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.