substantiated_ form, as implied by our own fading away, not even photographs or videotapes, much less e-list archives hold- ing back, holding forth, speaking and speechless.. Or think of it this way: The present is always opera oppression. Or think of it this way: The present is always already abject, neither present nor absent, nor accountable, the tabulation of the body which effaces itself, is effaced. Neither passive nor active. What we are trapped within: An accumulation of mucous; it spreads, glues, adheres, coheres to things, it is the _condition_ of spreading, our fascination with slime molds. It always refuses to declare itself for or against, no semantic tableaux, no truth tables, hardly distributivity. Lacan? She could be anyone, one lends herself to another, there is always this confusion, forestalling, foreclosing in the name of the other, the matronymic, metonymic. I consider Ballard's crystal world to have already occurred. This is the writing of a dead man, splintered from itself, a continuous splintering, mucous dried into the semblance of sharpened spi- cules at the edges. The pierced bodies of the saints already had their Internet addresses; they only lacked the protocols. _________________________________________________________________________ Froth heheheheh... what if we're only creating froth here, I mean not wryting/ writing at all, but those mnemonics spoken of my Nietzsche/Kittler (Dis- course Networks), repetitions inscribed in the body/not the body, hope- less inscirptions, I'd say, froth and spittle, the mnemonics of refuell- ing, maintaining lists against inevitable decay. when the tribe begins to acculturate, the first to go are the societies based on secret knowledge: no one to pass the stuff on to, the songs are forgotten, ownership becomes useless, no one cares any more. or then later is revived; in this space, however, there's no possibility of revival - the archives are already spo- ken and spoken-for by people long since departed; there's heheheheheh an ill wind that blows through here, you can't discount it... froth and spi- ttle, froth and spittle - the rest of us down below want to ensure our lifelines through it, give it substance, feed its maw - no such luck - it decays in the blink of an eye - why look how it's transmitted, packets and all running around independently in the networks, some of them may never make it. here's N/K: "Mnemonic inscription is, like mechanical inscription, always invisible at the decisive moment. Its blindly chosen victims are 'virtual- ly compelled to invent gods and genii at all the heights and depths, in short, something that roams even in scret, hidden places, sees even in the dark, and will not easily let an interesting, painful spectacle pass un- noticed.'" (Kittle op. cit., Nietzsche, Genealogy) empathetic magic uses froth and spittle, combinations of things, fetishes, the earliest signs haven't escaped yet, they're askew, powdered outlines on cave walls, hands, then footprints down below, they're just the way things are, the word creating the body, you can see it's all mixed up. in any case, heheheh, laughing echos itself back as the rush to memorize be- gins the work of collapse from divinatio through hieroglyph, ideogram, maybe the alphabet on the way to pure binary. then heheh, the binary, froth and spittle: the roar increases, balloon flies away with the symbo- lic: what have we here? well we've got something to rub all over us, no? froth and spittle, heh! that's what we've got! __________________________________________________________________________ The Structure of Reality This text which I wrote in 1976 worked through the assumption that infor- mation parallels can be achieved through threshold logics, and that such logics can be read ultimately in terms of channels, gates, and markers - not unlike the Net itself. Thresholds were _constructed_ units, not basic building blocks; they could be reset and the threshold level could also be altered. It was assumed that there was noise inherent in the system, which would lead to new operations and circuitry. It was also assumed that a _container,_ like electrical circuits, was always in flux, just as a CRT screen needs continuous refreshment. It was also assumed that a degree of "jostling" occurred, and if a marker _could_ move, it would, one way or another. From the basic elements and the threshold units, more complex networks were developed, and here the assumption of parallels came to the fore- ground; if subjectivity, mathematical thinking, and the physical world could all be considered domains of transformation and conservation, then one could construct parallels vis-a-vis artificial languages among them. This did not prioritize the languages, but only pointed to both the unity of the domains and their ontological differences. It seems that the Net can also be described in terms of subjectivity, mathematical thinking, and the physical world replaced by textuality itself. Textuality would be the uppermost level of a layering determined by well-defined protocols which behave as pure agents of transmission. Subjectivity refers among other things to psychoanalytical and reception theory concerns. What we are ultimately concerned with is _what is brought to the subject,_ the reader/writer, and what is given in return. It was also assumed by the way that the logics and parallels were fuzzy to the extreme; that semantic tableaux and truth tables would fall apart or be useless; that gestural logics (non-distributive lattices in partic- ular) were present to an extreme within the subjective domain; that the entire scheme would result in a _topology of intention_ vis-a-vis the subject. At that point I also defined my interests, not in terms of pure theory (i.e. 'hard' theory), but in terms of the subject's _introjection_ of such theory; even here on the Net, my interests lie more in the inter- pretation of community here from within, rather than theorizing from without. This is one reason Jon Marshall's work is of great importance, I think, on Cybermind - because it is from within, not even participant- observation, but participation itself, more a situation, say, of Taussig or Lingis than of Malinowski. Alan, meandering with difficulty through mined terrain. _________________________________________________________________________ How I'm not a Universal Listening-Post to the World-Wide_Web I've developed tinnitus, a continuous ringing of the ears, the sound of a high-pitched motor, in both. I have been to the doctor who said that my hearing was normal and that I would have to live with this. I am living with an engine, always present, not so loud as to block other sounds, but a disturbance nonetheless. There are two interacting frequencies and long drifting waves of amplitude, and the tinnitus seems insensitive to temp- erature and humidity; the sound, like that produced by the drone in Indian music, is always _there,_ which translates into _here,_ a kind of intimacy that I have tried to relate as well to the background radiation of the un- iverse, the originary Word creating and destroying. No such luck, nor is it, no matter how much I want to believe, a sound truly electrical in na- ture, reflecting my time spent on the wires, the net, square-waves demon- strative of packets roaring down the wires somewhere near the speed of light in vacuo. Instead of ringing the transendent, in fact, tinnitus only imitates and configures it; instead of re-sounding with absolute and univ- ersal truths, tinnitus reflects a malfunctioning physiology of the subject refusing _all_ truths, including the problematic of its own being. Since there is no discernible damage, the tinnitus will continue until either I, or _it,_ whatever that happens to be, burns out; in the meantime I can pretend to a hampered and very minor god. __________________________________________________________________________ Useless Biography My Compaq Aero 486/25 began registering a video rom i/o error #101; today I called the company after running diagnostics which indicated a serious fault in the rom itself, not the setup configuration. The system board has to be replaced. On the AST Bravo 4/33 I get video errors in the AW5vga.drv and qtrle.qtc files over and over again; the SVGA monitor connects at only 16 colors indicating the alpha.exe file for Alphaworld won't run, the AVI PRO won't run, the Quicktime (QT) for Windows won't run, and Xing runs in 16 colors although Xingstream had some difficulties. I downloaded Netscape 20b3 on top of Netscape 1.1 which worked and finally could get Xingstream to produce images; it was Finland, not me, that was down. On the Aero I downloaded winsock.dll from AOL to test and it's true; with a Ewan telnet client I also downloaded I could telnet to Panix. But the connect was too slow and stuttered; I wrote Daniel at AOL who agreed; it had to do with the configuration of the winsock. I also ran Netscape 1.1 through it to see if it would work, and it ran immediately. I then transferred Anzio- lite, another telnet client, from the AST and could run that also from AOL - in short anything, but slow. Back on the AST I tried to contact someone, anyone, on POWWOW, no luck; I used Globalchat to listen to some channels, empty as usual. Now I'm back on PCPLUS which is still the best way to con- nect to the Net, through the korn shell on Panix running fast and smooth. I have been learning the listserv commands and writing in my spare time, listening to Lauren Hutton at the moment. I think everyone should read the current issue of Scanning the Future 21/C, issue 3/95, which has R.U. Sir- ius on Mondo/Wired, Kathy Acker, the Visible Human Project, Andrew Ross, Frank Tipler, and Mike Davis, as well as Mark Dery and SRL (Survival Rese- arch Laboratories/Mark Pauline); this, my writing, and Balzac are keeping me busy. Today I found the first issue of Miles Davis Sketches of Spain. I've got to get Alphaworld running but should probably give up. I'm going to shoot some film. __________________________________________________________________________