The poetry of the word is no longer compelling

For a long time, the poetry of the word, line, message, and image is no longer compelling. The disenchantment began at least from the time of the Dadaists. Where is the argument, the narrative, the subtle assertion, the fine turns of phrase, the deft ironies and ambiguities? Where is the theme or subject, the stylistic form, the syntax, or even the known and readable language we used to have? What are the essential elements of poetic composition? The answer seems to be: nothing. There is nothing sacred or essential. What is the point of replacing one value system with another? Our art should just be the history of perpetual emptying, ceaseless abandonment. When any element is called back on the table, this citation is merely now a quotation, caricature, or collage. All concepts we pour in come out at the other end. We can't be convinced by an intentional pattern, nor by all-out chaos and chance. We cannot assign absolute semantic values to the elements we put on the table. More and more, we no longer know what they really are, inseparable from pure markings and asemic scripts. We can swim in it, dip our feet in it, drink it, it is all around us, so many things, so many teasing signs, yet whose origins and destinies escape us. It is a close up of something so familiar, and yet without a meaning greater than that of a momentary material contact now appended to a process with endless referrals.

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The glue of association is melting (2010)

Finally, the glue of association is melting (metaphor here);

To resist the way things are seduced to rhyme, like the alliteration and the internal echoes in this line;

Because you are expecting a message somewhere, or looking for an object ready to reveal itself, instead of simply accepting a foregrounding of event horizons, a venue of energetic linkages arbitrated by plural forces.

There is--at least in principle--nothing pre-ordained, except the “raw” ingredients, like the flesh you are in;

The event is not drawn ahead, but emerges in the act of looking. Everything is in potential state;

You are face-to-face with the artifacts of your historical insertion. Better: no affect mode of any sort, just an objectified process of inscription;

Every symbol is a supplement to understanding, that is, a surplus, an additive or extraneous element, always excessive, always another item in a larger event;

A different dynamics beyond subject or object, process or material, concept or context, where the message is not anywhere hidden or expressed, where symbolic energies are not the cause nor the effect;

To subtract the symbolic energy from the line: the symbol with the minus sign;

The symbol in itself is not signifying; there are super-signs deployed that circulate to organize other signs: master concepts, idées-forces, key terms, sign-posts…

Two parties in conflict is the beginning of all symbolic energies…

Coherence is a criterion in a specific paradigm of reading or art; Consistency, which does not refer to any logical or semantic content or form, is another;

Any species of the declarative (explanation, illustration, etc.) is suspect as a device of coherence. Any argument moving towards the defense of an idea or process is a declarative;

There is always a question of necessary links between the practice of the idea and the idea of the practice;

We can start a writing without any master discourse or subject taking charge, no thematic conducting the mass, or rhetorical order sculpting the flow of thought and emotion;

Yet, although consistent with an argumentation, it would be too declarative to cement it with a coherent practice, or overload it with the physics of illustration or execution, as if there was a seamless medium between idea and practice, and that it would just take some technique and effort to demonstrate it.

That would just replicate or reinstate a center for the discursive production, overlaying the negative symbol with a positive film of meaning that super-intends all the series…

It would restore the symbolic energies of scripts. This is unavoidable, with the symbolic resurging like an echo or after-effect, without necessarily carrying a bag of truth-functions in its wake.

This is the tension that pushes and pulls us from meaning-effects and their dissolution.

There is an actual management of scripts within an economy of significations.

This scriptural gesture is managed by a host of thematic attractors: subject, topic, argument, key idea, source, destination, etc.

One of the tensions in laying the scripts is the resistance to major associative items and principles: syntax, attribution, description, allusions, imagery, rhyme, other language patterns…

Next, there is a resistance against various thematic attractors: lyricism, humanism, idealism, movements, aesthetics, schools of thought, etc.

Last, there is resistance against various types of coherence or cohesion: literary forms, discursive styles, rhetorical patterns…

Again, there is indeed a limit to the success of such an approach, in the beginning and at the end.