Introductory Preface and Postface, or Open Bracketing of the W/Hole

Introductory Preface and Postface, or Open Bracketing of the W/Hole

[This is my introductory postface or preface to my forthcoming WVU book;

it's a fairly good explanation of my essay-work I think. Offered with

permission.]

The process used to produce this book has been one of continuous

negotiation over pieces, which are broken remnants of a text that might

go on indefinitely, if I did. I would say this about the individual

sections -

1 that each begins, for me, from ground zero, both in the sense of

catastrophe, and without regard to presuppositions; in other words, each

sketches out a terrain which, phenomenologically, is close to the

scratching-out of inscription against the flesh and abjection of the body.

2 that each tends towards summarizations, as if reaching beyond the goal-

playing of a football (soccer) game, recapitulating the game in every

move, as there are only a limited number of moves, of space and time,

given us.

3 that a text from the year 2000 is as currently relevant to me as my

latest text; the problems remain the same and the dating of particular

texts doesn't drive them out of date, but simply situates them within a

particular stratum of writing.

4 that for me there are no outdated philosophical theories or references;

this isn't science, but a continuous description of the world. the

problems of Aristotle are the problems of Thomas Brown and the problems of

Bacon - not to mention those of the Lankavatara Sutra. science is the

progress of the container, of inscription, of fundamental ontologies and

epistemologies, of logos and placement; philosophy is the meandering of

abjection, flesh, and our pretensions to the values of inscriptions and

the fields of cultures in general.

5 that I'm most interesting in the grounds and grounding of writing, in

its relation to the virtual and the negotiation of the virtual, and I do

believe that we are always already virtual, invaded by such, and only in

moments of insufferable pain and the diffusion of the portal of death,

does inscription drop away into the thud and inconceivable flesh and

violence of the body.

6 that there are no dead philosophers, or rather no dead philosophical

writing, and that writing, always virtual and inscription, always saying,

may be within any form, from sound through any variety of artworks,

including scientific texts (which are always only one form of their

theoretical content); in other words, standard writing is just that, one

canon and genre and mode of exposition among others.

7 that beneath every inscription and inscriptive process and act, lies

abjection; that catastrophe theory provides us with a model of the

'fragility of good things,' i.e. what we interpret as coherent

transmissions among the incoherencies of the world. that in other words,

the world is contingent as best, that our time, in the sense of birth

through death, but also in the sense of species or organic life as we

interpret it, is limited, and that the universe is inconceivably alien to

us and among us: that this is what we have to contend with and

continuously contend with.

All this being said, or thought, I might add that I've always said or

thought this, that my thought tends towards repetition. I might use a MOO

or MUD as an example, just as Second Life or quantum computing; they are

all one and the same in a sense; there is no new thought in the world that

is not thought.

As to the Introduction: I am thrilled with it, thrilled that Sandy Baldwin

has been able to make sense of a massive amount of material that all too

often insists on audio, video, or still-image examples - or even insists

that analysis itself occurs in these examples, just as much as it does

within standard forms of writing (which I tend to subvert). There are some

longer pieces I would have liked included; I would have liked a multi-

media disk as well, etc. etc. But I would, more than like, love this

collection of texts, which continues to develop and proliferate.

Again I want to reiterate; if I talk, for example, about a prompt such

that

k4% date

Wed Feb 15 04:48:14 EST 2012

appears as an antiquated non-GUI (graphic user interface), but a command

at a prompt accompanied by its response - I'm not talking or writing

historically, but about the very act of the performative, the performative

surface which is literally virtual in regard to the underlying program

structures, down to the level of the machinic, where potential wells and

materiality lie. We are surfing, not on a surface, but in the midst of

holarchies of protocols and material transformations, where noise is

roughly held back, but never entirely. And this is as true of the latest

3d tech as it is of the prompt: In other words, in an odd and twisted

sense, there is no history here, only careful thinking through

phenomenological moments, when the performative and its dialectics among

machines, users, softwares, hardwares, etc., are clearly the order of the

day and night. And this is the case surely going back at least to Hero of

Alexandria, if not farther; we move through the stillborn of cultural

presuppositions which like everything else are continuous and in varied

degree.

Along this line, a not unrelated point: That culture is found, among

organisms, all the way down, as is inscription, processes of learning,

protocols and broken protocols. We have no dominion over this, only a

certain blindness. So writing too is every world among organisms, and, I

suspect, beyond; its universality is what makes things like the

conceivable collapse of the wave equation so interesting - not as a garden

experiment, but as a condition and conditioning of all our existence.

As far as 'this being a book,' it is a book in the sense that a microtome

slice is both limited and fecund, exemplary/symptomatic, and a slice after

all. I am grateful for it, grateful for the work Sandy has done with me,

in assembling a group of texts that hang together in a more or less

coherent fashion. I'm well aware of the difficulty of texts that change

style constantly, that use conceptual or programming tools in their

construction as much as densely laid-out thought - and Sandy has done an

amazing work in this regard. In addition he has always questioned me,

pushed me to my own limits, and the result has been a deepening on my

part, an ability to see beyond the confines of any section's boundaries.

========================================================================

The Internet Text is a poor title; it defines a location and locution, a

plateau, but the Net itself is an inconceivable multiplicity, always

entangled. At one point I considered a 'darknet' which consisted of the

underlying protocols, but that division now seems arbitrary. I do want to

add that I don't believe that the Net will become 'sentient' as some have

suggested, but AI will play an increasing role in its evolution, dragging

human and other subjects along with it as confluences of Likes and

Dislikes. Within this horizon, I think of online writing as 'wryting,

simultaneous suture and rupture, reiterating once again that the body is

and has been always inscribed, that as long as it functions qua body,

beyond or outside the aegis of insufferable pain and death, it is a

composition positing its own history, one that remains after death in

fact. Such a body or vision of a body extends to any geographies and

species, a worlding of history that will continue until the planet is

welcomed by the surround of a dying sun and exhausted universe in a future

so distant that it appears gestural at best.

I only want to add a few notes on Second Life. It is a framework and a

laboratory for exploring somatic issues; my avatar bodies are often only

partly visible, carrying behavioral patterns generated by highly altered

motion capture software and hardware mappings. I can explore some of the

limits of the wounded or suffering body; I can negotiate the movement of

such a body in spaces so corrupted that they themselves appear suffering,

and need to be negotiated in their traversal. I can build up and pull down

quickly, using the 4000-plus files in my inventory. By combining the

results of such studies with mixed-reality movement - live performers and

performances - issues which might appear uncanny at best take on a

different life in the real. These issues translate poorly into text, as

does some of the soundwork I do. But it is all using available tools,

within which the body is situated, not as tool, but as internalized site.

This is where I live and ultimately this is where the book lives.

Again I have to thank Sandy Baldwin greatly for teasing out these texts

from their skein within the larger unwieldy body. They'll manage, I think,

within the book to live on beyond the data-bases housing the Internet

Text, and they'll point beyond themselves to those data-bases. But every

one of my texts is every other, and these are no exception.

- Alan Sondheim