<nettime> book. the sixth go at it all.

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

-


book. the sixth go at it all.


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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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 -

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:

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 -

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 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:

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:

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:

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":

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:

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,

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:

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,"

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:

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,

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:

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,"

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 -
grasping or cohering of imminence - loss of imminence:

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,

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:

every content an indirect addressing, including the sixth, tending towards
those resonances already discussed, in which feedbacks collapse into
skeins of relationships,

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:

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,

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:

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,

this is the first thing: this is the only thing there is:

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 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 writing through her, assembling the sixth go at it all, muted
conversation about the sixth, it's continuity and careful honing, we
arrive at everything through collaboration, discussion, you'd be surprised
at how few disagreements there are,

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":

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,

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:

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,

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 -

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,

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:

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,


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