langpo

Reading can look at language as the arena,as the medium,the mode of engagement,the centerpiece of Method.What’s social here is not some separable content,but the Method of writing & of editing.Editing is the reading moment.Reading constructs.And it does so by combating the obvious at all levels —in order to maximize openness at every level:acoustics, ‘looks’, page layout and design, authorship, genre, grammar.The normal starts to seem precarious, contingent, even exceptional.I want something that holds together that’s not smooth.Something that would agitate or reinscribe the social raw materials of agency, of subjects, of subject positions, of persons, of discourse —and make them the building blocks of whatever it constructs.An Informalism. Of connections.The connectionism is a Surprise Machine.It works by ...MULTIMPLICATION.So-called Language Writing distinguishes itself:First,by challenging the transitive ideal of communicating, of the direct immediate broadcast,of the Truth with a capital T (you pompous fool) —by challenging the usual generic architecture of signification,of the unrequited or unrequitable sign. Second,by foregrounding in a pretty drastic way the materiality (and social materiality) of the reading surface, down to its tiniest markers.(Even punctuation. Remember: Russia, the 1905 revolution –the first soviet was formed in St Petersburg in order to coordinate a print-workers strike called to demand payment for typesetting punctuation marks and not just ‘letters’).Reading SoftwareIn reading, this makes for, instead, a drastic unnerving constructivism all the way down to the level of the sign. And then beyond, backstage.It looks behind the sign for the particulars, for an extremism of raw material, of what comes before signification, of preposterous dispersal & modularity, of energizing strangeness, of interferences, interruptions, & noise without a beat.(This puts the reading experience closer to sacrifice and surrender, to anti-productive expenditures and excess, to a surplus or hyper-trophy of enjoyments.)Faced with Collage & Noise,Reading can be set loose from its usual anchorings (and hankerings).Making it hard to recuperate it, or reterritorialize it, back onto the continuities that those anchors prescribe:First, set loose from GENRE[The writing is more like the music of so-called ‘free improvisation’ which means free from prescribed genre or idiom. Nonidiomatic.] (Is normative syntax a genre?)And second, set loose from the usual demands for a Psychology-CenteredSubjective Expressiveness on the part of the Author (that all-purpose glue the traditional reader is supposed to identity with)Language as an infinitive would mean to make different —given to us as an opportunity.To reentangle rather than decipher.To rerehearse the shocks.I’m all scattered.We make ventriloquism out of the building blocks, the raw materials of a social readymade.And try to turn literary space into a more wide-open information space or architecture, of materialized complicity.For reading:If Making Meaning or Making Sense is Establishing Authority,how is this done?That’s what I want to nudge at tonight —with glances at some parallels between how this plays out in experimental writing and how it gets sidetracked in hypermedia’s absorbing 3-D illusion (taking off from some points raised in the language of new media).To start with:The page, like the windowed computer screen, can encourage a looking through or a looking at approach —Looking through: as a transparent, dematerialized virtuality, cinema-style),or a looking at (as an opaque, action-oriented, control-panelled material reality).Reading works as a simulation of a flat control panel It’s more presentational or theatrical, less given to auratic or cinematic absorption.Look how much smoothness of ‘editing’ is needed to sustain the illusion of a centered subject ‘involved’ in a centerable outside world;most of that smoothness can be jettisoned along with that illusion.If you want to immerse yourself into a visually represented world, the severity of collage might be a threat.Drastic cutting and montage and whacked-out juxtaposition have to be ‘dialed back’.A little of the ‘elliptical’ is okay — right now, it’s even fashionable — but just make sure there’s not too much, because that would endanger the fixed center of personal expression or unmediated observation and the chance for us as readers to identify with it.We don’t ‘rule out’ or try to escape from the mechanisms of social construction. (This isn’t the langauge equivalent of pure abstraction.)Instead, this is what the texts seem to wallow in: to appropriate or sample them, hyperbolically.They incite pleasure by the scrambling of fantasy and ideological resolution.They play off a desire for subversion, for fragmentation, for miniaturizing and maximalism, for refusing the compensatory, for shortcircuiting.Reading helps it ‘lay bare the device’ — at the social, not just the literary level.The writing helps stage, rather than conceal, the particulars of its format.It helps the text foreground its social constructedness, as a body of social sense, not just leaving us stuck with a fetishizing of artistic process or the preenings of author control.Don’t be dictated to.Don’t be sutured — show us “some kind of rip”Nothing like digital morphing.No pretensions to imitate (or reassure) any world we already know.(Try to avoid making the world seem pre-known or interpellative overall, whatever happens with its particulars.)decorated with all kinds of versions of closed anti-social formalisms susceptible to entropy like this.)Don’t let meaning coagulate.Help it humor us.Work to create an anti-aura, to make language ‘famous’(remembering Brecht’s comment that alienation is a kind of fame).The politics point outward, toward an embracing of concern for a public, for common goods (language as an overall body),not merely for ‘identity politics’, for enlisting recruits in one or another specific struggle.Our almost automatic complicityWe want a reading that sounds that outWhen illusion gets shattered, so does the comforting distance that nurtured our little dream of subjective centeredness and mastery and protected independence.Words gain force by dispelling the illusion that Language is at my disposal (and that certifies me as a legitimate disposer, as a safe subject).Texts that give us a semblance of a cozy interior don’t seem so compelling any longer. Or too sentimental. so much as laying bare ourselves as the device.We don’t want to think of the vivid action of reading as just an active, conscious — and increasingly po-mo self-conscious — reconcilement with circumstances.Even a Brechtian style ‘alienation’ of immediacy can be too prone to pride itself on its mastery, on its meta-level ‘transcendence’.But too often this is an empty pleasureless pride.Maybe Brechtian distance is too reminiscent sublimation to give us a model for reading these texts.This is personal abjection —Abject, the opposite of exalted or imperious —“offered in a humble and often ingratiating spirit”.For reading: no self-validation, no self-assertion.Its ‘face’ is not recuperable as persona or as private property.Instead, we get a relentless impropriety, a rough trade.Any fixed rendition of the self is put in danger.Empowering of the language works as a self-disempowering.The subject suppressed (as a control tower) to pluralize the meaning.We aren’t surfaces that can hide depth.We’re moebius strips without a stabilizable outer shell (and therefore without a protected inside).Privacy in shreds, the Other in the saddle.Why do you want to imagine that you are conducting your own train of thought?Nothing purely interior or individually psychological is allowed to familiarize all this.Nothing lets us person-ize or character-ize these singularities of event and experience.The self, the imagined integrity, wrecked.The ego, that big towering regulator, starts to give way in the face of a deregulation... of who we are and all we might be.We face up to words which are more like deindividuated subjectivities (or production lines for future subjectivity).Subjectivity gets felt as a complex bodily surface, with the familiarities of the person subject to an ecstatic clearing and extension.Or to notice that our own subjective and particular experiences don’t always have to be mediated through our ‘self’, that commodification.A shifting pragmatism of experiential reactivity: that’s what we feel like.And the deterritorializing of language enhances its Force, its sensational affectiveness.A projectile cluster (or stickerball) of words offers up a staged memory trace of how earlier word-clusters (and their repetition) turned the body into a lively, reactive surface of inscription.We let ourselves become a staging ground for intenseTechnicians of the Social?Don’t keep the social at a distanceDistance becomes interior constructivism —a self-reflexive social forming.The equivalencies and relays and thresholds don’t conceal the realities; they substantiate it.Reading makes a jigsaw puzzle out of the snapshot.Reading:To start with, unembarrassed by the artifice of language,but we let it operate on us granularly.We might even find moments of non-interactive cinema-style description or anecdote popping up in this writing, but only within a more complex, and overall opaque surface.We’re not seeking purity. We don’t need a tabula rasa.We live within an immanent overdetermination — and learn to love it.If you ask what immediate response gets created by this hypermediacy, it’s not minimalism. It’s not New Age; it’s not Old Age. It’s sensory overload, omnivoyeurism.Still, this doesn’t encourage a disinterested aesthetic contemplation (of desocialized objects, tastefully sketched out and given ‘auratic’ presence).For that, you’d need to lean on so much of the armature of familiarity.But this writing, mostly, is too strange.Strangeness puts things right in your face, right up to our ears.Strangeness doesn’t endistance.(Remember, it’s what reactionaries always want to quarantine.)It pulls us in, puts its headphones on us, and requires more wide-angle work, more action.We’re not stripping away illusions or normalizing machinery by talking about them, by ‘disagreeing with them’ or ironizing them, but by showcasing how they work at a micro-level. And they work by keeping us at a distance.Norms are distancing devices.Here, once the norms start to collapse, our proximity to textual particulars gets intense.The spectacle isn’t something the words protect us from, or keep us safe from.The words contain it, or burst apart trying to.The Spectacle requires some distance for us to be absorbed in it.These language texts, on the other hand, tend to intensify the reading action or praxis to the point where that distance disappears.The huge horizons of escape (from representation) pull us farther into the circuit of Language.It heightens our captivation.The thrill is post-personalizingThe armor of the private self gets soaked by complicity, ripped through by seduction, not by letting us keep a ‘knowing’ (or privileged nay-saying) distance.And in one definition, ”A fluid architecture of information makes the contagion of the text more likely. We find ourselves the accomplices of the text’s sense, not self-conscious lieutenants of it.Because the mission of the text is to reenact some of the production process that stands behind (or withstands) personal (and that means social) identity.Subjectivity is the waste product, not the source.Subjectivity becomes a wildly multiplying (metonymic virus-like) series of effects. [The opposite might be a metaphoric borrowing of a secure vantage, or cannibalism.]We’re not offered up some cathartic release from all the bonds of the subject.Instead we get an intensifying of all its particulars — once the wrapper is off.Subjectivity gets stimulated — at the micro, building-block level — as it gets destabilized at the overall, macro level.And identification comes in the form of a homeopathic medicine.We leave with bodily excitation, but without the ‘proof of purchase’ (the valid signature, etc.) needed to return it.After all, sometimes it seems as though the text’s conceptual unity and wholeness is sustained by there being an outside to the text, maybe one that could be captured by the gaze. But if there’s no outside that’s separable (if the surface contains it all, or implicates a zillion paths through it), then there’s likely to be no closure.An infinite extendability or outreach, beyond any VR (‘virtual reality’) fixation.Liquid PaperThe text encourages a spatializing performance. Reading plays along — to denaturalize or discombobulate perception.Foster a softened mental space or architecture.Space can be less fixed than in either: first, representational writing or second, writing that relies on clearcut formalizations or systems to create a solid objective space.[Similar issues might arise in the aesthetics (and theorizing about) contemporary Installation Art]Space — and the space of meaning and sense — isn’t just a projection, or even a clearly marked subdivision.It becomes the staging ground for particular choices of trajectory, always on the move.We face a dizzy proliferation of vectors, lines of flight, thresholds, fluid dynamics, the examples of Chaos Theory, instead of an architecture fixed enough to accommodate illusions of transparency (or translucency):‘can we see well enough to drive?’.Reading becomes vectoral rather than vehicular.Emergency rather than immersion.A social connectionism is there for the taking, not just to be taken for granted as something reflected or represented.Now, identity may lean on the carefully ‘composed’ image as a prop. But a barrage or multiplication of images (or of the raw material for images) will knock those props out from under it.So will the page as a flattened control panel.Action becomes spatialized, uncentered.We become less determinate, less neatly bordered, less fixed and fixated.As these unfixed, navigable spaces make for a ‘liquid information architecture,’ or a liquid paper architecture.Immersion & NavigationInstead of opposing Absorption (of a cinematic type) to a distancing Artifice or more activist navigation through the superimpositions and concentric circles ofMeaning isn’t elsewhere and fictional; it isn’t covering up some ‘Lack’.a control panel.We’re using information more like we would in the adjustment windows in a GUI (Graphic User Interface). Similar to the way that a cyber presentationcan remind us of cutting-edge graphic design — much less indebted to subordination as its guiding light, less hierarchically arranged than something we’re encouraged to look through.The ‘screen’ of reading is more opaque, not a window we call up to transport us to an imaginary world.This is no 3-D fly-through.The equivalents ofIllusion gets vaporized by the specific interactive activisms called for —by constantly choosing among competing accounts, alternate possibilities.Reading gets closer to the moment-to-moment focus and future anticipations of gameplay.More like constantly opening up multiple resizable windows.You’re on your own — all over the place —and your own isn’t your own.We get a spatialized navigable space —but mental space, no longer basedWe learn to take up permanent residence within competing (and mutually contaminating) multiple explanations.You can’t keep out the NOISE.Right away, it sounds off in a non-immersive density of juxtapositions and relations, of micro-referencing and intimation.This is multiple explanation as a viscerally immediate anti-absorptive readability.Words’ NervesWe’re not digging out latent meanings or dainty subordinations.These are not dematerialized images we’re dealing with.Excesses from the apparatus of illusion now get freed up and fastened on individual words.The literalisms of language take charge (without just having to mediate ‘the real’) or take precedence over its mediating role. They swamp that role or heighten it at a micro level.Objectification demolished, subjectification demolished.But the spatializing of the words by the readers’ active practice gives them a paradoxically greater power.It makes for rough and ready dislocations, or relocations.‘It’s not disjunctive, it’s leaping!’Affective response doesn’t get to ‘drop anchor’ in its familiar subjective harbors.pleasure.Sometimes it feels like it’s all about body reaction, corporeal sensation —the way that reading affects, even reshapes, the body and its enjoyments.A textuality that works (immanently) on the nervous system.Playing out on the surfaces of the words’ flesh and our flesh.Usually, the body’s constraint is its self-denial.If so-called language writing is reader-centered, it’s also more body-centered than we usually allow.(And not because the usualWriting plays off the body as a zone of multiple affect.As a polyvalent (or multiplying) recording device.The texts touch us here without representing some elsewhere.We don’t just go to these texts for critical detachment, or for negative evaluations of a social body kept at arm’s length.(We’re not just calling out requests for our favorite so-called ‘socialist one-liners’)A more shocking intimacy shortcircuits the calming pillow of self-reflection, the unruffled distance needed for subjective control.The distance rigged up for Contact is corrosive. You can’t keep it at a distance.This is more of a free-floating fascinatability.We look for fascinating texts, not something to keep a distance from.Texts get intimate with us, involuntarily.Which makes this writing closer to a linguistic pornography than we usually like to think.Once we get beyond the settling, unruffling visual simulations (so prominent in traditional poetry and fiction), the flesh is subject to toward the semantics of some purely national or subcultural paradigm or secure identity.But to encourage a swerve toward a transnational interactive space of translation and of that which is always already a translation: language.This is another kind of totalizing... in reading.