Its rugged individualism prevents anything from getting not just too close but close at all, with no one and no thing occupying a neighboring space. Turtles-texts/contexts-all the way down.īut let’s begin again and ask what happens if I read, instead of un-read, those words-i.e., take for granted the setting in which this language game is played, authorize its rules as inevitable and natural, thereby seeing (or better, not seeing) the spot at which I, as a reader, have been seated as invisible and limitless: Then what do I make of these three words? What if I see them as having no context? What if I drop my attention to the work being done by the quotation marks and ellipsis and, instead, hear the words speak directly to me, much like being captivated by the wit of the dummy instead of the person so successfully throwing the voice? Well, now there apparently is a thing, an “it” we’ll call it, that, like that animated dummy, has an agency of its own (for, we are told, it resists classification) by means of its own huffing and puffing, the absent signifier that goes by its pronoun defies being classed, has no context, and cannot be controlled. Yet the original is hardly original, of course, for it made reference to, deferred to, its own absent ancestors. “I am doing something here,” these marks say, in the voice of the writer, “Watch closely.” Because of the punctuation (in both senses of the term: a marking and an interruption), the reader can’t erase the agency of the writer-the historically-situated chooser, Roland Barthes’s scriptor, the one who has set the table for the reader-any more than readers can erase the sign that there was once another place setting at which these words and other readers once sat next to each other, accompanied by no trailing dots, framed by no 66s and 99s. This structure, evidenced but also produced by the punctuation, makes the text’s history profoundly apparent, the specified limits and the edges are there to see, and the manner in which meaning-making takes place-as a staged series of past and present relationships among interchangeable parts-remains. When I consider the form of the text above, that’s what I come up with. Our punctuation marks mark our punctuations. And it is precisely by such an interruption that meaning is created-“This here thing is related to that thing there, but they are not the same.” Texts re-signified by their extraction from there and their insertion here old contexts erased (yet hinted at). “But see here now?” they simultaneously ask, “Something new is happening, right before your eyes.”Įllipsis and quotation marks-marks by which writers make admissions to readers (akin to Bruce Lincoln’s sense, in the epilogue to his Theorizing Myth, of how footnotes “show your work”) and by which readers are reminded that writers fabricate their texts (they don’t just happen by themselves, after all), doing so by inserting their own uninvited interests into other people’s prior situations, making texts of other contexts, thereby interrupting someone else’s work and putting to new use just this one piece of a past. For, much like the verbs “remove” or “omit,” it makes evident that a strategic operation has taken place what’s more, the 66s and 99s that frame the text inform readers that the removal had surgical precision, for they allow them to conclude that this is precisely how it is in the absent original-“Go, find it, and compare for yourself,” they challenge. To begin this project of un-reading, I start offstage, before the meaning takes place, and note that the removal of these words from a larger context is signaled by those three dots which, when read as a unit, indicate that something is not just passively missing but omitted (as its Greek root, ἔλλειψις, makes plain)-i.e., this notation leaves a trace of the agency, the choice, of the one who has done the extraction. I find these three words interesting-worth re-reading, even un-reading, rather than just reading-because of the contradiction that they carry along with them for they unsay what it is that we think they just said. Take my epigraph, for example: three words from the fourth paragraph of Frequencies’ project statement.
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