Other contiguities

Reincarnation waves the dead body’s antennae above sentence structure’s serrated moaners.

-Matt Margo

In general, contiguity gives an excuse to speak of meanings. Even more interesting from the point of view of superstition and popular sentimental romance are "random" contiguities that are imagined to be emanating from a higher or transcendent source of special significance (like Fate). Unfortunately, we don't have the same mythic source for "language" wherever a certain brand of "scientific" rigor demands something beyond statistical consensus as an excuse for delineating a category of structurally and semantically "vibrant" contiguities. 

To dream of combinations that pretend to have more semantic weight or value (poetic or otherwise) has now been replaced by the simple execution of the motor of combination itself, where unrestrained coupling is the rule, like DNA mixing sent in a delirious fast forward drive. To what end? New matter, new meaning, new being? No, the goal is Combination itself, accelerated faster and faster, beyond the restricted barrier of vibrant syntactic or linguistic contiguities we were advised for so long to support or promote.

Matt Margo, from "Two Titles," 2011

This seems to be what is going on in a non-linear, post-grammatical work like that of Matt Margo's: mixing everything, words, figures, contexts, registers, expressions, idioms, narration, description, clauses, run-on phrases, fragments, imagery, the common and not-so-common and the orthodox and unorthodox all intersecting on any angle on the "discursive" plane. The odd mixture makes it difficult to determine their “complete” meaning (which is no longer the point). Sometimes, the parts, which could make sense if found in another context or out of context, are themselves in uncommon combinations that we even doubt if they are trying to make sense at all. Since "no current theory of grammar is capable of distinguishing all grammatical English sentences from ungrammatical ones," a combinatory textual practice like this also redefines the boundaries of syntactic possibilities and politics.

The result goes further than the articulation of accepted and unacceptable combinations reproducing the stock of  “common” and uncommon semiotic organization and sense. More importantly, the text returns us to the very dynamism where linguistic contiguities are happening before settling into semiotic refrains (like asteroids with a center or wandering stars forming imaginary constellations), thereby reinforcing the catachretic view of all linguistic combinatory processes. With this kind of text, writing becomes a sort of neural rewiring happening on the pure surface of free association. It is here that we enter once more towards the hazy boundaries between the order of Time and the order of Language: where semantics falls between the two would be anybody's guess.

The malleable page

-The new page is a field of events where anything can intersect another thing, an assemblage space. Syntax, any manner of concatenation of material or pro-symbolic elements, can have any multidimensional and multiple degrees of freedom. Nothing dictates that this or that should be what appears here or there.

-This field has no center: I don't control its elements or direction; I am only one of the players, and I myself am a plurality of forces. The page is a field of dreams without a center. (Or: the center can be simulated.)

-The sign is an imaginary object, its dimensions are unstable and immeasurable. When we speak in a language, or when we read a language, we are more than interpreting. We are activated in a field of intersecting events, where signs are reborn as symbols and new matter, magnetic transformations, a moment in a point of perceptual infinities, like in an aleph.

-Language is just one bark in a rich noise environment. Signs, when they appear, don't just appear in pairs; they appear with all sorts of things, a battalion, a fluid throng, with variable membership every time. Signs don't represent; they attach themselves like magnetic particles with other particles. These are gregarious types, with cliques and gangs or tribes, with their themes, hymns, emblems, and refrains.

-The multimedia intersection of elements is just the material consequence of a core operational nature, the eventual expression of assembly processes. A signifying event is a company that varies with each reactivation. Unfortunately, parts and wholes don't appear together because of at least two reasons. One, time constrains the experience of a whole set of evolutions. A novel, for example, can only be read one page at a time. Two, the forkings cannot be managed within the spatial limits of a circumscribed techno-media. The viewing space of say cable TV or URLs could represent the spatio-temporal field of an evolutive assembly space, where the intersection of concatenable things happen.

Just two ways the famous looking-glass of Alice is reinterpreted on the net. In the first, the humor arises out of the reassertion of the  duality of materiality and virtuality; in the second, the domain of virtual images and duplicates still awakens unknown terrors (in this case, the repossession of one's identity and body by others).

-Malleability of matter (and, by extension, of the "materialist" sign) is the end goal of techno-media. In digital space and in the dimension of simulations, signs and things are no longer opposites. (We see this made iconic by people entering films or virtual realities, or going out of them into the "real world" that still actually resides in both.) Within that new dimensionality where our perceptual literacy is now roaming, anything can become anything, where identities like signs and things are temporary blink-prints on electronic sand.

-In this domain, the palpable and the impalpable share the same addresses between Mind and Machine (themselves variable points on this floating dimension where everything is exterior, built up by sensory extensions that provide the whole content and mode of our world comprehension.)