Sunday, May 6, 2018

Not this not that

Random patterns, an oxymoron. But perhaps language is like that. There is a pattern without that pattern being less arbitrary.

In a similar way, I can try creating lines that have patterns, but without real meaning. It can be a pattern that appears at random in a series, made of words, or letters, or just symbols.

Random generators. Strange phrase. Word randomization since cut-ups and dadaist chance composition. old hat?

Syntax to lettristic mutations. plots to words. etc. everything is randomized. if we can do that to our organs, we will.

Meanwhile, the debate on the meanings of chance, aleatory, random, etc. remain unresolved. one remarked that probably the universe is a mix of determinacy and indeterminacy.

To incorporate this concept and to think one can really apply it, on this or that line, on this or that page, determinacy or indeterminacy, simply either falsifies or confirms both. it is a case of the Liar's paradox, among other paradoxes. in the end, however, they are just concepts being spoken about.

''Fantastic Machines''

What interests me more is the idea of something inapplicable, like an absent theory or idea.

Leftwich has an interesting binary he sets off as a kind of thematic sub-sections for his Six Months Ain't No Sentence series. NOT THIS and/or NOT THAT. Negated content, yet ever present and unfurling, albeit in a fragmented mode moving in and out of recognizable language. This is writing at the limits, alternating between possibility and impossibility, recognition and denial, in a state we can only call "negative knowledge." It is a kind of half-language, moving away from over-semantic, over-processed standard discourse that progressive xeno-linguists would barely want to touch or use, but picking up what remains codable within it, as a final gesture or signal to an old country of names.

The negative binarism simply enumerates in a series of negations all possible demonstratives.

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