Alan Sondheim on Fri, 24 Aug 2001 21:20:32 +0200 (CEST) |
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[Nettime-bold] book. the seventh going, the last. |
- book. the seventh going, the last. the relationship of consciousness to the world vis-a-vis structure, abstraction, symbolic systems. but the relationship of consciousness to its inscription: who is inscribing: veering back from the concern, blind ambition (see anecdotal) tending towards theoretical thwarting, return of the repressed - immersive and definable structures which are negotiations - irreversible or reversible - hierarchy of such structures - sets and arrows - categories - the implicate orderings of consciousness within all of this - untended: unintended consciousness: my work is already an es- cape, already unfounded: the phenomenological investigation of this rela- tionship requires a certain sensitivity: i have granted myself this: fol- lowing thought into harder structures: following structures into their languor or lassitude: the seventh going...the leaving of the number... for sooner or later there must come that moment of decay...proton or otherwise...the loosening of the strands, breaking of the vessels...the implicate order itself gone in the gone world...structure always requires maintenance...i leave you to your fate...the going of the book...interior moves... writing, within, or against, the paragraph, writing among texts, return to the repression of style, continuous honing, innuendo, negation, contrary and contradictory, of the sixth go at it, against the other five, the quasi-logical structure of the lifeworld. but which lifeworld, which state of confusion, which state of health: consideration of obsessional neurosis as the holding-forth of the world, radical deposition - the continuous need to inscribe, reinscribe - territorializations and assign- ations - not the theoretics of doubt but the analytic inability to take anything for granted - exhaustion as a condition for the constant recon- struction of the world: thinking of the play or theatrics of the world: methodologies of distancing and absorption: for it is of the moment... the logical structure which requires the possibilities both of connection and disconnection at a distance...that affairs may have no relationship among themselves...none of them...that affairs are all connected...teth- ered...wandering in a landscape (such that) entities are unknown, incon- ceivable... of the sixth go at the philosophical, against the other five, the inter- stice of thought, thought's blurred reminiscence, thought's thoughtless- ness, the potential for philosophical investigation through audio-visual and other media. but what style, what genre: whose investigation, what gender, what methodology, what deployment of desire: questions of periodization, extension of media on a continuous feed-forward basis, inextricably tied down to corporate research and development programs - weakening of them- atic thinking - the need to organization meta-methodologies of search / knowledge strategies - on the other hand the loosening of semantics through the muteness of audio-visual representations - what one might call "kidding ourselves" through the semblance of research: that's all there might be to it: a certain carelessness of thought: fudging, the kludge or glitch: loss of rigor: one might speculate that even the theorization of such loss constitutes a defensive fortification against theorization itself: one door might close...another open...on both sides the identical landscape...oxherders visible in the distance...the encryption is abso- lute... of the sixth, the go at it, defending the other five goes, of the text which insists on veering out of genre, of the genre of the philosophic, of the literary, the natural order of structure. but what nature: whose nature: whose cooperation: whose corporation: but what contractuality: the natural world under the sign of capital, in-corporation, em/bodiment of nature, the body politic, political body, structure transformed into performance, action - but the chaotic debris of the body - extensions of flesh - subtexting in which the dissolution of language is paramount, and always the problematic of the symbolic - what is the binding of standing-in-for if not already allegory, sign, inscription, intention - think of the bound body as al- ready the hieroglyph and its politicization, the restraint of the symbol- ic: arousal, tumescence, distension, stretched or opened skin: upwelling of debris and frisson, shuddering, stuttering, trembling of the subject: she knows it has reached...already...you might have guessed it...you could already see it in the sixth go at it all...approaching a moment when it is completed...ready for others' eyes...interpretations...hermen- eutics...approaches...critiques...postulations...hypotheses...how empty and vulnerable... or of the sixth go at it, binding the other five, of the politicization of philosophy, the ideology underpinnings, of the sixth go at it underpinning itself, loosening, "hardly something to write home about," consciousness in relation to subjectivity. but what consciousness: what eidetic reduction: what cognitive mappings: what mathematical catastroph- es: what tropes: the jump cut from phenomenology to mathesis, suturing the subject for whom the book is written, the writing of explanation and description and the problematic situating both, the cusp catastrophe as that leap which creates structural extension, boundary, moving-on - the fold, leaping into the fold, the relationship of the fold catastrophe to the sheffer stroke and its dual - elsewhere of not-both-a-and-b tending towards the nomadic, exhaustion - the exhaustion of "the species" or "the organism" - planetary exhaustion, universal denouement - already present in the specter of death - wandering in the dual - neither-a-nor-b - it is as if it splits: neither one nor the other: then there is the proboscis or exploratory thesis: we have escaped the monadology: the proboscis is a sign of truth...extension extends both tolerance and domain...every phy- sics existing within the limit...newtonian...euclidean...asymptotic... there is always something else...increase the energy or magnification... the other will appear... of the sixth go at it, expelled from the rest, temporally following after the others, "camp-follower," the go explaining everything, the diegetic or diacritical go, of the interstitial, of all of them, of the goes to come, inserted into enumeration: unaccountable and unaccounted-for: "there's no telling" of the soul: "there's no telling" of the eye: there's no future but hunger: no future but the desire or commitment to one or an/other: the other appears at the magnification...at the limit everything changes ...there is no limit... there's no telling of the sixth, the sixth does the telling, it's as if the sixth were told to itself, whispered to itself, it's as if the sixth were imaginary or avatar, hardly an insertion, as if the sixth were suddenly, irrevocably, scratched into the text, as if its place were placed and forgotten, as if one "walked away" from meaning and its defen- sive fortification, virtual subjectivity and its relation to protocols, the imaginary, and linguistic performativity. but which protocols: whose imaginary against what inscription and whose thetic: but what languages and what mechanisms of performance/perforation: who is speaking for whom across avatars, first through other persons and tenses, what insistence carries the projection and project of consciousness across real and virtual networks, what of consciousness as such project, what of the peripheral imaginary, the imaginary always already at a loss against or through the symbolic, what of the symbolic as always already foreclosing, what of the toppling of the scheme of things, what of alterities, multiculturalisms, sloughs, symbolic emissions and spews, flows, the flooding of clutter and part-objects - spoken within or spoken-for by avatars - consciousness as dialectic among semantic emissions among subjects only some of which seem real - there are always the virtual among us - ghosts, emanants, kami - ectoplasms at the periphery - prosthetics, prostheses - who among us is cyborg cauterized by insertion of flesh or electronic diegesis - moving among cyborgs - all of us caught in virtual realities - the keywords absent, unknown - we exhaust ourselves avoiding death and its already equally exhausted aporia - we're drawn in and out of it - this is a different sort of limit...entirely... no...this is exactly the same...confrontation of the other as the self swoons or collapses into unconsciousness... it's as if the sixth were a portal to the fifth, it's as if the fifth were coming forth, we're speaking as if we're spoken-for: we're spoken-for as if we're speak- ing: imagine a speech bypassing to such an extent that it occupies another stratum entirely: that it appears to come from elsewhere: from neither-a- nor-b: that it is one with aurality: that it comes from the limit...that it is the limit of the end which is denouement...that it continues past the exist from the theater...that it is an emission or spew from the thea- ter...from the theatrical... of the sixth which is bypassing, which is already speaking against itself, which is attempting closure, finish, beyond the denouement, which is of the end, ending itself against the rest "of them," the entrapment and proliferation of detail in a partially-cooled universe between plasma and annihilation. but which inscription and which seal: but what decade and what millennium: but what substrate and cosmological constant: and what of the sweeping away of the diachronic, necessary for the therapeutic or functioning of the organism within this space, this imminency, annihilation at the limit taken to the level of the absurd- catastrophic, debris - we're huddled in relation to our own demise - we can smell the fear of it - the phenomenology of scent - nowhere and everywhere at once - the smell of a person indeterminate, unidentifiable, seductive - the procuring of death - writing and writing against it - the continuous evolution of writing into and out of it - writing oneself into existence - writing oneself out of it - or at that limit where there is no mapping...no writing...inscription...whatsoever...no mapping...no per- ception..."she collapsed utterly upon the stage...they had to rush her out of the theater"...the audience... the sixth go at it all already written out of it, as if these intersper- sions no longer existed, as if one were subservient to the future anterior, the very scent of the sixth, its huddling, its refugee status, the audience... the scent bringing us back: the scent of the w/hole, anal musk: the scent of the cauterization of philosophy: the anal fissure - not the inscription of a / not-a, but the fissure of the same among/within the same: substance fissures, structure breaks at inscription: she is doing her toilet...she is reading...wiping herself...her scent is everywhere in the room...it is as if the walls have closed with her help...she wipes herself repeatedly ...it takes a while...the touch of the paper soft against her hole... of neither inscription nor fissure, of the sixth, already broken, of its annoyance, almost the scent of decay, the scent of abjection, falling-apart: the body bound, held taut against or within the generation of the hieroglyph: substance into structure through the release of no-thought: desire: glyph: she touches her anus lightly with her finger...she is utterly clean...clean to the limits "of what soft paper might be able to do"...she rises... the unmentioned or unmentionable sixth go at it all, hardly a considera- tion, variorum editions piled on, one after another, as if in collusion, collaboration with the enemy, espionage, each reading the other, of public consumption, the orders and relationships among communication, communality, and sexual- ity. but what mind lost among them: what sado-masochistic part-objects modeling the contractual contrast of the world, who are the communities that assemble consciousness out of linkages and couplings, out of contigu- ities and contingencies, what are the mathematics that operate within these fields such that the addition of a term in a chain may or may not affect that chain, and the withdrawal of a term in a chain may or may not transform the topology - what is the lure of a masochism in which all theoretics are abandoned - the organism at the limit of its existence - "i am still alive" - the shell or hull of the organism - the universal condition - but the rupture from everyday life: but the return: it is at the juncture that the contract is enacted: that use becomes exchange: the incipient or implicit or implicate or emergent quality of the signifier: the word just beginning as the bonds are released: she flushes the toilet ...pulls her panties up...her skirt...smoothes her clothing...the book she was reading...her own...she's surrounded by herself..."one of those few times in my life i felt really complete"... released into the sixth go at it, the problematic of enumeration beginning all over again, releasing the sixth into the hinge between closure and further operations, as if, to operate upon the book, the text, a universe of universal operations, fragility and specificity of operability and the human. but what goodness: but what taxonomies of errors, mistakes, phenomenologies of corrupted or failed teleologies, what judgments, what ethos: the constant collapse in the face of catastrophe, beginning and ending with ground zero, the null of physics politicized, culturalized, as the embedding of the focal-point within the aegis of any project of the subject - the implosion of infor- mation within and without the subject - think of the skein or membrane of the subject, subjectivity - network subjectivity, subjective networking - embedded survival - "i am still alive" - "i" turns against itself: is turned: is shredded: cannot turn: loses "its" domain: fissures: it is here within this fissuring that "i come closest to the substance of the world": she comes out of the room...the light is harsher...she has to adjust... everything in relation to the world...outside of the bathroom she hears... sees...touches...people speak to her...there are books...papers...to be read...radio...television...telephone...inside the adjustment itself falls away...she can contemplate the ending of the book...not its finality...it is never such...never in such a way..."one never loses track fully of one's children"... but the sixth go at it is not the sixth go at it all, not of the sub- stance of which it is a part, not fissured or broken down, not corrupted, propositional logics and the elsewhere of the sheffer stroke and its dual. but whose withdrawal of the not-both-a-and-b, whose banishment of neither- a-nor-b: what of the stroke itself engendered as | in relation to the dual v, the stroke retaining the dissemination of division, the dual tending towards the problematic of the scapegoat and expulsion - the nomadicism of the disappearing map - the implosion of the map into the real - nomadic annihilation of landmark, fluid kinship entities, constant transformations - one might say survival "at any cost" - there are no universal discourses - no discourses of the universe - automated writing - the philosophical writing of/by the automaton - the writing of the tape-recorder: imagine such without tape: it is the machine which is speaking: it is speaking through us: it is a far cry from the turing machine: turing's cry: the children in her demanding to emerge...she writes constantly...obsessively ...she can't sleep at night unless she's written something "she approves of"...sometimes masturbation..."all those connections are there"...she notes...she takes notes...she takes note of...these variations... of, somewhere along the line, the final go at it, the manuscript put aside, the book completed, the philosophical argument temporarily term- inated, the professor returns to her study, returns home, the professor has a meal, go to sleep, dreams, the professor wakes in the morning, decides just for once not to go to work this day, she turns over the day...she takes note of it... doubt and deconstruction of conclusions. but whose doubt against what standards and relativisms: what auguries of truth and denial: what obses- sional neuroses: what ignorance, incoherencies: the autobiography of the leap, short-circuiting or short-cutting ignorance, as if something could be made out of whole cloth, there are always strategies of apology, implications of humility, everything in the way, no clarity towards its absence - theoretical weakening, weak theory, as the shifting behind the scenes - think of the submerged philosophy of submergence in relation to extruded theoretical abstraction, pronouncement, death and facticity - the humility of the masochist: the transformation into substance: from there the pronouncement of no pronouncement: there is no mirror, no dust: there is no body: of the time when the thing is born that she annotates...she thinks "of these notes...annotations...of the world i find myself in...in a way of finding myself"...she finds herself saying... the professor puts the manuscript of the sixth go aside, just for the moment; the book "has almost completed itself," the book is "as finished as it's going to be," "i've done with the book," she knows...the world is hardly such as it is or annotated...there is far more to it...later ...it will gnaw at her...now...just for a moment it's as if everything is okay... the scientific as that methodology among others, in spite of heuristic breakdowns and the problematic of mathematics. what crystalline mechanism inherent of the tractatus-logico-philosophicus, what neoplatonism, what conventions, inscriptive labor: retaining the last vestige of ontology, giving existence a nearly-decomposable structure from groundwork to lifeworld, superstructure disconnections, proliferations of objects, elements, particles, things, organisms, universal constructs of contrasts and boundaries, boundaries maintenance, the general economy of inscription - episteme and ontology blurred - interpenetrations of regimes and domains - conventionalisms and idealities both subject to the same dis/ease of heuristic - bricolage or making-do in the world - this is hardly satisfac- tory for anyone - this is hardly the case of the world - the case of the world in relation then to the case of our being, dasein - the case of the world in relation to dis/ease - but there is no case: there is no world "such that it or that is the case": there is always the case that one does or does not make: there is always the general case but never the most general case: there are only notes...she's noted her stomach is once again upset...she's feeling ill..."been feeling ill"...she returns to the toilet ...pulls her skirt and panties down...the feeling of nudity is comfortable ...this is all there is...of the writing-machine or the description-mach- ine...far less of explanation...as soon as i start thinking this way it falls apart...back into that doubt such that everything is problematic... she knows...thinks...it has something to do with health... the case comes to a close, the professor muses, at least at the sixth go of it all, it's by and large, at least for the moment, i'm going to have a breather, after or before the illness...what is in my stomach...what is happening to me...she thinks momentarily of the phenomenology of causality ..."is happening"...everything is about agency...she thinks...but really ...everything is about agency dying... the topology of intention and neurality in relation to externalized mind and memory. but what privilege of data-banks, whose computers, whose optical fiber, whose skein of satellites, what membranes and firewalls, whose hackings and what penetrations: the future of networkings among multi-taskings, virtual realities, information wars, incandescent sexual hysterias, thickened communalities, and the relationships among these and other futures vis-a-vis theoretical abstraction and general accounts of cultural and universal creation - teledildonics and nodal bodies - voy- eurisms and exhibitionisms as inversions or dissolutions of entities, categoricities - the splayed or opened body - the body displaying or opening - the w/hole of the body - disruption or perturbation of percep- tion - the skeins of death and exhilaration - the splayed or opened electric body: mesh of contacts: bridgings, spark-gaps, tesla coils, stelarc-penetrations as flesh turns nebulous turns nebula: the absolute revulsion against secrecy is also the revulsion against language and the foreclosing of the signifier: bell's theorems as the body scatters: it's kept in contact: it's kept in contact with the skein: with nothing: with itself: with the semantics of foreclosed entities: the signifier makes agents...agents are signifiers..."otherwise the headless world"...how much of the shifter...i...need exist in order to set in motion...innum- erable universes...her mind wanders... i'm going to enjoy myself after the fifth, before the seventh, she thinks of the trajectory, of the content and indexicality of the book, of its weight, the cover chosen by the publisher (an unknown chinese painting of the sung dynasty), of the narrative faltering, almost bring the work "to its knees," there is the beautiful book in every universe...and it is in my universe and it is my book...she thinks... partial-objects and partial-mappings as givens in the construction and reconstruction of the world. but of the gathering of accumulations and assemblage of fragments, of the clutter and a-historicity of the world: the disappearance of history, resonance of ideological tendencies among historiographies, irrelevance of historical and theoretical recuperation, the loss of the world among the world - the absolute loss of the world in the future of the cosmos - writing/inscribing degree zero - the horizon of the uselessness of organism - continuous eroding of transcendence - gras- ping or cohering of imminence - loss of imminence: turning away for the moment...she considers...innocence "in its place"...the innocence...not of the world...but her innocence at stake...the recognition that there are levels within everything she sees or does...that her work has involved a certain uncovering...she's out of the bathroom thinking...i'm leaving debris behind in more ways than one..."everything is uncomfortable"... everything is partial...the erosion of shit or rather the erosion of the world into shit...organisms decontextualize...information irretrievably lost...mayday...mayday... of the sixth, here and now, of its inscription, it might be any of a series, accounted for, the terms begin to blur, one into the other, each revision another addition or edition, except for the punctuation, she muses, you could hardly tell where one ends and the other begins, i'm so tired...i'm so tired of it all...waking up in the morning and realizing none of it matters...the neuroses don't disappear...i sleep as badly as ever...in a while the finishing of the book...sinks in...it's back to the same old routines...it's as anyone might imagine...she thinks and in this fashion the symbolic devolves...back into the imaginary...it's all there...nothing's there... loss of positionality: what is unaccounted-for: accountancy and the de- marcation of nodes, direct and indirect addressing: a list of cases: if not 1 then 2; if not to then 3; if not n then endif: she's feeling somewhat better...sweating however...feverish...endif... every content an indirect addressing, including the sixth, tending towards those resonances already discussed, in which feedbacks collapse into skeins of relationships, in which relationships are ruptured...turned or inverted...inside and outside...momentary stases...impediments...nothing more... the use of cases, examples, anecdotality, perceptual modes, in relation to theoretical abstraction. what stories hidden with failures, ridden with failures, gaps in texts, hiatus, ignorance: what negations (there are none): what tales (they're all fiction): what parables (pretense!): and in relation to the audience, what demographics following what core phenomena, core metaphors, what one might tell you of an evening in miami with grack- les scrabbling among scraps of food already evincing a symbolic construc- ted among all of us in crude parody of heisenbergian sheffer-stroke quasi- analytical approaches, as if the natural world were no longer problematic but a gift towards the understanding - or now, outside this hotel room #330 there are cartons of palm pdas on the landing - they have been there all day - some are opened, people are taking them - i imagine, idiotic- ally, vast supplies of drugs - they're payoff - everyone knows what's going on - right outside the window here - taken fearlessly - personal communications and informal economies - more and more networks opening up - you can see all of this from the window - i've drawn the shades - maybe witnesses conveniently disappear - imagination runs wild - one never knows - she arches her body naked on the bed: there are people outside: her holes are visible, open: she is speaking: "i am alan sondheim's beautiful wife, welcome to miami": he is sitting naked, erect, on a chair, his face covered with her panties: he's moaning: the sound resonates with the tunnel reverberation effect in final cut pro: the camera cuts between the two of them: cuts to apartment-houses, children playing: cuts to people walking down a street: cuts to an office interior: interruption of the ending of the book or the seventh going...she's looking around the office ...looking out of it...interruption coming to an end... she's listening to him moan, she's completed the book, strangely excited now, her mind drifting to other things after the sixth, he's her neurotic husband, can hardly keep his mind focused, he's always falling apart, always building worlds out of nothing, or nothing out of worlds, it's beginning to make less and less of a difference, the virtual is descending like a dark cloud, impenetrable, onto the subject, any subject, any human being, she thinks, she's him...he's her...there are no divisions...in the war which is always on...body parts are piled on body parts...it's never- ending...differences are always dissolving like shit itself...but there's a pleasure...she thinks...in the bathroom...her own smells...surroundings that are strangely comforting...more naked than nude...the exhalations of the body...looking at the toilet paper before flushing...now though... looking at him...her excitement building...the next time he'll wipe her himself... exhaustion, defuge, and the wavering of existence in terms of the physical well-being of the body, as well as the deconstruction of that well-being. but what disease of the writer, what writing-disease: what textual wound- ing: what ending to what written world: what semantics, what syntactic endings: from indo-european to the absence of the subject in the sentence, the absence of the eye and the shifter, the winding up of the winding- sheet and loosening of the world from language in relation to or in spite of natural kinds, rigid designators, performatives, proper names, who are alan sondheim, daishin nikuko, who are julu-jennifer - what wounding of informal economies - what disseminations - you can have any name you want - take any gender - it's all there for the asking - nervously looking out the window - who will be next - here in the motel room - what knocks on the door - emptied hallways - strangely quiet around here - the camcorder runs on: everything is broken up: entities, circulations created: here is a thing now: this is the thing: what is the thing but shit between the two of them...abject mingling...when she dies...she muses...no one will care about proper names any longer...there's a great sadness there...it's overtaking her... of the sixth of which this is all there is, the computer runs, the hard- drive recoiling with entry after entry, the suppuration of the file itself, what might have been canonically inert, now open in the digital to eternal salvation on one hand, continuous change, revision, hacking, on the other, it's someone else's revision...someone else's hacking...it's even someone else's salvation...sadness turning towards depression...what to do...what to do... this is the first thing: this is the only thing there is: to rest...to give herself a break..."not to be so hard on herself"... of the sixth, almost the disappearance of the bones, of the bones, almost the disappearance of the marrow, of the marrow, the disappearance of the flesh, but of the book...of the sevenths and now last...not so much a disappearance as a momentary appearance..."i'm here for you"..."i've arrived"..."i'll be here for a while"..."now i'm here and present and the world is very very lovely"...do not be depressed my love...do not be so very...so very sad... but the dis/ease of writing - sound of keys - i can't stop this - the living representation of information society - at work on the network - gasping for breath on the network: holding our own on the network: a swarm of us: groups of us: groups of us comforting us among us...chora and chorus...the maternal roots...lullaby...but the healing of the two of them...for a moment...in the dusk or is it later in the evening...moaning and other sounds at the limits of the other...mewlings...cries... groups of us writing through her, assembling the sixth go at it all, muted conversation about the sixth, its continuity and careful honing, we arrive at everything through collaboration, discussion, you'd be surprised at how few disagreements there are, she could sense already...she could sense herself...she could see it coming...and all the discomfort knowing that the world continues exactly as before with all its jagged edges..."i didn't learn a thing"..."i'm as ignorant as ever"... what writing: what loss of writing to the world: such presumption that continuous production becomes closer to the thing, defines it, the "thing" or "it" or production, that the model of labor creates and forecloses among entities, that divisions and boundary phenomenology are somehow riddled with existence - always honing in - always flying apart - them- atic thickening, weakening - the philosophy in this book - this attempt or collocation of thought - this process of thinking - a kind of jabbering back and forth from systems of representation through structuralisms always nearly-decomposable, bricolaged, falling apart - writing ground down - inscription as well - into the abstraction of thought constantly retethered - the thinking of the return - nomadic homing-in - corrals prevent chaos: cages break down disseminations: locks contain spews: banks hold back floods: muscle tension retains shit: "slips of the lips sink ships": "maybe someday i'll return"..."this is...what might be called... the saying or thinking of everything...of thinking nothing at all...a poor thinking...poor thought"...she begins to cry...mourning every tiniest thing in the world...every wounded insect...every wounded bird...trees with broken limbs...she senses "the depression hitting her"..."the depres- sion coming on"... she's opening herself up to herself for the first time, she thinks, now that the work's done, now that i have myself, she's looking in the mirror, naked, closely examining her body, she's "got to pull out of it"...she's got to open up..."it's a book after all"..."it's nothing but a book"... "don't take it so seriously"... that of or within existence - that of the nought, cipher - of weyl's cartesian origin as the last vestige of the ego in mathematization - you can always locate from that point - sufficient vectors, orthogonal or not - giving thought the substrate necessary for reading - writing - or is it in fact necessary: consider a flooded reading, a reading without order: phrases and fragments, resonances out of which a certain philosophic tone: philosophy itself: emerges: "it's a masterpieces"..."you've said all you're going to say"..."you've gone to the limit...taken it to the limit ...you've returned"...she's walking...dazed... she thinks, i've stuttered everywhere among myself, i've felt my texts run through me repeatedly, i've mouthed them insistently, i've cut crystal out of them, i've brought them to their knees, they've taken me over...i've lost my limbs...they're my phantom limbs...i'm dying... returning to the apparatus or partial-objects necessary for this - most recently bought an antique glass pen - dip it in the ink, write for a third of a page or so - hand-blown - here working with components made in malaysia - the result of academic exchange - there are data-bases involved - obsolescences - atavisms and dead media - prosthetics even in the illumination of the screen (from before or behind) - what it is you are reading "this" in - a whole system of temporary equivalences, technologies - repetitions of databases - never forgetting a thing - to you...dear reader...this is all i have to give you...this is what i've been working for...towards...my entire life...there's very little left of me...nothing can ever be taken for granted...i've never done that...all these partials ...impartials...in this world of partial impartials...her hands are flut- tering almost uselessly...she's becoming aware of her hands...moving them ..."nearing the end of so many things at this critical juncture in his- tory"..."in our history"... neither the fifth nor the fourth; neither the fourth nor the third; nei= ther the third nor the second which, almost mewling, crept along the theoretical substrate desperate for suturing, neither the second nor the first, far too exposed, inverted, laying the groundwork, withdrawing simultaneously, of a certain breathing of the text, she's noticing her breathing...is it always like this...is it always the same...on its own ...her breathing..."is philosophy a sickness"..."a sign of ill health" ...is writing itself that illness which produces no change in the writer ...in spite of everything... writing into this: section by section: paragraph by paragraph: each revi- sion as if it were the last: the most important: each addition a more careful construct: the work appearing from the inside-out: philosophy unbound: evening the seventh ending...not even the portal to the eighth ...the portal to the ninth..."having to end this sometime"...she's feeling the loss of the word...loss of the world...perhaps there's a meeting to go to...she should call a friend...her husband...they're dressed again..."the bedroom scene"...they haven't been out in a long time...it's taken a long time to finish the work...she's been almost compulsive about it...sometimes not even eating...the sleeping broken down to the point of incoherence...circadian rhythms collapsed into bad rem...she'll find herself sleeping on her feet...waiting in line...on the toilet...she doesn't understand this..."i don't have the energy to worry about it"...for a moment she thinks that the book...such as it is ...theoretical abstraction...is one long sign or departure...a form of mourning...she thinks "there's very little left of me"...they are very very tired...they fall into bed...turn out the light...she's whimpering slightly..."existence...of and about existence...has everything to do with it"...they fall asleep...they sleep... of the sixth go at it all, the revision or breathing of the text, she is sleeping soundly for the first time in her life, there are small cells, cancer, in her left breast, just a few of them, they are feeding, "she is sleeping soundly...her sickness will come...they are all sleeping... all of them are sleeping"... _ _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list [email protected] http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold