Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.63.0511271409480.21603@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: Missive from (effects of Net-demise)
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 14:10:14 -0500 (EST)
Missive from This missive, having once been written and already destined for /dev/null, is written, once again, reinforcing the direction of the original, that the Net, our Net, as we know it, or as it is own, is not only ephemeral, but that our communality, communitas, so dependent upon it, might well disappear - replaced only as dreams, of alterities in other places, likewise dreamed. What might be cauterized, what finality, is nothing less than our own interiority: limbs become phantom limbs, voices become phantom voices, and the social matrix itself becomes figurative ectoplasm. Not only is this a real possibility; it is fundamental that our ordered socius tends towards the disorderly - addresses and url will disappear, permanently, and that communicable touch we take for grant will turn towards a state of unacknowledged, because uncommunicated, mourning. This may happen tonight; it may happen tomorrow; or a century from now - but it will happen. And with this happening, technology reverts as well towards the hyper-personal - out of touch with anything but those loops of secondary narcissism that carry, first and foremost, the effluvia of identity - the rest is nothing but cultural superstructure, dependent on capital, which may have collapsed as well. Or not collapsed - capital never collapses - but turned local, regional - a xenophobic capital like homeowner's associations, owing nothing anywhere - no international debt for example, which is alterity raised to an incandescent degree. Equivalence, that primordial condition of the duplicated file, breaks: all typifications, standardizations, disappear, and no textual instantiation may be compared to any other. The condition is diasporic; only the diachronic remains as re/constructed memory, synchrony itself such a memory, useless, uncanny, the materiality of dreams, the dreamwork. This will happen. All of this will happen. On one hand we witness again and again the fragility of the material-real, which is both inert and always already unique; on the other, equivalence and the Net are destined to cease as processes, becoming nothing than other disconnected, scattered artifacts. We should prepare for this. We should recognize this future as certain and (in)coherent within our present own. We shall not own it. We shall not recognize 'own.'