Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0702010113120.2644@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: From film history through codework (notes):
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2007 01:13:30 -0500 (EST)
>From film history through codework (notes): Distinction between Lumiere and Edwardian silents: (L & E) Melies (M) L: distance - veracity indicated by modernist neutral camera. L: clean, framed. E: intimate, communal - veracity disturbed by biased and externally- articulated scenes. E: dirty, unframed. L: telescope, stationary E: eye, saccadic The distinction might not be between M and L but L and E. L: Telephone, modern E: Internet, postmodern M: Cyclorama, mythic, premodern E: paralleling early history of novel, other media. In all of these: What constitutes narrative? To what extent is narrative related to ordinary life? Does narrative always have closure? M: closure. L: continuum E: 'ruptured' events E: as _codework_ - exposing the bones of the apparatus within the production - not artifice (as in Godard) but within the _real._ >From this to codework in general: If codeworks are the problematic of the surface and the bones, aren't these read as archaeological structures - i.e. the need for an accompanying hermeneutics? In other words codework is _always_ a contradiction since it is _always_ within the register of the perceived; therefore a hermeneutics is necessary to reconstitute the depth which is presented indexically only. It's the reading of signs, but the signs are neither graphemic nor mythic - they're procedural within a neutralized and technological chora. How does this relate to the real, everyday life? Argue that the graphemes themselves are the bones - the diacritique of spoken language. The graphemic carries its own mythos, its own procedural. Writing is always already interpretable, which is why that writing which isn't appears uncanny, writing itself out of the abject, but no further. What does it mean that a message is unreadable? Distinguish this from the illegible, which is constituted to some extent by the erasure or ambivalence of signs; here, I want to emphasize a total legibility which nonetheless remains silent. The silence of the unreadable is coextensive with mythos - what is not given up within the register of X, what is suppressed, appears elsewhere, exfoliated, in the form(ation) of narrative. But what happens in codework is different - again, there is legibility and the problematic of readability, but the unreadable is _not_ silent; it (as if it) insists on the reinterpretation of language itself. Codework's neutrality, techne, is codework's refusal of mythos, ideology - instead it remains within the aegis of deconstruction, a skewed deconstruction attempting a reassemblage of the unknown. ==