The ''writerly'' text

"In our age of relentless demystification, the text itself remains the last mystified object."
—George Bornstein, 2001.

    

       A text is simply the assemblage of all possible readings. The text itself as itself does not exist. It is also an ideal but ontologically empty place, without essence or value, without “intrinsic” parts. A text, like a sign, is the set of all virtual readings of itself. The text only exists as the differences of all readings that have been made, and all future readings of it that will be made. There is no “essential” text. To say that one reading coincides with the text’s interior place, its essence, is to reduce it to a timeless enigma. When a sign signifies most fully, that is when it also becomes the most non-signifying object.

    Edmond Jabès: La lecture est impossible.

    Reading as a concept that reads something out of something else, as history, psychology, semantic, aesthetic etc. This is impossible. Today, reading is its own movement, an inner momentum without a partner, without an orbit. This is the moment we cannot accept, and that is why the orbit and what is at the center of the orbit that captures the reading in its gravitational field, must exist, and continue to exist. It is the grand alibi of reading, its basis for institutionalization, and the rational for the discourse that maintains a cultural formation and identity. 

    De- and recontextualization are the normal processes that befall texts. There is no mythical whole or mystical unity in textuality. More a sociohistorical and technomaterial process, the text is not a fixed object, an idealized semantic whole. In reading, the focus should be less on the reconstruction of this mythic object, than in the creative reappropriation of textuality, and the resulting skill displayed in the new uses of language. Barthesian ''writerly'' text over the ''readerly'' one.

Exercises of style

-What literariness as self-reflexive textuality is saying is that the real model of knowing is ironic self awareness, how both the rule and its violation emerge from the same invention of the condition of the possibility of perception as such: that is, as aesthesis. Both are neither essences nor absolutes, but the work of differentiation on the level of metaphorical binaries which allow sense to happen. To teach textuality is to begin with literariness, with stylistics happening "prior" to systemic concepts of language and textuality. It is to teach the emergence of perception as the self-reflexive imposition of limits of play, of reading as a game, a language game.

-Illustrating writing as self-reflexive textuality using R. Queneau's Exercices de style. Language and literature are stylistic variations of the materiality of meaning-emergence via the self-conscious mode of writing and textuality. A word is already an angle, and there are no neutral, objective words. Each linguistic choice is already style and ideology. There are no synonyms, no paraphrase. Each use is translation, modification. Also, there are no antonyms as such, but perspectives of judgement, a play of discourse and power assigning slanted meanings, and calling it lexicon or vocabulary, and not, say, "idiography." 

-Twentieth century writing as self conscious manipulation of language as an arbitrary material construct, as a generalized material creativity which explores the bases of meaning production. Dadaism to OULIPO to cut ups, chance, and collage, until Goldsmith and Conceptual writing. Machine writing understands it better as material code unfolding itself on the basis of arbitrary parameters.

-Even before the idea of an ''integrated'' approach, writing, especially after the avant-garde counter traditions, has already become highly self-conscious of the difficulty of maintaining the line dividing language per se and literariness. More strongly, that both domains are actually already the field of thinking and meaning production in terms of the self-reflexive material play between rule-making and rule-breaking.

-Textus, we've forgotten its materiality, to give way to an abstract ideal of textuality. The physical, mediatic affordances, and sociology of textuality must be recalled, if we are to address more fully the artistic production of the 21st century, which, like Concrete poetry, is grounded on material modernism and the expanded kinetic affordances of New Media information design ecology.

-We live in semiotic spaces and signifying bodies informed by the material history of media technology. Today, the confluence of the codex--as memory storage and retrieval device dominant for at least a millennium--with digital media has emphasized the so-called latent virtuality of the former. The codex carried in itself the virtualization of space and time, the implied bibliographic material codes which govern its manipulation, and hence the logical directionality of reading. The connection between media material technology and paradigms of reading.

The living fiction of us

---You cannot step into the same river twice. There is an implied scenario, though, where the act of stepping is presupposed as antedating the river. In its fuller implication, Heraclitus' aphorism cannot admit the possibility of a position before the step into the river, that is, a foothold outside the flow. The "before" is already part of the flow. What it restricts, thus, is the provision of any external vantage point from which to observe the flow. I am not external to the river, I am with it, and thus cannot really see where I am except as against mobility itself. The assertion ''I am here, now'' is possible only in its negative form, but a form which must also negate itself. The Now is our only ontological possibility, but since always moving, is also the realm of our ontological impossibility.

---The living fiction of us as the locus of the authorial real. The living moment of speech, in its very unfolding materiality, has no room for doubt. It is structured immediately by its full life as intent. Telekinesis is the fantasy equivalent of the seamless intersection of the material and the semiotic, matter and mind in unison of execution, perfect marriage of intent and event.

---Concepts are difficult not because of some difficulty related to individual skill of reading or to the clarity of exposition. Understanding requires belief. This faith in concepts as graspable, self evident substances or content is disconcerting. Concepts are not transparent logico-semantic atoms. They are essentially essenceless. The difficulty is indigenous, so much so that the difficulty of this difficulty is included in the difficulty.

Dealing in ready-mades

--Literariness as one part of the so called poetico-pragmatic spectrum. The problem with this modelling metaphor is that, first, it is a metaphor, and second, that, like the electromagnetic spectrum of light, it is difficult to divide the spectrum into really self-distinct categories following such a binarism. My argument is actuallly stronger, and may sound even ridiculously naïve, even anachronistically romantic at first sight. We should entertain the idea that there is nothing but literariness. Put another way, there is nothing but stylistics before both idealist and essentialist notions of Language and Literature. 

--That the notion of the structurality of a linguistic code was the central determining instance of significance or meaning was perhaps true only within the limiting dispensation of a reading paradigm, the one which we call today, in general terms, the formalist approach. It is both a historically specific critical apparatus which certainly profited pedagogical and institutional needs, and a generalization of a historically specific mode of literary composition or koine aesthesis. Both domains, one critical and the other artistic, are paradigms of language which complemented each other's ideological grounding in objectivist, structural, or formal aesthetics, all of which we place under the banner of critical modernism, in contradistinction from 19th century romanticism and classicism.

--In the era of New Media, our reading and textual conditions have changed beyond the dominance of the turn to the linguistic code. The dynamics in meaning production and reception surpass the idealist formal confines of purely textual grammar. Beginning with at least Mallarmé, the dispensation of the complementary metalogics of the codex medium and the linguistico-formal code has been overtaken by a more kinetically and haptically media technology realizing the limited affordances of print space. Materiality and mobility are allied more than ever in the dynamic of forms in the new media, yoked with the synaesthetic ideal of bodily experience of time. This is the era of multi-literacy.

--Cut and paste media literacy represents the  wisdom of the technology of least effort and a demonstration of the focus on the delivery of form versus content as such. The valuable literacy skill is less focused on the manipulation of linguistic code than on bibliographic ones: genre markers, formats, design, layout, packaging, etc. Hence, to ask for a plot summary, for example, is less to demand the production of one than the provision of it. It's like asking for pizza: you don't make one from scratch, it's easier to get one ready-made. A ready-made culture. True post-romantic, collagic, cut-up 21st century culture. Less poesis than para- or metapoesis. It's the materialist, objectivist, and structural modernism taken as parody of itself through mechanical and digital reproduction. We parody our own forms. This is the operational logic of postmodern literacy overlaying the obsession with the idealist spaces of linguistico-hermeneutic codes.

The material other

---Shouldn't we re-imagine the semiotic artefact as no longer the embodiment of an abstract logical idea, but the evolution of materials in time as a physical system of forces? There is no division between media and agent. Instead, everything is a medium unfolding in time. When the medium is the message, it doesn't imply that there is any transcendental component which the whole scriptural event is pointing toward. The event is unfolding following its inner necessity, as the sum of all forces in its transformation. The only teleology it admits is its becoming-other. It is not autotelic, as if it had an inner potential it must fulfill or be true to, an entelechy of sorts. It does admit nonfinalistic or temporary reference points for navigation, but these points are floating frames, also evolving on their own terms, cancelling out any use of them as inertial frames, and invalidating any designation of fixed values.

---The art of writing has always followed and reacted to the changes in media technology, from the invention of photography and radio by the turn of the 20th century. Even if the metalogics of the codex and the printed page remain the dominant ground of semiotico-pragmatic spaces, the 21st century nonetheless has led us into the remodeling of these spaces under the expanded affordances of new media and digital kinetic spaces. Beyond an idealist notion of semantic logic, the realm of human meaning-making now includes the massive simulation of temporal and material effects. This foregrounds the procedural and less the structural, the emergent against the inherent, interactivity against passivity, and the poetico-technical against the nomological in the creation of sign-effects.

---We remain enthralled by the fiction of the given. Both concepts and objects--the conceptuality of the object and the objectuality of the concept--as self-evident forms given by reading are perpetual constructions, sketches or works in progress. We should re-imagine once more an aesthesis of movement above that of the monument. The material is the metaplasm of experience and the experience of metaplasm. Instead of a subject-object dialectic, we could imagine a co-evolution, co-invention, and co-implication of subject and object in the same information design dynamic.

The essentially arbitrary (and vice versa)

----We think that an artefact like the artistic text has this or that salient feature, as in the obsession with literariness, a version of essentialist thought. This idea is applied both on the production and reception paradigms which inform the governing reading contract at play in this classic hermeneutic position. Inherent property notion, as if it were residing within an object of reference. The whole point of art is always to foreground this habit, to make us see the arbitrariness of human meaning as it is expressed in various media, an arbitrariness founded on the the aporias of desire and myth than on essences and nature which are always posited to neutralize the arbitrary. This arbitrary, however, is not the opposite of law but the highest law, the highest form of necessity. The positing of inviolables, paradoxically, is also part of this arbitrary necessity. To posit the arbitrary fufills the arbitrary as its own negation and affirmation, whereas to posit the necessary is simply to assert the affirmation of its own necessity.


---Aren't we strangers to language and vice versa? What seems to be our most intimate possession is also the most mutable, the most traversed by the unknown. What we use to dispel the unknown, a guard, a solace, against it, the tool we depend on to understand, is also itself an unknown foreigner. What we think we possess always escapes, for it does not belong to us but to Time. What we felt to be our unique aid against the threat of the unknown each day is, in the final count, its ally. The more we use it, the more it becomes an other. It is not the foothold of identity, but of alterity. When spoken or written, its form transcends itself, and becomes a stranger right under our eyes. What we think we touch is not nearness but distance; what is left is nothing but a brief disturbance. Between the lips, a pure sound marks the meeting point of two strangers. When do I really speak you? When do you really speak me? Maybe only newborn children, whom we thought struggled with first vowels, had truly spoken.