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.