<nettime> the difference between the new fiction and the old

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

the difference between the new fiction and the old

is simple: we're increasingly forced to recognize
that we're buffeted in the universe, that we're
atom to mountain, that we're increasingly irrelevant
outside our own self-interest. so the narratives
are narratives of buffeting, of forces beyond our
understanding and control. we received entangled
messages of limited content from the cosmos; we
strangle ourselves in attempts to cohere, inhabit
instead of live within as abstraction - Heidegger,
where are you when we need you? we are the misery
of absolute annihilation within the matter of time;
we operate on smaller and smaller domains as if
space were a matter of local technologies and our
corporate love of them. the truth is that the truth
is incontrovertible, inconceivable, immense, beyond
our limitations, as multiverses become place-holders
in formulas and emptied signifiers. we believe in
universal knowledge, sentient networking, data-banks
of the world's intelligence, ignoring the real
physical devastation the planet shakes upon us. we
hold to the myths of an Internet of totalizing and
infinite connectivity, ignoring the buffeting in
favor of buffering, hold-fasts and clouds which are
still more phenomena of the mythos of placing and
placement. the buffeting will necessarily,
entropically, win out in the end, in a version of
Eliot's whimper, and it's this that's forming the
new germ of our cultures, hardly visible, but with
increasing presence as the surface of the planet
continues with its own branding of devastation.
write of buffeting, not buffering, and tell the
truth, while simultaneously the truth, under
erasure and corrosion, is annihilated, while both
voice and comprehension are permanently stilled.


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