<nettime> Public Offering digest [dery, sondheim]

["nettime's_inside_trader" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

Public Offering  (Re: <nettime> no people)
     "Mark Dery" <markdery@mindspring.com>
     Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>

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From: "Mark Dery" <markdery@mindspring.com>
Subject: Public Offering  (Re: <nettime> no people)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 23:51:42 -0400

Alan:

To be frank, phrases like "cultural production" and "textual practice" give
me the fantods. They reek of Prada Marxism, they're conveniently
vague---sufficiently so that they cover a multitude of intellectual
sins---and can usually be replaced by clearer words that cost less ("textual
practice" = *writing*). More often than not, they amount to intellectual
handwaving.

In any event, if you're arguing for a Nettime that makes room for a vibrant
profusion of ideas and opinions, then we're in complete agreement. If, on
the other hand, you're defending your---and my---right to be willfully
obscure, I'm afraid I can't agree. Is there room, here, for "many modes of
thinking, working through ideas"? No question. Nonetheless, I refuse to
unplug my critical faculties in the name of a faux populism that throws wide
the floodgates to any and every post. Let a billion flowers bloom, and you
have intellectual kudzu. We live in an attention economy. Time-starved and
data-glutted, most of us appreciate posts that don't have to be read with a
weed-whacker in one hand. Nettime, as its .sig file suggests, is "a
moderated mailing list for net criticism, collaborative text filtering and
cultural politics of the nets." Net criticism gets pride of place, in that
micro-mission statement, with cultural politics taking up the rear. There's
no mention of ePoetry or ASCII art or my own private turbo-blog, much as
that pains me. Whatever else it is, Nettime is a forum for public discourse.
*Public*, not private. *Discourse*, not solipsistic self-expression with one
finger on the "send" button.

It's incumbent on all of us to contextualize our remarks rather than begin
them in medias res, as if our listening audience has been privy to our
internal monologue all along, like devoted fans of the daily soaps who can
flick on in mid-show and pick up the thread without missing a stitch. It
helps to know that the prose snippet you posted has to do "with the
stereotyping of.animals whose characteristics are related primarily to those
of first-grade readers." It would have been *more* enlightening to have had
that information at hand while reading the text in question. I'm not calling
for a Stalinist purge of our Inner ePoets, for Chrissakes; I'm simply asking
for a little context. Be polemical. Be passionate. But if you believe your
thoughts matter, don't cloak them in the intellectual equivalent of a cloud
of squid ink; make them transparent to me.

A parting thought: If you "feel, like many others, outside of the nettime
mainstream," you may want to consider the possibility that Nettime *has* no
mainstream. We're *all* on the outside, Alan. Which is Nettime's greatest
strength---or one of them.

Regards,

M. Dery

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Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 00:22:53 -0400 (EDT)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
Subject: Re: Public Offering  (Re: <nettime> no people)

On Sun, 20 May 2001, Mark Dery wrote:

> Alan:
>
> To be frank, phrases like "cultural production" and "textual practice"
> give me the fantods. They reek of Prada Marxism, they're conveniently
> vague---sufficiently so that they cover a multitude of intellectual
> sins---and can usually be replaced by clearer words that cost less
> ("textual practice" = *writing*). More often than not, they amount to
> intellectual handwaving.

I meant textual practice, in fact, not writing, Marxism or not - because
the work stems at least in part from programming practice. I associate
writing with something else related, but not identical.

> In any event, if you're arguing for a Nettime that makes room for a vibrant
> profusion of ideas and opinions, then we're in complete agreement. If, on
> the other hand, you're defending your---and my---right to be willfully
> obscure, I'm afraid I can't agree. Is there room, here, for "many modes of
> thinking, working through ideas"? No question. Nonetheless, I refuse to
> unplug my critical faculties in the name of a faux populism that throws wide
> the floodgates to any and every post.

Well, first of all, it's not faux nor populism; not all posts go "through"
as you well know. As far as "willfully obscure" - you might as well elim-
inate Joyce, Lautreamont, Mallarme, Celan, and dozens of other writers who
are equally obscure; as far as "willfully" - that's already problematic
for me, as I am certainly not trying to obscure clarity, but perhaps
clarify obscurity, to work with the noise that for me is inherent in every
text, every rationality - in other words, a loose (and I'm sure you'd
find, vulgar) form of deconstruction.

I certainly would not want any critical faculties unplugged, but only
perhaps in the name of this populism.

Let a billion flowers bloom, and you
> have intellectual kudzu. We live in an attention economy. Time-starved and
> data-glutted, most of us appreciate posts that don't have to be read with a
> weed-whacker in one hand. Nettime, as its .sig file suggests, is "a
> moderated mailing list for net criticism, collaborative text filtering and
> cultural politics of the nets."

It depends by what is meant by "weed-whacker" - I find a lot of posts on
nettime obscure and turgid, and don't read them - but I wouldn't want them
censored out, eliminated.

Net criticism gets pride of place, in that
> micro-mission statement, with cultural politics taking up the rear. There's
> no mention of ePoetry or ASCII art or my own private turbo-blog, much as
> that pains me. Whatever else it is, Nettime is a forum for public discourse.
> *Public*, not private. *Discourse*, not solipsistic self-expression with one
> finger on the "send" button.

However, except for rare interchanges like this one, Nettime is _not_ dis-
course so much as presentation - of ideas that relate to net criticism,
text filtering, etc.

Nor is this self-expression "solipsistic," any more than any other text, I
think.

As far as "one finger on the 'send' button" - I send rarely to nettime,
much more to other lists. Go check the archives.

> It's incumbent on all of us to contextualize our remarks rather than begin
> them in medias res, as if our listening audience has been privy to our
> internal monologue all along, like devoted fans of the daily soaps who can
> flick on in mid-show and pick up the thread without missing a stitch. It
> helps to know that the prose snippet you posted has to do "with the
> stereotyping of.animals whose characteristics are related primarily to those
> of first-grade readers." It would have been *more* enlightening to have had
> that information at hand while reading the text in question. I'm not calling
> for a Stalinist purge of our Inner ePoets, for Chrissakes; I'm simply asking
> for a little context. Be polemical. Be passionate. But if you believe your
> thoughts matter, don't cloak them in the intellectual equivalent of a cloud
> of squid ink; make them transparent to me.

Here, I agree with you totally. I did think the work was more self-evident
than it might have been; I'm also possibly more used to people who are
familiar with my work and understand its context.

I know you're not calling for a purge of ePoets at all; what I'm saying is
that there is other writing of this sort - and it hardly dominates this
list.

For me, btw, this discussion is interesting, since it implies a shift from
semantic difficulty back to the materiality of language - which isn't new
- you get it in Joyce, in Sterne, etc. - something Kristeva talks about.
So the question is why this difficulty within the materiality? The
language poets go on and on about this - for me it has to do, however,
with a kind of prosthesis that exists in relation to the phenomenology of
computer art and writing - I remember Sartre's comment in the Critique
that "it's the machine in them that's dreaming" (something to that
effect).

It's a way of exploring the potential for new language (which aren't that
new), for extending, metaphorically, the tendrils of the sememe into the
software/hardware of the machine, for collapsing interior and exterior.
And that makes for difficult writing, difficult in its materiality.

> A parting thought: If you "feel, like many others, outside of the nettime
> mainstream," you may want to consider the possibility that Nettime *has* no
> mainstream. We're *all* on the outside, Alan. Which is Nettime's greatest
> strength---or one of them.

Again, I agree here.

yours Alan -

> Regards,
>
> M. Dery

Internet Text at http://www2.sva.edu/~alans/
Partial at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt
Partial at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html
Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm
CDROM of collected work 1994-2000/1 available: write sondheim@panix.com

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