<nettime> Codework Self-Negated

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

Codework Self-Negated


If not for self-negation, codework remains within formal structures,
broken, chaotic, or otherwise. It's semantics that opens up the universe
of discourse; at the same time, semantics shuts down or bypasses the
structures. The problematization of language rises by itself as
symbolically or indexically generated; the ikonic fades, varies from
workstation to workstation. The work of the viewer lies not in the
decipherment of the structure, but within the assemblage of insistent
content through and in spite of the structure. Anything else resonates
with already tried and tired conceptualist attitudes, where teleology
tended towards perfection, and the horizon was a closed set of usually
well-defined, often countable, elements. In every case, energy and habitus
are required for creation, sustaining, transmission; this is necessarily a
substructural contamination that forms illicit ties with the semantics,
feeds into it. Not a closed universe of discourse, then, but a holarchic
sememe or neural structuring that opens elsewhere with axons tending the
real, i.e. the stewardship of the real. Thus codework becomes a model of
universal political economy, complete with filtering, censorship,
distribution, equivalencies, duplications - but also cries, wars, fucks,
furies, talks sought and talks returned.

Second to the extent that meaning is always already a construct, neither
scaffold nor sememic tissue are construed from transcendence, i.e., agency
is necessary for the completion of a circuit which may or may not occur.
Agency always produces circuitry. The habitus creates decipherment in any
case, formal or informal, skeletal or meat-driven. So it is a question of
history and the history of agency. The self-negation of codework occurs
within this history and this agency. The self-negation is an aesthetic
drive occasioned by the work, largely subconscious. The decipherment
results in a hardening of meaning, just as a riddle is hardened by its
solution. Of codework there is no solution. Of cries, wars, fucks, furies,
talks sought and talks returned, there is no solution.

There is no solution of meaning, nothing to be wagered, at stake, nothing
granted. Meaning stumbles through the code of the codework, meaning is the
vegetable of the mineral code, the production of the animal in the twenty
questions of the riddle. Animal, vegetable, mineral, all are contaminated
by agency. Agency does not resolve. Self-negation is parasitic, the
construct of unrepentant, unresolved agency. The content is the chaotic
mix. Structure sits at the bar, content the blood-stain on the floor. The
crime of codework: meaning oozes. It needs the hydraulics of the code. It
is of the code, attaches itself to the sememe. Contamination of the
sememe: the sememe. The content and meaning of codework is contamination.
The riddle is resonant. Unresolved contamination cries, fucks, furies,
talks, expends, empties.


_


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