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.