NOISE

"The bit of noise, the small random element, transforms one system or
one order into another." - M. Serres

"Between the rationality for which the analysis speaks and the law that
history repeats there remains a gap, infinitesimal to be sure, but
fundamental" - M. De Certeau

call for submissions: PERFORATIONS 15

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE: Memory and its Dislocations

Memory. Is there anything without it? Thought, action, love, morality,
community, family, the state, subjectivity, all require and rely on the
ability to relate what is no more and yet has not disappeared with what
is not yet but is on the way: 'past' and 'future' finding their only
existence 'now'. Sometimes comforting, the past (which in some form is
always still here–that's why we know it's the past) seems most often
these days weak and spiteful or alternatively a fractious and vexed
tyrant, Eurydice-like in its beckoning us back, promising redemption yet
ultimately trapping us in its labyrinthine corridors. The balm of
continuity that the past once offered (was it ever thus? or only another
turn in the labyrinth?), a genealogical covenant with both time and
space, seems now more honored in its breach (and AS rupture) than its
contiguous states. Even matter, though as obdurate as it has always
been, seemed to be resigned to its performance of decay (and even the
perennial gnostic wink–*performance* of decay–we could live with, as
some misty object of devotion behind the scenes that some folks could
wrap their abjection around).

Memory was the great stitch suturing matter and flesh (never quite
coincident with each other) with however the heck it is we can KNOW
anything. But now memory seems simultaneously, and contradictorily, as
porous as a sieve and yet strangely mutable to our desires. The
*performance* of consciousness as it turns to those beckoning cries from
the cave (heard faintly over the roars of the concrete trucks as they
dump load after load, attempting to fill that unfillable archaic void):
we remember things that never happened, we forget events that MUST have
happened, we alter events that did happen. We are increasingly abducted
by our own brain as it eviscerates itself, starfish-like, cracking open
its evening meal, squirting its stomach into the meal, rather than
viscera versa, everything sucked/blown into our electronic/technical
apparatus. Everything, including memory, now spawning its uncanny,
shadowy double while, laser-like, memory is pumped faster and faster
between the opposing half-silvered doubles of birth and death (perhaps
proving eventually they're not as opposed as we thought, maybe only
memory making it so).

False memories, implanted memories (aren't all memories implanted?),
memories of the future, traumatic memories, memory lacking the necessary
immunological agent to protect itself, the overpowering presence of the
archive (and yet, we now see, remember/make-up, it's unavowable
duplicity), it's density gone hypersonic (and tachyonic?) as it meets
its electronic self.

The next issue of PERFORATIONS will be written on soaked madeleine
cookies. You are welcome to take a bite, cook a batch, remember your
first morsel, forget your last.

All projects, poesis, phronesis, catharsis, morcellations, proposals,
memories, forgettings, rumours of the Fall, courtiers to the crash,
breach babies, neurological scans of your frontal lobe, your past life
regressions, your carrot at the end of the stick, your
lacano-freudo-nietzscho-mastications of the memory nodes and their
favorite dump–the 'culture'–are welcome as always.

general enquires to: info@pd.org

technical: jdemmers@pd.org

artist questionaire: cprince@pd.org

p e r f o r a t i o n s/FORT!/da?:: zeug@pd.org

S P R A w l: xman@pd.org

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