novel debris

The classical system immediately fills these differences and distances, believed to make the enchantment of the perfect chords of their differential grow. Thus the rational resembles the system of numbers. Yet the irrational infinitely keeps its differences and distances without ever ceasing to be mathematic. Okay. The book of differences, noise, and disorder would only be the book of evil for someone who would prohibit the Author of the universe, through calculation, from a world that is uncorruptibly dependable. This, however, is not the case. The difference is part of the thing itself, and perhaps it even produces the thing. Maybe the radical origin of . things is really that difference, even though classical rationalism damned It to hell. In the beginning was the noise." -- Michel Serres, The Parasite, p 13.

Rainer Maria Rilke wants to play a human skull on a gramophone needle, which is hilarious and insane and way weirder than anything else Rilke does. (Kittler, 45).

"The white noise no writing can store," Kittler says, "Technological media operate against a background of noise because their data travel across physical channels; as in blurring in the case of film or the needle in the gramophone, that noise determines the signal to noise ratio... noise is emitted by the channels media have to cross." Bodies themselves generate noise, Kittler notes (46). Useful in the sense of noisy data: Bodies make that, too.

The Purloined Letter, Lacan

Lacan read's Edgar Allen Poe's "Purloined Letter" to say that "The letter always arrives at its destination," because regardless of what is inside the envelope, the possession of the letter changes each character's relationship to it. The letter is stolen, and replaced with a fake. The letter represents for Lacan "the signifier," the thing that indicates nothing more than a position. This is a structuralist view of language, in that the word means more or less nothing either beyond its placement, which gives it meaning. Thus the same letter can create very different positions too, and so to say "the holder of the letter is changed" is to acknowledge that the letter creates subjective positions. Lacan writes, "When the characters get a hold of the letter, something gets a hold of them," 196, Seminars). The letter has no meaning, only positional value: one character sees nothing, one sees that they see nothing, and one sees both. Lacan suggests that what determines behavior is the position we occupy in a symbolic structure, rather than our intentions or knowledge. (My mind goes to the "character of the day" on social media, where someone becomes a stand-in for, say, "all conservatives" or "all liberals" and is individually raked through coals and abused online for occupying their position). But the real is a little more than this. For Lacan, pushing against pure structuralism, the subject is not empty (like the letter is not empty) but split. It's not that the letter's content is blank but that it is unknown, and largely irrelevant. We don't know it, and it works to position us anyway. Because the letter is a symbol. The Real, for Lacan, is not what exists "before" language but the thing that language cannot capture, the residue that is leftover after words draw the circle around the idea.

Everyone has told me to read Kittler for 30 years so I finally did. Reading it I was mostly cognizant of the fact that I'd internalized a lot of Kittler over the years through references in other stuff I was reading, and so, unfairly, I found the book a little underwhelming.

pg 3: "Time determines the limit of all art, which first has to arrest the data flow in order to turn it into images or signs." ... "What is called style in art is merely the switchboard of these scannings and selections." pg 5: Kittler discusses Foucault, and Foucault's sense that there was power in the archive. I wonder if there is now a kind of powerlessness of the archive, translated as it is into datasets and re-activated against its will. Kittler says that this is part of the world we need to address: that the mechanisms themselves are the writing devices (the gramophone, the projector, the typewriter). How they inscribe and re-project shapes what we see and can see and think even as much as the medium.

I suppose I agree with this. But Kittler seems to think each of these forms operates on a different level of the Lacanian symbolic/real/imaginary, whereas gen AI operates on all of them at once, posing us in different relationships. pg 12: Fun stuff on noise and as divination, the Jurgenson wave said, in the early days of radio, to be static containing the voices of the dead "1450 to 1600 halfway between Vienna and Moscow."

The mixing bowl, the cuisinart, the popcorn maker, the butter dish, all flew upward in a sudden rush. The roof of the building detached and flew skyward, silent like a lost balloon. Gravity had failed. The tiles came undone around my feet, drifting off. I realized the problem and followed earthquake protocols to get outside. Down the stairs, and then the stairs rose up. The grass stood tall and straight, then, as if plucked by a child's hand, they started upward, too. I'd been upset about the kitchenware. They’ll find new orbits, I figured, once they find new gravities to hold them. Until then, I hung out, the house all dismantled. The gravity was failing everything. I tied a string around my glasses, and leaned way back when I had to pee. The earth beneath my feet streamed into space like so much spilled kitty litter. The sand rose up like backwards rain. I had to pinch my nose to prevent suffocating in a standing burial.   After that there was just blank space around me. There was a hemp rope tied around the top of a mountain over in the distance. When I tried to walk I couldn’t. I’d step into nothing, push my foot against nothing, and get nowhere. No gravity, no resistance. Just sneakers looking for footing.

So it’s me and the mountain and the hemp rope at the crest. I wondered, for too long, if gravity carries sound. Will my voice carry if my body can’t? I pondered this for two days. Self-conscious about shouting at a mountain.

“Yama-san!” I said. It’s day three, though the sun flew away, so who knows. Who even knows where this light is coming from. Yama-san just keeps floating around. I take a good look. With no surface to rest on, his bottom is showing. Jagged and snarled roots of trees and brown dirt. It all feels arbitrary. Where does the spirit of a mountain start and end? Stones and crust in segments, layers of dust that cooled and melted and cooled and melted.

He would come and go in and out of focus. I inhale, he compacts himself. Exhale, he expands. When dust rolled off, it doesn’t fly skyward, but rolls down his sides, collecting at his belly. I inhaled, he tightened. I exhaled, he grew. I watch him to be sure. I focused on the snow crest, his hemp rope crown. I saw trees bloom, and wilt, bloom, and wilt. Stones grew too. At a certain size they crumbled, and rubble rolled down the slope. Grass blooms and turns brown and returns taller. A swarm of cicadas rises up every 17 breaths, swarms and dies. The breath is the timekeeper and the world gets larger. A thousand breaths and I see a kingdom rise, 100 breaths the castle burns, 2000 breaths the cuisinart is reinvented. Finally my feet meet the swollen belly of the mountain planet. “Yama san!” I yell. “Now what?”

Take an origami palace. Dismantle it. Uncrease the floors at seams that meet the walls. Untab the folds that hold windows in place. Bend back the silhouette of the person in the doorway, rising from the floorboard. Fold them down until the palace is flat.