Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0809090654540.6706@panix1.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Infinite
Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2008 06:56:15 -0400 (EDT)
(apologies for so much mail; see http://www.alansondheim.org/biog.txt for what might pass for a psychopathological explanation) Infinite Goethe: "Whichever way you look at nature, it is the source of what is infinite." (Maxims and Reflections 1409, trans. Stopp.) Julu: Yes, but of course in Second Life, there is no nature; things can only go so high. Nikuko: Perhaps the idea is one of extrapolation, the asymptotic - one imagines going higher, and this is always the case. (Of course there is always dimensional collapse - the asymptotic grinding to a halt.) Julu: Only to an extent - if nothing else the computer itself, client or server, carries its own limitations, and these are intrinsic, inherent, inherited. Nikuko: This is responsible for what I consider the _compression_ of Sec- ond Life - the uncanny sensation that everything, no matter how distant, remains contained, closed in, closing in on itself, closing in on us, users and avatars and observers, for that matter. Julu: And contained along the axis of equivalence or equivalent substance (shades of the analogic!), since it is all code, protocol, programming, program dynamics; it is all of a one or a two, of a type - one might say, following Kripke, of a _natural kind._ Nikuko: Yes, it is a digital substance or floating signifier - and a sub- stance with malleable boundaries and internals, but one nonetheless having a limit or limits, compression. This is easier to see - witness - than in the physical world; inhabiting any virtual world, Second Life or other, always has a sense of poverty to it. Where one invests is ultimately in the language or culture - inscribing oneself in and out of it, so to speak/write/rewrite/presence onself. Julu: The compression extends metaphorically to a lack of atmosphere - for that matter a lack of anything at all (shades of Nagarjuna!); what occurs, rides on any number of machines and conduits. As if the world were vacuum and emptied even of that. Julu again: But it's this - I _sense_ it, this compression. In a way it seems unnatural, but it's all we have within what is, one way or another, a corroded, porous, and dynamic manifold. And it's suffocating. Nikuko: It's suffocating and wounds; we live within a semantic manifold as well, one of permanent wounding. Julu: And this is what I meant by _flattening,_ the flat world - Nikuko: - which extends, seeps out, from the virtual, back into what one normally considers the real or Real (literally whatever, here); it is all compressed - Julu: - abjection and defuge at the heart of it. Nikuko: However one might want to define heart - whatever it is or seems to be, it's not infinite. Julu: The idea of the 'true world' again, coming into play everywhere, inscribed or uninscribed. Nikuko: I can't breath... Julu: Nor I... http://www.alansondheim.org/smallgears1.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/smallgears2.jpg http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/48/12/22