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I dream of GENiEmorphEMEology I: DERRIDA the colonel linguist: gene- SSES ' ANALogies ' RES & IUS SECRETing from CIXOUS' ARChive

May be I should eXplain meself | mEmOTHER says she DOesN'T read meME when I get like this | may being why I get like this | so Mothers of the worLd caN'T underSt.AND | like tHere  '  when I say 'Mother' I don’t mean my mother  but ALL mothers | o I could’ve said MOTHers if I wanted to strESS the CREPUSCULAR nature [ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Latin crepusculum ‘twilight’ + -ar 1] | |   I've alWAYs wanted to live in a place with a STOOP   ' not that I'd stoop to use it  but b'cause I dig the word STOOP & just want to say "We live in a place with a stoop" for no particular reason other than to say the words | | |    SUMtimes yoU just need to SURface for air | to towel off & REplay murky vIDEo of your deep SEA diving exploits ' to step out of the ScEnE & see what it is you are doing ' as seen from the EXT.ernal ' fumbling aRound down for to SEA | wHere yoU are go iNg   in this zzzone of perPETual twilight | STOP | stop to think abOUT why you say  the things you say   in the way you say it | the FIrST thing that popped into my bRAIN this morning were the words “I came on her face” | not the actION of it   but the WORDs | obvIOUsly a LOaded SENTENCE | most people would probablimMEDIATEly conJURE a bad VISual & regard it with dis taste o if they took PLEASurE from it ' it's in a dirty o pornoGRAPHIC way | but think about the WORDs: I CAME ON HER FACE | an orgasm could be a  rich OReCHASM with a sLight shift in your berrain: 1. you're COMing on her face ' not GOing | GOING on her face would NOT be a good thing | GOing is sumthing done in a toilet | you GO piss | GOing implies you are moving Away | COMing IMPlies you were INvited | that you were aWAY from sumwhere & reTURNing ' preSUMablY home | 'LET THE RIGHT ONE IN' is a good way of PUTTing IT | 2. if something 'hits you in the face' it IMplies a SUDden realization ' w/out explanation | the face is the interFACE be tween an IndIvIdual & REALity | it's the brrred TAiLLE you disPLAY to the world | saying you want to 'come on someone's face' should be an enDEARing & thoughtful thing to say | but 'BeaUTy is in the eYe of the beHOLDer' | 'it takes 2 to tango' ETC. | if you thINK it's dirtY then cleanSE yoUr MINeD w/tHis | | |

These are the TYPEs of thinGs I thinK a bout  when I think a bout lanGUAGE | LANguage as a living ORGAniSM '  as memetic code | I don't read a lot of LITerary CRITicism ' but this sort of deCONSTRUCTionIST mindSET got me to reading   sum Jacques DERRIDA '   most SPECIfically: Geneses, Genealogies, Genres & Genius: The secrets of the archive | | |

Not only did reading G ' G ' G & G arcHIVE SECRETs make me want to read Hélène Cixous ' whose literary GENome Derrida LITerally maps out comPLETEly ' but it made me want to kNow French | you miss out  on a lot of the innuendos of linguage re:ading translations | with surgical precision  DERRIDA diSSects CIXOUS ' her arcHIVE o library as a wHOLE ' specific books ' passages ' sentences ' down to the morpheme level & it's relation to the French linGUAGe | | |

Jacques Derrida: Gen Archive

In other words ' Derrida comes all over her face ' smears it on a slide & puts it under a microSCOPE:

"... in the toss, the uncertain toss of the dice, namely the idea of the event, of the arrivingness of whatever or whoever arrives, of the other as that which happens, an idea forever indissociable from the experience in the course of which the the dice are tossed. But, on the other hand, this powerful formalising of the 'jet', which encompasses the greatest generality of the Cixous library, which forms her element in the sense of general of general 'milieu', is also strewn about like an atomic particle, an all but insignificant phoneme or grapheme, as element, here in the sense of the atomists' stoikheion, in the sense of the letter of the minimal composition of letters in the syllable, words or word fragment. ...   This 'jet' (that one can only read, for it is unpronounceable, between 'jet'' and 'je t'') is not only the jet or the genius of the writing; it is the double element of the corpus, its element as a theory of sets, set theory or jet theory, but also an atomic element, a sort of genetic cell or link in the chain of DNA, one of the smallest possible writing particles, but also a litiger capable of biting on everything, of swallowing the whole, a smaller bigger than the biggest. ..."

We're not just talking HERe a bout face & words & grammar & syntax & etymology ' but also it's aboutting USagE: the SUMmatION of all conTEXTual EVEnts pre ceding it's use | the bagguage of a par tic ular word o phrase ' like 'COME ON HER FACE' is daunting & forEVEr MOUNTing  w/ each USE | the word BUSH ' has been fucked & plastered all over the worLd since MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS un til we can no longer BEAR o reCOGnize it's true memeaning | the bird in the bush is forEVEr shifting ' morPHing | a tongue is a living ORGANism | not a tongue depressed by a tongue depressor but a kernel ' lingual tongue | if a WORlD is used too MUlCH w/out thinking it dWINDles & dies | it loses it's meaning | we need to continuously keep pumping words with blood to keep them alive | we need to take the words back that have been misUSED & abUSED | | these aren't things Derrida says ' but in his bramblings on Cixous he made me think n this way | | |     The source of the FOuNTain of Derrida's muse Cixous' library are her dREAMs | she writes right when she WAKEs up & is upright:

"This, while miraculously keeping the thread of the dream going (this, for me, is the miracle), the gift of the writing, nonetheless cuts it off instantly and knowingly transfigures all the givens, taking into account, so as to incorporate as well as surpass them, all the resources of a vast literary experience, an incomparable science of the language, of the thousand and one libraries of universal literature so as to create events totally without precedent, and without imitators, no schools possible, there where, as I shall show in a moment, the genius consists precisely in making the work come, giving it room, giving, period, giving birth to it as event, paradoxically breaking with all genealogy, genesis and genre.”

DERRIDA on CIXOUS ' MOUNTing on her liberry ' is inSPIREng to say the lEast | not only does he underSTAND the 10,000 meter VU of her library ' but he dis sects down to the mole cular le vel in a way that in & of it self be comes the art:

"I am reminding you of the dream's delicate work; first it slips the invisible laser scalpel between the letters, t, u, t'es eu, tu {you've been had} next between the signifieds Siamese twinned by homonymy: tu es tu {you are you} that's why, étant tu {being you/having remained silent} tu ne peux plus te taire {you can no longer remain silent}. As for the bistouri {scalpel}, il bisse tout ris {repeats, echoes, all laughter}.”

It doesn't eVen mather whetter you've read Cixous | she just hap pens to be the arbitrary literary library that Derrida maps completely in G ' G ' G & G arcHIVE SECRETs | per haps she's the chosen one be cause Derrida could relate to her ' both BEing French Jews born in Algeria | sharing genetic code | |     in my REtiCiENT PONDerings of LANguage I've considered SCALAbility & inFLUENCEy | tHere are almost 7000 languages in the WORlD | Mandarin tops the list at almost a billion | sum 333 million speak English | sum 77 million speak French | there are a few dozen languages with 1 speaker & many languages go eXtinct EVERy year not unlike animal species | sad | while you might think it's best to write in English o Mandarin on a count of MARket share ' consider the number of books in that language to choose from | if you wrote a book in SQUAMISH there'd only be 15 people capable of reading it | but there's only so many books they'd have to read & you'd probably intimately know all 15 so probably all of them would likely read & it would mean so much more ' | the more its spoken the more a language is dilooted | any word strings Chaucer o shakeSPEARe spat from their lingual vaCUUM at a canvas stuck | words have since globbed & acCUMmutilated on every living and nonliving surFACE billboard|magaZINE|taxi|webspace|consumerproduct all garbled to gether to CRAP | English is the CHEATAH ' it's reached capacity for its carved niche but is a dying bREAD now lacking geneTIC diVERSity | its FUR code unraveling under the microscope & paparazzzi & MFAs ' self-inspecting leading to it's own demise | hence the need for GENRE and SUB-genre | to fjorge a head we need to cross-pollinate & induce mutations ' CULL ' selectively deconstruct to REbuild on the SHoUlDERS ' perpetually ' keep English rolling a stoned juggerNAUT gathering sum shedding sum | E.G. Nick Cave's first album FROM HER TO ETERNITY | the beauty in simply removing an 'E' | |   CERTES ' certainly ' is an anagram for SECRET | A GAR MAN is an anagram for ANAGRAM | AMIGO REDEFINE is an anagram for I DREAM OF GENIE | this is not just about writers but READERS ' deCODERS | WORDs are a gift ' per Derrida:

"A gift that knows what it is giving to someone who knows what it is he is receiving is not a gift. It repossess itself and cancels itself out in awareness and in gratitude, in the symbol, the contract, economic circulation, in the symbolic. Silent genius {le génie qui est tu} surpasses both the symbolic and the imaginary, it grapples with the impossible. Genius gives without knowing it, beyond knowledge, beyond the awareness of what it gives and of the fact, of the performative event that constitutes the gift, if there is one. And those who receive from him/it (individuals or institutions) do not know, must not know what it is they are receiving ..."

You don't even NEED to reed Cixous to get her ' but I'm dying to kNOW her | it's more a bout what Derrida unCOVERs in her CoNT EXtS ' what it does ' did to him | she was his ARChival MUSE ummm ' his lingual MAP ping deFIBrillator | this is sumthing Cixous herSELF might say ' 'her' BEing the suMMM of her biFURcating bits:

"Why have I never tossed out 'the incriminating bits'? I never set foot in either the cellar or the attic, I fear the cardboard boxes, the crates, the envelopes, the compact allegorical beasts big as a good-sized crayfish or an elongated tortoise, belly clad in white skull followed by telephone antennae, old delayed-action suitcases that for all your life like portable coffins ..."

What is lost in translation is a wHOLE NEiTHER story | like genes ' lanGUAGE can be translated but subTEXT of lanGUAGE is lost & only meaning remains ' the INtent not the UNinTENTional bytes | constituent MORphemes and GRAphemes are rejiggered & the mast shifted into a new organismeaning | i've got mORE to mine about L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E & deconstructionism & synTAX in different conTEXTes but this is all I can muster in one sitting | MORE TO COME ...

 

(c) 2009 Derek White

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