Queer-e Vol. 1 no. 1 -------------------------------------------------------------------- 6. Alan Sondheim [sondheim@panix.com] Copyright (c) 1995 by Author, all rights reserved. This text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editors of Queer-e (queer-e-approval@vector.casti.com). ----------------------------------------------- HEART OF DARKNESS: The Disquiet Body of Electronic Communication Disquiet \ the square in the deserted village \ the square in the busy city \ in the middle of the night \ lurking on the conference, breathing down a back _I am speaking with a stranger._ an ominous beginning, the spy coming in from the cold, the lurker who hides in the shadows - someone, an intimacy which occurs as the whisper of voices in the dark (Am I the lurker? Am I being watched? My fear is everywhere, the fear of an impossible intimacy, blocked voyeur, exhibitionist, my voice drowned silently in the wires.) _I imagine your body_ your face, everything hidden beneath your clothes, the picture of smooth skin dark or light, toy-like genitals, the hat pulled down over your eyes, smoke rising against the streetlamp, fog, rain - I would - (I would do nothing, modest and awkward in your vicinity.) What do you want? I say. What do you want? (You say you're lonely, you want love. You say you're looking for an SO, significant other. I tremble, want so much to please you. I tremble, naked, before the screen.) _I would tell you everything,_ spread my legs for you - for you I have no secrets, my mouth, my ass are open, wide cunt, hard cock - (You can write this, sexless, of every sex, every _preposition_.) (You can have me, have my love.) (The cunt or cock, that's not it at all. It is the _frisson_ or murmur of acceptance, the pleasure of communal being, lost in ASCII _space_ or talk.romance.chat.) Or just the pleasure of the _voice,_ its grain, it reads itself to me, _disquietude_... (There is no voice, we remind each other: _there is no voice._) :A disquiet withdrawn, always already overlooked, a disquiet or interference, the threat to bring the structure DOWN, collapse occurring alone, in isolation. There are a million rooms across the planet filled with my images of you, corresponding, writing _to me_, moment close to the dream screen itself, but its inversion: retreat from the symbolic to the imaginary.[1] (I write to you; you treat each post as potential romance and I am bound to _disappoint._) This is a delicate manifold or _web inversion_ [2], near collapse, the body in quick retreat, detumescence, the loss of faith, hope, charity. Net communication skims on a fetishized reflecting surface like the skin of a new car; the discomfort is the real. (I didn't mean it, I say. You misunderstood my words, I add. I never even thought you would think like this, you say. You add, we should stop before damage is done.) _You can feel the discomfort approaching. Your correspondence becomes voluminous; you dream the Name, say it dangerously to yourself, over and over again. [3] You can feel it; the response, once playful, takes on a harder edge, full of decodings. Neurosis appears within the grand design; the writing itself veers, unredeemed, from one side to another, careers across the inscribed trajectories and etiquette of the superego. This is the seepage of the imaginary, the hallucin- ogenic character of the communication, beginning to open, the crack in the door, crack in the body. If the Net begins as symbolic communication, the subject inscribes herself/himself within it; address, recognition, and protocol charac- terize the subject who is produced/constructed as a state of continuous REWRITE. [4] Inscription itself is based on a classical two- valued logic with distributivity. Within the sememe, gestural logics take over as well - logics without distributivity in which individua- ted elements are capable of generating greater bandwidths than the distance/distinction/differance between them. [5] When the subject _fissures,_ collapses near disjunction, the sememe degenerates into partial logics, incoherencies, and fragments; the Kristevan _Thing_ (*Black Sun*) - inert and obdurate - appears. The communication is simultaneously out of control and muffled/drowsy, a state of (addictive) withdrawal. [6] There is a double parallel (double, because of internal reflections) here with the fetishization of commodity in late capitalism, and sexual pornography; both regimes imply a continuous reinscribing of the self through chains of commands (_pipelining_) as well as a detumescence/aphanisis [7] of affect: _specific_ objects (last year's computer, last month's "playmate") become (psychoanalytically) used up, discarded. This _using up_ is _critical_ to the comprehension of Internet and other electronic ASCII/Image communication, just as it is critical to an understanding of the devouring-machine of capital. Orgasm wastes the pornographic image; turning-away or face-to-face wastes the Net correspondent; time wastes everything. This devouring is a decathexis returned to the fetishistic/shamanic of the paleolithic in which an object is used to "carry" the disease from the patient, an object/abject of loss. [8] All objects are objects of loss. All objects carry within them the horizon of discard, retreat within the face of death. The face of death burns itself from the wires into the face of the correspondent or user. The face of death writes/ rewrites the user, the _uncanny_ face of death. Abject: no place to go, no origin to come from. The user is always in a position of disquiet. I correspond with Susan and I correspond with Keith, correspond with Karen and correspond... I imagine their faces close to mine, double moons, impossible skin, soft reading of the world across their eyes. I imagine the body's infolding, the exalted rapture of flesh within the sweet/complete surround of flesh, my broken body within, contained and rearranging, the seat of consciousness returning to pure liquidity. "Susan," I begin. "Would you like to meet face-to-face, or is this just a _terminal relationship?_ :) " I add the smiley to appear suave, more human, a level of seriousness underlying the potential cauteriza- tion. "I've been dying to meet you. I try to picture you, but without much luck. I'm not even sure whether you're involved with someone, even want to be." " I'm " I'm " I'm This is the phenomenological horizon of correspondence, the eidetic reduction, which reaches to the fluidity of the imaginary, beyond which the body violates itself, death seeps in, the terminal cools to writing degree zero, and ECHO is toggled off. [9] -----------------| Cyberspace is often described as a space of flame wars and electronic rape, a situation of potential violence, extremely hetero- and phallo- centric. Call this the limit. (Call this the dead-end, the wrong turn, the violation.) The limit is the violence of desire, the effacement of the other, male or female. Within the limit, there is procurement; there is a stream of projections and introjections. Nothing remains on the surface of the text, appearances to the contrary. When I transmit a post, I imagine it entering the darkness outside my window, disappearing into the distance beyond the streetlamps. It ends up in PURE SPACE, a readership on couch or deskchair or bed, a reader in suspense, as if her breath were held for the duration. When I receive a post, the disquiet begins; I imagine languour, the post entering the world of uneasy dreams, the noise of the disappointment of my body, a sense of _peering_ through my glasses into a world disinterested and not of my design. I am afraid at this point of the warmth and intimacy of the email, which fail all too often in real life. But I cannot hold myself back; in a state of absolute loneliness (the body devoured by the vacuum, at the edge of the abyss which it alone has generated) I hear _her voice_, the maternal suturing the letter back into the fold of skin from which, I imagine, it emerged. The posts are labial, enfolding; they are any gender, any anatomy. What I imagine is the _grain,_ the bone-and-flesh sound of the man or woman who _speaks to me._ But he or she is speaking to the other of the REWRITE, [10] the lurker adjacent to/beside me: _I overhear myself._ And I am _speaking with a stranger,_ the most beautiful spy, most beautiful spy who _comes in from the cold_. And against my interests, against the _presence_ of my interests and my desires, I LURK WITHIN ME. --------------------------------------------------| Footnotes: [1] The dream screen is the (abject and maternal) matrix of the dream. Think of a dream as a projection which simultaneously hides (screens _from_ the unconscious) and reveals (illuminates its ostensible con- tents. The symbolic is the order of substitution, concatenation, and language; the imaginary refers to disruption, laterality, and the pre-symbolic. Anika Lemaire, in *Jacques Lacan*: "The imaginary is an infinitely supple conceptual category. It covers everything in the phantasy which is an image or representation of a lived experience pertaining to the castration complex before its formalization - for- ever incomplete, of course - becomes petrified in the symbol of the 'Phallus.'" "...the imaginary ocncerns the intuitive lived experience of the body (dependence, welcome, gift, etc.), of activity, passivity, of the will to power, etc." ... Thus the imaginary is a _prior_. In telecommunications, however, the reverse is true: ASCII text is always already symbolic, a linguistic formation, through which the imaginary "leaks." [11] [2] The web inversion is the inverted body sustained across the mem- brane of the Internet; it is also the (partial) externalization and dissolution of the ego as a result of inversion. [3] The Name is the proper name, uncannily tied (through an imaginary, not symbolic connection, a tie of intimacy or ravelling) to the body; it is _your_ name I dream of, delicious shuddering at the slow and liquid evocation of syllables... [4] Protocol specifies specific commands, codes, rates, and linkages among machines - what's acceptable and what's not. It also stands-in for the etiquette of the (human) subject, who "behaves" in company, gaining recognition. Address is the proper name and its directory path; recognition is simultaneously the permission to speak and an acceptance of the "fullness" of the subject, his or her imaginary. The subject exists as a tentative _coagulation_ within recognition, producing a continuous REWRITE or use of the "shifter" within protocol to reaffirm its existence as a (speaking, acting) coherency. [5] The subject is inscribed _within_ the communicative order on the Net; an inscription is a demarcation based on complementarity in classical logic (the intersection of books and non-books being the null-set). This logic is two-valued (0/1, true/false) and distrib- utive: any two members of a set "define" only the space between them. In gestural logic, distributivity is eliminated, and two elements can "define" the entire bandwidth or universe of discourse - the elements formally extend beyond themselves, and their boundaries are fuzzy. The sememe is a partially-closed or inscribed web of signifiers and signifieds; it is _active_ and turbulent (as in the theory sememe for example). [6] Why would the subject collapse? Exhaustion, sensory or information overload; the increasingly neurotic _frisson_ of desire in Net commun- ication; insomnia; the radical disjunction of "real life / face-to- face" and virtual subjectivity; dreams, sweats, obsessive masturbation - the general failure of inscription and rewrite; lose of the I and eye; sightless and siteless. [7] "Aphanisis" is from Ernest Jones and is used here to refer to a hollowing or devouring of desire, the interpenetration of anomie and libido. [8] I flame you on the net; you return the favor. I flame you again, raising the stakes; the language, veering back and forth between us, shrieks with incantations. Detumescence sets in; I hardly remember your name, everything lost, useless between us. [9] Dreams collapse; as in masturbation, images rush and violate, disappear into the darkness. It is the _foolishness_ of Net communi- cation, hardly recognized, always present; caught with our pants down before the moment of castration or clitorectomy, _done things_ of the inertia of the world. As if a password opened a gateway on to emptiness or the _null address_: nothing doing here where everything ends up. (_Not_ to imply a narrative: Everything begins and ends here and all at once.) [10] We always already speak to the REWRITE which is the only speech and speech's matrix or dream screen; REWRITE recursions into REWRITE as speech is _other_. And what does one make of this, from Sartre's *Critique of Dialectical Reason*: "The reactive behaviour occasioned in the listeners by the Other-Thought as the meaning of the Other- Voice is always the _behaviour of alterity_"? [11] In this manner, the other of the footnotes continues indefin- itely, the production of a linguistic chain, everything necessary to modify the original essay in the form of an integration or _smoothing_ - as if desire had contracted into the semblance of an _accent_ or diacritical mark. About the Author: Alan Sondheim is moderator of Cybermind (which was co-moderated by Michael Current), and Fiction-of-Philosophy, both at jefferson.village.virginia.edu . He currently teaches at the New School and Film/Video Arts in New York. He has published extensively on issues of gender, aesthetics, and philosophy; his most recent book is _Disorders of the Real,_ Station Hill, 1988. He is included in _Vulvamorphia,_ published by Lusitania, and is editing a book, _Cybermind: Being On-Line,_ also from Lusitania, to appear in 1995. His video and filmwork have been shown internationally.