computation

Notes on the Perpetual Deferral of Being

This scrawl here that preserves in its (literary) texture what it loses being prettified in the neo-modernist conventions of universal design and in the san-serif font so distant from what I scratched illegibly on paper with a pen. I have stopped writing—writing is too full of temptation: to nostalgia (for the inkpot and quil), to self-love (I had tender feelings for the brutal gestures of my own hand), to self-loathing (the pen's ink is too much like blood and draws sickly, confessional prose).

Watchspring

A twist on the key tensions the main spring until there is no play left. But the steady tension of that wind turns the clock's arms in measured jumps. In the escapement, the wheel is caught and released discreetly, and seconds don't run like fluid around the face. it is two, and then it is three – the in-between is a blur. Time was digital even when it was analog, as those teeth and cogs ensure.

Sublime

The range of cultural enterprises which depend on the computer for conception, construction, storage, and display, share with that device — as if by an intrinsic and fractal reciprocity of structure — a parametric ontology that imbues them with an aura of the sublime. Attention to this quality of the sublime that adheres to digital projects promises to link the quidity of the computer with aesthetic philosophy and a history of modernist and post-modernist artistic practice.

Un-gendered

A trajectory towards a generic view of containment, possibly un-gendered, and described in a language of instrumentality seemingly well suited to a discussion of technology, appears from a certain perspective to be promising. But, is the lure of the generic, as a solution to the problem of difference, a symptom of masculine blindness to that difference, one more gesture of erasure that fails to account for the way that breasts or a womb change the experience of embodiment? Is accusing Irigaray of missing something in her cleaving to woman, equivalent to the phallic gaze which refuses to see her? Or, is there a radical potential in the embracing of a notion of containment by the masculine body — not a containment on the model of the womb, but a containment that cannot hold; not a containment that gives birth to the new, but a containment that grasps and releases, that receives and sends?

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