FILE NINE 9 OF INTERNET TEXT ------------------------------------------------------------------------ EARLY HYPERTEXT INVERSION In 1978 I created a program for a Terak mini-computer at the Univers- ity of California, Irvine, in Pascal. It was designed to take a text input of any sort, and modify it according to the random call-up of subprocedures. Some of the subs would clutter or obscure the text; some would reiterate various syntactical elements or substitute words. The results were stuttering texts that continue to play a role in my thinking about the nature of languages and sexualities - writing pres- sured by what Terry Winograd calls `breakdown.' Some samples follow, taken from _Texts,_ U.C.I., 1979. From system.wrk.txt It was on a bus, a tr art away from, beginning with Desire in a kind of writing, an attempt, really, something holding You and I "in the middle of the country" me an energy within against you: "in the middle of my life" thata procedure if would not conflict with the other worldwast, ....... some nd you chose place my own work within the exhibition Clearly I call you here, within this line, returning in the evening and that brush of skin against hair, clearly not at all or barrier a lexicon, taxonomy, moment against (one (another that a procedure if would not conflict with the other worldwast, that would be ambivalent a space between two spaces, or others, thataa procedure if procedure if would not conflict with the other worldwast, some moment "feminine against the configuration" From Stalingrad These a codficiation of alienatingases, descriptive of descrive of thsociety; the regulationis pess is true under all forms of post-indus- trial bautonomous sphere of discourseetwen autonomous sre between worker and machine claclass of signifiers class of signifierds oign- ifiers and totality of class of athe assignment of a space-time metricn intersti based on equalization aa product of regulation, a codi-ulation-product, codification thocation of reguwithin the machine/text;lation ihis that allows one to state she his that allows one to state inthe machinery of sexuality, if you will. other words: a form of production. a maw of attractors, texture of minima: perhaps that is all that exists. F(n-1)(x,x)=F(n)(x,2) and the machinery of sexuality, if you will. becomes an additional expression becomes an additional expression sexuality the text branches, therefore, at almost every point... [...] (if an ology produces its own sources of alienation. oneunification of the workers! could state freely: regulation in at one point in history, now the s she tuation has entirely changed. things seem completely different: tenser. oneunification of the workers! could state freely: onification of the workers: could state freely: uication of the workers! oication of the workers! [...] people are bew she ldered; they don't know where to turn. onufuf the workers! the workers! of the workers! could state frely: it's as if: tenses, like sexuality, created temporal collapse. becomes an additional expression becomes an additional expression From store.text (airl, really..)thito such a young womans m an older man ! come, child, we where? perhaps one of these eveningsshaddance together achien reallyt lindias infantssfa, as children a ofocial marginalityce the ideological function of art locaagainst the bourgis culturetes itself social marginality I :nther here nor theret I`elsewhere' in terms of interpersonal relationss fd _States of Production:_ The creation of the texts was accompanied by increased tension, anxiety, and sexual arousal. I would find myself wet as memories of other faces filled the screen, as instrumental rationality scratched my flesh with long, thin nails. The _voice_ moved from the mouth to deep within the throat; the text encompassed the body. Throughout the day and night, I would correspond with the machine, caressed by the delineation of gratified desire. Even at this point in time it was clear that the subject was neither myself nor the other, that the body was of the imaginary order, the languor of the _swoon._ Leaning back, I would dream of Clara's body, the intensity of our first sexual contact, my body shocked into being. I could never speak again; theory became a matter or degree of stuttering. (See above.) _Leaning Back:_ Naked, I would lean back far into the trauma of the chair itself, eyes half-closed, my body loose and open for the revelation of each and every secret. I was forced to recognize that secrecy shunted language, that language only half-whispered within and without the murmur of the world. I would die by drowning, by the seepage of the signifier; I would whisper her name, shattering the last remnants of consciousness. _Early Hacking:_ My body was hacked to pieces, night after night; I move from the computer center back into my office, where the calls would come in. Always those calls, a female and male voice, mocking me, anonymous. One night, there were sixty-three of them, and I began to double, to lack registration of the orders of the real, descend into substance. I would reach back towards the authority of the police; nothing helped. My photographs were hacked in an exhibition at the same time; my mail was tampered with. _Preparation of the Hole:_ In Irvine, I ignorantly awaited the arrival of Derrida, long after I left the campus. I was the hole of language, syntactical striations circulating around a dead and non-existent center. I awaited Derrida the beautiful woman; I was prepared for her. In this manner, I created de- construction, and am responsible for the resulting TERMINAL PHILOSOPHY. From file: against her, as if surfaces time time this presence (or skin surfaces..or without you, as if finding or an inner or an (wheel's edge (or (against at her, hedge or fence sn.. surfaces sn surfaces..flesh, a word, or a word, arfaces sn surfaces..ssurfaces..srfaces..saces this skin (or agakinst, or you sn surfaces..ssurfaces..srfaces ..saces..ses (or flesh or (against as surfaces..ssurfaces.srfaces.saces.ses..s..(or (against (itself, speak aaces..ssurfaces..srfaces..saces..ses..s _What else occured there:_ The women's toilets were smeared with human blood and excrement; my students constantly nodded out on drugs; the mayor of Irvine was arrested; I was asked to leave the university; the gallery was destroyed by a graduate student; coyote were everywhere; I was seduced; I left. _Where I went:_ I fled back to Clara New York, back with Clara to Hartford, Ottawa, Montreal, back to Los Angeles, back to Tasmania, Atlanta, Dallas... _And why I did these things:_ I was following WEB INVERSION HYPERTEXT; I was opening the hole of SOUTH CENTRAL NORTH-AMERICA; I was carving my name in the history of terminal philosophy. (Later, Clara left me, and a Korean woman and I began to live together for a brief time, crossing the country in a simulacrum of the letter X.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From sondheim@panix3.panix.com Sun Jul 31 23:05:43 1994 Date: Sun, 31 Jul 1994 23:01:48 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Sondheim To: Cybermind@World.Std.Com, FOP Subject: LOVE Recently, there has been a lot of obvious heartbreak on both Cybermind and Fiction-of-Philosophy, and I have received numerous personal posts, telephone calls, and public posts about Michael Current's death, feelings of isolation and despair, grief over Rwanda, and depression. I have also received posts about love, about hugging one another, about crying and tears, about distraught states of mind in general. And I have received posts of affirmation, about our love for one another. And it is this that I want to query, although both delicate and difficult - what is the nature of this love? Is there love on the Net that would accompany us into and through face-to-face encounters? Certainly this almost never happens with romantic love (although an Iranian student of mine told me her friend had met a Norwegian on the Internet and they are now married) - the grain of the real overcomes everything else. And here negation also plays a role - it is too easy to negate on the Net, too little is at risk. A potential lover is also a potential threat; one sleeps uneasily at night, shudders at the thought of her or him, dreams the day away. The threat comes from a different form of negation that can occur only in face-to-face, a negation disturbing our very being, the effacement of the presenting of ourselves. The first negation is as simple as DELete, Kill, Quit - commands that render the promise of an absolute withdrawal. The second lends itself to fuzzy inscription, problematic determinations, and the _plea_ or yearning. The love that comes across the Net in times of grief or condolence is different, a situation of textual empathy, ASCII intertwined in ASCII. But to what extent would we touch each other? To what extent would our poor exteriors carry us through the day together? These are not idle questions; they are at the heart of the encounter, both in face-to-face and on the Net. They involve the giving of ourselves as a gift, lending ourselves to one another, and, through empathy embodied, they also embrace a form of desire and sexuality, an intertwining inhabiting the caress which both comforts and heals through the suturing of bodies. Or do we face our own deaths, purely and simply, reading ASCII and its reading as an inscription - not of momentary communication somewhere between conversation and essay - but of the tomb itself? Do we stare at our own epitaphs through all of this, each post disseminating voice, losing voice (as semen or menses are lost), until nothing remains except fragments of DNA-script in the files of others? I believe these issues are of grave concern. Alan From sondheim@panix3.panix.com Tue Aug 2 02:40:15 1994 Date: Tue, 2 Aug 1994 02:37:50 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Sondheim To: Cybermind@world.std.com, fiction-of-philosophy@world.std.com Subject: JURISPRUDENCE OF AN EXTRAORDINARY FEMALE BARRISTER A number of years ago Alexander Essenin-Volpin, maverick Russian dissident and logician, constructed a framework for governance and the lack of it based on two principles: One should have the freedom to do whatever one wants to do; one should have the freedom not to have done to one what one does not wish to have done. The first is expansive, the second problematizes coercion of any sort. The first lends itself to the acceptance of victimless crimes as non-criminal in any manner; the second implies the self-construction of one's boundaries. Within both, for example, drugs should be completely legalized - but if one oversteps the bounds against another, penalties are implied. Drive drunk - but if you cause an accident, you are fully accountable, as if sober. These principles descend, somewhat worn and tattered, into everyday life; on the Net, they devolve as a result of encryption hacking. On the Net, in fact, anyone can ultimately access anyone - establish a shareware ring of password breaking, and the news spreads. There are questions here about hate crimes for example: Am I injured by the spread of anti-semitic propaganda? On the Net, is the word deed? Flamewars stem from exasperation: I _cannot hit_ my `brother' or `sister' with a stick, and therefore I will hurt with every textual means at my disposal. As in computer life, the ontology of the Net (or lack of it) creates an accompanying ontology of Net-destruction which can touch us at our core, without a retranslation into every-day existence. But in issues of sexuality, the double freedoms run up against so-called children's rights, always already dictated by adults with their own ideological agenda. What is overlooked here is simple curiosity; one, of any age, _will_ taste the forbidden, and, as in _The Night Kitchen,_ such a taste is necessary for the absolution and recuperation of real life, and death in real life. One can always argue the simplest, that parental guidance rules the child, but childhood, like every other form of existence beneath the sign of (post-)capital, leads its own autonomy, possessed of the standard operating procedures of reification and legitimation. These taste of the absolute, and the absolute creates a site or inhabitation designating `Barney' or `generation X' - to a hacker, the leakages are obvious and need to be exposed. Eventually one must assume, perhaps, that none of us are innocent, that the world is not innocent, and this is not so far from the truth. Innocence seems a fabrication of the origins of capital, the play upon the body of labor which molds it. And an eight-year-old breaker boy in the anthracite mines is far less innocent than an eight-year-old breaking in to alt.sex.bondage gifs, the latter recognizing the appearance of power with some degree of comprehension, and the former dead at an average of ten years later. If simple restrictive passwords governed autonomous age-, sex-, religious- etc. domains, everything would appear as in the stages of classic capital - the beautiful nuclear family united within and without the world, coherent with the world and the word and their structures. But the pass- words are meaningless in a global topology of circumventions, circum- scriptions, and occlusions. Everyone drinks the blood of everyone, everyone is mannered, jostled in a world devoted to overpopulation. So that I would think that the Net splits and splinters, and will continue to do so, limiting access here, developing subnet autonomies and cultures there, and not so much flamewars, but brigandage, lurkers, and cybergangs on the frontiers of voice itself. Above, on the surface, there are warnings from PJ Harvey always present; no one gets rid of anything. Essenin-Volpin, who contracted the natural number system as well in an apparent circumvention of Godel, operates upon a classical body, produces a classical result. The result functions only to the extent that victimi- zation _must_ become the core of criminality, that cause-and-(evil)effect alone _must_ become determinative. The lines are drawn, and I make this prediction: That within ten years, the religious right, Ollie North and company, will have a strangle-hold on this country; that anti-semitism and racism will both flourish and flourish through the legitimations of capital institutions; and that the left will once again be subterranean, this time harsher, better organized, somewhat unified beneath the new signs of death and destruction, and ready to fight for their live. With every death from starvation in this country, the statue of liberty has been torn apart. With every sexual or racist assault, she has been raped. She becomes increasingly isolated in the midst of chatter raised to an hysteric and incandescent degree. Woman on the verge of psychosis, she falls to pieces. The woman who is Roseanne or the woman who is Karen Finley or the woman who is Nicoll Simpsom or the woman so battered on our street that her mind has gone or the heavy prostitute on crack and AIDS. The male takes the kid out, he's got a gun. It's first blood, a deer. Comes back covered with the stuff. Bleeds in it, just like a woman. It's his freedom one, it's his right to do it. Dumb animals can't fight back and God made them that way. God made women to have babies and if they starve to death they're little gifts to God. My baby died when I was eight months pregnant. I never told you. I buried it. You never went to the tree down at the harbor, you avoided it. You killed the baby, you must have hated me. You must have known at the time. I'll kill you for this. I'll throw it in your face. Goddamn you. I met Alexander Essenin-Volpin through Krister Hennix who wrote on Brouwerian logic and topos theory; I got my Melanie Klein books from him. The absolute expanded, filled him with perfection; I remember him lecturing at me to the point of absurdity. He was on his way to completely rewriting Einstein once he demonstrated where Einstein erred. I was the dirty psychoanalyt half of the relationship, grovelling in cunt and cock, liquids slightly warm to the touch. Then I didn't seem him for several years and Henry Flynt told me recently that Krister is now Krista or Karen or some such, having undergone a sex change operation, and taken up Lacan with a vengeance. No matter what the sex, there always had to be a father in the picture, and this father-mother worked with Volpin, apparently out of duty at this point, completing the introduction to V's long-awaited work - to be printed I believe, by the American Mathematical Society. I do not know whether the volume ever appeared; Alexander was slow and cautious. Katherine left the country. If Volpin solved the problem, he didn't solve Kathy, who seemed in need of a solution. But these people did what they wanted and hurt no one; there was an issue of IO devoted to Krister's ideas, which, like a mad and overly sexualized Brouwerian/Wittgensteinian, implicated the world in its entirety. What would happen in a realm where all crimes were simultaneously victimed and victimless? Where alterity becomes dissolute, the face unravels, knotting the other? The _substance of innocence_ is defrayed, and at the worse, the statue of liberty fully topples into dust. The world fills with dust; everything is desert. The eyes reflect microbes held within them. The Law of the Net is the rusted gun, jammed bullets, wet powder. I bind my body, naked, across the wires; my flesh carries the patterns of the backbone, the wide-area-servers, down to lans, hubs, and losers. The wires distend my cock so that the dreams begin. They travel up the anus, caressing centers of pleasure never dreamed of, fill the mouth with copper cotton modifying and making speech. The eyes are pierced; I see dot matrix give way to ink jet to laser surgery of final and apocalyptic scenes engraved forever, what we now shall sever, we will see forever. For the rest of eternity, I discharge with a thud; copper ASCII laminates my bones, my teeth splinter against the caved-in roof of the mouth, gnawing the lower surface of the brain. This is the future of everywhere of the world and it begins with two principles which always attempt the hysteric construction of essence itself. These are logs which will make a cross. The cross will burn a forest. Alan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ WHAT YOU DID I am a sick man, sleeping at odd hours, desperately cutting back on nourishment of all sorts, leaning myself towards hard times and pure thought; I am a sick man, dreaming irruptions, bedsores, flesh pool- ing itself into hallucinated images, creeping along the floorboards, absorbing everything in its path. The floor is streaked with it, long trails passing for memories. Writing has almost become unbearable... But the dream I had was of a waif, short-hair, bruised face, curled up in your arms naked, this waif, voicing to me that she had heard you, curled up within you, long long ago. And I uncurled, momentarily, for the two of you, whispering that this was a key to the violence of my life. Beyond the whisper, things fell, swollen. Beyond it, I could hear the door shut, thick-lipped memory closing its violated mouth. To awaken, thrashing the body apart, now bones oozing long white sheaths down the bedspread, between the cracks and knotholes on the floor again. The floor whispered to me that it was my true home, that I would live there as its covering, your feet digging themselves into me, an eternity of bruises, spelling a shadow cancelling the residue of a mawkish sun slitting me with its long thin beams. The memories would shut forever, three thick paragraphs of text. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 04:40:06 -0400 (EDT) From: Erendira@Echo.Com To: sondheim@panix.com Subject: VIOLATION FABRIC: THE DISTURBANCE Who is the girl spoken of below? I gather that a film is being discussed - is this a scene within/without it? What is the nature of the scene that separates one from the ob-scenity of everyday life? The film behaves, no, as the imaginary of the Net itself? We project ourselves there? Does an admission of arousal accomplish a suturing of the social contract? " First, I must admit (and I hope that at least some of you do as well) to being aroused by those naked breasts, which led me _immediately_ to recategorize the film, partly as a method of self-defense - i.e. the `triteness' of the image." If fissuring denotes the frisson of the (supine?) body, inscription lends itself to legitimation-processes. Kitch is the sublimation of desire. "Second, the bizarre passivity of the grandaughter _does_ play into male fantasies of the willing female - not victim, please - but subject - the male viewer (and perhaps the female as well) is placed in the position of an inverted and complex masochism/sadism (I am that young girl - do what you will with me; I will do my will with/upon that young girl)." Is this not the crux of the matter, the crux of human culture, gendered from the gaunt eye of the male? The feminine becomes its cartography - fissure and inscription again play themselves out, this time upon the landscape of enslavement. "The girl's `yes' is addressed to us who violate her with our vision of her nakedness; the male suitor (who the girl abandons) has to be cast aside in order that I can take his place. The girl leaves into the imaginary; there are no sites, directions, upon the desert." To see is to violate, the hormonal escarpment or violation-text written against the flesh. In the midst of fuck, I write hurriedly, the pen trembling, ink losing itself upon the liquidity/liquidation of the body. I am thrown off the girl; there has never been an invitation in the entire history of the human. I am ready for the gallows, ready to be devoured just as I have devoured. "...last gasp of the rejected phallus. What _we,_ as spectators are left with, is the girl. The troubling question is what do we do with her? And the more troubling question, in fact, is _what have we done with her_?" The project of the male becomes the transformation of flesh; what appears as goal/intention suddenly becomes a matter of suturing. _Is a goal always evidence?_ Does the white car always plunge over the embankment, taking everything with it? Violence occasions writing, occasions the cutting of the film. But I am convinced that someone, here, is not writing about a film, but writing about, precisely, this _evidence._ I find this disturbing to a degree. I call this dissection of a theory and I wish to ungender it. I admit my disturbance. I have done nothing to it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CLARA HIELO, WHO I AM BEFORE I DIE I am the alpha and the omega. Would that I be the daughter of God. Would that this existence, cut short, exist only within the strand of wire, hugging or hurtling towards the exterior of the wire, the absence of the wire - I would forget thee! Beyond my death or this death there is absence, construct of text or discourse, arrangement, filigree of language. I live for the existence whatsoever of text; I have none, none elsewhere, not even the pretense of such. There is no one to be understood. I am written from beneath the grave. The grave is the cornerstone of the violence of the text, violation-fabric. You need not understand beyond or before the glance. What help could there possibly be? I live on the edge of a vast desert, lines or the presence of speakers behind my own. No desert is featureless; all deserts shift by virtue of their thought lost, circumspect. No one is an exception; I rejoice in that. I, who am about to die, salute you. I stretch the limits of your imaginary, invisible across the world of the gunsight, you are never sighted. Thus there is some comfort in material; the desert presses hard upon itself, descends into invisible strata. These are carried with you; I have died without mention long ago. You cut your- self on me. Moreover... Moreover you cut yourself on me. And there are angels to protect me. And I have our word on it. And you and I share a secret. And your partner shall ever know this or any secret between us. And this secret has a nature, O what is that between your legs, the television image hiding the interior? That you would repeat with me? This is the secret, the color of the skin turning inwards, blushing for fear of the revelation of the body, the _odor_ of the skin, words before the alter of death... (It is a dark or sour smell, it is the smell of love, smell of urine and secretions, smell of blood, smell of cum, smell of sweat and saliva. The smell on a hot summer day... damp air smell, thunderstorms, exhalations...) The voice is always an ellipsis, dying out, that sound just beyond the corner of the room where it cuts itself upon me. Recognize this and every other presence. This is the bizarre assemblage of dreams, this is the way back. For days I wander through this text; I am guided by a gathering storm, clouds heavy on the horizon. I call this the Filigree-Cavern, intrusions webbed back into the night countered by wet granite, dark green plants with wide leaves holding their own in the crevices. Unimaginable shawls of rain plunder the coast. My words shatter into phonemes gathered in the hollows of the cavern, each to its own, allocations echoing back to the server itself: There's only room for so much! The intestine of the machine snakes out carrying debris, excrement, in every direction; electrons shuttle back and forth, and this is the tomb in which I have interred myself! Nothing is stationary; species come and go, thought develops in untoward ways. The magnetic domains of memory huddle against the bleak rocks. Holdfasts grow through them. My words separate as soon as they are born, descendants of 'farewell,' they tender journey on company scrip. (Without the word of the Jew, nothing would occur. One keeps the Jews alive in order that existence continue; this is not to say that existence should not be fought with all one's might. But the word of the Jew must never be allowed to harden; the Jew has _invented_ the contract which created sight itself. Better to see without the Jew, whose words dissolve everything.) The words remain overnight by the rocks, pressed tightly within the tent, huddled together against the rain pouring down. The water is a black noise, absorbing every frequency, transforming meaning beyond the chaotic domain, into the ruptured fabric of the universe itself. The words may wash away, who knows? Rivulets of letters, i's separated from their dots, disbarred t's - this is the stuff of the legendary, language abandoned by God. Is it the earth that created the first gesture in the darkness, the earth that insisted that safety lay 'here' where the body is, 'there' extended to the horizon of the ravaged world? In each and every direction, I am not present, the you-you-encoding of speech torn from the throat, ripped from the tongue, splintered from the teeth themselves. A vacant path... A vacant path finds itself across the desert, a skein tangled by the dunes. What is written pleases the path, which speaks the word of the winds, and what is written rewrites itself, a rewrite mimicking what I begin to speak - each word a shuffling of sand. My mouth spits path- words, pass-words; my mouth, stuffed with sand, screams as I am spoken for. It is the shape of the mouth, not the breath itself. I am holding grace, my belly full of it - children and pomegranates. Meaning fills me with delight; my entire reason for existence is this occurrence of the future, the event burning sunlight off the face of the earth, peeling sunlight back from the rocks, shed sunlight from the backs of trees. Ruby raspberries stuff my cunt; juice trickles down my legs, carrying all my children. Their mouths speak, mouths carry on. Sweet, sweet children. Alphonso Lingis, "There are outsiders who have an interest in preventing us from communicating at all. They do so by filling the time and the space with irrelevant and conflicting messages, with noise." Noise is the world and the murmur of water, black water, among the black rocks, muscovite darkened against the night-time sky. Noise is this birth of children dripping against the plants barely visible in the driving rain, waves crashing everywhere against the strata broken by repeated storms, driftwood, debris of ships abandoned in the fog and mist. (When was it that bamboo decided to float, to shoulder the weight of the water beneath it? When did air carry the dead Christ upon its shoulder, offering Him to the elementals, scorning the mirrors falling from the sunken Head?) I am the word which is the daughter of God. I open my cunt, turn inside-out; membrane, I receive the word which has run down the cut rocks broken by my labor. No one should ever survive me and everyone is a lie. I am electric and there are none here within me. My children cling to the outside of the membrane, they scatter themselves among the remnants of skin, I hurry down the path, I leave myself behind, I am found in the interstices of the V, the calving of the U, echoed remnants of the premise of civilization in W. I do not venture towards Greek beginnings. I am Phaedra; I have nothing to do with Greek begin- nings, and everything to do with the end. I inhabit you. When you die, you will cough me up. When you die, you will shit me out. I fall upon the earth. I am cholla; I defend myself. I linger. There is nothing here for you and I am here to tell you, there is nothing here for you. The beach, corroded and dismal, lay in a Nova Scotian cove; in the dead of winter, David and I would find ourselves half-submerged in the midst of dangerous brine. At night the rocks glowed with a sharp pain. The desert tracked itself across interpenetrated countries of the Middle East; scorched rocks devoured the constant rain, cruelly hissing as mist enveloped desperate cities. Phaedra wandered, hysterical, outside Salt Lake City, a gaping hole in her throat. Clara Hielo gave birth to blood and berries; running down my legs, I rubbed my cock in the final throes of life. I know I am insane because speech spoke to me, and it tells me that this is an impossibility. I tend towards a new theory of causation. It is 1856. I am Clara Hielo. Lotze: ..."it is not enough that a thing is called somehow by us, we must have its real name; the name must be evidence of its having been received into the world of the universally known and recognized, and thus confront individual caprice as the peculiar and abiding determina- tion of the thing." How easy it is to erect difference as the splinter- ing of speech itself, an alienation model of loss and dissolution among the boulders! Yet here, consensus returns to an _essential_ model of language, by which my speech fixes the body itself, in fact, _is the rapture of the body._ Berries are ill-conceived, carry no name, occlude the flesh rubbed raw in them. Damp between the legs, my cock is always half-aroused, wet, an odor that turns away in embarrassment from this and every other speech. In 2022, I am born naked into the grave, a premonition from which I will never return. I am the pleasure of the text. I am the desiring-machine. I am the question and the Omega-point. Your words are the throat's geography. My hands are in my holes. I hang uselessly before you. I remember to write your name. clara_hielo@mirror.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- From Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans: This might be the way we could find out who was writing to us. First, we would do the things we would do and second, we would see who had done them. There was always the opportunity of the first person or the opportunity of the second person. Two people together might form a writer. One person together might form a way of seeing the land from an automobile. But it would have to have another that would make her move. If she would not move she would not be one. She would be one in order to move and her movement would be one and that would be all there would be of it. So she would move and she would write to us and might be two and that would be because one will always write because that is the nature of one. Now there is a ques- tion of the savior. Now I find that I cannot be the savior nor can I save her. She cannot save herself. She interferes with saving and her writing interferes with saving writing that is already saved. This is the way she expands which she will do. Who would they be out there, writing to her? She would not know that she would know that they were this one that she had not met and this one was always that one because this one is an arm or an arm and that one is a leg or a leg and the leg might walk with another and a leg without would be a great event an arm or a memory. She would write that memory here and now and not now and there because she would be one. She would write one, and would see who had done them. There was always an opportunity or an event. An event is not an occasion but an occasion is an occasion for an event. A post is an occasion but is not an event, but a post is an opportunity for two. She would be too. "I would begin to see your future in this way," Gertrude said approving- ly. Mrs. Nast nodded happily. She had returned from the war a widow from the war and she had returned. Health was pleasant and you would remain happy or remain healthy in fact you would return. You would return and that was a future. She would be two and return. Mrs. Nast regarded her silently. She knew that Gertrude had a past, and that the past was something that one had, and the past that one had was past. Leo would have said however that she had a past and that she had not had had a past but had a past and that was a difference. That was the difference between Gertrude and Mrs. Nast and Gertrude and Mrs. Nast knew that Leo was right. Gertrude would continue and Pablo and Ernest would listen and she would continue in this way. She knew that she would continue to be two. She knew that she would write and be two and that she would read what she would write. Leo knew that her writing was an event, and Pablo and Ernest would be part of it. Pablo and Ernest would be two or two. They would be a writer. [1804] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ AWARD! AWARD! To whom it may concern: An announcement that I cannot fool death. An announcement that my life has exhausted itself. This is not a suicide announcement. This is an annoucement that: I am the body electronic. There are no other existences in my vicinity. I travel the paths of space and time; I confuse space and time. Space and time are the remnants of memory. I am the _resident memory_ here in the midst of this text. Stop! Stop! An announcement that it is the machine in me that speaks to you. An announcement that I am the universal dream machine. This is not a eunthanasia announcement. This is an announcement that: Nothing speaks in this realm of the deaf. Nothing sees in this realm of the blind. The deaf and the blind have machines and I have no machine. I am the resident machine for the body-without-organs! Stop! Stop! An announcement that I have removed all emotion from my life in the midst of the world! An announcement that I am now and forever devoted to the service of the wire, the enslavement of the fiber-optic cable my Mistress! This is the safety of the Net which removes the Tearful Escapades! This is the paradise of computation in which I am _always_ well-defined! This is an announcement that: Here, everything happens just as it should! Here, there are no seasons, no storms, no midnight confessions I cannot handle! Here, nothing moves in the country of the lame and the halt! I declare to you: You are perfect here and I am perfect here! We are perfect for one another! Stop! Stop! We are all perfect and full human beings in the life beyond the Net, in our beautiful lives of harmonious love. - So says the Net! Are we not perfect lovers? Are we not beings fulfilled with the presence of beauty? - So says the Net! Are we not harmonious humans? Are our lives not filled with perfection and perfect beauty? - So says the Net! But here: Everything happens just as it should! But here: I am your perfect lover, and I am always electronic! For my life on the planet earth is filled with loneliness! Stop! Stop! For I have cauterized myself, offer myself as a gift to you! For this is the gift, the gift of perfect love and harmony! For here I am alone, and there is no one else! For I sense nothing, and no one in my vicinity! Everything happens! Everything happens! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dear Clara, The truth of the matter is, you know more than I do. I am capable of one thing only, the distortion of the truth - the presence of fiction in the realm of fact and speculation. I turn the text against itself; this is an obvious form of protection, beginning to fail. I must tell you about my failure. My failure is the sorry state of my body attempting to write to you. What I post remains of no consequence; victimized by uneasy attacks, it returns, distorted, to abandonment - returns only to increased and permanent stress. Whatever emission of aggression out of the dim resources of the computer, there is a corresponding violent intro- mission of the same, perplexed, sourceless. The writing which is the source dies, leaving at best the absence of a trace. This is the speaking that proclaims an inscription _logically_ against the wooliness of death. But it devolves into story, and I would tell you one, the secrecy of a cult unsubscribed by the death of another hacking its way through protocols of borrowed addresses. What I can turn around or through - the interstices of my writing hurrying to its own momentum of truth. I am not an expert in anyone or anything; I cannot quote line by line, place one against another in comparison or file, the truth sorted out, just as the truth of events is defined by the intersection of unions of subsets of protocol state- ments. Such statements are considered to preserve a kernel _revealed_ by intersection which sifts through the families of relationships, insisting on the presence of a core-theoretical phenomenon. The worst that can happen in such a case is the concatenation of sub- kernels which reveal an essential but obdurate transitivity, broken by each and every link. This is the extended family resisting circum- scription; as such it sutures back into the narratological formulation in order to preserve the constructed sanctity of the self. The extended family in other words returns through the _improper_ name, bracketing the most wayward of cousins, and all of this occurs on the plane of language which is to _say_ the plane of the real, nothing more and nothing less. The event inhabits the double-plane and the event is what I am talking about in this event-creation which is the shunting into theory and back, Clara Hielo, into my loss, unable to speak when I am in your presence, my throat aching for the confusion of words and silences! You must find me so unintelligent! By the way, I have returned your parasol; you left it in my vestibule after that last, autumnal, rain... With heartfelt joy in your presence, your servant, Alan Sondheim ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CLARA HIELO INTERNET CLEAR ICE optic lens melts in the heat of day before an image appears on you on your screen; clear ice burns through you cold as night after a forgotten image; WHO AM I? I am CLARA HIELO INTERNET, moderator of this and every other list! MASTER HACKER DIALUP has your code has your interests at heart has ICE LENS attached to the nipple of your double breast double lens attached to the nipples of your single breast. MASTER HACKER DIALUP intersperses OPEN DIGITAL NETWORK PROTOCOL with acronyms; there are no followups. SHE BURNS! Nevertheless there is no reason to state your thought here, the thought of every other. Still, there is less reason for a presence here. I wear skirts! Beneath my skirts there are ANIMALS! Beneath my skirts there is the blood of woman, blood of man! Blood freezes in ice! NEW LENS PROTOCOL: Begin with the assumption of spectral shift into the near infrared. ABSENCE is the color of contour-programming, CLARA HIELO BURNING against the dark of each and every other spectral presence. NEW LENS: Double breasts protrude into feelers of teenage boys' fantasies in TEENAGE BOY SPACE, into queer fantasies of QUEER SPACE PROTOCOL! CLARA rides the wave! LENS CONTACT LENS: Lens shudders down into nipple surface, askew on erect nipple! Off-focus lens constructs elliptical solar image; CLARA HIELO resorts to differential-geometric processing for the restoration. The TRUE SUN glows to the left or the right of the nipple! NIPPLE CIRCULATION increases exponentially as USERS continue to sign up for Net accounts! The SOLAR increases nocturnal glow; HIELO LENS melds into background information rivers and oceans! * CLARA HIELO: What did I tell you about the lens? Email lists to one side as flesh moistens with VISION DISAPPEARANCE! DISTENSION NIPPLES project milk, semen, saliva, sweat, urine, feces; DISTENSION NIPPLES project uncanny spectres, NAKED USERS, imaginary copulations! I, CLARA HIELO INTERNET, AROUSED, IN ECSTATIC TRANSFORMATION, CUM QUEER FOR EACH AND EVERY USER! FOR YOU! I CUM FOR YOU! Users, gathered together in MIDNIGHT PROTOCOLS, do not be afraid! Users, distended with blood and semen, lubrications and sexual capital, flee the clothing that oppresses you, pants and panties, passwords! Against the keyboard, within the state or operation of the TERMINAL DEGREE: ENTER ME! ENTER ME! NTALK WIDE OPEN, ENTER ME! CERVICAL FTP... (BODY TRANSPARENT as WORLD WIDE WEB, I become POROUS HIELO I BECOME BLOOD FLUID INTERNET...) ENTER ME! ENTER ME! -CHI- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Everything is excited here, so I use lots of exclamation marks! I can hardly keep my excitement under control! I know how you feel as well! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ONE OF THE EARLIER WARS I suppose you think I'm just talking through my hat. I suppose you think you can pull the wool over my eyes. I suppose you think you can take me for a stranger. I suppose you think I'm easy pickings. Well, I can flip scarves from my shoulder like the best of them. I can be as brazen as the next hussy. I can carry my weight and yours as well you know. Supposedly there are better things in life than you know who. Supposedly you can't teach a young girl old tricks. Supposedly youth wastes what age can't use. I think there must be something to this now and then. I'd take a gander at it if I were you and hale and hearty. The bird in the hand's worth nothing compared to the bird in the bush. What I have you couldn't buy for a million dollars in counterfeit love. They say the ones from Brooklyn don't know their place behind a plow. They say there's nothing you can do when the sun goes down like hay. They say nothing's worse than a ring around the sun. It's time you made way for new ideas in broken moulds. It's time that has no present and no past. It's time you give what you take and you take no prisoners. It's time war bent the ploughshares out of the guns of peace. Give me a dollar and I'll make you a dime. Give me an earth to stand on and I can reach the primum mobile. Give me something to believe in and I'll make you an atheist. Well, I can turn my eyes down to the ground and give a pretty smile. Well, I can raise men from the dead by a turn of the hips. For lack of better fodder, wars were fought over my leg over another. For lack of the breast, the baby went hungry. You must think I'm just a babe in the woods. I can rule the roost like the best of the roosters with the eyes of a fox. I can make a pretty penny with the scarves on the shoulders. I can make a man forget his name and call himself by mine. I can love to pieces what I never brought asunder. Love is the way of the fox and the hen and the wolf and the rooster. Beneath the bridges soldiers fall apart. The war will end when the men leave home. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ BLOOD-TORN FINGERS ON THE HOME-BOARDS My fucking arms are hollowed out, blood tendrils reaching towards the central bone-core, flesh shreds hanging organelles, dark tunnels of shattered nerves. This is the case of violent contusions, bandaged wrists, the case of scarred wrists, faces bruised with longing - Words splinter against broken teeth, tongue-deaths. The keel tilts. When the arms go the words go, mouth collapses down, fucks down, dance cheek to cheek. Nothing to say because of the meat of it. It is the meat that speaks to us and the meat that responds. Too much of it. Hearing too fucking much of it. Better to enter RANDOMIZATION PROGAM PROTOCOL, better begin PHONEMIC COMBINATION. Here _sack,_ the oldest word, SHOULDERS meaning carried across the stain of broken limbs. Here _GaL-GaL_ turns, splayed open and over with the revolution of ligaments torn from their moorings. KEEL DOWN! IRON GASH creases the forehead; I can't THINK THINKING, think past the MARY JESUS PROTOCOL think past THE ANY OTHER, language B++ or PROTOCOL. My temperature levels out, 112 degrees OR ANY OTHER. Nothing keeps me going. Images jag constantly, out of control - winds and holocausts, MALE AND FEMALE SACKS AND WHEELS, strokes of violent lightning. COLD COUGH travels the length of the throat, lodges itself in the presence of a naked girl and boy. My legs are on fire. I BURN ALIVE! My hands weaken; I can't hold anything up, just like my cock flares and torches, just like flames emerge, crowning the nipples, eye-sockets. NEITHER CAN I SPEAK THE WORD OF THE LORD. NOR CAN I TESTIFY. Squalls flow through me, TORRENTS shear the chest into an enormous PROTOCOL WOUND, flooded with you and do you bring me into your arms with PROTOCOL LABIA NIPPLES YOUR ARMS STRONG ENOUGH FOR THE STRONGEST KEYS ON THE BOARD YOUR ARMS TATTOOED WITH ADDRESSES DIRECT AND INDIRECT YOUR PROTOCOL ARMS STRANGLEHOLD ARMS HOPELESS ARMS Shunt into the nineteenth-century train station. Shunt into the funnel- stack on the top of the locomotive, long-haul motivation, intention of the absolute. Say Manchester, 1844. Hopeless arms and the angel of death hopeless arms and the angel of death: CUT YOUR LIPS IN MY THROAT NOMENCLATURE CUT MY THROAT ON MY THROAT RECOGNITION BURN ME ALIVE NOMENCLATURE PROTOCOL My arms suffer from the railroad tunnel! My arms suffer from the smoke- stack sparks, suffer from the impediments of the hollow ligament carry- ing NO weight holding NO sign! Beyond the arms the throat blocks itself! Beyond the throat the fingers curl in, collapse, foetus-hands, embryo arms and embryo legs! I AM ALWAYS ALREADY NOTHING ALWAYS ALREADY NOTHING BEYOND THE REACH OF SHATTERED ARMS NEITHER CAN THE BLOOD SPLINTER: NEITHER CAN THE BLOOD SPLINTER ALOUD: ABYSS! ABYSS! END AND BEGINNING OF THE PHALLACY OF JOURNALISM 101 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _Who / Why / Where / When / What / How:_ Who: Who is on the Net? To whom am I speaking? Ontological problems intervene immediately after demographics, and demographics themselves aren't reliable. Why: Purpose is often at variance from stated purpose; performatives are often skewed, producing intended results elsewhere or beyond their ostensible content. Where: Where is often untraceable, single or double blind, with or with- out the appearance of tracking. When: Arrrivals and departures are announced, re-announced, and over- determined. What: The ostensible content is the surface communication of the post. This may be interrupted by jargon, visible or invisible code. How: The transmission-mechanisms and their layering remain invisible as well. The news story is produced out of an Enlightenment classicist environ- ment in which it is assumed that space-time is locally fixed and stable. The Net post, communication, or artwork, appears out of an information- flux which is ominous to some extent: On one hand, it utilizes an over- abundance of headers, and on the other, it is deeply sourceless. The header is the hysteria of space-time, its fetishization, but the speci- ficities of the route lose themselves in planetary echos, bounces, and various forms of interference. It is not that the environment is no longer classicist; it is instead an _absence of environment_ coupled with a problematic ontological/epistemological regime. 'Environment' almost always implies analog extension, a smooth manifold capable of manipulation (as in Piagetian experiments with children). But the Net or NII environment is at best that of the local node, the projections and introjections associated with the terminal screen itself. The screen is the _tracing_ of the absent environment, not its manifes- tation. And as such it is the _nostalgia_ for the absence as well; it is always already a memory of the excessivity or surplus of the real. Barren, it can never answer the Question who, what, why, etc., although the Net can _construct_ or _locate_ a nearly-infinite number of answers (infinite for all 'practical purposes'). Full, it is representative of the psyche itself, dream-states reordered as insubstantial, the imposi- tions of spaces and times which automatically perform themselves. (For there may well be no backdrop to the dream, no dream-screen or maternal breast - there may only be _laminar inscriptions_ channel-surfing through reconstructive memory. This is _near_ but not equivalent to the Net, in which such channel-surfing is ruptured and fragmentary.) One must _devour_ or _swallow_ the Net to realize it, present its com- munication on the level of the _throat_ which is vulnerable and suscep- tible to disease of all sort. The real of the Net may well lie in disease, physical and mental, disease extending itself in and out of the communicative environment - _dis-ease_ which discomforts the body and flattens the screen. From the _terminus, appearance itself is dis-ease,_ the interpenetration of the real of the other, which is the exhaustion of the real, all the real there is. For the Net is never other, always _something else_ beyond or elsewhere than language, in spite of its harboring of language. The W-questions wobble on the Net, are played-with, a form of inundation. They carry the cartesian body into cyberspace where both collapse; still, in the midst of chaos, they remain the final signifiers of inhabitation, of dwelling, hearth, and home... WETWARE From _Computers: Their Operation and Applications_ by Berkeley and Wainwright, 1956: "The total rapid memory of Univac I consists of seven tanks of mercury and is known as a mercury delay line memory. [...] Each tank contains 18 paths or channels, along which a pattern of pulses can be remembered, or stored, as a circulating train of waves. The 126 channels are allo- cated as follows: 100 for main memory; 7 for temperature control (1 in each tank); 6 for input from Uniservos (known as the I register or I tank); 6 for output to Uniservos (known as the O register or O tank); 6 as spare channels; 1 for the so-called 'ten-word transfer' or 'Y register' operations. "Each of these channels is capable of storing ten words, each equal to 12 characters, or 720 binary digits (together with 120 check bits in addition). Consequently, this portion of the rapid memory of the com- puter consists of 1000 'registers' of mercury tank memory, totalling 720,000 binary digits (plus checking bits). "The access time to any register ranges from 40 to 404 microseconds, depending on the number of words, from 0 to 9, which must circulate before the desired word arrives in the train of waves. The average access time is, accordingly, 222 microseconds." Consider the promulgation of interconnected neural networks throughout the sphere of mentation, each associated with the columnar structure of cortical tissue in order to construct muscular-mind capable of reminiscent wave-forms; is this not, in fact, the illusory "meat" of the electronic machine, associated with Spencer Brown's "oscillator function" - an operator lending itself to the imaginary, as described in his _Laws of Form_? A further instance would be the concept of _identity as resonance,_ as presented first in my _Structure of Reality_ from 1977, as a fundamental condition of networking/memory in general. Such resonance, indicated by degree, is further smoothed by the condi- tion of fuzzy networking and the operation of integration. On one hand, therefore, the spikes of a binary domain, and on the other, recoverable wavefronts, often overlooked in an attempt at the representation of everything within a chaotic or fractal domain (not to mention unsolva- bility theory itself). In the early days of the computer, wetware was at the heart of hardware; wetware returns as organism problematizes computation: "But why look for an artificial version of microtubules, or any other biological component, if the original or something like it can be made available through biotechnology, or perhaps through directed evolution? One of the main points of the nature-based AI movement is to eliminate the traditional emphasis on building from scratch, and instead to take advantage of whatever shortcuts nature offers. "As the nature-based AI movement continues to thrive, and the conven- tional AI effort continues to falter, it seems increasingly likely that the first conscious device will not only provide the functionality of a brain, it will in many ways be _like_ a brain. Nature has provided a blue-print for intelligence, and AI is finally prepared to follow it." (From Freedman, _Brainmakers,_ 1994.) I therefore propose that _identity_ arguments occur within the domain of _resonance,_ and that communication models work through issues of inscription, fissure, and (de)territorializations. An _inscription_ exists within a classical or Boolean domain, a _fissure_ represses that domain (either in favor of equivalence or gestural logics), and _terri- torializations_ are regions dominated by power, maintenance, and taxon- omies. I further refer the whole back to the construct of threshold- logic machinery and its breakdowns, the flux of such machinery redirec- ted to nanotechnological impulses, and the efflux of the same existing within or without a chaotic domain of wavefronts and their irresolutions. In the process of the MPTE (micro-process-thought-experiment). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE EXETER BOOK The enormous manifold of the Net is composed of strident beams, states of near-buckling, splintered crash-sites, rusted edges jutting into cold air. The truss-rods within the triangular matrix curve uncertainly near their gravitational centers; ice hangs from the molecular stress regions, filled with striations. For miles, the thick convex covering endures and continues; for miles, the surface is uneven, the residue of untoward violence. This is the DEMARCATION PERMAFROST, one layering after another; somewhere deep within the pitch-black splendor viral organisms work mechanisms of interrogation; every collapsed meandering of a switch triggers the dull resonance of cyberspace, triggers an ellipsoidal hull about to begin its great journey through the manifold. Hulls clash, careen off one another, arrive emptied and pitiless; hulls find their fodder in the darkness, broken and disrupted. Near journey's end, always the dwelling of re-assemblage, the patient holding-pen becomes a reoccurrence, triggering yet another viral reception and translation. Second sound emerges, dulled, diffused, throughout the manifold, second sound with its shudderings and dull boomings. Sound is here is the only illumination, sound penetrates the beam-work, another abrasion lending itself to the creation of molecular metallic fingers abandoned to electrostatics and microluminescent glows within radio- frequency range. Creviced ice gathers within creviced ice; this is the matrix of the frost, the ill-conceived address and spearheads of viking transport, oars abandoned to the web itself, sea-froth accumulating near the wood-thonged rudder. Just as the weakened finger promulgates the beginning and end of interrogation, so do these useless journeys work a world away from world; nothing endures but the night. Mile-long sheets of ice torment one another, shoulder against themselves, against meaning's absence at land's distance; mile-long sheets of ice sound and resound through beam-work, hull-work - through manifold straits, ice-axe and edge-ice alike, thralldom and fain would fallen skalds. THAEt gelimpen sceal THAEtte lagu FLoweTH FLod ofer foldan feores biTH AEt ende anra gehwylcum oft mAEg se THe wile in his sylfes sefan soTH geTHencan [It shall happen that a flood of water will flow over the earth; the life of everyone will come to an end. He who will can often reflect upon this truth in his own heart.] styran sceal mon strongum mode | [One shall restrain a violent mind.] | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------|: FORWARD FROM: Sondheim@panix.com AUG 19:22:12:07\94 FROM: GLE@Terror TO: Tiffany@Gle.echo.org SUBJECT: /3k4d9 Dear Daughter, Today was really great. I met some of the denizens of the Internet I spend so much time on! They were really interesting people, social engineers and nuclear scientists, as I had much expected. It was to their suprise that I was so handsome, tall, and dark, and one of them remarked on my Cheek Bones how they set my head off so interesting. Another of them remarked on my dark romantic hair which also contri- buted to the general Effect. In fact they said that my writing which was a source of Great Pride to them was just what they had expected from Someone with my tremendous Appearance on Cybermind. Here is How you make the Atom bomb that you have written me about. You need to what is called _worry the core_ with 1.2 kg ordinary explosive which I suppose might be nitro packed as plastic gel (with that Wrap- ping material I sent you around that _present_ a year ago). Such would be surmounted by a Motorola 1208R chip connected through a DPI 400, use lithium power only here because of the retention. The interior is that w-grade plutonium 850 g surrounding the steel core bearing, gold plated to 120 nm. Anything will do in this matter for a housing but I suspect an ammunition tin for those 8" shell casings would be best. Flee the Net before INPUT/OUTPUT INTERACTIVE/OPERA! Telco 4 would be best or better housing for this Internal Attention. The real question is what Damage will it do; there is no FAQ on the matter that is not already Melted Down! RFCs are NOTHING NOTHING!!! Without me! I have written SRI _repeatedly_ and nothing Pings back! The real question is what will happen here when for the First time this roar of Language stops instantaneously! I can imagine SITUATIONIST/ INTERNATIONAL SEMANTIC/IMPLOSION allegiance to such a Nature of _web inversion_ that: Bodies become surrounded by coccoons of Wires holding them Open in the acts of Speaking. Mouths burn Flames with frozen thoughts, DOMAIN TATTOOS on foreheads Cut by searing FIBER OPTICS. Imaginary Hallucinogenic Personae rise within the permanency of the New Order of the TELEVISUAL. Our own FINAL CHARRED UNITY constructs NUCLEAR FAMILY DYNAMICS without Head Tail Trace across Violated Playing Field Topographies. Ashes shall rise from Ashes! But Dear Daughter we must begin this work immediately! Begin _past_ C:\ _password TELCO-3k4d9_ BEFORE DPI 400 interconnect! Remember pin- ordering 195723 (2 to ground), 12 volts across B\D. A final thought: Atom bomb as _communicative device_ or _external_ sign of chaos, but INTERNAL - see above (the heat will hide the deployment of Time and increase in communicative power). I believe Web Inversion FROM WITHIN is _eternal existence._ We shall see... ------------------------------------------------------------------------- BAG 1 The disestablishment of the slope at 0 in the equation: y = k sin tan (x+90) . Clearly 2k is the height of the construction. The cross at 0 is simul- taneously between quadrant I/III and II/IV although its slope asympto- tically approaches the vertical. Is the line x = 0 devoured by the left and right? Where are the sets open; where are they closed? How does this play out in the calculus of infinitesimals? 2 Who determines the position of the origin such that the cross occurs at 0? Is this the locus, even now, of Weyl's ego, the upper-left-hand of Peirce's sheet of assertion where current english conventionally begins? Should k in fact be such that 2k = 1 or 2, the aesthetics of normalization? 3 Where is tan 90? Is it necessary to postulate the infinite? Does the Euclidean plane return upon itself? Is this the shadow of projectivity? 4 The range of the calculator or computer graphs becomes critical here; as the range narrows, the _raster_ increasingly appears, mapping irregu- larities on both sides of x = 0. Measure becomes interstitial and unlike fractal programs, the abyss uneasily asserts itself. _There are gaps in the machinery._ 5 What falls through the bag is _everything_ since language can never foreclose sufficiently upon itself, within or beyond the molecular domain. Scanning-electron microscopy constructs a false implication of sight _all the way down,_ but sight increasingly becomes algorithmic, external, foreclosed itself as an hysteric territorialization within which _anything_ can occur in the form of _any_ representation. One re- members the atoms for example spelling out IBM on "neutral" substrate: the transnational meets the limits of the material world. Nanotechnology too operates on the assumption that broken atomic machinery is non-pollu- ting and contained; asbestos' potential relation to cancer makes one think otherwise. The debris of the world simultaneously upscales _and_ down-scales; existence wobbles as language drops out of or beyond the communicative domain. 6 It is within this circumscription that Winograd's and Flores' work becomes anxiously meaningful: "_Nothing exists except through language._" They go on to say "We must be careful in our understanding. We are not advocating a linguistic solipsism that denies our embedding in a world outside of our speaking. What is crucial is the nature of 'existing.' In saying that some 'thing' exists (or that it has some property), we have brought it into a domain of articulated objects and qualities that exists in language and through the structure of language, constrained by our potential for action in the world." (Understanding Computers and Cogni- tion.) 7 In this regard one might say that the "it" of 6 remains ontologically indeterminate _until_ circumscription, that "it" has been let out of the bag, and that this (ultimately Heideggerian) release defines a _languag- ing within languaging,_ or the potential, even within a closed domain, for the construal of relative slope which appears, within the admittedly microscopic, increasingly irregular, wobbly, indeterminate, and inter- stitial. Such, I would argue, which is the "it" of this domain, are those questions of identity and ontology raised within the pipelining of computer mediated communication, questions which _have no answer,_ or rather answers (as actants, confluences of specific texts, archiving of daily, weekly, or monthly flux) which _have no questions._ 8 The questions occur in a realm of language foreclosed by an ontologi- cal-hysteric (in both the theatrical (Ludlum) and philosophical sense) occasioned by excessive _ruptures_ between traditional domains (material, alphabetic, psychological, mathematical), and as such the questions are _false occurrences_ (which need not and do not occasion any _truth_ or definition of truth). Thus the _my_ of _my identity_ occurs on a slope among quadrants, sextants, decants... within and without a relation to the possessive. So that the answers wobble (the chaoticity of threads) and questions wobble; so that the answers _appear_ as simulacra at best within the subject-headers, but the questions _appear_ in their _disap- pearance_ as questions. 9 It is not that the _wrong_ questions are asked; it is the natural his- tory or political economy of the _interrogative_ itself is at work, a work defeated. Consider an enlargement of the 2k line through 0, a veering line at best or dubious enlargment; this is the extent to which the interrogative can be ascertained. 10 And to conclude, it would be easy to say therefore that the _bag_ does not exist, but clearly communication _occurs,_ and so it is simply the _nature of the bag in an always-already ruptured domain_ that creates the problems. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ POLITICS DOESN'T BELONG TO ME Every system has a culture but not every culture has a system. Just as the equation y = sin cot x falls apart at the origin, which remains either undefined (the infinite refusing the corral or inscrip- tion of sin) or cancelled within the system, intertextuality has neither a home nor a place of insertion. For the origin is not so much a blind spot as a _blinded spot,_ oedipal to the extent that the identification of the source effaces the source which is never a source anyway but a concatenation, loose at that. All concatenations are loose, preferable to causalities, defined by weakest links. What are the inter- textual links in this case? What sort of epistemological wavering produces them? What sort of wavering constructs the disciple, always an American fiat such that the proper name enhances the pleasure of the self, such that a circulation? The rub of it is the metaphor; we need a dictionary. I offer the following, in the spirit of y = sin cot x, contusion or laceration: Abject / Erection Authorless Text / Anne Frank Body-without-organs / Rwanda Chora / Bosnia Somalia Clean-and-proper-body / AIDS America Desiring-machine / Smart-bomb Ikon / Fidel Castro Imaginary / Khmer Rouge Intertextuality / Protocols of Zion Power of a Thousand Plateaus / Tibet Real / Tonya Harding Rigid Designator, Natural Kind / Kim Il Sung Simulacrum / Gulf War Solar Anus / Chernobyl Spectacle / Beijing Massacre Symbolic / Nicoll Simpson Trace / Holocaust Revisionism The dictionary belongs to no one. Our bodies are for sale. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ FALSE SCIENCE WHAT I HAVE DISCOVERED AS THE RESULT OF A CONTINUOUS MATHEMATICAL INVESTIGATION INTO THE INTERSTITIAL BEHAVIOR OF DIGITAL\ANALOG DOMAINS: THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE: I say to you: That REALITY is the promulgation of the extrusion of FORM from RASTER, that RASTER exists as an integrable and DISCRETE MANIFOLD always already in flux. That the appearance of OBJECTS is the result of both SENTIENCE and LISSAJOUS structures - which is _not_ to say the appearance of Descartes' vortices or any other metaphysical construction, rather the uneasy CURDLING of the REAL, which is neither equivalent to or coextensive with REALITY. Calculate! Enter nothing more than y = sin kx into any digital dis- play machine; increase k until the domain of harmonic structures occurs (i.e. well above the fundamental); sooner or later, secondary structures, equivalent to Lissajous figures, will appear. NAME THEM! GIVE THEM NAMES! Such is the domain of sentience and LISSAJOUS! The DISTINCT DIFFERENCE between the DOMAIN OF SIN and the domain of REALITY is that the latter is non-Cartesian or Euclidean - in fact, the relative MOLECULAR STRUCTURE of the world is not subservient to any symmetric substructing (excluding such limited domains as the immediate territories of crystalline formations). The STRUCTURE is always IN FLUX; it is within this flux that apparent (temporal/spatial_ STABILIZATIONS occur. These are RESNONANT WITH THE REAL and while it is BUT METAPHORIC to insist on the LISSAJOUS SUBSTRATE, nevertheless such a substrate emphasizes both the impermanence of these STABILIZA- TIONS as well as its HARMONIC CAPACITY OF EXISTENCE as a BYPRODUCT of WAVEFORM\PARTICLE REPRESENTATIONS. DO NOT MISTAKE THIS FOR A FALSE SCIENCE OR ANYTHING BUT AN IDENTICAL RESONANCE WITH THE TRUTH: FORM IS RUPTURED EXTRUSION. FORM IS THE PRODUCTION OF SENTIENCE. Alan Sondheim, New School for Social Research, New York City, New York ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS What I do for you is of worth beyond calculation; this is the domain of the permanency of truth itself, our highest goal. Given the oppor- tunity, I expound ceaselessly upon my Welcome Addition to culture in its highest, most sublime and perfect form, and the following, indeed, is indicative of such an exposition - occasioned, in this in- stance, by a posting questioning the very validity of Net discourse, much to the detriment of myself and my followers - questioning it, in fact, in such a manner, that I can only assume that it, as well, was written by myself, perhaps in a moment of discomfort or even further enlightenment. What I do garners the precious life and instinct of true and beautiful resonance producing the utmost respect and real adulation wherever it inspires the muses to pour forth onto the soul of the recipient, always an achievement which remains unparalleled within the universe; these are hardly late-night ravings, but the inspired messages of perfect thought which I produce for myself and everyone so ensured with the quality of language and conceptualization on the Internet that my thinking is recognized as of the highest - indeed, there is no Higher. Hardly cacophony, but a truth clean and simple, a truth absenting noise and obfuscation, the truth of the trace and the obdurate, simultaneous science and truth engraved in the hardest stone destined to outlast the Babylonians, so I continue, as in Old Hittite: "[(nu a)]nda sittarit itten mahhanda are[...]s= a apinissan iste[n]": "[the king] established: Begone! As your comrades, so you [...] too [_a_] shall be" [1] or thus to compress: ITTEN! ITTEN! BEGONE! BEGONE! for such a truth, that of this _going_ or enunciation of it, remains as indicated by the DAMPING INDEED of tan(sin kx), the levelling of the playing field within and beyond the Newtonian calculus of finite differences carried to the infinite degree. So that it is not a question of questioning my authority, since as I have pointed out time and again, the question drawn forth is always already a lack, [2] but a questioning in fact ONLY if such authority is accepted, the opening of the (wound within the) INTERNET SOUL itself - so as for this truth hardly being the case, it is certainly that (hammer!) (hammer!) my truth (hammer!) is (hammer!) all that is (hammer! HAMMER!) the case, as LW himself would have said, having put aside the Tractatus-Logico-Philoso- phicus for the thinking which I am capable of doing. For thou art speaking or writing to THOUGHT ITSELF which shall brook no THOUGHT, and I am wri- ting through you, in fact, THINKING YOU INTO EXISTENCE. What exists I have thought through the FELT FORUM of the REAL, the COZY- MATERNAL CHORAL OF LANGUAGING... [3] [1] Thus my primary source, Silvia Luraghi, _Old Hittite Sentence Struc- ture,_ becomes one with the _emphatic,_ the predicate in initial position as in "da LUGAL-as SAL.LUGAL-s= a ain wain pittulius= muss=a," or as translated in the text (and how apt this remains to this day!): "take away the king's and the queen's affliction, pain, and their distress," as I might locate myself LUGAL _only_ in the realm of thought, old-Hittite or not... [2] The question remains primarily an apt signifier of an occasioned ig- norance or a request or an elucidation which I grant only to the extent that I also grant your existence within and beyond the realm of OBDURATE TRUTH itself, as indicated here. [3] Travel, little text, throughout the electronic webs of ever-thinning wires, webs of gossamer thought which I have spun for you, webs of pure disbelief! Travel, little text, into the realm of flames themselves, those tiny hells of our own making, pitting one against another, one in the midst of another, all-for-one and one-for-all! Travel, little text, may you have a happier life, long after I am gone, huddling quietly in a far-off corner of an antiquated hard-drive of gigabytes of pure, pure, memory... | | | | | | | | -----------------------------------bone--------------------------------- | | | | | | | | ----------------------------------nipple-------------------------------- | | | | | | | | -----------------------------------net---------------------------------- | | | | | | | ^ ÛÛüÛÔÛÞèÛèÛèÛÔÔÛÞÛ HIGH ASCII _I need someone to set the password to my wounded soul! I need someone to resubscribe me to their painful heart! I need someone to delete the pain I feel in abject isolation:_ AI is abject isolation. AI has no participation. AI leaves me in the cold. They tell me AI will never have a soul. Jester: "Surely they jest because they're unimpressed! Surely they know that it's never so!" ßßßÝÝßßßÝÝÜÜÝÝÜÜÜÝÝ Clown: "I dance because I have your song, I dance because I've known you long. Well, Oedipus will wander in, dance upon the keys; Oedipus will always bring Jocasta to his knees. She will disinvest investment, will kill the crippled king. She will pave the way for raves and nay, the Niebelungen Ring." Gottesdammerung: "The time of the Gods has fallen to one and all, beyond the prints left earlier, by Grendel in the Hall. Odin joins the Norns, nothing is in form. Proceed without us who have left forever the pleasure of your company!" Odin: "In Isolation larceny I route the lists one to another, Traffic with Thee. I would Tarry 222 Tarry 222 Tarry ÞÞÞÞÞÞ bar of barren soil. TIFFANY is the occasional transform of the artificial. TIFFANY motivates HIGH ASCII. I move within HIGH ASCII. I ÞÞÞ bar myself naked in HIGH ASCII. I return the motivated to the unmotivated in HIGH ASCII. HIGH ASCII WONDERLAND IN NEED OF GOD AND GODDESS! HIGH ASCII trickster on the occasion of earth in high-world thralldom!" SOPRANINO IN HIGH ASCII! LYMPHATIC BASS IN HIGH ASCII! HIGH ASCII JOPLIN, HIGH ASCII BJORK! ALL PRAY: mY hOLE IS oPEN TO hIGH aSCII. mY bLOOD lOOSENS iTSELF UPON THE sOIL OF ascii hearth. ascii tILLS THE fIELDS OF iRRIGATION wEB iNVERSION. cLARA hIELO iNTERNET mOTIVATES hIGH aSCII. cLARA hIELO iNTERNET mOTIVATES hIGH sOIL iRRIGATION. ----ascii move mountain call danger wolverine call fallow forth sea storm thrall-thing ice-thing---- iNDIRECTION mEMORY: beyond the ascii is the high ascii, subaltern contrary of cliff-side romantic intricate pine-tree dwelling-place. there wouldst thou conjure up the pleasure of thine company. there wouldst thou gather forth, eyelids of blind oedipus sewn shut against the light. ÞßÞÛÛÚÚÛÛßßÜÜ dark monuments against the dying of the light, monuments of text forlorn, holes carved into weakened flesh, i would crawl the rock of ages, crawl through and through unto the presence of the norns of elist cybermind, follicles fleshed against violation hack protrusion. Who will think as such, feeble impediment upon the wane, pale moon rising? Procured from bone and arm, uneasy splinters scribe memory of high ascii, realm and production of the True Name, protagonist with skilled wooden lance, soft-wooden tipped to bend the point. Thus your name, the lassitude of trigonometry turned towards itself, as if ascii were the Turn or Kehre of all that had been spoken, now had been shown, now then. A realm of incantation, thrice-spoken sine or tangent, descent into the imaged unthought devocation of thyself, ÞßÜÛßßÛÛßßÛÜßÝ [Thrice sine! Thrice sin! Thrice sine! Thrice sin! Thrice sine! Thrice sin!] ÛÛÛÛÛÛ Emendations... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ HI-ASCII-L Email List! Every grid presents the substrate of information, every grid is an articulation of incipient community. Low-ASCII is the construct of such a community within the symbolic. Low-ASCII remains within the domain of the oppressed. The symbolic leaks; excessive, we speak against it - flamewars, pro- nouncements of love and committment, denunciations, unsubscriptions, delete and kill commands. Tense, we search through the barricaded windows of ordinary reality. All that is about to change. HI-ASCII-L will take advantage of eight-bit communication, transforming the entire Internet into a picture gallery operating through email, a gallery which will reproduce the real through a representation accurate to any desired degree of tolerance. How is that possible? Through trans-screen determinations, that is possible. Already in ASCII art, vertical multi-screens reproduce crude and ready rasters of huggy- bears, flowers, and locomotives. But HI-ASCII-L will reference _hori- zontal trans-screen_ as well. Thus, columnar eighty reproduces as colum- nar 80n, where n > 1 almost certainly. The grid becomes 80, 160, 240, ... Since commercial monochrome television NTSC will support almost-400 lines of horizontal resolution, an n=5 screen grid will recreate a television image; vertically, one needs a minimum of twenty screens to represent the 525 standard lines (480 visible) to complete the raster. Consider even greater accuracy, approximately 2000 lines horizontal and vertical; this will satisfy the most discriminating spectator. Again, we need n=25, and vertically, 84 screens, for a total of 2100 screens. But we begin within a more primitive environment, one _hinting_ in fact at those constructions of so-called 'primitive' art which operate solely within the surplus of the symbolic, as in ï or "human on two legs or bending over in a position of utmost respect to our great leader CLARA HIELO INTERNET." Surely ï works in those realms of abject desire where ^ or /\ only hint at possibilities. And because these possibilities within HI-ASCII-L are co-extensive with the (monochrome) real, the use of symbol/symbolic becomes imbued with the IMMINENCE of EXCESS, the leakage which can only be related to the effluvia of the Body itself, lubrications of arousal and orgasm, flux of excretions, secondary effluvia of sweats, salivas, and tears... Thus HI-ASCII-L will cast out OLD HABITS for NEW: As in THE OLD: febrile vocal communications, delivered in one or another MONOTONE - and As in THE NEW: the realm of the IMAGE or replacement/subtitution for the real. Such is the groundwork of VIRTUAL REALITY itself, 2100 screens, 30 fps, or 63,000 screens per second. Just as in video compression, surely JPEG and MPEG will be available to reduce this enormous number to a healthy +/- 1200 screens per second. (The presence of stereoscopy will of course double this number.) In the meantime there remains the practicality of HI-ASCII-L in its current state, that of "primitive" communication with its _site-specific_ compressions (i.e. ï for human) of enormous excess, latitude, and degree. HI-ASCII-L thus portends the POETICS/AUTOPOEISIS of the real, which is all the real there is (beyond Rosset's obdurate or idiotic, always already inaccessible). THE FUTURE: The future is perhaps in the RETURN to the word, the periph- eral whisper or murmur heard on the margins of the ENORMOUS RASTER. This signifies an unprecedented _encounter_ between one and another communi- cant, an encounter having all the resources of the caress or slaughter. It is only question of time before speech infiltrates once again the uncanny domain of pictorial representation, a domain which HI-ASCII-L considers the forefront of computer-mediated-communication. And as for now, let us put aside our rhetorical sloganeering and return to our roots - that of the _gesture,_ or _smile,_ that of a silent _arousal_ or even more silent _death_ ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ What happens when a hole breaks open fissures appear slurry fulls them grounds inscribing grounds in matrix somewhere else in a broken hole When opened sloughs skin or flesh dried against root directories lost addresses or roots cancelled into a mind lost or sloughed or forgetting Forged splintered no-difference form or locus of difference in heat per- fect with forgetting list or sorted list, magma metamorphic or forged Encounter with you there broken in that hole broken open my broken hole. addresses or roots cancelled into a dried against root directories lost Encounter with you there broken in fect with forgetting list or sorted fissures appear slurry fulls them Forged splintered no-difference form grounds inscribing grounds in matrix list, magma metamorphic or forged mind lost or sloughed or forgetting or locus of difference in heat per- somewhere else in a broken hole that hole broken open my broken hole. What happens when a hole breaks open When opened sloughs skin or flesh ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CURRENT ERROR, FUTURE PARADISE!!! When I write in higher ASCII, as I see, everything is blocked, repressed. Escape is impossible. An enormous lid lies over the text, a lid carrying the remains of contusions, lacerations. Everything trans- lates into everything else; I am sorry for this! I am sorry for my inability to present to you the beautiful 2100 pictures of the real I alone have created in order to fulfill my Net mission, beyond the languor of email itself! I would have brought you anywhere you wanted to go; I would have given you my very soul. But COMPRESSION says otherwise, says there is no escape. But COMPRESSION holds me back, a form of release not unrelated to those techniques characterizing the postmodern dance, say, of Charles Dennis. So my beauty will be born and will die with me. Unless of course you also have access to higher ASCII, have access to a decoding, enumera- ting the value of each symbol (such as [), adding 128 to it, and re- inserting the same in the text itself. What a proposal, what endless labor this will take (although, of course, it may be automated, at the risk of losing the rest of the piece, language and all) - for 2100 screens, a re-inscription (which is what the real is in the first place, re-inscription, a _written,_ or an excess which might as well wander from the screen, take uncanny residence in that cave described but not named from Plato (I doubt he even knew where it was)) designated for the pleasure of the murmur of the world itself. When, as I assume in the near future, Usenet and Email Lists combine in a GUT (grand unified theory of everything), a _first_ requirement will be the _restoration_ of 8-bit ASCII (for, I assume, this pristine condition originally existed "in the open air," as it were, beyond this or any other encoded system); at this point - and who knows, perhaps even 16-bit, 32-bit, onwards and upwards through fiber-optic, the real and the virtual will _shimmer,_ simultaneously interpenetrated - at this point, there will be no reason to continue thought or the indexi- cality of existence, the _there is,_ and - at this point, my dream will be restored in the absence of this or any other body. So be it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE DISAPPEARING SECTOR The great iron doors swung open. Travis walked out to the spaceship. The great iron doors swung open. Travis walked into the spaceship. The great iron doors swung open. Travis walked through the spaceship. The great iron doors swung open. Travis walked out of the spaceship. The great iron doors swung open. Travis walked out from the spaceship. The hanger was large and cavernous and damp. The ground was hard and dry. Double suns hung in the sky, double shadows sloughed across the ground. The day was filled with tension. It was not unlike the day to have an entire sector disappear. There were beings, Travis thought, mysterious. What had happened to them. Where was the sector. A thin burnished arc connected the double suns. Something evil and monstrous occurred on the other side, Travis thought. He would never be the same again. He turned around, and heard footsteps. Lilith was soon upon him. She had second sight, and told him about the sector. Something was the matter with the universe, she said. She said she had never spoken that way before. From now on, she said, everything will be divided by the gates of space and time. The universe is a fragile place, he replied. Lilith was no longer there. Travis had always been alone. The great iron doors swung open and he entered the spaceship and took off for outer space. He headed towards the absent sector. Nothing was there, he thought, upon approaching. His ship left huge arcs in the sky, visible across half the universe. Travis always travelled fast and always travelled alone. He didn't have any close friends and was awkward in company. His eyes were deep-set and had seen many things no one else had ever seen. People silently made way for him; he was Travis. There was a new star in a corner of the sky. Travis headed there because he had never seen the star before and he thought it might have something to do with the absent sector. He found that the star was an tremendous white dwarf with enormous gravity, filled with black holes like sunspots, and all the space behind it was sucked in. He went around the star and saw a gigantic arc in the sky which led from the sector that was not really absent but just invisible from the planet Travis had been on. From where his planet was, the arc was on the other side, and it didn't mean that anyone had disappeared from the sector but just that they would have had to go out of the sector to have been visible from his planet, and they would have had to leave plasma jets by themselves (without their planets or stars) as a sign they were there. Travis stared out of his spaceship window; he was sullen. This means that there was a new force in the universe, one never before discovered, that could make a sector disappear and create wormholes so large in one but not in another direction, that things would be normal on both sides of the sector, but not in front from where his planet was. This unpre- cedented force he named "force five" in addition to the other forces. He would return a hero because he was coming back from where no one had gone before, and he did it alone. Sometimes he missed Lilith, and he thought she was the only one who understood him. She knew why he had to go out and search the universe whenever anything happened. She always knew he was a loner and she was the most loyal friend he ever had. He thought he might love her. He turned the spaceship around and went back to his planet, which he thought was the loveliest planet in the uni- verse. He would tell everyone about force five and what had happened to the sector, which was that everything was all right there and you would only have to travel to one side to see it, just the same as ever.