Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0806221233580.28278@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: My enemy the digital, why not to live
Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 12:34:11 -0400 (EDT)
My enemy the digital, why not to live It's on the verge of something, on the tip of the tongue, something about the digital and its relation to truth and mass accountancy and the ability to harness languaging on an unprecedented scale, something about the evanescence or shadowing of truth, about dictatorial tendencies and the ability to spread and modify code across whole continents, that this isn't an academics but an unmitigated furor - and in this sentence the digital or any specification/speciation becomes a disease of separation and the wager of truth, that is to say a political economy of truth that relies not on facticity but on a market or gaming in which truth is the outcome, not the forerunner, of stakes. One doesn't stake on truth, but on an apparatus that produces truth vis-a-vis accountancy, the digital; it is this manipulation that permits staking in the first place. My digital my love, my digital my enemy; these inscriptions produce skein, structure, market: Every market is an inscription, every inscription a market. It becomes increasingly useless to survive, to the extent that survival is a condition of change or altruism; instead, the same old game repeats itself indefinitely, a game of strategy within which slaughter, dis/ease, anomie, become byproducts or residues of categorization. It was writing, the writing of the concrete and concrete writing, that began a slide towards miasma, no matter how much it was curtailed by that very same writing. And what a slide, because also a harnessing of miasma, withdrawal from the real; it's a miasma of the imaginary and it's within the imaginary that the market is the most violent: without bounds and gaming, truth appears both certain and purchasable, and is always, within the digital and accountancy, infinitely alterable, without tethering. Without tethering there are no bounds, the world is boundless and frontiers are infinitely mobile; with infinite mobility comes exponential consumption of resources until asymptotic limits are incoherently named and approached - while the rich get richer, their class rapidly diminishes and dissipates. There's no end to all of this pseudo-fecundity except defuge, exhaustion, extinction, and each hour we are all the closer to the chaos of the retrievable. What was canonic is nameless, just as genre dissipates into an absence of meaning leaving organism without a _not_ to stand on; sure slow death results - no one notices, no one has the capacity to notice, all that accountancy grounded in backup is lost, the files topple, electricity cut off for longer and longer periods, finally none at all. I think of Hitler and all those records, arms marked by integers, bodies cut out, decomposed elsewhere, increased complexity of coding, Auschwitz, sludge... =