Charles Bernstein, from "Veil" (Xeroxial Editions, 1987/1976)
Situated between concrete
poetry and asemic art, this production from Charles Bernstein (http://www.ubu.com/contemp/bernstein/index.html)
conveys the thickness of writing, where words themselves attain depth and
weight, shade and texture.
Like a wild forest of weeds,
the words overpopulate a space where language is no longer distinguishable from
noise. Sign upon sign, the iteration of language, in the competing market of
information, has rendered the text really opaque, literally, a singular page of
sedimentary, overcharged signification. We can imagine the future of this
document where ink or pencil, or any marking substance, after supplying the
base for the articulation of differences, and feeding the glutton we call
Meaning, returns by refilling the gaps, and restores itself in its seamless,
borderless materiality, effacing the language it gave birth to in the
beginning.
We can say that, as a
consequence of the development in the technology of expression since
photography and cybernetics, older media became the material of newer media,
taking away their role as primary carrier of knowledge, and giving them a
secondary role as material elements objectified and supervised by the absorbing
mechanism: the hypertext.
In Bernstein's
"Veil," the text is really becoming a textus, a cloth whose nature is
more and more tactile than verbal, more manipulated than read, and more measured
than understood. At least in this state, we don't see any master discourse or
subject taking charge, no thematic conducting the mass, or rhetorical order
sculpting the flow of thought and emotion.
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