Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.44.0201271909510.23325-100000@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: on hemiptera, Lacan, others
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2002 19:10:05 -0500 (EST)
- on hemiptera, Lacan, others years ago, in the Far Hills Project (1973), I was already faced with taxonomic anomaly. in recording pond-life employing an EIAJ NTSC video camera through a Leitz microscope, I was well aware of the fuzzy encoding that occurred between the real and the analog. later, I would write of the distance between one scan line and another, a broken distance, with nothing between, nothing cohering, contiguous at best - already presaging the deep digital disconnect between a pixel and its neighbor. at that point, I considered the topology of intention in relation to microworlds: opening spaces at 2000x magnification, close to the limits of optical microscopy (newtonian diffraction rings, etc.) - how does taxonomic identification occur, what schema are utilized? in pre-DNA days, or on the level of the amateur naturalist, the phenomenology of consciousness, of anomaly and coherence, plays a large role. now I find myself returning full circle: these insects are deeply unidentifiable, and I bring every means, every symptom, to their occasion. the distancing mechanisms are still there, as are the radical disconnections; in a sense, I've learned nothing, except that the vast array of knowledge before me has an imperfect, at best, relationship to my own neural processes. the clues just don't add up, as if they ever did. even if I succeeded, the most I'd gain would be a name - but at least that would lead out of this, would lead elsewhere. perhaps I'm not being clear, faced with the clarity and fuzziness of the world - of which these are already phenomenological, aesthetic terms. it's not that I want certainty, or even to know what I'm stepping into - so much as what I will be, in the future, leaving behind. in the Everglades I'm faced with inconceivably tangled matrices of molecular organization, micro-ecological niches, human mayhem. a name, just a _name_ for the _thing,_ would add and subtract. _