Language, in the ideal imagination, is divided according to relatively stable, distinct, discrete
reproducible elements which follow a regularized combinatory pattern. In performance, however, something
always takes over, takes language for a spin, as use always opens it to
one rule: variation, or alterity. It prevaricates, becomes plural,
multi-directional, multi-modal, when it gets in contact with time and space, when it
becomes part of the flow of things. It becomes war torn within itself
and becomes the site of tension between the past and the future, between
the memory of its previous incarnation and the reality of its current
reincarnation. A tension between sameness and otherness, as it hovers
between making and unmaking, arriving and departing, becoming and being.
It is always not yet, where its present is this contrast between what
it might be and what it could have been.
In the stream of appearances, language, like us, is always a resemblance
of a resemblance, or a suspension of self-identity, a series of gaps
among its parts which are never fully there. It can never refer to
itself positively, and must pose as a tension between what it could be
and what it could have been to produce the momentary precarious space
for its always emergent perception. Language is the highest form of
hesitation. A throw of the dice, this or that throw, the launch into the
(im)probable presence of the poem as poetic-noetic-generic environment.
(Mallarmé as predecessor for E. E. Cummings.)
[A parachutist posits ground and sky as the arena of its free fall. But
the ground is also sky, and the sky ground. Both are in free fall, as
the earth is in motion among the stars, which are also in motion with
respect to each other. To locate itself, a satellite must triangulate among bodies which depend in turn on the previous satellite and on
other bodies for self-location, and so on. My location is an arbitrary
designation created from the fiction of other locations. In reality, I
am nowhere. I am no different from Dante: I need frames of reference for
motion and direction.]
The infinite labor of the sign-concept. Suspension of resemblance,
resemblance in non-resemblance. The incomparable comparison, the
difference which allows two entities to be comparable, the gap which
allows resemblance to happen. Resemblance needs non-resemblance or
difference to function. Ergo for the sign, or languageness (Cf. Warhol).
Language faithful to variation. Idiosyncrasy as identifiable trait of
style, or language as nonself-resemblance is the operative field of
idiosyncrasy, as the always-other-than-itself. What repeats is what doesn't repeat fully or absolutely. The always-other is not an other modeled as the
same. It is neither this nor that, neither same nor opposite of the
same, but this gap between sameness and other-sameness.
