Signage

CRITICAL    ARTICLES      CHRONOLOGICALLY

PURSUE VERITABLE SIMPLES

One. The functions of criticism.

There are too many reasons to write criticism, be it critical (discursive/excisive) essaying or, critical (excisive/discursive) book reviewing. Too many reasons surround the writing itself.

This latter enunciates itself twice: the writing itself1 or the mode of critical approach, the writing itself2 or that which is approached. And here the assignation of number assigns the grammar: either could have preceded. And, again and, in fact, the writing itself is that which does.

The functions of criticism, and particularly of book reviews, are infatuated with, and activated by, a past. Criticism sells the book (pushing the book), it sells criticism, it sells two authors. Perhaps it has in instances begun to approach the present, provided a present not too critical of the past.

Criticism advances the reader, effecting (affecting?) a change in understanding, of style perhaps. Perhaps this constitutes a diversion, a sub-category, of the critic’s intention to understand the considered writing. These approachings may magnify themselves, they may aim, indirectly, to change an or the entire social matrix: (but this is algebra).

Criticism intransitively records a history. Intransitively because, taking history as an object/function it is equally taken by history as a function/object. Criticism makes of itself an expression of history as/through literature. Being written it is a second history. Being writing it is being historicization.

These, then, vertical aspects of criticism: its cutting through time; its cutting, through time.

Criticism has a lateral aspect, which it shares with its objects and which it derives from its methods: to write excellently.

Two. Criticism’s approach.

Criticism approaches. In this it implies its aggressive/ submissive trait.

Criticism is tautologically aggressive: criticism pursues criticism. This aggressive pursuit produces its stature, a production which will not because it can not separate it from writing.

Criticism is empirically (historically) submissive: it pursues an object.* It takes an object as subject, it subjects an object. So-called secondary writing.

The aggressive functions, strongly considered, are submissive. Criticism pursues. However vaguely uncertain of its object, it flees. Equally: take an object: aggress: and excellently and deservedly so, when it takes that object without discernment of its sameness/difference.**

Criticism accepts itself without judgement, having judged (accepted) itself into the position from which to do so.

Three. The materials of critical examination.

The materials of critical examination hold their history. The materials of critical examination have their present; to have is the verb unavoidably and always conjugating itself in the past. No one will have the writing in the future. The materials of critical examination have their future: in this way, they begin to anticipate and fabricate critical writings as object.

This divided view falls into itself in the middle. The materials of critical examination have their present. The materials of critical examination have their tools. The materials write themselves, they won’t be separate from writing, such that their writing of them is not permitted separateness, or exclusion. The critical writing is writing writing, because the writing explains it.

Criticism is the activity of non-distance, separating from the critic the activities of distance. The past and future materials are peculiar fetishes: they are constantly sold as such. And it is a very great distance, to non-distance.

The materials of criticism are, then, the tools which, as itself, the object-text is offering. Within this most critical of presents, no tools are re-sold in the critical exemption criticism makes for its text. The materials are their tools and the tools their own exemplary potential.

Four. Criticism at its best at the present time.

When the object is approached directly there is therefore no object. There is no condescension, and the object is not declined. Criticism writes directly across to the text/object such that this across goes into the object; the distance is abolished, not the directness.

The reader of criticism looks in two directions, realizes self as the pierced object (substance) of each, as one. The triangle (text/reader/criticism(2nd reader)) is flattened: the line. This makes for the reader of critical writing the exercise of not having the obvious and the assigned place. The reader works at each, him and her self.

The book begins to be gone as the object of criticism. Criticism achieves its status as object, and knows the difficult limits of status; the object with an object: the schizophrenic. The reader who questions the difference, the sameness, of the two objects, the text and the critical text, becomes the critical being in both, the one in the one. It is learned that there is one. The critic, making of critical text an object, looses equal objects together into the world.

Criticism achieves text status, not abnegating the word original, the word originary, to its object-text; nor any longer taking for itself a secondary safety. To the advantage of both, criticism is strong enough to be consumed as itself: (Problem: the avoidance of non-fetish status). But at least the original text, the critical object, is not any longer spoken at (Problem: if criticism escapes, by easy routes, the definition implicit in its name, the original text escapes notice).

But and against these problems, criticism participates with the object/text. The problem here is that the reader escapes notice, recognizing this their absence as the difficulty of reading (both). Perhaps, and this difficulty can be, the readers’ own reading of their potential, their excellence.

Criticism abandons its book-selling function without abandoning the book; with its interest in its materials, precisely, the book, and itself, it promotes to the reader those tools which, if it has been worth the attention, always an indulgence, the book has already best promoted itself. Criticism reiterates but recognizes in reiteration only a lowest acceptable common denominator of reading experience.

The criticism is an agent the original texts appear to demand in their imagined efforts to make the reader write. Criticism is an accomplice of those things which make it possible to live; it accomplishes them.

* It may avoid this in taking one without (having) pursuing it. The past, then, has been placed within its attendant brackets.

** A ratio whose sum is always zero.

L I E S

Truth is lies that have hardened.

This should be obvious from the fact that the obverse is also correct. The same obviousness obtains for correctness.

Truth, which will never be more than the notion of truth, keeps for itself only its own over-guarded presences. It is the equator without hemispheres, without a globe. This line, which merely appears to establish itself, is non-equatorial, in extremis.

Truth is the purest notions of dominations, not without persons, not without social exigencies, and not aside from the facets of the experienced tracts of truth. It is, in and by itself, the misnomer.

It is most certainly not true, not not true. It is the failed tautoology, tautology without equatability, the terms of which are so very easily subsumed by the notions of there being terms.

Truth is the effort of intention to make of space protracted space, of time, protracted time.

The distance between truth and that which is known is that distance between intention and that which is truth. Truth is the shifter among concrete fact, the tightest of attentive experience, and the most indissoluble of intents.

Truth succumbs to a pressure of indifference. This makes of it truth.

Hard words don’t get called true, except on the verges of hatred. This is a failure which specializes, and in itself, but the most solid things know this and it is they whereby we know that we have been otherwise mistaken.

Truth articulates itself only in relations with non-truths. Facts don’t make these mistakes, because they stand in, for, in for, and as, some kind of solidity.

Truth articulates, it mentions, itself, only in relation with things which are not true, not because opposites are necessary (they are not), but because truth is a special form of the untrue and thereby finds itself most articulate in that presence.

The realm of truth is the realm of the alphabet. Thus is recognized its limitation: that truth is completely inscribed within the alphabet.

Truth is that flourish which a mind makes in an effort to make of itself a perfection, an aura which it will not mount without the angles of straight arts.

Truth.

I.e.

The idea of truth.

If you walk down the street as truth you walk down the street the other side of the street from violence.

Truth is some thing which resembles, as its exterior, some other thing. It is the appearance of the exterior of this thing, and without it, as evidence, which makes of its semblance, a thing wherein we recognize a truth.

The practice of truth is a hollowing of what is real, the removal of the substance to ensure the (false) sanctity, the (false) perpetuity, of the form.

Form is, as such, deserving of those interests which thus elevate it. Truth, in its methods, merely imitates the just formulations of form, and within the results of those methods which it must then attempt to erect, to stabilize, as facts. Their appearance as supreme facts is merely a function of their resemblance, which they have, after all, manufactured, to forms. It is perhaps only the extreme effort which must be made to make a statement appear true, which makes us call it a truth when we recognize it. Truth is the evaluation of the boundaries to which it reaches, its limits, its husk. That is to say, when we say of something that it is true, we say that it has stopped.

Each moment is a retrograde moment, and it is moments which are productive of truth.

Truth is present only to itself, which is why nobody notices it until it is talked about, and why everyone notices it when it is.

Truth and lies. That is not the question.

The Indeterminate Interval: From History to Blur

(Coauthor: Nick Piombino)

Event-related signals can reveal subtle differences in mental processes. The wave that appears when the mind confronts nonsense is easily distinguished from the one that results from simple surprise, according to Dr. Steven A. Hillyard of the University of California at San Diego, even though there is surprise in encountering a word that transforms a reasonable sentence into nonsense. He and Dr. Marta Kutas reported discovery of the coping-with-nonsense signal recently in the journal Science. This signal appears about 400 milliseconds (four-tenths of a second) after the event that causes it and appears on a graph as a negative voltage. It is called the N400 wave. The brain’s signature for surprise is found in another wave called P300, a positive voltage appearing 300 milliseconds after its event.

The newly discovered signal seems to appear in response to a nonsense statement, even in prolonged testing, Dr. Hillyard said. Even after encountering many sentences that degenerate into nonsense, the brain evidently cannot stop trying to make sense of them. The special response to nonsense does not appear if a word is simply misspelled, but only if it is a legitimate word used in a nonsense way.

‘This N400 wave seems to be tapping into a higher mental process than any that we’ve been studying with ERP’s during the past 10 years,’ said Dr. Hillyard. ‘It depends on a person having a sophisticated language ability.’     The New York Times, March 11, 1980.

It wasn’t until 45 years later that Heisenberg stated in a new theory of physics what Mallarmé knew in 1880: ‘A Dice Throw Will Never Abolish Chance.’ Heisenberg demonstrated that you cannot measure a particle’s speed and its location at the same time; out of these factors evolved a theory of indeterminacy, a theory of constant uncertainty.

Stochastic: (Greek, stochazein, to shoot with a bow at a target; that is, to scatter events in a partially random manner, some of which achieve a preferred outcome.) If a sequence of events combines a random component with a selective process so that only certain outcomes of the random are allowed to endure, that sequence is said to be stochastic.

Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature (1979, p. 230).

The Freudian theory of free association inscribes a stochastic situation: the analyst asks the analysand to speak every thought entering his/her mind, the analyst sifts those thoughts through the analyst’s mind, at some point stops the flow, selectively. Free associations, the random component; the analyst’s interpreting intervention, the selective.

One interprets, with fairly great certainty, a probable outcome; the position of the individual units is relatively unknown. The relationship between writing and reading also describes a line of uncertainty. Publishing locates, within a historical moment, the position of a thought.

In metric reading (i.e. reading at a certain momentum) the reader reads the momentum; in contrast, within the Mallarméan idea, one reads the space as a schematic