Whither

I once sent a posting to Humanist about objects and electronic text editing and as the thread progressed I was reminded of a formulation from Owen Feltham: "Contemplation is necessary to generate an object, but action must propagate it."

The two ways (vita contemplativa and vita activa) bring to mind a statement by Jerome McGann in his essay "The Rationale of Hypertext"

To the imagination, the materialities of text (oral, written, printed, electronic) are incarnational not vehicular forms.

To be found in Electronic Text: Investigations in Theory and Method. Ed. Kathryn Sutherland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997 (p. 19).

I am intrigued by the possibilities of recasting McGann's exclusionary dichotomy into a pair of allied pursuits (incarnation-contemplation and vehicle-action). The question takes on a hermeneutical hue: just where does the encounter between the horizon of the reader and the horizon of the author take place?

The answer may require a whole (social) renegotiation of what it means to contemplate versus to act upon a text. I suspect that the vexed question of the relations between powers of abstraction and embodied knowledge is at play.

The relations are not likely to be a one-way street. And this has bearing on what is involved in the telos of editing. I turn to Julia Flanders, "The Body Encoded: Questions of Gender and the Electronic Text" (which we find p. 129 in Electronic Text: Investigations in Theory and Method) for a recovery of a history of what were deemed the stakes in editing. She draws on Stephanie H. Jed Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (1989) to trace and critique a spirit/flesh dichotomy at play in textual editing:

The organizing terms of this relationship revolve around a familiar binary of body and spirit: each physical text, the manuscript or printed book, is a particular concrete carrier of a universalized and disembodied textuality, the "text of the author" which may be fully represented in one physical object, in many, or in none at all. Within this schema the physical object, in a manner familiar to any student of neoclassical aesthetics, is subject to corruption and debasement, its very physicality and particularity drawing it towards the realm of the monstrous and the deviant. The task of the scholar and editor, then, is to discern the universal text within the various documents which instantiate it, and by patient study and labour produce a new — but also originary and authoritative — witness which perfectly transmits the "text of the author". In Jed's example, these texts are the foundational documents by which republican Florence was to construct a public ideology based on an assertion of lineage from ancient republican Rome (p. 75)

Of course the story does not stop here.

And so for day 2402
11.07.2013

Vertical Virgule Veridical

On page 97 of Picture Theory by Nicole Brossard in the 1982 edition (Montréal, Éditions Nouvelle Optique, coll. « Fiction », 1982) there is an image at the corner of the page. It renders a 3D illusion as if behind the page there was a city, a grid of vertical structures. All at the invitation of the turn of a page...

Toutes étaient touchées ; mais les filles uniques qui s'étaient confondues à la verticalité

Pages later (p. 151) there is a reference to the fold in the paper

La cité calquée dans les plis du papier continu reconduisait l'émotion.

Translated by Barbara Godard

The city traced in the folds of continuous paper was bringing back emotion.

Jumping out of the book into other places/spaces in the oeuvre ... French Kiss: étreinte-exploration [English translation available in The Blue Books (Coach House Press, 2003)]

Red, I open my eyes: a state of mind. By day and by night a cirque ringed in red where centripetal and centrifugal forces make round Camomille and Lucy not just a motion of emotion but a vortex of desires: an ocean, 'a womb where death and life transmute one into the other.' And all this hidden in the cubicled spaces of a tall insalubrious box wedged between two similar blocks, lethal cubes. Tall building / kakémono, translation for verticality with drifting shadows and junks mooring by the shore, early-morning fantasy, a membrane, hovering fog woven in silk. Ideogramme to be deciphered, blacks and whites on over-toasted toast.

Kakemono - a Japanese unframed painting made on paper or silk and displayed as a wall hanging.

Brossard also uses a Japanese term in "Ma Continent" in Amantes which poses a challenge to the translator hoping to capture the play between French ma and Japanese ma *** Barbara Goddard translates in Lovhers this line as "detonation. (mâ)* it's a space/an hypothesis" with the note that "mâ" is Japanese for space and "ma" is a possessive pronoun of feminine gender in French.

Back to "kakemono"

Google translate draws on Oxford Dictionary to provide examples:

‘On awakening he found the figure on the kakemono seemed to be alive.’
‘A kakemono is intended to be displayed vertically as part of the interior decoration of a room.’
‘Rainbows and reptiles at the same time, the compositions rub against each other like kakemonos in a stormy wind.’
‘The same is true with his collection of kakemono, which are hung, along with other pictures, in some sort of rotation.’
‘Two kakemono hung in the library of the Ho-o-den, and one hung in Silsbee's dining room.’

Very suggestive -- was Brossard interested in a Japanese ghost story [The Kakemonon Ghost of Aki Province]? "On awakening he found the figure on the kakemono seemed to be alive."

Let us turn to some French vectors. The entry on Wikipédia for Kakemono references Tanizaki, Éloge de l'ombre

« Les reflets blanchâtres du papier, comme s'ils étaient impuissants à entamer les ténèbres épaisses du toko no ma, rebondissent en quelque sorte sur ces ténèbres, révélant un univers ambigu où l'ombre et la lumière se confondent. »

But the dates don't align the earliest version of Tanizaki's Praise of Shadows in French that I can find dates to 1978; French Kiss appeared in 1974.

Dead end? The passage in Brossard continues...

Une architecture urbaine reflétée sur la pupil-
le. Les cristaux s'échangent l'arc-en-ciel sur les gla-
ces longues luisantes des édifices. Points de jaillis-
sement. Des formes circulant autour de soi ainsi
que des arguments en faveur des ombres chinoises
plus décousues qu'un roman sans fil. Parasites trr,
ça ruse et et se poursuit comme une vaine liido
pigmentation sur la lu pupille.

One thinks of a typo for "libido" but one may be open to a play on the signifier.

French Kiss, p. 33 which in the English translation by Patricia Claxton p. 28 renders "Interference trrr, plays trick on trick like a ji-jiggling waterbed, a liido, crowded beach pigmentation through the pupils as re(a)d."

Claxton picks up the possible allusion to the Lido in Venice and goes further inserting a "waterbed" -- a "lit d'eau" -- into the text.

And she has done her homework...

Occasional typographical errors, have needed correcting in the translation process. Some of these have prompted recourse to the manuscript, which resides in Québec's Bibliothèque nationale along with the pages and pages of orderly notes from which the French text was constructed. One such correction arises from a contradiction between the book's first and second editions; both the manuscript and typescript vindicated the first, by Les Editions de l'homme [? 1974 Édition du jour], which give liido, as opposed libido in the Quinze edition [1980].

And so we build and so we turn.

And so we build a relay, a convergence... Brossard teaches us that texts reach down not like icebergs but like the glass and steel cubes of skyscrapers connected through their foundations into the grid of the city's infrastructure -- to the mass of social and cultural associations -- trusting that there is some sort of connection though indirect between Brossard and the tradition that Tanizaki conveys.

*** hypothesis - via late Latin from Greek hupothesis ‘foundation’, from hupo ‘under’ + thesis ‘placing’.

To which notes, I, paying attention to space, add "spacean" pertaining to voyager through foundations. Also "space/an".

And so for day 2349
19.05.2013

Dislodging

We have a record of the discussion of the second session at the 1970 colloquium at Cluny on "literature and ideology" [Littérature et idéologies. Colloque de Cluny II. 2, 3, 4 avril 1970. La nouvelle critique. spécial 39 bis]. These discussions are as interesting as the presented papers and sometimes quite revealing as to the intellectual roots of some critical concepts.

Julia Kristeva quotes the first of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach to introduce a notion of text as activity or practice.

Le défaut de tout matérialisme passé (celui de Feuerbach compris) c'est que l'objet, la réalité, la matérialité ne sont pris que sous la forme de l'objet ou de l'intuition, mais non comme activité sensible humaine comme pratique. C'est pourquoi le côté actif est développé de façon abstraite en opposition au matérialisme, par l'idéalisme — qui naturellement ne connait pas l'activité réelle, sensible, comme telle. Feuerbach veut des objets sensibles — réellement distincts des objets idéaux — mais il ne saisit pas l'activité humaine elle-même comme activité objective. Il considère donc, dans l'essence du christianisme, le rapport théorique comme étant le seul vraiment humain, tandis que la pratique n'est saisie et fixée que sous sa vulgaire et judaïque forme phénomenale. Ainsi ne comprend-il pas la signification de l'activité révolutionnaire, critico-pratique.

After citing this, Kristeva invites us to consider these remarks in the context of signifying practices:

Transposons cette réflection sur le terrain de la pratique signifiante — nous trouverons le texte

Marx's Theses on Feuerbach seeks to establish due regard to practice.

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in The Essence of Christianity, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity.

Practice occurs in a zone of strife. That zone is within and beyond the reading subject. See "Textuality" entry by Manina Jones in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms (1993).

[...] subversion of the principle that any text can function as an object whose meaning is coherent and self-contained. [...] Textuality in this context describes the tendency of language to produce not a simple reference to the world "outside" language but a multiplicity of potentially contradictory signifying effects that are activated in the reading process.

Kristeva's "transposons" makes it sound so easy. And it is if one remembers the collective notion of "let us transpose".

And so for day 1214
10.04.2010

Field

Johanna Drucker in Poetry Plastique curated by Jay Sanders and Charles Bernstein.

Any textual artifact is a contingently configured field of potential, capable of producing a reading.

To which I would like to add:

Every reading is a text.

Of necessity.

But every reading is not the text being read.

And so for day 1022
30.09.2009