Tamarin is talking very FAST

Rachel Lois Clapham and Alex Eisenberg documented today’s 10 Performances event with a live feed they updated throughout the day. By the time my performance What To Do begins they’re halfway down their third page. I love their occasional attempts to type out variations on everything I was saying. You can read what they’ve written here.

The text of What To Do is available to download as a pdf from the 10 Performances website, but I’m not sure I recommend you read it: the effect of reading the text on a page or a screen is very different from the effect of the performance itself.

Forks

I sometimes try to write using things that aren’t words, especially utensils. I think it’s because like words, utensils already have a purpose – they always already point at some function beyond their physical edges.

This questionably photoshopped arrangement of forks and rortary motors is what I want to try next.

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 Reality of the Fictive World

This is John Barth’s “Life-Story” (in Lost in the Funhouse, 1968) as it approaches my work.

The protagonist, a writer, has become convinced of his fictional nature, and the third-person narrative that contains him presents continuous metatextual anxiety over the purpose of the story, its relationship to the protagonist, and hence the purpose of the protagonist. This anxiety finds expression in the tension of linguistic representation, and namely in the fluid exchange between grammatical and semantic fields. A sentence like the following:

“Through a lavender cascade of hysteria he observed that his wife had once again chosen to be the subject of this clause, itself the direct object of his observation” (p. 126)

threatens the destruction of the fictional world, but resists entirely dismantling it. The destruction here finds purchase in a rhyming malapropism (wisteria-hysteria), and this simultaneity of irreconcilable elements is maintained in a radical slicing through representation.

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)

Accretions

Below is what I’ve been writing today, which is emerging from the studied encounter of post-it notes and utensils on my tabletop.

What’s important is that the writing be practical. It needs to be usable: it needs to be something you can read for yourself at home like you can use a tin opener without getting lots of user manuals out. There are references in it to the things I’ve been reading, but I want the text to make sense even if you don’t notice them. I have to think about how to footnote things later on. If I decide to stick with it, something like this will be the first few paragraphs of the commentary I’m writing for my Vyner St show next month.

It is that things are accretions of activity rendered pitifully apparent by the thickness of their substance. That it is a shame about things, we are ashamed and saddened by them, and that there is nothing to do but make them.

It is that the activity of making – the period of exertion writhing bright as imaginary skies – is pursued by its inevitable collapse into a thing. That activity is snuffed out by its accumulation into the thing that answers it. That these are real, handleable things which have persisted past the point of their making to be set into time, where they linger like the wear of a work boot or the ringing of an answer too shrill to withdraw.

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:

Is the sky blue? – Yes.

It might be helpful to frame my ideas about things going off the ends of themselves through Blanchot’s treatment of the interrogative form in his essay The Most Profound Question, in The Infinite Conversation (1969).

The nature of a question is to be incomplete: it demands something else, namely an answer. Blanchot argues that while the question is incomplete as speech, it is not incomplete as a question: “on the contrary, it is speech that is accomplished by having declared itself incomplete” (p. 12). He continues:

“Through the question we give ourselves the thing and we give ourselves the void that permits us not to have it yet, or to have it as desire. The question is the desire of thought.” (p. 12)

Ekphrasis in Grammar

On page 126 of John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse is the following sentence:

He happened at the time to be in the oak-wainscoted study of the old family summer residence; through a lavender cascade of hysteria he observed that his wife had once again chosen to be subject of this clause, itself the direct object of his observation.

It’s profoundly funny to slice through a sentence into the fact that it’s there. It’s embarrassing for the sentence and it’s embarrassing for the stuff that the sentence is talking about. They both sort of spin around in the middle of what they were doing, caught red handed, and look at you, and there’s no point either of them trying to act natural any more. All three of you know what’s been going on.

The Distribution of the Sensible

I’m reading a book at the moment by Rancière called The Politics of Aesthetics. I’ve been having to write whole paragraphs out again somewhere else before I could start shaking the ideas clear of the words. It’s a library book, and the words I’m trying to read from the page are in stubborn allegiance to an unknown previous reader, and they won’t come unstuck from the paper.

The pages are more than annotated. They’re marked up. It looks like they’ve been prepared for assembly like the flat plan of a paper model. There are no pencil marks in the margins, only among the printed words. And the marks themselves are never words, just shapes, brackets, lines, operating like braces and pulleys. They look like they’re trying to help the sentences along, pushing the words out into palpable, physical relationships with one another.