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The Coming War on General ComputationCory Doctorow doctorow-4iQhXdbfv6f2eFz/2MeuCQ< at >public.gmane.orgPresented at 28C3https://github.com/jwise/28c3-doctorow/blob/master/transcript.mdTranscribed by Joshua Wise joshua-NtISFavHD6+ERl/eT5k2og< at >public.gmane.orgThis transcription attempts to be faithful to the original, but disfluencies have generally been removed (except where they appear to contribute to the text). Some words may have been mangled by the transcription; feel free to submit pull requests to correct them!Times are always marked in [[double square brackets]].The original content was licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY (http://boingboing.net/2011/12/30/transcript-of-my-28c3-keynote.html); this transcript is more free, as permitted. You may provide me transcript attribution if you like, or if it does not make sense given the context, you can simply give Cory Doctorow original author attribution.If you simply wish to read the transcript, you may wish to read a version that has been formatted for screen viewing, on my web site.Christian W\"ohrl has also submitted a translation of this text into German.Introducer:Anyway, I believe I've killed enough time ... so, ladies and gentlemen, a person who in this crowd needs absolutely no introduction, Cory Doctorow![Audience applauds.]Doctorow:[[27.0]] Thank you.[[32.0]] So, when I speak in places where the first language of the nation is not English, there is a disclaimer and an apology, because I'm one of nature's fast talkers. When I was at the United Nations at the World Intellectual Property Organization, I was known as the "scourge" of the simultaneous translation corps; I would stand up and speak, and turn around, and there would be window after window of translator, and every one of them would be doing this [Doctorow facepalms]. [Audience laughs] So in advance, I give you permission when I start talking quickly to do this [Doctorow makes SOS motion] and I will slow down.[[74.1]] So, tonight's talk -- wah, wah, waaah [Doctorow makes 'fail horn' sound, apparently in response to audience making SOS motion; audience laughs]] -- tonight's talk is not a copyright talk. I do copyright talks all the time; questions about culture and creativity are interesting enough, but to be honest, I'm quite sick of them. If you want to hear freelancer writers like me bang on about what's happening to the way we earn our living, by all means, go and find one of the many talks I've done on this subject on YouTube. But, tonight, I want to talk about something more important -- I want to talk about general purpose computers.Because general purpose computers are, in fact, astounding -- so astounding that our society is still struggling to come to grips with them: to figure out what they're for, to figure out how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. Which, unfortunately, brings me back to copyright.[[133.8]] Because the general shape of the copyright wars and the lessons they can teach us about the upcoming fights over the destiny of the general purpose computer are important. In the beginning, we had packaged software, and the attendant industry, and we had sneakernet. So, we had floppy disks in ziplock bags, or in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs in shops, and sold like candy bars and magazines. And they were eminently susceptible to duplication, and so they were duplicated quickly, and widely, and this was to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software.[[172.6]] Enter DRM 0.96. They started to introduce physical defects to the disks or started to insist on other physical indicia which the software could check for -- dongles, hidden sectors, challenge/response protocols that required that you had physical possession of large, unwieldy manuals that were difficult to copy, and of course these failed, for two reasons. First, they were commercially unpopular, of course, because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the legitimate purchasers, while leaving the people who took the software without paying for it untouched. The legitimate purchasers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they resented the inconvenience of having to transport large manuals when they wanted to run their software. And second, these didn't stop pirates, who found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication. Typically, the way that happened is some expert who had possession of technology and expertise of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor itself, would reverse engineer the software and release cracked versions that quickly became widely circulated. While this kind of expertise and technology sounded highly specialized, it really wasn't; figuring out what recalcitrant programs were doing, and routing around the defects in shitty floppy disk media were both core skills for computer programmers, and were even more so in the era of fragile floppy disks and the rough-and-ready early days of software development. Anti-copying strategies only became more fraught as networks spread; once we had BBSes, online services, USENET newsgroups, and mailing lists, the expertise of people who figured out how to defeat these authentication systems could be packaged up in software as little crack files, or, as the network capacity increased, the cracked disk images or executables themselves could be spread on their own.[[296.4]] Which gave us DRM 1.0. By 1996, it became clear to everyone in the halls of power that there was something important about to happen. We were about to have an information economy, whatever the hell that was. They assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information. Now, information technology makes things efficient, so imagine the markets that an information economy would have. You could buy a book for a day, you could sell the right to watch the movie for one Euro, and then you could rent out the pause button at one penny per second. You could sell movies for one price in one country, and another price in another, and so on, and so on; the fantasies of those days were a little like a boring science fiction adaptation of the Old Testament book of Numbers, a kind of tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information and the ways we could charge them for it.[[355.5]] But none of this would be possible unless we could control how people use their computers and the files we transfer to them. After all, it was well and good to talk about selling someone the 24 hour right to a video, or the right to move music onto an iPod, but not the right to move music from the iPod onto another device, but how the Hell could you do that once you'd given them the file? In order to do that, to make this work, you needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and processes. For example, you could encrypt the file, and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain circumstances.[[395.8]] But as they say on the Internet, "now you have two problems". You also, now, have to stop the user from saving the file while it's in the clear, and you have to stop the user from figuring out where the unlocking program stores its keys, because if the user finds the keys, she'll just decrypt the file and throw away that stupid player app.[[416.6]] And now you have three problems [audience laughs], because now you have to stop the users who figure out how to render the file in the clear from sharing it with other users, and now you've got four! problems, because now you have to stop the users who figure out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs from telling other users how to do it too, and now you've got five! problems, because now you have to stop users who figure out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs from telling other users what the secrets were![[442.0]] That's a lot of problems. But by 1996, we had a solution. We had the WIPO Copyright Treaty, passed by the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization, which created laws that made it illegal to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to extract media cleartexts from the unlocking programs while they were running, and it created laws that made it illegal to tell people how to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and created laws that made it illegal to host copyrighted works and secrets and all with a handy streamlined process that let you remove stuff from the Internet without having to screw around with lawyers, and judges, and all that crap. And with that, illegal copying ended forever [audience laughs very hard, applauds], the information economy blossomed into a beautiful flower that brought prosperity to the whole wide world; as they say on the aircraft carriers, "Mission Accomplished". [audience laughs][[511.0]] Well, of course that's not how the story ends because pretty much anyone who understood computers and networks understood that while these laws would create more problems than they could possibly solve; after all, these were laws that made it illegal to look inside your computer when it was running certain programs, they made it illegal to tell people what you found when you looked inside your computer, they made it easy to censor material on the internet without having to prove that anything wrong had happened; in short, they made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did not oblige them. After all, copying only got easier following the passage of these laws -- copying will only ever get easier! Here, 2011, this is as hard as copying will get! Your grandchildren will turn to you around the Christmas table and say "Tell me again, Grandpa, tell me again, Grandma, about when it was hard to copy things in 2011, when you couldn't get a drive the size of your fingernail that could hold every song ever recorded, every movie ever made, every word ever spoken, every picture ever taken, everything, and transfer it in such a short period of time you didn't even notice it was doing it, tell us again when it was so stupidly hard to copy things back in 2011". And so, reality asserted itself, and everyone had a good laugh over how funny our misconceptions were when we entered the 21st century, and then a lasting peace was reached with freedom and prosperity for all. [audience chuckles][[593.5]] Well, not really. Because, like the nursery rhyme lady who swallows a spider to catch a fly, and has to swallow a bird to catch the spider, and a cat to catch the bird, and so on, so must a regulation that has broad general appeal but is disastrous in its implementation beget a new regulation aimed at shoring up the failure of the old one. Now, it's tempting to stop the story here and conclude that the problem is that lawmakers are either clueless or evil, or possibly evilly clueless, and just leave it there, which is not a very satisfying place to go, because it's fundamentally a counsel of despair; it suggests that our problems cannot be solved for so long as stupidity and evilness are present in the halls of power, which is to say they will never be solved. But I have another theory about what's happened.[[644.4]] It's not that regulators don't understand information technology, because it should be possible to be a non-expert and still make a good law! M.P.s and Congressmen and so on are elected to represent districts and people, not disciplines and issues. We don't have a Member of Parliament for biochemistry, and we don't have a Senator from the great state of urban planning, and we don't have an M.E.P. from child welfare. (But perhaps we should.) And yet those people who are experts in policy and politics, not technical disciplines, nevertheless, often do manage to pass good rules that make sense, and that's because government relies on heuristics -- rules of thumbs about how to balance expert input from different sides of an issue.[[686.3]] But information technology confounds these heuristics -- it kicks the crap out of them -- in one important way, and this is it. One important test of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose is first, of course, whether it will work, but second of all, whether or not in the course of doing its work, it will have lots of effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress to write, or Parliament to write, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it's unlikely I'd succeed. If I turned up and said "well, everyone knows that wheels are good and right, but have you noticed that every single bank robber has four wheels on his car when he drives away from the bank robbery? Can't we do something about this?", the answer would of course be "no". Because we don't know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys. And we can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we'd be foolish to risk them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies by changing wheels. Even if there were an /epidemic/ of bank robberies, even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies, no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.[[762.0]] But. If I were to show up in that same body to say that I had absolute proof that hands-free phones were making cars dangerous, and I said, "I would like you to pass a law that says it's illegal to put a hands-free phone in a car", the regulator might say "Yeah, I'd take your point, we'd do that". And we might disagree about whether or not this is a good idea, or whether or not my evidence made sense, but very few of us would say "well, once you take the hands-free phones out of the car, they stop being cars". We understand that we can keep cars cars even if we remove features from them. Cars are special purpose, at least in comparison to wheels, and all that the addition of a hands-free phone does is add one more feature to an already-specialized technology. In fact, there's that heuristic that we can apply here -- special-purpose technologies are complex. And you can remove features from them without doing fundamental disfiguring violence to their underlying utility.[[816.5]] This rule of thumb serves regulators well, by and large, but it is rendered null and void by the general-purpose computer and the general-purpose network -- the PC and the Internet. Because if you think of computer software as a feature, that is a computer with spreadsheets running on it has a spreadsheet feature, and one that's running World of Warcraft has an MMORPG feature, then this heuristic leads you to think that you could reasonably say, "make me a computer that doesn't run spreadsheets", and that it would be no more of an attack on computing than "make me a car without a hands-free phone" is an attack on cars. And if you think of protocols and sites as features of the network, then saying "fix the Internet so that it doesn't run BitTorrent", or "fix the Internet so that thepiratebay.org no longer resolves", then it sounds a lot like "change the sound of busy signals", or "take that pizzeria on the corner off the phone network", and not like an attack on the fundamental principles of internetworking.[[870.5]] Not realizing that this rule of thumb that works for cars and for houses and for every other substantial area of technological regulation fails for the Internet does not make you evil and it does not make you an ignoramus. It just makes you part of that vast majority of the world for whom ideas like "Turing complete" and "end-to-end" are meaningless. So, our regulators go off, and they blithely pass these laws, and they become part of the reality of our technological world. There are suddenly numbers that we aren't allowed to write down on the Internet, programs we're not allowed to publish, and all it takes to make legitimate material disappear from the Internet is to say "that? That infringes copyright." It fails to attain the actual goal of the regulation; it doesn't stop people from violating copyright, but it bears a kind of superficial resemblance to copyright enforcement -- it satisfies the security syllogism: "something must be done, I am doing something, something has been done." And thus any failures that arise can be blamed on the idea that the regulation doesn't go far enough, rather than the idea that it was flawed from the outset.[[931.2]] This kind of superficial resemblance and underlying divergence happens in other engineering contexts. I've a friend who was once a senior executive at a big consumer packaged goods company who told me about what happened when the marketing department told the engineers that they'd thought up a great idea for detergent: from now on, they were going to make detergent that made your clothes newer every time you washed them! Well after the engineers had tried unsuccessfully to convey the concept of "entropy" to the marketing department [audience laughs], they arrived at another solution -- "solution" -- they'd develop a detergent that used enzymes that attacked loose fiber ends, the kind that you get with broken fibers that make your clothes look old. So every time you washed your clothes in the detergent, they would look newer. But that was because the detergent was literally digesting your clothes! Using it would literally cause your clothes to dissolve in the washing machine! This was the opposite of making clothes newer; instead, you were artificially aging your clothes every time you washed them, and as the user, the more you deployed the "solution", the more drastic your measures had to be to keep your clothes up to date -- you actually had to go buy new clothes because the old ones fell apart.[[1012.5]] So today we have marketing departments who say things like "we don't need computers, we need... appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that I haven't authorized that might undermine our profits". And on the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea -- just a program that does one specialized task -- after all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don't worry if it's still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that's not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We're not making a computer that runs only the "appliance" app; we're making a computer that can run every program, but which uses some combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer -- it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box.[audience applauds loudly] Thanks.[[1090.5]] Because we don't know how to build the general purpose computer that is capable of running any program we can compile except for some program that we don't like, or that we prohibit by law, or that loses us money. The closest approximation that we have to this is a computer with spyware -- a computer on which remote parties set policies without the computer user's knowledge, over the objection of the computer's owner. And so it is that digital rights management always converges on malware.[[1118.9]] There was, of course, this famous incident, a kind of gift to people who have this hypothesis, in which Sony loaded covert rootkit installers on 6 million audio CDs, which secretly executed programs that watched for attempts to read the sound files on CDs, and terminated them, and which also hid the rootkit's existence by causing the kernel to lie about which processes were running, and which files were present on the drive. But it's not the only example; just recently, Nintendo shipped the 3DS, which opportunistically updates its firmware, and does an integrity check to make sure that you haven't altered the old firmware in any way, and if it detects signs of tampering, it bricks itself.[[1158.8]] Human rights activists have raised alarms over U-EFI, the new PC bootloader, which restricts your computer so it runs signed operating systems, noting that repressive governments will likely withhold signatures from OSes unless they have covert surveillance operations.[[1175.5]] And on the network side, attempts to make a network that can't be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments. So, SOPA, the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act, bans tools like DNSSec because they can be used to defeat DNS blocking measures. And it blocks tools like Tor, because they can be used to circumvent IP blocking measures. In fact, the proponents of SOPA, the Motion Picture Association of America, circulated a memo, citing research that SOPA would probably work, because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan, and they argued that these measures are effective in those countries, and so they would work in America, too![audience laughs and applauds] Don't applaud me, applaud the MPAA![[1221.5]] Now, it may seem like SOPA is the end game in a long fight over copyright, and the Internet, and it may seem like if we defeat SOPA, we'll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I said at the beginning of this talk, this isn't about copyright, because the copyright wars are just the 0.9 beta version of the long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry were just the first belligerents in this coming century-long conflict. We tend to think of them as particularly successful -- after all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage, and breaking the internet on this fundamental level in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies! [laughs, scattered applause][[1270.2]] But the reality is, copyright legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it's not taken seriously, which is why on one hand, Canada has had Parliament after Parliament introduce one stupid copyright bill after another, but on the other hand, Parliament after Parliament has failed to actually vote on the bill. It's why we got SOPA, a bill composed of pure stupid, pieced together molecule-by-molecule, into a kind of "Stupidite 250", which is normally only found in the heart of newborn star, and it's why these rushed-through SOPA hearings had to be adjourned midway through the Christmas break, so that lawmakers could get into a real vicious nationally-infamous debate over an important issue, unemployment insurance. It's why the World Intellectual Property Organization is gulled time and again into enacting crazed, pig-ignorant copyright proposals because when the nations of the world send their U.N. missions to Geneva, they send water experts, not copyright experts; they send health experts, not copyright experts; they send agriculture experts, not copyright experts, because copyright is just not important to pretty much everyone! [applause][[1350.3]] Canada's Parliament didn't vote on its copyright bills because, of all the things that Canada needs to do, fixing copyright ranks well below health emergencies on First Nations reservations, exploiting the oil patch in Alberta, interceding in sectarian resentments among French- and English-speakers, solving resources crises in the nation's fisheries, and thousand other issues! The triviality of copyright tells you that when other sectors of the economy start to evince concerns about the Internet and the PC, that copyright will be revealed for a minor skirmish, and not a war. Why would other sectors nurse grudges against computers? Well, because the world we live in today is /made/ of computers. We don't have cars anymore, we have computers we ride in; we don't have airplanes anymore, we have flying Solaris boxes with a big bucketful of SCADA controllers [laughter]; a 3D printer is not a device, it's a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer; a radio is no longer a crystal, it's a general-purpose computer with a fast ADC and a fast DAC and some software.[[1418.9]] The grievances that arose from unauthorized copying are trivial, when compared to the calls for action that our new computer-embroidered reality will create. Think of radio for a minute. The entire basis for radio regulation up until today was based on the idea that the properties of a radio are fixed at the time of manufacture, and can't be easily altered. You can't just flip a switch on your baby monitor, and turn it into something that interferes with air traffic control signals. But powerful software-defined radios can change from baby monitor to emergency services dispatcher to air traffic controller just by loading and executing different software, which is why the first time the American telecoms regulator (the FCC) considered what would happen when we put SDRs in the field, they asked for comment on whether it should mandate that all software-defined radios should be embedded in trusted computing machines. Ultimately, whether every PC should be locked, so that the programs they run are strictly regulated by central authorities.[[1477.9]] And even this is a shadow of what is to come. After all, this was the year in which we saw the debut of open sourced shape files for converting AR-15s to full automatic. This was the year of crowd-funded open-sourced hardware for gene sequencing. And while 3D printing will give rise to plenty of trivial complaints, there will be judges in the American South and Mullahs in Iran who will lose their minds over people in their jurisdiction printing out sex toys. [guffaw from audience] The trajectory of 3D printing will most certainly raise real grievances, from solid state meth labs, to ceramic knives.[[1516.0]] And it doesn't take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it's really... really... important to make sure that computers can't execute programs that cause specialized peripherals to output organisms that eat their lunch... literally. Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or merely hysterical fears, they are nevertheless the province of lobbies and interest groups that are far more influential than Hollywood and big content are on their best days, and every one of them will arrive at the same place -- "can't you just make us a general purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can't you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?"[[1576.3]] And personally, I can see that there will be programs that run on general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. Because we've spent the last 10+ years as a body sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been the mini-boss at the end of the level, and the stakes are only going to get higher.[[1627.8]] As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die, and of course, it won't be a hearing aid, it will be a computer I put in my body. So when I get into a car -- a computer I put my body into -- with my hearing aid -- a computer I put inside my body -- I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, and to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests. [vigorous applause from audience] Thank you.[[1669.4]] Thank you. So, last year, the Lower Merion School District, in a middle-class, affluent suburb of Philadelphia found itself in a great deal of trouble, because it was caught distributing PCs to its students, equipped with rootkits that allowed for remote covert surveillance through the computer's camera and network connection. It transpired that they had been photographing students thousands of times, at home and at school, awake and asleep, dressed and naked. Meanwhile, the latest generation of lawful intercept technology can covertly operate cameras, mics, and GPSes on PCs, tablets, and mobile devices.[[1705.0]] Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks. And we haven't lost yet, but we have to win the copyright wars to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Because these are the materiel in the wars that are to come, we won't be able to fight on without them. And I know this sounds like a counsel of despair, but as I said, these are early days. We have been fighting the mini-boss, and that means that great challenges are yet to come, but like all good level designers, fate has sent us a soft target to train ourselves on -- we have a organizations that fight for them -- EFF, Bits of Freedom, EDRi, CCC, Netzpolitik, La Quadrature du Net, and all the others, who are thankfully, too numerous to name here -- we may yet win the battle, and secure the ammunition we'll need for the war.[[1778.9]] Thank you.[sustained applause]

Well, #28c3 has come and gone.I’m not sure how it happened, but after all these years on the internet, It looks like I’ve somehow become a blogger.I never really wanted to be a blogger, after all the most exciting thing about the Internet has always been the ability for users to interact on neutral turf. Yet, the web, even when it has social features, is always home-court for somebody or another.The definitive technology of the Internet to me was always UseNet, a worldwide distributed discussion system, and this was where I first began to express and discuss political issues, where the worlds of political activism and media art intersected with my life as a computer programmer, and drew me into ideas and projects and communities I would otherwise have had no connection with.I didn’t start out thinking about what I was doing as “publishing” so much as fishing, posting not so much so people would read my texts, but so people would respond to them. Their responses give me new ideas, insights, and more leads to better understand these topics I could now begin to access, byway of the Internet.UseNet was an ongoing multiparty dialogue.When people started blogging I couldn’t see the point. Why post something on just one website, instead of millions of news servers all around the world? Why force people to use dodgy webforms to leave comments, instead of slick news reading software? It seems so retrograde, so hierarchical, privileging one writer as the blog’s “author” with everyone else reduced to “commentators,” under the tyrannical moderation of the blogger, meaning that the presence of opposing views, that made UseNet groups so vibrant, was absent.A personal website seemed to me no more useful than as an elaborate .plan file, a kind of online brochure, good for a CV and Contact info, maybe even a archive of what you had really posted online (meaning on UseNet), but certainly no way to reach any community.Sadly, UseNet has become increasingly obscure, for reasons that I have discussed at length, as part of the Capital-financed enclosure of the peer-to-peer Internet with centrally controlled client-server technologies.As a result for years I’ve been lost in wilderness, making my contributions on web-boards like Autonomedia’s InterActivist, mailing lists, etc, and even *gasp* “Social Media,” Eventually being published by Mute Magazine, and other websites, leading to the Telekommunist Manifesto being released by the Institute for Network Cultures.In an effort to co-ordinate my use of these disparate platforms, somehow a blog emerged.So here we are. I’ve accidentally become a blogger.Last week the #28c3 occurred in Berlin, and it served as the point of departure for the last six texts that I’ve written. For completeness, I’ve collected links to all of them below.- Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded! | http://wp.me/p24fqWhen a place becomes too crowded, things like getting in, getting a table, getting service, etc, become more competitive and thereby difficult. Some of the original regulars become crowded out and stop going, eventually the others stop too, “because nobody goes there anymore.”- The Suck Principle | http://wp.me/p24fqL-qoOnly places that suck can really have a continuous community, because if nothing about the place sucks, it will attract more and more people until it sucks because of crowding. So if you want a continuous, closely knit community, something about the venue or event must suck, your only choice is what should suck or how it should suck.- Exceptionalism and The Internet Surveillance Industry | http://wp.me/p24fqL-r1Expressing outrage that enemies of the US and it’s allies are using the technology being developed by the west also seems misplaced, and rests on regressive exceptionalist view that privileges western states as being somehow noble enough to be trusted with the ability to survey their citizens, but not sinister foreign powers.- Capital and The War on General Computing | http://wp.me/p24fqL-rgIt is not ignorance, nor even genuinely the needs of law enforcement that is driving the war against general computing and a general network. It’s too simple to understand this war as simply tyrannical law enforcers and paranoid music execs duping clueless legislatures into locking-down cyberspace to save Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. Rather this war is simply a consequence of the fact that our technology industry is funded by finance capital, and finance capital requires profit as a return.- There Is No A List | http://wp.me/p24fqL-rCCertainly the freedom-loving free markets will punish peddlers of tyranny and domination! No doubt ethically minded investors will move their investments to the virtuous firms of list A, leaving the B listers starved of Capital. Justice conscious consumers will immediately dump B’s products and take up the A list! Politicians, eager to please their constituents, will kick the B listers to the curb and shower the A listers with all the lucrative governments lucre. The sinister B-list companies will collapse and the bold and brave A listers will take their market share and refuse to implement censorious or freedom-denying features into their products, and certainly not enable sinister foreign powers to oppresses their people. Cackling foreign despots and their bumbling mad scientists are now foiled for good by the freedom loving actors on the glorious free market system!- Class Struggle Among Cyborgs | http://wp.me/p24fqL-rNSo long as we have an economic system that allows an owner/lender class to exploit a worker/borrower class, we will have communications systems and social institutions that are controlled of the owner/lender classes and structured in their interests, and against the interests of the worker/borrower class, for the simply reason that since the owner/lender class will aways be able to retain earnings and accumulate while the worker/borrower class can only earn enough to service their bills and debt.I’ll be at Buchhandlung as usual this evening, all are welcome to come along for a drink.

Dear nettimers,here is an article I co-authored with Jodi Dean on OWS, the question of demands, and the politics of the commons. It was published a couple of days ago on the Social Science Research Council online forum "Possible Futures" and is sparking some discussion here and there. I anticipate that due overworking madness I probably won't have time to answer questions and objections--yet debates on this list tend to take a life of their own.I take the opportunity to wish the list a happy 2012,snafuA Movement Without Demands?By Marco Deseriis and Jodi Deanhttp://www.possible-futures.org/2012/01/03/a-movement-without-demands/The question of demands infused the initial weeks and months of Occupy Wall Street with the endless opening of desire. Nearly unbearable, the absence of demands concentrated interest, fear, expectation, and hope in the movement. What did they want? What could they want? Commentators have been nearly hysterical in their demand for demands: somebody has got to say what Occupy Wall Street wants!In part because of the excitement accumulating around the gap the movement opened up in the deadlocked US political scene---having done the impossible in creating a new political force it seemed as if the movement might even demand the impossible---many of those in and around Occupy Wall Street have also treated the absence of demands as a benefit, a strength. Commentators and protesters alike thus give the impression that the movement's inability to agree upon demands and a shared political line is a conscious choice.Anyone who is familiar with the internal dynamics of the movement knows that this is not the case. Even if some occupations have released lists of demands, the entire question is bitterly contested in New York, where only independent organizations such as labor unions have released their own demands. In this essay, we claim that far from being a strength, the lack of demands reflects the weak ideological core of the movement. We also claim that demands should not be approached tactically but strategically, that is, they should be grounded in a long-term view of the political goals of the movement, a view that is currently lacking. Accordingly, in the second part of this text, we argue that this strategic view should be grounded in a politics of the commons. Before addressing the politics of the commons, however, we dispel three common objections that are raised against demands during general assemblies, meetings, and conversations people have about the Occupy movement.First, demands are said to be potentially divisive as they may alienate those who disagree with them and discourage newcomers from a variety of backgrounds from joining it. The argument is that insofar as Occupy aspires to be a movement that expresses the views and interests of the vast majority of the social body, every attempt to define it through a politics of demands entails a reduction of this potentiality. We call this *the anti-representational objection.*Second, it is argued that demands reduce the autonomy of the movement insofar as they endow an external agent---notably, the government or some other authority---with the task of solving problems the movement cannot solve for itself. This second objection is usually accompanied by the argument that the movement should focus on "autonomous solutions" rather than demands. We call this point of view*the autonomist objection.* The third common objection, which stems from the second, is that by meeting some demands the government would be able to divide and integrate (parts of) the movement into the existing political landscape, thus undermining the movement's very reason for being. We call this the *cooptation objection.*//Some counteract this third objection with the idea of releasing "impossible demands," i.e. demands that cannot be met without igniting a radical transformation of the system. The very impossibility of the demands is said to demonstrate the rigidity of the system, its inability to encompass much needed change. Impossible demands thus cannot be co-opted. This proposition is in turn rebuffed by pragmatists who argue that if demands are to be issued they should focus on attainable objectives so as to show that the movement can achieve concrete and measurable changes.Let us first consider the *the anti-representational objection.*The objection begins from a basic and unspoken assumption about OWS, namely, that the movement is an organic and undifferentiated bloc comprised of people from all walks of life, and all racial, cultural, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds. From this perspective, the slogan, "We are the 99 percent," is seen not as a rhetorical strategy and political fiction but as the designation of an existing sociopolitical entity that would define itself in opposition to the 1 percent.The anti-representational objection takes two primary forms. In its first, it insists that it istoo earlyfor demands. Because the movement is still young, it is argued, there has not been sufficient time for the 99 percent to reach consensus on the issues most important to it. Introducing demands now//would hinder the organic unfolding of a collective discussion whereby the movement can articulate its own interests and desires. In the second (and more radical) form, the anti-representational objection argues that it is never the right time////for demands. Demands always and necessarily activate a state apparatus apart from and over and against society. For example, anarchists and libertarians in the movement have repeatedly blocked proposals for introducing taxes on financial transactions and stronger oversight of the banking sector on the grounds that such proposals would expand the size of the government and the scope of its intervention.Both the not now//and not ever//versions of the anti-representational objection obfuscate the fact that the 99 percent is not an actual social bloc. It is rather an assemblage of politically and economically divergent subjectivities. The refusal to be represented by demands is actually the refusal or inability to make an honest assessment of the social composition of the movement so as to develop a politics in which different forces and perspectives do not simply neutralize each other. Such inability is further obfuscated by emphases on democratic processes and participation. In order to avoid conflicts and pursue the myth of consensus, the movement produces within itself autonomously operating groups, committees, and caucuses. These groups are brought together through structures of mediation such as the General Assembly and the Spokes Council, which struggle to find a common ground amidst the groups members' divergent political and economic positions. In other words, the emphasis on consensus, the refusal of demands, and the refusal of representation may well have served the purpose of inciting political desire and expanding the social base of the movement in its first phase. Nonetheless, it has installed in the movement a serious blindspot with regard to real divergences, a blindspot that has high costs in terms of political efficacy as serious proposals get watered down in order to meet with the agreement of those who reject their basic premises.Nonetheless, there is a truth in the anti-representational objection: demands are divisive. They animate distinctions between "for" and "against" and "us" and "them." This is the source of their mobilizing strength insofar as the expression of a demand provides not something that people can get behind but something that they must get behind if they are part of a movement or on the same side in struggle.The *autonomist objection*is certainly better founded than the anti-representational objection. For autonomists (and anarchists), the practice of occupation and the very mode of existence of the movement are themselves prefigurative of a new, more democratic and more egalitarian world. The modes of action and interaction associated with occupation attempt to "be the change they want to see in the world." Participants work to act in accordance with the ideals of mutuality and egalitarianism animating the movement against exploitation and inequality. The autonomist approach, then, emphasizes the creation of autonomous structures and new political organizations and practices. From this perspective, the problem with demands is not only that they provide life support to a dying system, but that they direct vital energies away from building new forms of collectivity ourselves. Demands focus the movement's attention outside when it should be focused inside.As with the anti-representational objection, the autonomist objection proceeds as if the multiplicity of political and economic interests of the 99 percent could immanently converge. Yet where the anti-representational objection ignores political differences, the autonomist objection overlooks economic ones. The practice of occupation that the autonomists imagine is full-time. It demands total commitment---living, breathing, and being the movement. The politics of remaking the world is anchored in supporting the occupation, primarily logistically. Many of the activities of logistical support, however, of necessity are not prefiguring at all but rather require interaction with dominant arrangements of power. Legal support involves lawyers, permits, injunctions. Someone has to pay for and someone has to make the tents and sleeping bags. Someone has to do the work of growing and preparing food. So the very practices of prefiguration in fact rely on infrastructures, goods, and services that are by and large provided, maintained, and distributed through capitalist means and relations. Additionally, many who would like to support the movement work to earn an income. With needs, debts, and responsibilities of their own, they want to participate in the movement yet not give up their jobs. Bluntly put, their economic position doesn't give them the time that the practice of permanent occupation demands.Both the anti-representational and the autonomist objections fail to recognize two key features of demands. First, we can make demands on ourselves. Second, demands are means not ends. Demands can be a means for achieving autonomous solutions. When demands are understood as placed on ourselves, the process of articulating demands becomes a process of subjectivation or will formation, that is, a process through which a common will is produced out of previously divergent positions. Rather than a liability to be denied or avoided, division becomes a strength, a way that the movement becomes powerful as our movement, the movement of us toward a common end.If the truth in the anti-representational objection lies in its insight into the divisive nature of demands and the truth of the autonomist objection lies in its emphasis on making the world we want to live in, the truth of the *co-optation objection*//is its recognition of antagonism and division. The problem is that the objection as it has been raised in the movement misconstrues the location of the division that matters. The co-optation objection presents the problem as between the state and the movement rather than as a division already within, indeed, constitutive of, the movement itself. Instead of grappling with the multiplicity of different positions in the actuality of their economic conditions, the fear of co-optation posits that the strength of the movement comes from a kind of unity of anger and dissatisfaction that will dissipate in the face of any particular success. Thus, the anti-co-optation argument initiates a discussion about particular proposals, playing out their pros and cons. Will the demand for a national jobs plan mean that the movement has been co-opted by the unions? Will a push for a constitutional amendment to eliminate corporate personhood fold the movement into the Democratic Party? And isn't the support of partisan organizations such as MoveOn a symptom that this co-optation is already under way? In pursuing such a discussion, the co-optation objection obscures actual and potential connections among different proposals. It thus reinforces, in the attempt of preventing it, the very fragmentation that has long plagued the contemporary Left.The problem that cuts through all the objections to demands is the movement's inability to deal with antagonism. So the very question of demands brings to the fore the fact of division within the movement, a division that many---but not all---have wanted to deny.Fortunately, the truths animating each of the objections suggest a way forward. In order to metamorphose from a protest movement into a revolutionary movement, Occupy will have to acknowledge division, build alternative practices and organizations, and assert a commonality. The set of ideas and practices built around the notion of the commons fulfills this function. The commons is afinite resource //whose mode of disposition and usage is determined by the community of its users and producers. The finitude of the commons enables us to address social inequality and environmental limits to capitalist development in their dialectical unity.Against those who claim private rights and particular interests, then the idea of the commons asserts the primacy of collectivity and the general interest---an idea found in Aristotle's emphasis on the common good as well as in the work of contemporary theorists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, Iain Boal, Elinor Ostrom, Eben Moglen, Slavoj Z(iz(ek, and others.A politics of the commons acknowledges division in that it begins from the shocking recognition that the commons does not exist. Destroyed and privatized by over two centuries of capitalist enclosure and "accumulation by dispossession,"[1]what Elinor Ostrom calls "common-pool resources"[2]have been reduced to tiny pockets of the world economy. To be sure, informal economies and communal practices such as worker-owned cooperatives, community-supported agriculture, community gardens, occupied and self-managed social centers and houses, free and open source software, are diffused at a molecular level everywhere. Yet the natural and social resources such practices mobilize are quantitatively irrelevant when compared to the wealth that is appropriated and exploited by capital. For instance, while cyber-enthusiasts such as Yochai Benkler point to the Internet as a vast repository of knowledge accessible to everyone and often managed in common by the Internet users themselves,[3] these same technophiles overlook the fact that industrial production and agriculture rest by and large in private hands. Further, the apologists of the information commons often fail to recognize that such commons can be, and in fact is, functional to capitalist development as long as their fruits are productively reintegrated within the capitalist cycle. (One may think of the use of Linux in the public administrations of several developing countries and the adoption of open source software by corporations and military.)If this is true, then the first question that stems from a radical politics of the commons is "how can truly anti-capitalist commons be created, recreated, and expanded"? It goes without saying that such a question points directly to the centrality of private property to capitalist accumulation---an issue that looms so large that most activists prefer to avoid it altogether. Demanding the creation and expansion of commons that are not subject to the imperative of accumulation and profit would make the divisions that are latent in the 99 percent apparent. Weary of the historical failure of actually existing socialism---and lacking large-scale models of alternative development---most Occupiers seem to content themselves with a neo-Keynesian politics that begins and often ends with demands for fiscal reform and government investment in strategic sectors such as infrastructure, green technologies, education, and health care. As we have noted above, however, these demands cannot be properly articulated as they meet the opposition of anarchists and autonomists who reject demands and focus instead on communal processes of self-valorization and self-organization. For the autonomists, the organizational forms of the movement are already functioning, in many ways, as institutions of the commons. Such a perspective fails to recognize that the vast majority of the resources managed by the movement are produced and distributed according to capitalist logic.In this respect, while neo-Keynesian and socialist positions downplay and overlook existing processes of self-organization, the autonomist perspective cannot address the issue of the long-term sustainability of the movement insofar as it fails to recognize that the massive accumulation of wealth in the private sector is a major obstacle for an expansive politics of the commons. In our view, the autonomous organization of the movement and a politics based on radical demands have to go hand in hand if durable transformations are to be achieved. Once an expansive politics of the commons is adopted as the centerpiece of the movement's strategy, demands become tactical devices in the service of such strategy rather than floating signifiers power can use to divide and conquer. From this perspective, every attempt the state makes to co-opt the movement through concessions enables an expansion of the communal management of common-pool resources---setting in motion institutional transformations whose political and symbolic power should not be underestimated.Because a broad-based politics of the commons does not yet exist (even as the conditions are ripe for it) and will not emerge over-night, the tactical use of demands creates opportunities for testing and learning from experiments in managing the commons. For example, what if the environmental movement against hydraulic fracturing were to envision a national campaign to declare the ground waters a commons? This not only would prevent gas companies from putting at risk the lives of millions, but it would immediately empower water management boards elected by local communities with unprecedented powers. How would these governing bodies be constituted and how would they be run? Following this logic, we may also ask similar questions in regard to education, health care, and the production of energy. In each of these sectors, we may have to design solutions to manage these resources not as commodities but as goods whose mode of disposition and usage is determined by the community of their users and producers.Such questions are only the beginning of a larger investigation that takes the commons not as a one-size-fit-all solution but as a mobile concept that can and should operate at different levels of granularity and on different plateaus. As a preliminary exploration, we suggest that a politics of the commons should operate on three levels: 1) the management of land and natural resources; 2) the production and reproduction of social life (including care work, housing, education, and labor); 3) the production and allocation of energy, knowledge, and information. Because these three layers interpenetrate one another, multiple conflicts arise as soon as one attempts to set priorities. Yet it is also clear that there are elements that cut transversally across these areas, namely, the understanding that the commons is a finite resource that can not only be extracted but needs to be actively reproduced. Such a notion, we believe, marks a decisive break with the capitalist system of production. This system has been thriving by constantly overcoming the limits to its own expansion---with the result of producing an unprecedented demographic explosion while bringing the life support systems to the brink of total collapse. The Occupy movement is an extraordinary opportunity to rethink this model. But in order to do so, the movement has to dispel the illusion that all proposals and visions are equivalent as long as they are democratically discussed, and begin to set priorities on the road to a truly transformative and visionary politics.Footnotes1. David Harvey,/The New Imperialism/(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).2. Elinor Ostrom,/Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action/(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1990).3. Yochai Benkler,/The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom/(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006).

Dear nettimers,I do not want to respond to technology as right/enabler question. Internet as a human right? How about a car, fridge, water? We know that debate. Others on this list can reply to these circular arguments in a much better way. What stroke me in this text is Vint Cerf's heroic emphasis on the figure (Gestalt) of the engineer as civic worker. Interesting to relate this to Ernst Juenger's Der Arbeiter... What is left out here is, of course, that these engineers are not autonomous agents but employees of large corporations such as CISCO, Microsoft, SUN and Google, assisted by mostly American (and some European) academics and 'governed' by US-controlled agencies such as ICANN. Apart from this blind spot of Cerf and his buddies, known for decades, it would also be interesting to inquire if today's IT workers are in fact still engineers in the classic sense. I just heard on the radio here in the Netherlands a plan of the Technical University Delft to cut back their engineering studies. On average students study there for a period of seven year. What? Seven years? That's unreal, utopian, so 70s and 80s! Obviously most IT programmers do not study seven years anymore. Maybe they should... My thesis would be that there is a huge army of programmers now, globally spread from Nigeria to India to Romania, China and Brazil that study max. 3 years and purchase commercial certificates from the above mentioned firms. Do they consider themselves engineers?Geert

Dear nettime, a late response to the much earlier post by Snafu~By the one-month mark Occupy Wall Street had gone from a ragtag activist question mark to a movement tying together all parts of the left spectrum that changed the national political conversation from a vapid argument over Democrat and Republican debt ceiling posturing to a substantive one about income inequality, financial industry irresponsibility, and freedoms of speech and assembly. Over those same crucial weeks from the middle of October to the end of November, the movement grew and mutated, spread across the country, and evolved as a culture of political engagement. One of the hallmarks of the Occupy culture—and one of the first indicators of OWS as a new political culture—is the human mic, identified early on as an innovation by necessity, a creative technique born of and against the absurd amplification restrictions placed on the Zuccotti occupation. It is therefore accurate to say that every time the human mic is used, it is a performance with roots in resistance and a reproduction of what makes OWS its own political creation, that is to say, a political reality. That partly explains why the mic check was readily spun off by activists from its native milieu of the General Assembly and deployed as a technique of confrontational intervention in hostile spaces. Even as a tool of confrontation and invasion into the spaces of the 1%, as opposed to a device used for internal organizational communication, the human mic reproduces the movement whenever used.For me, the first attention to the mic check as a viral protest tactic came in a post to the nettime mailing list dated Friday, November 11, 2011:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbmjMickJMAhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oHRdiklTlU&feature=sharehttp://mountpleasant-sc.patch.com/articles/bachmann-talks-foreign-policy-at-yorktown#video-8403501Enjoy,Snafu I have not worked on the said social history, but I have been keeping an inventory of incidents in which activists have “mic check’d” political opponents, corporate heads or representatives, or even the consumer public.Now that more than two dozen such interventions have been carried out, recorded, and circulated via Youtube, from all parts of the US, it is time to make some distinctions on how these events went down, and how well the documentation communicates. In general, what I find interesting is the use of the open source tactic, combined with the lo-tech versatility in terms of where and when it is used. The recognizability of the form makes for a unified movement culture no matter the different kinds of content, even if the verbiage is very particular to that target, event, or locality. Precisely because the content is changeable, even more importantly, affect and emotion is largely unified across all the events. Righteous outrage, monopolized in idiotic form not so long ago by Tea Party-types, belongs to the left once again, along with a small and just right dose of true pain exposed (see the Lindsay Graham and the John Stumpf actions, below). Because the content is tailored to the particular event, the outrage is genuine, and after watching a few of these, that is really what gets communicated.That said, through all these actions I can see the limits of the mic check as an effective action. The events featuring well-protected, well-practiced figures of national stature speaking in front of large audiences are more difficult to hijack. The action becomes a disruption rather than a takeover, an illustration of how unreachable, insulated, and repressive they really are. As with the mic checking of Karl Rove. On the other hand, functionaries who have no public role, who rarely get confronted by the 99%, who probably don’t even think of themselves as doing the work of the 1%, are less quick to defend themselves from the lectern, and thus are easier targets for a full human mic takeover.It is difficult to generalize about the venues and spaces. One might think that the more elite the institution, the more tightly controlled the event space, and the quicker the demonstrators will be tossed out. Not true. Probably the most beautifully complete takeover of an event occurred at Princeton University—about as elite as it gets in the world of the 1%. There the mic text was based on the university’s motto and includes a searing self-critique of the school’s privileged campus culture. Three cheers. As the calendar year turns, the Occupy movement seems most likely to grow in at least two directions. First, that of housing activism, anti-eviction campaigns, and foreclosure occupations—ie defending and making our homes in a small and personal sense. And second, in the direction of stopping the Keystone pipeline, anti-fracking, and on other environmental fronts, ie defending and making our home on an ecosystemic level. If this be the case, then new elements of the Occupy culture are bound to emerge. But to send off 2011 and bring in a New Year of ever better and greater occupations, here are my annotated favorite mic check action videos. Visitors, comrades, and fellow citizens, enjoy.9. Karl Rove Get Mic Check’d at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimorehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlko7nweb4kUnlike the politicians he influences, Rove is not under any pressure to respond decorously. Even so, Rove proves himself unbalanced and quick to anger, leading a grouchy one-man counter chant. Apparently he still suffers from the instant defensiveness of being held responsible for two failed wars on foreign lands. If the mic check works sometimes only as a disruptor, this was a good one of those. Make them drag you out. Even though the action is not a successful takeover, the marriage of form (war at home) and content (wars abroad) satisfies.8. Minnesotans Confront Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpfhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsybOu8VJ28This group gets kicked out pretty fast by some pushy business school security workers. The intervention turns into a human mic rally outside the venue featuring an impressive young woman who tells her story of Wells Fargo’s treatment of her parents as homeowners who had never missed a payment for over twenty years, including for two years after they lost their jobs. It is heartbreaking. Also of note, John Stumpf may be the only person who has thus far been mic check’d at two separate events (the other in North Carolina).7. Occupy El Paso Mic Checks Walmart on Black Friday, El Paso, Texas http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9lamTknxnwI for one did not know that there was an Occupy El Paso. I love the emphasis of this mic check: low pay, poor working conditions, and important everywhere but especially in El Paso, the poverty rates in the Hispanic population. And c’mon, to have the human mic take over the ambient media voices of an electronics department in a Walmart is just great on the face of it. The Occupy El Paso brigade looks to be an anarcho-youth posse, which always makes a corporate retail environment more interesting.6. Chancellor Gets Mic Check’d at University of Oregon Statutory Faculty Meeting, Eugene, Oregonhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uvA8u5WDww&feature=endscreen&NR=1The mic check brigade makes a point specific to a UO governance and hiring controversy here, but links it to the wider trends of corporate culture invading the public universities. I love that the amplified voice of authority sounds both more hysterical and less understandable than the human mic. The activists remained seated, seem to have not been escorted out, and finished with a courteous “Thank you!” Also notable is the space, a major conference university basketball arena. Only 249 views of the video as of Xmas night? Let’s change that.5. Senator Lindsay Graham Mic Check’d at Private Fundraiser, Washington DChttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmEiREqvUMgThis is probably the most intimate confrontation of an elected public official in my portfolio of bookmarked videos. I hate to give it up to Lindsay Graham—he’s such a slime—but he went for the dialogue and that is way more than most of the politicians have done. Of course, he was essentially captive to the group as this intervention was something close to a genuine temporary occupation, so he did not have much choice. Along with the whole idea of crashing intimate gatherings to begin with, the personalized confrontations are an excellent strategy when the target is this close because it leaves the man no room for hiding behind platitudes. Compared to the videos listed here that have none, the basic text intro and outro are helpful. Activists ought to take the time to add them.4. Gas Industry Event Mic Check’d at the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohiohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9jQXop_6RiUAh, here we go, a complete takeover. Industry flacks are defenseless in the medium sized lecture hall. Student activists deliver an uninterrupted speech calling out the industry for its lies, and condemning it for the environmental damage and cyclical economy the millenial generation refuses to accept. The speech seamlessly ends in a militant chant, to which the students march out. The text intros and outros are more informative than in #5 above. Excellent on all levels but one. I would have liked to hear the speech tie in some public university funding or governance issues.3. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Mic Check’d at Union League Club, Chicagohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oHRdiklTlU&feature=relatedThis was a contentious intervention on a couple of levels, but exemplary in its success. On the intra-movement level, the action was designed and carried out by the labor activists of Stand Up! Chicago and the teachers’ union, but not by Occupy Chicago. Occupy Chicago activists refused on principle to buy the entrance tickets to this private event, but many Occupy partisans expressed solidarity by protesting Walker’s appearance outside the building. The activists inside also had to deal with a shouting battle against the governor’s regressive supporters, and the activists won. The video is edited down to an effective narrative and captioned in full for total communication. The language of the event’s human mic brings together Chicago city and Wisconsin state austerity politics, and even gives voice to the Occupy Chicago arrestees. The tag team lead voice technique is also used here to great tactical effect, seeming to confuse the security people. Finally, it is not just me who despises Governor Walker. Stand Up! Chicago knew that mic checking Walker would guarantee the video an audience, since there are now many thousands of Wisconsinites working to rid their state of him. The views stand at 320k-plus.2. Occupy DC Mic Checks Big Insurance at Chamber of Commerce Event, Washington, DChttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ1_Pebu5TcI love this first woman, playing lead voice while shooing away the big security guard giving her chase. Note that the tag teaming is performed to the prolonged maximum here. The language of the intervention is a great example of the conversation-changing spin of the Occupy movement. They don’t speak solely of big insurance as parasite, but specify Scott Serota’s bloated salary as proof of the broken healthcare system. And not least, this was apparently broadcast live on C-SPAN. Probably not a huge audience, but I am sure there were a lot of surprised viewers. The middle aged activists play right into the sympathies of what I imagine to be the middle aged and older viewership of C-SPAN. And the Chamber of Commerce? Talk about taking the intervention to the heart of the beast.1. JP Morgan-Chase Mic Check’d at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jerseyhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ0J_HUsRaIAnother beautiful takeover, from the 1% to the 1%. The corporate shills never stand a chance. It cannot but tap at the heart when seeing the youth of the privileged class demanding that the institutions of the 1% live up to their billing as the standard bearers of service and stewardship. It is the beginning of their radicalization. And 49k views cannot be sneezed at.Forward,Dan w.http://prop-press.typepad.com/blog/2011/12/mic-checkd-the-best-from-america-2011.htmlhttp://prop-press.typepad.com/http://prop-press.net/http://www.midwestradicalculturecorridor.net/# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime< at >kein.org

J. Dean said:don't have active occupations going on (I say this based on looking forevidencebiggest cities (not a surprise, but worth keeping in mind when we thinkaboutI see this as a major unresolved weakness of the movement. Not only thepoorest places, but also the suburban and rural areas. Right now, it?sbasically a city thing that still appears to be led by middle class youthsand *hippie, whack-o?s*. Occupiers can discount this general public framingas *not what we?re really about*, but that won?t get rid of theframe/public perception. No matter what the demands, structural changeswon?t occur unless you engage the lower classes and the suburban and ruralpopulace. The Occupy foreclosures/evictions initiative in the Poughkeepsiearea is a good start, but much more needs to be done to include thosebeyond the urban sphere.And, as several have already mentioned, the movement should focus more onthe capitalist system. All this internal striving for consensus and directdemocracy is superfluous, and from what I?ve witnessed, a lot of BS. Occupyis becoming highly stratified and hierarchical, which isn?t necessarily abad thing, but let?s not pretend that it?s all about the virtuous god ofdemocracy. (Even the whole hand signal ritual for running GA?s excludesthose who don?t know the code. It immediately creates an in-group/out-groupdynamic.) Hacker and Pierson?s point is not that democracy is at fault, butrather that capitalist forces are the culprit. So, think of differentforms of economic organizing, and teach it to others. Come up withinnovative forms of exchange and practice it with those not in the Occupyclub.-nativebuddha

[digested < at > nettime == mod (tb)]Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org> Uncomfortable notes on the poetics of captured human behavior: Part cauterization of the sublime Mis/take (self-interrogation) Propeller Here's the Thing, two texts Worry WORLD */CYCLE CONTROL COMMAND COMMUNICATE COMPUTER CENTRAL/* (fwd) Warwick rehearsal shooting (fwd) Fireworks: American Empire Islam, Norway, Christ I used to be good. wounded avatar. aporia. Wounded Avatars text - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sun, 8 May 2011 01:43:16 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Uncomfortable notes on the poetics of captured human behavior: PartUncomfortable notes on the poetics of captured human behavior:Part 2: the Wringing (Part 1 repeated below):Laban, in Modern Educational Dance, distinguishes ``eight basic efforts'':Wring, Press, Glide, Float, Flick, Slash, Punch, Dab. ``Each of these efforts contains three of the six movement elements: strong, light, sustained, quick, direct, flexible.'' Four of the group are strong: Slash, Wring, Press, and Punch. Wring and Press reconfigure the avatar; Press preserves both topology and topography, but Wring transforms at least the latter.Wringing slides one against another, in combination with pressure: Wringing distorts the body. With physical bodies, wringing breaks connections (slashing can also break connections).The wrung body, the hobbled body. Wringing occurs when the body is simultaneously twisted and restrained.Gravity restrains and locates the body. With mocap, gravity may be 'eliminated' through the use of harnesses, or through edge phenomena that carry the body elsewhere.The heaped or pressed body: the body as thing, as material: the body of the slave (wrung from and within capital, wrung from the socius).becoming element or token, demarcation of nothing but position, mined for its materiality.The finality of the dancing body, the dance of death - the heaps of Rwanda, Auschwitz, Abu Gharayb.Similarity, in the world of the simulacrum, the disappearing body: Argentina, U.S. prisons.Not similarity: the world of the (natural) catastrophe, the disaster: the heaped body, but the body (perhaps) recuperated for/within history.One might think through all of this as the historiography of the body. Where do we go from here?Uncomfortable notes on the poetics of captured human behavior:[for Epoetry 2011]motion-captured/motion-transformed/behavior-modification:poetics of movement: vocabulary of movement:{range of human actions, Laban A} >T> {unlimited range of actions B}A bound by skeletal connectivity, Jordan surfaces; B bound by skeletal connectivity, twisted/tangled surfacesin other words the links in B can bend in any direction;the links in A are confined by human skeletal potentials + topology (topological embedding in four dimensions): think of this as a tensor calculus of human movement think of this as a topography of flesh and sinewRuptures in the calculus: the tortured or wounded body the body convulsed in pain the catatonic body the terrorized body the broken or 'defective' bodyRuptures through the imaginary: the nightmare the orgasm hysteria/ boundaries of laughing and crying the confined body/ body of s/m the forgotten or abandoned body the hyper-sexualized body transmitters/ receivers hallucinations and other phenomena (Dendy's Philosophy of Mystery)Ruptures of the body invaded by capital: prosthetics X-scopic surgeries rfid implantsRuptures of the body invaded by the imaginary: (capital of the imaginary, imaginary capital) psycho-tropics/overdetermined associations/disassociationsRuptures of the body by an augmented real: sports, steroids, body-building, and so forthInvasions of the imaginary, invasions of capital, of the augmented real, invasions through the imaginary: invasions or invaginations, incorporations or intensifications? These terms entangle and return to:Either the proper body, or the body as heap; the articulated body, or the dismembered and reassembled body; the body characterized by a real, or the body chararacterized by an imaginary;either the fundamental topography of the body, or the fundamental topology of the body - invasions, dissolutions, ruptures.Ruptures as returns of the repressed: What lexicons are at work? What economies?What is it that motion capture captures? What is snared, what abandoned?What is the vocabulary of behavioral dynamics voluntary, autonomic, involuntary, intrinsic or involuntary, anomalous and axiomatic, extrinsic?In other words: What's going on with us, within and without the world?- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Tue, 10 May 2011 00:57:44 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: cauterization of the sublime cauterization of the sublimehttp://www.alansondheim.org/ikantsee.movand of the sublime?The sublime, the infinite, remains. Life is a narrow-bandwidth "I sleep insublime unconcern for the words which wander abroad, whilst I think of thecliff of whispers." sublime beauty, herself oozed among signifiers, grap-pled by Nikuko-hands, the sublime child through the romantic clef to thesonorous echo, through dark virtue.at long last, last sublime. what next. death is always the ruin of theworld, the world's ruin. For we are within this era, this positioning,dulled, imploded, but never this ecstasy or indefinite sublime whichremains unreachable.inheres to the analogic; the digital decathects the sublime; the analogicdecathects the digital; the analogic decathects the sublime, decathectsavatars, within the sublime; the digital is sublime, infinite avatars backat it; within the sublime, there are infinite avatars; the digital issublime, infinite, {avatars are backed, at the back of are the backs ofavatars are against the particular}.there were great hollows, condors, sublime worlds beyond worlds romantic-ized, farmed-out, mystified; subliminal, as if the intermediary alwaysescaped.among the sublime. neither singular nor plural. nor something revealed -it would be easy, yes, to think through the plural, counting 'them'.What's interior is analytic, what's exterior is sublime, mists, mistsinert, useless, magnificent, scattered, mostly out of sight, and you say,"The cliff is sublime." Think of the cliff of the sublime, think of time.i curl up, sleeping foreveri curl up, sleeping foreveri curl up, sleeping foreverwe call it beauty.and Kant?posited as a simple position, which was precisely his position. And foruniversity found in a copy of Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Hegel,Husserl, Kant, Aristotle, and Spinoza, in any detail. Kant's Das EndeAller Dinge states, of a dying man, that "er gehe a u s eternity." Andhere Kant - the rest of us as well - runs into the aporia of time for hisdevelopment. Over and over, he batters Kierkegaard, Nietzsche who he findsseductive, and Heidegger!Speaker says, ""Jerry asks about Kant ... Alan thought he meant something.Speaker says, "Questions about Kant ..."Speaker says, ""Jerry asks about Kant ... Alan thought he meant something. chapters on: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber ... and chapters on Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Frankfurt School Kant: Heidegger, chapters on: Kant, Hegel, Marx, nietzsche, Weber ... and chapters on: Kant, Hegel, Marx, nietzsche,Kant might have it, the world may split apart,which plays into him in an interesting way."commit humming." "Great Kant, As a believer calls to his God, I call!""commit suicide." "Great Kant, As a believer calls to his God, I call!"- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Wed, 25 May 2011 04:40:19 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Mis/take (self-interrogation) Mis/takeAbove all, my work is philosophical. It insists not on the letter ofphilosophy, but on its dissemination contamination, of and through media.It insists on the visual as always already ikonic, inscription as presentand concrete. It insists on the final grounds of unutterable pain anddeath and the cipher that exists, not as replacement, but as fool'serrand.The mistake is to read my work otherwise, as neurosis or autobiography;the latter is always lies, fabrications and the narratology of thepredicate, and the former is no better or worse than anyone else's,certainly nothing that structures the text. If my text is a symptom, it isa symptom of the well, not the hospital, and of a deliberate abject thatrefuses concealment or conciliation.When I write what I might consider codework, the issues exist, not in atraditional reading of the surface, but in the production of a forest ofsigns that ground the surface as residue, hardly symbolic, but abjectdebris of the future anterior of the written. I am always aware of this,this structure and its motility, in every 'literary' text I write; I ammore concerned with this level than that of the surface, which seems aproduction in the sense that a play may be a production, but is a playingas well, with or without the theater.In other words, the forest of signs are trees, im/plants, physiology.In other words, the signs are signposts.When I write a text on mathematics, it is not an exercise, but through 0and 1, a penetration among analogic and digital discourses, an entangle-ment refusing an unraveling. To the Borromean knot I oppose the platetrick of braids rotating through 720 degrees of 3-space, deeper melding ofstructures than meets the eye, or rather structures that meet the eye onlydynamically and not at all through a laid n-dimensional diagram with timeas afterthought. Not a formal exercise, however defined but the concretemovement of organisms through space, taking up time, proceeding.In this regard my motion capture work is not an exercise in topology orchoreography, but a philosophical investigation into the topology of thebody, opposed or adjunct to a topography which is thereby renderedpolitical or environmental, not to mention medical, within and without aphenomenology of pain and pleasure.My characters, Julu, Jennifer, Alan, Nikuko, are actants in Heideggeriandrama among MOOs, talkers, and other virtual worlds. They stand fornothing and do not stand-in; they are ikonic, one might say abject, on theorder of a thud or philosophical gesture. This is especially true of AlanDojoji or Julu Twine, who have inherited what Nikuko originally profferedin MOOs or internet relay chat.I cannot force a reader to apprehend the philosophical content of my work- what I see as the heart of what I do, but I can say that anything else,anything bypassing or ignoring that, is a form of misrecognition thatmistakes my circumstances for a world or word or ward, or rather attemptsto interpret the world or my vision of it, through my (personal) circum-stances which are known to varying degrees, as usual for all of us andamong us. This is in direct opposition to how I think the world, what Igrapple with: the ultimate alienness of a existence that can only behinted it - surfaces, for example, skewed within liquid architectures ofvirtual worlds, or languaging decoded to the point of abject exhaustion,where non-sense borders on truth's frenzy in the face of an unknown.The world is an unknown; knowledge is always already on the bring ofannihilation, catastrophic; it cannot decode its own hunger or power; itcannot exist without extraneous and useless style. All mistakes are toassume otherwise, but it is only through mistakes, miss-takes, thatanything is acknowledged or apprehended. Decoding is endless; multi-verses fill incomprehensible gaps; it is within the diacritical that anyprogress at all is made. The chasm I acknowledge is the chasm within allof us; the flesh that falls apart here is the same as elsewhere. It is thephilosophical that is the obvious beyond of religion; it gives the remnanta voice, and is itself the remnant of voice. The 0-1 brackets nothing.Murmur escapes the wall. Beyond neither 0 nor 1 is the murmur.But it is philosophy, in the guise of philosophy, and hopefully, in themidst of the noise of my endless klein bottles of texts, this is whatcomes through - not a philosophy of axiomatics or foundations, not aphilosophy of absolutes or technophilias, but a philosophy constantlyunder erasure - an erasure in which, it turns out, the flesh is scrapedraw, without an emergent. Synergy only goes so far, and only inso-far asone might deterritorialize the world, which means nothing, reduces to theashes of the grave, the cries of the wounded, the anonymities of theleading-to-slaughters, all on the levels of histories under erasure aswell.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Fri, 27 May 2011 16:11:37 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Propeller Propellerhttp://www.alansondheim.org/propeller.mp4The propeller cuts through the air like a knife through the body of Gaia.Bird-particles are removed by virtue of the fold catastrophe.The helix makes a vector for its own dragging body.The body is filled with rough-and-tumble tools and organisms.The propeller pays no heed until it winds into dirt and asphalt.Dreams and spirits witness whispers of cranks and plumes.The vector moves the air which barely registers.Those tools and organisms register every moment of foreign occupation.Part of the engine whirls with the propeller, and part refuses.What refuses wants to return to the ground. Oh those kids of blades.The ground is our aspiration as an aircraft flies belly-up.It is a final destination in the midst of air's fitful ocean.Foreheads align and alight before a twist and upwards we go.Mr. Heidegger's hut recedes in the distance but Mr. Wittgenstein'sblood-red spot is there for all to see.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sat, 28 May 2011 13:46:18 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Here's the Thing, two texts Here's the Thing, two textshttp://www.alansondheim.org/clocking1.mp3http://www.alansondheim.org/clocking2.mp3http://www.alansondheim.org/clocking3.mp3Here's the ThingConsider two different watches - one with a digital/numerical readout, andthe other with a traditional circular dial (digital or analog). Considerthe path swept by any of the hands - second/minute/hour - the track. Thetrack lies between ikonic and indexical; on one hand, it stands-in for theconcrete space traversed in a given amount of time; on the other, its veryphysicality is a pointer towards duration. Consider the numerical readout;on one hand, it stands-in for the symbolic state of an instant, which isin reality a duration from one decimal point to another; on the other, itis indexical, a pointer towards an instantaneity embedded in a sequence.The philosophical position behind the numerical readout is that of theDedekind cut; behind the track lies a form of intuitionism embedding bothmechanism and observer, the track inhabiting or accompanying his or herinternal time consciousness. Duration is an inhabiting; one might say, forexample, looking at a circular dial, that it's almost five, that we stillhave some time before dinner, that he's a bit late. Looking at a numericalreadout, one is likely to say, it's three to five, dinner's in a halfhour, dinner's in forty-five minutes or so. Of course this is exaggerated,but the track tends towards the metaphoric consciousness of the bodydescribed by the Lakoff's and the numerical readout portends towards aninescapable but fictitious exactitude. I think of these as differingorders within the real, different insertions of body and technology,different prosthetics. The track is closer to the graft of skin or tissue;the readout is closer to an insertion or prosthesis. The former is closerto a fissure in the real, separating same from same; the latter is closerto a concrete division, a separation of x from ~x, this from that. In thisodd sense, the numerical readout is classical, and the track is post-mod-ern - anything goes, the body runs/exists anywhere among intervals whichare smeared out, abject, spewed. To read a track is always to interpret;one searches in vain for concrete divisions. To read a numerical input isthe opposite - it is never to interpret, always to read out what iswritten, not to interpret the given, but to reproduce. it.These two models, and the transformations that have occurred from one tothe other - how subtle, what is lost and what is gained! One never thinksabout, for example, those 'vintage' windup travel alarms with theirticking that measured the unraveling of potential energy, that ran on theenergy of the body; now one uses digital and often silently-running alarmswhich are almost as disposable as the batteries that power them. One mightsay that the mechanical is comprehended as levers and wheels are compre-hended, that the mechanical clock, no matter how small or complex, runs onprinciples that are readily accessible. The digital/electronic on theother hand operates as a black box tied to corporate but common specifica-tions. It's not just a question of scale. Ironically the electronic iscloser to the workings of the body, than the mechanical, but not closer tothe phenomenology of things that surround us. It's those things which arereceding in the distance, even the track or slow unfolding of time. Andwhat comes in for replacement is the digital which may or may not run atany speed (whose speed in the long run may also be mapped analogically andwith full cognizance of potential wells and the like), but which collapsesinterval into instant, and perhaps along the line, the instant intofashion, which takes all the analogic time available to fill out. Fashionis the crossroads here, indicated by the thing or punctum, but also by theroads traversed, the gaps opened up. And here's the thing: the walk alongthe line or from one side of the aisle to the other, the walk through themall or across it, stopping at the Gap in order to proceed apace.==================================================================they said that, propellers, propellors, helicopters and props."its propeller festooned with propeller" getting better, a propeller spunoverhead, gathering speed while bikes propellor-marked the radios theboats, propellor-marked by tired with propeller wounds. my writingunsolicited, goes unsolicitied. listen: i rope sidestroke swimming smokecigarette propeller arms left propeller projections of dismembered avatarsover propellers and gratings.two engines of aeromodeller have propellers at right-angles - there areprojections of dismembered avatars over propellers and gratings * nomadicpropellers and radios the and propellor-marked boats, their tired andprimate for and of its propeller festooned with propeller.alternating video where propellers ruotano and children in plastic seemprojections of dismembered avatars over propellers and gratings, twoengines of aeromodeller have propellers at right-angles - there arepropellor-marked propellor-marked blame slime crabgrass fury propellor-marked fury and tree sunflower and and dandelion, fern slime not primatefor tired by the blame propellor-marked comfort manatee, blame or "ah yes,i'm also thinking of the propellor vanes."write helicopters ####helicopters #### 33 ###################### through my 34 #### ! 35 #### :a trail from the helicopter engine and you know that the helicopter isone fine evening, and i will end it on ano when the helicopter shows wherejudgment on that, helicopters, how could you possibly predict what of helicopters, pure katana swordhelicopters are bannedthe airwolf helicopter wow how long ago was this!for the killing of wolves by helicopterand the roar and sputtering of helicopter bladesconstructs that disappear as so many props only necessary at this point insinking. props undermines community honesty. but subterfuge, subterfugepropping (there were no props, only a round-robin of symbolic formations).themselves into dark realms and greater props ::the dancers are nude, there are no props.and the consciousness of the body, why wear clothes?why work for people the dancers are nude, there are no props, and aboutthat sinking, my writing props up the world it undermines. constructsdisappear in so many ways. be on the stage without an props at all.they say "jacki's give props ry's sylvie fortin what's wrong here aaa bbbccc ddd" - they said that.they said that, propellers, propellors, helicopters and props.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2011 19:11:37 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Worry WorrySince I lost my YouTube account, I fought to get it back, but to no avail.The charges were violation of Viacom and obscene videos. I 'won' the firstround against Viacom, at which point I was told my account would be rein-stated. The charge then switched to the second. They said there were num-erous videos, and named one which was not obscene. In fact, I was carefulwith YouTube and none of the pieces put up were sexual at all. Theyrefused to name others and I was told I was in violation of a number oflaws. Instead of giving me further information - the nature of thecomplaints, the list of videos, they first sent me cut-and-paste responsesand then no response at all. I've given up. There were around 70 videos atYouTube.I first heard about the take-down from a researcher, who was looking forcertain pieces. I hadn't posted for quite a while to YouTube and wasn'taware the account was 'suspended' - which means closed fact.Because of this and my own insecurities, again I urge you, if you'reinterested, to download my works from http://www.alansondheim.org/ - sofar no troubles at all, and from http://espdisk.com/alansondheim . The Netis too corporate, too unstable, too hacked at this point. The latter sitecontains all my music to date, except for two forthcoming releases - onefrom FireMuseum, and one from ESP-Disk. There's lots of interest I think.The former contains all my texts and a great number of videos, images, andexecutables.In any case, these sites are still good. For your enjoyment, two newpieces of sound/music below:http://www.alansondheim.org/ams1.mp3http://www.alansondheim.org/ams2.mp3Thanks, Alan=========================================================================- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2011 01:21:34 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: WORLD */CYCLE CONTROL COMMAND COMMUNICATE COMPUTER CENTRAL/* (fwd)WORLD */CYCLE CONTROL COMMAND COMMUNICATE COMPUTER CENTRAL/*http://www.alansondheim.org/CCC.mov- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2011 23:30:47 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Warwick rehearsal shooting (fwd)Warwick rehearsal shootinghttp://www.alansondheim.org/warwick1.mp4 avatar setup / developmenthttp://www.alansondheim.org/warwick2.mp4 trapped controlled avatarhttp://www.alansondheim.org/warwick0.mp4 typical transformed avatarmocap movementFor the upcoming Virtual Futures conf. at Warwick; I won't run camera orvideo; warwick1 is a control video - how it should look and how it appearsfrom my end; warwick2 is a response video - what might appear; warwick0 isan avatar closeup. The projection will combine installation with avatarmovement, perhaps seesawing back and forth. In any case, this is the miseen scene or current 'state of the art' for me.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2011 05:32:00 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Fireworks: American Empire Fireworks: American Empirehttp://www.alansondheim.org/fireworks.mov- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2011 04:49:27 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Islam, Norway, Christhttp://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/07/2011723135619293955.html==email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/webpage http://www.alansondheim.orgmusic archive: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rc.txt==- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:12:37 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: I used to be good. I used to be good.I used to 'really have it' as they say. That was 'really something.'I could turn out the magic without even thinking.I was master of the image, master of the image programs.I'd have an idea, just like that. And I'd make the idea _happen._Here's an example: http://www.alansondheim.org/stranges.mp4 .Here's another: http://www.alansondheim.org/stranges2.mp4 .Brilliant! I couldn't possibly do these now!I don't know what happened, but I have a theory: the Republicans.It must have been the Republicans. It can't possibly be a coincidence.The Republicans come in; my images go south as they say.That's not an insult to the South. That's just an expression.I'm sure that's just an expression. And I won't be side-tracked.The Republicans would side-track me. Look at these images!Look at the skills I had! I haven't made anything this good for years!Not since the Republicans came in! I can't afford anything any more!My mind's a shambles. My mind's ground to a halt.It's the fault of the Republicans! I'm sure there's more to say aboutthis but I'm not sure what it is. I used to know what it is, but Idon't know; my mind's blurry, I can hardly keep track of anything andI don't have any ideas any more. I don't even know to to end this.All I remember is that I used to be brilliant and I look at thesestunning images and say wow to myself and I know I can't do anythingthis good now and the Republicans are running around my mind likevermin. In fact I like vermin but I don't like Republicans! I used tobe so good!- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:37:32 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: wounded avatar. aporia. wounded avatar. aporia.it's always someone else who writes this.it's always someone else who is sick.up until the limit, it's you, not myself, who is sick.at the limit, i am gone, not even leaving a gift, leaving nothing.at the limit, it is someone else who receives a gift.the gift comes from nowhere. the gift is an object in the world.the gift is a labeled object in the world. or an unknown object.the avatar who is sick is a gift. the avatar who disappears is a gift.the avatar leaves nothing behind. or the avatar leaves everything.the avatar leaves everything but leaves everything to no one.the pain of a wounded avatar is infinite. an avatar cannot speak.an avatar is always spoken for and hir pain is stolen.http://www.alansondheim.org/ama.movthe wounded avatar is at the heart of the problematic of culture.the wounded avatar is the heart of the problematic.wounding is the erasure of the grounding of inscription.the wounded avatar is the inscription of woundingand the wounding of inscription:it is within this field that materiality dissolves,meeting oncoming death face to face, in the sense of alterity.the field blocks everything; the field does not exist.the avatar says: it is over when i say it is over.the avatar is wounded.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2011 22:40:21 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Wounded Avatars text Wounded Avatars"when i was young i was told i wouldn't live past twenty-five.i gave the ugly lie to that interpretation.now these words resonate but only briefly with my voice.you'll read them in your own, nothing otherwise will remain.the back-theory is that fragile, look how the letters line up.one, two, and three, they appear different to youthan they ever did to me."Wounded avatars are inconceivable; however what is transmitted across -from the visualization of the data-base to the user - may reflect asurplus of inscription.This is accomplished in at least two ways: 1. the augury and presence ofthe human voice, as voice-over or apparently emanating from the avatar,whose movement of the lips can reflect the pronunciation of the phonemesin real time; and 2. the use of photographic textures, of the woundedand/or sexualized body, attached to objects and avatars. The first isresonant with the 'grain of the voice,' which is easily transmitted(occupying a fairly small audio bandwidth, simple to channel and receive)and yet perceived as _of_ the body, intimate with and within the body, inother words an aural tissue inhering in the speaking subject, and listenedto, in that regard, by the receiver. The second, the use of photographic(photographed) textures, is based on the gaze, and its function as aproscenium of arousal and empathy; the body gazed-upon is my own (taken asmy own, inhabited), the wound and genitals are my own (inhabited), and soforth. The silencing of the voice, the portrayal of the death of the bodyare my own as well, and the more obdurate the silencing and portrayal -the more these appear to deny the epistemology of the data-codecs that areat the heart of their transmission - the more the viewer succumbs to them,the more they are lodged within the him or hir, the more the flesh appearsbeyond what otherwise defaults to the usual (notion of the) transparencyof data.So that, to re-mark within the virtual, within virtual worlds, thepresence of the body, wounded or aroused or dying for examples - the useof voice and texture are useful portals to those journeys we all take atvarious times in our lives, and towards their ending, when the flow of thebody becomes insistent in its very becoming-object.In the nightclub, the sleazy can predominate, as can elegance, brilliance,glitter, and monstrosity. Imagine a windowless space, dark but for thepresence of club kids, who emerge as rare birds of the night, a metaphordone to death and stereotypical, but clear in its depiction of a menageriewhich appears self-illuminated, self-controlled, self-presented. In thisway, ontology is self-determined, what is, is brought to the foreground bythe club kids themselves; this is the world of the club, the world of thenight, the world of flat black texture in virtual worlds where what isvisible is always already a detour or bypass, an inversion of the usualroles of light and shadow.Further, what appears in the nightclub, in this self-illumination, self-ontology, is nothing more or less than the image or flash, evanescent andalways on the verge of disappearing. This image appears simultaneouslyreal (for it is there, before me) and virtual (since it seems grounded intranslucence and the ephemeral; in fact it sutures inscription to theflesh, perhaps erring on the side of inscription. For what is occurring(but does not occur) within a depth psychology here, is the aging of theimage-body, body-image, outside the club, which then is visible (as theclub kid is visible) as a framing-device remote from time, forestallingtime. The time of the club is always a detour.So here is the third device within virtual presentation, beyond voice andphotographic texture, the device of the glow or self- or narrowed-illumination, which isolates and creates, which effaces architecturethrough architectonics, and which insists on the wounded or dying avatar,the sick or aroused avatar, the avatar brought to its/our knees at itslimits, which are the limitations of representation among transmissions,codes, protocols, and so forth.I can imagine a solitary avatar, whose body is that of carefully-recon-structed wounds and violent demarcations, mouthing almost autonomicallythe audible narration of a woman starving in the Horn of Africa, asurvivor from a Rwandan massacre, a soldier chewed up by a roadside bomb,or an American dying from malnutrition; I can imagine an avatar whose bodyis mapped from aroused or used and debilitated flesh, audibly murmuringthe caress of sexuality, or sexuality's violence... So many difficult andun/comfortable modes of presentation, carrying the real of the body intothe virtual, returning it to the real of the observer, who may become aparticipant in spite of hirself, and for what end? For experience andempathy that inhabits the lived world, breaks down virtuality, or better,demonstrates that virtuality and inscription inhabit all of us, that it isnot an escape, that our bodies and desires follow us and paint the worldin colors which are often abject and denied. I would like famine and warbrought home to second life, in a semiotic close to the ikonic, not theusual cartoon-indexical which all too often colors 'magical' representa-tion. I would like arousal to move other than Vaihinger's as-if or Ben-tham's fictions, to bring the body and its consequences to the foreground(as speech often does). And I'd like death to appear as other thancommodity as representable in its non-representability; I'd like thatdeath to appear as _our_ death, not the death of the other, not the deathwhich is named, but the death which is unnameable. And finally, I'd likethe wager which comes from all of this (and there are other means to applyas well, of course; I'm just scratching the surface), to be seen for whatit is: not a wager in the sense of a zero-sum game, but a wager within thereal, within organism, where we all are lost in the end, but may havemoments of clarity and action on the way there. Otherwise we spend ourlives as separate 'real' and 'virtual,' both skittering across data-banksand back-ups, as if such constitute how the world is turning or hasbecome. And the danger there is that, to repeat myself, that real war,starvation, arousal (it is not all negative), wounding, cessation, isalways just around the corner, and we ignore this, politically andsomatically, at our peril.Some texts -Reporting Vietnam, Part 1 and 2, includes Herr's DispatchesThe Body in Pain, Elaine ScarryTibetan Medicine, the Ven., Rechung RinpocheThe Matrixial Borderspace, BrachaL. EttingerLeaves of Grass, Second Annex: Good-bye My Fancy, Walt Whitmanthanks to Monika Weiss- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

[digested < at > nettime == mod (tb)]Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org> PAIN.TXT: On (severe) Pain War Against War, Krieg dem Kriege in silence here the idiotic poverty of pain For Occupy Wall Street, Jesus' Third Way * Eyebeam Window Gallery Installation Pompeii (the proper name, pompeii) Quick reviews - recommended books - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2011 04:36:45 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: PAIN.TXT: On (severe) Pain PAIN.TXTOn (severe) Pain(dialog between Sandy Baldwin and Alan Sondheim)In relation to pain:Inexpressibility occurs because of the difficulty of expressing interiorstates that might not have a clearcut symptomology (as thirst does, forexample) - and also because severe pain derails speech and language andthought, as the internalized horizon of the flesh is muted or screams inabeyance. All of this touches on the _pain of the signifier_ and itsinexpressible relation to death - (Alan)=========================================================================I really like your phrase "pain of the signifier" in that finalinstallment on unprintability. I'm not sure how we think about it,however.On the one hand, pain is all that the signifier negates and forecloses.So, there's a numbness to the signifier, an anaesthesia.On the other hand, the signifier in the place of pain, as a kind of badsuture, a bandaid.On the third hand, is the real gamble, the crying or trembling of thesignifier, in its negation, trembling with the world that it is holdingoff. How to show this? Or is it simply what shows up?Sandy=========================================================================Hi Sandy, doesn't pain negate and foreclose the signifier? The pain of thesignifier for me is the pain of the _incision_ accompanying inscription;the world simultaneously expands and narrows. In Buddhism, I'd imagine(I'm fuzzy at the moment) all signifiers equal and empty; suffering andattachment imbues distinction with intentionality, capture.The signifier's sharp; the numbness is what's created in the act ofdistinction. So the signifier's x^-x, that stuff I wrote about a whileback about the intersection of a set and its complement relativized inrelation to the 'content' of the set; if x = apple, then 0-sub-apple isthe intersection of x^-x. So classically this is very sharp, 'smeared' outin the real via abjection.The signifier's not in the place of pain except for the observer; for theperson undergoing (severe) pain, there is no place at all: that's thenumbness. The signifier's the report; the distance between the report andthe pain is also painful...Could you elaborate on the third hand? Not sure I understand - (Alan)=========================================================================I'd say I was thinking about the signifier as something read, as an objectthat I read into. Whereas I see in your reply the signifier as something Iwrite.In the case of the reader, of myself as reader of the signifier of pain,the incision is for you, the pain is yours. This fact makes pain *yourpain*, makes it witnessed, validated for me by that big other. Thesignifier is communicated and read. You and I share in the signifier ofpain.I would say it is beyond reading or non-reading to realize that theemptiness of all signifiers. Every reading fictionalizes this, tells astory of it, but it is only in non-reading that I really approach thealterity of your pain.So, I agree that for the person undergoing the pain there is no place; Iwould go further: it is this inarticulate boundary that concerns me. Thesignifier of pain as your pain - can I feel this? Only as reversibility,as my pain (which in a Cartesian sense I would see as like your pain)?As reader or receiver, I can push reading to impossible limits. I canstrip everything away from the report of the pain, every connotation,every signification, to the point where I touch at the incised flesh ofthe signifier and find the continuous flesh of the world, the greatsurface where we all feel. And here it is no longer your pain / my pain.Here signification is a kind of perturbation, wherein pain and pleasureblur and float, pleasurepain.Or - and this may not be an alternative but a supplementary dimension -reading your pain must be already framed, consensually, as they say ofcommunicational domains. There must be pain before and beyond, which is tosay, beyond otherness, beyond the ultimate fact that the signifier is astructural fact in the communication circuit. (The validation, theimplication of the big other I wrote of above. (In communication, theprice of signification is that it is always the others pain I read, neveryours, and the other's pain I write, never mine.)I think, I think the beyond where "I feel your pain" no longer isdetermined by the symbolics of intersubjective communication is Levinas'"beyond being," or also, I think, these are the encounters that Lingiswrites of. This phrase "I feel your pain" implies such a beyond. I mean: Imust feel your pain even in the absence of the signifier (and it will beabsent, it is absent). Impossibly so, since pain is always pain for you,for the one incised. I must feel impossible pain. (I would say thisrelates to love as well.)Not sure I'm going anywhere. (Sandy)=========================================================================Hi Sandy, this is certainly useful for me. I'd say when you say 'thesignifier as something read,' it's a perception, an incision, that you'remaking; with severe pain, there is no signifier for me at all, not evenincision; I'm emptied of it, even to the extent that "I feel your pain"wouldn't be heard, wouldn't be a received communication - there might noteven be a "you" that is speaking those words to me. When my mother wasdying and in severe pain, she could utter, mumble that, it was her feet,but there was only minimal recognition I was present, and I was literallydumb-founded - i.e. found dumb, and transformed into one whose foundationwas dumb, mute - almost an erasure. I couldn't possibly feel her pain, Iwouldn't know where to begin with either that act or that sentence, thatinscription. Pain turns to groans, moaning, as if the sound might assuage,and perhaps sound does play a role, which later mantra built on; I don'tknow...Might one go so far as to say that the 'reader of the signifier of pain'does not feel pain, he or she is in such a state that reading is stillpossible? Or that the pain he or she feels is encapsulated, notsufficiently severe to cancel out, thwart, communication?Thinking of my mother (she died a few days later, under morphine, given toher to assuage the pain, she never woke through that period, we were allwaiting... The parentheses remains open, as I await my death in a sense,this is as close as I've been...So I'd say we didn't share in the signifier, my mother and I - she wasemptied of that, what was left was pain and the dark horizon she must haveknown, all along, was part and parcel of it...The boundary, too, disappears...::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::SO I wonder, why isn't THIS the focus of philosophy, for example, why allthis talk before the curtain goes down? With the Bardo Thodol, theTibertans have recourse to the symbolic; in a sense Tibetan Buddhism is adiscourse about death, but again, by the living - the guiding continuingafter the death, by the living, and it's a form of imagining and castingaside deity, a conscious form of eliminating the symbolic, so thatemptiness occurs, and maybe enlightenment and maybe the cycle of rebirthscomes to a halt.I've never understood this, why one would want to halt the cycle, whenlife, if not fabulous, is full of novelty in spite of or through thesuffering, but that's another story, or perhaps the same. - (Alan)=========================================================================Hi Sandy,Odd working on this and re: my mother; my father's in the hospital at themoment and my brother and I have been talking about his death, although hemay well live for several more years... It's a harrowing time.I like the exchange below; I'd like to continue it a bit, if it'spossible, and in any case prepare it for putting up online, possibly onthe Eyebeam blog which would be really good; apparently I'll have one offthe main blog, etc. Please let me know what you think.I'm twisted re: my father, as you can well imagine, not in all that greatshape... (Alan)=========================================================================On Wed, 17 Aug 2011, Charles Baldwin wrote:Sorry about your father. I know it's a complicated relation.Sure, on the Eyebeam blog would be great. I think it's substantial enough,we might think of other venues of "publication" as well. Though I thinkeventually we might move on to pleasure and not pain? (Sandy)=========================================================================Hi Sandy, I want to respond to your email tomorrow when I'm awake and ableto think at all, about anything, we were out all day, I wrote you when Ireturned and it's been fuzzy tonight. But I do want to say re: pleasure,that I'm not personally all that interested in it, I don't see it inrelation to pain at all, and I see pain as fundamental to philosophy andphenomenology in particular. I hope this makes sense? Pleasure seems moresurface, disparate, connected to fulfillment, maybe even homeostasis,etc., not to mention the brain's pleasure centers. I don't know what I'mtalking about here of course. Pain/wounding/death relate to the project atEyebeam, and there's also sexuality - in other words, the avatar which isbroken or taken over - the sexuality connects to pleasure, but for me itconnects more to permissions and formal control - it's what's dark orforbidden in virtual sexuality, teledildonics, etc. that relates I think -in other words, what transgresses into the abject. All of this alsotouches on Kristeva, Douglas, purity and danger, Franz Steiner on taboo,etc. - these sorts of barriers that can lead to death, etc. - menses aswell and the whole world that engages around menstruation as sexual/wound/death/rebirth, etc. On a practical level, I feel my time is limited, andthis area is fecund and mostly denied - the same way that the bodies ofdead or wounded American soldiers are never presented, are always beyondthe Pale. And it's here that the crux of virtual occurs, that is that thecommon - doxa - interpretation of virtuality lends itself to skimming oversurfaces - to such pleasures that we can talk about the U.S. for examplere: Wired mag. etc. as a culture of pleasure which buries everyting else.It's the debris I'm interested in here...I'll try even to work this into an article, if I can, and more later fromyour original post today of course - I'm literally worn out at themoment... (Alan)=========================================================================On Wed, 17 Aug 2011, Charles Baldwin wrote:I suppose I wonder now on what conditions can I say "I feel your pain."Is this phrase even possible? But also, we say it and mean it. (It wouldbe interesting to pursue "I feel your pleasure" as well, which would bedifferent, though present some related issues.)"I feel your pain" is indexical"; a moan is ikonic; we're thinking throughthe language of ikons here. (Alan? Sandy?)I suppose it is at least in part a matter of when and where and whoutters this phrase.There is also pain that is *managed* or lived through. Though I thinkthis is already a problem with this as I write it: wouldn't all pain beshattering, in its time however brief, as a kind of obduracy within? Andyet we're constantly living with it. At least I mean that in this casethere are available conventions for signifying its presence. I feel yourpain because it is like other pains in I have felt in the past, pains Ihave had, with the sense of *having* pain as an object possessed andcontrolled, as an experience catalogued and available to telling. I havehad a toothache or a broken toe or a sore muscle. I lived through eachand can now speak of it, can share it with you, can point to the scars.I am certain that here the pain is encapsulated - as you put it - or ina kind of vesicle within me. (Sandy)This is true to an extent, but only once for example have I had such badtoothache that I could do nothing but scream (and did); I had to be rushedto an emergency dentist. Now I 'remember' the pain, but I'm not sure ifthis is the same kind of memory reconstruction that occurs, for example,when I 'remember' my childhood home... (Alan)Then, thinking about your mother: a setting with no communication, noexchange of commonplaces about where it hurts. No signifier of pain, orrather the signifier is framed and held by the setting. No "pain index,"no seven words to describe it, from flickering and pounding throughnagging and torturing, or in between. In this way, pain is a problem forindexicality as such (and differs from similar problems e.g. thepunctum). Gesture falls short: the witness - and there might need to beanother term? the "vigilant" works in a way, but isn't right for thepain-sharer - consoles and soothes to no avail, the sufferer utters andmoves but conveys nothing of the internal anguish. (Sandy)Yes, absolutely, this is it, which is why I think of pain as ikonic, aninternal ikon operative and witnessed only by the subject who bears it.Which brings up a closely related concept, that we are ikonic to ourselvesand that this is a closed transmission (not even sutured in the sense ofthe construction of the subject). (Alan)What remains? A phenomenology that is blinded and muted in many ways.The tableau of sufferer and vigilant conveys only distance and numbness.It also conveys waiting (vigilance). Mute and blind waiting the suffereris not dead, nor are they undead (in a monstrous sense), but they are nolonger a subject, no longer speaking and asserting. You write "theremight not even be a 'you' that is speaking those words to me," whichmakes it impossible for you to say "I feel your pain." This is a tableauof nothingness, of an open gap in being. It is not yet mourning. It istraumatic in advance, marking a trauma to come, in the sense that traumais dream, is something displaced in experience and time. Thephenomenology of the gap is tied to the time of waiting and not to anyother perception. Duration, waiting, vigilance: these may be bodilyrelations beyond alterity ... (Sandy)Yes, again, and the waiting for the observer is also tied to thepossibility of recover; for the person in pain, it is timeless, and I'dthink even the potential of temporality or a temporal horizon is absent.(Alan)Is it not here that I might say *I feel impossible pain*? At least, thiswas where I ended my last reply, except now I would say that every wordin that phrase, "I feel impossible pain," is broken in the tableau ofnothingness I'm writing of: the subject that might utter the phrase (thevigilant) is dumbfounded, as you say, troubling "I" and "feel" and soon. Perhaps *I feel impossible pain* is absurd, impossible, not evenworth saying. It is philosophically absurd ... (Sandy)It would seem almost an egoism, no? Since (feel)and(imossible pain) aslocutions are contradictory, but yet the observer insists on saying_something_ since he or she is reduced to silence by the other's moaning.A doctor on the other hand, would see all of this as symptom, andhopefully act accordingly, doing whatever she or he can to assuate thepain which she knows by proxy is _there._ (Alan)I keep returning to Lingis: in one of his books, can't remember which,he describes his own vigil by his dying mother's bed. She has cancer,she's in a hospital near Chicago. He describes his own inarticulatenessand hers as well; but - as I recall - he also sees a bravery in thescene, a dignity in both the mother and the son facing death. Withoutbeing able to dig up the reference - I may be wrong in recalling it? - Ihave to say I find it a bit forced, but also I see it fitting thegeneral refusal of real abjection in his work, his sense of the glory orwonder of being in every situation. *Forced* as a way of philosophicallyor pedagogically making a point about imperatives that bind us beyondbeing. Yet I wonder if it's too much on his part: how can it be so surethat I'm able to hear and answer the imperative? I'm not sure I believethat in the presence of a dying loved one it is so easy, exceptphilosophically and perhaps only after. Again, I'm being unfair: itcould not have been easy for him, and yet it becomes easy tophilosophize, and to achieve a passivity and even enlightenment. Lingisfocuses on the extreme, the rending and transforming of suffering andencounters, but there's a sense of certainty, of philosophical claritythat he brings to these. (Sandy)I like your description here and the notion of refusing real abjection,but then I wonder how he approaches situations of real torture or painbefore its 'time.' But the philosophizing itself is a way of dealing withit; when my mother died I played shakuhachi, and when I recently wroteabout my father's being in hospital (on Facebook), I talked about playingzurna - it's a way of dealing, a kind of expressivity against everything,including the potential cessation of expressivity of course. (Alan)Perhaps this relates to your final points about Buddhism or*philosophy*. I'm left wondering if dialogue in the presence of death,if description of the tableau of vigilance - as above, as here - is, canpossibly be, *philosophical*? How can it be? Surely philosophy fails? Weare, as you say, dumbfounded. I'm pretty sure that I'm unsure about whatI'm writing of here, that I'm in no way certain about your pain or thepain of others, that I'm in no way certain about the nothingness of thevigil. How could I be? It is obscene to philosophize on pain. (Sandy)Another turn here, however - perhaps that is the only philosophizing thatisn't obscene; one is speaking for a body that's no longer capable ofspeaking, one is simultaneously within the intense privacy of thatinexressible pain, and the intense privacy of writing itself, Vygotsky'sinner speech, Blanchot's writing of the disaster, Scarry's introductorymaterial on pain (the best part of her book, at least for me), and soforth... (Alan)=========================================================================On Thu, 18 Aug 2011, Charles Baldwin wrote:Although, it seems to me that already in the below pleasure is leadingsomewhere interesting vis a vis the virtual. The US as a culture ofpleasure which buries everything else must be, it seems to me, a tight andanxious relation to an excluded domain of pain and violence. I supposethere'd be other kinds of pleasure, so simply tied to fulfillment orclosing off the leaks. But now I'm elaborating a response to this... let'skeep focused on the pain (said the masochist). (Sandy)Agree with keeping the focus. The locus of the above is sexuality, the wayit plays out on say SVU or with Janet Jackson's breast, etc. It's apuritanism consistently pushed to the breaking-point. But the discussionleads elsewhere, to pop culture, communality, not the isolation, the_body_ in the hospital bed or on the battlefield... (Alan)==================================================================================================================================================Notes from Utah (Alan)110812_004: Pain as separating inscription/history from the inertness ofthe body; what's read as history from the outside (and thereby enteringthe social), from the inside is unread/unreadable. The inside is puresubstance.110812_005: Inscription carries, until burial, carries a specificrelationship to the body until burial. Burial is a form of reinscription.A line on the body - how is this interpreted during life? during death?110812_012: Inscription => embodiment and maintenance; maintenance =>retardation: what makes for example virtual particles last as long as theydo? Retardation - slowing things down, copying, duplicating, a poetics ofdispersion, holding-back. See the phenomenology of numbers: data-base,interpretation, intentionality, an immersive situation, memory. In doingmathematics, always dealing with temporal processes. In pain: everythingdrops away, definable and immersive situations cease to exist.110812_014: Splintering, splintered nails, leveraging of particles,striations, applicable to notions of binding, constriction, discomfort.110816_002: Pain of the signifiera: signifier as incision, disturbance,splits between the Pale and beyond the Pale. Pain beyond the Pale?The pain of death: horizon foreclosing its origin and the subject as well.110816_003: The work I do as obdurate, not grid or mapping, but flows thatare not channelized, flows that are mute - relation to pain. Thephenomenology of the embodiment of the signifier is also mute. What I dois planless, expands into available technology on a practical level,produces and reproduces that way.110816_006: My Textbook of Thinking: components of inscription: linkage,syntactical structure, inscription is an ordering of difference, impulse,representation-structure, legitimation structure, maintenance, stabili-zation mechanisms, positive/negative feedback, field of abjection. Excess-ive related to corrosion. Difference between fissure and inscription.Relationship of corrosion and scarcity to pain.110816_007: Phenomenology of eccentric space, Sarduy, de-centering thesubject, tied to abjection.110816_008: Difference between fissure and inscription; pain tends towardsfissure; if fissure is same and same, there's no geography, no topography,no topology; the result is the crack / wound, everywhere and nowhere.110818_001: Pain relates to the body as cosmology to the universe. (?)110819_001: Pain in relation to virtual worlds: in circumlocution of thesubject who may remain impervious, the degree zero of phenomenology.110821_001: What happens when users exchange their avatars? Our histories,inventories, are no longer our own.==================================================================================================================================================- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2011 13:13:53 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: War Against War, Krieg dem Kriege War Against War, Krieg dem Kriegehttp://alansondheim.org/Fb.jpg- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2011 04:02:21 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: in silence here There's an Assyrian Standard Inscription extolling the deeds of kings; this is a standard denouement of death, dispersion, and the breaking-down of networks. My father, our father, had died a week ago Tuesday; I've been here in Kingston, Pennsylvania, only since Saturday. We had an interment, a cremation next to my mother's coffin, two days ago. We've been clearing out the house, which means dealing with five thousand books dad had collected over the past century; he was born 97 years ago. Most of the books were bought over fifty years ago, when limited editions were cheap; they went up in value, down slightly again. Argosy and Swann are handling them. I've been going through books, through our parents' wedding announcement, through wartime mementos, family histories and reminiscences going back two centuries, teacups, swords and guns, bird prints, receipts and broadsides, glasses and crystal and small carved wooden figures - and all of this, forming a network or skein of ill-suited and impossible redundancy, in other words a network of _things,_ helping tear it apart, trying to retrieve whatever items I could, working alongside Azure and my brother and his wife and others coming and going. Until the point of no return, when I can't sleep and walk the home late-night alone, neurotically photographing everything (like I play music, the labor of it, the labor of these _things,_ trying to capture-captive), ending numb and unable to conceive of playing the simplest note or writing the simplest script - those I've already done, run into the ground - my mind focused on _this_ teacup or _that_ fountain pen - my grandfather's 32nd degree mason badges, everywhere intimations of classicism that I can't identify with. I look for the cracks - Fox's Martyrs, Tortures and Torments of the Christian Martyrs, Anatomy of Melancholy, Quine's Quiddities, Celan, an Aldus press book from 1514 working on the organization still, of the _printed book,_ Thomas Browne, Godwin's Essay on Sepulchres. I think my father began with expansion, contracted quickly in the move from Brookline Mass to Kingston Penna with World War II along the way. I think I'm beginning to understand a Monsieur Teste or Proustian way with him. I share certain interests - Sam Johnson and Byron to mention two, but I've gone in a direction of philia, not phobia, where technology is concerned.But I roam these walls/halls as now, unable to contain myself; oddly, it's not the finality of deaths, of organisms, that upsets me so, so much as the finality of the skein of things; this was a world I grew up in and now I'm in the process of dismantling (with others), just as I had to put down, with Azure, acknowledge the kill, of our first cat Boojum, which because of proximity was the hardest death of an other I've endured. I want to read Kripke and others on possible worlds and natural kinds, again: is organism and coherency one or an other? Is there a possible world where these skeins remain intact, along with organisms with names and naming, for millennia? Or does the entropic seize everywhere along lines of flight, corralling and expelling debris repeatedly, there's no end to it?The numbness. I'm stuck to the world.I'm stuck to the world and recognize the _unique event_ might not be death after all, but the dissolution following death, the unreconcilable dispersion that sends everything, every object, every organism, beyond the universal Pale. In the end we're all mongrels and in the beginning we're all mongrels.Time moves slow throughout this process. I've been here 5.4 days, and already an empire of the dead has been established and holds sway. I call people, write, people, thank people, I feel guilty if I write, like this, in the form of a group, but my energy drains faster than thought, and the horizon of relevance Schutz describes is simply - _simply_ muted. It's not a process of decathecting, it's the opposite, a refusal to release the glue that holds the world together - never mind the bodies of organisms within it. (One might wonder where is the net, virtuality, within this, beyond the physicality of routers and their _tubes,_ but that is another story, another time, when I can _think_ again. Like Levinas in existence and existents, exhaustion now determines the quality of my thought, and the shudders, fears, night terrors, migraines, and nightmares undetermine thought's realm. Sometime in the future, I will be there, writing away about pain and its indescribability, the impossible of pain, the signifier as wound, and the impossibility of inscription. But not I try to hold onto what I think of only as text and textual process, thinking beyond thought, which is a basis for philosophy, once the shuddering slows and halts, temporarily, until it halts again.On a practical level, I hope to return Sunday or Monday to New York, resume the Eyebeam residency full-time, prepare for playing on the 23/24/ 25/28 of this month, sort through the books I'm bringing back (including Joseph Campbell's copy of Morte Darthur with Beardsley), find out where my embrochure has gone, and get back to Second Life/virtual worlds work. The flood never got to our father's home although surrounding towns have been inundated. There's mold everywhere. I'm online. Family relationships are realigning. I'm thinking about Quine on negation, about negation, and there's a start.And thanks for putting up with all of this, and reading this far, if you have, and there's the differend for you.- Alaneyebeam: http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim/email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/current text http://www.alansondheim.org/re.txt- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 03:08:24 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: the idiotic poverty of pain the idiotic poverty of painbecause there's so little to say about pain, you're always thumping upagainst that, a sort off surface which gives way, but only within alimited compliance, after a while one wants to slither, one wants to move,to move, into projections of images or fantasies, or holographic universeson the edges of the surface, you can consider the surface in the same wayas you can consider the bangu, the drum, as you can consider the surfaceas the surface of pain, with the center where the harshness occurs, andthen reading the skin, reading the skin on the outside of the drum, andthen leaving the drum altogether and go elsewhere, the sound that goeselsewhere, so, moving from there, after a while, pain then reveals itself,as does death, as an ultimate poverty, idiotic, nothing left but nullsignifiers always already collapsed, because everything becomes the sametoken, everything becomes the same dissolution or decay of the proton, sowhat is left is not even substance, one moves away then to embrace, orcatch or catapult oneself, or corral, the image or imaginary that appearson the outside of the curvature of the drum, it's there that sound mean-ders into form, embraces the subject, brings hir back alivehttp://www.alansondheim.org/bangu1.jpghttp://www.alansondheim.org/bangu2.jpghttp://www.alansondheim.org/bangu3.jpghttp://www.alansondheim.org/bangu4.jpghttp://www.alansondheim.org/bangu5.jpg==eyebeam: http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim/email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/current text http://www.alansondheim.org/re.txt==- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:59:34 -0500 (EST)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: For Occupy Wall Street, Jesus' Third Way *For Occupy Wall Street, Jesus' Third Way *Seize the moral initiative.Find a creative alternative to violence.Assert your own humanity and dignity as a person.Meet force with ridicule or humor.Break the cycle of humiliation.Refuse to submit or to accept the inferior position.Expose the injustice of the system.Take control of the power dynamic.Shame the oppressor into repentance.Stand your ground.Make the Powers make decisions for which they are not prepared.Recognize your own power.Be willing to suffer rather than retaliate.Force the oppressor to see you in a new light.Deprive the oppressor of a situation where a show of force iseffective.Be willing to undergo the penalty of breaking unjust laws.Discard fear of the old order and its rules.Seek the oppressor's transformations.* This is in Walter Wink, Beyond Just War and Pacifism: Jesus'Nonviolent Way, in Volume 4, Contemporary Views on Spiritualityand Violence, in The Destructive Power of Religion, Violence inJudaism, Christianity, and Islam, J. Harold Ellens, Editor.The articles in the four volumes are based on close theologicalreadings of texts, actions, and hermeneutics, and well worthreading. I think their relation to OWS is really useful.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2011 21:46:49 -0500 (EST)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Eyebeam Window Gallery Installation Eyebeam Window Gallery Installation"never such pain againthey will not have itthey will flay first or kill firstthey will open maw and ruin :death never stops for death"PLEASE VISIT! Chelsea, West 21st Steet near 11th Avenue!installation photographs:http://www.flickr.com/photos/asondheim/sets/72157628198851569/sound from combined crystal radios and aerials:http://www.alansondheim.org/install1.mp3http://www.alansondheim.org/install2.mp3video:http://www.alansondheim.org/install1.mp4http://www.alansondheim.org/install2.mp4Up through 12/11/2011: texts, 3d models of distorted avatars, mid-19th-century painting, crysal radios (early 1920s with condenser,late 1910s loose coupler, variometer, antenna condenser, 1941 RCBP-10 radio (first real portable) used for loop antenna, B-field VLFloop antenna), video of Second Life avatars with distorted motion-capture behavior syndrom (DMCB)."perfect julus/he is arranged so that hir limbs are such arrangedthat they make you think thoughts you'd rather not think.they're thoughts of what you might do to julu twine andwhat julu twine might do to you shudder shudder.you've read somewhere you're giving out heat with theshiver and taking it in with the shiver.you remember thinking the perfect julu twine s/he is sojust an arrangement as i will always remember thinking.and that no one but hir thought hir up and then s/hethought me up too and then you full of sex and death.that you might die without pain and unwounded, or thatsomething better might be there for all that.that that something better has a name and that thatname is perfect julu."eyebeam: http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim/- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 12:50:45 -0500 (EST)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Pompeii (the proper name, pompeii) Pompeii (the proper name, pompeii)(virtual world work, philosophy, memory, sign)video / thesis / name of the facehttp://www.alansondheim.org/pompeii.mp4the face/body reconstitutes itself, dragging hermeneutics with it.nothing remains but the rewryte of memory, continuous.face/body neither dead nor alive, axed or picked or nubbed.one hundred meters minimum, holding avatar by choreography,or the gravitational pull of dance and tensor calculus.because it generates from nothing, proceeds from annihilation,unerased from previous aeons, themselves under erasure.what human can never know, extent of space and time.all bridges are broken to this image-land land-image,which seems to insist on the human in the midst of substance.image / thesishttp://www.flickr.com/photos/asondheim/sets/72157628368639267/frozen, released less than desire or interpretation might procure.something to do with inscription, who or what inscribed.that is to say, the signifier of something in remembrance,of the human, or in human memory, or memory of the other.older space-time genres, they can't fit, they can't make itpainting / thesishttp://www.alansondheim.org/justpaint.mp4beauty of continuous development of abstraction,carrying the weight of flesh or bouquet of human energy.sculpture / thesishttp://www.alansondheim.org/justsculpture.mp4immobilized development of organisms, what remains, beyond,or only the static caging of desire, something within these,untoward, held in abeyance, petrification or circumscription,boundaries always already out of reach, out of touch.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:02:27 -0500 (EST)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Quick reviews - recommended books - Quick reviews - recommended books -Hello Avatar, Rise of the Networked Generation, B. Coleman, MIT, 2011- Highly recommend this book which isn't the usual first-personnarrative, but carefully builds a theoretical structure for analyzingthe phenomenology of avatars, which we might be taking increasinglyfor granted; the days of Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen have beenreplaced by life. I like the breadth and time-line of the book. Ipicked up the copy at Eyebeam; it's one of the more useful recentvolumes of theory/sociology/philosophy of new media to emerge.Noise Channels, Glitch and Error in Digital Culture, Peter Krapp,Minnesota, 2011- Again, highly recommended. The book is theoretically dense but quiteastute; I remember the author from a Derrida list years ago. I think ofhis approach as 'deep glitch,' glitch as basic to online culture; thevolume goes well beyond glitch as style. I'm working my way through thebook now; I hate doing this, but the last sentence indicates the author'sapproach: "And so the digital humanities assert that 'from the standpointof art forms instantiated in informatic media (aural sounds, visualimages, linguistic signs), the noise _is_ the art.'" - the quote is fromBruce Clark. I'm trying, using books like this, and the above, to find ahome for my own standpoint; these come close and are far more useful thanother works which emphasize heavy description plus theory.The Destructive Power of Religion, 4 volumes edited by J. Harold Ellens,Praeger, 2004- This is an amazing collection of essays on 'Violence in Judaism,Christianity, and Islam,' with an introduction by Desmond Tutu. They'renot anti-religious, but they are upfront about the violence inherent invarious scriptures and practices, and potential solutions. Liberationtheology would love these, I think. I found the books at a library salefor a dollar each; they're extremely expensive, but there's a one-volumeversion that's relatively cheap. (I haven't seen it.) If you can checkthese out a library, please do.The Better Angels of Our Nature, Why Violence has Declined, StephenPinker, Viking, 2011- Eight-hundred pages of analysis makes me believe once again inpsychology as a useful science, and for that matter, as a science to someextent. The thesis of declining violence - in spite of continuousmassacres, extinctions, scarcity economies, etc. - seems promising. Ipurchased the in a state of depression after my father's death and thesplit-up of part of my family, and it helped. There are troubling sections(including time-lines and absolutist/inerrant religious tendencies), butthe book as a whole is reasonably, guardedly optimistic. Highlyrecommended.The Poetical Works of John Gay, Including 'POLLY,' 'THE BEGGAR'S OPERA,'and Selections from the other Dramatic Work, Edited by G.C. Faber, Oxford,1926Everyone knows The Beggar's Opera, but Polly is rarer, and then there arestrange things like The What D'Ye Call It, and Trivia: or, The Art ofWalking the Streets of London. Do check these out; they're fascinating andstrange and oddly predecessors of Brecht as well.Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Sir Thomas Browne, various contemporary editionsIf you haven't checked out Browne, you should - he wrote any number ofworks you might know including Religio Medici, but the Pseudodoxia is themost interesting - like Aristotle's Problems, it deals with a variety ofunbelievably wide-ranging topics, but the speculation on them isabsolutely wild. There's 'Of the cutome of saluting or blessing uponsneezing.' and 'That Iews stinke.' (he concludes that they do not). Thenthere's 'Of the cheek burning or eare tingling.' and 'Of smoak followingthe fairest.' and 'That Children would naturally speak Hebrew.' Amazing!Green Eyes, Marguerite Duras, translated by Carol Barko, Columbia, 1990Reflections on film, Judaism, phenomenology, Chaplin, Godard, 'RaymondQueneau, Reading Manuscripts,' and so forth. I love this book whichmeanders around the sites of ambiguity; if you like Duras, you'll lovethis as well. I found it first in the French Cahiers du Cinema edition.The English includes other interviews and a different presentation of theimages.

[digested < at > nettime == mod (tb)]Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org> PAIN.TXT: On (severe) Pain War Against War, Krieg dem Kriege in silence here the idiotic poverty of pain For Occupy Wall Street, Jesus' Third Way * Eyebeam Window Gallery Installation Pompeii (the proper name, pompeii) Quick reviews - recommended books - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2011 04:36:45 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: PAIN.TXT: On (severe) Pain PAIN.TXTOn (severe) Pain(dialog between Sandy Baldwin and Alan Sondheim)In relation to pain:Inexpressibility occurs because of the difficulty of expressing interiorstates that might not have a clearcut symptomology (as thirst does, forexample) - and also because severe pain derails speech and language andthought, as the internalized horizon of the flesh is muted or screams inabeyance. All of this touches on the _pain of the signifier_ and itsinexpressible relation to death - (Alan)=========================================================================I really like your phrase "pain of the signifier" in that finalinstallment on unprintability. I'm not sure how we think about it,however.On the one hand, pain is all that the signifier negates and forecloses.So, there's a numbness to the signifier, an anaesthesia.On the other hand, the signifier in the place of pain, as a kind of badsuture, a bandaid.On the third hand, is the real gamble, the crying or trembling of thesignifier, in its negation, trembling with the world that it is holdingoff. How to show this? Or is it simply what shows up?Sandy=========================================================================Hi Sandy, doesn't pain negate and foreclose the signifier? The pain of thesignifier for me is the pain of the _incision_ accompanying inscription;the world simultaneously expands and narrows. In Buddhism, I'd imagine(I'm fuzzy at the moment) all signifiers equal and empty; suffering andattachment imbues distinction with intentionality, capture.The signifier's sharp; the numbness is what's created in the act ofdistinction. So the signifier's x^-x, that stuff I wrote about a whileback about the intersection of a set and its complement relativized inrelation to the 'content' of the set; if x = apple, then 0-sub-apple isthe intersection of x^-x. So classically this is very sharp, 'smeared' outin the real via abjection.The signifier's not in the place of pain except for the observer; for theperson undergoing (severe) pain, there is no place at all: that's thenumbness. The signifier's the report; the distance between the report andthe pain is also painful...Could you elaborate on the third hand? Not sure I understand - (Alan)=========================================================================I'd say I was thinking about the signifier as something read, as an objectthat I read into. Whereas I see in your reply the signifier as something Iwrite.In the case of the reader, of myself as reader of the signifier of pain,the incision is for you, the pain is yours. This fact makes pain *yourpain*, makes it witnessed, validated for me by that big other. Thesignifier is communicated and read. You and I share in the signifier ofpain.I would say it is beyond reading or non-reading to realize that theemptiness of all signifiers. Every reading fictionalizes this, tells astory of it, but it is only in non-reading that I really approach thealterity of your pain.So, I agree that for the person undergoing the pain there is no place; Iwould go further: it is this inarticulate boundary that concerns me. Thesignifier of pain as your pain - can I feel this? Only as reversibility,as my pain (which in a Cartesian sense I would see as like your pain)?As reader or receiver, I can push reading to impossible limits. I canstrip everything away from the report of the pain, every connotation,every signification, to the point where I touch at the incised flesh ofthe signifier and find the continuous flesh of the world, the greatsurface where we all feel. And here it is no longer your pain / my pain.Here signification is a kind of perturbation, wherein pain and pleasureblur and float, pleasurepain.Or - and this may not be an alternative but a supplementary dimension -reading your pain must be already framed, consensually, as they say ofcommunicational domains. There must be pain before and beyond, which is tosay, beyond otherness, beyond the ultimate fact that the signifier is astructural fact in the communication circuit. (The validation, theimplication of the big other I wrote of above. (In communication, theprice of signification is that it is always the others pain I read, neveryours, and the other's pain I write, never mine.)I think, I think the beyond where "I feel your pain" no longer isdetermined by the symbolics of intersubjective communication is Levinas'"beyond being," or also, I think, these are the encounters that Lingiswrites of. This phrase "I feel your pain" implies such a beyond. I mean: Imust feel your pain even in the absence of the signifier (and it will beabsent, it is absent). Impossibly so, since pain is always pain for you,for the one incised. I must feel impossible pain. (I would say thisrelates to love as well.)Not sure I'm going anywhere. (Sandy)=========================================================================Hi Sandy, this is certainly useful for me. I'd say when you say 'thesignifier as something read,' it's a perception, an incision, that you'remaking; with severe pain, there is no signifier for me at all, not evenincision; I'm emptied of it, even to the extent that "I feel your pain"wouldn't be heard, wouldn't be a received communication - there might noteven be a "you" that is speaking those words to me. When my mother wasdying and in severe pain, she could utter, mumble that, it was her feet,but there was only minimal recognition I was present, and I was literallydumb-founded - i.e. found dumb, and transformed into one whose foundationwas dumb, mute - almost an erasure. I couldn't possibly feel her pain, Iwouldn't know where to begin with either that act or that sentence, thatinscription. Pain turns to groans, moaning, as if the sound might assuage,and perhaps sound does play a role, which later mantra built on; I don'tknow...Might one go so far as to say that the 'reader of the signifier of pain'does not feel pain, he or she is in such a state that reading is stillpossible? Or that the pain he or she feels is encapsulated, notsufficiently severe to cancel out, thwart, communication?Thinking of my mother (she died a few days later, under morphine, given toher to assuage the pain, she never woke through that period, we were allwaiting... The parentheses remains open, as I await my death in a sense,this is as close as I've been...So I'd say we didn't share in the signifier, my mother and I - she wasemptied of that, what was left was pain and the dark horizon she must haveknown, all along, was part and parcel of it...The boundary, too, disappears...::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::SO I wonder, why isn't THIS the focus of philosophy, for example, why allthis talk before the curtain goes down? With the Bardo Thodol, theTibertans have recourse to the symbolic; in a sense Tibetan Buddhism is adiscourse about death, but again, by the living - the guiding continuingafter the death, by the living, and it's a form of imagining and castingaside deity, a conscious form of eliminating the symbolic, so thatemptiness occurs, and maybe enlightenment and maybe the cycle of rebirthscomes to a halt.I've never understood this, why one would want to halt the cycle, whenlife, if not fabulous, is full of novelty in spite of or through thesuffering, but that's another story, or perhaps the same. - (Alan)=========================================================================Hi Sandy,Odd working on this and re: my mother; my father's in the hospital at themoment and my brother and I have been talking about his death, although hemay well live for several more years... It's a harrowing time.I like the exchange below; I'd like to continue it a bit, if it'spossible, and in any case prepare it for putting up online, possibly onthe Eyebeam blog which would be really good; apparently I'll have one offthe main blog, etc. Please let me know what you think.I'm twisted re: my father, as you can well imagine, not in all that greatshape... (Alan)=========================================================================On Wed, 17 Aug 2011, Charles Baldwin wrote:Sorry about your father. I know it's a complicated relation.Sure, on the Eyebeam blog would be great. I think it's substantial enough,we might think of other venues of "publication" as well. Though I thinkeventually we might move on to pleasure and not pain? (Sandy)=========================================================================Hi Sandy, I want to respond to your email tomorrow when I'm awake and ableto think at all, about anything, we were out all day, I wrote you when Ireturned and it's been fuzzy tonight. But I do want to say re: pleasure,that I'm not personally all that interested in it, I don't see it inrelation to pain at all, and I see pain as fundamental to philosophy andphenomenology in particular. I hope this makes sense? Pleasure seems moresurface, disparate, connected to fulfillment, maybe even homeostasis,etc., not to mention the brain's pleasure centers. I don't know what I'mtalking about here of course. Pain/wounding/death relate to the project atEyebeam, and there's also sexuality - in other words, the avatar which isbroken or taken over - the sexuality connects to pleasure, but for me itconnects more to permissions and formal control - it's what's dark orforbidden in virtual sexuality, teledildonics, etc. that relates I think -in other words, what transgresses into the abject. All of this alsotouches on Kristeva, Douglas, purity and danger, Franz Steiner on taboo,etc. - these sorts of barriers that can lead to death, etc. - menses aswell and the whole world that engages around menstruation as sexual/wound/death/rebirth, etc. On a practical level, I feel my time is limited, andthis area is fecund and mostly denied - the same way that the bodies ofdead or wounded American soldiers are never presented, are always beyondthe Pale. And it's here that the crux of virtual occurs, that is that thecommon - doxa - interpretation of virtuality lends itself to skimming oversurfaces - to such pleasures that we can talk about the U.S. for examplere: Wired mag. etc. as a culture of pleasure which buries everyting else.It's the debris I'm interested in here...I'll try even to work this into an article, if I can, and more later fromyour original post today of course - I'm literally worn out at themoment... (Alan)=========================================================================On Wed, 17 Aug 2011, Charles Baldwin wrote:I suppose I wonder now on what conditions can I say "I feel your pain."Is this phrase even possible? But also, we say it and mean it. (It wouldbe interesting to pursue "I feel your pleasure" as well, which would bedifferent, though present some related issues.)"I feel your pain" is indexical"; a moan is ikonic; we're thinking throughthe language of ikons here. (Alan? Sandy?)I suppose it is at least in part a matter of when and where and whoutters this phrase.There is also pain that is *managed* or lived through. Though I thinkthis is already a problem with this as I write it: wouldn't all pain beshattering, in its time however brief, as a kind of obduracy within? Andyet we're constantly living with it. At least I mean that in this casethere are available conventions for signifying its presence. I feel yourpain because it is like other pains in I have felt in the past, pains Ihave had, with the sense of *having* pain as an object possessed andcontrolled, as an experience catalogued and available to telling. I havehad a toothache or a broken toe or a sore muscle. I lived through eachand can now speak of it, can share it with you, can point to the scars.I am certain that here the pain is encapsulated - as you put it - or ina kind of vesicle within me. (Sandy)This is true to an extent, but only once for example have I had such badtoothache that I could do nothing but scream (and did); I had to be rushedto an emergency dentist. Now I 'remember' the pain, but I'm not sure ifthis is the same kind of memory reconstruction that occurs, for example,when I 'remember' my childhood home... (Alan)Then, thinking about your mother: a setting with no communication, noexchange of commonplaces about where it hurts. No signifier of pain, orrather the signifier is framed and held by the setting. No "pain index,"no seven words to describe it, from flickering and pounding throughnagging and torturing, or in between. In this way, pain is a problem forindexicality as such (and differs from similar problems e.g. thepunctum). Gesture falls short: the witness - and there might need to beanother term? the "vigilant" works in a way, but isn't right for thepain-sharer - consoles and soothes to no avail, the sufferer utters andmoves but conveys nothing of the internal anguish. (Sandy)Yes, absolutely, this is it, which is why I think of pain as ikonic, aninternal ikon operative and witnessed only by the subject who bears it.Which brings up a closely related concept, that we are ikonic to ourselvesand that this is a closed transmission (not even sutured in the sense ofthe construction of the subject). (Alan)What remains? A phenomenology that is blinded and muted in many ways.The tableau of sufferer and vigilant conveys only distance and numbness.It also conveys waiting (vigilance). Mute and blind waiting the suffereris not dead, nor are they undead (in a monstrous sense), but they are nolonger a subject, no longer speaking and asserting. You write "theremight not even be a 'you' that is speaking those words to me," whichmakes it impossible for you to say "I feel your pain." This is a tableauof nothingness, of an open gap in being. It is not yet mourning. It istraumatic in advance, marking a trauma to come, in the sense that traumais dream, is something displaced in experience and time. Thephenomenology of the gap is tied to the time of waiting and not to anyother perception. Duration, waiting, vigilance: these may be bodilyrelations beyond alterity ... (Sandy)Yes, again, and the waiting for the observer is also tied to thepossibility of recover; for the person in pain, it is timeless, and I'dthink even the potential of temporality or a temporal horizon is absent.(Alan)Is it not here that I might say *I feel impossible pain*? At least, thiswas where I ended my last reply, except now I would say that every wordin that phrase, "I feel impossible pain," is broken in the tableau ofnothingness I'm writing of: the subject that might utter the phrase (thevigilant) is dumbfounded, as you say, troubling "I" and "feel" and soon. Perhaps *I feel impossible pain* is absurd, impossible, not evenworth saying. It is philosophically absurd ... (Sandy)It would seem almost an egoism, no? Since (feel)and(imossible pain) aslocutions are contradictory, but yet the observer insists on saying_something_ since he or she is reduced to silence by the other's moaning.A doctor on the other hand, would see all of this as symptom, andhopefully act accordingly, doing whatever she or he can to assuate thepain which she knows by proxy is _there._ (Alan)I keep returning to Lingis: in one of his books, can't remember which,he describes his own vigil by his dying mother's bed. She has cancer,she's in a hospital near Chicago. He describes his own inarticulatenessand hers as well; but - as I recall - he also sees a bravery in thescene, a dignity in both the mother and the son facing death. Withoutbeing able to dig up the reference - I may be wrong in recalling it? - Ihave to say I find it a bit forced, but also I see it fitting thegeneral refusal of real abjection in his work, his sense of the glory orwonder of being in every situation. *Forced* as a way of philosophicallyor pedagogically making a point about imperatives that bind us beyondbeing. Yet I wonder if it's too much on his part: how can it be so surethat I'm able to hear and answer the imperative? I'm not sure I believethat in the presence of a dying loved one it is so easy, exceptphilosophically and perhaps only after. Again, I'm being unfair: itcould not have been easy for him, and yet it becomes easy tophilosophize, and to achieve a passivity and even enlightenment. Lingisfocuses on the extreme, the rending and transforming of suffering andencounters, but there's a sense of certainty, of philosophical claritythat he brings to these. (Sandy)I like your description here and the notion of refusing real abjection,but then I wonder how he approaches situations of real torture or painbefore its 'time.' But the philosophizing itself is a way of dealing withit; when my mother died I played shakuhachi, and when I recently wroteabout my father's being in hospital (on Facebook), I talked about playingzurna - it's a way of dealing, a kind of expressivity against everything,including the potential cessation of expressivity of course. (Alan)Perhaps this relates to your final points about Buddhism or*philosophy*. I'm left wondering if dialogue in the presence of death,if description of the tableau of vigilance - as above, as here - is, canpossibly be, *philosophical*? How can it be? Surely philosophy fails? Weare, as you say, dumbfounded. I'm pretty sure that I'm unsure about whatI'm writing of here, that I'm in no way certain about your pain or thepain of others, that I'm in no way certain about the nothingness of thevigil. How could I be? It is obscene to philosophize on pain. (Sandy)Another turn here, however - perhaps that is the only philosophizing thatisn't obscene; one is speaking for a body that's no longer capable ofspeaking, one is simultaneously within the intense privacy of thatinexressible pain, and the intense privacy of writing itself, Vygotsky'sinner speech, Blanchot's writing of the disaster, Scarry's introductorymaterial on pain (the best part of her book, at least for me), and soforth... (Alan)=========================================================================On Thu, 18 Aug 2011, Charles Baldwin wrote:Although, it seems to me that already in the below pleasure is leadingsomewhere interesting vis a vis the virtual. The US as a culture ofpleasure which buries everything else must be, it seems to me, a tight andanxious relation to an excluded domain of pain and violence. I supposethere'd be other kinds of pleasure, so simply tied to fulfillment orclosing off the leaks. But now I'm elaborating a response to this... let'skeep focused on the pain (said the masochist). (Sandy)Agree with keeping the focus. The locus of the above is sexuality, the wayit plays out on say SVU or with Janet Jackson's breast, etc. It's apuritanism consistently pushed to the breaking-point. But the discussionleads elsewhere, to pop culture, communality, not the isolation, the_body_ in the hospital bed or on the battlefield... (Alan)==================================================================================================================================================Notes from Utah (Alan)110812_004: Pain as separating inscription/history from the inertness ofthe body; what's read as history from the outside (and thereby enteringthe social), from the inside is unread/unreadable. The inside is puresubstance.110812_005: Inscription carries, until burial, carries a specificrelationship to the body until burial. Burial is a form of reinscription.A line on the body - how is this interpreted during life? during death?110812_012: Inscription => embodiment and maintenance; maintenance =>retardation: what makes for example virtual particles last as long as theydo? Retardation - slowing things down, copying, duplicating, a poetics ofdispersion, holding-back. See the phenomenology of numbers: data-base,interpretation, intentionality, an immersive situation, memory. In doingmathematics, always dealing with temporal processes. In pain: everythingdrops away, definable and immersive situations cease to exist.110812_014: Splintering, splintered nails, leveraging of particles,striations, applicable to notions of binding, constriction, discomfort.110816_002: Pain of the signifiera: signifier as incision, disturbance,splits between the Pale and beyond the Pale. Pain beyond the Pale?The pain of death: horizon foreclosing its origin and the subject as well.110816_003: The work I do as obdurate, not grid or mapping, but flows thatare not channelized, flows that are mute - relation to pain. Thephenomenology of the embodiment of the signifier is also mute. What I dois planless, expands into available technology on a practical level,produces and reproduces that way.110816_006: My Textbook of Thinking: components of inscription: linkage,syntactical structure, inscription is an ordering of difference, impulse,representation-structure, legitimation structure, maintenance, stabili-zation mechanisms, positive/negative feedback, field of abjection. Excess-ive related to corrosion. Difference between fissure and inscription.Relationship of corrosion and scarcity to pain.110816_007: Phenomenology of eccentric space, Sarduy, de-centering thesubject, tied to abjection.110816_008: Difference between fissure and inscription; pain tends towardsfissure; if fissure is same and same, there's no geography, no topography,no topology; the result is the crack / wound, everywhere and nowhere.110818_001: Pain relates to the body as cosmology to the universe. (?)110819_001: Pain in relation to virtual worlds: in circumlocution of thesubject who may remain impervious, the degree zero of phenomenology.110821_001: What happens when users exchange their avatars? Our histories,inventories, are no longer our own.==================================================================================================================================================- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2011 13:13:53 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: War Against War, Krieg dem Kriege War Against War, Krieg dem Kriegehttp://alansondheim.org/Fb.jpg- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2011 04:02:21 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: in silence here There's an Assyrian Standard Inscription extolling the deeds of kings; this is a standard denouement of death, dispersion, and the breaking-down of networks. My father, our father, had died a week ago Tuesday; I've been here in Kingston, Pennsylvania, only since Saturday. We had an interment, a cremation next to my mother's coffin, two days ago. We've been clearing out the house, which means dealing with five thousand books dad had collected over the past century; he was born 97 years ago. Most of the books were bought over fifty years ago, when limited editions were cheap; they went up in value, down slightly again. Argosy and Swann are handling them. I've been going through books, through our parents' wedding announcement, through wartime mementos, family histories and reminiscences going back two centuries, teacups, swords and guns, bird prints, receipts and broadsides, glasses and crystal and small carved wooden figures - and all of this, forming a network or skein of ill-suited and impossible redundancy, in other words a network of _things,_ helping tear it apart, trying to retrieve whatever items I could, working alongside Azure and my brother and his wife and others coming and going. Until the point of no return, when I can't sleep and walk the home late-night alone, neurotically photographing everything (like I play music, the labor of it, the labor of these _things,_ trying to capture-captive), ending numb and unable to conceive of playing the simplest note or writing the simplest script - those I've already done, run into the ground - my mind focused on _this_ teacup or _that_ fountain pen - my grandfather's 32nd degree mason badges, everywhere intimations of classicism that I can't identify with. I look for the cracks - Fox's Martyrs, Tortures and Torments of the Christian Martyrs, Anatomy of Melancholy, Quine's Quiddities, Celan, an Aldus press book from 1514 working on the organization still, of the _printed book,_ Thomas Browne, Godwin's Essay on Sepulchres. I think my father began with expansion, contracted quickly in the move from Brookline Mass to Kingston Penna with World War II along the way. I think I'm beginning to understand a Monsieur Teste or Proustian way with him. I share certain interests - Sam Johnson and Byron to mention two, but I've gone in a direction of philia, not phobia, where technology is concerned.But I roam these walls/halls as now, unable to contain myself; oddly, it's not the finality of deaths, of organisms, that upsets me so, so much as the finality of the skein of things; this was a world I grew up in and now I'm in the process of dismantling (with others), just as I had to put down, with Azure, acknowledge the kill, of our first cat Boojum, which because of proximity was the hardest death of an other I've endured. I want to read Kripke and others on possible worlds and natural kinds, again: is organism and coherency one or an other? Is there a possible world where these skeins remain intact, along with organisms with names and naming, for millennia? Or does the entropic seize everywhere along lines of flight, corralling and expelling debris repeatedly, there's no end to it?The numbness. I'm stuck to the world.I'm stuck to the world and recognize the _unique event_ might not be death after all, but the dissolution following death, the unreconcilable dispersion that sends everything, every object, every organism, beyond the universal Pale. In the end we're all mongrels and in the beginning we're all mongrels.Time moves slow throughout this process. I've been here 5.4 days, and already an empire of the dead has been established and holds sway. I call people, write, people, thank people, I feel guilty if I write, like this, in the form of a group, but my energy drains faster than thought, and the horizon of relevance Schutz describes is simply - _simply_ muted. It's not a process of decathecting, it's the opposite, a refusal to release the glue that holds the world together - never mind the bodies of organisms within it. (One might wonder where is the net, virtuality, within this, beyond the physicality of routers and their _tubes,_ but that is another story, another time, when I can _think_ again. Like Levinas in existence and existents, exhaustion now determines the quality of my thought, and the shudders, fears, night terrors, migraines, and nightmares undetermine thought's realm. Sometime in the future, I will be there, writing away about pain and its indescribability, the impossible of pain, the signifier as wound, and the impossibility of inscription. But not I try to hold onto what I think of only as text and textual process, thinking beyond thought, which is a basis for philosophy, once the shuddering slows and halts, temporarily, until it halts again.On a practical level, I hope to return Sunday or Monday to New York, resume the Eyebeam residency full-time, prepare for playing on the 23/24/ 25/28 of this month, sort through the books I'm bringing back (including Joseph Campbell's copy of Morte Darthur with Beardsley), find out where my embrochure has gone, and get back to Second Life/virtual worlds work. The flood never got to our father's home although surrounding towns have been inundated. There's mold everywhere. I'm online. Family relationships are realigning. I'm thinking about Quine on negation, about negation, and there's a start.And thanks for putting up with all of this, and reading this far, if you have, and there's the differend for you.- Alaneyebeam: http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim/email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/current text http://www.alansondheim.org/re.txt- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 03:08:24 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: the idiotic poverty of pain the idiotic poverty of painbecause there's so little to say about pain, you're always thumping upagainst that, a sort off surface which gives way, but only within alimited compliance, after a while one wants to slither, one wants to move,to move, into projections of images or fantasies, or holographic universeson the edges of the surface, you can consider the surface in the same wayas you can consider the bangu, the drum, as you can consider the surfaceas the surface of pain, with the center where the harshness occurs, andthen reading the skin, reading the skin on the outside of the drum, andthen leaving the drum altogether and go elsewhere, the sound that goeselsewhere, so, moving from there, after a while, pain then reveals itself,as does death, as an ultimate poverty, idiotic, nothing left but nullsignifiers always already collapsed, because everything becomes the sametoken, everything becomes the same dissolution or decay of the proton, sowhat is left is not even substance, one moves away then to embrace, orcatch or catapult oneself, or corral, the image or imaginary that appearson the outside of the curvature of the drum, it's there that sound mean-ders into form, embraces the subject, brings hir back alivehttp://www.alansondheim.org/bangu1.jpghttp://www.alansondheim.org/bangu2.jpghttp://www.alansondheim.org/bangu3.jpghttp://www.alansondheim.org/bangu4.jpghttp://www.alansondheim.org/bangu5.jpg==eyebeam: http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim/email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/current text http://www.alansondheim.org/re.txt==- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:59:34 -0500 (EST)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: For Occupy Wall Street, Jesus' Third Way *For Occupy Wall Street, Jesus' Third Way *Seize the moral initiative.Find a creative alternative to violence.Assert your own humanity and dignity as a person.Meet force with ridicule or humor.Break the cycle of humiliation.Refuse to submit or to accept the inferior position.Expose the injustice of the system.Take control of the power dynamic.Shame the oppressor into repentance.Stand your ground.Make the Powers make decisions for which they are not prepared.Recognize your own power.Be willing to suffer rather than retaliate.Force the oppressor to see you in a new light.Deprive the oppressor of a situation where a show of force iseffective.Be willing to undergo the penalty of breaking unjust laws.Discard fear of the old order and its rules.Seek the oppressor's transformations.* This is in Walter Wink, Beyond Just War and Pacifism: Jesus'Nonviolent Way, in Volume 4, Contemporary Views on Spiritualityand Violence, in The Destructive Power of Religion, Violence inJudaism, Christianity, and Islam, J. Harold Ellens, Editor.The articles in the four volumes are based on close theologicalreadings of texts, actions, and hermeneutics, and well worthreading. I think their relation to OWS is really useful.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2011 21:46:49 -0500 (EST)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Eyebeam Window Gallery Installation Eyebeam Window Gallery Installation"never such pain againthey will not have itthey will flay first or kill firstthey will open maw and ruin :death never stops for death"PLEASE VISIT! Chelsea, West 21st Steet near 11th Avenue!installation photographs:http://www.flickr.com/photos/asondheim/sets/72157628198851569/sound from combined crystal radios and aerials:http://www.alansondheim.org/install1.mp3http://www.alansondheim.org/install2.mp3video:http://www.alansondheim.org/install1.mp4http://www.alansondheim.org/install2.mp4Up through 12/11/2011: texts, 3d models of distorted avatars, mid-19th-century painting, crysal radios (early 1920s with condenser,late 1910s loose coupler, variometer, antenna condenser, 1941 RCBP-10 radio (first real portable) used for loop antenna, B-field VLFloop antenna), video of Second Life avatars with distorted motion-capture behavior syndrom (DMCB)."perfect julus/he is arranged so that hir limbs are such arrangedthat they make you think thoughts you'd rather not think.they're thoughts of what you might do to julu twine andwhat julu twine might do to you shudder shudder.you've read somewhere you're giving out heat with theshiver and taking it in with the shiver.you remember thinking the perfect julu twine s/he is sojust an arrangement as i will always remember thinking.and that no one but hir thought hir up and then s/hethought me up too and then you full of sex and death.that you might die without pain and unwounded, or thatsomething better might be there for all that.that that something better has a name and that thatname is perfect julu."eyebeam: http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim/- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 12:50:45 -0500 (EST)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Pompeii (the proper name, pompeii) Pompeii (the proper name, pompeii)(virtual world work, philosophy, memory, sign)video / thesis / name of the facehttp://www.alansondheim.org/pompeii.mp4the face/body reconstitutes itself, dragging hermeneutics with it.nothing remains but the rewryte of memory, continuous.face/body neither dead nor alive, axed or picked or nubbed.one hundred meters minimum, holding avatar by choreography,or the gravitational pull of dance and tensor calculus.because it generates from nothing, proceeds from annihilation,unerased from previous aeons, themselves under erasure.what human can never know, extent of space and time.all bridges are broken to this image-land land-image,which seems to insist on the human in the midst of substance.image / thesishttp://www.flickr.com/photos/asondheim/sets/72157628368639267/frozen, released less than desire or interpretation might procure.something to do with inscription, who or what inscribed.that is to say, the signifier of something in remembrance,of the human, or in human memory, or memory of the other.older space-time genres, they can't fit, they can't make itpainting / thesishttp://www.alansondheim.org/justpaint.mp4beauty of continuous development of abstraction,carrying the weight of flesh or bouquet of human energy.sculpture / thesishttp://www.alansondheim.org/justsculpture.mp4immobilized development of organisms, what remains, beyond,or only the static caging of desire, something within these,untoward, held in abeyance, petrification or circumscription,boundaries always already out of reach, out of touch.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:02:27 -0500 (EST)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Quick reviews - recommended books - Quick reviews - recommended books -Hello Avatar, Rise of the Networked Generation, B. Coleman, MIT, 2011- Highly recommend this book which isn't the usual first-personnarrative, but carefully builds a theoretical structure for analyzingthe phenomenology of avatars, which we might be taking increasinglyfor granted; the days of Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen have beenreplaced by life. I like the breadth and time-line of the book. Ipicked up the copy at Eyebeam; it's one of the more useful recentvolumes of theory/sociology/philosophy of new media to emerge.Noise Channels, Glitch and Error in Digital Culture, Peter Krapp,Minnesota, 2011- Again, highly recommended. The book is theoretically dense but quiteastute; I remember the author from a Derrida list years ago. I think ofhis approach as 'deep glitch,' glitch as basic to online culture; thevolume goes well beyond glitch as style. I'm working my way through thebook now; I hate doing this, but the last sentence indicates the author'sapproach: "And so the digital humanities assert that 'from the standpointof art forms instantiated in informatic media (aural sounds, visualimages, linguistic signs), the noise _is_ the art.'" - the quote is fromBruce Clark. I'm trying, using books like this, and the above, to find ahome for my own standpoint; these come close and are far more useful thanother works which emphasize heavy description plus theory.The Destructive Power of Religion, 4 volumes edited by J. Harold Ellens,Praeger, 2004- This is an amazing collection of essays on 'Violence in Judaism,Christianity, and Islam,' with an introduction by Desmond Tutu. They'renot anti-religious, but they are upfront about the violence inherent invarious scriptures and practices, and potential solutions. Liberationtheology would love these, I think. I found the books at a library salefor a dollar each; they're extremely expensive, but there's a one-volumeversion that's relatively cheap. (I haven't seen it.) If you can checkthese out a library, please do.The Better Angels of Our Nature, Why Violence has Declined, StephenPinker, Viking, 2011- Eight-hundred pages of analysis makes me believe once again inpsychology as a useful science, and for that matter, as a science to someextent. The thesis of declining violence - in spite of continuousmassacres, extinctions, scarcity economies, etc. - seems promising. Ipurchased the in a state of depression after my father's death and thesplit-up of part of my family, and it helped. There are troubling sections(including time-lines and absolutist/inerrant religious tendencies), butthe book as a whole is reasonably, guardedly optimistic. Highlyrecommended.The Poetical Works of John Gay, Including 'POLLY,' 'THE BEGGAR'S OPERA,'and Selections from the other Dramatic Work, Edited by G.C. Faber, Oxford,1926Everyone knows The Beggar's Opera, but Polly is rarer, and then there arestrange things like The What D'Ye Call It, and Trivia: or, The Art ofWalking the Streets of London. Do check these out; they're fascinating andstrange and oddly predecessors of Brecht as well.Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Sir Thomas Browne, various contemporary editionsIf you haven't checked out Browne, you should - he wrote any number ofworks you might know including Religio Medici, but the Pseudodoxia is themost interesting - like Aristotle's Problems, it deals with a variety ofunbelievably wide-ranging topics, but the speculation on them isabsolutely wild. There's 'Of the cutome of saluting or blessing uponsneezing.' and 'That Iews stinke.' (he concludes that they do not). Thenthere's 'Of the cheek burning or eare tingling.' and 'Of smoak followingthe fairest.' and 'That Children would naturally speak Hebrew.' Amazing!Green Eyes, Marguerite Duras, translated by Carol Barko, Columbia, 1990Reflections on film, Judaism, phenomenology, Chaplin, Godard, 'RaymondQueneau, Reading Manuscripts,' and so forth. I love this book whichmeanders around the sites of ambiguity; if you like Duras, you'll lovethis as well. I found it first in the French Cahiers du Cinema edition.The English includes other interviews and a different presentation of theimages.

A delegation from Transmediale 2012 [1] came over to my place last night to discuss the latest Telekommunisten artwork, R15N [2]. In addition to various organizational and technical details that we need to work out in preparation for the not-to-be-missed upcoming Transmediale, we talked about the artistic qualities of R15N and the Miscommunication Technologies series in general, which includes works such as deadSwap [3] and Thimbl [4].R15N in some ways represents the purest example of a miscommunication technology so far in the series, not only is it a broadcast model, thus fulfilling the Telekomunisten slogan "The Revolution is Calling," but it really combines many of the core characteristics common to the work of Telekommunisten.Like Thimbl, it is an economic fiction [5], a platform that for the most part is free to use, yet does not in anyway monetize user data or interaction. Like deadSwap, the system depends on the diligence and competency of the users [6] and their willingness to co-operate with random people, who are likely to be completely unknown to each other. Without such diligence and co-operation of the users, the system breaks down into nothing more than a telephonic game of broken telephone.R15N will be the Official Miscommunication Platform of Transmediale 2012.Our hope is that the system will serve to create engagement and a greater sense of community at this years Transmediale. The installation side of R15N is minimal. Some signage and two retro phones under desk lamps, along with a phone booth in which to access the website will represent the work in the physical space of the festivals, but the main purpose of these is to get visitors to register to the system.Only once the user is registered is the artwork really experienced.The system is extremely miscommunicative, failed calls and missed calls and occasional poor call quality seem bewildering at first, and the R15N experience begins quite mysteriously and somewhat awkwardly, as users get dropped into the network and begin to be connected with strangers, with whom they are ment to interact. But very quickly the experience starts to feel normal as users acclimatize to it's quirks and begin to lose inhibitions.Very quickly, the system becomes a highly efficient way to broadcast information, as despite the somewhat unmanageable communication flow happening on the system, the very cooperation and engagement such a miscommunicative platform requires amplifies the message on channels outside the system, as users share their experience with the people around them and people connected to them on other mediums. By building community though the shared experience of the system, R15N becomes a catalyst for the exogenous propagation of information as well.Technically, this style of broadcast is similar to what is known as the "Random Phone Call" broadcast model [7], a theoretical model which proves that a given message can saturate a network very quickly by simply connecting random nodes together.Historically, it works like a randomized, ad-hoc version of the old "phone tree" method of pushing information out to a large community. Phone trees where used by many communities, from schools to church groups to the military [8], when they needed to notify a large number of people quickly. Setting up and maintaining a phone tree was one of the essential tasks of activist groups and political campaigns.Artistically, we have given the system a retro identity, harkening back to the early days of computer networks and telecommunication platforms and the utopian visions of a new society these new platforms inspired. Both playing on the related nostalgia, but also as a parody of modern corporate web platforms today, who peddle centralized and captured implementations of use cases that have been around for decades as somehow revolutionary and innovative because they have managed to squeeze out more powerful open alternatives by way of exclusive access to finance capital.Economically, such a system is extremely accessible, since all calls are initiated by the system and incoming calls are free in most countries, the system is free to use for most people, even for people who have no calling credit on their mobile phones. Nothing more than a working telephone is required to participate.The system is currently in beta stage, and thus usually inactive, however registration is open and everyone is free to sign up now. Be a part of the R15N community. Don't miss out on important information! Register Today!I'll be at Cafe Buchhandlung [9] tonight at 9pm as usual, please come by.[1] http://transmediale.de[2] http://r15n.net[3] http://deadswap.net[4] http://thimbl.net[5] http://wp.me/p24fqL-Z[6] http://deadswap.net/HandBook[7] http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~tfried/paper/2011STOC.pdf[8] http://www.state.nj.us/military//familysupport/family_readiness/telephone_tree.html[9] http://bit.ly/buchhandlung

These are some speculations that have been bouncing around in my headfor some time, particularly with reference to architecture - thediscipline I practice - but perhaps having wider implications: Eversince the early stages of the modernist movement (since the secondhalf of the 19th century) artistic innovation has been underpinned bythe idea of the avant-garde.The avant-garde are (to use a term from Thomas Kuhn) paradigmshifters. Their work consists of two facets that operatesimultaneously . One is a deep critique of current paradigms ofcultural production. And the other is production of artistic workthat demonstrates a new paradigm and a new set of possibilities. Onecannot privilege either of these facets saying it is primary, andthe other derives from it - the relationship between the two is farmore complex. However the two always go together. Gradually the worksof the avant-garde become accepted and are mainstreamed. But thismainstreaming is subject to displacement by the next generation of theavant-garde. This continuous thread of displacement forms modernism'salignment with progress and history.As has been pointed out by Goldhaber, Davenport and others, we arenow in an attention economy. If we are in the information age, theone thing that information consumes is attention, and consequentlyattention becomes a scarce resource. As an economy is substantivelyaffected by those resources that are scarce and important, our livesare now being affected by the quest for attention.The scarcity of attention is exacerbated by the changing natureof alienation (as defined by Baudrillard). Alienation was earliercharacterized by distance - a separation from the normal routines oflife. But it is now characterized by an overwhelming proximity toeverything. The construction of sheltered spaces for reflection, whichwere provided by the regular routines of life, are now difficult tocome by, and require substantive and sustained effort that few arewilling to devote effort to in an attention starved world. Deprived ofspace for reflection, we face the challenge of being "reduced to purescreen: a switching centre for the networks of influence".The twin problems of attention and alienation have created a rupturein the avant-garde. The facet of critique, which requires rigorousattention, does not now receive sufficient consideration. The facet ofartistic production receives far greater attention, but tends to beread superficially, focusing on the work's apparent visuality.Two major modes of capturing attention are scale and novelty.Scale involves achieving a size that is difficult to ignore. It isseen in the increasing scale of real estate projects, the wave ofcorporate consolidation through mergers and acquisitions, and theleveraging of technology to achieve self-referential size (as seen inthe global financial services sector).The impulse to novelty centres on displacing us from the anesthetizinginfluence of habit, and making us see and notice things.The avant-garde are now recast as a resource to be mined for theproduction of novelty. Their work is taken, detached from its criticalfoundations, and presented for its apparent visual novelty. So onesees architects such as Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid, whose statementsearly in their careers aligned with an avant-garde identity oficonoclastic rebels, and whose work is now being utilized as vehiclesof mainstream branding.It could be argued that this detachment from critical foundations isa normal process of mainstreaming the avant-garde. However the speedwith which it now occurs is significant. In an earlier generation, thefirst step in mainstreaming the avant-garde occurred through a setof "enlightened" patrons, whose idealism could be aligned with thecultural critique of the avant-garde. For example, if Jawaharlal Nehruhired Le Corbusier to design the new Indian city of Chandigarh, it wasbecause Nehru's vision of modernism for his newly independent nationcould be aligned to Corbusier's critique of traditional urbanism andthe potential he saw in new city forms.But it is rare to find patrons with this idealism today. The patronof today tends to have motives that are largely commercial ratherthan idealistic, whose primary request to the artist is "make menoticeable on the global stage". The resultant quest for novelty makesthe disruption between the critique and production of the avant-gardeoccur with a speed and vehemence that threatens the very status of theavant-garde.In an earlier era, the engagement of an iconic star avant-garde artistwas substantively affected by an ideological alignment with theartist's ideology. But now the iconic status of the artist, togetherwith the novelty of the work, have become ends in themselves. We arereminded of Daniel Boorstin's prescient definition that the celebrityin this world of pure image making is to be "a person well known forhis well-knownness".The impulse to novelty has rapidly diminishing returns, and onestruggles to keep balance on an accelerating treadmill of visualstimulation.Modernist art has centralized the notions of creativity andinnovation because it seeks to align with history. Without seeking toeither diminish or sideline creativity and innovation, we now mustsimultaneously seek to align art with timelessness through a quest forauthenticity.Prem

<http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-will-stop-serving-torrents-120112/> The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents In a month The Pirate Bay will no longer offer downloads of .torrent files. Instead, the largest torrent site on the Internet will only provide so-called magnet links to its visitors. The first step in this direction was made today with The Pirate Bay replacing the current default torrent download links with magnets. Could this be the end of an era? After half a decade of loyal service, The Pirate Bay shut down its tracker in November 2009. The Pirate Bay argued that BitTorrent trackers have been made redundant by technologies such as DHT and PEX. In addition, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering magnet links instead. "We're talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT and PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally - like pick a date and all agree `from this date, we'll not support torrents anymore'," a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time. Now, two years later, that date is coming soon. Today, The Pirate Bay made the first step towards this new future by making magnets the default download links instead of torrents. TorrentFreak was further informed that in "a month or so" the largest torrent site on the Internet will stop serving torrent files indefinitely. The announcement is bound to lead to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little will change for the average Pirate Bay visitor. Users will still be able to download files, but these will now be started through a magnet link instead of a .torrent file. The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages of the transition to a "magnet site" is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy. This is topical, since this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site. Perhaps even better, without the torrent files everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future. Unlike the site's users, existing torrent sites that scrape .torrent files from The Pirate Bay will have to make some drastic changes. If they want to continue serving .torrent files they will have to fetch them from DHT. Also, hotlinks to .torrent files will stop working and will soon redirect to The Pirate Bay's detail page for the files in question. One of the potential downsides of using magnets is that it could take a bit longer for downloads to start, especially if there are relatively few people sharing a file. This is because the .torrent file has to be fetched from other users instead of being downloaded directly from the site. More background on these and other technicalities can be found here. The good news is that all mainstream BitTorrent clients support magnet links. This wasn't the case back in 2009, but when The Pirate Bay hinted that in the future they could become a magnet-only site, all developers quickly made their clients fully compatible. There's no doubt that a torrent-less Pirate Bay will certainly mark the end of an era. At the moment it's hard to predict what the impact of The Pirate Bay's decision will be on the BitTorrent community. But torrents, however, will never disappear completely.

Dutch IT entrepreneur and 'New Edge' evangelist Luc Sala was very muchpart of the 'digital hippies' scene of the 80s and 90s on the Westcoasts of both the old and the new continent. You can read the fulltext of his reminiscences to Mondo2000 here (with new versions as theyappear, this is from version 2.2, the latest):http://www.lucsala.nl/mondonewedge.htmCheers, patrizio & Diiiinooos!New Edge and Mondo 2000: my personal perspectiveAt the request of Simone Lackerbauer and R.U. Sirius this is apersonal and maybe somewhat opiniated account of what I remember andcould trace.Mondo 2000 has been, for me, a door to understanding and experiencingthe convergence and integration of technology, new age, philosophyand art. I believe the magazine and the scene were at the root ofthe development of the cyberculture and have helped bridge the gapbetween the more traditional new age (fairly conservatively focusedon eastern traditions, health and body, somewhat negative and Ludditeabout technology) and the computer/information wave.My involvement with the actual magazine was limited, I sponsored withmoney and was international distributor (paying in advance helped toprint the magazine). My involvement with the people of and aroundMondo was what was most important for me, those contacts opened a doorinto the world of cyberspace, cyberart, psychedelic (ontological)philosophy, design and counterculture. The Mondo scene was where onewould meet the great alternative thinkers and writers. They were easywith their contacts and networking, opened many, many doors for meand I am very grateful for what I took home, not so much in materialthings, but in thinking for myself. Mondo inspired me to publish asimilar magazine in Dutch, called Ego2000, and has been a sourceof contacts and new ideas for my activities in the nineties. Apartfrom writing and publishing this encompassed my broadcast televisionstation in Amsterdam. This Kleurnet channel (colored net) producedsome 8000 television programs between 1995 and 2001, covering a widerange of subjects, many with a similar focus and taste as what Mondooffered.Mondo 2000 was a focal point where the counterculture, psychonauts andmind-researchers met, physically in Berkeley, and at various events inSF and elsewhere. They met in person, but also communicated via thethen emerging email and budding internet communications of the timessuch as The Well. It united the greatest out-of-the box thinkers andchange agents of the era, but was not a commercial success, moneyto pay the printer had to be found every time. Lack of commercialtalent and financial savvy hampered its development so that the newerWired was able to capture the flag of the cyberculture. Wired wasmore of a hit, but remained more gadget-oriented and lacked the heartand zeal of the Mondo initiative. Funny enough, founding publishersLouis Rosetto and his partner Jane Metcalfe (after their Electric Wordventure in Holland) contacted me in early 1990 to ask for fundingfor a new magazine in the US, which later became Wired (1991 trial,1993 first issue). Jane was a great networker and organiser and Iactually employed her for a while, she set up the seminal SeptemberVR-party in my house in Hilversum, near Amsterdam. I always consideredWired as overly commercial and not so ethical and was proven rightwhen Wired tried to go public and failed because their data were notvery honest, to say the least. While many contributors wrote for bothmagazines, the Wired-Mondo dichotomy, the difference in focus taughtme a lot about the soul, the root energy of a venture, how the initialthrust kind of shaped its future. Wired in a sense was a cheap marketoriented venture, it lacked the quality and integrity of the Mondoformat.(...)

Dear nettimers,I thought I should post the intro to my Still There research here. There must be still people on the list who remember what I remember, or remember it differently.http://contemporary-home-computing.org/still-there/- - -In September 1996, I came to Rotterdam to participate in the Dutch Electronic Art Festival – not as an artist yet but as a film curator, or, to say it better, as a film curator from Moscow who made a website for a film club. For many people, the mid-90s were all about going online, making websites, travelling to the East and to the West.[1]It was my very first media art event. I was overwhelmed by the scope and scale of the interactive installations – the huge, loud constructions of Knowbotic Research; the scary performances of half-human, half-cyborg Stelarc; the trips in a virtual submarine that seemed so real, and other interactive and immersive stuff distributed throughout the city. The modern architecture of Rotterdam was truly enhanced by all of these futuristic objects with their surprises inside.One of them – an inflatable internet café floating on a canal in Rotterdam’s centre – left a strong impression on me. I kept thinking about it and talking about it over the years. After all, it was the first thing I saw as I headed from the railway station to the DEAF offices, and it was so different from any other previous experiences I’d had with the internet in public spaces. I had never been to a “normal” internet café before and suddenly I found myself in this totally over-the-top place.Well, years later I found out that it was not really an internet café but an “an intelligent object,” an “inflatable sculpture with brains connected to the World Wide Web”[2] called ParaSITE and built by the Dutch architect Kas Oosterhuis and his team.After I squeezed inside through the tight soft gates, I found myself in a space that can probably best be described as the inside of a spaceship or other apparatus designed to take you into outer space. Stylish pillows wrapped in plastic invited you to make yourself comfortable and situate yourself behind the connected computers. As well as check your email — for free.The place was crowded. People were reading and writing emails, looking up the URLs they had recently received from other festival venues on business cards and pieces of paper. Everyone really enjoyed the atmosphere there.The festival’s participants would no doubt have enjoyed being online in more trivial situations. They would have happily rushed to the computers even if they hadn’t been installed inside this zeppelin-like bubble. The extraterrestrial beeps and blinks it was producing were not the reason why people were coming and staying inside. But still, it felt very right that the internet-connected PCs had a special space constructed just for them in a special location. After all accessing a mail server is not nearly as exciting as entering the CAVE. Opening a page in a browser can’t be compared to the spectacular act of manipulating Stelarc through electronic impulses. On the other hand, the notion that there was something bigger happening right now was in the air. The interactive monsters of the day were just about to become obsolete, making way for bigger and more important things, namely, the World Wide Web.Back then, going online and just being online were the thing to do. Networking was the passcode into the new millennium. And we, people on the web, even those who just had started to make their own pages, would fly into it soon to become human apparatuses like that gorgeous zeppelin moored on the channel in Westersingel street.I came back to Rotterdam in October 2010 with an exciting new challenge from the research program at the Willem de Kooning Academy – to write about Rotterdam’s internet cafés. After years of working online, researching the vernacular web and digital folklore, I was about to begin my investigations of the “low forms” of digital culture in real life. From my window in my Goethe Institute apartment on the Westersingel, I could see the canal, but, of course, ParaSITE was long gone and, I should add, along with it, all of that mid-90s excitement about the Web as well. But this kind of statement doesn’t really begin to capture what has actually happened since then.Over the past one-and-a-half decades, the internet has experienced its ups and downs, the WWW has been kissed goodbye and welcomed back a number of times. And as I write this, it has again disappeared from the centre of media attention. In fact, in August 2010, Wired declared the web dead again, with its editor-in-chief casually observing that “The Web is not the culmination of digital revolution.”[3]Ironically, the next big thing according to Wired is all about interactivity, just like in the early 90s. Only this time, the focus has been narrowed down to the interactions that people have with that one particular mobile device that you can touch and shake. The New Media world is totally preoccupied with imagining and testing new apps for mobile phones. This made it an interesting time for me to commence with my research, just as the spiral of technological evolution was making yet another new turn, bringing a certain completeness to the entire period before it, which gives us an opportunity to highlight it and analyse the phenomena that are still there, but already belong to another era.Among them are the internet cafés, places you won’t need to visit if you are equipped according to modern standards. And users are fleeing the number one Dutch social network, Hyves, for the seemingly cleaner and better organized Facebook, marking another endpoint of the web’s diversity and decentralisation.In the mean time, Geocities, millions of home pages created over the past 15 years, was officially shut down by Yahoo in 2009, but was quickly rescued by a group of underground archivists who made it public again in late 2010. Both, Geocities’ destruction and the resurrection, are significant events for web culture.I’ve been buying connection time in various Rotterdam belhuizen (Dutch for “call shop”), browsing through Hyves user profiles, analyzing Geocities pages, to find myself amongst the ruins of the Web that I believe was a culmination of the digital revolution.Rotterdam, 2011 - 2012[1] And getting funding for all those activities from George Soros.[2] ONL, ParaSITE, 1996, version from 31 December 2011http://www.oosterhuis.nl/quickstart/index.php?id=173[3] Chris Anderson, The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet, Wired, 17 August 2010 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1- - -http://contemporary-home-computing.org/still-there/

Autonomy, Labour, and the Political Economy of Social MediaI'm flying off to Athens on Thursday to give a public talk[1] in anoccupied theatre with Tiziana Terranova, with whom I also participatedin a discussion on the Empyre list last week[2].The Talk is titled "Autonomy, Labour, and the Political Economy ofSocial Media."The Political Economy of Social Media is of course nothing other thanthe Political Economy of Capitalism applied to Social Media. Lookingat Social Media through the lens of capitalism unveils some ratherstriking implications, many of which have become central to my work,and many which I'm only beginning to explore further.The basics are by now well discussed, among many others, I havecovered these some time ago in InfoEnclosure 2.0[3] and expanded uponthe theme in the Telekommunist Manifesto[4]. The central fact is thatCapitalism will not fund free, open networks. It can not do so becauseit must control user data and interaction in order to capture profit,and for this reason capital financed centrally controlled socialplatforms are replacing free, open, peer-to-peer platforms.The trouble is, once you understand that capital will not fund openplatforms, the question remains, who will? How can they be funded. Inthe Manifesto and in earlier works, I introduce the idea of VentureCommunism, an autonomist/mutualist approach focused on worker'sself-organisation of production as way to build what capitalism cannot.However, many questions remained open, for while Venture Communism maysketch out a structure with which a common stock of productive assetscan be efficiently allocated among independent producers, similar tothe way computer networks provide an efficient way for independentworkers to employ a common stock of immaterial productive assets, itdoesn't got very far into investigating how these material productiveassets can be acquired by a Venture Commune in the first place.The basic idea that bonds are sold in order to acquire productiveassets. But sold to whom? In a functioning Venture Commune, withestablished enterprises producing wealth, this would not be an issue,the bonds would be purchased by the worker-owners of the commune fromthe retained earnings of their productive output.However, the bad news is this is not possible before the communeexists, because before the commune exists the workers are notworker-owners capturing the full value of their collectivecontribution to production, but just workers. Working for capitalists.Workers who are paid just enough to sustain their lifestyle while thecapitalist-owners appropriate all the remaining wealth produced.In other words, as I explain in my arguments about Kickstarterthat I reposted from the Empyre list a few days ago. In order to"kickstart" workers-self organized forms of production, to createfree and open social media platforms, or anything else, we must, inthe first instance, depend on the retained earnings that workers canconsistently divert from consumption.The problem is the basic workings of the labour market functions todrive this potential amount toward zero.What this means is that we can not solve the problem by way ofautonomist or mutualist means alone, but need to engage directly inpolitical struggle. Even if our goals are autonomist, our ability toachieve our goals is directly tied to the level of wages and publicgoods provided by society, for this determines the structure ofwealth, wich itself the determines the total amount of wealth we caninvest in becoming worker-owners rather than just workers.For this reason Counter-politics[5] is required, and indeed, perhapsCounterpolitics is perhaps the an important strategy that emerging"Crowd Funding" platforms could fund.The role of the State is to mediate among the classes on behalf of theruling class. The role of Counterpolitics is to engage in strugglewithin the theatre of the State against the ruling classes. Not totake the State, but to build social power and fight to maximize wagelevels and availability of public goods to create the space forautonomist and mutualist means to make the state irrelevant. Can weCrowd-fund The Debtors' Party? [6]I'll be at Stammtisch a little earlier than normal today, probablyaround 8pm or so. See you at Cafe Buchhandlung! [7].[1] http://www.mignetproject.eu/?p=502[2] http://wp.me/p24fqL-sO[3] http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/infoenclosure-2.0[4] http://telekommunisten.net/manifesto/[5] http://wp.me/p24fqL-K[6] http://wp.me/p24fqL-X[7] http://bit.ly/buchhandlungCenter for Gender Studies of the Department of Social Policy ofPanteion University and the European research project MIG< at >NET inviteyou to the event titled: «Autonomy, Labour, and the Political Economyof Social Media». Presentations by:Tiziana Terranova - Becoming autonomous? Labour and the politicaleconomy of digital social mediaDmytri Kleiner – P2P Communism vs Client-Server Capitalismon Thursday 19 January 2012 at 7:00 pm at Empros Theater, 2 Riga Palamidi Street, PsirriTiziana Terranova lectures and researches cultural studies and newmedia at the Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’in the Department of Human and Social Sciences. She is the author ofNetwork Culture: politics for the information age (Pluto Press 2004).She is currently working on a book on neoliberalism and the Internet.Dmytri Kleiner is a member of Telekommunisten and developsmiscommunication technologies, including deadSwap, Thimbl and R15N,He is author of the Telekommunist Manifesto. He can be followed athttp://dmytri.info.The event will be held in English.

Communication, Crisis, and Critique in Contemporary Capitalism.Conference of the European Sociological Association’s Research Network 18 - Sociology of Communications and Media ResearchOctober 18-20, 2012. University of the Basque Country, Bilbaohttp://fuchs.uti.at/wp-content/uploads/ESA_RN18_CfP2012.pdfKeynote Talk: Prof. Peter Golding (Northumbria University, UK) – Why a Sociologist should take Communications and Media SeriouslyAbstractIn the presentation of this paper, Peter Golding will reflect on why the study of communications and media demands the insights and methods of sociology, and why RN18 therefore is an appropriate network within the European Sociological Association. He will present reflections on how such key sociological concerns as inequality, identity, power, and change are at the heart of the questions we should be posing in addressing the nature and role of the media as institutions and communications as a social process. The paper will also address how far changes in the technologies of media and communications alter, or should alter, our approach to generating research and insight in this field.Peter Golding is pro-vice chancellor of research & innovation at Northumbria University, founder and honorary chair of ESA RN18.Call for Submissions and ParticipationWe are living in times of global capitalist crisis that require rethinking the ways we organize society, communication, the media, and our lives. The current crisis seems to a certain degree be different compared to previous ones, among other reasons due to the role of mediated communication and information in establishing/changing economic, political, and social relations as well as the crisis itself. The crisis can also be seen as crisis of what has been called consumer capitalism or informational capitalism. More precisely it has resulted on the one hand in a hyperneoliberal intensification of neo-conservative policies and on the other hand in the emergence of new popular movements that are critical of the commodification of everything and demand the strengthening of society’s commons. The second movement has in the social sciences been accompanied by a renewed interest in critical studies, the critique and analysis of class and capitalism, and critical political economy. The overall goal of this conference is to foster scholarly presentations, networking, and exchange on the question of which transitions media and communication and media sociology are undergoing in contemporary society. The conference particularly welcomes contributions that are inspired by sociological theories, critical studies, and various strands and traditions of the critical study of media & society.Questions that can be covered by presentations include, but are not limited to:* What is a crisis? What forms of crisis are there? How do they relate to capitalism and communication?* How have the media presented the crisis? Which similarities and differences in crisis reporting are there between different media (television, press, and new media) or between media in different countries?* How has the crisis affected various media and cultural industries? What is the role of changing media technology in the economic crisis? How has the media economy changed since the start of the crisis in 2008? How have advertising investments, profits, market values, etc developed in the media economy since the start of the crisis? How has the global expansion of media industries been reshaped by the crisis and what is the future of global media and news agencies? What changes can be traced in the production of news and other media content? Are there changes in the nature of media products?* What is the role of media and communication technologies in the financialization, acceleration, and globalization of the capitalist economy? How can a post-crisis media economy look like? How has advertising favoured a climate of private consumer debt?* What are the ideological implications of the crisis for mediascapes? Which ideological discourses do companies, CEOs, managers, or neoliberal politicians use for justifying their interests, lay-offs, high bonuses, inequalities, etc and how are these discourses represented by the media or in strategic company reports? How are hyper-neoliberal crisis policy responses (“socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor” in the form of bank bail outs and budget cuts in areas like welfare, education, social security, health care, etc) ideologically justified and how do the media represent such ideologies? What is the role of finance capital in the media and cultural industries? Which hegemonic, alternative, or contradictory interpretations and reception practices of media content that relates to the crisis are there? Which ideologies and myths underlie the capitalist crisis?* What is the role of media, communication, critical journalism, and alternative media in contemporary uproars, riots, rebellions, social movements, protests, demonstrations, and revolutions?* How do identities and mediated identities change in times of crisis? How should one think about the relationship of economy and culture in light of the capitalist crisis? What is the relationship of class and identities and of politics of redistribution and recognition today? How do we have to rethink and reshape the relation between political economy and cultural studies in the light of capitalist crisis in order to adequately study the media and communication?* How is the public sphere changing in the light of the global crisis? What are perspectives for politics, participation, and democracy today and how do these perspectives relate to the media and communication? Is the role of media in democracy changing? If so, how? Are media a distinct player in politics? If the established media form an estate of power in democracy, do we today new a new estate of power? If so, how could it look like?* What are the causes, realities, and consequences of the commodification of the communication commons? What are alternatives to the commodification of the communication commons? How can one strengthen and create public media and commons-based forms of communication? What are the relationships and differences between the commodity logic, the gift logic, and the logic of public goods and how do these logics shape the media?* How do contemporary societal trends, such as integration, diversity and conflicts in Europe and the world, transnationalism and networking, digitization, informatization, globalization, glocalization, prosumption, neoliberalism, privatization and commodification, migration, racism, changing gender relations, consumer and advertising culture, warfare, terrorism, the new imperialism, surveillance, social movement protests, global societal risks, the strengthening of right-wing extremist and fascist movements, or the anti-corporate movement and other movements, shape media and communication and how do media and communication in turn shape society in times of crisis and transition?* What are the tasks, roles, responsibilities, and identities of the sociology of media and communication in a society that is facing deep crisis? What is the actual or potential role of critique, ethics, struggles, counter-power, resistance, protest, civil society, and social movements in contemporary societies and contemporary communications?* What are the major trends that shape contemporary society and how are these trends related to mediated communication and knowledge production? In what society do we live? What society do we desire to have? What forms of media and communication do we find in contemporary society? What forms of media and communication do we desire and how must society change in order to achieve these goals?* What are the major trends in respect to crisis, communication, and critique in Europe? What are the major trends in respect to crisis, communication, and critique in other parts of the world?* How do different companies and organizations make use of different information transmission technologies? What is the role of high speed financial flows and associated transmission networks in the finance industry? How (in)visible are these flows?SubmissionAn abstract of 200-250 words should be sent to Dr. Romina Surugiu, University of Bucharest, at the following e-mail address: bilbao.conference< at >yahoo.com. Please insert the words Bilbao in the subject. The deadline for abstract submission is May 31st, 2012.# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime< at >kein.org

Cohn Bendit teaches Orban: “information must derange politics”January 19, 2012 by Tjebbe van Tijen in the Limping Messengerthe illustrated and annotated version can be found here:http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/cohn-bendit-teaches-orban-information-must-derange-politics/[tableau: "l'information doit déranger la politique"]Daniel Cohn Bendit is an old style orator who loves to be on stage and debate, from the university back rooms of Nanterre in the mid sixties as a ‘young European anarchist’ and explicit anti-parlementarist, to the the front room of the European parliament in Strasbourg and Bruxelles as an elected deputé of the Green Party. Yesterday I saw on French television TV5 a snippet of his discourse against Viktor Orban, Hungarian President, comparing Orban’s position with that of Chavez and Fidel Castro.To me his way of arguing on television seemed to be a fallacy, as Orban is a member of a neo-liberal right wing party – Fidesz – that came to the fore because of its fierce anti-communism.When I tried to find a more complete registration of that yesterday debate, I failed to do so, but I did stumble upon a similar oration of Cohn Bendit versus Orban exactly one year ago on January 19. 2011.Here Cohn Bendit’s discourse is less crude and more to the point when he attacks the new press laws of Hungary, which lets a (Fidesz) committee decide on the objectivity and balance of news reporting. State censorship in short in the name of “balanced information” (l’information équilibrée). It is the European Parliament meeting where the EEC presidency of Hungary for that year is inaugurated.“L’information équilibrée n’existe pas” (balanced information does not exist) declaimed the Green tribune, facing and pointing to Hungarian President Orban and sums – apostrophic and repetitive in the form of rhetorical questions – cases from history where state authority has been challenged by news media: from the Watergate scandal of burglary in the offices of the Democratic Party under Nixon to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse under George Bush.“L’information doit déranger la politique..” (information must derange politics). With a grim face and fierce gestures Cohn Bendit finishes his display of exemplum by adding after a short pause ”et ça fait mal quelquefois: (sometimes that hurts).Cohn Bendit is fully equipped to propose this dictum, as he has been fiercely attacked personally several times in his life – often unjustly – by news media that had to fear no state control in his favour. From the right wing news papers in 1968 calling him ”un juif allemand” (a German Jew) (*) to the more recent attacks on him linking his sexual mores of the sixties and seventies to pedophilia (**).[link to Youtube video]When one sees this Youtube version of the Cohn Bendit debate in the European Parliament not embedded here but on the Youtube page, scandalous racist hate viewer comments are on public display, as well as the moderate and supportive ones. All this seems ‘unmoderated’. This is not “information équilibré” and one must have a harnessed soul to read many of the comments. The relative anonymity of the internet produces such reactions and its is up to any internet community to keep excesses under control.We remain with the question whether the dictum ‘information must derange politics’ should also be applied to the public realm of digital social media.[screen shot of insulting comments to Cohn Bendit on youtube]—-(*) 2 mai 1968 extreme right wing journal Minute writes: “Ce Cohn-Bendit, parce qu’il est juif et allemand, se prend pour un nouveau Karl Marx.” (this Cohn benit, because he is a jew and a German, takes himself for a new Karl Marx)(**) ”German MEP open about his paedophilia” is just one of the many descriptions (British Democracy Forum) of the belated reactions to a passage in his book “Le Grand Bazar” published in the year 1975 in which sexual tinted activities between him and some children are described. It took 26 years before a political opponent (German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel of the FDP/Free Democratic Party) grabbed the opportunity to confront Cohn Bendit with his escapades in the early seventies of last century. In January 2001 Cohn Bendit answered by way of an interview in The Observer: “I admit that what I wrote is unacceptable nowadays.”Tjebbe van TijenImaginary Museum ProjectsDramatizing Historical Informationhttp://imaginarymuseum.orgweb-blog: The Limping Messengerhttp://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/

[a new wurk based on #TangoDown + #OpMegaupload: "The Rapunzel Files -Series 1, Episode1"]--____________________________________________________teh_WRa.Punz.L_Philes_S1E1:The #MuthaMegaWon'tLoad___________________________________________________ SCENE1:#Sale[m_esque(p)ItchForkingCurrentL(p)aw(n)Hounds+MPAADawg'sBodies_plus_#SOPACounterAtt(h)ack(ed)S(t)inking]/SailingOnThePr(m)ox(y).seas/ProxCs_ada[|o]ptionSCENE2:#TangoGoingDownWithRapePunz[meme_organ]EllesTowers+plus+FiteTheP[erpsWithHerp+Derps+]Ow[s]a[OB]SCENE3: THEMEGAM[E][AN]UTHALOADINGUPTIMETODOWNST[C]ARVETHEBEAST

... wikileaks, the wikileaks truck, "lost", and the governments of .the us and spain. with soundtrack by m.i.a warning: spoilers and .potentially illegal stuff .http://motorhueso.net/lost_remixed/?and the fight goes on.

Greece and the Macroeconomics of Class Struggle.At thursday evening's talk at the occupied Empros Theater in Athens, Tiziana Terranova and I gave presentations on the political economy of social media to a diverse and engaged community.The Empros Theatre is in central Athens, part of the overall urban geography that has been besieged by occupations, protest and police brutality in the recent surge of class conflict stirred by crisis and the accompanying austerity being inflicted on the Greek population. The theater was occupied by a collective of artists a few months ago, and hosts talks, presentations and events, often engaged in the cultural and political questions surrounding the resistance against the politics of austerity.The financial crisis has pushed the greek economy into extremely dire straights. Eurozone pressure and speculative attack on government debt has forced the greek government into counterproductive austerity measures which are hotly contested by the population. As demand falls as a result of austerity-driven spending reduction, the economy sinks further into stagnation, in turn reducing taxation levels, leading to more austerity, and so on. A classic vicious circle.The situation has unmasked the folly of the Euro. If Greece had monetary sovereignty, the government would have recourse to all sorts of monetary and fiscal means to stabilize demand and stimulate the economy, but because Greece is part of the Euro monetary union, it's hands are tied. As a user, and not an issuer of it's currency, Greece can not control it's monetary policy, and as a result, has concrete limitations on its fiscal policy as well. It can neither increase spending to stimulate the economy, nor can it issue bonds and adjust lending rates to influence interest and control the cost of servicing its debt. All it can do is raise taxes and cut spending, and while these may stave off default and move towards Eurozone dictated fiscal constraints, these do not do what the greek economy desperately needs to recover, that is,create demand, and thereby employment, increase tax levels, etc.Within Eurozone Monetary policy is centrally managed. Yet, Eurozone nations may be, and usually are, out of sync at any given time in terms of what sort of policy best suites their current economic situation, and policy is naturally driven by the bigger economies, such as those of Germany and France, and not according to the interests of smaller economies like Greece. Thus, the greek people pay the price for a financial situation that was not of their own making. While other nations, especially the financial elite within them, are able to escape consequence.Yet, while one could conclude that if Greece left the Euro and regained monetary sovereignty it would protect it's people, sadly, not even this is likely to be true.The political elite of Greece are beholden to the global financial elite and remain fully committed to the neoliberal program of wich the Euro was once shining jewel. The destruction of the welfare state, and immiseration of the workforce is not just a unhappy consequence of the neoliberal agenda, it is the goal. Thus, the Euro and the constraints it places on a nation's ability to pursue the public good is quite intentional. And as they say, where there's a will, there's a way.Even without the Euro, the intent remains. There is no reason to doubt that the henchmen of neoliberalism would, in any case, find ways to continue to push greek workers towards destitution. This is the case in the US and the UK, where despite possessing monetary sovereignty, these governments seems to be more interested in insulating financiers from loses, rather than actually stimulating the economy and thereby benefiting the whole of the people.The problem is that the role of the State is to mediate among the classes on behalf of the ruling class. This is a simple political fact that can not be changed. The ruling class controls the bulk of the wealth in society and thus has the means to relentlessly push it's own interests, and always eventually get its way. And with each victory, strengthen its position further.Not ambitious politician or party can represent any other class, though they can represent different factions within it. To fail to attract the support of at least some faction of the ruling class amounts to handing victory to your rival, at least in most cases, and certainly in the long run.The structure of the social order is the mirror image of the structure of wealth in society. It should be fairly safe to believe that even if the Greek government had the monetary sovereignty to intervene in the economy of behalf of their people, they would not.Within a capitalist economy, wealth flows to owners of capital, and thus concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, while the share of wealth available to the great masses of people gets ever smaller, and with it, there political influence as well.But for the largely autonomist crowd at the Empros theatre, the loss of political influence is not directly the most critical loss.As with mutualist, syndicalist, "P2P" and other political views that can be described as autonomist, which can broadly include the free culture and free software movement, Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados of Spain, etc, a large current in the Anti-Austerity movement in Greece also believes that we must create our own institutions, our own alternative structures that move beyond the meagre choices offered by bourgeois society and prefigure the future society we are fighting for.And that is right, that is also the main form of political struggle that Venture Communism proposes and explores mechanisms of realizing. Thus, the most important direct loss is not political influence, but rather mutual capital. Our capacity for investing in alternative structures comes from a single source: The amount of wealth that we, as workers, can consistently divert from consumption. Thus, as the share of wealth accrued by capital increases, not only does our political influence decrease, so does our capacity to invest in alternatives.We can understand this as the macroeconomics of class struggle. The total wealth available for both political influence and alternative initiatives comes from the "monetary base" derived from the amount of wealth that workers can sustainably divert from consumption. Capitalism, as manifested in the neoliberal agenda, will work towards pushing this base towards zero, to increase its own base, its accumulated capital. Thus, the first dimension in the macroeconomy of class struggle os our collective will to fight to resist reduction of our base wealth. Mass collective struggles against further reduction of benefits and wages are crucial. "Counterpoltics."Yet, this is but one dimension, since our base of mutual capital is not only smaller than the accumulated capital of the capitalist class, but far less intensively utilized.We must intensify the application of our base wealth. We do this by investing in alternative ways to produce and share, this means both the organisation of the surplus working power of unemployed and underemployed members of our communities, but also by making whatever money we can spare have available for social investment in commons-orientated means of creating wealth. "Venture Communism."And yet, these are still not likely to be enough. For not only is the Capitalist base far larger and more intensivly utilized, capital is also much more leveraged. Systems of capitalist finance multiply the amount of money by borrowing and lending. Much of the money available for investing and spending in the economy exists as a result of such activity.We must not only protect our base wealth by means of counterpolitics, and intensify our application of wealth by means of venture communism, but we must expand the size of this wealth by means of "Insurgent Finance." That is we must draw capital inflows into our social economy by drawing the existing accumulations of retained wages; worker's pension funds. Pension funds are currently under the control of capitalist managers, and not only are they not being utilized to capitalize a people's economy, but pension funds have historically been some of the most predatory financiers in the industry, most often working against the interests of workers.We need to create securities that underwrite social ventures and convince pension funds, and workers in general, to hold them. In addition to the securities used to build capital for social enterprise, we must employ other mechanisms such as crowd funding and mutual credit to further stimulate our social economy. Insurgent Finance must not only capture capital inflows to finance the means of social production, but also create liquidity to capture demand.We transform our society as we build the means satisfy our needs outside the financial cycles of capitalism. When we take demand away from forms of consumption that reproduce capital and further concentrate wealth, and instead satisfy the needs and desires of our communities by other means. When we produce and share according to our mutual needs and desires, and not according to the logic of profit capture.While there is certainly much more that could be said about these dimensions of the macroeconomy of class struggle, the implied strategy is straight forward: Protect our base wealth with counterpolitcs, intensify it with venture communism, expand it with insurgent finance.See some of you at Cafe Buchhandlung Tonight, I'll be there around 9pm. (http://bit.ly/buchhandlung).