Message-ID: <200004161607.MAA17493@bbs.thing.net>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
Subject: <nettime> crumbling slate / silence
Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2000 11:39:36 -0400 (EDT)
- crumbling slate of silent worlds the blank world, the slate, there i will draw one or another, constancy:words are transitional objects between silence and silence; between one silence and another, disturbances on the periphery, as-if:juncture of stars-neutralization, intention, huddled, maintained, in erasable memory, taut like lines are, these are the rooms we have left, written and lost, written and lost:nothing:nothing does juncture of stars-neutralization, intention, huddled, maintained, in erasable memory, taut like lines are, these are the rooms we have left, written and lost, written and lost turn ours, the blank world, the slate, there i will draw one, or another, constancy, to you, azure, of shorter evenings? and there between silence and silence, there the rooms we have left, there, the blank world, the slate, there, erasable memory, all such memory, written and lost, words hungered, lost, nothing:nothing:nothing - Thematics I write in a relative vacuum, almost no feedback; so it comes about I lose track of thematics, corrections; so I wander over unforgiving territory, ignorant; today I look back at double files, the current and the last, looking across death, among other processes transparent to the world. For it was during this period, after six months, that my mother died; this is recorded, across the files, an extended meditation on death, which has always encompassed me. What is there elsewhere in these files? Transparency, invisibility, the slight, weakness, everywhere, accounting for our presence in absence, and in fact an inversion of death and life: for it may be that we already are of the death, descended from the living replete in dark matter, a far more ethical world. "Texts on bagkeys, relation of protolanguage and performativity of the body to keystroking - end users, the three lamps, lake texts below, cancer texts etc." say my reminders - bagkeys being a key capture program, recor- ding keystrokes - in other words, the incessant movement of the fingers across the keyboard. Somehow this references another hysteria of the vir- tual-real - creating a mathematics of Press, Release, Move, Hold, leading to a phenomenology of contiguity. It's as if the text were primarily a coding or decoding of bodily movement, not an autonomous production or computational emission. What can we do with this? We can look at proto- language or pidgens, we can find our way clumsy in the world, the enmeshed and performing body, the body in movement, breathing through the text. There there are the texts of the lake and the light spilling, meandering - waters and lights, the body suspended in the midst of the former, opening up to the latter. The insertion moves back and forth from screen and key and computer to water and light, but it is the same dispersing of selving at work in the death texts, in virtual existence, in media emissions. There are also the texts of the rectification of names, thinking again through issues of designation and harmonies, names disappearing as quickly as any other worlds. And a long text on the phenomenology of the projects I designed for the Trace virtual-writer-in-residence position, projects which were organized around backbone pages, writing/scrawling, disappear- ances. All of this reflects a position of waning articulations, translucent structures which may or may not present themselves. The phenomenology in- sists as well on its lack of positionality, on its self-effacement, on its spew or flow - such are its grounds. Again I return to thinking through contiguity, the ephemera of touch, of passing-by. I write the theory of the three lamps, of open circuitry, batteries using the universe as broken linkage; I write of kludges in the world, things coming together primarily as bricolage, making-do, held together by lines of code going nowhere, inflated, almost correct, reporting errors at best to /dev/null. And I write the theory of the end-user, oblivious to machin- ery and undercurrents, and the philosophy of cancer and the stereotypic- ality of death, and the stories of death, the meaning and meaninglessness of stories. I write about my mother's death and cancer as dispersion and online com- munities as dispersions, no longer organized around particular applica- tions or sites, but constituted (as the very first probably were) by loose associations and a kind of mobility - one seeing, for example, old friends appearing in all sorts of places. I return endlessly to the binding of names, to those names that should participate in creation, but die stillborn, as if there were something to learn from empathetic magic: every file leaves itself space unfathomed, between one and another domain; it's here that wings, terror terrified holds to the semblance of the real I write as well about phoric meaning, meaning carried on the back, holding oneself as if against death, and I write up against the wall of death, as if it were transparent, and I return to transparency and meaning lost and not regain, a continuous contemplation of death: i'm tired of making meaning, i'm tired of meaning and making meaning, tired of all of this, of carrying the necessity of language, and as well: 1 i have not experienced death; death is not an experience. THIS IS A TEXT 2 FOR A MASSACRE. for to one, then the other. THIS IS NOT A TEXT. There are gaps, there is a funeral, a period of mourning after a death, there is Nikuko returning. Mixed, technology: A discussion of the rack- over viewfinder, the implied doubling of vision and the displacement of time in favor of the singularity of space, an inversion of our binding to temporality and its singularity. So philosophy appears even in this rela- tion, just as the phenomenology of contiguity appears at first in terms of an analysis of the stylus-pen used with hand-held computer touch- screens. Everything reduces to a motivation of primary constituents - space, time, motion, stillness, touch, release. And as usual, all such constituents are seen, first, as constituted, granted meaning by the human articulation of semantic domains, and second, as interpenetrated, proble- matized by the real (as well as careful analysis). A philosophy of characteristic forms, drawn from thinking about Boas, is hinted at; such forms fall between structuralism and post-structuralism, are represented by fuzzy logics in every direction, and indicate as well a wavering position between real and virtual, constituted and deployed. More return to ourselves as ghosts invisible, writing within and without the floating world, dark matter and the thickness of the real always beyond our grasp; we are on the verge of discovering the real, finding ourselves always already displaced from it; culture told us so. A text emphasizes the "shimmering ontologies of transparency": | dream / real / constituted virtual / the gnawing of dark matter | - symbolic - imaginary - idiocy of the real (practico-inert) | imaginary / as if | imaginary as displacement takes hold, as a form of suturing occurs, and I am brought back from one realm to another, all within the same. Philosophy mingles with the therapeutic; I find solace in certain positions I, perhaps, wish to find - these also appearing, as if natural, from one or another source located in the murky articulation of unbounded thought. Finally there is an analysis, once again, of the nature of parable, to which I ascribe these texts, and a final: and there between silence and silence, there the rooms we have left, there, the blank world, the slate, there, erasable memory, all such memory, written and lost, words hungered, lost, nothing:nothing:nothing Such is the process which continues through my work, through my avatars, through Jennifer, Julu, Nikuko, and the rest, through the programming, through the conferencing and discussions - a process which is singular insofar as it is based on constitution upon constitution, problematic upon problematic, and interpenetrations, fuzzy phenomena, exculpations, the breathing of a body reciting, praying, creating, telling - such a body of love or death, such a written body, such a body writing. - The Passage (lit. op. cit. 'natural artifact,' Bridging Worlds) She would come to me in the garden (lit. she rounded her feelings, op. cit. 'nature'), asking as if she were pursuant to flower unfolding (lit. asking because she liked the spring), would the bamboo present itself circumstantially to both of us, entwined, as if we were real (lit. there are stemmed plants, op. cit. 'cultural artifact,' growing wild in such shadows so that our shadows are knotted and bound by their untoward growth). Every evening (lit. op. cit. 'nature,' of the death of the sun, she would weep constantly, praying for its return as the darkness closed in upon her), we would spend many hours (lit. op. cit. 'natural artifact,' deaths of amphibia, lingering note of the flute) together; (lit. ;'',) thus did skeins contribute to the cascading waters enmeshing of what might have been planktonic follies, caught alive, drowned in pure air (lit. and so our lives passed uneventfully, full of love and happiness). (lit. op. cit. ::./) _ The Vapid Ju16lu% date Ju17lu% Sat Apr 15 17:23:29 EDT 2000 _ cit. ::./) have been planktonic follies, caught alive, drowned in pure air (lit. and so our lives passed uneventfully, full of love and happiness). (lit. op. thus did skeins contribute to the cascading waters enmeshing of what might Sat Apr 15 17:24:34 EDT 2000 How did it come to this, words cascaded, in disarray, memory of older orders lost and drowned with them, words poised in slow and circling waves between surface and bottom, sludged and slurried lay- ers, all in the space of a night, dull morning, gloomy afternoon? Time hurries without us, works its slow unravelings; letters lose their violent hold on meaning. Remember that, meaning is always caught alive or not at all, the monstrosity of noise, shrill echoes blanking out the remnants of the world around us. Just as I write these words, they begin their incessant decay; already I picture transpositions, occlusions, vapors, the vapid... ___ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net