[Nettime-bold] Re: Public Offering (Re: <nettime> no people)

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

On Sun, 20 May 2001, Mark Dery wrote:

> Alan:
>
> To be frank, phrases like "cultural production" and "textual practice"
> give me the fantods. They reek of Prada Marxism, they're conveniently
> vague---sufficiently so that they cover a multitude of intellectual
> sins---and can usually be replaced by clearer words that cost less
> ("textual practice" = *writing*). More often than not, they amount to
> intellectual handwaving.
>
I meant textual practice, in fact, not writing, Marxism or not - because
the work stems at least in part from programming practice. I associate
writing with something else related, but not identical.

> In any event, if you're arguing for a Nettime that makes room for a vibrant
> profusion of ideas and opinions, then we're in complete agreement. If, on
> the other hand, you're defending your---and my---right to be willfully
> obscure, I'm afraid I can't agree. Is there room, here, for "many modes of
> thinking, working through ideas"? No question. Nonetheless, I refuse to
> unplug my critical faculties in the name of a faux populism that throws wide
> the floodgates to any and every post.

Well, first of all, it's not faux nor populism; not all posts go "through"
as you well know. As far as "willfully obscure" - you might as well elim-
inate Joyce, Lautreamont, Mallarme, Celan, and dozens of other writers who
are equally obscure; as far as "willfully" - that's already problematic
for me, as I am certainly not trying to obscure clarity, but perhaps
clarify obscurity, to work with the noise that for me is inherent in every
text, every rationality - in other words, a loose (and I'm sure you'd
find, vulgar) form of deconstruction.

I certainly would not want any critical faculties unplugged, but only
perhaps in the name of this populism.

Let a billion flowers bloom, and you
> have intellectual kudzu. We live in an attention economy. Time-starved and
> data-glutted, most of us appreciate posts that don't have to be read with a
> weed-whacker in one hand. Nettime, as its .sig file suggests, is "a
> moderated mailing list for net criticism, collaborative text filtering and
> cultural politics of the nets."

It depends by what is meant by "weed-whacker" - I find a lot of posts on
nettime obscure and turgid, and don't read them - but I wouldn't want them
censored out, eliminated.

Net criticism gets pride of place, in that
> micro-mission statement, with cultural politics taking up the rear. There's
> no mention of ePoetry or ASCII art or my own private turbo-blog, much as
> that pains me. Whatever else it is, Nettime is a forum for public discourse.
> *Public*, not private. *Discourse*, not solipsistic self-expression with one
> finger on the "send" button.

However, except for rare interchanges like this one, Nettime is _not_ dis-
course so much as presentation - of ideas that relate to net criticism,
text filtering, etc.

Nor is this self-expression "solipsistic," any more than any other text, I
think.

As far as "one finger on the 'send' button" - I send rarely to nettime,
much more to other lists. Go check the archives.

> It's incumbent on all of us to contextualize our remarks rather than begin
> them in medias res, as if our listening audience has been privy to our
> internal monologue all along, like devoted fans of the daily soaps who can
> flick on in mid-show and pick up the thread without missing a stitch. It
> helps to know that the prose snippet you posted has to do "with the
> stereotyping of.animals whose characteristics are related primarily to those
> of first-grade readers." It would have been *more* enlightening to have had
> that information at hand while reading the text in question. I'm not calling
> for a Stalinist purge of our Inner ePoets, for Chrissakes; I'm simply asking
> for a little context. Be polemical. Be passionate. But if you believe your
> thoughts matter, don't cloak them in the intellectual equivalent of a cloud
> of squid ink; make them transparent to me.

Here, I agree with you totally. I did think the work was more self-evident
than it might have been; I'm also possibly more used to people who are
familiar with my work and understand its context.

I know you're not calling for a purge of ePoets at all; what I'm saying is
that there is other writing of this sort - and it hardly dominates this
list.

For me, btw, this discussion is interesting, since it implies a shift from
semantic difficulty back to the materiality of language - which isn't new
- you get it in Joyce, in Sterne, etc. - something Kristeva talks about.
So the question is why this difficulty within the materiality? The
language poets go on and on about this - for me it has to do, however,
with a kind of prosthesis that exists in relation to the phenomenology of
computer art and writing - I remember Sartre's comment in the Critique
that "it's the machine in them that's dreaming" (something to that
effect).

It's a way of exploring the potential for new language (which aren't that
new), for extending, metaphorically, the tendrils of the sememe into the
software/hardware of the machine, for collapsing interior and exterior.
And that makes for difficult writing, difficult in its materiality.
>
> A parting thought: If you "feel, like many others, outside of the nettime
> mainstream," you may want to consider the possibility that Nettime *has* no
> mainstream. We're *all* on the outside, Alan. Which is Nettime's greatest
> strength---or one of them.

Again, I agree here.

yours Alan -

>
> Regards,
>
> M. Dery
>
>
>

Internet Text at http://www2.sva.edu/~alans/
Partial at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt
Partial at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html
Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm
CDROM of collected work 1994-2000/1 available: write sondheim@panix.com



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