Buddha Negation These are simply notes-towards, thinking it through. Negation in cyber- space is always a judging, performative. Quit quit exit e Q .q kill delete @quit. These function as _protolanguage_ (see Bickerton, Language and Human Behavior), which is also the language of the moo/mud. The syntax is unary, conjunctive. Context is imminent. The _creative autonomy of language_ : is absent here. Only in the bypass- ing. We are thrust out through the libidinal restraint: get all from corpse, kill troll, hug Kim. The text is always a byproduct waiting for the command say ". Waiting for the command : emote. As in late capitalism, one _adds features._ The language doesn't "improve"; it isn't. The texts smear themselves across each other's bodies. The commands create incisions among them. Negation is absolute, because it eliminates, not like shit or piss are eliminations which render the body abject, but like purified heavy water which annihilates the body absolutely in the process of its cleansing. What is judged and eliminated in cyberspace has never had existence. Has always been cauterized, cut off. But it is language at the mercy of proto- language, and that is the nature of the Net, and its politics: Language at the mercy of protolanguage, the performative cutting of worlds of meaning. __________________________________________________________________________ To everyone, Last night I was talking to someone on the Net at around 3-4 in the morn- ing and I began getting chills and was shaking and thought nothing of it and got off-line and took my temperature and it was 101 F which was very disconcerting; I struggled to bed, slightly nauseous and awoke feverless but extremely weak; I've been faint all day; it may be the result of stress or it may be the result of pushing my addiction, if it is such, to a limit that my body can't take; or it may be Christine's letter to me that I always live emotionally on the edge; or that I pour myself useless- ly into this space returning through a Kierkegaardian either/or; or that I flee from myself and everyone else; whatever the case it is like the de- piction of cumming in net sex, the outpouring of flooded language beyond what the body can take; so I will try and cut back, speak clearly, reform myself, hold back all my secrets, learn to live alone and independent, face death like the man I was borne to be on the shoulders of others, be- come a disciple of innovative neo-pragmatisms, work hard, expect nothing; you must give me time, you must be kind to me: I am undone... _________________________________________________________________________ Wryting across my previous writing Years ago I was interested in what have become neural networks, designing a marker/vector based system that used threshold logic and was capable of constructing threshold units that fired and reset. At the same time, I was interested in what I called then immersive and definable situations, the former phenomenologically constituted, temporal, and involving subjectivi- ty, and the latter formally constituted, using protocols and so forth. All of this led to my Textbook of Thinking, written around five years ago, in which a theory of inscription was developed, based on classical logic (fuzzy and otherwise) and catastrophe theory; an inscription was defined as an intersection between a set and its negation. There were paths that could be traced across the Venn diagram, etc. Inscription is based on dif- ference; there is also fissuring, which is based on sameness (as when the wall of a cliff fissures, with equivalent strata on each side). The two are interrelated, and play different roles in the psychoanalytics of ero- tic writing. Fissuring is also wryting, performative, disruptive; it is the dissolution that problematizes semiosis, the rupture between, say, the two works of Lautreamont (Maldoror and Poesie); and it is Dickerson's protolanguage. Fissuring and inscription are interrelated, just as MOO or MUD commands tend towards well-defined and syntactically complex opera- tions beneath the surface. I would go so far as to say that inscription is based on language learning the world, while fissuring is constructed from the world learning language. And note that both are local, not global, operations, pursuant to postmodernism's deconstruction and weakening of the nation-state. __________________________________________________________________________ hidden title of anonymous block that this is an impenetrable block, that no one will read it in full or in part, that it will garner no response, that it is wryting opening to a void or a ghost which in a land where there is no church to pray for subs- tantiality, that this collapses in upon itself, that it harbors no concern or resentment, that it is machine-made that it husbands no reply or furth- er consideration, that it constitutes your position but a focal point but a threshold beyond which the firing occurs so i can speak freely to you. so that there is no fear of reading wryting arithmetrics. _because of my vulnerability in this space, I will never have netsex again._ typing this text occupies my name, restraining me. i promise never to fall in love with your text again. your text wraps around me, wrything, pulling me towards the ground, the command prompts at the bottom of the page. when i go to sleep i dream of golden-letter commands, would rather dream of unknown alphabetics. i will disconnect reconnect. i will be beautiful_alan cleansed of neuros- es, happy/ compliant. now to another matter. i will devote myself to wry- ting, to moving up to the wizardry of muds and moos everywhere in cyber- space. i will devote myself to those august bodies. i will hold the scales of life and death over each and every user. i will tip the scales. this august space will be legislated, and i will learn, with my cleansed and proper body, to legislate in and beyond the field of wryting. thus i will test the limits of performativity by decision-to-be-implemented. this has nothing to do with justice, except by legislative fiat, bypassed by the word under erasure. but it has everything to do with the positioning of oneself in space for the pleasure of others. and i will inhabit wizardries, building myself within the interstices of anyone who will have me; my powers will be like the silver skeins flooded out from beneath deep-sea medusae, illuminating the darkness everywhere you turn. there will be a pavilion in cyberspace and i will be its luminous breasts. __________________________________________________________________________ Derrida, Heidegger "Lely comments that, although lesser degrees of coprolagnia (pleasure in smelling, pleasure in the apprehension of traces of excrement) are not uncommon, 'the coprolagnic aberration carried to its ultimate excesses' (that is, coprophagia) is extremely rare. Just as Blanchot sees the libertines' 'normal' focus to be on the traces of the murderous passion, on the potential for murder and not on the corpse as corpse; so too the hint of shit, the trace of shit, ought to be more titillating than the full brute presences of the lifeless turd." ... "The turd will not be _auf-gehoben._" (Jane Gallop, Intersections, a Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski.) The _trace of shit_ nicely neutralizes the body, signing it as epitaph, as neutralized; the spun-out mind revolves around itself, tethered, not to death, but to the signifier beaten-out. The trace wrytes itself across the body; Peirce's sheet of assertion becomes the dirty-sheet, in need of cleansing. The dirty little girl, dirty little boy, escape the planet only to be rewritten by it. _It_ wrytes. _It_ wrytes and wrytes. "That does not mean (to say) that there is no castration, but that this _there is_ does not take place. There is the that one cannot cut through to a decision between the two contrary and recognized functions of the fetish, any more than between the thing itself and its supplement. Any more than between the sexes." "The tongue remains in the sheath," (Jacques Derrida, Glas.) The horizon and achievement of the fetysh is the decathected body. _________________________________________________________________________ After my Time Reading Emerson's maternal oversoul, hopeless interspersing of totalities among postmodernity's fractal deconstructions of knowledge, coming to this/these texts that have emerged from my back's fissure. Turning back to my inability to face myself in a mirror at any age, returning to the very _triteness_ of shattered mirrors, cyber- or otherwise. Transforming hardly possible, considering. That I am living beyond my time, that my listing of Lautreamont, Chatterton, Joan of Arc, Lucan, Dickinson, that my listing of dues, Kristeva, Nietzsche, Quine, that I should have died. Ruining my writing by writing. Killing myself by remaining alive. Watching language sink into the pores, unlike Hendrix, Joplin, Wilson, unlike Bird, Mozart, unlike Gorky, that my listing of dues, Acconci, Aycock, Immendorf, listing of Wilke, Wittgenstein, fucking them all, that I am pricing myselves' fear of death, that it was doing, hammering it down until the skin exploding. Reading them they should have, speaking a word, silencing, dying. Losing and dying, silencing. That I should be dying. No reason for living for no reason for writing. Writhing and should be silencing. Writhing and praying the should. _________________________________________________________________________ From: Alan Sondheim Reply to: cybermind@jefferson.village.virginia.edu To: -- Cyb , Fop Subject: what i do late at night with the names changed k:25> late at night can't sleep thinking this is what I do who wants k:25> to deal with _this_ stay away i'm full of poison you'll hate me k:25> f [ting.oregon.edu.nl] control^C k:26> b 0 0 0 .mailspool/sondheim k:27> h 12b13m14b15f16z 17fz18talker 19tom20b21m 22b23carp;24susan 25f26b27h k:28> moo Trying 128.143.200.59... Connected to hero.village.virginia.edu. Escape character is '^]'. ****************************************************************** * Welcome to PMC-2 -- MOO server 1.7.8p4 * ****************************************************************** A Production of Postmodern Culture, in cooperation with The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, hosted on a DEC Alpha/OSF1 at the University of Virginia. Participation. The lag is 0 seconds flat. It is staying level. The MOO will checkpoint in about 37 minutes, at 5:10 a.m. EST. @who Participant Connected Idle time Location ----------- --------- --------- -------- Guest (#93) 3 hours 3 hours The Conversation Pit Roland (#6530) a day a day Total: 2 participants, none of whom have been active recently. ..Ryan Schram was here (repeatedly) @quit *** Disconnected *** Connection closed by foreign host. k:29> media Trying 18.85.0.48... Connected to 18.85.0.48. Escape character is '^]'. **************************** ** Welcome to MediaMOO! ** **************************** @who Player name Connected Idle time Location ----------- --------- --------- -------- GNA-Lab-link (#6963) a day 10 seconds switchboard Total: 1 players, 1 of whom has been active recently. @quit *** Disconnected *** Connection closed by foreign host. k:30> b 0 0 0 .mailspool/sondheim k:31> biff y k:32> b 0 0 0 .mailspool/sondheim k:33> b 0 0 0 .mailspool/sondheim k:34> date Sat Oct 14 04:29:17 EDT 1995 k:35> fortuen ne Keep America beautiful. Swallow your beer cans. k:36> f [bang.oregon.edu.nl] control^C k:37> b 0 0 0 .mailspool/sondheim k:38> pico o.txt UW PICO(tm) 2.5 New Buffer ^G Get Help ^O WriteOut ^R Read File ^Y Prev Pg ^K Cut Text ^C Cur Pos ^X Exit ^J Justify ^W Where is ^V Next Pg ^U UnCut Text ^T To Spell [ New file ] Fil e: o.txtModifiedIcan'tsleepsoIwritethis.Ikeepcheckingformail.Lateat nightwhenwhenyouareals sleep.Nothingcomes.Maybeouare youareawakeandhateme.Idon'tdon'tknow.Iho Ihopenot.Iwoul dn'twantyoutohateme.ButIamawakeand andthereisnothingfromyouandImissyour words.Mybodysplitsintopiecpieces.Thereisdebriseverywhereonth eground.File Name to write o.txtT To Files C Cancel [ Writing... ][ Wrote 6 lines ] ^G Get Help ^O WriteOut ^R Read File ^Y Prev Pg ^K Cut Text ^C Cur Pos ^X Exit ^J Justify ^W Where is ^V Next Pg ^U UnCut Text^T To Spell k:39> more o.txt I can't sleep so I write this. I keep checking for mail. Late at night when you are asleep. Nothing comes. Maybe you are awake and hate me. I don't know. I hope not. I wouldn't want you to hate me. But I am awake and there is nothing from you and I miss your words. My body splits into pieces. There is debris everywhere on the ground. k:40> b 0 0 0 .mailspool/sondheim k:41> rz rz ready. To begin transfer, type "sz file ..." to your modem program **B010000012f4cedŠk:42> ________________________________________________________________________ My Life "Philosophy, as I have so for understood and lived it, means living volun- tarily among ice and high mountains - seeking out everything strange and questionable in existence, everything so far placed under a ban by morali- ty. Long experience, acquired in the course of such wanderings _in what is forbidden,_ taught me to regard the causes that so far have prompted mora- lizing and idealizing in a very different light from what may seem desira- ble: the _hidden_ history of the philosophers, the psychology of the great names came to light for me. "How much truth does a spirit _endure,_ how much truth does it _dare?_ More and more that became for me the real measure of value. Error (faith in the ideal) is not blindness; error is _cowardice._ "Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, _follows_ from cour- age, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness to relation to one- self. "I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves before them." (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.) I am crippled, brilliant, because these words are a posteriori stolen from me, ripped from the cage of my chest, opened up along the fault line, exposing myself momentarily to you through this wrything into existence. But cleanliness is embedded in this territory, and it precisely through its absence, through the edge afforded me, that I am able to go on, beyond Nietzsche, in spite of his gaze, cleared of the necessity of the clot spattered back from the formation of the ego which, through Hertz and Zarathustra, must have appeared jeweled and ice itself. From one pole to the other I have veered, have laid in the earth itself to bring back its secrets positioned simultaneously in mouth and anus; I am far more aware than you of the weakness of the skin, our ability to retain our blood within ourselves, for our own private circulations. For it is among human- ity as a whole that blood flows, from one to another, an exchange of fluids, diseases, languages, each term transitive in relation to every other, each term simultaneously distended and under erasure. I have par- ticipated in the tablets and the hardening, baking of the tablets, and inscribing upon them, which is within them; I have participated in the tablets, and the crumbling, sintering of the tablets, inscriptions fissured and raw, exposed, in the dust composed of memories cluttered against sweet holes open to the weather. Yet I, too, do not refute ideals, preferring to refrain from them who continue to clasp them as veins etched within the earth itself, mobile from strata to strata; if ideals have defeated totality, they have erected themselves in its stead, beneath the same sign of the other. Thus I ignore the signs, only to expose them in any weather. But _hardness,_ yes, the hardness to observe the world with eyelids stit- ched open and unblinking in the darkness of the midday sun. It is not truth which emerges; it is lies. There is no truth, the one; there are many lies. They cannot be called by their names; they are in excess of names. They are called by their productions. They are called because they lead to 2+2=5 in each and every system. They reflect the truth of the name. I endure impossible truths, dare more than possible. I am a coward; I cannot harbor physical pain, run from anguish. And I recognize there are no peaks of truths, no ranges; truth makes itself apparent as a skein upon a plateau, fissures cracked from the lack of rain. Natural signs are sim- ultaneously indecipherable, and imminent in the simplicity of their read- ing and interpretation. The endurance is another matter altogether; I am not a coward, and have faced the most violent truths about myself and others. And ice, yes, ice in any weather, shatters my skin, opens me into the wound that assails the truth with blood, wrything blood within, without my body, ice and flux in any weather. What Nietzsche has lost by virtue of _soap_ and the _problems of soap,_ I have gained to ascend the plateau which surrounded him, invisible. __________________________________________________________________________ In the Park on a Spring-Time Afternoon [1] : Alan: Give me a password: : ********: : Welcome wizard Alan Last logged in on Sun Oct 15 03:24:03 1995 from panix3.panix.com ---------------------------------- No system announcement today... ---------------------------------- Area: square You are in the town square. There is a monument in the centre and lots of people walking about. Exits are: park road You are alone here The area is set to public There are 7 messages on the board There is no current topic here <03:36,00:00> You say: I come to the park to wait for you. <03:37,00:00> Some kids wander around A sadness envelops me at this time of day. <03:37,00:00> Some kids wander around You say: I wait for the last and final message of the day. <03:37,00:01> At this time of day it appears like a slit against the horizon. <03:38,00:01> A pigeon flies off You say: I do not know who will send this message to my vicinity. <03:38,00:02> It will be in my vicinity, almost a lure surrounding me. <03:39,00:02> You say: It will twist like the dynamics of waves of cardiac arrhythmias. <03:40,00:03> Some kids wander around Alan is wandering about, breasts towards the setting sun, nipples erect. <03:40,00:03> Clara wanders in the park, breasts towards the sunlight, and erect. <03:41,00:04> A pigeon lands in the square A pigeon flies off You say: The message is always already the last of the messages; of that, there is no doubt. <03:41,00:05> A pigeon flies off Alan the shades of the bodies are one and the same, are no doubt. <03:42,00:05> A pigeon flies off Alan Clara the shades of the body harbor my desire for the last and final message of the day. <03:42,00:06> It is the stuttered rhythm which returns me to this space. <03:43,00:06> You say: I sit on the bench, I travel to the park. <03:43,00:06> : .go park: Area: park : You are in the town park. It is a lovely green with the grass and the trees basking in the bright sunlight. Exits are: square shops You are alone here The area is set to public There are 0 messages on the board There is no current topic here <03:43,00:07> In the park AlanClara sits, the dynamics of the three-dimensional waves roll on. <03:44,00:07> People kick a football about You say: We await the coagulation of the message. <03:44,00:08> You say: We await the intensity of its arrival. <03:45,00:08> You say: We await the shades of the body hardening into shadows within the catalyst of the last and final message. <03:45,00:08> Some birds fly out of the trees They have come to the understanding that arrhythmias are the most <03:46,00:09> Reasonable model for understanding the lure that encompasses them. <03:46,00:09> Some birds fly out of the trees And we will grant them that understanding, and leave them there, <03:47,00:10> Standing beneath the beautiful trees of the park, <03:47,00:10> On this loveliest of spring-time days. <03:47,00:11> : .quit: k13> -----------------------------------------------| [1] When Time Breaks Down, The Three-Dimensional Dynamics of Electro- chemical Waves and Cardiac Arrhythmias, Arthur T. Winfree. ________________________________________________________________________ Meander Does mathematics interact with the psychoanalytical in a deeper fashion than hitherto considered? Yesterday I met with my friend Catherine, who identified epistemology as perverse, because in her reworking (with a Russian mathematician, text to appear shortly after ten years) of Godel, it becomes possible in fact to prove 0=1 within a formal system, so far as I gather. Let us assume for a moment this to be the case, that by a particular method within a given axiomatics, 0=1. Does this constitute the perverse in terms of belief - i.e. does the _production_ of the formula constitute a _belief_ in the formula? Note of course that if 0=1 is accepted within a mathematical system, i.e. as more than say Lacanian metaphor, then the system transforms into substance; equivalence, in a sense, becomes concatenation, and symbols differ at most by their appearance. But is this perverse? And what would be perverse, in any case, within the psychoanalytical? Since equations are read left to right in English, one might argue for a different effect with 1=0, a hint of annihilation... Not only have I always been suspicious of the Freudian metapsychology in terms of its ontological status, but the Lacanian use of formulas, which admittedly I have never fully comprehended, are at best a metaphor, yet they continue to be employed as if they constitute a system of fundamental structures. My ignorance is vast in this area; while I appreciate the Borromean knots or rings, for example, I fail to see how they are more than a narrative for an interlocking which always threatens to be undone with the removal of any ring whatsoever. The so-called arts and humanities, the so-called human sciences, have an increasingly problematic relationship to mathematics and computer science, both of which threaten from every direction. The Internet is a surface manifestation of this; it appears to combine or embed languge within other and more well-defined domains. The point is that mathematics is simultaneously totally alien and totally submerged within us - that it holds its own problematic platonic status on one hand, and reterritorializes the cultural landscape on the other. So that the _status_ of mathematics becomes more and more of an issue, even though it is less and less considered. Catherine tends towards an ultra-intuitionism, building on the work of Brouwer, through the selfsame Russian logician. Much more naive, I tend towards the platonic, finding the interrelationships among the constants and fundamental particles of the universe having an eerie resonance within mathematics itself. Meanwhile I continue to delude myself on the Net, as if there were _only_ the occurrence of a narrative, a site to which I must bring myself, in order to continue on any level whatsoever. __________________________________________________________________________ To Whom it May Concern: None of the texts I send out are about you. These texts are about issues of cyberspace, its philosophy, psychology, its psychoanalytics. Please do not read me either in or out of these texts. Please do not read my sexual preferences either in or out of these texts. I will push my writing as far as I can and this does not mean that I will push you as far as I can; I do not push people. Some of the texts I send out are about me. These texts are about issues of subjectivity, virtual and otherwise. Please do not read me either out of or in these texts. Please do not read my social life, death, or depression in or out of these texts. If I have something to say about you or to you or to you about you, I will say it to you, not to the list. If you want to write me privately please do, and realize I will not write about your writing me to the list. What is on the list is my work; what I write to you or read from you is my pleasure. Don't confuse them. _________________________________________________________________________ smear all sorts of enfoldings, infoldings, demons, interiors oh , burstcumming ing g bigger bigger your hands becoming lips your alipsses s for you tohole ago been the most blood everywhere comein ing out on me, you coufor a few hours day weeks ld wipe it on my face body ..so u can feel safe..an cock erecsave for t... degraded at ..smthe same tooime,thper e soclosme stuffest has to imaghadine a se"urex chcuntange,' "ure coi admired him,ck" ..uyes, re places that through the other, other placescan only be touch... i woud ld love that, i have done that once also it was wonderful layerings of love ..giving wfay to ucking ththe floor rough ouror the mine ..to see all things that my body never be allowed to go to the bathroom... only to use my body to place all ure fluids and passings... to give to each other in times of need..and to lick ourselves clean.. u fe u from will mix oui am usingr writings, is that ok? (I will stop logging and send you what we have while we write)... * , the museum. ..and many images of wimmin..so when u speak of these images there is a Tibetan museum here, my friend mei see them eve ..er is this a nice way of asking me if i am naked and sitting here waitin ..it shall never be mine againyou sound like you just gout t out of a MUD! ..tiny dusty points were i can touch u .everywhere.... I will imagine she's there now I will tell her to touch you yes... lag...YOUR oodBLOOD, your cl..from this ots, all over me... a aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaall all of it over u altlve am currently doing a video that is footage from Tibet ..it was shot two months amazing to be dirtied and erect all the timec, exposedoating ourselves in all yes.ourl.. and all the showers o and all this space we will create through our fluids ..i have notions of swimmin and generally don't think about it much and he had this sex change and then lives with a woman which is perfect, and her fluids sand her sssblood and ys....ours, i would be there and i am guuna go to hell..:.but hel-) and i could take imges of u with blood dripping from ure lips ..covering ure yes, fac and i would push u through that point that and my hiar would become entangled in ureslef ..so and scream as u screaham ..and pleasure u ah in my screamingah a...h aaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaia aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawiaaaaa and she will streach them further ..so that the pain bewt tween me and u r flet..th and to sip all these fluids from each others ysescreens ....and to give u my brebut to ap api tirped e from my sbody, a fkin ..and go riend was here on journey tyeo other placesters ..day to feel ure who skin through mine . ar so much ..that point that u need to feel ..and all this wrapped up in my are you there? ath thr bidden hand? blessedct i am doing blood in me body will be tied with many clothes ..that r covered in my body bout the likes of u ..and now i ve done it ...donIe it with a devil .. imy can't believed breaking one cycle openiing another bugrin* buoftwt this are but i want to cum i am having a hard time holding back thinking f of this but it pu came over carmming it in our holes, backe the ones in our bin.odies .. clotheds vampire cock. d me an d watch and moivre and lick and take all this from drip frommy mouth your blood ds dsove to tieof my me up, should woulf lu e woulud pidiss ..wonere me toou e e ..that when a person said that u die and go t e and eyes ..do that..and smearing e would protect u ...i would really really love that ed through ed to live or die..or go to heaven... ery we except for the cloth and strands of yes, bmy hiar ..u wut my could beock wouldjust uralways be skin e exposed and my asshole as well..and not f f out ourselves would be on the floor..we would forever be swiming in our own bodie f t f therehis other proje; it's forbidden handand how aron all parts of m fucking anyone who would have me, sucking anyone who wn anted to be sucked g in ure body ..and u in m g to be taken to heaven/ gigghell/fertlinilg.... izer/bayocteria heavens and hells in that way either ..but i am sure as hing else hl is nice ellthere, we'll too ...be in purgatory together... hope so... i always thi i am so close to cumming i am so close to cumminga... i am so naked here now i can send ysou whatmilewe have... i could bring you pleasure and your friends pleasure i could suck it directly from your cunt i d m i have done that once it was wonderful i have never done that, i would like to, all your effluvia all over me, i think a sponguew would be better i want everything from your body, others w there watching, everything i want her to runn her mouth over ure every hole .. i want her tonguein my h in my asshole, around my balls.... i want one of your friends there too, looking up me, fucking youiwill I will my fin i want you here, my cock in your asshole, i keepthinking of that. i want your fluids in my hair i wanyset lf i watcher lips becoming becomind, tied up, unable to move. i wi i would always be naked i would love that, i would really do that... i would push yaour bnd they willlood into my boplace thedy ir manytoohands and i would put it in my mouth idea to cumming if i came to you i would be naked in your place all the tim eiwth you ii want to wear your tampx in e ax in me, i know you don't use one, but enter your iill hol; ing ingainting allourselves this andin acrll thisaming isty and to it dripsa salot if ponge would be fine if you u leave it in ure cunt put it in mto long it into lil spaces ..lik it is in a suburban neighborhood, a building directly out ofthe the Potala... it needs ge of our editing somewhat I think too... it would drip from me jews don't have heavens or hells, we're just confused about stuff like that just going to turn into bacteria f and fertilizo heaven ..sureely this must have lag... lag... lag... laugh...oh god them ..yeah well perhaps he im too ... ld place my button box on the shelf ..to play mucsic to dance and fuck too ld tie myis to li lipopsur yourself into ll pa lted ands maybe you would lock my clothes up, i would be naked for you and anyone who me me me when i did... mouths on ure very skin ..to feel u ..f my cock is ready to burst my legs are spread so far they are hurting n n u tugged and pulled at me ..ure own skin would feel the pain..oh y.es.... and i would have to beg you to goto the bathroom... nd to take droplets to save ..to drink when we r thr nt..and the ne o it wasn't lag totally desecrated, it's really powerful. oh i don't have h oh no ...me mother tol ok or u or uyes yes ot to tu faall oughdo this in real life toothis , withtyouapand wiping th others, to do that, ould be Yple bl probably closer to listening to early Midnight Oil... re re body and your jesourney... re skin trunsurns into my cloth read me open, hold me nopen rough the distance through tyeshe pain.thr..ough her hands pushing me apart ryday in the edit suit..whcih i think its quite amazing . s s..wi sdl died and gone to heaven.. self you must tell her what to do to me send me some hair too... she she must use her hands and toungue all the time..she must never take them from u she wth thould lrea shit and wour allap iss and s our cum ..reand oucrer blood ating our own shapes and the shapes of the buildings arooundur bodies reall should i keep logging? smearing us together... so so that i could bleed too so u would be coated in sor do yomile ..well u mean Midnii am naked ..aght oil Oilnd yes i have had my ? ss u strands of my hiar to tie to the bottom ...base of ure cock ...to stop st on the ed strands of my hiar and wrap it aroundure t the .sinceDalai Lamu know notha ing o that when that would be amazing, it would be amazing f video, amazing to see... thatnkwould be a this is the besbeautiful image, you ovt way ..to crawl er meup, your into my cunt cunt andin to my mouliveth,there then cum all over my body my skin ..so i can smear u into myey hs yes yesair and my ...b.ones. these visions we build are so powerful, overhw whelmig... they are like Tibetan imges for ages for me always, from the Book of the Dead, to feel all this ..and to touch many ..and to watch many pother s..and i wou to s to stop and tell me ure texture ..sssss tommorow..and to untie u when i feel fai touch me where, do what, she is listening... tronges so whereell tha...t a feel cheated..and i have to escape this tr turning me into your thing. u have ided l u mean there is sex lag here too? u would u would be shivered by the tio p of her lips ..should were she leaves tiny droplets of ..in her siliva uer uer ul my soul this! ure ure lips around all thi have this imagee minglings usy dirty, wet watchig us fuck, shit, piss, everything we'rehell sur well it is still in forbidden plai'm cessorry...i cam*egrin wgerhen my friend coumes herpe you must tell yher to dourothings to me where ami wots a MUD? wr y y e you doing with your forbody yeah i get these imagses too ..when i exwhich isplore my body ..what is so which i know very vsll ..perhaps sometim yer i like it that way best of all yer that would be good ..oi kthink this tex.t was very..lovley ..like ju yes yes i am your hole through h yes but my blood is piu urple ...* yes i like that image of 'the cloth' and ure mouth ..'the cloth' and ure body .. yes... yes.... yes..into..ure ..clth..into u yesp, exaint ourse you can put the cloth in my mouth. you cou.to save all their you could offer me up... you could turn me into your thing you to sp you would you would control all of it, i could like your urethras cleanatoond to take you would have your friend sit on me and i would lick her cunt and suck it youand fill my holes and fuck someone while your cock becomingI will look into I will look inside I wo your friends coming over, filming, touching us, opening our holes __________________________________________________________________________ Theft You own your own machine you own your own Hamletmachine trans. Weber: Muller: "Ich war Hamlet. Ich stand an der Kueste and redete mit der Branung BLABLA, im Ruecken die Ruinen von Europa. Die Glocken laeuteten das Staatsbegraebnis ein, Moerder und Witwe ein Paar, im Stechschritt hinter dem Sarg des Hohen Kadavers die Raete, heulend" "I was Hamlet. I stood at the shore and talked with the surf BLABLA, the ruins of Europe in back of me. The bells tolled the state-funeral, murd- erer and widow a couple, the councillors goose-stepping behind the high- ranking carcass' coffin, bawling with badly paid grief WHO IS THE CORPSE IN THE HEARSE/ABOUT WHOM THERE'S SUCH A HUE AND CRY/'THIS THE CORPSE OF A GREAT GIVER OF ALMS" spaces/blanks/Tiffany's own "Ich bin Ophelia." "I am Ophelia. The one the river didn't keep. The woman dangling from the rope. The woman with her arteries cut open. The woman with the overdose. SNOW ON HER LIPS. The woman with her head in the gas stove. yesterday I stopped killing myself. I'm alone with my breasts my thighs my womb. I smash the tools of my captivity, the chair the bed. I destroy the battlefield that was my home. I fling open the doors so the wind gets in and the scream of the world. I smash the window." /smash/Tiffany's broken own "I walk the street clothed in my blood." DA DADAAAAH "Ophelia "Hier spricht Elektra." "This is Electra speaking. In the heart of darkness. Under the sun of tor- ture. To the capitals of the world. In the name of the victims. I eject all the sperm I have received. I turn the milk of my breasts into lethal poison." "Hamletdarsteller "Ich bin nicht Hamlet. Ich spiele keine Rolle mehr." Tiffany is Medea is Hamlet is Ophelia Tiffany is the actress playing Tiffany Tiffany sucks the words of the play I play Tiffany says I suck the words of the plays I play You play yourself burrow through the skull of Your words you strip the skin from My Bones you wear My Breasts puff them against your Own Tiffany Honey Clarissa Shulamit Margarita Catherine I wish I were the fallen Europe skin any color than white gender any color than male body any other than my own says Tiffany Honey Clarissa Shulamit Margarita Catherine Tiffany write her own upon the skin write her own Catherine write her own Margarita Outside of you you inside see through My eyes grasp your desire grab hair Grab teeth splinter against skull skin Of mine sutured into six or seven perfect pieces (Buddha's skull-bone: "This done, they wash their hands with scented water and bring out the bone, which they place outside the vihara, on a lofty platform, where it is supported on a round pedestal of the seven precious substances, and covered with a bell of lapis lazuli, both adorned with rows of pearls. Its colour is of a yellowish white, and it forms an imper- fect circle twelve inches round, curling upwards to the centre." Fa-Hien.) Tiffany no longer call her own I no longer call my Tongue her bone A sheath against your own your own Perfect cyberspace my body responds to you I am sheathed and capsule in your hand in your body My body onto you your body into me im Ruecken die Ruinen von Amerika BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH A plain with Tiffany of White Crows Black Sky Clarissa Violence of SPECKS ________________________________________________________________________ Bricks For those who haven't made the journey - the following are buildings on PMC2-MOO: *** Connected *** PMC-MOO evacuation of anal, stumbled clitoris of Tiffany, burrowed plains, expulsion of rhizomatic surface to skin smeared with effluvia, desire, fragments of love, exit down You see #1, #5, and hieroglyph here. Last connected Thu Oct 19 01:01:43 1995 EDT from panix3.panix.com There is new activity on the following lists: *Chatter 5 new messages You have no messages on your Answering Machine. look #1 You see nothing special. look #5 You see nothing special. look hieroglyph hpylgoreih down MEDEA-MOO Tiffany eats a dagger. Tiffany eats a piece of rabbit meat. You say "We're on." Tiffany eats a piece of rabbit meat. Tiffany says "good." You don't seem to have any. Tiffany grins evilly. Tiffany says "Strange, I haven't seen them." You sit down and rest your tired bones. SEEK SHELTER AT ONCE! Tiffany has begun ti sing. <<<<>>> PLEASE NO SINGING IN THESE PARTS! Says the Orc! Orc falls over dead! Tiffany asks "Did you kill Orc?" You say "It feels emptier somehow." You say "Let me try and kill you." The day has begun. Tiffany eats a piece of rabbit meat. Tiffany says "" You say "I will kill you." You chop Tiffany to pieces! Ah! The blood! Your blood freezes as you hear Tiffany's death cry! *** More *** 15 lines left. Do @more [rest|flush] for more. @more Look Corpse of Tiffany Eat corpse. Ok. i Bones of Tiffany. Tiffany arrives with an ear-splitting bang. Tiffany exclaims "You killed me!" You drop the bones of Tiffany. You fondle yourself. Tiffany says "" You say "Now you wil kill me." <<<<>>> You see two-thousand-fourteen, Tiffany, anal, MEDIA-MOO, Menstrual Table, plains, and bloody handprint here. look two-thousand-fourteen Menstrual Table, anal, clitoris, MEDIA-MOO look Tiffany #2014 MEDIA-MOO look anal striated hole, i am embedded, enthralled, i speak words on occasion, cleansed in every room, whispered into aphanisis Contents: clitoris look MEDIA-MOO o i beg you dearest sister visit me in defuge, exhausted after a weary night of legs open to one and all, skin piercing lance upon Menstrual Table look Menstrual Table graphemes, suture, surgery, place of birth and dissolution, cloth or armor worn protecting from wounds of desperation, clitoral kinships, the blood-red plains of bones, bodies, languages look plains blood-red anal striations; evacuate down, body hieroglyph (see PMC-MOO): exit down down PMC-MOO evacuation of anal, stumbled clitoris of Tiffany, burrowed plains, expulsion of rhizomatic surface to skin smeared with effluvia, desire, fragments of love, exit down You see #1, #5, and hieroglyph here. @quit *** Disconnected *** Connection closed by foreign host. ________________________________________________________________________ Wyrd A woman is singing "passion for the road" on an advertisement. Her voice is hoarse pushed to the limit; she's almost but not quite out of control, it's Janis Joplin all over again. She has to be violently forcing air through the throat, upper chest, microphone standing swinging in front of her, the drums almost dulled by comparison, forget about the bass. Is it capital that is being performed here? What are her emotional parameters? Writing on-line I feel waves of tension and heat rise up my shoulders, back, neck. My arms tense; everything is angry around me. I want to cut through the text cut through the screen cut through the flesh. The topic splatters through the wires, is almost irrelevant. It gets funneled through a channel or a furrow. It breaks the writing in two. The politics of language on the Net are the politics of wryting. There is no separation between the wyrd and its production. Think of wyrd as mnemic symbol (Freud quoted in Laplanche and Pontalis): "By this means the ego succeeds in freeing itself from the contradiction; but instead, it has burdened itself with a mnemic symbol which finds a lodgement in conscious- ness, like a sort of parasite, either in the form of an unresolvable motor innervation or as a constantly recurring hallucinatory sensation." Such mnemic symbols have the weight of poetic language, protolanguage: the body is blocked (as in blocking an actress in a play, stage-blocking) (as in disrupted, foreclosed, tumescent), capital flourishing from the beautiful whiteness of her throat, upon which is written the guise of information. (Thinking of Lyotard's Pacific Wall, white white white white white.) __________________________________________________________________________ The Internet Text (periodic notice) This is a somewhat periodic notice describing my Internet Text, available on the Net. The work to date is divided into two sections: the Internet Text proper, and the alphabetic text; together they would fill more than two megs, and constitute around 1000 pages total. The Text was started more than a year ago, and has continued as an extended meditation on cy- berspace. It begins with a somewhat straightforward theoretical approach, and then, calling on numerous ghosts (alive, quasi-alive, and dead), continues into the domains of psychoanalysis, interiority, subjectivity, narrativity, and so forth. My current writing, more distant in some aspects, nevertheless references back into the strata of the whole/hole, a work which for me is an entering into future issues of cyberspace and subjectivity in the next millennium. The changing nature of these email lists, cybermind and fiction-of-philos- ophy, hides the full textual body itself, since new readers will not be aware of its presence. For them the text appears fragmentary, created piecemeal, splintered from a non-existent whole. So this (periodic) notice is an attempt to recuperate the work as a whole, retard its diaphanous existence. And below is the introduction, updated. ---------------------------------begin file------------------------------- Internet Text Description 10/21/95 The Internet Text consists of 700 +/- sections written over a period of twenty-two months, a continuous meditation on cyberspace, emphasizing issues of interiority, subjectivity, body, and language. The extended range of topics includes Net applications, the materialist "gristle" that can't be discarded in analysis. Most recently, I have been using a re- worked MUD (multi-user-dungeon), talkers, MOOs, and other MUDs, as a way of creating discourses about these issues. _Nothing_ is concluded here, although there are summarizations of key concepts, such as _rewrite, protocol, emission, spew, ghost, address, inscription, fissure, and the uncanny._ There are also several sections serving as outlines or recapitulations of the "arguments so far." Recently, the text has dealt with issues of net sex, psychosis, and protolanguage. It has also covered the concept of "defuge," and traced notions of cybermind back through such things as the Gilgamesh epic; Lacanian and Freudian concepts have been brought back into play. Kim Mcglynn and I have worked together on a series of pieces as well. The Internet Text is in the form of "short-waves, long-waves." The former are the individual pieces, almost all titled, written in a variety of styles, and referencing a number of writers ranging from Jabes and Blan- chot to Acker and Lingis, with Penrose, Kristeva, and Karl Kraus somewhere in between. These texts are interrelated, interpenetrated; on occasion "characters" appear - these are _actants_ possessing philosophical or psychological import. They also create and problematize narrative sub- structures within the work as a whole. (Such are Clara Hielo Internet, Tiffany, Alan, Claire, Honey, and others; Tiffany, in particular, has become a space of learning, sexuality, mathesis, semioisis... - as well as the armature of spaces on PMC2-MOO and Media-Moo.) The long-waves are fuzzy topoi on such issues as death, love, virtual embodiment, the "granularity of the real," and physical reality, which criss-cross the texts. The resulting fragmentations and coagulations owe something to German Romanticism, but more to the function of sites or nodes on the Net itself. There is no binarism in the work, no series of protocol statements. On the other hand, virtuality is considered far beyond the ASCII text net- scape that is most prevalent now, at the end of the twentieth century. The various issues of embodiment that will arrive with full-real or true-real VR are already in existence as embryonic, permitting the theorizing of various present and future spatialities and their inter- connectedness. The text often presents and stumbles over gender, genders and regenders itself; consider other-gendered personages replacing the ones described. I have no stake in them beyond my own desire, memory, and circumlocu- tion; others will do. Although there are faux-texts of writers such as Dickinson, Stein, and Poe, these texts are meant as partial transparencies. I do not mean to imply that virtuality is synonymous with masquerade or freely-given choice of identities. Almost all other references are accurate, referen- cing a wide range of writers and viewpoints. The resulting matrix, how- ever, is entirely my own. The Internet Text divides into fourteen files; there is also an index file to the whole. While it is best read in the order it is written in, certain early sections, at pains to establish a working vocabulary, are more terse and perhaps difficult than others; they may be skipped, to be returned to at a later date. The same goes for the few Qbasic programs and those sections which employ technical terminology (once again the gristle). (Note that the Text is continued in the alphabetic text, which contains files a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l, and m to date.) Certain texts has been written with Kim Mcglynn or Angela Hunter, and are of course as much their creation as my own. The work to date can be found by telnetting to http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html (including images and sound) or at: ftp jefferson.village.virginia.edu cd pub/pubs/listservs/spoons/cybermind-digest.archive/internet Some images are at http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/ as well. The building at Media-Moo is #2014 and at PMC2-MOO, do @join Alan and from the first space, go "down" to the second. Alan Sondheim, sondheim@panix.com, sondheim@netcom.com ________________________________________________________________________ Precipice Negation gnaws at the Real; negation is a precipice. Whether or not it is a present condition or the condition of an absence, or potential, it fissures and splinters our possibility of anchoring on more than language. It darkens as an operator passing as a state, a condition passing as a situation. It throws the jar into the void. It violates sanctity. The Torah is protected: Make a hedge around the Torah. Cyberspace is not. Nouns slip like water, fracture themselves. The cor- ruption of nouns reveals itself here. Things are always already splintered and invisible. One never sees the same without the Other. The Other is its negation. The negation is psychosis. __________________________________________________________________________ Inert Is it possible to create a philosophical position form which it is imposs- ible to move on? Not in the sense of time continuing, the relegation to the historical, but in the sense of supercession. What epistemology would remain rooted in an originary theory, or a theory that declares itself originary? Would this not in fact parallel the development of conceptual art towards that null point implied by Daniel Buren's continuous reduction of painting to a series of prefabricated stripes? (Which is a reduction that projects _a_ null point, among others, projects in other words a class of null points, of which it is a member.) Even a philosophy of the zero, however, is dependent upon null sets and other mathematico-logical considerations. Deconstruction still remains tethered to the present, but Russian nihilism has been transformed forever into the historical... Logical atomism and logical positivism, look at Carnap... Consider trigonometry as exhausted, the comprehension of the gene; it's a matter of time in isolated domains. There is a broken continuum of scientific progress, at least in terms of tolerance. One intercedes, in spite of issues of paradigm. Newton becomes nothing more than crude limit. Philosophy wars against temporality. One desires statements constituting plateaus, potential wells, the obdurate. Even under erasure, the obdurate is not effacement; philosophy insists on the face. It harbors the other, the zero or null point; it deconstructs origins, allowing the residue to float to the top of time. Time continues. _________________________________________________________________________ Presentation of the Self in Everyday Wryt (I wryte my sex. I wrythe my sex.) Earlier in the text I have been working on, I described negation as the heart of human communication, the ability to be denied by the Other, and the effacement that ensues. Ef-face-ment: the humiliation of the face and its openness, the embarrassment which is caused by the sensation of the denial of being. It is this risk that negation entails psychoanalytically, a risk that is replaced in cyberspace by erasure: the ability to annihil- ate words (but nothing else), through the use of kill/delete/and so forth, the instantaneous cure of the pseudonymous other. Erasure parallels effacement, but permits the reading and wryting of the self; if I wryte net.sex with you, I _am_ net.sex; if I wryte violence among you, I _am_ violence. What I am wryting in both instances is with- out effacement, without risk; desire is doubly released here, first, as a flux or emission from the components of the id, and second, as a textual device which wrytes the unconscious, through the hysteria of (proto)lan- guage, reminiscent of, and replacing the real. What is under erasure is always legible, readable; what is under efface- ment, has turned the body away. The ability to annihilate textually eliminates at best the framework of communication; the ability to efface constructs shame. (On the Net, I am capable of flirting; in real life, I am psychologically tongue-tied, unable to face the Other, even the mirror, embarrassed, incapable of even asking someone for a date. But I am not ab- sented in real life as I am on the Net where I open myself to the release- ment of the Hidden.) The "whining" effect of cybermind, the emphasis on pain, the occasional outpouring of emotion, is the result of erasure; at worst, an ignorant reply is the result. But the construct of the self through the mirroring of the Other that goes beyond language, into the implicit ontic processes of the gaze, is absent here; the self emerges more often in cybermind splayed, vulnerable of speech, and invulnerable of flesh. These are delicate distinctions, but they permit the speaking of pain here, the therapuetics of the ascii unconscious as, through speaking, it finds itself spoken-for, by others who are not. The reciprocity of languaging procures community. Never forget that Freud pursued the talking cure. (And crying and laughing, re: Plessner, are the limits of the body, limits which textually inscribe themselves in cyber- mind.) _________________________________________________________________________ Pre-MOO 1990 the stream spoke. what did it say, what did it say? Margaret has come to play. trees bent blood back down to root. dawn came and went. then night cried out the blind black dust of sight. void filled. branches overturned branches stuttered dead and echoed forth. sound came from the north and hurtled south, along the axis of the earth. the flowers thrust, burst in thought, then language first retrieved your name. I ran towards you. in rhyme the sky turned blue. __________________________________________________________________________ Pre Net.Sex 1990 Flattened against the rim of your clitoris, its stem flowered within the teeth and lip of me and you, the mouth descends and showers between labia swollen with slow dark streams; and everything that was, or will be, is. Eyes press on liquid septum; they dip, enfold and drink, see night; your body's fevered hours are now my own. The mouth surrounds, the body dreams, inhales urethral showers, hot waves ascending from thigh to hip, flows between the breasts to neck, from tongue and back, salt eyes descending into tears. The anus burns, opens wide; a murdered speck returns into the light. There are no more of me, no more of you. There are none of the mountains. There are none. Where blood meets blood, nothing dies; clitoris swells, I breath it hard between the lids of sight. The mouth devours. Somewhere cries are lost against the skin. Everywhere is in. ___________________________________________________________________ Pre-Cybermind 1990 Without your presence, writing remains immaterial. Something retains the course of this beyond the father? Does the species repeat itself? Does culture slide back into the phallus and its mimicry of strength? Are questions repetitions, for example concerned with the sublimation of nurturing? Women have been excluded from the question, problematize the interrogative. (But the question is asked _of_ the woman.) To ask appropriates, crashing an entire structure. Halves rebel against the absenting father. At the very least exhaustion opens, fluctuates. No one can complete the course set, no one of either gender. the insatiability of yearning and longing Nostalgia and longing collapse desire into commodification. The immateriality of writing seethes, inconsequential, invisible. What I harbor is always elsewhere than the writing produced by harboring. I am not responsible for myself! I repeat the same old story! Speech adjudicates itself, adjusts, returns with fury, refuses to let go. The occurrence of my writing: that nothing occurs in speech. So writing is already machine production, autonomic. So there is nothing of me present therefore the absence of the father. Who writes itself into every discourse, transforming _him_ into neutrality. Transforming him as far as allowable beneath the law of the father. As if there were a mechanics of _jostling._ inundation of pre-oedipal semiosis, part-objects, contour-processing? Therefore a liquidity of logical fragments, infant seethings? Which are never lost, moving to the limits of the body, laughter, tears. To the excitation, shattering of the margins, contours. Beyond the interrogative, remaining as the source/fragmentation of discourse. Or the difficulty, impossibility, of opening up _same_ to _other_. Writing as drift, without anchorage, untethered writing. But nonetheless at odds with its subject (absented), choral, on the side of _whatever._ "Whatever" spoken accompanied by a gesture of resignation, particulate and abandoned field, "no matter what." ... Writing incising the body, transforming fissure into inscription: lifted off the body, compartmentalized, the beginning of the (continuous) bi- furcation of the psychoanalytical field itself... ... The abandoned field field of absence and loss field of memory and collapse field of decay and admonition... ... ________________________________________________________________________ Kim Il Sung wrote his mind literally across his country; @echo creates a sourceless statement, unattributed, on MUDs and MOOs and talkers (one form or another), as if the terrain itself has adapted to the position of the author, everywhere, transcendent, no need to mention the name. Even the menus in the restaurants of the capital were apparently written by him, as were all the ideological statements. The stadium was named after him, and you could see his cigarette butts in the museum. @echo also returns what- ever is written, by virtue of the command, as if the earth were literally, @Kim_Il_Sung, an interesting case of wryting, it seems to me, inscribing without cyberspace, part of the ideological underpinnings of protolanguage which aligns itself with the real, knows no bounds, and, in this case, is awarded to the aggressor. Alan On Mon, 23 Oct 1995, Glenn Yarnell Jr. (HCC/SABES/ALP) wrote: > > > > > >On monday alan sez: > > > >@echo > > > > > huh? > _____________________________________________________________________ Disconnections In Postmodern Sureno, a tape edited with Dawnja Burris, I worked with issues of postmodernism in relation to Ciudad Juarez and El Paso. What developed from this were considerations of geography in relation to tele- communications, the maquiladora / colonia system, and the hallucinatory city. The tape was shot on location, a series of interviews, landscapes, commentaries, with little image manipulation. The journey was often in real-time, Spanish and English, not all of it translated. Juarez appeared increasingly as an intensification, a gathering or coal- escence of humans, part-objects, trails and traces, across a denuded land- scape; there were no sewers, water, paved roads, or paid-for electricity. The last was "stolen" directly from overhead wires run into the dwellings, and the water was trucked in to the lower elevations, from which it would be hauled up the barren hills. Television was everywhere, as were gangs and gang-signings, and the area was largely undefined, undemarcated, the number of inhabitants of Juarez at that point (say three years ago) unknown, the delineation of the formal urban geography equally problematic. News spread by foot, by television and radio, through signs and loudspeakers. The colonia dwellings were examples of bricolage, paralleled everywhere in the world from Brasilia to the Philippines. They were remarkably invent- ive, territorial demarcations which might or might not shift. Some of them were in existence for years. The colonias had loose identities. The city maps, which were very few at the time, did not map the city, only the more or less disrupted core. Sickness was a catastrophe about to happen, with the factories dumping industrial waste, combined with human, directly into either runoff chan- nels or cesspools. The maquiladoras themselves, some of them, provided education and health-care. The city was centered around a plaza, where traditional dances were carried out, for money, overlooked by a cathedral. Juarez had schools and health-care towards the center of town, which was extremely run down, not servicing the outskirts to any extent. Microwave connected Juarez with El Paso, as did television, beamed from Mexico, from New Mexico, from Texas. This was also the region of classic border radio, from Wolfman Jack further south and east, all the way to Tiajuana. Mexico is now wiring heavily for the Internet, and nations everywhere are backing down from their borders into coagulations of inter- ests, difficult and relative nomadicisms in which whole populations are on the move, some of which are making Mexico City the most populous in the world. Postmodern Sureno dealt with all of these issues, as well as the informal economies described by de Soto in The Other Path. These economies, their redrawings of territories and the territorial concept itself, are increas- ingly becoming a planetary consciousness, one already presaged from the Internet. That consciousness is fragmented, not only by languages, histor- ies, populations, and identifications, but also by tourisms, scarcities, linguistic hegemonies, and electronic communications. All of these play into the world as a whole becoming, like the MOO with @dig commands, an accumulation of local exchanges within corrupted and distant superstruc- tures. Brother Gates may rule the wires, and his subjects will never have heard of him. And his subjects may starve. __________________________________________________________________________ Subject: James Ellroy, as if he were in cyberspace (from the ending of Brown's Requiem): So I go on, heeding Jane's advice. I have not performed violence on a human being since hurtin gthe two boys in Bayreuth. I try to appreciate beauty. Most of the time I'm equal to the task, but sometimes my head turns to wild flights of fantasy, envisioning other electric calms and moral stands that might bring me permanent salvation. When I think of these things, my reason and love of beauty desert me and I hang suspended like a bizarre hovercraft in a holding pattern over Los Angeles. But I hold. I listen to a lot of music. _________________________________________________________________________ Disconnections One can construct postmodern sociologies, based on cities like Juarez, counties like those found in southwest Texas, anywhere that displaced pop- ulations exist and increase without the accompanying urban infrastuctures we take for granted. These regions participate in "communication econom- ies," since they possess a wide variety of channels for public and pri- vate, one-to-one, many-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, communications. Private one-to-one, on the order of the telephone or cb, intensify ties at a distance, either from rural origins (diachrony), or city-wide empha- sizing origins (synchrony) - or productive of other identities and econo- mies, such as beeper networks for drugs. Many-to-one occurs in the form of flyers, distributed individually to homes; one-to-many is the domain of the loudspeaker, among other things. All of these forms of communication can create closer ties and more tightly constructed identities than regionalisms or nationalisms, often overlaid from above (see, still, Jean Duvignaud, Change at Shebika). Of all these forms, radio and television are the most critical and easiest to import/export; telephones were very rare in the colonias, but televi- sion and vcrs were not. One of the shacks in the colonia we visited at length was a video rental store. In the markets, rap and other musics were common; there were huge quantities of cassettes for sale, both (apparen- tly) bootleg and legitimate. Boundaries break down in situations like these and the political becomes the psychoanalytical, and vice versa. The distinction between urban and rural for example is transformed into a matter of style mapped on to competing images produced in both regions (you see the same thing in rep- resentations of so-called "hillbillies," from L'il Abner to Deliverance). The images are often introjected, so that, for example, part of the image/imaginary of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is Hollywood- produced and then reintegrated into Canadian Culture (see Pierre Berton). (And see The Harder They Come, and any other number of movies.) All of this is compounded by tourisms which reinscribe cities and encap- sulate cultural domains; the commodification, for example, of native crafts results in an emphasis within the native community to produce those "traditions" which apparently sell. (There have been extensive studies on Native American crafts production in this regard.) These tourisms are another form of communicative linking, nomadic, comp- licated, displacing the native populations in the region. The Internet, still in its early stages, fits well within these models, which are hardly models at all, but flows upon fixed and denuded topogra- phies, as well as economies rapidly running out of resources of all sorts, from food to bandwidth. I should add that Juarez and the southwest coun- ties are only openly systematic of what, for example, may be found in my own neighborhood or elsewhere in North America - everywhere, in fact, as fundamental realignments are occurring among and in the midst of nations. The relatively minor battles fought _here_ will be on the streets within a couple of decades: One can imagine, again, a future combining enclaves of the rich with the deterritorializations of everyone else - including de- territorializations of the body and the "I" itself. Fascisms are an easy way out. __________________________________________________________________________ True Stories Tiffany stands on the street corner. She's approached by Clara. Clara sez, there's no men allowed on this corner. Clara sez, it's ours. There's a phone. Ring ring. I'll get it, Tiffany sez. It's for me or you. There's no one else in the world. A voice sez something and you can't hear it. Tiffany sez she can't hear it. It's there though. Now the voice has its space. "Hey Tiffany I think you're amazing. You've made wonderful space. Can I come visit?" Tiffany thinks she doesn't know, she'll ask Clara. She can't tell about the voice. "Please can I come visit? There's all the space in the world here." "You're so beautiful Tiffany, you know what's going on." Clara sez keep it out, I don't know it. Tiffany's heart beats fast. It's a voice, it's calling her. It wants in. Tiffany and Clara stand on the street corner. "Please please let me in. I'll give you a pretty present. I'll give you a pretty picture." Tiffany thinks she needs all the pictures she can get. Tiffany doesn't like herself much and this is too pretty. Tiffany sez she doesn't know, she really doesn't know. Clara sez to Tiffany keep the voice out, I wanna talk to you. Clara wants to talk to Tiffany. Tiffany wants to talk to Clara. There's this voice: "You're making me a slave wah wahhh. You're turning me into a slave wah wahhh. Let me in, let me in." Tiffany thinks she's wet, she'd like the slave. Tiffany thinks the slave brings her a pretty present. Tiffany wants to see the pretty picture. Clara sez don't let it in, keep it out. Clara sez it's always there. Tiffany hears the voice. Tiffany is wet and hard. "I'll be your pretty picture. I'll be your pretty present." Tiffany is shaking. Clara watches Tiffany shake, sez, gag it. Clara sez, gag the voice. Tiffany gags the voice. The voice is silent. "" " " Tiffany looks at the voice. The voice is a pretty picture. The voice is a pretty present. Tiffany is hard and wet. Clara sez come close to me. Tiffany comes close to Clara. Tiffany and Clara gag each other. Tiffany and Clara look into each other's eyes. Their eyes are wide. The voice is gagged. " " Tiffany and Clara are naked. Tiffany and Clara kiss deeply. Tiffany and Clara fuck. They are wet and hard. Tiffany and Clara are gagged. " " Tiffany wants everything. Tiffany wants the voice. ______________________________________________________________________ The Human War on Time Which is Human came home. It wasn't as if things were in ruins; things were numbers still. She looked around; the @-commands remained in place. It wasn't as if there were verbs. thought verbs there weren't. The war on the present; things were never _there._ Impingement of spines, spicules. The present was enervating. She crawled. home. Not memories but layouts of construction. Indirect addressing. She was sure of human war. Word after word of time, crawling across time, crawling across the tumor. came thought. Into the home; exits and entrances, @-constructions. There was never time and never time enough. That the movement marched upon itself, folds and indiscretions. Prehensile, as if there were were. never was home. She. That would have been a relation. That would have been a gap or a witness. Inconceivable lamina. The war on the present, uncanny war that never was. Impingement of the human. _________________________________________________________________________  i am a fraud a hypocrite can't write obscene i am nightmare nazi sondheim undergoing shaman transplant operation eyes in belly eyes in swollen skull: oh oh you devour my liver oh oh you pluck my eyes you spit down on me oh oh my skin suppurates scabs and separates but the tree walks around me and the tree walks around me on the ledge where i'm suspended oh oh your blows break my teeth on the ground where i'm tied back to the bark walking blindfolded is the tree around the ledge of me oh oh my brains splattered there you see them down there it is the animal it is the panther i prowl down you see the track down there the tree in the snow the woods the forest down down there up up the slope up the treeline jagged rocks oh oh cut my feet bleed my hands fingers broken claws sharpened oh oh your words tear my intestines tear my stomach my lips walking is the blindfold stealing the tree panther there i'm flying oh oh i'm flying there are cities mountains forests valleys rivers meadows streams lakes hills canyons caves oh oh you slice my neck bleeds in spray circling trees bark ledge skin bark skin ledge skin bark liver ledge liver cut my words in me cut my words in me white trash loser white trash loser * shaman then i die shaman then i die oh oh you can tell oh oh you can tell i don't have my song yet oh oh still don't have my song can't sing can't talk can't whisper can't yell oh oh clumsy me oh oh: shaman, cybermind, cyberspace, shamanic journey, arctic hysteria, fetish objects, katmandu: whirling in front of you, it is mourned for, the rope of our world (yokut) *he died ________________________________________________________________________