Carapace





In the middle of the night, in the darkest hours, I am reading Paul 

Feyerabend's  Killing Time, I am working my way through the carapace of 

the book:



this post comes to you like an arrow lost and isolated 

in the nighttime sky. 

it is the loneliest space in the world.

it is fed by its own ego, held with invisible wires suspended

in the invisible air.



[What about the ego? It is encapsulated, governed by packet protocol.  It

is fed by an energy not my own. It thrusts itself into the void. It tra-

vels through wires enough. I cannot follow the course through the earth

itself. It devolves, is shunted, energizes, uses itself up, always in

remission, arrives letter and packet perfect. It is suspended perfectly

and forever. Light loses its speed at either end. In the time it takes to

hold a breath. In the end time.]



it is coming across a photograph that has long-since 

disappeared. the world withdraws into silence.

it is comforting. it does not tally death, voices of amazement

no longer heard.

you turned and looked at me near the stop-sign on the corner. 

and it was black and yellow and you have died only I carry that glance

forever and I will forgive you it 

poised there

in the blank air.



it is always the air. it is the engine of the air or the air-movement 

or the dissolution of the air. it is the air this and the air that and 

it is the dissolution. there is no doubt about the air.



it has no doubt.



"Again I remember only isolated episodes. I can locate some of them, but 

I have no idea where and when the rest occurred. Until about five years 

ago I thought I had been in Kiev; a little checking back and forth 

convinced me that I never left the northern part of the Russian front."

(Feyerabend)



There are myths in the Northwest, a trope of a bridge of arrows, each 

linking to the other, shot perfectly, a conjunction of force, energy, 

vectors, into empty space.



_________________________________________________________________________





My Fears Day and Night in Which I Strike Out / For New Territory





I fear failure most of all. I fear that my texts are bad scholarship, that

they'll never see print for the most part, that they'll disappear all too

quickly in this volatile medium. 



I fear I will never live with a lover again. 



I fear myself.



I fear that I will never have a full-time job again, that I will be found

increasingly useless and irrelevant on the basis of age alone. 



I fear my last fuck is my last fuck forever.



I fear that I shall die before the Net blossoms into an inconceivable

future in which we will walk through the solitary wild, in which the world

will dance again. 



I fear that I will turn inward, collapsed in cyberspace, bone and soul 

torn apart.



I fear that I will never know what it is to be beautiful, to command res-

pect and love in real life. 



I fear that I will never know what it is to live without fear, to wake in 

relative contentment and simplicity, without depression raging in the 

corners of my mind.



I fear that I am right, that I am wrong. And I fear that I am wrong, that 

I am right.



I fear nuclear holocaust, incipient fascism already on the horizon, and I

fear for women and minorities the world over, and I fear for species lit-

erally under the gun, extinction a deathstyle, way of death.



I fear my nights of nightmares and insomnia, and my days of dissolution.



I fear I have not given into my desires and I fear I have not been obscene

enough, and I fear that the edge for me is nothing more than a plateau for

the rest of you. 



I fear I never have been able to recognize the existence of others^.



I fear that I have never been able to believe and I fear that I have wan-

ted to believe something, anything. 



And I fear that I still have the residue of a body, its stain, tethering 

me to the side of the real beneath the sign of cyberspace. That I still 

desire body. That there is no one here beside me. That there is no other 

body. That there are no other bodies. That others^ disappear.



__________________________________________________________________________





The _That_ (a poor text but one that leads to something finer)





The machine as painting: There is always the need to rely on the contin-

gent: in painting, it's the plane of the canvas itself, including the 

material support; in music, it is in general the twelve tones of the 

octave. Not that these are inviolate; as the century winds down, they 

have been abandoned as absolute stands. But they remain (just as the

vessel remains for the ceramicist) as a given, tying the body in parti-

cular ways to the medium which harbors history as ultimate restraint.



Tied to the computer, to the qwerty keyboard, to the necessity of using

_this_ particular language and alphabet, I wind my way through the city

flaneur-style, but with always already additional requirements - now

here in Dean and Deluca's, where many famous meetings have occurred, held

taut by the computer battery, itself winding its way to exhaustion. Is 

this the beginning of a primitive conjuncture of language/body and flesh

held taut within its presence? My claws press keys, press surfaces from

which the savannah is gone forever; this is a symbolic life-form, exist-

ing on another plane altogether.



There is always a form of restraint in communication - it's the restraint

which clears the noise from the message, redirects code into redundency.

The machine is a painting because the machine is tied to a vocabulary of

representation, always already; one works with the _that_ which parallels

science and technology as a _that_ in relation to the real. But then I

believe not so much in anarchy/conventionalism, but instead in a core-

theoretical approach - that the real has gristle, and a fairly specific

one at that - the gristle articulating the movement of the bones which

constitutes code...



________________________________________________________________________





No Time to Say 





Travis _knew_ time didn't exist. He knew it the same way he knew the 

color of the stars outside the ship the color of the earth the day he was 

born. 



He knew that there was a slurry. That there were reports that kept 

accumulating. They always vectored one-way, that of increase. There was 

always increase and this was static and there was no time.



The increase could be organized and he'd think about that and then he'd 

look towards the vector but it would always be horizoned. This gave him 

hope and the hope was permanent. The horizon remained at exactly the same 

distance and always empty. That way.



There were premonitions but they showed up only in the increase. They 

were the latitude of the increase. This was static and skewed. 



There was no time but always already increase which seemed to him an

economy, seemed to him capital. He thought of it exactly as that: beneath

the sign of capital. 



He thought that the crisis of capital had something to do with death, 

which was always on the horizon, mute, shuffled. He knew there was no 

death but always already reports of it. The demise of capital.



He involved himself in the biblical tense, the collusion of tenses, and

thought of the project of tenses. He thought the project would permit the 

manifestation of the absence of time, a trace left from the future (all 

traces originate in the emissions of the future, always already), skewed 

towards the past, spread like an eddy or delta, because the past was 

always infinitely shallow, symbolic, and infinitely deep, imaginary.



Travis translated va-y'omer, the talking of it which was the doing of it, 

and he will talk and he said, will say, in the saying of it. Then thought,

saying:



Travis translating:



Travis and the Absence of Time



Travis and Time No Longer



Travis and the Hunger



The Hunger





__________________________________________________________________________









Flight





"You can almost find a lucid way to express delicate or transcendent 

things. If not, trying using a story!" (Serres, ibid.) 



In flight, I have often dreamed of a perfect air engine, swallowing itself,

an analog for neural processing, the blank generation, Peirce's sheet of

assertion. Now, thirty-one thousand feet above the ground, the engine

thins, dissolves; air transforms into purity.



Six miles up, we are becoming insubstantial, granular. In front of me there

is a second lcd screen, built into the seatback, with instructions for 

computer, game, telephone, and fax use. I am missing the connect, using

this notebook independently, isolated. Something reminds me of rocking back

and forth.



It's the same with atmosphere as with cyberspace: _there is no there 

there._ Not even flux exists; flux buries itself, just as time has ceased,

just as space has seized.



Landlocked space thrusts out from the body, gathers evidence and detail as

the perimeter increases; in three dimensions, detail, always out of reach,

increases as the cube of the radius. There is never enough detail, or too

much - on one hand, it is filtered and collapsed, and on the other, it is

the only thing that can return us from the engine of air.



I do not know any of you. Monitoring the list of subscribers, I find 

always new names, new transformations, a few constants, text peering out

in what I have called the state of "hysteric embodiment," reading beyond

description into the semblance of flesh. I write, inscribe, into the text

which retards the engine of air, as virtual particles retard the vacuum,

no greater, no less. And no greater.



At thirty-one thousand feet, the engine continues through the flux of the

Net. The machinery sputters beneath me, satellite machinery tethered to

the governing bodies of the order of angels. Pure vector...



There is no detail detailed. Only what the body embraces, the reach of the

arms and legs, tethers us to - here I am lost, speaking from within, to 

the extent that speech itself issues, taken for granted, within the organs

of hearing and sight. I can chatter my way through the Net.



I can chatter my way through the debris of detail, through the engines of

air, adding unnecessary fuel. The cone of detail, like Minkowski's, speci-

fies the unreachable, but here the kernel is both miniscule and obdurate.

It is a material poverty, overcome by no amount of tacit knowledge.



Writing in space, I write against time; taking my time, I wage against

space, tethered to it at thirty-one thousand feet. The plane continuously

falls as the earth recedes, but at a cost, never freely. I am reading

Bruno Latour and Michel Serres. I have never followed anyone, never that

close for an embrace.



Nothing is sufficiently detailed.





Michel Serres: 



"Thus I developed the habit, which you may find strange, of learning phil-

osophy elsewhere than in the places where it was allegedly taught. I 

learned almost everything on the outside and almost nothing on the inside.

Yes - we can safely put it that way - everything on the outside, almost

nothing on the inside."



"When you have no affiliations and want above all to avoid them, when you

have no home and cannot live anywhere, you are very much obliged to begin

a project. All my life I have had the distressful feeling of wandering in

the desert or on the high seas. And when you are lost and it is stormy,

you quickly feel the need to build a raft or a boat or an ark - even an

island - solid and consistent, and to supply it with tools, with objects,

with shelters, and to people it with characters...doesn't philosophy con-

sist of such a series of domestic improvements? Later, whoever wants can

seek shelter there."



"'Where are you?' 'What place are you talking about?' I don't know, since

Hermes is continually moving on. Rather, ask him, 'What roadmap are you

in the process of drawing up, what networks are you weaving together?'

No single work, neither substantive nor verb, no domain or speciality

alone characterizes, at least for the moment, the nature of my work. I 

only describe relationships."



(From Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, 

and Time.)





How much I identify with Serres, with Serres' project, as if I, too, were

a wanderer, continually unrooted, uprooted, constantly displaced. I have

never been one to believe in anything, identify with place, site, first or

second person. Air passes through the body, the mouth both input and 

cloaca, this becoming memory, its immediacy. There is no story to tell

here.



There is no story to tell except that which is just out of reach, a real

comprehension of knot-theory as an example, or a discourse which would be

recognized as such by all parties involved. Most of on-line sexuality 

involves the replacement of one body by another, the familiarity of one's

own becoming a surrogate for the comfort of an abandoned lover who awakens

at night with identical dreams. Cybermind is full of dreams and visions,

a _sight_ where detail collapses, not expands, and where everything and 

nothing are simultaneously out of reach. For whatever is in reach, _is,_

and whatever is present is in reach. Beyond the interstices and their 

links, there are no details, no interstices, and the granularity of cyber-

mind remains _of a size,_ quantum, irreducible. Only speed makes up for

difference, the compression and decompression of a file giving the illu-

sion of the continuous. Detail appears to increase by subterfuge; every-

thing is laid out the same, everything is carried by everything else. 



The flight is now _hurtling_ towards Los Angeles, the vector purified

above the clouds, the surroundings remaining comfortably familiar; even 

a crash at this point (I look out the window and see the engine on fire!)

would play out as always already memory - but there is this, in addition,

the feeble play of light recorded as the brain begins to die. I realize

I don't want to be there for the _effect,_ the light at the end of the 

tunnel, neurons winking out, consciousness holding forth, blithering, 

until the last possible moment. I've seen the film too many times; there

are no details, and, limbless, there's nothing to reach, and limbed, there

probably never was.



Details! Details!





_________________________________________________________________________





The Most Difficult Path





Taking or writing away during the reading of air

When nothing is given. Play or air combine. A leaf

Gives belief. The song begins to lose itself.

The song says: I once had a mouth to live in,

And now I wander exhausted, you have forgotten this.



Because you did not hear it, because of the reading

of air.



_________________________________________________________________________





An engine is anything which irreversibly transforms epistemology.



An irreversible transformation implicates the temporality of the subject.



Science is a tolerance-engine.



Before the nineteenth-century, something was true. Later, something was

true as-if (Vaihinger, even Bentham). Now, something is true within a

given.



An engine expands the domain of the given and contracts the tolerance.



An engine drives an engine.



_________________________________________________________________________





Michel et moi



I have been reading the Michel Serres Conversations books (w/ Bruno

Latour) and noticed a number of similarities with my own work. Does this

make me a fan? I've followed Serres' work for years, but the parallels are

still peculiar: He chooses Lucretius for example and I run around with

Diogenes Laertius. He talks about a mathematical underpinning to his work

in the sense of articulations, and my own proceeds out of the same to some

extent, coupled with interests in logic. He talks about multiplicity in

Genesis, which is something (spew, emission, inscription) that I have

worked with for years as well. He describes leaps of interconnectivities,

the past not being quite-so but imminent and relevant, which is also the

case for my work, using texts ranging from Gilgamesh and earlier to cur-

rent thinking, Serres himself. He takes offense at the label "poetry" for

his texts, on the grounds that it involves a radical misinterpretation -

and I've run up against the same. He is bothered by his work being consi-

dered shallow or inept, because the leaps fail to spell out their inter-

mediary steps - I've had the same difficulty. He rejoices in the liminal

or peripheral, and so do I. He collapses reading almost into the multi-

plicity of a substance which denies totality, as do I and Flaubert in his

St-Antoine, which has always been influential. He follows his own path,

helter-skelter through literature, mathematics, science, finding it always

fruitful and intensified in this fashion, and I do as well. So that I can

turn to Serres, now Michel, now _tu,_ and protest or rejoice affinity? 

Such is hardly the case. So that I can inflate myself with comparison to a

reasonably well-known Continental thinker? This is a source of hyperbolic

embarrassment to me. So that I can write this text, muse on uncanny simil-

arities, hope for future dissemination (the metaphor is deliberate)? This 

gets closer. So that I can learn from his texts? No more than I have 

learned from any other. So that I could convince him to read my own? No 

more this possibility than the crisis of identity which never resolves 

but is simply defused, _defuged,_ forgotten.



Alan



___________________________________________________________________________





How we know what's between our legs:



We know the earth moves during an earthquake because the inertial moment

of our vestibular apparatus is thrown off simultaneously with nearby cords

subservient to conservation of angular momentum. And we know the earth

moves because such angular momentum leads to differential torsions in the

midst of the apparatus of everyday life. And we know because such torsions

produce overshot realignments resulting further in acoustic phenomena as

material thresholds are surpassed among stressed and adjacent materials.

And we know because electrostatic energy fields are altered as friction

produces the migration of charges to surfaces, the greater the surface

area in relation to the interior, the greater the charge. And we know

because stress-related faults sever conduits, breaking electrical and

optical linkages to the world outside. And we know because our bodies are

of great transforming, and we identify such movement with sexuality,

libido, passion, forbearance, and elastic or abrupt transformations. We

know the earth moves during an earthquake because we song chthonic, Honey

Weatherby la la, Clara Internet la la, because we song La Smoky Sunset,

because of frond-wine, whined palms, stabilized vorticies among the spears

as the wind blows smoke, blows down soot from the burning hills. And we

know because of Clara Hielo come where the stones melt bones and chills

torn forgotten We know this change of earthquake because we've spoken

through alarms in dark Clara night, plumes of Tiffany dawn, Weatherby

dusk. The drink edged towards the lip of the glass. The lips parted. 



_________________________________________________________________________







Dreaming





Every item placed as if it were always remembered for its use and the

name to which it belongs.



Propitiation carried the namesake of the day and each and every night.



Losses became elsewhere the nourishment of being and each way reflected

every other.



Resonances became swollen with resonances, occupying culture's frayed 

edges, naming the territories.



Between the stars there were more stars, and between them, incommensur-

able void.



This was the place of names, no visible source of light, the fulfillment

of: Olber's paradox, a direction which murmured the world. 



If Olber had been right there would have been a world of comfort; if 

Hoyle had been right, so much fulfillment!



Articulation from equivalent distances, and distances.



None.



__________________________________________________________________________





Trapped!





I woke up this morning half sleep slamming my eyes down to the carpet

where no one was. Crawled over to the laptop, time to write, time to

ride on the Net, checking in before checking out, the way to Armageddon,

downtown Venice California where the canals ran viral dark decades ago,

another project like Hollwoodland gone bust leaving remnants of beautiful

years and people. That was a sentence to make people fly.



So on the way out the door, turn the machine on for a fond farewell and

found:



The message from Japan like Venice lichen riding in, shaping itself with

bounces, catastrophies, little deaths and violations - misshapen errors,

threatening east, west, north, south with closures/foreclosures, mon-

strosities cutting out the clay forever.



What to do, quickly called a who cybermind to majordomo, to no one at all,

sat back waited for the answers. No one came, no one ever came, I thought,

more murders, earthquake disasters threatening the whole thing down. _What

to do,_ unplug the whole scenario - and nothing came again and again,

nothing coming like desert monsoon, a gap between emptied walls, it was

like that I tell you and I had to take a deep deep breath.



So there it was: error message of violence and terror, no reply from 

majordomo, holding my breath to leave the building and soak in the hard

Los Angeles air. Called up again and again, no response whatsoever - tried

the telephone to one or another collaborator, emptied out as well. Zero

multiplied by zero a million times over, there was no escape. It would 

only take the barrier of _one_ I thought to myself, and wondered if that

was ever to be.



I called, fretted, cyberspace cybermind emptied out like rats from Colum-

bus fearing the onslaughter to come. Onslaught, onslaughter, laughter,

the packets screaming in my ears as I longed to lunge for the door. Was

it for or against, was it dying. The whole eastcoast I thought down in

flames I thought and sent more and more, message to majordomo ship in

distress, passengers sick or dying.



I slashed my way into the heart of the empire, jefferson.village.virginia.

edu, just to see what I could find, dragged out the sub list screaming

beyond any sort of semblance of the human. Found the address, cybermind/

paradigm somewhere in deep Japan where I had never been, and it took only

a control-K to wipe it out in total, not even the residue of memory on the

Jefferson hard-drive waiting for another fall. What was, what would have

been.



But the list was down, majordomo was down, and I ran screaming, myself, 

out the door, and I hope that no human ever has cause to look at that

terror in my eyes. Behind me I could hear the screech of packets looking

for a port, sockets emptied of all confabulation. Behind me everything

rushed nowhere at all. Cyberspace, behind me, an empty vat. Eastcoast up

and down in flames. It took atmosphere, and Los Angeles had plenty of 

that, export or import, it made no difference.



So here I sit in the world of books, no ideas but in things, no things on

or off line, cut off, castrated from the real I think. And whether or not

you get this depends on the damage done and the damage control and the 

lack of both and that lack I discovered for the first time, deep, deep, in

myself. I hope to God you never have to go through this, and I hope, more

than hope, that if you do, you don't survive, any better than myself - a 

shell of a man without hope, an abyss in the heart, something you'd never

comprehend, until you've walked the walk, talked the talk, and that's a 

blue moon on Sunday, get my drift.





__________________________________________________________________________





Carol





Yesterday, I saw Carol for the first time, after thirty-five years, more

than a third of a century. I knew she was in television, film, and theater;

I came across her over a decade ago in a Mary Tyler Moore show, walking on

the way I remembered her, and there was some Mary in her as well, and 

Colleen and other actresses whom I admired. I had looked for her, on and

off over the years; at the twenty-fifth highschool reunion, she included

an address which led to another dead-end, and no one I knew could locate

her, or had the interest. Or maybe the interest; I'd lost touch with al-

most anyone. But I wanted to know what happened to Carol beyond the images,

and this seemed important and impossible.



(Already the captured tropology of narrative and the saying of it.)



So when I was in the bookstore yesterday at Beyond Baroque and the phone

rang and someone handed it to me and a voice said this is Carol ----, is

this the Alan Sondheim - so when this happened and I interrupted, I'd find

my voice again, and she'd run down to Beyond Baroque at three o'clock high,

thin, and sharp -



And I'd find myself waiting outside the place, waiting for my past to make

sense, for those wounds to heal or at least scar over from the nightmare

that highschool was for me - and I'd be nervously pacing all over the

building unable to concentrate -



So when she came I recognized her, an image-memory, her hair that exact

color of somewhat darkened off-blond that I remembered, her gait the same

and voice the same, no matter what's said - not that youth is still inside

the body whatever the body, whatever the age, but that the body has always

already been there in the absence of time -



So what can I say to further the consequences? That _something happened,_

that we flew into each other's arms? I would have, at a moment's notice; I

was near tears, not with memory but with memory's absence - a meeting out-

side of presence, outside of the imminent; it was the uncanny of cybermind

all over again, something initiated long before -



(Nor could I say this to her, my arms outstretched for another rejection,

our parting kiss cheek to lips at best after hours' conversation. I 

danced the dance on the edge of talk forgotten, the nuance of sun over 

Venice Beach, Pacific at our feet. It wasn't romantic.)



I had looked in all the phonebooks, asked actors and actresses of my ac-

quaintance, she had never married, I knew the solution would be in pre-

sence itself. Duration creates coincidence, shudders history to a halt;

duration did this. She didn't look old or young, she looked like Carol

and talking in a way that led to the margins where the meadows met the

desert, flowers transform into plants thirsted, foreclosed, for nourish-

ment. That is the absence of the forest. Would I have appeared trans-

parent, translucent - would I have become a ghost. I knew I was always a

ghost. I knew she would never want me. I knew she couldn't give me part

of my history because what she gave me was _history's absence._



I knew that there was no history, not that it was all right or illumina-

ting in any way. She had no children, had a career that fluctuated like

mine, major roles then nothing, as in a contrary or wayward person, as in

contradiction but not suture, not a path, not directionless. I'm moving

towards a state.



(I have always understood that there is nothing to learn.)



I'm moving towards a state where this matters, where there is no repeti-

tion because my desire continues to circulate, inscribe me, this dissolu-

tion that remains ungrounded, recognizing foundation's absence. I'm moving

towards a state where after thirty-five years, I can create a pivot, where

the depression that comes with cyberspace is deflected in the recognition

of irreality, split-screen and split-skin, neither interior nor exterior.

And I'm moving towards a state where movement remains, remnant or residue,

not ever a truth to be seen, experienced, lost and restored by a telephone

call from a long absent, long missed, searched-for, friend.



The state: that we inhabit the imaginary, that it's the symbolic that 

leaks, and not the other way around, not even, especially not even, in 

cybermind where all we have is sticks and stones for letters.



The dissolution of the classic nation-state. The absence of the state. 

Fuzzy states. What can never be stated. Who Carol is and is not. Where 

Carol has been, what Carol has done. What has occurred in an interval of

thirty-five years. The length of the interval. The length of the next

interval. The length ofthe next.



__________________________________________________________________________









American Tabloid





I figured I'd finish American Tabloid flying out of Los Angeles back down

to New York but didn't figure I'd finish it here in the city at 5 am in

the morning. LA-lala was Net all the way, nodes and penetrations, trans-

parencies among sites, channeled flows down freeways across homeowners'

firewalled fences designed to protect cordoned neighborhoods from _them_

- oh but you know all that. 



But American Tabloid by James Ellroy doubled the stakes/Net imaginary:

Corruption is everywhere within it, sites are always already imminent, 

passion rains terror and ecstasy. But it is a mystery or a story with no

surprises, which is the trajectory of the real, or rather what is a sur-

prise to the characters is no surprise to us; we know where Kennedy was

shot before they do for example.



And it's a deeper analysis for all Ellroy's real-life bluster, of simul-

ac America, than Baudrillard could ever produce - deeper because of the

deaths and drugs involved and the sheer interiority of bodies. And the 

sites, Netted landscape more cyber for all its street-transport, than 

Gibson, I think because of the uneasy quality there and available. Right

now outside the fireworks are turning violent; it's Fourth of July, ready

or not for example.



That's why we get along in this space - because for those of us in the

States, it's already familiar - only you can't get AIDS or killed through

the screen, yet. We're becoming a nation of posturers, sweeping people of

color aside as quickly as possible as the Rehnquist Supreme Court returns

to the post-reconstruction era and its segregation clampdown. We'll see

what we want and see only at a distance.



And try as hard as we can, distance is something that comes with the Net,

only we're on the other side, trying to get in.



Trying to _get real._ Or as real as Ellroy's book.



_________________________________________________________________________



What the Engine Does, of the Anorectic Airliner





The Engine swallows the air; it is the point at which the movement of air

and its dispersion begins. This is an act of devouring, gorging, the buli-

mic cycle which collapses as the world is absorbed. It is a transformation

into substance as the Engine appropriates the foundations of the signifier

for itself. What an appropriation! The Engine inscribes the absorbed world

in an exhaust trail. The Engine parallels the photon; it refuses position

as the tokenization of existence; it exists as movement and collapse. Thus

it flies and desires the air. Thus it appropriates and seduces the air,

through an act of violence which retains its position of flight. For that

which would escape it, Engine, cruise missile, bomb, what is being said

but the "I" of the engine, within a dialectic of seduction? Seduction in

which the Origin is proclaimed, and that is the metric established as

Origin, the location of the phallus. The cruise missile cocks its head,

gives it to the world. It is semen which is disorganized; the world burns

into paste through an atmosphere of paste, through an Engine of paste. The

world burns, the Engine burns, swells, disgorges; it is the world returned

to vomit. The anorectic airliner shudders (therefore shudders);  the line

of flight is re-established. Such an establishment with markings in the

sky! Such a sky that establishes itself as a graph with mobile coordin-

ates, exhaust that indicates while it dissipates, is absorbed in the

clutter of the air. The tiny Engine! The presence of Flight! The erection

in the sky and the charred earth! It is the appearance of the microtech-

nological once again, the bacteriophage with its consonant and identical

units. It is an empty circle. It is the exhaustion of repetitive expan-

sion. 



(Disorders of the Real, 1988. The Engine continues to devour.)



___________________________________________

					   |

					   |





Heiner Muller!





Heiner, who are you raving at, the source of anger, frustration, when

Europe fragments into Medea's costume jewelry? this isn't caw caw x-

generation eyes gouged in Valkyrie unison unisong, little beuys playing 

little riot grrrls, no organization supermarkets, vaginal dentatas 

devouring everything in site 



  Heiner Muller: (previously East German) playwright, wrote Hamletmachine 

  and Medeamaterial among other works

  Europe fragments: dissolution of the classic nation-state

  Medea's costume jewelry: _precisely_ because it wasn't 

  caw caw: Allen Ginsberg refrain which I also employed

  x-generation eyes: because of the simulacrum, because of blasted vision

  Valkyrie unison: because of artificial intelligence flock behavior

  unisong: consider plainsong

  beuys: Joseph Beuys, progenitor of bunker mythology

  riot grrrls: because Mecca Normal and Courtney Love

  supermarkets: go back and read Howl (see above)

  vaginal dentatas: see Elwin's Myths of Middle India, the plural in

  violation fabric of European hegemony

  site: because there isn't one, never were; see Serres' Conversations



this will be the night of the blade

railroad track switched to a siding at the very last minute

computer screen flickers with memory of you

wetware caught the boys and grrrls napping



  blade: not _runner_ nor commerce but glint

  railroad track: concentration-camp, MIT model railroad club (see 

  Levy's Hackers)

  wetware: because cum _sticks,_ binds the body to itself, cunts and 

  cocks _leak,_ the body's bound to itself, to another transitive in

  transition



Heiner! this isn't the you you've known, girls have gone it alone for too 

long now, your glasses are like mine, mirrors are against the law, you've 

got bunkers, intensities of down down thought, you've got cunts scratched 

out in the military caves under Dover Cliffs, cause you know beuys will 

be beuys and it's still pretty much a game of chemicals



  you you've: uuencode, uudecode

  alone: because you haven't helped, because we've pillaged

  mirrors: because you can't go to that _other_ stage where Lacan 

  dissolves, where annihilation fabric tells whatever remnants of truth 

  remain

  bunkers: see Heiner Muller, Material, Reclam-Verlag Leibzig, 1990

  military caves: Napoleonic-era fortifications built into the chalk cliffs

  you descend down stairs rubble, you see the double helix asshole 

  tunneled all the way all the way through, gaping one side for officers

  one side for the enlisted



  You enter the caves. You walk along Piranesian ledges, everything rotted,

  encrusted, having broken through the barbed wire. The year is 1963.



  You turn towards the wall, still damp, covered with graffiti. There you

  see the image of a woman, scratched onto the surface, but the cunt, 

  the cunt scratched deeper, as if the cock could go all the wa as if 

  the cock could go all the way through, could keep on tunneling, Heiner, 

  could suck the flesh itself, explosion fabric against the soft rock 

  scuffling, don't ever think the surface holds, don't ever think.



  The year is 1963, the place, the Cliffs of Dover, my companion the 

  young son of the borstal governor.  



water dissolves everything but wait what time dissolved



  Wenn er zuerst am Baum steht, ist er frei

  Wenn nicht muss er stehnbleiben auf der Stelle

  Als ob der Handschlag an Baum oder Wand

  Ihn an den Boden nagelt wie ein Grabstein. 

   (Muller, from Blut ist im Schuh)



  If he reaches the tree first he is free

  If not he has to freeze on the spot

  As though the tap on tree or wall

  Nailed him like a tombstone to the ground.

   (trans. Bernard and Caroline Schutzhe)





_________________________________________________________________________







Socrates





"Moreover, in his old age he learnt to play the lyre, declaring that he 

saw no absurdity in learning a new accomplishment. As Xenophon relates

in the _Symposium,_ it was his regular habit to dance, thinking that such

exercise helped to keep the body in good condition. He used to say that

his supernatural sign warned him beforehand of the future; that to make a

good start was no trifling advantage, but a trifle turned the scale; and

that he knew noting except just the fact of his ignorance." (Diogenes 

Laertius)



Translation Hicks (Loeb), but supernatural sign = _daimonion_ here, and 

what are we to make of this? For his philosophy, close to the beginning 

of everything, was one of ethical conduct; that _otherwise,_ as in the

Tractatus of Wittgenstein, was either consigned to silence or produced 

as aura. Listen:



"For Favorinus in his _Miscellaneous History_ says Socrates and his pupil

Aeschines were the first to teach rhetoric; and this is confirmed by Ido-

meneus in his work on the Socratic circle. Again, he was the first who

discoursed on the conduct of life, and the first philosopher who was 

tried and put to death." (ibid.)



"Then if I believe in supernatural beings, as you assert, if these super-

natural beings are gods in any sense, we shall reach the conclusion which

I mentioned just now when I said that you were testing my intelligence 

for your own amusement, by stating first that I do not believe in gods, 

and then again that I do, since I believe in supernatural beings." 

(Plato, Apology, Hamilton/Cairns edition)



The Timaeus complicates things; the creator says "Wherefore, since ye are

but creatures, ye are not altogether immortal and indissoluble, but ye

shall certainly not be dissolved, nor be liable to the fate of death, 

having in my will a greater and mightier bond than those with which ye

were bound at the time of your birth." This before the creation of the

three tribes of mortal beings. (ibid.)



I am confused by daemons, by Socrates' daemon, by his relation to godhead,

by the Apology and the remnants of what drove him everywhere, and for all

time. I am missing something that inserts itself in the midst of the ques-

tions, something that has to do with the inauguration of a certain concept

of the West. Look at Jowett's introduction to his translation of the Re-

public, where he speaks of the _daimonium,_ or "internal sign, which is

alluded to by Socrates as something peculiar to himself." 



There are both epistemological and ontological questions at work here, and

I am hardly well-versed enough to describe Socrates' beliefs, even through

Xenophon's accounts. Plato himself wanders throughout the Parmenides and

Timaeus and neither sounds like the rational argumentation of the Repub-

lic. Ethics is one thing; mythos is another, with its built-in narrative. 

In any case, the daemon appears as _something else,_ cybermind or residue,

almost an implantation or disturbance. Was the daemon Plato, or Plato Soc-

rates? Who was inserting what?



What did Socrates _see_?



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



Heidegger begins An Introduction to Metaphysics: Why are there essents

rather than nothing? ("Warum ist uberhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr

Nichts?") This question draws forth the same barrier as always; now it is

also a cosmological issue, no closer to the deconstructed Origin. In fact

the questions remain constant, continuous, already present in Aristotle's

Metaphysics - it's only perhaps in the theory of signs, motivated by de-

velopments in logical calculi, that anything like an "advance" has been

made. It becomes necessary to conceive of the work of thinking (somewhat

in the Heideggerian sense) as processes within fuzzy domains. Internal or

neighborhood dialogs are established, with books and other concreted texts

as a form of residue. But the dialogs themselves hurl themselves at death,

only to retreat. The sciences alone (including mathematics) have recogni-

zable progress, based on identifiable and well-definable tolerances; out- 

side, language continues its buzz. Were more texts to survive, say, from 

Sumer or Egypt, it would be even clearer that as Serres would have it, 

nothing is outdated, everything wobbles but the environment which is con- 

tinuing to collapse.



Our neurosis is that we are doomed to repetition; our schizophrenia, that 

we refuse to accept this; our psychosis, that we are blind to it.



For the gods: To have had a body would have been to die.



Thought binds itself to annihilation.



The daemon of Socrates.



__________________________________________________________________________





Subject: Maudlin Sentinmental Intellectual Trashy Despair







Friday night is the loneliest night of the week, 

But Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week.



Saturday afternoon is filled with despair wandering in the midst of couples.



In my classes there are no couples but everyone is coupled so they're

tethered, someone somewhere somehow.



Down the street boys and girls together or in pairs there. I'm up here two

floors up so I see them, Dean Street like a scar disappearing on and out. 



I can't get my mind off this. It burns through my work, ruins it.



Heidegger again, right at the beginning, asking "Why are there essents 

rather than nothing," goes on in the next paragraph -



"And yet each of us is grazed at least once, perhaps more than once, by 

the hidden power of this question, even if he is not aware of what is 

happening to him [sic]. The question looms in moments of great despair, 

when things tend to lose al their weight and all meaning becomes obscured."



Yet Levinas insists in these moments on the falling-away of existence 

itself, Kristeva talks about the thing, I think of disinvestment. The Why 

requires energy - there's the rub of it. Anyway, Heidegger goes on:



"Perhaps it will strike but once like a muffled bell that rings into our 

life and gradually dies away. It is present in moments of rejoicing, when 

all the things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the 

first time, as if it might be easier to think they are not than to 

understand that they are and are as they are."



But of course in joy all questions fall away, not out of lack of interest,

but out of the distraction of existence itself.



Here, nothing. Without the text, fantasy. With the text, repetition com-

pulsion, a basically neurotic relation to the real (not that I haven't 

the capability of infusing the real directly (not that the real is free 

from the symbolic)).



I sit here; it's Friday night. I have the weekend to muse on this. It's 

the loneliest time of the week. It's my maudlin sentimental intellectual 

trashy despair.



Alan



_______________________________________________________________________ 





Parmenides' Letter to One Unknown





Dear Clara,



I do not blame you for leaving before I screened my recent work. You might

not have liked it, and maybe you knew that and maybe that's why you didn't

stay. You have always spared me, comforting me and remaining outside or

beyond the carapace; you have been the only one to recognize that the 

carapace made no difference. It was there, you explained, that clouds and

symbols scudded across the daylight hours and proceeded into the night,

where they garnered invisibility like the cloaks of darkness surrounding

your skin, your hair, your eyes.



Decades ago I made up my mind to find you, but what purpose would that 

have served; searching is withdrawal, unless one is a detective, sur-

rounded by the world off-line. Finding is always religious; something com-

pletes us, allowing further movement in any direction, always with the 

suture and stasis of the soul itself at hand. And searching and finding

are never the living of the journey itself; that is for weaker spirits who

collapse their fury and intensity into packets convenient for the produc-

tion of books or travelogues. 



Finding is more than a sighting, it is a citing of the flesh as well, the

presence of a body shifting beyond the possibility of illusion. The grain

of the skin, shuttled crystalline slivers of the iris, scintillate in 

light and shadow themselves changing in the arena of other movements, 

what remains incalculable, the chaotic and noisy dissolutions of a reality

I have recovered only in my dreams. Your presence dissolved them as well,

your body a gift of future physics, edgewise sightings of jets, black 

holes, murmuring at the borderlines of consciousness, howling at displays

of ego dragged from the interior of the earth.



Such displays as you would silence, mud-displays, dirt foamed and seething

in the plays and scripts of desires. Decades ago, the healings began and

collapsed as time no longer struggled to matter, through matter, and I

would say, Clara, my contemporary, would say this to myself, sealing bodies

in the absence of bodies. This enabled me, always and forever, to continue

where others were no longer present, in this space of sputtered packets,

your name world-wide and resonant with the planet's breathing. You did 

this for me, and changing names can only return to you resonance's doub-

ling, riemannian surfaces wrapping themselves around us, like the cloak

of skin, flesh, and bones, the daggers of the closing iris in the midst

of the dawn of the night...



Alan Hielo Internet



__________________________________________________________________________





Kristo Plateva:  



  

		Everything I have said has been said before.

		      I have no facts to back this up.





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



Representations of the chora:



What could possibly be the advantage of an image of the chora, which is

of course unrepresentable, so that even the concept turns in upon itself

as if in the form of denial? This of course after Plato, where "recep-

tacle" and nurture play a role.



Clearly the chora is fractured, hollowed, multiple, filled and fulfilled

with virtual collisions, virtual collusions.



Not so clearly it possesses illusory and problematic depths. Within, the

dawn of the night of signifiers, broken edges of graphemes - within and

without, a certain uncertain distribution of the poetic.



Clearly there are partial inscrptions, the uncanny beginnings of the 

proper name, colorless, this matter of intensities.



Clearly these intensities beginning their emergence as things and objects

of the world, a certain uncertain darkness at noon.



Not so clearly, this space which flattens, increases in depth, pulsates,

in response to the position, site of the viewer's sight, who refuses to

cite, who has released hirself to cite.



So I imagine a sheet, taut, almost to the breaking point, nonetheless

curved, stretched from horizon to horizon, edges and edge-phenomena close

to invisible, laminar, or not quite.



Which is never possible on a terminal screen, but only as an extrapolation

which is also clearly self-defeating. Nonetheless...



Nonetheless this image inhabits for the pleasure of your downloading at:



ftp jefferson.village.virginia.edu

cd pub/pubs/listservs/spoons/cybermind-digest.archive/internet/chora.gif



and there are others as well, extensions/intensions, still in process of

development which... are not quite suitable for public access... as the

chora remains... within a certain darkness or interpolation of the sym- 

bolic... crushed, what might be a form of intension.



__________________________________________________________________________







Kristo Plateva:  



  

		Everything I have said has been said before.

		      I have no facts to back this up.





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







These Images, These Stuttered Dissolutions





The diagrams create both the gaze of the subject and the fetishization

of space as a result of the gaze; a wager of fixed proportions is con-

structed. The space looms, cut, invisibly thin, the result of a sheet

inscribed with its own geodesics; it's here that words are wrapped into

the fabric of space. The viewer/voyeur becomes limner against the visage

of unadulterated interiority, protuberances. The stuttered effect of the

strips plays cinema across surfaces increasingly incoherent, unraveling

at the edges. The edges are only the means of inscribing the invisible;

they play the role of standards against which heteroglossia occurs.



The game is that of the fisher of signs, not symbols, waylaid traps among

uncanny visitations. The game occurs by processing parameters which tend

towards inconceivable unfoldings, the glimpse of flesh, desire manifest

through the torsion of psychoanalytical space, minus analysis, blocked

and corrupted.



The scar image is inserted into the graphic of the earth, mercator pro-

jection; the scar twists the planet into inconceivable geographies. Such

images are intensifications of topography, not simulacra or leakages, 

but the precise control of dissolution, lending themselves to constraint,

frameworking, protocols.



"The Other crossed through (0) stands against this knowledge in the place

of division where meaning falters, where it slips and shifts. It is the

place of _signifiance,_ Lacan's term for this very movement in language

against, or away from, the positions of coherence which language simulta-

neously constructs. The Other therefore stands against the phallus - its

pretence to meaning and false consistence. It is from the Other that the

phallus seeks authority and is refused." (Jacqueline Rose, Introduction

II to Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality)



To search for the proper image for overlay: construct a path, inscription,

through the message bases, in the form of a hunt or retrieval: recupera-

tion of excess as the plane transforms into a contusion, bend, the victim

or procedure of a psychoanalytical tensor calculus. 



Nothing is sutured until you, dear reader, blind yourself to the calculus

of language, reopening your eyes to decipherment, from that which is found

at ftp://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pub/pubs/listservs/spoons/cyber-

mind-digest.archive/internet/*.gif ...





__________________________________________________________________________





Internet Questions



Where can I find an mpeg viewer that doesn't require a videoboard? Are

soundboards really necessary for all audio applications? Is Eudora

superior to Pine or the other way around? Why doesn't the Pico editor

allow me to jump to the end of a file? Is there any reason to download

linux to a home computer? What's a good telnet application for Trumpet

Winsock? Where does the name Trumpet Winsock come from? What is the

difference in download time for Mosaic and Netscape? What is the

difference between Netscape 1.1 and 1.2 beta? What is an AVI file and are

there AVI readers and if so, can they run without a videoboard? Does

anyone know the current legal status of gif? Is there a way to move into

the interior of a gif file and edit it directly? Can someone recommend a

decent uuencoder and uudecoder for DOS? 



Internet Securities



I worry about the tenuous nature of email lists in relation to the invest-

ment made in them by numerous subscribers. For this reason, I think it

worthwhile that all of us download the subscriber lists every so often, so

that if there is a disk crash or the necessity of setting up elsewhere,

the list could be reconstituted. To obtain the list, of course, write to

majordomo@jefferson.village.virginia.edu and say, in the body of the post,

who cybermind or who fiction-of-philosophy; once you have the list,

download and save. If the list goes down permanently, in the event of war

or other international catastrophe, create an alias file in your address-

book, and place the list there; enter it at the Bcc: option when sending 

out a post. To access Bcc: in Pine, when your cursor is in the header, 

type ^R, control-R and the rich-header will appear. Although it may 

appear that I am being facetious, I have learned in my short life not to 

trust the world.



_________________________________________________________________________







A Woman





Were I to have been born, I would have been born woman, I would have lived

solely within the society of women, I would not have known male, I would

have circumscribed male. From the center which would have been ellipsoid,

I would have circumscribed male, from this center which would have been

surface, depth, interior, from this surface which would have been emission,

emanation. From the exterior I would not have know fear, pain, aggression,

the absence of nurturing, the cold spray on the edges of the face, and from

the exterior I would have known edges, walked through their toppled geome-

try. And from the edges I would have dreamed of plinths and broken arms, I

would have dreamed of breasts warmed from marble enclosures, and I would

have dreamed of the spaces between the breasts and the arms descending, 

pointing, opening up to their spaces of the other, which would not ever

have inscribed the rough spray on the cheek of a sailor male, but the 

smooth cheek of a woman tending the boat towards each and every destina-

tion of her choice. I would have been that woman tending the boat, gazing

across and through the bow to the filtered green-blue sea beneath; I would

have wandered the furrows of that sea in the search of a shell for the 

voice of the woman I would have loved forever. I would have heard her in

the lineaments of the shell, in the folds among the hinging and calcium

concavities worn smooth as well by the wind, like my cheek against the 

wind, worn smooth of many colors subdued in the face of the deep, and the

oars and oarlocks of the boat, the tillers and calking of the catboat set

into the water like a jewel in the ring of my lover walked through the

deep with me. Would I have been born a woman with the shore and the steps

and slopes beyond, would I have darkened the bottom of the sea, phosphor-

escent me, would I have circumscribed the male.



Wooden shaft of the color of the sea, wooden shaft of the color of the sea,

turn the moon around, turn the moon around. Unfurled marine of the oak,

of the grain dark with longing for the depths stilled near the vents orange 

with the promise of life, life seeping among the strata of the rocks far 

from shore, unfurled ferrules of the shaft, remember the bowed petals of

the flowers of haunted memory, redolent with the turn of the living. Life

alone reminds itself, merged with the kelp and sea-oak, drawn from the 

shore and the winds nested in the midst of winds. Oh to have been born a 

woman and long riding on the sea, and oh, to have dwelled near the floor

tracked of silt and longing, nothing but the others kept out, seahorses

raveled in my hair, anglerfish among my many limbs ...



_______________________________________________________________________





Ground Control





Shuttled information travels during electron orbits stuttering themselves

around broken space, smeared in orbital clouds; running with a fury, 

they're too simple to concern themselves with the wolves of winter. Down

elsewhere, ground control parcels the space of the body near the machinery

which connects, throughputs, to Japan, Australia, stains thrown across the

civilized world. The civilized world:



/defined by protocols, etiquette, organized in steps paced with the clock

breath, thresholds gathering information as clocks underpace/outpace the

_other._

/intensifications of lines, traces, ashes, inscriptions, speech acts, 

procurements, endocolonizations, simulacra, labia, phalli, packets, data- 

grams, petit a's, habiti, emissions: electron pipelining dividing the

natural as a point in two-dimensional space, not even an obstacle.



Ground control loses force as graphemes and analytical divisions, survey-

ings, gather across the landscape dominated by the gnomon. What measures,

measures itself, expends itself; what travels, speaks, dissembles. What

means this spending of an _alterior economy,_ that of the other? Ground

control speaks, loses control, divides the boundaries, folds inward, in

the matter of the _curl._



The Shuttle will land in the curl. The Shuttle will be comforted.



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



"The Last Judgment, which so tortured the Middle Ages and which our day

has forgotten so absolutely, is no mere invention of selfish and uneducated

monks. The Last Judgment is the supreme reality. In moments - their rare

moments - of illumination - even our positive thinkers feel this. The Last

Judgment decides whether there shall be freedom of will, immortality of

the soul, or not - whether there shall be a soul, or not. And, maybe, even

the existence of God is still undecided. Even God waits, like every living

human soul, on the Last Judgment." (Lev Shestov, In Job's Balances)



__________________________________________________________________________





Losing Ground Control (The Glutton)





"The task of philosophy is to tear itself loose from life during life, if

only in part. And even as man comes into the world wailing, or awakes with

a cry from a torturing fever dream, so too the transition from life to 

death must clearly be accompanied by a senseless, desperate effort whose

proper expression will also be a senseless, desperate cry or a wild sob. I

think that many philosophers have known such an 'awakening' and have tried

to tell of it." (Lev Shestov, In Job's Balances)



In the heat, it exhausts itself, the lists get old, decayed, there's noth-

ing going on here, people write papers, no one comments, it's more impor- 

tant to discuss the weather, the energy seems low, it's my fault, my de- 

pression's contagious, perhaps there's nothing more to say, cyberspace 

exhausts itself quickly, perhaps the details are elsewhere, perhaps we're 

all too unread to continue any further - in the heat, ground control is

lost, you can see the waves of energy focused at the source, dissipating,

spreading like ripples in a pond, the earth heats up momentarily, cools, 

cool juxtapositions, there's a dampening-effect, until silence slopes in-

ward - in the heat, tears boil off the eyes, liquids coat the body, quick

evaporation, the skin in a constant state, turmoil, of transmission - but

to return to my subject, the lists, these lists - for example gender - 

where are the theories, analyses, references, the differences of language,

response, transgressions, intromissions on the net - already memory refuses

to serve me, cool dispatch, back from the warzone - here everything's safe,

dispassionate passion or discussion which in the heat it exhausts itself, I



I curl in the heat of the shuttle, look forward to the exchange, am desper-

ate for calculi, the argument of ontology, epistemology, the argument of

foundations, of deconstructions, argument of post-structuralisms, argument

of structure itself, structure and substructure, text and infratext, this

all-too-even prose, this tone of explication -



The text breaks off there, the text breaks off here -





__________________________________________________________________________





Who Are You





In the middle of the night, oppressive heat, billowed clouds, etc., I get

a post: Do you write to strangers? Replying, I hear nothing for months,

then more cryptic allusions. Elsewhere, I find that X has unsubbed because

of the presence of Another on the list. These categories deserve attention.

Who out there in the midst of the continents writes under the sign of the

unknown?



The writings displace themselves as they come in, each linked to the 

other/s in the in-box. Or else they efface each other, as escape codes

corrupt files, reduce the whole to blank and irretrievable sequences, not

quite through careful filtering. But here, who are you?, something else

occurs, effacement which places itself as the crossed-sign of god, woman,

phallus, being - neither a circumlocution nor a translation. I assume the

posts originate from one or more of the four, and I'd eliminate the phal-

lic which shudders under the weight of its Lacanian name, or not: there's

always the literal consideration of outlawry for example, militiamen as

well for whom secrecy is as rigid as... 



I've lost sense here; neither man or woman nor both, or the presence of a

god perhaps, all being - the posts don't generate themselves, they don't

sound like bots. Honey says it's sexist perhaps to place gender among 

them, but Honey also acknowledges that it's the _site_ of the phallus or

the woman (as if there were _the_ woman, in discourse or otherwise) that's

at work, nor is it a question of sight or Lacan's masquerade, but simply

absence - or why are these posts signed with the sign of gender in the

first place?



Do you write to strangers? If I write to you, am I, are you, a stranger?

What constitutes the familiarity of a return - particularly in the age of

transnational capital, when the seriality of Sartre continues operational

- these inauthentic displays of false intimacy. Unlike the "hugs Clara 

with a warm and loving embrace" of the MOO - attempting to coerce the 

body in the realm of the symbolic (and all those issues of embodiment/

disembodiment which come into play) - the intimacy of _writing to a 

stranger_ remains just that, foreclosed, the _imminent_ presentification 

of power (always already at hand, but here, determinative).



But it is the night that gives them meaning, the voice-out-of-nowhere, as

artificial light after dark gives meaning (by virtue of its intention) to

those appearing within it, the television or cinema screen, the nightclub, 

the presumed intimacy of the livingroom, bedroom, bathroom, illuminated

bodies and sexualities. The posts appear out-of-nowhere; they signify no-

where, no matter how much they are ultimately configured. Just as I, you,

all of us, Tiffany, are configured out of nowhere, returning nowhere, on

our journey to nowhere, beneath the sign of nowhere, which is not even the

sign of capital, late or not, and hardly even a sign, except that it is 

such by virtue of the investment which we grant (ourselves) to it: Do you

write to strangers, do you write?





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







Hover





If a friend or a child who is a friend desires to find the means for pro-

curing the elements of a poison guaranteed to frighten all within the 

vicinity of feigned death, it is no more difficult than if a child or a

friend of a child designs to ascertain the appearance of others without

the protective raiment of everyday wear by means of procuring such imple-

ments of infrared observation as are obtainable at any espionage outlet.



And if a young woman deigns to seduce an older man by means of bouquets

which delight and ennervate the sensory apparatus accustomed to years of

normal practice, it is no more than the dialup of a world wide web server

plying its wares across the electronic skyway bringing democracy and the

edges of the personality to every neighborhood of your house and my own.



Now if a young man places his designs upon the smaller animals of the

self-same neighborhood, he may look no farther than the transfer of files

of mystery and ecstasy exquisitely formatted for the members of the fe-

line race, behavior outposts signalling the canine-kind entrance into 

rampant vandalism and thugees.



Thus if a tiny boy desires the services of an older woman past her time

and degree of hormonal sexualism pursuant to the creaton of creatures 

like himself, he may purvey gerontological postings to medical data-bases

subsumed by men whose hairlines, like his own, leave much to be desired,

by themselves, himself, or those who fall fallow of his troubled dreams.



Thus if a young man were walking by the woods on a day in summer, he would

happen to stop by the side of a rivulet where others of his kind bathed

naked, clean and smoothed bodies slipping like silver fish beneath the

shores and banks, and so lined with tiny roots meandering down to the sur-

plus of liquid for the taking, the asking, with infinite kindness.



Thus would the animal and vegetable kingdoms and queendoms celebrate with

haste, undue the freeing of desires upon which the eyelids leave their 

trace, images found hovering just outside or beyond the bordering of posts

to realms unknown, mossy dreams spoken of by fallen leaves of trees, the 

moisture gathered together where one, young or old, has implemented visage

with unholy truths, stirrings on the surface of the world, murmurings of 

its depths.



__________________________________________________________________________





used thought





		      death: I have become a symptom.







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Future developments of the email lists:



1. Setting up of a MOO or MUD for at least partial operation, synchronous

multi-party use. Partial operation: The MOO would run at on a fixed

schedule or at pre-announced times. It would be connected with elist 

archives. It would be capable of suspension and document insertion. Does

anyone want to organize this?



2. Development and use of the cybermind/fop archives, which are reachable

through ftp://pub/pubs/listservs/spoons/ . These should be expanded; if

there's not sufficient disk-space, perhaps someone could take up the 

slack elsewhere?



3. Possible audio applications: Netphone or complementary list devoted to

audiofiles, not archived. I imagine a future email list as voices in a

darkened room, flashes of images on an otherwise invisible screen.



4. Mpeg and other file attachments - using the dmpeg viewer for video in

DOS at the least. Files must be kept to a minimum, low-priority, in order

to keep bandwidth down.



5. Jpeg and other file attachments - supplying a small jpeg/gif viewer.



6. Web pages - Anyone want to design one? Could Netphone etc. be built

into these? Again, there would be space limitations, unless someone wants

to set one up and maintain it at their site (Marius' site is closing).



7. What encourages community? What encourages discussion (data-base and

other resources. The use of multiple linked sites/application, public

ftp, for example. Would the production of an e-magazine be either realis-

tic or relevant?



8. Use of aliased configurations, sublists, etc. - what's possible? Do

sublists reduce or complement elists?



9. Purposes/mandates: What should be the long-term goals of an email list?

Should there be any? Can one speak generally about this? Should there be a

point when elists should be dissolved? What should be the future of cyber-

mind and fiction-of-philosophy?



These questions are both general (applicable to all elists) and specific 

to cybermind/fop. Should we involve subscribers in extending the lists in

one or more of the above directions? Does anyone want to take any of them

on? Let us know ...



Alan





Symptoms





(By and large in the form of the interrogative, not interrogating the

symptom, but the site of inscription itself.)



The recent Freud and post-Freudian history of psychoanalysis is not only

a history of theory, and therapies; it is also a history of symptoms and

illness as well. And one can see a transformation from the moment of hys-

teria through that of anomie, to the moment of schizophrenia, and now, 

reading through Kristeva's New Maladies of the Soul, to that of distur-

bances of representation as well. These transformations are _of_ what, 

against what matrix, what healthy interiority? For if everything remains 

on the level of representation, even through hysteria (inscription of 

trauma) and schizophrenia (holarchic inscriptive sememes), then what co-

herency would be said to constitute health in such a manner as evading 

enlightenment rationality? Does representation, in fact, go all the way 

down into and within the inchoate? - in which case, given their pre-logi-

cal status (which continues all the way up), are these illnesses and their 

interiority (interiorities?) _a continuum of injuries_ as the psychic 

apparatus applies its developing strategies to continually evolving situa-

tions?



And what happens if the structuralism itself is removed, as the healthy

interior is found to be nothing, in fact, but a representation through

such injuries? - Is there a deconstructive (non-) narrative in relation to

this? For example, the Lacanian symbolic or imaginary - when there are

already ontological subversions of both vis-a-vis a techne which itself

is no longer techne?



Then, and in what sense - this debris that accumulates, this organism 

against the organization of the real (apparent in its repetitions, order-

liness), this exhaustive debris?



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



In other words - not only does the concept of mental illness change in

time, but the prevalent illnesses also undergo transformation. Do these

reflect a continually transforming psychic core - in which case, what is

the basis of such transformations; how are interior and exterior admixed

- or do they in fact contain representations of an psychic core that is

itself only existing as such representations? If schizophrenia is a 

splitting of "a" self, and hysteria an inscribing of "a" body, are self

and body other than representations through the schizophrenic and hys-

teric? And finally, if we are now concerned with illnesses of representa-

tion (and affect, disassociation), what is the core of the inscription at

work here? I would argue that it is a form of _technique,_ that technique

exists among self and body, that all three are continually inscribed and

reinscribed, and that accumulation characterizes their interaction - an

accumulation splitting them apart into images of health and illness, vis-

a-vis the psychoanalytical profession and power in the Foucauldian sense.





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