Stuff Recalled: Through Unnatural Translation
2011
A re-composition of Proust
Published by 15 shudders
Format: 19.5 x13 cm, 80 pages
Printing: Riso, black & white, perfect binding
My pathology as a reader led me to consider the tension between proliferation and disappearance. That is, repetition. To explore how digital technologies have changed radically our practices of viewing, reading, writing, and the economies of attention. To recognize our profound perceptual crisis – prefigured by Proust – as one that perpetuates a haunted state of unknowing, even as it comes to seem like possession. To wonder that neurotic explanation has allowed prosody to assert itself to an unnatural degree. Stuff Recalled is a response, a bid for meaning, to avoid dissipation.
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Notes:
This is an attempt to engage both the mind and the eye through a re-compositional device that is both procedural and impressionistic. As a Cyborg-like hybrid of machine and organism – form and content, fiction and reality – it is expressive of conjunction, rather than the traditional disjunctions of the avant-garde. As ‘stuff’ evokes both the material and the immaterial, the text is constituted by its preterition – by what is left. It is radically incomplete. In the subtitle, Through Unnatural Translation, the zig-zag between heirarchies of knowledge, of nature and technology, supports Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice: her criticism of the ‘naturalisation’ of poetic language, which attempts to ‘convert all verbal organisation into extended meaning – to transform pattern into theme.’ Since she outlined this theory we have undergone (and are living through) a profound perceptual crisis. One prefigured by Proust. One that – more than ever – perpetuates a haunted state of unknowing, even as it comes to seem like possession.
Wittgenstein’s aphorism could now be rewritten to resemble a dictum from some IT bible: “Do not forget that [data], even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.” Data is in the game of creating data. Digital technologies have changed radically our practices of viewing, reading, writing, and the ‘economies of attention’. We are carried away on a tsunami of data streams, and the effect on the eyes and mind, the imprint on human perception, demands a radical rethinking of the relationship between pattern and theme, between form and content. Where and how do we create and establish meaning – or sense and nonsense? Like the Internet, 24-hour news, multiplying channels, and incontinent academe, amongst other data deluges, Stuff Recalled is a story that is constantly attempting to form itself, but always points elsewhere. In this perpetual state of emergence it’s meaning is fugitive. So there it is. If the aesthetic of the present is one of tension between proliferation and disappearance, one of repetition, then (through attempts to subdue it) prosody has asserted itself to an unnatural degree. And here I am. Attempting to use the syntax of the Internet to construct an accelerated model of subjectivity, a conceptual resemblance in translation, an assertion of form – not at the expense of content, but with it. It is a frantic bid for reason, to avoid dissipation. Re-composition as explanation, as Gertrude Stein or Oulipo might have had it.
