<nettime> net.<foo>

[Alan J Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

What is net.<foo>? Why is it necessary to state net.artist, net.criticism,
net.language, etc. without an adequate deconstruction of both net and . in
the first place? Why the necessity of reification, which plays into the
language of the manifesto, always already restructuring an imperative that
has all but disappeared elsewhere? A similar question in relation to virt-
ual intellectual; when was an intellectual other than virtual? 

These are not idle questions in spite of the brevity of this note. Beyond,
say the com-priv list or RFCs (and where is 675 by the way?), aren't these
constructs a problematic they efface by procuring content as-if elsewhere?
(Perhaps that is the nature of a problematic.) I find these terms suspect;
I am not sure what a "net.artist" is as opposed to an artist or one work-
ing in the media, or working with community. It's the . that raises barr-
iers - as if net.artist were already the reification of a subdomain, a
scheme of classification somehow legitimated by the substructural period. 

These . raise barriers; they're not connectives, just as virtual intellec-
tual troubles me in relation to the transgressing political economy of the
media. 

But then it is duly noted that I am from the United States, and there are
surely processes of misrecognition, misinterpretation of history, at work.
Beyond Neoism and occasional zine-ing, I view manifesto-ism itself more
than likely a European phenomenon; we tend to inscribe our _disciplines_
instead.

Or rather, perhaps, net.criticism, net.<foo> as a movement, in which case
it is already subtending, sublimating the work of others not necessarily
ascribing.

For I must say, what attracts me to working on the Net is precisely is
porosity (in the normative and Hegelian sense), that there is the poten-
tial for what might be considered an offshoot of Irigarayan fluid mechan-
ics, as opposed to category theory with its objects and nodes. It is the
latter, inscribing through functors behind the scenes, that seems on a
certain level to be the same old story. I would argue to free language,
portend what releasement is possible in this medium (I think of jodi.org
for example, or some of my own attempts)

In the meantime I'll strive to remove the dot

Alan

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