second

[Alan Sondheim]

second

at the Metropolitan today, looking at Oribe and Mino ware. Momoyama
period. then rereading my Antarctic writings from Hobart (Tasmania), 1982.
'Who controls discourse controls the law.' listen: 'the body an inductive
body, the play of logics extending everywhere, collapse and extensions of
spectrums, running-on, probabilistic wave-function, union extends and
intersection blurs, the former altering distributivity. the editorializing
body operating within a limited bandwidth, a situation of sampling through
the elocution of the gesture, the sway, field phenomena melding, crossing
the skin, adjacent holes.' doesn't this - two + decades later - become the
network society - as if it never existed in the first place, a priori?
something I was aware of back in 71, with my analysis of the tangled
holarchies of immersive and definable structures - how one looks at things
through time, how things may remain outside of time, outside of
temporality, how humans bring time to things. and here from 82 is the net:
'body-centered, it is the body which extends, consciousness as a wake
following, recuperating the extensions through language. images play
across the surface; these are ingested, failing distributivity. the images
as phenomenological appetition, a process of accretion.' 'the body of
thought as in a body of water.' look for the packet-sniffers, on an
average day I receive 500 emails, of which only perhaps 360 are spam. how
can one remember the distinctions among Oribe and Mino, the Chinese 17th-
century Nanking painters, the enormous collection of Japanese work in the
Bridge of Dreams show we saw years ago? images pour through the world,
falling into adjacencies. I can't keep distinctions, separations; my work
is cultural flux, not the exigencies of boundary-formations, not even the
margins - the world folds in on itself. and reading in this regard
Shaviro, who I think gets networks 'wrong' - begin with the thing and the
arrow, the protocol and the carrying-capacity; extend through looping and
filtration - one might find networks are precisely dead, hillside skeins,
whose content is otherwise-driven, and never to encounter itself - no more
than one phonecall can understand another. enough notes, and I wish I
could sign this Jennifer. [third]



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