Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.40.0111280238420.12150-100000@panix2.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: CYBERMIND@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
Subject: (essay on sex.mywork for an offline magazine.)
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 02:38:55 -0500
(essay on sex.mywork for an offline magazine.) k14% sex.mywork k16% sex ksh: sex: not found k17% i'm not saying that sex is a foundation, originary impulse; only that it retro-projects into the fantasm of an originary state. sex is neither an irruption or disturbance within enlightenment contractuality - nor is it intimate with violence, with pleasure, with desire. in spite of aphanisis, its domain engorges, its symbols topple, it topples symbols. it pervades appearance as perception peels layer after layer of clothing, culture, speech, away from bodies turning supine. it curls around the image. it filters through programs and protocols. our names are lost; we are always among the missing. the greater our passions, our arousals, the less our signifiers remain; we flow like wax into you, taking your impressions. it's politics. it transforms into the rhetoric of war and the strategy of war. it's a game of substitutions. this is a window of displacements. content curls around the image in a state of arousal. it creates uneasy dreams. it may be portrayed as the game of bodies: give yours, take ours. it's the beginning of transitivity: we will devour you, you will devour us. and the beginning of an inverse economy in which value is devalued in breathlessness. sex uncurls the body; eventually everything is proffered, di/s/played, exposed. you are given the ontology of the image, representation portrayed and analyzed as function. the sexual image is oral, pre-oedipal, the murmur of the world, the choratic stuttering into the construct of space and time. eventually it doesn't need anything at all, neither body nor viewer, writer nor reader. plasma curls the image, the page, the computer, flesh and its offerings. neither is it transcendent; it remains caught in the throat; the throat surrounds it; the throat is distended; nothing breathes, nothing speaks. k3% work ksh: work: not found k4% everything turns to liquid; everything flows, cauterizes. the corro- sive effect on the basin is to gnaw through to emptiness. within the aegis of gravity, gravitas, it can flood through all pronouncement. it draws you in. sex curls the screen, turns hard drives into replete translations, fills hard drives with catalysts of the imaginary, turns our images into part-objects, spreads us across your magnetic domains, your optical domains, your fiber optics, your twisted copper wires. nothing touches anything; the drives are sealed, abjection without. "what we have is our presence in the cosmos; we can feel the weight of our arms, legs, breasts, the heaviness of our head turned to one side or another, the explosive gasp of air (surfacing), the violent inhalation (going down once again). we are thrown into the flesh of other's; we claw through it back to our original face." (banon) our original face is never ours alone. our original face is always elsewhere, always others. we are blind beneath the surface; we carry atmosphere with us, refusing union. union alone extricates the flesh from the flesh. our original face is flesh. in "our" work, we work the original face. we play against technology, memory, direct and indirect addressing. we participate in the irruptive economy of desire, arousal, trembling. the body shimmers in repetition: stutters / shudders / shivers / shatters / spatters / smatters / clatters / clutters. repetition is always inexact; the noise of the other, chthonic domain, is always in emergence. in "our" work, this trembling scatters; objects return to part-objects without memory of the w/hole. the images / videos / texts exist on the lip. the lip is the guard and guardian of the other. the lip, labia, is the other's entrance. the lip is the emergence of the word. it is all of the word of the lip; the world is tongued. the face is nub; the tongue, nub of the nub. the material of the world is a matter of pressure; substance is the same against the same; the nub is the lip or edge of differentiation, difference. what emerges from the nub re-enters the nub; what the nub differentiates, returns to the same. the representation of sex in "our" work is as explicit as possible. it is as delineated as possible. it withdraws from the medical into the fantasm, withdraws from the anatomical into the anatomical. it wavers among anatomies. it is as if the presentation were itself a text or inscription of sex, as if all sex, all culture, were inscriptive, were process. but the same presentation collapses; the inscription is within self-erasure, self- disclosure; the sex were chemical, full-on, the catalyst of incandescent arousal. (as if to imagine us whispering in your ear; as if to imagine this is for you, and you alone; as if to imagine you have us in our fullness, the scent, touch, and taste of it; as if we were your pocket imaginary; as if we were your imaginary process and procedure, protocol and program; as if we were your imaginary corporation. our body becomes your own; it is unbecoming, wayward, contrary, sassy; it speaks words that should not be spoken, gives away secrets that should be kept hidden. it remains parenthetical; it overturns content, inverts, as our holes are inverted, as our mouths inhale the remnants of language: as if we, as if you, were parenthetical; as if parentheses were contradictory, unstable, destabilizing, naked, reversing at high speed: )()()()()()()( in a simulacrum of that repetition from your interior that raises the alarm.)( it is not the reduction of 0*S nor the splayed inversion S/0 but that signal or warning of loss 1^S in a process of absorption, a false S of sex and the subject, sex and the city contract. it is not the diminution of 0+S, nor the reaffirmation of S^1. it is not the symbol nor symbolism, nor the symbolic nor the semiotic; it is the semiosis of the subject absorbed by the trembling of the parenthetical, holding at bay, beyond the Pale, what is most feared, that of indiscriminate fucking, desire penetrating beyond the criminality of the family, terrorisms and explosions at the heart of the continent, produced by continentals, for continentals, that theater of the real which is always and simultaneously contained and uncontained. that which is always a loss and a gain, a matrix and lost terms. 2,428,472 terror0.mov 2,003,222 terror1.mov 2,007,064 terror10.mov 2,521,204 terror11.mov 2,813,798 terror12.mov 2,154,246 terror13.mov 2,219,020 terror14.mov 2,357,798 terror16.mov 1,928,738 terror2.mov 2,128,458 terror3.mov 9,483,752 terror4.mov 11,311,620 terror5.mov 2,053,232 terror6.mov 3,097,668 terror7.mov 3,118,812 terror8.mov 2,121,244 terror9.mov 322,756 theory1.jpg 276,402 theory2.jpg 302,479 theory3.jpg 293,133 theory4.jpg 300,316 theory5.jpg 245,574 theory6.jpg 233,133 theory7.jpg 232,403 theory8.jpg 61,224 poison0.jpg 46,448 poison1.jpg 119,470 poison2.jpg 66,703 poison3.jpg 64,831 poison4.jpg 47,346 poison5.jpg 47,569 poison6.jpg 53,243 poison7.jpg 64,427 poison8.jpg 203,856 poison9.jpg 130,317,436 sex.mov 1,640,468 spread.bmp 214,664 skein.jpg 182,247 skein10.jpg 240,176 skein2.jpg 183,262 skein3.jpg 317,868 skein4.jpg 316,094 skein5.jpg 305,447 skein6.jpg 262,084 skein7.jpg 219,589 skein8.jpg 237,542 skein9.jpg that which controls the terror. that which poisons the theory. that which spreads the sex. that which catches it in the skein. that which holds the skein. that which grips the skein. that which loosens the grip. _