Scratch I've been working with sexualized (or sexual, descriptive/performative) images (I sent out a description a while ago), splintering/fragmenting organs and text - trying to work out a way of describing and disinvesting cybersex - the imagined embodiment of the other, which is impossible through computer communication. So that there's a doubling as the images/ organs proliferate, but do so according to easily-determined rules of transposition.... Everything I do is naked, completely transparent. You can see the body parts smeared across the screen, terminal-decay, terminal-desire. Alone, uneasy dreams transform culture into the inchoate, genitals into mud, body fluids into fissures wet with trapped effluvia. I am in a losing war with form, spew contained by protocols, arroyos dammed into the shape of reservoirs. Uneasy dreams transform culture into the inchoate, genitals into mud, letters into unreadable scars, new scars not yet settled into time. Between the first and second, there is the third, between the first and third, there is the second, between the second and third, there is the first. Between the first and second, there is the fourth, between the first and third, there is the fourth, between the second and third, there is the fourth. Uneasy dreams transform letters into the origin penetrating flesh, layer after layer; ruptured and broken cells smear disrupted contents against it. Blood gushes to the surface, and there is no surface. What was the surface is under erasure, always discontent. What I do is absolutely naked, down to cellular interiors; I am full of holes. Holes spread the body apart, fingers block speech, darkness places the eyes under erasure. Uncomfortable words are scratched from memory, then all words are scratched. When the words are scratched, there are fissures. When there are fissures, there is trapped effluvia. One can only imaginary the intimacy of the molecular, taste, touch, smell. Uneasy dreams transform culture into the inchoate. (What makes them dreams? A rhythm emerges only to dislocate itself, splin- tered secondary narcissisms, flashes, eyes. Or something begins in the electronic, skitterings across cellular membranes, alliances transforming into the symbolic. It's night or it's dark. There is a ledge where the dream sits. It is white, more precisely, the color of ivory. Ivory, against maroon. The lip is rounded, fissured, filled with effluvia. I bring my bright cheek against it, my eyes against it. My eyes are opened wide; they make dreams. My eyes are dream-makers. Oh, some say I have dreamy eyes. Some say I make dreams.) __________________________________________________________________________ Demonsterations "Then there is another yle that men call Dodyn, & it is a great yle. In this yle are maner diverse maner of men yt haue evyll maners, for the father eatheth the son & the son the father the husband his wyfe and the wyfe hir husbande. And if it so be that the father be sicke, or the mother, or any frend, the sonne goeth soone to the priest of the law &prayeth him that he will aske of the ydoll if his father shall dye of that sicknesse or not. And then the priest and the son kneele downe before the ydole devoutly & asketh him, and he aunswereth to them, and if he say that he shall lyve, the commeth the priest with the son or with the wyfe or what frende that it be unto him yt is sicke, and they lay their hands over his mouth to stop his breath, and so they sley him & then they smite all the body into peces & praieth all his frendes for to come and eate of him that is dead, and they make a great feste thereof and haue many minstrels there, and eate him with great melody. And so when they haue eaten all ye flesh, then they take the bones and bury them all singing with great worship, and all those that are of his friendes that were not there at the eating of him haue great shame and vylany, so that they shall never more be taken as frends. And the King of this yle is a great lord and mightie, & he hath under him LIIII grete Yles and ech of them hath a King, and in one of these yles are men that haue but one eye, & that in the middest of theyr front and they eate not fleshe & fishe all rawe. And in other yle dwell men that haue no heads & theyre eyen are in theyr shoulders & theyr mouth is on theyr breste. In another yle are men that haue no head no eyen and theyr mouth is in theyr shoulders. And in another yle are men that haue flatte faces without nose and without eyen, but they haue two small round holes in stede of eyen, and they haue a flatte mouth without lippes. And in that yle are men also that haue their faces all flat without eyen, without mouth & without nose, but they haue their eyen and their mouth behinde on their shoulders. And in an other yle are foule men that haue the lippes aboute the mouth so greate that when the sleepe in the sonne, they cover all theyr face with the lippe. And in another yle are lyttle men as dwarfes, and haue no mouth but a lyttle rounde hole & through that hole they eate their meat with a pipe, & they haue no tongue & they speake not but they blow & whistle and so make signes to one another. And in another yle are men with hanging eares unto their shoul- ders. And in another yle are wild men with hanging eares & haue feete lyke an hors & they run faste & they take wild beastes and eate them. And in another yle are men that go on theyr handes & feete lyke beasts & are all rough and will leape upon a tree like cattes or apes. And in an other yle are men that go euer uppon theyr knees mervaylosly, and haue on euery foote viii Toes. Many other maner of folke bee in the sea in yles there- about, of whom it were to longe to tell all." (Entirety of Chapter LXII, except for "Here a paragraph is omitted, not being suitable for general readers," of The Voiage and Travayle of Sir John Maundeville Knight Which Treateth of the Way Toward Hierusalem and of Marvayles of Inde with Other Ilands and Countreys," edited by John Ashton, London, 1887, from the original, if such there be, which had to have been written in the late 14th century, the printed edition from the 16th.) IRREGULAR LANGUAGE, syntax and spelling, fills UNKNOWN AND EMPTIED SPACES with REGULARITIES. Thus the monsters are constructed out of SYMMETRIES and SYMMETRICAL TRANSFORMATIONS, affine or other projections. _ They exist _either_ by virtue of such transformations _or_ by the pre- sence of the _abject,_ inconceivable, open to description, glimmers, how- ever sutured by _this_ edition with its _censorship_ of that which is never named, although _spoken._ These *antiquarian texts,* in fact, are always *present* among us, moments of *cyberspatial* embodiment, peripheral to the *description of the surface* or *cultural structuration.* They *threaten* to dissolve, trans- forming the *socius at its heart,* the *first term in a series hurtling towards divergence.* _But the IRREGULAR LANGUAGE ITSELF_ erupts from within _the very FORE- CLOSING_ operative _WITHIN THE INDEXICAL of othe other,_ _any CONSIDERA- TION OF WHICH_ constructs _REPETITION_ within the _FORM OF THEORY._ *In _short,_* theory tends to *construct _chance_* itself, in the *_form_* of *_scissors,_ _paper,_ _rock,_* so that *_there is *_always already_*_* a form of *_recuperation,_ hiding the _abject,_* within or beyond *_the symbolic._* THE *COMPETITION OF DOMAINS* IS THE ORIGIN *OF CAPITAL.* CONSIDER *THE ELIZABETHAN* AS AN *EMISSION OR FLOOD OF THE SYMBOLIC* INTO THE *ABJECT OF THE OTHER* WHICH IS *NOW,* WHICH IS beyond the keeping of records, enumeration, direct or indirect address- ing, of what is feminized in the image, masculinized in the register of the alphabetic, as recounted in the text and accompanying woodcuts, although to be fair, this is at best a rough approximation, imaginary bodies lending themselves to the imaginary production of monsters, monstrosities, the fucking of exposed and exfoliated flesh, clearly, in _*THE FIRST PLACE.*_ __________________________________________________________________________ Other Sides "On the other side of Calde toward the south side is Ethyope a great lande. In this lande on the south are the folke right blacke. In that side is a well that in the daye the water is so colde that no man may drinke thereof, & in the nighte it is so hote that no man may suffer to put his hand in it. In this lande the rivers and all the waters are troublous and some dele salte for the great hete, and men of yt lande are lightly dronken & haue little appetite to meate, and they haue commonly the flixe of body and they live not long. In Ethiope are such men that have but one foote, and they go so faste yt is a great marvaill, & that is a large fote that the shadow thereof covereth ye body from son or rayne when they lye uppon their backes, and when their children be first borne they loke like russet, and when they waxe olde they be all blacke. In Ethiope is the lande of Saba, of the which one of the three Kings that sought our Lorde at Bethleem was King." (Maundeville, op. cit. LI) Each morphology represents habit, singularity; the large foot has a specific function, that of the proper name; each dominion possesses the fantastic in relation to communicative distance from the European main- land. As Lingis would point out elsewhere (and I have quoted elsewhere), one deals with "the society of dismembered body parts," which in this instance, are a result of symbolic spew into spaces vacated (as if they had been inhabitations). The theory is import rhetoric (Meaghan Morris), the text is a result of distorted importations, symbolic loops, reso- nances producing fabulous displacements, enlargements. The loops are cyberspace blackholes, the displacements are hypertext links, the dismembered parts are dismembered packets, the symbolic spew is the flood of email posts, the vacated spaces are non-existent, only these words, these singularities, coming forth to create the book of the three wisemen and women. _________________________________________________________________________ _____ |___| | | | \___===\ L___________J The footnote offers the possibility of detachment, tethering; it also con- structs the illusion of mirroring the text from a distance. It is necess- ary for the subject, which is already divided, coagulated, resisting fur- ther pulls upon the body. It gathers at the bottom of the text, appears to trail off, whispering a continuous conversation limited by the wavering interest of the author. Or, categorically, she believes that everything is pinned down, placed within the relic of taxonomy at this juncture which is the border of the text, border of the body, liminal space among the purity of the reader and her flow, and whole worlds of legitimation, articulations of the real through the activity of speech alone. The subject always already appears above the line, but the footnote is neither scaffold nor matrix, but vector. It reduces the body, turns away, effaces, recuperates. It is the site of the body as well (paradoxically), harboring otherwise censored material. But don't look for the unconscious here: everything is revealed, and the footnote is the sign of that revel- ation. _________________________________________________________________________ "_Of the ylande called Raso where men be hanged as sone as they are sick._ And from this yle menne go unto another yle that men call Raso, and menne of thisyle when that theyre friendes are sicke & that they beleve surely that they shal dye, they take them & hange them al quick on a tree, and say that it is better that byrdes, that are aungels of God, eate them, than wormes of the earthe. Fro thence men to to an yle where the men are of ill kinde, for they nourishe houndes for to strangle men. And when theyr friendes are sicke that they hope they shal dye, then do those houndes strangle them, for they wyll not that they dye a kyndely death, for then shoulde they suffre to great paine as they say, & when they are thus dead they eate theyre flesh for venison." (op. cit., LIX) The doubled yles cancel one another, a circuitous route articulating the potential of the rest of the world, scribble or fill. Anomaly always cons- tructs the real; after the kidnapping, the Patty Hearst syndrome signified indexicality in the guise of explanatory power. Virtual and real hugs for example intersect only on within the linguistic, and the conquest of the First World is mirrored by real estate in the Fifth (MOO). In the 19th century, experiments involving magnetism were often accompanied by sparks which were ignored; their presence signified the complexity of electromag- netism. Only after the relation between electricity and magnetism was de- scribed, theorized, did the sparks become visible. In other words, the colonization of electromagnetic space was based at first on existing rela- tionships; only later, were relatively _new_ phenomena perceived. Structure emerges everywhere and is the condition of emergence itself. If virtual subjectivity is new, it is presented in terms of the already- thought; the future anterior alone carries an invisible and sleeping ori- gin along with it. To be human is to recognize that the dawn will never come. __________________________________________________________________________ Subject: Re: this is not an error. (Accompanied clara.gif) On Sat, 19 Aug 1995, Alan Sondheim wrote: > she couldn't forget herself > she couldn't forget me > i couldn't forget her > i couldn't forget myself > > when i closed my eyes, i'd see: the interior > later, it would come in, and my eyes were always closed > my body became her memory's tomb > there was nothing left of me but bits and packets on the wires > > later, my files were corrupted > our bodies fell to pieces ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Missing Boo hoo, it falls apart, it's broken, the limbs come off, the strings ripped through, there's a hole where the neck was, the image is broken, representation is always broken, parergon, always framed, false accusa- tions, only a doll! The gif or jpeg doesn't fall apart, _it's corrupted,_ speaks inexactly, muffled - you can hardly hear it! At the top, the real as always, down beneath, not even the remnants of structure, but isolated bits, enlarged, distended pixels, tumescent pixels spilling inordinate color. Oh, a mixup! _Analog_ imaginary, so pure, always appears through the noise, seduction! _Digital_ portends annihilation within the frame, rearrangement, death- wish, all those things we live for. If the packets don't arrive, the body doesn't come up! In text, the body always comes up, always comes, jouissance! Parergon! But within the jpeg or gif, the framework's there at the top; corruption is down below, now you get the idea! Effluvia! What's missing is pure absence, what's missing is irretrievable - signal processing won't help at all. The blocked spaces contain the missing links, the public and private keys, code books of all sorts, encyclopedias of forbidden knowledge, the quarrel of tiny private deaths, each marked by coordinate position, emptied of everything else. Boo hoo, it falls apart! I wet myself down there! ___________________________________________________________________________ Wanting Always I want to thrust myself out into space. I want to distend myself. I want, I want tumescence. I want great portents. I want to establish the bulwark of my name on every packet, bunker on every datagram. I want my eye, blank and forever vision, singular, at the head of every header. I want the spray of routers against the pupil, effluvia of bridges washing the iris unlidded. I want my eye to reflect my body upon my death. I want my retina cut open, fixed, so that my image will appear. I want the deadman to appear everywhere and I want to be that deadman. I want to carry the eye through fiber-optics where vision works, carry it half-closed, somnolent through antiquated copper-filigree. I want my name to be whispered on every bang path, separated by exclamation marks and percentage signs. I want my name to be included in VRFY in SMTP, my name a standing-wave in the midst of TCP/IP, my name a soliton down the MBONE, my name a public key a private key, my name Pretty Good Prophecy. Close to the speed of light I rush the deadman headlong, rush stream deli- very, deadman stumbles frame by frame, deadman speaks the message coding. I want frames, to be framed, datagrams covering up my name, opening up my name, packets spelling out my name, the eye of the datastorm buried by the packetstorm, I've got nothing further to be said, everything further in the saying of it, thrust myself distended - thrust myself distended - there's no flesh here or anymore - my spit is messaging, tongue is packeting, my teeth are datagrams, muscular frames driving me toward you, driving me everywhere, driving me towards you - where I've given up on real life, where I pull out tumescent life, where I glow for you, where I glow for you, my name Alan Sondheim, where it glows for you in the midst of the fury of the wires, in the midst of the storm of the fiber-optic cables, controlled and harnessed, down to the level of the text, down to the level of me coming to you, the level of me entering you, down to the level of you ________________________________________________________________________ Always Aquaria I want to thrust myself out into space. I want to distend myself. I want, I want tumescence. I want great portents. I want to establish the bulwark of my name on every packet, bunker on every datagram. But look, it's always the question of the aquarium, if not glass, some other substance, but look, it's always an exhibitionism, but real life is on the other side, no matter how much someone interprets these patterns as languaging at the other end. But look, the aquarium is everywhere, I beat myself, head, arm, arm, leg, cock, leg, against it, beat my mouth against it. But look, I write words against it, shoved through the narrowness of vacuum or display format liquid crystal transistor matrix grid, they hang there - there's nothing between one pixel and another, they have nothing in common, they're not related, they couldn't care less. I press my breasts against the aquarium walls, my nipples are exercises in perfect circles, the glass is cool to the touch, nothing happens. The language is the language of nothing happening. I want my eye, blank and forever vision, singular, at the head of every header. I want the spray of routers against the pupil, effluvia of bridges washing the iris unlidded. The aquarium wets my body, I'm curled up, available for site at best. Sight has long since disappeared in this world, you only know my location which is mobile, electrons sputtering across the world and back. I try to bring me back: I want my eye to reflect my body upon my death. I want my retina cut open, fixed, so that my image will appear. I want the deadman to appear everywhere and I want to be that deadman. Because the retina supposed carried the gesture of the last light, the retina in the throes of death. All light is last light; I see with the eyes of the dead, I carry my body as a prisoner in real life, release its stain on the wires: aquarium. You know me from the glass I keep. (...) I scratch my name on the glass, but with what? Everything is taken from me, nothing is hard enough. My body glistens: Close to the speed of light I rush the deadman headlong, rush stream deli- very, deadman stumbles frame by frame, deadman speaks the message coding. (...) Addressing beyond me, the milky effluvia of the solitary dysfunc- tional iris, I see through the transparency of codes I have never under- stood, as I: thrust myself distended - there's no flesh here or anymore - my spit is messaging, tongue is packeting, my teeth are datagrams, muscular frames driving me toward you, driving me everywhere, driving me towards you - this petty ubermensch running liquid at the mouth, electro-algae coating the aquarium, the more I reveal myself to you (frisson!), the less you know me (frisson!): I've given up on real life, where I pull on tumescent life, glow for you, nameless in the midst of the fury of the wires, in the midst of the storm of the fiber-optic cables, controlled and harnessed, down to the level of the text, down to the level of me coming to you, crashing the aquarium, banging the aquarium, thrusting the aquarium, crying the aquarium, scra- tching the aquarium, housed and rehoused, nothing but it's inescapable, nothing but it's me. ________________________________________________________________________ Roll After Maundeville and the analysis of gesture transformed into morphisms, I am insecure in procedures, reading, rereading, returning to Christine Rossetti's Goblin Market, and Skelton's verse, both of which roll, lang- uish, return like Swinburne on the tongue: "Curious Laura chose to linger Wondering at each merchant man. One had a cat's face, One whisked a tail, One tramped at a rat's pace, One crawled like a snail. One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry, One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry." There is possession and action, intentional, protean; the repetition of "One" implies both totality and separation, a roiling of identity as well. A certain sonorous and semantic liquidity is present. These themes, with erotic overtones, return towards the end when Laura's sister Lizzie coats herself with the juices of the goblin fruits, to save her. Lizzie: "She cried, 'Laura,' up the garden. 'Did you miss me? Come and kiss me. Never mind my bruises, Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices Squeezed from goblin fruits for you, Goblin pulp and goblin dew. Eat me, drink me, love me; Laura, make much of me; For your sake I have braved the glen And had to do with goblin merchant men." "merchant" indexes an economy of evil, satiation, and excess that develops throughout the poem, but as modifier of "goblin men" it bypasses, bridges, "doing with goblin men" - a more directly sexual metaphor. The goblins - listen to them: "Laughed every goblin Whey they spied her [Lizzie] peeping: Came towards her hobbling, Flying, running, leaping, Puffing and blowing, Chuckling, clapping, crowing, Clucking and gobbling, Mopping and mowing," and the roiling language recuperates the body and the body's rhythms - which is the point, the language which extends here into the unknown does so by way of an Irigarayan fluid mechanics, not the symbolic of Cartesian transformations which Maundeville utilizes. Here, as in Skelton or Swin- burne, we're in another realm altogether, that of the flesh refusing boundary, not even borderline flesh. From Skelton's The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng: "Her lothely lere Is nothynge clere, But ugly of chere, Droupy and drowsy, Scurvy and lowsy; Her face all bowsy, Comely crynklyd, Woundersly wrynklyd, Like a rost pygges eare Brystled with here. Her lewde lyppes twayne, They slaver, men sayne, Lyke a ropy rayne, A gummy glayre. She is ugly fayre: Her nose somdele hoked And camously croked, Never stoppynge But ever droppynge;" The Skeltonic rhyme burrows within the sloughed boundaries of the self and body, clarity exchanged for solitons, standing-waves. Taste and touch, and smell are oddly foregrounded here, even in Swinburne where touch is light and poisonous. Morphology is _lost,_ the self (as in Forbidden Planet) de/faces its own coagulation-origin. This is the world of aliens, slime, the world in which the body is literally a vortex which may disappear when the frenetic energy of the whirlpool is drained off. Scarification works when an incision into the flesh inscribes; in these instances, these dominions of the unknown, inscription is lost entirely and scarification, rearrangement, are replaced by dismemberment down to the level of the molecular. Form transforms into liquid; the body rots into its truer form, still sutured elsewhere, by description and syntac- tical strategies themselves. All through this, the development of cyberspace, well-defined on one or another level, with the political, psychoanalytical, and sexual shuddering of bodies down within the imaginary untouched by the presence of text, swallowing text, fucking it. ( Kristeva: "The true is not the absolute positing of a transcendental ego; it is instead that part of it registered in a relation with the other. Truth is thus an alteration, a positing but an altered, imaginary one. Lautreamont values this imaginary truth, in opposition to Pascal's moralism which belittles this alteration. 'We are not content with the life within us,' Lautreamont writes. 'We wish to lead an imaginary life in other people's minds. We strive to appear to be what we are. We make every effort to preserve this imaginary being, which is simply the true one.'" {From Revolution in Poetic Language.} ) ______________________________________________________________________________ Modalities In cspace, one might consider modalities of information - for example, the sound of the voice in real life; the sound of the voice on the telephone; the sound of the voice on one or another of the net phone applications. The granularity of the voice both intimidates and creates an untoward fam- iliarity - I'd keep myself withdrawn - in relation, for example, to ascii text. But the voice is crude, cuseeme is crude, all of these technologies are crude - and this very crudeness is a lure and a portal. It's a portal because it's prescient, because it's leading to something beyond us. But it's a lure because it seduces, seduces powerfully; I quote from David Humphrey, The Abject Romance of Low Resolution, in Abject America (ed. Catherine Liu): "Low definition has acquired an ability to appear more convincingly 'real' because its crudity is understood as directness. A low-resolution image, like a badly taken photograph, or an image produced after many generations of cheap copying, has the capacity to solicit the viewer's participation in a production of its sense. That degree of filling-in-the-details re- quired to 'recognize' or 'define' the low-resolution image draws the view- er closer to a realm of memory and association. Like certain stained walls and cloud formations, these vague images create an increased susceptibili- ty to the unintended or subjective, exercised by the peculiarities of the maker and viewer. To zoom in on an image is to move down toward the reso- lution threshold, to the point where the medium refuses to cooperate, where it asserts its identity as something completely different, approach- ing abject nonsense." But a badly-taken photograph also engages as _real_ precisely because it doesn't appear as a production, but as a presence, that of the photograph- er and that of the model, who is not a model - think of the relative power of amateur pornography for example. The roughness and irresolution of low resolution produces an intimacy that may or may not be desired; to have the voice speak rough to you over a bad connection is both seduction and threat, each tethered to the other. And these intimacies, these intimations, are leading us out of ourselves, into an electronic dominion hardly recognizable at the moment - we're on the threshold or lip of an enormous hole where the real becomes pluralized and contested. Shouldn't we all be there, phoning, MOOing, working our sensory anxieties to the limit? The world is being delivered, but as I have pointed out, the world is always already being delivered - again, consider a chair in a room, isola- ted by light, and an unexposed piece of photographic paper "facing" it. If the paper is developed, the "image" that emerges is no image at all, nothing but white, blankness - and this _is_ the image of the chair, as it is the image of every other thing. Place a lens before the paper, however, place it within the potential well of a black-box, add a shutter, and expose the paper again: the chair appears to us _qua_ chair, a token or index of the chair - but this _only as a result of processing,_ which is prior to the retinal processing of the eye itself. So that there is a confluence of operations necessary for the production of "chair" as iden- tified object or entity - thus even with the apparent real, a delivery system, filtering, is at work. (And note further that the eye is never a parallel to the camera; color vision is the result of active processing, as are the definitions of boundaries, coherencies, distances, and so forth. The saccadic movements of the eye condition it to a particular form of reception which a frog, for example, lacks.) A second example, which I have also pointed out elsewhere: One cannot imagine a landscape without imagining a viewpoint as well - a landscape is a world _with a perceiving subject,_ the result of the biology and physics of vision itself. So modalities of information interpenetrate, call one one another, just as programs call upon subroutines; here, however, everything is fuzzy, somewhat chaotic, and much more complex. The net phone is the clearest Internet presencing to date, bringing up the question identically asked as the telephone rings and a man or woman speaks: Do you ever speak to strangers... (Because the stranger _is_ on the net phone, because the stranger is there in the form of ruined voice.) ___________________________________________________________________________ Virtual Bodies From an absurd book, Virginity, Pre-Nuptial Rites and Rituals, by Ottokar Nemecek: "Menstrual blood can create harmful charms. A man who strains his lips to it or who has let himself be soiled with it compels the reluctant maiden to give herself to him. The archives of the Naples Inquisition for the year 1603 have preserved the case of one of the mistresses of the Prince of Verona who gave her lover menstrual blood to drink." Somewhere Freud gazes with fear upon the female genitals, loses sleep, wakes wet with desires, soaked to the skin. Havelock Ellis was pissed on repeatedly. Demetrius Alexandre Zambaco's hysterical violence against female masturbation, evidenced in Masson's A Dark Science, is well known. Theweleit documents fears of women, fluids, menses, wombs, impotencies. Men lose themselves in effluvia, can't face themselves, their desires, can't gaze upon themselves. Heterosexual men are often afraid of anal penetration. Men are afraid of loss. They're afraid of loss of the body. They're afraid of the disappearance of the body. They're afraid they can't perform. They can't suck their shit, drink their piss, cum in their mouths. They dream of self-fellatio, a narcissitic circuit of strangula- tion. Immolated, they strive to be the best. In gangs, they hunger for the worst. In cyberspace, everything is wet and ideal. There's no body to confront, only the imaginary, isn't that the case? The first time I talked to someone on the phone, that I knew from the Net - the first time I was filled with fear. The voice was _competely different._ To know each other, we have to know each other's bodies; to love, we've got to know each other's fluids as well. We've got to be _besotted._ We've got to be there, so that our loves and tongues aren't just tokens of our love. Aren't just tokens of our love. Aren't just tokens. ________________________________________________________________________ Wonder "Cezanne's difficulties are those of the first word." (Merleau-Ponty) Using netphone last night, I spoke haltingly with Nabil from Kuwait. The connection was cranky, slight static, but understandable; because we were using unregistered software, we had to constantly reconnect. We had nothing to talk about. How's New York. We talked, nonetheless, talked the child's language of wonder. We were _amazed,_ as Bjork would say, _astounded._ Not that the connection was only a duplication of the telephonic, but that it was possible at all, packets travelling across the skein of the Net, high-speed reassemblage within the well-defined algorithms of our computers. Such a reassemblage is nothing less than a _realignment of the world,_ a secondary or parasitic alignment in relation to the word. The skein of the world comes closer, trembling, to the skein of the Net, ah seduction of the transitive! Tonight Tom Ellis and I tested out the application somewhat at length. The sound came through somewhat softly at my end, and it was awkward, cut- ting in and out; without a duplex board, only one person speaks at a time. One learns to create a space for listening, which is not at all evident, a form of tin-can telephony. One is facing the computer, reading the modulations on the screen. One holds a microphone, listens through speakers; equidistant, the sound comes from nowhere. Still, it's not as if the computer is speaking - it's as if space is, with an awkward raster. A voice from an ordinary object. Perhaps we need to have vocal adjunct to Cybermind, Fiction-of-Philosophy, Image, a channel opening on occasion, listening to one another. Perhaps we need to settle within one another's cybermind and images, listen to each other's fictions and philosophies. As an experiment, bringing the voice which is, after all, a premonition of the body, a mapping of the body, to the foreground. What happens to the politics of identity? What happens be- tween or among the sexes? How is anguish articulated or discarded? The text is always paramount, but it is the sound of the voice, even more than the televisual, that presences the uncanny lip of the future-real which is already close to upon us. _________________________________________________________________________ When I Grow Old I Will Be The Subject Of Understanding because slowly the world will decathect, it will make no difference if one is or is not jacked in, beyond imminent arousal the repetitions will dominate beneath a bleeding sun, red-streaked deer will run again through the urban wilderness when i grow old, i will have been understood by myself, now, a terminal subject, subjected to the beginning of transformations which are always in evidence such understanding ahead of itself, breathing just barely, breath fogged in the wind, stillness up here, lots of movement now there the mattering a result of reading holding the breath beneath the bleeding sun until a revelation that death is never of this world this world slotting itself through me, drab in its repetitious and religious running through the urban wilderness and one two three two one one two three two one __________________________________________________________________________ Aurality Caught in Bibliographic Skein The aural dimension is always second person (re: Individuals: Post-Movement Art in America), referencing body, interiority, slippage (re: Cinematograph #4 on the voice), occasioning circulations (re: Obscura, Pornography: Its Penis, Its Vagina), from within the gaseous excretions/effluvia of the body (re: Disorders of the Real), now placed within the clean and proper body of the Internet (re: Internet Text, Net1). It is a ruptured caress, distanced by language formation, expulsion of air (re: Damaged Life: Someone Dies, It's a Movement of the Lips) or excess of sound (re: Damaged Life: Starck Club Performance Tapes), cutting through the bibliographic towards the im- mersive domain of the body (re: The Structure of Reality), a form of hys- teria or otherwise (re: Uncontrollable Bodies, Hole) (re: Crash, Internet Texts). The visual is always already a cleansing or absolution (re: Warwick Virtual Futures Tape), the real as-if (re: Postmodern Pobre tape and exhi- bitions) (re: Postmodern Sureno tape and exhibitions), the desiccation of the under-erasure/originary stain (re: Spew gifs). When I talk I think: fuck. When I talk I think: destiny. When I talk I think: empty. When I listen I think: fucked. When I listen I think: destiny. When you talk you think: destroy. When I talk I think: hole (re: Hole). When I talk I think: destroy, empty (re: Textbook of Thinking). When I listen I think: fucked (re: Ritual All 770). When I listen I think: destiny (re: An,ode). When you talk, I hear destiny, hear the future, hear the body (re: Art Papers, Future Culture), hear the body speak (re: Art Papers, Throat), hear the wholes opening to the untoward violation fabric of the world (re: Cinematograph, M). The voice holds me, caresses me, like no other text, like every inner speech (re: Third Sex and the Ascii Unconscious), like a cradling, trembling, mouths opened and never enough (re: Defuge). To work my way back, enumer- ate the real through the speaking of it (re: Lists). To stop before the world ends (re: Strike, Annihilation to the Limit!). Last night I talked to someone in the Philippines. He said, he said: So what's it like in your end of the world. He said, he said: The wires are slow, what's it like, and I said: They're slow outside Manila, twenty-five kilometers where you are. I said: I'm speed towards you and we heard, close but not nearly, heard the speed of light. _________________________________________________________________________ lost in the heteroglossia turn, glossolalia heteroglossolalia, alallarum- baretarsurmsubarueimdarevuianaing, of protocols immured, mur on the Pacific of the Wall the Rim, disturbances of sounds alalalalalalalala, alallarum-baretarsurmsubarueimdarevuianaing arraru, voices, "", " ", " ", indices n s e w what guidance engines, rails, =========================, towards the next millennium, I have loved you for one thousand years (indexed from M. Gira, Jarboe, Skin), I shall not live to see the aural sparks, hear the bows of rain, touch the smell of hole, taste the sound of alallarum-baretarsurm- subarueimdarevuianaing, more than a spark I shall not live, opening sn ne ws we flooded lines broken rails tearing eyes dripping cunts spraying cocks smelling noses touching arms grasping lips tasting feet seeing clits hearing holes tasting ears cooling thighs longing minds sticks of marrow sticks of yarrow ///--- alallarum alallaru place the senses in their box then throw away the keys, their locks place the census on the blocks where second-hands of slicing-clocks devour through each morning shower flower of evil, every hour the box destroyed will disappear and with it eye, and distant ear - and with them tongue, and nose and cock and cunt and clit will break the stock and free our shackes and the true, alallarum alallaru _________________________________________________________________________ (with Angela Hunter) Les Morts Reconaissants I can't write without a voice which is another's throat, teeth, something to articulate the movement of the tongue. It's a useless organ. It shapes the sound of another. I can't write without prosthesis. I borrow every- where, everything. No originality whatsoever, I'm your stain. It takes the shape of your cloth which gags me. Reading these words, you're reading someone else, the swerve of uneasy mouths. Uneasy mouths are jarred open and filled to repletion with chloroformed cloths, the absence of stain, the absolute power of unconscious(ness). There is this which awaits you in my mouth, so recently emptied of pebbles and little fossils found in marble. I write the rupture of the bank, the bankrupt word with no commodity to fetishize, no soothing green bill to be symbolically cut--yes that's it, I am neither green nor symbolic. You see this. In your eyes, I am berry-tongued and broad. Your eyes are voiceless and therefore I see them in a vacuum covered through sound. You emit useless organs, seething in an evolutionary crime of meaning. Everything closes down. Someone in Greece practiced speaking with a mouth full of stones, screaming at the sea, tearing her hair, Medea wandering in lands not her own. Everything you say closes down cutting me to the heart; you are imaginary, the waves hurtling nothing but noise back at you. We're parasitic upon the shore which practices at night, waiting for the day Medea returns, in media res, Medusa, turning the waves to stone. That day the world will end, sun scream, ravage an emptied planet. That day experiment falters, Medea stained upon the land, her period that of the sun's, plasma devouring the local neighborhood, Schelling's absolute. At night all cows are black. I burned in Trojan horses, churned in houri. I call the Trojan horses in sequence like reindeer--I harness that glory in a tainted medium. The scale is twelve notes up and twelve down, keys are pressed like the calling of horses, the counting of sheep, cows lowing in the field wake me from this statuary remnant stained by night. Who would deny the storm its name? No force that beats against the shore goes un-named in your territory; you are the escape artist of my provincial grasp but I am a close-fisted child in sleep. My borders are less obvious and more pornographic--the waves practice your imaginary stroke at my devoured limits. There is a curtain which on that day will not be torn nor pulled violently away and the face before it won't know which sun is turning away ensconced in a bloodless recognition. Frieze: My pornography goes unnamed, it's that which stirs these remarks, coats me with the pathos of hearing. Sleeping, I watch everyone at sleep, hoping for them.* Nothing comes; the conduit shatters against itself in the night. Flood brings pipes hurtling downstream; I watch them emerge. Teeth burrow into teeth; I come up empty. (This is about the empty and the fool. This is about the hook, torn skin, hymen, permitting the insertion of the femin- ine, flourishing writing.) I pace, tread my steps, measure them against your breathing. Empty and fool are identical; traveling across their crippled dominions, there is nothing to be seen. When everyone is a wit- ness, occasion becomes permanent sight. [*"You're not rid of me, yeah you're not rid of me, yeah you're not rid of me, I beg of you"; we listen to _Les Morts Reconaissants._] Siteless, this goes _off._ ____________________________________________________________________________ Eyes I can check into a MOO and get my names listed there. I can subscribe to email lists and do a who command and see my names listed. I can send a post to Usenet and have my names on the upper part of the screen. I can write you a post and have my names on the return address. I can set up a plan file and a project file and have my names embedded in them. I can set up a home page and have my names on the home page. I can connect to inter- net phone and place my names on a general topics discussion. I can connect through Powwow and list my names on an interests list. I can join a web dating service and place my names on the service. I can connect with Cu- seeme and list my names at the top of the screen. I can moderate an email list and see my names on the info sheet. I can be a wizard on a MUD and see my names listed at the entrance to the MUD. I can set up an ftp site and list my names on my files at the site. I can operate a server and list my names in the README file on the server. I can create a gopher site and have my names in the menus of the gopher site. I can have an alt Usenet group with my names in the title of the Usenet group. I can have my names embedded in my names and in my cites. __________________________________________________________________________ (My text on building #7811, locked, discarded, in PMC MOO) defuge worn out with defuge/refuge, exhausted, the isolated image of clit or cock doesn't do it any longer, forgetting which body was which, which located in the folds of which walls, which hole plugged me into my own my mouth tongues my mouth through your hole through your door dead language reporting on mouths unspeakable, swallowing urethral fluids of introjected verbs pouring out through locked doors of building "defuge" liquid bodies remembering the exhausted image of cunt or fingers grappling across their hole or moment when the locked door freezes shut, rusts everywhere inside, stains, bodies walking away, remissions, walking the bodies away ------------------------------------------------------------------------- *** Disconnected *** The Twentieth Century She was an opportunist. He was a wrecker. She was a fellow-traveler. He was a revisionist. She was an engineer. He was a nay-sayer. She was a saboteur. He was a traitor. She was a subversive. The opportunist slapped the wrecker. The wrecker gave the opportunist a warm and loving hug. The fellow-traveler embraced the revisionist. The revisionist spanked the fellow-traveler in a materializing cloud. The nay-sayer denounced the subversive as an informer. The saboteur sent the traitor to a show-trial. The saboteur called the opportunist a double-agent. The wrecker expelled the engineer. The subversive betrayed the nay-sayer. The wrecker denounced the opportunist as unpatriotic. The fellow-traveler whipped the revision- ist against her loving thighs. The saboteur said the traitor was morally reprehensible. The engineer exterminated the saboteur. [1] [2] --------------------------------------------------| [1] John Dewey meets Leon Trotsky: Dewey: May I ask a hypothetical question? Suppose the bourgeoisie of Eng- land and France, in alliance with the Soviet Union, defeated fascist Germ- any and feudal Japan, might not the result be to make the Soviet Union a bourgeois country? Trotsky: Yes, a victory. A victory of France, of Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. A victory over Germany and Japan could signify first a tran- sformation of the Soviet Union into a bouregois state and the transforma- tion of France into a fascist state, because for a victory against Hitler it is necessary to have a monstrous military machine, and the fascist tendencies in France are powerful now. (From The Case of Leon Trotsky, Report of Hearings on the Charges Made Against Him in the Moscow Trials, by the Preliminary Commission of Inquiry, John Dewey et. al., Harper, 1937.) [2] This is the language of the children of the twentieth-century. This is the feudal language of the adolescents of the twentieth-century. This is the fascist language of the teen-agers of the twentieth-century. This is the modernist language of the young adults of the twentieth-century. This is the language of the adults in their prime of life. This is the post- modernist language of the middle-aged of the twentieth century. This is the cyberspatial language of the elderly of the twentieth century. This is the language of the terrible infants of the terrible centuries of ter- rifying terror. ___________________________________________________________________________ Om Beautiful young philosophers are writing beautiful texts with unknown names refuting all the philosophies of deconstruction and the pragmatic, and I'm left behind, working the wires with primitive mechanical tools; I semaphore those who languish in novels by terrific new people just moving out of generation yz, towards a future when the planet will be dominated by forces my eyes refuse to see; And I espouse the political science of monarchy, aristocracy, marxism, liberalism, new left 123, and it's all over with them, there's no place to move, no animals left to bait on the planet, I never hunted in my life but by God knew hunters and fishers and knew hunters and fishers of men and of women; And there are beautiful sexes to choose among and the skin falls from my bones daily, huge puddles of organs everywhere, I don't know their names, know how they work, what molecules are filtered across what membranes; And I step gingerly into the future, carried by prosthetic devices inven- ted by fifteen-year-olds, I'm their test case, I take down notes, this one works, this one doesn't - And there are all these objects around me I don't understand, what does that switch on the wall do, that virtual switch on the screen, that apparatus on the end of the keyboard, the plug attached to my skull; But there are all these beautiful philosophies written by ten-year-olds who have never heard of Plato, never have had to, and they glisten like dead fish lying in the sun when I was a child and there were still waters in the oceans and streams - Imagine you could see one through another through the waters, one through another through the waters - And the philosophies prove to me concretely, written by amazing teen-agers with amazing bodies I dream of nightly, prove to me that there are no lon- ger numbers or objects, that my mouth is not my own, that my full lips grasp only empty air, no matter how near my lover is - that my hands grasp only empty air in the midst of making love unto myself, by myself; And they refute Kristeva and Serres and Rorty and Irigaray and others as I have said, seen, and shown, and beyond they have further indicated that post-modernity is only a phase and a phrase conjured up by those who lack imagination; And there are unknown machines making sounds in the heavens, and yea, ver- ily, I have heard them, and know not what they do, knowing full well the doing of them - , - , _Imagine you could see one through another through the waters, imagine you could see one through another through the waters, imagine you could see one through another_ _________________________________________________________________________ Remnant from PMC MOO building #7811: Enter the new description, line by line. [Type lines of input; use `.' to end or `@abort' to abort the command.] you digitize yourself for deconstruction elsewhere you stain yourself following paths to old defuge you make me repeat myself tied up like this building is tied why would you want an entrance to my body there is no part of me you would ever want but i beg you to leave me a message. my name is emission and i am an answering machine. my name is emission and i am an answering machine. why would you want an entrance to my body you make me repeat myself tied up like this building is tied you stain yourself following paths to old defuge you digitize yourself for reconstruction elsewhere . Permission denied _______________________________________________________________________ The room in the moo: Moonglow say, "that's a good sign" You say, "but I wanted the room locked; it's a single sheet of text so to speak, it reinforces the flatness, the text as a marker inthe space, that's all. I wouldn't want to do anything else with it." say a remainder/reminder You say, "a remainder/reminder" Moonglow knows that. ;) You say, "resident/residue and so forth..." Moonglow grins. Moonglow say, "I liked the text from it, that you posted." You say, "an infratextual operation vis-a-vis derrida..." You say, "there were two texts; I had permission denied to change it, which is just as well - it's a fallen space." Moonglow say, "appropriately" What happens when a space falls, when the text falls flat? Pertaining: From Francis Bacon, Natural History: Cent. III 295. _Experiment solitary touching the differing operations of fire and time._ Some things which pass the fire are softest at first, and by time grow hard, as the crumb of bread. Some are harder when they come from the fire, and afterwards give again, and grow soft, as the crust of bread, bisket, sweetmeats, salt, etc. The cause is, for that in those things which wax hard with time, the work of the fire is a kind of melting; and in those that wax soft with time, contrariwise, the work of the fire is a kind of baking; and whatsoever the fire baketh, time doth in some degree dissolve. Cent. X 938. _Experiment solitary touching the emissions of spiritual species which affect the senses._ These emissions, as we have said before, are handled, and ought to be handled by themselves under their proper titles: that is, visibles and audibles, each apart: in this place it shall suffice to give some general observations common to both. First, they seem to be incorporeal. Secondly, they work swiftly. Thirdly, they work at large distances. Fourthly, in curious varieties. Fifthly, they are not effective of any thing; nor leave no work behind them; but are energies merely: for their working upon mirrours and places of echo doth not alter any thing in those bodies; but it is the same action with the original, only repercussed. And as for the shaking of windows, or rarifying the air by great noises; and the heat caused by burning-glasses, they are rather concomitants of the audible and visible species, than the effects of them. Sixthly, they seem to be of so tender and weak a nature, as they affect only such a rare and attenuate substance, as is the spirit of living creatures. Cent. III 296. _Experiment solitary touching motions by imitation._ Motions pass from one man to another, not so much by exciting imagination as by invitation; especially if there be an aptness or inclination before. Therefore gaping, or yawning, and stretching do pass from man to man; for that that causeth gaping and stretching is, when the spirits are a little heavy by any vapour, or the like. For then they strive, as it were, to wring out and expel that which loadeth them. So men drowsy, and desirous to sleep, or before the fit of an ague, do use to yawn and stretch; and to likewise yield a voice or sound, which is an interjection of expulsion: so that if another be apt and prepared to do the like, he followeth by the sight of another. So the laughing of another maketh to laugh. __________________________________________________________________________ Family There's this guy, Travis, let's call him Travis. Let's call him Travis because that's his name. He lives alone with his parents. That is, he hasn't got a lover, a partner, a roommate; he has his parents, and they live elsewhere in the house, which is a white frame house. He's at home a lot and they don't like the way he talks to them. Travis, they say, don't talk like that to us. He eats his meals silently, from the food groups. All the food groups are there. Travis eats three meals a day. He has coffee, orangejuice, cereal, for breakfast; scrambled eggs for lunch with coffee and toast, and for dinner, potatoes, green beans and sometimes a red meat when times are good, chicken when times are lean. Travis leans back on his wood chair; his mother says don't do that, you'll fall over like you used to fall. Travis, his father says, stopping in the middle of the sentence. His father hears the need to finish sentence. Travis rises from the table, after setting his chair back into place. All the silverware is there. The candle flickers while he strangles his moth- er, and the other candle flickers when he stabs his father. There isn't any blood in the room, and everything happens in silence. The father and mother are dead, and Travis thinks, I've done a dreadful thing. Travis plays games but is low in the player category. That is, he's in the outfield, nowhere near the bases; he gets the ball and throws it towards the region of greatest intensity - there are a lot of other players there. The players disperse behind him towards infinity; he's not sure they're around at all, in fact. Then this woman comes up behind him, and he senses she's there, this is something new. First his parents are dead, and then this woman comes up, and Travis knows that one, two, three, he'll be all right. He looks around as if just about everything was fine. He knew the woman was there and when he turned around he knew they saw each other, just like you and I know we see each other when we're together in the comfort of our home. She says, now @addfeature chparents to #741. Travis knows there's some- thing wrong, people disappearing from his life. He worries they're turning ppl. He worries about the ppl turning. The ppl turned and his parents are a lot more detailed. His mother pages; his father whispers. Their voices come out of their mouths and he hears their voices almost in sync with their lips. He doesn't worry about the slight delay. He can almost read the morning news in the morning. _________________________________________________________________________ Questioning fluid identity, postmodernism on the MOO - In discussion with someone tonight, I've been trying to work out my feelings about PMC, postmodernism, and MOOs in general, finding Media Moo eerily quiet all the time, and sympathetic to discussions everywhere on the crisis at PMC. That said, I wonder how it is possible to investigate issues of postmodernism on any MOO which permits morphing, identity changes, and so forth, without any ceiling - in other words, without the @whois command on Media MOO that allows one to see the user's real name, email address, and the @research command, that brings up the user's interests, as he/she has entered them. Pomo theory, which owes a lot to the grand narrative theory of Lyotard, has moved on, to considerations of alterity (hence Levinas, maybe Mark Taylor, recent Derrida) and multiculturalisms (Spivak, etc.). Both of these are concerned with the subaltern, politics of identity (but not PC necessarily), and the Other, questioning both occidental metaphysics and its foundations. Yet on the MOO, identity is fluid and masquerading, an inheritence possibly from the MUDs which inherited from Dungeon and Dragons which inherited from Merlinology which goes back to Victorian escapism, Crowley, and God knows what and She won't tell. Merlinology/magic/fluid identity is based on incantation, whether programming or ritual speech, reproducing the primary narcissism of the infant, in which the world may be remade in hir form, or is only recog- nized in hir form. However such identity on the MOO is a _reproduction,_ at best, requiring labor, an economics of labor which is ultimately open to all; anyone can learn and construct this fluidity. (Which means that to a large extent it's packaged, another problem. But then so are fetishes.) My point in the midst of this is more of a question: Is it possible in fact to discuss postmodernism, postmodernity, or any other relevant philosophical position in the midst of a phenomenology of magic? Doesn't such an environment mitigate against the troubling/discomforting aspects of identity - that we are born sexed, within or without or borderline in relation to certain cultures, and so forth? And that what the MOO might offer is the commodification of the Other, as if, say, my signing as a woman gains me experience as a woman (as opposed to only reading the signs of roving males in relation to my presence in the space)? (Clearly there are signings used to eliminate oppressive circumstances as well - some women signing as men for that reason; and those signings may be unfor- tunately necessary.) There are other problematic issues, again, vis-a-vis postmodernist issues, such as that of ownership, objects, emootions, in the first place. I'm concerned about these things because for me, PMC functions largely as a social environment in which I do ask questions and discuss postmodernism - but it is not an environment which reproduces postmodernist culture - it's not postmodern (in any sense I understand the term and theory) it- self. I picture such a culture composed of both microterritorializations/ nomadicisms (which _are_ present in the MOO) _in relation to_ the posi- tioning of bodies, cultures, the obdurate/inert of the world - in which I would also include, for example, highly limited resources which are rapid- ly running out. To the extent that the MOO insists on the essentially mag- ical (and magic as essence is its own problem), it constructs a mediaeval environment as stage for actions, transformations, and occasional conver- sation. And of course, there's nothing wrong with this - I'm questioning, as I said, only the relation of all of this to postmodern theory, communicative strategies and the like. In this sense, to conclude, couldn't computer-mediated-communication it- self relate closely to mediaeval/feudal environments (vis-a-vis Braudel), rather than the postmodernity that some of us take for granted? Alan, who is not a wizard at this or any other Thing (Icelandic gathering for the establishment, by consensus of custom and law) By the way, I apologize for the sloppiness of this post; it's been a hard few days - a close friend is in the hospital after overdosing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Family Travis would later think about it. That he had been duplicated on the MOO, that the story was a lie. That the MOO was text, emptied of text, text flooded from basement to cosmos. That the sung language sang into him, sung dynasty, multiple entrancings. But then he would think about it; it was the unconscious in him that was thinking like a language. He would think about it. _It was unconscious in him to think._ He'd think about "family," the story he read. That he had been duplicated in the text, that the MOO was a lie. That the story was text, emptied of text, text flooded from cosmos to basement. >Alan is running on empty _Travis is running on empty_ page Alan Alan's story Travis pages Alan @sweep "I'm on to you @quit ________________________________________________________________________ depression walking anywhere, there are scraps of paper, and i wonder about the mutilated history of every little thing every thing cries out its lost name, every paper bag, every twig, every discarded note by discarded lovers things cry out their mines and forests, their roots deep within the earth or tethered above it things have lost their tongues, their eyes; they're present, orphaned, invisible, ransacked and raped by the animals that carved them from the cradle of the planet a split-second use of a styrofoam cup, aluminum can, metals and molecules twisted and forged, released and hammered into almost total annihilation and this is depression, too much history, too much longing in the things themselves, the world yearning for another, alterity consumed by capital as we're all consumed by capital, taking even this space of writing for granted, infinite presence and infinite resource, text splattered across the world in decaying patterns depression is recognizing the waning, the dying-out, the embers; depres- sion is recognizing the death drives as nothing more, nothing less, than a slow settling, the local-real trashed, not beyond, but into recognition and it's impossible to survive their imaginary cries -------------------------------------------------------------------------- dreaming and misery of cybermind, the operation: Site From Devils, Drugs, and Doctors, Howard Haggard, 1929, quoting Hayden in 1896 on the advent of anesthesia: *THEN* With a meek, imploring look, and the startled air of a fawn, as her modest gaze meets the bold eyes fixed upon her, she is brought into the amphi- theater crowded with men, anxious to see the sheeding of her blood, and laid upon the table. With a knowledge of merciful regard as to the inten- sity of the agony which she is to suffer, opiates and stimulants have been freely given her, which, perhaps at this last stage, are again repeated. She is cheered by kind words and the information that it will soon be over and she freed forever from what now afflicts her; she is enjoined to be calm, and to keep quiet and still, and, with assistance at hand to hold her struggling form, the operation is commenced. But of what avail are all her attempts at fortitude? At the first, clear cut of the scalpel, agonizing screams burst from her, and, with convulsive struggles, she endeavors to leap from the table. But force is nigh. Strong men throw themselves upon her and pinion her limbs. Shriek upon shriek make their horrible way into the stillness of the room, until the heart of the boldest sinks into his bosom, like a lump of lead. At length it is finished, and, prostrate with pain, weak from her exer- tions, and bruised by the violence used, she is borne finally from the amphitheater to her bed in the ward, to recover form the shock by slow degrees. *NOW* How would the same case be now? With a sweet, calm smile playing around her mouth - an evidence of pleasant dreams - her eyes fast closed as in a gentle sleep; her body extended languidly and listless as in the repose of childhood, surrounded by no ill-favored men whose powerful aid will be needed; with no crowd of medical men to guard against unforeseen accidents. The surgeon and his two assistants to pass the necessary implements, or to assist in stanching the blood, are all who are required. At his leisure - not hurried by the demands of pain to complete as soon as possible - he can coolly prosecute his work, varying it to suit any exigency of the occasion, and ready to profit by any favorable contingency which its course may present. When finished, and all is in the proper condition which will demand no fresh interference for some time, the patient is awakened from her slumber and receives the glad information that it is all over. The one grateful look which answers this news can have no value placed upon it. Alone, it is worth a lifetime of exertion and trouble. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Critical Problem of Western Metaphysics Where are we working? What is the labor employed? On the surface, utilizing Windows or running even on the level of qbasic programming; running from the Unix shell; on the surface, running conversation on a MOO or even run- ning simple programming commands on the MOO: where is the epistemological at work? What is being constructed in reality? Am I working in depth if I know how to utilize assembly language, machine language - if I can move into the interior of PMC MOO? Is this perhaps nothing more than another set of instructions. (It's instructions all the way down; at the bottom, still instructions, running in clean rooms, run- ning through the mines of the planet earth.) (But it's always a myth of origin. Everyone believes it; even the hacker feels privileged to inaccessible knowledge at the level of foundations.) Think of computers as composed of tangled hierarchies of well-defined com- mands: Then would I be closer to the heart of things if I were hard-wiring already constructed components, relaying the CPU to the satellite units that make the surface skein appear sutured, cleansed, of a piece? Or would I have to design the mask of the CPU itself, P6 P7 P8, in order to attain the position of a _wizard_ who operates among the communication modalities dispersed as well among the beings on the surface of the planet? (But it's the machines. It's the machines which are making the machines again.) Where does the labor begin? What is at stake? (But think of it this way: The machinic as an irrupted continuum, broken parts, assemblages. Think of it this way: There are gaps in the continuum and it's these that are perceived as _objects_ or operational plateaus, _the level of_ (assembly language, template etching, Windows 95, third layer in the TCP/IP protocol, Netscape...). Think of it this way: Objects are instructions, definitions within well-defined plateaus.) Think of the _labor of information._ __________________________________________________________________________ Dubious Speculation on the Nature of the Case One slow sea-change over the past century or so is the disappearance and re-representation of the _case._ If one reads Sumner, Fraser, Boas, Freud, Breuer, in the past, one sees cases presented as typifications as well as limit-points; the same occurs in a great deal of Klein's work and don't forget that the 19th century was the century of analysis. In Freud's meta- psychology, Klein's schemata, the mechanics of Hertz, etc., the case begins to disappear, replaced by abstract or meta-level rule-governing; we can skip to Piaget, Levi-Strauss, Propp, Greimas, and in particular the Bourbaki for a continuation of this. Post-structuralism problematizes the bases for the rules/instructions, which continue to be used on the level of heuristics. Even literature, through Joyce, Queneau, etc., developed towards the abstract and away from modernist narrative transparency (all of these of course are only constructs); something like Sterne can be read either as abstraction and/or as a plethora of microanalyses, micro-cases. In psychoanalysis, Lacan avoids cases for the most part, and Kristeva's cases are seen through the dark glass of depression, her body its ful/fil- ling the spaces, much as Irigaray fills the spaces of Lacan without men- tioning him. Computers as well abstract; the digital realm is based on the parametrics of the real, which is only recreated to the level of percep- tion. Only fractals benefit from increased computational magnification, and they reside as problematic objects in the first place. In multicul- turalisms, say Trinh Minh-Ha, cases are disappearing, replaced by holisms, romanticisms, self-reflexivities; the case becomes something that is necessarily problematized or only visible from within, creating those rad- ical problems of translation that Quine among others was concerned with. Clement Rosset talks about the idiocy of the real, which is its inertness; French nuclear testing, which has just started again as I write these words, serves to obliterate difference in the Pacific Ocean. This then is one movement, towards the problematic of the case, its over- coming so to speak, sutured by abstraction which is clearly related on one hand to scientism and on the other to the abstract quantifications of cap- italism and late capitalism. A second contradictory movement arises, how- ever, that of taxonomic casing, 3x5 casing, Dewey Decimal casing, World Wide Web casing, the reproduction of the real in the digital or televisual domain, which is always already a question of well-defined formatting; it is this reproduction that returns the case to its necessary obsessive-com- pulsive plurality. This reproduction is also a fetishization of the case; one sees this as well all over Debord's society of the spectacle, from massive museum exhibits of Egyptian and Chinese tombs (exhibitions which owe their spectacularity to worlds fairs, dioramas, etc.). The fetishiza- tion is based on the stylistics of shiny and/or mobile surfaces; any good Web site functions as an example. It separates the garden from the weeds, just like "cute" or "cuddly" animals are at the heart of wildlife conser- vation. The separation also splits the rich and poor, oppressor from oppressed; at the top, there is Broadway imaginary galore, the price of the plays themselves skyrocketing. Thus the case is _split_ from the compulsive description/transcription of say Boas - eliminated on one hand, and reconstructed as taxonomic http:// token on the other. The fallout from the French testing and this slow sea change is not yet apparent; the theoretic of the future remains invisible behind the fog of radioactive information pouring in from every channel. Will the _real_ future Beatles please stand up? Who is Madonna? Michael Jackson? Andy Kaufman? Walking the line originating from the case of Elvis, they move across the Web, abstraction of gender, and so forth. (Which is why Sandy Stone for example is no longer shocking or gender- bending: because gender itself has become abstracted, webbed. Sandy Stone is writing the theory of the every-day, her cases (presented live and in print) no longer cases, not even "signs of the times." There are no times, no signs, no meta-cases no micro-cases. The case has gone, split. The writing is on the screen.) Continuing here with more names conjures up defenses, circulations, meta- theoretical approaches; the text appears in its header and somewhere in its packet reconstruction, shells are opened, addresses and router infor- mation discarded, and you discover the residue, this substance which is no other, which is always accounted for but unaccountable, and which is always besides itself. __________________________________________________________________________ Materials for the Speculative Posts Look at: The Problems of Aristotle Bacon's material on natural history, physiology, Advancement of Learning Pliny, Galen, Hippocrates (cases) Mandeville's Journey Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy Early schemata - Lully, Leibniz, Kabbalah. Cases often occur as exempla driven by negation from the normal. Look at Curiosity Cabinets, growth of museums from the Renaissance on. Even Wittgenstein's The world is all that is the case. Freud's Interpretation of Dreams working through dreamwork working through dreams. Who is the woman Freud is addressing? Think of foundations-work in mathematics, axiomatics and now varieties of conventionalism for the most part (working mathematicians still subscrib- ing to platonism). Monster-curves return, are subsumed in fractal theory; unsolvability absorbs as well. Think of Boas' ten-thousand pages of Kwakiutl testimony. The case can become a journey of sorts: Taussig's Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, or Lingis' works. Wittig's work still rings of the journey. Are journeys exceptions to the diminution of the case, or are they insertions? Running across the world on Iphone, building on a MOO, rattling through hypertext links, threading subjects on an email list: surfaces of dreams, skittering, not _traumwerk_ for lack of time. Connections fulfill grids; ham operators still ride the ionosphere in long-distance contests and monitorings. Cases imply seriations: think about Mersenne primes. The proof that there is no largest prime has been known since antiquity, one of those disquieting facts (like the squaring of the circle, trisection of the angle) that have always perturbed the coherency of everyday life. The anecdotes of the Torah and its 613 commandments become subsumed in the New Testament to eschatology. Now there's _a_ story to tell. Cases: But there were the scholastic debates of the first 1400 years at least, Augustine, Neoplatonism; Aristotle's Metaphysics is totally abstract. Cases: But the Metaphysics was balanced by the problems, the work on animals; there are broken links. The episteme was different. This is what's undergoing the sea-change now. For example: The debate over whether the wilderness exists: It has become a case, transformed into a structure of manageriality which is deconstruc- ted, transformed into a series of Web sites. What about the wilderness? Deconstruct _about._ Don't forget on the other hand that Mandeville, for example, all those sources, imply a great deal of naivete which still exists; they're tokens of sympathetic magic, which is imbued with deep-structural linkages to the inhabited world of _divinatio._ Everything is/was signs, signifies. The case in the 19th century sense begins the work of alterity. Alterity can be problematic, genocidal as well: the case of the Tasmanians. Alterity needs the recognition of the same at the heart of the other, the same which holds back the breath, makes the heart skip a beat. With this, the bracketing is deadly. What constitutes a case? What is its closure? To what extent does it entail place? The psychological/psychoanalytical case involved taxonomy as well, 35 year-old female, constructing narratives. The ethnographic case involved oral histories, _listening,_ narratives but also sites, citations. There no end to it. While there are reports of Lacanian therapy, the case is by and large absent. And for so much theory, the case is located in film; think of the 70s work on the male gaze. Is the case a question of getting out into the world and looking at something? When I think "the case of X on the Net," I'm thinking of the textual reports of biographical information, events happening elsewhere for the most part (but events like death of someone on the Net happen everywhere in a sense). Y got married, left the Net. G started a server. Events solely _within_ the Net: black holes, loops, shutdown of routers. As in my post on instructions: these go up and down, always present as definitions, even on the level of silicon wafers. Are events cases, cases events? An event and an occasion are different; there is a linguistic analysis of the uses of these words in a fishing village. But a case implies something else, the typification, bracketing. For a case to be a case, it must be reported. A case then _might_ imply a transmission process, distribution, communication in general. Finally, back to my thesis: that _cases_ are disappearing in the sense of a bifurcation: deconstruction on one hand of the subsuming structures (without however the return of the real/repressed); typification within highly-defined abstracted structures on the other (Web pages and so forth). And this is a highly generalized conclusion, exceptions 49% of the time. _________________________________________________________________________ The Fall Lines beginning > from Wittgenstein, Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, Pears and McGuinness translation. (The TLP as _case._) >1 Die Welt is alles, was der Fall ist. >1 The world is all that is the case. The case is the given, what has falling towards reception. >1.12 Denn, die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen bestimmt, was der Fall ist und >auch, was alles nicht der Fall ist. >1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also >whatever is not the case. We know that the case is the result of filtering, whether passive or active, whether perceived or imperceptible. >2 Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten. >2 What is the case - a fact - is the exitence of states of affairs. A case is an interconnectivity, involving facts, pictures, affairs: involving the structural matrix of the real. >2.024 Die Substanz is das, was unabbhangig von dem, was der Fall ist, >besteht. >2.024 Substance is what subsists independently of what is the case. The case, again, is structured, structuring substance. The structure is connected to the Umwelt; it is not case-local. If the world is all that is the case, there are cases within the world as well. >3.342 An unseren Notationen ist zwar etwas willkurlich, aber d a s ist >nicht willkurlich: Dass, w e n n wir etwas willkurlich bestimmt haben, >dann etwas anderes der Fall sein muss. (Dies hangt von dem W e s e n >der Notation ab.) >3.342 Although there is something arbitrary in our notations, _this_ >much is not arbitrary - that _when_ we have determined one thing >arbitrarily, something else is necessary the case. (This derives from >the _essence_ of notation.) The case is a logical or structural production. A waterFall is the result of gravity, topography, and chaotic trajectories. The psychoanalytical case is that of the Fallen self structured by the metapsychological topo- graphy and internal/external chaos. In 5.1362: >("A weiss, dass _p_ der Fall ist" ist sinnlos, wenn _p_ eine Tautologie >ist.) >('_A_ knows that _p_ is the case', has no sense if _p_ is a tautology.) The Fallen takes everything with it; it is surrounded, fibrillated. The case is _neither_ abstract _nor_ substance; it is always problematized by its reach; only the purely mathematical case is well-defined. In 5.5151: >Aber auch hier ist ja der negative Satz indirekt durch den positiven >gebildet. >But really even in this case the negative proposition is constructed by >an indirect use of the positive. Here the case is a _situation_ in mathematical logic. The case is the structure; the structure is the case. In 5.541 is found the clause: >wie "A glaubt, dass _p_ der Fall ist" >such as 'A believes that _p_ is the case' This is in relation to "gewissen Satzformen der Psychologie," "certain forms of proposition in psychology." This need not be taxonomic, i.e. X is schizophrenic, but a state of affairs: X is troubled by the death of her daughter. Referring to elementary propositions, Wittgenstein asks in 5.5542: >Hat die Frage einen Sinn: Was muss s e i n, damit etwas der-Fall-sein >kann? >Does it make sense to ask what there must _be_ in order that something >can be the case? Thus something may _not_ be the case, for example, if it were substance (within the ontological), or if it were false, for example, the largest prime (within the epistemological). Of course possible worlds arguments utilizes cases which are not the case; this is the domain of modal logics. Now look at the outside, ausserhalb, of the World, in which the case is seen as accidental in relation to structure - therefore structure itself participates in the accidental; we are thrown accidently. But the _case_ remains one of contingency, contiguity, ontological/epistemological transgression, outside the domain of mathematics. (And there are indica- tions that this domain, as well, is not self-contained.) >6.41 Der Sinn der Welt muss ausserhalb ihrer liegen. In der Welt ist >alles, wie es ist, und geschieht alles, wie es geschieht; es gibt >_in_ ihr keinen Wert -- und wenn es ihn gabe, so hatte er keinen Wert. > Wenn es einen Wert gibt, der Wert hat, so muss er ausserhalb alles >Geschehtens und So-Seins liegen. Denn alles Geschehen und So-Sein ist >zufallig. > Was es nichtzufallig macht, kann nicht _in_ der Welt liegen, denn >sonst ware dies wieder zufallig. > Es muss ausserhalb der Welt liegen. >6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world, >everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: >_in_ it no value exists--and if it did exist, it would have no value. > If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside >the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens >and is the case is accidental. > What makes it non-accidental cannot lie _within_ the world, since >if it did it would itself be accidental. > It must lie outside the world. The world is all that is the case. Please open the case again. Nothing was in the case. Her case is interesting. His case was closed. The simplest account of postmodernity: ausserhalb under erasure. _________________________________________________________________________