Beginning the Fragment or Fragmenting to Begin—“They” say that the Fall is a time for new beginnings, a time when Americans choose to change.  Beginning only means being in thrall to the past while anxiously casting away one’s more-than-likely future, like being surrounded by a roomful of books you’ve read but cannot remember a single word of and choosing where to start your reading over again.  For my part, I’ve started dressing nicer recently.  By “nicer” I still mean jeans.  Jean Baudrillard, Jean Claude van Damme, Jean Grey, Gene Fest, Wyclef, Sartre, Rousseau.  (Searching my .docs, there is no satisfactory origin for the concept of origin.  Either a “Riot Grrrl History,” a bunch of lonely sexual ramblings, or Yaphet Kotto.  Oops.)

Beginning Again—This is more like it.  Origins are categorically onanistic.  How much seed need be spilled in pursuit of beginning something that must inherently end?  Like when Eve recounts her birth, Milton inscribes the myth of Narcissus upon her before she even meets Adam.  Before the beginning (what else is Paradise Lost about?) of human history, we have a being obsessed by its encounter w/ the mirror-stage, its beginning of self-awareness of the other (self), before the sad descent into history.  I’m sick of: the end of the beginning, the beginning of the end, the end of the end, the beginning of the beginning, or the beginning of the end of the beginning of the end of the beginning.  It’s why humans drunk-dial/-text.  At least in America.  TFLN (Txts Frm Lst Nght[1]) is only the most conspicuous aspect of this: we collectively cannot remember how “last night” ended, and thus, waking up (beginning) in the mo(u)rning, we are shocked to learn that our present has been inscribed by a past w/ no present whatsoever.[2]

Beginning over Again—Ugh, how Derridean.  The proliferation of forms has made formalism de trop.  Perhaps we should start teaching our students about the impotence of form, about the form that comes from not taking Viagra  (Wow, that’s in my spell check!).  As in: logorrhea is a form in-and-of-itself. . . if not the form.  Is hyperarchivization anything less than this logic?  Like in Paradise Lost (again) when Adam and Satan both complain about the fact that neither had any say in the manner of their creation.  Oh, the wisdom of Silenus.

A Perhaps Even More Pressing (Form of) Beginning—Can I only write as if it were about to be immediately posted to the interwebs?

(Apocalypse) Now Begun—To those who perhaps do not understand the liminalities of this here present undertaking, let me be frank in my reference: “These are the two fantasmatic limits of the book to come, two extreme, final, eschatic figures of the end of the book, the end as death, or the end as telos or achievement”[3]; “the hypothesis we are considering here is that of the total and remainderless destruction of the archive,”[4] or the total infinite accumulation of that archive w/o end.  It is b/t these things, b/t these two ultimate limits, impossible in their irreducible extravagance, where we attempt to locate ourselves in the HYPERARCHIVAL PARALLAX.

Let me attempt to be clear: any writing, any writing whatsoever, occurs b/t these two poles.  These are the poles which inscribe any attempt to write, in all its banal euphoria.  So, on the one hand, the hyperarchival parallax attempts to incorporate everything, but on the other, to destroy everything, to destroy everything it incorporates, and thus it is able to exist b/c it is aware that it can never reach these untransgressible limits.[5]

When Foucault writes on transgression, he says that “the twentieth century will undoubtedly have discovered the related categories of exhaustion, excess, the limit, the transgression—the strange and unyielding form of these irrevocable movements which consume and consummate us.”[6] The hyperarchival parallax seeks to undo the 20^thc’s discoveries.  Not that F. was wrong, far from it, but rather b/c it seeks a transgression of the gap b/t liminalities.  “The first critical move is to replace this topic of the polarity of opposites with the concept of the inherent ‘tension,’ gap, noncoincidence, of the One itself.”[7] Consequently, if the “ONE” is the “ARCHIVE,” the hyperarchival parallax seeks to highlight the fact that the archive is never the archive: it is always hyperarchive.  The two sides of its coin are (perhaps) the interwebs as infinite accumulatory archive and the interwebs as an archive that is always undergoing the process of its own destruction infinitely.  If these are untransgressible limits, they are only so b/c we don’t have an AI strong enough to breach them, or our posthumanity has not caught up w/ its reality yet.  “We should therefore also assert a gap between life and meaning, analogous to the gap between truth and meaning—life and meaning do not in any way fully overlap.”[8] Thus. . . .

To Begin Again, Anew—Thus, “Sun is shining, / Birds are singing, / Flowers are growing, / Clouds are looming and I am flying.”[9] The shit has been defined, and, whether or not the birds are singing tomorrow b/c its pgh and the sun don’t shine, it (the sun) will rise tomorrow (hopefully).  But that’s the whole parallax, right?  The birds surely sing when the sun goes down.  I got these birds in my more-or-less-backyard that for periods of time make a squawking, quaking type of noise every day when the sun goes down.  I think they’re related to the blackbirds/crows that used to perch there/fly across the sky every eve at sundown.  Or else, “the sun has gone down for the last time.”[10] But that still ain’t a solution to beginning.  We’ll see.

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[1] How Hebraic.  YHWH-damn.

 

[2] The first instance of this that popped up when I visited this site on 10.24.2009 was: “You were so drunk last night you typed http://www.face.come/cheese.com as if you were logging into facebook.”  Point.  Win.  Though I will admit this is a fairly banal case-example/-study of what I’m talking ‘bout.

[3] Derrida, Jacques.  “The Book to Come.”  Paper Machine.  Trans. Rachel Bowlby.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.  15.

[4] Derrida, Jacques.  “No Apocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead (Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).”  Psyche:   Inventions of the Other.  Vol. 1.  Trans. Catherine Porter & Philip Lewis.  Eds. Peggy Kamuf & Elizabeth Rottenberg.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007 [1984].  400.

[5] For instance, “Otis Nixon” is the most hit-upon reference in this archive.  Destruction!

[6] Foucault, Michel.  Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews.  Trans. Donald F. Bouchard & Sherry Simon.  Ed. Donald F. Bouchard.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.  49.

[7] Žižek, Slavoj.  The Parallax View. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006.  7.

[8] ibid., 182.

[9] M83.  “Birds.”  Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts.  EMI, 2003.

[10] Milemarker.  “Sun Out.”  Ominosity. Eyeball Records, 2005.