Welcome to Public Domain's new publishing venture.

Strictly speaking, Freud's observation in Beyond The Pleasure Principle, of the child's tossing of objects (shouting, Freud thought, 'FORT!' or gone in German) and subequent reeling back in ('da ', or there), becomes problematized at the beginning of the twenty first century. One does not need Freud to know that objects thrown out may or may not find their way back -- and if they do come back it is often in the guise of a haunting (if it makes you feel better, you may call it an 'effect'). This playful sending out and receiving back, or not, or in a burnished form, marks a new, apparently gravity-free stage of history, where even the fundaments may return eventually, continually, perhaps heralding (even in a purported non-appearance) some form of the Eternal Return, much feared/beloved by Nietzsche. But if so, all appears in that tight nexus that Benjamin examined in the aura, a simultaneous mixture of the very distant within the very near, a glamour which refuses to go away and perhaps bewitches to a greater extent than ever before but hidden, exerting subterranean pulls within the flows of our machines.

But what is 'writing' if not the pulsations of these powerful flows and folds of temporality and spatiality, writing forming the liminality of a Mobius strip, forever stitching along the border of inside and outside, nearest and furthest, object and subject, and all the other metaphysical dyads that have whirled through the human mind probably from the beginning of the time when there began to be such a thing as the human mind.

There, in that problematic -- fascinating, fabulous, dead yet undying --stroke between is where this new/old venture resides, the skototropic surplus mass that can never be fully moved past the stroke...and yet never fully assimilated.

There, write there.

"Perhaps these 'forbidden games' make up an autonomous system that, from a semiotic psychoanalytical point of view, inspires in the text a 'diabolical' uncanniness, the current equivalent to the question that had formerly been asked by a possessed women from depths forever inaccessible to us. As such, something of the interrogation she formerly opened never ceases to be diabolical."

Michel de Certeau, Discourses Disturbed: The SorcererÕs Speech

from back cover:

"These texts were all written within the last five years (with one exception, Portal), all suffering from the fate of words as talismans, hoaxery, buffoonery, perpetual failures now: bits of flotsam and jetsam left alongside the informational highway; an occasional installation, a call for submissions, online jabberwocky, things that look like poetry but are merely intimations of such, family album mixing with a quantum flux in search of some small crack, some glimmer, any glimmer of some bottomless crevice which opens out at the bottom but, nevertheless always turn out badly, truncated, counted to death, eviscerated and yet palimpsified, nothing ever quite going away permanently."

Fehta Murghana

from back cover:

Ò The children eventually abandon the parents and leave with the aliens, having crossed a boundary condition that was unseen and unreadable by the parents. Not mutation or mediation but rather abandonment would seem to be the governing motif of all forms of modernity, including the form which has apparently embraced its abandonment, postmodernity. This leave-taking seems to always be accompanied by unreadability as a threshold condition and liminal state.Ó

Unreadable

FORT!/da? is a division of Public Domain, Inc.,a non-profit organization devoted to examining the nexus between art, theory, community, and technology.

visit the main we site:

http://www.pd.org