Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0706071911530.26182@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Virtual, not Real
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2007 19:12:18 -0400 (EDT)
Virtual, not Real Two modes of writing, most likely among others: Well, I demonstrate (x); well, I demonstrate (myself). The first compresses, contains, confuses the object; the second smears the object within or against the code/work of the text. To smear the object implies an onto-epistemological corruption or breakdown; it is abjection that determines the problematic relationship between self and object. To demonstrate (x) is to clarify an indexical mapping between symbol and object; to demonstrate (myself) is to dis-em- body both object and self; the ontological breakdown is between organism and signifier; the epistemological breakdown implies that knowledge itself is problematized across the boundary. Of course there isn't any boundary; this is all non-sense - in other words, senseless, one can't make sense of these things, there's nothing in the sense of sense as direction - can you sense which way to go? The discussion itself leads to abjection; a w/hole body has no need of dis/splay, dis/comfort; it's there inhabited, sutured, one with inhabitation and self, powerful, commanding, desiring, desired. The body tending towards discussion is already embedded in a futile attempt to construct existence out of shifters, pronouns; the discussed body is already a crude form of empathetic magic, which never works but which constantly requires both sacrifice and repetition. Then one reads it, the same, the differentiated, as autobiography; what is being described adheres to, seems to adhere to, the events of the day, those contortions or fits (fitts) of the writer, and thus replete with projec- tion; this holds as well for fictional characters, but everyone recognizes that avatars at least have no history. The avatar is intermediary/sluice between clarified object and smeared self; its skin labors skin in one very singular direction, that is, from an acceptable exterior distance - but its skin labors space within or close to within. Within what? The prims fall away, replaced by space which mirrors, maps external space, all the way to the ends of the game, game-space, or beyond; mirrors, by asso- ciation, space itself in the real, which is already virtual, the closer one approaches quantum or fundamental particle levels. In this very real sense it is the avatar which is real, and our selves, bodies, our organic existence, which is virtual, dependent among other things on an Aristotel- ian logic that holds only on _this_ level in the holarchy, among others. For the law of distribution, so important in the application of classical logic to the world, breaks down in favor of the gestural, once the logic is examined closely, once appearance and the reading of the world, such as it is, virtual-real, is foregrounded. We defend ourselves against this through a whole phenomenology of pain and suffering, as if death consti- tutes the undeniable presence of the material world. That this isn't the case is clear, not by considering death itself virtual, but by recognizing death as the termination of processes in the middle-zone, in the middle- way - and processes them- selves, are by virtual of the ineluctable ontol- ogy of time, virtual in their constituation. In lieu, place, virtual or real, of this, I speak like a madman, like a hungry ghost, already a contradiction, since what would fulfill a ghost, hungry or not, except an internal transform among ghost-organs, ghost- perceptions, ghost-epistemologies? Madness always carries the tinge of the virtual with it, and thereupon the real, just as what one considers the real in everyday life, appears as a dream, false, masquerade, sham, fac- ade, theater and theatrical performance, all of which is true, recognized in every movement or body-speech of an avatar, in one or another world, more real than virtual, as ours is more virtual than real. To write of an object: "Two modes: Well, I demonstrate (x); well, I demonstrate (myself). The first compresses, contains, confuses the object" - is to write of oneself writing of an object; this is elementary. And it is also elemen- tary to realize that "writing of oneself writing of an object" is an aporia, useless, exhausting, falsely-recursive; one might as well stop there and recognize that the smear (stutter, cough, text, pause, punctua- tion, page or screen) is behind, within, inherent in, every utterance whatsoever. The psychoanalytical loss of object or good object or bad object is founded on no object at all - none, but food in the eyes of the hungry ghost, or the hungry ghost in the eyes of its prey. Nothing is simple, everything melds within the hallucinatory, and rational action is the apparent ability to 'freeze' those moments, as if they endured beyond the momentary glance or description.