Alan Sondheim on Thu, 9 Aug 2001 11:46:21 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> of the book |
+++ of the book i cannot write the book i desire; i think constantly - this text is an introduction. there is nothing beyond the introduction. the introduction is fecund, replete, with the details of the world between heat birth and cold death; the introduction inhales universal annihilation. there is no proper way to express this. the books i would write break down upon their enunciation. the announcement of the book is the book; the announcement effaces itself in the exhaustion of continuous production. i hold therapeutically, psychoanalytically, to this production; it becomes a life-form, prehensile; it reaches towards the book; its tentacles begin to wrap themselves around each and every trope; metaphors becomes obstacles and worlds; the production exhales in its own denouement. only in fear do i look forward to this production which spells my failure,this inability to continue, this waywardness, contrariness. it reaches through me, comes through me; how could i not believe in ghosts, avatars, cyborgs, prostheses, emananations? i write as if their very existence depended on it. repeatedly: i write myself into existence; i write myself out of it. but the existence is tinged with labor throughout - it is the laboring of an existence fragile and wavering literally beyond belief. if i could only make a statement and hold to it; if i could only connect a series of statements, almost as if they were axioms "as if to say." it is my strength and weakness that such connections are governed by laughter, and the statements themselves, by misery. i am one of the few who constantly see through myself. i know about failure from within, the rapidity of existence, the inability to seize time for an instant. the darkness is overwhelming: it is the darkness of the first and last, and only in the midst of chaotic neutrality is the semblance of being manifest. holding to the book: holding memory in place throughout the vicissitudes of life. a continuous series of failed projects tends asymptotically towards truths that otherwise remain submerged; as it is, they are external to symbolic foreclosure, forms of meanderings more at one with dark matter than luminous and momentary gravity. i could never tell you where the statement might be; what might be the equivalence of the book; what might be its destination or distribution; who might read what could be interpreted as a tropology of illness. i could never tell you the statement, or "make it" in any sense, nor is there a concept which holds fast, the "one good idea" that each of us is supposedly destined to express. it is the "nor" that grips me, the "neither this nor that," the "not both this and that," the dissuasions of propositional logics and their fundamental modes - the superimpositions of gestural logics and their organic gestures towards the frisson and trembling of being in relation. if only i could write of the rush of letters, the stream of meanings, shape-riding semantics in the depths of the night! if only utterance were at home within me, if there were set themes ready to be expressed, clouds and darkened flows "just" about to turn or return to the symbolic. instead the dance is always around - and it is a dance - a fire elsewhere,beings i could almost see in the dim light, theoretical constructs about to emerge out of a communality i witness, but never partake in. even the play of the world escapes me; i search for books within it; i search for the finality of the word, deconstructing at a rush, fevered with disbelief, exhausted with being. what is "out there" is never a "what," never "out there"; what is out there is insufficient. biography, autobiography, flattens and disenchant, transforming theory and abstraction to the incidental. scaffolding becomes anecdote and complexity is reduced to the despair of a sleepless night. the book that calls me forth is otherwise, effacing in the midst of the call, denying in its insistency. it asserts the "it" "itself," creating presence in absence, ontology in the midst of chaos. it is the engine or process born of desire; it has no otherwise existence. i fight constantly to ensure that its contents and index reflect something beyond that, that desire does not become circumstance, that circumstance does not turn thought of the world into diary. no life is "worth living" and not in the book which calls me. the book is an addiction. the book is an inescapable addiction, raging, regulated, in the absence of drugs, called forth in clarity, self-inscribing. not worth living, but a medium of the world, circumstantial mediation or re/mediation in denial. this denial, rhetoric, flight, are characteristic of that philosophy of dedication inhabiting me like an illness; they are symptoms of the book; they fumble within me; they lock themselves within me; they hold my mind in its insufficiency. they are my promise of redemption. i deconstruct the possessive, calling on methodologies i recognize as already used, carrying their own stain, their own historic shame. thinking must always cast aside the stigma; thinking must never replace it with the taint of purity. this is what i have been promised, speaking to others through myself: these are the words of the book. never written, this too a cauterization of a wound refusing to heal. i cannot write the book "i desire" - that is my failure, not that of the book. even the sentence is a sentencing; what is left to say falls to pieces. indeed, there is nothing beyond the introductions. like any other illness, a compulsion to write, to rectify, to bring down the house, to absolve rectification, to slant. to comprehend illness as a symptom, the momentary apparition of being. "i desire," "my desire." the writing of submergence. the writing of the remnant, remains. the writing of being-submerged, submerged writing. the book, my book, the book. === # 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: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net