--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.
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