INTRODUCTION

"Keep the irregularities inconsistent, variously differentiated and otherwise unmatched in all manner of ways and variety of sorts."-- Edward Fellow, Cranbrook School of Design

Hyperdiction offers tools with which to make the World, a technodiscourse of movement, creation, and delectation. Language creating itself from itself, the hammer which wields around in an impossible calculus in order to hammer itself into being. A mobius creation.

Hyperdiction proffers tools for a world here to go, mechanisms with which to consume, to produce, to enjoy Life.

Like the technes of ancient rhetoric, Hyperdiction does not offer rules of propriety, mandates of behavior, but techniques to create, to assemble the world to one's liking. We cannot offer rules because the rules are made on the go, ever changing, morphing, shifting. With equal parts humility and hubris, we offer tools for tactful living, stratagems for Now.

New technologies result in new experiences. But technology does not refer solely to machines as we commonly know them, things like computers, telephones, calculators. Punctuation is a technology. (Before parentheses you couldn't make a discrete literary aside.) Concepts can be technology, opening up possibilities, creating frontiers. Words are technological: they allow and facilitate and create, they injure, seduce, persuade. The right word at the right time can conjure the miraculous, the delicious, whimsies of delight, epic grandeur, the grotesque, the horrific, the sublime.

As words gather together they forge more complex structures, behavioral engines which we'll call discourse. A discourse at once bounds and liberates; it is simultaneously the space of possibility and of action. Different words, different discourses, like different technologies, create different shapes and possibilities of Life.

A discourse is a configuring of space and bodies, both physical and meta-physical, visible and invisible. It assembles concepts, identities, properties, the limits of action, the terms of engagement. Prepositions, for instance, determine the relative positions of agents and events: are you for me? in me? against me? beyond me? over me? with me? So-called political discourse often speaks in the language of for and against. But what happens if I'm both for and against and beyond? What language can I speak? What discourse--what technology--can I invoke?

Hyperdiction offers a multivalent technology of the self, ceaselessly creative, polycentered, and impeccably tactful. A self which sorts and distributes, tastes and decides and chooses and assembles, conjuring the world along the trajectories of its taste. Are we not men? We are Memex. No longer a dichotomy of passive consumption and active creation, this HyperSelf is a metabolic flux, creating and consuming in the same gesture. A singular nexus, a particular modality, the HyperSelf engenders itself, forging itself from the fray, on the go, here and now: a flaneur, polymorphously perverse, polyglotic and ever at the ready.

Hyperdiction offers a techno discourse of multiplicity, of infinitely variegated plenum, alanguage of pleats twists turns: a language of flux. A tongue of polyphonous tastes, HyperDiction beckons diverse discourses in the same breath: biology, philosophy, Chinese, video, corporate, hip hop, the culinary arts, rave, rhetoric, psychadelic. A dream machine, an übermaschine, perpetually overcoming itself, an engine of differentiation.

A surging, an urging, a relentless creation: a hyperdiction.

* Memex is an active optic onto the world, not a dead chattering box (think: tv). Memex is not only a machine of association, recording, presenting, collecting and archiving one's own information but it filters and re-examines and composites these lexica along certain lines. It forges a landscape in which we can author, transact, reflect ourselves.

Because we're on the World Clock, the Memex machine moves in multiple temporal directions at once. It relentlessly constructs history. An input--an event--forces a re-alignment of the entire series. What I do today creates different historical trajectories than what I did yesterday. And yet that same--or different--yesterday itself joins the new series. The memex machine is annotated and archived throughout one's lifetime, both forwards and backwards.

Memex browses along varied trajectories--theme, place, texture, color, concept, etc... It is an engine of associativeness, bringing together, keeping apart, forging series over the universal network. It navigates a push environment, relentlessly attentive to texture, pulse, energy, not only real time but archived media, textured signage from Buenos Aires, Varanassi, Odessa, Afghanistan, a mosque, a stuppa, rivers, bells: image tracks from all over the world transmute in an ever changing hieroglyph. Both an authoring and reading procedure, a responsive, alert swirl of image, audio, and information, forging beauty, art, Life: YOU.

* The World Clock keeps all times, performing an infinitely dense Baroque ballet of clicks, dongs, minutes, hours, hands swirling 'round. Cuckoo, cuckoo. 4/4 in Britain and New York, 7/8 in Bangladesh and San Francisco. The WC beckons and births new holidaze. The New Year, Rosh Hoshana, Ramadan all get mixed up and put back together: Burning Man? Schoenberg kept a World Clock on his wrist so he tried to make the scales fit. The sound of the World Clock is Glenn Gould channeling Bach.

* Simultaneity As McLuhan said, the new media ushers in an allatonceness. Time stands still, if only for that arresting moment: odd bedfellows are found, past and present stand side by side, new shapes of the world emerge. Peter Greenaway's Pillow Book used video technology to present multiple events--multiple screens--within the same space. The past runs in real time alongside the present. * Juxtaposition An indifferent ordering, as in a newspaper: this simply goes here, without necessary regard for order, theme, concept, category. Gilles Deleuze's "and": this and this and that and the other and this. The relations between things stem from themselves, not from a ruling principle or idea. The Surrealists enjoyed juxtaposition: a sky raining men, an umbrella on an operating table,

* Autopoiesis The world constructs itself, from itself, as itself, for nothing but itself. The writer of a book is a participant in an event--essential, integral, necessary, but not the author(ity). As Humberto Maturana tells us, there's no objectivity, no outside: life always and already happens from the inside out. An inventor moves with the world and the world with him and together they create a Third Mind, a new thing, the world happening now. Order, sense, meaning emerge from the flux of things, from the urging urging urging always procreant urge of the world (Walt Whitman). Like leaves of grass.

* Newspapers Like a hypertext, a newspaper is never simply linear. A veritable weaving, reading through the newspaper involves a certain rhythm of starting, stopping, returning. Each page, certain stories are wrapped up, others begin, still others more slowly but persistently assemble themselves. But the newspaper is a daily event which constrains and condenses the event-window of the newspaper. It is, after all, not be lingered over. Most newspapers have therefore carved niches; that is to say, they repeat essentially the same choreography of reading: this much forward, this much back. A memex newspaper would be able to be responsive to the particular reader and hence would offer different rhythms, particular and evolving reading designs.

* Collage Layering of the found, an assemblage which strattles dimensions, the play of the hidden and the revealed. The collage revels as much in secrets as in declarations, gathering disparity--a lock of hair, a soup can label, an old family photo--but so as to forget as much as to remember. A memory-construct, a forgetful mnemonic.

* Ambience A posture, presence, duration. Ambience is not abstraction: it is the swirl of ghosts and light and shadow which surround and encompass and fill space, forging a plenum, an infinite density (even if filled, punctuated, with pauses, silences, gaps).

* Cut-up Here you have a machine that can take 15 different newspapers, fold them this way and that, cut them up and down, so that the Economic Times meets Vogue meets Plato meets the Cyberpunk Manifesto. New meanings, impossible and unimaginable meanings, pour forth. Imagine such a process being automated and becoming a standard operation run across a wide variety of texts that are presented electronically, from the internet, private networks, various kinds of web. Of course, there is a quite a bit of static in such an operation: nonsense and assault pervade. But with taste, with tact, with a bit of the ol' know-how, the cut-up can be used quite effectively to forge humor, beauty, lines of flight. There's no doubt that much of Burroughs' cut-ups are unreadable. But he learned the vicissitudes of this most difficult tool--wrestling the random is always the most difficult task--so that he could make odd bedfellows enjoy their nuptials and move the world into new, unexpected, hilarious, wise places, shapes, textures. * Hybrid A multiplicity, a nuptial, a Third Mind, life spawned from the meeting of difference. These mergings often result in sterile off-spring. But fertile hybrids are birthed every second. In William Burroughs' The Western Lands, Joe the Natural Outlaw--or No--ceaselessly experiments, cutting and sewing, breeding this and this and that, a head of a zebra on the body of a pig, and finally succeeds much to the suspicion and chagrin of the medico-scientific community. The fertile hybrid sets the borders of discourse wide open. The Western Lands is itself a hybrid: a book of fiction, philosophy, a Book of the Dead, a Book of Life, a series of short stories, a set of legalistic ruminations, a Book of Dreams, a comedy of errors, a tragedy, a temporal re-aligning, a new language.

* Kairos The right time, the time of action: the moment beckons, Michael Jordan cuts to the basket, Chow Yun-Fat aka The Killer begins firing, you lean forward and kiss her. The point of power is always in the present.

We are talking about heeding the situation. Why do airports have the same media as our living rooms? Muzak is onto something: a frequency hidden within the barrage of static, reaching only those ears its meant to seduce. Now take the Muzak model and steer it out of crass commercialism and into the realm of beauty and complexity. A kairotic media.

* Web Tone or Always-On No down time, no off, a media plenum. Not just a screen-saver, an ambience, an experience, a nuance of tone mood, a sensoryscape.

* 4D Pages Walk in and around. No longer simply sitting and looking, but beckoning the hologram, an image bound by the light of itself rather than by a screen. Not just a move into three dimensions, but into four dimensions. The hologram moves, interacts, responds: it's a temporal creature.

* Tesseract Beyond the distinction between surface and depth lies the fourth dimension, the tesseract. A thing has width, depth, height, and duration. There is no stable bottom, no top, only shapes in time.

* Calculus Beyond the 3D coordinates of geometry, calculus gives us space in motion. It is a science of differentiation, of particularizing the infinite. Each curve has a limit, but the limit is infinite. Pi, for instance, is an infinite number which is nevertheless bound. Each step is unpredictable and yet absolutely determined. Calculus is the logic of a world in flux and coherent. Just because borders aren't rigid, doesn't mean there isn't shape.

* Polyopticality With perceptive sensors extending from Venus to the microcosmos of the insect to the lava rumbling thousands of miles below the surface of the earth, we become bionic people, prosthetically augmented. A multi-perspective creature, navigating different--or indifferent--series of circumstances simultaneously. Not all seeing but multi-seeing. * Plenum A world of perpetual plenitude which never overflows. Neither lacking nor excessive, but full: filled to the brim, always and already at the limit. An infinitely dense space.

* Coincidence The intimacy of multiple moments, indifferent to space, cause, and logic. In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon imagines an infinitely dense dance floor, each couple doing a different jig, boogying to a different song: Schubert waltz, BeeGee disco, House rave. And yet no one collides, no bump and stumble, no need for excuse-me's, no call for alarm: a coincidence of bodies in a Baroque thrall. Meanwhile, Gravity's Rainbow finds bombs dropping along the same trajectory as sex is had. Coincidence? The uncanny thing about James Bond is that his most personal pleasures, his absolutely aesthetic satisfaction, is an ethical gesture: stirring the martini saves the world: coincidentally.

* Irony Not to be mistaken for nihilism, detachment, camp, kitsch, or humor. Irony holds two opposed positions at the same time: I am this and I am not-this. Effacing the surface to dwell in the depths, an infinite soul forever exceeding the finitude of language, of categories, of appearance. Irony creeps around the back of the world so as to point to the infinite. In the same gesture, Socrates affirms and effaces himself and his interlocutors, gesturing not to Zero (which is nihilism) but to Infinity.

* Humor An odd meeting, the world folded so as to align itself at odd angles: Conan O'brien's robotic pimp. Humor moves laterally, slipping and sliding and folding and pleating, the origamistic joy of folding towards transformation. Burroughs' laugh as he cuts-up, the surrealist with a smile. A whimsical delight of gathering, pleating, assembling. Manipulate the familiar, as in rave culture's parody of corporate identity. Trading on the known to create the unknown and the new. Humor always offers another way out, a secret passage, a line of flight. It puts a whole new spin on things.

* Quote A crane with which to pick something up and put it in an entirely new place: " "

* Polyglossolalia At the limits of representation, the language of tongues, of tones, of bodies. Each flourishes in a tropics all its own. There's more than one glossolalia.

* Polyglotism To read along diverse planes: Chinese verticality, Hebrew's look to the left, English's look to the right, an astronomer's infinite but focused gaze, the language of the stars: a polyglot ready to speak, always already speaking, always silent. After all, kairos is rarely determined; it is heeded, not controlled. The trick, then, is to create a state of perpetual readiness: alert, keen, nose to the wind, ears to the wall.

* I Ching An algorithm generating meaning through shape, and shape through meaning. Chance begets necessity and vice-versa. A contrived serendipity.

* Hypertext A multi-directional proliferation of narrative trajectories, a rhizomic text. Allows for the layering or lateral movement of information and narrative down estuaries stipulated by color, history, theme, concept, genre, whim or fancy.

* Troubadour memory Memory splayed through space as footage from birth, from toddler daze, from right this very moment move side by side, all in present time: you are your entire life happening every moment. Troubadours used spatial mnemonics: telling a story involved walking through an edifice, a field, a site configured by that story--and vice-versa. The hypermemory is a Troubadour memory.

* Taste A kind of know-how, a productive filter, a sieve, a sensor, a tongue licking the world for the tasty spots. The lay of the tongue is unique, the first step in a singular trajectory of distribution, before the digestive system kicks in, sending this here and that there, before the world becomes oxygen, protein, shit, an idea. Taste doesn't just sense salt, sweet, sour, etc., but proportion, balance, position. Good taste weighs, assesses, senses relationships: what belongs where. It's a decision making function situated between conscious and unconscious (taste is not predicated on reason but neither does it necessarily follow the inclinations of the id), mind and body, reflection and immediacy. In this synesthetic world, taste has a keen eye and a discerning ear.

* Tact Like taste, tact is a kind of know-how. But unlike taste tact is not concerned with the user's bodily system per se but with other bodies. Tact is a political function, negotiating and distributing bodies and experiences outside of this body. William Burroughs says that the only man he ever respected was Brion Gysin: Gysin was a master of tact. He was perceptive, discerning: he knew when to say what to whom. He knew the proper mode of address, not because he'd memorized a code and knew when to say "Sir" or "Madam" but because he was able to navigate new and unique circumstances. He knew what the situation beckoned; he negotiated kairos impeccably. Tact does not rely on extrinsic codes or behavior. Rather, tact makes the right decision on-the-go. As Gysin writes, "What are we here for? We're here to go!"

* Delectation The full consumptive embrace, devoured not in an instant, but in all its particulars as parts and whole in every instant.

* Colorwalk Pick a color, any color: say, green. As you walk, see green, literally walk down the streets with green. The world organized by color rather than by capital or moral principle or desire or need or utility: an aestheticization of the world. Simultaneously, you learn the infinite modulations of a color, the hues, moods, shapes, textures, and tones of green. The world ruled by green.

* The Wink A rhizomic tic. To look and not look at the same time. To mean and not mean at the same time. A beckoning, an effacement, an ocular play, nudging language and people this way and that.

* Origami The art of folding so as to transform what sits before you, a most handy skill. For instance, walk into anesthetized Disney Times Square. Take Daffy between thumb and forefinger, fold Mickey this way--make sure the ears go just so--then pleat the IMAX at such an angle and voilà: a naked lady. This same technique can of course be used in a variety of situations, e.g. family gatherings, crowded bars, bus rides, etc..

* Flaneur The flaneur is not a user of the world but an enjoyer. A sensuous creature happily indulging the world's pleasures, tongue outstretched, lips pursed for a kiss. The flaneur lets his or her taste wander through the landscape, enjoying whatever piques his or her interest.

* Remote Control From the comfort of your lazy ass chair, morph dramas into comedies, talk-shows into ball games, the tv into a wealth of ever-changing possibility. Create your own story, plot, set of characters. Invent your own genre. With remote in hand, you're the director, writer, casting agent. Be your own tv guide.

* Polytopia As dictinct from utopia, atopia, dystopia or heterotopia: polytopia, a proliferation of place.

* With Prepositions are tricky, dangerous creatures. They're a matter of place and posture, of relations, of how things stand towards one another. The most difficult aspect of learning a new language is mastering the preposition. "For" and "against" are prepositions of the weak: they place the speaker outside him or herself, always directed towards