Alan Sondheim on Fri, 29 Nov 2002 13:38:40 +0100 (CET)


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<nettime> Space/flows/radiations



(The following are notes I used in discussion of radiating spaces - these
- as 'cantor dusts' - reference the political economy of the electro-
magnetic spectrum, etc. - Alan (from around 1992))


Dusts (lecture notes)

and disillusions, layers sloughing off: below, protocols, above: tempor-
ality: intermediary confluences, flows, meaning-generators:

cantor-dusts, decay of red-brick buildings, dissolution of inscriptions,
allergic reactions, electromagnetic emissions, sputtered packets across
protocols

favillas, colonias, shack cities, slacker cities, hacker sites, spewed
codes, dispersions and headless emissions, universal desiccations of all
living things

serrated edges, grated minerals, fractal dimensions and chaotic paths,
universal catastrophies, faultlines and faulted memories: universal radia-
tions, collocations of murmurs of universal organisms

no borders, no transgressions, nodes in seas of radios and televisions,
ghosts in telenovellas, emissions throughout, images and broken images,
the colloquia of truth and disinformations

sinters, powders, pulverizations, clutter losing memory, the absolute
annihilation of memory, pressures and the breaching of potential wells,
splintered protons, particle crashes, k-meson resurrected identities,
virtual particles and shadow-galaxies

splayed bodies and genders, dismemberments and cyborg claptrap wirings,
cyberspatial dimensions and seas, landmines, shrapnel, movements of rem-
nant populations, nomads, chemical warfares

ideological part-objects, sputterings, words rolling off the tongue, re-
lationship marketings, viruses and bacteria, transitional objects to
nowhere, skins and cancers, skin cancers and acid rains, damaged frogs,
damaged lives

dead-end theories, theory-machines, paraplegic bodies without organs,
surface skitterings, information overloads and spews, information implo-
sions and catatonias, information managements, managed communities, in-
formation all the way down

binarization of the world, error codes and encryptions, checksums and
prime searches, home-owner's associations and regional conflicts, bias and
hate crimes, digital eternities mutilated by legacy softwares and dead
tech, who do you trust

false random, pseudo-random, true random, death by nuclear or chemical
warfare, by plague or global warming or breakdown of the ozone layer,
ideological foreclosing, the last remaining woman or man, planetary ex-
tinctions, clearcut forestry, machine speedup to infinite regress, in-
crease in birth defects and retardations, all the land in the world

all the land in the world tending towards dust, towards the storms and
santa ana winds of dust, towards the harborings of dried muds and silts,
whole talus slopes of dust, accumulated accomplishments of humanity
rubbled against the base of cliffs and mesas, worn buttes and violated
tablelands

dust between your teeth, dust in the air, the newstory: dust, the theory:
dust, the television special: dust, the world-wide-web broadcast: dust,
the whisper among lovers: dust, the managed online communities: dust, our
bones: dust, our speech: dust, dust our destiny, radiations our truth


(Text on postmodernism, radiation, dust.)


Dusts and Radiations (Cantor Dust Transmission Towers)


Dust settles. It sloughs from the real, fills the cracks, cauterizes his-
tory, sinters culture. It travels. It moves substance across meridians..
Dust is atmospheric, existing in alliance with the air. Radiation travels
through dust, is dispersed by the same.

Radiation carries obstacle and inherent information. Extrinsic, it bounces
from surface to surface, defines surface, contributes to the formation of
entity and identity. Intrinsic, it run in spurts, amplitudes, wavelengths,
shuttling information that defines its very existence. It's presence is
intrinsic, say, and the quality of its presence is extrinsic.

Nothing is pure in the radiative domain, everything interweaves, and meta-
phors go only so far. Radiation, like dust, traverses; it doesn't require
the atmospheric ether. If dust silently corrupts the surface, wears and is
the result of wearing down, radiation floods, spews, emits; it breathes
the virtual vacuums of outer space. Information is the result of division;
it's _here_ that something exists, and it's _here_ that my voice is car-
ried to you, and it's _here_ that image image image. Desire rides, inter-
weaves, interpenetrates, but desire is an other.

Postmodernity is the topography and psychogeography of dusts and radia-
tions - extinctions, pollutions, desertifications, abandonments, colonias,
internet, telephony, radio, television, microwave. Dusts are bottom up;
they're beneath the surface, under things. Radiations are top-down, ig-
noring boundaries: what is being said, produced, constructed, wherever you
are. Dust erodes electronics; electronics must be placed in physical po-
tential wells to continue operating - islands of stability in the midst of
flux, heat, moisture, vandalism.

I desire a phenomenology of dust and radiation, interspersed with global
economies, the ravagings of human occupations. I desire the analysis of
uncanny or imaginary ghosts wandering these denuded landscapes, with all
the information anyone might desire, on any planet, anything, overwhelming
and absurdist information, the truth of the real buried in defuge. I de-
sire the interlace through all of this, the emergence of a pure and beau-
tiful text like that very ravaged body.

Dust leaves trails; radiation decays in quantum noise; we bury ourselves
in the fiction of truthful nomenclature.

_________________________________________________________________________


The Configuration

The relations now become clear. The operations described elsewhere are
coupled as follows:

                     core-theory ------ radiation
                     |        \         /       |
                     |          \     /         |
                     |            \ /           |
                     |            / \           |
                     |          /     \         |
                     |        /         \       |
                     finance----------------dusts

Core-theory is both intrinsic and extrinsic in its couplings; finance is
pervasive, agency of dissolution, worn and wearing down. Finance cancels
time and history, fissures populations; core-theory inscribes populations
and time. As dust dissipates the effects of radiation, finance cauterizes
the investigation of core-theory (Brillouin) which is coupled with energy.
As core-theory dusts and dissolves the entities of the world (Jeans and
Hiroshima), finance introjects and projects radiation. Radiation trans-
forms into media under the guise of capital; dust transforms into a re-
cuperated time under the guise of the scanning electron microscope. Dust
and finance embrace chaos and self-similarity; radiation and core-theory
reproduce the leniency of bandwidth.

The chiasm is the positioning of the abstracted alienation of the subject
who appears within other masquerades; this is the construct of the post-
modern.

___________________________________________________________________________




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