Tag: communication

A Kind of Credo : Intertextuality : “Art is Difficult” : Manifesto?

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Reflections, Writing9 Comments

“perhaps our arrival at interpretive conclusions participates in that process and affirms the inescapability of attempting to read the world in an empowered way, even if we are always missing the point”

-Anne McConnell, Approaching Disappearance–

But then there is a reality to writing – the unexpected, the making-up, emergence and invention.  I believe in it, in spite of my theories, in spite of acquired knowledge.  Something like the terms of paradox.  Little matter, much substance (not really).

For fun, let’s say (in the manner of a credo):

  •  “I believe…

that language is a socially constructed resource recursively constituting and innovating meaning potential

  • “I believe…

‘the notion of meaning potential can be characterized as a heterogeneous totality of knowledge of conventionalized patterns of normatively correct situated verbal behavior which manifests itself and emerges from social practices of a given social community’ (-Mika Lahteenmaki)

  • “We believe…

that actual meanings are emergent from meaning potentials – are jointly created – recursively and interactively dependent – in their situatedness and perspectivity, unique and irreducible

  • “We believe…

‘reality works in overt mystery’ (-Macedonio Fernandez, via JL Borges)

  • “We believe…

that to live ‘is to make all these repetitions coexist in a space in which difference is distributed’ (-Gilles Deleuze)

  • “We believe…

that living occurs via the ‘conservation of autopoiesis and the conservation of adaptation – a constant and mutual structural coupling of continuous transformations betwixt organisms and environments (envorganisms)’ (-Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Paul Kockelman)

  • “We believe…

in complexity and meaning, difference and repetition, redundancy and novelty, structures and contingencies, openness and change

Measures of reality (situated and perspectival…partial and relative to) – our As-if-oscope and Toxic spoon-deep.  A hurly-burly and chaotic entanglement – intertwingled – adjoined in movements (writing of writing) to use an outdated metaphor:  textuality and trace.

  • “We could believe…

that ‘texts record the meanings we make: in words, pictures and deeds…shaping and shaped by our social relationships, politically, as individuals as members of social groups’ (-Jay Lemke)

That no effect is not mutual, recursive, intermingled and intertwined.  Life is ambient, writing of writing.

In other words.

  • “We believe…

that ‘Art is difficult’ (-Viktor Shklovsky) and meanings dialogic/multilogic / multimodal/multivalent (-Mikhail Bakhtin, Gunther Kress, Bruno Latour, semiosis)

Empiricism regarding ourselves is impossible (the situation and perspective necessary are not available) so we rely.  i.e. we need one another and beyond.  Envorganisms, we.  We believe (we could say.  I might).

“When we leave each other, we leave.”

–Henrik Nordbrandt–

A text composed is intertexuality – an Irish monk illuminating a copy; a modern blogger mashing-up – bricolage, meaning – I write, WITH.

To say I instantiate a social practice.  It becomes.

Thank you.  And welcome.

-a glyph is a hunt for optimism-

Slideshow of works cited:

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We are Registry

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Photography, Writing6 Comments

Friday Fictioneers, July 26, 2013

maui-from-mauna-kea

Between you and me, of myriad conduits, the others.  We set out.  Toward.  Send messages made of signs and symbols, ripples, waves – our gestures.  We move.  Where we are.  It resonates.  When you touch down and look in my direction, molecules dither, there is some concord.  Generation. Gravitation.  I do not believe in “flow,” or that everything is One.  You set out, we are in relation.  Things pull, things press.  Hearing dribbles in the brain and puddles.  Echoes something else.  I am here.  I will be.  I set out.  Between the myriad conduits and air, water, fire.  We breathe.  We become a ground.  We register.

N Filbert 2013

Inflexions: Issues

On By NW FilbertIn Art, Current Reading, Graphotos, Philosophy, Photography, Traces, Writing2 Comments

Inflexions: Issues.

Very exciting new discovery for me!

for instance:  A Perspective of the Universe – Massumi & Manning

The Meticulous Blur

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing7 Comments

entry for Friday Fictioneers, June 28, 2013

copyright - Indira

How it left my mouth, toward her.  How long I’d ached and labored it.  How meticulously prepared.  From amorphous origins – a preoccupation and urge, a hunch, desire.  Like longing + some desperate attention.  Had I shared this constant process, they’d have named it “obsession.”  A phrase, a statement, a promise, a claim.  How it left my mouth when the moment arrived, arrowing itself toward her.  A chiseled and hair-thin fibre of sound, a core-content-chain of DNA, let free in the matter between us.  How it blurred and whooshed past.  Disintegrative and smeared in possible meanings.  How quickly the resulting compound decomposed and deconstructed.

The Wasps Nest

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes13 Comments

Friday Fictioneers – April 19, 2013

Wasp nest

We move in, we move out – forging a network in lieu of an origin.  Seekers in search of a source.  Our tunneling leads to more tunnels and caves – enclosures disclosing.   Disclosures enclosing – we seesaw in dialogue.  We create and we seek.  We call it the Realm of the Conduits – we guess and infer, hungry for meaning.  Communicating by movement, we follow and lead, listen and hum.  When sharing we shove through the space.  We sense we’re on shifty smooth ground.  To call it a world does not matter.  The question is how we might meet.

N Filbert 2013

Situating Language

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Writing9 Comments

“ultimately all the meaning of all words is derived from bodily experience”

-Bronislaw Malinowski-

(from The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages)

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RESPOND

Unspoken Fragments

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes4 Comments

Through someone else’s blog award list I recently discovered The Dream Journal Today – a remarkable blog straightforwardly recounting dreams.  It has stimulated me to pay more attention to what my brain is doing in its “off-hours.”  The post regarding my longing for knowledge of my father is such a result, as is the following post, gathered through the past night.  I have the hunch my psychophysiology works over emotion when I’m out…something my waking mind deters.  Whatever the case, I have found the ritual to be as intriguing as working with photo-prompts to dislodge other-conscious concerns, and recommend it to writers everywhere as a kind of exercise in translation.

Thrown on my back as from a jungle gym – panicked in the way of breath-smashed bodies.  Helpless then, disempowered.

Lying next to you in our warm nest of bed, nose and right eye microscopically near the flesh of your chest – the sharp distinction of its tattoo’s inky night and the blemishless cream covering your major pectorals.

I see it falling, the exploding crush of a thick plate of glass the size of a small wall and maybe four inches thick – variegated and stained – slicing and dicing my face with the stories you don’t share.

The night is full of phrases.  Intimacies shredded by the unspoken, the secrets.  A literal compaction of my face in bloodied fragments – the world a shattered windshield.

Sleeping fitfully you deliver direct language through the dark.  “This is wrong and this is wrong and this is wrong…with you.”  I don’t remember details, only that I’m broken like a vase of porcelain on the floor of an empty manor.

The decompression and drainage, the fracturing damage of all you hold apart.  Discommunication.  What is withheld.  The feeling of what happens when I supply the captions to your silence.

more_fractured_light_by_thescreamingid

“What is fiction after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming?”

-Jonathan Franzen-

Some Reasons…for Some of Us

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, Writing12 Comments

“I am someone who tries to write, who right now more and more seems to need to write, daily; and who hopes less that the products of that need are lucrative or even liked than simply received, read, seen…why I’m starting to think most people who somehow must write must write.  The need to indite, inscribe – be its fulfillment exhilerating or palliative or, as is more usual, neither – springs from the doubly-bound panic felt by most persons who spend a lot of time up in their own personal heads.  On one side – the side a philosopher’d call ‘radically skeptical’ or ‘solipsistic’ – there’s the feeling that one’s head is, in some sense, the whole world, when the imagination becomes not just a more congenial but a realer environment than the big Exterior of life on earth…The need to get words & voices not only out – outside the sixteen-inch diameter of bone that both births & imprisons them – but also down, trusting them neither to the insusbstantial country of the mind nor to the transient venue of cords & air & ear – a necessary affirmation of an outside, some Exterior one’s written record can not only communicate with but inhabit…the textual urge, the emotional urgency of text as both sign and thing.  The other side of the prenominate 2-bind – … – is why people who write need to do so as a mode of communication.  It’s what an abstractor like Laing calls ‘ontological insecurity’ – why we sign our stuff, impose it on friends, mail it out in brown manila trying to get it printed.  “I EXIST” is the signal that throbs under most voluntary writing – & all good writing…

what must the world be like if language is even to be possible?”

got it, David.  Thank you.

Wobbling

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes2 Comments

What I might name or designate, “the Here.”  The present.  Synonym to “only.”  That there are not points in time.

Perhaps always movement.  Have we uncovered something that is still?  Not that I know of.  But perhaps.  What do we call it?

Rather IS-ness is what I’m referring to.  Things that ARE.  NOT eternally the same.  NOT really able (reliable) to be depended on or assumed.  NOT all-anything, omni-nihilism.  But  movement, active, undergoing change (literally – in way less than fractions of milliseconds – remember, we’re talking about things that ARE – no fractions).  Like a rock, or an ocean, a sense-of-self or single cell.

Truly momentary, present-ly – precisely why the adverb was made – to come closer to experience, reality, in its motion and manner, without fantasizing it into a definable, locatable, or measurable.

While all is wobbly and wobbling – shifting, bouncing, deteriorating, expanding, dancing, vibrating, whatever – once in a while things wobble together (actually, constantly), and when certain things do (oscillation, pulse, a kind of unison rhythm),  moments also occur (to us).

Never resumed, never recalled, never predicted.  Ever occurring.  It is shaky, reality.

N Filbert 2012

Masterful Hejinian on Language

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, Writing6 Comments

“Language discovers what one might know, which in turn is always less than what language might say.  

We encounter some limitations of this relationship early, as children.  Anything with limits can be imagined (correctly or incorrectly) as an object, by analogy with other objects – balls and rivers.  Children objectify language when they render it their plaything, in jokes, puns, and riddles, or in glossolaliac chants and rhymes.  

They discover the words are not equal to the world, that a blur of displacement, a type of parallax, exists in the relation between things (events, ideas, objects) and the words for them – a displacement producing a gap.

Because we have language we find ourselves in a special and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world.

Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual conditions.

Indeed, it nearly is our psychological condition.

This psychology is generated by the struggle between language and that which it claims to depict or express, by our overwhelming experience of the vastness and uncertainty of the world, and by what often seems to be the inadequacy of the imagination that longs to know it – 

Language is one of the principal forms our curiosity takes.

It makes us restless.

As Francis Ponge puts it, ‘Man is a curious body whose center of gravity is not in himself.’

Instead that center of gravity seems to be located in language, by virtue of which we negotiate our mentalities and the world; off-balance, heavy at the mouth, we are pulled forward.

Language itself is never in a state of rest.

Its syntax can be as complex as thought.  And the experience of using it, which includes the experience of understanding it, either as speech or as writing, is inevitably active – both intellectually and emotionally.

The ‘rage to know’ is one expression of the restlessness engendered by language.  ‘As long as man keeps hearing words / He’s sure that there’s a meaning somewhere,’ as Mephistopheles points out in Goethe’s Faust…”

–Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry–