-


Some Dialog on the Way Towards Self-Hatred, Construct of an Ego


-You're afraid of men.
-I'm afraid of getting too close to men. They seem to want something
from me, do you know.
-They want something from you.
-They want to take me over completely, you know.
-Why are you telling me this.
-I can trust you. You're not like them. You're not like those other
men.
-I know.

-Do they make you shy or something.
-Do they. I don't know. I mean, I'm shy. I know what I want. I want to
decide if I, you know, want to get married. Like I get offers.
-You get offers.
-I get, well, an offer, you know. When I want to. I get nervous, what
they want. Not shy, you know, nervous. What they want from me.
-What do they want.
-You know, they want me, you know. Not like you.

-You're shy of men.
-What I have to say, you know. Like who I am. I need something, you
know. Like when I want to be alone. They want to take me over.
-Take you over how.
-Want, you know, things. I'll decide when I want to.

-You are hiding behind something.
-Just don't like crowds. Too many people. When I'm back here, you know,
by myself. I can do what I want to.
-I don't expect you to go out anymore.
-You don't. You want to go out with me.
-No just that you're hurting yourself I think. Alone.
-I get things done when I'm alone, you know. When I'm out I get nothing
done. I learn nothing.
-Hurting yourself, I think.
-Better than I was. You should have seen me then. Better than I was.

-Are you afraid of being unhappy
-I like this, you know. Nothing around me that matters this way. You
know, it's the same thing. What has happened and will happen, you know.
-Too many years like this.
-You know you don't see me. You're a good friend, you know. Not like
them. They seem to want something.
-They seem to want something
-Yes, they want something, you know. You don't.

________________________________________________________________________


Fucking


Is fucking information? Certainly, there are sensory modalities involved -
scent, touch, sight, sound, taste, all of which play into neural net-
working; there are also the usual bodily somatic responses. But I wonder
if it is possible to map these, vis-a-vis teledildonics, and I suspect
there is a limit to information, not only in terms of bandwidth, but also
in terms of temporal "windowing," i.e. mapping the internal body pathways
and their delay-patterns in relation to input and output. I would think
that fucking would map _only_ onto fucking, and nothing more. This fasci-
nates me, one way or another, because of the horizon of cybersexuality
which is brought up in so many discussions, as if intimacy will eventually
come the way of the virtual, be brought into the (literal, catastrophic) 
fold. 

The discussion is related to Penrose et. al. who consider consciousness 
and other higher-order functioning of the mind to be inherently quantum 
oriented. One might think no farther, however, than a multiply-layered 
manifold with waves spreading and interacting across the surface. 

The discussion isn't trivial. Fucking is one of the most intimate phy- 
sical acts humans are capable of. The Net is tending towards increased 
bandwidth for aural and visual modalities; to the extent, for example, 
that hearing occurs through registration in the ears (low frequencies 
also register elsewhere within the body), it should be possible to 
eventually program binaural input with a high degree of versimilitude. 
Sight, of course, is another matter, and even binaural recordings fail to 
take into account variegated rates of transmission through different 
areas of the skull, brain, and flesh. 

Suppose, however, that complete aural-visual bandwidth is achieved, that 
body-suits are perfected, that molecular synthesis includes the possi- 
bility of taste and odor, that these may be triggered "accordingly." I 
would still question whether fucking is information, whether there is an 
excess, quantum or otherwise, based on wavefronts throughout the body 
(i.e. information carried by neurons and other sensors).

There is also a question here as to the nature of information itself, 
which has been debated forever. Here, I mean primarily is fucking quan- 
tifiable, that is, able to be placed within a digital database in one or 
another form, and able to be transmitted in and out of the database. 

And there is also a question as to what constitutes fucking, since (let 
us consider only male/female for the moment) penetration by two other- 
wise bound and gagged bodies is entirely possible, and certainly that 
would take considerably less effort to simulate (it already does). 

Never mind the bullocks.

_______________________________________________________________________
-


The Loneliest Text


The loneliest text in the world announces itself, expects and garners no 
response, like so many others. It stands in for itself, for all those 
others of which there is no account, which have been lost in the archives 
or worst, abandoned entirely, invisible, violated without a murmur or 
other sub-text, other presence.

The loneliest text in the world expects nothing in return; read or unread,
nothing makes a differance, it leaves no trace, not even defuge announcing
its already tired presence.

The loneliest text in the world was lovingly brought into existence, each 
word caressed upon the birth of each word, only to be abandoned, control 
x, only to silently end up, packets, splattered nowhere across the wires, 
garnering no response, or in return, no other alter, no other presence.

The loneliest text carries its history, messages of beauty and import, 
messages of travesty and desperation, tragedy and dissolution; it lies 
fallow, outside of all time and space, losing itself in the memory of the 
writer who entered letter after letter, thinking each word, speech in 
return, weaving such a feeble presence.

The loneliest text is this text, lost in a world of noise and confusion, 
time and space filtered through dim membranes, cells coagulating around 
othered, emptied cells, forgetting for a moment, for eternity, for all 
time, forever and ever, the slightest vestige of its presence.

__________________________________________________________________________

-


Differences


Sometimes the simplest ideas take the longest time to seep in; sometimes 
additional information is necessary. Years ago, I was interested in 
difference equations - fascinated by them in fact; more recently, I've 
been interested in the phenomenology of iteration, i.e. where one has
f(x) => (x1); f(x1) => f(x2) and in fact f(x(n)) => f(x(n+1)). Clearly 
each of this is a production depending on the series, and f itself can be 
considered a generating function. So this leads to a conception of mathe- 
matics, from a phenomenological viewpoint, as time-dependent, i.e. one 
establishes a series of discrete temporal intervals, t1, t2, t3, etc. and 
at each turn of the "clock" the generating function is activated. Note 
that _nothing_ occurs between such intervals, i.e. t2 - t1 is empty. 

What I failed to notice, blindsighted that I am, and what is pointed out 
in Kocak, Differential and Difference Equations through Computer Experi- 
ments, is that the series f(x(n)), f(x(n+1)), etc. is constituted as a 
series of "equal" intervals as well, a series of differences. The trails 
left in some programs then are trails of equal steps, and out of them 
chaotic behavior is constructed. For example I've been interested in the 
difference equations x1' = x1 - cos(x2) * b, x2' = x2 + sin(x1) * b. The 
results, plotting them in two dimensions, are stunning. 

In any case, thinking of the trails as atemporal tracings constituted by 
equal differences results in the notion of a transcendent structure, back 
to a form of Kantianism I'd suppose, as opposed to considering them as 
patterns of growth, etc. It all depends on the viewpoint. What emerges 
also from the book is - given that it's written in 1988 - little comment 
on chaos or fractal theory, even though examples of the gingerbread and 
henon equations are given. I was surprised to notice that a ball bouncing 
on a periodically vibrating table is subject to strange attractors.

Anyway to summarize this sad tale: I'd always assumed iteration was temp-
orally based and constructed, for no reason at all. It didn't "occur"  to
me that the construction-presentation was a result of computer calcula-
tion, i.e. needing f(x(n)) to produce f(x(n+1)), but that beyond this, 
there is no reason to assume that anything is present other than a fixed 
structure of differences. This relates of course to the cardinal/ordinal 
phenomenology in the philosophy of mathematics.

Enough! Computers have led me astray!

_________________________________________________________________________

-


Dissolving


One reads William J. Mitchell's City of Bits, Space, Place, and the
Infobahn, against Anne Fausto-Sterling's Gender, Race, and Nation, The
Comparative Anatomy of "Hottentot" Women in Europe, 1815-1817, and against
Carol Groneman's Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexua-
lity, both in Jennifer Terry's and Jacqueline's Urla's Deviant Bodies; and
against that of the fourteenth century The Voiage and Travayle of Sir John
Maundeville, Knight. All of these present dissolute discursivities: the
inability to classify Sarah Barton on sliding scales of constructed races
and humans; the problematic of nymphomania in the 19th century, and the
fantastic/uncanny reports on races, women, men, through travel narratives
in close-to-medieval Europe, Africa, Asia.* The City of Bits relates the
difficulty of the interpenetration of city and cybersphere through a ser-
ies of binary oppositions that turn out, themselves, to be false, and
dissolute in a somewhat similar manner. Instead, the model, as elsewhere,
is that of local territorializations, temporary circumscriptions, coagu-
lations, membranes. These hold, I believe, within the other domains as
well. What of it? 

Concepts and categories are becoming more fluid; categoricity itself may
fall by the wayside. This is no light matter; the metaphysics of Stefan
Korner become an issue of concepts. The question moves from the concept to
the nature of circumscription. At one point, I defined inscription in
terms of such qualities as maintenance, embodiment, linkage, representa-
tion structure, legitimation structure, impulse, and field of abjection.
Now I put forth the questions again: What is the nature of inscription and
circumscription in cyberspace? What is required in terms of maintenance?
Is there anything other than temporary identities, softwares, communities,
applications? These categories themselves are mixed, and mixed in among
themselves. 

For one effect of City of Bits is a sense of exhaustion, and this not just
the result of something new coming along which will be assimilated in the
future (for one thing, the noise in a contemporary urban center creates
higher levels of stress and anomie, even among those born within it). The 
exhaustion arrives with the constant necessity for reterritorialization, 
for the inhabitation of situations which are always already destabilized.

Some of the pairs in City of Bits are: Work / Net-Work, Department Stores
/ Electronic Shopping Malls, Trading Floors / Electronic Trading Systems,
Banking Chambers / ATMs, Schoolhouses / Virtual Campuses, Bookstores /
Bitstores, Brains / Artificial Intelligence, Muscles / Actuators, Nervous
System / Body Net, Contiguous / Connected, Narrowband / Broadband, Syn-
chronous / Asynchronous, Banishment / Sysop Blacklist, Territory / Topo-
logy, Jurisdictions / Logical Limits, Enclosure / Encryption, and Face-to-
Face / Interface. Almost all the latter terms reference delocalized space
and time, continuously upgraded software, electronic investment, variety
of sites/applications, and increasing computational power. So the _third_
question arises, now, and in the future: In the next millennium, how will
one cope with this global destructuring? Don't forget it will be accom-
panied by increased gaps between haves and have-nots, and so forth; the
resulting global stresses, if nothing else, will be tremendous. 

-------------------------------------------|

Surely these discursivities are the result of partial information, the
emergence of new information and communications technologies, the
projection of desire into the uncanny - all characteristics, in fact, of 
Internet communities, and the City of Bits.

__________________________________________________________________________

-



States of Affairs


In relation to Heidegger, can one talk about technology as referencing
_the course of things_ (as opposed to an analogy based on cyborg/prosthe-
sis)? The viral aspect of technology, its interpenetration, its doubling
within the real, parallels the simultaneous growth of organic viruses, the
planet heading towards the double cusp of plague and pure virtuality. As
the organic sloughs, decomposes, transforms into the intermittent, so vir-
tuality coheres, composes and constructs, transforms into the redundant. 

Nonetheless this occurs beneath the sign of plasma, lest one forget - that
the planet is in a potential well of momentary relative stability and not-
hing more... 

(I would not place technology within Being or beings; I would place it
within the construct of the _things themselves._ That is, construct is
always already technology. I would not place technology within the pros-
thetic, nor would I insist on a nature/culture dichotomy - not only
wouldn't I know where to draw the line, but the inscription itself onto-
logically wavers.)

See Heidegger's Identity and Difference:

"Let us at long last stop conceiving technology as something purely tech-
nical, that is, in terms of man and his machines. Let us listen to the
claim placed in our age not only upon man, but also upon all beings, na-
ture and history, with regard to their Being. 

"What claim do we have in mind? Our whole human existence everywhere sees
itself challenged - now playfully and now urgently, now breathlessly and
now ponderously - to devote itself to the planning and calculating of
everything. What speaks in this challenge? Does it stem merely from man's
spontaneous whim? Or are we here already concerned with beings themselves,
in such a way that they make a claim on us with respect to their aptness
to be planned and calculated? Is it that Being itself is faced with the
challenge of letting beings appear within the horizon of what is calcula-
ble? Indeed. And not only this. To the same degree that Being is challen-
ged, man too, is challenged, that is, forced to secure all beings that are
his concern as the substance for his planning and calculating; and to
carry this manipulation on past all bounds." (Trans. Stambaugh.)

(But Being is not challenged, neither one nor the other is challenged, or
rather, the Other is always challenged. And I would question whether tech-
nology is in fact manipulation, rather, again, than a state of affairs,
that is, always an interpenetrating circumscription, construct, process of
emergence. In this sense to talk of the prosthetics or uses of technology
is precisely to talk of beings; to talk of technology is to talk of Being.
And is the challenge that of a Being who is challenged, i.e. handicapped
or thwarted precisely to the extent that it is not Being but emergence it-
self? Which hopefully is not to argue for say a Whiteheadian process meta-
physics, but instead to deconstruct metaphysics and categoricity in favor
of emergence, or to comprehend phenomena as emergent, information all the 
way down - although information which may carry scars, wounds, virality, 
death and its simulacra.)


__________________________________________________________________________
-


My You, My Net, My Stockings


My current issue of The New Yorker is a Women's Issue and it comes with an
ad for ALLURE from Chanel, Impossible to Resist, and there is a page that
folds out, there is a page that folds out, and in the crease of the page,
in the corner of the crease, there are these words, ...stroke inner fold
on pulse points, and I do on my shaved skin, on my shaved skin, and per-
fume releases itself, perfume floods from it, and I am flowing with vir-
tual you, I am coming with virtual you, and I touch my skin you are my
skin and I touch my perfume and you are my perfume and I turn ever so
slowly, turn ever so slowly, across the bed, turn faster now, almost but
not quite as in dreaming as in sleeping, and the perfume leaves its stain
on the sheets, perfume leaves its stain on the nipples, across the chest,
and there is a crease in the bed and there is a bed that folds out and in
the corner of the bed there are these words, and I can't read them, virtu-
al you, and I can smell them, virtual you, t, u, v, virtual-u, x, y, z,
your equations in six unknowns reduced to five, your smell on my eyes, my
ears, my throat, perfume sheets, perfume calves and pages, perfume text,
all I reach for in the morning alphabet, all that floods this, flooding

_________________________________________________________________________

-


SEAR: Spew, Erase, Assay, Release


I want to write about the project I have been carrying on, the writing of
a (continuous) text, called for lack of a better term, the Internet Text,
and available at the URL that accompanies my signature almost everywhere
I go/write. I have been wondering whether this meditation, more or less
continuous, produces any effects in cyberspace other than to assuage my
own ego, whether it's not, in fact, a signifier of my own virtuality, my
disappearance behind a certain foreclosure of writing. Certainly as some-
one said to me recently, it forms a punctuation in the midst of posts on
both Cybermind and FOP-L, but the punctuation is intermittent and hardly
creates discussion, nor, do I think, does it direct or intervene discus-
sion. 

Instead, it continues on its own, building on what, for the reader, must
be a fictitious past; no one reads _all_ the posts (and probably few will
read this one as well). Yet without this past, without the return engen-
dered, the text would have to begin all over again with each new instance,
much as if a 19th century serial novel proceeded by creating one first
chapter after another.

The risk, for those who don't go to the Internet Text as a whole (and I
assume no one does for that matter), is that text is out of con-text, 
creating either a sense of obscurity or dullness; what is the point, for
example, of correcting something now at time _y_ that I may have written
at time _x_, if no one else has noticed? What sort of totality am I pla-
cing the texts within, if I alone am aware of this? And such a totality
clearly takes on the character of _psychosis._

The strategy to avoid this is to assume an uncanny or imaginary audience,
one which engages and critiques the text at each and every turn, one that
in fact interpenetrates it. But such a fantasm itself requires a consider-
able effort to maintain as a (circum)scription of the w/hole, an effort
that's not without its own psychological cost. 

The result of this travail is that the text exists within a dreary suspen-
sion. It's awkward, inoperable; it belongs nowhere. It's not publishable
in its entirety (which would run over 1200 pages), nor piecemeal (since
the parts are interrelated), even though a number of articles have been
taken from it, by hands other than my own. It's also not publishable in 
an edited version; I've attempted to reduce it (with help) to a form more
suitable for print, with no success. 

And even the form is continually ruptured, with dialog, script, programs,
poetics, theory of all sorts, narratives as well - so that it becomes, 
not formless, but suspect of form, almost substance-like, a roiling of
philosophical, literary, and psychological issues. Each of the individual
sections, for that _matter,_ is dense in itself; the weight of the pro-
duction appears to increase without bound.

Again - it's not as if any conclusions have been reached. Certain terms
and concepts have been developed - ascii unconscious, defuge, construct,
emission, inscription, representation, etc., and these have been reapplied
into and within the descriptive apparatus. While this constitutes theory
it hardly constitutes an orderly progression; it's both a new and/or dif-
ferent mode of theorizing, and an absurdity, a work gone out of hand, in
fact a form of _spew._

I characterize _spew_ as an emission of the inchoate, a dribbling of coa-
gulations (related to ego-constructs, etc.), abject ecriture of the body,
incoherent maintenance of inscriptions. Spew is also desire thwarted, 
failure of the prosthetic body, detumescence; it is nomadic, not in the
sense of situationism, but in that of concrete poverty, of conclusion, of 
capital even to continue. It is blocked, dammed, gathered; it roils as 
turbulence, as the equations I occasionally describe also roil.

Spew is hardly _there_ for the subject, the reader, as well. As individu-
al texts, it becomes a displaced pebble-architecture, weir-grating. With-
in the contexts of the texts' appearances on "their" email lists, they
are objects for deletion, not catalysts for meditation, debate, reply.
They're too rounded for that, too emptied of entrance, simultaneously 
dammed and damned.

So the writing is void-writing, as in the sense of writing void on a 
check, avoidable writing, writing into the void; likewise it is abyss-
writing, abysmal writing. I would that were it delirious, it would then
bring forth an _act_ of reading, that, if it were the symptom of psycho-
tic production, it would nonetheless bypass the same in favor of the 
other. But none of this seems to be the case, and perhaps the texts need
tendenz towards retirement, towards a closure beyond the Net 1-14, beyond
as well the alphabetic texts, already a through t, midway through u. 

The ritual of self-publication, placing the files one after the other on
the URL, proves unsatisfactory as well; what is the point of this act
carried out every two or three weeks, without end, for over two years to
date? Spew knows no boundaries; there are none from within, and everything
turns cancerous, stillborn. Everything is dead.

Thus a time appears when in fact I have less to say, when already a cer-
tain lid appears in the sky, heavy with viscous fluid, coating, flooding,
the landscape with the transparency of glycerine. My mouth and lungs are
coated with molasses; I choke on unimaginable sweetness, engorging text
and texts, section and sections, paragraph and paragraphs, down to the
poor shapes of the letters themselves. There's no dawn in my world - if 
I've learned anything, it's that. And with this broken communication -
broken among the texts, broken as spew, broken with audience, broken with
publication, broken with form, broken with continuity and content - with
this vomit, disgorging, I can hardly call it a day.

ii

Normally, I would have stopped here. But I think to myself: And what if
this _is_ an end, the spew drying, coagulating as I have said that it 
would? The entire text suddenly becomes irrelevant, as if it were rele-
vant in the first place; it gains a date and a time, gains a location and
a system, an entire taxonomy, of attributes: it's _there,_ as if something
had been said, after all, but something that is now ended, completed, and
finally, furtively, discarded. So it must continue onward, push itself
once more into the light, the latter sections bringing the earlier into
the self-same bandwidth, even plateau, of misplaced temporality. But then,
I continue to myself, it can at the least be slowed in its pace, the vis-
cosity increased, not in order to rethink or reinvent sections, but in
order to devote my time to other projects of writing and thinking. Doesn't
this become absurd, pretentious, a creation of a whole _economy_ of thin-
king, as if the time I have at my disposal is not only limited but meas-
ured? Still, since it seems both necessary to disinvest, release, and
at the same time, tether the work to the present; since it's part of my
own psychosis to continue speech yet not in speech's absence; since I
insist on a certain defeat of order paramount on the construct of my or-
dure - since all of this together and separate, since thought is already
in the process of dissolving the image of the body, I continue through
transparency, posting on occasion of posting, something on the order of
_touching reminders,_ engagements now and then, as if I were to be mar-
ried on the _morrow._

(It's all "as if," "still," "yet," "nonetheless," it's all me me me. Yet
there's _no face to it,_ as if there ever were. A text in subjunctive 
form.)

_________________________________________________________________________