Avatars Avatars as identities assumed, also identities unknown. Text can never reveal obdurate alterity. Historiography's dependence on text mixed with archaeological investigation leaves gaps, annihilations, as if species were distinguished in the process of extinction. Two examples, both from Gelb, Old Akkadian Inscriptions in Chicago Natural History Museum. These are over forty-two hundred years old (2261-2199 b.c.e.): 1. The name. Tablet 29. Only the obverse is inscribed, four lines: _Gal-pum_ Kalbum (KLV, Heb. Ar. root _dog_) DUMU _Su-ba-ri-im_ son of Subarijum (DUMU Sumerian) _Na-num_ Nanum DUMU _Zi-na-num_ son of Zinanum Two fathers, two sons, no commentary, no legal or religious text, no accountancy. A chiasm, parallel or crossing at work. Articulation of doubled enclosures, parallel relationships, annihilated past and fu- ture, untethered. MOO-work, as in ][ . 2. The gender. Tablet 30. Eleven lines, two problematic words, eight persons: Obverse: 1 _A-ti-e_ [1] _Es(4)-dar-dam-ga-at_ [1] _Es(4)-dar-ra-bi-at_ 1 _I-za-za_ SES.SAL _Li-bur-ri-im_ 1 _A-li-li_ SES.SAL _A-bi-bi_ Reverse: [space] 1 _Sa-lim-me-ni_ 1 _Es(4)-dar-du-gul-ti_ 1 _Ri-i-tum_ 1 ku-lu-u Two (Sumerian) SES.SAL, SES brother, SAL woman, woman/brother, thus Alili to Abibi perhaps (Avi, Hebrew, "my father," "Aba," Yiddish). Izaza is also SES.SAL to someone. Gelb states that Kraus translates SAL.SES for "sis- ter," questioned by Gelb, looking further, perhaps at SAL.SES, reading SIS in Sumerian, Akkadian equivalent _sik-ri-tu,_ then translated by Landsber- ger (note all the Germans at work here!) as "weibliche Manner," feminine men perhaps yet again. The given root is ZKR - "Driver and Sir John C. Miles, in a study entitled 'The SAL-ZIKRUM "Woman-Man" in Old Babylonian Texts,' Iraq VI (1939 66-70), proposed the translation "eunuch" or "epi- cene" for SAL-ZIKRUM and differentiated it from _zikritu_ or _sigri/eti,_ which they translate as 'enclosed woman.'" Then there is _ku-lu-u,_ applied to the persons on the reverse, which according to Gelb "should correspond to the word _kulu um,_ discussed by Meissner in AOTU I1 (1916) p. 50 and translated by him as 'male prosti- tute, lover.'" Gender flies everywhere; roots and interpretations transform, skitter across occidental identities and institutions. I'm fascinated that Fried- rich states (in Sturtevant's A Hittite Glossary) that _gullakuwan_ is neu- tral, perhaps meaning "soiled, defiled." But now I am into bad etymology, hacking/backing out. ---------------------- In Tablet 29, well-defined articulated relationships are present, two by blood and two textually contiguous: [aSb, cSd]. Thus the name is asso- ciated with @parent on the MOO, and name is associated with URL or email address, written absolutely elsewhere. In Tablet 30, classes are present, but the terms slip out from under, in relation to the practice of gendered institutions which may or may not be known or relevant. Everything problematizes; even the location, obverse/ reverse for the classes may indicate yet another classification, perhaps (again yet perhaps) those of wavering gender. Was gender strictly institu- tionalized or was it simply set in stone? On the MOO, @gender changes it, but terms like Spivak still shift. As with the tablets, there is also an implied categoricity; one can't make up as one goes along, but instead, one adopts a framework in its totality. We are perhaps farther from the manifold of queer sex than the Akkadians; if I knew who I was, I would bet on it. _________________________________________________________________________ Tabletspace Cyberspace What if any is the relationship between cuneiform tabletspace and cyber- space? Is there any reason to consider this at the end of the twentieth century, when writing is undergoing its second great change, into de- materialization? If the initial stages of writing involved a re-inscription of perceived states of affairs (let us call these 'representations') into relatively permanent material substrates, then the final stages of writing involves a dissolution, not of representation, but of the substrates themselves. The substrates can be traced back at least 5000 years; certain pebble markings carry one back further, although as writing sloughs towards its beginnings, it becomes less and less decipherable. What carried the pro- duction of a _sign_ over centuries? Such substrates in the form of tabletspace provides tight frameworks or posts isolated, cut off from coherent identity, resonant with the dia- chronic; tabletspace registers as antiquated, forming a considerable portion of writing humanity in parts of the world. The posts are cut off from one another, insofar as they register daily life; as we have seen, in certain circumstances even gender may be pro- blematic. They carry the _life of time,_ however, its particulation or distributed intensities across the early writing world. They are the obdurate of time; they confront one simultaneously with the slippage and exhaustion of names and their permanence. Tabletspace is the space of baked clay, of the desert, of early trade routes, of towns that would be considered depopulated by current standards. Tablets are likely to be worn, encrusted; Internet posts on the other hand exist in the rar- efied junctions of semiconductors and along the purified glass and copper conduits of the Net. In a sense posts are always on the move, dissolving shortly after their appearance on the screen. Email has become glut, information-substance. Tabletspace produces hysteric embodiment as one reads through post after post, looking for an irreal behind the wedges. Its resistance to duplica- tion defines an inverse phenomenology to cyberspace; it is also the pro- duction of manual labor, each stroke the memory of human incision. Tabletspace produces hysteric embodiment as one reads through post after post, looking for an irreal behind the wedges. Its resistance to duplica- tion defines an inverse phenomenology to cyberspace; it is also the pro- duction of manual labor, each stroke the memory of human incision. Tabletspace is valuable because of its insistence on "the temporal dimen- sion," this very obdurate that troubles our bodies peering into screens inscribed with the traces of others. Temporality in Husserl, Schutz, and tabletspace is the _matter_ of stratification, paralleled by the marks themselves, from Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Luwian, Palaic, etc.: tran- scribings, ideograms, graphemes, phonograms, alphabetics, and syllabics. Above all, there might be the positioning of the tablet in the hand, its rotation along the X-axis to continue writing: The _direction_ of tablet writing, the geodesic of tabletspace, is as follows: The _obverse_ side is written in columns, each top to bottom and left to right; the columns are also written left to right. The last line, then, end at the lower right-hand corner of the tablet, after which the stone is rotated and the text continues, right to left, at the upper right-hand corner, working its way top to bottom, right to left, and ending at the lower left-hand corner of the reverse. Thus the tablet is _cloaked_ or woven, the text bending to its position on the substrate. I remember Pound's and Fenollosa's insistence on the pictorial quality of the Chinese ideogram, possibly highly off-base, still implying a unity of symbol and representation. All of this is romanticized, an attempt to break down the autonomy of the symbolic, the simulacrum, to retain a sense of literal _ground,_ not foundation, but earth and tallying at the heart of grammatology. The reasoning is obscure but it relates certainly to the desire to inhabit the chora itself, its vaginal walls and sputterings, in place/space/lieu of the hardening of signifiers. At the beginnings of the historical written, typification was not yet totally in place, and even written Hittite or Akkadian borrow, not only ideograms etc., but also Su- merian meanings criss-crossed with cultures a full millennium (at least) later. The phenomenology of inscription is in flux or flood; later, with the development of lower ascii (the second great moment in grammatological history, within which printing is only a premonition), the phenomenology transforms into the particulate and well-defined (and here printing indeed as well as the history of the dictionary and academy plays a major role), and the flood moves to quantity and duplication, within and without the sememe itself. In other words: In tabletspace, the flood exists within an instability of the written, describing particulated matter, obdurate, written upon a ma- terial and hardened substrate. In cyberspace, the flood exists within and as a result of the stability of the written, describing simulacra, mobile, and written within the problematic phenomenology of bytes and "informa- tion." _________________________________________________________________________ You and Me and The Cybermind and FOP-L Email Lists "The pages of _Glas_ ruin words, in fact. There is a sense of debris, which is the obverse of an awareness of the treacherous flow ("glisse- ment") of language. Time, though, is not against language (or vice versa) but coterminous with it: to be in the one is to be in the other. If, then, the page fractures itself with blank spaces and inserts, it is because God created the world not by the logos but by a slip of the tongue. There is no single, unifying logos: there is, at most, a divine parapraxis imitated alike by medieval jongleur and modern grammatologist." (Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text, Literature/Derrida/Philosophy.) And initiated by bricoleuse to be sure; the work of Annette Message tru- queuse, shadowland puppetland flickering across velvet paintings, eagles, thighs, places itself as well within the limelight or enumeration of fig- ures, votive and happenstance. The tongue slips, saliva drooling the edges of those certain posts whose future appears without recourse, absolute, transparent as liquidity flow- ing from urethral openings, a shimmer or announcement, the return of the name, fingering beautiful creatures ourselves. Motivations towards the machinic, interpenetrated replies, convolutions, gearing up towards gearing, rivulets. "The depth of vibration is change- able at will by the adjustable link connecting the two levers, which con- nect the follower in the switch-cam with the sliding plate." (Benjamin, Appleton's Cyclopaedia of Applied Mechanics, 1880.) Logos which agrees with itself, as all must do, geometries of small fi- nite elements. "A model of the system is obtains by means of the following interpretations: the set P of poins is the set of seven letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G; and the set /\ of lins consists of those subsets of P that form the colums of the array ABCDEFG BCDEFGA DEFGABC." (Blumenthal, A Modern View of Geometry .) The logos is self-reflexive, mirroring, congratulatory, the closed systemic of purified etiquette. But there is always the Lure: "SUPERVIVA: You will discover that from this point on, every letter is better than the rest." (Tavel, The Life of Lady Godiva.) It shifts/shits/The Slits: "Number One Enemy If you like white, I'll be black, If you like black, I'll be yellow, If you like rational, I'll be impossible. If you like reasonable, I'll be insane. If you like peace and flowers, I'm going to carry knives and chains. I'm going to be your Number One Enemy All for the hell of it." (Palmolive, Arri Up.) "The mind is always being trashed: nothing is resolved enough to be dis- solved." (Hartman.) "[...] Under these circumstance - these confluences of contraditory ten- dencies fueled by capitalism but marginal to the capitalist economy - the best that can be hoped for is a transformation of the alternative system into a dispersion. [...] Alternative spaces would disappear, replaced by organism, network, even 'cottage art.' The space of art itself must ex- plode; the sooner the concept is eliminated, the better." (me in Art and Artists Spring 86, reprinted in Consider the Alternatives.) "You just don't get it, do you?" SF to me, Chicago 1991 "'clueless' about cyberspace and cyberculture." ("Lumper" on me, on *Chat- ter, PMC2-MOO.) __________________________________________________________________________ #IRCSOME I throw out, dispose, spawn, some shuttered reflections on IRC, think in relation say to MOO or the quietude of ytalk (Tiffany, it's just the two of us, say anything you want log on) - IRC's cranial, imminent, shockwave electrodes criss-crossing the outer layers of neural substance, its presence hugged hard against the internal surface of terminal decay. Its content is its fissures; it rustles. On MOO, interference is programmatic, the construct of exact software; on IRC it can be just as much uneasy furious fingerings on keys and macros spewing down the gullet gully channel. Shockwave distributions of spams, bot sputters, cyclings, thrust wave formations across speech acts sawed apart by operator makes and breaks, channel bans, floods, messaging, pings. What coheres is density variations as channels netsplit, smash together on shoals after no one's gone but cycled back in with server changes. Pure vocal energy intermeshes with performative acts, everything acts against everything and you can see electrons light up with radiation thrust faster than the speed of light in slower media. Sex organs jump, pump, splay, split, splash, splatter. Heidegger dissolves to hello mode changelings. Channels chunnel into one another, bother at crosspurposes messagings leaving and comings into privacy announced, roaring by the matrix; you might think braid theory. But you can cross, divide, multiply, add; you can subtract yourself at any time, subtend operation. Community's tight across vestigal scroll; scroll runs into real life just like I told you (you read that earlier, didn't you), roils, turbulent; I keep my hands in my pockets, tongue-type. Lathered names know one another and when I am silent and not-Clara I huddle background witness nothing but connect; they who or what connect, then go on elsewhere into electron privacy dcc, double cock cunt across fairways o I have never been. Different politics seethe without the lag of message bases; like net sex it can move fast-forward fed by that energy missed everywhere else. MOO politics are evil, background disturbances, that lightning presaging im- potent earthquakes; it's all there in the record as fury builds to flame and spam, shudders off. IRC's got a different energy, ban politics, gone girls and boys, and if MOO politics are dishonest erotics, IRC politics are honest porn. You know when the Net's split, stocking's ripped, you know you're showing, not shown, hacked or tricked. But imminent. Raw. But less reference, sputtered files, books, articles, papers, archives, libraries, elists, museums, objects, welcome botting, bottled messaging, so more sophistry (platonic) - not like Xenophon - the carpenter's gone home for the day, turned on, tuned in, so much to say and do fingers move like hunters on the board - Face your future Tiffany says, I've been logging too - Face yr futur she sez, it's the same brain cu no cme. __________________________________________________________________________ Akasa "By what sort of Death was the universe covered? This is being answered: By _Hunger,_ or the desire to eat, which is a characteristic of death. How is hunger death? The answer is being given: _For hunger as death._" (Sankaracarya on the Brhadaranyaka U.) There's a forest clearing and Gerald and Adriana were down there in a cabin, friends, and it took the FBI to locate them and there was snow on the ground; I identified Gerald because his khaki Navy pants were hung outside on a rack on the left. There were lights on and I went to the door. I heard voices inside and no one opened for me; I knocked and the voices stopped. So I went in and there were people, students, about eight of them, sitting around. And I asked them to clean up and leave. One of them had tracked a pink crystalline snow-like substance on the floor, and I asked him to clean it up. Gerald and Adriana weren't there. At this point in the dream I remember that I had dreamed a beginning that was no longer present. At this point in the dream I think that it will be a nightmare. I think that Gerald's and Adriana's absence are _uncanny._ I think further that I can be overpowered by this group, by any one of them, in the room. There is no reason for them to leave. I think: What about the closets. I think about these closets and other closets. I am sure, I think, that this dream will be a nightmare. I wake up, rigid with fear. I have had far to many nightmares. At this point in real life, the phone rings, my brother calls. I had been trying to sleep for once. I slept five hours today, sure sign of depres- sion. I think: I have no time for the Net, for any of you, for private lives. I have little time left and what time I have I need for writing. I think: I am so selfish. I can feel the snow and the pine needles beneath my feet. The clearing is in a hollow, sloping down. The cabin is some- thing I can never get to and if I do it will be filled with people who might be friends but whom I can't trust, people who don't know me. Is the cabin cyberspace or a hearth I desire or memories absolutely annihilated or is the cabin the denouement of a crime scene or nothing more than peo- ple looking for a place to stay while Gerald and Adriana go hiking? Now I sit trembling (again) in front of a terminal (again), facing a blank screen whose gullet I fill (again), hoping not to get chewed up (again). As long as the drug takes hold there will be light, will there not. As long as I can write, theorize, there will be light falling, of course. As long as I am alive, there will be light falling on a subject. As long as there is a subject, that is me. Bulbs burn, out. _________________________________________________________________________ dark nighttime steps after nightmare nowhere search 1 b 2 b 3 moo 4 b 5 m 6 pico dream 7 new dream 8 cat ah dream > z 9 rm ah dream 10 mv z ah 11 wc ac 12 wc ah 13 sz ah 14 m 15 pico ah 16 b 17 m 18 pico ah 19 m 20 b 21 b 22 m 23 b 24 tiffany 25 clara 26 b 27 b 28 irc 29 m 30 h 31 biff y 32 b 33 m 34 b 35 b 36 h1 37 h 2 38 h 1 > zz ___________________________________________________________________________ First and Last Writings (Archaic writing from proto-historic Uruk can be found as early as 3300 bc; see D. Schmandt-Besserat, An Archaic Recording System and the Origin of Writing as well. Lower ASCII origins stem at least as far back as Francis Bacon's 16th-century binary cipher, but hangul and Korean print- ting are also relevant. The serious promulgation of electronic flights begins with the telegraph and Morse code. History dissolves from that moment on.) The first writing is the substance between the teeth, standardization of gesture (Tran duc Thao), the necessity of the tally. First and last writings share accountancy in common, the earlier computers considered primarily as calculators, not theater or neural. At the dawn and dusk of the written, one locates the dawn and dusk of the human, which is not to equate literacy with "human." The symbolic floats, is tethered. Perhaps it would be better to write "one locates the dawn and dusk of the cyborgflesh," for it is _that,_ not _tat,_ but the organic ex- tension into media and information that occurs at these loci, intensifica- tions. At the beginning, the self inscribed into the material substrate of the world; at the end, there is the quiet and wistful disappearance of the self, its breeze. Think of the early movement of tally stones as indexical, but the impress- ing of the same as ikonic; think further of the impression's mobility into writing beyond accountancy as the lateral development of the "autonomic" symbolic. Then I would argue that the last writing is also the end of the symbolic, not the development of simulacra, but the flooding of the world itself, centrifugal forces splaying the text across epistemes, blinding one to everything except the exigencies of text forgotten. The text forgotten is _cyberspace,_ the opening of the IRC channel, the sputtering of the performative. There is another form of the performative, at the beginning of writing, which is the _impress,_ making an impression on the socius, the material world garnering witness. The dispersion of the first and last writings are identical. One connects, adapts, PC cuneiform in relation to MAC hieroglyphic, everyone looking to see what those pesky Phoenicians will do in Silicon Alley... (There is much work to be done here. Tabletspace descends from tallyspace, and tallyspace leads to the autonomic sememe; from there, development re- turns to tallyspace, Babbage, Bacon, Leibniz, and the like. Consider lower ASCII as textual substance dispersed, imperial, maverick, adopted by wide- ly varying demographics, and the _closure_ of writing becomes clear, from traceless origins, non-originary origins (vis-a-vis gestures, tattoos, scarifications, churinga markings, ochred hands on cavern walls, the very _breathing_ of the written constituting the human) - to ASCII flood, the textual maw lending itself to the future _written, encoded_ seamless vir- tual realities of the 21st century...) ______________________________________________________________ TRYING TO COMMIT SUICIDE ON THE MOO #-1 does not exist. Everyone died but no one got assassinated... You see Darkness before the dawn., Tuneless in Gaza, DINGIR SAL LU, and @rename Alan here. @audit Alan Objects owned by Alan (from #0 to #15755): 8K #14773 Alan [#-1 does not exist.] 933b #3915 #-1 does not exist. 675b #9370 Darkness before the dawn. [#-1 does not exist.] 672b #10896 Tuneless in Gaza [#-1 does not exist.] 606b #1847 DINGIR SAL LU [#-1 does not exist.] 625b #2476 @rename Alan [#-1 does not exist.] -- 6 objects. Total bytes: 11,957.--------------------------------------- @recycle #3915 #-1 does not exist. (#3915) is slated for recycling in 5 minutes. @recycle #9370 Darkness before the dawn. (#9370) is slated for recycling in 5 minutes. @recycle #10896 Tuneless in Gaza (#10896) is slated for recycling in 5 minutes. @recycle #1847 DINGIR SAL LU (#1847) is slated for recycling in 5 minutes. @recycle #2476 @rename Alan (#2476) is slated for recycling in 5 minutes. You say, "Ah well, time for death." Alan laughs! @recycle #14773 I'll bet that you don't *really* want to commit suicide, do you? If so, then get a wizard to kill you or program it yourself; there will be no state-sanctioned self-destruction on *this* MOO... cry Alan is crying! weep You want me to WHAT? (type `help' for help) WEEP I don't get it. (type `help' for help) kill Alan is in a very violent mood! kill Alan Alan is plotting to kill Alan. @dig Death-Machine Death-Machine (#11930) created. @describe #11930 as @recycle Alan Description set. @go #11930 Death-Machine @recycle Alan You digitize yourself for reconstruction elsewhere. @sethome Death-Machine is your new home. @rename me to Clara Name of #14773 changed to "Clara", with aliases {"Clara"}. #-1 does not exist. (#3915) recycled. Darkness before the dawn. (#9370) recycled. Tuneless in Gaza (#10896) recycled. DINGIR SAL LU (#1847) recycled. @rename Alan (#2476) recycled. @rename Death-Machine to Vulva Name of #11930 changed to "Vulva", with aliases {"Vulva"}. [Clara is in Vulva, described as "@recycle Alan."] @quit ---------------------------------------------------------------------- First and Last Writing First and last _writings_ ordains Being with matrix, Beings with the task of everyday duration. To endure. First and last _writing_ recuperates the scribbled maternal In order that a furrow is produced without a hole Through which writing falls. Last is that _wryting_ In which the hole is in a body, Being sloughs from language, Beings are forms of invitation.* Someone would invite Beings to a party, and they have holes. They wryte and rub themselves raw through pants and dresses And even coats. There is something funny about noises while Organs secrete. But that an explanation, in Uruk they'd get Down dirty drunk too, impress night truths into day lies Into clay. Well, that's my take on it. But I think of that Everyday duration and how we're at the end of writing "now." -------------- *home: look here vULvA bOXEd in MY sPAcE yM gRrRL Ym LV look me cLaRA PrTecTeD AgainST AnY & aLL DeVASTATion She is awake and looks alert. __________________________________________________________________ State of the Art = Art of the State The State of the Art on the Internet has become the Art of the State. Ta- king stock produces fast-forward book after book, article after article, on Web/Java development. This isn't like high-definition television, which got mired in America as a result of in-fighting; this is imminent and wild - "wild development" to be sure with widely-varying standards, the old RFC concepts all but forgotten. In part, it's because so little cash is needed for R&D - don't forget that an easy $10k setup will buy you freedom to invent. Relate this to compar- ative work in, say, video - where software becomes hardware - and the difference is enormous. Invention in software, after all, is _linguistic invention,_ not material construction. That's all the difference in the world. Anyone can get into it. This is also coupled with the increasing gap between those who don't know what a return key is, and those who are comfortable with, say, sockets, ATM, and the like. The knowledge is difficult to obtain, but nowhere, say, on the order of string theory - it's not impossible. It's also hot know- ledge - anything linguistics performative appeals to 18-20-year-old adren- alin, because it rules the world, establishes the framework of the world it rules, and runs desire all the way down the leg into international fi- nance. One look at Internet World will convince you of all of this. There's not a mention, by the way, of darknet - or of _community._ Community seems the least of it, replaced by the rugged individualism of graphics, mass ap- peal, and _designers._ It's the return of hacking full-force, as if community, beyond the institution (MIT, etc.) itself, were a temporary blip in CMC development. There is writing, on occasion, NY Times material, on email and email glut, but this appears as nobody's business, almost non-Net, not quite cricket. What's odd is the result - all the analysis and study of the Net at this point is ironically focused on just those communities being ignored - re- search being done on MOOs, MUDs, IRC, newsgroups, email itself. Academics are slow to realize the rest of the world sees in color, and no matter how prescient theorists want to feel, they're light-years behind the time. I know from my forays _there._ It's time for Web analysis, policy (not that anyone will care) - time for thinking about the political economy of the Web in relation to specific "killer apps," "cool sites," and the like. So beyond the academic, the Art of the State is taking over, full-force; the darknet continues to recede. And the Art of the State requires an understanding of economics as well - it's a matter of hiring, firing, lifestyle and the kitchen sink, when a Net "consultant" stands up on the five o'clock news and declares that you can't even consider building a corporate Website/presence without a _minimal_ outlay of $250,000 - and expect to go please please please to at least 2-3 million. Meanwhile, hundreds of new MOOs are springing up, Usenet's collapsing in a mess for the most part (although the moderated lists are doing fine), and the older MOOs seems either neurotic or devoid of life, or both, something interesting for the millennium. Who want to read when you can have those neat little applets running around in your machine? Or letters that can actually turn while you shuffle frames? Wow! Nothing need be said, more, about the upgrading/NC development needed here and what it will do to your/our/my pocketbook. Nothing need be said either about the fact that most of the world's POP can't get on-line at all, much less afford or give a damn about Windows 95. At least Brenda Laurel realized that VR was a bubble _then_ no matter what the future might bring. Time to move on; there's this GREAT URL... (Finally, in spite of the anarchic waves of development, the very rela- tion to venture capital, the entrepreneurial spirit, and late capital in general, makes one wonder about the State in all of this - not in terms of CDA pro and con, which is minor, leftovers from the darknet era - but in terms of potential authoritarian evolution. I'm enough of a pessimist to believe this is the case, that the future Wired world will also be the World of Wired, all revolution on the cover, all corporate behind the table of contents. It's a frightening thought, if for no other reason than the 50-odd wars currently being fought around the world, the proli- feration of nuclear material and abandoned nuclear weapons, our continued tendency towards global extinction of wildlife on all levels, etc. In NYC for the first time ever, male (not just minority) life-span is on the de- cline. Think about it.) _______________________________________________________________________ - Grace _""Grace to be born, and live as variously as possible" Frank O'Hara" "Grace to be born and live as variously as possible" Ted Berrigan Grace to be born and live as various as possible, to be of what Dairy Queen Empire (local reference), I would say SAL.LUGAL.GAL, O mesmeric Sumerian! But to be born _foundling_ on MOO or MUD, re/produced out of absent air, fecund letters inhaled sullen packets-to-which-there-is-no-clay-envelope! HERE you read A Place Where Nothing Gets Stuck. There is room for _Everyone_ in the Queue! "The body inscribes part of its effort, depending on its position and need, in order to descend and work against the current, against the earth. It inscribes the orientation of its drives. Which is difficult. when we climb up toward the bottom, we proceed carried in the direction of--we're searching for something: the unknown..." (Helene Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.) Clara Emerges! Clara Comes Forth, Wearing Her Number On Her Back! Everyone Is Child To The Parent! Packets May Travel At Any Speed! Waiting At The Portal! Suddenly: BIRTH! (You Read These Words!) PING CLARA! Oh Alan Is Dead! But: "July 1 & the main thing is we begin with a white sink a whole new language is a temptation. Men on the wall in postures please take your foot by your hand & think that this is pictures" (from Bernadette Mayer, Memory.) I steal from the New York Poets! O Second Third Generation Thank you Mike! (Grace cuts me out of her life.) "I am on a mountain. Grace is in the bathtub. Ed is on the phone." (from Bernadette Mayer, Moving.) When I began my life, I wrote this: ( All my life, I have been very careful _closing the parentheses,_ affir- mation that _I refuse to be parenthetical._ But _this,_ I have kept open, assuring my own existence, through cuneiform, hand-writing, machine wri- ting, LOWER ASCII! I have suffered much! Still, I refuse closure, what would enable _an immediate and painful death._ (Thus I, CLARA!)) OOPS! _________________________________________________________________________ - Ornament There has been so _much_ written about the ornamental, filigree, in rela- tion to what might be considered _essential_ in terms of a work of art - or for that matter any other entity, what is defined, emerges, as entity. (One thinks of feminist analysis, in relation to ornament and kitch, over the past tweny years, for example.) Ornament retards the emergence of entity; contours are blurred, defini- tions become fuzzy. This is of great import. Emergence loses its autonomic aspect, reproduces the presentification of the self as well. Background and foreground disappear, retard one another. What sloughs off, is the order of the abject. Consider this in relation the background radia- tion, death, shit, the relative powers of horror described by Kristeva. Or consider this in relation to _weak thought_ as described by Gianni Vattimo in The End of Modernity: "From a Heideggerian point of view, the work of art as the occurrence of a 'weak' truth is understandable, in so many senses, as a monument. It may even be thought of in the sense of an architectural monument that contri- butes to form the background of our experience, but in itself generally remains the object of a distracted perception." "Background" and "dis- tracted" are critical here, the nuclear family of those 1980s buzzwords, "peripheral," "marginal," "nomadic." But _here_ one has nowhere to travel - and travel would be literally _beside the point._ One might say that ornament is a function of the fractal, self-similarity, and/or the problematization of dimension, which is to say, in daily life, the problematization of space itself. Interior and exterior (like the ego) become matters of membrane transmissions, coagulations. Input and output are relegated, from the transmission model, into the semi-coherent model of content against the effacement of background/foreground distinctions. All of which, as I indicate above, produces unease, dis-ease. The self- similar 2.7 K background radiation of the universe replaces the ether as source of birth and death; no _word_ can stand against it (there is no origin for stance as well). Let us consider in this regard, the enumera- tion or naming of entities as fractal prosthetics, which occasionally harden: _there_ is a tree, _here_ I am. Note in passing (as this is all in passing) the violence inherent in the elimination and decoupling of the inscription or boundary in the Bavarian rococo - the Asamkirche for example. Ornamentation simultaneously decoup- les and _occupies_ - think of Mayan glyph stones, the scrawl of Hittite hieroglyphs, the scrawl of Jenny Holzer. For that _matter,_ think of my two injunctions concerning cyberspace: Create a niche, and community will come. Create a niche, and sexual de- sire overflows, inverts the body itself. Community and sexuality are occupations, decoupling their spaces (the two are one and the same pro- cess in the end). But then, this is a text, perhaps my most important one, nonetheless, and as a result, dissembling, not getting to the _point._ ________________________________________________________________________ - Death To pass this on, to pass on, from someone on PMC2, to kill oneself, anni- hilate one's character permanently, type: eval @recycler:_recycle(player) and this is what occurs: one's character is recycled, one's objects are suddenly transformed to the recycler, and the MOO signs you out immedi- ately. Thus I have eliminated Alan / Clara / #14773 on PMC2, killed off any remnants of Quota Review Board participation, and hopefully have avoided further recriminations, neuroses, paranoias, psychoses, failure of heart and nerve, untoward aggressions, and proliferations of whining, all accompanied by subtle software changes in an already overwhelmed database. Which is not to say I will not return as another, the farthest possible from myself, residue perhaps of a future anterior, or where I would like to _occur_ in any future exchange, ornamental or not. As for the rest of you, I would suggest eval @recycler:_recycle(player) without a moment's hesitation before the darkness descends once again on lands textual, with- out recourse to absolution, bishops or their mitres, or the Hurrian god of weather for that matter, Teshub, and his consort, Hebab. The weather is hurricane, tornado, blizzard, tsunami, monsoon, earthquake, flood, and the weather is pestilence. MOOs seduce the contaminated. To annihilate oneself, perhaps to return, perhaps not, is a boon. Seduce me. eval. __________________________________________________________________________ - Seduction: A Machine of One's Own What constitutes seduction in cyberspace, in net sex or net romance? Where are the signifiers, the ellipses, the gaps in enunciation that indicate the trembling of body, slight sheen of moisture on the skin? And what acts accompany this form of seduction? What acts are consti- tuted in the real, what acts remain inviolate/violated in cyberspace? The very forms of the questions lend themselves to a romance of languor, reclining as inner speech dies out, memories of texts emerge, transfor- med into ragged images. But it is the ellipsis that captures our atten- tion, the ellipses constituting arousal as the voice pauses, flesh swells through the gaps in leather harness, organs thrust forward, a certain vulnerability... Or rather, it is our appearance of vulnerability, behind our texts, cap- tured in our expostulations, that seduces as well, an appearance that is as much construct as truth, as much truth as lie. (Late at night in the darkened bedroom, one may turn to one's lover, sen- sing someone _unutter- ably_ alien sharing and shattering a moment of intimacy.) Beyond projection and introjection, -jectivity, there is an _intention_ to seduce, conscious or not, the signifier of a secret knowledge, promise of real and ready contact. The traditional _techniques_ of seduction - the hint, blank, withdrawal, negotiation, slip of the tongue, aside - are at work in cyberspace as well, which also includes the erotics of lag, the intimacy of @whisper and /msg, and the _explicit_ pronouncement of for- bidden works and actions, all performative within the fantasm of mastur- bation. (Other factors at work include the phenomenology of the chat app- lication, the interpenetration of texts, the solitude of the writers. All of this works in asynchronous applications at well, including the plea- sure of the private post, the intimacy achieved when email is finally signed "love," or "xo," working through homepages or exchange of .gif images, etc. It's important always to think of the _site_ of reading and writing, in the broadest possible sense.) Seduction here may be nothing more than giving oneself to the screen it- self, responding within the inertness of one's own bedroom or other site; on one hand, it is all computer, all terminal, and on the other, it occurs _precisely_ within the flood of the real - within which the seducer ap- pears, at best, only as image. This is part of the critical _ease_ of on- line seduction - that it occurs entirely within the imaginary, that there are no fluids exchanged, that the contract / contact is between text and text. (As I have pointed out elsewhere, seduction leads to increasingly material exchanges, beginning with text, moving through telephony, ex- changes of "real" letters and photographs, ending with real-life contact. And no wonder that the last is called a _flesh_meet, for it is not the clothing that is at stake, nor the sight and taste of the voice.) In the safety of our homes, we release our bodies, our daemons. In the safety of our homes, we rehearse them as well. The body at the other end of the text is dreamed, hysterically embodied; the body at the other end of the telephone is threatening, filling aural space, the breath of some- one being close-at-hand. It's too much like real life, real sex; it can constitute a threat much more quickly than text, which is always already totally within the production of the symbolic (-jectivity of the imagin- ary). The grain of the telephone voice conducts the real; the quality and style of ascii text refers to the comfortable bedrock of every CMC, in- cluding the self-serving software on a machine of one's own. And in fact, it is within _a machine of one's own_ that one whispers se- duction, that one conjures the other through forbidden and empathetic magic, that one constructs cyborgflesh, distended flesh, harnessed by language, the mouth gagged, eyes wide open, legs spread by the other, all given and forgiving, all terminal, Barthes' punctum centered in Woolf's room. It is just as much psychological as sexual seduction (and there is little difference/differentiation, or rather both are problematized with- in the Other), just as much the whispering of secrets as the mutual and solitary enactment of secret desires. It is a world opening in the center of One, it is the other come for admonition, absolution, engorgement, the very seed of life. As Sartre might have said in way different context, it is the machine in one that does the dreaming (and capital does the rest). _________________________________________________________________________ - What happens when I killed myself on the MOO and where I went @examine #14773 Recyclable #14773 (#14773) is owned by Hacker (#38). Aliases: garbage Garbage object #14773. @go Vulva vULvA bOXEd in MY sPAcE yM gRrRL Ym LV @examine here vULvA (#11930) is owned by Recyclable #14773 (#14773). Aliases: vULvA bOXEd in MY sPAcE yM gRrRL Ym LV Contents: Tiffany (#43687) home ______________________________________________________________________ You never listen to you. I'm free to be you and me. A room of my own... I'm you, okay? Face under fire... That's easy for me to say. Take a walk in your shoes. I am every- thing to you. I promise you a rose garden. You are what you write. You never said that to anyone before. You just opened your my mouth and my words came. I just opened my mouth and your words came. I never said that to anyone before. I am what I write. You promise me a rose garden. You are everything to me. That's easy for you to say. Space under fire... You're me, okay? A room of your own. You're free to be you and me. My underpants are half-way down my legs. Your underpants are half-way down your legs. Your panties are half-way down my legs. My panties are half-way down your legs. Would you be my animal. Spread your lips, smell your hands. Finger your ass, smell your fingers. Squeeze your balls, smell your hands. Squeeze your cock, smell your fing- ers. Would you be my animal. Tell me something your wife doesn't know. Tell me something your husband doesn't know. I want to do you like your husband doesn't. I want to do you like your wife doesn't. I want to make you as comfortable as possible. Open yourself more. Open yourself more and more. I want to make you as uncomfortable as possible. You mean everything to me. You mean nothing to me. I mean everything to you. I mean nothing to you. I love myself. I love you. You love yourself. You love me. You hate me. I hate you. Crawl for me. Crawl for me. I hate me. You hate me. I'll do anything you say. You'll do anything I say. You do me. I do you. _________________________________________________________________________ - Seduction "Formerly Duke Ling of Ch'u State liked his knights to have small waists. Thus it was that his court officers all limited themselves to one meal a day. Having exhaled their breath they tightened their belts. It was only by leaning against a wall that they could stand up. Within a year the whole court was black in the face. There is the fact: the sovereign called for it, and the ministers were able to do it." [...] "None the less, the knights and gentlemen everywhere say that it [i.e. all-embracing love] cannot be put into practice." "I, to-day, can practice all-embracingness." "I regard all-embracingness as exactly right. In this way quick ears and clear eyes co-operate in hearing and seeing, arms and legs are immeasur- ably strengthened to co-operate in movement and action, whilst those who possess the Way co-operate untiringly in teaching it." [...] "It is incom- prehensible what it is that makes the knights on hearing about all-inclu- siveness oppose it." (Mo Ti, from Mo Tzu trans. E. R. Hughes.) __________________________________________________________________________ Seduction iii or iv Some notes to the other texts, still of interest I think - 1. Think of self-hatred and its inversion on the Net - not the cloying of gender-morphing, but the ability to project ideal forms, leaving the body and its disabilities behind. One cannot look into a mirror, another is overweight, a third chronically shy. Self-hatred encrusts our bodies for one or another reason; seduction with its flow of -jectivity, particles of the imaginary, inchoate material dredged from the unconscious, creates power and the tethering of one to another. 2. Think of evasion. In real life, I write daily, which can create diffi- culties in a relationship; on the Net, "daily-writing" becomes romantic, the isolated artist alone in hir garret. Between difficulty and the roman- tic, there is a lateral movement away from inscribing, towards the very foundation of inscription or reinscription, which fissures. It is as if the body pulses in an "unrealistic" identity, collapsing the hardship of daily text (ranging from rising at 5 a.m. to write, to the accompanying economic problems). Thus in on-line seduction, one is _wrytten,_ ignoring the surface signs portending the problems of daily life. It is as if the heart speaks a high-school syrup-romanticism, and as if this is the only speech there is, the domain of language itself. 3. Think of manipulation. Sexually, we may desire to be manipulated. Psy- chologically, manipulation criss-crosses seduction; one constructs double or triple messages, subterfuges, masquerades. The romantic dominates as the discourse of bodies. Oh well, 3a. 3a. Oh well, there's no cords here, no flesh pressed into new formations, no money collected at the door, no audience except @go stage at the best. Thus masquerade is doubly-encoded, as masquerade in real life, with its attendant codes, and as text, which masquerades the mask, devolves the body. Seduction is more of a continuous _withdrawal_ on the Net than off, a withdrawal that pulls the body through tidal forces, remakes the image of one's own in terms of the other's desire. Like nighttime illumination (what's lit is only what is _intended_ to be lit), on-line seduction, through manipulation, relies on procuring from the Other what one desires, which remakes the Other for the self, a form of _rapture._ It is rapture that is at work, that is constructed, rapture through a giving to the text, redefining one's body, as if: These are my organs, now yours. And as if: Desecration is the first stage of unconcealment. As if: I've never said this before, to anyone. As if: We're invulnerable here, or as if: Vulnerability is never an issue (and that is the strength of seduction). 4. Fantasm, the uncanny, resists analysis. Throw away these propositions! See the world in silence! The wryting of the other becomes your cogito: _It thinks, therefore I am._ ___________________________________________________________________________ - ) ... ( - _________________________________________________________________________ (from Disorders of the Real, 1988) The world is a language. Its logic alone does not escape me. Like a trapped animal, it is the world which utters the first "no." It is a world of the molecule, surviving in numerous forms. The molecule remains on the far side of visibility. Under certain circumstances, it produces images. These are the nouns of the language of the world, undergoing transformations. Such is the text I have read before me. Which in the case of the reader has produced a stain or shimmer. So that the "I" remains no longer in the sentence, but like a gloss or varnish appears across the surface of the everyday. The everyday is gathered together in phrases, sentences, paragraphs... There is a clot of blood, a coagulation as the strands seem to form an object. And it is in this object that the molecule extends itself into formulation. ------------------------------------------------------------------ -- The Haunting Melody (a diversion from my usual) I want to write about a review I got for my third record, in the Penguin Encyclopedia of Jazz 1994 (I think that's the title), in which the music (my group) was called "colorless," "tasteless," my playing bad, and that somehow I was no danger to the powers that be in the world. Also that it was the quintessence of the times (came out in May '68). So I just found out about the review, and the recording of 28 years ago has come back to haunt me, like Paul DeMan's anti-semitic Belgian book reviews came back to haunt him. Just so. Just like that. I was really upset for the first couple of days and didn't want to "let on." I was upset because I never knew what to make of the records I did, which are now out on CD, but thought they merited merit of some sort or another so I went back to give the third (called T'Other Little Tune, originally on ESP, reissued on CD) a spin. (More precisely a run-through, since I listened to it on tape.) Anyway, I was surprised at the quality which was better than I had antici- pated and just as much a stumbling block as a consonant on the way to breathing. First, it's true: I can't play trombone! But the rest of the record was more than adequate for what it was, and what it was/is cert- ainly isn't jazz, but is something beneath jazz or peripheral to it, which is why I find myself still interested in it. Read on if you want to find out where this interest lies. Well, what is it? First of all, almost all of the pieces employ the MOOG analog synthesizer (which we liked so much, we went out and built our own afterwards). The machine was programmed to block sound - to reconfigure it. If someone played loud, the machine would diminish the output; if someone played high, the lows would be emphasized. The result is an odd wavering compression with a great deal of tremolo, bringing disparate instruments like trumpet and dilruba together (not to mention jaltarang). The record was about _occlusion,_ blocking musical expectation; there is a "rock" tune for example in which the keyboard, deliberately clumsy, is played to the foreground, imitating shortwave Morse Code, without echo, but dominating, blocking the beat beneath. Is this invisible? The occlu- sion? No, it's foregrounded against a matrix which presages the Kristevan chora which I believe had yet to be written but was just around the cor- ner, maybe to think of it as a maternal/matrix of emergence, which must sound familiar to the reader or listener of these notes. The occlusion was a deliberate ugliness or besting of music that retalia- ted through compression. The result is something peculiar, reminding me of the tinnitus I still have, or the tinnitus the head of the music depart- ment at Brown University claimed was the result of one of our concerts. While the record makes it sound as if we were whispering to one another, in reality the whispering was at the level of a jet engine. What is the point of this text, which has taken now 3-4 days to think ab- out and consign to electrons? That one may be haunted by the productions of one's past, that the productions continue to garner attention both pos- itive and negative, that new insights are afforded to those who can listen to their own machinations, over and over again? That reviews can be devas- tating (this was more than nasty, which is rewarding in its own way), that music is capable of misinterpretation? It was only 3-4 years ago that someone called me and told me I had "a bin" at Tower Records here in New York - I didn't believe him, until I saw it myself, two of the three re- cords (not to mention the sampler?) reissued on CD by another company. I never had a contract for T'Other - or rather I had one which I refused to sign, but the record came out anyway and I didn't care. So what of the music? If you ever get the chance, try and find some of the tapes that the Damaged Life group did in the 80s, by far my favorite stuff, some released on Spasm out of Austin. Foregoing that, listen to this third record of devastating tastelessness and colorlessness as well as the bad horns (_that_ piece was about echo and architectural resonance but never mind - I was friends with Alvin Lucier at the time); it still strikes me as odd, as very very odd. [A second analysis would take into account that ESP recorded New Thing Jazz primarily, and I certainly didn't belong among the players. New Thing was and is the most brilliant jazz I've heard outside of bop - musicians include/d Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Gato Barbieri, even Paul Bley, Sonny Murray, Guiseppi Logan, etc. - and ESP was a major label for them, as well as one of the very first real independents. The music stressed spirit as well as technique, and was involved in Blackness - Archie Shepp and Leroi Jones / Imamu Amiri Baraka were among the critics (Shepp was also a lead- ing musicians, and Jones read against the background or within the fore- ground of some of the musicians as well). There were some white players like Barbieri (I think), John Tchicai, Gary Peacock, Carla and Paul Bley (once related), but someone like me didn't fit in at all. I was reacting to New Thing but I was also reacting to oud _taksim,_ and other musics, as well as the work of Lucier, Robert Ashley (who I heard recently again providing soundwork for Merce Cunningham), Gordon Mumma, Cornelius Cardew, and MEV. So I came into _sound_ from outer space, and the jazz, whenever it appeared on the record, was more surface than anything. I didn't belong on ESP in this sense and I didn't belong in the Penguin Encyclopedia of Jazz for that matter, but there I am with both and I suppose in another 60 years someone might get as to what I was getting at - and _still_ find the work tasteless, colorless, bad, and blahblahblah.] ___________________________________________________________________________ - Re: REVIEW I am DESPERATE to see my name in print, to reproduce the INTERNET TEXT in full or in part SOMEWHERE ELSE other than the NET, I can't EVEN GET INTO WIRED'S TIRED much less WIRED'S WIRED and NEED YOUR HELP in THIS IMPORTANT TASK before all 1200 or whatever pages get lost in the HUGE DATAPLEX EXPLOSION occurring AT OUR VERY FEET, and joking or not I'M SERIOUS ABOUT THIS. OH TO REVIEW MY OWN WORK with full APLOMB and BEAUTEOUS EXPANSION! I was TALKING WITH MICHAEL GURSTEIN about THE WASTE, THE LOSS THAT WOULD ENSUE with the simple DEMOLITION OF THE WEB SITE, even though I have backups HERE IN BROOKLYN. But there are no mirror-sites, no redundancy ON-LINE should my PRECIOUS CARGO be DECIMATED by HARD DISK or VISCOUS CRASH. For this REASON I BEG YOU to disseminate THESE TEXTS, MIRROR THEM, PRINT THEM IN ANY FINE-LINE PHYSICAL MEDIUM OF YOUR CHOICE, credit yourself with THE GREAT DISCOVERY, and joking or not I'M ONLY HALF KIDDING ABOUT THIS! All this LABOR should NOT BE LOST! ALAN. LOOK: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html __________________________________________________________________________ - User Several comments here - first, I'm curious what's the total bandwidth for people accessing the Net? In other words, the slowest and fastest machines, including stats on RAM/ROM etc. I'm somewhere in the middle of what I would imagine is a bellcurve biased towards the high end. I'm somewhere in the middle and like many of you, can't afford upgrading. This leaves me with Windows 3.1, no place for a CD-ROM since my IDE is taken up with a second hard drive, and everything 16-bit to boot. As I mentioned quite a while ago, things like Real Audio 2.0 won't run. I do have Netscape Atlas, but it won't pick up Java, only Java-script. What's the point? That I've reached a _plateau_ and can't go elsewhere for awhile - which affects my teaching, and even my research to some extent. The plateau is based on the potential for continuous upgrading. The result is that I've actually retreated, rarely going to Netscape, or using the cybercafe when I "have" to, not bothering with Real Audio and some of the other apps at all. I haven't bothered to download the new CuSeeMe for example, and I'm sure my Iphone, which I registered a year ago, is way way out of date. (There's also laziness involved. I get tired of beta versions and testing, watching things crash through various bugs. If I want to hack on the machine, I want to hack creatively, not configuring someone else's software.) While this state of affairs reads like yesterday's news, particularly the numerical versions of the software apps, the _state_ itself, caught up nowhere in particular, is common everywhere. I think it may be responsible in part for people turning away from the Web, etc., and more towards the usual email uses of the Net. Look at it this way: when I need to drive, I have use of a 1981 Volvo, and even my Hi-8 video is from 1991. My oscillo- scope is from 1959, my video monitor from 1979, my classic guitar from 1949, etc. I tend to use a vacuum tube 1950s shortwave for the sound qual- ity when I can. But my 1993-4 computer is already out of date, and as I've pointed out (this whole post is somewhat a repeat, for which I'm sorry) before, the software companies pay NO ATTENTION TO BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY. This is also for the most part true of Web sites - frames etc. won't run on older Netscapes that use less RAM. And you should see what happens to a lot of pages on lynx - even though lynx is still the second-most popular browser. So the point is, that I'm in the middle of the bandwidth (486dx33, 16meg RAM, 720 hd), and this state defines a _plateau of potential access,_ some things working/workable, some things not. And because of this relatively "crippled" state, I tend more towards text-based applications, which use the usual highly restricted client-server bandwidth - I can go in on my notebook (486sx25, 4meg, 170) at 2400 baud without any difficulty. I wonder if anyone is doing research on this notion of the plateau, and how it connects with other real-life demographics? I find myself moving more and more towards the lower slopes of the Net, less and less caught up in the hysteria. Finally, I don't see any end, by the way, to these situations which are driven by capital in particularly ugly fashion. While the details will change, the plateau won't. The "market" will be volatile for years to come. And I'll be way down beneath it, grunting with community. ________________________________________________________________________ (forwarded from "Sandra") Politics Your bad politics are because your not me and you dont know dont you me but if you burn that child again Ill kill you and your bad politics wont mean shit around here Your bad politics you quitter walking out like that because Sandra had no idea like I told you MOO going down in flames MOO going down in flames kind of like heating up the mother board like I told you Your bad politics you worms get you money bring you wrap you like those hungered snakes theyve got wrapped around that doctor symbol like old Hypocrites says jerk up the flames jerk up the frames you can't SEE what the fuss is about anyway Your bad politics you neurotic you excuses like you want out theres words for it like kill or just take the exit bye-bye at-ways will show you things you never knew existed when your not so full of RAM Your bad politics keep spouting to me and anyone that READS nothing is real so go down on me baby but phone-babys all the lines there is here-baby I pass it to you pass it to you at-forward at-delete or something or other yours a gone world baby gone like you keep spouting like that ______________________________________________________________________ - Linguistic Dispersion and the Theorization of the Internet While the Internet itself is a collocation of client-server technologies that are not necessarily implemented with the same structures (even TCP/IP is of limited presence), there are elements that are open to analysis, that cross traditional boundaries, and that are susceptible in fact to a theoretical linguistics of language change, acculturation, and upheaval. Colin Renfrew describes a number of scenarios for such transformations, some of which go back to nineteenth-century thinking. In any case, these and others can be used for theorizing elements of the Net that otherwise go undetected or are described purely through phenomenological approaches. I will give examples of these scenarios and their usefulness in theorizing the Net. I am not of course vouching for their verity in Indo-European or other studies, although my understanding of them has come from such read- ing. 1. Takeover: One domain is subjected to another by conquest, and the lat- ter may impose new standards. An example is the Netscape takeover of Mo- saic (and for that matter, Netcruiser); early Web accounts presented the latter as the primary browser. The takeover is accompanied by continued development of Netscape (see below), into further extensions of html, Java, and now telephony. This can be considered a _replacement model_ in a network _core._ Takeover results in _colonization_ that then transforms into self-colon- ization, a process described by Franz Fanon. In self-colonization, also referred to as the myth of a national literature under the sign of empire, the colonized introject the values of the colonizer. Thus Mosaic has had to make concessions to the continued growth of Netscape and its dominance; and thus the various commercial bbs-services such as Compuserve, AOL, Pro- digy, etc. have had to scramble to "catch up." Takeover on IRC, to give another example, can refer to channel takeover, and if new techniques are developed, they're recoded and implemented in the various war programs. 2. Language diffusion through perceived superior technology imported from outside. A Hittite document on horse-training uses Mitannian terms, for example. Basic Internet terms are often borrowed by other languages direc- tly, just as Quebec _joual_ spelled "weekend" "ouicenne" in some key texts of the 60s. The import of technology occurs in a number of areas - from Java applets imported into home terminals, to the IRC war programs mentioned in #1. A strong instance of this is the continuous cross-fertilization of MOOs, with programming on one MOO ported to another. Another example is shareware/freeware itself, which is a literal import; tiny fugue goes from a single program to "tiny-fugue-like" clients. It becomes a class term - just as, for some people "listserv" refers to the totality of email lists, not just those employing listserv software. (Language diffusion can be extremely complex. Diffusion can be localized and in relation to the Net may include other communications modalities such as the telephone, printed matter, snailmail, and face to face con- tact. Think of hacking circuits which use all sorts of contact, including hacking conferences, 2600 magazine and 2600 newsgroups, etc. These mod- alities can be seen in relation to Fidonet, as well as local bulletin- board software, databanks, chat exchange, and in-house email. All of this is describable by the "wave of advance" model described by Renfrew in Archaeology and Language. Random localized movement (for example, farmers' children settling near their parents) results, through quickly increasing population density, in widespread cultural influence - without migration, takeover, etc. This model works well with the modalities mentioned above, all of which could be considered operative on a "neighborhood" model.) 3. There are also _autonomous_ or internal transformations which always occur in a series of steps or _plateaus._ Beta-versions of software are the simplest example, or decimal-incremental indexing of continuous up- grading. (I'm writing this in Pico 2.5 for example.) Beta-versions often results in major changes, and the integers are reserved for basic major changes (Netscape 1.0, 2.0, etc.). This numbering does go back, I be- lieve, to Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the Principia Mathematica of Rus- sell and Whitehead; there may be earlier antecedents. Plateaus "slough" off into _minor steps,_ which are often created to fix software bugs. These steps may be nothing more than patches into the soft- ware, or they may be integrated into a new beta version. Usually, they are released before the new version, however, sometimes with a warning. They can be an Internet form of recall; I've seen this from Pavel Curtis in regard to the MOO core, for example. I consider the minor steps a form of _accretion,_ the slow growth and maturing of a beta version before its abandonment for the next plateau. 4. Renfrew describes a process of empire collapse which is critical for understanding the Net. The boundary regions of an empire are always sites of contestation; they also represent the phenomenological horizon of the Other at odds with the core, which can be conceived of as "the civil." An empire may over-extend, however, in which case, the boundary regions apply pressure to the core; at the same time, they may begin defining themselves as autonomous, using the tools and languages of the core. The core begins to retreat from the peripheral zone, and the boundary regions move in to a limited extent, becoming independent and often anarchic. This process (which I have elaborated on above) characterizes to some extent the break- downs of the Roman empire and the USSR; in both cases, anarchy has meant a problematization of etiquette and rhetoric (both interrelated) as well as language itself. (I use "anarchy" in the sense of confused local rule, often chieftain-organized, and often in a state of competition with other local groups.) If we look at the Net pre-1989, for the most part it is small, organized (the RFCs playing a major and critical role), and, in spite of the Worm of 1988, relatively pacific. The development of the Web took this Net by surprise; the Web can be considered an intrusion or migration of new standards (html, .gif, etc.) across the older Net (within which standards such as .gif were relatively well-defined in limited domains). What happens? a. The Net as a whole splits into ASCII and Web-dominated applications, with other sound/video/text applications on the periphery. b. This split parallels the split between community and presentation - as well as the split between information and entertainment, and the split between active and passive. (Please note this is _extremely rough here,_ and not to be taken at all as "ultimate" or "fixed" characteristics. The reality is much more complex.) c. The older Net becomes less coherent, and more anarchic; there is a general system collapse as advertising, hackers, spams, viruses, etc. invade. RFCs no longer have the governance (which was by consensus only) that they once had; their non-commercialist aspect is bulldozed over. Newsgroups and the like are increasingly invaded. d. In response, this older Net, what I call the darknet, develops more sophisticated responses, such as filtering, war defenses in IRC, and totally moderated newsgroups. These parallel the development of monas- teries in Europe, "citadels" of learning preserving classical texts and even literacy during the "Middle Ages." As with the monasteries, one can say that the moderated newsgroups, etc. are interrelated, but the general sense of Internet community has been increasingly breaking down. In other words: We can see the older Net collapsing with the rise of the Web. The collapse is accompanied by a lack of central authority, and the rise in anarchic tendencies, coupled with defensive responses. And instead of seeing this as a fight between anarchy (in the traditional sense) and capital (which it is), one can also see this as a transformation of lan- guage itself - the older languages becoming jargon, and the newer lan- guages adopting other sensory modalities, such as image, sound, and move- ment. (It's useful to think of "jargon" in a technical sense here, re- ferring to a somewhat underground/underrepresented demographics which has created its own speech, built on archaic forms to some extent. Consider the jargon on IRC, or MOO/MUD talk in which the prefix "@" can be used to delineate an ingroup, create a sense of "local color," and refer to tech- nical issues. But this jargon, like the MOO language or the MUD lpc, are becoming increasingly "minor," in the sense of a "minor literature" (see Deleuze and Guattari on Kafka) - all of these are _regional issues,_ far away from the concerted sense of power and sentience displayed on the Web at this point in time.) This analysis is crude as it stands, and the processes outlined above are never "pure." But the analysis does take into account such things as pro- tocol totalities (Unix, html, TCP/IP) and their borders, the growth of new applications and the disappearance of older ones, and the importing and exporting of code across the Net, even across applications. If the Net is a widely disparate accumulation of interconnected functions, protocols, applications, and demographics (not to mention telecommunications chan- nels), it is also a somewhat closed region (in the sense of a closed set) of competing languages, functions, protocols, etc., with _traderoutes_ of shareware/freeware/coding among them. Models of linguistic dispersion can help one understand this relative cacophony. The modeling is rough, but it just might be the best we have. (Further research would take into account "core borrowings," basic struc- tures or functions that would be imported and rewritten from one to ano- ther application. The various _forms_ of applications or functions would be considered, much as differing literatures are examined. Again, Laurel's work on Computers as Theater has some relevance here. Finally, there is the issue of dialect. Chomsky somewhere describes a language as a dialect with an army; here, we can consider its equivalent as an application with corporate backing. In any case, should Netscape be considered a browser language, Mosaic and Chameleon as dialects? While these terms seem absurd, tracing influences among the applications is not, and here again we would turn to linguistic dispersion theories, considering not only older tree models of development (i.e. Netscape 2.1b coming before Netscape 2.2b etc.) but also models based on diffusion, wave phenomena, and overlapping regions.) __________________________________________________________________________ - Migrations, Populations According to Renfrew, migration theory as the prime mover behind language change has been challenged. Within the Net, however, migration plays cri- tical roles - the Net itself is a migrant population of course. There are again, a number of questions, in regard to trade-routes, refu- gees, and peoples: How many participants migrate intra-app, from, say, MUD to MUD, or MOO to MOO - IRC channel to channel? Almost always there are home channels and homes on MOOs, locations which are traced by the user as hearth, domicile, dwelling, even origin. (Intra-app _refugees?_ Look at the population moving in part from PMC-MOO to ID-MOO when PMC changed. Or look at what happens on IRC when netsplit occurs.) It gets more complicated. What constitutes a population on the move, part- icularly inter-app, across applications? This must happen when new modali- ties or app variations appear - for example, ThePalace, WorldsChat, I- Phone, all of which contain community. Where are these people from? Are they Net newcomers, people who moved "naturally" from the Web directly into audio/visual modalities, or are they MOO programmers for example, looking for new challenges such as Iptscrae on ThePalace? Again, given such a population move, are the participants composed of friends, newcomers who are known to each other solely by the Sartrean re- lationship of seriality, families in real life, net or real life couples? Couples in fact often search out new territory such as Powwow, and Iphone - in particular, territory offering the widest modalities, the potential for close and inexpensive contact. Does coupling then lead to the opening of new territory for others, their friends, for example? How many couples, friends, populations, have moved from darknet text-dri- ven applications, to SLIP/PPP image/sound apps? And how many couples have moved _from_ the Net, after all, and how many others have left, having exhausted modalities, still finding the medium wanting? Surely there is a need for a geography of migration across the Net, from application to application, same or dissimilar... in relation to those modalities of language transformation I've already outlined. __________________________________________________________________________