Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1104290411340.22978@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Insoluble Cases
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2011 04:13:06 -0400 (EDT)
========================================================================= Insoluble Cases ========================================================================= I've just solved the case: Here's how it happened. (Monk) I began by thinking of the collapse of books, literature, theory: not of carry-over and interoperability among file formats, electronic productions or reproductions, but of the splitting and fragmentation of text and theory, the reduction to what I've considered elsewhere as radiations and dusts. Thus fundamental physical theory might just reduce to competing structures producing equivalent, if not identical results; in which case, the concept of the fundamental becomes moot through its splitting into entangled at the top, but deeply incompatible at the bottom, predictive and coherent constructs. So it goes, just as video, for example, has abandoned long-form for splits and bites/sound-bites that will continue to shrink. The world's buzzing confusing itself coheres and continues to grow and every genre, form, classicism, or medium disappears; even the voice channels into text, text into abbreviations, abbreviations into augments, augments into part-objects, all against and within the massive violence and poverty of the coming-to-age-and-end of a species literally dying for a singularity, other than dying. Consider new media, practices shadowed by their own future anteriors, constant redefinitions and tropes from simulacra through vectors and speed, back into the forests of signs and spectacles. Everything is plural and always already has been, which cripples the monotheisms of explana- tions, explanatory power, and the power that pervades them. Power is always a becoming, a leverage; now and forever, power splatters among gangs, hackers, corporations, languages, exploits, patches - and patches themselves are the new sutures, designed, not to hold subject or subject- ivity together, but to bridge monetary gaps in structures ultimately doomed to obsolescence or collapse. I've thought long about this, about the idea about this and about ideas and idea; these thoughts as well transform, are transformed, through radiations. Think of such as literal: how much gadgetry now speaks to itself through collocations and designated bandwidths, just on the desk or threshold? And think of such as content, not in the sense of McLuhanesque media, but in the dissolution of such media, everything parceling within electromagnetic spectra that begins and ends, usually, with something physical, some manifestation of receiving/ receiver and transmitting/transmitter. Think further, transmissions of receivers, receivers of transmitters, transmissions of transmitters; you get the idea, get hold of the idea, and the idea bifurcates chaotically; in the end you get nothing, you're swallowed by the waves, by the particles constantly in circulation. There's no room for the strictures of genre here, for the long-form that's already rusting, corroding at the ends, at both ends, throughout the long-form which requires patience, silent, and grounding that's inconceivable at this point/plane/dimension. For the long-form needs stability just like accountancy; it's the world of classical economy, classical accountancy; it requires memory and the stability of memory, things that can't, ever, be hacked, things that one can return to, two or three hundred pages or notes earlier; this isn't the case (for that matter/s, the world is no longer the case/s, if it/they ever were) - these arguments and edifices that built up, that led nowhere, that promised monotheisms, monotheories, that carefully laid themselves out (when not laying bodies) - these buried their internal violence, excreted it out the other end. All, everything here, requiring a respite from slaughter, extinctions, exponentially-increasing populations on the fast-track, these intrusions into the social, which now constitute the socials: the strings of the world are pulled by children, and the children's children, and ultimately nothing else matters. The children too dissolve into radiations and dusts, Fukushima and Chernobyl, but also the scatterings of local wars, gang insignia, temporary autonomous zones with a vengeance. There are pollutions, mostly invisible, everywhere, permeat- ing the world with the stench of death always already disappearing before it's presence is felt; we're all embedded like journalists in guerilla operations among the enclaves of a collapsing planet. It's too late for anything else, but it was always too late; we lived in momentary stases - of goods, apparently stable economies and weather patterns, that are once again on the fast-forward track. Our books, films, symphonies, portend the culture of death which inheres within them. We're watching ourselves disappear, and this isn't towards the prosthetic or viral, but rather the prion or unstable nanobots: as the atmosphere turns against us, nothing happens but fundamental ontology that mirrors and collapses within itself. And that's everything - in a sense, what used to be called 'anomie,' as long as anomie hearkened back to an inconceivable, inauthentic Eden of coherency that never existed in the first or any other place. Think of the anomie of anomie, anomie as nothing but the word itself, the inscription that's half read, half-disappeared, transformed by the fall of internal empires that still seem to hold us as one, together, or in multiplicities, or whatever groupings you might think still hold within occasional dream- ing. Whatever else, culture appeared thick, with inconceivable depth - this is the Castanedan theater, or the primordial or the aboriginal habitus, epics and virtual worlds emerging out of it, oral traditions miraculously holding forth for generations and so on. We believed that, just as we believed the moment from oral to written or written to oral, or the primacy of inscription or of things, or of orderings, or of axiomatics - even those that were admittedly insecure at the edges, Godel numberings for example tending towards the disappearance of moorings. See what can be accomplished at a distance, through a telescope or prime number investi- gations, but then there are always the problematics of other number systems, multiverses, families dangerous and out of control just the next block over. The thick was always a sheave, was always abject, always required control. Culture not only buried abjection; it consolidated the thing floating on top of the muck, cleaned off the shitty bottom. It answered, it had answers, if only anti-oedipal. But abjection comes with the corpses of extinctions, with local wars, hacking, pollutions. But no, it doesn't come with these at all; it's always been there, what's been fundamental are the dusts, the pollutions, the radiations, the muck that Plato wanted to bury, that D&G dug up again and rubbed in our faces: now those faces are gone as well. So the ontology, the epistemology, the ontic, the episteme, dissolve, and there is no yielding to a new order, though there might be chaos. I think of this as 'neither A nor B,' 'not both A and B,' dual and Sheffer-stroke lending themselves towards Pales of no concern, maybe A and B just go out like lights, maybe they disappear, maybe they were never there in the first place, maybe they're our dream of stability. How simple it all seems until we look for constant, the thick again, so we can speak, make sense, as if it were more than possible to make sense for more than a little while, more than the occasion on the corner, the chance meeting, the unknown disease or bullet fired in the dark. All of this is up for grabs, sites/cites/sights of contestation, but it should be clear by now that contestation itself, on local and global levels, among tendrils and temporary holarchies, is what roils, what roils within the abject, what provides no clear footings, anymore than currency or human exchanges. Things are beginning to run out; more likely than not, the singularity will be one of scarcity, not the fecundity of technological answers that promise immortality to those enclaved lucky few able to afford them. It's just a matter of time before immortality as well is swallowed up; even cryogenics depends upon the thick, upon basic stabilities, in order to propagate itself and the species with the wealthy few. So we're left scattered among augmentations, inscriptions, the arrogance of chic - and among inconceivable pain and beauty as, not only empires, but the very elements of culture dissolve. And we can discuss these things; if social networking is the current paradigm, the radiations and problematic of paradigms will leave us for some brief moments when we might pick up a book, for example, just to feel the weight of it. But more likely we'll be listening to tunes of our own mirrored creations, as long as the power stays on. (Wait, this isn't right here, this trope.) There won't be tunes or books; there might be implants. They might last for a while. There might be fetishisms of all sorts, driven not by power, but by Lingis' lust, abject and oozing. There might be splits. There will be scarcity. There won't be long-form. There will be momentary stases, strange attractors. There won't be life-spans; there will be fallout. Dusts never die, carry no information, infiltrate driven by no will of their own or anyone's. They increase. The appearance of the future of the world is Maya. The future of the world is graffiti. That's where it will happen, the warnings to vacate the area, that something poisonous and deadly is just around the corner. That's where the thick ends up - with such unspeakable pain, with such death, that words not only fail - they never existed in the first place. And not even that's guaranteed. =========================================================================