Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0705241308000.19757@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Sinter from audio notes
Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 13:08:12 -0400 (EDT)
Sinter from audio notes (I'm interested not in noise (in the classical cybernetic sense), but in grit in the system, irregular powders, micro-topographies which remain unmapped. I'm thinking of sinter and its relation to topography and topology, and I speak into a voice recorder and take down the notes verbatim; the style is clumped, clumsy, the ideas are scattered, the voice drones on but only for a little while. Transcription follows.) When you think of the distinction between topography and topology, you also want to think of the idea of grit in the system because the distinction might really be on the basis of the sand grain or sinter. It seems to me that sinter inheres to he real; in fact it may be even considered the found- ation of such, at least in terms of lived experience, to the extent that everything is always in a state of decay, a state of falling apart. And one can consider the building and maintaining of cultural artifacts as a kind of shoring-up against that. Sinter always references wearing down and it can be applied, self-referentially, to a wearing down of itself; at the same time it also acts as a kind of lubricant among larger objects in the realm. We want to consider sinter in the sense, even in the absence of a metric, in other words without considering geometry, not even necessarily topology, but just something that invades the origin and coordinates of Euclidean and other geometries. Sinter also implies the microscopic or the atomic, not on the level of particle physics or even physics, but on the level of those things that might create streaks or striations in everyday life. Sinter isn't on the 'level' of the raster, nor is it below nor above it, but it's a kind of noise that potentially could invade the rest on its own level, so if you have a grid of x to x + 1, sinter would be around x + 1 - x, would be around that interval, that interval normalized, to a certain degree of tolerance. Sinter may also be considered aligned with plasma, with all those surfaces that are worn or chaotic, or which carry history at the same time that they are erasing history. It's necessary, when thinking about sinter, to think about the irregularity of particles; however the irregularity is incalculable - in other words it's not based on a lower order of smoothness, or rather a lower order of structure, but it's based on what is at least taken to be on a phenomenological level, deep irregularity. Sinter belongs in the level of the analog and the wearing away of the digital. and that's why sinter is aligned with topography, and topology itself might be considered digital to the extent that it's abstracted, abstruse. Of course in this sense the digital circumvents the analogic. I think you could apply these principles or these ideas - this phenomenology - even to the organization of nature, of nations, to notions of communications in the real world as opposed to theoretical communications and so forth.