NKdeE Newsletter Extra (English only) - A note on Sondheim, take 2

http://www.vilt.net/nkdee/kristine/index.jsp#sondheim

also & repeatingly, beyond it's repudation by its REWRITING subject, before the text was written, granulated, after it was postponed, annihilated by its appearance at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt/net4.txt, framed by THIS text, a jsp included COPY referring to an act of (mis)reading the impossible appearance of an outdated text by my act of opening a REMOTE file,(closer to this 'place' then mine)that in its turn gets framed by sending a reply to itself, lust turning on itself:

pin-u]p o[f][f].ab(sence)::dv

& next, outdoing any need for inscription:

A Refusal to Mourn the Death etc by Dylan Thomas, vide http://www.palace.net/~llama/poetry/refusal
a perfect example of how _only_ the negatively asserted can continue to withstand the inevitable


Dirk Vekemans unwrote:

>
> ——————–NEWSLETTER - NKdeE - NIEUWSBRIEF ————
>
> … A note on Alan Sondheim, take 2 (fading, exploding, fading)…
>
> One of the more ambitious stuff going on in my shaky Cathedral at
> http://www.vilt.net is the attempt to formulate answers to analyses
> like the
> one from Alan Sondheim below (see
> http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt/net4.txt for the complete
> source
> text).
>
> 'Answers' is a bad word, however, it's more a matter of writing into
> this
> kind of text floating on the dim moonlit field where art meets with
> philosophy on a common ground of howling fear and throws it's inward
> gaze
> back onto society, deflecting despair from the individual to the
> unresponsive dull mass of internet text users.
>
> A question, rather, of materialising on absent readership through
> vanishing
> authorship (absent because 1: text on the internet remains to a large
> extend
> unwritten until it is printed, or till the industry finally comes up
> with a
> 'materialising' screen rendering, visualising the traumatic aspects of
> text
> in an efficient way, and 2 because the medium itself hoaxes its
> 'users' into
> consuming text, clicking and sucking it in as a liquid, a visual
> hybrid that
> loses or even contradicts the inner voice of the author, she herself
> on the
> brink of losing her touch 'n feel of the word itself, of the flow that
> language was before she hacked into this stream of unconsciousness,
> plugged
> herself into the mediating apparatus that allows her to spit it out at
> formerly unknown speeds), throwing the
> linking-fading-exploding-fading-linking machine forward from an
> installment,
> an instance of temporary arrest, of banking 'gained' points in a game
> of the
> weakest link brought live on the net, that is at the same time a sign
> of its
> own deficit, throwing it away from the freezing body into a haltering
> rhythm
> someone else might sing to, or curse in, dance to, scream at…
>
> There's a lot in that text that i can agree to, if you want opinions,
> it's
> mainly the basic concept of GRANULARITY that i must refuse. I tend to
> believe that granularity is a regression to a primal but fictional
> atomism
> that can be avoided. 'Fictional' to be understood as any human act of
> representation or of perception itself, fiction as that process that
> we
> actually need to deal with the real to avoid the abyss of reality
> itself.
> Human mind cannot bare too much reality (Eliot), so the atomism itself
> is a
> primal need of humans, but in our human state of being we constantly
> deny it
> as well, as our desire is towards a complete annihilation of fiction
> and
> thus of any refraining concept of atoms or grains or points or
> whatever you
> want to name the singularity. We need singularity, because that's how
> our
> brains work, much like we need(ed) gods or Lacanian Objects, we
> construct
> singularity from the absence of it, create it by being here. So it's
> there
> all right, and at the same time it cannot be there, because that would
> immediately lead to global arrest, an instantaneaous fixation of
> reality,
> or, as Sondheim suggests here, a rewrite of the same into the same. We
> have
> nothing to write but that which we write into. There is no text beyond
> the
> text we live in.
>
> This may be all going beyond a ontological or philosophical point of
> discussion, because there are lot's of things that suggest that in
> ways
> similar to our recently discovered ability to destroy the physical
> earth
> (Hiroshima-denial of pending eco disasters) or simply the scale of
> effect a
> 'slight' carelessness on the part of our entrusted worldly powers can
> have
> (oops Bophal, 'xcuse me Tsjernobyl, you were saying Rwanda?) we are
> now
> becoming capable of creating networks of distributed 'intelligent'
> computing
> that could effectively disrupt reality as we know it on a global scale
> and
> rule out any 'normal' process of human perception, leaving us in a
> black
> hole in the great void.
>
> Optimists tend to fill this void with projections of better futures,
> in fact
> the other day i found a copy of a leading scientist's doctoral thesis
> in a
> second hand shop, bluntly inscribed with the words "The only history
> that
> interests us is the history of the future". It doesn't matter who that
> scientist is, suffice it to say that it's someone in a position to
> pour
> substantial amounts of corporate money into what used to be
> respectable
> scientific research. What does matter is his reference to an 'us' that
> justifies his bluntness, taking the reader of this inscription into a
> thrusted circle of "those who are enlightened". Even if that 'us'
> would only
> exist in his overenthousiastic, self-indulgent prickness or in the
> paranoical minds of folk like the three hackers in the X-Files, the
> threat
> is symptomatically a clear and present danger.
>
> Our world as we have built it is perhaps blindly walking down the path
> of
> the Great Modernistic Project lead by such people blinded by the
> sudden
> (although predictable) advancements in certain fields that they
> paranoically
> think is all of their genial doing, into believing the earth was
> inhabitated
> by ill-trained and dark-brained barbarians before they or their tutors
> came
> along, a utopian nightmare leading, for anyone who cares not to
> dismiss the
> entire human history for an instance can clearly see, either to the
> zero of
> a finite silence (Beckett) or the big 1 containing all and therefor
> nothing
> (Joyce).
>
> Once you start tampering with ontology itself ( the Zeus project at
> http://more.btexact.com/projects/agents/zeus/ for instance is one of
> those
> area's where business logic threatens to invade reality,it's all
> 'Open
> Source', mind you and no-one seems to know or care what they are
> plugging
> into which machine, no-one is worried by the idea of an ontology,
> however
> primitive in its conception, gaining dominance and therefor arresting
> power
> (define your freedom like we do, or die) by it's allegance to the very
> core
> of business activity), you should be aware of what you're getting
> into.
> Sure it's harmless. Sure it's 'only' about business communication,
> application 'integration'. Naturally we only 'call' it 'ontology'. No
> we
> have no 'ambition' whatsoever of 'defining'language, it's 'only' a
> matter of
> machine 'readability'. 'The' 'only' 'history' 'that' 'interests' 'us'
> ','
> 'is' 'the' 'history' 'of' 'the''future''.'
>
> Image: http://www.vilt.net/nkdee/graphics/inscription.jpg
>
>
> It doesn't help much if you do like lot's of these scientists do,
> negate
> everything before or after Nicolai Hartman because it's of no
> immediate use
> (they can see) and go on from there because you are evidently
> succesfull. Of
> course ontologies on a strictly logical calculus work better and
> faster,
> mathematics was doing pretty good too till G? and Russell came
> along, so
> on our way out let's quietly dump all those awkward quantum
> incertainties as
> well, shall we?
>
> The reactionist declaration of intent of the Mitteleuropa Foundation
> at
> http://www.mitteleuropafoundation.it says it all:
>
> "A research-center in cognitive systems and ontology. Our guiding idea
> is
> that theories developed between the end of the 19th century and the
> beginning of the 20th in the area we may broadly term "Mitteleuropean"
> could
> offer positive hints to the development of contemporary science."
>
> The fact alone that they need it to be Mitteleuropean. Comfortably
> tucked
> away in an old monastery, their intentions are clear enough: anything
> written in any fashion identifyable with French Post-Modernism is of
> no use
> whatsoever and should be kept from the premisses at all costs.
> Derrida's
> probably the worst virus imaginable. We need dollars, no revalations.
> Do not
> look at anything older than 1850, you don't really believe there can
> be
> anything of use in quaint old Leibniz, do you? We are talking ontology
> here,
> not mythology. How do you expect me to run an institution on monads?
> Or
> nomads for that matter? It's maths here, not mads. Untsoweiter…
>
> The only thing this website reminded me of is the way young Dutch
> poets (I
> only know about that language, I'm sure similar things happen in other
> literatures) started writing unbelievable 19th century rhetoric lyrics
> a few
> years ago, doing away with all that nastyness from modernism and
> post-modernism, cultivating a non-existent corpus of dogmatic rules.
> If
> you'd write anything pointing out what they were doing they would get
> excessively mad, with
> we-don't-want-to-hear-it-go-away-or-we-will-beat-you-out-of-here.
> Or the way some painting schools (literally: training schools) deify
> late
> 19th century realistic bourgeois painting, a similar reaction of
> reverting
> and denying everything that happened in between.
>
> And of course such ontologies can almost effortlessly (3 to 5 years,
> starting last year, not even that many buckets of dollars requiered if
> you
> get your talent cheap in the east) be brought to rule the world
> ('rule' in
> both it's governmental meanings, setting out and being the mental
> rule), and
> 'naturally' object oriented software programming is the way to go if
> you
> need fast successes.
> It's rather the question if humanity needs that kind of success and
> if,
> indeed, that great Beyond is not a place were we are banned from for a
> reason, told ad nauseam by countless holocausts to get away from, a
> pre-human writing on that blemished wall inside that thick skull of
> ours.
> What we urgently need is perhaps more an ontology for engineers that
> relates
> to them in understandable terms of 'best practices' what they are in
> fact
> doing in an ethical perspective, or more effectively, what they are
> bringing
> down upon themselves. Or should i be singing the joy of accomplishment
> here?
> Drive my bike through the living room and cry out triumphantly 'look
> mummy,
> no hands!'. Trust the clever people with the power and the money to
> show it?
> I am stupid, and like any self-respecting artist slightly deranged, i
> admit
> it freely, but not that stupid, nor an utter crank. Code is text, many
> people dealing with code don't even realize that, and if the IT
> business
> academics want to abolish history how could they realize the true
> power of
> text, once unleashed, like they "Unleash" all those thick useless
> Bibles on
> a new programming language every five years, because the old ones have
> become too complex for youngsters to learn in 24 hours, and therefor
> economically inefficient. Recycling is for assholes, let's dump that
> shit,
> we _are_ history. Eschatological alright.
>
> What i can think of in my ignorance, positively: I consider Derrida's
> research into negative theology a very interesting escape route here
> and the
> Deleuzian Leibniz rewrite a good starting point of fabricating
> alternatives
> to the dominant logistical ontology approach.. I hate to use the word
> but a
> minimalistic deconstruction of the current programming paradigma's,
> the text
> we feed our machines with, can be manufactured relatively easily, it
> wouldn't 'do' much but demonstrate that it can be done, but results
> may come
> equally spectacular when sufficient resources are applied to such
> processes.
> It's a question of finding a singular impossibility, an example that
> prooves
> beyond doubt that just by using a different ontology and applying that
> to
> another set of semantics, you can create something that is not within
> the
> scope of infant Zeus and the likes.
>
> A nice grail to be hunting down after hours, so in a way you could say
> that,
> like for any artist who is serious about her business, saving the
> world is a
> harmless hobby i like very much or a nice side effect of my
> symptomatic
> 'convoluted' condition and the obscure poetry with its ideosyncretic
> and
> eschatological tendencies that condition creates with or without my
> consent.
> No need to loose one's sense of humour, is there?
>
> Or to slip out another back door: in the end it's perhaps a good thing
> that
> there are so many hackers around, only it would be better if a few
> thousands
> of those would start hacking into ontology, break into the fabrics of
> semantic webs and leave some of their own cobwebs, reminding some
> people
> metaphorically of their inevitable abdication and subsequent demise in
> the
> future of their history.
> It's all just another code, really, only too bad much of the goodies
> is in
> French or German only (you don't go 'n translate your cool Linux stuff
> to
> windoze and let everything get corrupted, now do ya?), but that could
> be
> part of the challenge.
>
> Now leave me, you have not read this, i do not exist, i want to write
> some
> outdated poetry now in your absence, for another non-existence,
> neither of
> us in need of being right about anything.
>
> Last update 9/06/2005 23:37 GMT+2
>
> HERE's the Alan Sondheim text, from internet_txt4 @
> http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt/net4.txt
>
>
> INTERNET TEXT partial summary
>
>
>
> "Au voile qui la ceint absente avec frissons" (Mallarme)
>
> I address the problem of ELECTRONIC SUBJECTIVITY by virtue of several
> threads, all concurrent. I continue this addressing, each thread
> writing and rewriting the text, a continuous-production or discourse
> against the grain.
>
> The GRAIN, GRANULARITY, is a physical reality both classical and
> quantum-mechanical, a physical reality whose appearance is that of the
> grain: letters on a bleak field, the grains of granite and
> photographic film, beach-sand, the granularity of the retina itself.
>
> The SUBJECT "au voile" or VEILED SUBJECT is defined by ADDRESS
> (location, without which the subject no longer exists); RECOGNITION
> (the activated ADDRESS opening and closing channels of communication);
> PROTOCOL (the syntactic structure of communication); and REWRITE (a
> continuous-production or reiteration of the subject, a flood or
> EMISSION of the symbolic).
>
> The EMISSION is a signifying; a SPEW is a symbol-dump, noisy and
> granular, referencing the real exterior, transforming the interior
> into an abject. EMISSION and SPEW are communicative occasions whose
> analog is the set of GENERALIZED MEASURE GEOMETRIES, always but not
> quite symmetrical, always reiterative. The Net diffuses and collapses,
> differentiates and integrates, transforming smooth into semantic or
> inscribed space, and back again.
>
> The ontology of the Net is UNCANNY, an absenting or problematic
> alterity; within the UNCANNY, FANTASM appears, the introjection/
> projection (-JECTIVITY or the THROWN, DASEIN) of narratologies and
> ACTANTS, "persons," neither present nor absent; these may be
> ELECTRONIC SUBJECTS themselves, or a constructed IMAGINARY transmitted
> and diffused. NARRATOLOGIES are the collapse of NET DISCOURSE into
> remaindered patterns; the opposite is the MURMUR or STUTTER, the
> irruption of "frissons" everywhere and nowhere at all. The imaginary
> is addictive; Net users become USERS, circulating around specificities
> fetishized from emissions, a collapse into the lure of the UNCANNY.
> Here, POWER is what passes for POWER. If addiction is the obsessive-
> compulsive neurosis of the net, WEB INVERSION is the psychosis,
> transforming the body into its exterior, and its exterior into flesh
> burned into the Internet itself, wires laid across the skin, the skin
> speaking the hieroglyph of imaginary usage.
>
> The DIGITAL DOMAIN is the dominion of eternal life, the dominion of
> eternal REWRITE; information is never lost from generation to
> generation, but always repeated and repeated absolutely. This is the
> dominion of the clean and proper body, the introjection of burnt wires
> producing always already a simulacrum of life guaranteeing continuous
> discourse. There is no death; DASEIN becomes EMISSION itself. The
> SCREEN is the only TERMINAL OPERATION; the screen becomes the EGO or
> gateway, the surface of the addictive user. Everything is PERFECTION.
> TRUTH and FACTICITY are occurrences, since truth tables are decided
> only by ASCII or other decoding/encoding matches. What is true is
> present. And what is true is also BEAUTIFUL since perfect and
> perfectly clean, always a symmetry or lure.
>
> The GREAT BEYOND is the horizon of the Internet, always farther,
> always increasing circulations of the planet which short-circuit or
> circumvent. At the edge of the GREAT BEYOND one finds the BLIND
> PASSWORD "absente" beyond which is a null-set or zero file. ONTOLOGY
> itself is absent; epistemology is viral, transformative. Nothing is
> certain and nothing circulates.
>
> PROPER NAMES circulate throughout the Net, the promise of TRUTH or
> BEAUTY, the promise of emission. Such names are FANTASMS; every
> possible world is every possible Net world in a continuous morph, and
> every KIND is simultaneously a NATURAL and UNNATURAL kind. Thus TRUTH
> is each and every occurrence, and who is to say that FALSEHOOD is not
> the same? What is neither this nor that is foundation, gestural,
> within and without the GREAT BEYOND, UNCANNY. The TERMINAL becomes
> retinal but anonymous. Names MURMUR forever, lose identity. NAMES
> never had identity to begin with.
>
> The POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE NET constructs a class-consciousness
> fuelled by reification-tendencies; everything is reification.
> Teleology is defined by a FUTURE IMPERFECT in which reification
> constitutes the IDENTITY OF THE SUBJECT ITSELF.
>
> The FUTURE from the exterior results in the LAST SCIENCE FICTION STORY
> in which the subject confronts the GREAT BEYOND. Narrative itself
> disappears, replaced by PERFECTION. LIFE, once defined by MODULARITY,
> has become SUBSTANCE, a REWRITE of the same into the same.
>
> "Rien, cette ecume, vierge vers" (Mallarme)
> —————————————————————————-
> ——
>
> greetings, dv
> Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends at
> http://www.vilt.net/nkdee
>
>
> Voor mensen die het Engels niet machtig zijn: sorry, dit eventjes ter
> compensatie van de vorige uitlaat, exclusief in het Nederlands
>
>
> ————————
> (NL) ViLTNET respecteert uw privacy. U ontvangt deze nieuwsbrief omdat
> u (of iemand anders met dit adres) er zich ooit voor ingeschreven hebt
> (飨t hoor). U zich kan makkelijk uitschrijven door een bericht te
> sturen naar [email protected] met in de berichttitel LEAVE. Als dat niet
> lukt stuur dan effie een mailtje naar [email protected], dan vis ik er u
> handmatig uit. Groeten, dv.
>
> (EN) ViLTNET respects your privacy. You are receiving this message
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> (really, it's true). You can easily unsubscribe by sending a blank
> message to [email protected] with LEAVE in the subject. If that doesn't
> work, send me a mail at [email protected] and i'll remove you manually.
> Greetings, dv.
>
>