Other contiguities

Reincarnation waves the dead body’s antennae above sentence structure’s serrated moaners.

-Matt Margo

In general, contiguity gives an excuse to speak of meanings. Even more interesting from the point of view of superstition and popular sentimental romance are "random" contiguities that are imagined to be emanating from a higher or transcendent source of special significance (like Fate). Unfortunately, we don't have the same mythic source for "language" wherever a certain brand of "scientific" rigor demands something beyond statistical consensus as an excuse for delineating a category of structurally and semantically "vibrant" contiguities. 

To dream of combinations that pretend to have more semantic weight or value (poetic or otherwise) has now been replaced by the simple execution of the motor of combination itself, where unrestrained coupling is the rule, like DNA mixing sent in a delirious fast forward drive. To what end? New matter, new meaning, new being? No, the goal is Combination itself, accelerated faster and faster, beyond the restricted barrier of vibrant syntactic or linguistic contiguities we were advised for so long to support or promote.

Matt Margo, from "Two Titles," 2011

This seems to be what is going on in a non-linear, post-grammatical work like that of Matt Margo's: mixing everything, words, figures, contexts, registers, expressions, idioms, narration, description, clauses, run-on phrases, fragments, imagery, the common and not-so-common and the orthodox and unorthodox all intersecting on any angle on the "discursive" plane. The odd mixture makes it difficult to determine their “complete” meaning (which is no longer the point). Sometimes, the parts, which could make sense if found in another context or out of context, are themselves in uncommon combinations that we even doubt if they are trying to make sense at all. Since "no current theory of grammar is capable of distinguishing all grammatical English sentences from ungrammatical ones," a combinatory textual practice like this also redefines the boundaries of syntactic possibilities and politics.

The result goes further than the articulation of accepted and unacceptable combinations reproducing the stock of  “common” and uncommon semiotic organization and sense. More importantly, the text returns us to the very dynamism where linguistic contiguities are happening before settling into semiotic refrains (like asteroids with a center or wandering stars forming imaginary constellations), thereby reinforcing the catachretic view of all linguistic combinatory processes. With this kind of text, writing becomes a sort of neural rewiring happening on the pure surface of free association. It is here that we enter once more towards the hazy boundaries between the order of Time and the order of Language: where semantics falls between the two would be anybody's guess.