Alphabet
Consider the letters of the alphabet and all of their various phonetic interpretations. Each individual character has its own history, its own stages of evolution, and its own place among the others. Some stand alone and others are hopelessly paired. Some are virtually unemployed while others are over-worked and abused. Consider the edifying effect of capitalization or the finality of a period--the non-committal dash--or the apostrophe's possessiveness. Consider what a book actually is: a bound collection of pagesendowed with a non-repeated series of charactersprinted in black ink, pages that are basically indistinguishable from a distance--indecipherable smears of black on white--no more enlightening from five feet away than the bar code on a package of frozen spinach in the grocery storecheckout. They would be worthless were they never examined closely.
The flâneur would say the same of the people and things that fill the citythrough which he walks. The morphic field of his external world is also a text worthy of close attention--worthy of reading. Each specific place and time producs its own temporary hieroglyphicconstellations that may or may not go unread by those who pass through it, by those who comprise it. The characters that make up these figurative phrases in "the drama of the world"--whether they be the towering visage of a skyscraper, a frivolous plume in a woman's hat, or a watercolor painting in a storefront window--are as substantial as anything one could ever close between the covers of a book, yet they are there regardless, a text to be read--a language to be deciphered. Each glossy street sign or gnarled oak tree, the glaring traffic signals at every intersection in town, each sparkling piece of jewelry waiting in its velvety nest to be sold, the propaganda-packed political posters in the metro stations, every abandoned tractor in the fields, each bored mid-day prostituteor smart-mouthed panini vendor, the crumpled day-old newspapers and gawking tourists, they are all part of a text: four-dimensional ABC's that await the myth-molding power of the astronomer's dot-connecting pen. Those who are avid readers of the world have gone by various names--names composed of rearrangeable lettersof various alphabets.
Consider the Letter people.
Think of filing systems in computer programs--all done alphabetically in keywords (of course, that is really just one option. You can choose to organize by many other attributes, file size, date of last modification, etc. etc...but this site is currently organized alphabetically--why? because that's the easiest thing...--sure, the order is arbitrary to a degree, but it still begs a hierarchical mode of engagement, as in beginning, middle, end--alpha-beta (is there a more hierarchical arrangement than that...the alpha male...the beta female...). The other thing that alphabetical filing systems do is require a one-word title of some kind...as can be seen in this particular site and the way it is arranged. This keeps the possibilities for spidering to a minimum. We can navigate between the keywords of various definitions of that title--instead of between different concepts...like there is a difference.
Here we also need an alphabetical directory for the dissertation. (See toolbar to your left).
What does this do? Simplification? ArbitraryFilters? Yet, it is how we are organized too--Last name, first initial.....anyway...
ANNOTATIONS:
The flâneur would say the same of the people and things that fill the citythrough which he walks. The morphic field of his external world is also a text worthy of close attention--worthy of reading. Each specific place and time producs its own temporary hieroglyphicconstellations that may or may not go unread by those who pass through it, by those who comprise it. The characters that make up these figurative phrases in "the drama of the world"--whether they be the towering visage of a skyscraper, a frivolous plume in a woman's hat, or a watercolor painting in a storefront window--are as substantial as anything one could ever close between the covers of a book, yet they are there regardless, a text to be read--a language to be deciphered. Each glossy street sign or gnarled oak tree, the glaring traffic signals at every intersection in town, each sparkling piece of jewelry waiting in its velvety nest to be sold, the propaganda-packed political posters in the metro stations, every abandoned tractor in the fields, each bored mid-day prostituteor smart-mouthed panini vendor, the crumpled day-old newspapers and gawking tourists, they are all part of a text: four-dimensional ABC's that await the myth-molding power of the astronomer's dot-connecting pen. Those who are avid readers of the world have gone by various names--names composed of rearrangeable lettersof various alphabets.
Anatole France's The Garden of Epicurus: Chapter titled "How I Discoursed one night with an appariation on the first origins of the alphabet" (Anatole France, The Garden of Epicurus, page 137-148):
Yet consider Zukofsky's "A"--or maybe not. Consider the Letter people.
Think of filing systems in computer programs--all done alphabetically in keywords (of course, that is really just one option. You can choose to organize by many other attributes, file size, date of last modification, etc. etc...but this site is currently organized alphabetically--why? because that's the easiest thing...--sure, the order is arbitrary to a degree, but it still begs a hierarchical mode of engagement, as in beginning, middle, end--alpha-beta (is there a more hierarchical arrangement than that...the alpha male...the beta female...). The other thing that alphabetical filing systems do is require a one-word title of some kind...as can be seen in this particular site and the way it is arranged. This keeps the possibilities for spidering to a minimum. We can navigate between the keywords of various definitions of that title--instead of between different concepts...like there is a difference.
Here we also need an alphabetical directory for the dissertation. (See toolbar to your left).
What does this do? Simplification? ArbitraryFilters? Yet, it is how we are organized too--Last name, first initial.....anyway...
ANNOTATIONS:
Artaud, a surrealistwriter of the early twentieth century
chose to organize his Alphabet of Cruelty alphabetically because it
is an arbitrary means of ordering unrelated things. FIND EXAMPLE
"In A Lover's
Discourse Roland Barthes justifies his choice of (137) an alphabetical
order in the following terms: 'to discourage the temptation of meaning, it was
necessary to choose an absolutely insignificant order,' that is to
say, neither an intended order, nor one of pure chance,
but a perfectly conventional order. For 'we must not,' he writes, citing a mathematician, 'underestimate the
power of chance to engender monsters,' that
is, logical sequences -- meaning." (Baudrllard Seduction 137-138)
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