Hi keston, rising early to the bait, 'the hooks, the hooks!',
here's an extract from what i said last Friday. If anybody really wants a
chunky word6 file as an attachment then i'll post the whole paper as read,
although i'm already thinking it needs more work. It says more things and
with more overall complexity than this extract allows, but what i'm posting
here, mostly nothing that anybody here doesn't already know, lays out some,
and i'd emphasise that some I'm keen to hear others articulated, of the
bones from which arguments concerning 'autonomy' might currently hang.
Sorry about this, those not interested, you know where the delete button
is. And it is an extract only.

                                    *

In an anxiety, born of that wish to be able to separate the 'authentic'
utterance, from the tarnish of 'authorial' immanence, writing is desired to
be only that which resides on the page. The autonomies of texts are, in the
privileging eyes of such readers, dubiously compounded and so consequent
readings hindered, by the noisy significances of physical gestures, facial
expressions, intonational 'tricks', seductive clothes or not, peer response
and so forth. A hankered-after 'purity' is corrupted, made dirty, by the
baggage of physical exchange; through everyday modalities, persistently
inscribed onto, and mediated by each human body. Can such details of the
mechanics of social dispersal not also be read? If so, then where does the
writing lie?

                                   *

                     'Literacy', became promoted as a 'higher', more
objective or autonomous, form of knowledge, in many but not all cultures,
exactly because it is not as immediately socially dispersive, or so
obviously ephemeral as 'orality'. It took root in the West, according to
Foucault's account, through taxonomic ambition, exemplified by the
encyclopaedic projects around the turn of the seventeeth century. He
writes, that, 'such an interweaving of language and things, in a space
common to both, presupposes an absolute privilege on the part of writing'.
'Literacy', grafts onto its construct, an association with the higher or
more sophisticated echelons of a given society, with a priesthood, or an
intelligentsia, or an academe, or a policy elite. 'Literacy', can be
regulated through occupations of power, through the agencies of convention.
Meanings, and their proliferative tendencies, can be controlled, and owned.
As Foucault puts it, 'the author is the principle of thrift in the
proliferation of meaning'

                    'Orality', has by contrast been more associated, by
literatii, with redistribution of information already acquired; with
repetiton rather than with origination. A hierachy, based on literate
values, considers downgraded those sites of oral proliferation in the
everyday, and the 'billingsgates' common to them, Malinowski's phatic
communion. Orality thereby becomes tarnished itself, associated with
transitory topicality, with trivia, tittle-tattle and yiminy piminy.
Foucault goes further, showing the spoken word at the turn of the
seventeenth century becoming aligned with the passive intellect as 'the
female part of language'. Writing, as paginated text, was ensconced, as
the active male intellect, and the harbor of truth, as phallogocentric
matters of fact.

'. . . in vivo and in vitro. Biochemical mimesis mutates the modernist
anxiety about authenticity.' - Donna Harraway

                     Writing and publishing might therefore be considered
as related to eugenics and the issues of anxiety thereby raised;
patriarchal drives, production of offspring, reproduction of preferential
'self'. Authors, through the agency of their publishers, like contestants
at a beauty contest, setting out their bodies of work, (or 'Arnies') in
order to be successful, as the chosen tokens against threats to the social
fabric posed by 'proliferation of meanings'.

                     Among increasingly hybrid texts, intertextual
boundaries, between niche market readerships and producer-consumers of mass
market writings, are sites of contestation - through blur, slippage,
fracture, erosion, granulation and immersion. Out at the words market, a
sufficiently wide range of aspirational tastes is being catered for, such
is the myth of choice, to result in the seeming absorbtion of 'all', by the
artifices of a capitalist society obsessed with controlled diversity as an
engine of its survival.

                    The subject of this paper, 'dan', is a collaborative
writing which roadtests that stamina for absorption within the society that
has asked for it. Typically, it interrogates conventional boundaries of
concensual meaning formation and in the process of so doing it establishes
a construction site for potentially unassimilable proliferations of
meaning. 'Authorship', far from providing a buffer between readers and 'the
great danger with which fiction threatens our world', ('Are Your Children
Safe In the Sea' asked Cobbing thirty years ago) becomes an active agent
for engagements of interest with the formlessness of indefinite community.
'dan's' progenitors will be both applauded and cold-shouldered for their
tenacity in proposing that interest.


                                     *

                    Whilst references, representations and meanings will
continue to proliferate as 'd a n' is processed, for some readers the terms
of engagement are already barren, too immersed in acts of negation. Too
often for them, 'd a n' offers only invocations of the denial of consensual
meaning, mockery of the need for meaning as a symptom of socio-deficiency,
or active erasure of existing common sense. These are, for such readers,
'writings' ready-redolent of neo-dadaism; yet more conceptually packaged
artists' shit. 'd a n' can be misunderstood then, as no more than a
re-presentation of Mrs. Sparsit's 'impossible void'. Its depictions of
textuality so dissipated as to be unreadable, within terms of readability
measured against dominant linguistic practices. Letter forms have exploded
their delineations to become blotches and globules. Inkish stains muck out
the page, turning conventional interdependencies between text and
background upside down and inside out. Ink, medium of positive
articulation, literally blots conventionally negative spaces between
letters and words, rendering the page opaque with necro-lingo-goo. Too many
boundaries are being blurred at one time.

                                     *

                    Twentieth century developments in accessible
technologies for 'indirect testimony', the various reproductions made
possible through systems of 'recording', have certainly skewed boundaries
between 'ephemerality' and 'longevity'. It is now possible, for example, to
hear Kurt Schwitters' own performance of the whole of his 'Ur-Sonata',
discreet speech components treated as units from which to compose
relatively precise structures for vocal performance, as well as to 'read'
printed versions of this text. Although, as Bernstein says, new critical
issues emerge as a result, regarding:

'the status of discrepancies among performed and published versions of
poems, and moreover, between interpretations based on the text versus
interpretations based on the performance?'

                    Despite anxieties raised, by the reinvigorated spectre
of 'authentic utterance', and what price Dolly the cloned sheep in this
cultural festival of copies, those most obvious rifts, between conventions
of 'performance' and 'page', connected to relative 'perishabilities', have
partially healed.

                                          *

                    'Domestic Ambient Noise' deliberately confounds the
aural and visual to boot. For Cobbing, using the Japanese word 'kaku',
writing and drawing are essentially the same. Counter to the eye 'being
destined to see and only to see, the ear to hear and only to hear',
Cobbing's and Upton's insistence is on creating charged transitions between
aural and visual registers; in the cases of smudges and puddles and gouges
and smears (inclusive of alphabetic forms, runic systems, oggamic writings,
logosyllabic, calligraphic and pictographic facture). Intent is on
interaction and concomittant transition, as much as on discreetness,
between juxtaposed material elements; frequently foregrounded in twentieth
century art works and forming part of a wider registration of those
moment(s) hingeing between continuity and discontintuity.

'The minimum real unit is not the word, the idea, the concept or the
signifier, but the assemblage. It is always an assemblage which produces
utterances . . . the utterance is the product of an assemblage - which is
always collective, which brings into play within us and outside us
populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events.'

Acts of assemblage then reveal the workings of the manufactures of
concensus. They can further such manufactures, and they can challenge the
political ideologies that underpin or undermine the desires that drive such
necessities. 'D a n' is partially becoming a contemporary sourcebook of
material poetic assemblages, a not so m uch exemplary as salutary
compendium of period connectionism, a sampler hooked up to a hard drive as
it crashes, grabbing snapshots from total recall.

                                         *

               Renewing anxieties, via the agency of 'indirect testimony',
concerning the authority of utterance, led Derrida to assert that the West
had become trapped by the voice. 'Logocentrism: the metaphysics of phonetic
writing' , as transcription of the living voice, which Derrida seeks to
unshackle from phonocentrism, is, for him, a distinctly ethnocentric
problem; a Western logocentrism, locked into tracing reality through
phonetic mimesis. Yet as Zhang Longxi asks:

'if logocentrism is found in the East as well as in the West, in
nonphonetic as well as in phonetic writing, how is it possible for us to
break away from, or through, its enclosure?'

Zhang suggests that those writings, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and
Chinese characters referred to by both Foucault and Derrida as nonphonetic
and direct representations of 'things', are, in fact:
'sweeping generalisations about East - West cultural differences . . . very
much the result of misconceptions or of a wilful projection of the desire
to differentiate the Western Self from a non-Western Other.'

Let's try another tack.

'From Plato to Leibniz, we have been able to observe a few modifications
but no real displacement in the field of debate, whose active center has
remained mimema phone, imitation of meaning by vocal sounds. Now natural
language does not materialize in speech only but in writing, too, and
beside a phonic mimesis (or below it, or above it, depending; . . .) can be
dreamed - has been dreamed - a graphic mimesis: imitation by the concrete
forms of writing. Imitation of what?'

                    The basic principles of an alphabetic writing, 'to
represent a single sound of a spoken language by a single letter.',
supplemented by accumulations of visually symbolic value, are not equally
directly applicable to other writing systems. In addition, whilst the
principle of one sound per single letter might be sustainable in continual
isolation, as soon as combinations of letters formed words and words passed
from mouth to mouth and community to community through time, such neat
distinctions blurred into complex knots of influential stress, that have
resulted in fold upon fold of buckled, rather than teleological,
developments.

                    Genette is cunning therefore, in not putting his
emphasis onto imitation of physical objects, but crucially, into imitation
of meaning. For meaning implies human interaction and contextual
specificity. Meaning is 'motivated' within particular historical and
cultural frames. Far from being arbitrary, meanings are produced by
specific details, of varying ephemerality.

                    Consensual realities in respect of meaning need to be
mapped onto that 'unanchored slippage from signifier to signifier, pure
unmotivated metonymy in a one-dimensional world without metaphor', which
Massoumi emphasises is 'produced by determinable social functionings within
a real network of power relations'.

                    Situationism, developing from Lettrisme, took the
concern for creativity and meaning in the context of the struggles of
everyday life seriously. Its programme agitating towards taking control of
the production of meaning, addressed through the deconstruction of
dominant, or territorialised, linguistic inter-relationships, was seen as
part and parcel of the workers' demands to take control of the means of
production. Perhaps a deconstruction of the means of the social
construction and state representation of production is part and parcel of
retaking control of what meaning can be. Meaning need not be the instrument
of a coercive state. It might or it might not be appropriate to talk of
meaning as a meeting between intention and interpretation, as Fiona
Templeton puts it in the afterword to 'You : The City'; for perhaps such a
meeting is perceptable to neither the intender nor the interpretor at that
time.


_____________________________

blah blah. In conversation last week with John Cayley i admit that the use
of Xang Longxii is problematicised by his otherwise hermeneutic agenda.
Also the 'references' are not footnoted in this extract and I'm not able to
give the proper time to doing so right here and now. Those wanting such can
get the full attachment, it says a lot more and certainly gives further
complexities to what is already a thicket of discourse.

love and love
cris




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