Tsunami





I am writing you in the midst of the onslaught of logouts, cancellations, 

packet-debris spewing haphazardly across the screen, storms of commands 

untended; I am writing you against all odds, quickly, before the knock on 

the door, before the final silencing. 



This is a message whose purpose is a slice breaking ground and protocol, 

holding the self-same door apart/in departure from itself, from the frame.



It is the door bolted from the frame.



It is never a moment of truth, but a moment of the implementation of 

power: leverage.



The screen closes like a low horizon, close to the ground; ordered 

lightning constructs the text, clears. It is a forgotten ground: nothing. 

A farewell always obsequious.



But I am writing you in the hope of the text, the hope of speech, breath 

forced into the play of symbols. But I am writing you in the midst of the 

onslaught of logouts, cancellations, the debris of the symbolic, every- 

thing you might make of this.



__________________________________________________________________________





Poetria Nova, L'Indice:

 



"Flames waken in response to the bellows; the crude metal is buried in

fire; tongs transfer the heated mass directly from fire to forge; the

mallet, as master, deals blow after blow, and with hard strokes chastises

the metal; and so it does what he wishes; it draws forth a rounded hel-

met, useful counsellor for the head; or it generates a sword, legitimate

fellow for the side; or a cuirass makes its appearance, friend of the

body; together with these are born a greave, for the leg to don as shield,

and a spur to incite the horse, which the ankle adopts as its own; and

other shapes of iron which the craftsman's skill fashions as armour.

Objects so unlike in appearance, arms of such varied shape, exhaust the

iron. The mallet curbs its blow; the forges regain their breath, their

course accomplished; the work comes to rest at its goal, and completes the

task prescribed." (Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, trans. Nims)



"The flames are thoughts, some flames, others otherwise, produced in this

fashion as inscribing on stone, or in air; the bellows are those events of

daily life; the crude metal is electrophoric energy generated from the

mines of the earth; the forge is etiquette itself; the mallet, the fingers

moving across the mobile keys of the board, doing what the mind commands;

the rounded helmet, description and careful reply to one who has already

spoken; the sword, a friend of desire or the greave; a spur, that which

arcs across sea and land and peninsula, taking the short way, not the long

way around; nor those shapes of armour, which are a knight's dream, at the

lest that of the pleasant squier. Nor do the fingers preclude the

exhibition of the mallet; the dark forges produce that which is born to be

spoken and remembered; man and woman rest at the end of a day's goodly

work; and the task has spoken itself, pro nomine, pro se, neither for one

nor for the other." (Commentary, Geoffrey du Langage)



"When you transpose a word whose literal meaning is proper to man, it 

affords greater pleasure, since it comes from what is your own. Such a 

metaphor serves you as mirror, for you see yourself in it and recognize 

your own sheep in another's field." (Geoffrey of Vinsauf, op. cit.)



________________________________________________________________________





One Who is Insane Espousing a Philosophy of Cyberspace





Are Net-relations always contractual? They proceed from and return to, 

the Law. Determined by headings and protocols, confined to the appearance 

of normative communication and lag-times, what sorts of transformations 

occur in real life?



Decompressions the other way around: From RL to Net, there is always an 

expansion, the granularity permitting the construct of an open field with 

memory. The post becomes a form of breathing.



And compressions: From Net to RL, always this constriction creating acts 

of reading, re-reading, recognitions (which are cauterized), miscrecogni- 

tions (which may or may not appear as such). The opposite of Popperian 

falsification, truth falls precisely into the open field, dissolves; 

falsehood has no existence whatsoever. 



Thus everything on the Net is true, and this is a fundamental fact of the 

Net. What is meant by true? That there are protocol sentences which can 

be assigned the value T at time n, T at time n+x, x variable. That all 

sentences are such sentences, since all sentences are imminent and since 

all sentences have internalized referents at best (which are the ghosts 

in the machine, the uncanny-imaginary component of confined ontology).



If everything on the Net is true, then there is no circumscription or 

delimitation. _Entities_ and classes do not exist, because inscription/ 

bracketing require classical two-valued (or fuzzy) logics, negation, 

difference, determining one thing from the rest: differance.



I claim there is no deferring on the net, no deferral, no deferance. I 

claim further that there is no difference. If there were difference then 

the operation of neitherness would be possible: neither a nor a, lending 

itself to organism. The Net is the residue of organism, not organism itself.



The protocol suite itself is otherwise, but that is also elsewhere,

primordial in relation to the objects of our desire. And within the 

protocol suite as well there is only truth; what is annihilated no longer 

has ever existed. This must be understood to be the case, which is 

singular: The World is all that is the Case. (1: The Thing itself. 

Kristeva, _Black Sun._)



And what about the contract? Obviously the result of Capital, Das and 

otherwise as well, the contract is _what One makes of it,_ that one 

becoming two, but elsewhere.



_________________________________________________________________________







Not Rural but Distant not Distant but Rural





For the first time in a year, I'm away from New York for an extended 

period of time. In New York, I sit at the computer and write text after 

text, nervously reading all the while; incoming and outgoing combine in 

an indecipherable melange as _scroll_ itself takes over. Here in the 

hinterlands there are no sirens outside, and the loudest sound currently 

is that of the keyboard itself; I provide energy in the form of whispers 

of encouragement to my little sentences, hoping each grows to become 

criminal in a world of safety. Graffiti cuts through the surface of 

things; the war isn't between the empty and the full wall, but between 

_cleansers_ and _text(ures)_ and we shouldn't forget it...



Cleansers predominate everywhere; in NC home of Helms we might see the

beginning of ignorant armageddon. But it is the silence and poor connec-

tions, saving you, _dear reader,_ from reply after reply, that are unnerv-

ing, yet the future of the Net isn't in New York, a rust heap of failure

and insipid violence. I imagine terminals in country homes of unspeakable

crimes. I imagine rifles pointed to and from the screens themselves, quiet

organizations ridding themselves of outsiders, governments, returning to

the standard of barter and purity. I see book-burning scams clogging the

gateways of newsgroups, and in the cities like New York I see jealousies

explode to Net-spamming of unbelievable proportions. Here, what is it; 

the message separates from the sender, and the sender from the receiver. 

Here, what is it, outgoing and incoming pass by on a divided highway

(grass crotch) which closes down randomly, firing at drivers, crashing

vehicles into endangered species. There in New York, I cock-and-cunt-suck-

ing merge organs with mouths, mouths with mouths; shapes morph into one

another and the Lacanian mirror is pasted tain to tain, a sliver of the

world turned inside out without the presence of the Thing, only media-

tions. 



More insipidities, Lacanian mirror pasted surface to surface, silver to

silver sliver, infinite annihilating reflections of utter darkness, make

way for the occasional virtual photon. 



Here mirrors are mall-mirrors reflecting clouds but every time I look I'm 

completely naked, what do you think of that. 



(In Kingston, Pennsylvania, neighbor of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Scran-

ton, Pennsylvania, my little corner of the galaxy, I am stuffed with coal

dust, teeth invisible. It was there I learned to speak which was writing

the secret word. The word came back to me, fucked me. I couldn't tell who

had spoken, couldn't tell the language from the speaking of it. Such

quiet that burst my body, pieces still floating down the Susquehanna.)



___________________________________________________________________________





Singing





Humo kupliaku natho humo tokiyo /now the eagle is made now it will 

destroy us all/



"These songs were the property of certain mean and were the means by 

which they put forth their psychic power for the healing of the sick. 

Persons of serious mind might join in the songs when a sick person was 

being treated. By this means they added their quota of power to that of 

the doctor. For this service they were rewarded by a share of the feast. 

Thus there were many persons in the tribe who knew the songs that were 

sung by the medicine men but they would not sing these songs except when 

led by the medicine men. If the singers or spectators were disrespectful 

or inattentive they were stricken with the diesase for which the patient 

was being treated." (Densmore, Papago Music, 1929)



Wanitho ci makai coi niathanur vavazaza /I will become like a medicine 

man my feathers are growing longer/



my words lala are like songs lalal they belong to me

you hear my words lala like my songs lalal they belong

my words lala are my own are not Papago lalal

in a book lala they belong to you lalal in a book

in my words lala are my words lalal they belong

when you sing lala them you are sick

when you sing them you are sick lalal



my mail comes into my heart my mail is blood of my breast

my mail goes out of my heart my mail is milk of my breast



lala

lalal

lala

lalal



________________________________________________________________________





What's Needed Now: Inverted Panopticon





Kobe is Net-death, believe in it; the entire highway collapses because of 

nothing beneath, there are no structures to save structures. Zero*N=0 in 

arithmetic; redundency depends on infra- or sub-structures sure taken for 

granted. Give us something aerial to work with, common universal 

interface, give us a tendency towards discontinuity and we can do the 

rest. Make it inexpensive, a planet-pulse entering the machinery, 

breathing along with us through the fires and ashes. Only then can 

dismantled buildings be dismantled; only then can the particulation of 

communication and community, those disembodiments, permit city-collapse 

without loss of life.  Give us universal gateway, call it the portal. Run 

it through satellite, low-frequency too risky, something up in the giga- 

hertz cutting through the vertical. At minimum quadrant the earth. Make 

units available for text, slow video or some super .mpeg compression that 

doesn't run too much bandwidth. Have entrances into the unit, voice-con- 

trol with a command dictionary, who knows who will use the stuff. You can 

speak in Japanese, produce identical; there are built-in languages 

through modular removable units. Choose what you want. Have other 

entrances, command-key stuff like Unix, terse for those who slide across 

the field, necessary in any emergency. Hit ^V, control-voice, and you're 

back in the other mode; say "star K key" and you're down there running the 

board. Pack the whole with lithium at the least, lcd with backlight only 

if necessary, no hard-drive but flash-card solid-state. You might stop 

all movement, type without the feel of it, designated-areas across 

intelligent interpreters. Internal antenna. Carbon-fiber casing, inside a 

removable/attachable soft-shell. Withstand a fall of eight feet on con- 

crete. Can talk as well; say "star T talk" and activate the speaker. Ear- 

phone jack at the least, bandwidth up to 6k. Intelligent screen of 40 

characters across, 80 if necessary, legible for emergency. Runs off 

standard AA batteries as well, simple recharger. Built-in communications 

of course minimum 14.4, everything standard for the satellite. Can down- 

load everywhere, save souls. be your friend. Can tell your fortune, tell 

your future. Can be your future, be your lover, save your life.



________________________________________________________________________





More from On the Road





My luck the car broke down the other day and I pushed it through heavy 

traffic to the side of the road. Sore shoulders. I am so very male.



It's hard to take cyberspace with you, and yes, it does appear as an 

image or lens just over the mountains of North Carolina. I check in on 

another account, write quickly, sign off quickly; it's slow-motion all 

the way, and I can't upload like I'd want to, nothing gets through to 

panix.com that way and out into the wilds of the Net, poor modem.



So I write hurridly on-line, bringing my thinking to miserably bear on 

whatever happens to be ongoing as well through the thinking I usually do 

during the day. And thereby hiding out and missing things as well, the 

lens however hovering.



What's needed is a base like the postoffice used to be and never was, 

that is there at the ready supposedly like the mouth, speech is. Can come 

in any time, out of the cold, the same protocol like those Mac programs 

at tenth the cost, no little mouse to balance on the knee in the back of 

some godforsaken bus.



_Scroll_ always remains burning into me and why is netsex more of a 

negotiation than real life? Netsex is always talking bodies into 

position, all that positioning, back we go to the contract again. It's 

corporate at its best which can be good indeed, but with all the implied 

problems of grammatologies.



The future has to get used to thin bodies; my daughter spoke of anorexic 

encouragement in one of her dance classes. Thin bodies collapse the 

signifier upon them; things stop meaning when the material world takes 

over, but a thin body slips among the interstices. It takes real life to 

slow the stuff down, put the weight back on.



In Brooklyn, there doesn't seem time for real-life. The loft is input/ 

output, information central. Everything becomes signifier; like high- 

speed reading which I do these days on panix.com, the flux is ridden, a 

pre-cursor of the shape-rider.



Did Socrates for that matter ride the shapes of the artisen? Athens was 

almost rural. He must have been a nuisance.



When the planet settles down into coherent electromagnetic terabytes 

swarming overhead, you'll be able to see the lens pulse. With those 

units, things will slow down to your own speed. You'll have that electro- 

luminescent display to guide you through the fog. 



Finally don't for an instant believe that net.sex is the same, equivalent 

as real-life. We need monitors for this, resplendent couplings to come 

forth and describe the differences. The complexities of the interstice 

can be underwhelming.



You have to rush the scroll, keep it moving, get it on the run. What 

moves, does so quickly, remains still. Not zen, but nomad. 



Nomad is a sane island.



Alan, Donne



________________________________________________________________________





Vacating of the Symbolic





Spatial visualization for the platonic solids at the least is highly 

underdeveloped, as anyone trying to construct the division of spaces by 

planar extension soon realizes. The four sides of a tetrahedron extended 

produce a division of 15, as far as I can tell, since points extend as 

cones, lines as wedges, surfaces as flat wedges, and then there's the 

interior. But as I mentioned, the octahedron is possibly more complex 

since the sides fold in upon themselves; the dodecahedron and icosahedron 

are worse still. A perfect sphere at the limit divides space into an 

infinite set which fills space perfectly; I don't know how nonstandard 

numbers fit into the picture, however. (That is, taking the set of 

tangent planes and their intersections.)



4-space is worse; it's easiest to begin by analogy, and sometimes easiest 

to begin by picturing the sphere. After a while, analogy can be shape- 

ridden, so that the precise configurations no longer matter; what results 

is a form of internal twisting of the mind attempting to come to grips 

with the whole. The limitations of the _thinking_ are clearly evident 

here; accustomed to rather simple complexes in three-dimensions, anything 

else is illusory, a question of learning what is inconceivable. I imagine 

later neural interfacing will take care of any remaining problems, and 

eventually, VR will sail away into uncharted domains.



Meanwhile, it's clear from all the exercises that in fact Hadamard was

correct, and that mathematical thinking need not follow the symbolic; the

internal twisting described above need not be of the order of sheaves or

torsion at all, but a meandering within a preconscious that does not

devolve into signifieds of any sort. Later, such signifieds are recupera-

ted for the purposes of communication and proof-checking (and couldn't

this be fully automated, no matter how long the text?), but the opera-

tions themselves are more flux than anything. 



Text itself slides into this flux, as poetry indicates; languaging no

longer means according to dicationary-definition, and the supplement of

poetry remains elsewhere (neither A nor B). For that matter, text is never

linear, except for the formalism itself; it is compression/decompression

and it is always the illusory of the body. Hence I speak of phantoms, and

now you get my drift, the drift across this text and parcellation of

three-dimensional space. 



The illusory is the result of the interstice, of the deconstructive 

swerve, and it is the result of repetition, lag, arrangement, the body 

arched in relation to the keyboard. The illusory is only illusory in 

relation to physical tests of the existence of the other; there is always 

room to move and vacate the symbolic.



This is the issue here, the vacating of the symbolic, as the body is 

thrust into inordinate postures. I identify these with net.sex, with 

n-dimensionality, n>3, with the parcellation of 3-space better witnessed 

from the vantage-point of 4, and from text itself. I relegate the 

vacating to the site of tacit knowledge, as Polyani stressed, or the 

unutterable writing, erasing, underwriting of the body that occurs in any 

culture. Certainly then the specific communicative matrix or specific 

mathematico-sexual problem plays a role. But greater than any role is 

that very arching of the body, our desires which center in on alt.sex. 

bondage to the degree that bondage strains the body into one or another 

position, the position of the _hieroglyph,_ the beginning of writing 

therefore, the constraint of the symbolic, the beginning of culture -

culture which thereby spends the rest of our time in the maintenance of 

the symbolic, symbolic-maintenance, within and without those uncanny 

parcellations I still cannot imagine, for the life of me.



_________________________________________________________________________ 





Who I am and What I am and Thinking as Labor for You and for Me

Thinking Slaughters Me





When I was focusing on the problem of the octahedron (again, extending 

the sides indefinitely, i.e. planes, so that the embedding 3-space was 

divided), I kept trying to picture a certain configuration (which I still 

can't), realizing there was a _trick_ involved which still eludes me. I 

was not able to sleep as a result; the stress was enormous, worse than 

anything physical. The shapes etched themselves into my mind, almost my 

retina, almost a scar; the eyes were seared internally, and I felt 

blinded by my ignorance, literally. Neck and back began to ache, and the 

mind tenses, ready to spring, at nothing.



In the morning, I'll lie awake, eyes closed. Just the slightest opening 

brings, not only the every-day into focus, but an expenditure of energy 

that again appears at the level of the shoulders, although my mind senses 

tiredness as well. 



I will push myself to the end of a text, ranging from a James Elroy novel 

to a section of _Contracting Colonialism,_ shuddering violently as the 

pages come to a close, unable to recognize my surrounds. I will write 

texts until sickness sets in; working the computer during a crisis, I 

have developed a fever and malevolent nausea. I have developed malevolent 

crises. I am consumed by malevolence, cancer in this area.



My fingers will begin to counteract their commands, revolt in premonition 

of a suicidal attempt to figure out the last aphorism in a text that 

appears absolutely necessary to properly suture the day. I will bite my 

lips until they bleed, working out a 3-space problem of intersecting 

planes. I bring wounded tools, paltry and ill-used, to the simplest 

number series, which continues to glare at me, devour what can only be 

called the remnants of mind.



At 51, I figure I have twenty years left at best to complete my work; 

every day wasted is irretrievable, another death, and every indication of 

mental exhaustion simply points out the enormous amount of _labor_ 

involved in the most febrile thinking or visual processing. Understand 

that thought is labor, that it is difficult labor, no matter how 

privileged it appears to be from the outset/outside. I have paid, and 

continue to pay, the price.



I will die with a thought on my mind.





_______________________________________________________________________





Levitation





If I rise above my body, I imagine it drawn by the outlines and inter-

stices of the hadwritten text formed against my eyelids; thus I travel

upon the Net from one goal to another. Looking downward, I see myself 

supine, there is a narrow mattress against the wall in an off-white room,

and I am perfectly dressed in jeans, dark long-sleeve shirt: there I am!

With care I can move slightly above or below, always remaining fixed on 

the image, which can never escape; it is as if I am here to guarantee the 

lack of escape, the positioning of the body for all time, the body which 

I claim, the body which is mine alone.



I would huddle there against the ceiling, fixed as I said, somehow unable

to escape the dimly-lit room, which I most certainly desire to; after all, 

the body feeds on foreign images. I would bring back, devoured for its  

pleasure, everything in the world, cathedrals and mountains alike from the 

smallest guppy to the largest whale. But on the other hand which is my 

only hand, I am remaindered there, as I said, just below the ceiling, off-

white, dark, unable to find my way to the nearest window or door. And how 

could I, without a key or the means of opening this or any other latch?



Sometimes in this position, I will a dream of other worlds and visions, 

but this is inconsequential, something I would do normally from the posi-

tion of sleep. There seems to be no reason to elaborate.



My body is remarkably acquiescent; it remains more or less still, and I

have no fear of its waking. Pinned there, it could not escape on its own;

there is hardly a split (_Spaltung_) of the ego that would accommodate

it. Nothing speaks to nothing, although the unconscious is not only not

structured like a language, but hardly a knot, or a not-knot at best. And 

where would this reside, except in the interstices of the hovering, some-

thing to consider at all counts?



(Hovering is always already shape-riding, the vortex, as in The Forbidden

Planet, that which eludes the most, the body-without-name, but present

as inchoate/chthonic. Hovering is what may be seen through the dream of

texts, and it is my/I firm belief that secondary narcissism is primary

narcissism, a virtual tunneling through the symbolic, as if the symbolic

exists. Perhaps this detour is in fact the construct of the symbolic; no

matter that I have located such a foundation. The shape is _there-here,_

an emanation from spew to emission. Heidegger's got the shape.)



__________________________________________________________________________





They Nothing Much





"The without is neutral ground, it is the _within_ of ourselves that we

should like to be for others and that others encourage us to be for our-

selves. This is the realm of the _commonplace._ For this excellent word 

has several meanings. It designates, of course, our most hackneyed 

thoughts, inasmuch as these thoughts have become the meeting place of the

community. It is here that each of us finds himself <sic> as well as the

others. The commoplace belongs to everybody and it belongs to me; it is

the presence of everybody in me. In its very essence it is generality; 

in order to appropriate it, an act is necessary, an act through which I

shed my particularity in order to adhere to the general, in order to be-

come generality. Not at all _like_ everybody, but, to be exact, the _in-

carnation_ of everybody. Through this eminently social type of adherence,

I identity myself with _all_ the others in the indistinguishableness of 

the universal." Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Nathalie Sarraute's Portrait

of a Man Unknown. 



What of the "particularity" is shed? How is the particular defined in and

against the general/communal? Maturana years ago talked about the mutual

orienting of cognitive domains, which leaves the content alone, and there

is always the concept of distorted/undistorted communication at work, 

Habermas and elsewhere.



How is particularity/universality shared and operated upon/within on an

email list? Community seems quickly to settle in, even on the most acad-

emic; I can recognize _voice_ everywhere. But there is this _tendency_

towards...aphanisis, decathexis, releasement, this uncanny loss from

which there is always a return (as in, without the narrative/intensity,

of orgasm?): _I release myself to Cybermind, to Fiction-of-Philosophy_ -

no wonder the sexual appears in these most obscure of places.



And what sort of identification is possible with _all_ the others? Does

this become more an issue of epistemology, tagging texts with proper 

names (which are capable of sliding hard past Kripke, downhill all the

way)? What is surprising is how unsurprising real life is, how all of

this is in fact real life. Holding Them, it is the grain of Their nails

into my back, my skin cut just below the level of legibility where there

is nothing to declare. Everybody in me is viscous, a sinking towards a

materialization described by Flaubert in his St-Antoine, but unlike 

Flaubert, there's no sun, christian or otherwise, to hook the body alive, 

return it to the They, that moment of birth. No, the inanimate holds fast 

and tenuous, the maw of the animate as well. This indistinguishability as 

the light fades and darkness rules the world, this decathexis: our future 

remains less than a stain upon a planet already stained from too much 

oxygen, too little _air._





__________________________________________________________________________





My Story



There are always populations in my theories, populations which take care

of things. Now there are 'floaters,' out-of-body minds; I remember when

there were ghosts, Tiffany and Honey, when Clara Hielo Internet ruled the

texts. Travis constantly explored the farthest reaches of cyberspace,

brought home by conceptual limitations; there was the tinkling of tiny

bells, always warm airs and oceanic life. 



The populations become me, speak to me, dismember me; Clara Hielo talks

behind dark eyes, illuminated wires, and Tiffany melds into me, flesh and

body one. Primary and secondary narcissisms merge; recognitions devolve

into part-objects. But I abjure narrative, for nothing tells a story.



The populations coalesce, dissolve, create language and speech, grope

hesitantly into all the interstices of the world. They refuse to non-

exist, refuse the abyss, retaining instead the incessant protocol neces-

sary for their survival. They regain the ground lost in each and every

battle; they incessantly regain the ground.



These populations proceed from disembodiment, or a-bodiment, not other-

wise, no, not at all. They never had a body, never pretended to. They

observe the discussion of body and embodiment everywhere, on every list 

and newsgroup, from Derrida to nomads (which isn't all that great a 

leap). If there were a solution - if there were a problem - the discus-

sion wouldn't be continuous. But there is none of either; we observe the

populations, and count ourselves among them, wondering how we arrived.

Staring at ourselves, the nerve-net of our wombs appears to have caught

something, the nerve-net of our members appears to have written on what

has been caught. We write on ourselves with our wombs; we catch ourselves

as members. Uncomfortable with these shifts into absence, how can we

conceivably understand shakuhachi or ch'in musics, for example, since 

silence for us is dangerous erasure? 



These populations write through me, and they write the philosophy of the

Net and the philosophy of cyberspace and cybermind, and further, they 

write the philosophy of the body and the philosophy of presence and ab-

sence, and further, they continue to write and write, they continue to 

move my fingers upon a distant and long-vanished keyboard; they have 

moved my fingers from time prior to electronics and prior to the elec-

trical, and they move, and continue to move. Ghost-traps, nothing catches

them; we are the ghosts themselves within the traps. You see how it goes,

how it meanders, how it continues to meander? That is the philosophy,

incessant, they write and continue to write, and the philosophy I place

down here and beside myself, upon and within the Net that they have 

thrown down gauntlet.



________________________________________________________________________



_________________________________begin___________________________________



Epitaph





Someday you shall remember me by these words.

My little letters nuzzle one another like the very best of friends.

I was the first to introduce them and I was the last.

I have been removed from the wonderful sailor-cap of existence.



Or there are a thousand years descending to a vast plateau.

No records recall who has or has not observed from the edge.

The horizon stretches from horizon to horizon.

Clouds and stars and muffled group gropings of letters.



Dust clings to the solitary Y half-submerged in the burrowing earth.

I have returned in a state of absolute clarity.

What are bones but the bones of other bones.

There is nothing I have not been told.



Shortly after, you shall no longer remember me.

Shortly after that, the severance of letter upon letter.

Their introductions know no bounds, bulky horizons.

The wonderful sailor-cap of existence sits on my head.



_________________________________end_____________________________________





__________________________________begin________________________________







Future Culture /rough draft/





("Future culture," ethnocentrisms, multiculturalisms, regionalisms, im-

plying _both_ cultural production vis-a-vis the arts, and lived culture

"in general." So we say our art is our life, on occasion, something to 

that effect. Now, there is no difference; both are utterly transforming, 

the terms suspect. Keep that in mind. You're on a journey and there's

no turning back.)



A short while ago, there would have been no problem; Delphi and other 

predictive techniques, including computer extrapolations, presented a

relatively coherent view of an emergent world. Now and for at least the

next half-century, such extrapolations are locally relevant at best; no

pictures, nothing is glimpsed beyond them. We are in the dark-age of

fast-forward multiple (inter)-connectivities which construct equally

multiple topographies and worlds. It is no longer clear that what lives

on the level of representation, does not _live_ as well; artificial life

is life of a form, decimated by pulling the plug. If artificial life is

clearly the dynamics of information/processing, what removes us from 

this as construct: What remains obdurate in the world?



Even embodiment becomes problematic; the body is a report from ourselves

to ourselves, and an echoed message on the Internet sends the state of

things back to the machine which sent it. What _appears_ to be the Net 

is a first step into the darkness of cyberspace, rather cyberspatiality,

where William Gibson novels appear almost classical in their depictions

of communications domains and their (ecological) niches. The confines of

3-space in/out up/down back/forth may break apart, returning only as

orthogonal foundations always already out of sight.



The act of _reading the screen_ thrusts the body's desire away from the

body like a thing unhinged; desire travels, no longer a psychoanalytical

category, but an _intelligent agent,_ away from the home terminal, per-

haps to return immediately, perhaps to wander forever. New relationships

become possible; net.sex is only the beginning of an efflorescence of

intimacies which no longer necessarily reflect an "authentic" self. It

is not so much that gender is switched, as that gender is construed in

each and every case, the body falling/not falling far behind. (Not to

mention other genders, nuances, other forms of power, multiple and new

organs, vaginal mouths, probosci.)



Traffic Report: As bandwidth increases and protocols become more flexi-

ble, so do sensory modalities increase on the Net; virtual reality tech-

nology will eventually become commonplace. But as the Net expands into

the simulacrum of an organic membrane, it becomes increasingly vulnerable

to hacking. Hint: Look for increased hacking in the next millennium, 

hacking as a way of life, the hacking culture, with its emphasis on anar-

chic bricolage, becoming the seeds of a future renaissance.



Suburban sprawl begins to characterize the spew and cacophony of informa-

tion fleeing the center city everywhere in the world; within the sprawl,

nothing lacks. The growth of CMC (computer-mediated-communication) in

the less industrially-developed or poorer nations is indeed slow, and

within them, nationalism on the Enlightenment model becomes increasingly

difficult to maintain. Cut off, these will be more and more left to fend

for themselves, Net sites like sparks in blackout electrical storms. One

can expect continuous reinscription of territory as global extinctions

and pollutions exhaust the land everywhere. In spite of occasional suc-

cess with DNA banks, the world of 2020 will be one of limited species

maintenance; only viral and bacterial disorders will continue to prolif-

erate at an unprecedented level. (And what of other models of nationalism

or territorialization? Everywhere, competition and weaponry work war,

separate. Desertification and population are still out of check.)



Information will exhaust itself daily in this model, without legitimated 

steering mechanisms; these, too, are up for grabs, sprawl, proliferate. 

The future model of _anything_ moves from mechanism through clock through 

membrane to coagulation. Consider mechanism and Newtonian/Euclidean phy-

sics; clock and general/special relativities; membrane and string theory/

telecommunications; and coagulation, the clotting of local nanotopograph-

ies, computer-assisted theoretics, the humanities continuing their re-

treat, on occasion retrenching vis-a-vis totalization/coag/deconstruction. 



(Connectivity: Currently this is often through university or corporate

accounts, work-stations used off-hours. The trend towards home computers

will obviously continue, particularly as multi-media expands and prices

drop. Future culture, however, tends towards portability, beyond laptops

towards notebooks, subnotebooks, voice reception/transmission, and above

all, towards the elimination of the modem in favor of cellular or other

radiolinks. In this fashion: voice/radio, the terminal becomes an inten-

sification of identity/communality processes, a tacit accompaniment or

prosthesis to the body inhabiting "virtual subjectivity" or _cybermind._

Hint: The body moves from _being_ to _doing,_ an existential project.

Hint: It's not used to this; it lurks, or talks and talks. Speaking, it

abandons the productions of its speech. Listening, it flows with aban-

donment. Hint: The internalized machine listening to its own and others'

speech.)



(The arts: People will continue to make things. People will continue to

write about them. There will be fewer galleries. There will be more

images and more museums. Nothing will die and nothing will change.)



The arts will be a painting. As on the Net, the spectator shifts into 

the gear of a spectator; sure, there will be collectors and justifyingly

dense prose as long as capital survives with its insistence on the hand-

crafted and materiality. But vis-a-vis Bourdieu, CMC is already its own 

formulation, sparking transformations, sexualities, desires, economies,

identities, objects, visions, disembodiments and life on another level

altogether. What is occurring epistemologically leaves the traditional

art-critical methodologies working upon the hardened body of representa-

tion behind; when representation becomes dynamic flux - when process art

no longer processes within an isolated bandwidth (i.e. Robert Barry) -

criticality itself changes, hypertexts, absorbs. Hint: _Just as hacking

is an art, art is hacking._ In art, identity burrows beneath representa-

tion and commodity structures. It's sellable because unsellable, always

software-in-hardware, always in media res, always in discourse.



Just as "a short while ago, there would have been no problem," now there

_is_ a problem, as new class structures emerge in North America and else-

where, among those who embrace the new technologies and those who do not.

The telephone, in spite of its relation to the dead and mourning, never

promised the space of the Other and the Same; television's space is 

clearly indexical, no matter how much surround is added to it. (In fact,

indexicality may be considered an attribute of late capitalist produc-

tion, which has moved from the symbolic in terms of consumerism.) In vir-

tual reality, however, as well as its intimations upon the Internet, one

moves even beyond the ikonic to representation's absence (although built

of course upon level upon level (protocol suites) of representation);

it's for this reason that so much is made of "cyberspace" as if there 

were really another world present, instead of single or double computer

output screens. Representation glides into the _uncanny,_ which both 

utilizes and problematizes the symbolic itself; it becomes deeply and 

permanently unclear _who_ is beyond/within/without the physical body

clearly interacting with the monitor. (This _who_ comes up constantly in

discussion on newgroup and email lists, usually in reference to issues of

embodiment. It's not so much a matter of reaching a resolution, but of

charting previously uncharted territory - as if one were finally able to

concretely examine the psychology and phenomenology of ghosts. Something

like that, but not quite.)



The phenomenology of ghosts lacks granularity; details go blank as the

abyss opens up between one and another character or pixel. The surface

must always extend by gestural logics, the mind filling-in the details,

a projectivity involving the releasement of desire. This is the dream-

like quality of cyberspace, always melding, flexible, a relative of the

arcana. Surface and depth become identical, but not surface. (O just

like Narcissus.)



And in the abyss, there is always the darkness beckoning from the screen.

Noise and abjection are relegated to the content of text or image; the 

space is cleansed and stuttering. It stutters because of the others who 

are also on-line and speaking, chattering elsewhere; it stutters because

of the vagaries of the network connections, because of the hops; it stut-

ters because of the weather. But the stuttering closes down, lends itself

to textual lag, not to the slow deterioration of analog communication

which almost always gives the appearance of reconstitution; one can _try_

to hear someone else, after all, in the midst of a noisy party. Instead,

the abyss is a metonymic representation of absolute annihilation, also

given by the kill/delete commands used in Net applications. 



It is the abyss which opposes the excess of the textual, and the abyss 

which provides the substructure against/within which the textual appears.

It is always tenuous, the crack in cyberspace spelling death of (dis)em-

bodiment, a remainder or reminder. It is the abyss which is located with-

in the appearance of real life as well - just as "real life" needs now a

term of its own, not in contradistinction to a cultural arena such as the

theatre, but in relation to _lived experience elsewhere,_ an elsewhere-

inhabitation. (In cyberspace, nothing dies, everything moves from node to

node, the flood floods. "In cyberspace, there is no there there.")



In the future books will be very clean with illuminated letters. In the

future, books will never have pages; they will have search engines prod-

ducing the reader's history, or search engines producing hypertextual

content. In the future, images will stop at a specified magnification of

content to pixel; nothing but code exists beyond the object you carry

with you, the being you make love to. In the future, you may use a search

engine to search that being, or a search engine to reproduce hir history.

In the future, you will learn the art of _concatenation,_ the placement

of one thing against or adjacent to another think, and the art of _link-

ing,_ connecting the two, beginning the web. You will hope that the web

will grow, take on a life of its own. You will examine your body for your

own web; your web will have links that you and others have constructed.

In the future, you will think of this as a recognition, but it will never

be clear that the coagulation-thinking is in fact "you" thinking, or 

thinking-thinking, and it makes no difference, philosophically, psycho-

analytically, or other wise. 



In the future your body will be very clean with illuminated images. In

the future, your body will never have organs; it will have search engines

producing your history or lend itself elsewhere, in couplings bringing

back dim memories of ancestries which are located elsewhere, in another

web, but completely and entirely accessible.





("In the future, there is no when when." There are sheaves, topologies of

temporality, internal and external time-consciousness. There are differ-

entials, but there are no when, no now. There are certainly no then. Like

space, time is a becoming-coagulation, a confluence as nation passes na-

tion into collapse, or there is no nation, or no one talking. Begin with

this no one, this zero-psychoanalysis. Emerging beings flutter around 

networks, embodied as programs or information, embodied as machines, 

embodied as organic carbon-based complexes. Emerging beings are always 

emerging and there are irrevocable passages among them. But the when-when

is/was/will-be no longer, or at least differently. 



The differential is because of the absent class, those not jacked in, 

those close to starvation; those in the midst of wars and famine, those

producing these equations in dirt-poor factories around the world. Infor-

mation flows from the material substrate of exhaustion and pestilence

through the chips themselves to the jacked-in; this is the political econ-

omy of information, as deadly as any, with its information rich and poor.

Overall, the cost of production decreases as physical downsizing contin-

ues; no one requires an office-building or physical starship model when

bits and bytes will do. Value relates to information-density and _manage-

ment._ Value is the processing of that density and management. Unlike the

traditional artist, working with clay and other relatively disorganized

materials (in spite of the cost of oils, say), the artist who is the 

_shape-rider_ exists parasitically at the top of the heap: S/he has 

_access._ Access and the knowledge to use it determine already future 

culture, and this is literal jacking-in, the crack-war information drug

pumping hard through hir veins. The future is one of addiction, language-

games coming around full circle; if we're addicted to speech now, and

who isn't, we will speak through each other, through ghosts speaking

through us, through the thinking thinking that we will/are become. 



>> _In the future, there is no is._)





__________________________________end_____________________________________





Telescopy





Placing the cipher



			 oooooo                 __

			o      o    [         ||  

		   ____/o      o     c        ||

	       ___/     o      o              ||  

	    __/          oooooo b             ||__

	 __/         ____/                        d

	/        ___/

      ooo     __/      granting removal of the cipher

     o   o __/         relative lack of closure

      ooo /a           enlargement of the abyss (c,d)





The cipher is unbearable; there is nothing to look at. That is most appar-

ent in the diagram. The unit (a,b) folds and unfolds in the process of

focusing. One may consider the pleats (on the order of course of Bruno

Schulz) an intelligent agent for searching\circulation.

		  

		  

		  ________________________________________________________

		 /

The Whoosh:     /

	       /

	      [   <  whoooooooooooooooooooooooooshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

	       \

		\

		 \________________________________________________________







It manages to sound in cybermind. I remember it as if the pleats were har-

nassed by a wind modulating over the regular furrows. A sigh fills cyber-

mind, a murmur in the cove of a cathedral under formation. Ahhh, and the

lens closes forever.





	       /\

	      /  \

	     /    \

	    [  <>  ]

	     \    /

	      \  / 

	       \/





__________________________________________________________________________





Notebook Entry



On September 23, 1998, several small atomic devices were discharged in

the following cities: Dublin, New York, Oran, Beijing, Buenos Aires,

Beirut, Jerusalem, Los Angeles. A radiation belt was visible for several

nights thereafter, and ground levels rose world-wide by 212%. The death

toll has never been determined; including the resulting cancers, it can

be assumed in the neighborhood of 75-78 million. The pattern of explo-

sives has never been accounted for. The world was going through a long-

term crisis of denationalizing, which began with the breakup of the 

former USSR; it is speculated that the material necessary for the bombs

came from Siberian sources.



The Internet was heavily disrupted for several weeks; due to the redun-

dency of its backbones (some of which had just been implemented), it

functioned as an alternative communications system during the aftermath.

An odd consequence of the disruptions was the immediate increased number

of "hacks," or computer breakins/breakdowns, which died down only after

several months.



No demands accompanied the detonations, and no groups took responsibil-

ity. Clearly, there was high-level organization behind the slaughter; 

the devices all went off within twenty minutes of each other, universal

time. The coordination may have utilized the Net, but there were no

functioning sites, for example, in Oran (a town described by Camus).



Like a plague of flying saucers in a grade B film, the impact of the ex-

plosions went far beyond loss of life. In fact, it was dearly hoped 

that the world would finally come together in a siblinghood of humanity,

working as one for the pure and perfect peace that was so surely at hand.

But it was also recalled that the breakup of the former Cold War environ-

ment had also appeared to signify the increasing production of peace, and

nothing of the sort occurred.



Some of the post-generation-xers speculated that young men always need to

set their goals high, and what could be higher than slaughter, in which a

division is clearly made within the fabric of civilization: you are or 

are not dead, for example. They argued that life is defined by death of

course, and more, that war and terrorism always create horizons of death,

an exciting place to live in half-life, which is all we have been grant-

ed. They saw terrorism as an edge which defined them, because it was an

edge of action and activity, an edge even of artificial intelligent 

agents which could roam the interstices and courses of the Net itself, on

the prowl for one another. They believed that the world was ruled by 

chaos in the form of size queens, young bucks measuring their penises in

a contest which began at least four million years ago when upright men

were visible shaken by the appearance of upright men and women. 



They philosophized that the pacific or peaceable kingdom or queendom had

no boundaries whatsoever, nothing to test themselves against. Pounding

their spears into the ground, they required the construction of writing

to parade what they had learned, and durable materials for the leaving 

of records to their posterity. They demanded further implementation of 

the Net for the disemenation of their wildest dreams and desires, insis-

ting that this specific form of aggression, which included chest displays 

and increased pounding, was gender-inherited, part and parcel of each and

every male, no matter how peaceful they seemed, clothed in the benign

forces of post-USSR civilization. 



Some women argued in return that nothing was gender-inherited, and that

this particular gauntlet transcended considerations of sexuality. Thus in

turn they argued that size queens belong to all, that it was not a matter

of any sort of demographic preference, but that just to speak was already

to do true warrior violence to one another; even silent signalling would

determine the course of a battle in ancient times. 



Of course the majority of men and women were silent on these and other

issues, concerned as they were with getting on with life or tending the

walking wounded. Among themselves they said they simply did not feel safe

any longer and would no longer feel safe as long as they lived.



Later there were rumors that a new series of detonations would occur 

somewhat closer to the beginning of the third millennium, but there were

also rumors that there would be no causal linking between the slaughter

and the approach of the occidental new year's day. We continue to hear

these rumors now, and are writing them to you, so that you may be aware

that something new and awful may be about to occur.



_________________________________________________________________________





Absolut 





123456789*987654321=121932631112635269



"Therein is concretely shown the firm and indissoluble bonds of our Party 

with the people, the wisdom of its Leninist and collective directory, the 

all-conquering force of Marxist-Leninist doctrine on which is founded the 

activity of the Party. In all these years the Party held high the great 

banner of the deathless Lenin. Loyalty to Leninism is the source of all 

the successes of our Party." Khrushchov 1956



"Changes in the world will proceed in the direction well described by 

Marx, Engels, and Lenin in their theoretical works. We Communists have 

deep faith in the triumph of Marxist-Leninist teaching. I think that for 

the majority of mankind the great vital power of this teaching is now 

becoming clearer and clearer." Khrushchov 1958



"The basic principles of Dialectical Materialism - the doctrine on the 

material essence of the world, on matter and its existential forms, on 

the most general laws of the development of being, on the relationship of 

matter and consciousness - were able to be elaborated only on the solid 

basis of a knowledge of nature. The revolution in the domain of 

philosophy which was accomplished by Marx and Engels and which marked the 

origin of Dialectical Materialism, was the product of a masterful 

generalization of the development of science and socio-historical 

practice." Osnovy 1958



(Blakeley, Soviet Scholasticism, Reidel, 1961)





"In dialectical materialism the following qualitatively distinct stages 

of reflection (_otrazenie_) are generally distinguished:

At the level of _inorganic_ matter reflection appears in the form of

physical and chemical effects of material objects on each other and their

reactions." 

...

"On the _organic_ level of matter, which is characterized by the 

appearance of albuminous bodies, one finds reflection in its simplest 

form as _sensibility_ (_cuvstvitel'nost'_). In cells structured in this 

way reflection consists in the adaptation of the cells"

...

"The simplest _biological_ form of reflection is _irritability_"

...

"The next form of biological reflection is the _excitability_ 

(_vozbudimost'_) of higher animals."

...

"At the level of the central nervous system reflection appears first in 

the form of _'unconditioned reflexes.'_"

...

"In higher animals and men, reflection takes the form of _'conditioned 

reflex'_ (_uslovnye refleksy_)."

...

"Sensations are the simplest form of _sensible_ reflection."

...

[These include sensation, perception, representation, imagination.]

...

"The highest form of reflection, _logical_ or _rational_ knowledge, is 

found only in man. It is based on the _'second signal system,'_ i.e., 

language."

...

"Thus reflection always has two aspects: the passive reception of the 

properties of the reflected object and the active determination of the 

mode of reflection by the reflecting agent."

...

"Where information is connected with reflection, the problem of the 

'universality of information' involves the question as to whether 

reflection is a universal attribute of matter. And this question still 

remains unclear."

...

"A further difficulty involves finding a place for cybernetic information 

processes, seen as 'concretizations' of reflection theory, within a 

systematic philosophy. As products of mental effort, cybernetic devices 

are not themselves objects of natural philosophy, i.e. the kind of 

considerations contained in the doctrine of reflection. Only some aspects 

of some processes in these devices correspond to a few processes in the 

realm of the living. The Marxist-Leninist philosophers themselves stress 

this fact. In the discussion of specific problems, however, processes in 

cybernetic systems are often included without further ado among the forms 

of reflection."



(Kirschenmann, Information and Reflection, On some Problems of 

Cybernetics and how Contemporary Dialectical Materialism Copes with Them, 

Reidel/Humanities, 1970)





"170 _Submission._ One must know when it is right to doubt, to affirm, to

submit. Anyone who does otherwise does not understand the force of reason.

Some men run counter to these three principles, either affirming that

everything can be proved, because they know nothing about proof, or

doubting everything, because they do not know when to submit, or always

submitting, because they do not know when judgement is called for.

Sceptic, mathematician, Christian; doubt, affirmation, submission." 



"761 Many minds are not sound."



(Pascal, Pensees, trans. Krailsheimer)



_________________________________________________________________________ 





My Paper "Absolut"





"Absolut" refers both to vodka and the things we buy and sell when we are 

operating under the fact that we need money to do the things we buy. I 

love vodka and all forms of drink and thought it would be wonderful to 

see the land where Mr. Kruschev (sp.!!!) comes from where there was so 

much thinking about this and later the war which is just like our War 

Between the States to keep Chechenve (sp.!!!!) so that Russia can keep 

her church. And I thought that Mr. Pascal had the write idea as well 

because he says that submission is cool because there's always someone 

who knows more than you do, and who knows who that someone could be! So I 

thought that was cool and just perfect.



And because I use computers (I play Doom and Myst is great too but you 

have to think too much) that old book on cybernetics really showed how 

the Russians could just see the whole world as information reflected in 

every piece of matter, just as when I smile my teeth light up the 

computer screen because it's black (I could never figure out windows!!!). 

I guess like Blake says the whole world is reflected in a piece of sand 

in front of a mirror (it's in his Flowers of Evil I think but I don't 

read French!!!!!!!), so the Russians found this out really late. And it 

was great to make a whole paper without even ONE word that I WROTE 

(underline! underline!!!) because they were all things someone else had 

said! So guess what I submitted to THEIR THOUGHTS! And they REFLECTED 

WHAT I WAS THINKING! And I hope they win their war to free Chechchenene 

(sp.!!!) because the Russians know what's best!!! (Well they do now 

because all the COMMUNISTS have left and stuff!!!!!!!!!!!!)



- CHT



_________________________________________________________________________





Cyberspace Energy Absorption Protocol





It's desperation time and mouth opens time, drawing a thin chain of 

saliva across my throat, o could I still continue to speak, down between 

the nipples; I devour one, then the other of them, red wounds the size of 

silver dollars, my tongue playful now.



Further down, penetrating the navel, searching out the interior of the 

blank refusal of motherhood. At the level of genital hair, my teeth 

become cowcatchers, my mouth a locomotive; I tender my cock to myself, 

torn from its moorings, swallow that to mix with the rest of the debris.



Delightedly I find a fork after testicles and tonsils mix, left-right, 

right-left, I always knew it made no difference; lavishly and luxuriantly 

I move from one to the other, always these thin snail-trails working my 

way down, now on the outside of this tough meat.



At the toes I begin, cauterizing left-right, right-left, beginning with 

the smallest, working my way inward; this is the metaphor I decided on, 

always groping towards the center.



Both legs swallowed up to the knee, my body circulates around itself, 

half-inside half-outside, a double-layer of gristle and bone, my mouth 

unbearably distended as if your cunt filled me, reached the back of my 

throat, sutured membrane on to vocal cords. 



I am up to my waist in myself, hiding the wounds of organs cut off 

forever, and the thickening in the abdomen continues, becomes crowded in 

there. I slither in an inch per hour, drool and semen sliding the effort 

quickly and curiously.



My arms create difficulties, but once inside I can touch myself again; 

masturbation makes the time fly, flooding the lower accesses of the 

external portions of my ankles and heels. Shuddering, I think, now I'm up 

to my neck in it, this self-swamp of bent bone and skin manifolding 

towards itself from each and every direction.



Swallowing the lower chin, I begin until my eyes themselves fall through 

the mouth self-cannibalizing; I am approaching a singularity at a 

constant rate, sentient black-hole grinding to a halt at normal diameter 

zero, there isn't even an odor left to mingle with the rest of the land- 

locked world.





"The quantity in the laws of black hole physics which plays the role 

mathematically analogous to the total energy, E, is the mass, M, of the 

black hole, which, in general relativity, physically _is_ the total 

energy of the black hole." (Wald, Quantum Field Theory in Curved Space- 

time and Black Hole Thermodynamics)



________________________________________________________________________





The Waiting Room, Keeping the Record Straight





The time of the Apocalypse has not yet arrived because we have not sinned 

quite enough.

The Rapture has not yet arrived because the trains run close to schedule.

The Messiah has not yet arrived because the phone still works.

True Communism has not yet arrived because some people still want things 

that other people have.



Eternal Life will transform Humanity forever.

The perfect State will be absolutely still without Growth or Decay.

The perfect State will absorb all contradictions.

The most beautiful Woman in the World will fuck the most beautiful Man

and the second-most beautiful Woman.

The second-most beautiful Man in the World will fuck the second-most 

beautiful Woman and the most-beautiful Man.

The Lamb and the Lion will fuck each other because there will be no Age 

difference after they lie down.

Everyone will fuck and cum forever and they will lie there and cum 

and cum.



Everything about History will come to an End.

History will recount only the History before the coming of the End.

History will recount right up until the End itself and then History will 

have to come to a stop, but you might have someone recounting the History 

of the recounting which will come after the End.



Simultaneously, People will always Smile.

Their Smile will be genuine and meant for one another.

But it will not be an exclusive Smile because everyone can participate.

They will always Smile because they will always be Happy.



The Nighness of the End will always be behind them.



_________________________________________________________________________





The Comfort of my Very Beautiful Future Home





I take great comfort in knowing about the animals in the Burgess Shale

because they were very, very, lovely and they take up all the time in the

world for millions of years so they lived and left themselves soft-bodied

in the shale so you can see some of their organs, appendages, imagining

the soft parts hungering after one another in waters with lightning in the

sky, yellow clouds scudding by like I saw tonight over the New York blood-

low-building skyline looking always in the wrong direction. These ancient

creatures in the Burgess Shale are symmetrically beautiful or gently off

to one side or another, sloping in a way, or hinged cleanly and clearly,

some with spikes for protection, none of great size, a dreaminess to all

of them. They communicated by chemicals and primitive vibrations of the

medium to which they were accustomed, the water, and were silent for the

most part, although occasionally there would be a slight vibration of a

tail just enough to warn the near-by trilobites to roll into a ball. The

hyolithid _Haplophrentis_ would cower with its operculum in the vicinity

of _Opabinia_ with its five eyes and long flexible proboscis.  Such would

grapple perhaps with the priapulid _Ancalagon_ slightly larger but consid-

erably less mobile. Of the chlorophyta, lonely _Margaretia_ waves its thin

fronds in the slow current, and bush-like _Yuknessia_ remained possibly in

deeper water. Early life was blind or almost blind, invisible to early

life; the world groped towards its first vision of itself, and did eyes

begin with _Anomalocaris,_ _Opabinia,_ or a pretty trilobite testing the

appearance of the sun? _I would have been there, I would have helped you

see, describing every creature to every other, my shadow glimmering in the

shallow shoreline beyond which I dared not venture. Happily, I would have

noticed _Pikaia_ swimming by, our lovely pre-vertebral ancestress, and

happily, I would have joined communally with curvaceous _Odaraia_ with its

enormous eyes peering blearily everywhere through plankton and microplank-

ton alike. Do you not see, dear heart, that I belong here so submerged,

mind filtered out into the membrane of the watery wilderness of long ago?

What need have I for the present, when the past, so obdurate, so _pre-

sent,_ remains connected to me forever? No longer shall I drown in soulful

longing, nostalgia for hidden and fantastic worlds, when the other, warm

and liquid, is always and already there, silent, _wet,_ engulfing... 



__________________________________________________________________________





Homely





[echo $HOME]

When you need to go home and are all alone

Who are you to listen to?

Life becomes unstuck and glue

Won't cut it, take it to the bone.

But echo $HOME, and all turns towards the thing

That roots itself, and yet will give you wing.



[cd ..]

(To turn away, seedy; the dots that follow

Withdraw your presence into something hollow.)



But I'm tired and I want to return. Tired of reading and writing, tired 

of subbing and unsubbing, tired of administrating and tired of life, worn 

out, another birthday an hour away, and all I can think, where are we going.



I think: It might be good to attack, subvert, take over other lists.

I think: We need a fortified Web Site with carnivorous maverick links 

devouring all the others.

I think: Check out the Computer Underground Digest *now* as the Net turns 

towards corporate power.



Let's all write about things we don't believe in and send them out 

everywhere on the Net. Let's become unwanted holy angels bringing nothing 

but bad addresses to bad people.



Let's get them.



But I'm tired and want to go home. I echo myself (yawn, already trite), 

Narcissus in electric pond. I can't even see my fucking self; there's no 

Mosaic in ancient Greece, no Netscape. .jpeg downloading worked flat and 

out flat-out in Plato's terminal.



So I'm tired and go cd like Paula said. I go seedy, jump from the window. 

Lame, I'll beg in subways. You'll hear me asking for net.money net.sex, 

you'll know I'm a whore.



Let's get them. I'm out there with Clara Hielo Internet. I'm not alone.



Alan



-------------------------------------------------------------------------



Phenomenological Sociology and Murmurs of Mourning in Cyberspace





A phenomenological approach to cybermind involving mourning and death as 

a boundary crossing into another space of recognitions and investments 

can serve to background an analysis based on care and listening. I am 

brought to this through Schutz and Luckmann's The Structures of the Life- 

World, Volume II, in which boundary crossings and appresentation are 

considered. I will quote piecemeal from the relevant section of the work.



"How boundaries are experienced and lived has been described in consider-

able detail. Something has also been said concerning the possibilities of

encounters and lived experiences, which open up when one turns away or

distances oneself from everyday reality. But the boundary-crossings them-

selves have not been studied sufficiently. Up to this point, little more

has been said on this subject than that the barriers of space and time are

crossed in memory and project; that in understanding and communication

bridges are thrown across to the Other person's alienness, that the

dissimilarity of realities outside everyday life is made more evident by

the interpretation of the memories and indications that are brought back

from there to the 'normal' wide-awake state; and that death is 'overcome,'

if at all, by the interpretation of indications of indications. In the

introduction to these reflections, it was, moreover, suggested that in

ccrossing the limits of his experience a person uses certain means that we

call indications, marks, signs, and symbols." 



"First, indications, marks, signs, and symbols all convey news from beyond

the boundaries of immediate experience by co-presenting in the experience

everything that is thematically, interpretatively, and motivationally rel-

evant to the actually present experience but in some way or other trans-

cends the kernel of the experience. Second, signs, even though essentially

'news-bearers,' also help us, in _reciprocal_ communication with other

people, to cross the boundaries to them; symbols, although essentially

embodiments of a different reality in the everyday world, can, in combina-

tion with certain (namely, ritualized) acts, be of assistance in crossing

the boundaries to other realities, including the last boundary. 



An indication points to something other than itself, something disguised,

hidden, or absent, and makes it accessible in the reference of experience.

It brings a person the tangible news about what lies spatially and tempor-

ally beyond his reach. A particular form of indication, the corporeal

expression, points to something that is not just 'accidentally' outside

one's spatial and temporal reach, but is in principle not apprehensible

otherwise than through such a reference: the Other's consciousness. Marks

help 'overcome' the barrier to the future by projecting, now, memories for

later; they transmit information to one's own future: like memories, but

tangible and planned. Signs combine indicational and mark-like components

in an intersubjectively compelling manner; in concrete and anonymous

reciprocity they carry news of a like kind from one to the other - and

back. Symbols give information concerning non-everyday realities, or news

about the everyday realm from that non-everyday perspective, which is

disclosed as completely different from it. 



All these means are based on appresentation, a performance of conscious-

ness that is essential to life-world experience." 



For all intents and purposes, disembodiment, and for all its dialectical

tracings, references a state of absence and mourning, phonecalls from the

dead which are part of the construct of the uncanny of cybermind. This

uncanny, a replacement for an unconscious, is a flux of transmission/

reception sites of inscriptions, re. Schutz. The boundary-crossings are

trans-terminal (and _terminal_ implies an end-point or node itself), whe-

ther within the hyperreal, cyberspatial, irreal, whatever term is (mis)-

appropriate. The lend themselves to the reading of voices which, for most

of us, is a form of internal speech, the bleak barrier of the other lost,

drowned in the shoals of the self, at home, one, with Lingis' murmur of 

the world as an equally lost whole. 



I leave you with a quote from Schutz' fifth notebook, which, together 

with the other four, constituted part of the planning of Structures:



"There are as many innumerable kinds of shock experiences as there are 

finite provinces of meaning that can receive the accent of reality.

Examples: falling asleep (cf. Linschoten) as a leap into dream,

	  the theater curatin rises;

	  picture frame;

	  laughter as reaction to wit and involved shift of reality;

	  toys;

	  Kierkegaard's 'instant';

	  the scientist's decision for the theoretical attitude."



And:



"What has just been called a 'leap' or a 'shock' is nothing else than a 

radical modification of the tension of consciousness that results from a 

different _attention a la vie._"



_________________________________________________________________________





Concept Art





"I dream'd there would be Spring no more,

 That Nature's ancient power was lost:

 The streets were black with smoke and frost,

They chatter'd trifles at the door:"



(Tennyson, from In Memoriam A.H.H.)



 

No one could beat the work of Mary Perillo, who would place an X into the 

environment like Cadere's sticks, and that would be the artwork; no one 

had ever occupied sites in such a fashion, the X designating either the 

site as a work of art, or functioning itself as a work of X, X-work, the 

signifier hovering between the two meanings in 1969. There were texts to 

support the materialization of the site and the dematerialization of the 

work although all of us knew that the texts were unnecessary, that these 

events were unique in the history of culture, this alliance of earth with 

form, the thread connecting the two so thin and tenuous that the form or 

idea won out in the end. It was Kuspit who described the Kantianism of it

all, but we preferred Platonic idealism coupled with late-capitalist 

rhetoric of progress and tough art; we knew better. There was also 

anarchy underlying the idea of purity, grappling guerilla-like with site 

after site, something Kuspit couldn't understand. We thought Kant must 

have been getting at that in the Critique of Judgement, something Kuspit 

also couldn't understand.



These were hard times and Barbara Reise got caught, hooked, on writing the

ultimate definitive book on concept/ual art, found dead after two weeks in

her Camdentown flat, where I had visited her with Ian Murray, close

Canadian friend reading these very words. She had stayed with me here in

New York on one of her forays into feral artgang worlds of the capital

corrupt, currently reduced to nasty provincialism. But she taught us the

strength of that tough concept art and its cleavage through weaker forms

of aesthetics and taught us to believe hard when we did believe. 



Hard it was then to see later that the art was ruled by fallacy, that

every gesture and every moment connects with equal uniqueness, just a walk

across a room in 2024, for example, something I probably won't see too

well, my eyes dimmed and almost blind. 



Every difference inscribes itself unique within the plenitude of the

world, every letter sequence of any length exhausts the remnants of time

with the hundred or thousand or ten thousand computers or monkeys, the

remnants of time torn and bewildered by this emphasis on individuality, on

progress, on the newborn new, this essential elemental _misrecognition of

progress_ that constitutes progress itself. 



It's as if the purity of these acts guaranteed their certain strength, as 

if the purity rendered them undefiled, whereas we now know that every act 

is defiled equally, every act is a moment of dissolution, the body on its 

way towards certain collapse.



Not the necessary dissolution of death, but those markers that Schutz

refers to, this collapse through the incrementation of future memory and

its exhaustion; each and every act becomes contaminated or polluted this

very day within this very world. There is nothing implicit, nothing in-

trinsic.  Exhausted, we stand one way or another before or behind meaning.

We work it though. The global culture is a panoply of intelligent agents,

meso- and electronic, manual and other labors. The global culture falls

apart upon faulty reception, and reception is always already faulty,

always already at fault. There is nothing but reception. (Not the

necessary dissolution of death, but those markers.)



Mary Perillo's X's were more than magnificent, the last vestige of the 

destiny of the sign.



_________________________________________________________________________



Cybermind





"As theoreticians or witnesses, spectators, observers, and intellectuals, 

scholars believe that looking is sufficient. Therefore, they are not 

always in the most competent position to do what is necessary: speak to 

the specter." (Derrida, Specters of Marx)



You need me.



_________________________________________________________________________