The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

>From sondheim@panix.com Tue Jan 20 00:30:57 2004
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 00:30:33 -0500 (EST)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU>

[In response to a meditation on codework and the World Trade Center, among
other things - I thought it might be of interest by itself, here.]

I think it's in Michael Benedikt's Cyberspace: First Steps, all the way
from the early 90s, the idea of a liquid architecture - which unites the
post-WTC hybrids and code itself; the latter is mobile, always in flux,
protocol-dependent, software/hardware dependent, just as these letters are
written in 'lower ascii,' another code necessary placed in the sendmail
protocols, the tcp/ip protocols, all the way back and forth among routers,
operating systems, radio transmissions, even wireless protocols. And there
is always a bit of illumination realizing that hitting a key on a computer
keyboard INTERRUPTS, and is read as an interrupt, that communication is an
interference in quietude or flux.

At night one loses sleep, is it codes or noise and chaos? Wolfram provides
a way out, the simplest codes tending towards enormously complex chaotic
structures reminiscent of noise, but not annihilating. My own pessimistic
tendency heads towards plasmas, the inconceivable alienness of space, dark
matter, strings, quarks with problematic spins, all these things tearing
at our pretence to eternity and even towards comprehensino. Brillouin, a
French physicist, created the idea decades ago that our knowledge of the
physical world is tied directly to economics - the larger the machinery,
the more energy consumed - the greater the number of anomalies. It's not
even known if there's an end to it. The current Linux Journal describes
software developed to manage the industrial processes of high-energy
physics machine fabrication - already another mini-industry in itself.

Code or annihilation of code, presence or absence, interrupting parasite
or well-loved guest, the world is a miracle.

- Alan

http://www.asondheim.org/ http://www.asondheim.org/portal/.nikuko
http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt
Trace projects http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm
finger sondheim@panix.com

uns*bscr%b^


spam 'uns*bscr%b^' notices: we've got the encompassing of the dialectic
just as marxism and psychoanalysis attempt to absorb all contradictions.
think of spam as the theory of capital.

or as the false theory of capital, or as sartre's theory of the
inauthentic: for 'uns*bscr%b^' rarely works, but in fact contributes to
the maximization of profits.

the dialectic has no resolution; capital oozes in, transforms the ontology
to its proper status: that of abstract and increasing quantity.

the opposite is the same, vis-a-vis irigaray: if one does not click on
uns*bscr%b^, one, by default, contributes to spam's increased production:
'i want it.' thus the opposite is eliminated 'in any case,' of which
wittgenstein's 'the world is all that is the case' is more than apropos.

even here, in this brief notice, one must protect oneself: uns*bscr%b^.


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