Doves Typeface

This was mentioned very briefly in one of our sessions, in case anyone wants to hear a little more on the matter. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07lhh6z

Dominique Hurth

I just saw Dominique talk in Bremen, she addresses Mallarme throughout her work thought she might be of interest.
http://www.dominiquehurth.com/www.dominiquehurth.com/dominique_hurth.html

Angle of Yaw – Ben Lerner > Mallarmé + Badiou + [ _ ]

E D I T   >>  Lerner's recent essay 'Hatred of Poetry' < Fitzcarraldo Editions > 
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/88730

"I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility."


Excerpts from Ben Lerner's Angle of Yaw, that seem to grow out from a Mallarmian core... but then spills over something else..

———————————

The novel hurled to the ground breaks into verse
and achieves a perfect synthesis

of Bible and phonebook,
a chance synthesis
recalling the work of X
in its use of cherry and adverb.

A branch of adverb negatively rendered
is characteristic of a period
in which phonebooks possess all the qualities of epics

plus or minus three.
X is a generation that gloried in synthesis
privately performed,
in charity syntheses held for cherry trees.

I have chopped down the truth conditions for cherry trees
with a chance synthesis,

with a phonebook in one hand
and a bible in the other
and the other.


—


Configured to return to the thrower when hurled
and configured to return the thrower to the herd,

intended backfires configure warmth
for the polis and polis fans.
Context attributed to the skin at birth

picks teams:
shirts and skins,
redshirts and redskins
and tomahawking redskin fans.

"In 1825, the natives of Port Jackson hurled their halos and lay down"
Support your polis: chop the air.


>> from Begetting Stadia, Angle of Yaw, 2006, pg 7 - 8


////////////////////

...
The names of the dead are inscribed on the wall.
The play is making Hamlet's mother uncomfortable.
I can't feel my legs.
The limit of latitude past which trees will not grow.
                    Tear down this wall.
                    Let them eat snow.

Then, without warning, our guiding star burned out.
We stood around the sleeping infant to see if she was breathing.
The poet notes that beautiful days and seasons do not last.
My emergence from mother was captured on film.
All I ask is that we stop executing the mentally handicapped.
The stadium lights prevent the cereus from blooming.
But what if the mentally handicapped want to be executed?
                    Big Bird towers over the human actors.
                    We have both the right and duty to expand


—


into the blasted lands of southwest Asia,
Let's add touches of ethnic instrumentation.
I am attracted to women I do not respect.
the child makes a substantial advancement in poetics
with a canister of hair spray and a bic.
Then you wake up next to a war criminal.
A rapid slide through a series of consecutive tones.
                    The memorial will have to be continuous.
                    Lift every voice and sing

...

>> from Twenty-One Gun Salute for Ronald Reagan, Angle of Yaw, pg 123 - 124


Definition of 'Yaw' :

verb

verb: yaw; 3rd person present: yaws; past tense: yawed; past participle: yawed; gerund or present participle: yawing

1. 1.

   (of a moving ship or aircraft) twist or oscillate about a vertical axis.

   "the jet yawed sharply to the right"

noun

noun: yaw

1. 1.

   twisting or oscillation of a moving ship or aircraft about a vertical axis.

   "applying the opposite rudder will tend to reduce the yaw"

My Derrida notes - hope they make sense too

Derrida’s Double Session

Turns around 'Mime'/'Dumb-Show'/'Mimesis' from Divagations ('Mimique')

Mimesis opens up problem of TIME, cos imitated always comes before imitator 203 – but then Socrates wonders whether thing mimed could be ‘to-come’: Derrida: ‘The overtures of “hope’ (elpis), anamnesis (the future as a past present due to return), the preface, the anterior future (future perfect), all come to arrange things.’

Mneme and mimesis being on a par, since both are unveiling, drawing-out of thing from ‘the crypt where it prefers itself’ 206 – so memory and mimesis v close

D: closure of metaphysics ‘is discreetly but absolutely displaced in the workings of a certain syntax, whenever any writing both marks and goes back over its mark with an undecidable stroke…. This redoubling of the mark, which is at once a formal break and a formal generalization, is exemplified by the text of Mallarmé’ 207

Also: this dislocation ‘does not take place in writing. This dis-location (is what) writes/is written.’

So, Derrida’s hymen, between-space: ‘Thanks to the confusion and continuity of the hymen, and not in spite of it, a (pure and impure) difference inscribes itself without any decidable poles, without any independent, irreversible terms. Such difference without presence appears, or rather baffles the process of appearing, by dislocating any orderly time at the centre of the present. The present is no longer a mother-form around which are gathered and differentiated the future (present) and the past (present). What is marked in this hymen between the future (desire) and the present (fulfillment), between the capacity and the act, etc, is only a series of temporal differences without any central present, without a present of which the past and future would be but modifications. Can we then go on speaking about time, tenses, and temporal differences?’ 220 – and this sets up ‘pure medium of fiction’

D: the hymen’s operations cause ‘the displacement withouth reversal of Platonism and its heritage. This displacement is always an effect of language or writing, and never simply the dialectical overturning of a concept (signified).’ 222

‘What counts here is the between, the in-between-ness of the hymen’. 

Then entre becomes antre 222 – cave, grotto [recess] – also antara, cleft, cave, which also signifies INTERVAL 

Then hymen ‘only takes place when it doesn’t take place, when nothing really happens…’ 223

And it’s right here (at this ‘fold’) that D locates M’s ‘pure medium of fiction’ 224 – hymen is pure medium of fiction

‘What takes place is only the entre, the place, the spacing, which is nothing

But hymen isn’t just negative: ‘At the edge of being, the medium of the hymen never becomes a mere mediation or work of the negative; it outwits and undoes all ontologies, all philosophemes, all manner of dialectics. It outwits them and – as a cloth, a tissue, a medium again – it envelops them, turns them over, and inscribes them.’ 226 ‘This nonpenetration, this nonperpetration (which is not simply negative but stands between the two), this suspense in the antre of per-penetration, is, says Mallarmé, “perpetual”.’ 226 – this is how Mime sets up a ‘pure medium of fiction’

 ‘hymen’ is not a thing in-and-of-itself, but about the between-ness – so it belongs to same category as supplement, différance etc 230

Mimique ‘could be read as a sort of handbook of literature’ 231 – ‘Not only because the metaphor of writing comes up so often (“a phantom… white as a yet unwritten page”)… but because the necessity of that metaphor, which nothing escapes, makes it something other than a particular figure among others. What is produced is an absolute extension of the concepts of writing and reading, of text, of hymen, to the point where nothing of what is can lie beyond them.’ V imp 232

240: ‘The intermission or interim of the hymen does not establish time: neither time as the existence of the concept (Hegel), nor lost time nor time regained, and still less the moment of eternity. No present in truth presents itself there, not even in the form of its self-concealment. What the hymen undoes, outwits, under the rubric of the present (whether temporal or eternal), is the assurance of mastery.’

my notes on Badiou - hope they make some sense

Badiou

Badiou starts with Cantor's set-theory, and introduces idea of something that does not belong to a given set:

‘I will term evental site an entirely abnormal multiple; that is, a multiple such that none of its elements are presented in the situation. The site, itself, is presented, but ‘beneath’ it nothing from which it is composed is presented. As such, the site is not part of the situation. I will also say of such a multiple that it is on the edge of the void, or foundational (these designations will be explained).’

So, evental sites are negative

‘negative aspect’ of evental sites (i.e. to not be represented) ‘One can only maintain that there are site-points, inside a situation, in which certain multiples (but not others) are on the edge of the void.’ – so there are evental sites in situations, but there is no evental situation – ‘Every radical transformational action originates in a point, which, inside a situation, is an evental site.’ 

So: ‘the existence of a multiple on the edge of the void merely opens up the possibility of an event’ – it doesn’t guarantee it – site has to be ‘abnormal multiple, on the edge of the void’ – so ‘there is no event save relative to a historical situation, even if a historical situation does not necessarily produce events.’

But event’s belonging to situation of site ‘is undecidable from the standpoint of the situation itself’ – i.e. ‘signifier of the event… is necessarily supernumerary to the site’ – ‘an event is not (does not coincide with) an evental-site. It ‘mobilizes’ the elements of its site, but it adds its own presentation to the mix.’

‘To declare that an event belongs to the situation comes down to saying that it is conceptually distinguished from its site by the interposition of itself between the void and itself. This interposition, tied to self-belonging, is the ultra-one, because it counts the same thing as one twice: once as a presented multiple, and once as a multiple presented in its own presentation.’

But the he says that event might not belong to situation – in which case… (da da da) ‘nothing has taken place except the place.’

‘Therefore: either the event is in the situation, and it ruptures the site’s being ‘on-the-edge-of-the-void’ by interposing itself between itself and the void; or, it is not in the situation, and its power of nomination is solely addressed, if it is addressed to ‘something’, to the void itself.’

He calls this undecidability a ‘double function’: ‘On the one hand, the event would evoke the void, on the other hand, it would interpose itself between the void and itself. It would be both a name of the void, and the ultra-one of the presentative structure.’ He calls this an ‘ultra-one-naming-the-void’: ‘It is this ultra-one-naming-the-void which would deploy, in the interior-exterior of a historical situation, in a torsion of its order, the being of non-being, namely, existing.’ Fucking great.

Event can’t be formalized mathematically, i.e. ontologically: ‘There is no acceptable ontological matrix of the event.’ – so event ‘belongs to that-which-is-not-being-qua-being’ – and he talks of ‘the brilliance, in which being is abolished, of the mark-as-one’

‘Mallarmé is a thinker of the event-drama, in the double sense of the staging of its appearance-disappearance…’

B sees (Mallarméan) poetry as ‘an action of which one can only know whether it has taken place inasmuch as one bets upon its truth.’ – and see Un Coup as perfect staging of evental-site being on edge of void (storm etc)

‘The paradox of the evental-site is that it can only be recognized on the basis of what it does not present in the situation in which it is presented.’

So, shipwreck: ‘every event, apart from being localized by its site, initiates the latter’s ruin with regard to the situation, because it retroactively names its inner void. The ‘shipwreck’ alone gives us the allusive debris from which (in the one of the site) the undecidable multiple of the event is composed.’

Then casting dice: ‘A cast of dice joins the emblem of chance to that of necessity, the erratic multiple of the event to the legible retroaction of the count. The event in question in A Cast of Dice… is therefore that of the production of an absolute symbol of the event. The stakes of casting dice ‘from the bottom of a shipwreck’ are those of making an event out of the thought of the event.’

But then B homes in on the HESITATION! This passage is super-important:

‘However, given that the essence of the event is to be undecidable with regard to its belonging to the situation, an event whose content is the eventness of the event (and this is clearly the cast of dice thrown ‘in eternal circumstances’) cannot, in turn, have any other form than that of indecision. Since the master must produce the absolute event (the one, Mallarmé says, which will abolish chance, being the active, effective, concept of the ‘there is’), he must suspend this production from a HESITATION which is itself absolute, and which indicates that the event is that multiple in respect to which we can neither know nor observe whether it belongs to the situation or its site. We shall never see the master throw the dice because our sole access, in the scene of action, is to a hesitation as eternal as the circumstances.’ 

‘Between the cancellation of the event by the reality of its visible belonging to the situation and the cancellation of the event by its total invisibility, the only representable figure of the concept of the event is the staging of its undecidability.’

And, of course, Hamlet emerges at this point – the feather etc – figure of undecidability

And then event disappears back into void – ‘Must we then conclude, in a nihilistic manner, that the ‘there is’ is forever un-founded, and that thought, devoting itself to structures and essences, leaves the interruptive vitality of the event outside its domain?’

‘That ‘nothing’ has taken place … means solely that nothing decidable within the situation could figure the event as such. By causing the place to prevail over the idea that an event could be calculated therein, the poem realizes the essence of the event itself, which is precisely that of being, from this point of view, incalculable. The pure ‘there is’ is simultaneously chance and number, excess-of-one and multiple, such that the scenic presentation of its being delivers non-being alone, since every existent, for itself, lays claim to the structured necessity of the one. As an un-founded multiple, as self-belonging, undivided signature of itself, the event can only be indicated beyond the situation, despite it being necessary to wager that it has manifested itself therein.’

So constellation compensates for this neutralizing equivalence of gesture and non-gesture by fixing ‘in the sky of Ideas the event’s excess-of-one.’

But Badiou ends by turning to the bet. And this ties in with ethics, for which Badiou has previously given imperative ‘Decide from the standpoint of the undecidable.’

‘Mallarmé writes: ‘Every thought emits a cast of dice.’ On the basis that ‘a cast of dice never will abolish chance,’ one must not conclude in nihilism, in the uselessness of action, even less in the management-cult of reality and its swarm of fictive relationships. For if the event is erratic, and if, from the standpoint of situations, one cannot decide whether it exists or not, it is given to us to bet; that is, to legislate without law in respect to this existence. Given that undecidability is a rational tribute of the event, and the salvatory guarantee of its non-being, there is no other vigilance than that of becoming, as much through the anxiety of HESITATION as through the courage of the outside-place, both the feather, which ‘hovers above the gulf’, and the star, ‘up high perhaps.’ – nb feather is also pen.

Typography Presentation

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1SzvTzNzMpbZElQQlpFUC12amM/view?usp=sharing

livre notes

So, all the preceding are copies I made of a few pages from the collection of Mallarmé's notes (gathered by Jacques Scherer) towards 'Le Livre' - notes which (like Kafka) Mallarmé requested be destroyed. Luckily they weren't.

Here are my notes from the commentary I gave in the last meeting about this extraordinary document (I hope they kind of make sense):

Letter to Verlaine 1885: ’I have always dreamed and attempted something else, with the patience of an alchemist, ready to sacrifice all vanity and all satisfaction, the way they used to burn their furniture and the beams from their ceilings, to stoke the fires of the Great Work. What would it be? It is hard to say: a book, quite simply, in several volumes, a book that would be a real book, architectural and premeditated, and not a collection of chance inspiration, however wonderful… I would even go further and say the Book, convinced as I am that in the final analysis there’s only one, unwittingly attempted by anyone who writes, even Geniuses. The orphic explanation of the Earth, which is the poet’s only duty and the literary mechanism par excellence: for the rhythm of the book, then impersonal and alive, right down to its pagination, would line up with the equations of that dream, or Ode.’

M Calls this his ‘vice… I am possessed by it and I will succeed, perhaps – not in drafting the whole of it (one would have to be I don’t know who for that!) but in showing a fully executed fragment… and indicating the rest, for which a single lifetime would not suffice. To prove, by means of these finished pieces, that this book exists, that I knew what it was I couldn’t accomplish.’

M conceives idea for Livre in 1866, but can’t really work on it then - really gets down to it in 1892; by 1894 completely working on it 

These notes - meant to be destroyed - not book but notes towards - always to-come

it’s 202 pages of notes - outlining material aspects of both book and ‘seances’ in which it would be enacted - including ticket price and seat layout - mathematical correspondences between volumes and performances - also thematic schema (relations between genres, modes etc) - it’s all about relationality - 

‘myth’ instead of narrative - cos it’s about sacred rite

all about symmetry/duality/dedoublement - Scherer: various correspondences function as reciprocal proofs

numbers are really high - i.e. projected numbers for attenders and copies: as Sch points out, M aspired to acquire a readership comparable to the Bible’s

book should have paralleliped (rhomboid) form - and purpose of seances (or double-seances) is to reveal mathematical foundation of book (like in Igitur: consciousness reveals itself) - to show that it’s not chance: ‘it has not fallen. from chance/ sacred to a unique / from which it issues… The lectures having no other goal / than to show these scientific relations / in discover of book (40-41 A)

each seance led by ‘operator’ or enactor -

Mary-Lewis Shaw: ‘The opérateur accomplishes this by performing various permutations of the text, before an audience of twenty-four ‘assistants’ who are themselves symmetrically arranged in either eight ‘triple places’ or six ‘double places’ on either side of an auditorium. He changes the order of the distribution of the feuillets in a ‘meuble de laque’ containing six open vertical slots and reads the fragments in two different ways as if to demonstrate their perfect congruity and that of the text as a whole… Every fragment of the text is read twice. Every text is presented through two different readings in a double séance. Each double séance lasts two hours, consisting of a preliminary 15-minute waiting period, a 15-minute intermission, and two 45-minute reading periods, in which the opérateur directs his attention toward either half of the audience. Two double séances are given in one day.’

‘drama’ is profane; ‘mystere’ is sacred

chiasmus is criscrossing-correspondence/‘reciprocity of proofs’ pattern that M uses a lot - nb I think that line ‘reciprocity of proofs’ explains a lot - it’s also about mirroring/doubling, thereby creating logic that self-confirms

so, yes: work will be published in text and presented in performance - operator’s role is to coordinate this - his hat is important!

2 mythes sketched out: 1. calling and hesitation to come forwards… 2. two mermaids on beach, mirroring each other, reaching out arms to join, like dancers… this second is kind of marriage (fiancailles)

Then digression on nature of INTERMISSION - but intermission is actually entr’acte, which is dance - so a performed pause - cf Interrupted Performance, and M’s obsession with interregnums and intervals

then wild animals eating meat (like bear)

3rd myth: sacrifice of old man - goes into tomb/Book - and this before WORKER/CROWD (like in Conflict)

4th myth: two characters come together and eat each other - which is also marriage ceremony, and crime