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<\/p>\nBy Louis Armand.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Robert Smithson, A Heap of Language <\/em>(1966)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n C’est un espace-temps, un son-sens, un \u00e9crit-vu-calcul \u00e9-ni \u00e9 qui se signifie dans son frayage et, simultan \u00e9ment, signifie ses bords infinis, neuve de l’histoire, rives \u00e9parses de l’inconscient. Le vieux Joyce a fait parvenir son Anna Livia jusqu’\u00c3\u00a0 l’oc \u00e9an. H<\/strong>, voil\u00c3\u00a0, c’est un peu d’hydrog\u00c3\u00a8ne pour le monde futur \u00a0: pas une recherche du temps perdu, une irrigation-vibration de milliers de \u00ab \u00a0temps \u00a0 \u00bb, chant \u00e9s, chuchot \u00e9s, cri \u00e9s, nettement et distinctement, une foule de fugues, j’ai envie de dire le feu du repos, l’en-trop.<\/em><\/p>\n \u2014Philippe Sollers[1]<\/a><\/p>\n Recorded in February 1969 and released as a double album the following year, Chicago jazzman Anthony Braxton’s debut, For Alto<\/em>, represented a landmark in the development of free jazz, distinguished by Braxton’s minimalist choice of unaccompanied alto sax with no studio overdubbing. Braxton’s alignment with the contemporary musical avant-garde was clearly signalled by his dedication of one of the album’s tracks to John Cage, whose advocacy of chance compositional procedures and his close association with artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns indicates the kind of aesthetic-critical continuum in which Braxton sought to situate his own work (he would, for example, later record pieces for two pianos, five tubas, four amplified shovels, an orchestra and four slide projectors, even music for four orchestras).<\/p>\n Along with Steve Lacy, Ornette Coleman, John Zorn and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Braxton’s early recordings had a decisive impact on the postmodernist wave of 1970s jazz. The reach of Braxton’s compositions was eclectic, to say the least, embracing both European and African-American traditions, incorporating influences from Cage, Stockhausen, Reich, Glass and Webern, alongside Coltrane, Brubeck, Monk and Albert Ayler. It was an approach geared to generating almost universal antipathy from within the contemporary jazz establishment: they didn’t like the style of his music, his hair, his sweater, or the pipe he smoked. He looked more like a philosopher than a musician, a musicologist more than a jazzman. And when at the end of the sixties he moved to Paris, it was perhaps for these same reasons that Braxton attracted the attention of the b\u00c3\u00aate noir of the French intelligentsia \u2013 a controversial writer still little known at that time in the English-speaking world, but whose interventions (as editor of the highly influential journal Tel Quel<\/em>) would soon have a decisive impact on cultural criticism in the US and elsewhere.<\/p>\n Art Ensemble of Chicago<\/em> with Anthony Braxton & Frank Lowe (New York, 1975)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Philippe Sollers, the writer in question, responded to Braxton’s determined effort at abolishing the artificial distinctions that surrounded musical \u201cgenres.” In an interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Gerard Bourgadier in December 1978,[2]<\/a> Sollers identified Braxton’s \u201csubversive encyclopaedism” as the key to his attraction, in particular the breadth of Braxton’s preoccupation with \u201ccompletely new forms\u2026 which pose the problem of a kind of subjectivity that hasn’t existed before.” This, Sollers argued, placed Braxton in a relationship not only with composers such as Stockhausen, but also writers such as Joyce, since Braxton’s experimentations brought to light \u201cother forms of thought” that are both rigorous and highly elaborated without adhering to an epistemology, articulating instead \u201ca violent desire of a BEING THERE” of a body at the moment it expresses itself. A body, as Julia Kristeva will have written, that is also a text<\/em>. [3]<\/a><\/p>\n Braxton’s time in Paris happened to overlap with a hiatus in the publication of Sollers’s loose \u201ctrilogy” of experimental novels written in the aftermath of the 1968 student uprising \u2013 Nombres, Lois <\/em>and H<\/em>. The latter, arguably the most radical of the three, was composed during Braxton’s first two Paris sojourns, between 1969 and 1971.[4]<\/a> In September ’69, Braxton recorded This Time <\/em>with Leo Smith and Leroy Jenkins at the Paris studios of BYG\/Actuel: the album’s \u201cimploding categories” were regarded by no less than the Situationists as \u201cthe most accurate \u2013 most direct, least theoretic \u2013 expression of May ’68”[5]<\/a> \u2013 a counter-punch to the already banal \u201cspectacle” of capitalist normalisation, as Guy Debord saw it, in which \u201call that was once directly lived has become mere representation.”[6]<\/a> The recording had an important impact on Sollers, too (who at times has aired his affinities with Debord and the Situationists), perhaps even a decisive one with regard to the form his work-in-progress, H<\/em>, would eventually take. In Sollers’s interview with Houdebine and Bourgadier the question of \u201cinfluence” somewhat inevitably arises. Bourgadier notes, \u201cre-reading Lois<\/em>, H<\/em>, Paradis<\/em> one can find correspondences between the evolution of your writing and that of free jazz.” To which Sollers’s replies, \u201cC’est \u00c3\u00a7a\u2026”<\/p>\n The correspondence Bourgadier has in mind is the effect produced by the absence of punctuation in H <\/em>(it’s still present in Lois<\/em>). A comparison is made to Coltrane, whose playing is described by Bourgadier as a \u201ccontinuous flux, without pause\u2026” before going on to note a direct reference to Braxton in Paradis <\/em>(which was being serialised in Tel Quel<\/em> at the time). The idea that an unpunctuated \u201cflow” of text somehow approximates the \u201cflux” of Coltrane’s saxophone solos, or the free form of Braxton’s, is of course trivial \u2013 the absence of punctuation in H <\/em>is only the book’s most obvious characteristic. Sollers himself points to a more syntactical and schematic relationship: the way in which, for example, Braxton’s phrasing <\/em>represents a certain \u201cimmediacy” whereby different modes of repetition<\/em> are used to produce effects of cumulative intensity and drama, out of which some sort of \u201ccode” emerges \u2013 an \u201cabsolutely singular code,” as Sollers says \u2013 like the emissions of an electro-cardio-encephalogram. It’s no accident, either, that H <\/em>begins with an invocation to \u201cthe machine” (but not to any ordinary machine \u2013 for Sollers’s \u201celectro-cardio-encephalogram” is a subject <\/em>machine, a writing <\/em>machine[7]<\/a>: like jazz it produces a \u201cdirect interpellation, a DIRECT appeal” to the necessity of dealing with \u201cwhat can be done symbolically with one’s body” \u2013 by means, we might say, of a certain instrumentation<\/em>).<\/p>\n This echoes a view expressed by Roland Barthes in his 1973 review of H<\/em>, entitled \u201cOver Your Shoulder” \u2013 the fourth of six articles he would eventually publish on Sollers’s work.[8]<\/a> \u201cWriting,” Barthes suggests, \u201c(in total contrast here to \u2018literature’) is the tension of the body trying to produce language which cannot be situated (it is the dream of a degree zero <\/em>of discourse).”[9]<\/a> For Barthes, Sollers’s dispensing with punctuation is not a simple mimesis of the modernist clich \u00e9 of the \u201cstream of consciousness,” rather it marks an insistence upon a non-situated<\/em> status of language. The text, like the body, is articulated by movements, torsions, tensions, moods, rhythms, cadences \u2013 it functions <\/em>in a kind of symbiosis with its own coming apart. And by consequence, it causes a reading that on the one hand constantly intercedes in itself, constantly adjusts, rectifies itself like homoeostatic device; and on the other, accedes <\/em>in itself to what Barthes calls \u201cdifferent rhythms of intelligence.”[10]<\/a><\/p>\n Soller’s notations on Webern for H<\/em>; Braxton’s notations for improvisers, from Composition #108B (1984)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Articulated<\/em> rather than \u201cstructured.” It’s not so much that H <\/em>lacks punctuation, as that what \u201cpunctuates” is both intransitive <\/em>(in the sense of being a textual agency<\/em>) and in a state of constant genesis. This punctuation or its perceived absence becomes a figure <\/em>of \u201ccomprehending” the text, by experiencing it, rather than directing and pre-empting understanding through merely observing it; it dis-objectifies <\/em>itself. It’s in this respect that Sollers’s text most bears comparison to Braxton’s \u201cphrasing,” for example, or what Barthes calls \u201csyntactic movements, scraps of intelligibility, stains of language.” But while Barthes draws a further comparison, to the \u201ccalligraphy” of Jackson Pollock \u2013 perhaps due to the \u201call-over” character of Pollock’s drip paintings and Sollers’s \u201cundifferentiated” textual fields \u2013 a more convincing analogy might be made to Rauschenberg’s combines <\/em>or Roberts Smithson’s sites, non-sites, displacements and \u201cmonuments.” In any case, the point Barthes seeks to make is that structure<\/em>, too, is a kind of rhetorical edifice, and that what we call punctuation is a grammatic formalization of what is in fact a generalized poetics<\/em>. For Sollers, as for Braxton, the punctual <\/em>is a trope \u2013 a mode of articulation: the accumulation, looping, bifurcating, permutation, and \u201call-over” arrangement of phrasing<\/em>. In contrast to which, \u201cthe aim of all structure<\/em>,” as Barthes puts it, \u201cis to constitute a fiction\u2026 a \u2018theoretical ghost.'”[11]<\/a> This fiction sustains the composite fiction of \u201creadability,” \u201ccomprehension,” \u201cunderstanding” \u2013 whereas in fact, readability <\/em> is always a matter of potentiality<\/em>, of the possibility of the text<\/em>, which must, as it were, be \u201crealised,” just as comprehending and understanding, too, remain first and foremost experiential<\/em>, which is to say experimental<\/em>, and not something foreclosed by the promise of a certain \u201clucidity” simply by way of grammatical rectitude.<\/p>\n \u201cStructure,” in this sense, is for Barthes \u201ca little bit like hysteria. If you pay attention to it, it becomes a reality. If you pretend to ignore it, it goes away.” The distinction can be likened to the signifying logic of the Freudian dream work, which is above all \u201cpoetic” (metaphor, metonymy), as opposed to literal\/symbolic. \u201cThere are,” Barthes writes, \u201cin fact two sorts of phenomenon: those which stand up to<\/em> being looked at (the realm of \u2018what is secret’) and those which are produced by<\/em> being looked at (the realm of \u2018what is for show’).”[12]<\/a> The \u201cimage” represented by H<\/em>‘s typography is thus a kind of non-image, an image caught in its own genesis as representation<\/em>: \u201ca whirlwind of language\u2026 organised into a splendid series of irrelevancies.” Or, to return to Sollers’s metaphor of the electro-cardio-encephalogram, it is \u201ca moving, electrified screen, on which no representation stands out\u2026”[13]<\/a><\/p>\n If H <\/em>is a type of subject machine this is precisely because it is a machine that produces a generalised objectlessness<\/em>. (It writes <\/em>in the intransitive sense Barthes fixes upon in his well-known essay.) It isn’t so much a question of the ontological status of the \u201ctext” (viz Andr \u00e9 Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image, from a decade previous),[14]<\/a> as of its genesis, its articulation<\/em> \u2013 what Donald Judd referred to laconically as \u201cone thing after another” emptied of \u201crationalism” and resistant to the impulse to organise<\/em> \u201cwhat seems on the surface merely an incoherent array of phenomena.”[15]<\/a> Obvious analogies can again be made the work of Rauschenberg, as well as to Duchamp and the sculptor Jean Tingely, whose self-constructing, self-destroying machines (such as \u201cHomage to New York” [7 March 1960]) seem to parallel Sollers’s sardonic, sarcastic, satirical \u201cmachines” in that they \u201cproduce” nothing other than their own non-production (they do not contribute work <\/em>to the maintenance of \u201cthe spectacle”). Anti-allegorical, they \u201ccommunicate” nothing. Or more precisely, they display a radically entropic <\/em>orientation. Here is Sollers in the opening passage of H<\/em>:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ‘who says hello the machine with its bandy legs its deformed side cata bases its stiff press buttons tonic accents outside the stanza she dreamed tonight that I was throwing a ball very high and very far it’s never gonna stop it lights up passing the hoops meridians arranged rounder when it traverses them and here’s the bomb that tumbles back’<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Twelve pages further we find:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ‘my idea of control by spontaneous repression it only takes the state to gobble itself up in the viscera that it be here patient at the time triangle of the stacked pyramid the block machine works shit that’s not gonna happen any time soon that we’ll be able to twist our mess acutely ourselves year by year it’s like the return of jesus’<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sollers’s \u201cidea of control by spontaneous repression” (an echo of the Freudian \u201creturn of the [sainted] repressed”), introduces into writing an elemental<\/em> constraint that does not <\/em>emanate from an \u201cabstract model through which to depict the organisation of matter.”[16]<\/a> Its subversion of Cartesian \u201csubjectivity” is likewise a subversion of what, to paraphrase Duchamp, we might call \u201cretinal” prose: H <\/em>is not a vehicle <\/em>of expression \u2013 its syntax interferes<\/em> with what Barthes calls the hierarchical systems at work in sentence-formation which might otherwise restore the consensual hallucination of \u201csubjective expression” or \u201ccommunicated sense”[17]<\/a>: \u201cforce them,” it incites, \u201cto spit the bite on the well-known relations language machine.”[18]<\/a> This is what Barthes means, vis-\u00c3\u00a0-vis Sollers, by \u201cthe radical non-expressivity of textual writing<\/em>.” Sollers:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ‘the shiny negative beginning of the division let’s go the night’ll be long the lights’re going out we break the terror the machinery type you’ll splash about in the bidet they’ve done you in ama ama fuck<\/em> quod vis the only forbidden thing is to consume the sexual difference raw and without knowing anything smash the glass one touches at the source at the engulfing of the rowers you understand it’s there the contradiction becomes the engine species’[19]<\/a><\/p>\n A page from the manuscript of Lois <\/em>(1972)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sollers’s \u201cengine species” is what we might call this subject in writing<\/em>, this constellated ensemble of readymades that Todorov, already in 1966, described as a \u201cpattern of events<\/em>” as against a \u201cpsychology.” (And it is perhaps in this sense, after all, that we should understand Harold Rosenberg’s frequently misconstrued appeal to painting [for which we may substitute \u201cwriting”] as event<\/em>, as an inscription<\/em> of \u201csubjectivity,” as an action<\/em>.) What we encounter in Sollers’s text, then, is the very contrary of an organisation scheme<\/em>; instead we are presented with what, in an obvious provocation to Structuralism, could be called an \u201corganisational tropism<\/em>.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ‘life wraps death death hatches life I’m a picture i’m a rug i’m a machine and the picture of the machine and the machination of the picture’[20]<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n H<\/em> is a text that, like Duchamp, like Cage and Rauschenberg, like Braxton, stakes everything, in a manner of speaking, on the severance of \u201cmeaning” from the \u201clegitimising claims” both of the ideology of form (art\/music\/literature) and of a \u201cprivate self.”[21]<\/a> The \u201cwork” represents <\/em>a nexus of contingencies, significations that, as Merleau-Ponty says, are \u201cparallel in depth.”[22]<\/a> Its readymade \u201cterms” arise tropically from \u201cdifferences” (Sollers’s \u201ccontradictions”) which are \u201clike” machines set into motion, the generators of forms not despite but because <\/em>of their constitutive entropy. Sollers:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ‘if assemblage is fortuitous the exit doesn’t end up the same depending on the context depending on whether the machine-operator is close enough to natural elements depending on whether he’s on the contrary in industrial commercial entanglement\u2026’<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In his 1966 article for Artforum<\/em>, \u201cEntropy and the New Monuments,” Robert Smithson wrote:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ‘Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content. Problems are unnecessary because problems represent values that create the illusion of purpose. The problem of \u201cform vs. content,” for example, leads to illusionistic dialectics that become, at best, formalist reactions against content. Reaction follows action, till finally the artist gets \u201ctired” and settles for a monumental inaction.’[23]<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Smithson \u2013 responding to the new minimalist sculpture being produced at that time by Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Sol Le Witt and Dan Flavin \u2013 points to what he calls a \u201chyper-prosaism” rooted in the materiality of the work itself and not in any object or mode of depiction<\/em>. These \u201cprimary structures” throw into heightened contrast the \u201clugubrious complexity” of Debord’s society of the spectacle, with its all-encompassing \u201cconsumer oblivion,” giving rise, for Smithson, to a \u201cnew consciousness of the vapid and the dull.” As Warhol had earlier pointed out, the artefacts of consumerism, while designed to convey the message of their own uniqueness, are ostensibly <\/em>the same thing repeated over and over. This dictum applies to all such artefacts, including literary artefacts, which are no less a product of \u201cspectacularism” than anything else. For Warhol, the response was to pursue an aesthetics and a mode of production not ostensibly <\/em>the same, but exactly <\/em>the same (while still incorporating chance deviations, etc.).<\/p>\n Robert Smithson, Monuments of Passaic <\/em>(1967)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Smithson’s hyper-prosaism \u2013 likewise focused on the hidden, entropic mechanics of spectacle \u2013 explored the monumentality of \u201cdecay.” Arguing that entropy was the true defining characteristic of modernity, Smithson reversed the conventional notion of \u201cdecay” as a deviation from \u201cstructure,” advancing the contrary view that entropy is in fact the sole constant generative <\/em>condition of whatever can be called \u201cform.” The \u201cnew monuments,” exemplified for Smithson by the industrial \u201cruins” of Passaic, New Jersey, are \u201cthe opposite of the \u2018romantic ruin'” because they don’t fall <\/em>into ruin after <\/em>they are built, but rather rise <\/em>into ruin before <\/em>they are built. Echoes of this deconstructed Romanticism find their way into H<\/em>, which itself operates as a kind of monument to linguistic entropy. Sollers:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ‘to make a corolla for the smoking chimney stifle the screams of the workers the noise of the ovens cisterns milling machines balers turning machines chains trolleys guns hammers all in all a poetic thought bourgeoisie dreaming in acid cut fingers laughter sobbing and the women near the greenhouses stretched-out from the other side of proletarian cloakrooms doubtless excited idle by the boring voices last days of the empire waste of sleep we take the coffee on the background of machines in the shade of young blooming girls along the mountain ranges’[24]<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n For Sollers, the apparent depletion <\/em>of meaning is likewise refigured in the \u201chyper-prosaism” of socalled expressive (e.g. novelistic) forms. H <\/em>\u201cexemplifies” not the decay <\/em>of meaning, sense, readability, but precisely the contrary \u2013 that, as cyberneticists had revealed already in the 1940s, \u201cthe information in any fact is in inverse proportion to its probability\u2026” Vast swathes of socalled realism were, in effect, redundant, empty, products of a \u201cspectacular” lugubriosity shoring up its ruin. Like Smithson, Sollers’s \u201cretrieval of obsolescence,”[25]<\/a> so to speak, hinges on an \u201centropy made visible.” The novelistic <\/em>\u201cform” becomes a type of \u201canarchitecture”[26]<\/a> \u2013 a compound<\/em>, in fact, <\/em>an agglutination<\/em> at the limits of signifiability, like Roquintin’s pebble on the beach, lathed by an impelling senselessness. Against the oceanic sublime of the Romantics, such \u201cmonuments” appear to us as paradoxical incidents \u2013 the attestations of a contingent being <\/em>that is both punctual <\/em>and radically anachronistic<\/em>. Nothing, we realise, has been summed up and yet everything remains at stake<\/em> and in play<\/em>. It is as if, in the work of Braxton, Sollers, Smithson, what is to be arrived at is not some horizon of recuperated sense, but \u201cmerely” the next wavefall. Or as Smithson writes: \u201cInstead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.”<\/p>\n NOTES<\/strong><\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Philippe Sollers, \u201cA propos de l’avant-garde,” Interview with Marc Devade in Peinture, cahiers th \u00e9oriques<\/em> 6\/7 (Spring 1973).<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Published in Tel Quel<\/em> 80 (Summer, 1979): 10-37.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Julia Kristeva, \u201cNovel as Polylogue,” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art<\/em>, ed. L.S. Roudiez, trans. T. Gora, A. Jardine and L.S. Roudiez (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980) 163: \u201cThis heterogeneous object is of course a body that invites me to identify with it […] and immediately forbids any identification; it is not me, it is a non-me in me, beside me, outside of me, where the me becomes lost. This heterogeneous object is a body, because it is a text<\/em>.”<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> In 1970 Braxton, perhaps emulating Marcel Duchamp, briefly gave up music upon returning to the US and worked as a chess hustler in New York’s Washington Square Park while living in the apartment of Ornette Coleman.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Ben Watson, Honesty is Explosive: Selected Music Journalism<\/em>, ed. W.C. Bamberger (London: Borgo, 2010) 105 (on Kevin Norton, For Guy Debord (In Nine Events), <\/em>Barking Hoop BKH001 CD).<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle<\/em>, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, [1967] 1995).<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Philippe Sollers, H<\/em>, trans. Veronika Stankiovansk\u00c3\u00a1 and David Vichnar (London: Equus, 2014) 56.<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> First published in Critique <\/em>318 (November 1973); rpr. in Roland Barthes, Sollers Ecrivain <\/em>(Paris: Seuil, 1979); English translation by Philip Thody in Writer Sollers <\/em>(London: Athlone, 1987).<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> Barthes, \u201cOver Your Shoulder,” Writer Sollers<\/em>, 82.<\/p>\n [10]<\/a> Barthes, \u201cOver Your Shoulder,” 89.<\/p>\n [11]<\/a> Barthes, \u201cOver Your Shoulder,” 89 \u2013 my emphasis.<\/p>\n [12]<\/a> Barthes, \u201cOver Your Shoulder,” 89 \u2013 my emphasis.<\/p>\n [13]<\/a> Barthes, \u201cOver Your Shoulder,” 81; 75.<\/p>\n [14]<\/a> Andr \u00e9 Bazin, \u201cOntologie de L’Image Photographique,” Qu’est-ce que le cin \u00e9ma?<\/em> vol 1: Ontologie et langage (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1958).<\/p>\n [15]<\/a> Rosalind Krauss, \u201cThe Double Negative: A New Syntax for Sculpture,” Passages in Modern Sculpture <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977) 245.<\/p>\n [16]<\/a> Krauss, \u201cThe Double Negative,” 245.<\/p>\n [17]<\/a> That \u201cinfinite weaving of narcissisms” \u2013 Philippe Sollers, Femmes<\/em> (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), loosely quoting from Julia Kristeva’s essay \u201cNovel as Polylogue” (originally published in Tel Quel <\/em>57 [1974]).<\/p>\n [18]<\/a> Sollers, H<\/em>, 106.<\/p>\n [19]<\/a> Sollers, H<\/em>, 29.<\/p>\n [20]<\/a> Sollers, H<\/em>, 35.<\/p>\n [21]<\/a> Krauss, \u201cThe Double Negative,” 226.<\/p>\n [22]<\/a> Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception<\/em>, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962) xii.<\/p>\n [23]<\/a> Robert Smithson, \u201cEntropy and the New Monuments,” Artforum<\/em> (June 1966): 26.<\/p>\n [24]<\/a> Sollers, H<\/em>, 127.<\/p>\n [25]<\/a> See Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism <\/em>(London: Thames and Hudson, 2004) 509.<\/p>\n [26]<\/a> A term used by Gordon Matta-Clarke.<\/p>\n ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong><\/p>\n Louis Armand<\/strong> is the author of eight novels, including The Combinations<\/a><\/em> (2016), Cairo<\/em> (2014), and Breakfast at Midnight<\/a><\/em> (2012). In addition, he has published ten collections of poetry \u2013 most recently, East Broadway Rundown<\/em> (2015) & The Rube Goldberg Variations<\/em> (2015) \u2013 & is the author of Videology<\/em> (2015) & The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture after the Avantgarde<\/em> (2013). He lives in Prague.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cStructure,\u201d\u009d in this sense, is for Barthes \u201ca little bit like hysteria. If you pay attention to it, it becomes a reality. If you pretend to ignore it, it goes away.\u201d\u009d The distinction can be likened to the signifying logic of the Freudian dream work, which is above all \u201cpoetic\u201d\u009d (metaphor, metonymy), as opposed to literal\/symbolic. \u201cThere are,\u201d\u009d Barthes writes, \u201cin fact two sorts of phenomenon: those which stand up to being looked at (the realm of \u2018what is secret’) and those which are produced by being looked at (the realm of \u2018what is for show’).\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n Louis Armand<\/strong> on the influence of free jazz on cultural criticism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":91613,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91609"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91617,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91609\/revisions\/91617"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Untitled2-300x224.png\")
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