The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

June 21, 2017


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.

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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.

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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


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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


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