Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.44.0202070024360.24971-100000@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: Beginnings of an essay ready to be abandoned
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 00:25:08 -0500 (EST)
- Beginnings of an essay ready to be abandoned Elsewhere i've written about the characters I use as emanants or source- less semiotic spews that coagulate as characters, take on a life of their own - one that I follow with insistence. They also form a bypass or excuse - if I want to say something childish or out-of-sorts; if I'm in a bad mood - if I want to present something dubious, something erroneous - I can call on Nikuko or Jennifer - none of them care... These people help, but they also get in the way. My main concern is philo- sophy, not literature; I want my work to be taken seriously as theoretical thought. In Nietzsche's time, or Kierkegaard's, both branches might well intertwine, as they do in Derrida for example. But there's a cost involved - a general referentiality to the dominion of the philosophers or theor- ists - which is absent in my work, as Julu, for example, will have a spirited conversation with Jennifer in a MOO. Who can untangle both the stylistic and application involved - not to mention the sentiment? One can write all one wants about postmodernity, virtuality, subjectivity, epis- temology, ontology, and so forth - but one must do this through the proper channels... My dreams aren't full of them - not even Jennifer, the first - not even Alan. Instead there are shattered and strobed screens, prompts as part- objects, control passages and program transformations. I think of floating signifiers, sememes with contusions, shattered commands I don't quite understand. Among other things these are the deconstructions of avatars, breakdowns of characters: bones. Out of the dreams other assemblages arise, heading towards language, program, text. I can always fall back on the dreams - against the logics of genre, for example. It's that logic of the unconscious again. I'll use programs - collectively called "julu programs" - as catalysts. I wrote the following - you can see how disordered everything is - I'll read axiomatics, the care and Kehre of reasoning - then turn - Mobius strip - anyway I wrote the following just this evening in another context: "Here's a major point for me. I've never been that interested in poetry or literature/style generators, mainly because I'm interesting in a kind of writing of urgency or writing that insists on a semantic world or "sememe." I'm not that interested in abstraction per se which - for me - underlies generated work. I'm trying to work out philosophical issues, issues dealing with virtuality, etc., and so generation - unless it were revealing something about language itself - isn't that interesting to me." "That being said (sorry I'm writing awkwardly - I'm dizzy from some medication) - when I first programmed, it was on a Texas Instruments 59 calculator with 1k of programming space, and one of the things I did was make a text generator with maybe 100 words in it. There was a lot of very very (for me) tight programming; it was all indirect addressing and abbreviation to fit it in. But it ran and produced a series of texts. What I did learn about through this was the way structure works (as well as indirect addressing) in relation to language -" "And _that_ being said - I tend to use the programs for catalysts, almost for revealing sub-texts or the unconscious of my own thinking - which I can then rewrite, tease out - this is a process of reworking, abandoning, re-arrangement, etc. None of the programs is used for "pure" output; it's all mixed, a mish-mash." "Of course, even doing that - the reworking - I tend to learn more about the subject at hand, and my own role or placement within it. And of course that being said, I try to eliminate my own bias, or to extend it - play around with the phenomenological reduction." "There is also the energy used in reworking the syntax and vocabulary of the various programs - that's another kind of study or summarization of my current work - I'll need 43 nouns, 22 verbs... I can write this as a semantic field in itself - a way of dis/organizing the domain -" For example here are my entries to a unix spell-check file: "actant aether alterities Amidah avatar avatars BBS bricolage bushido castrated cd cdrom CEN Centre chora clots coherencies com Compaq complicit consciousnesses consensualities cordons cunt cunts Cybermind cyberspace cyborg d'eruza d'nala decathexis deconstructed deconstruction defuge Derrida dhtml diegesis diegetic differend disassociating disinvestment effusions emanants emergences empathetic empathized entasic extasis extensivity extrusions fantasm fantasmic feedforward fictivity filmmaker filmstock fingerboard foofwa geomatics gesturally gigabytes gridlines halfgroupoid hemiptera hirself holarchy htm html http hyperreality i'd i'm i've ideogrammar ikonic imaginaries incompletes indexicality informatics internet interpenetrating interpenetrations introjections isp izanagi javascript Jen jennifer jisatsu jouissance judgmental julu kanji Kebara kwat Lacan linux literarily machinic magatama mediaspace microworlds morphing morphs ms Mt multiculturalisms Myouka nakasukawabata Nara Netscape neurophysiologies nikuko Nikuko's nostalgias NYC oeuvre offline Panamarenko panix particulation paysage peerings perl phenomenologist pneumosphere poolings postmodern postmodernism postmodernity primordials protolanguage qbasic realspace rebirths rills RNA runnels Sagdish satori sed sememe sememes sexualities shakuhachi shamisen shimenawa shinjuu signifiers sions Snoxfly sondheim sourcess spam stromatolite subgroupoids subjectivities subtexted susan Sysadmins techne teleologies thanatopoesis tion tions trAce traceroute tracert tropes ulpan unfoldings unhinging URL URLs vicodin videowork voiceovers VRML webboard Webpage Webpages wetware wetwares worlding wryting www yamabushi ytalk" ...