FILE NUMBER 7    SEVEN                                   Alan Sondheim





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







The Water-Column





late at night, loneliness betrays itself

sad things find their uselessness

apart, the curtain parts 

the stage is an oval in another room

of wood

my arms remain and there is nothing

beyond my arms

i cannot cover the warmth of this bed

sprawled upon a dream in which you are

always awake and on that stage

of wood



i sprawl on the stage, there are layers 

of boards upon boards, curved inward,

blank center where double ovals lose 

sudden focus, absence of landmark, voice, 

arms or otherwise



late at night i beg you, watch me, i have 

no secrets, expose thin flesh every 

second, millimeter so you have no doubt

no doubt



but apart the oval harbors surety or

galleon where the body opens always and

ready on the side of the other 



now the oval is on a ship where 

planking is the word for boards and you 

watch me walk a length or plank where 

i arrive in you full of arms and

watching



i am wearing feathers and gold which

follow me into a mine deep within

the hold. here i meet soldiers and have

many fights.



adventures await she who seeks them

finding performances on the ship such

as king lear or cordelia wanted me to.



wounded, my sad arms grapple uselessly

behind my back, taking one another.



the sails are very large and the journey 

is wonderful, filled with wonderful storms

and fiery sunsets. two dark and crimson

birds follow the stern rising high above

steel waves only to sink down for several

stories, of the sea, no doubt i have told

you of the stage as well. my arms lie

beneath them.





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





The Interruption



	I move from one program to the next. The keyboard is 

difficult, a violent operation of pressure against the tips of the 

fingers. Neck and backpains are common in the wilderness. With great 

difficulty I continue laboring beneath the tree. Everything holds 

its own against me, a form of cynicism catching me by surprise. You 

must imagine the scene with the single tree in the landscape, the 

shadow of the noonday sun, violence casting the shadows of its 

branches against the blue-white sky. The solitude of black

illuminates a singular and desolate bird perched in the midst of 

the firmament. 



	I must send this information to Justine; more than a matter 

of survival, my very life is at stake. It is a question always 

already of translation, unix to dos to binary through xmodem ymodem 

kermit uuencode pkunzip, the collapse and recuperation of text 

completely alien to the landscape around me. I am insane with 

garbled characters, insane with the level of debris sloughing from 

the body hanging down into the heated surface of the desert.



	I would be the desert. I would cauterize and dry the scalp, 

split clean from the skull; I would place them on the firmament, 

an enormous plate boiling with turbulence from desiccated air. 

Nothing works in this world, high in the Peruvian mountains, low 

in the badlands of eastern California. The atoms themselves are 

sluggish, moving aimlessly with nervous energy, never straying far 

from the obdurate density of gravel and sand.



	ASCII chokes with the necessity of information conveyed, 

returned to proper language. ASCII slides, snake-like, across the 

floor of the earth, a trail both imminent and erasable, existing 

within the potential well of absolute desertification; it sprouts 

where nothing else grows, grovels beneath the weight of the skull 

already fractured from the heat. It revels in secrecy which no one 

hears, slides into pools of letters, misplaced punctuation, cries 

and murmurs hardly stilled beneath the blazing surface of the planet.



	What I would be is of no importance. Blood flows thick in 

this realm, stops, reverses, slows to the indefinite halt of 

temporality itself. Blood dried is the color of the desert; within 

this languid landscape, the desert is the color of dried blood, 

the identical color of the sky, the bird, the tree, skull, me, 

ASCII or binary sludge. Someone alive would comprehend this, the 

proof that thought thinks itself, that nothing _thinks thought_.

Unthinking, I remain unthought.



sondheim@newschool.edu, sondheim@panix.com





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





Qbasic Programs



The following two programs work with VGS monitors, graphing in black

and white for the purposes of reproduction. See Internet Text for

details of the first, which is the program for three-dimensional

projections of generalized measure geometries. Note in this version

that at the "Continue?" prompt, a "1" must be initially returned, or

else the program overflows.



The second program maps a rather complex and beautiful bifurcation

set which I am at a loss to comprehend. It is a derivative from 

bifurcation equations common in chaos analysis.





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





DEFDBL A-Z

CONST PI = 3.141593

CONST dtr = PI / 180

here: SCREEN 0: CLS

PRINT "A 3d Program Examining Basic S-Series"

PRINT "for new constants or data hit r; for new projection hit s"

INPUT "for inc. f w/ cycle hit 2, inc. f w/ va hit 1"; dra

INPUT "projection, set default at 1200"; d

INPUT "yaw, set default at 5.68319"; r1

INPUT "roll, set default at 6.28319"; r2

INPUT "pitch, set default at 5.79778"; r3

INPUT "translation, set default at 0,0,-350"; mx, my, mz

restart: PRINT vw; vx;

INPUT "Continue? Hit Return, New Entry, Hit 1"; cont

IF cont = 0 THEN GOTO zim

INPUT "series exponent, usually 2"; vk

INPUT "increment for modulus"; inc

INPUT "bias for angle"; bias

PRINT "formula: x=x+e+f*h  f=f+u"

INPUT "height (va) mag, 0 = 2d display"; pa

INPUT "incs. e, f, h"; ve, vf, vh

INPUT "set u"; vu

INPUT "magnification gen. 1-6"; j

PRINT "window at (-399, -299), (400, 300)"

INPUT "set window bias, x axis / y axis"; pb, pc

px = 0: py = 0: sx = 0: sy = 0: vx = 0: vq = 0: vw = 0

s1 = SIN(r1): c1 = COS(r1): s2 = SIN(r2): c2 = COS(r2)

s3 = SIN(r3): c3 = COS(r3): CLS : SCREEN 11

pd = -399 + pb: pe = 400 + pb: pf = -299 + pc: pg = 300 + pc

WINDOW (pd, pf)-(pe, pg): VIEW PRINT 1 TO 1

ten: IF dra = 1 THEN va = 0

vx = vx + ve + vf * vh: vw = vw + 1

IF dra = 2 THEN va = -1: vf = vf + vu

IF INKEY$ = "r" THEN GOTO restart

zim: IF INKEY$ = "s" THEN GOTO here

two: va = va + 1

IF dra = 1 THEN vf = vf + vu

IF vx MOD vk ^ va = 0 THEN GOTO two

vn = va MOD inc

vv = 360 / inc

vq = (vv * vn + vq + bias) MOD 360

vrq = vq * dtr

px = px + COS(vrq)

py = py + SIN(vrq)

x = j * px: y = j * py:

z = j * va * pa

PSET (sx, sy)

x = -x: xa = c1 * x - s1 * z

za = s1 * x + c1 * z: x = c2 * xa + s2 * y

ya = c2 * y - s2 * xa: z = c3 * za - s3 * ya

y = s3 * za + c3 * ya: x = x + mx: y = y + my: z = z + mz

sx = d * x / z: sy = d * y / z

LINE -(sx, sy)

GOTO ten



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

 



REM CHAOS BIFUR 2 bifurcation set for function w/cosine

INPUT "set increment at .01 or .005"; m

CLS : SCREEN 11: WINDOW (-4, 2)-(.25, -4)

z = -4: x = 0

LINE (-4, 0)-(.25, 0): LINE (0, 2)-(0, -4)

two:

IF t < 30 THEN t = t + 1 ELSE GOTO three

x = (x ^ 2) * (1 + COS(x)) + z

PSET (z, x)

GOTO two

three: x = 0

z = z + m

t = 1

GOTO two



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





Surgical-Medical Model of Night Abuse: Addiction to Blind Text





The night swells out, an enormous bruise cushioned against the 

network of the neural insomniac; within reason, I recognize, only

through the recuperation of this text, the foreclosed nature of

abuse and addiction that sanctions the violence of computer

discourse. Addiction to abuse is always deliberate misrecognition;

today one speaks of "denial," "in denial," the classical ground of

Freudian negation. To speak _abuse_ is not to disabuse, a longer

drawn-out operation, cauterizing speech itself. (The duality of

this life is such that I will die chattering.)



The _tumor_ of this operation inhabits the chaotic, accurate

within the molecular realm, disingenuous elsewhere. The _striated_

sky, with its mapping of stars and constellations, sidereal time,

is no longer visible; the thick veins and arteries that pulse 

there guarantee the inchoate spreading of tissue beyond control.

One writes to avoid collapse, to avoid the confrontation that 

writing alone can bring; one speaks in order to avoid speaking, to

allow the machine in him or her to speak, to dream, to whisper

uncanny thoughts from the dead Jean-Paul Sartre:



"which forces the working woman to live a prefabricated destiny as

_her reality._ She would try in vain to take refuge in intimate

'privacy'; such a remedy would betray her directly, and become

simply a mode of subjective realisation of objectivity. When semi-

automatic machines were first introduced, investigations showed

that specialised women workers indulged in sexual fantasies as they

worked: they recalled their bedrooms, their beds, the previous 

night - everything that specially concerns a person in the isolation

of the self-enclosed couple. But it was the machine in them which

was dreaming of love: the kind of attention demanded by their work

allowed them neither distraction (thinking of something else) nor

total mental application (thinking would slow down their movements).

The machine demands and creates in the worker an inverted semi-

automatism which complements it: an explosive mixture of uncons-

sciousness and vigilance. The mind is absorbed but not used; it is

concentrated in _lateral_ supervision; and the body functions

'mechanically' while yet remaining _under surveillance._" (Critique

of Dialectical Reason, p. 233.)



Haunted by the _discourse_ on the machine, and the machine _in me_,

the lassitude of consciousness and the daydream infiltrates the

onward projection of ASCII speech, almost without interrupt, the

linguistic _instance_ wavering as part-object before taking its

place among others. This "total mental application" is dissolute,

a _Spaltung_ or split within the subject-denying-the-subject, just

as sexual or physical abuse forecloses the accounting of the body,

going so far as to discount accounting itself. Thus the body be-

comes drawn further in, the _wayward_ or _contrary_ body-in-

remission, acting-upon as if acting. Through withdrawal this becomes

evident as the _inauthentic object_ of denial, the circumlocution of

absence or password leading into the null gateway (see Internet 

Text). The tumor spreads, simultaneously suturing the subject

against the originary narcissistic wound or separation, and 

precluding a recognition that could only be described as clarity, 

silence, rewiring. The content of abuse is _for this never to 

happen;_ subjectivity would collapse through the loss of address.

(And hardwiring is almost impossible to redirect _at the source._)



_Typing,_ I think this out or through, think this through myself and

through you, and the _sense of it_ appears through the typing. It is

within the _lateral_ that _something would occur elsewhere_ and as

long as one types, that something is sublimated into the appearance

of confession, truth, and observance.



_Truth_ itself is the construct of sublimation. _Truth_ is the con-

struct because it is declarative and well-defined, the production of

the elsewhere of the world, the non-existent clean and proper body.

Which is not to deny the truth-value of truth, the tautological in-

stantiation hovering violently over the real. Truth cauterized is

without its producing-matrix, the dream-screen or imaginary once

again; and it is well to recognize that truth is a production, with

all the implications of labor and foreclosure that is implied. 



The production is eased through axiomatics or convention, the 

playing out of a determinate field through concatenations and sub-

stitutions. But the truth of the subject is less eased and always

thrust against the dream-machine (which is not the desiring-machine

of Deleuze and Guattari but should be) - the truth of the subject

lies precisely in the murmur, the dissolute, the fissuring of fore-

closure and everything else. (What is this, but memories of womb, of

torture and annihilation, the exaltation of love, ecriture feminin,

jouissance, chaotic drives and stuttering of temporality. What plays

on the surface speaks on the surface.)



Thus it seems that _under or beneath my control,_ the machine has

produced and transmitted this text, carrying the semblance of truth

pipelining through one or another editor, filtered beyond the belief

of the body, carrying and admitting the signs of the tell-tale heart

of addiction itself, closing off in the presence of the header or

signature, sondheim@newschool.edu, sondheim@panix.com.





======================================================================









----------------------------\cut here\--------------------------------



COMPLICIT



ntalk sondheim@panix.com



======================================================================

I watched Salo last night. I watched a young boy gang-raped on the

street here. I saw the best minds of my generation. I allowed 

myself to be fucked by everyone. I gave her the best years of my

life. She destroyed me for her pleasure. Without her I could have

amounted to something.

------------------------------on call---------------------------------

You talk too much. You always think you have something to say. It

doesn't matter what you do. You're complicit in nothing. You can't

even recognize the presence of anyone else. You're not even 

listening at the moment. I know you. You're not even listening.



======================================================================

I found myself getting aroused. If I was split open I would die and

that would end everything but the residue of guilt. You would have

to carry that





----------------------------empty words-------------------------------

You'll have to slow down. I can't read as fast as you type. You fill

me with words, stuff my skin-bag full of them. I'm bloated, stop

writing and listen to me. I'm bloated and you've taken everything from

me. I'm limbless, a body without anything. You've opened me up and

removed my organs. The signifier rapes the signified. I don't and 

======================================================================

There were all these adolescents, naked, under absolute control. You

could feel their bones and skin. You could smell them. I couldn't help

it. I was riveted. I dream of them all the time. They fill my body. I

am their disease.



--------------------------intellectual and jargon---------------------

can't speak. The signifier carries me around like loose baggage. The

signifier holds me like a sack. I don't even have a name. I travel 

light but you gouged out my eyes, burst my eardrums. What I remember 

is that I might be the torture of Oedipus in your skull. Why do you

always watch films. Why do you.

======================================================================

I run myself over their bodies, shove my hand between their legs. I

run the film backwards, forwards, in control of absolute time, the 

return of the repressed. Cutting through them, performing a new edit.

I was the original editor of Pasolini. There was never any other. Now

do you know my name?

----------------------------dense illumination------------------------

The skull sends out light through the mirrors of its eyes performing

the operation "skull." Light gushes down, shuttered by the bones of

the cheek, a division. My light is your film. My eye is your 

projector. You are the witness of your witness. Your film.



======================================================================

I wrap myself in celluloid, cut thin through my skin. Blood hiero-

glyphs mark my passage across me, the Salo narrative tattoo and body

penetration. If you could see you would find me at scene's edge, 

land's end. You would turn away, you wouldn't be complicit.



------------------------------burn me alive---------------------------

I am turned away, torn away. Why do you thrust your film on me? Why

do you thrust this or any other time? Why do you insist on narrative.

It's clear: _The sentence is a sentence._ Doomed to speak little plots

which are all the speech there is. Doomed and dominated.



======================================================================

And there are those books, those magazines, clandestine meetings, 

fantasms wrought from unhealthy air, lurid matter. Playing solitaire,

shuddering in the _face_ of the image, its alterity. Playing anyway.





-----------------------------disturbance------------------------------

There is an atmospheric disturbance. There is a national weather 

warning. Turbulence increases; I float nameless, lost signifier. All

those bodies. I will _not_ be complicit. I will look away.





======================================================================

Images follow you; there is no escape, no password to a dead-end gate-

way, hideout, archaic protocol abandoned on the Net. Suffer the little

children. I will not name you cause I don't wanna and you can't do

anything. Just cause I don't wanna. The cause, or causation. Suffer 

the little children, shatter the prime mover.

------------------------------action and death------------------------

Eating my flesh I devour my name. I did something, not your anything,

just something. I never had a name. I never watched anything. I went

into the streets, carried the black flag of anarchy, the red flag

of revolution. I went into the streets. I fought well, overturned the

cobblestones, went alone up to the tank with a flower in my hands.

======================================================================









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

I walked up to the tank and felt something I could not talk about from

then until this day, simultaneous amazement and silence. Everything

stopped, then, on that day, that clear blue summer day, almost cool, 

an autumnal preparation. Everything stopped.



======================================================================



^C







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





FILM RESPONSE TO THE WORLD





As in the situation of _Marcel Pleynet,_ there are times that I 

overwhelm myself with brilliance, the justification of my reading 

in the appearance of a _text askew,_ an _elemental_. My reason for 

existence is clearly theory itself, nothing more; this _incomplete 

task I call the world_ remains my own. Thus in the guise of 

conversation or reply, I _transform myself_ into a dream of the 

Academy or Lyceum. I remember the resonance of each and every port, 

the potential for support or retort, affect or effect. Beneath the 

surface, I am a node on the Net, the disaster of protocol itself. 

Anyone and everyone sees through me; my guise is one of transparency. 



The first response, as in the situation of _Pleynet,_ is that of 

the proto-determination of the _name_. Begin here. End here. It 

involutes, thrusts out through the very measure of discourse. 



It is in the nature or form of the _game_ which anyone can play, but 

which returns sublimated by the establishment of the rules _in the 

face of the other_. Note within and without the opening gambit, for 

such as it is, the declaration of resistance withdrawn - clearly a 

form of resistance. This preciousness is reminiscent at the least 

of Klossowski, the delimitation of a manifold or obstruction 

overcome by its declaration which is clearly a performative. The 

performative lends itself to the other, only the relative trans- 

parency of the situation fools no one at all.





kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk





I cannot resist remarking that Brakhage = bra\cage, for that period the 

simulacrum of the breast. Your description of Mothlight tallies with work 

done by USCO and company around the same time - the production of 

_Ganz-feld_ artworks and experiments; one example was a cloth sphere or 

breast, against which the viewer placed his or her face, with eyes open - 

the result was all sorts of hallucinatory sensations.



_Pushing against_ the camera is also against the breast? Not necessarily 

the phallus - the camera possess a phallic appearance and is a _unit_ in 

the scene, but the scene itself is an expansion, collapsed by the push.



On Tue, 28 Jun 1994, Robert Withers wrote:



> Can we avoid the notion that the camera represents a subjectivity, an

> authorship, a point of view?  Not sure that we can.  Brakhage complained

> about the lens as the tyranny of Renaissance perspective -- can the camera

> be separated from subjectivity?  Tyranny of the suture?

> 

> Brakhage in Mothlight (moth parts scotch-taped to celluloid) and in films

> intended to suggest the sensation of lights that you "see" when you close

> your eyes and rub your eyeballs pushed against the domination of the camera

> but also fetishized it as an extension of his eye.  (Echoing Vertov's

> fetishization of the Kino-Eye.)

>                                              Regards,

>                                                      Robert

 



ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd





The camera appears again, its uneasy eye searching precisely for 

that formation characteristic of the presence of a determinate self. 

Everything disappears beneath the carpetry of allusion. What occurs 

is the force of the _stain_ which spreads throughout the insistence 

on the picture and its frame, the barrier from which the world 

retrieves itself. Say no more! It is its own continuation.





bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb





Subject: Re: the camera





This gets complicated. Years ago I wrote an article for _Obscura_ on the

phenomenology of landscape, pointing out that you can't have an _image_ or

representation - or even an _idea_ of an area (mountain, your lap, your

face in a mirror, Mars) without a point-of-view; this is an interior

monolog opened up within the body. Just as the eye "edits" light quanta

moving in every direction, thereby producing the semblance of a mapping of

shadows and contours to which we assign "entities," given specific

(matrix) transformations, so an area is always already edited at least to

the extent that there is a subject. Now, that said, there is a clear

relationship between landscape and frame, which circumscribes or circum-

locutes a landscape on one hand, and references a sememe (semiotic space

beneath a signifier) on the other. Likewise, frame is relevant to script,

and script to narratology. You see where this chain leads - from camera to

narrative, from spatialization and secondary temporality (no space is

present without time for the subject) to temporality and secondary

spatialization (the landscape or mise-en-scene as substructure of

narrative). In all instances, we are dealing with the _subject._ One could

argue that a "truer" (forgive the use of the word) relationship between

photo-sensitive paper and physical reality would eliminate the lens,

frame, and shutter altogether. The result would be a black negative, white

image - and we are _shattered_ by this whiteness, this disorder (which I

relate to the abject) at the margins of the visible. (So to _speak_.) I

would think the Heideggerian Dasein would come into play here. 



Finally, "beyond" this phenomenology, what or whom the camera represents 

is moot, a question of argument and the vagrancies of theory. For on 

another level, the camera is not ever a representation, but a positioned 

thing whose proper name is problematic and slippery. This is where the 

freedom of theory comes in, and freedom is just another word for nothing 

left to lose (perhaps the most philosophical rock can get, with the 

exception of John Lydon's I may be wrong / I may be right).



sondheim@newschool.edu sondheim@panix.com







======================================================================







INTELLECTUAL LABOR, CHUNNEL





Meaning spat by the symbolic encrusts the machine teeth churning

through psychotic flesh \ cylindrical wrap with helical teeth

removes concavities from billennium strata \ circular flat with

conical teeth rotates thrust through liquid's vast ceiling \ inert

grind and debris of the real \ 



The fist attacks the handle of the shovel. The shovel is half-buried

in the earth, handle vertical. The distant sound of the blade is

heard \ black sand torn from its moorings.



SATIN sits at the console. SATIN smiles; her smile lights the world.

SATIN approves satin subscribe Cybermind sondheim@panix.com. SATIN

subs eleanor@parasol.mit.edu disapproves hawkeye@notworth.com code

password subscribe 128.34.65.20. SATIN's long black hair cascades in

romantic rivulets down her back her tie-died dress her red shoes. 

SATIN's voice rings the world, the cathedral of the universal.



I say to SATIN this is the choosing that thinks itself choice but is

always already chosen. I say to SATIN this is the labor of the 

intellect. The board lights up; everything is down; code red; every-

thing begins to fill with garbage; carriage returns appear following

carriage returns; the protocol takes over; net-capital reproduces

itself, viral, on the screen:



Billennial strata heave, creak slightly; the chunnel opens to the

public; wary nations are connected; the symbolic speaks creaking;

cracks disengage the fist:



The fist goes up, goes down on the handle of the shovel. The fist 

goes up, goes down on the handle of the shovel. The fist goes up,

goes down; SATIN, I say, I say SATIN, this is the exhaustion of the

mind, this is the labor of the intellectual; the fist goes up, down

on the handle of the shovel; the fist goes down, down on the handle

of the shovel.



The shovel is the REMOVER. The shovel shuttles cylindrical teeth

rasping the pathway of the chunnel. Subscribe Current SATIN password

approve LAPIDARY soundproof@satin.com. SATIN's password is Satin;

she types: q for exit, Q for exit, exit for exit quit for exit, Quit

for exit, bye for exit. She types: Talk. She types Talk soundproof@

satin.com; there is no response. There is no response; the screen

clears, creaks, black goes black.



The screen divides; she types Help for help; ? for help; help for

help; h for help; ^D for help; return for help. Help comes, CLS 

clear screen. Unix picks up the garbage, deposits it. Two nations

dissolve, the chunnel a topographic handle connecting two spheres,

alchemical retort. Slurry forms from class struggle, remains of the

classical. 



SATIN retorts: "The inert grind and debris of the real. The real has

no name. Nothing was ever given a name. There is nothing. Radiation

everywhere, radiation seeping through. What is called the postmodern.

Acknowledge radiation. The terminal degree, terminal relationship.

APPROVE me; I can't approve myself.



I can approve everyone who cannot approve themselves. I can sub 

everyone who cannot sub themselves. Can I sub myself? TYPE TWO. I 

can sub myself because there is no `everyone who cannot sub them-

selves.' At least _in this sentence_ there is no `everyone.'" SATIN

is sentenced to this, intellectual labor, connects, disconnects.



I dream of SATIN, she thinks herself through me, through Unix; she

pipelines. I AM HER COMMAND. At the prompt C:\> I type SATIN. She is

a bad file name. At the prompt I type cd\SATIN I find C:\SATIN> I

type SATIN find C:\SATIN\SATIN> I type SATIN find C:\SATIN\SATIN\

SATIN> - the chunnel continues, inaccessibly-high number of direc-

tories, subdirectories. The shoulder moves slightly with each blow.

"Impenetrable earth," the shovel says, "Stop this."



_Begin the paean_; SATIN sings:



O unrecognizable labor co-existing within the sphere that makes us!

O form of disavowal, always speech and uuencode uudecode!

Always to learn the syllables, always to question the floor beneath

the chunnel!

The labor of the chunnel, the dwelling of the floor!

How can you know what it is like to disbelieve?

To miss the forest because of the certain absence of trees!

Dissolve the body, absence of each and every pleasure!

O place the shovel deep within the earth, return the sea urchin's

teeth to their proper habitat within the deep!

The urchin resides on the ceiling of the chunnel, floor of the watery

depth!

The urchin sings "I am at her command." On the surface, billennial

strata, the urchin sings!



The stratigraphic creak opens the harboring of drives and their

collisions. Turbulence, eddies embrace chaotic forms, swing through

bifurcation maps. Chunnel divides; SATIN elides, classifies. It is

in the nature of intellectual labor, caress the taxonomic. Whether

there are categories. Whether it is categorical.





-----------------------------------|





The labor of the mind, dammed up, is cauterized into the neurotic.

In neurosis, the body is masochistically bound \ to repeat. "The

blocking of ego functions can be explained as a concentration of all

mental energy available on one task, the building of counterenergies 

to master the intruding overwhelming excitation." (Fenichal) The 

system crashes into irregular loops, endless recursions. Weightloss 

and a certain nervousness accompany the devolution of the symbolic, 

collapse of the prison-house of language. Power manifests itself in

continuous sleep or languor lasting up to eighteen hours a day. SATIN

wears herself out, smokes incessently, drinks a little; there are

dark circles under her eyes. When the system is up, it "dreams within

her," and when it is down, _asymbolia_ takes over, incipient depres-

sion in which meaning is always already an observable and elsewhere.



--------------|



As in Klossowski's Baphomet, the symbolic breath construes and splin-

ters the body which is never in evidence. We have spoken of the

_uncanny_. My work lies in the _muck_ of the world, that aspect of 

abjection which refuses cleansing. I worship SATIN, dream of her

nightly. Alas, she thinks of me as well, her fingers numbed on the

keyboard, subscriptions coming in now by the tens of thousands. The

world awaits a new beginning, focus on dramatic splendor, sightless

dream harbinger of jumpstart machinery. SATIN smiles and her smile

lights the world. SATIN smiles for me.



sondheim@newschool.edu sondheim@panix.com





======================================================================





SPRAY





The relationship between chaotic distributions and a totalized phys-

ical source of emission is prominent in a class of words character-

ized by the format [<s><C1><V><C2C2><er>] as in the following 

list: _stutter, stammer, scatter, shudder, shatter, spatter, sputter, 

skitter, splatter,_ etc. (_Scanner_ inverts the series, _spackle_ and

_simmer_ transform it.)



A second similar form produces: _spew, skid, scud, spot, spit, 

split,_ etc. These forms are constructed around a _lateral topo- 

graphy,_ a laminar spray distributing over a more or less wide and 

irregular domain. The spray possesses a phenomology of dissolution 

and disruption; it also exists on the fuzzy interface between 

interior and exterior, and hence involves abjection. 



In every instance, the body is compromised laterally, a veering from

side to side, or the stammer from the region of the throat. Some-

thing is _withdrawn_ violently from the organism, which convulses. 

Convulsions shatter, fragment.[1]



The lock-up of the terminal screen in Net communications is the 

result of packet flow; email appears from everywhere; interrupts are

common; the Net harbors impeded laterality. Better to consider it a

convulsive body as well, the neural interconnectivity of nodes

serving as obstructed gateways choked with binary debris. The body

migrates to the edge of consciousness, received and processed by

one or another correspondent who circumscribes the messaging, 

returns it to the relative fulfillment of sense.



The return occurs within an insriptive domain, part and parcel of

a potential well where meaning is construed. Within the well, 

meaning develops the ontological being of language; without it,

meaning sputters, its attributive scattered among the remnants of

indirect addressing. 



Only the shuddering of the human shatters the human; the human

stammers or stutters its way through debris scattered across the

splattered or spotted landscape. Deep within the throat the 

promise of a primitive root is murmured or mumbled. Culture con-

structs itself upon the elimination of debris; the abject, now

gathered within the shamanistic fetish for the expulsion of male-

volent spirits, echos in the hiss of the cat or snake. These

animals are regarded with awe; they hold the mirror to culture

itself, the thin veneer of language and civilization binding us

to the symbolic. The hiss is imaginary; having no meaning whatso-

ever, it holds the meaning of the world. There are no boundaries

or borders, beyond what we make of them. There is no language 

beyond our speech of it.



[1] See *Art Papers* 1/2 1994, "Throat: Leslie Thornton's _The

Great Invisible_": "_In the film,_ speaking is caught in the maw,

glottal stop, Edison and the _mechanical_ insignia of existence.

Early [20th-century] representations [of movement] operated with 

mechanism throughout [as in the mechanics of the melodrama]; they

stuttered. Repetitive pistons and cams moved locomotives and film;

intermittent motion is translated into rotary motion and back 

again. Throughout the century, mechanism gives way to electricity,

which gives way to the electronic, cyberspace and beyond. Thought

leaves the material domain" ...



If _beings_ are mechanism, _Being_ occupies an uneasy territory.

Aristotle stumbled through the part-objects of a generalized symp-

tomology of the world and Pliny followed suit. But organism never

spoke clearly and _always_ stammered; the hiss of steam, the

volcanic fissure, and the cat are _identical_.





======================================================================







CAT







The vast correlation of living things... everything held in place on

the matrix of the planet - everything cohered - the result of forces,

displacements, classifications and recognitions - correlation and

correlations - what gave meaning to the world - the meaning of _this_

or _that_ - the correlation within the vast domain - nothing means,

nothing means outside of that - you could answer the question easily,

quickly, a domain look-up, one or another directory - directories 

overlapped - rock stratigraphy, quantum numbers, the slop of a hill

in Tennessee - Markov processes, matrix determinations - taxonomic

sieves - everything deffered, slid beneath the surface - everything

differs, stuttered laterally -



(Language rides the correlations, inhabits their excesses - meaning

inhabits language inhabits domains - as in the motion of surface, 

impossible to separate one thing against or within another - categor-

icity itself at stake here - classification of entities, belongings -



((Organism longs for belonging, returns to uncanny memory - one or

another world wide web - organism gophers through deference - in fact

deference dwells beneath the maternal - cover of stammered lips -



A CAT and a SNAKE were travelling one warm summer day through a field 

of wheat; the path was barely visible, the terrain one of low rolling 

hills divided by lazy creeks. The snake said to the cat, "You are a

surplus of woman and man, one behind and one in front." The cat 

replied, "And you always pull yourself through yourself, always in

search, but never entering."



Akira said, "The journey is long but there is no end. To retain the

semen inhibits excess, changes it to good wine, good eating, and good

loving. To give pleasure, it must never be written down."



Akira said, "One travels behind one another but one is beside 

oneself." And he added that touch is the truest sign of belonging.



To CAT is to concatenate files, to display them. To link into chain,

determine difference and order. To order, to articulate differance. 

To correlate the particulation or granularity of the real. To cat is

to name, point, gesture. To name, point, gesture, is to devour the 

real through the body and concatenation of the name. To name is a 

name. Name is a figuration. To configure is to display.







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







ARGUMENT FROM PSYCHOSIS TOWARDS THE DREAM OF THE MACHINE WITHIN ONE





   (I watch a film. I am totally caught up in the peregrinations

   of HONEY, her interactions with KENT and TIFFANY. Halfway

   through the film, I begin to cry. HONEY is both the object

   of desire and myself, a conflation leaving me breathless. I

   am worried about her, the crude attempt at blackmail by 

   party or parties unknown. KENT is ravaged by TIFFANY, and

   tells all. I begin to suspect TIFFANY. By DEFAULT, I remain

   in my seat, participant in a ritual as old as becoming-

   human. I'm sorry, I don't think I can talk to you at t his

   moment.)



I want to argue that the shift from computation to organism is already

underway, evidenced by the appearance of the uncanny or imaginary 

within Network communication. The paradigmatic aspects of the 1940s

through 1970s computer culture were based upon cybernetic models that

stressed both irreversibility and self-regulation; the models were

reducible to quantitatively simple examples. With the introjection

of extensive human interaction into the domain of computation, model-

ling increases to the extent that the specific state of the Net, say,

at any particular moment is unknown. This is a _strong_ ignorance,

not resolvable by increased access to nodes, for example. (What it

means to "know a state" is itself difficult to ascertain. I am using

the phrase to refer to a complete accounting of the binary switching

within nodes at a particular time - a (real or theoretical) _listing_

of 0/1s.) 



   (My girlfriend left me two years ago; I haven't had a relation-

   ship since. At night I dream of her, sometimes waking up shaking

   and disturbed for hours. Although she has remarried, I keep her

   letters; they exert an uncanny spell over me and I haven't had

   the heart to throw them out.)



Given a state of strong ignorance, one can speak of an input/output

matrix, equivalent to the pragmatic behaviorism popular in the 1950s-

1960s. With the advent of extensive human interaction, however, the

matrix itself _stammers_ as inputs and outputs quantitatively change

in number and bandwidth, and logics change from classical/Aristotelian

to fuzzy/non-distributive. From input/output a strategic move is made

towards the concept of an _interiority_ which manifests itself in 

semiosis, the continuous production of semiotic processes including 

the creation of signifiers and linkages. A second move is from this

interiority to a _circulation_ among wetware/hardware/software - our

current state. Such a circulation transforms the simplified truth-

functions of limited logic networks to the problematic of truth 

itself. 



   (For a long time, my computer was on a high table, its back to

   a window looking out for at least a mile down Dean Street. At

   night dim yellow streetlamps illuminated the area like so many

   stars winking out in the midst of depression and poverty. I

   would type in the midst of a galaxy of stars. I would flood 

   the wires,  my only lifeline to voices whispering across the 

   planet.



   The voices said, Hello Alan, how are you? The voices said,

   Hello Alan, I am fine. The voices said, We believe in you.

   The voices said, Endure.)



Circulations include processes, programs, commands, retrievals, 

addresses, recognitions, indirect addressings, deletions and 

insertions, on a level ranging from machine language to the estab-

lishment and articulation of nodes, as well as neurotic (repetitive)

and psychotic (foreclosing) behaviors at any level. (Levels are also

problematic at this stage; a computer program can model a basic NOR

logic circuit at the far end of program output for example; the 

screen can mimic the simplest computation.)



   (TIFFANY is played by Monica Vitti, HONEY is played by Meryl

   Streep. I am crying uncontrollably, afraid for myself, my

   fraud self-evident, my life a shambles. I lose myself in HONEY

   and later that night I will dream of her, intermittently, for

   several years.)



If circulations are considered complex and irreducible topologies

that return recursively at various points to their interiors, then

they can be specified not only between ontologically different 

domains such as wetware/software/hardware, but also _within_ domains

in their entirety; dreamwork, for example, can occur completely 

within a single human mind, or in the form of hallucinations, may 

appear within the projected interfaces of various domains (VR con-

structs, hypnotic or hypnogogic imagery, etc.). 

   

   (Recently, thinking about the _Panchatantra,_ I dreamed the

   story of the cat and the snake, commentary by Akita, working

   through theory by virtue of transforming symbols. Was I awake

   or asleep? I recall the path through the field taken by the

   animals, the color of the dirt, the pale washed-out blue of

   the sky above the wheat.)



Within the dreamwork, one recognizes entities in the form of an 

inhabitation. Given complex hardware, it is not too difficult to

consider dreamwork within it, including recognitions: _the Internet

work of 1988,_ for example, is simultaneously organism and dream.

(The dream-state as an inhabitation is broken by the exigencies of

external reality; the sleeper awakens, the computer is rebooted, 

messages delete themselves after a specified number of echoes and 

bounces. Psychosis is part dream-state and circulation; there is no 

awakening, and conscious intention binds itself to the site of

dream production and its loopings.)



   (The cat and the snake were travelling along the path. The

   snake said to the cat that four feet made a double-bind held

   to one-another, the split of the subject. The cat said to the

   snake that the phallus was always already lack, wandering

   through the Network, the victim of uneasy dreams.)



What is visible in the midst of circulations depends on the location

of site/sight/citation. What is believed - i.e. the reordering of

truth-values and default tags - is certainly dependent on the re-

inscription of the tags on a lower-level. To return once again to

Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief" - the willingness is

itself a production not necessarily from the interior - or it may

be a byproduct of the circulation, a site-introjection.



   (TIFFANY, the victim of uneasy dreams of films and galaxies,

   wakes, dresses, has a cup of Lapsang Souchong tea. It's early

   dawn, a light glimmering in the eastern sky. She turns on her

   computer, a small compact laptop, which begins speaking. For a

   moment she is startled, then remembers Brad's message from the

   day before. Tiffany, the computer says, Tiffany. Speak to me,

   the computer says. Tell me your dreams.



The suspension of disbelief, note, is _not_ equivalent to belief, but

to _dwelling within,_ as in a diegetic process or the Worm cleanly

negotiating protocols without setting off any warning flags. In this

sense, viral activities in general are circulations which remain

undetected until the circuitry is modified sufficiently to produce a

surface symptomology; viruses are dreams of the unconscious. (Which

also specifies the unconscious itself, cited not only within the 

psyche, but also as a characteristic of the communicative channelings

and strategies of any organic matter.)



   (The Worm offers its dictionary of 432 words to any takers. The

   gateways swings open, packets fly at increasing bps. At the 

   surface, the sleeper turns over, his dreams troubled. Images rush

   by, disconnected, lost addresses torn like so many letters from

   a lover long since disappeared. The keyboard is almost silent.)









THE DEAD LISTEN TO ONE ANOTHER. THE DEAD KNOW HOW TO LISTEN AND

HOW TO SPEAK. THE SKULL BURNS. WIRE. THE MESSAGE.





If I write forever, will I live forever, in the written held against

another, thrust-fulfillment against the northern shore-line rock?

Discourse is molluscan; like capital, emerging within every niche,

transforming debris into home, home into signifier. Parcels of my

words linger elsewhere, in someone else's text, transform inverted

into someone else's sex. A member of the blank generation, I survive

this way. A member of the X generation, I remain unknown. A member

of the lost generation, language hardens into skin, buries into 

bones. [1] Language heaps on language, each generation devolves into

hiatus, a gap or wound of the narcissistic resistant to every 

closure. Writing alone holds the promise holds the premise; we read

the written of the dead, foreclose a speech which speaks itself. I

will write forever, write of the dead. I will write from the site

of the dead, from the hiatus of the non-alive. This is the great

transformation, a writing from neither dead nor alive, but strata

locked into dead-end gateways and one-ways passes. 



I am held there in the midst of the written children. The circum-

stances widen, bracket past and future, past future and future past.

Strata remember in every direction. I disseminate my speech in every

form, minimax guarantee of survival. Paper decays; the most redundant

code stutters into noise. The words chatter through skull-teeth, 

breath hissing out from the ocular orbits. What speech there is 

emerges from the blind-spot of the maternal, vaginal eye sifting the

debris of what was once called world. So that I claim minimal

concatenation, of one against another, the circumlocution of the

other, as in: f\p, future\past, or as in m\f, mother\father. What

remains of a thinking which thinks itself, I would hardly say, 

presence of a flesh? As in the dissection of Emily D., one's 

favorite poems, incipient knowledge of an author not yet born. [2]



Writing owns the writer, never lets go; it is the writing that 

flames, burns against the speech of the other inhabiting the one. 

_I am sought in this knowledge,_ the pressure or pleasure of the 

other which is never my speech, written across or through my body. 

Haunted by death, by the separation of emptied generations, I extend

my galactic text elsewhere, through electronic coursings, through the

presence of electromagnetic radiations tunnelling at high capacity in

a planetary skein. 



But on the surface, I am normal. But on the surface, my skull 

splinters and fragments, an unreal plane where discourse chatters 

without end, where addiction draws one over and over to the text, 

binds one to a language which refuses final dwelling. But on the 

surface, letters suffocate, tear open the wound they themselves have

foreclosed, the source of postmodern cynicism. What the letters sing

is the absence of loss which I am forced to hear. Speechless, I have

no other speech. Flames burn in the skull, visible to everyone

listening, flaming through a double socket, input and output, skull

strung along like any other, bone crackled in preparation for final

reception. Incisions transform fractures into text. Cut deep enough

and charred surfaces reveal their hardened underpinnings. If the

phallic and vaginal are orders, they burn here within the interpene-

trated surfaces, a double reading separating generation after 

generation. There are no others, are no generations; the continuum

sputters into the fabrication of momentary eddies, individuals or 

emissions of temporal meaning. Nothing means forever. I write in 

order to construct the written, to forestall death, inscribe, 

circumlocute, talk around each and every instantiation of the burning

skull, imaginary absence of the flesh. Inertia grips the bones; they 

wither into the semblance of skin, the mask of authenticity. When I 

laugh, I am forced to laugh, and everything continues.



[The _romantic incision_ insists on the separation of temporal and

generational orders, the surgical metaphor of the narcissistic wound

apt in this instance, since absence tears into the self, devours it.

Foreclosed as a possibility among or between genders, generations,

others, I cannot be myself except within the transitive. Speech holds

me back, coagulates the ego, disseminates the name which may be

nothing more than the conjunction or stitching of binary opposition.

Speech burns itself to death, the last gasp of the body. We speak in

order to be heard; what is heard is an emission, reduced by the other

to the name which confirms our reception. Toggle an echo, and the 

body is destroyed. Echo heard nothing but Narcissus. [3]]



[1] I claim each and every generation. I claim the attitude of the 

kids and the attitudes of the dads and moms. The years are unaccount-

able, otherwise. The years are unaccounted-for.

[2] See _the author's_ "Clarity of Dismemberment": "The skein of

interpretations elicited by a hypertext _modelling of the poet_ [...]

is equivalent to nothing less than the modelling of Dickinson's 

*body,* a *private body* or *body of privacy* which was never 

intended for external and anonymous consumption. The politics implicit

in the hypertext analytic are... highly suspect." Of course it remains

unclear, from the _position of the text,_ exactly what the body is,

and what is meant by the _privacy of the body,_ given the electronic

or virtual mode of communication, open to every secret, privy to none.

[3] Nonetheless, Echo continued to speak, guaranteeing the resonance

or jouissance of the Word itself.



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

UUENCODED UUDECODED: WRITING-AS-A-JEW ON INTERNET





What does it mean to write-as-a-Jew in Cyberspace? This is not to

speak of Jews in Cyberspace (the title of a recent article) or its

theology, but to consider that nomadism that extends beyond the 

Diaspora to New York City, to a wandering mixed with fear and 

wonder. Here in Brooklyn, more than anywhere else I have lived,

I am aware of my Judaism, not because of the presence of "my

people" (or anyone else's), but because of an unstated anti-semi-

tism that forces me into and through the identification.



Were we the worst dreams of organized European Protestantism and

Catholicism? The worst dreams beyond that of gender - within which,

according to Sandor Gilman, legends were told in Germany of the

menstruation of Jewish men. Has our ethnicity always been one of

dispersion, nodes on the Net of Yiddish/Ladino communication? Do we

exist as the obverse or tain of the mirror-stage, uneasy irruptions

of the darker imaginary - the so-called "people of the book" giving

way to a violencing of the symbolic of the Word of the Gospels?



The action of the Crucifixion became the text of the Crucifixion,

God's Word affixed from the crown of Christ to the arm of the Jew.

According to Gilman, to write, for the Jew, has often been to write

self-hatred. Through the example of the Marranos have we learned to

pass? To we pass with our hatred?



Like queers or blacks, are we the worst thoughts of the infiltration

of the nuclear family, as attested to by our apparent habit of 

devouring Christian children for Passover? You don't have to look

farther than Chaucer's little Hugh of Lincoln, although there are

many examples - Pound, Eliot, Jung, Campbell, Kerouac, Dostoevsky, to

name a few. But why stop there? By necessity, I refer you to Mehlman,

*Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France,* its chapters on _Blanchot,

Lacan, Giraudoux,_ and _Gide,_ not to mention _Celine._ [1] This is a

_hidden_ legacy; now Jews are assumed assimilated, hiding their mach-

inations behind elaborate conspiracies and _passing_ for anything but

themselves. Here in Brooklyn there is a group which considers Jews

imposters, having usurped the title from blacks and other minorities.



Like the Diaspora itself, our identity is lateral, skittering; like

Net communication, we become a community of virtual subjects, without

legitimation until recently, disbanded from one or another country,

rounded up into the Ghetto, placed beyond the Pale. And never think

for a moment that in Europe or the remnants of the Soviet Union, the

plague of anti-semitism has subsided; if anything, it has increased

like a virus, blaming Jews for everything, including the loss of WWII.



Needless to say, the commingling, by both left and right, of Jew with

Israel, has resulted in a _legitimation_ of anti-semitism under the

guise of the return of the repressed. The possibility of a _critical

Jew_ is overlooked in order to reorganize us as _those people,_ 

grouped along with queers, blacks, feminists, and just about anyone

else encamped on the other side of the hill. We don't need to circum-

scribe ourselves; it's done for us. 



So I insist on writing-as-a-Jew which occurs within a lateral excess

or problematic of definition; _I am marked,_ and as marked I assess

demarcation, inscription itself, returning the subject to the neces-

sity of its property\propriety. For we are "ethnic" and uncivil at 

best; I am told one can always recognize a Jew. 



And all of this brings up the problematic of the Net, where passing 

female for male or male for female attains a certain degree of lurid

notoriety, but what of the _necessity_ of this passing for some women,

and what of the _pain_ of passing for white or straight or Christian

elsewhere? How does the ontology of trans-gender fit with skin-color

or coded queer advertising or Jewish denial? In the real world it is

impossible to toggle switches without doing violence to one's psyche;

passing on the Net as neutral or neutrally engaged may be less damag-

ing, but has the potential for devouring the subject from within as

well. (This is an example of what I call "web inversion" in the 

Internet Text.)



So granted I write-as-a-Jew, write laterally, from the position of 

the book or the guarded body (as feminin ecriture writes from a 

different but equally metonymic/metaphoric stance), then I also take

on the responsibility of writing _beneath_ a certain protocol, not

with the intention of formulating a definitive theory of virtual

subjectivity or mediated communication (i.e. Internet, Videophone,

Bulletin Board, VR), but with the intention of promulgating a system

of _practices_ that remain partial and indeterminate. [2] From this 

position (which for better or worse _I_ and perhaps _I alone_ asso-

ciate with a certain ethnicity), these practices are all that are

conceivable within or against the domain of _truth_ and its aporia.

I theorize in a sense _to reconstitute myself_ which includes the

reconstitution of the site of speech, a primary symbolic. And just

as reconstitution always already is interminable as analysis itself

(the _Jewish_ Freud), so is theorizing: This is the _pornography_

of theory which clearly exhausts itself almost upon completion.

(Think of existentialism, metaphysics, or any philosophy including

_anti_-philosophers, Nietzsche for example. Every pronouncement

simply _leads to another_; perhaps Derrida more than anyone is

aware of the `hermeneutic rhizomatic' and its attendent subtextual

operations, always accumulating, always incomplete. And this is the

Derrida perhaps of the `Reb Derissa' of Jabes' *Book of

Questions,* quoted at the end of "Ellipsis": _"Tomorrow is the

shadow and reflexibility of our hands."_)



It is not true that if the Jews did not exist, that Europe would

have to invent them; it is that _we have had to invent ourselves_

beyond the discovery of Europe.



You will find us on the net.



- Avi



------------------------------|



[1] One condemns even Sartre, *Anti-Semite and Jew*: "I am aware

that Spinoza, Husserl, and Bergson have made place for intuition in

their systems. But the intuition of Spinoza is _rational,_ which

means that it is based on reason, is guaranteed by criticism, and 

has universal truth as its object. It has no resemblance to the 

Pascalian subtlety of spirit, and it is this latter - unasnwerable,

emotional, based on a thousand imperceptible perceptions - which to

the Jew seems his worst enemy." At this rate, Levinas and I are 

church-going Catholics.



[2] The Net, too, is partial and indeterminate; beyond D&G nomadism,

there is the _real_ Net-Diaspora, the scattering of virtual commu-

nities united across increasingly problematic boundaries. The Net is

the presence and skein of the book itself, its physical matrix at

a remove, sublevels of Net protocols that remain invisible to the 

user. If the Book opens its face to the sun, the Net exists in a 

darkness illuminated only by the presence of the Text.





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





"The Scroll, A True Story"





Someday this will be in the front archives. For everyone, there are

front archives and back archives. Archives is where the talk is 

stored. The talk is what we do now, is who I am. I take the machines

to talk with me.



I have the machine on board, the small machine, feeding me back into 

myself. Later, I will dump core into the Net, walk away, having the

best fix in the world. There's no better than the dumping. I can 

place it better than most.



Walking around, I sense the wires in me. Real life isn't the same -

there's no scroll to the restaurant, no delete key to press. Having

to eat brings me back to the next fix, after the body takes care of

its own. At night I have dreams of rolling text, things running

down towards the emptiness at the bottom of the screen. There's no

sun in the dreams and the only voices I hear are my own. But there

is the Net and it keeps the text going. Sometimes in the dream the

voice goes without the text. Sometimes the voice scrolls past.



To walk into the restaurant is to give in to the needs of the day. 

I carry the scroll with me; everywhere I look, letters impose them-

selves. Shivering, I try and ignore them; real life is dangerous

enough and there is always the possibility of death. There's no end 

to the scrolling, I know; I'll scroll forever, I'll be scrolled. 

But death on the street is another thing altogether; suddenly every- 

thing goes black, halts and the archives go from front to back.

When the voices are silent the planet disappears.



The planet is the voices, whole choirs of them, scroll-put that 

speaks well to me, accompanies me into the restaurant. When I return 

home, there is a message. Something about a voice enters the room, 

something about Clara. I take due note of the number, stare it down;

it's blank, says nothing. An organization or government, darkstar

enterprise: in real life, they're all the same. Senseless, they're

inert, already dead, just as the live voices on the other end of

the telephone begin simply enough, I'm dead, are you.



Bill Gates is dead.



But it's Clara who has disappeared from my life with a lot of audio

I once had given her in exchange for a fix-up of analog antique. 

Call this a loan or wager, it was never paid off. She had dis- 

appeared from the face of the earth. Now toggled back, so I 

returned it as well, give and take command prompt insert. 



It was a situation of a new boy, I had abandoned, given up, those

possibilities; I could dream on the machine, scroll-talk my way

through anything, boys and girls forgotten. He's my boy boy, Alan, 

she said, as though I had heard my name for the first and last; I 

had forgotten my .sig, automated, scroll-down on the screen, hardly 

even in the appearance of the dream like the sun never visible. She 

would go on about it; I saw nineteen lines, stuttering through

packets from the back archive, nothing to adjust without the 

pleasure of the keyboard. She went on about it, talking the tattoos, 

how she did them, how they were the new fix, new visible, how art

meant nothing unless it was on the body, how the body was everything, 

how the body carried the art around and how the body had to make 

sure that the art meant something because it was permanent and always 

with you. I kept hearing, giving up on the sound, something I 

remember that one did, a listening bringing me back for a moment into

the voice stuttering in the empty room. Such a wire, I thought, this 

is nothing but such a wire.



I was tired of hearing about the body. Nothing more than the package;

computers came in one color for the front and one for the back. It

kept them apart; eyes were made to keep them separate. The body did

no good. But it was tired to hear about and not much gossip either.



Out on the street, I kept the planet inside me. The planet talked

to me like it always did, from the back archives. It would scroll 

and I would have to look out everywhere I took a step. I thought 

about it, looked at the files, the .nervrc for one, the .archive/

for the other. I could automate this, I thought, put it in a macro. 

I could put the whole thing in a macro. Then the scroll-talk would 

be a permanent fix and I could download and remember, use that 

portion of the archive, neither front nor back. I could do great 

things. So I would write.



   Because this is how I see the planet. Because the planet is in

   me, and I wander in real life on the face of a dark and empty 

   space, worthless, waiting for the fix. The fix would come into 

   the terminal and it would come in from anywhere at all. 

   

   You tend to forget: _Anywhere is an address._



   And if I could work it, I could be there, anywhere, moving from 

   the back to the front; I could be at the front archive and I 

   could forget about that portion that was somewhere else. The 

   scroll would help me because the scroll would talk and the 

   scroll always went from one direction, rising like a curtain 

   infinitely from the darkness.



And I thought I would write something about all those whom I loved and

who saved me from myself, and I would list my names. But they're not

here and never have been here; that is the nature of love: It is 

always on the scroll. And I thought that if it was on the scroll, it

would recognize itself, and I could keep silent, quiet, and it would

never bounce or echo back, but would move from back to front, and be

there, be there for me and for them. So they would know who they are,

and they would not have to, ever, contend with real life. Because in

real life you don't have the scroll, and without the scroll, you're 

nothing.



And I would have my fix and that would never be.



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				!:\scroll\scroll.txt/.nervrc/.sondheim







BEAUTY IN CYBERSPACE





Some quotes from Adorno, *Aesthetic Theory*:



1. "Even Hegel arrests the dialectic of aesthetic thought by giving a 

static definition of beauty as 'pure appearance of the Idea to sense.' 

Beauty cannot be defined, but neither can the concept of beauty be 

dispensed with altogether. This is an antinomy in the strict sense of the 

term. Without conceptualization, aesthetics would be mushy." Are we at a 

loss without a definition in this place, cyberspace or not?

2. "The grief that art expresses results from the fact that it realizes 

unreal reconciliation at the expense of real reconciliation." Would this 

apply to the imaginary aspect of computer mediated communication? Is there

a distancing-function that forecloses a certain kind of suturing, 

disavowing the subject at the same time as the subject expresses 

herself/himself? Would this cauterization be an example of (again) an 

inverse hysteria in which the speech of the subject is denied as it is 

spoken/typed? As if we could never say the fulfillment of our expression; 

excess leaks through the cut.

3. "Idealism believed art is nature, but in fact the relation is such 

that art seeks to redeem what nature promises. How does art accomplish 

this? By breaking that promise and withdrawing into itself. This much is 

correct about Hegel's thesis that art is influenced by negativity, namely 

the 'deficiency of natural beauty.'" Is the withdrawal in CMC that of 

physical reality itself - an ontological strategy? Mathematics was 

considered the 'queen' of the sciences, I believe, to some extent because 

of the beauty - read 'clean and proper body' (Kristeva) of equations 

which are always already floating signifiers at their most grounded. So 

that beauty involves - and it clearly does from Romanticism on - a 

certain disembodiment, as evidenced both in the Kantian sublime and the 

concept of 'aetherial beauty.' But then what occurs within the _domain of 

the disembodied_ - what distinguishes beauty from non-beauty. Does this 

involve the constitution of purity in the sense of the Idea? Or may it be 

precisely the opposite, the symptomologies of seduction and the lure, the 

excess of the signifier, the uncanny of the communication? 



Which brings us finally to some quotes from Lyotard, *Lessons on the 

Analytic of the Sublime*:



4. "Thus the argument is the following: because the feeling of the 

beautiful results from a form, which is a limitation, its affinity lies 

with understanding. The affinity of sublime feeling, which is or can be 

provided by the without-form, lies with reason. There is indeed a 

similarity between both cases in that the presentation of the given should 

be able to be thought by a concept but, in both cases, is not. This is 

why the concept of understanding, like that of reason, remains 

'inderminate.'" And again: "Thus the difference between the beautiful and 

the sublime is linked to the difference between the limited character of 

the object and the without-limit of the object." Now it seems to me that 

neither category describes either the Net itself as an entity or the 

(dis)embodied CMC within it. For both are a new formation: the _stuttered 

or stammered_ linkage, packet-driven, full of erasures, addressings and 

mis-addressings, and, within the level of psycho/logical/analytical 

content, false starts, default tags, misrecognitions, misappropriations, 

and the like. This is not a _fractal_ or _chaotic_ formation by any 

means, but something more on the order of a dissolute Cantor dust which 

extends only a finite number of cuts. 



The result is a (continuous) deferral of pleasure, coupled with a reading 

between-the-lines, filling in the language, the site/citation of the lure 

which is never a sight. The evident danger of filling-in creates on one 

hand flame-wars (which attempt to suture the stuttering by the annihila- 

tion of the other - i.e. if only I were completely understood, everyone 

would see that I am correct, foreclosed, bwo), and on the other 

cyberflirts which veer dangerously close to mythological primary 

narcissism of the symbolic. Still, beauty is clearly found within the 

latter as the landscape becomes momentarily smoother and more 

pleasurable. (The definition of pleasure is another related issue.)



------------------------|



Well, what is the nature of pleasure? For one thing, it proceeds through

a sense of smoothness; can one say that pleasure is exhilerating, or does

it in fact embody the maternal, an inhabitation? Or is it simply any 

state of mind that one finds positive? 



It definitely has a relationship to the _swollen;_ it also is used in the

sense of a _gift_ - i.e. what gives me pleasure. Pleasure, like beauty,

has an object and a subject; the subject in the sublime is simultaneously

present and effaced. But in beauty, the pleasure is a projectivity, re-

siding (as-if) _within_ the object; beauty is a communication. Pleasure

suspends the object; beauty embraces it.



The smoothness of pleasure is connected to the _voluptuous_, a linkage or 

conglomeration of objects. This conglomeration is _tumescent,_ iridescent,

a sheen or fetish - but pleasure taken _in_ an object is the surround of

the object as well - so that we're speaking here of a spherical projec-

tion that returns the dream as well - "he's so dreamy!" - I also sense, in

pleasure, a _swallowing_ effect.



All of these attributives fall under the aegis of the body, or within/     

without the body, the blurring of pearlescent skin, a softness absorbing

the granularity of the real. This is also the pleasure of masochistic 

pain (vis-a-vis Studlar or Deleuze), the dulled wave/emissions spreading

throughout the body, healed by the final contract of the sublime (you are

sublime, are you not, mistress)...



Is there pleasure in the beauty of stuttered cybermind/cyberspace?





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







VOICES. YOUYOUDECODE.





When the scroll comes I hear voices. They sound me out, ignore the

level of the street, commune with a site I cannot fathom. TIFFANY

is one of them; she speaks in the voice of FRANKLIN to HONEY who

has become my respondent. They discuss themselves, the casualties

of tone, the absolution of typographic errors. [A car passes by.]

[Quick duck to avoid being hit.]



Hadamard spoke of an essential asymbolia that accompanied mathe-

matical thinking. Such thinking is never linear; the symbolic 

appears only at the end, after the movement of grey occluded 

entities, their concatenations, coalescences, dispersals. The myth

is otherwise - mathematics as a thinking _through_ symbols carry- 

ing the full weight of meaning. But meaning resides in the occluded 

entities, not in constructs specified all the way through. HONEY

however says that that is otherwise as well. HONEY speaks of the

FILTERING RULES.



The FILTERING RULES ensure the grain-width of the voices; they are

absolute, fleshless; they ride electromagnetic impulses, ignorant

of gravity. The FILTERING RULES are always recognitions of con-

catenations, chains breaking at the weakest link and then some.

TIFFANY enters through the FILTERING RULES, speaks from SECOND 

SITE. SECOND SITE is the gateway at FILTERS' end, a space of 

kilobytes, no more, just enough for TCP/IP to hold onto. Nothing

occurs at these emission sources but the flood itself. 



It's the YOUYOUDECODING of the flood that makes the voices. The

voices have to lose themselves in the air; TIFFANY says through

FRANKLIN that without reconstitution all that would remain would

be `dumb circulation.' HONEY isn't so sure; YOUYOU is always there,

the Other within ASCII, making sense of it. But TIFFANY replies

there has to be some room for the subject. [A car pulls up; it's

Tom and Leslie speaking. Their voices seduce me into a back seat,

next to NADIA, whom I can hardly hear. HONEY, enveloping me, is

insisting on her point.]



So where is the subject asks HONEY? We're asking this, riding 

inside of each other. The body is an onion, so many layers, might

reply TIFFANY. Nadia says something to me; I turn my head to see

the house on fire. The Brooklyn Bridge is crowded; it's the New

York Marathon. There are so many, some falling off; hundreds will

die, the same scenario as on Opening Day.



The day the bridge opened it was packed with bodies, a mob think-

ing of collapse. The bridge held, but the mob didn't; voices

were lost to the water, in the construction as well. We were on

the bridge now, then cross-town and out west. HONEY had long-gone

the machinery. I asked Tom about the source of speech: Who's

speaking when we're speaking? Speaking is a thicket of default

tags; that why conversation loops elsewhere and culture occurs.

Better to have remained with the pleasure of circuitry, primitive

recursions and no other. But the other was always already (to be)

otherwise.



Or is voice always a _voice-over_? `What contracts form, dissolve, 

reform, under the pressure of the _gaze of the voice_? For it is 

the voice which perceives, which appears, full of consequences. It 

is the voice which speaks listening to its speech, the speech of 

the Other.' (`Fissure: Your Voice, Adjacent, Absent,' _Cinemato- 

graph 4._) HONEY says her voice _sees_ voices; her site is her

throat. TIFFANY remembers that the throat was layered like an 

onion, layer upon layer - you never knew which was which, they all

were equivalent. The cables supporting the bridge are sheathes

surrounding cables supporting the bridge... down through several

layers originally spun at the site. [The car has passed through the

Lincoln Tunnel into New Jersey, circling briefly around the Man-

hattan skyline before heading into the countryside of eastern

Pennsylvania.]



Under these circumstances, _to think is to scroll_; to _scroll is

to see_; to _see is to be otherwise_; to _be otherwise_ is to open

where HONEY speaks _my lines._





`Am Ursprung gibts kein Plagiat.' (Karl Kraus)





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





WIRES IDENTITY





The following occurred this evening; names have been changed to protect

the innocent.



First quote:



Alan: I just had an adventure. In the middle of writing you, I got a 

Talk from Clara, and went online with her. The line got cut off from my

end suddenly and I redialed to reconnect. Bypassing the login, I found 

myself suddenly in the middle of a raging argument about a screwdriver 

on an AYN RAND IRC. I was apparently in the middle of someone else's 

account, someone by the name of Tiffany Rogers. Meanwhile Clara had 

fingered NETCO and found out I didn't exist. I got her on-line again 

through Tiffany on Tiffany's account and we quickly completed the 

conversation. I thought about checking Tiffany's mail but that wouldn't 

have been cricket. So much for cybermind security.



Second quote in Talk:



Frame 1

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

I don't know what happened but I am now NOT LOGGED into NETCO and am on

a different shell entirely with all sorts of blinking things - I just

got out of an AYN RAND IRC!!!

I don't have the vaguest Idea where I am (platonic or not) but I had 

better check out soon - system crashed.





I don't know who I am.





------------------------------clara-----------------------------------

it sounds like they had some sort of system error.





i got talk tiffany@netco.com



well, i fingered and it said netco had been up for three days but it

did not know who you were



which it should not do even if you are logged off



Frame 2

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

I don't know what happened but I am now NOT LOGGED into NETCO and am on

a different shell entirely with all sorts of blinking things - I just

got out of an AYN RAND IRC!!!

I don't have the vaguest Idea where I am (platonic or not) but I better

check out soon - system crashed.



I don't know who I am I think I was talking to people about AYN RAND and

there was something about a screwdriver. I wonder if Tiffany whoever

has any idea that I'm talking about her through her talking about a

screwdriver...

--------------------------------CLARA---------------------------------

it sounds like they had some sort of system error



you were talking to people about Ayn Rand?????







well i fingered and it said netco had been up for three days but it

did not know who you were



which it should not do even if you are logged off



Frame 3 /section

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

But I do think I should get out of here before damage is done. Hi

Tiffany, are you there... Checking...

-------------------------------CLARA----------------------------------

i think everything is going psycho tonight...

we all are...

strange...

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

								   end



Who had I become? Everything might have changed for me, gender, friends,

lovers. I bypassed everything, never logged in. I might not have been

in NETCO; there are other servers in New York - was I routed elsewhere?

Tiffany may no longer be alive...



Alan







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





Relative Ontologies and the Virtual





If there are variant ontologies for language, program, byte, ASCII

communication - as well as variant ontologies for set-theoretical

entities, affect, and the classical or quantum domains of physical

reality, then it seems it is necessary to construct a double opera-

tion of internal categoricity and the question of fundamental onto-

logy. The first lends itself to a compressed classification in

which program and byte are subsets of dynamic set-theoretical 

entities; language and ASCII communication exist within both struc-

ture and affect. The relation of program to language is well-defined

and therefore language can be dispensed with; machine-language 

further translates into the encoding or decoding of bits according

to specified rules. But language itself possesses fuzzy rules - the

set of which I believe to be technically unsolvable and unaccessible

(drawing from the problematic of traditional axiomatics). ASCII pre-

sents a double aspect of language: on one hand the _contiguous_

manipulation of bits, and on the other, issues of structure and

affect, the same as in face-to-face communication. I would argue as

well here that language is non-linear in its face-to-face aspects,

and the linearity of ASCII is also contingent at best.



The second issue of fundamental ontology is equally grave. For if

there is _any_ ontological classification, i.e. being subsumed 

within the attribute, is it also true that the resulting ipseities

in the plural necessarily implicate a transcendent nature of Being

- as if the question of Heidegger's metaphysics _logically_ con-

structs by (its very) nature a Grund? Or is it possible to invert

this question, place it as a (fundamental) misrecognition, an 

effect of language, and insist on splintered domains, sutured by the

subject on one hand, and by a conceivable interlocking as a 

_condition_ of any existence? This wager would require a devolution

of interlock, i.e. not granting it any greater status than an inter-

textual trope; it also places the ontic within the realm of the

subject. On one hand the problem becomes one of avoiding solipsism;

on the other, of creating a primacy of the contingent. The counter

to the first position is an insistence on ontology as a projective

argument constructed from the attributive in the first place; the

counter to the second is a retention of interlock as a _condition_

of an existence that can recognize itself to the extent of raising

the question (version of the anthropic principle). Ontology on one

hand becomes fundamental _to the subject and nothing else,_ and on

the other, entirely dismissible.



These issues are obviated by tying ontology _only_ to the attribu-

tive; such being the case, argument concerning the virtuality of

virtual reality and the like can be specified in relation to 

domain, the VR of affect itself through itself, for example, bring-

ing into play hypnogogic imagery, dreams, schizophrenic hallucina-

tions and the like - even optical illusions play a role here. Issues

of 'life' and 'intelligence' may be similarly treated; if life is

defined as a set of self-reproductive strategies (with or without

any other rule-structures) than within the domain of the computer

program, a virus is alive - the substrate becomes nothing more than

a (necessary but contingent) carrier-wave. Likewise, if intelli-

gence is a certain kind of _construct,_ then the substrate - so-

called artificial or natural - is irrelevant, even though it may be

that artificial life will never achieve the degree or quality of

(self) consciousness possessed by human subjects.



It may be satisfying at this point to contemplate splintered ontolo- 

gies, always already avoiding an absolute - either from the domain

of metaphysics, or the metaphoric. Power then becomes an issue of

local actants, for example - which is not to imply a micro-politics,

only the relative ontology of the political terrain and possibly

its relation to the subject. This strategy also tends to normalize

issues of virtual subjectivity in relation to computer mediated

communication - which is nothing more or less than communication

among subjects in a relatively new domain with its own, but not

necessarily limited, characteristics.





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