Story
From monstrouspossibility
DAVID's WEEK 3 LECTURE: POMO
ski sauvage there's a cabin on a mountain. the sky's foam gives the mountain a cool, transparent atmosphere. the air around the mountain is sonorous, pious, legendary, prohibited. the entrance to the mountain is prohibited. the mountain has its place in the soul. it's the horizon of something and it retreats ceaselessly. it gives the sensation of an eternal horizon . . . and I describe that painting with tears, because the painting strikes my heart. it feels how my thought unfurls across the painting, a space that's ideal, absolute, but in a space with a form that could be incorporated into reality. there I fall out of the sky . . . --Artaud
the black line (more abrupt) is the one that ruptures our equilibrium with those skips that cause us to deviate from continuity. you preferred the red one. because, like me, it was a river of blood that's feared--it can wash you away. it allowed us to keep going along above our boots toward a tenuous slope--to glide and pretend--that we rupture the air pockets with our lungs and that we open, with our bodies incarnate, the illusion of a form. swift, across the immense whiteness that turns purple-blue with the desperation of the after. after this love? after this ocean? after this metaphor? to glide and to fall on the frothy snow, bathing ourselves in light, in champagne, in red algae . . . we've suffered so much from wanting to open up the line at the edge of the object, the feeling, the word, the border. the border of nature is black and we'll brain ourselves in an attempt to cross it (the skies where we used to commit suicide in reverse, toward infinity, against gravity). the bloodstained hills under the snowy peak that cut into my left leg when I scraped against it and I, rather than suffering from the wound, describe its pain (aesthetics) of disaster. against all protection--unprotected--looking in the mirror at the fissure from which I bleed, first sniffing, touching the bubble that appears and later, from that complicit height, to always watch the body, shrunken and dark from the act in which we've participated as an incident, not as a choice. of the different lines of escape, we've taken one as a way--not as an end--and this red, lyric line allows us to concentrate our sensations in the structure of a feeling, to throb with the explosion of a word (wrapper) that encloses and protects our desire. the poesis of this watery line allows me to pretend that this human landscape is one of snow. and it's inside. without the difference of the (my) intermediary, I assume it as an (I). but I'm tired of the drawing and I throw it away (the boot bucks and drops its binding and I don't fall). does a difference exist, or is the self in the difference? that's how I can repeat the fall incessantly. but the space comes and goes. does the writing move away from itself (the motion of the stroke enters the very motion of the text), from life? the difference is choice. the difference doesn't exist at the center (each thing is the same thing). the difference is peripheral and I like to wander, to split those oblique borders that seem to determine some structure of feeling between these trails of complexity that the artist chooses for his blue, his green, his black gravity. the trails aren't in the context, they just mediate the interior and the white surface of the mountain (his page). Mont Blanc as end and death. and the metaphor (paperweight with snow made from blanched wheat that whirls around without melting) is the real fiction. every man is alone in his determination. and this is nothing more than the tone that assaults him when he makes a choice in time. not in space, his space, which is instant and repetition. we've sensed it at different heights (the yellow espeletia seem like forests, as we court the shadows of the trees). over the appearance of this reality, a fixity: we're imprisoned between the gray air of the paperweight, its green pines, and the border that is the sky and is made of glass. from here, the fable: the sentence constructed to save ourselves from not coming back from the black hole, its dark line, the most dangerous point of escape. (my feminine discourse is syntax; the stapling of the tapestry in which I capture the night). the bell sounds its last peal with horror, it opens and that's my fatal moment to intervene, to glide, frightened (to create inside us spaces for life, spaces that didn't exist, that didn't seem to be able to find a location in space). you were expecting a story. dare to discern whether you've ridden on a ski sauvage, between the leisure and the soft caress with streaks of the obscenity that is writing. -- Translated by Kristin Dykstra and Nancy Gates Madsen
(>) There is a tension between the interventionist and the emancipatory now. These are approaches to what we might think of as a post-modern situation in writing, to our current western climate, not completely oppositional. Oppositransitional.
(>) The former seeks to find normative modes and exploit them, explode them, and use their lingo in order to emasculate them (contra bad faith).
(>) The latter to withdraw into a kind of meaninglessness, a super-autonomy, to approach the ineffable, or in any case to avoid the normative through complete refusal, disavowal of the lingo. So what may seem ironic or non-interventionist, what Jameson hits on as “insincere” and “superficial,” i.e., flarfist poetry or spoetry, may in fact, in particular instances, be the opposite—a strategic infiltration of normative modes of discourse akin to culture jamming.
(>) Is the opposite forever?
Annie Choi, The New Bricklayer:
(E) The very idea of the post-modern is a product of a peculiar form of capitalism death: the contemporary multinational workforce has too much time on its hands, not because it is a leisure class, but because its jobs no longer imply making anything. We have time to contemplate our own demise as agents in a world, for we are sitting at desks built by the company that we work for, using the web built by the company we work for, looking at indices on the web built by the company we work for, occasionally looking out the window at a world that might or might not have been built (the world and the window) by the company we work for. The company we work for has 24 board members, each of whom we might liken to Feudal lords of the past, with the exception being that these accumulations of wealth need no physical weapons to control their workers, i.e., their populace, a populace that for the first time on record is in the position of meekly wondering what it thinks it’s doing, why the marionette strings appear to have vanished, while suspecting that they have not—that they have simply gone wireless.
(>+E)The postmodernist assumes a condition of damage, according to Adorno. At other times, particularly in Notes to Literature and The Culture Industry, he writes of calamity, catastrophe, wreckage, alienation, bewilderment, liquidation, kitsch, flippancy, inertness, and hope in the form of intermittent cracks in the drawn blinds of a rented house in a land as foreign as the last one he was kicked out of for being in the world.
(<) But what of isms? What is this thing, this time, this space, we call modernism? The post, after all, implies the pre. Sometimes. And what, if there is such a thing, might we say of literature and theory, or literary theory, or theoretical literature, of this period?
A standard model arises with the hope of making sense of the Eurocentric experience. Modernism is to be defined as:
(X) · Artistic and socio-political reaction against Enlightenment rationalism of 19th century in Europe and the United States · “High” modernism starting prior to and just after WWI, the 1910-1930s · Emphasis on the formal autonomy of artistic practices, i.e., not science, not craft · Period of immense collaboration and experimentation with form (cf. Joyce, Stein) · Emphasis on genius and objectivity in the form of grand narratives (in some instances – cf. early structuralism, surrealism)
(> + X) To be sure, there was a very real reaction against Victorian art-as-humanistic leisurely delight on the one hand (entertainment), and moral lesson in the form of craft-oriented communication on the other (art as moral betterment). Realism in literature—emphasis on story in fiction, painting a world that somehow reflects truths, perhaps confessional, in fiction and poetry—becomes a questionable affair.
Questions come in the form of suspicion about the status of certainty and perspective. As poet Charlies Anders writes in her autobiography, A Life Not Told:
(>+E x X) I feared the world to be more complicated than all that, but Trollope did comfort me as a blanket in winter would sometimes comfort me when the fire had died...
(<-E x X) And yet questions also came in the form of a turning inward, an examination of language, its valences, its limitations, its mysterious relation to the subject-object dynamic, its sources of authority and power—the presumed epistemological stability of the author. The uneasiness about authorial status is profound by the 1920s and is said to be explicated as a rebellion, a set of willed transgressions by renegade anti-academic intellectuals who lived on the banks of some river in some town in France or maybe Ireland and often came from America, some America, someone’s America:
Virginia Woolf:
(M) Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
(> + E(M)/<) “She,” here, can be Woolf, women, humans who are gender-complicating, or, if you will, language embodied. The interrogation of literary paradigms, of language itself, this kind of mining, surely influenced by an increasingly industrialized world that saw other endeavors exploding for the same reasons, with similar results, such as physics turning on itself in quantum uncertainties, tanks being rolled off an assembly line in the service of protecting exotic occupied territories, the warped impression of which was seen most often in paintings by Picasso (cf Guernica), this takes not only the form of anxiety about literary criticism of course, but of literary form. Or, if you will, textual form and analysis.
(<A) But what about writing as an action, a convulsive bodily pronouncement undulating in accordance with its own physical laws of dynamics?
Rose Stevens, a poet embodies this embodiment, this rehearsal of movement.
From A Container (1934):
(a) Language a must a muscle a warden an, an, an, says this, says me, writing itself, it writing itself out of itself no itself no me know me no me
(> + E(M)/<) But whose experiences are we talking about? The question of who “we” are immediately arises when we ask what modernism is, where it is, how it develops, how the story goes.
(<W) Tell a story about HISTORY, says the child to his grandmother. Allow me to be your grandmother.
(<A(a)+W) I am your grandmother.
(> + E(M)/<A(a)+W) If language is a set of gestures circumscribed and constrained by a context, and that context is not neutral, what lens other than mine might I have to make claims about an historical epoch or a specific text? Or a paradigm shift in thought and artistic output? Grandmother’s story goes something like this
(I don’t have all the details right, as this was a long time ago, she’s dead now, she’s been dead for a long long time):
(<-E x X + W) There is a problem of subjective embeddness for the notion of objective interpretation to take off, a problem that simply is, despite phenomenology, Barthes suggests (cf. on Sollers). Is acknowledging this fact part of what we might think of as a transitional state, even a state of mind/minds/culture, between modernism and post-modernism? Interrogation now not just of our languages, our texts, but of our methods of interrogation, our “ourness” that permeates any analysis of a situation?
(> + E(M)/A(a) + W-w) The literature of rupture, of autonomy, of form, emerges with an anxious shriek in Stein and Joyce, in Gene Tumor and Juna Barnes, for instance. Emancipated from other academic or civic disciplines textual arts takes on the duty of the avant-garde: soldiers in a utopian project that push forth, at times even blindly, with no map or compass, paving ground and clearing brush with the hope that society may follow, and, eventually learn how to lead themselves. Lenin’s What is To Be Done? is answered: organize, write, lead, acknowledge the institutions of language, capital, and, above all, colonization by industrialized societies—or withdraw from all of that and start fresh with a blankness, an idea—new ideas about language, autonomy, artistic objects, and reference
(> + E(M)/A(a) + W (w))=<2 alternative ideas.
This, we might add, can be thought of as a rehearsal or mimicking of State-sponsored colonization, where that which is colonized is not physical space, towns, people’s commodity value, but of linguistic landscapes, imaginations, assumptions about individual, national, and cultural identities.
Or the material conditions that give rise to the eulogy of narrative—the potential that old forms no longer function.
(<2) But, then, what of post-modernism? Where does it begin if these worries are already being articulated by Tumor or Joyce, say? You put a “post” on something and it’s eulogized. The implication, in other words, is that something about the later modernist mode, a certain utopianism and, at least, artistic gesture towards utopia through autonomy (Stein) or universality (Pound), has died. An acceleration of a worry.
(>2) Back to the story. Our story. Again, a standard model of compare and contrast emerges from the textbooks. Post-modernism is marked by:
(X2) ·Rejection of objectivity ·Rejection of universality in favor of particularity ·Rejection of author as authority, often rejection of authorship simpliciter ·Rejection of grand narratives: teleological, analytic-systematic, dialectical, Marxist, etc ·With the death of the Subject and of One History comes a multiplicity, hence in literature and criticism a disassociative state of being, what Danto calls the age of pluralism, or what Jameson calls “schizophrenia” ·Meaning is no longer a one-to-one relationship between sign or word to world, but rather the world, now multiple, now inaccessible as thing-in-itself, is an unstable notion, such that meaning is context-dependent, potentially relative, and our world is thus created by and through a system of signs. ·Language and text are thus particular modes/systems that interface with each other, not with History or The World · “Free-play” in literature is now not just a transgressive act, but a fact of language, such that literature turns to itself as its own subject of inquiry
(B) Post-modernism, and the avant-garde, seek to turn away from history, towards histories, particular histories that have no designs on universality.
--Araki Yasusada
(>2+X2+B) There is something right about this. But something missing? Here we have the emergence of Beckett: an emblem of erasure, recursivity and self-reflexivity, uncertainty, language anxiety, imprisonment, abjection. The distinction between outer and inner, above and below, the hierarchies and binaries assumed and posited to be necessary for a world beyond the world by the early avant-garde, those of the external grand narratives—these seem quite distantly naive in the face of calamity.
((<2 + X2 + >2)B)The great distopian deflation must, or maybe, or could, White—in echo of Blanchot—suggests, have something to do with the obliteration of Europe, Holocaust, the War. So, modernist notions are accelerated (at times) and rejected outright (at times).
The consequence of exile and annihilation breeds hyper-alienation through shell shock, perhaps a withdrawal and retreat into the constantly shifting, paradoxical, and contradictory possibilities of language-as-subjective-and-arbitrary signification.
((<2 + X2 + >2)B) No absolute comfort here, but a thing to do, talk, utter, murmur....
((>2+X2+B) - <2) A thing to do not unlike walking in a circle, pacing, pacing for no reason other than a need to move some in a confined space....
((<2 + X2 + >2)B) Post-War Europe and America sees a radical rebuilding and recolonization of territories, leaving whole sections of a populace behind, driving clefts between the majority and the first class. Late capital charges on in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, its mark that of multinational monopoly, a “society of the spectacle,” as Debord would call it by the time of the student riots in Paris, 1967—an emergent system of commodities that are traded, you, me, traded until liquidated, subsumed by an industry of administered culture (Adorno, CI).
Our literature and criticism now, is the literature of pastiche, of superficiality, of what Adorno, perhaps more aptly, called “unadorned makeup” that is an “inert” bi-product of the schema of mass culture.
((<2 + X2 + >2)B)/ ((>2+X2+B) - <2)=Q Realizing this and reflecting this, contradicting it, erasing it, and reflecting it again, formally, as a writing of the world, is what writing can do?
((<2 + X2 + >2)B)/ ((>2+X2+B) - <2)=Q Realizing this and reflecting this, contradicting it, erasing it, and reflecting it again, formally, as a writing of the world, is what writing can do?
((<2 + X2 + >2)B)/ ((>2+X2+B) - <2)=Q Realizing this and reflecting this, contradicting it, erasing it, and reflecting it again, formally, as a writing of the world, is what writing can do?
((>2+X2+B) - <2)+((<2 + X2 + >2)B)/ ((>2+X2+B) - <2) The alternative is to relax and have a good time.
For if functional literature is over, we may still play word games for shits and giggles. Let us make fridge poems while we go into our fridge and select yet another frozen pre-packaged, eulogized, plasticy gelatinous, carcinogenic substance to microwave the hell out of. Let us not forget clip art, because clip art is actually awesome if used ironically!!! Go to your computer now, says K. Silem Mohammed, and make a poem out of clip art. You can do it while eating that substance from your microwave. You can, alternatively, make poems out of the death rays that microwavable substance emits while eating the magnets meant to be turned into fridge poems. Point being: Multi-task, goddamn it!!!!
((>2+X2+B) - <2)+((<2 + X2 + >2)B)/ ((>2+X2+B) - <2) = DN This, of course, is a kind of vulgar Marxism. It is one pole of theory, not particularly hip today, that we may call literary theory, but encompasses much more than the literary, for the literary—criticism, theory, writing—is taken to be part of an economics of power, a dialectics of imminent critique, a symptomology of a condition a la Frederick Jameson were Jameson actually vulgar, which he is not? If there is to be a thesis to this thesis it would be something like:
(L) I want to...defend the position that literary criticism is or should be a theoretical kind of symptomatology. Literary forms (and cultural forms in general) are the most concrete symptoms we have of what is at work in that absent thing called the social. Suffice it to say that works of the past afford all kinds of uniquely aesthetic openings onto their own moment; while those of the present include all kinds of coded data on our own – that blind spot of the present from which we are in many ways the farthest. What we tend to neglect, however, are the utopian projections works of past and present alike offer onto a future otherwise sealed from us.
--Frederick Jameson, “Symptoms of Theory,” Critical Inquiry
(DN +L)Though Marxist literary theory still exists today, it is endangered. I suspect this endangerment came when it was pronounced to be engendered, not by Adorno in his now famous remark that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz (for he took that comment back as soon as he made it), but by non-Marxist literary theorists who sit on the Board of the Endangered Literary Theories List. Derridian disciples on the left and the Stanley Fish’s on the neoliberal center-to-nothing come to mind. The former take their cue from actually reading today’s texts. The latter are simply afraid of monsters, things that go bump in the night. Of course, if Marxist literary theorists only read the literature of the now... (S) Which gets me to, avoiding Fish for now, late structuralism and post-structuralism.
(s) So, to enact a second pole of non-existing caricatured theory, that of vulgar semiotics, in order that we may finally finally wind up with a vulgar dialectic, the third term of which is Marxist semiotics, in my estimation an irrationally reasonable place to be. A place we were? A place we went not a second ago.
(DN +L+s) What is later structuralism absent a Marxist critique? Specifically, the later structuralism of a strawman, or the scientistic and variable systems of Americanized (cf. Pierce) semiotics? Full tilt deconstruction?
Structuralism simpliciter: the study of sign systems, i.e., texts, where “text” is any sign-system—written, gestural, visual, auditory, etc. For brevity, and because Eagelton does a fair enough job covering some of the major aspects of modernist structuralism—the initial seeking out of a science of meaning, a systematized way of talking about how meaning functions viz. textual analysis, the deep or symbolic formal structures of texts that involve binaries and their negations—and since you have read Eagelton and no doubt perused the wiki in order to balance yourself against the onslaught of his strawman critique, that of the scientism and arbitrariness of earlier structuralism (whose?)--I want to talk here about later structuralism, semiotics. The basics:
(X3) Sign: a meaning-bearing symbol in a symbol system, that which evokes a set of associations, call this meaning, in someone conversant in that sign system
1) Signifier: the physical symbol or cue that does the evoking, for instance the physical scratches and lines that amount to the English word “SIGN.”
2) Signified: that which the physical thing, the signifier, evokes – the mental associations that the signifier triggers. “SIGN” when uttered, for instance, might invoke in a particular system of signs, a mental association that commands you to write your name down on a piece of paper.
((DN +L+s)+X3) The employment of this couplet in textual analysis, that of the signifier and signified, spurious as it is if considered as anything more than one systematic and rigorous but instrumental approach to how we make meanings, often, though not always, consists in pointing out the initial conditions of the couplet. There are no steadfast reasons for a signifier to attach to, as opposed to fleetingly mingle with, the signified.
In Stein, for instance, it can be said that the signified drops out, leaving a free-floating signifier, the sentence “rhubarb is susan,” for instance, to be interpreted, reinterpreted, ad infinitum.
(Q+E+s(X3))=>2s Rhubarb is susan susan is your grandmother I am your grandmother.
((DN +L+s)+X3))=<2s The result, especially in the writerly text (cf. Derrida, Pyshche), is that of free-play and recursive movement, where, though there may be dominant readings of a sign-system, there are multiple, if not infinite, readings of some tezts, such that one can, and maybe should
(>2s) have a one-night stand with Stein’s signifiers in the appropriate way, which is to say unsafely and in ways that celebrate said appropriation.
(<2s) Lingering too long is to try to construct a stable narrative or interpretation that is not warranted by how we make meanings, how we move about as subjective language users. To Destroy All Monsters (cf “Destroy All Monsters,” 1970s, Detroit). Incompleteness here is always the result. There is no total reading or understanding. We have, as Kaya Silverman points out, a reader-interpreter-meaning-maker that is in the position of:
(J) an infinite play of signification; in it there can be no transcendental signified, only provisional ones which function in turn as signifiers (Silverman, 1982: 246).
(>2s+J)=3s And what I have just outlined is vulgar semiotics, a vulgarity that can be seen in structuralist semiotics in theorists ranging from (at times) Barthes to Silverman to Eco, but only fleetingly, not in some simplistic way that I have just outlined.
(<2s+J) What makes it vulgar?
(R, T) Two critiques: 1) the analytic (Wittgenstein), and 2) the vulgar Marxist (Jameson) (<2s+J+R) The first critique is one not often seen in literary theory, and though nitpicky, I think is important. It leads to the second, larger, more accepted critique. The question is this: what, beyond instrumental modeling, leads us to think that the signifier and signified can be separated?
This is different from stating that the signifier can drop away—a claim, that makes sense to me, that a word, say, does not necessarily refer to any one thing, or set of things, or idea, or set of ideas in one’s mind.
(>3s) Your mind, your grandmother’s mind, which is to say my mind. But what of pleasure?
Here is a possibility:
(<2s+J+R) I say to you “Can you hand me my herpes medication?” I have some images in my head about the noun “herpes” and the verbs that go with the command, and luckily, you hand me my herpes medication. Very well, we have a signifier-signified thing going on, I think. But it turns out, or maybe it turns out—I don’t know—that there is nothing in your mind. All is dark inside. You are, in fact, an automaton, habituated to the nth degree such that when I make requests such as “Can you hand me my herpes medication?” you do so automatically. Here, it seems, we have an instance where semiotics does not apply, need not apply, isn’t a good fit for something we may call “radical translation” when applied to writing or textual analysis. Or, to put it more precisely, the signifier-signified distinction seems like so much scaffolding for a set of behaviors in which the model has no functional role to play. Which is to suggest that maybe the signifier and the signified can be one and the same?
(<2s+J+R) This seems like so much pedantry, but it gets to the potential imperialization of the structure of semiotics, which, paradoxically, is supposed to be, and can be, and is, a tool, not just for analysis, but which says, radically and rightly, I think, that
(>3s((<2s+J+R)) meanings are not given—they are in flux—and that reality is not external to our language systems. How to import structuralist semiotics from one culture to another is a vexing problem. In vulgar semiotics, the arbitrariness of the sign is a backdoor way of assuming a great deal about communicative systems, other cultures, potentially. So there is an Anglo-centric viewpoint here that defies its critique of dominant cultural modalities.
I, you, Susan, am a dominant cultural modality. I am stuck in a container now.
(<2s+J+R+T)=U This bends into the second critique, which is a Marxist one, and one that contemporary semiotics has often taken seriously and adapted to. It is simply this: much of semiotics until the 1970s (with great exceptions such as Foucault and Derrida) have favored the description of the structure of the mentalistic and arbitrary to such an extent that the question of how meanings are exchanged and dissolve crowded out, in my view, and Burgin’s, Strinati’s, the more important question:
(U)***how and why have particular couplets or significations and therefore interpretational modes come to dominate over others? What are the material conditions of the sign system—what structures, economic, cultural, and material, are at work in building normative modes of discourse?***
These questions are adopted by semiotics and continue to be in what is often called Marxist semiotics or contemporary semiotics, or Marxists-feminist contemporary semiotics (cf Kristeva), which, to close, is what Derrida comes close to capturing with deconstruction and what Eagleton fails to grasp as compatible with Marxist (or otherwise left socialist) ideology.
Derrida, in Psyche: Invention of the Other:
(&) Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; it does not settle for methodological procedures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and marks a trail; its writing is not only performative, it produces rules -- other conventions -- for new performativities and never installs itself in the theoretical assurance of a simple opposition between performative and constative. Its process involves an affirmation, this latter being linked to the coming [venir] in event, advent, invention.
(>3s((<2s+J+R)+&)=U It is the possibility afforded us by inventing and re-inventing text through the ritual of performance (translation/mistranslation) that serves as the tool, potentially, for unearthing the non-normative, otherness of a beaten socioeconomic perspective(s). Deconstruction, that is, serves as a call to arms for the passive reader(s), the indentured servant(s) of the dominant narrative(s), to see reading and writing about writing as an inventive act, equivalent to the initial scribbles of the author(s).
readers=writers=workers=texts=...=... (?)
So, as Jameson has pointed out when in a restless and kinky mood, there is a utopianism here, though one that admits of its subjectivity but not complete relativity, its post-modern uneasiness and uncertainty.
(U) Call it an invitation to constantly recalibrate the calibrations of the writer/reader/worker/system/text, and call that theory, or better, call it writing to writing itself, and call all of that writing. Or reading. Or working. I suppose for those of us in the West, that is partly what the post-modernist intervention might appeal to. Or it might look somewhat different after this sentence ends with a period.
(U) The literature of rupture, of autonomy, of form, emerges with an anxious shriek in Stein and Joyce, in Gene Tumor and Juna Barnes, for instance,
(U) but settles into a kind of joy (=revelry, erotic) in Calvino. In Calvino, in Oulipo, in the books, the paradox of freedom: possibility in constraint, where possibility is to imagine what a world could be, for it is, as soon as it is born, imagined, which is real.
(U) This cannot be done by a person.
''''(U) Impossibility is only that which, in constraint writing, is inconceivable, where to conceive we need prompts, paradoxically constraints, juxtapositions and rearrangement of our own thought processes – imagining new systems – economies, cultural modes, languages, etc, and this involves a pleasure and its accompanying unsatisfaction, a comfort and an unease, a utopianism and a skepticism of utopia.
' Impossibility is inconceivable, and therefore we are stuck with possibility.
(U) This cannot be done by an author.
(U) We can think of Calvino, then, as embodying a set of contradictions and a comfort with those contradictions, a certain comfort level in infinite meaning, or non-reference, or non-answers, the ineffable and its afforded peculiar freedom.
(U) With the comfort in Calvino, we have the semiotic, the critique of essentialisms, certainly, but also an overabundance of meaning and a directed critique of commercialism and hyper-reality, a politics of reading that has elements of Marxist critique, and so we have
(U) A taxing example of the combination, or dialectic, of
emancipatory
and interventionist
political
and playful
Marxist
and self-critiquing Marxist, or, the uncertain utopian, the gnostic utopian, the Pascalian radical, the erotic, the erotic work the reader must do to navigate, create, and revel in the unsatisfaction of such proximity without touching
text to context
freedom from to freedom to
black to blankness
utopia to distopia
fullness to erasure
reader to author
reader to readers
author to authors
grandmother to stranger
&
