Sunday, March 31, 2002
Okay, I'm trying to work out how to phrase this:
Put differently, silence and the blank carry the trace of the “endless supplementarity” which in turn points to the presence of deferred meaning; Two instances of flaunting ‘absolute absence’ that yet carry traces of the lack of presence which ..
No.
Put differently, silence and the blank carry the trace of the “endless supplementarity” which in turn points to the presence of deferred meaning; Two instances of so-called ‘absolute absence’ which nevertheless both carry a trace of the lack of presence which..
Oh hell. Once more with feeling.
Put differently, silence and the blank carry the trace of the “endless supplementarity” which in turn points to the presence of deferred meaning; Two instances of flaunting ‘absolute absence’ that yet carry traces of the lack of presence which ..
No.
Put differently, silence and the blank carry the trace of the “endless supplementarity” which in turn points to the presence of deferred meaning; Two instances of so-called ‘absolute absence’ which nevertheless both carry a trace of the lack of presence which..
Oh hell. Once more with feeling.
Per Aage Brandt: "Grounding Iconicity" - one of Denmark's leading semioticians (and our only professor of Semiotics).
Computers and mass media are yielding a veritable renaissance for iconicity in contemporary culture. In a world of screens, the importance of the supports - still more sophisticated, ephemeral, immaterial - for the evolution of human semiotics becomes clearer than ever. A screen is still an intelligible entity by the force of the face as an attractor of intentional attention. People experience computers as human simulators with big heads and small bodies, turning those heads towards them and shining like human faces seem to do by emotional involvement.
"If Only I Were Not Obliged To Manifest": Iser's Aesthetics of Negativity by Gabriele Schwab. A whimsical paper which still makes for good reading while munching brunch.
Okay, it's actually great, fairly accessible stuff. If you are looking for an introduction to Iser, you could do a lot worse than look here.
While a text’s guiding devices exert a certain control by inviting specific responses, individual readings will never simply coincide with the parameters of "the implied reader." Instead, actual readings are shaped by the contingencies and idiosyncracies that determine the historical situation in which they take place. The act of reading, then, unfolds in the space between the implied reader and the concrete reader, a space marked by the dynamics of cultural interaction and negotiation. The "implied reader" is, in other words, a textual agency that actively confirms, interferes with, or disrupts a culture's familiar communicative patterns.
Okay, it's actually great, fairly accessible stuff. If you are looking for an introduction to Iser, you could do a lot worse than look here.
Domestic Ambient Noise/Moise by Cris Cheek.
The patterns of insistent, processual materiality, generated between these 'texts', enable us to begin to make maps of consensual 'slippage'; of those moments in-between communication most often edited from analysis, if not from consiousness. Insistences of pattern read as states of editorial attention. Akin to those marks of Cy Twombly, which Barthes refers to as 'so many little satoris . . . writing . . . literally in excess'.
Saturday, March 30, 2002
The tiny pleasures..
I accidentally hit the spell-checking button in my Word document and it suggested that logocentric should be replaced by homocentric.
I may have had too much coffee, but I think it is hilarious.
I accidentally hit the spell-checking button in my Word document and it suggested that logocentric should be replaced by homocentric.
I may have had too much coffee, but I think it is hilarious.
Paradoxically, the absence of sound is experienced as deafening, and a refusal to say anything turns out to be the clearest way of making a statement. At the risk of stretching a point, one might argue that the trivial and conventionalised metaphors of ordinary language echno a sentiment of linguistic skepticism that is pervasive in much modern literature: truth, it seems, cannot be expressed in language
from Christian Mair's article "The Semantics of Silence", in: (Grabher, G.M. and Jessner, U., ed.), Semantics of Silence in Linguistics and Literature, Anglistische Forshungen, vol. 244, Universitätverlag C. Winter, Heidelberg, 1996. My emphasis.
Friday, March 29, 2002
Kevin Hart's The Experience of Poetry (.pdf).
Thursday, March 28, 2002
Derrida and Nonsense Theology by Jay Michaelson. An interesting look at some Nag Hammedi texts (particularly my beloved "Thunder: The Perfect Mind") and just what Derrida fails to do. A grad school level paper, but I'm quite impressed. See also The Metatronics Library.
Back to pregnant silence (not my own).
The trouble here is understanding what to make of them. When Perfect Mind says "I am the name of the sound and the sound of the name/I am the sign of the letter and the designation of the division," what does she mean? Of course, it is tempting to just put asterisks by the lines and say they look Derridian. But it is also tempting, and slightly more responsible, to say that in the Ultimate, there is no disjunction at all between the written and the spoken, that language -- itself the foundation of cognizable reality -- is only "ultimate" insofar as it is both written and spoken. Tempting--but perilous.
Back to pregnant silence (not my own).
Again, personal notes, thoughts and ideas.
Notes from Don Idhe lecture a year ago. 10 people gathered in a tiny, white, stinking room. Round-faced American enters holding a box filled with various shapes of paper. "Hi", he says.
- logic tradition: measurements; graphs
- image tradition: mimetic representations; representations of technological events
- what we cannot see, we map via technology. Technology as mapping: of course. writing.
-- Moses: iconoclast - God cannot be depicted. Moses, though, must talk or write with God.
-- Aron: attacking Moses for his claim that God is imageless --> what of the writing, the burning bush? ==> God can be said to be encoded
- mimetic representation is immediate -> 'non-isomorphic'/non-mimetic representation needs to be an inscription process which in turn needs a reading process. Encoded- decoded
- spaces: omission or absorbtion. lines in barcode.
- does science regard the instrument as transparent? instrument never neutral - it offers a transformation.
Idhe beams isomorphic/mimetic and non-isomorphic/non-mimetic representations of scientific discoveries unto the white wall. Difference between the encoded and the decoded. A difference in level of understanding?
Notes from Don Idhe lecture a year ago. 10 people gathered in a tiny, white, stinking room. Round-faced American enters holding a box filled with various shapes of paper. "Hi", he says.
- logic tradition: measurements; graphs
- image tradition: mimetic representations; representations of technological events
- what we cannot see, we map via technology. Technology as mapping: of course. writing.
-- Moses: iconoclast - God cannot be depicted. Moses, though, must talk or write with God.
-- Aron: attacking Moses for his claim that God is imageless --> what of the writing, the burning bush? ==> God can be said to be encoded
- mimetic representation is immediate -> 'non-isomorphic'/non-mimetic representation needs to be an inscription process which in turn needs a reading process. Encoded- decoded
- spaces: omission or absorbtion. lines in barcode.
- does science regard the instrument as transparent? instrument never neutral - it offers a transformation.
Idhe beams isomorphic/mimetic and non-isomorphic/non-mimetic representations of scientific discoveries unto the white wall. Difference between the encoded and the decoded. A difference in level of understanding?
Wednesday, March 27, 2002
Mark Bernstein says: "It's hard to write tight. It's unreasonably hard to write unreasonably tight." I disagree. I'm finding it extremely difficult to write at great length about anything. My academic writing has always been focussed on writing incredibly tight about huge topics. Right now I'm struggling to write more than 600 words about the concept of literary silence despite having a huge bibliography. Ughr.
Wake up! Gnosticism and Buddhism in "The Matrix" - linked because it sounds fun (although it makes claims such as "Gnosticism parallels the plot of "The Matrix" .. erm, isn't it the other way around?)
Luckily for the Gnostic, salvation is available in the form of gnosis or knowledge imparted by a Gnostic redeemer, who is Christ, a figure sent from the higher God to free humankind from the Creator God Yaldabaoth. The gnosis involves an understanding of our true nature and origin, the metaphysical reality hitherto unknown to us, resulting in the Gnostic's escape (at death) from the enslaving material prison of the world and the body, into the upper regions of spirit. However, in order to make this ascent, the Gnostic must pass by the archons, who are jealous of his/her luminousity, spirit or intelligence, and who thus try to hinder the Gnostic's upward journey.
"Text" and the Site of Writing by Jeff Derkson
Mentions the usual suspects in novelistic mapping: Joy Kogawa and Michael Ondaatje. I'd also include Rudy Wiebe, but that may just be me. I once wrote a paper on the obscured landscape in Iain Banks' "The Bridge" while I studied at Stirling University. It is a beautiful book.
Parallel to this "textual turn," which leads intriguingly to Mowing Kwon's vague "discursive vectors,” there has been both a related mapping impulse and a constructive intent directed at "place.” The mapping impulse is both ontological and geographic (writing as a mapping of a mind or of subjectivity, writing as part of the process of realizing "place"). In popular media, texts, particularly novels, are given a primarily ontological role, of telling us something about the places we live in, and by extension to tell us something about "ourselves" or to illuminate the author as subject.
Mentions the usual suspects in novelistic mapping: Joy Kogawa and Michael Ondaatje. I'd also include Rudy Wiebe, but that may just be me. I once wrote a paper on the obscured landscape in Iain Banks' "The Bridge" while I studied at Stirling University. It is a beautiful book.
.. what remained to be discovered would make sense; it would fit in, it could all be gradually and patiently fitted together a bit at a time, like an infinite jigsaw puzzle, with no straight edges to look for and no end in sight, but one in which there was always going to be somewhere for absolutely any pieces to fit..
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
There is a reason why I'm slow at writing at the moment. I'm trying to summarise Saussure, Derrida's critique of Saussure, Derrida's development since Of Grammatology and the entire notion of poststructuralism .. all in one paragraph. It's mad, but I'm not giving up. At the moment I'm struggling to move a sentence from explaining the notion of "signifying difference" to the concept of self-authentication. Should be possible. Pass me the red wine. I think the sentence will only improve from a slight bout of tipsiness.
It's so much more gratifying doing this instead of writing a chapter on linguistic negativity. Somebody please yell at me. Please.
Synthesis-boy strikes back. He is being naughty.
No, it is an attempt to define oneself in terms of contextualisation. As I wrote below as part of a note-to-self:
Depends on context. Always context. As for Danish values (contextually a funny phrase, indeed): the foundation and domestic policies of DF - a Danish political party which I do not support, by the way.
Synthesis-boy strikes back. He is being naughty.
It's the hydra of the "Many-Me's," back once more!
No, it is an attempt to define oneself in terms of contextualisation. As I wrote below as part of a note-to-self:
Only source of 'meaning' lies within this given blank space as it recreates itself (note no arche) as an oscillation betwixt sg and sé
- or oscillation between easy-peasy labels that cease to be labels once caught in 'play'. Dynamic relations, rather than 'stable' paradigms. And Terrence continues:
Is it possible to talk about individuals without resorting to labels like "Israeli", "Woman", "Republican" or "Muslim"?
Depends on context. Always context. As for Danish values (contextually a funny phrase, indeed): the foundation and domestic policies of DF - a Danish political party which I do not support, by the way.
I started this blog partly because I wanted a space to post responses to discussions elsewhere; responses that were perhaps too sober, too calculated or plainly too long to post at d.f.a.d.s.. I hope the following makes sense.
Thus writes the eminent synthesis who provides me with challenges of the most wonderful variety. He is wrong, of course. When I wrote "I do not feel particularly rooted in Denmark..", I did not have the Net in mind. I had my time living in Britain in mind. I had my travels in mind. Denmark is such a tiny country that only two options appear to be available - either you embrace your "Danish-ness" or you realise at an early age that you do not fit in. My inability to identify with "Danish-ness" runs through my entire life - and I did have a life prior to discovering the Net (despite various reports).
Now I do have an imagined audience (Anglophone urban dwellers with a fairly geekish love for pop culture, books and coffee) - but I'd have an imagined audience even if I wrote columns in a newspaper. I have an imagined audience when I write Post-It notes, dammit. It is all about human beings - not about a space/place (although without human beings, you could not have a place). It is not about geography; it is about relations. Contexts and differences (dare I invoke differance?).
I agree. Choice is always an act of violence insofar as it values something above something else. The notion of representing a given culture is something I have thought about since the Danish election last year. These days Denmark has seen a surge in nationalism. Political parties emphasise their will to fight for the preservation of Danish values, Denmark's borders and Danish culture. I am not certain what they mean when they talk of Danish values. The representation of Denmark that pervades the media is something utterly alien to me. To me, Danish values are liberal attitudes, openess and ready acceptance of other cultures, customs and ideas. These values are not the same values being promoted by the political parties or the media. Instead I'm staring at an idyllic, tiny country which to me is something so Baudrillardian, so constructed-within-its-reality, that he should sue the political parties in question. Could I represent Denmark? I do not think so. I do not think of myself in geographical terms; I think of myself in terms of relations. Yes, that point again.
To invoke Mike, I'm Tinka (among other identities), Academic, Arty, Sarcastic, Feminist, Vaguely Lefty and a dozen other labels before I reach the geographical label. I may even feel more Scandinavian than Danish. I'm not so sure that I'm doing anything praiseworthy. I just prefer individuals to paradigms. There are problems with that attitude too.
When Tinka writes "I do not feel particularly rooted in Denmark..." there's an implicit construction of the Net as a place above and beyond Denmark.
Thus writes the eminent synthesis who provides me with challenges of the most wonderful variety. He is wrong, of course. When I wrote "I do not feel particularly rooted in Denmark..", I did not have the Net in mind. I had my time living in Britain in mind. I had my travels in mind. Denmark is such a tiny country that only two options appear to be available - either you embrace your "Danish-ness" or you realise at an early age that you do not fit in. My inability to identify with "Danish-ness" runs through my entire life - and I did have a life prior to discovering the Net (despite various reports).
Now I do have an imagined audience (Anglophone urban dwellers with a fairly geekish love for pop culture, books and coffee) - but I'd have an imagined audience even if I wrote columns in a newspaper. I have an imagined audience when I write Post-It notes, dammit. It is all about human beings - not about a space/place (although without human beings, you could not have a place). It is not about geography; it is about relations. Contexts and differences (dare I invoke differance?).
Sugar coat it as you will, the act of deliberately choosing one language over another can only be understood as an act of violence. Further, deciding that it's more important to reach a wider audience than to represent a given culture implicitly undermines the universality of that culture.
I agree. Choice is always an act of violence insofar as it values something above something else. The notion of representing a given culture is something I have thought about since the Danish election last year. These days Denmark has seen a surge in nationalism. Political parties emphasise their will to fight for the preservation of Danish values, Denmark's borders and Danish culture. I am not certain what they mean when they talk of Danish values. The representation of Denmark that pervades the media is something utterly alien to me. To me, Danish values are liberal attitudes, openess and ready acceptance of other cultures, customs and ideas. These values are not the same values being promoted by the political parties or the media. Instead I'm staring at an idyllic, tiny country which to me is something so Baudrillardian, so constructed-within-its-reality, that he should sue the political parties in question. Could I represent Denmark? I do not think so. I do not think of myself in geographical terms; I think of myself in terms of relations. Yes, that point again.
..a revolutionary declaration of independence that asserts, "Before I am a Dane, I am Tinka."
To invoke Mike, I'm Tinka (among other identities), Academic, Arty, Sarcastic, Feminist, Vaguely Lefty and a dozen other labels before I reach the geographical label. I may even feel more Scandinavian than Danish. I'm not so sure that I'm doing anything praiseworthy. I just prefer individuals to paradigms. There are problems with that attitude too.
Monday, March 25, 2002
Not First in Words but in Flesh from ChristianityToday.
The Gnostic Imagination of Borges
And finally, Jewel Spears Brooker reviews the complete version of Lyndall Gordon's biography of T.S. Eliot. And Michael R. Stevens writes aboutt The Bones in Mr Eliot's Closet and examines recent takes on Eliot.
Minds are not to be stayed upon the words that convey truth. They are to be stayed on the truth conveyed. And it may be brokenly conveyed. Indeed, it is never adequately conveyed. For truth lies in the transcendent signified and it is incarnate, moreover, not first in words but in flesh.
The Gnostic Imagination of Borges
Borges's work displays an odd combination of seemingly contradictory pairings. On the one hand, for example, he is fiercely intellectual, and it has been remarked that, stylistically, his spare and precise language adds something new to Spanish. But the intellectual rigor is of a special kind. Borges was never a scholar, though he was a wide and retentive reader. Most of his information came from reference books and encyclopedias.
And finally, Jewel Spears Brooker reviews the complete version of Lyndall Gordon's biography of T.S. Eliot. And Michael R. Stevens writes aboutt The Bones in Mr Eliot's Closet and examines recent takes on Eliot.
Saturday, March 23, 2002
Eloquent Silence by Ulrich Schmitz. A linguistic study of - well - silence.
As always, silence is both something (presence) and nothing (absence, in this case, of communication): it is the only sign without a material vehicle and, due to this very reason, so open. Silence, as a lack of established meaning, can be unfamiliar and strange (cf. Malinowski 1974:349f; Mann 1927:652). Its open ambiguity cries out for semiotic release: what is being concealed?
Disobey my own decisions / I derserve all your suspicion / First it's 'yes' and then it's 'no' / I dilly-dally down to duel..
Photography - Or, the Writing of light by Baudrillard. "Writing of light".. am I the only one to think of Kabbalah?
Photography - Or, the Writing of light by Baudrillard. "Writing of light".. am I the only one to think of Kabbalah?
The instantaneity of photography is not to be confused with the simultaneity of real time. The flow of pictures produced and erased in real time is indifferent to the third dimension of the photographic moment. Visual flows only know change. The image is no longer given the time to become an image. To be an image, there has to be a moment of becoming which can only happen when the rowdy proceedings of the world are suspended and dismissed for good. The idea, then, is to replace the triumphant epiphany of meaning with a silent apophany of objects and their appearances.
Silence as Discourse by Fran Sendbuehler
Seven Dada Manifestos (see also Village Voice's Manifesto Destiny).
Essays and Reviews by Barbara Foley - includes Marxism in the Poststructuralist Moment: Some Notes on the Problem of Revising Marx.
If discourse is an exhaustive representation that silences by leaving no gaps or silences, it says everything that there is to be said and so leaves nothing more to be said. This silence is, then, in possession of meaning since it says all there is to be said. Thus it can be seen that we are now dealing with two forms of an exhaustive representation: discourse that silences, and silence that discourses.
Seven Dada Manifestos (see also Village Voice's Manifesto Destiny).
Essays and Reviews by Barbara Foley - includes Marxism in the Poststructuralist Moment: Some Notes on the Problem of Revising Marx.
Friday, March 22, 2002
Procrastinating. The Importance of Being Jacques is faintly amusing.
Less amusing are my notes scribbled in haste and without my glasses: "'infinite regression' - a constant doubling within the aporia which forever contains/confines uncontaminated meaning. Only source of 'meaning' lies within this given blank space as it recreates itself (note no arche) as an oscillation betwixt sg and sé."
Questions: how can I get this to make any sense to others beside myself? How can I possibly posit any form of "sense" since I have just said it does not exist outside not-existing (yes, that is what I'm saying)? And how will I ever get a job based on this?
Less amusing are my notes scribbled in haste and without my glasses: "'infinite regression' - a constant doubling within the aporia which forever contains/confines uncontaminated meaning. Only source of 'meaning' lies within this given blank space as it recreates itself (note no arche) as an oscillation betwixt sg and sé."
Questions: how can I get this to make any sense to others beside myself? How can I possibly posit any form of "sense" since I have just said it does not exist outside not-existing (yes, that is what I'm saying)? And how will I ever get a job based on this?
Found an online version of the excellent The Search for Distance - Negation & Negativity in Wolfgang Iser's Literary Theory by Winifred Fluck.
Also found the Online Dictionary of Philosophy
Negation, therefore, not only engenders blanks within the textual repertoire but also maneuvers the reader into an intermediate position between what is canceled and what has to be supplied as the motivation for the cancellation: "It is through the blanks that the negations take on their productive force: the old negated meaning returns to the conscious mind when a new one is superimposed onto it; this new meaning is unformulated, and for precisely this reason needs the old, as this has been changed by the negation back into material for interpretation, out of which the new meaning is to be fashioned." (Act, 217)
Also found the Online Dictionary of Philosophy
Monday, March 18, 2002
Interested in graphic design or avant-garde modernism? Feel free to drool over the International Dada Archive. If you feel brave, there is the DADA Server which focuses on neo-dada.
Sunday, March 17, 2002
No work being done tonight. Shame on me. I'm standing on Earth trying to find pneuma, the divine spark, which will connect me with the source of true gnosis, knowledge residing somewhere between Cosmos, Pleroma and the Abyss. Ack. Too much garden variety Gnosticism..
Canonizing the Popular - by Robin Markowitz
Can't begin to express how tired I am of reading "the hegemony of Dead White European Males" .. possibly because I've been exposed to too much second-rate politically correct literature. Just how many exquisite Samoan lesbian mud-wrestling poets are there? Not all that many, I can exclusively reveal..
Border Crossings - from diaspora writing via gender and cyborgs to something very interesting called 'border incidents'. Worth checking out, even if it seems to be abandoned.
Bad Subjects is fortunately still being updated. It ranges from the rather absurd (Milli Vanilli and the Scapegoating of the Inauthentic ) to the rather sublime (Manifest Congestion: Freeway Landscapes and Timescapes). So far I've bookmarked The Voice of Authority: Michel Foucault's Problematization of the Intellectual, The Abyss and You: A Brief Anatomy of Fear, Cross-Dressing in Bulgaria: Gay-Identity, Post-Communist Fear, and Magical Love, the intriguingly titled I'd Rather Be a Whore Than an Academic (do I detect a hint of bitterness?), Write Me Disconnectedly: Assembling Hypertexts and (because I loved the game) The Microserfs Are Revolting: Sid Meier's Civilization II. One day I'll get around to reading the articles..
Even if the hegemony of Dead White European Males were finally vanquished once and for all, would anything have changed? In creating fresh canons of the work of marginalized peoples, have we yet confronted whether canons (however marginal) ought to be produced at all? I don't really think so..
Can't begin to express how tired I am of reading "the hegemony of Dead White European Males" .. possibly because I've been exposed to too much second-rate politically correct literature. Just how many exquisite Samoan lesbian mud-wrestling poets are there? Not all that many, I can exclusively reveal..
Border Crossings - from diaspora writing via gender and cyborgs to something very interesting called 'border incidents'. Worth checking out, even if it seems to be abandoned.
Bad Subjects is fortunately still being updated. It ranges from the rather absurd (Milli Vanilli and the Scapegoating of the Inauthentic ) to the rather sublime (Manifest Congestion: Freeway Landscapes and Timescapes). So far I've bookmarked The Voice of Authority: Michel Foucault's Problematization of the Intellectual, The Abyss and You: A Brief Anatomy of Fear, Cross-Dressing in Bulgaria: Gay-Identity, Post-Communist Fear, and Magical Love, the intriguingly titled I'd Rather Be a Whore Than an Academic (do I detect a hint of bitterness?), Write Me Disconnectedly: Assembling Hypertexts and (because I loved the game) The Microserfs Are Revolting: Sid Meier's Civilization II. One day I'll get around to reading the articles..
French Intellectuals to be Deployed in Afghanistan to Convince Taliban of Non-Existence of God - not strictly academic, but since it actually ties in with what I'm doing at the moment.. and it's bl**dy hilarious. Found at synthesis
'The Cloud of Unknowing' in dialogue with postmodernism by Nike Kocijancic
The reasons for the authorial disappearance are then essentially different in the two cases; while Roland Barthes proclaims the death of the author because he wants to announce the birth of the reader and above all that of the critic with his/her own interpretation of the text, the medieval author of the 'Cloud' conceals his name because he thinks that his authority is not needed, and that the shared experience with the reader of his book will grant access to the divine transcendental authority, which bestows meaning on the text.
Michael Sells writes:
I like Sells so far. I've spent the morning reading the introduction to his "Mystical Language of Unsaying" and while Sells writes within the field of Religious Studies, it is easy to trace a line to Literary studies (he even admits that his work is "literary and synchronic") and my own work. However, I have circled the quote above with my red pen. If everything is discourse - as the theoretical school Sells employs insists upon - how can literary discourse suddenly have meaning to be paraphrased while apophatic (read religious) texts can only exist in the "hub" of the infinitely regressing aporia? Is there really such a difference between sacred/profane texts? I maintain that the sacred/profane distinction must be situated in the reader and it is thus not universal. Hmmm...
And sorry if you have dropped by looking for highbrow intellectual discussions. At the moment I'm mainly jotting down thoughts and notes.
Poetry, drama - almost any form of art - risks being trivialized when its meaning is defined and paraphrased discursively
I like Sells so far. I've spent the morning reading the introduction to his "Mystical Language of Unsaying" and while Sells writes within the field of Religious Studies, it is easy to trace a line to Literary studies (he even admits that his work is "literary and synchronic") and my own work. However, I have circled the quote above with my red pen. If everything is discourse - as the theoretical school Sells employs insists upon - how can literary discourse suddenly have meaning to be paraphrased while apophatic (read religious) texts can only exist in the "hub" of the infinitely regressing aporia? Is there really such a difference between sacred/profane texts? I maintain that the sacred/profane distinction must be situated in the reader and it is thus not universal. Hmmm...
And sorry if you have dropped by looking for highbrow intellectual discussions. At the moment I'm mainly jotting down thoughts and notes.
Saturday, March 16, 2002
..new ways of discovering old texts - an Independent book review:
..a book is not a tomb. If scholars build ruins, it is because the book has no architectural boundaries. It is instead an archipelago of fragments dispersed across space and time. New technologies allow us to see the wonder of the book as if for the first time: drifting nebulae of meaning; eerie constellations of significance.
Photographs and Signatures: Absence, Presence, and Temporality in Barthes and Derrida by Lori Wilke. Found via Juliet. Interesting quote from Derrida:
The possibility of the absence of the referent, he argues, "is not only an empirical eventuality" but is constitutive of the mark: "It constructs the mark; and the potential presence of the referent at the moment it is designated does not modify in the slightest the structure of the mark, which implies that the mark can do without the referent" (SEC 183).
Friday, March 15, 2002
Notes to self:
Second chapter: "Sound & Silence - Negativity & Language". The connection between Logos, Adamite speech, the Derridean notion of irreducible twoness and the supplement prior to Logos (or implicit within the Word), metaphorical 'Breaking of the Vessels' (Kabbalistic thought pertaining to The Word entering the world - but this is a simplification) - trace this through to Iser's negation (both degrees), negativity, the Unsayable and the Unsaying of the Ineffable - and end up with a contemporary theory of language which Shira Wolosky (bless her soul) calls Linguistic Asceticism. Where to start? I also need to address apophatic discursive strategies (repetition and paradox) -- and somehow relate all this to the argon betwixt Modernism & Postmodernism (almost impossible to do this, but at least try).
First tracing/introducrtion? In Alasdair Gray’sdystopian novel Lanark, the protagonist Lanark/Duncan encounters an authorial/ethereal voice as he is travelling towards the city of Provan. He hears something he believes to be Adamite language – language charged with pure, uncontamined meaning: “a sound like remote thunder or the breathings of the wind in the ear. “Is ... is ... is ...” it said. “Is ... if ... is...” The loss of pure meaning - and the inability to establish a one-to-one relationship between something one might tentatively call ‘intent’ and ‘utterance’ – pervades Alasdair Gray’s novel ..
..tracings, tracings.. trace fields, make maps..
Second chapter: "Sound & Silence - Negativity & Language". The connection between Logos, Adamite speech, the Derridean notion of irreducible twoness and the supplement prior to Logos (or implicit within the Word), metaphorical 'Breaking of the Vessels' (Kabbalistic thought pertaining to The Word entering the world - but this is a simplification) - trace this through to Iser's negation (both degrees), negativity, the Unsayable and the Unsaying of the Ineffable - and end up with a contemporary theory of language which Shira Wolosky (bless her soul) calls Linguistic Asceticism. Where to start? I also need to address apophatic discursive strategies (repetition and paradox) -- and somehow relate all this to the argon betwixt Modernism & Postmodernism (almost impossible to do this, but at least try).
First tracing/introducrtion? In Alasdair Gray’s
..tracings, tracings.. trace fields, make maps..
Bodies & Voices. Tempting. Very tempting.
I read Gerald L. Bruns' chapter on negative discourse in his "Modern Poetry and Language" (or something similar) today. Disappointed. Very structuralist reading of Barthes' "Writing Degree zero" and Bruns' observations on negativity were useless. Could always use him as a pawn. Re-read Fluck's piece on Iser and negativity today. Still very pleased. Excellent article. Key text. Am reconsidering shifting my focus from Eliot to the concept of negativity - am borrowing Michael Sells' book on Unsaying tomorrow. With less than two months to go .. is this really a good idea?.
I roll in the hay with Hobbits
Thought I'd get my academic blog started with something very serious!
