Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0812241129070.6985@panix1.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Happy Holidays! and automorphism!
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2008 11:29:52 -0500 (EST)
automorphism "...a guiding principle in modern mathematics is this lesson: _Whenever you have to do with a structure-endowed entity E try to determine its group of automorphisms,_ the group of those element-wise transformations which leave all structural relations undisturbed. You can expect to gain a deep insight into the constitution of E in this way. After that you may start to investigate symmetric configurations of elements, i.e. configura- tions which are invariant under a certain subgroup of the group of all automorphisms; and it may be advisable, before looking for such configu- rations, to study the subgroups themselves, e.g. the subgroup of those automorphisms which leave one element fixed, or leave two distinct elements fixed, and investigate what discontinuous or finite subgroups there exist, and so forth." (Hermann Weyl, Symmetry, p. 144; E = sigma.) I propose this principle as critical guidance in the phenomenology of a virtual world: textures, motions, manifolds and surfaces, curves and geodesics may be analyzed in such a way as to _eliminate the object or process_ - an elimination that brings forth subtextual dynamics without subject or object. These the images present here are at best a lure implicating us in abject desire, that is desire seducing away from the inverse punctum of the absent object or process. It is here that our _interest_ lies in critique in the first place, a place which is dis/placed into that very structure that forms and effaces its basis. Leave the human behind, confront the human - two sides fucking with dissipation and exhaustion the only result. Then nothingness is apparent to everyone, that encounter with death in the wires, in the last glance of the supercession of thought. http://www.alansondheim.org/snapped1.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/snapped2.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/snapped3.jpg
