Nobody's Got it Figured Out Yet but I've gone this far; consider that pi contains all possible number se- quences in its infinite series of digits meandering long after the deci- mal point has declared itself the window between 3 and 1. Assume that any finite sequence is infinitely likely to be present somewhere or other in the series, and hold true to this with a machine possessing a closed loop printing one after another digit in random sequence; the loop holds, say, k integers, and integer k+1 erases the first, k+2 the second, and so forth - the loop in other words is constantly reinscribed which takes care of the problem of paper (we can take care of the ink problem as well by using lcds - _now_ the problem is one "purely" of energy and time - in any case... In any case, one can assume this this generated sequence, say one per second, is found _somewhere_ within the pi sequence as I've said to an infinitely high probability, as close to 1 as you'd like (nothing is absolute anymore)... So that what we're doing _for all prac- tical purposes_ is generating a segment of pi without any difficulty whatsoever - we can hold this up as an evident truth - we can insist on the perspicacity of our process in the long run (in the short run) to any purpose whatsoever... So this might for example keep us alive, it might be the inverse of the so-called situation of the hundred monkey somewhere along the line typ- ing Hamlet - because here we've got Hamlet within our grasp - we just don't know _where_ (and whereas in the monkey Hamlet situation, we know _where_ and what, we just don't know when...) - so that we can say it's possibly to know the where of things here, but not the when - or it's possible to know the when of things, but not the where - just not both together, which sounds remarkably like Heisenberg on one hand, or the Internet on the other... _______________________________________________________________________ Cyborg Identities, Interiorities Sony monitoring earphone, Toshiba mini-FM radio turned up full, loud edgy music, drag-down, difficult to explain to someone not tuned in; no need to explain to someone tuned in, no way to do it, sign-languaging? As if there were explanation. "Wedded to the earphones." Acoustic space is al- ways filled with bodies, virtualities, embodiments, stereo sound mixed and matched from the center of the skull. Acoustic space like _this_ e- space, is you-space, second person/al, voices inside the head reproduc- ing the thought that begins elsewhere, drawn inwards by desire. But the point _here_ is that it's cyborg, virtual reality, the construct of a fully-developed world of sound (ever heard binaural?). It removes the listener from space-time cause and effect machinic coordinates (and De- leluze and Guattari, ++, remained behind in the midst of the analog- mechanical - can't anyone see that?)/coordinations. (Try explaining the Net, net.sex or community, to someone who has never been on-line - try explaining surface to someone without a sense of touch (Baudrillard would say everyone).) Sony earphones, spatiality is _continuous_ interior and exterior; there is no interior - what is in-between is on a continuum with what is to one or another side say... The listener is _transparent to flow,_ you flow among me, surround me, within me, might as well eliminate the brackets, continuous flux - like bar-code, readable in either di- rection. Cyborg in this fashion is intermixture; it's not a question of interface/application (not here, yet), but one of confusion-profusion of identity - what is playing what, where the song and where the matrix? This is the realm of no resolution, and it's not even true that the sub- ject is _transported_ (vis-a-vis the romantics), but in fact is already _installed,_ an inhabitation. _I'm living somewhere else with Aerosmith._ Later more needs to be wri- tten about this, but later, deferment, after the sound stops and another form of the real floods in. ________________________________________________________________________ Totter No Room I'm not sure how much longer I can go on; I'm tethered to the machinery, to constant cultivation of the addresses, protocols, applications, one or another level of Net operations; life wasn't supposed to be like this and there's no love in it anywhere; it exhausts me; there's always re- quests, always something else that needs tending; there's always the time factor involved - checking in several times a day to catch things, make a living, finish the next text on time for the next (a form of self- driving that's the only thing keeping me going) - it's the early morning heat, it's the heat of it all, the constant heat, the lack of shadow in the sun, lack of delineation, self- or otherwise - so the self - it's al- ways a return to the self (lots of "constant" and "always" as well of course) tears itself apart in order to sustain itself - theoretically it's got to refuse to recognize itself as totality in any case, the "I" can't live a lie (collapses onto nothingness, annihilation concept/con- ception) - I've become worried over this, sick over this - this _tending_ of the equipment, this _tending_ of _tendency_ - so that in other words the cyborg feeds its own addiction - a question of _finance_ as well, or even primarily - feeding the maw, it doesn't rest, cease, messages flare up, burn - there's no negation anywhere (no one in real life to say slow up, you're wrong, you're not going to do that, you should have known bet- ter, the touch of skin, etc., the gaze met by gaze, etc.) - it floats to the top - tea-leaves - there's no prediction in the midst of the storm or in the constancy of the storm - situations of guide-ropes, protocols, I know _all_ about them, you'll catch me hanging over the torrent but the ropes, slippery, are well-grounded, one side or another, teetering over cyberspace so to speak, the lack of space - I can see you're grin- ning as things become a bit loose, a pebble skitters down the rocky slope to the river, another - can't hear them with the roar of the wind, but I think to myself, some of us are holding our own - I think to myself - I'm _among_ me - part of me hanging over the edge says, though - can still hear it, this voice, at this moment, very moment on the way down - so to speak - who do you think you're fooling - what do you think - who are you that you've been forced to think, think over and over again, several times all the time each day every day - how much room there is among us, and thinking, and so forth - like I said I'm in a pretty bad way __________________________________________________________________________ Spirit of Death Because it's the same, the spirit of death hovers over the airwaves. Be- cause nothing changes, but brute bandwidth continues its miasmatic de- scent in the future; the future is always descent. The eruption of plea- sure at the court consumed many on the plain, waiting or surviving with- in their tents; the European visitors reported everything in return for a chance to speak _the Christian._ These things become literally unimag- inable, trivially imagined, dust beneath one's feet, the neighing of horses in the background, snow everywhere, smoky fires. One always wants desire; one wants to say "you know how it is," one never does. By the time the present is realized, one is blind to the real. The spirit of death changes characters, populations, voices; the cloaca of the lists continues to disgorge, just like philosophy must always for- get names. A text is a vor-text, dissembling, spewing into interpretive gestures, secondary or tertiary (and who can quantify these continuous levels of repeitition); a text is always loss, lost before the writing of it (lost before the speaking as well) - this is the transparency of text, its aurality/orality: _there's never another moment other than the text, there's no other moment other than the text's other._ The transparency of _this_ discourse: that you always already know this, it, that it makes no difference, that this remains the discourse impos- sible to work through (no therapeutic here), that this remains obdurate and hence trivial, idiotic - but nonetheless the _locus of the text,_ of some millions of organisms at a particular moment in time which is any moment, any organism, which is the slow cold dying of the plasma, of the world, even of its worlding, of this and any other world. Oh I could tell you stories, this world which is not ever the world it was: organism takes delight in the moment or movement of a stone across a grid, pleasure in the giving of a gift. By such means the fabric of the world is sustained, time drawn forth, the irresolution of spaces resolved: "Having received the presents they led us to his _orde_ or tent, and we were instructed to bend three times the left knee before the door of his dwelling, and to be very careful not to put our feet on the threshold of the door, and this we were attentive to observe, for sentence of death is on those know knowingly tread upon the threshold of a chief's dwelling. After we had entered we were obliged to repeat on bended knee before the chief and all the other nobles, who had specially been convened there for that purpose, what has been previously said." (John of Pian de Carpine, report on a journey to Mongolia 1245-46, in Dmytryshyn, Medieval Russia, A Source Book 900-1700) ________________________________________________________________________ Distributed Representation In my 1977 Structure of Reality, I created something called SRG, state- representation-graphs, that were associated with threshold networks. Net- works (similar to neural networks or Petrie Nets) had only a finite num- ber of states, no matter how large. These states were interrelated; one could move from, say, state 10011 to state 10111 by changing the third digit from 0 to 1. The result was an SRG in which each _node_ represen- ted an entire network state. Now consider the nodes labeled or tagged (beyond their position within the SRG); these tags could be considered the names of entities. Then each entity is distributed among the origi- nal nodes of the threshold network. The possibilities are endless here: there are networks whose SRG possess loops, and there are mirrorings pos- sible; for example, a simple "exchange" vector 1-0 would have only two states and the SRG would be (1-0)1-(0-1)0. It is also possible to force SRG _onto_ networks, such as there may be states that are unaccounted for, or "foreign" surplus states. Eventually, representation develops _not_ as systemic difference, but as a many-to-many model, many networks represented by many SRG. I used the symbol "(" for representation - then a(b indicates that b is the SRG of a, but a(*b indicates that b and a are "wild" to each other; this is a situation of forcing. Clearly there again are all sorts of possibiities, such as a(b(c, a(b, and so forth - and to develop these leads to a general theory of representation, based on states and nodes. Further, this model leads to another, in which states are modeled onto arrows among nodes; in particular, a(*b indi- cates situations of constant mobility among threshold units (variable thresholds, connections, and so forth) and their SRG (foreign, chained, or otherwise). Out of this model it's possible to construct holarchies (rather than hierarchies) of representation, or representation (program, information, etc.) "all the way down," as some of the previous texts have indicated. In this model, there is no clear distinction among a(b, since in certain situations one may also have then a)b, etc. These holarchies, it seems to me, would be useful for considering repre- sentation in cyberspace, in which issues of textuality, hysteric embodi- ment, and so forth occur. But it would not be possible to define, pre- cisely, what would constitute a _network_ of references or associations through a particular post; another means would have to be found in order to associate, say, attributes with nodes. The difficulty is in the _loca- ting_ of attributes in the first place: How are attributes associated with particular (linguistic) representations? Are we in a situation of infinite regress? What _is_ of use is that there is not necessarily a materialist founda- tion resulting from this approach. (Elsewhere in Structure I defined for example an "event" as the intersection of its descriptions, to a speci- fied arbitrary "depth." "Event" then is not an _occurrence_ in the world so much as a description _of_ the world, and it should be possible to distinguish between the two.) Thus hysteric embodiment becomes a means of reading or postulating a body, whether or not the body _is_ present or ever _has been_ present; modalities of existence themselves could be tagged within threshold networks... ________________________________________________________________________ Writing as Paste Writing pastes itself to the page, incises material or magnetic domains, holds itself taut against the skin. It's tattooed but there is no future in these words; they carry the seeds of their own dissolution. No matter how much I bang against your screen I am rejected. No matter how much the flesh is lacerated, blood flows at best to the bottom of the frame, coag- ulates across the keyboard circuitry. Nothing protects language against the elements like rubber coating, latex skin inserted between one and another key. This is the taste of writing in the mouth, dry heaves, effects of psycho- tropic drugs, or their generation. The o/pens wide, e/merges, a/nulls what you cannot tear apart, i/mage. Beyond the joke or pun, beyond the _throat,_ vowels flood what consonants retard, meaning among us. Powder. There are quantities of organisms splintering twig-strokes of high con- trast, one form or another, strokes spewed and coagulated among them. What is "passing for meaning"? Even from afar, it's possible to recognize arti- culation at work. Dismemberment is always already construction, parts of things giving them their names, identities, equivalences. The edge between _distributed_ and _dispersed_ intelligences is precisely the edge of cul- ture, between definition and excess, surplus. I call the one to myself, inscription. I call the other, fissure. What is inscribed is circumscribed, the domain of classical logic. What fissures is im-precisely the gesture, dispersed among units. No one knows where the gesture ends; labanotation is the body withdrawn from the page. But it is paste, it tumbles onward, locks into others of its kind. There is no locking and certain there are no others. What happens in the long run is garbage, what is discarded, rendered useless, poisonous to the earth. It's here that decisions are made. There's no going forward, no return as well. _________________________________________________________________________ Besides Myself Pascal was afraid of a chasm _opening beside him_ and to the left or right? Doppelganger, Dostoevsky's doubles, always seem on a _vertical axis,_ before or behind, an orthogonal transformation of gravity. Later, there was a text written and read with/in relation to Kathy Acker at a radio performance; there was a hole opening up next to me, my hole in fact, hardly a chasm. As if my body split clean in relation to her pre- sence. One is besides oneself, overcome with oneself in the presence of the uncanny. The uncanny strikes at any moment, taking us along with it, demarcating boundaries where none previously existed. If the Net and cybermind/cyberspace are vertical, back/forward (Netscape ensures these directions with proper buttoning of the Web upon us, what constitutes the uneasy laterality which Levi-Strauss speaks of (Conversations with Claude Levi Strauss, C L-S and Didier Eribon), uncanny for all sorts of (mis-) reasons?: "The luncheon was held at the Columbia Faculty Club. It was during the winter, which was incredibly cold. Boas arrived wearing an old fur hat that must have dated from his expeditions among the Eskimos sixty years earlier. His daughter Mrs. Yampolski and several of his colleagues from Columbia where there, all former students: Ruth Benedict, Ralph Linton, and a few others. Boas was very jovial. In the middle of a conversation, he shoved himself violently away form the table and fell backwards. I was seated next to him and bent down to lift him up. Rivet, who had started his career as a military doctor, tried in vain to revive him. Boas was dead." Does the thief approach from the side, the left side? The one time in my life I was mugged, I was approached on the right, which seemed wrong. The sides of the body are nubile and shimmering slabs, reasonably anonymous; strength, sexuality, and the reading of personality appear from before or behind. Still, one pushes against an obstacle with one's side, for example opening a stuck door, breaking one down. And a face from the side accomp- anying the body as well (the _right_ side) expresses posture, the delinea- tion of form that accompanies all of us. A head-on collision makes sense, knocks one insensible. A collision on the side is almost an apology... __________________________________________________________________________ Tuning I stab into the machine, change one or another line, back out, run the assessment programs, return to autoexec.bat or config.sys, place REM before a possible difficulty. I download a video driver from AST, load it into C:\b, inflate it, install it in A:\ reinflating, run it from windows, change the settings; I defragment drives C: D: E:, back out, remove several directories from E:, change the bins all the way around, fool with high memory but leave it empty, establish a permanent Windows section on E:, try 32 bits and crash everything, go into the system.ini file blindly and set 32=no no no over again, reload and rerun after placing REM in front of all sorts of devices and possible TSRs. I don't have the slightest. I rearrange files, bring yoyos (so I'm told) towards the front, create menus, eliminate everything dead or useless from the different sections, thinking about returning to Trumpet Winsock setup, play again with virtual memory, change the files and buffers sizes, eliminate dead or unncessary directories from the path, place all the backup files in a CHANGE directory. I'm flying blind now, not the vaguest. When Windows crashes, it crashes big, recreates the C: direc- tory with nothing on it; rebooting, everything returns. Sound files con- stantly slip out of control; if I hear the song one more time I'll go crazy, maybe I'll go crazy anyway. The machine's up to a 10.7 run on the clocktime ahead of the 10.5 standard and way up from the 5 some- thing it was running at earlier. Windows takes ThePalace now, it takes AVIPRO, runs out on CuSeeMe from Norway with a record 12 frames a sec- ond on a 33 mhz machine, say. No land record but for this. Xingstream actually works out recognizable, someone's talking in Finnish and his picture moves on occasion and by the looks of it I'd recognize him on the street. Amazingly, Windows loads at doublespeed now, but the lamp by the bed is beginning to fizzle, the bulb's going - I can't turn away - the sound's in tune with TV static, emissions all over the place. There are antennas all over the place as well, the television and phone base antennas, but also three for the Sony and Hallicrafter (antique!) short- wave radios, tuned and hustling against the ceiling, desperate for air, circuit, current. But the colors are more subtle on the AST at the mom- ent and this notebook I'm writing on runs fast enough for type to take, transmit affect. Still it's all stabbing at the dark; never before have I been so aware of the _body_ of the machine, the virtual body which re- acts according to the vagaries of unknown dis-easing; I hereby witness. This isn't the body of the _case,_ screwed or unscrewed, occasionally reconfigured itself - this is the body which speaks desperately to me, attempts to hold its own as it slims down for the penultimate but con- tinuous run. I've absorbed it running; nothing crashes anymore, and what were dim flickers across the internetworking screen have become pleasures of the sensory text, familiarities, familialities. You can guess where this is heading, far beyond the stabbing, into interstellar absorption, body thinned against perfect works lit, nuclear, from within. Stabbing dulls the knife as the wood is carved, and becomes one. Where that is, is for no one to say.* ------------------------------------------| *A branching direction takes us to top-fuel nitro dragsters at 306 mph, engine burning for a lifespan of six minutes total, already innumerable races, tests, as the quartermile's around five seconds. Hill and Bern- stein are still my favorites on the circuit - finesse. I'd grant them a Pentium any day, but they're probably running 886s before Intel's got them made made made. _________________________________________________________________________ A Million Nudes The Taschen Uwe Scheid collection, 1000 Nudes, is available all over New York at the moment. The images are primarily from 1850-1939, beginning with daguerreotypes, and ending with "pinups." There are short introduc- tions to the various sections; the work runs to 750 pages. About 98% of the images are of women. The sections run:: Daguerreotypes: the first photographs of nudes; Academy figures: early pictures of nudes; Saucy scenes; Obscene photography; Erotic postcards; Peepshows: the three-di- mensional nude; The ethnological nude; Pictorialism: painterly nudes; Arcadian works: Baron von Gloeden and Co.; The nude in nature: the nudist movement in Germany; The longing for sun, light and nature: open-air nudes; New trends in nude photography; and Glamour shots and pin-up girls. While the sections overlap (for example open-air and nudist images), most of the images are surprisingly chaste, owing a debt to Ingres for example. There are two points to be made, both of which are emissions rather than argument. The first concerns the _vaginal slit,_ which is figured, often occupied by men or things, in the Obscene section. For this serves as a literal _punctum,_ a reminder or remainder of nudity that is the limit of the body (in terms of revelation, Annie Sprinkle notwithstanding); it is the Obscene section that draws one into the interior of the book itself. (And because of the _time_ involved, the limit is also that of history; this is the slit of someone in 1850, this is her expression, or even more - this is an _intention._) The second point is the _uncanny nature of_ these images, which, like the work of Beardsley, seem connected to cyberspace - I am thinking of the very obvious fact that, not only are these women (and men) dead for the most part, but they are known, revealed, only through this photographic residue; they're silenced otherwise, as are the bodies themselves. _Watch- ing_ the Obscene section, I desire to tongue the bodies, taste them; this is a visceral reaction which immediately couples with the morbidity of the _corpse,_ the tongue reaching through the tissues (decayed, moldering, _molded_) back into itself, either earth or the void on the other side. What one desires is always already no longer, is always already consumed. Could it be that _embodiment_ is always thus hysteric, that representa- tion contains within it the seeds of impossibility, chthonic dissolution? I would think so; the book, for all its apparent eroticism (appealing as well to the _category_ of the erotic as established, say, in the 1950s, a remarkably _quaint_ book in this respect) is intensely disturbing: the desire for devouring, for corporeal consummation, for the corpse itself, shines through. What one is to make of this is the sexed coupling, not only of desire and death, but of both with representation and hysteria: we _never_ are otherwise than Other, "unaccountable and unaccounted-for," for ourselves which are Other than ourselves, displaced, as I have indi- cated, neither to the front nor the back, but to the _side._ ________________________________________________________________________ L/oo\k Towards the side of the screen lined with bamboo Autumn fallen into pools, carp enunciations Too formal for the peerage of eyes and finials Arriving customarily through loosened footing Doubling the site of pure looking through leaves Rooted across the earth of sky and water strewn Across with leaves hewn from charred and darkened wood Or lewd eyes if not peerage doomed to use of others' Shadows by the door, haiku spoken slowly, terms of Bamboo pools too, loosened footing, looking rooted, Or wood, doomed door, and bamboo pools Of pools of look _________________________________________________________________________ The Throes of Addiction Clutching my notebook, I go out as usual in 16 degree Fahrenheit weather, heading to the local coffee-shop for breakfast/lunch after sleeping fit- fully from four o'clock on. It's around noon, and I hug the computer case close to my body, keeping it warm, the battery charged (last of a dying breed, etc.). This is prosthesis in the truest form, communication at my fingertips, and now, sitting against a low wall next to the cash register, I type among the condiments, mustard, sugar, something called Lea & Perrins Sauce, cream, and ketchup. The table shakes slightly; they all do - it's covered with formica or a formica derivative, fake granite with one tenth the weight. Bobby and Paul are behind the counter; I've got a reputation of being _awry_ or weird here. I'm sitting next two two women talking about Russia, and the food arrives - coffee, orange juice, egg whites for low cholesterol, bleary rye toast. I carefully put the computer away, opening it now after quickly eating, trying to remember my place. The women are talking about tutoring, moving on "maybe it's more like one of those, like like one of those, this, this is one of those pop psych things that's kind of true, my dad was a math idiot, but now he is, my mother's got all these interesting ideas of it" and they continue while I put down coffee and book, Natalia Ginzburg's Family Sayings. If I'm not clutching the notebook (active), I'm clutching the book (pas- sive), but it's the notebook that starts me trembling, that has _re- placed_ speech and community for me. What I'm writing here will travel by serial cable to the mother-ship desktop; loaded there, it will ooze onto the wires, out of my hands. Distended writing, it's also extended speech, the only speech I am capable of at this point. I dream in fact in aphor- ism, see you through the yellow letters of the screen, see myself in simi- lar garments. On the laptop, the font remains the same; only the colors change, now black on white on a monochrome display. Sometimes I imagine the labor involved in the movement from the stroke of a key to the subse- quent crossing of a _t_ or the serifs producing the illusion of ruled paper, parchment, vellum, anything but transparent plastic, glass. Soon I won't be able to live without these devices; my speech will be- come totally encapsulated, the tenor of my voice heard on rare occasions, for the most part a thing of the past. Surely this is part of depression, but it is also part of _anterior life,_ electronic under the skin, nour- ished in ordinary restaurants by ordinary food, eyes glazed with galaxies. The woman says she is "conspicuously all over the place" at this very moment and I envy her this _being_ which partakes of the visible; she moves on to discuss female power, segueing into "Emily's mom," and I re- turn to total concentration on the keys, in spite of the 50s music play- ing in the background, and the sound of dishes and utensils being pre- pared for washing at the other end of the restaurant. I finish the second cup of coffee, pay, and leave; the temperature is up two degrees. Home, I prop the computer on a DOS 6.2 manual, both resting on a white wool blanket on the bed. (I bought the blanket in happier days, teaching in Texas. The blanket is from South America; I found it in Den- ton, north of Dallas, for $60. Now the edges are frayed, and when the trim begins to fall apart, I retie the strands superstitiously.) I continue typing, the words bouncing around _somewhere_ between my mind and the blankness of the screen; they inhabit neither one nor the other, but come to settle, with a false sense of security, on the drive itself. No one has telephoned. I receive a mysterious video in the mail, which I haven't watched yet - I gave my address to someone over the Net. The desk- top sits quietly in its cover about nine (an uncomfortable number) feet from the bed. There's traffic below, two flights down and out into the street. Typing, I wonder where everyone is moving at this relative end of the world, wishing I were behind a wheel hurtling cross-country. The only sound in the loft (small loft or apartment actually) is that of the keys, and the notebook is almost silent. It's the running of mice in the wood- work or the scurrying of slightly larger animals in the woods, leaves rustling on an autumn day. Even as a child I was alone with my memories. Now my memories are of words and their effects, and the return of words to me, and I try desperately to make that sufficient. Every day in real life I head to Manhattan, run around the city, visit, hold meetings and class- es, curate, busy myself. It's a business acting itself out; I am its ag- ent. In this sort of real life, I am always interstitial, mediating among institutions and players, advising, but always peripheral; it's as if I'm automatically screened or screening, filters established on a far more psychological or even psychoanalytical level than is healthy. But who am I to _say_? And to whom am I to say it? Now, as I write these last sentences, I am blocked, filtered out from the real again, returned to the writing, desperately trying to ensure its _interest_ for you, seducing you to the very end, by any means available. For to lose you would be to lose myself, although the benefit of the wri- ting, of course, is that I will never know that I am blocked, held taut always _elsewhere_ by the computer, which repeats itself, myself, to me. It's the machine in me that is doing the writing; I, the prosthesis of the machine, the very _practice_ of the machine. I am its alpha and omega, I am its life-force. The telephone almost never rings to break into my de- lirium; the mail is impersonal, a matter of filling out forms, economic inputs and outputs. Only those trips to Manhattan show me the clear blue sky, often scarred by jagged snow or rain and I prefer it that way. In- side, I fear for the coldness of batteries fading, servers down, but I have managed to establish enough redundancy (text backups, several compu- ters, two servers, various communications hardware and software) to keep me going in the bleakest of times. If I die, you would know only by the absence of the text, those texts, in fact, I temporarily call my own. So I have written myself through a meal, back onto the bed where Ginz- burg's Family Sayings awaits me, an ironic book, given the silence here. Next to it, both on my right, is John Earman's Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, and Shrieks: Singularities and Acausalities in Relativistic Spacetimes, which I have yet to finish; on my left, a book on the philosophy of sci- ence, two books on medieval Russia, unstarted novels. Ironically the phone rings; a friend of mine tells me about her mother who went into the bath- room with a gun to her head. Ironically also a package arrives as well; I run downstairs for it. All is not lost; real life intrudes. --- But I hunger for the keys and their safety, even the muted messages that arrive hourly on the screen; there is a secrecy, mystery, about them, a slight taint of the asylum (hearing voices meant just for me), therapeu- tic as well (hearing voices meant just for me). Soon I will transfer this text; it will be slotted, entered, disappearing into the maw of files, labels, tcp/ip protocols. Until then, it lives, more than I do, letter by letter, word by word, short-term memory embellished in the immediately vicinity of the cursor - and as for long-term, I can always scroll back, the batteries still good, for a little while longer. --- I feel I am letting you down without a conclusion, but what conclusion is possible? Embedded within text, anything becomes part of anything else; as for me, I await the passing of the bleak winter, holding out for a spring and a summer where I too may find myself in a big car heading out, like the woman in Nicole Brossard's Mauve Desert. But I would bring along the laptop, so I can whisper secretly into the void, and so that, in the truth of the world, the void may hear, and whisper, secretly, back to me. ______________________________________________________________________ BEING LISTENED-TO What happened? Somewhere I was talking; there were rocks, a beach, sullen sky. I screamed into the sky: name, serial number, address. I screamed: secret sex, distributed words, those who hated me, robberies and unspeak- able acts. The mouth and lips gleamed against the teeth which were bared grey matte in the darkness. Reversed, my body turned one way or another. What did they say? They recited my name, my serial number, address. They echoed secret sex, the exact expression on my haunted eyes, thinned mois- ture across my lips, the position of bodies exactly. They knew the names of the bereaved. They followed the furrows across my flesh, hieroglyphs of skin, unwritten thoughts. They knew everything. Before, when I cursed God, I was happy! My body was hoarse with taut lungs, arms lunged and clawed sky! Now, my body was ripped in two, the Secret Sharer emerging, mocking me! O God! O God! She turned her vast FACE towards me; the Mouth, Lips, and Teeth were not Hers, could never be Hers! In Beauty She walked in the Folds of the Night and I was among Her! But THAT mouth, THAT speech which mocked me, took my breath away! A breach of the bulwark of etiquette itself! Like a slave, my words were spoken- for; my body was spoken-for, my heart! To whom should I turn but my Fian- cee, also the result of an Unholy Assignation, known but to Her, Mouth, and the crevices of my Innermost Mind! Wherever I turned, I KNOW NOW, only that which has been begotten for me is readily available - that speech is a GIFT to be taken away - that my love itself BELONGS TO ANOTHER WHOM I DO NOT KNOW - that these WORDS ARE WRITTEN BY THE MOUTH dictating THUNDER AGAINST THE BLACK SKY - that every- thing I do is Plagiarized; I am the VICTIM OF UNHOLY UNION - I NEVER ASKED FOR THIS - I never asked for any other - I WAS ALWAYS OTHER - stolen, stolen, stolen! ALWAYS AN OTHER! ALWAYS, ALWAYS: CONDEMNED!!!!!!!!!!!!!! __________________________________________________________________________ URL http://www.revolution.com/ Clara Hielo Internet says: If you were 18 in 1968 when May took over the world of Paris, you were born in 1950, closing in on 46. And where are you now? The hippy move- ment was enormous at the time, even excluding suburbanites. At 46, you should be at the height of your powers, say 46-60, and so why have you suddenly become a thing of pathos and mockery, putting away the tie-dye or the bell-bottoms, treating the music as nostalgia, while the United States swings further and further to the right? Why are you silenced, why are you afraid? What do you dream of late at night, if not the peace and freedom that came for a moment in the middle of war tearing this country and SE Asia apart? Were all those battles for nothing? Abbie Hoffman a suicide, the rest of them either dead or in remission! This is too young, this is too little rage for the money! But it was something I just realized in my own naivete - that revolution is _always_ style in this country, first and foremost style, for those who can afford it. And there is that commercial on television with the lines The Revolution Will Not Be Televised over and over again, like some hysteric poem, which it was back then in the dark ages of the early 1970s, and now it's mediated by, deflected by, BASKETBALL, jumpshots useful nowhere else other than the court. So one Court has been replaced by another, and this is revolution? Or were those early years, as the so-called "under- ground" has it now, nothing but a preparation for growing up? And to what? Pain unfurls its flag, increases in the world! The beads and what they stood for, beyond the current joking, lie rotting in your bureau drawers. You've become ugly, withdrawn, compromising, and you've put all of us at a loss! You're the trauma of the West, you are, and you've made radicality quaint! Long live Wired! Long live the Web! HOT Java! GIVE THE REVOLUTION A URL! PENTIUM RULES! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Aubrey The last time I saw AB, Beardsley, he beckoned to me, opened the pages of the Modern Library volume from the 20s, with an introduction by Arthur Symons himself. Look at the picture of Siegfried from "The Stu- dio," with its almost glacial ledge of rock over a black lake or abyss, Siegfried's vanquished dragon's wings opening up V behind him. A land- scape recedes on the right, the image tree-framed at the edge. Beardsley works with lines thinned to the cutting in combination with solid blacks; there's a relationship with stained glass. But there's also a relationship with MUDs and other forms of cyber-creature lairs, and it's this that immediately attracts one Net-obsessed - these images and their inhabitants reside in texts and narratives - in unconscious textuality in fact. This conclusion was reached through immediate recognition of Siegfried as a prototype of MUD/MOO embodiments. The delineations of gratified desire parallel exactly the immersion into dream-forms; only Maxfield Parrish can challenge these avatars with others, who are placed well above the rest. But Parrish has relations to perfection that Beardsley won't go near, and Beardsley's decayed imaginary keeps the forms from positions of pure dominance or visual art. Like Schiele's stains, they can crawl across the page; unlike Schiele's figurations, these are cusps or frame- works for one's own projections - it's here their strength lies - here, and in the quick and dirty communication of form they entail. Beardsley's details, like MOO objects, hold things back, but _just so._ Caught in their spikiness, consciousness refuses to let go, drags them into the textual domain. (In this past, only Cranach or Hokusai portend the same unease.) Beardsley captures the decay inherent in MUDs or MOOs, their prehension, their sickly sexuality tending towards perverse ex- ploration. Beardsley relies on rawness and transgression, covered by breasts, phalluses, diadems, areas of black oozing to the edge. The work is the stifled drama of cyberspace. The work has _odor._ ________________________________________________________________________ Order Order of reading and constraint are critical in the functioning of MOO email lists, email lists, and Usenet newsgroups. For a time I participat- ed in the *Theory list on PMC2; I found myself increasingly irritated with what I perceived as noisy or spamming messages. On the *Theory list, each message is numbered; one can access these by stating for example "@read 267 on Theory" but for the most part, posts are read in order. When I'd log on, there would be an announcement stating "*Theory-MOO has 4 new messages" and I'd enter "@read next on Theory" or "@send to *Theory" (the star necessary on the "@send"). In general, these messages are read in order; one doesn't know the con- tent in advance. After they're read, they're retained in the overall mes- sage base (which thus also functions as an archive), but they no longer show up with the "@read next" command. And the result of this command is a straight-forward linear progression, in which threads are less relevant than elsewhere, and where subject titles are fairly random. Used with the "@read next" command, one is bound to a formal one-dimensional structure, the well-ordering of integers. It's fairly easy, then, to clog the list, spam it; one must pass through the spammed messages to continue discussion on another topic. Usenet, say with the tin reader, is another framework altogether. Messages are easily listed by threads; one scans the subject headings, reads only particular ones. Scanning can be two-dimensional in this regard - moving up and down the headings, then into the linear ordering of the threads themselves. This allows for more tolerance of spam, but it also makes the headings critical; they become mini-statements themselves, often seductive and/or flaming - on the technical newsgroups, they often convey consider- able detailed information. Recently, as we all know, newsgroups have be- come noisier and noisier, if they're not moderated; many of them convey an atmosphere of violence. If one goes as an example to one of the Tonya Har- ding newsgroups, this will become clear; almost all the posts are cross- posts, often advertisements or quarrels which move from group to group. Email lists are still another form; there are external archives, and the rest arrives in the inbox. Thread headings are usually markers of distinc- tion, separating strands rather than seducing readers. Headings are split to indicate branched discussions. The order is random-access; one need not even read a thread in the order it was written in, for example. Spam is not that common, either because of moderation or limitations to exter- nal postings. At one point, newsgroups had a stronger sense of community, but now, I think, this sense has moved to the lists, which are publicly advertised but less public in other ways. While Usenet is linear in the tin menu system, it's easy to back out of a thread one doesn't want to participate in; it's a lot harder to do this on a MOO. For that matter, it's also harder to get information about a particular MOO list, or even a proper set of commands. MOOs, talkers, and MUDs have on the other hand a wide variety of message bases beyond email lists, such as paging, private email lists, telephone answering machines, bulletin boards, signs, and so forth. Email lists themselves have arch- ives, and both home-pages and files depositories at times. While Usenet groups have archives, they're rarely accessed, I believe. Finally, demographics vary widely. Obviously newsgroups have the widest open audience; email lists are second. MOO email lists are generally tiny, often unused by MOO participants. Newsgroups can be slightly diffi- cult to post to for new users; email lists are the simplest. In all of these, there are varying degree of protection, ranging from full to no moderation, from closed to open subscriptions, from heavy to no address/ user filtering. In the future, given darknet necessities, I predict that increased closure will be necessary in order for any of these forms to function as anything beyond relics of flaming, advertising, and self- promotion. But prediction is as unreliable as the message bases themselves. ________________________________________________________________________ My thinking thoughts I think of Henon sets, bifurcation sets, New York City buses, deserved flames, suicide, Lauren Hutton, distributed intelligence, Tonya Harding, floods, iron sculptures, cats, anxiety of relativisms, ThePalace, lone- liness, Tintoretto, ascii text, Margaret, deserts and shores, family welcomes, being beaten, The Sugarcubes, translation, hypercubes, perfect love, torture, nervousness, good advice, getting even, Tyler Stallings, recursion, Julia Kristeva, Dallas Texas, thunderstorms and the phenomen- ology of lightning, net.sex and meeting you, Jenny Holzer and Sue Wil- liams, measure series, The Perilous Cemetery, Herodotus, Derrida, defuge and wryting, labia, serrated edges in other planetary systems, CuSeeMe, exhibitionism and splaying, ocotillo and creosote, threshold logics, shogi, negations, silent film, psychosis, Thomas Chatterton, top-fuel dragsters, marine vents, binary systems, Godard, memnories of writing to myself, blizzards, Christopher Isherwood, scanning tunneling microscopy, flu, violence in cyberspace, the year 3000, Alphonso Lingis, dyads, slime molds, breasts, Carl Hiaasen, P.J. Harvey, general relativity, margins and limits, Bourbaki, shortwave radio, Akkadian, love, and Clement Rosset. ________________________________________________________________________ Snow Close to whiteout, color of needled death, I remember other blizzards, dri- ving towards Yarmouth at the hour of the dark night of the soul, cardoor open and foot on the pavement, trying to stay on the road in the face of pure blindness. Blindness is always pure when it is difference, when sense shuts down suddenly without striations; no longer is it possible to see be- yond myself. Looking from the window, the abyss _yawns,_ not only maw, but also exhaustion, those moments in the north when one sits and sleeps, never waking up, in the midst of snow. But those moments are also myth; in fact sleeping is what one does best, curled in upon oneself, descending into the conservation of all energy. The blizzard blows around one or through one; the blizzard is elemental and cyberspace is not - there is always a moment when cyberspace, like the number 2, appears as pure feuilleton or vignette in the gone world. There is _never_ a moment when the purity of whiteout blindness tells a story, nor is there one purity in balance with another. Needled death is neither reductive nor a _test,_ by the way; this isn't the world of romantic fallacies, but as close to nothing as one can get. There is no point to it, no fulcrum; the blankness lies everywhere, most likely deep within the soul, the eyes would have it. We cannot get along without such points; even this text constantly circum- scribes. Circumscription is quick within one realm (look! there's the sun, there's the moon!), dead within the other. The white has a thickness to it; like paste, it not only covers everything and dulls the edges, but it replaces one world with another. The first, which is obdurate, granular, suddenly becomes translucent; walking through snow, one recites the addres- ses of cyberspace without location but with relation. It is only death or _that_ blindness which ends relation, the last that which is of oneself, one's constructed and maintained symbolic. Look at this! As long as there is a dimension to look from: Now, this heaving substance contains nothing for eyes or ears, nothing but a hint of what desire might have been. ________________________________________________________________________ Marked The t.txt begins at this end of the file and continues across to this side during which the fingers ply the line, bringing home Murphy Brown running on the television, which places the t.txt within a certain time-frame. Or so it would seem; these messages disconnect, and this was written during a production of Caroline in the City, the one where Roseanne finally changes one of her daughters to another actress. Halfway in, the water floods the lower floors of my parents' house in Pennsylvania, destroying my notebooks from childhood which might have held the clue I have been looking for in a text which continues, going nowhere. Sammy Davis Jr. is on the tube talk- ing to Lauren Hutton, placing this within a very specific year, as the camera carefully delineates the features of Levinas. Alas, Derrida has re- turned from the dead, mon pauvre something or other, time out of place, out of joint. The t.txt runs out quickly as batteries begin to die; it is this January heat near Perth, and the screen is almost invisible in the harsh sun. January was never meant to have a harsh sun; it is unholy, un- toward, awkward. But it is also childish to continue in this fashion, the placement of running jokes, light-motives, take your pick during this Jimmy Carter year. The text swells and fulfills itself as memory, as cy- ber-penetration, hypodermic needles soliciting the body suffused with the glow of language. There is a horizon in sight; there always is. It con- stitutes the stuff of liquid depths, black pools, de-oxygenated. Nothing's down there. You know that these texts are electronic only, that they exist by virtue of _sites,_ are useless operations, suppurating bodies themselves. They carry the page forward. They'll be buried by President Roosevelt within the year - literally, mark my words. I'm a marked man. Nothing exists. Literally. _________________________________________________________________________ Finished The forty or so qbasic programs I have written constitute a zone of com- fort, all that needs remain, occlusions to leaking comprehension. They fall into various categories - those of the almost-symmetric series, for example, exemplifying the properties of the integers which diffuse vision and the mind in favor of remarkable identities; in fact these series are the closest to straightforward identity, just beyond a line of pure repe- tition. A second set of programs develops maps of chaos; the islands of stabilization are clearly mapped. What is elegant here is the conciseness of the programs. Two other sets create quite different cinematic displays; the first, related to the second, constructs orbits within parabolic or sinusoidal structures. The orbits, which may be of any length, are pre- sented one after the other in rapid succession, the result being a flut- tering around certain stabilized positions - chaos clearly in evidence otherwise. The final set here uses recursive nesting to construct orbital clouds around points in a planar lattice; instabilities send the orbits flying to other attractors. The result may be anything from a single orbital bundle to nestled orbits forming complex irregular patterns. Then there are the primitive programs designed to illustrate one-dimensional life-forms, and the programs which utilize nestled orbits to create vary- ing patterns on the screen. All of these together exhaust certain pattern- ings of symmetries and equivalences (deeply related of course through automorphisms; see Weyl); they pour into me, constitute the integral cal- culus of thought I employ elsewhere. (I would add to these the programs written, years ago, exploring catastrophies, folds, and the like; the result of one of them forms the pattern on the cover of my Disorders of the Real.) I think through my clumsiness here (if my programs have any intrinsic beauty, it's accidental; my mathematical knowledge is basic), that I have tightened my hold on the symbolic in odd ways - designing threshold logic units, for example which allow me to conceive of thresholding itself as a higher-order construct than, say, that of demarcation. I wouldn't go so far as to claim ur-forms, but only that certain classes of pattern may be succinctly realized and explored. Finally, what is odd about all of this is that the programs are relatively simple, indicating the quick demon- stration of properties near the surface of the continuum, properties which still (like the Mandelbrot or Julia sets) produced unexpected results. Thus stated, there is nothing else to do but grasp the forms, introject them, proceed with analysis until the grave ices over, in summer or in winter, wherever time continues to exist. ___________________________________________________________________________ - Knot Totalitarian temptation of unblemished skin: The photographs in numerous sections of 1000 Nudes (Koetzle, Scheid); Julia Kristeva on the _clean and proper body_; Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies; material on Neue Slowenis- che Kunst (Laibach, etc.) in Amok Journal (Swezey); Deleuze and Guattari's BWO; Charles Peirce's sheet of assertion; the pure skin preparatory to tattoo; the classic manifolds of catastrophe theory; lampshades from the concentration camps: the violence of in/scribing; the _trap_ of pubic hair: Rebellion: the body that refuses to reflect! Resistance: The body that refuses to deflect as well!: The skin and hole that absorb; the tat- too that seduces; the piercing that ensnares: That drag the body _into_ and _within_ the gaze; that _hold_ the body no longer suspect: "Our mis- sion is to make evil lose its nerves." (NSK): Without nerves, the body has no name: Nerves are blemishes (although seductive for the torturer); and again "We never speak of life as such but of the commandment of life." (NSK): _What commands, totalizes. What commands is totality._ But: What resistance with the _technology, prosthetic and otherwise, of the body?_ of _exercise, the workout machinic?_ Which _expels_ the abject, blood, woman, other, jew, gypsy: _Capital punishment of the tattooed number, defenestration of the _name_ as well. They have killed the body: What do they do with the corpse? Tiffany: "Hovering above the glistening woman on the rowing-machine, I see myself reflected in the supple curve of her limbs." Tiffany worries about the ease of the mirror-stage. Tiffany worries the future. Tiffany hugs the laconic woman with a warm and tender hug. _The woman tenders Tiffany._ __________________________________________________________________________ - Stretch-Limo Discomfort accompanies the stretching of skin, attached or unattached, the skinning of animals, the disappearance of _sight,_ roar of pain; we belong to ourselves, we _accompany_ ourselves. The skin of the body is a closed manifold with a complex topology - but _closed,_ rounded; removed, the skin possesses edges, boundaries - it becomes an _object_ for others, one- self having disappeared in the act. Discomfort among the writing of this, I consider the smoothness of the letters, yellow on a black background, and Lauren Hutton and her guest in another background are discussing "sex- y" men who have their skins upon them, the expression "the whole package" summarizing this section torn from the conversation. The splayed skin dis-plays striations, convolutions, curled affects, memo- randa; the splayed skin invites warmth, wearing, tokens of death, fetishi- zations, dis-embodiments, hysteria. Why is this so difficult to write about? The skin is _my_ skin, torn from _my_ body; this is myself split, wired-up, sent elsewhere, placed in an economy of capital and flesh. My body succumbs to the discomfort; under the weather, it types with fingers trembling at the moment when the sym- bolic becomes real, when the imaginary haunts the devastation of organs. The devastation is confirmed by history, embedded. Beyond that, the hori- zon of the flesh is _such._ Silence greets the disaster. _________________________________________________________________________ From sondheim@panix.comWed Jan 10 04:16:39 1996 Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 04:12:45 -0500 (EST) From: Alan Sondheim To: -- Cyb , Fop Subject: secret desires (true and false, double texts forthcoming) ---------------------------------------------------------------- | ooo . | | oo o. o| | oo .o o| | ooo . o | | oo . oo| | oo .o o| | o . | | oo o.o o| | oo .o o| | o . | | ooo . oo| | ooo . | | oo o.o | | oo . o| | oooo. o| | o . | | oo o.o o| | oo .o o| | o . | | oo o.ooo| | ooo . | | oo .o o| | oo o.oo | | o . | | oo o.o o| | oo .o o| | o . | | oo o.o | | oo o.ooo| | ooo .oo | | oo .o o| | o . | | oo o.o o| | oo .o o| | o. o | | ooo . oo| | ooo . | | oo o.o | | oo o. o| | ooo .o | | o . | | oo o.o o| | oooo. o| | o . | | oo . o| | ooo . oo| | ooo . oo| | oo o. | | oo o.ooo| | oo o.o | | oo .o o| | o . | | oo o.ooo| | ooo . | | oo .o o| | oo o.oo | | o . | | ooo . | | oo o. o| | ooo . oo| | ooo . oo| | o . | | oo o.ooo| | oo o.oo | | o . | | oo o.o o| | oo .o o| | o. o | | oo o.ooo| | oo o.ooo| | oooo. o | | oo o. o| | oo o.oo | | oo .ooo| | o . | | oo . o| | oo o.o | | oo . o| | oo o.oo | | o. o | ___________ - Compilation I have been compiling on and off all day. When I'm not compiling, I'm working with configuring Netcom's Netcruiser, and when I'm not doing that, I'm looking for Unix programs on the Net. Actions account for little in the Cloud of Unknowing which, cushion-like, readies its skin in order to succumb to speech. Speech becomes writing becomes wryting through compi- ling; compilation is the _order_ of writing, borrowing and rooting through libraries standard and non-standard, linking files, splaying its legs and claws across generics. Crawling just beneath the surface, binaries gently resist penetration, open up to cacophony and peculiar obtuseness. Crawling is tethered by threads to phenomena elsewhere, acts of reading and writing game for the transformation. Statements such as ++i or x = x + 1 already hint at the operationalism which grants subjectivity its sense of power _before_ anything has actually occurred. One readies for the moment of movement. Here more than anywhere, the muscle behind wryting evidences itself; the generic file name a.out already takes on the characteristics of emission from aleph/alpha/the ox whose horns encompass the universe. _out_ is goal- less, meandering, primal plasma of programming, peripheral shadows outlin- ing the concrete world in remission. But the concrete world provides again the _skin_ of it all; just as programs write wryting, so wryting writes the world upon the world: The programmer hirself is the pineal eye sutur- ing the world to itself, sintering from the long-shot of the text. Think of it! Such thinking creates the Word, which has become the everyday act- ivity of computation on the way to something else. __________________________________________________________________________ From sondheim@panix.comThu Jan 11 15:15:15 1996 Date: Thu, 11 Jan 1996 15:15:00 -0500 (EST) From: Alan Sondheim To: -- Cyb , Fop Bcc: u , Judith , Lee Murray , Mike Metz , Peter Kelk , Steven Meinking , Kayo , Mona Afifi , Robert Pollard Subject: periodic notice The Internet Text This is a somewhat periodic notice describing my Internet Text, available on the Net. The work to date is divided into two sections: the Internet Text proper, and the alphabetic text; together they would fill more than 2.5 megs, and constitute around 1100 pages total. The Text was started two years ago ago, and has continued as an extended meditation on cyberspace. It begins with a somewhat straightforward theoretical approach, and then, calling on numerous ghosts (alive, quasi-alive, and dead), continues into the domains of psychoanalysis, interiority, subjectivity, narrativity, and so forth. My current writing, more distant in some aspects, nevertheless references back into the strata of the whole/hole, a work which for me is an entering into future issues of cyberspace and subjectivity in the next millennium. The changing nature of these email lists, cybermind and fiction-of-philos- ophy, hides the full textual body itself, since new readers will not be aware of its presence. For them the text appears fragmentary, created piecemeal, splintered from a non-existent whole. So this (periodic) notice is an attempt to recuperate the work as a whole, retard its diaphanous existence. And below is the introduction, updated. ---------------------------------begin file------------------------------- Internet Text Description 11/30/95 The Internet Text consists of 750 +/- sections written over a period of two years, a continuous meditation on cyberspace, emphasizing issues of interiority, subjectivity, body, and language. The extended range of top- ics includes Net applications and practices, the materialist "gristle" that can't be discarded in analysis. _Nothing_ is concluded here, although there are summarizations of key con- cepts, such as _rewrite, protocol, emission, spew, ghost, address, inscri- ption, fissure, and the uncanny._ There are also several sections serving as outlines or recapitulations of the "arguments so far." Recently, the text has dealt with issues of net sex, psychosis, upgrading, skin, addic- tion, and distributed entities. As in the work of Serres, "antiquated" texts are considered of interest theoretically; Nagarjuna's Fundamental Wisdom is an example. The Internet Text is in the form of "short-waves, long-waves." The former are the individual sections, almost all titled, written in a variety of styles, and referencing a number of writers ranging from Kittler and (Nicole) Brossard to Ellroy and Lingis, with Penrose, Kristeva, and Karl Kraus somewhere in-between. These texts are interrelated, interpenetrated; on occasion "characters" appear - _actants_ possessing philosophical or psychological import. They also create and problematize narrative substru- ctures within the work as a whole. (Such are Clara Hielo Internet, Tiff- any, Alan, Claire, Honey, and others; Tiffany, in particular, has become a site of learning, sexuality, mathesis, and semiosis.) The long-waves are fuzzy topoi on such issues as death, love, virtual em- bodiment, the "granularity of the real," and physical reality, which criss-cross the texts. The resulting fragmentations and coagulations owe something to romanticism, something to cognitive studies, but more to the function of sites or nodes on the Net itself. There is no binarism in the text, no series of protocol statements. On the other hand, virtuality is considered far beyond the ASCII text and GUI that are most prevalent now, at the end of the twentieth century. The var- ious issues of embodiment that will arrive with full-real or true-real VR are already in existence as embryonic, permitting the theorizing of poten- ial present and future spatialities and their interconnectedness. (Thus cyborg-thought is seen as roughly mechanistic in favor of future technolo- gies and the psychoanalytical.) The work often presents and stumbles over gender, genders and regenders itself; consider other-gendered personages replacing the ones described. I have no stake in them beyond my own desire, memory and circumlocution; others will do. Although there are faux-texts of writers such as Dickinson, Stein, and Poe, these texts are meant as partial transparencies. I do not mean to imply that virtuality is synonymous with masquerade or freely-given choice of identities. Almost all other references are accurate, referen- cing a wide range of writers and viewpoints. The resulting matrix, how- ever, is entirely my own. The Internet Text divides into fourteen files; there is also an index file to the whole. While it is best read in the order it is written in, certain early sections, at pains to establish a working vocabulary, are more terse and perhaps difficult than others; they may be skipped, to be returned to at a later date. The same goes for the few Qbasic programs and those sections which employ technical terminology (once again the gristle). (Note that the Text is continued in the alphabetic text, which contains files a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p and q to date.) Certain texts were written with Kim Mcglynn or Angela Hunter, and are of course as much their creation as my own. The entire work to date can be found by telnetting to http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html (including images and sound) or at: ftp jefferson.village.virginia.edu cd pub/pubs/listservs/spoons/cybermind-digest.archive/internet Some images are at http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ as well. Alan Sondheim, sondheim@panix.com, sondheim@netcom.com ________________________________________________________________________ The Real Skinny It is what is _done_ to the skin that frightens, carrying history with us, unable to be shaken off or ignored. Thus we become the books of our history, our faces and bodies tallying everything desired or traumatic, every moment of our failures, our falling. The skin weathers us; we are contusions of the real, microbial harbors. Worst of all, we're plati- tudes. In cyberspace, the skin is as smooth as the skin, translucent imagery reflected back upon us; scars never show, only inscriptive pro- cesses pushed to the level of hysteria: I'm here forever yours. Taut, however: what is done to the skin is the doing of it; separation between intention and fate, it is always stretched to the limit. It is the skin that speaks on the telephone, reveals itself on the video; it is the odor of the skin that occupies us. There is the pratico-inert of the skin; there are construct, abjection, and annihilation all at once. They're also nothing at all. They're construct, they're abject, they're annihilated. The skin always already partakes of the other; tickling, massage, itch- ing all contribute to presence elsewhere, conjuring or seduction. It won't leave us alone; it speaks from beyond, wraps us around ourselves. On the Net, it appears only as performative; in net.sex one _speaks,_ demands, presences, the other - automated arousal replaces the lightest touch with zero pressure. The keyboard is always the imaginary, plastics under control, beneath our control. Massaging as such never _takes._ It's the real that's the real skinny, surface area increasing in rela- tion to volume as the body loses weight. The real skinny is all surface, written upon, curled-up. The real skinny _things,_ sings, the body from without; the anorectic gathers the real around hir in signifying. In cyberspace, we're anorectic degree zero, destined towards death, already cauterized, lost to the meat of memory. ( There's no skin in cyberspace; don't even try to imagine it. The words are granular, positioned against all gravity, all feeling of gravity, by pulsed magnetic fields, electron streams. There is vacuum _in there,_ or at best, sterile atmospheres. No one lives within them; there aren't any parasites, oozing suppurations. There's none of the truth of the history of skin - good truth is hard to find, but when it's there, it's the real skinny. ) ________________________________________________________________________ - Lullaby For a brief moment tonight, I felt peaceful; I wrote, during an intermis- sion at an evening of performance, "For one brief moment in time, all the peoples of the earth talked among themselves." About six years ago I was involved in a psychologically abusive relationship; when I parted from the woman, all hell broke loose. I didn't see her, physically, until this eve- ning; N. was sitting on the other side of the room; the audience was lost in shadows... And we ignored each other. The performances were good; Ron Ehmke, whom I know from my stint in Buffalo, was brilliant. Buffalo was everywhere in evidence in the room. Later during the same intermission, after talking with Maureen, I began to read Running Linux (Matt Welsh and Lar Kaufman). On Friday, I compiled a talker and got it running on a local LAN without difficulty. Afterwards, when I came back to the loft, I was excited and couldn't sleep - I wrote: "Compiling the talker in the room, communication opened up immediately across feet, across yardage that would never be encompassed by vocals, already grunge rock filling the air. Performatives flew nude _presences_ in unforeseen spaces; this is the power of the Net closeup, flesh med- iated by bodies skewed on the imaginary in spite of the real everywhere at once. You, I, all were at once" and at this point I broke off, thinking about the _power,_ emptied of all force, everywhere present in my life. Back at the performance (at Dixon Place, totally recommended) I became nervous, even talking with Maureen, whom I have known for a long time, because of the _presence_ of the other woman; there was a party afterwards, and I decided not to stay. I was surrounded by ghosts, hauntings; I was inhabited off the Net and on it as well.* The presence was something that couldn't be deleted, but that's not the point - the point is that I found the world of linux, compilation, Net stuff in general, totally incomprehensible; I couldn't move from one to another environment with grace. Psychosis (which I have written about in this regard) was evident; it was as if I had a secret, and the secret, in this space of intense presence and presentation, was abject, sad, even tawdry; I felt crippled (with all the antagonistic stereotyping inherent in the word itself). Nothing mattered but the Ron's _speaking,_ the heat of the room; nothing mattered but the optimization procedures for gcc and whether -O6 was really equivalent at this stage of the game to -O2. I can't live like this! I do live like this! I can't live like this! Returning from Dixon Place, I logged in, cleared out the account, began this incessant TYPING... --------------------------------| *Tears came; nothing made sense as everything split. I felt hopeless. The only thing missing was rage. Walking in the snow I thought to myself, I alone am like this, and every one of my stories has another pulled behind it like some sort of mad relay circuitry. I describe this poorly; I am either half-dead or half-alive, and twilit, blind, I no longer tell the difference. ________________________________________________________________________ - Langue, lingo, lunge The terms become confusing. Ascii unconscious references the Lacanian/ structuralist notion of unconscious processes; defuge is concerned with a form of abject exhaustion. Neither prepares one for upgrading, almost symmetric series, recognitions, protocols, and the like. The theory con- stantly veers away from itself, occupying frameworks and bandwidth; in the meantime, compilation tends towards the performative. What of the nature of the uncanny, hysteric embodiment? And is power always relegated through one or another constricted channel? There doesn't seem to be any form of escape from violation fabric or web inversion; embodiment is always a contradiction, implying container and the thing contained, a condition of terminal decay. Interiority is a matter of gainsaying, and site/sight/ citation locates nodes against which wryting prepares for the presence of granularity, the obdurate. Plagiarism and recursivity document the move- ment across boundaries; packet control constitutes the true real subject with the clean and proper body within the domain of the imaginary. Address and recognition are hysteric as well, the failing signs reinforced as a different form of consumption is processed. Ghosts and black holes break down the mirror-stage inversion as skin becomes the literal matter of dis- memberment, first the production of language, last the body from the screen. Net psychosis _means_ what it says it _means_ and that is its def- inition. Power's in the interrupt, in the fallen. No idiolect conveys the barbarous; terms, spewed emissions, slip against one and the same. This is us, the extract from the real. Broken upon ourselves, we're thrust into any future. Time is eternal, space discrete, monotone. We're gone boys gone girls. We learn the _lingo._ ________________________________________________________________________