Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.63.0505130312110.21268@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: Why I am narrow.
Date: Fri, 13 May 2005 03:12:19 -0400 (EDT)
Why I am narrow. I am narrow, minded; it is difficult to follow any stream, much less any particular stream, of thought. On an analog/digital forum I have been reading, there was already a worry expressed, take the division and run with it as if something were being said/done. It's on the edge/verge of nonsense. To be strict with oneself is to mine the sememe, abandon it in large part. What's left is practically non-existent. For example, issues of raster: increase the digital raster to the infinitely, small and create an identity map - that seems simple enough. But then quantum effects come into play - in fact the wave equation collapse enters here as well. Back out and try the other - the digital to the infinitely large. Then one has monotheism, totality. Try from the analog side - nothing occurs. Surely one integrates the digital to arrive at the analogic, but to begin with the analogic? To differentiate it? This might map, but then there is still the question of the raster. The raster? The question of the wave equation again. Try the abacus. Base 1: counting, enumeration, matching one-to-one. Base infinite: each number a symbol, memorization of ideograms (English spelling, kanji). But given infinite memory in the latter, zero memory in the former, they are both procedural; it's just that in the latter, nothing carries. This goes on and on. So far so good, these are abacuses, objects counted, not too much out of line. If metaphor's involved, it's indexical. But then perhaps I bring in libido (Dionysian, analogic) and superego (Apollonian, digital), and I'm off and running. Before long I'm tied in Lacan's knots, a slippage that's always productive - how can it knot be? Language begins to curl, everything proceeds with a poetics of the real, and I'm lost, I'm lost...