Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1103061138580.23698@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Open
Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2011 11:40:07 -0500 (EST)
Open There are 500 million worlds in our galaxy, a great number of which might support life. Or 500 billion - this changes daily - as such, at least seventy planets for each of us on earth: inconceivable. Life-forms seem to have been found within a meteorite, some local and identifiable, and others alien to the core. Multiverses range from 10^500 to an infinite number of universes, depending on the theory; in some of these, we're reproduced more or less exactly - in others, there's no relationship - in almost all, no ingress or egress; we're alone but fantastically duplica- ted. Ontology disappears, as does epistemology; knowledge and its constit- uents devolve in entirely unforeseen ways. Singularities are more of our myths; what is happening is slow erosion, as if eternity is just around the corner - but corners themselves are duplicated, and there is no more of the same, just as sameness itself appears as 10^500, an impossible degree. The point of all of this - the x-dimensional space-time of all of this - is only that knowledge has collapsed in its own deconstruction; given the problematic of proof, at least in this era, there's no reassem- blage on the other side of the brane or horizon. It's hard to configure art or ideology - any set or fieldings of human cultural values, given this landscape; new discoveries from one day to another bypass momentary blockages which are temporarily assembled as theory beyond heuristics - Badiou's mathematics comes to mind, Lacan, continental thought, philosophy itself, just about any scoring or underscoring one might make of a day or night when knowledge seems certain, always on the verge of trembling or text. I try to situate my work in relation to all of these, discarding myth, religion, even geometries and the truth of the image - any image - any imaginary - along the way. Buddhism stumbles on reincarnation for me, and the paradoxes of the void dissipate in the sizzle of virtual produc- tion. One writes always already suspended, from what and from where, or what form of connectivities - these are not only the wrong questions to ask, they're questions that are deeply meaningless, as is the preposi- tional aegis constructed in and out of localized geometries: above, below, within, without, before, after, and so forth. The suspension is from nothing. There is a degree of production one attempts to do, with all this knowledge, anti-knowledge. Even here, I am ignoring mass extinctions, the damage humans have done to the planet, local political corruptions, the nadir of what appears, from our positions on the bent plane, as universal slaughter. Everything can disappear in an instant: 9/11, Katrina, Christchurch, Tibet, are names hinting at a damaged symbolic. It's this: as time goes on, (phenomenologically) speeds up, nothing is recoverable; we're already gone before we've arrived: we're ghosts occasioned by our own exponentially-increasing knowledge which is already out of date. We can't catch up with ourselves, as ghosts; phantasms fly faster than flesh, which drags us down to death, to a stop of all of this. But until then, what? That these universes carry us elsewhere, that we become invaders of our very selves, marauders of what we've taken for granted? I try to work through this storm, this permanent monsoon encompassing all realities, all virtualities, no matter how invisible. And we're all, all of us and our selves, in the same positionless. ========================================================================= note 1 - not acceleration, but derivatives > 2nd degree; note 2 - not virtual or real, inscriptive or abject: neti neti, neither this or that, thrown outward, neither sein or dasein, all sets are open =========================================================================