Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0611141010100.9604@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Does this work?
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:10:29 -0500 (EST)
Does this work? I'm fairly complicated in this regard; part of me feels that I'm genius and working on necessary (however defined) themes, part of me is jealous and troubled that others haven't really read the material (one thing that happens a lot is that people feel a kind of hatred or awe at the work that also keeps them from it), and part of me feels just worthless in any situation - which has nothing to do with any of my work per se, but goes back as usual to family issues/problems. http://www.asondheim.org/bones.mov (with Sandy Baldwin) There's always an issue of legitimation and history. Because my work is produced in sections and over a wide variety of outlets, but not intensely within any particular outlet, I feel I have to literally re-present the grounds I work within, in any given publication. This has led to a fairly dense writing, which is also fragmentary. I've taught in so many venues without any kind of stability, that the fragment seems almost second nature to me, more than the finished text which involves, again, a kind of stability I've never had. http://www.asondheim.org/dns.mov (with Sandy Baldwin) As far as contents are concerned - I think what I do is valuable - at least the work I do with analog/digital, defuge, virtual/real, the older material on rewrite, immersive/definable, thresholding, and so forth. The theorization of sexuality, body, and language, tends to be overdetermined but these are grounds - abjection, the corpse, arousal, familiality - that we live within and through, and they're often not confronted directly. Sexuality sloughs into eroticism, body into body of theory or theoretical body, and so forth. It's one thing to have theoretical layers between abject and reader; it's another to have them rub raw against one another. I felt this at the conference panel today in fact - that we're talking about Web 3.0 on a dying planet; most people have little, if any, access to broadband, yet the discussion appeared as if within the 'pure' of capital, infinite capital, a fecund planet, and so forth. It's short- sighted. For me, the death of _any_ species as a result of human behavior is both problematic and dire - and yet we're destroying at a steady rate of 3/4 an _hour._ It's all too easy to read WOW against that, but theory, at least on the panel, presented the site of gaming as independent or immune or oblivious. Again, I think that extinction/pain/slaughter and virtual pain/slaughter inhere within each other. - In my secret dreams, I want to produce, work on, processes etc. that are new, that move in entirely new directions, at least for me, and at least as far as possible. And while the work might embrace sexuality, it ab- jures violence; there isn't murder or beatings or rapine in Incidences or the videos - in fact there are pleasures, sadnesses, fear of death, and so forth, but no celebration of brute force. I can't abide it; my early reading of the Nuremberg medical trials still gives me nightmares, and I have no faith in humans; they/we are capable of absolutely anything. So I try to make my ecological footprint as small as possible in this regard (which touches on vegan concerns, and so forth). I've never seen re/presentations of humans in the manner I work with them (yes, it's easy to mess up in Poser and produce distorted figures, but they're not married to motion capture, they don't return to the flesh etc.), nor have I seen dance/performance in the manner of Foofwa and co. In the music/soundwork I try to go elsewhere than anything I hear. It's a kind of migratory/emigrant behavior, a forced nomadicism (at least in the roots); again I'd have to retreat to family history. (I should say I identify with Lenny Bruce, Houdini, the Marx bros. here.) http://www.asondheim.org/azuredanceis.mp4 I want to take theory, however I understand it, to the limit, to the limit among other things, of its annihilation; theory is as destructive as it is revelation - it distances the always-already distanced, to the point of language games, no return, conferencing, capital, enunciation. I love Lingis in this regard, and Existence and Existents as well. If one can be made uncomfortable in a positive way, one succeeds; there's some sort of progress (although I don't believe in progress per se). It would be even better if one might be motivated to the point of political respon- sibility, but I think at least in this world, that's asking too much... So back to the beginning of this meander, I think what I'm doing is valuable, and I have absolutely no doubt about that, none at all. How it plays out within and without acad- emia - I have no idea, but for me (in a safe position of course), that's not the primary thing. The primary thing is the work - for me, it's always been the work, above anything else. I'm well aware that this is a neurotic position but it keeps me going. -