Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1007042346390.28421@panix1.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Clarity.
Date: Sun, 4 Jul 2010 23:47:29 -0400 (EDT)
Clarity. the clarity of darkness: http://www.alansondheim.org/dark1.mov http://www.alansondheim.org/dark2.mov some older texts concerned with virtual worlds - these are still valuable; they have an 'uncanny' clarity I think I'm lacking at the moment: For Nicanor Parra I came into cyberspace in order to look at myself. I would stand aside from myself and from my fingers. I would look at language in orderly rows coming from my mouth. A woman would flow and she would create a thing. I would rush into familiar words and at times in the middle of a conversation I would run into a conversation. A general would appear carrying swords and knives and a warrior. The white screen would never beckon the dark, nor the grey, the color of death. Colors poured into a vise a carpenter would build with letters. The first building was the building with letters. I have traced you back, computer through computer, tool behind tool, entire genealogies at work until the very beginning. Here, I found hand-axes starting to strike metal. The metal was a dagger or a knife and I could hear speech in the dagger, colors glistened in the knife. Later, there would be a wheel, and later, a pulley. On a ceiling a pulley turned where belts connected steam to tools milling shanks for motors, electric relays, turned carbon for telephones and lamps. Someone spoke beneath the lamp and all was lost. Electrons rushed in vacuo; things started turning and memorized the axe into this space. Then, I would watch this space, looking for signs of me. I would look at myself and a woman. Vocks I want to take up the idea of voice in chats as embodiment again, from a relatively simplistic viewpoint. The voice, its granularity, is intimate with the body, produced directly by the reconfiguring of tissue. To the speaker, it appears unmediated; even language itself streams forth, as if without impediment or processing. When an avatar represents a player on a visual chat, there is a split in embodiment; however, the body is adept at what Polyani calls _tacit knowledge,_ the ability to invest in, cathect through, an other, implement, terrain, etc. The human organism exists within a symbolic field with physiological consequences; physiology and communication are intertwined, as aphasias, etc. demonstrate. So the split between visual avatar and verbal language, or even visual avatar and writ- ten/textual language at the bottom or adjacent to the image, is ultimately no great difficulty, no matter how theorized. The _practical_ element is something else again, however, with the text covering up the its embedding space (including the presence of other avatars) in ThePalace for example. If one wishes in fact to study the _cyborg_ at this point in time, the avatar itself, as dissemination from the physiological body, constitutes a dominant site. The avatar is articulated in dialectic among software, par- ticipant, and communicative space (the give and take of the on line commu- nity at hand); it is simultaneously organic and machinic, self-operated and remotely "run." It is susceptible to upgrading, software variants, etc. And ultimately, it represents, not an exterior shell, but the interi- ority of the participant's body, morphing according to intention, command, and drive. It's interesting to watch someone beginning with WorldsChat, moving a clumsy body around a constantly (and clearly) reconfigured space; there is always a kinesthetic sense involved, interference for example indicated if and when one of the figures comes between two others apparently (who knows?) engaged in whispered conversation. And this occurs with minimal clues of course. Even the early mouse movements leave one feeling as if she or he were _propelled_ through the space, tentatively or violently moving from group to group in blind search. In spite of the fact that (at least the surface) conversation is reasonably inane, WorldsChat provides a clear example of future cyborg existence. It's already here, inhabited, dependent as usual upon consumption, fast machines, and the lucky me who has access to a T1 line. It's _money_ all the way. The Plain My Gothic grammar states that there is almost no literature available in the language; most of what one knows stems from the New Testament translation done by Ulfilas in the fourth century, through sixth century Italian copies. In Mandeville, the images of the Khan remain with me, mobile capitals on mobile plains, nomadic. In the Utgarda-Loki section of the Prose Edda, Thor turns around, and the castle has disappeared; there's nothing but the plain. The plain is the locus of power, the site of a part-object tentatively connected to Goths, Visigoths, Saxons, the Golden Horde. It's criss- crossed, temporary. Distance is measured by civilization, the rings of stationary dwellings, agriculture, surrounding, encroaching on the desert which proceeds to devour them. As today. Territories extend indefinitely, carrying nothing with them. Simmel's stranger glances, walks on. It's always a situation of strangers; reading Rutilius Claudius Namatianus, there are Goths who are enemies, and a Goth who buys the house. Investments are made in the form of the project/production. Imagine the brightness of the stars in the evening, the fair regularity of the cycles of weather. One can gallop up and down almost indefinitely. You can hear the sounds of the horses at a distance. There are always the skitterings of small mammals in the underbrush. Firelight is the source. There's a smell of meat. There's the sound of stringed instruments and sometimes dancing in the distance. These are the spaces of cyberspace, holes, temporary encrustations, in- tensities. These are the spaces where fantasms appear, burn into the eyes, turn inward or outward, disappear once again. Try as I might, these spaces defy description. They're not nomadicisms in the Deleuze/Guattari sense; there are no lines of flight. The spaces are self-similar, but _locally_ intense, everywhere, with the currents of micro-ecological niches. You can't forget the ecology, ever; you can't forget the claims of nations, colonialisms, geographic economies. Boundaries are always already in flux, just as they are, say, in the WorldsChat emptied spaces which look some- thing like enormous boxing rings. WorldsChat in fact provides an example: _What anchors the avatars to the simulated ground?_ Nothing, of course, except for programming which occasionally is faulty, sending figures flying. The screen, not the de- lineation of planet, is the final arbiter. And the screen is nowhere; it is the eye, the stain or residue of the gaze. The screen is naught; the screen carries a sense of boundary, outline. Outline disappears in the literal maze of links, multiply-connected topo- logy that always returns to itself, frays at the edges. It's as if culture is the _objet petit a_ somewhere else; who/what pulls the tongue from the mouth? The body is never found. The voices are always at a distance. You can't see the animals for the underbrush. The animals are stases; they know where they are. They aren't agents, of anything, anyone. It's not as if they're "there" either. The "it" is a neutral inscription. It doesn't mean anything in the sense. It doesn't have any location. Nor does it move on; there aren't vectors. But it's not all negative. It's the plain. It's where you can draw figures or cut them into the grass. It's where they appear as if they're _some- thing_ in the midst of, that is, between, seasons. They're ignored because you can only see them from the air. Airplanes haven't been invented yet but the kids are having a good laugh and you can hear them clear across the plain. (There's so _little_ of Gothic left to read/hear. Almost all of it is translation from the Gospels, as if others are speaking through their tombs. Colonialization circulates among itself. Logos takes over, hard inscription. The Bible is the Book. The Book is the Bible. The world goes flat with forgetting. Each and every world is a plain. Cyberspace is all the world there is.) Entering, Rites of Passage, Characteristics Hey, what's the entrance to the software? The other day I was on Worlds- Chat and there was this avatar with the signboard on its head reading n******basher, and I'd never seen anything like that. I tried to blow him out of the space, but you can't do that; I ended up just getting the hell out of there as fast as I could. I felt doubly violated, not only because of the overt racism of the name, but because in general, these things don't appear in the environmental chats. For one thing, when you log on as a guest on a MOO, ThePalace, etc., you're given a guest designation - you've got to do an @request on the former for a character. Because of this - the simple matter of @request - there's a rite of passage that's involved, which makes literally all the difference in the world, just as there is a rite of passage into an email list, as opposed, say, to a Use- net newsgroup. With that rite comes responsibility, designated or not; one's acted intentionally, thought about joining, cooperation, even if one's aim is ultimately very different. But on WorldsChat, you can pick any name you want immediately; it's with you, a sign of terror, just as you can violate within IRC, or a talker for that matter. True, a talker takes a password, but you can change that any time - it's your responsibility, not the sysadmin's. And you do that when you log on, not later. It's the _delay_ then that establishes the entrance into an email list or a MOO (or ThePalace for that matter) as a rite - a rite then is something that proffers liminality, that in-between state framed by inscriptions. The delay designates temporality, trans- forms short-term into long-term memory, changes occasion into event. There's also something to be said about the textuality of the delay - the proper name begins to assert itself, binds itself to the circumscription of the body, the participant using the software. This is very different than jumping into chatlines, IRC, or other forms in which identity is often amorphous, changing momentarily (it is true you can morph in a MOO of course, but that requires programming, keystrokes beyond a click in MIRC) - changing in fact in a way that can decathect language from its own display. Be that as it may, delays, rites of entrance, inscription, liminal states, all play a role in the character of these spaces. Not enough attention is paid, in any of the accounts I've read, to the welcome message and initial operations required to enter a space - things which are ultimately taken for granted, forgotten, circumvented, but which nonetheless create in part the character of the communications framework itself. As I pointed out elsewhere, then, there are innumerable elements in such a framework (these are given in no particular order): 1. The player's client software; 2. The program software (including issues of quota, buffering, etc.); 3. The program aura (contacts outside the program); 4. The sysadmins', wizards', or moderators' decisions and powers; 5. Various rites of entrance and exit; 6. Assumed quality and conditions of governance; 7. Assumed quality and conditions of privacy and distinction of public/ private spaces; 8. Ability of the player to transform his or her character on a formal level (i.e. set descriptions); 9. Ability of the player formally and in terms of individual knowledge, to transform the environment itself; 10. Async/sync aspects of the environment in relation to each other; 11. Types of speech possible (first-person [ytalk] / third-person [MOO]), (packaging of emotions/emootions), (paging, telling, yelling, whis- pering, asking, exclaiming, saying), (echo on / echo disabled), etc.; 12. Types of speech tolerated, use of toading, kill, delete, filtering, etc.; 13. Issues of network and software lags. All of these play a role in the quality of communication; the framing of flaming; the ability to carry on sustained conversations among partici- pants; the ability to carry on sustained conversations continuing across various login sessions; the manifestation of desire and sexuality in various modes of privacy; the manifestation of a certain political econ- omy in relation to ownership and privatization of spaces, software, and generic objects; and the very real questioning of the loci of power in relation to wizards, administrators, server ownership and mandates, and so forth. There is much work to be done in regard to these issues, work which lends itself naturally to creating a phenomenological approach for the consid- eration of future seamless virtual realities. Threshold Living alone in my loft, there is an entire phenomenology of entering and exiting; the external world literally floods my presence when I _emerge_ into the light. The rite of passage in signing on to a MOO is different; one is already on-line, and the passage may occur among various applications, including ytalk, IRC, and so forth. The threshold in fact occurs with the initial logging-on, a trivial act in itself. The community then appears, with the secondary log-on in its entirety; ontologies shimmer, epistemologies crash, and so forth. It's difficult for an outsider to understand this transformation occurring with the movement of a few keys. The body remains in place. Nothing floods the room, and it's the flooding that ordinarily separates interior and exterior - along with the relative lack of ownership and privacy the ex- terior occasions (which is more problematic in cyberspace), and so forth. This is where prosthesis, the uncanny, projection/introjection, and the like come into play. The user is at home or in the office; the mind is moving fast-forward elsewhere. It's going to seem useless, artificial, non-existent. It's going to be incomprehensible from the outside, and so forth. The space is dry. Nothing is illuminated. Words crack either darker or lighter than background, light background flattening the screen, dark background an illusion of inconceivable depth; Pascal comes to mind, and so forth. In dreams real and virtual coalesce, ascii-dreams, livid dreams, maroon dreams of womb interiors, dreams of classification, conflagration. They flicker in and out of the preconscious, lists of sexual graphemes and regions centered around the penis, perineum, anus, nipple. I wake in the middle of the night, fingers half-inserted, erect, sweated; there are monsters. The image: cuneiform word-lists, transliterated and translated, sharp spikes penetrating the body, mouths held open. There are no screams in cyberspace, not even with Iphone's advent; there is the collusion, the _substance_ of the computer, and it's this _substance_ as well which remains untranslatable to those unfamiliar, and so forth. Circulating among the home pages, one rarely runs into community; language is pasted onto signboards, even on those refreshable chat sites. Crack the Web, split it open, and words, neighborhoods seethe forth. I resist this, this splitting, even the surface, resist the Net; for me, totally succumb- ing to its narrowed modalities is the sign of death, hungering for too long too near the screen. But I understand the promise in this hungering as well, the ability to achieve satiation, find commonality. I have to remind myself constantly that I'm a freak, that the lure of the threshold is the lure of paste compared to the flood of the out of doors, and so forth. It's a litany of occasions, events, each with their temporal horizons, subjective projects, relevances, avatars, sublimations, repressions, identities, political and monetary economies. As I said last night to the interviewer from NPR (not broadcast), humans will find communicative and communal possibilities in any ecological niche; there are Iphone and IRC societies as well as those in MUDs, MOOs, newsgroups, email lists, and so forth. Communication in this fashion parallels capital and late capital- ism, extending and expanding through all those devices of -jectivity, hy- steric embodiment, that I've documented elsewhere. So there are thresholds and rites of passage, there are communities and projections, there are hy- sterias and issues of governance/framework/political economy, and there is a majority off-line public out there, meeting explanation with bewil- derment, uncomprehending of community external to the obdurate existence of bodies, trails, buildings, streets, and so forth. And so forth into the night of the darknet, day of the real, vacillating among illuminations, uneasy dreams, sexual-depressive twists of the body, corporate-celebratory twists of the machinic, and so forth.