[First the queries, as they arose in the reading:]

>Within art, I
>wonder if the text doesn't limit with its directed linearity.

The linearity of the text is at issue. Now. This very instant. Has been for
some time. Always was.

>Within
>experience in general, it's the implied intentionality that I object to in
>reading all of the readable as language.  Is language simply an ordering
>process of the cognitive, with no necessary extension beyond the
>individual?

'Simply'? It is intimately involved in all of what is cognitive.

>Again, if so, how useful is it to use the word when it also
>refers to a communicative process?  Then whatever word you want to use, I
>often need to distinguish between those meanings.

I find the notion of language as a communicative process marginally and
only very, very occasionaly useful. What is communication? When does it
occur? Who decides whether it has occurred? Successfully? If something
called communication takes places, what does that have to do with language?

[Now the thoughts and sentences which followed:]

It's this notion that language/text should be applied only to specific
activities, functions, aspects of experience -- 'experience in general' --
whereas it is assumed that 'experience' might ever occur in the absence
whatever language is? Which is bigger? Is *that* what we are 'arguing'
about? It's an old chestnut, but worrying over it and changing what we say
because of these worries is something that keeps me hooked.

But seriously, you and I don't have a problem distinguishing our textual
from our so-called 'experiential' activities/engagements. Or do we? Can we
really always make these distinctions? Or rather, given cultural
developments, will it always be so easy or useful for us to make these
distinctions?

In William Gibson's _Idoru_, a hopelessly, perhaps pointlessly, seductive
book, the text gets one over on us, in part, by conjuring out of purely
readerly (/lisible/) authority [I mean he is 'the big author' -- undamaged
by the writerly problematic -- of the popular, and possibly significant,
book] a world in which memory/experience is *inscribed*, where it becomes
consensual not in the sense of 'agreed after the fact,' but in the sense
that I/you/we/they (whoever has the conch) may inscribe (?impose) a memory
or experience which we I/you/we/they then 'actually' share/experience (not
by argreeing to a pre-existing world, but simply by *using the same
technology* -- VR by another name).

OK, so you and I both reading this message (or Joan Retallack's
_Afterrimages_) doesn't confuse us into thinking we've drunk from the same
glass of water, but what happens when I can send the consensuality of the
glass and water down a 'wire'?

Shouldn't we prepare ourselves for this in our present practices? (Haven't
we already so prepared ourselves?) The practices of the so-called
'linguistically innovative writers' are not, imho, qualitatively different
from the overly seductive potential which fizzes and buzzes in the e-spaces
we've (manifestly) entered into. In fact, I *thought* you all were ahead of
the game.

asallways,
John




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