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Brathwaite

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MR(2), Kamau Brathwaite. 268-9.

If the break with the star could be accomplished in the manner of an event — if we could (if only through the violence that operates in our bruised space), depart from the cosmic order (the world), where whatever the visible disorder, order always dominates — still, the thought of the disaster, in its adjourned imminence, would lend itself to an experience of discovery whereby we could only be recuperated, not exposed to that which escapes in motionless flight, is separate from the living and from the dying and is no experience, but outside the realm of phenomena. (Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster)

The semiotic’s breach of the symbolic in so-called poetic practice can probably be ascribed to the very unstable yet forceful positing of the thetic…When [the thetic phase of the signifying process is obstructed or resisted by problems…these problems take the place of the symbolic and] give rise to “fantasies”; more importantly, they attempt to dissolve the first social censorship — the bar between signifier and signified — and, simultaneously, the first guarantee of the subject’s position — signification, then meaning (the sentence and its syntax). Language thus tends to be drawn out of its symbolic function (sign-syntax) and is opened out within a semiotic articulation: with a material support such as the voice, the semiotic network gives “music” to literature…we shall content that it is the thetic, and not fetishism, that is inherent in every cultural production, because fetishism is a displacement of the thetic onto the realm of the drives. The instinctual chora articulates facilitations and stases, but fetishism is a telescoping of the symbolic’s characteristic thetic moment and of one of those instinctually invested stases (bodies, parts of bodies, orifices, containing objects, and so forth). This stasis thus becomes the ersatz of the sign. Fetishism is a stasis that acts as a thesis…the text signifies the un-signifying (the semiotic), which ignores meaning and operates before meaning or despite it. Therefore it cannot be said that everything signifies, nor that everything is “mechanistic.” In opposition to such dichotomies, whether “materialis” or “metaphysical,” the text offers itself as the dialectic of two heterogeneous operations that are, reciprocally and inseparably, preconditions for each other…language is simultanesously “analog” and “digital” [and] it is, above all, a doubly articulated system (signifier and signified), which is precisely what distinguishes it from codes. We therefore maintain that what we call the semiotic can be described as both analog and digital: the functioning of the semiotic chora is made up of continuities that are segmented in order to organize a digital system as the chora’s guarantee of survival (just as digitality is the means of survival both for the living cell and society); the stases marked by the facilitation of the drives are the discrete elements in this digital system, indispensable for maintaining the semiotic chora…Through its thetic, altering aspect, the signifier represents the subject — not the thetic ego but the very process by which it is posited…The thetic — that crucial place on the basis of which the human being constitutes himself as signifying and/or social — is the very place textual experience aims toward. In this sense, textual experience represents one of the most daring explorations the subject can allow himself, one that delves into his constitutive process. But at the same time and as a result, textual experience reaches the very foundation of the social — that which is exploited by sociality but which elaborates and can go beyond it, either destroying or transforming it. (Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 63-7.) Bold Mine.

…signatures themselves, in the Derridean sense, regain the meaning lost to proper names through the endless enmeshment of the signifier in its network of substitutions and differences…[the application a signature technique] to [one’s own signature] calls attention to the recombinatory network of substitutions and differences which threathen the proper name is what Derrida termed “Dissemination”: the ways in which the trace of the signifier moves in order to generate and multiply meaning, always contingent and unstable, because the same movement in turn leads back to…”the force and form of its disarrangement puncturing the semantic horizon” of any text. Uncontrollable and contingent chance, like the proximity of a name to some other common noun, announces the generating florescence and disintegration that define Derridean dissemination and that, for Derrida, defines the name: “the structure of the proper name sets this process (of dissemination) in motion. That’s what a proper name is for]. (Derrida qtd. in Craig Dworkin, Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality, 64).