way way No, don't you do that. Don't you do that. Don't you slap my hand. No, don't you walk that way. Don't you street the street. And don't You corner the corner. If you corner the corner, you whichaway. And don't you whichaway. If you slap my hand, then you mouth my palm. Then you fill my mouth And you speak to me. And you say this, Thus. And you say, Thus this. If you speak to me. If I hear you speak. Don't you whichaway. Don't you throw that rock. Don't you dare that rock. That rock goes Whichaway. That rock goes down the road. Don't you touch that rock. If you touch that rock you will hear from me. You will hear from me If you touch that rock. If there's a million years. If there's a billion years. That the rock Will hug. That the rock joins the rock. That it is itself. Don't you Tell it that. Don't you speak to it. That it's in your hand. That you slap my hand. That my hand signs you. That you read the signs. That you turn the corner. That the corner ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dream of the Planet, Something Else All day all night I search for driven images, image drivers, cutting deep into files gouged out of binaries, splattered across equidistant grains refusing resolution. They move and sputter across the screen; someone from Japan gestures impotently at this lurker nude and detumescent as male after male presences himself in front of dulled and shuttered eyes. Later I turn back to planets, marbles run dark, despairing across the screen, sixty-one million bytes for the inaugural of shuffling Mars. Reading Kristeva's anal- ysis of the drives among psyche and somatic,* I think blood and spears cut- ting, deleting file after file. I am sinking into a miasma of the visual which refuses to relinquish its hold upon the real, in spite of packaging turning towards emptiness and noise in the depths. Noise held down. I move across a field, a frame, return to the frame, con- dense or hold the field, monochrome the image, store/unstore it, but I am concerned about the _driver,_ non-interoperability, incommensurability, nothing fits as the real turns into the purity of _technique._ Which is what I mean by techne defined by the _core_ which itself suddenly pulls an ontological shift: guess what, the real as video chips, simms, cpus, and other fauna of the machinic suddenly come to life... (The planets _glow,_ edges slough from the rim, datagrams pouring off their sides, uneasy dreams... I toss and turn in a planet-dory, oars smattered against the vacuum; they're tethered. Moving them (three-hundred-meter oars disappearing into the darkness around us), I push against their inert mass, whiplashed by discordant interiorities - I can almost hear the chattering of the oars, responding chattering of the stars themselves... This is the _metaphor of the boat,_ I dream the boat a body, scaled back by raster- matched, recombinant compression DNAs. Planets roll down the length of the hull; they enter me bilged and swollen. My cock is rudder and keel, my eyes prow the surface of the sea, and conditions worsen.) ---------------------------- *Kristeva holds to Freud, oh vicissitudes; my semen coats the sea like oil; Jesus walks on it. ___________________________________________________________________________ Carol Carol: After thirty-five years, I never heard from her again.* I remain the bumbling fool I must have been in high-school. It's true, I sent her my book (Disorders of the Real) with a personal note in it. This work is the least offensive of all... But perhaps it proved too much? Nothing, not a word back - and I even signed it for her! Or signed it over - after all, she didn't ask me! The Net is so much safer, none of these misunder- standings, nothing but a quick delete, or someone writing in the night: Do you write to strangers? This enticement... But Carol was face to face, _there,_ and I shuffled around, holding my breath. I saw her... first in Venice, I waited for the car to pull up! I ran over to her, walked actually - I was afraid to run. She's tall... And face to face... I didn't know what to say, but words came quickly - perhaps too quickly, too much too soon. And her reserve, the _enigma,_ was there as always, remarkably short of passion - I wrote her about this too, a letter in the book, accompanying it. Oh, I worried over that let- ter, worked over it, it was a labor of love... Sent out two weeks ago perhaps - she was to send me something she's writing on. And then? Nothing, nothing, nothing, and my face and body collapse, just like they did years ago, decades ago, a full third of a century, time enough for hundreds of histories in fact. My soul becomes painful, twis- ted all over again. And her silence isn't even deafening, it's a state of non-existence, she isn't there, that's all, there's a gap in the world which nothing will fill. And I feel like such a fool, wasting my money on the postage, carefully packing book and letter up, my heart beating, sending them on their way through the mail, air-mail even. I don't even have many of the books left! The mail remains empty day after day, after day, and Carol has disappeared once and forever more. Another thirty-five years, perhaps... I'll take her address out of my book, there's no reason to torture myself any longer - it makes no sense. It's over; I won't live that long. --------------------------------- *Remember? I told you about her, high-school friend, actress, I searched for her, lost track... Then, I'm speaking at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California, she shows up that afternoon, she'd seen publicity, knew every- thing all at once... __________________________________________________________________________ Julia "Hence, although the interest that psychoanalysts have in the linguistic and translinguistic expression of psychic determinants can sometimes make analysis appear abstract, this abstraction ends up personalizing each treatment as much as possible. Each treatment becomes an ideolect, a work of art, as well as a temporary installation of a new theoretical creation within the Freudian world. As a result, we would like to know which fea- tures of this discourse can be identified with Freudian thought, as well as where we can draw the line between loyalty, innovation, and dissension. "The history of the analytic movement combined with the current ecumenism of its tenets (Freudian, Kleinian, Winnicottian, Lacanian, and so forth), shows that despite various misunderstandings and impasses, Freud has staked out a path that all innovators must respect if they lay claims to psychoanalysis. It is admittedly a narrow path, one in which sexual exper- ience resists language." ... (Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul.) Always this appearance of structure in the name, Freud in this instance, identity and loyalty which has no parallel beyond those institutions pro- mulgating discipleship; it is this analysis which "never lets go" (Rous- tang) that lends itself to the American inability to _represent_ to the extent that, for example, Baudrillard becomes precisely that grounding of the simulacrum that forgets and reifies him simultaneously. For Julia, as if there were no thought without the name, precisely the name-of-the-father which resonates top to bottom with structure... Think of it as a protocol suite, layered, well-defined. Think of it as a substrate still resonant above the chora, Father-name splitting into the hundreds of thousands of addressing throughputs in the routers. So that there is a dispersion known as TCP/IP: which never lets go. Do protocols function as unconscious, in relation to the ascii unconscious I described in Third Sex? Hardly; they are automated as mobile structure themselves, invisible touchpoints. But Freud is visible in name and flesh, Kristeva's passion and resurrection, where theory lends itself to articulation of language and somatic phenomena. __________________________________________________________________________ wwwww Carried on the wind. Sprockets. This post. Frames. Out against the. Control track. The wires of which my fingers. Blood under the nails. I throw them out. The post. Which carries my skin slit. Words pour from the wounds. Which claw at the wires. You see how it is, words, wires, wounds, wind. The wires wrap themselves around me; it's that which stiffens my cock, holds it in place. This is the secret of males; this _holds it._ When we speak. When we are silent or when it collapses. The words heat the wires. The helix was born. The cunt churns through the central core: core of MUD, kernel of Unix: wireless, the wind packages itself. "O hurry wind!" the little fishermen say as the wind froths their tiny oceans, whipping their rods taut with the energy of the deep. "O I am such wind!" say the little fisherwomen, casting their nets into the thinnest ridge of all, that between the anus and base of the testicles. The ridge is where the words joined the words. All three sexes have it. The ridge slopes down where the wound wires wounded, the base of the musculature of the legs. There where the mud seethed from the hole. Where the bloody fingers held the glove of the post. Where the post searched itself for you. Where you held a memory. Where I was. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- L'Etranger He didn't appear crazy or homeless or within any other urban category. He always stood there, outside, an Algerian or Egyptian, I believed, doing nothing, either against the wall of the unemployment office or within the subway. The nothing included tics, vocal mannerisms, smiles, gestures of any sorts; his eyes followed no one, looking neither in nor out, hardly blank. He would stand in spaces neither liminal nor central, focal; he placed himself or was placed nowhere at all. His dress was nondescript. He refused both the name and the cipher, and never appeared to be waiting, either for someone else or for drugs or other _materiel._ He did not exist as _neither_ nor as presence nor absence; he was there without presence, but without its absence as well. There was nothing that was was nothing and there was something that was something and nothing as well. But it was never interstitial, nor was there time. Because there was no time, there was the occurrence, continuous, and you can find him now still present at Pacific Street and Fifth Avenue in the Borough of Brooklyn in the City of New York in the state of the same name in the totality of the United States of America north, just beneath Canada against any sort of weather. You can find him near the unemployment of- fice, but it is clear that he has no _relation_ to it whatsoever, never entering nor leaving it, nor speaking to the people who enter or leave it, or simply pass it by. You can find him on the stairs of the subway, or just in the vicinity of the turnstiles, but standing not so as to see down the subway corridor itself or to wait for anyone; you can find him at the base of the stairs, near one wall across from which is another, and nothing else but something which is the space between. You can find him nowhere else but most of the time you could find him. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- News The news is that the water wants to be the water. The news is that the water no longer touches the shores of the Harbor of New York. The news is that it wants to be the memory of the water, always plural in the Hebrew, always replete with water. It had the memory of the water, the news goes on to say, that it wants to become again. It had the memory, the news goes on to say, that spread from shoal to shoal, reef to reef, vent to vent. It wanted to be the water again, that's all there was to it, the news went on to say. All that the news had to say was that it remained off shore, that the water remained off shore. All the news said was that it had remembered and no longer wanted to be on shore at the Harbor of New York. All the news said was that it wanted to be the memory of the water. ________________________________________________________________________ Origins of Anti-Semitism Obviously this has been on my mind; it was on Lenny Bruce's. I can't buy any longer into the relationship of A-S, my initials, to the Crucifixion which never led to the disparagement of the Italians - far from it, the Vatican the locus of that ecstatic intensity which I believe calls for the examination of the other end of the body, its origin, feet, or birth. For it is the grounding of Christ in Judaism, the infant problematic, that constructs a legacy of hatred, the Jews representing the _stain_ of the birth in the body (and the crooked hook-nosed Jew leaves the legacy of the crooked hook-nosed Christ, who threw out the money-lenders but not the religion). I am sure of this, the birth uncovering the birth, anti- semitism recovering the birth which becomes simultaneously present and effaced. What about this body, this somaticism of Kristeva's which still requires Freud, of course, but even there an origin castrated from its sources? Christ increasingly becomes the subject-object, the _jectivity,_ of ecstatic passion, the enfolding across, crossing, the Virgin Mary who is reduced all the way back from the inheritance of the father. The Josephs, Arimathea included, disappear, Mary Magdalene recuperates without loss (except in the gnostic Philip, another but central story), the apostles are graduate students, Christ becomes the focal-point of medieval anorexic sainthood - and what would the Jew be, but a reminder, much as the parents of a rock star occupy an interstitial position always already apologetic, forgotten except to autobiographers. With Christ the need arose early for the simultaneous presentification and effacement of the origin, an impossibility - which then becomes the impossibility of the Jew - which the _signifier_ of the Jew _is._ The Marys get lost in the process, recuperated themselves for the simul- taneous effacement of sexuality (Mary's a virgin, Mary's no longer a whore) and its presence in the ecstatic union with Christ, burrowing out through the feet of one body, up through the marrow, brains, and halo of the Other... _________________________________________________________________________ Travis does a Wide Area Information Search and Retrieves Something! I think you should know that I have cyberspace for sale, not the entrance, not the exit, but the space and the place itself, that it's down by the swamp there where the hosts and the legions of servers are there for you to serve, for you to serve and be served, And it won't cost you more than a dime of your time, but the money, Honey, that's another thing, you'll see the packets whizzing by on the fly, you'll breathe in and one thing or another will happen, it will make all the pa- pers, and you'll breathe out in a great shout and your name will be there, your name will be everywhere And the legions of servers will be routed and returned, echoed across the wires and fibers of pure information, and you'll have a perfect body of that, you know, just a perfect body - you can't imagine how perfect the skill will look - so that you should just produce a little bit of cash, So the carving can begin, you'll have your own great state in no time, can have another star on the flag if you like, it's nowhere at once, can have your name on it - you'd like that, wouldn't you - The beautiful girl stood by the side of the Ferris Wheel wondering who Mr. Ferris was and how he got to fly so high that he touched the sky and didn't die, he didn't. The beautiful girl had long black hair, eyebrows bridged all the way from one site to another and the angelic hosts played teardrops from up above down below. Mr. Abernathy doffed his hat. Travis watched all of it, gathered Honey into his lean muscular arms, and whispered that he'd win another stuffed animal if he did anything at all. He was good with a gun but faster with the joy- stick or boystick as he called it. His sailor uniform matched the cirrus clouds girdling the sky. The girl said there weren't enough domain numbers to go around, everything was going down. Sell them again, then, the men said, some of them are dead, you can have a split, it makes no difference. She said well she said. She said that when that happened that there would be a-weaving and a-sewing and everyone would share skin and bone and hair. And that would be fine with her, with her long black hair, there was enough to make a pair. What was for sale would go from the keeper to the reaper, from the administrator to the fornicator. Everyone would benefit. There was cotton candy on the little boy's fingers; he lingers in the shad- ow of the sideshow. Travis felt cynical, no, he didn't. The girl walked away in the dusk that was gathering in the hemline of the evening's cur- tain. Mr. Abernathy felt for his cravat, fell for the girl, folding into her just as the names coalesced. Wasn't there a need to feel even further? The wide area information search had just expanded, nodded to the node, contracted just a little bit in the great state with Travis' name on it. It would be the State of Travis which had the little boy girl Mr. Honey everywhere around in a single sound. They'd move elsewhere, there was the Cyclone and the 'Lectric Cars, and the streetlamps made of lime. What a show for a day when the Tattooed Lady gave him a kiss on the noggin! Sam danced a little jig all his own! The little boy was sure he made it up! __________________________________________________________________________ come to me How many of us are bored, looking for danger, wanting the secret post in the middle of the night, as I said, do you speak to strangers, as I said, help me help me, as I said, do you do fantasy? These demarcate fields of play, moments of hysteresis outlining the boundaries of things; and how many of us hope that the next post will be the last, that nothing further need be said, that everything is either out of control or under control, that it is _this_ post, like the book I keep trying to read, which tells the truth, sutures the body, heals the lame and halt? It would be the next post, the secret post, and if that, the one after, such posts carrying the great burden of the interstice in the midst of the pornographic, breath held until the orgasm from which one never recovers. Here the symphonic tends towards death itself, but it is not death which the post conveys, only the grounds of meaning, circulations which need no other justification. Waiting for the existence of this existence-post, for meaning and being are intertwined, one settles for the magic-post, of the same or other era, as time is no longer culpable. The waiting collapses time, collapses the interstice; one is born, looks around, dies: [ ]. But it is the boredom which plays itself out in _specificities_ here, I mean that of the Internet email list as an example, this particular set of lists or this list at this moment in particular. So I would say: we are all waiting, resplendent and capable of seduction, a double flux - we _await_ you, her- alded by a particular post, that which will be the next, touching us in our hearts of hearts, That post naked and alone, which will be ours, which will have arrived in the midst of our files, neither looking to the left nor to the right, bor- ing down upon us; that post which we swallow in our dreams, which spreads among the seas and shores of the untoward chasms of the body, that tsunami post, awash in the debris of our uncanny: This hidden text, this unknown text, is concerned with the _economy_ of the post, magic, secret, existence, the _economy_ of this text coming to you, heralded, unheralded. __________________________________________________________________________ Theoretical Work in the Internet Text (Subjects) 0. Clara Hielo Internet. 1. Concepts of address, protocol, recognition: the tuning of subjectivity, instrumental reason. 2. Rewrite and the opening of the space of the I: inscription and fissure. 3. Emission, spew, and sourceless/targetless communications. 4. Hysterical embodiment and the variants of reading the other. 5. Synesthesia and the transformations of senses across the Net. 6. Defuge, burnouts and anomies on the Net. 7. Third sex and the ascii unconscious. 8. The uncanny/imaginary, fantasms, and the reading/jectivity of the other. 9. Communities and communalities on the Net. 10. Disruptions of community and self, web inversion and power. 11. Liquidities of identity, identity shifting, shape-riding. 12. Appearances of cybermind elsewhere in literary/philosophical texts. 13. The phenomenology of the architecture of the Net TCP/IP itself. 14. The chora/maternal: towards the symbolic, murmur/stutter of the world. 15. The presymbolic as an interpretation or regression from the symbolic. 16. Addictions, censorships, obscenities, and other topical issues. 17. Death on and off the Net, the physical body as obdurate and/or residue. 18. Virtual or veiled subjectivity, phenomenology and psychoanalytics. 19. Detemporalizations and the problematic of time in the virtual subject. 20. Generalized mesaure geometries and dissipative communications. 21. Phenomenology of emotional states, behaviors, and discourses on the Net. 23. Source and phenomenologies of the voice, mouth, organs. 24. Phenomenology of cyberspace, of its "inhabiting." 25. Looping, blackholes, the blind password, the 'great beyond.' 26. Events in cyberspace: wars, peace, origins, dissolutions. 27. Part-objects, entities, proper-names, and totalizations in cyberspace. 28. The granularity of the real. 29. Relationships of the above to everyday life, philosophy and sociology. ___________________________________________________________________________ Spell Spreading my body open, letters, graphs, descriptions of all sorts, poured forth from my hole, first the S, then the p followed by the r; shortly af- ter, the e, then the a followed by the d, i, n, in that order, g lending itself to the following space beginning the m which was shortly followed by the y and then, behold, an other space, then a b to be sure, an o, a d, succeeded by a y and another space, more to the point of the o leading to the p, the e, the n, after which a mark of punctuation, , followed by that blank space portending a recommencement heralded by an l, an e, then two ts in whatever order they desired, it made no difference, subsequently an e producing the effect of an r and an s, then immediately another comma, , and the whole thing begins again with a g, subsequently r and an a leading to the p ... And to cut into this infinity, my legs spread to the utmost, my hole divi- ding into one, two, many holes, into a fractal dissonance of holes, my ear enlarged, reaching down towards the vicinity of their rims, where I could just perceive, sustained, the h, the s, followed by the pause and silence of the comma, the huge space or chiasm bridging the arrival of the third d, the fourth e, the fourth s, and my tongue as well And to cut this into finitude, sustained elongation towards many, many holes, only to twist within and without the rim, seduce the rim, bend the rim towards the mouth, towards speech, towards the reception of the c, the r, the i, and I had better slow to a halt here, at this point of the tongue or other organ, this clitoral or vaginal movement, silencing the sound which the ear caresses, dimming the light on the chiaroscuro blush of the rims, opening only into the murmuring of touch, the whispering of taste, the almost inaudible smell, musk, fragrant, the p of pleasure, the t of tongue, the i of sight, the o of elongated breathing coming to an n ... s reverberant, space __________________________________________________________________________ Dark Nighttime Thoughts With Beautiful Thoughts Opening Up (Every night I work on these texts, appearing as posts, and this work is necessarily a _work-of-writing,_ which I am considering as well in its entirety. This consideration involves resonance, the cross-referencing of these texts on a theoretical and literary/narratological level. And throughout all of this, there are always these fears.) That I will never learn anything but no longer have the herb to speak. That I will recline in the force of memories and the glances of the dead. That my writings will descend into nonsense without their customary edge. That I will no longer understand the language of canyons and arroyos. That my writings will be buried, forgotten, the labor of delusions. in the land of the labor of delusions. That my writings my limbs will be broken and burned. That I will never feel passion for someone again, or she for me. That my senses, eyes, bodies will close down, dissolved into the thing. That I will never celebrate the year 2000 or the year 3000. Or that I forget the knowledge I have and its endless ambulations. ambulatory river blood stiff-walking on double legs. Or that my wager with this knowledge and descent will be lost. That my eyes will forget my eyes, my ears forget the space of birth. That everyone will die around me. That it is conceivable that my language admits of nothing but conception. Or that there is a gift or a tool for this language, breaking it on rocks. Or that I will never see a coyote again in the wild, or another tornado. tornado mouth of river blood tongue in ambulatory lands. That vibrating words transform into noise in the midst of nuclear plasma. That I speak only to myself; disillusioned, that I am filled with lies. That my writing will descend to the anecdotal, that I will settle for this. That my writing will become effect, sparks, not the kernel of absence. Or that my depressions and sorrows will blind me to truth's absence also. to truth's blue-dark tornados of blood-blue dissolutions. Or that I will find or lose meaning in the presence of the past. Or that I no longer can swallow the beautiful thoughts of the night. (I would say that every text is _occasioned_ by these fears, but not that these fears are the occasion of every text.) _________________________________________________________________________ Theoretical Work in the Internet Text (Locations) Everthing I write must be read with this doubled meaning: 0. Clara Hielo Internet. avatar of the uncanny scattered throughout her text 1. Concepts of address, protocol, recognition: the tuning of subjectivity, instrumental reason. from the very beginnings of the Internet Text, these terms focused upon the entrancing and frameworks of cyberspace, first files 2. Rewrite and the opening of the space of the I: inscription and fissure. nearly the very beginnings, inscribing which continues and thins throughout the other texts, the alphabetic as well 3. Emission, spew, and sourceless/targetless communications. focused upon well early enough, presencing of speaking without author or text through until and beyond the end 4. Hysterical embodiment and the variants of reading the other. third sexualities located from the middle of the Net files on, centered in the alphabetic texts 5. Synesthesia and the transformations of senses across the Net. substratum everywhere in the Net and alphabetic texts, discomforts of the body against the particulation of the symbolic, stuttering of packets 6. Defuge, burnouts and anomies on the Net. recently, and harbored primarily within the alphabetic, wandering against theory which refuses the function of the suture or I. 7. Third sex and the ascii unconscious. beginning early on, circulations, and stuttering, Tiffay, Travis, others, narratologies as well, recent focus within the alphabetic texts. 8. The uncanny/imaginary, fantasms, and the reading/jectivity of the other. increasingly relying on borderline states, what could only be imagined in the Net files, descending into the substance of the imaginary in the more recent work. 9. Communities and communalities on the Net. mid-sections coming together with false promises, premises, delusions, the largest middle-third of the work harboring occasional files. 10. Disruptions of community and self, web inversion and power. conflagrations and violent outbreaks, deaths and dissolutions, from the mid-early Net texts on to the present. 11. Liquidities of identity, identity shifting, shape-riding. Travis and others occupying the final science fiction stories going nowhere. 12. Appearances of cybermind elsewhere in literary/philosophical texts. intensity of recent investigations in which the textual body and the body of texts simultaneously presence the curlicue on the margins, almost afterthoughts. 13. The phenomenology of the architecture of the Net TCP/IP itself. running through the fourth and fifth sevenths of the total work, concerns about Net sentience and the clean and proper bodies of the datagrams. 14. The chora/maternal: towards the symbolic, murmur/stutter of the world. more recently, emerging with emergence, the convolutions of a text breaking in upon itself, the splintering and stuttering of the teeth and tongue. 15. The presymbolic as an interpretation or regression from the symbolic. everywhere in the more recent work, where text devolves into non-text, where politics begin with the word and endlessly end off-screen. 16. Addictions, censorships, obscenities, and other topical issues. addictions always already from the endings of the first few files, but the obscene a continuous return, aware of the politics "beginning with the word." 17. Death on and off the Net, the physical body as obdurate and/or residue. from several files in, real and imaginary deaths, the deaths of texts and spaces later and later on. 18. Virtual or veiled subjectivity, phenomenology and psychoanalytics. all the way through the Net files and alphabetic texts, the subject approached and withdrawn, introjections and projections merging into the wares of the terminally-screened. 19. Detemporalizations and the problematic of time in the virtual subject. recent thinkings towards the center of the alphabetic texts, the last few, destabilizations, the beyond of the earlier Net files, groping towards a theoretical resolution. 20. Generalized mesaure geometries and dissipative communications. the computer-program texts in the Net files, concentrating in particular on the series fgfffgfgfgfffgfffgfffgfgfgfffgfg... and its relation to the lost almost-symmetries of Net exchanges. 21. Phenomenology of emotional states, behaviors, and discourses on the Net. everywhere beneath and upon the surface of the files. 23. Source and phenomenologies of the voice, mouth, organs. everywhere beneath and upon the surface of the files, breaking-out in the midst of the other, narratological descents. 24. Phenomenology of cyberspace, of its "inhabiting." everywhere again within and without the totality of texts and files. 25. Looping, blackholes, the blind password, the 'great beyond.' in the earlier works, and in the middle seventh, reoccurring losses in the occasion of the framework itself and those farsighted enough to delimit the absent boundaries of these multiply-closed multiple topologies. 26. Events in cyberspace: wars, peace, origins, dissolutions. irruptions when they occur; they manifest themselves as tears in the fabric of the hole, which is sutured upon them; a certain hollowness pervades. 27. Part-objects, entities, proper-names, and totalizations in cyberspace. the fourth and fifth seventh moving through the name in relation to the earliest accounts in the Net files of the same. 28. The granularity of the real. the first three-sevenths of the Net text and alphabetic files, carrying the memory of its beginning, the initial post, the surrounding terminal screen, the dawn of the night and dusk of the relative day. 29. Relationships of the above to everyday life, philosophy and sociology. drawn forth in a process of withdrawing, throughout the textual domain. ___________________________________________________________________________ "or they're not sure of their virtuality" Tiffanys want to be sure about herself, the edges in her mirror, her breath on a cold day, her sounds her feet make in the snow, her shadow of her body against her lover. Her space was full, and there was so much to do! Her life, like ours, a question-mark. ____________________ "'Their vision came all at once. Perfectly they saw, perfectly they knew everything under the sky, whenever they looked. The moment they turned around and looked around in the sky, on the earth, everything was seen without any obstruction. They didn't have to walk around before they could see what was under the sky; they just stayed where they were.' And there is more: "'Their sight passed through trees, through rocks, through lakes, through seas, through mountains, through plains.' And finally: "'They sighted the four sides, the four corners in the sky, on the earth,' so says the Ancient Word. "Their limits, then, were those of the world itself. The only thing such beings might miss would be something that lay outside what sky and earth could comprehend - or 'skyearth' as the Book often has it written, bring- ing the world to a single word. Or else these beings might miss something that happened even faster than they could turn their heads to look around, or look up in the air or into the earth. Whatever space may have been for them, it was no more than turnings and twistings of their heads; there was no need for the measures of hand or foot. Whatever time may have been, it was no more than the time it took to do those twistings and turnings" ... (Dennis Tedlock, Breath on the Mirror, Mythic Voices and Visions of the Living Maya) ________________________________________________________________________ Psychotopography Nietzsche isn't working, neither Holderlin nor Wagner, nor destiny, nothing superceded; the directions of the four-fold world encompass the folds and hems of a white tablecloth, slightly uplifted at the corners. Neither above nor below: here ----------------------------- we Nor the quality of those divisions which suture the text as a totality; in its place are multiply-connected lines, dispersions, with _tendencies,_ and the tendences, tropisms, tropologies, lend themselves towards speakers and listeners. This is a form of circulations, eddies, not turbulence and not flows necessarily, but locales, intensifications where processings are ac- complished: the acts of reading and writing, further acts of decoding and filtering. So that _identities_ are equivalences to a degree, and there is no space to occupy, but the speaking of your own space in the midst of the speaking of the space of others. It's worthwhile to understand this, the absence of circumscription, and in this fashion the MOOs and MUDs are already antiquated, relying on sets of rules, broken or not, delimitations and centralized storage. Elsewhere, I connect to you or vice versa, and this is not even always already a negot- iation, as it might be in real physical space, real hard space, but some- thing done with a degree of lag, picking up the debris, searching through whatever residue has been left behind of a day or a week or a month; you may or may not know that I have been there, presenced you, just as adverti- sing occurs for the _they_ who no longer announce themselves. There is no site for such an announcement, not necessarily a need. One can imagine an advertisement in fact requiring nothing, not even testimonial or conceptual presence, but something operative on the level of problematic being, a dif- ferent category in relation to capital. But here this arrives with you, and it is broken on its way, taking many paths perhaps, a skein rather than a road, hardly a high-way much less a superhigh-way, ultrahigh-way, these terms reflecting more the metaphor of governing: us | them or here | we in the vertical, than the reality of multiple, fragmentary, momentary connections, intelligent connections which not only connect but _perform connectivity._ And what has this to do with the foundations of the classic nation-state, with its barriers, walls, taxes, tolls, tariffs, visas, passports, protocols (diplomatic and other- wise) designed for simultaneous communication and separation? Only that the local _now_ prevails, a local in which there is no territory to be won or lost, no capital accumulation, only the flood of platelets through the supine and unrecognizable body of the Net, with its holes and probes and penetrations, with its caresses and discontinuities. It is not that Bey's temporary autonomous zones need be established or dissolved; it is that the net itself _zones,_ unfolds, in a manner that outstrips circumscription. So the Nietzschian model, the Deleuze-Guattarian model, all fall short; what happens to lines of flight when they're transformed into packets and there are no routes but thinking through destinations, circulations, clus- ters? and what happens to far-sight, when all sites become a matter of pro- tocols, and what happens to protocol when it no longer separates, but is destined for a destination? That all destinations are approachable? That passwords are only necessary for those concealments of power that travel elsewhere or beneath the Net, that PGP and other encryptions themselves meander throughout the same or similar skeining? This is not even a form of democracy, given conditions of access and clos- ure, but it is different than nation, which we have become accustomed to over several centuries, and so occupies a different phenomenology, one giving notice to empire and boundary. The lesson is this: in order for com- munication to succeed, the boundary _necessarily_ splinters, like an active and temporary membrane always already in the process of dissolution. How can we think in such a space/skein, and how can we think through it? ___________________________________________________________________________ Dot-Org Nietzsche fumbled through the spittle of remembering the shapes he was riding. Fuck them. He didn't believe that had anything but jelly. He knew about the jelly. The jelly threatened to swamp him. "That way lies non- sense," he'd learned that from Heidegger maybe, Kristeva's cleansed body, the Parmenides certainly. Or was it Kristeva's cleansed boy? The boy was lovely shaved, skin inscribed with Nietzsche's troubled dreams; he'd fucked his sister, moved his language everywhere across her. But he wrote bad, what was that he had said. The contusions were breaking out across his body, he needed AIDS. He fumbled, German yes, but weren't they, it was like a Jew calling kike, he'd loved the Jews, yes, slavered over them, like Lyotard or brother Blanchot. He fucked Lyotard, liked the man, what a devil. Something moved in the corner. He'd do the posts he figured until everything got lost. His asshole whimpered the way of women. His asshole whimpered and he knew he was a woman and a Jew. Nietzsche laughed, there wasn't any difference, both menstruated, had their periods of blood and doubt. He _ached_ there, he _ached_ there. He did his walk across the room again. He sat down in the chair again and began to write again. The pen wouldn't cum the paper. He made a line again. He wrote a word again, .org then tore it up. There was nothing to finish the word. His sister the Jew spoke to him, spittle. She says: .org. His body caves in. He can't write good. He can't write well. He makes marks. He marks his cock. He knows about the jelly. Overman breaks the pen. Ubermensch drills the hole. Superman cuts the skin. He bleeds like the Jews, men and women. He stuffs his holes. There are more holes. He can't stuff them fast enough. He can't write either. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ALIENS!!!! ALIENSALIENS!!!! ALIENSALIENSALIENS!!!! We Invite All Aliens To Announce Their Historic Internet Presence Now! We Invite Them to Use Our Email Lists For This Purpose! Please!! Do Not Regale Us With Tales Of Bug-Eyed Monsters! Do Not Tell Us About Purported Abductions Of Beautiful Long-Haired Women! We Will Never Believe That You Drool From Sharpened Teeth! Show Us Your Magic Tricks! And Please!! No More About The Magic Crystals! Stop Trying To Impress Us With Right-Handed Turns At High Speed! We Know For A Fact That You're Not Intelligent Plants! Turn Your Blinking Lights Off And Stop Bothering Farmers With Crop Circles! So Now!! These Lists Are Waiting For You! Send Us Your Messages Of Greetings And Salutations! Don't Try And Fool Us With Secret Ciphers When We Have PGP! Don't Forget We're Big On Multiculturalism Here! Let Us Know What You're Reading At The Very Least! What Do You Think About _Wired_? If You Have Neat Technology, Let Us In On It! So Now!! A Big Hello For An Event Of Major Importance! We're Here To Welcome You To The Internet! You'd Like Us Better Virtually, Take Our Word For It! Do You Have A Neat Sig?! What Sort Of Domain Do You Use!? So Aliens, Tell Us! No More Hiding! Please Don't Spam! Do You Have Two Suns?! Neat Shadows!? Lots Of Sexes?! We're All Excited! Why Don't You Send Us Some .JPEG Pictures!? Forget Usenet! They're Not For Real! So!! Talk To Us! Stop Lurking! We'll Never Call You Clueless! Subscribe to Cybermind! Fiction-Of-Philosophy! We'll See You On The Net! Tell Us What You See Through Your Window! And What Kind Of Rays Do You Use?! TELLUS!!! TELLUS!! TELLUS!! Signed - The Committee For Saying HELLO!! ________________________________________________________________________ CHILN! Nietzsche fumbles with the children, dumb! dumb! He thinks, I have to save them from me! He thinks, their beautiful little limbs! He thinks Meat thinks Sex thinks LOOK AT THAT SWING OUT THERE! FUCK THE FACTORY! The Tiny Little Girl Falls Down BOOM BOOM! And Twists Her Little LEG! Nietzsche Sues The Factory, Factory Down in Flames. That Will Teach them! Nietzsche KNOWS he HAS TO SAVE THE CHILDREN! THEY WERE NEVER SAFE FUCK THEM THEY WERE NEVER SAFE DAMN THEM! They Were HUNTED DOWN all these Centuries of EVIL, BURNED AT COCK-STAKES DICK-STAKES ROD-STAKES! Men Slavered Over THem! He hAS to SAVE THE CHILDREN! WOMEN FUCK CHILDREN INDISCRIMINATELY CAUSE THEY LOVE IT! He wETS himself DReaming His CAR, HERE'S what he dreams: I am riding in a 1968 red Chevrolet and my two lovely children are in the back seat and I have a terrible accident and they are thrown through the Windshield and Cut Up and it is THIS Terrible Thing that it all the Fault of Chevrolet for Bad Seatbelts and the Municipal County of Luzerne for Bad Roads and Mayor Terrison for not repairing them and cutting back the budget for his own ends. I WILL PUT MAYOR TERRISON IN JAIL AND SUE LUZERNE COUNTY FOR TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS AND DRIVE CHEVROLET BANKRUPT IN ONE YEAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Nietzsche thinks he spells his name. He WORRIES the children. HE WANTS TO BE THE CHILDREN'S SAVIOR. He THINKS: Swimming Pools, HIGHWAYS, Cry-Baby Dolls, Hard Edge of Barbie's Tits, Hard Poke of Ken's Rod, He THINKS: TELEVISION SEXYVISION, Bad Words On The Radio, Internet SUCKINGCOCKS, TONGUING CUNTS. He THinks, MY Brain's bloWING up, Have to Write this Down. HE WRITES: I AM THE CHILDREN'S SAVIOR. LISTEN: I AM THE CHILDREN'S SAVIOR. HE WRITES: I AM THE CHILDREN'S SAVIOR. He chews his tit off. He chews his ball off. He chews his cock off. Last he chews his hands down to the bone. He can't hold the fucking pen. Fuck them. __________________________________________________________________________ Dear Everyone, I am going to take a break from the texts, maybe an hour or a day, maybe forever. I have written five- to six-hundred within the past year and a half, focusing on cyberspace, cybermind, and the result is evident to anyone who has been to my page off of Spoon's home-page. This is an impossibly bulky work, and I constantly wonder its effect, if any; I am looking for a publisher for at least part of it at the moment. It has extended my ability to work through difficult philosophical issues, since I set for myself a heavy rate of production. I have refused to settle for simple solutions to problems of virtuality, and the pieces have had to simultaneously cast their own shadow, and resonate with the others. I find myself empty in relation to solutions in general, except in tightly- defined domains, where solutions are all but impossible to avoid, the necessary consequences built into the apparatus from the beginning. So that what has developed is an odd discourse, which has kept me returning to the notion of the chora or receptacle, not as a waste-basket, but as a pre-oedipal or pre-symbolic staging-area where I can work out the origins and their lack, of inscription. I do believe that reading the hundreds of texts, ordered/disordered as they are, is more than instructive; I wrote with my understanding that they had a worth in relation to one another, and in relation to philosophy or literature in general. They may disappear in their electronic frailty, which worries me, as if the weight of a book carried more consequence, and perhaps it does. Now that I have stated thus, I search for new material, new texts. And there are sound and images as well at the home-page tethered to Spoons, since I am working through the non-inscript non-descript, 7-bit ascii extended into the imaginary flux of the senses. What else? That another text will surely follow this, and another as well, that the habit of writing, for me, has become the constant habit of thinking and of thought as well, that I am chained to it, just as I am chained to writing and speaking everywhere and for all time. Without this prisonhouse of language I would never be able to affect the escape into sound, image, and even my existence as something desirable, worthwhile. Another text will follow. Alan __________________________________________________________________________ Confession of Writing I write because if I don't, I'd kill myself. I write because I don't want to think of my past. I write because I had good times then and depression now and I don't want to think of the good times. I think because I don't want to think. I write because something will bring back a memory and I don't want memory, nothing from my life. I write because I was alive once. I write because I can never figure out enough. I write because there is no other reason for my cyborg existence. I write because if I don't I'll fall out the window. I write because if I stop I place the bag over my head, set fire to the world. I write because the saying of the world stops the world. I write because I don't want the world to stop. I write because I am without hope. I write because the earth becomes darker with each passing year. I write because there is no culture, no first, second, third cul- tures, no first, second, third, fourth, fifth worlds. I write because there are photographs I cannot look at, images that surround me, haunt me, invade my dreams. I write because I am invaded. And I write because I do not know the truth about this, or any other thing. Alan ___________________________________________________________________________ ARHALU: Archives, Rupture, Homer, Alexandria's Library Unmentioned Unknown to me, the migraine is just beginning. "We went to the tomb of Tjanefer, who had been the third priest of Amun. We opened it and brought out his inner coffins and took his mummy and left it in a corner of his tomb. The inner coffins we took in the boat, along with the rest, to the Island of Amenhotep, and we set fire to them in the night and made off with the gold which we found on them; four _kite_ fell to the lot of each man." (Ancient Lives, Daily Life in Egypt of the Pharaohs, John Romer) What is the point? Only that this occurred three thousand years ago, that there was a desert village near Thebes where the workmen who built the Pharaonic tombs lived. That this circulated around a series of names which appeared all over the village, graffiti, hieroglyphs, incisions, there and elsewhere, that this is a window for us into families and politics. That the window shut, that there are ruptures between them and ourselves; a chapter ends "We know nothing about Ankhefenamun's household, or his brothers, or their descendants: the entire family disappears: how tenuous our connection with these people, how valuable the ancient frag- ments of their lives." We are disconnected from Medea and Phaedra, from Samson or Delilah, from any names one might place in one's lineage. There are breaks, ][, gaps which foreclose, Roots which are always already in abeyance; only by tethering names to names do we exist. I don't believe any of this, I believe all of it. The names are our records, stuff our mouths with religious ecstasy. I am receiving preliminary migraine visual anomalies writing this: the screen skips incisions: I become catatonic. There is no recourse to history: I die: ecstatic. The screen develops an untoward depth. I wish I could tell you more about this. At night, files appear to me in my dreams: they're tagged. ][ tags everything which is why the stuffing of archives is important. To this, I would say, who are your own? "The tombs and chambers in which rest the blessed ones of old, the citi- zens on the west of Thebes. It was found that the thieves had violated them all, dragging their owners from their coffins so that they were left on the desert, and stealing their funerary goods which had been given to them together with the gold and silver and the fittings which were in their coffins." Op. cit. This happened centuries before Homer. I'm becom- ing temporarily blinded myself: the migraine interference sends spear- thrusts across the visual field. "But I said to them with an air of boldness 'My brother will not let me be interfered with,' and Amenkhau gave me a blow with a spear on one of my arms and I fell." Amenkhau and the brother got the treasure after all. Now I can't see, touch and follow the keys. Nothing opens. ________________________________________________________________________ Date: Wed, 9 Aug 1995 02:16:58 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Sondheim Subject: Re: ARHALU This is terrible, terribly written, I couldn't see what I was doing, I come across as an idiot, illiterate, hardly able to speak or write, forget it, I didn't mean any of it, even the screen disappeared, I used the word "there" far too often, the philosophical underpinnings are ridiculous, if this is the best I can do, I should go back to gradeschool, I apologize to everyone for my musings, this insane need to write, ground myself in this space which, if anything, slips out from under me, everything is water, and with migraine flashes looks like water for that matter - Alan __________________________________________________________________________ Only the Good Die Young You know where this is going but I don't. Anyone who went through the 60s, rubbed themselves raw in the middle to late 60s and early 70s, against the right in America that's now breathing down our necks with the fury of missed and regulated life - anyone who went through them caught in the war of the peace - has been traumatized, amputated, has learned to bury well, never say "far out" again because it's all reigned in, has learned to walk the walk, talk the talk - Has learned to bury early on Janis and Jimmy and John and John and Al and Robert and Abbie and Martin and Marvin and those who burned bright for a second, just when we were beginning to learn to fuck them, open our bodies, insurrections of the flesh - How did Jerry survive so long, get away with it, these little murders splitting out bodies open - we weren't taught that life was one long series of deaths, only that death was there on the horizon, present yes, but not these little murders - We're fucking survivors, the Net's a commune, the last Free Press, we're on the edge, waiting for insurrection, of the other, of ourselves, splin- tered on the bones of a country we barely recognize - Cause otherwise we're all sleep for the slaughter - little murders on down the line - take us - 'She wander'd in the lad of clouds thro' valleys dark, list'ning Dolours & lamentations; waiting oft beside a dewy grave She stood in silence, list'ning to the voices of the ground, Till to her own grave plot she came, & there she sat down, And heard this voice of sorrow breathed from the hollow pit. '"Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction? "Or the glist'ning Eye to the poison of a smile? "Why are Eyelids stor'd with arrows ready drawn, "Where a thousand fighting men in ambush lie? "Or an Eye of gifts & graces show'ring fruits & coined gold? "Why a Tongue impress'd with honey from every wind? "Why an Ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in? "Why a Nostril wide inhaling terror, trembling, & affright? "Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy? "Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?"' (Blake, The Book of Thel) Alan _________________________________________________________________________ The Images' Imaginary I have been putting .gif images up on my semi-home page, sending them to Image email list, working them through various programs. So that the in- terior space of the terminal appears to make itself present as a space of potential, a space otherwise of absolute darkness. Within the space I can hear the accounting of names, appearances which define contouring, which define and demarcate their own, much as email demarcates its own space, forecloses without ignition, non-existence and not even annihilation. The language of the images glows from within, inner fires; they're images of the interior, and the fires light themselves like blown bubbles or skeins. It's necessary to remember their origin as pixels, each a clear delineation of a position upon the screen, the cartesian asserting itself invisibly and at the very last moment. The images attempt to spell my name but the name's refused, stuttering, rolling like a never-ending _rrr_ and I build them, construct them, as images or email must be, and as speech appears elsewhere, as these images' or emails' alterity. I build them from pornography, which is always al- ready a form of denial, cauterization, and as bodies meander closer they too dissolve, and spaces continue to splay themselves, operate, open up - it's the surgery upon cyberspace that fascinates me, the impossible wounding and suturing, there's no anchoring, tethering, for threading. There's nothing. I write "i tell you all my secrets" on one image, "you tell me all your secrets" on another. Stereogram technology gives depth. The words are on the surface; the rest goes into the terminal, deep into the illustration of membranes, dampness, excretions and fluids. I can't open the holes up, can't insert, can't stream down the folds of labia sputtered from the tube, and the darkness returns to the chora, which could be anything at all. Penis shafts swim like fish in spaces emptied of analytical debris. The words are borderline tags, sublima- tions, withdrawals, luring the viewer away from the precipice: the symbolic beckons. Aren't those secrets (and I give myself away) the inversions, perversions, of the hidden contours of flesh that some say constitute the body? The body writes itself into pieces... Some of them are the taste, touch, and smell of cyberspace, the rest that imaginary beyond which you picture me, if you do, naked, ruptured, in the midst of the organic imaginary. __________________________________________________________________________ someday soon there won't be any letters someday soon there won't be a sign in sight there won't be a sign in the heavens there won't be a sign anywhere at all someday soon you'll stare at scratchings on the screen or maybe no screen, nothing anywhere or maybe the screen in ruins or maybe the words in ruins but you won't recognize the words because they won't be words or scratchings because they won't be sounds or pictures and they're blank now and they don't say a thing because there's no message here, nothing at all attention attention, earth in ruins you might as well forget it these aren't even letters they're nothing at all _______________________________________________________________________ Speculum The breakdown of the law of distribution, which only holds in classical domains, is at least one index of organism; this is the collapse of the Boolean lattice with the law an(buc)=(anb)u(anc) and its dual, au(bnc)= (aub)n(auc). With the inequality, it is possible for a gestural resolu- tion of bandwidth, such that a finite bracketing <---[x]----> in relation to a similar bracketing <------[y]---->, i.e. <---[x]----[y]--->, repro- duces a larger, almost complete, bandwidth spread, i.e. beyond that of <---[x,y]---->, towards that of <[x , y]>. This is a triggering based on activated threshold decisions, and now one might add intelligent agents, within a well-defined domain. If in addition (x,y) are taken as a semiotic system defined perhaps by complementarity x=y' and y=x' etc., then it is also clear that the breakdown of distributivity is connected with a certain leakage or residue/extension of the sememe itself. Note that in quantum systems, there are superpositions such that, given atomic propositions e1 and e2 (discrete), there exists an e3, also discrete such that e1ue2=e1ue3=e2ue3; thus "We can now understand why the validity of the superposition principle is so characteristic for quantum systems: It implies the non-Boolean character of the proposition system." This quote is from Jauch, Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, an older book already from 1968; he also says "Let us examine some of the mathematical consequences of the principle of superposition. A first remark: A lattice which satisfied the principle of superposition cannot be Boolean. Indeed, let e1, e2, and e3 be as in [above]. If the lattice were Boolean, we would have, for instance, e3n(e1ue2)=(e3ne1)u(e3ne2). But this relation cannot be right, as one sees from the following: Since e1 and e2 are two _different_ minimal propositions, e1ne2=0. Hence the right-hand side is equal to 0u0=0. But the left-hand side is equal to e3 since e1ue2 contains e3. Thus the equation is incompatible with e3 not= 0." This is the heart of the matter, which as I have mentioned elsewhere, I have located in the phenomenology of color vision according to Land, Horn, Marr, etc. In the Land experiments, let e1,2,3 be separate fre- quences; then any two discrete intersect at 0, i.e. e1ne2=e2ne3=e3ne1=0. Hence again the right-hand side is equal to 0. Let us look however at e3n(e1ue2); because e3 is a subset of e1ue2=(+-)U, where U = the band- width in its entirety, we are given the contradiction e3nU=e3=0. In its dual form, distributivity breaks down more radically; consider e3u(e1ne2)=(e1ue3)n(e2ue3). The right-hand side is equivalent to UuU=U; the left-hand side is equivalent to e3u0, or e3; we have then e3=U, a contradiction. These things show up, creating fuzzy situations, whenever an attempt is made to construct a clear differentiation/difference in semiotic situa- tions interacting with the "real." Such situations imply an observer; hence the spill mentioned above. Cyberspace is totally spill in this sense, totally a situation of super- position. As yet I am unsure of the mapping of distributivity and quan- tum logic onto the structure of email and other postings, but it is clear that what I have called "hysterical embodiment" is based precisely on this spill, the reading-through of well-defined limitation. I would go so far as to say that all human language is double-edged in this fashion: on one hand, it is characterized by redundancy (heavily documented by cyber- neticians of the 60s-70s), which results in expansion - and on the other, it is precisely this expansion which spills speech and textual acts into the gestural unknown. What Benjamin calls the aura always already exists by virtue of organism; quantum logic and mechanics are caught up in the human far beyond the reaches of Bell's theorem. ________________________________________________________________________ On Shaky Grounds Thinking further about the breakdown of distributivity: the gesture always already implies an ontological shift, from the plane of the real to that of the symbolic. Measurements made during the Land experiments reported only the classical substrate, not the perceptual bandwidth which was the result of the intelligent agents of optical processing coming into opera- tion. This bandwidth (even down/up to the level of the psychological) is produced unconsciously, although the Freudian divisions of c/pcs/ucs are problematic wherever vision comes under scrutiny. The ontological shift is on the threshold of the symbolic, and according to Tran duc Thao, it is precisely this shift that calls forth language: the gesture produces the excess which is named by it. Pointing with the index finger, for example, is already a floating signifier (almost but not quite a _program_) which implicates the targeted entity (and which also _defines_ the targeted entity _as_ entity). The real takes on value, as it does for all organism, but here it is a shared or consensual value, dependent upon the interpretation of the pointed finger. Thus the body's framework, which physically extends from arms' and feet's length, becomes other as the real (vis-a-vis the Lacanian mirror-stage) is recuperated, absorbed, through the signifier. Note the ontological jumping here, which is going to remain impure, in spite of Saussure et. al. The difference in the signifier, among the signifiers, is the difference in the real. The finger targets game for example; something loses its existence as alive, as entity. Rather than [x] [y] as positions, discrete or otherwise, one imagines a _jumble_ of positions, chaotic, melding into one another, flickering, somewhat transparent. (I wrote about this in The Structure of Reality.) Think of this as a field of thresholds, intensities which are defined (through simultaneous cathexis and decathexis) as names. Think of rule- governing across the field, say linguistic geodesics; these compose syn- tax. This field mediates among the real, among itself, much as pure mathematics bastardizes (who is the mother/father here) in applications which nonetheless speak an uneasy alliance with the physical. I'd say that this is the birth and homeostasis of language, a nonequil- ibrium thermodynamic plateau held in place by the energy necessary to maintain organism and culture. I'd say that this is gestural at its heart, and that the shifts within it are similar to those in cyberspace, result- ing in hysteric embodiment. And finally, I'd say that this hysteric embo- diment, as horizon, is suspiciously what we know, even in the midst of alterity - to the extent that it harbors the deathdrive; we are simultan- eously easy and uneasy in cyberspace, and for less than obvious reasoning. _________________________________________________________________________ Resonance, Gesture Looking through writings of all sorts, religious, anonymous, worked and reworked sublimating the particularities of the dream, who knows what repressions beyond the archaic are carried within them? It's here I run the search-engine, transforming species into families, families into the resonance of the purported real. These writings always reference elsewhere, sympathetic and internalizing the other through empathetic wandering. Plagiarizing Kraus, plagiarism existed from the origin itself, duplicating, splitting, and splintering - preserving, resuscitating, reconstructing. Eventually everything gets lost; what remains is the flux with which I concern myself, the hollow within which the particulate sem- iosis of the proper name is ultimately formed. In the meantime there are clusters and bandwidths of ontologies; nothing is well-defined. Call this the condition of the plasma, the ur-universe, ur-universals. Anything tenders towards this, for example: "sg=j dd wr=k m nm ntrw I will begin to say your greatness as lord of the gods m bg stg hrw wr sfjjt as "ba" with secret faces, great of majesty hmn rn=f s[hgp] ssm=f who hides his name and conceals his image n rh.tw qj=f m zp tpj whose form was not known at the beginning" Earlier the author states "These passages illustrate the original meaning of the lexeme _bg_, explained by E. Wolf-Brinkmann as 'capacity to assume forms.' They designate an aspect of the complex ba-concept, which distin- guishes the ba as the one (potential) power from the many (actual) trans- formations or forms. Ba is the power that 'happens,' materialises (hpr) in forms." (Jan Assmann, Egyptian Solar Religion in the New Kingdom, Re, Amun and the Crisis of Polytheism." I do my best to render hieroglyphic transliteration into ASCII.) The Evening Text states in part: "The rays of Re are in the earth, the inhabitants of the underworld receive them in joy. The ways with secret things are opened for the Great Ba, that he may settle in the land of life. It is caused that the gods go to rest in the earth through the secret speech in his mouth." The Western ba's are the jackels that belong to the sunset, and the eas- tern ba's are the baboons that belong to the sunrise. Continuing this meandering, we note that in the Book of the Celestial Cow, Assmann trans- lates: "The ba of Shu is air The ba of Neheh is rain The ba of darkness is night The ba of the primeval ocean is Re The ba of Osiris is the Ram of Mendes The ba of Sobek is crocodiles The ba of every god is snakes The ba of Apophis is (in) the eastern mountains The ba of Re is throughout the entire land." And he says "With the possibility of the aspect change inherent in the con- cept of ba, the expression [Amun-Re "'as "ba" with secret faces, great of majesty'"] also refers to the plurality of the cosmic manifestations and not only to the one life-giving principle in and behind them. Thus his 'ba's' are the life-giving elements and they can be experienced in the cos- mos as the ways in which god works. By making use of this concept Ramesside Amun-Re theology refers not to a specific power, but to the concept of ab- solute power, responsible for absolutely all effects, whose visible mani- festation is the entire cosmos." Moving from the historical _reality_ of these texts, it is possible to construct a ba-dialectic, splintered into manifestations, remaindered in the absolute, actualities/currencies and abstract theology. What of the originary power found in so many classical mythologies, out of which narratives emerge? Even the Rig Veda's X,129 portends a beginning in ba, unencumbered by proper names (I quote in full, because of its rele- vance and central role here): "There was neither non-existence nor existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose protection? Was there water, bottomlessly deep? There was neither death nor immortality then. There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day. That one breathed, windless, by its own impulse. Other than that there was nothing beyond. Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning; with no distinguishing sign, all this was water. The life force that was covered with emptiness, that one arose thorugh the power of heat. Desire came upon that one in the beginning; that was the first seed of mind. Poets seeking in their heart with wisdom found the bond of existence in non-existence. Their cord was extended across. Was there below? Was there above? There were seed-placers; there were powers. There was impulse beneath; there was giving-forth above. Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen? Whence this creation has arisen - perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not - the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows - or perhaps he does not know." (Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism) The absolute in dialectic with itself, somewhere there had to be time (a problem with _this_ universe as well), somewhere the story had to begin. When the story begins, there are characters, actants, narratological mom- ents. Only then does the collapse into everyday life, the origin, begin, not as an origin, but in the process of beginning. (And this occurs in relation to _negation,_ the thud [below] given as a continuity from which there occurs a withdrawal or decathexis. Decathexis? The world emerges out of a loss of interest. Take note.) Plagiarism appears as soon as division occurs, the namings which are du- plication, the magics, fetishes, seeking out the other, the uneasiness of alterities that are introjected back into the body. Beforehand, it's the world of substance, Flaubert's St-Antoine's froth: beforehand, that is before the signifier. Already the appearance of the absolute splinters it, are you following me?, as trace-ing, following back into the absolute is impossible, time forwards itself, in spite of the presence of people, in fact, in relation to the presence of people; time is always already peo- ple's time. (While, bi-directionally, across the membrane or field, there is no conclusion.) Ontologies skitter, existence thuds, resonates; resonance emits signals. It being, it begins. __________________________________________________________________________ Signals, Skittering of Difference If we understand what physically exists, in terms of the filtering, editing, and isolation of a signal, then we can understand the bracketing that creates a firewall around it, and the means for maintaining it. In Digital and Analog Communication Systems, Leon W. Couch II specifies the following attributes of "practical waveforms that are _physically real- izable_" [my comments are in brackets*]: "1. The waveform has significant nonzero values over a composite time interval that is finite. [There must be presence in the first place; a null waveform is equivalent to no waveform at all. If the waveform is a signal, there must be a symmetrical substrate of one sort or another, Peirce's sheet of assertion, carrier wave, etc. This is part of the delivery system.] 2. The spectrum of the waveform has significant values over a composite frequency interval that is finite. [These values would be carried in a particular medium. Everything depends in #1 and #2 on "significant" of course - when is a waveform noise, and when is it relevant as a signal? What constitutes relevancy?] 3. The waveform is a continuous function of time. [The waveform takes on a value for every subinterval within a specified interval, and further, it has a beginning and an end.] 4. The waveform has a finite peak value. [It can be contained within one or another receiving/transmitting unit.] 5. The waveform has only real values. That is, at any time, it cannot have a complex value a + jb, where b is nonzero. [The waveform is observable in the real world.]" Can we say that a signal embodies a delivery system, and is therefore both bracketed temporally and temporally dependent? This is a question of con- touring. The maintenance of signals constitutes culture, and the mainten- ance of culture employs the redundancy of signals. The embodiment of sig- nals vis-a-vis interpretation involves secondary narcissism. A signal is never totally defined by difference; as pointed out elsewhere, indexical pointing towards an object skitters ontologies but does not necessarily operate as relay against other gestures. Embodiment is always already an issue; sememes are never totalities. Even Baudrillard's simulacra exist as such in relation to practices in the real world, and such practices, de- terminative or not, "solvable" or not, are finite. If we begin with these practices, instead of the debris of structuralism (dyads, difference, etc.), then totality is quickly recognized as construct itself. The anal- ysis of gesture I have presented in the past few days is precisely that of the construct of totality. There is a politics of engagement embedded in this, which I leave to the imaginary. ---------------------- *I don't, by the way, pretend to the mathematical sophistication of this text, and other phenomenologies would have worked as well here. __________________________________________________________________________