Union of Intersections

Robert Scholes's opening sentence to "Afterthoughts on Narrative" from Critical Inquiry autumn 1980 is worth working through again on a May Day and any day:

Narrative is a place where sequence and language, among other things intersect to form a discursive code.

Narrative has other purposes. One of them being the generation of noise. Another the inducement of forgetting.

Narrative is sometimes taken to be story, sometimes plot. The term slips between the telling and the told. It is with precision that one arrives at thinking about narrative as being about placement and narration about placing.

And so for day 138
01.05.2007

Triplets and Beyond

Such good prose! Susan Stewart from the first chapter of On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection draws the reader in to a debunking of authenticity and speech:

The utilitarian vision of an ordinary language perfectly mapped upon the material needs of the everyday is a vision of language before the Fall: speaking from the heart or from nature as the vox populi is mythically able to do. Thus the folk are seen to rise in one voice because of their lack of consciousness of difference. Such theories of language can be placed amid other Western cults of the primitive: the celebration of madness in romanticism and modernism, the cult of the child, the cult of the pastoral — cults that have never been held by the mad, the child, or the folk themselves.

Not once in that whole passage does she say that words are never ever adequate. It is not an indictment against language but against fools.

And so for day 137
30.04.2007

Necessary Luck

The Ottawa Citizen reprinted (Saturday, January 21, 1989) an essay "Our clever but shallow 3-minute culture" by Michael Ignatieff which had previously appeared in the British newspaper The Independent. The introduction pits depth against randomness:

With great insight and originality, Canadian-born journalist and author Michael Ignatieff describes and decries a society that has replaced depth and narrative with cleverness and randomness.

I have encountered elsewhere the trope of tension between narrative in opposition to the workings of chance. There (in an article by Marie-Laure Ryan) I was struck by the invocation of coherence. Here there is a hint that some of us use narrative for purposes other than those described by Ignatieff:

Right across the media, we have replaced narrative with flow, connection with disconnection, sequence with randomness. The cost is to our memory. Narrative is a mnemonic device: stories help us to remember meanings through time. When narrative goes, amnesia begins.

Narrative has other purposes. One of them being the generation of noise. Another the inducement of forgetting.

And so for day 136
29.04.2007

Producing Transformations

From a photocopy of a work by Eli Zaretsky the catchword in the formwork reads "Capitalism and Personal Life" [could be a chapter or a running head for the title of a whole book] and the page number is "63". I quote here leaving out a bit from the middle:

In the United States the split between the traditions of personal liberation and of social transformation began to occur in the early twentieth century. The rise of corporate capitalism led to the emergence of forms of personal life that were seen as independent of the mode of productions. The split was accelerated by the domination of the American left by the Soviet Union and the emergence of a model of socialism based simply on the planned expansion of goods production. [...] The development of corporate capitalism in the United States, where the overwhelming majority of the population depends on wages in order to survive, entails the development of a separate personal life. This in turn sets new tasks for a socialist movement — tasks that the Communist Party barely began to address, and that have only recently begun to take political form.

Now to quilt and restore the elided section:

Currents based upon the new sphere of personal life such as psychoanalysis and bohemia tended to play down or ignore the importance of the economy. For this reason the Communist movement has downgraded these currents as "petit-bourgeois" or "middle class." But the idea that personal life could be transformed directly through the transformation of production had its major relevance in pre-industrial societies like Russia and China where the family as a whole was still a unit of commodity production.

Immediately mediated. A recapturing of personal time is the ecological idea that may reform the relations of production in the twenty-first century.

And so for day 135
28.04.2007

A Taste for Algebra

From a file folder from the early 1990s a typescript of a single paragraph with heading:

Identity & Dichotomy

Has it ever struck you that when one colour associated with X is taken up by Y, it means something Z? How and when characteristics cross-over from one character to another as a narrative unfolds depends upon the play of identity formation. Both the cross-overs and the identity formation are shaped by the logical type of dichotomy from which they arise. Contradictory dichotomies (A/not-A) give rise to identities dependent upon the demarcation of space. They do not permit flexible appropriation/alienation of characteristics. Contrary dichotomies (A/B) offer more fluid boundaries and result in stories that accentuate temporal factors. Such considerations are valuable for not only examining the arch-Canadian theme of the two solitudes but also the social construction of gender.

Evident influence of the classic article by Nancy Jay "Gender and Dichotomy". A certain sensitivity to initial conditions. In rereading the scheme all these years later I am struck by the order: space first; time second. And in a very unAristotlean fashion I wonder what lies between contradictions and contraries. How does the passage from space dominance to time happen? A hint may be there in reading the slash of suture and the double movement of appropriation and alienation.

A gesture of child's play comes to mind: drawing a line with the index; drawing a stave with a rake of fingers.

And so for day 134
27.04.2007

Feather Tales

Cur



care for the rage

attention to the tread

straying into the wagging



courage tales where

felines collect a surfeit of tongues

from eager children wanting to know



how to co-replicate the rooster’s many sounds

including dirt scratching



across the glee of languages

And so for day 133
26.04.2007

Mut

courage at the edge of a mouth

with pluck

an elusive inwardness behind the glowing screen which has a drawing power similar to a husky or sultry voice

surmised Stephanie Strickland in a talk given in 1997 about work in electronic space and "the book come to resemble an album". Album in the sense of packaging plus vinyl. Album in the sense of scrapbook of images and words, a commonplace treasure hoard. Objects to be pored over and bases from which to performance launch. air guitar or memory work. Space of liner notes. Noted space.

mixed mongrel courage "like riding melodies through silence" assured that haunted by the memory any extra letters, any different voicings of the same grapheme will achieve the mutter that matters


And so for day 132
25.04.2007

Jumping

It’s about tumbling, tuck and roll. Dawdling actually, duck walking. A hugging of the ground downhill like a log on the loose. A piercing view of the sky from hanging upside down from a limb. And the spinning and the jumping and the skipping.

Twirling through positions like an everyday glass of water giving the voice a drenching. Refreshing vision with the panting of joy.

No teetotum take all. Never quenching run singing into flight.

Soar into childfest simplicity. Roar. Worm wiggle giggle.


And so for day 131
24.04.2007

Fulcrum

Tinder tender.

Warren Tallman essaying on Creeley

For if muttering is a way of counting, counting is a way of telling [...] In the heat of the telling there is an expansion of the voice and that expansion leads to discovery so that more enters into voicing than was either in the telling or the things told.

Exit is a noun that exists.


And so for day 130
23.04.2007

Fishing

"cutlure"

first word in column three of page 7 of The Globe and Mail of Monday September 7, 1973 in an article with a Marshall McLuhan by-line entitled "Understanding McLuhan -- and fie on any who don't"

cut lure

for

culture

Compositor’s revenge?
Proofreader's slight?


And so for day 129
22.04.2007