The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

The Core


http://www.alansondheim.org/core.mp4

If I could back it up, I'd back it up and move elsewhere
and have a few moments of quiet; instead, this is the 
king and we are the subject; this is the object, and we 
are the citizen without rank; this is the noise, and we
are the silence; this is the Core and we are the periphery.
We try and make do and my neighbor smashed his laptop out
of frustration and water's coming through the roof again
into our place and I've lost time and space dealing with
emptiness. I'm not complaining; I'd love to leave the
planet and its Republican and ignorant horror, taking 
Azure and Ossi the cat with me, but instead, the Core is
seeping into us at 75 or 80 db and there's no recourse;
the Core is what controls the finance and the tearing-out
of neighborhoods, replacing them with Dylan and Lady Gaga,
and we keep functioning as if nothing is happening, while
inside the body, there is the whirring and slaughter of
knives, the bones sawed through, the tissues lubricated
with high-speed fluid, the machines stopping for nothing.
When the Coliseum was built, there were no complaints 
passed down to us, and ours are lost as well with clever
puns and sleepless nights and rage replacing any gesture
that might achieve something. This is the lesson of
capital: It achieves, it marches forward, and nothing 
stops it; it is as inert, as obdurate, as idiotic, as
Rosset's real, about which nothing can be said, because
even with speech, there is no speech act, nothing left
to be meant, nothing left of meaning. It is the differ-
end of the differend, a second order effect that trans-
forms capital into the very substance of the world, the
hold-fast which gnaws at flesh, animal or otherwise, 
which develops for the sake of development. Our protests
have been chimeras, have been in vain; they exist within
the imaginary, not even uncanny, not even perturbations
that demand the slightest bit of attention. Global 
capital moves at unbelievably high speed, past Virilio's
dreamlands; it pays no attention to anything, not even
flow or flux, not even the optics that carry it forward.
But it's global capital that's the Core, that's tearing
us up, permanently, and forever; accompanied by the
seizures of eminent domain, declarations of blighted
neighborhoods, corrupt rivers of multi-national capital
that remains intrinsically nameless - there is nothing 
to be done, no way to move out. The flesh is dying here,
the birds are disappearing, crime rises as desperate
people search for remnants that might keep them alive
for a while long; Ballard's world has come true, down 
to the smallest detail, as people who can afford to,
enclave themselves and gather their money and weaponry
around them. For us, we're already thrown under the
tank treads of the machine; chaos reigns and grows as
obdurate capital sits and gathers itself. No longer
intensifications or strange attractors - instead, we
have n-brane networks of surfaces that have no need 
to recognize the subject. Everything is object; 
everything is ground up; everything is slurry. We live
to die, to be replaced, although that is no longer 
necessary. And these words, like any others, are 
surplus and redundant; new meaning accrues to the
idea of erasure - for us - to annihilation - for us -
th the differend - for us - to concentration - for us.
Let's not forget the surface phenomenon of the arena
exists - for us - for entertainment only, and perhaps 
a bit of the old wilding in the neighborhood - any
thing to release tension, although in the long run, 
that doesn't matter as well. I think of these as 
dispatches from an occluded front, serving little
purpose, gathered by google or facebook or some such,
such a new way to connect. Just like the real, it's
flat, connected in its disconnectedness: the 
distinction is, it appears clever, and takes up very
little time.

http://xkcd.com/1110/

- do check this out; it's somewhere between a game, a cartoon, philosophy, 
a geology - maybe the most amazing image I've seen online. I was on for 
over an hour...

- Alan