Thursday, May 16, 2013

Post-Structuralism

I'm reading This Is Not A Pipe in preparation for my review of S/Z in July. I'm also reading and reviewing Meteoric Flowers next month and there is a sense that these texts are interconnected. The threads curve out from the images in the texts to form a structure that is anti-formal. A post-structure that rejects formal aesthetics in an attempt to move beyond "words and things" or rather to counter the way in which language itself becomes conflated with the ideas it seeks to represent. This is the dominant idea within The Order of Things--linguistic orders construct reality and become static things rather than fluid ideas. This is writing as noun rather than verb. The IS rather than is-ing.

I'd rather think of writing as a verb. I think this helps us to remember that all writing, all language use, is representational. It is a thing but it is also a doing. As my dear friend said to me, "an old antagonism exists between those who assign priority to nouns and those who assign priority to verbs; nouns = gods, verbs = tricksters..."

Let's be tricksters.


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