Saturday, March 4, 2023

Federico Federici on Asemics / EZE, 2023

 

Federico Federici on Asemics




Asemic writing points to a gradual weakening of the correlation between sign and meaning or, in the language of architecture and biology, to the confutation of the form follows function principle.


Saturday, November 26, 2022

One More Strategy for the Meaningless / EZE, 2022

The way Terry Eagleton reads T.S. Eliot is as a split text: at least one level of meaningless/at least one level of collective (un)consciousness. With asemics and polysemics and the interplay between them, we often have a single source of text and thereby an interplay of meaning/not meaning on what is usually a single plane. But the split Eagleton invokes gives us another textual problem: the identity of the text under interpretation. And this split creates yet another problem: the prioritization of the interpretation(s). 

See what you think:

Poetry was not to engage the reader's mind: it did not really matter what a poem actually meant, and Eliot professed himself to be quite unperturbed by apparently outlandish interpretations of his own work. Meaning was no more than a sop thrown to the reader to keep him distracted, while the poem went stealthily to work on him in more physical and unconscious ways ... . (Terry Eagleton: Literary Theory: An Introduction, 35)