Okay, onward, fingers-crossed for continuing connection. In fact what I'm
doing here on this electronic line bears some likeness to what we're
talking about in terms of textual footholds and new public spaces!
Ian, what I meant in my earlier cryptic posting about the differences
between "visionary" and contextualized responses to the relations between
language and space is that the former seemed, to me, while listening with
rapt attention to Karen, to come to mind as a potential description of the
prescriptiveness of this turn to "architectural" models for writing and
performance, whereas the latter suggests a continual immersion in the
process of moving through what must be acknowledged as space that forms
the writing even as the writing attempts to probe its dimensions. I find
troubling the adoption of terms that take us back to "structuralisms" of
various kinds; the messy relations between language, space, architecture,
history and the discursive history of particular subjects seems best not
reified or crystalized as blueprint, in my view, even if that blueprint
calls for "rotating anagrams" in spatial terms, or "the strange liberty of
palindromes" (one of Karen's examples that I liked most). The
"envisioning" of models that pre-empt desensitizations such as those that
arise when living in spaces that become transparent because functional may
find kindred projects in the work of certain kinds of language-oriented
poems, but what I see happening in performance work in this country seems
newly exciting to me because it doesn't re-organize, meta-linguistically,
textual operations so much as it investigates the way we do, now, occupy
space and make space -- not how we might, or how we should.
Those of you who write in shorter sentences, step in -- I'm getting a bit
convoluted in my own dark textual corridors!
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