Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.20.1706210212520.23419@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: SEMIOTIC SPLATTER, SPLATTER SEMIOTICS
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2017 02:14:30 -0400 (EDT)
SEMIOTIC SPLATTER, SPLATTER SEMIOTICS http://www.alansondheim.org/floodwall140.jpg (further notes on splatter) Defuge, exhaustion (pornography, returning to a book once read, attacks on HRC), continuous, future anterior semiosis, classical news vs doxa, dynamics of symbolic formations, the symbol or meme always already transforming. Semiotic splatter transforms into splatter semiotics. There might be a parallel here to accelerationism - except that with dissolution and percolation, there's nothing to acceleration. Think of dispersion in relation to the broken classicism of traditional analysis. The resulting epistemology is fragmentatary, an ontology of dusts and radiations. -------------------------------------------- Other (much older) texts: Dusts and Radiations (Cantor Dust Transmission Towers) Dust settles. It sloughs from the real, fills the cracks, cauterizes his- tory, sinters culture. It travels. It moves substance across meridians.. Dust is atmospheric, existing in alliance with the air. Radiation travels through dust, is dispersed by the same. Radiation carries obstacle and inherent information. Extrinsic, it bounces from surface to surface, defines surface, contributes to the formation of entity and identity. Intrinsic, it run in spurts, amplitudes, wavelengths, shuttling information that defines its very existence. It's presence is intrinsic, say, and the quality of its presence is extrinsic. Nothing is pure in the radiative domain, everything interweaves, and meta- phors go only so far. Radiation, like dust, traverses; it doesn't require the atmospheric ether. If dust silently corrupts the surface, wears and is the result of wearing down, radiation floods, spews, emits; it breathes the virtual vacuums of outer space. Information is the result of division; it's _here_ that something exists, and it's _here_ that my voice is car- ried to you, and it's _here_ that image image image. Desire rides, inter- weaves, interpenetrates, but desire is an other. Postmodernity is the topography and psychogeography of dusts and radia- tions - extinctions, pollutions, desertifications, abandonments, colonias, internet, telephony, radio, television, microwave. Dusts are bottom up; they're beneath the surface, under things. Radiations are top-down, ig- noring boundaries: what is being said, produced, constructed, wherever you are. Dust erodes electronics; electronics must be placed in physical po- tential wells to continue operating - islands of stability in the midst of flux, heat, moisture, vandalism. I desire a phenomenology of dust and radiation, interspersed with global economies, the ravagings of human occupations. I desire the analysis of uncanny or imaginary ghosts wandering these denuded landscapes, with all the information anyone might desire, on any planet, anything, overwhelming and absurdist information, the truth of the real buried in defuge. I de- sire the interlace through all of this, the emergence of a pure and beau- tiful text like that very ravaged body. Dust leaves trails; radiation decays in quantum noise; we bury ourselves in the fiction of truthful nomenclature. ----------------------------- Dusts (lecture notes) and disillusions, layers sloughing off: below, protocols, above: tempor- ality: intermediary confluences, flows, meaning-generators: cantor-dusts, decay of red-brick buildings, dissolution of inscriptions, allergic reactions, electromagnetic emissions, sputtered packets across protocols favillas, colonias, shack cities, slacker cities, hacker sites, spewed codes, dispersions and headless emissions, universal desiccations of all living things serrated edges, grated minerals, fractal dimensions and chaotic paths, universal catastrophies, faultlines and faulted memories: universal radia- tions, collocations of murmurs of universal organisms no borders, no transgressions, nodes in seas of radios and televisions, ghosts in telenovellas, emissions throughout, images and broken images, the colloquia of truth and disinformations sinters, powders, pulverizations, clutter losing memory, the absolute annihilation of memory, pressures and the breaching of potential wells, splintered protons, particle crashes, k-meson resurrected identities, virtual particles and shadow-galaxies splayed bodies and genders, dismemberments and cyborg claptrap wirings, cyberspatial dimensions and seas, landmines, shrapnel, movements of rem- nant populations, nomads, chemical warfares ideological part-objects, sputterings, words rolling off the tongue, re- lationship marketings, viruses and bacteria, transitional objects to nowhere, skins and cancers, skin cancers and acid rains, damaged frogs, damaged lives dead-end theories, theory-machines, paraplegic bodies without organs, surface skitterings, information overloads and spews, information implo- sions and catatonias, information managements, managed communities, in- formation all the way down binarization of the world, error codes and encryptions, checksums and prime searches, home-owner's associations and regional conflicts, bias and hate crimes, digital eternities mutilated by legacy softwares and dead tech, who do you trust false random, pseudo-random, true random, death by nuclear or chemical warfare, by plague or global warming or breakdown of the ozone layer, ideological foreclosing, the last remaining woman or man, planetary ex- tinctions, clearcut forestry, machine speedup to infinite regress, in- crease in birth defects and retardations, all the land in the world all the land in the world tending towards dust, towards the storms and santa ana winds of dust, towards the harborings of dried muds and silts, whole talus slopes of dust, accumulated accomplishments of humanity rubbled against the base of cliffs and mesas, worn buttes and violated tablelands dust between your teeth, dust in the air, the newstory: dust, the theory: dust, the television special: dust, the world-wide-web broadcast: dust, the whisper among lovers: dust, the managed online communities: dust, our bones: dust, our speech: dust, dust our destiny, radiations our truth ------------------- The World, by Jennifer Humanity exists on the thinnest wedge (of stability and entity) extending into catastrophic spaces; in the past, stromatolites were the order of the day - in the future, the frozen sputtered universe levels and exhausts any conceivable subject horizons. At the level of the smallest, dimension, time, and space are problematic; from this point of view, things in the world are illusory, emanations. Now move elsewhere, an impossibility, into other inflationary scenarios; we're again at a loss. Here, we're momentarily present, constituted by particles. And Jennifer, myself, is constituted by bits and bytes, floating from one drive or transmission to another. Jennifer is entirely constituted, and Alan is constituted by nearly decomposable hierarchies. So far, Jennifer is fully decomposable; what occurs on one level is responsible for another. Jennifer is a chimera, a mirage without a landscape anywhere in sight; this is also the world from the wedge. See the radiations and dusts, emissions and splays, everywhere, things dissolving, as if liquid were sintered and a form of breathing. Now let's go further into the membranes, remembering the temporary nature of what's found there, the notion of finding, the notion of the findable. Wherever we look, things fragment or dissolve; what doesn't, is shored up by perception, ideology, or the glue of the real world. Think of things as contour-driven, consciousness as assemblages. Think of ghosts populating a world of ghosts, holding on for dear life to the tightness of a mythical real - whether it be nation, race, religion, billiard ball, heterosex. Boundary maintenance becomes more and more necessary if you're frightened; whoever and whatever they are, they're already on the horizon - and they're not solid. (But sooner or later we'll believe they are, again. For who can live in an ongoing world of winds and storms, clouds and flares?) They're not solid, they're liquid; they seem, like AIDS or cancers, to infiltrate everywhere. They're in the air we breathe, in our minds, in the midst of our political system. They're linkages and couplings, they're frayed at the edges. They question our very space and time, the world we live in, our origins, our future. They have no future, have no past. They're never taken into account, they don't exist, they're unaccountable, uncounted. They're processes without the ontology of solids for example. They're fragments of dreams for another, footprints for a third, virtual particles for a fourth, IP datagrams for a fifth, solar flares for a sixth, trilobite communities for a seventh, speech for an eighth... - Jennifer ---------------