<nettime> fragment, bomb, wind

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

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fragment, wind


want to write until the language is destroyed
want to write until my throat is cut out
why the throat    why the throat



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The Political Economy of Bombs as Transparencies


Nikuko writes and wrongs, clearly we are entering a new age, occasioned
first by the harbinger of anarchists' cookbooks, not to mention Loompan-
ics, the whole wide world of Net, ready availability of household chemi-
cals. This is the world of the reign and rain of bombs, the porousness of
everyday life, fearful no longer of tiny-tot handguns, but the potential
for any place and any time to explode with nails, glass, strips of tin,
shrapnel beyond experimental poetics.

Think of bomb-blast winds carrying fires and debris everywhere; imagine
your own limbs incinerated, cut apart: look around you as walls and ceil-
ings fall through charred floors. A violent wind blows across the planet
as volatile mixtures from uranium to nitro rise from the interior in order
to be packaged in pipes and bottles, cars and trucks, airplanes and trains
- packaged in anything transportable - anything of the nature of _vector._

Because, adds Jennifer, first there is the _vector,_ and then there is the
emission or spew - the dissipation of materials after chemical or nuclear
reaction - as the earth returns mixtures to its own, returning, in fact,
the whole of civilization to the condition of the _brew._ Just as there is
a tendency towards _distinction_ - for example, the very computer I am ty-
ping on appears as an ordered coalescence of minerals and metals and other
elements of the world - there is also a tendency towards _substance,_ that
aphanisis or loss of distinction characteristic of our primordial begin-
nings. Call this the death drive or error, but we now may observe our pla-
netary surface within the throes of two regimes at odds - that of inscrip-
tion or distinction, and that of the fissuring of entities through bombs.

Julu chimes in, and this porousness will increase; biological weapons are
a short step behind. Soon, anyone, anywhere, will be able to make himself
or herself felt among the remnants of culture and civilization - ideas
will flourish according to an economy of detonations and silent killers.
That woman next to you may be carrying anthrax; that man across the street
hides grenades in his briefcase; those children run plastique for the drug
runners. These things are the orders of the day; the new political economy
is built upon the necessary destruction of the old. No matter that the
final result is planetary toxicity - that is at least decades away.

Jennifer says, we draw our circles in the sand. Nikuko says, within the
circles is our band. Julu says, the circles consecrate our land. All
three, then speaking together, the circles constitute our land. & they are
silent & watch the rising wind. & they do not see the wind, but only the
effects of the wind. & Nikuko says, we have been given this transparency.


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