The Secret Word

(When we last left our synchronized protagonists, Walt and Virginia, they were taking an intermission:

Like many alien satellite adventurers
wandering the desert of unrealtime

Virginia and Walt are going underground

Will they return?

Angela seems to think so

She says that that they are
unconditionally spinning
in the death-defying
double somersault of love

Their unusual story, previously captured in excerpted form in this blog here and here and here, is still, behind the scenes, developing into another novella. Herewith is another draft excerpt from this work-in-progress...)

---

Angela corrects herself and says that
it's not so much that Walt and Virginia
are going underground as much as
they have always been underground

Underground in an overground sense

What I mean (she said)

is that they have always been surfacing

You would think that a couple such as them
would have by now become something like
a part of the traditional or mainstream discourse
a kind of George and Mary Washington
for the elitist culturati who throw money around
buying shares in the prestige markets

But really there are very few people who even know
who they are or what they have to offer

and by offer I don't mean offer as in "deal"
although they too of course must deal
with and in things that have some value

some currency

Which brings me to another subject
and that is the intimate relationship
between the currency markets and the prestige markets

I'm not talking about the 15-year high
for the yen against the dollar
or how much the euro is worth or not worth
in relation to the pound
or why the Chinese keep artificially deflating
the value of the yuan
so that they can keep
exporting the hell out of everything
so that they can then reinvest their voluminous profits
back into the US bond market and essentially own us all forever

No (said Angela ... but who was she talking to?)

What I mean is the aesthetic currency
that comes with being en vogue
and how that gets translated into
value-added networking opportunities
(opportunities to see and be seen
but also opportunities to fuck and be fucked with)

This all has to do with how we maintain
(said Angela with elegant emphasis)
or not just maintain but enhance
our ongoing digital lifestyle practice
(and with this she unconsciously checked
her iRod for incoming dissemination)
as if such a thing were possible
given the state of our ongoing
Global Great Recession

How (she once again drew an emphasis)
to at least maintain that value-added
state of presence (literary presence)
in the networked space of flows

And she really meant it
when she said literary

As if she were saying something more

But more what?

The alchemy of emotions

The mysterious resonance

The absolute need to mirror neurons

Ah, but what about the networked space of flows?!
(asked Virginia [somewhat rhetorically] --
now that she had entered the picture --
but what does it mean to enter the picture
that is to say where does the picture live
so that phantom figures in the time slot of history
may use their generative figures to pervade
the quantum uncertainties that a picturesque
series of occasions intends to deploy)

You're here! (screamed Angela, genuinely surprised)

Indeed I am (Virginia responded -
a bit snarky but still ready willing and able
to alter her persona at a moment's notice
in order to accommodate what had become
a flux-like situation)

I was just talking about aesthetic currency
and how it might relate to what I think of
as the prestige markets -- the culture business
specifically the high end segment that seems to be making
a rebound in the minds of many but necessarily
involves the comfort of experiencing
an accumulating i.e. on the verge of orgasm
sense of entitlement due to the wealth effect
which can be measured in ones pure liquidity
if you know what I mean

I do know what you mean, Dear

At which point Walt walked in too

(Was he out parking the car?
Was there such a thing as a car in his
flux-like situation? Cars seemed like
such a thing of the past -- were they not
for the very worst off of society
poor slobs risking their lives every day
motorizing themselves through the death traps
while trafficking in the sublime slime of
mere dollars and sense?)

I have a new idea (announced Walt)

What?! (asked Virginia and Angela in tandem)

Power Pataphysique

PP! (screamed Angela)

OK (Virginia was playing with him)
please make your Power Point
and let's get on with it

Is it a new business idea? (asked Angela)

Could be (replied Walt)

I am not sure I want to go into business
although in theory I was made for business

But that's just in theory
and in theory anything can be a business
even the business of theory

He's in the theory business (said Virginia)

She's always giving me the business (said Walt)

At least you will never go out of business
not as long as she's around (said Angela)

True (said Walt)

And this reminds me of something
Yogi Berra might have said
had he ever been around in our time
to actually say it

and that is

"In theory there is no difference
between theory and practice.
In practice there is."

There was no immediate response
from the two women who were
performing the role of hostage audience

But the issue (Walt continued)
is not whether Power Pataphysique
is or is not a viable business model
because let's face it

(and here he cleared his voice)

anything is a viable business model
as long as people will pay for it

Yes (said Virginia)
but we are not interested in cash dollars anymore

We agreed that only aesthetic currency
would drive our purchasing power
in the so-called prestige markets
as Angela calls them
and even if we were to discover
the ultimate form of Picturesque Theory
we would not then turn around and market it
so as to generate more cash dollars
to fiddle away as we lose ourselves in the alter time

Losing ourselves in the alter time
repeated Angela in a kind of delay-pedal effect

Even if you say so yourself
said Virginia as if stepping on a flange

Yes (replied Walt)
and I mean every word of it

Just as you and Angela mean every word of what you say too

But that's not what concerns me right now

What concerns me is how we go about
filling our various domains with a network of objects
that when programmed correctly
would behave in such a way as to

a) alter time
b) intensify our pleasure
c) intellectually challenge our discovery process
d) ...

--- don't say it! (begged Virginia)

d) take us beyond the realm of metaphysics!

There (said Walt) -- I said it

Besides (he went on) you can't sell that sort of thing

(But then he self-corrected)

Well OK you can sell that sort of thing
and that's where Power Pataphysique comes in

Let's look back at what Alfred was investigating
before his untimely demise in his thirties

-- his thirties!

He claimed that pataphysique was
"the science of imaginary solutions
which symbolically attributes
the properties of objects
described by their virtuality
to their lineaments."

Here there can be no question (Walt elucidated)
that we have in one fell swoop entered the realm of
The After Physics

And yet everyone is so hooked on their body glam

that is to say

on making their body glam
and its concurrent "virtuality"
a networked reality sensation

that we know for a fact that The After Physics
will now and forever distend the laws of both
physics and chemistry while creating
another kind of -- dare I say -- alchemical
postproduction process that is powered
by the imaginary performance of the pataphysicians

What this means is that we can now
autohallucinate our own cinematic adventures
as ongoing works of time-based media
where we all play multiple personas
each persona informing the quanta of energy
that exists as a statistical flux or range of
possible states of mind for our digital images to embody

Digital images to embody ... ? (Virginia was skeptical)

Yes (insisted Walt)
in the age of digitally postproduced images
we have all essentially become body-images

Body-images (repeated Angela)

Yes digitally embodied images that think

That roam and charge and download and delete

That form and disperse and fragment and play

That condense into aesthetic currency trading
on the foreign prestige market

Foreign prestige market?

Yes since prestige itself has become foreign
at least to the vast populace

You are so elitist Walt

No! I am the exact opposite --

Remember this: the adjustment of reality
to the masses and of the masses to reality
is a process of unlimited scope

and the instant the criterion of authenticity
ceases to be applicable to artistic production
the total function of art is reversed --

we no longer find ourselves drowning in ritual
but rather engage in another kind of practice

Politics

This is our networked condition
and in this condition I think I have relocated
what I thought I had lost

Aura

although this aura is not unique
i.e. it has nothing to do with
the unique art object
and has everything to do with
the democratization of innovation itself

This is what it means to be avant-garde!

Now if only you could market it (said Angela, half serious)

But that's just it (said Walt)

Market it for what?

Cash dollars?

Who needs that?

I have a perpetual Internet connection

I have unending spools of pleasure unwinding
from the depths of my very being becoming something else

I have access to the most beautiful woman in the world

Women (said Angela -- where was Virginia?)

I have the ability to creatively inhabit
all of the source material the world has ever produced
so that I too can playfully postproduce
the very networked condition that now
after all of these years of self-denial
suggests that life itself is an aura worth investing in ...

Great (interjected Virginia -- she was back)

So how do you monetize it? (one of them asked)

Especially since you are obviously not going
the route of dollars and sense (added Angela)

BUT THAT'S JUST IT!

(Walt was getting pleasantly agitated
and by that he meant that he was setting himself up
for yet more bouts of defeat and deflation
and was going to let everything bug him
in a positive way because he was sure
more sure than he had ever been
that he was on the right track this time
and nothing -- not even catastrophic failure --
was going to get in the way of him
playfully signaling from the flames
while burning down in auto-affect mode)

What's it? (asked Virginia)

My idea: Power Pataphysique

Go on ... (they prodded)

It's the future and it can be summarized in one word

"Say the secret woid and you win a hunerred dollahs"
(said Virginia auto-morphing into a tranny hybrid of
Elenor Roosevelt and Groucho Marx)

And the word is? (asked Angela)

Walt waited for their undivided attention:

The word

(he said -- pausing yet again for prolonged effect)

is

...

supplements

Vision Rendering

How did you sleep?

Virginia asked Walt:

Did you dream?

At first Walt was speechless
as if he were lost in the zone
although what zone was still
to be determined

Yes

he paused for a few seconds
while Virginia held her breath

I was in a completely other posture

Walt tried to articulate
the body's acquiescence to its new-found
state of purposeless play:

And by that I mean that my orientation
was bodily distorted while tunneling
through an image space that was like
being inside a computer as it ripped
the contents of a DVD

I was drowning in the speed of these images

The phrase rocket-launched snorkeling comes to mind

It was a kind of underworld of images
so far removed from what we think of as
the human imagination imagining itself imagine
images

that what I saw was not really even
a matter of light nor memory

All I can really remember is the speed

And the body contortion

Or not even that since I no longer really had a body

Maybe you could say I was nothing but speed

But then that speed would alter and I would become

What is the word?

-- a floating point of reference?

I would just hang in the balance
a suspended entity refueling
for the next inevitable take off

Which is to say I was not straight up
nor was I on my back or side
or rolling or jumping or even
physically entangled with someone else
like you

Like me
said Virginia

Exactly

I had no back or sides
but had become sheer topological vector
shape-shifting through the alter time

Not even you were sharing
this angled looping through space
that was not quite slow motion
nor was it rapid chute motion
as if accelerating in any particular direction

It was like sliding sideways
in what from afar would be seen
as a confused state of motor deficiency
assuming there was a body
that could reveal its degenerative state
which there wasn't

This makes perfect sense to me
because if you look at the agility of
a lighter than life crab
skating hatch marks across the surface of
a sandy beach that never ends
you'll see how it too comes across confused
but is actually quite nimble
in its nonsequitur of motion

But there is no deficiency (Virginia pointed
this out as if to rule over Walt's illogic)

And it was not just my vector
(Walt kept on as if she had not said a word)
skating and shushing and chuting
through these parallel universes
while shape-shifting through the alter time

It was the angular trajectory of
an autohallucinatory sensorium
reaching epic escape velocity
caught in the blink of an I
one that corrupted all of my senses
to the point where one never knew
what season it was they were rushing through

Was it summer in Hawaii?

Snowy winter in Colorado?

Iceberg tentacles of invisible fall
picking up signals from a burning spring
Down Under?

Seasonal affective disorder
or systemic derangement of the senses?

It no longer mattered as I had
without even thinking about it
escaped the matter world altogether

No either/or or and/and
but the pure impulse of impact convergence
while spilling forth raw value points
along an improvised plotting of
wishful yet clearly emerging trend lines

And the things I saw while experiencing
the dramatic disambiguation of everything
that had heretofore grounded me in perpetual push-pull
were not ordinary

Yet even as they appeared totally other
and not part of this image world

I noticed something strange

(and here was when Walt started
doing something that had become
a recent habit namely he began
slowly massaging his thumbs
with his forefingers
as if suggesting the coming of money
or the residue of some dirty emulsion
that had suddenly seeped out of his skin)

They tasted like food

Food said Virginia

Yes said Walt

Food

These way beyond images tasted like food

But not food as sustenance rather food as aesthetic rapture

Something that fed my motion

The fuel of my imaginary trajectory
telemarking through proprioception fields
that were not downhill
nor were they uphill

They were simply paths

Trails that I intuitively floated through
while caught in the orgasm of aesthetic rapture

Floated said Virginia
as she turned the palm of her hand toward Walt
whereupon he saw the sign of her hand
maneuver its way in his vicinity
and flicker as in flutter

He saw her hand as a metacarpal butterfly
a skinflick of potential light motion
that would take hold of him like a stick shift
and churn his magnitude into a higher gear
so that he would once again teleport

He felt the shape-shifting vector he had become
begin to change its speed once again
as if she were now operating his propulsion
through the random flesh encounters
he was clearly still plowing through

The revelation suddenly hit him that
he had never really left the dream
and their conversation had
like the perpetual image machine
he was time-traveling through
always been a part of it

As he felt himself head into what
he imagined was the aesthetic equivalent of
Total Breakthrough Warp Drive

he knew that even this feeling would soon become elusive

He realized he never wanted to wake up again
nor did he want to disappear
in the unreliable space of the quantum vacuum

The in-and-out states of presence
he had thoroughly investigated
in his last major work of art
were meant to be left in the dust
and so there was no reason to offer
any concrete articulation for why
he was experiencing what he was experiencing

There was no question in his mind
that these oscillating states of
mixed reality presence
were part of that other
discourse network

the one he was untethering himself from
as a way to discover what came next

What he was entering now
was another dimension of becoming
even as Virginia playfully
put on the brakes and suspended his motion
so that he felt like he was once again
totally above it all
hanging in the balance

an entrapped-tease artist
floating in mid-air

photographed for the historical archive
his memory was slowly leaking

Was it pure madness?

If you want to create paths
Virginia said

you should not spurn madness
since it makes up such a great part of your nature

These were words that vibrated
deep inside his vision rendering

Vision Rendering...

It was like a computer dialogue box
in a cosmic sci-fi novel
about the second coming of Art

But this was no epiphany
he was having

Walt was simply dreaming

And in the dream
he and Virginia were chattering
as they always did
about the creative process
which then led to a meta-state
where they discussed the dream itself
in lucid detail

Details Forthcoming...

another dialogue box would purport
to know what was happening
while the processing units
kept pace with their awakening

Walt kept floating

---

Metadata: dreaming, awakening, processing, oscillating

Year of the Living Dead

How close were we?

Close enough to collapse

At least that's what Mervyn said

Walt was having nothing of it

We have collapsed (he insisted)

It's not possible (Virginia opined)
and I refuse to believe it

It was only one year ago that I found myself
checking my accounts every thirty minutes
and decided that we would brave the storm
and come out stronger because of it

But we are not stronger --

(she waited but hearing no other, continued)

We are not even resilient

We are Modern

Meaning what? (she rhetorically asked herself)

Meaning we are the living dead

But at least we have iPhones
(she quipped and began searching
Google News under the term
"Great Depression")

We have to admit that we are exacting

But is it possible to press a little further
and wonder whether we may not refer to
our sense of being "in recovery"
as being temporarily "in remission"?

How shall I set myself free of
all of the imposed methods?

(Virginia asked this aloud
knowing that Walt was thinking
pretty much the same thing
even if their methodologies
were anything but in sync)

Is it the method that inhibits the creative power?

Virginia shook the question off
but then it came back to bite her:

Is it due to the method that we feel
neither jovial nor magnanimous
but centered in a self which
in spite of its tremor of susceptibility
never embraces or creates
what is outside itself and beyond?

Walt secretly wished she would just ditch
this whole gargantuan task of ridding the self

There's nothing to get rid of --

(he once chastised her)

so just get rid of it

Do you suppose --

(she hesitated)

Do you suppose our contemporary aesthetic
is always already openly derivative?

Walt was not sure how to answer her

Counter-party risk in intersubjective role-playing
was a totally new operational mode of becoming

something he had never really traded in

He could speculate on their certain demise
for hours and hours on end
forecasting where all of this would lead them

But the more he speculated the more he returned
to the inevitable transfer of funds that would
mark the trajectory of their mutual inheritance

Money is a kind of poetry --

(Walt began quoting Wallace Stevens)

-- but then there is the story of
what in the past I have thought of as
my tendency toward creating speculative fictions

... of risking everything for the making of new work
that could easily make it impossible to continue
surviving ...

These speculative fictions are not poetry at all

Walt was acting as if he had had a couple drinks

They are intuitive rolls of the dice
where one codes new programming languages
that transform the techniques of data visualization
(what is sometimes called "creative visualization")
into the pure potential of postproduction

Virginia knew her time was up

She went to bed and started reading:

People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

---

Metadata: collapsing, becoming, programming, reading

Impending

Virginia tells me Walt is anxious
there is something about impending
or the intenstity of impending
that keeps him up at nights

The jet-lag only makes this worse
but he insists that it makes things better
and to prove the point he goes off
on this ancient riff about collectors
exhibitions and the demolitions

The demolition of emotions

She interjects this last phrase
as way to get him started
but nothing doing
he already has his trigger
and his trigger is Dream

Dream is the word he uses
to jumpstart his fuzzy logic

Dream

File it under Dream
as in dream research

The archives?

Yes the archives

I was stuck in them all night
thinking I would finally go to sleep
but then I realized I was asleep
lodged inside the depths of the archives

The fact that you realized you were asleep
means the research was lucid
so there must have been some wealth
some buried treasure

Yes

The archives are buried down

deep

into the core

into the floating root

and this testifies to the primal history

What primal history?

(Virginia has to ask because
she is not sure where he is going with this)

The primal history that says:

YOUR MONEY SLEEPS INSIDE ME.

Or:

MAKING A SIGN THAT ONE IS DISAPPEARING.

Who is making such a sign? (she asks)

It is making a sign (he responds)

It (she repeats as if firm in her belief)

It is making a sign (she repeats again)

Yes (he confirms)

It is making a sign
so that I can see what it is
that makes while making

While making a living
making a home
making friends
making it all work out

Am I making sense?

I hope not

Walt was certainly making something
making things never made before
things he was certain were valuable
but then uncertainty crept in
and he would go digging
deep into the archive that was Dream

He was subconsciously aware
that what was really happening
was that he was seeing things make themselves

Seeing things make themselves
but with his name on them
as if signing his name
was another kind of making
a kind of persona making
as if his persona were in-the-making
where by naming things that made themselves
he could somehow make a living
a living never really encapsulated
but that entailed movement
eagerness of knowing through playing
playing as research into process
process as investigation into life
life process as investigation into making

Such thoughtful wandering might enable him to

(Virginia could not finish her thought

so she kept walking with him

without saying a word

although a word

was on her mind

and the word was

PASSION)

---

Metadata: making, writing, passion, dream

Your money sleeps inside me

Awakening from haze of red-eye flight
staring at muted syndicated TV sitcom
with unexpected subtitle filling bottom of screen
a one-liner that comes into view
while shape-shifting into jet lag blur:

YOUR MONEY SLEEPS INSIDE ME.

Who is the subtitle translating?

The twentysomething actor speaking
to the girl who bucks the system
and decides nerd sex is de rigeur?

Or is it just more autohallucination

a deep interior projection
from the "collage" professor
whose field of expertise is slipping
into something much more comfortable?

The writer seems constrained
not by his own free will but by
some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant
who has him in thrall

says Virginia

who looks so great in profile
dignifying all that is frivolous
even though she too cannot help herself
(and must text her way into oblivion)

She tells me she is no longer set
on providing me with a residual plot
in her admittedly modern fiction

What's a plot anyway?

(she asks)

(and then answers herself
almost immediately)

A representative burial spot
that embalms the fashion of the hour?

(she often answers a question with a question)

It is clear that she wants to keep this thread going
and will not be distracted by manipulations

The tyrant is obeyed and the novel is done to a turn

(she continues)

But sometimes a momentary doubt
triggers an unexpected narrative event

(something like, maybe this, or this --

or the news of someone dying

even when not abruptly)

A physiological spasm of rebellion
accidentally leaks on her dress

She wants to laugh at herself

At the luminous halo that is now forming

At the fact that she can no longer control herself

At the fact that she is writing to find out what she is writing about

But the blister of pages that write her hands raw
fills her heart with too much satisfaction

There is no longer much of a need
to worry about how inhibiting
the tyrant's presence may still think itself to be

Her left eye wanders back toward the screen

toward the syndicated sitcom and its beneficent subtitles

(NO METHOD CAN REMIX ITSELF INTO INFINITY.)

Her eye she notices is drowning in its own
glacially paced waters as they pour down her face

A smear of plasticized membrane
sheathing her formative vision

Is this the customary way?

She asks herself this question again (and again)

Is this the customary way?

Virginia wants to know

What exactly is the customary way?

Is it always this exacting?

Is life like this too?

Is this exacting difficult to explain?

How can I frame my question differently?

Does this mean that novels must be exacting too?

She questions why men write the way they do

Look within and life (it seems)
is very far from being "like this"

She claws her hands as if hooking someone in

(Me?)

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day

The mind receives a myriad impressions

An incessant shower of innumerable atoms
as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday
or the day after tomorrow or as soon as I can get there

But the data signal is jammed
and the download times drive us catatonic

The trafficking in hubris is unbearable

This is making us go all neuro

(she says this as though she has discovered something for the very first time)

Besides

(she keeps the thread going)

this everyone going neuro is what we are really born to do

How many ways can one go neuro?

(she says it as if there is no custom to it at all
it's just something that you inevitably do
part of a release mechanism meant to relieve one of boredom)

Face it

Biography is considered complete if it
merely accounts for six or seven selves
whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand

Come now

Let's take our place among them

---

Metadata: shape-shifting, writing, hallucination, oblivion, infinity

Samples for Future Mash-Up

The dream: to know a foreign (alien) language and yet not understand it: to perceive the difference in it without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, community, or vulgarity; to know, positively refracted in a new language, the impossibilities of our own; to learn the systematics of the inconceivable; to undo our own "reality" under the effect of the other formulations, other syntaxes; to discover certain unsuspected positions of the subject in utterance, to displace the subject’s topology; in a word, to descend into the untranslatable, to experience its shock without ever muffling it […]

Roland Barthes

I became very interested in the model of schizophrenia. I wanted to explore the use of the word 'I', that’s the only thing I wanted to do. So I placed very direct autobiographical -- just diary material, right next to fake diary material. I tried to figure out who I wasn’t and I went to texts of murderesses ... I was doing experiments about memory.

Kathy Acker

"I want to revolutionize biography in a night."

Virginia Woolf

What's the connection?

Cut-up / cut-in / copy it out.

Overwrite.

Oozing suture.

Signature effect.

---

Metadata: Roland Barthes, Kathy Acker, Virginia Woolf, autobiography, meta-tag team

Intermission

Like many alien satellite adventurers
wandering the desert of unrealtime

Virginia and Walt are going underground

Will they return?

Angela seems to think so

She says that that they are
unconditionally spinning
in the death-defying
double somersault of love

---

Metadata: spinning, death-defying, loving

VOICE ... Vocal Aesthetics

Here's a link to VOICE: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media
Edited by Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson and Theo Van Leeuwen and published by MIT Press.

According to the site, "Voice has returned to both theoretical and artistic agendas. In the digital era, techniques and technologies of voice have provoked insistent questioning of the distinction between the human voice and the voice of the machine, between genuine and synthetic affect, between the uniqueness of an individual voice and the social and cultural forces that shape it. This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on these topics from history, philosophy, cultural theory, film, dance, poetry, media arts, and computer games [...] Chapters cover such technologies as voice mail, podcasting, and digital approximations of the human voice. A number of authors explore the performance, performativity, and authenticity (or 'authenticity effect') of voice in dance, poetry, film, and media arts; while others examine more immaterial concerns—the voice's often-invoked magical powers, the ghostliness of disembodied voices, and posthuman vocalization."

Besides myself, contributors include Isabelle Arvers, Giselle Beiguelman, Philip Brophy, Ross Gibson, Brandon LaBelle, Thomas Levin, Helen Macallan, Virginia Madsen, Meredith Morse, Norie Neumark, Andrew Plain, John Potts, Theresa M. Senft, Nermin Saybasili, Amanda Stewart, Axel Stockburger, Michael Taussig, Martin Thomas, Theo Van Leeuwen, and Mark Ward.

Rhizome recently reviewed it here.

And, as always, Paule at effetdepresence is on it too (in French).

---

Metadata: theory, voice, digital art, Mark Amerika