Diagrams

I come back to these diagrams very often.

Holidays Vocabulary on Resonance fm

Tomorrow afternoon’s Digestives broadcast on Resonance FM is Holidays Vocabulary, a new work of mine based on the sound files I unearthed on an old dictaphone of mine last month. It’s an experiment in translation.

Holidays Vocabulary airs tomorrow at 4:30pm and is repeated this Friday at 7:30pm, and you can listen by clicking the ‘Listen Now’ mp3 stream at www.resonancefm.com, or tune in to 104.4fm inside London. Afterwards it will be available to download as a podcast at www.antepress.co.uk.

What To Do

Here’s a short extract of What To Do, a 35 minute ‘blank talk’ that flattens its own text as it goes along.

Just for fun, below are some rough copies of the diagrams, some of which eventually appear in the talk itself.

The Things Painted Red

The things are back where they came from now, only red. There’s a nasty hierarchy now among my things. The painted things indicate the nakedness of all the other things. Are the red things fake, or are they the only things that are real, because they acknowledge themselves? They look smug about it.

Susannah and the Elders

I came across this picture today while I was trying to find the painting of Susannah and the Elders Diderot describes in his Salon reports. Jacopo Tintoretto’s version of events is the painting in this photo – it isn’t the one I was looking for, but the photo illustrates very happily my interest in the painting’s surface as a kind of pivot for the beholder’s gaze.

Process of manufacture

It is that the process of manufacture generates through moves of increasing precision a certain articulate outline, which contains and does not constitute the substance of its object. It is that manufacture contains the lack of its object. It is that the process of manufacturing a utensil differs from the process of using it, and that using also contains the lack of its object. That although they produce and are produced from the same object, the two processes are not symmetrical. That there are similarities nevertheless, because the material qualities of the utensil demand specific sympathies that determine its manipulation.

(world (thing (art (world (thing)))))

Commentary: richness of possibility

This is Blanchot’s The Most Profound Question as it approaches my work. It’s probably going to precede the Kafka text I posted yesterday in a list of texts accompanying the critical commentary I’m writing about the work I’ve done this year.

The question form “is speech that is accomplished by having declared itself as incomplete” (p.12). The particular incompleteness of the interrogative offers a “richness of possibility” by which we “give ourselves the thing and we give ourselves the void that permits us not to have it yet”. (p. 12) The void contained in the question form is indeed a lack -

“but this lack is of a strange kind. It is not the severity of negation: it does not do away with, it does not refuse. [...] The word ‘is’ is not withdrawn; it is only lightened, rendered more transparent, committed to a new dimension”. (p. 13)

The Burrow in the Interrogative

I want to look at Kafka’s The Burrow in terms of Maurice Blanchot’s The Most Profound Question, which I wrote about last month:

“The interrogative form is charged with qualities that mean the form [the sky is blue] is very different from the form [is the sky blue? - yes]. Rather than simply affirming the truth conditions in the question, the answer ‘yes’ truncates the richness at large in the question and turns it into a singular matter of fact. Rather than meeting the various calls of the question and drawing them to richly sympathetic conclusions, it just cuts them all off short. ‘The answer is the question’s misfortune, its adversity’”. (I’ve written more here.)

I wonder whether the burrowing animal is like the verb of a sentence, raised to the beginning in a question. Of the verb Blanchot writes:

“It is as though being, in questioning itself – the ‘is’ of the questioning – had abandoned its part of resounding affirmation, its decisive, negating part, and had freed itself, even where it emerges foremost, from itself: opening itself, and opening the sentence in such a way that, in this opening, the sentence seems no longer to have its center in itself but outside of itself – in the neutral.” (p. 13)

Last month I wrote:

Exhibiting Text

Some of the work I’m making has trouble sitting in the world. With the ocagraph and the cut-up books and the marked-up books there’s some tension about whether they’re real or not – are they examples? Propositions? Who’s meant to have made them? Doing some experiments with one of the cut-up books yesterday morning it became clear that I have to think of them as propositions or they don’t do the right thing.

With this in mind, I want to go over my ideas for exhibiting the body of work I’ve made over the past year. My intention up to today has been to put all the work on a desk in boxes and files – like a reading room – and to display a schema charting the relationships between the works.