Deirrid-a-do-don't, de--construct the deconstructing
I've been thinking about the pen and the space between the page before the ink even forms an image or with the keyboard of a computer, the space is there also. There is a traveling distance between the of touching a letter and seeing it on the screen. Then you as the writer must press more and more keys to accumulate meaning that extends in a time much delayed from the original thought. While meaning formed on not simply letter arrangement but meaning is determined by past accumulation of logic, and this meaning must be carried into another's perceptions. Once this page hits the blog you all have to make sense of it. You will take it, and it will somehow transcend into something beyond the context of my thought, beyond the original. It has been extended endlessly from Derrida, all his readers, scholars and translators. Also, the way I've structured his thought also leaves out thought but that thought still lives just as the thought outside Derrida's theory, which will ultimately be used to collapse his/my reasoning.
*
a scribe shines
in the sun of science,
of writing depicting,
of objects appropriate
to savage signs & words
can't be satisfied w/ writing
science runs the
risk of never able to define
unity of object & project
*
destroy itself to exceed
the metaphysical orb is
an attempt to get out
of the orbit to the limit
of coherence of being produced
as truth @ the moment
truth is shattered
of substitution, of desire,
of language, the logic
of all opposites, the abyss
is not a happy or unhappy
accident what is excluded
from our concepts
determines it & the excluded
comes the opposition of deconstruction
(From of Grammatology, his words, my collage of lines & pages)
For me Derrida, chases the space within two seemingly opposing or opposite entities. He reminds me of the eastern philosophical concept of yin yang. Western minds often write this as yin & yang to illustrate a difference, or when drawing the symbol using a line to delineate the space each concept occupies. But in reality there is no boundary between flux, and these artificially opposing forces are just simply fluid moving as a unified current it is this space....the supplement...the liminal place that resides between the two oppositions while holding them both.
The Supplement:
there has never been
an intermediary between
everything & nothing
supplements the mid-
point of total absence
& total presence
? what’s meant
isn't just in his
writing but our reading
the writer writes
always aims towards
the unperceived
reader commands
doubling commentary
to which language respecting
classical & traditional
only protects, never opens,
(From of Grammatology, his words, my collage of lines & pages)
Dissemination:
So what does this mean to Plato?
Plato's one is ripped apart. The world of ideals cannot be separated from the material world. Also, there is no such thing as this mystical one or true, because there are many realms and many ideals. As the world of ideals and it's unity is true, so too is the shadow mimicry and falseness of logic. The real and unreal are within each other and cannot be authentically separated just as Plato cannot be separated from Socrates. He is Socrates in a historical, conceptual and artistic doubling, and when you rip it apart there remain these multiples staged as opposites but is connected and is sophisticated mimes of each other. These mimes or concepts remind me of the ideas about mimicry and the rhizome, they are holes that smash, transgress and transcend one another.
*
a text is not a text unless
it hides
from the 1st corner,
the 1st glance,
text remains
imperceptible
never to be booked
in present, into anything
called perception
lost & who will ever know
woven textures
undoing web
behind the cutting
trace few fingers
caught adding new
thread hidden thread if
readingwriting are
one oneness
tissue of paradoxes
as khairein gives
myth a vacation
frees one-self
(From Dissemination, his words, my collage of lines & pages)
The Myth:
For me the most interesting idea of the myth is that all writing is in some way the essence of mythiness. It's like myth came back from the Bahamas in the name of writing. According to Derrida, when Plato gives myths over to khairein, he is simultaneously welcoming, rejoicing and bidding the farewell. And you could take away the "ing" and welcome the welcoming or rejoice in rejoicing and bid in the bidding. He contends that when Plato says he's letting myth chill on a beach, he sets myth as the center stage of his logos. Logic is myth and myth is logic. Derrida believes Plato brings myth in and uses myths not just in his retelling, but also as the storyline itself of a written copy of a speech. The speech's true form is altered and myth-like when written, as Plato's thoughts become myth when written. The written builds logic from the shifting forms of the words that are all "unreal" and myth. So there is the untruth in Plato's rational pursuit of truth.
*
writing what he
does not speak
in truth of non-truth
the written carries
out of themselves
die in the thrill of song
surprised by death
playing pharmakon
embrace the book
embrace the drug
(From Dissemination, his words, my collage of lines & pages)
The Pharmakon:
Choose your written word, choose your drug, choose your salvation, choose your poison, and choose your death. Reminds me of the 60's hipster dude (Timothy Leary?) who says you haven't lived and can't experience truth unless you've got a buzz on. But instead of "turn on" maybe write on or turn page, "tune in..drop out."
*
caught in a chain
malleable unity
masked & rendered
almost unreadable
someone else
see not see links
play in shadows
words turn
pivot strange &
invisible always
springing w/o
acting series
of opposites
remedy & disease
passing as truth
produce the opposite
effect outside
of self the drug is
hidden, the drug is hidden
in the middle hidden
under his cloak
Plato retires after
the pharmacy is closed
holding the pharmakon
thru the corridors bounce
contradicting rejoining
Full of meaning (a hole?),
a whole story
(From Dissemination, his words, my collage of lines & pages)
De-dis-discussion points:?::
In Plato, the myth of Teuth says, "writing will have no value unless god-king" assigns it, and that "writing always needs a father to defend itself or attend to it's needs. I like that Derrida took on two philosophers that believed in authoritarian strong-hand rule and conformity to illustrate that their absolutes are as much myth and drug and subversion as anything else. Here are a few questions to guide or not guide the discussion. I'm interested in seeing your ideas "bouncing" along the blog pharmacy corridors. Happy Sunday. Got some pills to read. Peace.
Ø Is writing always subversion needing to be controlled?
Ø Is it the drug that will at once cure and undermine a society?
Ø Is your writing or poetry in general a drug of subversion? or
Ø Or is poetry a drug of another sort, like, the cicadas reporting back to the gods?
Ø What kind of junkies are Plato or Derrida?
Ø Can you imagine the supplement within your work?
Ø What are the opposing meanings you like most to play with?
Ø How does the poetry we have read this semester play with the paradoxes within opposing meaning?
Logos represents what is indebted to the father, chief, capital, and goods. So our whole system – its discourse, rules, and structure – is based on the male heir. So Barack Obama really has no thoughts or opinions of his own. Bailing out banks and reemploying the middle class are not duties exclusive to him. He’s merely doing what other presidents (like FDR) have done before him. He’s continuing the work of his fathers! American owns the logos, the matrix that all must obey, because if it weren’t for America’s lend-lease act, then Europe would have far greater concerns than bailing out Greece. The Nazis would still be there, and like Churchill said, we’d be in the “dark ages.”
ReplyDeleteWell, “dark ages” sound like a grand time to me. Plato said writing is an “occult” power. I associate “occult” and “dark” together. You never really see ghosts and spirits, yet you your aware of their presence. Why else would you make a poem or a story except to gain contact with something otherworldly? I think if literature isn’t trying to contact Something Else, then it can’t be considered “pharmakon.” If you want to speak to humans then you’re not poisoning the current context, you’re reinforcing it, because the present ethos is built around people and their garden-variety needs. The writing I’m concerned with is a poison, it’s harmful, and goes against nature. Though I don’t think Derrida meant nature “nature” like trees, bushes, and unprotected sex in the woods. I think he was employing nature with his “tongue-in-cheek.” So writing goes against not nature so much as what logos you currently exist in, which is presented as nature -- an inevitable result -- because such rhetoric helps to dissuade coups and protests. You can’t excoriate something that has to happen. It’s like yelling at someone for blinking. Excuse you, but they have to!
Someone who has power, who controls the matrix of signs and productions and discourse, doesn’t need to write, because his thoughts and ideas can be seen everywhere in his domain. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf BEFORE he became chancellor. Afterwards, he didn’t publish any book, because his book, his literature, was his style of government. It was the most ghastly, extreme, and shrill text ever composed. Mein Kampf II would be superfluous, because all the citizens already know what’s going on in Hitler’s head: the story is right in front them: gas chambers, Wagner festivals, and lots of parades. And since Hitler knew his tale was the correct one (he was in conversation with Providence) he had to ban all other texts. Any other document has the potential to challenge his logos. Like poison, a contrary text might destroy and corrode the book Hitler worked so hard to construct. With disobedient words there’s the possibility that its readers might begin to imitate it and then it’ll overwrite Hitler’s text. Well, that can’t happen. No book will ever be able to top the Nazis – they were the chosen race: the indelible, proper apex of Earth.
I think a majority of humans don’t want to do much of anything. They’d rather have someone else tell them what to do. That’s America. America’s tell them their fine. Have an opinion, a cell phone, a sexuality, and, don’t worry there, bucko, you’re doing swell. So this very un-mythical, un-occult logos won. I find very little ambivalence in America. Its founders and proceeding caretakers don’t tell lawmakers that they only have to answer to God (Elizabeth). They don’t translate Greek texts, tease French dukes, and eats lots of candy (all Queen E), they do human things like play basketball and brag about their father’s bar. But humans are everywhere! I don’t want to see them! I don’t want to be around them! There’s no mystery, no darkness. It’s explicit! So writing becomes absolutely consequential in this vulgar environment. I want to hurt America, I want to destruct and leave it shriveled. According to Derrida, producing texts will assist me in my purpose. When I write I’m proposing a logos, a set of behaviors, signs, structures, discourse, laws, &c. If a poem about lollipops causes all its readers to start licking lollipops exclusively, then this endangers America. Americans aren’t supposed to only lick lollipops. They’re supposed to work, marry, go somewhere on a Saturday afternoon. If you’re licking a lollipop you’re staying still, you’re not contributing to the economy, you’re not voicing an opinion on the current budget impasses – you are not doing what Americans do! Please, eat Long John Silver’s, then buy something at a sale, then look at an open house because you never know when the housing market will rebound. But all of this is destroyed now, all because of a poem about lollipops.
ReplyDeleteTexts fight against each other. The USA constitution is not a natural document. There’s absolutely no NATURAL reason why we need free speech or the right to vote. The USA constitution is not a cloud. The USA constitution did not fall from the sky – it came from WHITE PEOPLE: MIDDLE CLASS WHITE PEOPLE WHO DISOBEYED THEIR KING. I don’t want to be in a world that has this as its foundations. I like King George III and Samuel Johnson. So this is why I make stories and poems. They are words on paper no different than the USA constitution is words on paper. But because I care more about my words, because they’re more thoughtful and theatrical, my texts blight out dull, average America. I do want to poison the middle class economy – I want to see it go away, and its place, I want Kings, Queens, and Leaders, who engage in occult, who speak to things that are inhuman, whether they be God or Providence.
also, kings can be independent of writing and words. They don't need to know what's actually happening on the page or in the world. The sovereign says and dictates regardless if his rhetoric matches the existing plot. So George W was king. He said "Mission Accomplished," even though it was far from concluding b/c Muslims were still being blown up in markets and American army men were dying.
ReplyDeleteSo this idea transitions into writing as a "mime." The word "Mission Accomplished" doesn't correspond to the material meaning of mission accomplished. If the Iraq War really ended when W said it did then we would see not text but palpable images of a peaceful Iraq and American servicemen waving goodbye them.
Another example: peanut butter cookie. Writing "peanut butter cookie" is different from an actual peanut butter cookie. An actual peanut butter cookie doesn't consist of the alphabet and its sounds, but of sugar, peanut butter, and other yummy ingredients. My writing the word "peanut butter cookie" can't summon one. So there's an alienation between text and reality. The world isn't built on words. It's centered on touchable bodies, like elbows, knees, and so on. You can't touch a word. You can touch paper and computer screens, but not words. So writing is make-believe, its another land. It takes you away from the real world of bodies, which is why I like it, because bodies are limiting and gross.
a bit of journaling as my head tries to wrap/warp itself round some derrida:
ReplyDeleteMust dig out the innards of a text which constitutes both the outside and the inside at the same time – much like the permeable skin of a fish – texts are slippery therefore the rules are slippery – the binaries are nonexistent because the word(s) that originally made them exist in the inbetween space – and do not note an actual binary – rather the translation of the word(s) formed the binary. They run the risk of being definitively lost because they cannot be definitively defined in language (speech and writing) that is always changing/evolving – meaning is unstable – so the text is unstable – unable to swim unless we swim it.
Every text is multilayered like an onion made of a web – or webbing material – encased and encased and encased until its indistinguishable – also regenerative and regenerating – so that it remains inseparable.
Just like Plato’s immature argument in the Phaedrus – the definition of pharmakon is both things at the same time – the word itself argues against itself by creating a binary in the translation of the Phaedrus – and Plato – too is locked inside this translatory binary. Kind of makes me think of all the different incarnations of Nick Demske in Nick Demske all fighting against one another creating webs upon webs in webs undernearth/ontop of webs, etc. but all contained in the text as it is outside and inside of itself at once. Demske exists as a text but is also the outer limit of and the innards of the text… double legendarizing or double mythologizing – this also reminds me of Demske and to a certain extext Antwerp and Song for his Disappeared Love – as all of these text have a certain layering to them – webbing – embroidery – that gives the text a self-referential legendaryness through accessing past historical events or referencing current events whether they have happened/are happening or not (feel this with Demske). Also w/ Morning News too – esp with the translatese quality of the language/writing and with the essayistic quality of the references at the end of the sections…
Freeing oneself of the pursuit of self-knowledge and “to free oneself of the relation with oneself” through rejection of the use of mythologemes seems counterproductive to writing in general since much of the texts listed above seem – to a certain extent – come from a space of mythologemes – in acknowledging and interacting with myth there makes a space for the metamyth web. I’m wondering if mythologemes are the ghost writer of these texts or could they be the ghost writers of these text – making the author a sort of ventriloquist for myth-making and mythologizing the self. and/or does mythologizing/mythologemes (function to) draw the reader’s attention to the constructedness of the text? also calling attention to the “undecidable” words – which I’m thinking of as an overlapping of definition – can the author be both the ghost writer, myth-maker, myth and self?
ReplyDeleteI think the Derridean “undecidable” also invokes the slipperiness of language – I want to say that myth is such a word that has a double-meaning along the lines of legendary – myth – myth-making – though I’m not quite sure how to express this yet. However, there is a definite slipperiness to myth/myth-making and legend too. I think these terms overlap and flip throughout much of what we’ve read this semester…
Perhaps much like the beginning of Phaedrus – where the Pharmacia is mentioned [which is no accident] - “that little spot , a little stitch or mesh woven into the back of the canvas, marks out for the entire dialogue the scene…” Nick Demske’s self-titled book marks out land of Nick Demske? I’m not trying to say that titles could be accidental – but rather that I think Demske/Demske is what this reminds me of – his name is the stitch that marks out the canvas of his book. Which is to say – I guess a lot of titles work this way, though I’m not convinced that this is always the case. I’m thinking that perhaps the title of a book is then its pharmakon – or the reader’s pharmakon. The drug and poison.
Indeterminacy is such a fun notion--Derrida invokes a classic example in 'pharmakon' that emphasizes this fractured element very cleanly, but of course the "real" point being that (as others have mentioned, and as basically anyone would agree after thinking about it) all words are like this, all linguistic constructions--all social constructions really, they all fracture out this way eventually whether language, morality, religion, philosophy, etc. This is the chasm between production and consumption, the shoots of D&G splitting off, Derrida's 'web', etc. Any definition of any word relies on other definitions and so on, the web splits nearly infinitely and eventually, sooner rather than later most likely, we run into a contradiction or enough ambiguity that we're forced to halt.
ReplyDeleteI'm intrigued by the question of subversion; does poetry inherently subvert? Is it capable? This demands answers to questions of who is subverted? Why? by whom? For what purpose? The last question probably the least necessary, but the rest seemingly unavoidable. What status quo must be assumed to assume subversion exists? As Derrida shows there can be no status quo without a status quo webwork of assumptions we can count on to begin with, and does this exist in language? I don't think so. Poetry cannot subvert because language cannot subvert. A coup in a land of coups isn't -a- coup, it's just another coup, and if there's no standing government as it is, by definition a coup is not occurring anyway. If a text could be seen to subvert in and of itself, which it cannot because in and of itself (i.e., no reader / consumer) it is nothing, it's the falling tree with no one around; the instant it's consumed it is itself subverted, granted few if any readers can conceivably consume it perfectly, if we can concede that it was even produced with perfect intentionality.
This kind of indeterminacy is why I sit in a strange paradox of enjoying book reviews, reading them and writing them, thinking they are "important" while also thinking they're useless, the products of middlemen with basically no one at either side, at least under notions of interpretation or judgment; it seems that framework has given way in the last few decades and that does feel like progress of a sort.
Seth. I like your treatise because you deal with America as a frame without a father and thus make the frame something lacking/ abounding in subjecthood and objecthood while simultaneously suffering from a lack of presence.
ReplyDelete++
Trish, if Derrida and Plato were junkies then it was surely on the drug of poetry and the drug of choice for the poetry was/ is Ketamine. Special K. (insert another street name). That wholly special veterinary tranquilizer with the out of body experiences. But in that very umbilical sense where the polar opposites of inside/ outside exist simultaneously. Because of course the mind is still in the zone of the body and merely as a function of itself (with help) exists outside of itself. If you’ve ingested ketamine in its various guises you’ll know that the body is often observed from the eyes of a third person narrator, one who operates totally totalitarianally big brotherish tendencies excreting to the thyroid. The eyes expand. The yes dilates. The eyes eye themselves and the yes frames. Yes eyes, yes I’ll eye my eyes and expand to yes. But the yes stays tethered to the eyes, the mother, whose waning high mimics the symbolic cutting that takes place at birth.
Because the body, IT, can see/feel itself in ways not possible off the Special K, IT seems to think itself the way any of us if an IT would think ourselves (presumably) if watching ourselves playing a Television character. And yet the self (but the term without its attendant meanings, especially as they pertain to authenticity) remains tethered to both bits exclusively and equally.
Whatever your diction has to tell you.
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“Irony does not consist...in the dismantling of an occult substance or power through analysis and questioning.”
Here occult though ought to include occult and its antonyms. Because occult here is not just witchcraft and ghosts and the ethereal powers disregarded by capitalist society but a recognition that consists just as much of a lack of those things willfully unacknowledged.
Irony “precipitates out one pharmakon by bringing it contact with another pharmakon. Or rather, it reverses the pharmakon’s powers and turns its surface over.” In either case, we are looking at the bust of the person peering into a pond either from above or below the surface. Looks the same both ways.
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The overall analogy of the pharmakon is analogous to making the analogy that analogy is to as analagousness is to . So there.
I’m currently working on a paper about “talk” in Alice Notley’s Close to me & Closer and Aaron Kunin’s The Sore Throat and I’m really intrigued by Derrida’s discussion of the pharmakon. In Notley’s text, the speaker hosts/channels her dead (absent) father as he attempts to articulate the “language of Heaven”—a language which is at once a difference and deferral (and as much myth as knowledge, just as Derrida says the pharmakon is to medicine). “Poetry is magic,” Notley tells us; this language springs from the abyss—always a mode of translation, a means of generating presence through absence—speech that is seductive because of its writtenness (“I mean…words come from…nowhere, no time. Like I do… talking to you,” says the father). The language of Heaven, then, might be a kind of pharmakon—(occult) substance and antisubstance; the speaker hosts the father in the space of dreams (if the father is a point of origin, this written dialogue marks perhaps an estrangement rather than or through this communion/communication, which is a doubling and a seam ripping—this “closeness” is also a gap?—or—The language of Heaven (an ambivalent—maybe—and indeterminate space) marks the ultimate gap between signified and signifier, perhaps, as the daughter and father, as the text piles up with approximation or analogies: “But thinking,” says the father, “is a fluid here—a…connection-a light.”). (I apologize for rambling about a text not-for-class; I’m wondering if this discussion could apply to Descent of Alette, which we read last year—or In the Pines?)
ReplyDeleteI’m wondering, too, if we might consider Kunin’s The Sore Throat as both “malady and treatment”/ “painful pleasure” at once (just as the pharmakon is under the cloak, the binary-hand alphabet is tapped into the palm?)—a “displacement” or “disruption” to the “normal progress” of an illness (a tic, in this case). Is this a kind of stoning (text as monument)? A miming (these given Plato’s definition of the sophist)? A supplement or surrogate for memory (as the text is comprised of these transcribed characters/limited vocabulary, a “preestablished pattern” unlike that of speech, or “speech”-made-myth as Trish suggests of Derrida’s use of myth, is this a way of recovering or reminding—with the potential for endless doubling now?) Kunin’s “translation,” like Notley’s text, involves the “disappearance of an originary presence” (1875).
I agree with Kim in that Nick Demeske might be useful to consider here (“what is is not what it is, identical and identical to itself, unique, unless it adds to itself the possibility of being repeated as such. And its identity is hollowed out by that addition, withdraws itself in the supplement that presents it”)—perhaps this is the constant scooping/swooping we experience in the text?
The last bit of my post got fucked in formatting.
ReplyDeleteThe overall analogy of the pharmakon is analogous to making the analogy that analogy is to ____ as analagousness is to ____ . So there.
This semester has been my Derrida semester across the board (even in my own poems), so please forgive me—I’m probably going to bring up some things which weren’t directly in this reading. But I promise they relate.
ReplyDeleteAlthough we were asked to focus on myth and writing as a pharmakon, what truly fascinated me was the second section, “The Father of Logos”—much like the myths in Phaedrus, this section exists half-tangential to the subject of the pharmakon and simultaneously quintessential to “the question of writing” which is ultimately the question of the pharmakon—whether writing is a poison or a panacea or both at the same time. After Derrida (and Plato/Socrates) lay out their explanation of the role of logos and the father, the creator, the primal progenitor of truth, self-awareness, dialectics, etc., we are treated to this thought: “the desire of writing is indicated, designated, and denounced as a desire for orphanhood and patricidal subversion…In contrast to writing, living logos is alive in that it has a living father (whereas the orphan is already half dead) ” (1841) and later “…the cadaverous rigidity of writing…In order to be ‘proper,’ a written discourse ought to be submit to the laws of life just as a living discourse does” (1842).
The argument set out here—not necessarily Derrida’s own sense, of course—is that writing is at once murder and defenselessness, a corpse animated uselessly and endlessly by those who stumble across it and fill it with their own vitality momentarily. It is devoid of voice, existing inside the realm of discourse and yet categorically (necessarily) different form it, a ghost in the machine of logical genealogy. Written text, then, is always and by its very nature subversive, belittling the worth of the god-king’s voice, hinging on elimination of the father’s role as creator and guardian. Writing can never be anything less than subversive along this thread of thought, because there can be no excuses (room) made for a creature which paradoxically is born dead from a living creature and persists in death to destroy its own primogenitor. Writing, then, always—always—exists outside of the “phusis,” the natural world, the established order. It is an alien, a monster with no head or tail, a “poisoned present” (1841). Existing outside of this natural order (the living son descendent from the living father, dependent upon and indicative of the father), writing may be as paradoxical as it wishes (if the orphan can wish anything). It can be both truth and nontruth, poison and cure, dead and alive, all of these things at once—it is no longer beholden to its maker and indeed forgets of its own volition that it had a maker (a logical world, reality) in the first place. Writing does not need to conform to the wishes or the logos of the living.
This may be pure speculation, but I don’t think that Derrida would subscribe to the concept of writing as a rigid cadaver (except, perhaps, in relation to speech, which can be amended, edited, etc. before it even really exists and after it has been brought to life), as fond as he is of the concept of play (or free play). Relative to speech, writing exists in a decentralized world—or no world at all—where the absence of traditional, necessary elements of “properness” (i.e., the father) is as indicative and necessary as his presence, and where meaning moves along not a single, forward-marching line but an interwoven chain which simultaneously conforms to and denies our perception. This is Trish’s concept of “traveling distance” and Ryan’s linguistic fracturing web, all meaning—especially in writing—dependent upon “accumulation of past logic” and upon other definitions and other definitions. I’m reminded of a poem in the anthology Sin Puertas Visibles:
ReplyDeleteThere are no centers but the circle exists,
and the idea of diameter and line. (Carla Faesler)
The written word then, is play, is the fluid translation of meaning between one individual’s perception and another, linguistic and logical roles, the impossibility and possibility of a circle without a center. And all of this inside a pharmakon, existing in a seductive, persuasive, undermining and addictive manner that draws even the desires of its staunchest critics, which makes the god-king aware of weakness, afraid—the drug which devours the human mind to the extent that more of the drug is necessary to undo the aching damage of the first dose. It is art and agony, the undoing of all logic into tangled threads, and route to death and ultimately as mythical as the panacea itself.
One other thing that interested me was the role of play in the definition/meaning/connotations of father for the Greeks, which Derrida laments no translators attempting to work with. In another one of his essays “Des Tours De Babel,” Derrida performs a similar translative gloss with a somewhat erroneous (possibly?) copy of the old testament which replaces Genesis 11:9 “Therefore the name of it is Babel” with “Over which he proclaims his name: Babel” transforming the action from a creation of name (proper noun) from common noun into a self-declarative moment in which proper noun and common noun coexist and can be understood by a speaker of the tongue as both meanings simultaneous and also independent of each other. “Pater” in Dissemination works this way as well, as he states that it means for the Greeks many things—father, good, chief, etc.—and proceeds to be regarded simultaneously as all of these things, producing webs of meaning which cannot be fractured—which cannot be followed by those outside the tongue… or by those experiencing a text devoid of the ability to clarify, to say “I mean father the living human figure, not the good” or “I mean Babel the name of the city, not the confusion.”
Therefore, readers of text—divested of the explanatory presence of the father—exist only in the indeterminate, the play, the space between two potentialities which Derrida calls “the confused translation,” the original source of all language, the babel. This space, the paradoxical site/nesthole/rhizome of all writing then contains and rejects absolute truth, becoming the repeated fable, the myth which contains no empirical truth and yet is the only available route to answering the question of writing, the drug and the cure.
Tada, theory! :D
split writing to lend a different transcendence. pure rules are a problem of translation filtered through poison which is a usage. a usage is the father of appreciation it means memory. a little body can have an allergy to itself this makes it inherently cadaverous. the cadaverous body doesn’t know how to speak its mouth is sutured shut this is unnatural. the structure of the unnatural requires organic decay that is to say a living thing has become an interior disease it hollows out the body & makes of it a receptacle. if the body is a receptacle it is the world. the world allergic to itself is natural. all the world’s allergic to all world’s it is the only legitimate total.
ReplyDeleteFIRST FAILED ANALOGY writing : cadaverous / dead : : speech : animate / living : : mining an absolute a mimeliketruth. structure prescribed an inscription to defy it’s own animate. a complex framework requires that there be an inside, an outside.
a skin is an interiority. also it can pass for the TRUTH by appearance. God has no allergies god has a body which is the world.
SECOND FAILED ANALOGY
WRITING : OUTSIDE : ALLERGY : BODY : : OCCULT : INTERIOR: DISEASE : HORCRUX
to write the body is to split the soul.
a book is a horcrux is an occult object. a play of appearances meaning the soul has been sold. the crux of capitalism means there’s no such thing as signified it means you have to make a pass at the truth kiss it it isn’t really dead. the pharmakon produces a truth which has died. not yet it still wants to be kissed it’s an insignia. A KISS : A LOGO : : A LIP : A LINE : : mining absolute : : an infinite self : : : “the natural illness of the living is…an allergy.” : an allergy is a horcrux it is a vacuum of pollen the pollen is made by the body it is a natural allergen THIRD FAILED ANALOGY
“A limitless memory would in any event be not memory but infinite self-presence” : or memory a mnemonic to access the presence : : the presence which must be legislated : : legislator : writer : : judge : reader : : truth : world : : structure : order : : truth : blindness : : death : ontology : : a text that has ravaged the receptacle of analogies which is the world through a door which is analogous to all other doors because it is, itself, a door, therefore, a language, therefore, A FOURTH FAILED ANALOGY.
THE FAILURE OF ALL POSSIBLE ANALOGIES IS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE LOGICAL COPULATION OF METAPHOR
ReplyDeletewhich is a kind of intercourse between the living and the dead which creates a reanimation inside of the frame of the self
THE FRAMING OF ALL POSSIBLE SELVES WITHIN THE FAILURE OF LANGUAGE IS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FUCKING AND SEX
which is a kind of metaphor perhaps the only truth. truth which is derivative of the fathers of all selves = the debasement of writing = a SYSTEM FAILURE
SYSTEM FAILURE MANIFESTS AS A REFLECTION OF THE UNATTAINABLE DESIRED THING
so the signifier a severed limb it makes a cask & cures its own illness it emits rather than reflects the emission is that of a light which does not know itself as such.
A LIGHT PRETENDING IT IS DARK IS A QUESTION OF TRANSLATION
or a word as a medium not split either/or. more fundamental so it doesn’t exist. or a vehicle pre-existing the star for which it was fashioned.
THE DIFFERENCE EXISTS IN THE PROCESS OF COMPOSITION
steins says everybody knows it everybody says it everybody is doing everything maybe then nobody has to do anything. the composition exists necessarily it’s a reaction. the body resists necessarily a retraction. a pause is a retraction from the lived into the scene : : “it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen” (stein, composition as explanation) : such is natural creation a disavowal of the father or a violence done to the structure because the genealogy comprises nothing
“ANY ONE CREATING THE COMPOSITION IN THE ARTS DOES NOT KNOW IT EITHER, THEY ARE CONDUCTING LIFE AND THAT MAKES THEIR COMPOSITION”
such as it is it has to be having been engendered by is it is infallible because it is empty, a receptacle, a doorway into the world which is a receptacle for life or its emission into brightness from a masquerading dark.
For some reason, I came to realization that there was no Hana-Nim (Oneness-(honorific term that does not exits in English)), learning to speak in English in the US.
ReplyDeleteOnly knowing Korean, translation/foreignlanguage/english was a (sub)name of the real Name, perfect marriage of signified and signifier that is connected to the presence.
(Creation by giving Name precedes, actually happens) And it was good.: Pleasure belongs here, at the presence. Park Here. My darling Genesis.
“Na” in “Hana” is “I” in Korean.
“I” came to the United States. : This is only valid sentence when my body is in the United States. If I had written this while residing in Korea, this sentence will be flawed.
“All Cretans always lie”, says a Cretan; his Cretan body, identity justifies this sentence. But I wanted to believe in language, language alone, grab the language. Hold on to it tight. “I”ts Presence.
“I” had to bring my body to the United States, the presence to be in the United States. That is the beginning of the story of living in the United States and Living in the United States.
The United States was the country where you-a woman- can smile without covering your mouth. It was my darling Signified. A skewed, ignorant one. The Signified crumbled in my head, but Signifier—u -n - i-t-e-d-s-t-a-t-e-s, stays. It is a state. It is states. always.
Many called me with wrong names; Jaiyoon, Jayoong. Where am “I” in this world of alphabets. Does Jiyoon as “I”dentity valid? when my name can only be crippled signifier? Romanized secondary name?
“I am Peter Stillman. That is not my real name. My real name is Peter Rabbit. In the winter I am Mr White, in the summer I am Mr Green. Think what you like of this. I say it of my own free will. Wimble click crumblechaw belooo. It is beautiful, is it not? I make up words like this all the time. That can’t be helped. They just come out of my mouth by themselves… I know nothing of any of this. Nor do I understand. My wife is the one who tells me these things. She says it’s important for me to know…She says the father talked about God. That’s a funny word to me. When you put it backwards, it spells dog. And a dog is not much like God, is it? Woof woof. Bow wow. Those are dog words. I think they are beautiful. So pretty and true. Like the words I make up.” Peter Stillman is crippled by his abusive father. His father’s name is Peter Stillman. You don’t joke around with Names, that hurt. That hurt the “I”, that boom-booms Peter Stillman as “I”. And he can barely speak.
Hana-Nim is God in Korean. Is Hana-Nim secondary name of the presence of God? Or is God? Or are they different presences? But Hana-Nim is singularity.
ReplyDeleteThe United States became “here” for “I” ; this sentence will only be valid when I am staying in the United States. “here” and “there” keep slipping between my fingers that do not exist.
This is not a Pipe. This is a painting of Pipe. This is drawing of the painting of Pipe. This is copy of the drawing of the painting of Pipe (Understanding comics by Scott McCloud)
Ring Ring, Quinn answers the phone call, and the phone call asks for Paul Auster. (there was no phone riniging; it is onomatopoeia; it is onomatopoeia typed up on the webpage; it is pixels that constitutes your monitor ); Quinn does not have a body, fictional does not have a body, but Paul Auster does; but in the fiction, the caller got a wrong number, “Paul Auster is not here. There is no one HERE by that Name” [Capitalization mine]. (From City of Glass, by Paul Auster) In this Supplement world, Quinn has “I”, Paul Auster does not, for he does not have the Presence.
I am “Here” in my cozy Supplement, misguiding, misleading, secondary replacement.
Fatherly advice: Take your supplements along with your meal everynight to stay healthy.
Raw Food Vegan’s advice: You wouldn’t have needed supplements if you maintained our primitive “Natural” Raw Food dietry.
Sci-Fi Imagination: we will eat our meal in form of pills by 2010, you know.
I feel at home in the Supplement, because I do not have Home.
Socrates wanted to stay Home to stay in his Supplement.
But Supplement is Masturbation; Masturbation is evil, for it does not require the Presence.: Drink Responsibly. 1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems
Masturbation causes seizures, loss of self,”I”, Victorians believed.
Damage to the “I”, ecstacy, Damage to the Body, the Presence, neither of them is a good idea.
Writing is masturbation, didn’t numerous writers lament about that already?
A Virgin was cast into the abyss, the opening that only remained possible location for “I” to fall into until the Virgin actually fell into. The Presence of “I” turn the abyss into the more substantial abyss.
Opening seduces: I thought of Roland Barthes’ writing on Striptease from Mythologies. It’s all about pleasure but anti-Supplement-dwelling/ecstacy would warn you: you better not cum until the actual penetration, because penetration is Natural, what is intended in the first place. Masturbation/Supplement shall not take its place.
Opening seduces and kills: the thief in Rashomon was seduced by the slit of the veil that was covering the face of a newly wed bride; and he had to penetrate her. After getting raped, she asks the thief to kill her husband whom she is married to, for there cannot be two “eyes/”I”s that shall penetrate/witness. To the investigator/audience, she LIES about what happened that day, generating multiple stories/ symbols without the presence of the incidents.
Différance: the carrot that dangles in front of the hungry donkey’s nose makes the donkey keep going, make us keep playing, keep writing. Endless striptease and no Epiphany, no Catharsis. No reaching through the secondary translation into Original text, nor reaching to the Presence. But to float on the web. Web of play.
Lovely post Trish, thanks for the interesting start! I've been agonizing over whether I am a Derri-do or a Derri-don't. :)
ReplyDeleteWhat I’m interested here is the idea of “repeating without knowing,” and I’m most curious about how exactly we are to define knowing here. According to Derrida, the nontruth of writing is revealed only through history, through it working as myth. Myth is truthless in the most basic sense of the word—without empirical application or proof—and this idea makes writing seem very spectral to me, then. There’s a notion there that writing cannot be proven—that the written word is so alive with resonations of other texts and phrases and ideologies, that on its own it means very, very little. Writing becomes a kind of imprint like myth is, evidence of a process or a primitive theory. What dissemination gives us is basically that meaning is only ever able to be infinitely divided, split up and split up all the time. Trish writes about the moment that we put our hands to pen or computer, and I’m interested in thinking about this as our most primitive moment. Is this the purest moment? The most true moment? What interests me here is the idea of a kind of objective truth for the writer in the moment that can only last for that moment, a nontruth unraveled as it makes its way through its history—it is critiqued by 12 people and is split up infinitely by each person. If they read it twice or three times, it continues to split and split. If we get lucky, a couple thousand will read it in a book, and it will split and split. So my personal issue and question is that I wonder if I am committed to the truth of that moment to the extent that that is the only moment that really matters. This goes back to what Ryan says about book reviews—they seem, in some way, important, but at the same time, what more use is the splitting once we know that it exists? And of course, use doesn’t really matter anyway. This is kind of what always gets me about these kinds of theories and arguments—I agree with them generally, but they turn me off to the things I’m supposed to care about as an MFA/poet—reading for anything more than my own intellectual and psychological and physiological enjoyment/interest. Maybe I’m just too cut-and-dry in this way, in that I fail to understand what I’m supposed to take as the “use” of any of it, and that I fail to understand how my barely-holding-on grasp of it is of any use for anybody else. There’s been talk in the past about what kind of comments are “useful,” are “helpful,” and I suppose I just waffle confusedly between not buying that 1. any sort of interpretation is useful or helpful at all, or, 2. that they all are. Split and split and split.
Is writing a subversion that needs to be controlled? It can’t be, if dissemination and Derrida are right about it. You can’t control something that won’t sit still, and you can’t control something that doesn’t really “matter.” Writing that sits still and doesn’t split isn’t art, its statistic. Writing that deludes itself into thinking it “matters” is on a kind of drug I’m not interested in taking.