<div dir="ltr">
<p class="gmail-p3"><span class="gmail-s2"><font face="georgia, serif">I had said: <span></span></font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><font face="georgia, serif"><span class="gmail-s2">"</span><span class="gmail-s1">We did want to focus
attention on language itself as the medium, but I'm not ready to embrace some
of your characterization: words & letters are not non-referential,
but we liked to organize them in other ways beside what they were pointing to
(which was too often, for us, the author's personalizing experience or
expressiveness or traditional lyric expectations). We tended to want the
readers' experience at the center — which cuts against some of this binary of
yours about the sensual, movement-based vs. logical aspects of language"</span><span></span></font></p>
<p class="gmail-p4"><span><font face="georgia, serif"> </font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><span class="gmail-s1"><font face="georgia, serif">Murat, on to this part of your response.<span></span></font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><span class="gmail-s1"><font face="georgia, serif"> </font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><span class="gmail-s1"><font face="georgia, serif">M: Bruce,
when you say "We tended to want the readers' experience at the center,"
are you saying anything different than saying "I want the text at the
center," the reader reading the text? <span></span></font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><span class="gmail-s1"><font face="georgia, serif"> </font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><span class="gmail-s1"><font face="georgia, serif">B: I put it
in terms of the reader's (or readers') experience. Because 'the text at the
center' can imply something different from 'the reader reading the text'. For
instance, it's gotten somewhat fashionable for writers to proclaim their lack
of interest in the reader's experience or even the existence of readers — at
times, the apparent intention is to create texts that are 'impressive', for
anyone hearing it or seeing it (or hearing about it or buying/collecting it) to
elevate the status of the author. This can go way beyond the older, more
familiar notion of the authors being celebrated for their distinctive expressiveness
or knowledge or personal stories & the reader 'tagging along' or bowing
down or pulled into an identification with another specific person. <span></span></font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><span class="gmail-s1"><font face="georgia, serif"> </font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><span class="gmail-s1"><font face="georgia, serif">M: The question interests me because in my essay The
Peripheral Space of Photography, I assert that what is important in a
photograph is not the photographer's focus (framing), but what escapes that
framing. The real dialogue occurs between the watcher of the photograph and
what is in front of the lens (human or a landscape, etc.). If, as I think you
are to saying, it is the reader (and not purely the text), then even the
"reveries" the reader builds around the text reading it become part
of it. Is that not so?<span></span></font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><span class="gmail-s1"><font face="georgia, serif"> </font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><span class="gmail-s1"><font face="georgia, serif">B: Sure, even the reveries (or the wild associations
or confusions or mishearings) that get 'built' around the text reading it
becomes part of it — but I'd say the 'it' is the reader experience; not sure if
those constructions can be said to be an actual part of the text. <span></span></font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><span class="gmail-s1"><font face="georgia, serif">Let me know if your essay on photography is
something others could link to. Some of our different aesthetic preoccupations
might come into play here: the 'framing'
that most interests me is that of the viewer/beholder rather than the
photographer's focus; and also, while it sounds intriguing to speak of what
escapes the photographer's framing, that is exactly what the (relatively
autonomous) potentials of language make available to a reader pretty much all
the time. To hone in on how the watcher dialogues with what is 'in front of the
lens', still emphasizes the representational/realist aspects of the art. This
brought to mind a fascinating article in the new issue of Louis Armand's
Prague-based journal, VLAK<span></span></font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><font face="georgia, serif"><span class="gmail-s1">(a huge issue #5) on the way film animation
confounds the camera/indexical/realist tendencies of film theory, by
emphasizing the individual celluloid frame. Adrian Martin's "Game with DVD"
is the piece. He suggests that "contemporary cinema in the digital age
tends ever more towards the surface manipulation of a graphic image on a
computer screen" —citing Thomas Elsaesser & Daniel Frampton, the
latter grounding his "account of cinema on the basis of the constitutive <u>artifice</u>
of the medium — the idea that everything can be created and manipulated within
an image-bank, rather than (or subsequent to having been) 'captured' by the
camera". Another example, I'd say, of how the digital domain allows us to
be less reliant on some pretty restrictive (arguably old-fashioned or
conservative) assumptions about the trajectory of writing (ones that would
focus on its obedience to an author's representational/thematic choices or 'camera-like'
framings). </span><span></span></font></p>
<p class="gmail-p4"><span><font face="georgia, serif"> </font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><span class="gmail-s1"><font face="georgia, serif">M: "Logical" was an unfortunate choice of
words, on my part. I am more interested in the distinction between predicated
idea (therefore fixed) and thought as process (therefore movement). One can
have thought and/in movement (that's what Eda is). In that way, thought is
sensual.<span></span></font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><span class="gmail-s1"><font face="georgia, serif"> </font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><font face="georgia, serif"><span class="gmail-s1">B: Again, not sure about this. Poets' thoughts are
usually claimed to be 'in motion' in a text, foregrounding the (sensual?) process
by which they get articulated or 'projected' [as in 'Projective Verse'], rather
than things that are 'fixed' (what you're calling a "predicated
idea"). Otherwise, they get criticized for being dogmatic, overly
intellectual, etc. But I'm still wanting the exchange to tilt away from the
author's thoughts, whether predicated or in process — to open up a wider arena
for the reader & for the disruptions or near-infinite horizons that
language implicates. [I'm fully engrossed these days in discussions of the
Sublime — trying to reconfigure Kant et al. so that this topic can have
something to offer an understanding of the poetry I want to read, & write.
That's too big a thing to delve into here]. </span><span></span></font></p>
<p class="gmail-p4"><span><font face="georgia, serif"> </font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><span class="gmail-s1"><font face="georgia, serif"> </font></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p3"><span class="gmail-s1"><font face="georgia, serif"> </font></span></p>
<div class="gmail_extra"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div><div class="h5"><div dir="ltr"><div><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></div><div><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div><div><div><font face="georgia, serif"><br><br></font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font><div class="gmail_quote"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra">
<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><font face="georgia, serif"><br>
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______________________________<wbr>_________________<br>empyre forum<br><a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" target="_blank">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.ed<wbr>u.au</a><br><a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu" target="_blank">http://empyre.library.cornell.<wbr>edu</a></font></div></div><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></div><div><div class="h5"><font face="georgia, serif"><br>______________________________<wbr>_________________<br>
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