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.

Reading reading

     We think of reading as an activity which is applied on a supposedly pre-existing object, as form, substance, structure, or design, from which is extracted or divined, via a mix of method and intuition, an authorial, original, inherent meaning or message. We should try, instead, to imagine that the object itself is but a function of the configuration space of reading. It is a space where the reading of the object is being made possible, as a sort of prosthesis of perception by which any act of reading is enabled via the production of binary values. In other terms, the object of reading and the reading of the object are co-terminous processes: they emerge synchronously. It is only the demand of our insertion within the physical mode of serial temporality that forces us to codify the reading event as a chain of sequential substances and identities. This same serialism distributes the ''cause-effect'' sequential rhetoric on the binaristic spatialization of the semantic values which subtend the emergent dynamism of the reading act (subject vs. object of reading, agent of action and recipient of action, and so on).

     We should imagine a poetics going beyond the notion of the delivery of a humanistic or semantic content carried by a vessel. Instead, it becomes the site of production, productivity. No longer the transfer of a putative quantity or quality but the inaugural moment of semiotic value, the regeneration of linguisticity as such, an act of reconstruction. An environment where thinking, seeing, perceiving are activated, made to discover themselves as act, event. Going beyond the form/content binary, the enabling fiction of the classic hermeneutic apparatus, alibi of authority at the moment of reading, discursive guard against the charge of the arbitrary, the rhetorical base of the relevance of ongoing speech, its affirmation of a referential anchoring. Fictions enabling the discursive legitimacy of current practice, raising it beyond the threat of the meaningless, the babble, or the errant.

     If some reading functions are merely geared toward utilitarian ends, representing the subservience of a class whose reading world has been proscribed and prescribed within a regime of semiotic transparency, another reading class, the writerly one, of scribes, critics, and poets, has as its vocation the foregrounding of the opacity or the metaphoricity of language. In the case of the first, the referential function of discourse is cast in the metaphysics of objective truth to maintain the political order of things in language. In the second mode, the reading apparatuses are laid bare, the axiomatics are identified, via self-reflexive strategies. The prosthetic support is made known so that, for a moment, the subject which knows now also understands the bias by which it says it knows the reading of experience as the experience of reading. The ideological and political leanings of reading apparatuses must also be placed in the clear to minimize the reproduction of paradigm zombies who tend to see an equivalence without metaphor between the provenance of the apparatus and the experience of the real. The real is always already the experience of metaphor in the paradoxical way in which metaphor itself is the paradoxical substance of experience.

The play of form, the form of play

     -Discourse stabilizing the object via a metaphysics of form or substance bearing the logic of essence, identity, and inherent properties. The temporalization of language, vs language as gift of the gods or as metaphysical structure, recasts it as a fully mutable entity whose center of stability is now difficult to locate. The singling out of discrete elements objectifies language as the reality principle of scientific discourse. Representation in its classical logic of variable/invariable gets redeployed in the binarism of form/substance by which the variable is tracked invariably. The Informal—bearer of Becoming—is set aside or forgotten as co-participant in the constitution of both the form of representation and the representation of form. There is no stable foothold in which form escapes Becoming. Whenever there is speech, there is always a fictive moment of transcendentality posited, as if there were an invariable which always preceded or supported the variable, as if there were a still moment in the river which could stand long enough to be useful as a point of reference for  fixing the location of other points of the coursing water. It is as if a blur could speak clearly of another blur. (Will not this be the rigorous logic behind Derridean "play"?)

   
    -The changes in media technology also modify the configuration of the material anthropic spaces or pragmatico-ergonomic fields of signification. Sign vs nonsign, real vs language, enabling binarisms of the reading space, including body vs sign. See Concrete Poetry in general, but also how the logic of textuality both colonizes nonsigns and reincorporates signs as the dual logic of the classical discourse of representation. The signifying space is now the whole Socius as a historically constituted discourse of things as signs, correlative of the inverted discourse of signs as things. The design environment, the metalogical, informational, and neomaterial field where these values obtain their place, remains in the shade of the Unthought.

    - If before the classical idea of teaching literature was the explication of a contained hidden special meaning, a legacy of a hermeneutics founded on biblical exegesis, today teaching semiotic artefacts would mean the fostering of self-reflexivity in relation to the contingent and situated conditions of reading itself. This historical awareness overtakes the formalist and structuralist alibi of binarist categories inherited from classical exegesis, and this beyond the plethora of ''extrinsic'' approaches in criticism. This self-reflexivity does not only demand a simple return to a genealogy of reading apparatuses, but also more importantly highlights the mediational affordances which enable the design of perceptual environments which are ergonomic ecologies founded on materialist economies of meaning production.

     -The literary is the foregrounding of the reading of language as the language of reading (cf. Manuel Portela). Following J. McGann or J. Drucker, because there is no such thing as a raw unmarked or nonliterary text in the sense of a linguistic composition which does not call attention to its structural code, all writing and all language is always already a reading protocol in action. In short, there is no such thing as a ''natural'' language. All language use or embodiment is already a codified instruction of reading, either in consonance or dissonance with its immanent contract of reading, its marked-up construction or layout. (Language, each time we speak of it, is always already its own metalanguage. The literary is also another metalanguage, both of itself and of language.)

     -In this way, the opposition ''natural'' vs ''literary'' language is not a primordial pre-discursive binary. Instead, it is already a discursive presupposition enabling the agonic and organizational possibility of the socio-epistemic field. Deprived of essentiality, these two terms are effects of the discursive field. One cannot teach language without directly involving the literary; nor can one teach literature without linguistics, not because one is in the service of the other, but because one is already the other, or one is the constant invention of the other. We must look at how, historically, the domains of language and literature studies emerged together in the rise of the human sciences, and also in the context of the rise of the romantico-political ideal of national identities.

     -For example, Concrete Poetry can be seen as the transgression of the historically standardized print space of the Codex. The arrival of new media's impact on the standardized print bibliographic space can be seen beginning with Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dès, as J. Drucker has pointed out. Concrete poetics, like post-figural art, is the response of the static Codex and Canvas semiotic space to the emergence of  new media. Suddenly, Codex space is rekineticized, poly-dimensionalized, and re-materialized. The conceptualist, idealist, logicalist, mentalist, and structuralist pseudo-transcendent or ethereal linguistico-semantic space of writing moves away from its metaphysical model paradigm toward new models of reading requiring multimodal, neo-material, and n-dimensional embodied or situated multilinear navigationality.

What is Absurdity?

     It is worthwhile to ask this question again, since Forgetting is an insatiable beast:

What is Absurdity?

    It is easy to oppose it to Law and think that, like following the Law, nothing is easier to do. Yet, to be absurd is both the hardest and the easiest to do. Hardest because we always see our actions as following some universal principle, and easiest because Absurdity,  like the Law we feel we do without effort, is also what we cannot but do with the smallest effort. The difference is tiny, and it lies in our belief in whether what we do or not do is founded on our ability to know the nature and meaning of the action that we choose to do.

    Hence, if we say to ourselves, ''I'm going to commit an absurd act'' and think it is equal to saying ''I'm going to do a lawful act,'' or an act that we assume, under the banner of the rational, follows a rule like grammar or an ethic or a positive system: then that intention cannot be absurd. In short, you don't wake up one day and say I will be absurd. It's not something you intend, the same way that you cannot say, ''Today I will make time flow.'' But equally you can't say I will follow  this or that Law, not because you can't follow a rule or law, but because, like time, law is what the universe follows whether we like it or not.

    That's why absurdity is hard: we follow a rule inevitably, whether we are aware or not, whether we intend it or not. To be absurd is hard because you need to be outside the universe to do it intentionally, and yet at the same time the easiest exactly when you want to do it intentionally. Everything we do, therefore, is the instantiation of Law. And this is the very basis of Absurdity, not its opposite, that law is inescapable, so that to try to enact it is what absurdity really is. It is not the opposite of Law or Meaning. What is absurd is to affirm that this act or that sentence follows this law or has this meaning. It is not the affirmation of the Meaningless, but the assertion that the act we do or words we say follow a rule or meaning we say they do. In short, absurdity is actually affirming this or that rule or meaning, because we never know which rule or meaning we act out, and eventually we act out one or the other, without the need to follow, like the lack of need to follow Time.

    This affirmation is what is absurd because there is no need to say or think it, and yet, we inevitably say or think it. What is absurd is that exactly and to say ''that exactly.'' And this is the reason that, like in Beckett or Ionesco, reason is itself what is absurd. The very fact of the inevitability of thinking this or that, sensing this or that, the very fact that I can't avoid a meaning or a rule in thought and action, makes my presence in the universe redundant because my thought or meaning is a superfluity, especially when I think that what I think is a mirror of the universe or reality. Why does the universe or reality need a mirror? And yet we are bound to make or be one, simply by being here and having thoughts or using language.

    This superfluity, this excess, this unavoidable doubling, and the awareness of it, is the beginning of the notion of the Absurd. Or you may also equally say: the beginning of Thought. Thus, if we get into the habit of thinking, and feel that this mirroring is smooth and without paradoxical status, is to avoid or evade vainly what must be, and absurdly be, a problematic ethic of our attempt at rationality, especially when that rationality does not see its limits or limitation, an absolute reason that we feel or we presume we exercise every day with every word or action, as a matter of course. To be absurd, then, is not to be irrational, but to be aware both of the superfluity and of the inevitability of rationality.

The blackmail of the social

1.
We are all hostages (cf J. Baudrillard), of asymmetrical relations as well as symmetrical ones. We are each other's hostages. The ethics we follow springs from the blackmail of universal debt, spawning the Social as the consensualist coercion of mutual obligation and control under the threat of different levels of terror: economic, social, political, moral, etc. In brief, the social contract is always a hostage situation and a blackmail relation. Crime dramas are exploded portraits of an already common condition. They are large-scale rehearsals in which the wide-scale condition is framed as the normality of Law, Ethics, Freedom, and Justice.

2.
The promises of utopian good life, simulated ideal of attainable good: health, wealth, mirth, accomplishment, love, family,  peace, assurance, eternity, beauty, value, property, etc. They participate in the blackmail which instills the state of perennial debt. We are held hostage by our fears, desires, love, wants, and needs. These are not primordially objective subjective or emotive states, but are defined by modes of subjectivity informed by historico-cultural forces. Insecurities are manufactured extimacies by which and through which the blackmail ethic of sociality is reinforced.

3.
The various sociotopes of modern life are forms of hypnoses prepping up the enjoyment of a mode of being, rings of ecstasy operating as enjoyment of attainable goods and subjective states. The taste of food, for example, of the sheen of glamor, affordable sensations hiding their manufactured availability, always proferred by a continuous indulgence in systemic consumption. Like all sensations, taste is not a natural experience: it is already a discourse. Here, even the acquisition of consumer leverage participates in the myth of distributionable quantities of individual capacity as transgressive will.

4.
It is equally important to recognize that the problematic of the question is as integral to the question of the problematic of what constitutes the horizon of presumed grounds of inquiry into what is considered points of departure of understanding, that is, the elements constituting the active sensus communis, or the structure of feeling in vivo.

5.
Living ''normally'' means simply living in a state of forgetting of the moral dilemmas which structure everyday life. Each day, we go about in a blissful non-reflection of the moral dilemmas we live in, how living on means surviving, keeping on despite the non-justifiable, the non-rationalizeable, and the non-legitimizeable. Everyday living is at the bottom unethical, must be unethical, to keep pushing on ''normally.''

The doors of perception of perception

1.
We are fantasies who are trying to become real, but who can become real only because of fantasy. Same logic in art,  sign, experience, self, presence, etc. They are dreams of their opposites, their nonselves.

Art is the ironic revelation of experience as already art. Like the mirror stage, a metaphor for the arrival of metaphor. If in psychoanalysis this is given an etiological weight, in art it is simply the counterweight offered by self reflexive design as the archeology of the art of experience. In information theory, it is driven by the emergence of complexity from noise, from difference.

Hence, language is like art: it is a form of recognition of recognition, of self-reflexive consciousness in which its other is a built-in function of its self-constitutional emergence. The fact that it can designate itself and yet efface itself in this act of designation displays its double logic of opacity and transparency, of presence and absence, of materiality and ideality.

The art of experience and the experience of art are one and the same experience as self-reflexive difference.

M.C. Escher, Hand with Reflecting Sphere, 1935, lithograph.

2.
Each object performs the minimum order of art in that an object carries with it an instruction of how bodies should behave toward it. This is the heart of design in the sense that objects are a reading of us, rather than they being our reading of them. The uses of objects are basically a transcription of the uses of us.

Objects are rhetorical devices.

The philosophical, historical, and formal analyses of representational economies can't be possible without looking at the material and pragmatic bases of their social production. They also circulate as 'noetic' goods no different from branded produce with attached images for consumption. The logic of capitalism has permeated intellectual products.


3.
The formal mode of the meaning that allegedly inheres in an artefact is seen primarily as a systemic code carrying the logic of its perceptibility.

We should have already posed the question of the nature of reading today and decades ago, ie since the advent of the digital age, a question that the majority of writers/artists have posed each time within their epochs, and is a major question today in the comparative studies in the confluence of new media and reading as self-reflexive emergence of reading. It is thus a question inseparable from the practice of media in which the perception of perception is posed as the central thematic dynamic of aesthetic praxis.

There has been a separation of the materiality of media from the phenomenality of perception. Perhaps in one scenic sense, they belong to the same informational field, as mutually constitutive embodiment of emergent cognition and perception, as a certain dynamical materialist aesthesis.

We are all media, that is the point. There is no real ontological border between us and things. This border itself is part of the operationality of media as the dynamical environment in which perceptibility itself emerges.


4.
Asemic writing is a materialist execution postdating the collapse of the imaginary space of representation. Knowledge doesn't exist in a void, but is inseparable from material organization of signifying forms and formats. To such a degree that knowledge is the function of artefactual design as memory retrieval technology practice, as exterior mind prosthesis.

The focus shifts from the search of some inherent message or meaning as some kind of 'content' toward the exploration of the material processes of meaning-making or sense-production. Hence, by not having an inherent content to discover, the asemic artefact shifts our attention to the socio-pragmatic dimensions by which meanings are determined via interactions with the artefact, as a social event of meaning processing, and not as meaning essentialism.

Because of this, all objects are incomplete, are partial object-signs. Everything requires a user-reader as completion process, which then loops into greater partiality requiring chains of completion acts. A completion makes gaps, which needs completion. Thus, the cycle.

An archaeology of communication technologies and ritualized habits of semiotic practices.


5.
Narrativity or semioticity as a rehearsal of psychical reinitiations.

De-essentialize reading, and return it to a multilinear process mixing guesswork and method, where the code is reading, not a transcendent translation machine distributing equivalences all throughout the semiotic design ecology. Instead of objects to be read, today's media poetics are metapoetics of reading as a semi-arbitrary voyage among non-essential signs and nonsigns.


6.
Text / image divide as discursive/institutional divide, a historical contingency, not natural state of perception.

Thing in itself gone in philosophy, but retained in analogous version as meaning in itself contained within textual objects.

Language-oriented leads to language-disoriented writing art.

Materiality means process, dynamics of becoming. The signform does not pre-exist the reading, but an emergent differential element.

It is the form of recognition in which recognition itself emerges as the recognition of its own form.


7.
Metagrammic, or at the threshold of the recognition of the signifying, the emergence of informationality, of recognizeability itself.

The return of the mechanism of gesturality as embodied extension of expressive desire or fantasy. Writing as fantasy fulfillment, or the utopia of the sense of utopia, of possibility.

The marks or markers don't diminish the unknown; the text, like any geographic field, orients toward the unknown and less toward the known. This ground where my feet tread on, it is sure and solid, but is merely the edge of the infinite.

Studies of unknown joyous objects

Lost trails