Peter Ganick and superfluid texts

Funny to see something like Richard Kostelanetz "One-Letter Changes."  Just a sample from the A portion goes like:

Abject object.

Add and.

Affect effect.

Aim aid air.

Antic attic.

Appeal appear.

At it.

Attach attack.

Auspicious suspicious.

which he does in the same way up to the letter Z.

This could be taken as a word list for an English class to help students with spelling or pronunciation. We can add a little erudition by saying that the list demonstrates how meaning is made possible by differences. Or, we can say that, even with differences, it's just amazing how long words can still manage to keep themselves distinct by such tiny, almost weightless, changes in superficial features.

The almost barren structure or format of "One-Letter Changes" won't certainly make us think of it along the lines of poetry. Of course not. Beyond the alphabetical ordering and the minor figure of letter substitutions, we would say that there's nothing really special about it. It doesn't tax language much beyond this quasi-pedagogical listing to bring us a finer breed of linguistic composition. What we have sounds more like an objective set of samples or items in a basic taxonomy. We certainly don't feel any angst or melancholia in any part. Nothing of pathos or bathos, nothing "subjectified" or stylized.

We can recall some of Gertrude Stein's work as a point of comparison. Sounds unfair if we are going to measure a simple word list to an acknowledged figure of "language-centered" writing. We won't do the comparing to see who is superior, but only to see what elements exist in one or the other. Roughly, we can note how in Stein, although laying out language in a non-linear and metalinguistic procedure, still carried remnants of a discursive flow, a shadow of the speaking origin of language, and the participatory role of a subject in a communicative set-up. No matter how ridiculous she sounded, her texts certainly had more rhetorical structure than the almost bare vocabulary list of "One-Letter Changes."

At least--to award a consolation prize to Kostelantz, we can say that he had more structure to offer than much of what Peter Ganick had been churning out for some time now. With Ganick, however, we don't have something as finite as Kostelantz's list. What we have is something much, much more than just a list of a few words. Kostelantz at least had the decency to give us an obvious reason why those words in "One-Letter Changes" should be together or be beside one another. Peter Ganick, on the other hand, didn't, as we can glean from a sample of his work below:

demiurge alienate premature sine quaff bottles dasein negotiator flamboyant vernissage column nor sans field networked ingredients allies damage stretto migrate sanitize preoccupy noon trousseau cell whitely apportionment vache doodle interest neithered wash coeli nomos einsam predicate nestling vanity shuck erasure pristine calculus realitize stigmata certification motility notion squalor public iterating sledge mitten alligatorese banned elongate neverthelessly acorn epater nib snit parse clorox niacinide maelstrom vanguardism periscope redmont sionara vend alsace tentative lasix funf directive anothers either waits mettle emotion answer caliper according salida vocality zones denizen percentage (Peter Ganick, from SLEEP'S SUSPIRATION)

Having no marked beginnings or endings, the words just roll in in medias res. Furthermore, we notice how any word is not attracted to or by its neighbour through any grammatical, syntactical or rhetorical relationship. You won't find any burgeoning phrase, or clause, and by extension, sentences or paragraphs. The words train along in a zero-gravity environment, where the only "borders" are the (movable) margins that give them some appearance of containment. Together with the lack of conjunctions and punctuation, the absence of any master structure or discourse does not help us sort out even the "function" from the "content" words.

Without local or global syntax, the words remain intact as plain words devoid of any contextual function or identity. The word “erasure” for example is something we know about, but what we don’t have is how it is “fixed” in relation to words around it.  Without this triangulation, the word does not “gain” further useful meaning. The absence of a geo-textual fix makes it difficult to say if it is an act, an object, or a location (The erasure made, an erasure found, this point marks an erasure, etc.). As Ganick himself has said in another place, "One ought to pause on each word to experience its physicality, energy, and therefore its lack of semantic value" (Peter Ganick, text. chalk editions 2010).

With Peter Ganick, we have no big alibi for the massive concatenation of lexical items. These super-free elements comprise a rain of lexicon in zero structure. Voiceless, subject-less, object-less, they populate the page without any restraint, without telos. It is as if language flowed out in all direction, becoming the true free flowing stream of language, unburdened by thought or by the unconscious, anchored nowhere, just moving stylelessly, with no external or internal intervention to coax them into a form, an argument, a point, a theme, a voice, a view, an order. It is a language freed of all its expressive, epistemic and stylistic burdens.

We should probably no longer even call it a “language,” with all the systemic burden that this term represents. No, nothing systemic here, no play of associations, no poetic inspiration breaking through, nothing in sentiment or in intellect.  No framework, no mesh, no plot. The view is the same in all directions, no part is special, no region has better clusters or thicker mass. You will find no key words or motifs, semantic fields or refrains. It is only “writing” in the most basic sense of having letters and words. It is only “textual” in the sense of having textual artifacts. Hence, we can speak of Ganick's work as an isotropic text, or a text that looks the same in all directions as far as its flatness of meaning is concerned. We can also call it a superfluid text, a material that has "zero viscosity and zero entropy... that flows without friction past any surface and over obstructions and through pores in containers which hold it, subject only to its own inertia."