The man in electricfity

Plasma scientists are now comparing electrical discharge formations in the laboratory to rock art images around the world. Results in 2005 should confirm that immense and terrifying plasma configurations were seen in the sky of our ancestors.

South Atlantic Anomaly

This is a huge electromagnetic sink in the van allen belt; it is bigger than Brazil.

Here's nice overview.

Earth can be viewed as a gigantic bar magnet spinning in space. Its toroidal magnetic field encases the planet like a huge inner tube. This field shields Earth from the solar wind—a continuous stream of charged particles cast off by the sun. It also traps charged particles, which tend to congregate in distinct bands based on their charge, energy, and origin. Two primary bands of trapped particles exist: the one closer to Earth is predominantly made up of protons, while the one farther away is mostly electrons. Evidence of these bands was first made public by James Van Allen, and so they are often referred to as the Van Allen radiation belts. This radiation can cause all sorts of malfunctions in spacecraft electronics. In fact, the Geiger counter used to measure cosmic rays on Explorer 1 stopped functioning because it was overloaded by radiation!

Catalyst; The Brooklyn Bridge - the best bit from MA Thesis on Samuel R Delany "Mirror, Prism, Lens"

... after glimpse, the stays and struts of the Brooklyn Bridge rise out of the sea of Delany’s oeuvre, water glistening and tessellating off the masonry. Now a ruin on Rhys, now a dry span over the Hudson valley, now a Bridge of Lost Desire, there a retreat from a flaming Bellona, here the scene for many illuminating conversations as the evening sun strikes New York City, the location of a career in balance. The motif of the Brooklyn Bridge endures as a bridge to the future. The reader remembers Hart Crane’s cry, “All life is a bridge, I told him. Even the whole world.” (AM 96) Delany is always crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, spanning gaps, exploring the marginal areas in the shadow of bridges, on bridges. As the motif of the Bridge appears again, and again, and again, throughout Delany’s oeuvre, taking the foreground, or away in the background, the Bridge exists as a metaphor, a physical symbol for the reconciliation of difference, for connecting communities and ideas. The Brooklyn Bridge was built with hope, with the most futuristic technologies of the time, and yet endures, the most solidly constructed bridge to New York City.

“the Brooklyn Bridge represents and incorporates many of the socio-cultural elements of the age that produced it, elements that have helped create our own technological age.”

The Brooklyn Bridge profoundly altered a career, after meeting Auden, a walk on the Bridge engenders a career in science fiction after the publication at nineteen, of The Jewels of Aptor. The bridge is a location of truce, a literal bridging of Delany’s relationship with the poet, Marilyn Hacker. They’d have conversations about literature to bridge their differences, the difficulties of communicating their feelings about their relationship. One such conversation was:

Among the conclusions we reached that evening, as we strolled or paused at the rail with the cars sweeping by below us, or walked once more, fingers interlocked, cables wheeling above, was that for a novel, SF or otherwise, to show any aesthetic originality in the range of extant American fiction, it must portray, among many other sorts of relationships, at least one strong friendship between two women characters. Also, the major heterosexual relationship would have to involve a woman as active as the man. (MW 173)

This is the same evening that plots out the shape of The Fall of the Towers, Delany’s next project after the experience of publishing The Jewels of Aptor at Ace. The interlocking weave of ideas, like Delany and Marilyn’s fingers, the structural mesh of the cables holding the span high above the Hudson, span the thirty years of Delany’s oeuvre that covers selection of stories, novellas, novels and tales. Quest, myth, identity, memory, and transgression are the powerful themes that surge and swell with the ebb and flow of the tide beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Each theme intertwines with one another, until it is difficult to unpick the tapestry. The Bridge of Delany’s humanist perspective unites each theme; his desire to create a way of living, a movement towards becoming a mature, integrated person, free of prejudice and filled with joy in the diversity of life.

imagine four giant harps, side by side. Then rotate the alternate ones – just a little, so that some cables were vertical and some slanted across them. Now put two of these double harps at each side of the walkway, that will have to be reckoned into the total, and let the wind play silent music through and against crisp blue. (AM 66)

To understand the present, one must know the past, and the past helps to understand the future. And to know the past, is to understand the powerful symmetry of the Brooklyn Bridge. Horace Gregory frames Atlantis: Model 1924 with this image from Far Beyond Our Consciousness, “He sees an image of the bridge springing from a remote past and propelled upward, spiraling, arching the sky, casting its shadow down upon us and vanishing in space.” (AM 57) From the past to Atlantis, Atlantis as a holy grail, the goal of Delany’s quest. Part of that quest is to free the reader from their assumptions, preconceptions, and open up consciousness to new possibilities. The journey of this quest involves a search for identity, remembering identity, constructing identity in a subliminal quest to bridge differences within communities, within selves, to reveal the commonality of the human creature in all its lotus-petaled forms:

part of what, from my marginal position, I see as the problem is the idea of anybody’s having to fight the fragmentation and multicultural diversity of the world, not to mention outright oppression, by constructing something so rigid as an identity, an identity in which there has to be a fixed and immobile core, a core that is structured to hold inviolate such a complete biological fantasy as race – whether white or black.

In the process of remembrance, memory defines identity, as society transgresses the limits of identity, as identity turns back in on itself, reflecting on the past, considering the future, intruding upon the present, as Delany’s journal entries intrude upon his work. Life is inseparable from the project, his diary frames and shapes his writing. Delany’s writing shapes and defines the path of his life, creates new mythologies, and forms frameworks for identity, for interacting with the world. Identity is formed against the constant threat of continuity, against the threat of Kidd’s Dhalgren, the underbed of society. Kidd’s loss of identity is not something to fear, his fractured, fragmented identity is real, and Kidd copes fluidly with his situation, with the confusing changes in his reality. He projects his reality upon his surrounds and the tumultuous changes, strangeness, is reflected in Dhalgren. Memory infects The Einstein Intersection, through the remembrance and denial of the myths of the past, and the creation new myth in the intersection between Godel’s infinite theorem and Einstein’s relativist manifestations of reality.

Memory creates identity, memory projects continutity. One wakes up in the morning, and remembers life the day before. Although the reader is trapped in a temporal loop where the future is unknown, the past is there to stand on, to push forward from. Empire Star’s characters are guided by their future selves. Through a trick of time-continuity by travelling through the interstellar nexus at Empire star, they travel into the future and into the past, and shape and guide each other’s future experiences, so that all the characters die at the beginning, but their end is their beginning. The characters are transformed like the progression from larvae to crystalis to butterfly and the return. Memory serves to structure and create the continuity of life.

The purpose of Delany’s textual diversions is to rupture the linear continuity of the text. The rupture of the journal, authorial observations, and commentary split the text into two. The split column tactic, is a reference back to double consciousness. Lewy’s journal is in code, and so is the split in the text. Lewy shows his journal to his brothers, “ when John opened the cover it was in code – two columns, one barely comprehensible, the other complete nonsense. ‘You don’t want none of them jewboys to get hold of this,’ John said. ‘They could figure it out on you.’ ” (AM 8) and returning to the journal, John repeats, “ ‘They could figure it out on you.’ But, chuckling, Lewy wandered away, barefoot over fallen blossoms, as if codes and journals and secrets and cyphers had ceased to interest him as he searched the spring night.’” (AM 16) . . . The cypher of the split column of the effaced journal . . . Dhalgren’sAnathemata: a plague journal effaced with the authoral influence, elimination, statements of transcription: “The falsification of this journal . . . What is down, then, is a chronicle of incidents with a potential for wholeness they did not have when they occurred; a false picture, again, because they show neither the spread of our life’s fabric, nor the most significant pattern points.” (D 734) These fragments of a thesis, consciousness bridging the gaps in between, produce a false picture, or a real picture, but with the potential of becoming whole deeply buried in the riverbed of the reader’s consciousness. How do the tiles of the mosaic fall together? Stand back a little bit more.

The double narrative, in its parallel columns . . . With the two (or more . . .) tales printed as they are, consecutively and not parallel at all, a romantic code hierarchizes them: the second account – full of guilt, silence, desire, and subterfuge – displaces the first – overt, positive, rich, and social – at once discrediting it and at the same time presumably revealing its truth.

Yet reread closely.

Nothing in the first is in any way explained by the second, so that this “truth” that the second is presumed to provide is mostly an expectation, a convention, a trope – rather than a real explanatory force.

But if it is the split – the spaces between the columns (one resplendent and lucid with the writings of legitimacy, the other dark and hollow with the voices of the illegitimate, and even a third aglitter with ironic alterities) – that consistutes the subject, it is only after the Romantic inflation of the private into the subjective that such a split can even be located. That locus, that margin, that split itself first allows then demands the appropriateion of language – now spoken, now written – in both directions, over the gap. (MW 67-9)

These prismatic filters of the split narrative, a “double narrative, in its parallel columns” (MW 67) accentuating, supposing inter-relations, yet they are resolutely separate. A fragment of self-conscious purity, framing devices which highlight and accentuate the underlying themes. It is the play of light in the mirror of the text, projected through the lens of experience, focused by the prism of consciousness: “motes cycloned in the slanting illumination where I had been. And the motes stilled.” (EI 23) With the rainbow magic of a sheen of oil floating on water, cultures, genders, differences are recognised and bridged, even as they are transgressed, redefined. Each split column, the different narratives, they are bridged in the reader’s mind, united by understanding. Delany allows the margins to intrude on his work, through anecdote, through experience, splitting the text to accommodate new perspectives. Delany writes with the hope that his vision may be actualized, and the first thing that must be done is to have the thought that it is possible, that his hopes will be realized, and if we begin there, it will happen. Listen to the marionetteer:

He / is the test of how you see yourself, and regardless of whether or not you hesistate, Sentimentiality and Inhibition are the Scylla and Charybdis of the criticism of this decade, it may be assumed that you have won, that this wooden and external representation (AM 71)

The marginal is made, through the expression of Delany's oeuvre, as magical as a dimension of a multifaceted prism which includes all possibilities in glimpse . . .

The Meaning of a Sensation Term is not a Private Object the Term Picks Out.

Phil 311

Wittgenstein
The Meaning of a Sensation Term is not a Private Object the Term Picks Out.

Peter Fogarty
2/10/95








I

The thesis, that the meaning of a sensation term is not a private object the term picks out, is difficult to interpret. A sensation is something that only you can feel or sense. It is highly individual, like pain. A sensation term is a term representing a sensation; the name given to a sensation. A private object is something that only you have access to. Your sensation of pain is one such private object. Therefore, the thesis can be read as saying that the meaning of pain does not lie in our personal sensation of pain. My personal sensation of pain is something that only I can know and understand. A private language is a language only the speaker can speak and understand. It could be used to refer to my sensation of pain. The thesis claims that we cannot have a private language. We can talk about our personal sensations; but not through a private language. The strongest argument for the thesis is that we cannot have a private language without fixing meaning through a public language. The most powerful objection to the thesis is that we refer to our private sensations to understand public sensation terms. The thesis is relevant to the materialist theory of consciousness in the contemporary philosophy of mind. It can eliminate the qualia objection to the materialist view of consciousness.


II

The thesis, that the meaning of a sensation term is not a private object the term picks out, is a statement against the possibility of having a private language. A private language, according to Wittgenstein, is distinct from a public language; which everyone understands and has access to; in that only the speaker can speak and understand her/his speech. It is not a language that is derived from a public language; for then it would not be private. It is a language that cannot be translated. Such language is untranslatable because the words of this language "refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations"(243). Hence, the content and context of a private language can only be understood by the individual to whom it belongs. The meaning of its terms are untranslatable because only the individual can know what they mean. As Wittgenstein says, "another person cannot understand the language"(243). The terms of a private language are necessarily incomprehensible to another person because of the fact that they cannot experience the same sensations or know the same objects as the owner of the language.

Thus, to say that the meaning of a sensation term is not a private object the term picks out, is to say that we cannot have private language. A sensation is a private thing; nobody can experience the exact same sensation as another. If private language is possible, then the meaning of the term used to describe a sensation would be fixed in that private object that is the sensation. Every private object would have a term to describe it; a term that is understood only by the individual to whom the language belongs. By stating that the meaning of a sensation term does not lie in a private object, the concept of private language is rejected.



III

The need to fix meaning forms the strongest argument for the thesis against the possibility of private language. Wittgenstein illustrates this strongly and clearly in his argument against the possibility of fixing the meaning of sensation terms in a private object. Each argument against private language returns to the need to fix the meaning of sensation terms in a public language. This must be done otherwise the private language is rendered irrelevant; as Wittgenstein states, sarcastically, I imagine: "The proposition 'Sensations are private' is comparable to 'One plays patience by oneself'"(248). This truth reveals the futility behind the quest for a private language. A private language, is by definition, comparable to a game of patience. The only person we can speak a private language with is ourselves. A private language can only give satisfaction to the speaker. Patience is played when the player has nothing better to do. Why should the speaker bother speaking when nobody else can understand her/his spoken private language? The private language is thus rendered irrelevant because it is not communicable.

Wittgenstein, however, destroys the case for the private language much more thoroughly than this. He attempts to build his own private language from the basics. He begins by examining what a sensation term is. They are possibly just words "connected with the primitive, the natural, expressions of the sensation and used in their place"(244). Wittgenstein eliminates the trap of description by saying that these sensation terms do not describe the sensation; but replace it by verbal expression. Sensation terms are therefore from the beginning, public. They are public because they are taught; sensation terms, Wittgenstein says, come from ostensive definition. This is only a possible interpretation; the benefit of the doubt needs to be given to this.


IV

Next, Wittgenstein asks of himself; "in what sense are my sensations private?"(246). Here he addresses the most powerful objection to the thesis. The objection is that sensations are private because nobody can know what someone else's sensation of pain is like and how it is similar or different from his/her own sensation of pain. One's only reference is to one's own pain. The private language argument depends on the meaning of sensation terms being private. If nobody can know another's pain, then the definition of pain cannot be fixed. Yet we still speak of having pain, of sharing pain. We are able to communicate our intensely private sensation of pain in a public sense. We are able to come to a consensus of what constitutes pain.

People are intrigued by the private language argument because they feel that nobody else can know their feelings and sensations. It is seductive because our sensations are private and it is impossible to communicate how it feels to have the sensation, to describe it exactly, to make the listener experience our sensations. It leads us towards the belief that we have a private language. This is the strongest objection to the thesis: that we refer to private sensations to understand public language and we refer to our private sensations with a private language. The advocates for this objection will disagree primarily with the conclusion that the meaning of a sensation term must necessarily be fixed in a public language in order for the speaker to communicate that sensation. It is however, a fundamentally flawed objection as Wittgenstein proves.

The private language advocate can reply to Wittgenstein that he is right; we use concepts and expressions that are understandable to others to communicate a sense of pain; yet we can find meaning in the sensation term for pain in our own personal experience of pain. This objection is almost beside the point. Remember, a private language refers to what can only be known by the individual speaking. By Wittgenstein's definition of what constitutes a private language; the meaning of a public term cannot be a private sensation. As Wittgenstein says: "in so far as it makes sense to say that my pain is the same as his, it is also possible for us both to have the same pain"(253). If two people can compare their pains and agree that they are the same and the while retain a private understanding that their private pain is different, they are saying that their pains are similar. In any case, if the meaning of pain was private, they would not be able to compare their pains; each having a different conception of what constitutes pain.


V

Wittgenstein attempts to reconcile these two arguments. He tries to "shew the fly the way out of the [private language] fly-bottle"(309), to show the private language advocate their error. He attempts to build his own private language. Wittgenstein's eventual conclusion is that a private language is not functional. I will explain his argument in more depth.

Returning to Wittgenstein's interpretation of sensation terms; the ability to communicate pain is understandable because it derives from a public conception of pain. If these sensation terms were natural expressions of sensations, his language would not be private because these expressions would clearly be understandable; being public. But, Wittgenstein notes, sensation terms are not necessarily natural. If there were no natural expression for pain, no groaning or grimacing, it would then become "impossible to teach . . . the use of the word"(257) that matches the sensation; if there ever was such a word. In such a case, the sensation might have a name invented for it; but because the sensation of pain is not obvious to others, it becomes impossible to communicate it. (How can someone with an impassive expression on their face communicate their blinding headache; something that they have never heard of, nor experienced, when there are no visual clues to alert other people to the existence of pain?).

Wittgenstein builds his definitions of the terms and limits of the private language argument by beginning with their foundation; sensations, and building up to sensation terms. But here, he is struck by an impasse: how could the sufferer of the sensation of pain have named it? This question illustrates the need to have a purpose for naming a sensation that is not shared. Why is there a need to name the sensation if it cannot be communicated? To give something a name without understanding why they have named it is a pointless action. To create a sensation term presupposes a public understanding of the term; which means that it cannot be a private object. How can the private sufferer of pain give it a name without privately understanding the reason for giving it a name? To give something a name is to place it in context; as Wittgenstein says: "it shews the post where the new word is stationed"(257). Hence, the existence of a private grammar must be presupposed. A private grammar is necessary to place the name in its context in a private language.

Wittgenstein's attempt at the construction of a private language fails because of insufficient stage-setting. This is clearly demonstrated in his diary example. Wittgenstein's diary example shows how giving a sensation a name without context becomes futile. Wittgenstein decides to keep a diary of a recurrent sensation that he feels; to which he gives the sign 'S'. The sensation, Wittgenstein says, is indefinable, but he can "concentrate [his] attention on the sensation - and so, as it were, point to it inwardly"(258). By this, Wittgenstein refuses to publicly define his sensation; the only sign of his holding that sensation is the moment at which he marks in his diary the day during which he had 'S'. He defines the sensation internally, by impressing it on himself; by saying 'I am feeling "S" right now', thus marking the connection between the sensation and the sign. The sensation is relevant only to Wittgenstein; only he can say whether he is correct in identifying subsequent sensations as 'S'. Wittgenstein remarks on the keeping of the diary as merely a ceremony, for it does nothing and accomplishes nothing for anyone else.

Wittgenstein elaborates that it is necessary to remember that the words that he has used in creating this example of the use of a private language come from a public language: "'sensation' is a word of our common language, not of one intelligible to me alone"(261). The use of these words within a public language stand in need of a justification of their meaning in the public language. The meaning of the sensation term, 'S' is not fixed in the private object that Wittgenstein designated as representing 'S'. 'S' must be defined in the public language for the diary experiment to make sense. Also, Wittgenstein charges that there is no feeling of "pointing-into yourself, which often accompanies 'naming the sensation' when one is thinking about 'private language'"(275). We live everyday without considering that what we see and feel are unique to ourselves; this is because we think in a public language, where we accept that our sensations and feelings, if not the same, are shared. The private object that represents the blue sky, our pains, cannot provide the meaning for sensation terms. What does represent the meaning of sensation terms is a gestalt of private and public understanding of the sensation the term represents.

We communicate our sensations through sensation terms. The meaning of these sensation terms cannot lie in a private language. By the definition of private language, they are not be communicable. To communicate a sensation; a public term must be used. The meaning of a sensation term cannot be a private object that the term picks out. It must always be fixed in a public object; otherwise the sensation term becomes irrelevant. Private language fails because of the constant need to fix its meanings with regard to a public language.


VI

Wittgenstein's thesis is supported by contemporary philosophy of mind. In contemporary philosophy of mind; materialism is the only game in town. Even a light reading of Wittgenstein confirms him as a hardened materialist. An objection to the materialist presentation of consciousness is from the position of qualia. Qualia is a subjective theory. The advocates for qualia claim that consciousness can never be defined physically, that there is another, inexplicable side to our mental states. This is as opposed to the materialist view that consciousness can be and will be fully understood. A Neo-Wittgenstein argument against qualia will eliminate the qualia objection to the materialist view of consciousness, by the same criteria by which Dennett sniffs: "they just aren't functional"(404) and dismisses Jackson's epiphenomenal qualia.

This contemporary theory is relevant to the examination of the thesis because both are similar problems. Both are reliant on what cannot quite be defined. Qualia and sensations are names for related mental states, if they are not the same thing. We cannot know another person's qualia just as we cannot know another person's sensations. Qualia is the Latin for qualities. In philosophy it is the qualities of experience that are under discussion. Personal experience, strictly speaking, is a private object. It includes sensations. The problems of qualia and private language are similar in that they are both internally located. A private language is possible just as epiphenonemal qualia are possible; it's just that both are non-functional. Both have no real effect on the world. Frank Jackson's interpretation of epiphenomenal qualia is that "certain properties of certain mental states, namely these . . . called qualia, are such that their possession or absence makes no difference to the physical world" but the "instantiation of qualia makes a difference to other mental states, though not to anything physical"(133). This sounds familiar. Although the analogy is not perfect, in that sensations do make a difference in the physical world, a private language does make no difference to the physical world and it would make a difference to other mental states. Wittgenstein does not directly say this, but implies it when he says: "One plays patience by oneself"(248).

Wittgenstein's argument against private language works just as well against epiphenomenal qualia if we consider it as an inclusive sensation term. A neo-Wittgenstein argument will consider that epiphenomenal qualia is a collective term for sensations. It would then deconstruct it in the same way as I have described previously; reaching the conclusion that although epiphenomenal qualia are private, they are discussed in a public language and therefore do not constitute a private language. As I have said, the analogy is imperfect, but this relevant because it is a new materialist reply against qualia.


VII

Wittgenstein effectively removes the foundation stone of the old Seventeenth and Eighteenth century models of language, at the same time rejecting the idea of private language as being inconsequential with the thesis: that the meaning of a sensation is not a private object the term picks out. This thesis eliminates the relevance of having private language by removing the meaning of sensation terms from private objects that the term represents. What does represent the meaning of the sensation term is a gestalt of private and public understanding of the sensation the term represents. Wittgenstein shows that all private language arguments fail because the meaning of their terms need to be fixed in a public language. This is the strongest argument for the thesis. The main objection to the thesis is that we look to our private sensations to understand the meaning of public sensation terms. Wittgenstein, however, shows us that our understanding of these sensation terms is based on a public consensus on their meaning. The thesis indirectly rejects the qualia objection to the materialist view of consciousness in contemporary philosophy of mind by asserting that, as a private language is non-functional, qualia is non-functional because they are not relevant to the physical world. We may have them, but they don't do anything relevant. "So", Wittgenstein says, "in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like to just emit an inarticulate sound"(261).








Bibliography

* Brown, Derek. PHIL 311 Lectures 1995
* Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness Explained. (Penguin; Auckland, 1991).
* Jackson, Frank. Epiphenomenal Qualia. Philosophical Quarterly. 1982. (127-136).
* Proudfoot, Diane. PHIL 311 Lectures 1995
* Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. (Oxford; Blackwell, 1992). (paras: 243-308).

The Resistance of the Hyperself against the Concept of Simulation in William Gibson's Burning Chrome.

AMST 106

The Resistance of the Hyperself against the Concept of Simulation in William Gibson's Burning Chrome.

1/6/95










In the postmodern, decentered world of William Gibson's Burning Chrome, the notion of identity is rapidly disappearing. It is slowly being destroyed by the pervasive influences of simulation and the development of the hyperself in response. It is erased by a supersaturation of stimuli, so overwhelming that the distinction between the artificial and the real is completely lost and Gibson's universe becomes, like his matrix, a disorientating, dangerous and strangely seductive place to be. Individuality is all but lost, but resistance exists in some individual agencies' adaptation and subversion of the bewildering array of technology and sentient corporations prowling the fragmented globe. The hyperself becomes the only way to preserve a semblance of individuality in the face of the loss of originality. The hyperself becomes a resistance against assimilation into the power games that corporations play in the killing fields.

The central source of the erosion of identity in Burning Chrome is its saturation with simulation. Simulation becomes the medium for communication. Baudrillard's "ecstasy of communication" lies in the transcendental aura of Gibson's cyberspace. Cyberspace is a virtual realm that exists everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It is a simulation created to illustrate the relative sizes of databases and to act as a virtual universe. The simulated matrix is "an abstract representation of the relationships between data systems . . . [an] electronic consensus-hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive qualities of data"(197). The matrix is laid out in cyberspace. It is best described in Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive as "the bright grid, the towering forms of data . . . a chrome yellow plain of light"(269). No amount of description can describe how transcendental the matrix seems to be: it is a "bodiless exultation" Even though it is an "illusion"(205), it is more real than reality.

Another dimension of cyberspace are the simstims. These are a futuristic version of today's soap operas, made possible by the same technology that created the matrix. Simstims, or "simulated stimuli"(211), are viewed as if the viewer was the star, Tally Isham: "the world - all the interesting parts . . . as viewed by Tally Isham. Tally raced a black Fokker ground-effect place across Arizona mesa tops . . . Tally partied with the superrich on private Greek islands, heartbreaking purity of these tiny white seaports at dawn"(211). These two dimensions of cyberspace come from advances in bio-technology and use simulation to draw the subject in.

Simulation in Gibson's world is pervasive. Because it is pervasive and indistinguishable from the original, the distinction between real and artificial becomes lost. The artificial becomes more real than the real. Cyberspace becomes more appealing than reality. In 'Fragments of a Hologram Rose', Parker survives only through his ASP (apparent sensory perception) fix. He uses ASP cassettes to enable him to sleep, and to escape from his mundane job writing "continuity for broadcast ASP, programming the eye movements of the industry's human cameras"(53). When he discovers a blank cassette that his ex-lover has recorded and jacks in, the calmness of the cassette is more soothing than his early life in a violent, turbulent and confusing Texan landscape: "European sunlight. Streets of a strange city. Athens . . . Look through her eyes . . . at the gray monument, horses there in stone, where pigeons whirl up and circle"(57). It is an escape for Parker. This idyllic cassette projects into cyberspace, where he becomes the woman in Athens and finds refuge in simulation.

The question of whether a simulated, artificial consciousness is the same as a normal consciousness is raised by 'The Winter Market'. Because the artificial is more real than the real, there is no distinction between the two. Casey, a dream editor and producer meets Lise, a young, terribly wasted girl wired on wizz and so weak; her body is only supported by an exoskeleton wired to her brain. He discovers the power of her mind, and helps her become a star. Neuroelectronics, a subsidiary of biotechnology has reached the stage where dreams can be recorded, and consciousness downloaded into massive databases. This technology creates a star out of Lise, but she is dying, so her consciousness is encoded into a database. Casey is troubled by his knowledge that "she was dead, and I'd let her go. Because, now, she was immortal, and I'd helped get her that way. And because I knew she'd phone me, in the morning"(140). Casey comes to the realisation that the artificial consciousness is no longer any different from human consciousness. After all "the technology is there, so who, man, really who, is to say?"(165). Simulation, in Lise's case, has superseded the original. The simulation is the original, because Lise's body has been cremated, her identity or an approximation of it, is encoded into a database. She will phone him. Who can say it is not real?

Every person's identity changes according to circumstances. The core of identity is the self, the part of an individual that always remains the same. In Gibson's universe, circumstances change so rapidly that a multiplicity of identities is needed to cope. This multiplicity forms the hyperself. The hyperself is a self constructed out of various personas according to need. The self has evaporated; there is nothing at the core of the individual, only personas filling an empty shell.

In 'New Rose Hotel', Fox and Sandii shuffle their identities like packs of cards. Fox is in search of the 'Edge', a new tool to make him perform even better for his chosen corporation, Hosaka. He discovers this Edge in Sandii, discovered in a bar in Yokohama; she is "Eurasian, half gaijin, long hipped and fluid in a Chinese knock-off of some Tokyo designer's original. Dark European eyes, Asian cheekbones"(125). Sandii is like Fox in that she has multiple identities. Her past is never the same, it is a construct cut from a deck of identities: "cut carefully from the scattered deck of [her] past"(130). Sandii is the definition of the hyperself. Even her features typify the hyperself; they seem constructed from the best possible.

Sandii floats into the narrator's life and helps him and Fox defy the expertise of Maas Biolabs GmbH, a multinational corporation, by kidnapping their key genetic engineer for their rival, Hosaka. Then she betrays them, and destroys Hosaka's Edge with a synthesised meningal virus manufactured by Maas. Sandii disappears; she adopts another identity and vanishes into the confusion and decay as Hosaka hunts, a wounded animal screaming for blood. The narrator, safe in his coffin room, can only wonder: "sometimes you just didn't seem real to me. Fox once said you were ectoplasm, a ghost called up by the extremes of economies"(137). This is what Sandii is, a hyperself; who, when examined, is entirely superficial. There is no core beneath the multitude of identities past and present.

This hyperself, while being a consequence of the necessities of Gibson's world, is also a form of resistance. It is a form of resistance because it is the choice of an individual agency. It is the only way to preserve a semblance of individuality in the face of corporate might. It was Sandii's choice to betray her lover and work for Maas against Hosaka; she asserted her individuality, and shuffled her deck of identities and disappeared. She used Fox and the narrator to advance out of her previous existence: "We thought we'd found you, Sandii, fbut really you'd found us. Now I know you were looking for us, or for someone like us . . . looking for a way out"(130). It was her choice; the assertion of her will. Rather than being acted upon, Sandii acts for herself. She makes active and original decisions. This magnesium flare of originality, of Edge, in Gibson's decaying landscape is a resistance to the relentless oppression of the corporations. Sandii was an individual agent. In a similar way, Fox and the narrator are individual agents, part of a whole, but ronin: "We were mutagens, Fox and I, dubious agents adrift on the dark side of the intercorporate sea"(128). Resistance is going with the tide, and working subtle, damaging changes to the composition of the sea.

In a different way, the cyberspace hustlers of 'Burning Chrome' are resisting by subverting their technology and entering cyberspace to steal data. In 'Burning Chrome', Bobby Quine and Automatic Jack cut into Chrome's database; slicing through malevolent black ice with a Russian military icebreaker to insert a program that will remove all her money, giving it to "a dozen world charities. There was too much there to move, and we knew we had to break her, burn her straight down, or she might come after us. We took less than ten percent for ourselves"(217). They are cowboys; it is their job to do this kind of stuff. Gibson's characters in his novels are usually cyberspace hustlers; breaking into huge corporation databases to remove vital information, or to simply, like Bobby, steal money. These corporations are encased by black ice, which is a neural feedback weapon designed to repel or even kill intruders.

Ice (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics) is an example of how real simulation has become. It is real enough to kill. By breaking through Chrome's ice: "They said she cooked her own cancers for people who crossed her, rococo custom variations that took years to kill you"(196), Bobby and Jack are resisting the implication that they cannot do the job, that they don't have the guts to face her ice. They are burglars, thieves, working "for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data". Because they are thieves, they are resisting the status quo, and they do this by adapting the technology created by these corporations and turning it back at them.

In William Gibson's dystopian, fragmented universe of predatory multinational corporations, in the decaying urban infrastructure of Burning Chrome; the concept of identity has been worn away by the relentless bombardment of simulation. The simulation becomes more real than the real and the sense of the original is lost. Because of the loss of the original, there is no longer any distinction between real and artificial. There is no difference between the human consciousness and the simulation of consciousness. In their attempt to resist this supersaturation; individual agencies subvert and adapt the technology that makes the simulations possible for their own ends. Ultimately, individual agency is no match for the corporations; all they can do is to try and survive. These survivors have evolved a hyperself; a multitude of identities to live in this postmodern universe. The hyperself is their attempt to be original; to go against the intercorporate tide, to assert their individuality. After all, it is the multinational corporations, the zaibatsus who are the dominant lifeforms; the individual agent's continued existence depends only on not being caught.





Bibliography

* Baudrillard, Jean. 'The Ecstasy of Communication'. From The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. (ed.) Hal Foster. (Bay Press; Port Townsend, 1983).
* Gibson, William. 'Fragments of a Hologram Rose', 'New Rose Hotel', 'The Winter Market' and 'Burning Chrome'. From Burning Chrome. (HarperCollins; London. 1983).
- Mona Lisa Overdrive. (Grafton; London, 1989).
- Neuromancer. (HarperCollins; London, 1984).
* Gregg, Jane. Tutorial 3. AMST 106; 16/5/95.
* Wilcox, Leonard. AMST 106 Lectures on White Noise and Burning Chrome. From 8/5/95 to 17/5/95.

Notes on “Red Roses for Bronze” (HD CP: 209 – 305)

On the function of the poet / of poetry / rejection / isolation / in unrequited love / and need for spirituality / HD sculpts her love in bronze / shaping the contours and wandering curves / belittled, mocked by cynic curls worn / by a light and free intellect / imprisioned by her gaze /

“With stroke, / stroke, / stroke, / stroke, / stroke at–something” (211) melts with welcome / HD’s careworn emotions sliding layers over one another, sediment falling to the sea-bed as her wishes, her images spin lazy down the page / how easily am I caught by red roses caught in bronze / when exasperated, a little breath is lost / “that I would prove too strange, too proud, / for just the ordinary sort of come and go, / the little half-said thing, / the half-caught smile,” (211-2) / the incredulity of “forgot? impossible,” (212) / quiet, contemplative, plaintive – a woman, fiercly independent / but desire has pulled despair out of the ravine / that separates by a marble stair / of love denied / of gaze fallen upon the muscle concealed beneath fine weave / her desire surges forth “I feel that I must turn and tear and rip” (213) / in her frustration – she longs to flail forth – to make him aware of her singularity among women / treat my exception with honour /

A scenario is built in IV / would you meet me “to-day – / tomorrow will not do at all;” (213) / HD’s discomfort makes my fingers ache as they dance over the keys / why the aching pain inside me / nags me, pushes fears forward / my faith in writing ever nearer the marble stair / of alienation and misunderstanding / without the complete picture / how can I proceed? /

Afro–futurist sound–check for Harry Allen / Ray Keith live in Mannheim, Germany: 000602 / http://www.breakbeat.co.uk/archive/dnbevents/liveevent3_raykeith.asx / now droppin Krust’s ‘Cloakin Device’ / http://www.krust.co.uk/media/real/new_releases/cloakin_device.ram /

Encircled by light caught in a tangle of serpents, HD slips into a rapture / bewitched by his hair / his eyes, flecked with pounamu glint / and we are swept by her adoring gaze / grasping the ineffable essence which words attempt to imprision / her love, who is as distant as the stars, as Mars, or Actaeon / as avatar of Artemis, the Huntress / buried beneath the hounds of desire, despair and desolation / Artemis’s own, not his own / did HD wish she would be stumbled on – in a cavern – to find Actaeon caught in surprise at Artemis’s sudden beauty / as she bathed / only to have her call his own hounds upon his transcendence from hunter into hunted / that sudden betrayal of purpose / of desire revealed all too late / when wounds bleed for too long / in mis-deed, retribution is swift / even the crime of inattention /

And did Artemis deliberately lose her race / did she cast her face / so that the dappled light beneath oak trees / flickered with irony over the freed mystery / of allure, so deep and still that all men are ensnared by her visage / in all her honesty – all her forthright pride – her solid sense of worth / so that she seethes in jealousity, in hate, and in love spited / spiritedly sings “I would clear so fiery a space / that no mere woman’s love could long endure; / and I would set your bronze head in its place, / about the base, / my roses would endure,” (215) / as she knows that her own is eternity / her red rose in brazen words sprint ever forth / outwards and upwards through time / the flame always one step ahead of ashes and dust / all that is left of these of lesser spirit / where is the earthy ideal / deal la ma!

Esprint activated / 21 electrodes tingling in the sudden vacuum / auditory relief / back into the formless / bone conducting vibrations from each bone – a nerve relay / no perceptible delay in response between nature and machine / sound meshes with vibro-sense / I listen to HD – she continues, a poem may also be a microcosm for a book / and “Red Roses for Bronze” circles and penetrates these themes / HD, a dancing matador goading her malcontence / HD finds a certain liberation in the expression of sensuous image and ritual / in a love which is transcendent / “ is a trap, / a snare ) /a bird lifed a passionless wing; / nothing, nothing was ever so fair / as the wonder that clutched at me there, / unaware; under the rain; my brain sang” (217) / in this refrain, too easy to grasp at this / and say ‘HD knows the pain of indifferent beauty; of the besotted vision which finds sumptuous wonder in the most starved of gesture’ / while this is not quite simplex, does it go deep enough into complexity to be called multiplex? /

One often finds darkness in the depths / and “Red Roses for Bronze” ends with ‘The Mysteries’ / a poem which begins its six sections in dark days / gloomy spirits, turbulent earth / then breaks the permafrost with the first flower of the season / at the cusp of her love lost / comes love renewed / with spring in step, it’s hard not to lift your head / and smell your bouquet / a sceptre / a flower / enchanter / magician / arch–mage / escalating magics running across the moor to greet the stripped, fevered warrior / its purpose? “Not to destroy, / nay, but to sanctify” (303&304).

My feeling is that this dimension of HD’s work reflects but one facet of her nature / and nature is the key / nature transcends human failings / while the pangs echo endlessly down corridors / “the air / will be full of multiple wings;” (218) / again, and again, HD turns away from the frailities of other humans to these long gone myths the Greeks stole from Kemet – but whose essence lives on, in the history of the tale / HD’s voice runs now quick, “Who is there, / who is there in the road?” (223), now lifted by endorphins “again shall my pulses beat / like the deer / escaped from the net,” (226), now melancholy “Hard, / hard it is to wake the gods, / but once awake, / hard, / hard, / hard is the lot / of the ignorant man,” (227) / Our own ignorance struggles with HD / in a world where words have become kaleidoscopic / where grammar has lost its importance / overwhelmed by the sound–bite / where classical no longer means white european achievement / but tradition in all its multitude / where the Greeks sample Africa / the persistent, constant use of Greek mythology to accentuate / imposes http://longman.awl.com/mythology/glossaries/default.asp upon the reader / even as “Orion bent / to shelter Artemis;” (261) and is slain for his pains and thereafter his dance across the sky is chased by the scorpion /

Peter Fogarty A4 14 000806

Notes on HD’s ‘Leuke’ in her _Helen in Egypt_

On L’isle blanche “as a flash in the heavens at noon / that blinds the sun, / is their Meeting.” CP100 I am struck by this image of the white island – a splitting of the atom – skills known to the ancients – an ability to split the atom with the weapon of superconsciousness – as Krishna demonstrated for Arjuna, and the walls of Jericho ruined by chanted harmonics. If Agamemnon and Achilles are two parts of an atom, to be split asunder for love, whom is the third star, if not Helen?

The cruel ties of Love bound within a gaze; Love does not love me but I love Love. As Helen wanders in the veils of time, she is drawn to her changing story: the disputable origins, locations and serenity of floating beneath a clear Mediterranean summer night. I smell the crisp tang of hot sand as my senses withdraw – the stars measured by the sway of a mast.

Again, the woman scorned, Oenone: abandoned by Paris for Helen of a thousand ships. Yet she bears witness to the death of her Love, calm, but for her “wild eyes” as Pallas turns her back on Paris. The handsomest man alive, the bewitched suitor betrayed to his death by Aphrodite’s promise. Yet he slew Achilles for Helen, the man whom she loved – after Aphrodite’s spell untangled at the walls of Troy.

Driftshards in time, detail of a veil fluttering in the wind as Helen vanishes into the stairwell.

Dying Paris reaches out for ghostly Helen, “you say you did not die on the stairs, / that the love of Achilles sustained you; I say he never loved you.” HE 144.

Theory ? Text ?

“we were frenzied beasts rampaging on bassfields in the jungle: surgical artists remorselessly guiding our passage.” Fogarty, 000319.

Where is text? Where is theory? Two questions bring storms of response; so many conditions can preciptate a different kind of rain, or shall we say: text. The imprint of alphabetic and alphanumeric symbols on a page, a screen, or a mind, is this text? If we play with the textual layers, my text, your text, Hyde’s text, whence can we define text from the nth dimension? From a vantage-point: a photon orbiting a nucleus composed of variant neurons. Text slides, a platelet on an icy mountain freshlet, bumping, spinning about grassy stalks thrusting from the current, in my mind. But these words are timid, flashy and ultimately arise out of distraction, as one reads desperately, to cleanse the eye from theory, from fiction, from poetry, from the mundane horror of 1930s fiction, no more circumlocutions! I beg of you.

Demanding, childish voice: TEXT?

If we are so pendatic as to have to refer to a dictionary or some other such resource, we find that the common consensus hallucination is that text is “the main body of printed words in a book as opposed to the notes and illustrations.” How anal. But as we delve deeper into this book on the sixth floor, we find that “the actual words of an author or piece of written work as opposed to commentary on them” is a fair idea of what text should be in our context of Hyde.

BUT.

The piece of paper in your hand, with the squiggly symmetrical markings on it, in even columns and rows, is this not a text? No. How many times?! I’m not an author. I’m not a writer; not even a textualist, ok? This piece of paper, or electronic bits encoded within a document in server no.5 in Superb Net, Seattle, cannot be considered to be a text unless I, myself am under discussion, under investigation for insubordination and dereliction of duty. In such an environment, this would be and shall be considered a text, as would my handwritten notes, as would any fragmentary piece of paper yielding some nonsensical phrase, in my hand, shall we see: “ in silence there is no death, only replenishment. Iron child, leaden, heavy: a burden to be carried, dead weight, consuming always with no return  iron child = war machine / stormy / fierce and petulant”. But here! A little further on, we find this apparent non-sense in a high, frantic hand, some words seemingly meaningless: “Elantite! Sharp SpIked [exaggerated, resembling meaning] needles mounting sea ripples [scribbles?] / waves weighing upon our furtherst shore of plenty  a movement into spasmodicy” (unknown notebook found unburnt in the ashes of Fogarty’s desk. 370819). The surrounding context for this unusual fragment is the work Fogarty was studying at the time, The Book of Nadath. We believe this because of “iron child”, which is the title of the eighth section of this long poem’s publication in 99. Could Fogarty have been referring to Hyde’s handwriting or his own? We shall never know, we are at too distant a remove to attempt to organise Fogarty’s disheveled notebooks, filled as they are with poetic rambles.

However, this discursion across textfields illustrates the potential for any piece of writing to be considered a text. Your text is as good as my text. But my text isn’t a text: it’s commentary. It cannot be considered a text unless it’s taken by unknown hackers and mutated into a text; anthropologists, sociologists, poor students undertaking textologic evacuations of the jumbled characters in such foolhardy rushes of expression post eleven hundred on twenty eight of three in zero zero.

These preliminary conditions for Hyde mean that our answer must be; any known, unknown fragment, letters, manuscripts and published works: all compose her text.

“what . . . is this thing that makes your heart roar and the muscles sing on your bones . . . ?” They Flew At Ciron, 81.

Nadath & Prophet: I could see how they could be regarded as similar, structurally. Nadath: false indeed, imagery obscures enlightenment, speaks to my eye, to my mind. Prophet: sings, unbearable song of freedom, of realisation, of escape through the eightfold path, out of the five delusions into the trinity of our world. We do not live in duality. Where is Rubaiyat in this?

Pleading, sobbing voice: THEORY?

This entire A4 is all theory, if we consider theory to be a series of ideas and general principles which sought to explain some aspect of text, these ideas and explanations have not been proven and never will. That’s is the nature of theory baybe! These conjectures about Hyde’s texts, about her compositions, the ‘correct’ manuscript theories; they’re all just hypotheses. However some hypotheses are better than others  what right does one have, sixty-one years later, to make decisions based on fragmentary manuscripts? It’s the desire to see something brought into the light of day, of criticism, to show literary artists the genius in their midst, with the apologetic understanding that this is an unfinished work, but here it is, in the way we believe the text was intended to be presented. No one is omniscient, it’s all theory, and we cannot have the practical application of our theories: how dare you accuse me of necrophilia?

I shy from theory, as I shy from a cowherd with razorblades embedded in sugarcubes, my forelegs threshing the air as the bit clamps my tongue and pulls my head down. Whence does text dissolve, becomes actuality? Crossing these borders is a monumental task of sorting, poring, associating: jumble of dates in my mind, made more confusing / difficult by different scales, agreements and jealous guarding of documents. Exhibitionist, isn’t Fogarty?

The deaf infant’s movement through Kristeva’s Semiotic and Symbolic

175.707






The deaf infant’s movement through Kristeva’s Semiotic and Symbolic














Peter Fogarty
Friday 22 October

Analyzing the development of the deaf infant through Julia Kristeva’s semiotic and symbolic with focus on the chora, thetic and mimesis stages highlights the source of the problem deaf have with language acquisition. As Kristeva is notoriously difficult to comprehend, once the reader feels that se has understood her prose, a re-reading reveals yet another interpretation: therefore this can but be one possible application of her thesis. Because the deaf infant acquires language at a much slower pace than normal, it is interesting to see how Kristeva defines the boundaries of the movement of the infant from the semiotic into the symbolic. She moves out the scope of language into the extralinguistic past the relations of signifier and signified into the semiotic and symbolic, always with a concern for the speaking subject.

The semiotic is the formless, anarchic motility of impulse and energy seething in the infant’s body before hir drives manifest themselves in the symbolic, which it pre-signifies. The symbolic represents the concrete solidity of the defined, of language. The semiotic and the symbolic enable the subject to signify, produce discourse and engage in society; this is how they are related. In this way the infant learns to associate the signifier with the signified in the semiotic. The formation of hir subjectivity, of identity is made by the connections se makes between the signifier and the signified, thus allowing hir to move into the symbolic. The semiotic is the space occupied by the infant and hir mother; it is a space preceding the moment of stability, of identity acquisition and subject formation. Kristeva locates the infant in the semiotic by the chora: ‘an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases’ (35).

Kristeva’s chora precedes everything, it is unformed, yet formed: it is the loci the infant, whether deaf or not, finds hirself immediately after hir emergence into the world from hir mother. The chora constistutes the uncertain infant before se begins to attain a signifying position; a position in which se consolidates hir identity before crossing the mirror stage. The deaf struggle to emerge from the chora into the thetic phase; their social stimulus is limited to the visual. They live within the social organization they were born into, their family and the communication system of their family, be it sign or oral speech. If the deaf infant is congenitally deaf, se will not acquire an understanding of sound until much latter in life; if the infant suddenly goes deaf, it comes as a great loss; a sense, which they did not know they had, vanishes and the trauma is evident. The social organization, which is always already symbolic, imprints its constraints onto the unformed motility of the chora. The deaf struggle to meet the expectations of a symbolic world while living in the semiotic chora & take a long time to move out into the thetic, and mimesis after that.

The movement out of the chora is marked by the infant’s drive to communicate; this drive is ambiguous, destructive and assimilating. The infant’s oral and anal needs are dominated by hir mother who mediates the symbolic. It is in this mediation of the symbolic that the life of a deaf infant is first determined: oral or visual, the drive to communicate is seeded here. This distinction must be made because it is the method the mother uses to speak to her child that determines the infant’s ability to acquire language. If the deaf mother uses sign to communicate with her child; the deaf infant develops quite naturally, speaking with hir body in gesture and mime. However, sign is object oriented; the tenuous connections between symbols and abstract ideas are not as easily expressed as they have no visual referent. If the mother uses an oral method of communication, such as was made in my case, with amplification of sound and speech movements, the deaf infant will take much longer to acquire language but has the potential to become almost assimilated into the social organization of the English speaking culture.

The drive to move out of the chora into the thetic phase and through the mirror stage is a struggle of waves against stases, pushing through blockages of understanding as the infant gradually realizes its separation from hir mother and passes through a castration phase. The deaf infant floods the barren plain of silence with hir body, expressing what se cannot, in the chora where se is generated and negated in motile instability. The realization that something is wrong, something is lacking, that they have been castrated unknowingly, their silence thrusts against their forming identity, molding it irreversibly as their body speaks. At 6 months of age, the deaf infant falls silent, vocal enunciation ceases but continues in gesture. The deaf infant of deaf parents soon learns to use sign rather than speech to attract hir mother’s attention, and thus their ability to vocalize is gradually lost and has to be brought back into life by therapy. I underwent twelve years of speech therapy to reach my current level of eloquence. The acquisition of the symbolic is a social effect of the relation to the other. It is established through biological and social differences and limits in concrete, historical family structures.

The deaf infant, as other infants do, moves from the chora into the thetic, the precondition for signification and assumption of language: the threshold between the semiotic and symbolic. It is within the thetic phase that the deaf infant moves apart from the normal infant in hir development. Hir growth slows, as stimulus remains visual and its place in the world, before the mirror stage, comfortably resides with hir mother. Fundamentally, Kristeva’s explanation holds for the development of all infants, but deaf in particular struggle to fully enter the symbolic in the sense that they find it difficult to form abstract concepts. It would be impossible, for example, to translate this essay into sign. Deaf tend to have a large vocabulary of signs representing visual concepts, but struggle to make connections between these signs: although all oscillate from the semiotic to the symbolic, the thetic phase is particularly problematic for the deaf

The thetic phase is the break in the signifying process between the signifier and signified: a slippage. The connection between signifier and signified to form signification is problematic for the deaf infant because they find it difficult to grasp the signified. The signifier is seen and understood implicitly, but the meaning in the signified is hard to learn and express. The deaf infant’s awareness of the world about hir is the same as a normal infant but the names of objects take longer to arrive, especially in an oral environment; in a sign environment, there may even be no naming sign for the object. Living in the motile semiotic, fragmented identity, clutching at hir mother, the deaf infant’s enunciation of hir drives is very much trapped in the oral and anal cycles in an acceptance that this is the way things are. This acceptance carries on throughout the deaf person’s life; if that is how things are, then that must be the way things are. The deaf infant learns this during the thetic phase before the mirror stage when se perceives hir reflection and realizes that hir unformed, motile state is reflected in a coherent body and discovers hir identity; hir space is filled by one alone, separate from hir mother. A spatial intuition is realized; the infant realizes se is separate from other objects and begins to distinguish itself with holophrastic enunciations while still in the agitated semiotic.

The deaf infant’s holophrastic utterances, expressing a complex of ideas with a sound or gesture becomes a signifier, the vocalization of the deepest structures of the body speaking its drive to communicate, its struggle to emerge into the symbolic with hir utterances. The deaf infant takes much longer to reach the threshold of language enunciation because se is not aware that gestures, sounds are communications until after passing the mirror stage. There is a division here in this threshold between the sign and oral deaf. The deaf infant in a social environment of sign, of deaf parents, learns early that vocalizing brings no response, whereas gesture does and thus its path of development through the thetic phase is fixed. There is an acute and dramatic confrontation between the unified subject, learning, positing, identifying, and the motile, uncertain, shifting semiotic chora at this stage of the thetic phase.

This separation of the semiotic chora and the unified subject which is posited in the social structure of the symbolic is a castration, a realization of identity and the infant begins to acquire language, guided by hir mother, who represents the phallus. The semiotic motility of the infant is transposed onto the more stable ground of the symbolic order. However the gap between signifier and signified remains; without completion of this phase no signifying practice is possible. Closure of the thetic phase comes with mimesis as the infant learns mimicry from its social environment. Because the deaf infant is trapped in the gap between signifier and signified, observing the signifier but unable to grasp the signified, it must mimic the function of the signified without understanding its meaning. Hence the deaf infant constructs an signified which is perceived to be like the truth but not quite.

The deaf infant of deaf parents comes closer to a normal acquisition of language than the oral deaf raised by hearing parents as visual gestures of sign language in their social environment are easily perceived, absorbed and imitated. The oral deaf are heavily reliant on direct intervention. The oral deaf infant’s mother must make a conscious and sustained effort to communicate with her child as speechreading is arbitrary in the least. An effort must be made on the part of the deaf infant to connect the movements of the mouth with the signified from its signifier. The deaf learn to communicate through mime, gesture and attempts to imitate their parents. Their body speaks by mimesis, the imitation of other creatures. The construction of the symbolic emerges from the semiotic in imitation of social convention. The most successful deaf are usually the born chameleons.

Trapped in the gap between signifier and signified, the deaf infant will always struggle to make a connection between the two to form a full sign. It will not be until a much more mature life, after immersion in the social environment of the symbolic that the deaf is able to make deeper, abstract connections between signs. Even then, their language to the expressible concepts of that language limits the deaf who communicate by sign. As sign is very object oriented, the return to the poetic language of the semiotic in the symbolic; making the semiotic part of the symbolic, making it new, is virtually impossible, distinguished only by subtle nuances in gestures which directly refer to objects and their relation to the environment. It is nearly impossible to distort the signifier to enable this return to the semiotic. The problem of the acquisition of language for the deaf is rooted in the incompletion of the thetic phase, forcing the deaf to rely on the mimesis stage of their development. As language is a doubly articulated system, split between the signifier and the signified, the bridging of this chasm is precisely what distinguishes the deaf infant from a normal infant, absorbing the world like the utterly receptive sponge se is. The limits of the world are defined by the limits of the language learnt.

Bibliography

• Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989.
• Kristeva, Julia. “The Semiotic and the Symbolic.” The Portable Kristeva. Ed. Oliver, Kelly. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
• Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Miller, Jacques-Alain. Trans. Sheridan, Alan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.
• Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Modern Literary Theory: A Reader. Eds. Rice, Philip and Waugh, Patricia. New York: Edward Arnold, 1992.

psychobabble

psychobabble

dual spin plates suspended astagger
gravity wells column roil square

cultivate field of thought
objects within define room more

enclosed space contains preference
affinity, symbiosis of polyglot virii

open pasture to genetic meddlin
edges bleed territory: meaning

seeps sumps intermarry blurry survival
goldi closed, stranger proof deny

pattern of growth swell coffers
spill over, intrude infected ideas

spreading pool propagate species
seed germinate layers, strata

descent stepped into graduation
shoots waver glided ripple

no closure


but of course. I called it open field, and open field is what the poem discusses. We were reading a charles olsen text on geography, body and fields in literature, specifically poetry and poetics. There's a fair bit of pontification going on there, hence, psychobabble. the poem is just my psychobabble on the idea of open field.

psychobabble

with that image I attempt to evoke the idea of two plates spinning, generating a magnetic force opposing that of the earth and creating an effect of antigravity. they're plates so imagine these plates scattered and staggered across the sky, floating fields, also there's a metaphor there on the use of magnetic fields to oppose the natural forces of gravity that holds us all to the ground

dual spin plates suspended astagger

this continues the idea of gravity, the squares float in a roiling gravity well, gravity fights to ground them, but the magnetic forces oppose it,

gravity wells column roil square

on the plates, we cultivate a field of thoughts, of ideas, thinking of field as a conceptual space, in which fields are defined by the thoughts that it contains. if we utter a marxism, we're in the field of marx and marxists. if you know what I mean?

cultivate field of thought

it is what the field contains that defines it, looking at the individual objects that compose fields

objects within define room more

the space that encloses the field holds the preferred ideologies, conceptual trains of thought that consistute the field. these three lines are iterations of the same idea, what makes a field a field; what it contains

enclosed space contains preference

and what it contains is a certain affinity of thought, a symbiosis, or meld of several people's ideas, thought of a glut of ideas, and turned that into polyglot, I'm not sure if it's a word, I can't find its meaning anywhere, but it sounds good, and the sound's the thing, this poem is mean to be read aloud. virii is clear I thought, viruses infecting minds and changing their perspectives, breeding and feeding

affinity, symbiosis of polyglot virii

but what happens if you open a field/pasture? genetic meddling with what defines the field, is to change the field, so if we open the field, new ideas and thoughts are going to come through, discoveries made in one science applied to another in the humanities, by opening the field, we open it to meddling and mutation

open pasture to genetic meddlin

the thought of the field remaining identifiable at its center, but the opened edges of the field are blending, bleeding into the other fields, that point of crossover where meaning arises and situations are fluid

edges bleed territory: meaning

thinking of ideas seeping into sumps within our minds, for us to retrieve with our unconscious mind, intermarrying survival tactics, blurring the edges, it creates a nice little alliteration with the repetition of sounds here, only by joining forces can ideas survive and breed, marry

seeps sumps intermarry blurry survival

this is a reference to the proofreading job that I did for penguin, and which prevented me from doing my A4 on time, which is why I wrote this poem during my class instead of doing something else before it. I got to class, found out what the topic was, and then made notes, writing the poem in the last ten minutes of the class. The book I was proofing was called Closed, Stranger, by Kate De Goldi

goldi closed, stranger proof deny

if the opening of the field is successful, ideas are bound to mutate, breed, spread and spill over the confinements of the original field, swelling coffers, and I mean coffers here in the sense of a strong, enclosed space, like a strongbox or the dry boxes used for underwater construction, if they can be swelled against the pressure of the outside mass . . .

pattern of growth swell coffers

and spill over, breaking into other fields, infected ideas, concepts intruding

spill over, intrude infected ideas

and spreading, a spread is propagation, procreation, more and more people click onto it, the survival of the species is strong, also liked the image of a pool of water spreading, that skin on the water inching along the ground . . .

spreading pool propagate species

seeds of thought germinate layers of the mind, strata, a visual image of the layers within, being fertilised by the conceptual seed

seed germinate layers, strata

a descent from that level of thought, in graduated steps, also a graduation as an accomplisment, and descent as return, a swoop from far heights

descent stepped into graduation

and to calm the consciousness after such a series of abstract images, a soothing line about shoots, rice shoots maybe, wavering in a ripple gliding across the surface,

shoots waver glided ripple

but there can be no closure, no resolution, no end of definition when it comes to open field, for that is the nature of open field.

no closure




16 / 08 / 1999

Meditation on Composition

He glows with danger. Most people just shimmer . . . he looks like a lightning bolt.
Noon, Zukofsky and Stein in Constellation.











Peter Fogarty
175.716
24 | 6 | 99


eXplication
A constellation of voices observed; three suns moving into alignment against the starsprent sky of literature. Hanging in space, scratch of vacuum pulls my skin as I listen, my eyes bathing in trinary radiation. Before me, Noon, Zukofsky and Stein float, their massive gravities tugging at each other, bringing me ever nearer. It seems inevitable that I must soon flare in the atmosphere of the closest orb, Noon. Within this boiling G2 star, language is remixed and rewritten. Text borrowed from OneList email cut up and renewed with noise and flavour, a voice never spoken, yet Noon speaks anew. Triumphant, spared a fiery death, I draw near the red dwarf, infinitely dense, Zukofsky condenses but within such density is a bubbling marvel of expanding understanding, if only we have the key. If only we have the appreciation of the new, cries the solar wind from Stein, no key but understanding, of generation after generation of work.

This constellation is formed from readings of Stein, Zukofsky in the first part of the year, combined with the contemporary stylistics of Noon, move into juxaposition, stripping the page of glue, links become tenuous and only the collage remains. More specifically, in this spiral inwards, I looked at Zukofsky’s AN ERA poem, at the condensing and mathematical symmetry underlying the simplicity of the work. Because of the extraordinary briefness of word limit, I could only allude, hint and direct understanding of the reader to the poem itself, resting beneath my presumptuous text. As this text is a collage, it becomes a collage of impressions, of veiled knowledge orbiting the true sources of light. Each generation needs new metaphors, new mediums of communication. Stein pushes and cajoles us into new beginnings, into learning anew, repeating and reiterating in loops of understanding, using simple elements to create music. Noon plays with metaphors taken right out of remix culture, from the readers of the future, sample madness and noise built into a deconstruction of communication, fragments of an idea recombined and re-expressed. Noon is the centrepiece of this collage of an array of authors whose work express the drive to change, to perpetual motion across time. It is his technique that looks toward the unknown, that compresses coal into diamonds. Zukofsky and Stein float in their contrasting modes of thought, of condensation and reiteration.

Elements of collage have steered away from the elements on paper tip. Instead, I have presented you with a collage of ideas pasted on the metaphor of three suns orbiting one another in a distant solar system. Iterations within the text unite the three pages as a whole. Think of this brief explanation as the balance that keeps the stars from tearing into each other’s immense gravity wells of influence, as the voice within the text comes from my mind, the underlying text speaks for the original genesis of idea. Language is unified by a sensation of collage, electronic cut and paste, in the dissonances to be found with such brevity. You will notice my experimental approach to the problem of referencing quotations. The entire Noon section is extremely problematic because there is not one word that I wrote there. It is all his work cut and pasted into the form which you find it. Where I have retained assemblages of more than two words in this essay, I have referenced them with book initals and page number. Let us evade this issue and concentrate, shall we?




AN ERA / ANY TIME / OF YEAR is as good a place as any to demonstrate Zukofsky’s fascination with numerology and meaning residing within consonant and vowel. Two ways of reading Zukofsky, the hunt for meaning by the ear. With Michele Leggott’s aid, we can look at Zukofsky’s process of constructing meaning. This is an extremely condensed poem, a poem that may have arrived whole, a subconscious realisation of a lifetime’s work of condensation: the process of making something increase in density as it gets smaller. Condensation is more than half of composition. The rest is proper breathing space, ease, grace. AT (81). AN ERA does not fail Zukofsky’s test of poetry. It breathes, the vowels sing with their beauty as they bounce off the consonants in between, no matter how you read it, slowly, quickly, top to bottom, letter by letter: it takes even, calm breaths with the grace and quiet confidence of old age in a lifetime of great confidence. Looking deeper than the sound to its etymology exposes an abundance of meaning, as Leggott has done: from AN ERA, she finds crude metal dug from the earth [aes] cohabitating with airy arias rising out of the construction of nines in a constellation of possible readings RZ (41). Zukofsky’s desire for immortality rests in his intense, cramped notes and without these Zukofsky remains difficult.
He has segued beyond phonemes and morphemes to juggle the letters, attributing to each infinite potential, denser than a neutron star burning in a galaxy of Objectivists yet as expansive in meaning as a supernova.



Each generation has something different at which they are looking AS (495). New generations of conceptual understanding thresholds of consciousness mapped and intuition ordering perception as we gaze at the new. With her iterations Gertrude Stein loops us in pulls us around and round in a spin of meaning in her repetition of key words until understanding evaporates and it is the time in the composition, the sounds of the words that we listen to. Hear it jump, see it speak and shout, taste its construction. The using everything brings us to composition and to this composition AS (499). A collage of concern for time for attempts to alter the way we see things to introduce new media and attempt to establish and consolidate perception. It can only be a defining mechanism: composition is the difference which makes each and all of them different from other generations AS (495). Yet the refusal to conform to established forms of expression is also a denial of communication. The response time delay in comprehension is prolonged when perception of the new is force filtered through our experience and definition struggles. A work of the new must communicate, must subvert and reuse, loop, recycle word and meaning until thought is lost, then found. The movement of the sound of the words passing down a monoxide stained service corridor, dopplering and shifting is just as significant as the ideograms infecting language with communication and time stretches and compresses as meaning condenses and expands in ever increasing spheres within spheres as we hang aloft.


I set my eye to ignition PJ (265). Elaborate, experimental. Remix the song, dropping words, sounds, noises in and out of the mix, a ghost of the original: a haunting song. Stripped down to the bone, exciting images randomised, mixed on screen, paper cut out in new connections, secret messages. Dub. Building it up order story feel a new life. Images on the screen move into groups of three lines, counting the syllables, seventeen. Work as a page, as a text, as a shimmer of meaning. Karaoke. Electric haiku remixes the ghost of original text. Language Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors’ Desire FR. Borrowing texts, pushing them through filtering devices, producing new texts: ‘the unreadable book’. Break these into words, phrases, juggle them around, looking for a new hit JP. Educating people, breaking down language. Segue. Isolate best images, only things that interest; series of poetic images. Random mix a scrap of meaning in it, maybe using the same language, atmosphere. When you first write a word there is a moment when it is still drying, you can move it around before its meaning is set. Language, different drummers. Remix techniques lengthen the drying time of a word FR. A completely different story jar jars so layer more input. Scratching. Series of words through a complete mess in and out of sense. Put the work in; the final piece has to be brilliant. The processes I use break the language down and then work it up again, then you can work the relationship and move through a narrative. Some experiments fail and have to be abandoned. Beauty is a dirty word in experimental writing FR. More minimal structurally, a texture of individual sounds. Noon has put the hours in. Sampling. A Chemical Generation guide to the English Language.

:referenceS

AB: Pound, Erza. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 23rd Printing.
AS: Stein, Gertrude. A Stein Reader. Ed. Dydo, Ulla E. Evanson: Northwestern University Press, 1996.
AT: Zukofsky, Louis. A Test of Poetry. New York: Celia Zukofsky Publications, 1980.
FR: Roberts, James [on Jeff Noon]. “Ghost In The Machine”. Frieze. London: Durian Publications, May 1999.
JP: Noon, Jeff. “Juicing the Pixels”. Posted by A.P McQuiddy. http://www.onelist.com/viewarchive.cgi?listname=Vurt&archive=137.gz
PJ: Noon, Jeff. Pixel Juice. London: Doubleday, 1998.
RZ: Leggott, Michele. Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Notes on “Tribute to Freud”

Helen Cixois: “I understood that the only way to live was to seek refuge, to perch oneself in a private tree, to live on a different planet – one made of paper that stratches above murder and conflict.” Dazed and Confused – July 00 [64].

HD visits no other planets in ‘Tribute to Freud’ but our own unconscious collective mind. Her prose is transcendent in its simplicity, its clarity of description. I am moved, most moved when I read §53: “HE HAD SAID, he had dared to say that the dream had its worth and value in translatable terms, not the dream merely of a Pharaoh or a Pharaoh’s butler, . . . but the dream of everyone, everywhere.” This description of Sigmund Freud’s dream interpretations is simple and eloquent. By assuming dreams arise from a common well of human expression and symbolism, Freud makes psychoanalysis possible. As empirical evidence increases, the analysand may begin to understand how the roots of their neuroses are made explicit when in dream–time.

It goes deeper than that, though, superficially, this is his main discovery, but deeper still, diving down into the mud of our consciousness, and down into the subatomic strata of our mind, we find the spraying fountain of collective memory. Such images arise from HD’s singing praise:

“He had dared to say that the dream came from an unexplored depth in man’s consciousness and that this unexplored depth ran like a great stream or ocean underground, and that vast depth of that ocean was the same vast depth that today, as in joseph’s day, overflowing in man’s small consciousness, produced inspiration, madness, creative idea, or the dregs of the dreariest symptoms of mental unrest and disease.”

And HD’s delight in Freud’s understanding of the sciences from the East, the buddhist and yogic traditions of consciousness stamp this knowledge large: we are all one people and we have but to learn to listen to our deep ocean, to dive into the ocean and in the logical extension of such transcendent access, in the words of Theodore Sturgeon in his equally brilliant “To Marry Medusa”:

“Humanity had passed the barriers of language and of individual isolation on its planet. It passed the barriers of species now, and of isolation in its cosmos. The faith of Mbala was available to Guido, and so were the crystal symphonies of the black plants past Orphiuchus . . .. As one man could share the being of another here on Earth, so both, and perhaps a small child with them, could fuse their inner selves with some ancient contemplative mind leeched to the rocks in some roaring methane cataract, or soar with some insubstantial life–forms adrift where they were born in the high layers of atmosphere around some unheard–of planet.

“So ended mankind, to be born again as hive – humanity, so ended the hive of Earth to become star – man, the immeasurable, the limitless, the growing; maker of music beyond music, poetry beyond words, and full of wonder, full of worship.” [149]

Can you see how Freud is extrapolated beyond humanity’s collective understanding into a cross-species understanding – the glory of the self within the all-knowing, all-understanding hive mind across the cosmos? Sturgeon, perhaps the greatest undiscovered American writer of this century, has captured the Buddhist reality of the cosmic mind where each of us are motes, aware of the billions beyond billions of motes about us. This, the cosmic mind we find what Freud calls the collective unconscious, is the sea of dreams.

HD blasts the past into existence with her blitz on Freud’s importance to human consciousness – the art of self-discovery in a form the puritanical, supremacist mind could find reasonable and appreciate the subtle interpretation of ancient knowledge, from another facet, as it were, of consciousness. HD’s 85 petaled lotus flower swims serenely in literature: one is reminded instantly of Paramahansa Yogananda’s ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ and Soygal Rinpoche’s ‘Book of the Living’. Both are divinely inspired, both, as is ‘Tribute to Freud’, are read with the utmost ease – as if the magnetic attraction on the receptors of language created its frictionless glide.

I am stunned by HD’s recall of Freud’s anger: “ I did not know what enraged him suddenly. I veered round off the couch, my feet on the floor. I do not know exactly what I had said . . .. The Professor himself is uncanonical enough; he is beathing with his hand, with his fist, on the head-piece of the old-fashioned horseheair sofa hat had heard more secrets than the confession box of any popular Roman Catholic father-confessor in his heyday . . .. Consciously, I was not aware of having said anything that might account for the Professor’s outburst. And even as I veered around, facing him, my mind was detached enough to wonder if this was some idea of his for speeding up the analytic content or redirectiong the flow of associated images. The Professor said, ‘The trouble is – I am an old man – you do not think it worth your while to love me.’ [16] This, this reveals more of Freud’s humanity in a few words than everything by Seigmund,

“The victorious mouth or voice or utterance.” [88].

Peter Fogarty A4 15 000815

Black Gold - Published in Re:Mix Dec 2002

Oil. Black gold underwrites the planet. Anyone living in the first world cannot avoid using oil. Most people think of oil as petroleum and refined gases: a greasy viscous combustible liquid. Plastic is a product refined from oil compounds as are CDs and some foods, candles and perfumes. We are immersed in oil-derived products; computer cases and cabling, implements, and even clothes are saturated with nylon compounds, waterproof coating and zipper teeth. You’d have to be naïve not to understand that efforts to control oil resources explain world political issues. If you slept through your history classes at high school, hear this: It’s always been about oil.

Consider this. Worldwide oil consumption is expected to exceed available resources within our lifetimes; this includes untapped reservoirs and stockpiles. The economic dependency on annual growth in output to remain stable of a militant, industrial and capitalist civilisation constantly multiplies demand. The world uses about 26 billion barrels of oil per year, but discovers only about six billion in new fields. Known global oil resources are expected to slow to a trickle within 2050 years. Geologists favour an earlier date than sociologists and economists.

Hitler drove his armies to the gates of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942 for the oil reserves beneath the Caspian Sea, desperately needed to supply his war machine. The hustling for the Caspian Sea oil never ended. The Russians will not grant independence for Chenchnya because the discovery of vast reservoirs of oil beneath Chenchnya in the late 1970s ensured that the region would be a global bone of contention as multinational corporations vie for rights to exploitation.

The key is Afghanistan where a 1,000-mile pipeline can be laid from landlocked Turkmenistan through long valleys to Pakistan and from there to the Red Sea. Cold war attempts to control the region resulted in the Russo-Afghan war: a decade of bitter fighting by American-backed Afghan and Arab mercenaries (including Osama bin Laden, recruited by then CIA director, drug smuggler and war profiteer George Bush Sr.) against Russian soldiers. Eventually the war collapsed the Russian economy and ended the cold war.

Fast forward to present day, and the hustling for Middle East oil continues. Why does democratic USA continue to back feudal Saudi Arabia, where all the 9/11 suspects were said to come from? With military bases in Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar, the American military engine’s foothold in the Mediterranean, the Gulf, and the Arabian land mass became permanent after 1990’s Gulf War instigated by then President of the United States, Bush Sr. The American presence is justified as a contra-precaution against invasions by Iraq and Iran in return for plentiful access to oil. It is a great source of irritation for Middle Eastern nations: effectively a military occupation.

Every day the newspapers tell you about the price and scarcity of oil and about unchecked American or American-funded aggression in the Middle East. Terror grips the world every day. The media in America and the rest of the white world are pounding the war drums. Weekly, a new villain is discovered; if it’s not Osama bin Laden, it’s the Washington sniper, and now it’s a ‘rediscovered’ Saddam Hussein and his Iraq.

News media clamour that Iraq poses a threat to the civilised world because of its huge storehouse of biological weapons and potential nuclear capabilities. What they omit is that America and Britain sold these biological weapons to Iraq in the 1970s and 1980s. They also omit that America is the biggest violator of UN law; producing illegal biological weapons; environmental emissions; supplying Israel with financial and military assistance in its genocidal drive through the Occupied Territories of Palestine; daily bombing Iraq; and all manner of unspeakable covert operations.

The truth is that America badly needs Iraq oil. It has hit an energy supply ceiling exacerbated by bad management and reckless consumption. California’s power blackouts in 2000 were triggered by complete deregulation of the energy industry and a shortage of oil to generate electricity with, which meant that power suppliers withheld energy until bills were paid, but because of Enron-style ‘creative’ accountancy practices, that didn’t happen. This is the future of energy in America: shortages. Thus, America’s oil dependency endangers its national security. America consumes roughly 8 billion barrels of oil a year or a quarter of all global oil production. It is not just America that consumes too much oil. So do all the first world countries, including us.

The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, formed when Venezuela approached its competitors Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia to set a stable price for crude oil in 1949, is a powerful intergovernment oil cartel protecting and unifying oil interests. OPEC believe they ensure a fair return on capital to petroleum industry investors.

Fair? The Group of 7 (G7) countries OPEC supplies, America, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, Italy and the UK, generated US$1.7 trillion dollars in taxes from $850 billion dollars worth of OPEC oil revenue over the period 19962000; double the price. The real profiteers (privateers) are the governments of consuming nations, including New Zealand and Australia. The UK receives four times more money from taxation than what OPEC gets from the sale of crude. Our government’s expenditure is also hooked on the tax revenues from our economic dependency on oil. Our governments readily see that our ‘strategic interests’ are at stake. That’s why New Zealand SAS lost limbs to American landmines in Afghanistan and why our minister of trade in opposition warns of American trade sanctions, which were lightened when our governments committed forces to Iraq in early November.

It’s a cliché, but it really is all about maintaining the oppressive white supremacist industrial-military complex of the ‘first’ world. Capitalists exploit consumer dependency on oil. Even at the end of October, OPEC oil prices were at their lowest for the eleventh week with no discernable effect on domestic oil prices. Where does the difference go? Meanwhile, news publishers worldwide are growing alarmed at the possible repercussions American control of the Middle East oil reserves would have on the planet. UN sanctions block access to an enormous 112 billion barrels of crude beneath Iraq’s radioactive sands; the second largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia’s 264.2 billion barrels. Consider the well-documented connections the current Bush administration has with the oil, pharmaceutical, energy and armaments industries: Bush with Harken; Ashcroft with Enron; Cheney with Haliburton; and Rice with Chervon.

Why wage war on Iraq, when so far the oil industry and the ‘first’ world companies have gotten their way through military dominance in Arabia? The question may be answered by asking who stands to profit from a war on Iraq? Oil industry investors stand to sweep a bonanza if a new Iraqi regime biddable by the US replaces Hussein. One of these investor families is a family with war and oil connections going at least three generations back to a key financier to Hitler, Prescott Bush.

The most cynical realist cannot shy from considering the accusation that the tragedy of 9/11 was allowed to happen to pre-empt the future security of the United States of America. Strategists may have seen inevitable terrorism within America, and seen it as no bad thing. For years before 9/11, thinktanks have predicted a future of worldwide terrorism from dispossessed peoples, as well as a future of oil and water wars: a fourth world war.

So, what does all this have to do with Re:Mix readers? You are involved whether you like it or not. For one thing, this magazine would never reach you. Without oil the records played by DJs would not be made. Your CDs couldn’t be so cheap. Your bottles of Coca Cola would still be glass. You couldn’t fly out of the country. Your nightclub couldn’t sell imported alcohol. You wouldn’t be trading mp3s, surfing the net, chatting on IM, or writing emails. Power wouldn’t be conducted through cables to you. Oil is everywhere, in everything; it flows, and we live. Our lives are soaked in the destruction of the lives of millions of non-white people, crushed so that the ‘first’ world can enjoy abundant oil. Nameless people without number. People like us.

RED/GOLD

In the blackness of a sealed tower
I find myself encircled by sound
As if I were a reed in the wind
Trembling and shivering in my sorrow

I stand in the deeps overwhelmed
By calm. A strange serenity
Settles upon me as I look into fastness
And am vastened. My mind

Shatters. A hyperbolic supernova
Mists away in a vild of light,
The universe is washed clean.
Enlarged so, in this darkness

The fates conspire to dismay me
With the scattered deconstruction
Amidst the fields of anger, I discover,
To regain confidence I must look

Heavy into the neural byways
of self and realise how lightly
This devastation has affected
The eternal curve towards freedom

Even as I stand within this fortress
Ensoncled by the great labyrinth
Of consciousness, it is easy to see
That all limits have fallen.



12/11/96