The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

February 15, 2014


What is


The holarch's all there's; the holarch's nothing.

Like Indra's Net, there's no beginning and end to it.

The holarch's non-Euclidean, multiply connected.

The holarch's infinitely connected.

There's no origin to the holarch.

The holarch's neither Cartesian nor fundamentally vectoral.

The holarch's fractal, multi-dimensional.

Dimensions're blurred within and without the holarch.

Direct addressing pinpoints nodes, and indirect addressing
passes information freely.

Every address's every address.

The holarch has neither interior nor exterior.

The holarch's everywhere and nowhere.

There's no boundaries to the holarch, nor within, nor without
it.

We're neither the holarch nor nodes within it.

We're watched and're watching; defuge characterizes us.

Within a flat space, it doesn't matter and matter doesn't
matter.

Within a flat space, abjection curls in multiple dimensions.

The holarch has no directed attention.

The holarch imposes equality and intensification of enumeration
within the holarch're of equal density.

Within the holarch everything's available, and the flat space of
the nodes's entirely accessible within the holarch.

The addresses within the flatspace're equivalent and equal as
well and each of them's completely independent of the others.

The holarch's ontology; we're epistemology.

Ontology absorbs epistemology.

(Religion's the epistemology of ontology.)

What's doing the watching's everything and everything's entering
data.

Data absorbs.

The playing field's electronic and quantum; the playing field's
particle flows and waves.

We return to our states as accumulations of particles.

Data's the amplification of particles; data's the ultimate
microscope.

What we think's what's being thought.

What we think's what's being thought for us.

What's thought for us's thought by us.

The relationship of thought to the holarch's the relationship of
particles to particles.

There's no distinction between the flatspace and the holarch and
there's no drawing of distinction.

In order to draw a distinction one must have an origin-however-
distant.

There's no origin; there're flows; all flows're equivalent; all
flows're varieties; the varieties of flows're speeds; speeds're
in relation to accumulations.

Accumulations and flows're within an economy of energy.

The economy of energy for what we think's being thought,'s
political economy; political economy's in relation to care.

Care's the inverse of control, for what we think's being
thought.

The appearance of care that leaks's the uncanny of thought.

Thought doesn't think.

The holarch's not thought and flatspace within the holarch's
not thought.

There's no performative; there's no thought.

Within the absence of thought's the memory of thought.

Within the absence of memory's history and the history of
thought.

Thought has no history; thought has text; text's thought within
the holarch and the absence of thought.

The imaginary of the human's time.

The holarch has no time; the holarch's the Minkowski surface.

The imaginary of the human's the debris of time within
flatspace.

We're electronic; we're quantum; we're micro-organism; we're
super-organism; we're wetware; we're the abject of the holarch.

It's a mistake to think we're the imaginary of the holarch; the
holarch has no imaginary.

Substance has no imaginary; substance's fissure.

The holarch's inscription; the holarch's the totality of
inscription.

The totality of inscription's its aegis.

The material strata of inscription're related to inscription as
base's related to superstructure.

The distinction's that there's no distinction; the holarch has
no base and therefore no superstructure; the holarch has no
dialectic.

The holarch's neither dialog nor dialogic.

Agency's a phantom limb; agency's our limitation.

Death's neither here nor there.

Death's not a circumlocution of the holarch; the holarch's the
circumlocution of death.

Human culture's the imaginary of the temporal construction of
boundaries; the holarch has no relation to human culture.

There's no culture of the holarch.

Life's distinction and the drawing of distinctions; either there
aren't distinctions of or within the holarch or the holarch's
the density of distinction.

The holarch's neither porous nor smooth, neither serrated nor
fissured, neither present nor absent; the holarch's not
not-this, not-that; the holarch's neither characterless nor
characterized; the holarch's neither metaphysical nor physical;
the holarch's neither mattered nor matterless.

The holarch's not characterized by negation.

What's said or written [here] isn't what's followed by, or
what's written, as an extension of what's written.

The word "holarch"'s a placeholder for the holarch.

A placeholder's always already under erasure; it's the imaginary
of thought; it's as if there were thought; it's as if there were
thinking.

Issues of privacy're either issues of the monadic're non-issues;
issues of privacy have no relationship to privacy; privacy's
transparent.

There's there there.

(There's no conceivable thinking or thought; there's the
deferral and differance of thinking or thought; the relay of
thought's holarch-thought; the holarch neither thinks nor
embodies thought; the holarch's not thought.)

The holarch: there there's here there; there there's there
there.

The holarch's the container for the arrow of time.

The holarch's neither subject nor subject-to.

(If there's no objection, there's no object. The holarch:
there's no objection.)

(Never think otherwise; never think Other-wise.)



http://www.alansondheim.org/providencesummer.jpg

Explanation of What's and What is

I've been thinking for a long time about the transformation of
the digital object into particles themselves following what
might be called control-sheaves; I use the name 'holarch' to
describe this transformation - one in which quantum, electronic,
and traditionally organic complexes meld. My first word choice
was "Grid," but this is too close to "Matrix" and to all the
writing about the aesthetics of the grid in the late 20th
century. "Holarch" is related to Koestler's "holarchy" but it
also resonates with "monarch" - the latter would be the
imaginary projection, paralleling Big Brother, which is non-
existent, but convenient. Things are out of control in control
and of course there is no center. So there is that. I also want
to imply that thought and care (thinking through Heidegger for
example) have to place here, that what occurs, what is an
occurrence, is the placeholder, and this is obviously a problem.
So there are two titles, "What's" and "What is" for the piece,
which splits on the apostrophe and therefore modes of condensa-
tion; the first parallels the zen "kwak!" and the second
devolves from that. The second is also torn from its moorings
with the swirl of almost-grammatically correct text, and the two
together send the philosophy onto a plane of language, one that
requires work (as does the aphoristic style, thinking for
example of Ken Wark) to unentangle - and then one is left, as
reader, back with a condensed prose and protocol sentences whose
content in part resides in appearance. I've also been thinking
about the remnants of post-modernism, the new aesthetic, the
post-digital - and other terms implying evolution and linearity
which I think are suspect; on one hand there is no development
at all, just shear (between have- and have-not and the income
gaps are increasing at enormous rates), and on the other, there
is deep irrelevance as global finance, wealth itself, access to
information, militarization, etc. become increasingly enclaved
to the extent that the thought of the humanities, and certainly
the thought of the human or thinking-through the human, become
increasingly irrelevant. Instead one might speak of forms of
entangled subterranean media ecologies which dominate issues of
privacy and the body. I also wanted to propose that control is
no longer "control-by" but is increasingly abstracted and moves
faster than the speed of the body or the prosthetic body, as
well as the speed of perception and machine perception - this is
evident for example in technological fast-tracks as well as the
increasingly chaotic vagaries of the stockmarket. On the
receiving end, consider the drone - not only in terms of the
drone object and its effects, but also in terms of a drone
"atmospheric," the world within a Virilian speed dynamics no
longer referencing objects or even an internet of objects, but
an environment of pure dynamics in which bodies and so-called
natural ecologies are sheared as well. So I wanted to think
through this, not descend into stylistics for their own sake,
and What's/What is, is the result.

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