Spray

[Alan Sondheim]

Spray


(as far as I know 1st internet-text dated post specifically to Cybermind &
for Lawrence Upton who edited some textual confusion of mine re: "9.
Therefore I produce as well st-* texts, which stutter, stumble, shudder,
sputter, and so forth, texts simultaneously within "jouissance," anxiety,
"frisson". (st-VC^2, "st," vowel, doubled consonant, referencing an entire
category of words, which may go back to the origin of Indo-European words
describing the oscillating, arousal, and contamination of an organism.)")

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Date: Sat, 2 Jul 1994 01:41:57 -0400 (EDT)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com>
Subject: Chatter



SPRAY


The relationship between chaotic distributions and a totalized phys-
ical source of emission is prominent in a class of words character-
ized by the format [<s><C1><V><C2C2><er>] as in the following
list: _stutter, stammer, scatter, shudder, shatter, spatter, sputter,
skitter, splatter,_ etc. (_Scanner_ inverts the series, _spackle_ and
_simmer_ transform it.)

A second similar form produces: _spew, skid, scud, spot, spit,
split,_ etc. These forms are constructed around a _lateral topo-
graphy,_ a laminar spray distributing over a more or less wide and
irregular domain. The spray possesses a phenomology of dissolution
and disruption; it also exists on the fuzzy interface between
interior and exterior, and hence involves abjection.

In every instance, the body is compromised laterally, a veering from
side to side, or the stammer from the region of the throat. Some-
thing is _withdrawn_ violently from the organism, which convulses.
Convulsions shatter, fragment.[1]

The lock-up of the terminal screen in Net communications is the
result of packet flow; email appears from everywhere; interrupts are
common; the Net harbors impeded laterality. Better to consider it a
convulsive body as well, the neural interconnectivity of nodes
serving as obstructed gateways choked with binary debris. The body
migrates to the edge of consciousness, received and processed by
one or another correspondent who circumscribes the messaging,
returns it to the relative fulfillment of sense.

The return occurs within an insriptive domain, part and parcel of
a potential well where meaning is construed. Within the well,
meaning develops the ontological being of language; without it,
meaning sputters, its attributive scattered among the remnants of
indirect addressing.

Only the shuddering of the human shatters the human; the human
stammers or stutters its way through debris scattered across the
splattered or spotted landscape. Deep within the throat the
promise of a primitive root is murmured or mumbled. Culture con-
structs itself upon the elimination of debris; the abject, now
gathered within the shamanistic fetish for the expulsion of male-
volent spirits, echos in the hiss of the cat or snake. These
animals are regarded with awe; they hold the mirror to culture
itself, the thin veneer of language and civilization binding us
to the symbolic. The hiss is imaginary; having no meaning whatso-
ever, it holds the meaning of the world. There are no boundaries
or borders, beyond what we make of them. There is no language
beyond our speech of it.

[1] See *Art Papers* 1/2 1994, "Throat: Leslie Thornton's _The
Great Invisible_": "_In the film,_ speaking is caught in the maw,
glottal stop, Edison and the _mechanical_ insignia of existence.
Early [20th-century] representations [of movement] operated with
mechanism throughout [as in the mechanics of the melodrama]; they
stuttered. Repetitive pistons and cams moved locomotives and film;
intermittent motion is translated into rotary motion and back
again. Throughout the century, mechanism gives way to electricity,
which gives way to the electronic, cyberspace and beyond. Thought
leaves the material domain" ...

If _beings_ are mechanism, _Being_ occupies an uneasy territory.
Aristotle stumbled through the part-objects of a generalized symp-
tomology of the world and Pliny followed suit. But organism never
spoke clearly and _always_ stammered; the hiss of steam, the
volcanic fissure, and the cat are _identical_.

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15 days later Cybermind co-founder Michael Current was dead.