Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1210031218180.10813@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: cleverness and the clever
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2012 12:19:51 -0400 (EDT)
cleverness and the clever cleverness has the appearance of universal intelligence. cleverness is the condition of the object in the digital world. to be clever means to remain on the obsessive surface of the catastrophic, punctuated by a tear constituting the imaginary of a bridge. the clever object appears to increase knowledge, but in fact constructs both surface and tear. cleverness is quickly perceived, understood, and appropriated, as if it carried the premise and promise of depth. the clever object is the combination of disparities, coupled and mapped together; the awkwardness of this suture is the clever. clever is a level playing field guaranteeing the perception of knowledge's interior, sidestepping its fractal nature. cleverness exists within the natural wilderness of the digital, procuring the analogic through obsessive builds. cleverness sutures time as well, simultaneously creating and deconstructing a zeitgeist whose border apparently extends to the edges of the world. cleverness appears boundless and sustains itself by leaps and disparities; it is the enemy of substance, whose depth is quickly transformed into the titillation of elicit knowledge in the midst of an appreciative community. cleverness exchanges use value for exchange, and the transformation of depth is also the transformation of temporal continuity to the time-bite. the obsessive-compulsive machine is employed to the right in the construction of cleverness, just as the time-hack machine, with its apparent instanteneity, is employed to the left; in cleverness time is never the duration of interiority, but is both the long-shot and/or the jump-cut, which appears as an exploit. cleverness is always exploit; at its heart lies the destruction or differentiation of long-reading, replacing the analytical by the aphoristic. cleverness thus appears to offer the world, blurring boundary; what might be considered technological is proffered as phenomenological answer and deployment of philosophical and general cultural concern. cleverness is active passivity passing for action. the clever can be grasped in its imminence, as if the aporia of the immanence of the world were suspect. the clever leaves nothing and everything unsaid. the clever is a circumnavigation of the political, drawing the strings tighter in its emphasis on quick construction; the clever is over before it begins. the political is transformed into the manifesto and petition, whose contents are buried as marxist superstructure becomes substructure. the clever is an image in both time and space; it is collapse, but broken collapse; the subject lies in the suture of the breakage. the clever is an epigram whose encapsulated life appears elsewhere, compressed into a plane, line, or point; life and its history are thereby immolated; in this sense, cleverness is breathless. cleverness is the wit of an object which appears as metaphoric totality; it breaks with the tradition of breaking; its humor is its suffering. cleverness appearing during the mourning of the mourning of objects and their inscription; cleverness is always under erasure. look closely at cleverness, and the corporate shyly appears; cleverness is the product and production of the sponsored world. cleverness is likely likely; cleverness is amusing.