The pathetical need for the dogma of unity in creativity, mistaking the creative mind for source of the whole thing:
“If you were to ask a writer which is the ‘real book’ – his idea of it, his activity in writing it or its return to himself in power, he would be at loss to tell you. Each of them is the complete book separately; yet in the complete book all of them exist together. He can be an act of intellect ‘distinguish the persons’ but he cannot by any means ‘divide the substance.’ How could he? He cannot know the idea except by the power interpreting his own activity to him; he knows the activity only as it reveals the idea in power; he knows the power only as the revelation of the idea in the activity. All he can say is that these three are equally and eternally present in his own act of creation, and at every moment of it, whether or not the act ever becomes manifest in the form of a written or printed book. These things are not confined to material manifestations; they exist in – they are – the creative mind itself.”
Dorothy Sayers, “Idea, Energy, Power,” The Mind of the Maker (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970) p. 41
Similarly: If you were to ask a coder which is the “real program”- her idea of it, her activity in coding it or its running compilation, she would be at a loss to tell you [untsoweiter]
Authors do not function as sources, their confusion is a place where things happen. You can’t write fiction from a pre-arranged reality, a reconstructable moment. That’s where most writing schools go wrong and end up with brilliant students producing products instead of novels. Any poetic instance of creation is the result of an irreversible process. You’d need to fly around the earth real fast in the opposite direction like Superman to change anything in a poem, stop the next word from being written.
Maybe. Like maybe “Searching equals Building because all information is eternally present in every moment”.
Perhaps. As if the storing/retreaval bit is just a flashy metaphorical hoax to keep you away from it. You do not connect to libraries of textual data, seas of sound or streams of video, not even to some imaginary fluxus of subliminal events by clicking or accessing files on remote servers. You always need to take your time, because time is taking you to the place where moments happen. Moments don’t have room for information, moments aren’t places.
Moments are absences, they are places without representation, hence they do not qualify as places.
Fiction is a weaving of meaning from absence to absence, a sustained pretending that there _is_ representation within the absence, of forceful denial of absence. Fiction establishes the Moment as a retreivable data object. A measurable space used as a co-ordinate in discrete calculation. But fiction that is succesful literary has the additional qualities of resonance and patina. It includes the poetic rendering of absence, a recurrence of the real within the fiction. This recurrence is not on a level beneath the text, it is within the text as code, an allegorical presence of the same movement, enabling to acquire resonance in the mind of the reader and patina as time changes, interacts with the code.
And poetic fiction might be a stochastic form of fiction because it (randomly? but what is random? the article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality) generates derivatory meaning within the absence, because it takes the absence for real, it has a vision of absence itself and can thus breed its meaning in it. So the only way to make poetical processes connect would be to stabilise their growth sufficiently over time to enable interaction, have offspring connect to offspring, and breed some next-of-kin that actually communicates, talks back to you. Like our senses continually hook into the absence of time, we first need to create absence for automated processes to hook into the absence within each others creations, the viral emergence of meaning in their deixis.
Jim Andrews is hinting at it less confusedly perhaps:
“it’s starting to be the case that net art works at least have increasing access to the information stored on the internet. when we ourselves respond to the moment, we not only need access to our own memories, but we need to be able to search our memories for relevant information and bring those to bear on our response in a relevant way. that sort of intelligence seems a long way off concerning net art works.
however, you can sort of see that one of the more exciting directions of net art–including literary strains of net art–will be the funky shit it does with an internet connection concerning how it retrieves information/memory of many types from around the net and brings that to bear on the moment. we will glimpse an ‘evolution’ of approaches to art and intelligence through this work.”
Jim Andrews in a post to rhizome text
