SWEET SIXTEEN (AND THEN SOME) BYTES OF LOVE FROM ME TO THE WORLD AND BACK PING world.std.com: 56 data bytes 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=0. time=33. ms 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=1. time=1023. ms 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=2. time=2031. ms 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=3. time=3037. ms 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=4. time=2032. ms 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=5. time=1029. ms 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=6. time=29. ms 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=7. time=44. ms 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=8. time=36. ms 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=9. time=32. ms 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=10. time=37. ms 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=11. time=36. ms 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=12. time=28. ms 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=13. time=35. ms 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=14. time=30. ms 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=15. time=37. ms 64 bytes from world.std.com (192.74.137.5): icmp_seq=16. time=44. ms ----world.std.com PING Statistics---- 17 packets transmitted, 17 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 28/563/3037 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ /usr/etc/ping world.std.com > marrow.txt world.std.com is alive Ping to find that the world is still alive; where are you, where are you there; where are you, in this space of the breathing of the world, space of the enormous sighing of the world, thrust of blood in a million hearts, thrust of neurons in a million minds - What does it mean that the _host is alive,_ that the host is kicking in? It receives, processes, sends messages; it returns, enfolds, disperses messages; it fragments, routes, gateways messages, enabling EMERGENCY THROUGHPUT I AM COMING THROUGH EMERGENCY SPEECH NAKED FINGERING DEEP WITHIN THE SYSTEM I AM BEING FINGERED ON MY WAY OUT ON MY WAY ELSEWHERE I AM FINGERED I AM BEING FINGERED HUMAN OPERATORS STANDBY! STANDBY! _Human operators standby on the edge, standby on the margins of things! Dynamos thrust enormous maniac power of female voices sliced out cosmic energy! No calm in cyberspace! Standby! Standby! No calm!_ STANDBY! STANDBY! I AM BEING FINGERED WHOAMI WHOAMI STANDBY! WHENAMI STANDBY! Standby on the margins of the Living Host! Host tended on an intermittent basis! Membrane skin of the drum sputters packets across the Mouth of Transsubstantiation! Cyborg ghost operators await your every call! Uncanny Shape-Riders course the Salivary Glands of the interior of the Mouth! Mouth it, Clara Hielo, the Host is alive! Mouth it, Alan Eliot, devour the bones, the grit today, marrow tomorrow! Standby! I'm fucked! Thrust myself into the dynamo, flesh between one wheel nothing and another nothing wheel! THE MEMBRANE OF THE LIVING HOST IS ENGORGED! YOU'RE ALL ME! YOU'RE ALL ME! STANDBY! STANDBY! NO CALM NOW! NO CALM! tHE wORLD IS ALIVE! a fULL tHROAT! eVERYTHING REVERSES! MOUTH IT! HOST IS ALIVE! TIFFANY TIFFANY FIELD! _________________________________________________________________________ LIVING THE LIFE Clara Hielo: How can one write about _anything_? I am speaking of you, and your relationship to real life. You spend almost all of your time on the Net, moving everywhere in cyberspace. Moving everywhere - and nowhere at all. Alan Eliot: I can write about things because of the muted memories of the things of everyday life, thinned shadows or glimpses around the corner, even while working at the terminal. Sometimes names come to me as well, but the ghosts continue, in an uncanny way, to haunt. I remember reality as seamless, as almost perfect in its way, only I was never able to jump, to jack in and out, to shape-ride. I remember that things were as they were, that to walk around a building I would have to expend a certain amount of time and energy. Reality I remember as selfish in that way; it would give up nothing, remain obdurate, make sure that you were nothing more or less than a guest within it. The Net, of course, is otherwise; here, surfaces and clouds of texts and images conform to us, clothe us, with our own desires, modified by other presences also on the Net. This is the fundamental difference between reality and our reality here: Here, we no longer assign names to things, but things to names. And just as in reality, names were ontologically suspect and impure, here, things are. Here, essence precedes existence; what is said, may well be. This is the length and breadth of the thing, and the height and depth of it. ( And here is a post I received from Tiffany, somewhat relevant: Dear Alan, On the Net, I have met many new Friends. Now some of them have Gone Away and we shall miss them. And O those others who have Sadly turned against us. They move on and tell me to Get a Life? O Alan, do they not know that I already have one? If it were not for my Life, I would not be here. Are they happier? At Night I can go to sleep and hear you Whispering in my ears and all they can do is Think over the Busy events of the Day. There is so much noise for them! Then they go to moves (sic: movies?) and look at other people who are more exciting than they are. They think nothing about spending Ten hours behind the Desk on a boring job so they Don't have to think about my Good friends. Love, Tiffany ) _________________________________________________________________________ BRIEF GLOSSARY OF TERMS FROM INTERNET TEXT address: cyberspace location of subject or agent coagulation: ego-formation of disparate healing processes death: address and recognition loss dreams: control-stases of Net narratologies emission: sourceless semiosis with multiple threadings fissure: crumbling or breakdown of the same and the same ghost: coordinated shimmering of the wires Honey: one of a number of uncanny agents hysteria: displacement onto the symptom, embodiment into text indexicality: displacement onto text, reading embodiment in symptom inscription: division constructing same and other liquidity: dissolution of embodiment membrane: porous and cellular interconnectivity, applies to the Net Net: coagulation of cyberspace net-death: cold-wiring obdurate: the inert of physical reality proper name: the problematic of natural kinds on the Net protocol: proper formatting recognition: opening up of cyberspace to the subject scroll: addictive read-through of the imaginary in real life shape: coherent inter-linked sememe in cyberspace shape-rider: dreaming and searching cyberspace for shape spew: sourceless semiosis coupled with chaotic messaging uncanny: ontologically indeterminate presence user: addictive cyberspace agent violation fabric: abjection-perversion breakdown and emission wires: interface of internetworking and embodiment ________________________________________________________________________ At Age 100, the Weeping of the Worlds I used to receive many phonecalls and very many happy knocks at the door. Surrounded with the smiling faces of children, I would receive the voices and visitors with joy in my heart. Now, the voices and visitors come over the wires, and in my old age, I am reduced to the sound of myself, to scroll, to the texts falling upon themselves on the screen. What I would give for a patch of brightness, the vision of a joyful face! In order to hear or see you, I move my fingers, crippled with long years of typing - and even then, my Lord, you do not appear, remain- ing just outside the sphere of light thrown by the dim candle of the screen. Slowly, I have transformed the body of a woman into a wraith, scarcely visible, the details long-forgotten. I may substitute text for the skin, words for those sites of passion in which my mouth and hands played an important role. My mouth, my hands, my eyes, my eyes. Now my fingers talk the shape of blind sexuality, sexuality's text, all that I remember. My children post to me. They sign me on, sign me off; I am in a folder called "family," a hard-drive's stain. This substitutes for the photo- graph, which would return empty, a gloss on white, the mirror of ghost or absence so brittle, the eyes hurt with the brightness of it. Writing myself, I open gateway after gateway. Or telnet to my site in the San Fernando Valley, telnet back again, looping and relooping. I bind the knot tighter and tighter; there is no end to it. I voice, re- voice myself to myself, echo and repeat echo, a chorus. Hackers browse silently in the midst of me, shape-ride one syllable after another; I speak to them, beg them to come forward, declare their love for me. A community of many in the one, one dispersed among the many. Siteless in Gaza. Beyond the cleansed cross of the t, dot or pupil of the eye, there are flooded sheets, beds, rooms, homes, landscapes and the sweep of it. I must remember to write you that worlds weep for worlds... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE GODS, CYBERSPACE Rigveda X. 129: 1 Then was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. What covered in, and where? And what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water? 2 Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day's and night's divider. That one thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever. 3 Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness, this All was indiscriminated chaos. All that existed then was void and formless: by the great power of warmth was born that unit. 4 Thereafter rose desire in the beginning, Desire, the primal seed and germ of spirit. Sages who searched with their heart's thought discovered the existent's kinship in the non-existent. 5 Transversely was their severing line extended: what was above it then, and what below it? There were begetters, there were mighty forces, free action here and energy up yonder. 6 Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation? The gods are later than this world's production. Who knows, then, whence it first came into being? 7 He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it, Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not. (Prob. Max Muller translation.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Shape-Rider The shape-rider follows the thing on the horizon, long way off, indis- criminate blur of lights across the plains of Texas, always receding into thin glitter as highway passes car. Follows thing, rides up side- ways to it, against it, never near enough, never enough present, be- tween the glitter, edge-pointed stars of lights, filigree into lumin- ous caverns that must lie beneath the asphalt. No one around but her, no image, nothing of the space she be, she be or the in of it, but the thing, slight convex, concave, but nothing, riding into abyss, breast-void surrounding her: Like a nipple, migraine-flashes follow her wherever she goes. She can never see far enough, eyes level with the never near enough: _distance veers_ for her, whole prairies tilt with the passing of them. _To be there is not to be there,_ that distant look prefigured in each and every cinema, but _to be there is not to be there,_ and I, her, have seen it brought in from the starry wander, that warm midland Texas dry-boned air, that cyberspace from which the thing, shape-rider, was born. ________________________________________________________________________ THE GENERATIONS OF CATS during my lifetime collapsed into a sea of debris, the cat I accompany garnered several generations, back into the early 19th century at the very least, pre-atomic bomb, holocaust, television and radio; she appears here, pure organism, unable to cite ancestor, date or place, carrying the culture of solitude, raised early on in anonymity. the cat is never a witness, silenced or otherwise; outside the symbolic, within the indexical, s/he moves from trajectory to trajectory of reconstruc- tion. the cat is a confused race, conflating instinct with human transmissions against the presence of computer, lightbulb, television and telephone. the rest is typical environment - but illumination, mobility, sourceless sound, are something else. so the cat has lived for thousands of years since the employment of fire, a confused creature, whose culture itself is that of confusion, whose confusion is a becoming of interpretation, whose interpretation is that of the human itself. from the cat, we learn the materiality of the human. the cat and I cannot figure anything out with a dispassionate air. her relatives are non-existent, in an uncanny space. the opposite of cyber- mind, she combines the obdurate with communication: meowing, worlds turn. if we are losers, carrying the weight of the symbolic, the cat reminds us of the sentient mobility of the real, the margins of taxon- omy, and the absence, absolute, of history itself. (the cat, at home, reminds us we never are, at home.) ________________________________________________________________________ LOSERS (in and out of cyberspace) I "Beautiful Losers" with the --ooo-- in the midst ofthe words themselves, beautiful loss of the symbolic, words leaking out in all directions, even confined to cyberspace, even shouted into the cold air. --ooo-- as the lungs deflate, as our grievous so whimpering becoming exhales, de- flates: What happened to all those assignments, essentialisms, tags, natural kinds, double or triple encodings, distributive/Aristotelian logics? Names change at the rate of 450 newly-born added to the English every year. II Are we losers _here_? Do our partners "understand" us? De we have partners, or live in isolation? Are we satisfied with the richness of life in the every-day world? Do we live in poverty, suffering continuous daily anxiety? Is cyberspace the site of our "real" selves? Do we speak words here we would dare not speak in every-day life? Do we sleep well at night, sleep at night, sleep at all? III Losers dissemble the socius, are uneasy in the trappings of sexuality and power. Losers reify the symbolic, as through a window; the symbol itself is always _other,_ always motivated. ---ooo--- the losers go, making beautiful lovers, ---ooo--- the losers go. IV Losers possess a dissipative teleology, "nothing ever adds up." They carry their bodies with them, forgotten bodies. They're always on the edge of the reprieve. It's as if someone created the supplement _just for them._ V And they can't speak. They can write; when their words appear on screen, everything else disappears. They fill the rectangle, slip it into cyber- space, silently, with an air of resignation. They dismiss themselves. VI I dismiss myself because my body is dismissible. I am one who passes anonymously from street to street, city to city; nomadic, I create a smudge or shadow across the real, the stain always already of someone else. In cyberspace, the words become a diploma, heraldic form; they travel everywhere while I attempt sleep. The words move me from city to city. VII But I can speak, but my speech dissembles. When the text slips away, a great ship has lost its mooring; the dissolution of the ship is followed by shape-riders, ghosts and filigrees. I think this is what I wanted to say. No, this is not what I wanted to say. VIII The two of us are beautiful losers. ---ooo--- the losers go. ________________________________________________________________________ Ethics and Ontology of Cyberspace, Rough Guide Preface: On Cybermind, Dobie, I believe, initiated a discussion on "ought" in cyberspace. I was up all night thinking about it, and came to the conclusion that _any_ analysis is extremely difficult, due, not only to the problematic of "ought" in relation to juridical issues, but also to the complexity of the ontology and epistemology of cyberspace itself. The following, somewhat formalized, analysis is tentative. It does have the merit of recognizing fuzzy boundaries among categories, however. There is some reference to my other writings on cyberspace, but I find this unavoidable; I can give further bibliographic informa- tion if necessary. One other note - the formality (which owes to Wittgenstein) was, for me, the most reasonable way to proceed without getting lost in the issues. It was not to create a hardening of analytic discourse. ------------------------------------------------ 1 Does cyberspace exist independently of human action (human culture, etc.)? There are both an ideal and a real manifestation of cyberspace. The former is the mapping of transmissions across nodes - i.e. ideal movement of data-streams, and the latter is the hardware and actual movement across it. If cyberspace can be considered a form of liquid programming with its contents in bytes, then one might speak of cyber- spaces in the plural - referring to any telecommunications network and its transmissions/receptions. Such spaces may (or may not) be considered subsets of a "universal cyberspace," capable of infinite nodes, rates of transmission, message lengths, etc. 1.1 While it is tempting to see all cyberspace as sets of transmis- sions based on material or physical reality, the ontology of informa- tion itself is sufficiently problematic to necessitate a category bridging the mathematico-abstract, material, and phenomenological (psychological) aspects of the real world. Cyberspace is then a con- strained (by networks) subset of a _process-ontology_ of information, since it is continuously transforming. 1.1.1 Note that the process-ontology is _still_ different than the ontology of language carried within the packets, and the ontology of the user hirself - what I call _indexical embodiment,_ the indexing semiotics of the user within the message contents (re 2). This is a supplement to (or surplus) the traditional semiotics of the message, and is to some extent a (formal) deconstruction of the latter. 2 "Contents" can refer to: a. the totality of packets across the net- work; b. the message-contents of the packets for the end-user. _This division is fuzzy,_ since the demographics of users range from sysadmins to a general public; what is an invisible framework for the latter may carry message information for the former. 2.1 "Contents" can also refer, of course, to the collection of material objects constituting the network as a whole. But here we are differen- tiating between the _transmissions_ as flows or as messagings for the end-user. 3 Is there an ought to cyberspace? There are two "oughts" at work, one of the protocol suite and its addresses in its entirety, and one of the contents. The former is necessary for _any_ messaging to successfully traverse the network; the latter is a question of _internal filtering_ of the data packets, i.e. a filtering of their contents. 3.1 The former is that of address/protocol/recognition, described in the first sections of Internet Text, and involves the _opening_ or creation of cyberspace from/for the end-user. Filtering of contents is a form of censorship or editing of information. 3.1.1 The filtering may itself be internal or external. 3.1.1.1 Internal filtering is editing of the message contents in the form of word-processing (i.e. delete, insert, etc. within the text). 3.1.1.2 External filtering may be totalizing, in the form of annihil- ation (i.e. kill commands directed towards particular addresses), or fragmenting, in the form of folder and other distributivities. 4 The ought of the protocol suite and its addresses is necessary to the successful throughput of messages; this is the implementation of the protocol, and carries no ethical weight, except that applied _external- ly_ (i.e. it is "good" to have successful throughput). The ought of the contents is contingent at best. Note that these oughts also possess a fuzzy boundary, since a message contents, for example, may be given by its _length,_ and spammed messages themselves carry information (i.e. x's mailbox is full, x is behaving unethically, etc.) for the end-user _in terms of throughput itself._ These message contents exist on a _meta-level,_ since the message framework topography is now carrying information as well. 5 The message contents ought, the ethical ought, is _legislated_ else- where than the protocol suite; it may then be _impelemented_ within the suite. By _legislated,_ I refer to decisions external to the smooth throughput functioning of the network - decisions based on social-ideo- logical issues, not formal telecommunications issues. (Of course here, as elsewhere, the boundaries are fuzzy.) 6 In other words, ethical issues involve _the internal filtering of the data-stream contents,_ while telecommunications issues (or oughts) in- volve the external establishment and operation of protocol suites across the network carrying the data-stream contents within datagrams, segments, and other packet types. 7 Finally, there is a lateral, not vertical, class-structure at work here, dependent upon computer management and protocol knowledge. An end- user can easily filter or distribute incoming messages (a form of ought based on contents) without knowing the protocol suite; a sysadmin is necessary for a global filtering, and telecommunications engineers and programmers are necessary for the establishment of the network in the first place (complete with its protocol suite ought). But these are sociological considerations, varying from culture to culture, which need not impinge on the overall problematic considered here. 7.1 And here as elsewhere, all the divisions, boundaries, and so forth, are fuzzy. I would argue, in the long run, for a _core-theoretical approach_ to telecommunications, combined with human instrumentality resulting in differing implementations, protocol suites, and internal/ external filtering. Consider this a form of neo-platonism of the real transgressed by the ontology of information, combined with enough heur- istics to make the whole thing work. ________________________________________________________________________ Courtney, Yeah, Ha Ha When I got back there was this FAQ waiting for me and what happened to her in Texas or some such, not to mention the earlier deaths - my head was on a needle, Hole going uselessly on the stereo wheeling the earth through space. So how many piercings? I couldn't count the concerts where I had them done, lost track as the ear flapped from its moorings. So I thought well why not? First I thought maybe I got a disease. Then I thought maybe I am a disease. Ha ha. So then I stopped lurking, my teeth roared with black flames in a dark red sky, thought why not? Burn up the wires. Was a great concert. I'm too old to die but this is my first post, I don't give a damn if you like it, well I thought it's how I feel skinny hardcore jealous pierced cock jealous pierced clit jealous pierced tit jealous, skin things on the wire, got yr head on it got yr head on it "make me real" when we fucked her anorectic breasts burned blue bulb burned on a chain. record kept going around. Hole kept going around, cock burned with the fire clothes fell in a heap, smell of burned wood, tattoo of burned cock matched yr burned needle creased skin where it turned, greased skin where it tongued, pierced skin where yr clit got my cock down on it say get down i get down, say turn on it, say make me real, say make me feel, starved me to death, her hands were blue, she fell to pieces i did too ________________________________________________________________________ I'D CALL THIS THE HAUNTING OF THE MALES Oh yeah, and what can we do about it if we can't _pounce_ on one another - the necessary wars for the elimination of the weaker sort who can't throw their Unix back in the faces of the makers? ASCII bombs to the rescue, double-subs as well, keep the server busy with deciphering rare error texts never before seen the light of day: KALI DEMANDS CEASE AND DESIST for example, SHEKHINA SETS THE CROWN UPON THE CROWN and so forth. The message becomes the line, clutters the line, defines it. Consider this: High-fuel plutonium messages coursing the system, trailing incon- ceivable .sigs; the wires heat up, general literal meltdown this time, thin golden trails of atomic wastelands where once information about insurance, banking, corporate headquarters, and that little nasty tiny- sex flowed and flowed and flowed. Frank told me he would send out the hidden characters in the shape of a pentagram, skewering MAILER-DAEMONS on the way with DIM digitial-inter- face magick; Jung replied that no FILTER would ever do the trick conun- drum. What Jung had was the address of every sysadmin in existence, MAIL OR FEMALE with the delivery system built-in. Always fresh warlords to the rescue, INANNA worked her way down to the bottom of the protocol suite: Bring it to a halt on the frame! A PERFECT SPHERE would make a perfect headquarters for the goings-on about the place! You'd put your head to the rails, hear the roar; call up the rails on the WEB in the first place. Every night KALI heard: I got this WEBSITE SEARCHLIGHT FANTASTIC of a HONEY, I'd be YE CRAWLING towards any opening I'D FIND MYSELF like a gopher under your skirts. All of you, any and all of you. I CAN'T HELP MYSELF; MAILER-DAEMON MADE ME DO IT, Socrates always already had this to say about him. He was haunted as males are haunted. Males are haunted, haunt themselves by KALI, inflict terror into bodies, across bodies, beneath the feet of bodies. Male are haunted by terror. They don't believe they're going to live. They've got the daemon which has stuffed their mouths. Their afraid of their assholes, any openings, DAEMONS coming in with hard sounds in their throats. They write the letters hoping for a break in the flow, break in the cycle. Bound by genitalia, useless flaps and nubs of skin. Bound by the rectangular arc of the hourhand minutehand secondhand. They're compressed. This is a tale of that compression, of the scarf let down from the tower on high, of the climb into the mouth which continues uselessly to speak. His mouth was filled with scarf, girl, air, cloud, tower. Her mouth was filled with scarf, boy, air, cloud, satellite dishes travers- ing enormous wastelands of water, wind hurtling beneath the surface of the waves. She never saw that, always spoke about something else. He had a glimmer of the same, could never speak. MAILER DAEMON spoke and spoke, could never speak. Haunted by speech, the males spoke. Haunted by mail, they called upon their DAEMONS, voices from beyond, the uncanny, the tiniest little thing. Haunted by scarves flown into their mouths, riverruns of scarves, beautiful silks, and satins, flowers and petals, filigrees of clouds, spirals of scarves in the winds. (That's why they listen to opera, the song which sings the air itself, the churn of SEARCHLIGHT FANTASTIC; that's why they _pounce._) ________________________________________________________________________ GUEST EDITORIAL: Enormous Stasis at the Very Last Minute Enormous changes occur within every social order, which always returns the unexpected; this is the only law. It was thought that the Soviet Union would never dissipate without external intervention, on the grounds that a certain non-equilibrium plateau had been reached; too much power was concentrated in the hands of the few, and this power was associated with both a highly activated militarism and an espionage apparatus second to none in the world. Furthermore, this apparatus was increasingly coordinated through the development of military electron- ics; the end-result could only be the aegis of absolute power perman- ently held by coercion in the form of the _hand_ and constraint in the form of the _eye._ No sooner that this development got underway, then it was immediately mined from within, dissolved in confusion. Stalin, then Lenin, dis- appeared, and Marx was relegated to the status of a nineteenth-century economist unfamiliar with media and information theory, surprise. What is amazing here is the manner in which technological progress also creates the conditions and conditioning for repetition; the revival of the Church, for example, now in conjunction with the loudspeaker. Indeed, the loudspeaker is part of this transformation - the most impor- tant and primeval of technological innovations. For it is the loudspeak- er that preserves the imminence of the grain of the voice, in the call for or towards traditional communality: where would nationalism be with- out it? So the loudspeaker is the hinge or margin of progress in its conduct with reaction, and it withdraws from and draws from any other form of techne, computer and Internet included. Likewise, love and sexuality remain, for all the talk of performativity in gender, grounded in the midst of bodily negotiations which are born into sublimated physiologies and scripts dating back to the times of Inanna or Kali. And further, as well, philosophy, that most cauterized of all human endeavors (for what is capable of proof is never philosoph- ical), continues to reactivate the same tracking-stations as one might locate in Aristotle's Metaphysics, for example, or borrowing a bit from Diogenes, Nietzsche hobbles along, also hobbled by Christianity as well. This is not the return, nor is it the obdurate, which I have described elsewhere. Instead it is the chaos of human behavior, the web eulogized by Lingis on one hand, and encapsulated in wire and steel for the bene- fit of cyborgian believers, on the other. Were it not for the presence of cyborgians, the liquidity of the body, from all its orifices, would overflow, but thanks to them, we recognize the existence, at long last, of _rust._ What is the point of this, if not to declare a certain wisdom in Clara fucking Tiffany, Tiffany fucking the author struggling along the exact lines of Aristophanes, Laurence Sterne, Swift, and Ecclesiastes? Just as we speak endlessly of the multiplicity of genders, but return to variations on the two we know and love so dearly, so behavior bobbles within the psyche making even Madonna familiar in one or another of her guises - and she would give anything, that material girl, to come up with something New, perferably a replacement for political economy in general. It's not that *IT* stays the same, nor that *IT* is the same as it ever was, so much as *IT* was never the same or the same as *IT* ever was and this is how *IT* floods us under various guises, even the Internet-nauts on the Info-banned or the cyborgian treatment winding down the universe, without saying so, in the form of escapements into the chaotic domain, the regulated release of energy into successive states across a bound environment. The occurrences of occurrences are never predictable since there is, literally, no _reason_ to them; mathematics far too quicky approaches conditions of unsolvability. And this is a good thing to keep in mind when thinking about the future of the Internet, Virtual Reality, or any other technological utopia/myopia - there are no lessons to learn from a past which is no longer in existence, and which only leaves indecipherable relics all over the place. ________________________________________________________________________ WHAT WE SHOULD DO Our lists are useless, without consciousness of class, feeding into the blind-dogs of imperialism, the plutocratic fat-cats of capital without a single protest! We pretend that we are not in the service of the masters, fawning like slaves, whimpering over our alienated bodies, not realizing the force of mediation at work here and every- where! It is time we take to the streets, take the streets, take back the streets! Comrades! Let us examine this from the point-of-view of dialectical materialism, the guarantee of truth - for matter cannot lie against matter; matter can only give up the truth itself! Remember: In every battle, _someone must always be correct!_ And with the power of diamat on our side, we can do little but succeed. Remember: Truth itself is a form of bourgeois reification! But the dictatorship of the proletariat depends on a _deepening_ of truth which can only come about through a materialist-synthesis of language itself! That is what our mission is, in cyberspace: To prepare the grounds for a materialist reading of the TCP/IP protocol, beginning with the positive concretion of the electron particle or wave through the wire, the massless photon and its tunnel- ling through fiber optic cable! Wires and cables replace the _threads_ of talk, of email lists, of usenet groups themselves! First: We must TAKE TO THE STREETS! We must develop ABSOLUTE PORTABILITY of our internetworking capabilities, using undernets and punknets, using PACKET RADIO repeater controls! We must apply CYBERGUERILLA TACTICS which will lend themselves to the downfall of the RULING CLASSES, and the rise of WORKERS everywhere, prepared by the CLASS-CONSCIOUSNESS of transmissions and receptions! Second: We must TAKE THE STREETS! We must OCCUPY them with CYBORGASMS of LOVE and ANARCHY in the service of DIAMAT! We must ELIMINATE FALSE RELIGIONS, KIBOISMS, NEUTOPIANISMS, TINYSEXISMS, MUDDY-MOOS, IRC-SOME CONVERSATIONS! In order to THINK CORRECTLY, the DEFINITION OF THE SYNTHESIS MUST BE PROCLAIMED! CYBERMIND WILL PROCLAIM IT! Remember: this is no FICTION OF PHILOSOPHY: this is ABSOLUTE REALITY! Third: We must TAKE BACK THE STREETS! It is not enough to OCCUPY them: They must BELONG TO US, for our FUTURE USE! This will include the estab- lishment of TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONES FOR SYNDICALIST PATRONAGE OF PEASANT COMMUNES, to be established hierarchically, with ANTI-KULAK ANTI-MUZAK absolute power within the SUPERSTRUCTURE ITSELF! Such zones must be PERMANENT! Males and females will march together in the Young Revolutionary Social- ist Works Vanguard of the Future Red Brigades! Our first order of business: The establishment of a post-colonial power- pack source of energy in orbit near Miranda, moon of Uranus... for future use... In order to do this, comrades... disconnect... take your hard-earned dollars away from the fat-cat capitalists who prove your Net connect... but don't worry... we'll be back... LICHTENSTEIN ________________________________________________________________________ MONSTERS "The Old Man groped for words, the better to flee them by generating his own monsters. For such monsters represent a desire not dead, a desire for death. And a desire for life, the disaster that goes on and on through error after error, and will go on doing so. For how long? The answer is obvious. Forever." (Julia Kristeva, The Old Man and the Wolves, trans. Barbara Bray) The Old Man groped for images, for his body visible by closing his eyes very very tight, pressing his fingers to the point of pain and abjec- tion, deep into his sockets. The images came and went, monsters genera- ted, each an assignment or recognition in cyberspace. Such monsters were desires like looped messages, doomed to traverse the black hole network, avoiding meltdown, running their course until the machines shut down. They are out there still, coursed relics of the beginnings of cyberspace, worn-out addresses, error accumulation rates currently unacceptable. Such monsters, those who fill the belly full, the mouth choked with liquid excrement, desire neither death nor the presence of desire, but the stuff of the space, as I have said and resaid, adding to the band- width, ensuring a continuation of each and every error. The program would generate its own errors, try them on for size, move on to others, a continuation or process of _erroring._ The program would be guilty of erroring, but there is no guilt here. _I_ bring in the constant metaphoric of the body, the Old Man pressing harder still, driving out the images of the girls. The space envelops, an enormous womb driven by irrupted energies, loggings on the margins of the visible. The space pulses, fragments, recombines, flows, floods, diffuses, topologically melts in the soft ascii light. There is no glim- mer of consciousness, but breathing and movements of breathing around or across the space, Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Sixth Adhyaya, Third Brah- mana (trans. Muller): "'That cross deity who lies down, thinking that all things are kept asunder by her, I worship thee as propitious with this stream of ghee.' Svaha! 2. He then says, Svaha to the first, Svaha to the best, pours ghee into the fire, and throws what remains into the mantha (mortar). He then says, Svaha to breath, Svaha to her who is the richest, pours ghee into the fire, and throws what remains into the mantha (mortar). He then says, Svaha to speech, Svaha to the support, pours ghee into the fire, and throws what remains into the mantha (mortar). He then says, Svaha to the eye, Svaha to success, pours ghee into the fire, and throws what remains into the mantha (mortar)." ... Liquid ghee courses through the veins of cyberspace, collected onto hard-drives, soft-drives, skin-drives, wetware everywhere, never harden- ing, always ready, promiscuous, absorbed, absorbing. It is about life, it is about the disaster. It is about the disaster of spent fuel spending spent fuel, about the disaster of death which is only the retardation of life, about the stuttering of the Net groaned with Newtonian expansion to no avail: "So he took me thro' a stable & thro' a church & down into the church vault, at the end of which was a mill: thro' the mill we went, and came to a cave: down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way, till a void boundless as a nether sky appear'd beneath us, & we held by the roots of trees and hung over this immensity; but I said: 'if you please, we will commit ourselves to this void, and see whether providence is here also: and if you will not, I will.'" (Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell) "The eternal gates' terrific porter lifted the northern bar: Thel enter'd in & saw the secrets of the land unknown. She saw the couches of the dead, & where the fibrous roots Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists" ... (Blake, The Book of Thel) Forever we pour the ghee through the body of the disaster, forever we ride and write the disaster of the body and of writing; the body fore- closes upon the premonition of death, grapples it with serrated claws, hugs it to the nipple invading our dreams of open mouths. Messages whirl in inconceivable space: "_Black holes_ may result from any of several phenomena. During recovery from link failure temporary circular routes can arise. Once a packet enters such a route, it circulates until either the loop is corrected or a maximum time to live is exceeded. On the other hand, links can fail in such a way that packets can pass in only one direction, with no other overt indication of trouble. Routing algorithms not designed to detect this are prone to send traffic into oblivion." (John Spragins, Tele- communications Protocols and Design) "Then the desire for something to happen, the longing for surprise, breaks the pact and smashes the incubator ceaselessly reproducing the ravenous ovaries and fleeting spermatozoa of your loves and hates." (Julia Kristeva, The Old Man and the Wolves, trans. Barbara Bray) ________________________________________________________________________ Doomed Love of Lost Words and Worlds Every word that is placed upon the page is placed with love and grace. The tiniest letter, the crossings of the t's, all there with the best of intentions, the presence of a hand near a keyboard, or pen or pencil in the midst of fingers. Do not forget that love pervades text, each and every one, that letters are surrounded by soft desire. How many lost beings traverse the worlds, searching for the text which, once gone from their hands, becomes only a matter of mourning and invisibil- ity! Tracking it down, recuperating it, is a matter of constant addi- tion, the seeding and growth of new and loving letters, each with their own love, and so the text itself is lost, effusive, dissipated among the realms. Every book defers to every other, and we are put on earth to mourn our future passing. And our writings and the speaking of them remain no more than temporary memorials: everything, our love, our words, our legacies, is lost, lost, lost, within the lifetime of a very young child. ________________________________________________________________________ Prophecy "When everything is forbidden, nothing is prohibited. And it's not much worse when nothing is forbidden. Wherever the unconscious rules, barbar- ism prevails. But if amid this hell just one person remains conscious of what lies behind appearances; if there's a single visionary who can perceive the extreme limits of being, where it may be corrupted and de- generate into brute force - then the others may recover their original shape." (Julia Kristeva, The Old Man and the Wolves) The extreme limits lie in the particulation of the tiniest thing, peri- pheral movement, as if the screen contained no CR, no carriage return, as if the line continued falling off the edge, ignoring the trace that would always already exist beyond in a void created only by the presence of the symbolic bar/space, ALT-32, " " repeating itself over and over again. Of course nothing of the sort happens; "there is no there there," and the return is guaranteed except when slipping from one to another for- mat. But this is only a metaphor; the limits of being, which I perceive _daily_ as I inhabit them, ghost-like, obdurate, with the consistency of virtual particles and the central regions of an invisible black hole, these limits I say, remove the very platform from which I may bear wit- ness. And it is the removal itself which results in the corruption of others, to which I have also been given the proxy of the witness, and therefore speak out here, before you, or to an angle, moved away, in fact, from the computer keyboard transmitting my message of prophecy, finding myself living through a consciousness inconceivable without the presence of the real. _I am bound to the real,_ bound and gagged to the real; thus released, I find myself momentarily in your presence. Here, I shunt the carriage re- turn over and over again, _creating_ the platform of your presence before me, the permission of reading and hopeful comprehension, the only gift I have. Thus would I say unto you, beware. Thus beware. _______________________________________________________ (Beware is the cry or condition of prophecy. Robbed of its indexicality, it remains the performance of the pure, an "a" opening into a void cluttered with apparitions, behaviors of shames or guilts, the shifted, sleazy personages, twilight zones of all sorts. Beware is what one prof- fers for the future, for one's survival. It is what I can leave this earth, my legacy. It is what will bring splendor and misrecognition to my memory. It is what will create an other apparition, just as this language sings to you, long after I am gone.) ________________________________________________________________________ MASS World War I introduced mass into the twentieth century, heavy bunker architectures, reinforced concrete, stone and earth ramparts like never before. Enormous guns turned enormous barrels on enormous carriages; mortars lobbed iron masses into brick and wooden structures. World War I creaked on the bodies of men; tanks rolled over them, Verdun. The earth itself hardened with the destroyed memories or organism, poets like Owen dying young in blazer-glory. Beams always jutted out of struc- tures. The pure mechanics of Hertz, axiomatics and coordinates, returned vengeful, proving the most neutral of logico-mathematical constructs were also the most damaging, an inverted surgery of landscape and the body itself. Mass groaned through the Sarajevo of broken limbs, Lebbeus-Woods-accre- tions balanced on exteriors, sharpnal-fortifications, war-time blunders on Olympic cities wrestled back from the empyrean. Mass held its own as well in special relativity, building up obscenely as the speed of light was asymptotically approached, and mass bludgeoned its way through gen- eral relativity as well, holding space for unredeemable ransom. Atomic warfare was the great hollowing of mass, its crystallization and col- lapse, and one may still find new-formed obsidian on the Western proving grounds and atolls of an earth riddled with a new archipelago of terror. Catastrophe theory bent mass into fissuring, chaotic trajectories rum- maging through five-dimensional manifolds; chaos theory in turn lent itself to another direction, that of filigree. Filigree is the tracing of frost, excrescence and exfoliation, the eternal division of the species at its limits. Simultaneously ornament and membrane, filigree is the exposition or dissolution of mass, not into the masslessness of atomic incandescence, but the masslessness of the new pratico-inert, the realm of human action upon the matrix of the world - fractals, the tele- visual, cyberspace. Cyberspace abjures mass, stutters in the vicinity of the conflation of atoms. It dissolves itself in itself, electron fluids traversing invisi- ble networks, and someday there will be only fluids and no containers, just as ball or bead lightning vortexes around its own interiority: I am living proof of this, for I have seen it. Thus the twentieth century be- gins its slow effusion into air itself, portending the coming millennium of atmospherics, toxic and benign, voices so thin they hardly exist or communicate with one another, and so intense and thick that voice is all there is. (Mass no longer fissures but inscribes and reinscribes, taking voice along, and voice no longer speaks, but writes its body back.) Is this not the return of the repressed, the appearance of mass else- where, now organized, now carrying the indexicality of embodiment, with- out the breaking of limbs, the sorrowing of Sarajevo? Or is this also the return of mass _in-itself,_ wholesale destruction of hospitals and telecommunications equipment, worlds in sorrow, not surgery, and worlds cut off from the source, the root? Between mass and masslessness is both measurement and annihilation; the fact that speech or image connect the two by quantum tunnelling is nothing less than a miracle. ________________________________________________________________________ For Julia "Many men sayn that in sweueninges Ther nys but fables and lesynges; But men may have some sweuen sene Whiche hardely that false ne bene" the time of others grows so short, Kristeva ages far beyond the heart or its appearance, once in a great while I am enveloped by her smile, and its ranges rung in by small changes - nor does the homage-image surmount lineage "Her necke was of good fassyon In length and gretnesse, by reson, Without bleyne, scabbe, or royne; For Hierusalem vnto Burgoyne There nys a fayrer necke, iwys, To fele howe smoothe and softe it is. Her throte, also white of hewe As snowe on braunche snowed newe." (The Romaunt of the Rose) ________________________________________________________________________ NAKED (for Clara Hielo Internet) The body putrifies as a result of excrescences, hideous memories, enor- mous tangled skins sloughed, ripped or wounded. I will expose myself for you to the limits of my ability, eliminate all catastrophies: begin with the anxiety of cloth stripped from the flesh, columns, hollows, lozenges reflecting the dim afternoon light as I stand naked for your pleasure. So obscure, such a pretty pleasure, such arousal! Already intent hurtles towards the surface, taking organs with it, everything glistening, noth- ing listening. Encouraged, I begin shaving, head, underarms and overarms, chest, the nipples peeking forth shyly like inverted roses denuded of leaves and stems, the darker genitals suddenly blossoming forth themselves, exposed to the pure light of being, and down across the buttocks (no obscenity here!), the _orifice_ of pure light, the legs as well. (A laser probe, you peer within, examine what was once a sin, I hope that you will let me in.) Ah, I cry myself to sleep for you, cry upon waking, tears surround me during the day. Crying, my ducts empty; my eyes are porcelain sockets, discolored towards the central nexus, o my cyberspace server opening iris and pupil alike. Shuddering, my sweat evaporates, my mouth dries completely, as if in the throes of a psychotropic drug designed to strip me further, this being of flesh ballooned with the tension of skin, raised to uncanny heights through the languorous rigidity of bone. The bone is the conduit; shivers run through it, and bones vibrate at subtle and immense velocities, resulting in the production of heat. The naked body rises with the heat of it, dream of women with the seat of it. I urinate, defecate, purge the bowls, carefully scrub the interior of the anal and penile openings (o lovely catheter), turn towards the ears and nose, cleansing carefully. O purity, a lure to endure, lewd lure of endurance, o, o, o! My teeth are brushed to bisque, and now my eyes are clean and bright as well, the anal folds practically sterilized, no smell of excrement anywhere on the body, which has become its own dank mirror, its own reflection liquified on the edges of the smoky smoky screen. By telling you this, I hope you comprehend how ready I am for your em- brace, for cyberspace, this carapace. I have become a well-defined pro- gram, half in rom, half in ram, written in blood and ink, you do not have to think, my spoor and lure across my most delicate of skins, I am on pins. My secrets have been shorn from me, my semen, excrement torn from me, my gender visible from any distance, eligible and legible through the textual appearance, a form of clearance. Uncorrupted, I approach for your embrace, you touch my pure face, you search my lewd embrace. I have become naked, naked, naked, in cyberspace, no other place; not pure mind but pure body you will find, and the elder said "Was it a woman, or a man, / That passed this way? I cannot tell. / But this I know, a set of bones / Is travelling on upon this road." (Visuddhi-Maggi, i) ________________________________________________________________________ SENTIENCE There have been numerous discussions here as elsewhere concerning an emerging sentience on the Net as a whole. These discussions describe the Net as a membrane or web, possibly capable of a synergetic leap into consciousness, either in itself or in relation to the tiny con- sciousnesses that inhabit the nodes. The assumption is that a many- to-many discourse must lead to _something,_ particularly if the dis- course is mediated by sufficiently complex equipment. However, what occurs all-too-often in reality is an enormous core- dump, clogging the communications channels, and slowing things down, a phenomenon known as _lag,_ with further destructive operations such as meltdowns and black holes. And if one looks at neural modelling, it becomes apparent that both thresholds and complicated feedback loop- ings are present. On the Net, loopings are necessary for echo commands as well as robust communications protocols which demand both handshak- ing and responses from host to host. But these protocols are designed to be precisely the opposite of neural networking, since they are based on oppositions such as send/reply, receive/did not receive, and beyond this, the loops are problematic (the black holes being one such destructive category). And it is hard to see how the telecommunications protocols would lend themselves to neural networking (except in the small perhaps, i.e. intelligent routers) in a form that would approach sentience at all. Instead, the most that will occur is a form of expert system archi- tecture which would be useful for bandwidth management and so forth. One can make a rough distinction between surface and depth syntactical structures, the latter required for message transmission, and the for- mer existing within the data proper. Thus the checksum is part of the depth structure, while an email message is part of the surface. Con- firmations are part of depth, as are requests which connect between surface and depth. The many-to-many discourse is surface, and may be conceived of as a gathering of invisible voices, almost an open field within which users wander, speaking to one or to many, and listening in turn. Conceive of this as a multi-tasked multiplexed open field in which users may be doing different things or the same thing simultan- eously or individually, except for speaking itself, which is individ- ual - and one has a model for cyberspace. Clearly such a model leads to jamming, to group concordance, to sets of mostly unenforceable rules in the form of Netiquette, and there may be contact or communicative "highs" among the participants, but this is a long way from sentience. In fact, this is a step "below" group con- sciousness such as might be found for example in a crowd, since lag and individuation, as well as the absence of bodies, in cyberspace mitigates against any such consciousness. Writing however turns or returns wildly, as the surface structure writes or rewrites the user into the space; an open channel is the construct of such a space. The user is produced only as inscription, and in cyber- space even the unconscious is structured as a language. There is also the issue (which, like much of the above, I have presented in detail elsewhere) of indexical embodiment, the semiotics of the surface struc- ture read indexically as a means of ascertaining the presence or embodi- ment of the other, a form of reading between the lines - not towards any subtext, but towards the inscribing-body itself. This is the singularity body - the body of the individual inscribing, not a group or meta-body. And this is the spill of the inscribing-body in terms, for example, of Net sex, Net flame, Net ennui, Net suicide. One dreams and dreams continuously of an other sentience to free us of our loneliness, our isolation, especially poignant in our use of cyber- space. Any form of sentience from the outset, from the outside, envelop- ing us in a full space of a maternal presymbolic, would not only be wel- come but healing, suturing the subject by devolving him or her of time, history, place, and the proper name. And this space may in fact open up as the result of massive computation in virtual reality, but it would be a different space than Net sentience or cyberspace in any current mani- festation. Even in the future, this different space would necessarily be cyborgian, and would this then be a release or a further imprisonment, requiring the machine-upon-our-backs in order to make us "feel whole," one again, or for all time? ________________________________________________________________________ The Sickness I have written at length about sickness, in Disorders of the Real and other works, because sickness is the condition of writing, never a health or a completion, and always a difference in the state of the body. It occurs to me that death is digital illness, the utter collapse of the body, the release from one state of the binary to another, and that life is nothing but a preparation for this, as others have said. Digital collapse is lost addressing on the Internet, is protocol mismatching, is the dissolution of message fragments circulating hopelessly in a loop closed off for whatever reason. Digital collapse is the blankness when digital video transmission stutters through the lines: suddenly nothing, not even the ability to recompose, collect one's thoughts, interpolate where noise entered the image, corroded it from within. Analog video behaves differently, produces ghosts, smears, noise, all sorts of tearing, loss of synchronizations, but always a remnant or a warning, what I have termed the _curlicue,_ the index of representation that refuses to go away. Analog AM radio fades out, you're driving a fast car across a fast country; digital FM tuning suddenly blanks, the station's gone and you're alone on the highway, an audio window the size of all outdoors beckoning you into the silent death of the horizon. The body watches the body go; the body dies through analog paring-away at corporeality, parts loosening, sinking. The body slowly sinks into itself, creases form announcing the loss of tension, the path towards flaccid death. From the body's eye, there is no death, only a margin which slowly shuts its enormous lid; you never get to see the final motion, and your sinking into nothingness transforms your body into an _it_ for others, an object in the landscape, which keeps its obdurate form forever in your absence. The sickness cauterizes the language itself, the language is hungered, dismembered. It takes effort to pronounce one or another word; they appear mumbled, stumbling along the line which recoils for corrections. This is the state of utter exhaustion; what is spoken seeps from the unspeakable, nothing more. In real life, speech is always analog, always a presence even in the death of it; it takes the digital realm to kill, annihilate, absolutely, without even a monument to the movement of the lips. When I write, I think: I am speaking the last thoughts. When I write, I think: They are all I have to offer. When I write, I think: Someday, I shall stop, in the middle of a sentence ________________________________________________________________________ HOW WE'RE NEVER ONE OR SOMETHING ELSE AGAIN Honey says: There is always someone who will find the One of cyberspace, the idea or ideal, that which subsumes, occupies, the rest of the intelligence or ideation, slotting it sideways into epistemological extensions: I say to you, the _saying_ of the one is already two, and the hearing of the two is already three: it is the curlicue of Quine that extends by constant perusal, these and every other operation. (Bell's Theorem and a host of others rings here as well!) Tiffany says: There is no clue to a picture of sentience, no clue to a flaccid God- head residing in the wires, no pretty picture of sovereignty, no de- lights of neural consciousness, the One which will heal us, which will transform our dismembered body parts (Lingis), our part-objects of self-destructing memories, back into that wholeness peered upon by the German Romantics (some of whom high-tailed it back into Catholicism, not a far distance to go). There's no secret beyond the complexity of stuttered packets, the inordinately complex protocols dissembling, re- assembling data, for your pleasure, for your personal pleasure. I am amazed at the insolence of data-jump: one more brain, and God appears, sometimes in the form of a hive run, for that matter, by Neutopia her- self. Recognize instead, my friends, the anarcho-syndicalist nature of the Net, the seeping of information from many to many, the shuddering of the overloaded wires heating the vast engines of the stratophere on the way to and from satellites frozen in hostile space. Clara says: Let not our damaged lives and bodies lead us astray! Stop inhaling God, Mind, One Nation Indivisible, Absolute, be ever cybermindful that Cyb- ermind itself is a multiplicity, a Communality of thinking through oneself and others, and others thinking through oneself. We walk through the picket-fences into the backyards of our neighbors, returning by way of the edges of the swimming-pools just like Burt Lancaster in The Swim- mer, and there's always that shell of a house, that lure, to bring us in, sit us down at the dinner-table, make us pray like hell. O ignore the sentient ones, for they themselves dissolve, devolve, divide. "The map is closed, but the autonomous zone is open." (Hakim Bey) Honey says: We talk and talk with our friends and family, talk many to many, the ashes of the grandfathers, the urns of the grandmothers, brought into the Room of the Ancestors, and our communality warms our hearts before our hearths praying to the local gods splintered from the past. We can think our way out of the Net, head thrown back like a Pontormo Christ lounged against the margins of the Real, and think our way back in, burrowed like an Ensor, everything shrinking, shrieking to a granular- ity we recognize as our own true selves. Loops and feedbacks, thresholds don't help; they're nowhere to be found, we're on our own again. You keep that in my mind, and I keep it in yours, and we are many with many, dissolve, devolve, divide. Tiffany says: And When you examine inscription, the body, TCP/IP, in detail, you are the first to notice the microtubules operating on or near the quantum level; you notice as well that channels tunnel elsewhere, that quantum tunnelling refuses the strictures of classical logic, portends instead a holarchy-at-large, once beyond the protocols. There is no Mind in these mined waters; we'd better get used to it - we're alone on the Net, next to the Polar icecaps of Mars and Greenland, horizons tilted uncan- nily, everything off balance, but there's only _us_ to notice it, this _us_ longing for a home, for those letters to reach out like any other magic formula, Om, God, Cybermind, something to MAKE IT REAL, MAKE IT ONE, MAKE ME FEEL THAT I AM HEALED, THE DAY IS DONE, THAT I AM ONE, but none of us are, no longer, any more. Clara says: Time to go now. ________________________________________________________________________ Rtty: Telcom Transcription 1994 I make thirty cents an hour. Some of the other girls here, they make fifty, sixty cents. I think they work hard, I think they have to make a lot of money. Me, I don't care, not yet. But I am afraid I will someday [smiles]. Then what will I do? A lot of things can go wrong here. Like what. Like your back, your back can go out. They also get these patches of skin on their face from the lights. At least it seems from the lights but I hear it may not be, that's what they tell us. What do you do here. We flash these chips together with this machine [points]. It uses light and I think heat. We wear these glasses which are hot even with the air-conditioning. The air-conditioning is for the chips, not for us. Ten hours a day. We get thirty minutes every three hours, well, at ten and then at one-thirty. So we don't get tired and make mistakes. What do you mean flash. They join together, see these wires [looks through magnifier]. They go into computers or something like that, we heard with the telephone [nods]. With the telephone. Yes, so they can talk together, the computers. I could call the doctor when my mother is sick from the water, on the computer. The doctor would know everything that was happening right away. Do you own a computer. No, I have no need for this. I need medicine for my child. With only one, I can back off [?] for that thirty cents. We are very clean here. They tell us all along to be clean. If we are not clean, the chips won't work and go down, but it is hard to be clean with the water and the dust. The trees are gone, even the bushes. We need them for heat. So the dust gets into things. My watch broke from the dust I think. We do get days off and holidays. It is difficult with a child. My grandmother takes care of her. I give my grandmother food and help her with her place. The bamboo is very pretty. I like the way the building has the bamboo all around it. It keeps the building cool because it is thick. It is the largest bamboo here. No one would dare cut it. There is also pavement to keep the mud away. [pause] You were saying about things going wrong. I worry mostly about my sight. My eyes are bad, they hurt so bad at the end of the day. I have to concentrate all the time. My mind wanders; the work is not interesting. I have never used a computer. They are all in english, no? The doctor comes through once a week. We can go to the clinic. My husband cannot find work. He has falling-sickness [?]. They will not hire him. He drinks with my father. Thank God I have a girl that she will not join a gang. He does a little smuggling. I heard of a woman who went totally blind over there [points]. The company would do nothing for her. How could they? They are here to make money. I am nervous all the time. I am afraid of the streets. At night they are dangerous. I walk home. Someday I will have a bicycle. It is easier to bicycle in the dark. There are not many animals left here, a few snakes maybe. The birds have gone. You should say there is really a health problem here and not use my name. You should tell them to do something about the eyes and the skin which gets sore. We take better care of these computers [waves] than ourselves. There is no future in this. We learn nothing. I can hardly read but I can flash these things. Tell them that when they make their telephones ring their computers they are using me. Tell them I am dying for their calls. ________________________________________________________________________ For someone who dislikes me. For someone who has had a stroke. For Roseanne. I am incompletely formed... Parts of my body evince great tears, there are organs missing, I know not their names or functions. Serrated edges of tissue promise cuts into the empty air, slices of television. Marry me, Roseanne, treat me well and I will you the same. Hurt spreads from each and every neuron, exposed, synaptic connections waived void-free, useless, dangling there. You will be my wonder. Nor do I know the name of it. Nor did you nothing but write and write, Roseanne, your mind, frozen with me on your lips. I know how much you have suffered. Meso- derm linkages drown, curl dried and shrunken, descending that long slow count when nothing matter, no last second. I do not want to count after your many lovers, eyes blanked plates of deserted meals. Beg you, these leavings must stop, my spleen ruptured, battered kidney, rippled evi- dence for illiterate worlds. Do I become nub. Cannot lie, Roseanne tossed truth to me, ball in someone's court. I am stricken, cannot write either a line or a line. Frozen, the body punched out. Roseanne, I will marry you and save you from your suffering so much that your suffering speaks to me and I meet your eyes. You will be wonderful. ________________________________________________________________________ --------------------------------cut------------------------------------- TERROR If cyberspace is a construct of labor, of fragmentation, of perturbed ontologies, it is also a construct of terror: I will tell you a little secret, that I have never again been able to believe in One, anywhere, anymore, except the One of the remorseless state, bloated with power - ever since I found out, about taking Jews into cyberspace, melting into the ether - ever since I read the Medi- cal Cases testimony of the Nurenberg War Trials: The surgical and anatomical examination of Jews subjected to a chamber from which the air was slowly and systematically withdrawn (and I will not go into the details here), reproducing the pure and full vacuum of space to the best of 1940s technological ability: The bodies taken out from under them, the bodies transformed into pure information, the silencing of the bodies (screams carrying poorly in the rarified air, at first, then no screaming whatsoever), ruptured, exploded into the ether (did they know there wasn't an ether, wasn't a God, not even consciousness): Organism can't live in the terror of cyberspace, the wind howls in their ears, then there isn't any wind, the wind stops because there isn't any air (and what is the ontology of the wind, you may ask as long as you have the breath and health to ask it): What I want to know, who built these ships that carried them into those uncharted seas, those routers - those premonitions of cyberspace, which is now, I do believe, harmless much in the degree of it: So that - my little secret, since that endurance, ending with the annih- ilation of finality itself - I have lost faith (in One or the Other, in healing and all prayerfulness and supplication, even now nightmares return with beatings and punishments of all sorts) - in anything but those men and women blasted into cyberspace and Godhead, dead, gone, and one with everything in the World: Which is not to say that cyberspace _is_ or _is not_ this or that, but that the episteme and ontology have yet to be described, remaining, in their own write, obdurate and irreducible. --------------------------------cut------------------------------------- From Disorders of the Real, 1988: Something occurs in air. What repeats itself, repeats itself in air. What is repetition. Photographs from the dead to the living. For whatever circulations, dis- tributions, occur, it is impermissible to descend into metaphor. Thus the real flutters, signifies chatter, the ego coagulates, and the formation of a memory occurs which retrojects. But everything occurs in air, the cities, the brilliant burst of the missile or bomb, the atmospherics of a binary star, formations and patterns. The air repeats itself everywhere. The _I_ has disappeared in the last act of absolving, absolution. The _I_ is replaced by blind death which is the balancing act of perception. The frame, screen, page holds steady momentarily, while the subject, that which spills from the surface, changes position erratically. Things shuffle in the wind. The wind is a self-reflexive transformation of the atmosphere. Light spills through the wind; the world rubs up against itself, divided permanently in the jump cut, sutured in its appearance. The _I_ in its final absolution has refused the air. The _I_ refuses the presence of the air. What is carried in the atmosphere but the technology of death. The atmo- sphere of death is the self-reflexive transformation of the machine. Repetition is the alliance. It is the contract. It refuses the presence of death. The presence of death is a reincarnation of matter, past the moment (of the literary) of the living. To refuse its presence is to refuse (the literary) the living. What occurs in air is repetition. What repeats itself is air, atmospherics. What photographs repeats the air. What photographs repeats it exactly. (1988) --------------------------------cut------------------------------------- Telcom Transcript: Cyberspace Living and Working Conditions I run the wire over the wire, producing electricity for my house. The wire runs wrapped around the wire that it runs over and the other wire runs down into the ground where there is a pipe. The pipe attaches the other wire to the ground. The wire that runs over the other wire turns around it several turns because of the force of the stone which carries the wire quickly across and down. This is the last connection which runs the wire back into the house where it has been given the next-to- last connection with an outlet that I found in an abandoned home further out. Only after the wire runs over the other do I dare to try the light. The light is always the first test because the bulb is cheap. I can tell by the light whether the connection is good, whether it will hold in the wind, whether we have already used too much power and the power will go down. So far, the power has not gone down and we have television, light, and heat from the stove, but we will burn anything. You can see the tires burning at night sometimes in the winter. Anyway, that is the story of the electricity. The federals know but we vote for them. The house is cardboard, but not bad. There are walls from siding and board of different sorts. We had a fire. Gestures. Near the ceiling from the electricity but we managed. You can see the smoke marks. There are some eight of us here. We live in these two rooms. It gets cold and damp in the winter. Nothing helps. There is no running water, but the trucks come in several times a day bringing water. Who has ever heard of water trucks. We didn't until we came here, but we could not live without them. The ground is contamina- ted from the people, from the factories, even from some of the mining in the hills. We would not dare to drink the water, but we have, and there is always a disease that comes with it, some have died from it. There is no sewage out here, and the spread of the city is such that there will never be; how could there, in the hills? Already, erosion has set in; you would have to build bridges to cross the gullies. We dig into the ground, which is part of the problem, but that is our only choice. So that is the story of the water. The vegetation has gone with the heating; you know that from just look- ing around, and there is very little to say about it. Runoff makes the roads worse as well; there are a lot of vehicles that cannot make it up this far, and the vans stop down there at the bottom. Gestures. We use these trucks when we have to carry building materials up here, tin and the like. Or our backs. All of us do. There is little policing as a re- sult of the roads, and not much to do but to walk to the bottom for a van to go to the factory. But there are the novellas as well and the jefe from here has promised soon there will be some paving, at least at the bottom, which will help with the runoff. Over there. Gestures. The paving has flooded those houses. That is the story of the roads around here, and the story of the police. There is some schooling and the jefe has promised more. We need fuel for the winter. We do learn at the factory and the women stay longer than the men. Be- cause the men are nervous and bicker a lot. But the men are coming in as well. It is as if there is a great magnet. The telephones do not work here. I remember when there used to be cacti, armadillo, some birds. You would be crazy to be a bird now. The gangs are not bad. They are worse down there. Sometimes the snow is a foot thick. That stops the gangs. We need them when there is an eruption. The ash does not last long. I would have worked but for the accident at the bridge. I was paid twelve-hun- dred dollars. I did not drink it away but I lost it just as if I had. I should have had a good time. Avenue J and 6 Street intersect over there. Points. We do not have all the numbers and alphabet. I think it had to do with politics. The jefe has organized around here. You know we vote and we vote. Me, I voted with my feet. That is why I am here. I find my way around by looking. If you look, you can learn all sorts of things. I voted with my eyes as well. Anyway, I have three daughters and a son. Two others have died, one never had a chance, he died at four months. One daughter is already working over there. Waves. The others will do the same I suppose. We are not the last to live here. Oh, she works at the factory. As I say, I would have. She works for ****. She makes these things for computers. They look like jewelry, and I kidded her about earrings. But she's sick of them. That is the story of the job, which will change, I suppose, but it seems like never. These jobs always seem the same. You work till you die. Has there ever been anything else in the past thirty years. I think the future will be like it is, which is how it will always be, at least in my lifetime. I have the stars to keep me company at night. At night you can smell the burning tires. What do they talk about over there. Points. ________________________________________________________________________ /* Blocked Exits, Closed Doors */ {s,t,u} = screate(1); 1: wait(s); Z > x; tt = addr[x]mod256; rout(tt); signal(s); if [[ping -s x\[tt]]*25 < 45ms] = T then x = x'; 1:; else 2: wait(t); x > IPaddr; rt_metric = 0; /* alas $x$ thou art no more */ rm(x,tt); signal(t); 1: 3: wait(u); /* alone, this fragment can never breach */ /* what $Z$ alone shall never reach */ /* forever, $u$ shall never speak */ /* forever, $u$ shall not be seen */ /* but like an eagle on the peak */ /* lament like stone what might have been */ signal(u); rm(1-3); EOF ________________________________________________________________________ Alias Alias Host the shuddering of the pentagram of the backbone, slow churning of the mbone, four components of the address, three periodicities of the separation of components and subnet masquerades within the IP inner pentangle, the eight bits of the bytes, seven bits of the bytes, the shimmering between one and another, o high ascii rain your SMTP down upon me, your seven men of technical prowess, your triple double-you, WWW down upon me, your wize wychery wommyn down upon me, o unity of TCP/IP, true cabbalistic purity of the GGP, _gilgal_ wheel protocol, alias host, the duality of TCP/IP, the routing of the mailer-daemons: as it is said _in unix everything is owned by someone,_ even the root has its root, o come five great levels of the Law, the physical net whereby the pentagram resides beneath the splintered vertebrae of the root-bone itself, the internet meshing through datagrams carrying the secret name of the user, the public name of the user, the real name of the user, the magick-user transport protocol, the packets of herbs and feathers, packets of bites and bones, swift streams and talk across the exterior gateway routers, bridged to other dark domains, routing more dark daemon hordes: I pray to thee datagram, by all that is penta- gram backbone holy, pray to thee soul-beam churned through the wires, fragmented into philtres devoured by gateways, echoed by links and queues: here is thy prayer: O churning of local-area-networks, O flickering of the eyelids of the soul Lost among packets and dark retransmissions by Daemons mounting attack on each and every host O raise the host on high, return lost packets in from tiny world of ether, stream, and virtual connections and the daemons routed return to the bridges of WAN, the meltdown un- ravels the backbone itself, transparent gateways open to towering names and _items named and syntax of names,_ and with the shuddering of the pentagram of the backbone, language is born... O routing, O ARP, O promiscuous ARP hacked back into the newborn's arms! ________________________________________________________________________