Re: [-empyre-] Re: Subject: inscribing of characters on an interface

[marcus bastos <bastos.marcus@gmail.com>]

Dear Simon,

when you mention "redundancy as a limit body-experience of text", I
immediately remember of Jacques Rancière´s "The flesh of words:
politics of writing". At this text, Rancière argues that writing
limits body experience, since it obliges the writer to be still for a
reasonable period of time — and, he states, this stillness molds his
actions. For Rancière, this process of fixing the body in a given
position is more responsible for molding a certain kind of individual
than the words and concepts he learns by acquiring language, given
that his body learns to obey before his mind learns how to think about
disobedience. Do you think the experience of writing with aid of
digital interfaces frees the body and, as a consequence, the mind,
from this stillness? Are digital interfaces capable of, so to say,
"undisciplining" the body?


On 10/5/05, Simon Taylor <swht@clear.net.nz> wrote:
> Marcus Bastos wrote:
> "Juxtaposition seems to be
> crucial here, but I am not sure if those flows of images are as
> controllable as we imagine."
> coming in at the end of this particular beginning, I would like to highlight
> the foregoing as a juncture in thought about the what is not left as its
> trace is untraceable in digital ecriture. First, to say, there is a
> summoning herein of the mystique of erasure - as it stands in Western
> meaning-creation. Second, to say that the privilege of transmitting thought
> as writing 'mind to mind' digitally might be deliberated in principle as
> contradiction: as we all know the enabling thought behind any thought in the
> history of this mediation of the code-digital lies in infomation theory's
> encoded redundancy of meaning-creating and signification. Far be it for me
> to depart from the idea of meaning-flows but I think there is a
> performative, enunciative limit-base to meaning-creation, which demands risk
> rather than redundancy as a limit body-experience of text. This is not to
> get logged down in the visuality syndrome of phallogocentrism, rather to
> rise up to greet limit-experience as corporeally composed - and discomposed.
>
> As a juncture controllability seems to belie a pathology of signifiance of
> surfeit meaning-creation, a decadence, if you will - a breath that is
> shorter than its reach - in line, in play - a distinguishable control-limit
> to flow dynamic and a sign to regime change - whether willed or not - in
> game.
>
> The stuff being moved - to invoke a physics model - relies on an absolute
> framework in which spaces/times are measured according to Newton against the
> absolute. Relativisation of the sphere of writing demands a shift that one
> can assume to be there because of digital mediatisation but may not
> necessarily be there because of the laws of meaning-production. The argument
> surely returns to an archeology of social production of meaning before it
> repeats in digitised mode.
>
> In short, I'm excited at the prospect of liberated digitised flows but would
> suggest that sociological barrieres still subsist to mitigate against such
> flows. Not least the statistical reach of the sociological
> self-constitution - dealing in mass statistical data reflected in
> attribution of meaning - signification - and limits thereto suggested by
> traditional avant-gardes.
>
> Which is not to say I'm way off the point. If so, I apologise in advance.
>
> simon taylor
>
>
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