transcriptions, 19

transcription19


P l I D L 9 z m P V
p a l i m p s e s t
3 G Q w H Y 1 A y n
a n t i q u a r i a n
R 4 o a H b h l I 8
r e p r o d u c e s
w n 5 I S N L 7 L q
v a n i s h i n g
l J 3 F R T q g 2 0
l i b r a r i a n
M Y H i j 2 S v 8 N
m y s t i f i e d
b S t 5 7 0 9 q T s
b e s t s e l l e r
O r n U Q 1 L C w Z
o r p h i s t i c
A k 9 h k Z F f F m
a r c h a i s m s
A B w m 3 Z E S m g
a m b i g u o u s
Z 6 J p Z 7 y Q 3 a
s o l i l o q u y s
Q z g g T z b a Z Q
o n o m a s t i c
v H 9 H C 3 n m V h
v o y e u r i s m
K 0 a d s c D j s 4
b r o a d c a s t s

A text is a text is a text

1. A rose is a rose is a rose. Like a chair is a chair is a chair… the loop excludes transcendental signifieds. Warhol prints...

2. Since Gertrude Stein, we have seen language moves that no longer fall within the classic forms that have been institutionally validated as "poetic." The "poetic" has become more and more a term that designated a limited paradigm of reading. If it is overblown by many, if any claim is made on its behalf, it indicates not only an over-extension of the term but also an attempt to confer a cultural value to language moves that otherwise would not get any "cultural" or "market" value. Any move in a vast language game that impacts the way we handle that game does not need that label to get attention. Beyond the attempt to insert that move in the institutional market to get some attention, to call any writing "poetic" is narrow, restrictive, self-serving, and self-prophetic.

Thus, a general cultural bias simply reasserted itself when the existence of the category of the "poetic" was assumed a priori as an aspect of language use instead of suspending this assumption for the sake of objective linguistic inquiry. To assume something is not to prove anything. We should try to test another assumption, that there is nothing inherently poetic in the uses of language beyond the rhetorical and the formal, or beyond the market politics of institutions.

3. To remain within a hackneyed definition is to wallow in one's significance pond: a semantic self-delusion. It is to be caught up in the force of one's own can of demonstratives. To be unaware of a linguistic fantasy is naïveté; to be aware and to continue in the same path is self-delusional; to be aware of this awareness is a second-degree fantasy, that of self-parody.

Finally, to dismiss or to devalue powerful language moves that fall outside of our own valorized forms and rituals (especially when those moves offer inversions and critiques of our valued word order) is to display one of the most short-sighted traits of negative discrimination.

Beckett & the impossible voice

By intensely interrogating the line that divided discursivity and narrativity, the meta-textual procedures deployed by «Texts for Nothing» exposed the aporetic dynamic of the Beckettian oeuvre. As a failed voyager in a landscape that seems to impede progress at every turn, the Beckettian personnage never goes anywhere. The blocage seems to come from an essential difficulty: what is the difference between the speaking "I" and the narrating "I"?

The answer always sounds obvious. The first one does not tell a story and only speaks. The speaking "I" speaks because speech is done in the present, and the person saying "I" is the same person referred to by the word "I." This disambiguated state of the speaking "I" is its deictic advantage. When this "I" speaks, it cannot be part of a story. Even in a homodiegetic narrative, the speaking "I" cannot be part of the story without first becoming a narrator. In other words, I cannot tell a story at the same time as I am living its events. It would be magical to see the "I" realize the events of a story at the same moment it is spoken, like some kind of performative act. Towards the magical ending of One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example, the narrative time and time of narration coincide. If the "I" says "It is a Tuesday" and it is not really Tuesday, we start to think that this "I" is probably deluded or hallucinating. Or this "I" is probably not deluded at all or crazy, but is in fact telling a story in which the events that are being told are happening on a Tuesday. The "I" certainly cannot make the day a Tuesday just by saying it.

When "I" says It is a Tuesday when it is not a Tuesday, and if it is certain we are not hearing mad speech, then what we have is a memory or story. The question we then ask is: who or what or where is this "I"? Can a machine tell a story? If by "can" we mean having the physical capacity to produce words, whether as recording or as programmed strings, then we say Yes. But if "can" means to function as a narrator, dependable or not, real or not, then we tend to say No because we seem to require more from a narrator than just the ability to reproduce sound. (Another example: a grocery list is not a story primarily because we can't see any narrator in it.) However, the fact that anything can take the role of the narrator, living or not, already tells us about its indefinite nature. It is simply a linguistic function.

At the beginning of "Texts for Nothing," the homodiegetic speaker/narrator appears "suddenly." This instantaneous appearance on the scene is immediately followed by an assertion of the inability to "go on." On the second sentence, an indefinite "someone" addresses the speaker, forming a dialogical pair: "You can't stay here." This is quite understandable, and the contradiction is only apparent: the narrator function cannot have a deictic status in the here-and-now of discourse. But this situation is made more complex by the third line, which probably summarizes the whole aporetic dynamic of the text: "I couldn’t stay there and I couldn’t go on." This situational cycle repeats itself, and carries the speaker, strangely, for many more pages to come: " And were there one day to be here, where there are no days, which is no place, born of the impossible voice the unmakable being, and a gleam of light, still all would be silent and empty and dark, as now, as soon now, when all will be ended, all said, it says, it murmurs." The "impossible voice," "the unmakable being": don't these fit a good description of the narrator function? The weirdness of this voice comes from the fact that it is no one and nothing, and yet it speaks. "It’s not true, yes, it’s true, it’s true and it’s not true, there is silence and there is not silence, there is no one and there is someone, nothing prevents anything." Impossible, and yet cannot be unmade.

And who is the narrator's interlocutor? Is it another character? The indefinite nature of the interlocutor reveals the monological status of the text: "Someone said, perhaps the same, What possessed you to come?" Here we see one instance of the coincidence between the narrating "I" and the narrated "I." Often, too, this bipolarity extends to the problematic attempts of the narrator/speaker to include contextual orientation in the text, elements that would normally be deictic parts of discourse: "I’ll describe the place, that’s unimportant...." "How long have I been here, what a question...." "And now here, what now here...."

This aporetic movement may all seem to reaffirm the clear distinction between discourse and narrative, between the speaking "I" and narrating "I," but the substantial use of language items we normally associate with a speech situation coupled with the constant breakdown of any attempt to produce a progressive narrative line also seem to point out a difficulty that still requires resolution. The clear-cut distinction we thought we had between the two "I"s is always creating a problem: on one hand, a totally narrative "I" would be an impossible voice, a "someone" without place and time except in language; on the other, a totally discursive "I" with full deictic capacities would not be able to tell a story. In short, it becomes a choice between an impossible narrative which exists as a "nothing" ("Whose voice, no one’s, there is no one, there’s a voice without a mouth...") and a very restrictive speech that simply speaks but cannot ever progress without first falling into narrative, thereby losing its full deictic status and becoming another "nothing." 

However, if " to speak of once, is to speak of nothing," then any use of language that does not carry with it any trace of story-telling or any trace of re-citation cannot even begin to exist as speech. Even in a conversation that goes "How do you feel?"/"I feel better now, thanks" is presumably carried within a stream of history laid out as a narrative or memory. An absolutely unique speech that happens only once for the first time and once only cannot be repeated or remembered. It is a speech that can't go anywhere, a speech that we can't even imagine to happen. 

As the quandary of nothingness at every turn, this voiceless voice keeps turning, mute speech that echoes its absence again and again. Time without time, space without space, these texts for nothing outline a zone where language speaks when it narrates, and narrates when it speaks.

Beckett's alibi (2004)

Posting something written many years ago:

     Beckett’s oeuvre represents one of the most sustained meditations on the nature of writing (we could mention Derrida, Jabès, Blanchot, Queneau up to Perec, Barthes, Calvino or Borges, Barth, among many others). Maybe the 20th century should be called the Century of Writing, following the « lingusitic turn » in discplinary and philosophical concerns after Nietzsche and Saussure.

     In general terms, the work « Texts for Nothing » (TFN) marks the moment in literature where writing can no longer be viewed as either representational (object-action-events) or expressionistic (conscious-unconscious self), or even an objet d’art in the neoclassical sense of Form or in the Parnassian concept of Art for Art’s sake. Hence, the mode of subjectivity « simulated » in TFN is one of bleak desperation (desespoir), and the textual « dynamic » one of self-contradiction (in all senses of the word as logical-linguistic conflict and mutual exclusion, as postulation and cancellation, as the proffering of one statement and its reverse, etc.). In syntactic terms, this can be seen in the paratactic and repetitive organization of the text, and in the exploitation of the comma to signify a continuous inconclusion or irresolution, or the lack of a teleological completion of thought or action. It is no doubt part and extension of the « stream of consciousness » technique in late modernism, a mode of utterance that the speaking «voice» deploys as a signature of its inscription as a dramatic monologist in search of narrative form.

     In this condition, the fabula of TFN can be seen as basically that : the search for narrative form (or sjuzhet). It marks a later stage in the progressive obsolescence of narrative elements that had Sarraute and Queneau searching for their « characters» in terms of their « identity » or « presence ». As a search for narrative form, the dramatic monologist cannot therefore deploy narrative as a means to such an end. This implies that at the very outset, all rhetorical elements belonging to the repertoire of narrative would be either interdicted, suspended, or, if used, requalified and even contradicted. This explains the momentary lapses of TFN into some occasional « pockets » of recognizable « story » threads and its eventual abandonment of them. Furthermore, as a mode of desperate search for narrative form, the « psycho-emotive » state of the monologist would translate into various types of blocage : uncertainties or doubts, indefiniteness, hesitations, reluctance, dilemmas, impotence, apprehension, difficulties, scruples, misgivings, vaccilations, etc. These forms of blocage are the direct result of the realisation that the search for narrative form cannot escape using the elements of narrative for its initiation. Hence, the incipits are often not foundational commencements for a sjuzhet about to unfold, but periodic bursts of intense blocages. In other words, the search for narrative form outside of the narrative format cannot even begin, cannot even dream of beginning. (Is it not that a narrative is defined precisely by a quest, that it is in itself the modus operandi of any search ?)

     How can the search for narrative form, which must take the narrative format as supposition, even begin when the fact of inaugurating the search activates the form immediately ? By this activation, the monologist translates his/her search into narrative, narrates his/her search as s/he searches for narrative form, and marks the site of the split of the subject into the multiple positions of monologist, author, narrator, figure, and narratee, and reader. The advent of multiplicity is probably not the greatest threat that ends the search and transfroms it into the object of the search ; the greatest threat is that, by incarnating narrative form at the moment of the search for form (by suspension of form, of course), the monologist abdicates or evacuates his/her position of priority as presence before form, and marks his/her inscription into and via narrative, terminates or executes his search, and, thus, heralds his/her non-presence as the prelinguistic space or origin of speech. The monologist, becoming plural, assumes the face of the other/s, resumes the speech and voice of the other/s, and most importantly, begins to inhabit the space of the other/s, which is the space of writing, the space of death and disappearance, atopia...

     But our monologist stubbornly pursues a logic or ethic of refusal against a capitulation to the Other, to death, to Nothingness. It is the desperate cry of the dying nostalgia for a presence, that metaphysical Now and Here space of Being prior to the irruption of difference. And yet, how can one be in two places at the same time ? That would really be an alibi.

Kenneth Goldsmith & "Uncreative Writing"

Kenneth Goldsmith's two new books on "conceptual" or/and "uncreative" writing:

1. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern University Press, Chicago, 2011)

2. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in a Digital Age (Columbia University Press, New York, 2011)

Here are some quotes from his discussion of "Conceptual poetics" (http://www.sibila.com.br/index.php/sibila-english/410-conceptual-poetics):

"If it all sounds familiar, it is. Conceptual writing obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos. Language as material, language as process, language as something to be shoveled into a machine and spread across pages, only to be discarded and recycled once again. Language as junk, language as detritus. Nutritionless language, meaningless language, unloved language, entartete sprache, everyday speech, illegibility, unreadability, machinistic repetition. Obsessive archiving & cataloging, the debased language of media & advertising; language more concerned with quantity than quality. How much did you say that paragraph weighed?

"I teach a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Uncreative Writing,” which is a pedagogical extension of my own poetics. In it, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead, they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly, what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.

Well, you might ask, what’s wrong with creativity? “I mean, we can always use more creativity.”(1) “The world needs to become a more creative place.”(2) “If only individuals could express themselves creatively, they’d be freer, happier.”(3) “I’m a strong believer in the therapeutic value of creative pursuits.”(4) “To be creative, relax and let your mind go to work, otherwise the result is either a copy of something you did before or reads like an army manual.”(5) “I don’t follow any system. All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives.”(6) “An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.”(7)

When our notions of what is considered creative became this hackneyed, this scripted, this sentimental, this debased, this romanticized . . . this uncreative, it’s time to run in the opposite direction. Do we really need another “creative” poem about the way the sunlight is hitting your writing table? No. Or another “creative” work of fiction that tracks the magnificent rise and the even more spectacular fall? Absolutely not."

Fantastic machines of rewriting and retranscription? As textual (re)productions that are not expected to be "read," Goldsmith's work may be seen as an extension of his beginnings in the plastic arts. The texts produced are re-produced or recycled, not as a book in the classical sense of a container/carrier of meaning and information, but as an archival artifact presenting the frenzied & omnipresent (re)production of more language material than we can handle or read. The more likely display space is the collector's gallery rather than the library. This does not mean that Goldsmith is forging new objects as "art" pieces, knowing well that he situates his process along the lines of "conceptual" exercises that include Duchamp and Beckett (Watt) as predecessors.

Craig Dworkin ("The Fate of Echo" in Against Expression):

"With conceptual writing, in contrast, the force of critique from the very beginning was just the opposite: to distance ideas and affects in favor of assembled objects, rejecting outright the ideologies of disembodied themes and abstracted content. The opacity of language is a conclusion of conceptual art but already a premise for conceptual writing. The very procedures of conceptual writing, in fact, demand an opaquely material language: something to be digitally clicked and cut, physically moved and reframed, searched and sampled, and poured and pasted. The most conceptual poetry, unexpectedly, is also some of the least abstract, and the guiding concept behind conceptual poetry may be the idea of language as quantifiable data....

"Writing, in these cases, referred more to itself, or to other instances of writing, than to any referent beyond the page. Oriented toward text rather than diegesis, these works present writing as their subject rather than imagining writing to be the means to a referential end."

Cut & paste: the very logic of quotation, no longer of an original or originating source, but of another quotation. However, to say that a quotation "reveals" the meaning of another quotation is to revert to the classical paradigms of reading. The consequence of a conceptual writing projected this way would also require a different definition of reading.

transcriptions, 18

transcription18


U c D d T h m n r B
d i t h y r a m b
P a s A s U p I E c
p a r a s i t e s
c J p b m e g r J V
s u b m e r g e d
Y t e L n T j i q p
e n t e l e c h y
j Q w q H a Q V g f
e x h a u s t i v e
s p y w s D v v E s
a s y n d e t o n
A N q b m g Z C d k
a m b u s c a d e
P S n d Y o Y Z k e
p a l i n d r o m e
U R c S C b q w Q v
u r b a n i t a s
B b C Y l r g D f v
c y c l o t r o n
C k C s h c q I g N
c r a s h s i g n
f F G E s t f s H J
u n e v e n t f u l
T b e C c Z d Q o w
t e n a c i o u s
G e Y y d w h b N b
g e n e r a t i o n