Form and Deconstruction

As usual – the bling – like the back of a lady’s leg – I’m interested. Zude is like that. I simply found a passion. That should not stop other functions. It simply makes me part of the audience. The demonstration I just happen to read about. Demonstration award winner somewhere on the West Coast got me to see its basic operation. The open and inviting staff that listened to my questions – that is well and good.

Branding was the next piece added. My life as Art, themed as the organizing scheme still keeping open to other possibilities. The clincher was daring to choose Deconstruction, (thinking not of the literary but of the racial and political fragmentation engendered when it is an open question “Is Barak Obama Black Enough?” This conversation then applied on both my relationship to the greater African American community and to my children of “mixed” marriage: Black Baptist to Irish Catholic – it’s my question too.

Then came Zude – the form. The possibilities of an open platform – Hyper Media – graphic, text, sound and video – “mourceau” – a bit, piece, morsel, fragment, musical composition; snack, mouthful. This mourceau, adds Derrida is always detached, as its name indicates and so you do not forget it, with the “teeth,” and these teeth, Ulmer explains, refer to “quotation marks, brackets, parentheses: when language is cited (put between quotations marks), the effect is that of releasing the grasp or hold of a controlling context” is truly within reach.

Now I’m forced to theorize notions of hypertext – playing form to de-center meaning making – active reading – co-valuing are now the subject that being Dubois’s “vision seekers” makes the effort all that more important: both fundamentally American and Not. A derivative of a “Strange Fruit”. But how?

 

Four theorists of differing stripes agree – A paradigm shift suggests George Landow in “Hypertext 3.0 – Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization”: Jacques Derrida, Theodor Nelson, Roland Barthes and Andries van Dam. They argue that we must abandon conceptual systems founded on ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity and replace them by ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks. Almost all parties to this paradigm shift, which marks, revolution in human thought, see electronic writing as a direct response to the strengths and weaknesses of the printed book. This response has profound implications for some specific elements of thought production – marketing, politics, literature, education and their distribution techniques. The very nexus of social networks and culture creation. A livelihood in the making. What better reason to understand, study, and execute than by mastering Zude.

The features of Zude’s openness – this Switzerland, many sources of content, fortune and time are in sufficient amounts to produce and drive several processes. The major outcome will be audience and their participation in meaning making. My aim brings many others into the conversations of race, gender, privacy, distribution, happiness and addiction. Then to my coaching practice. This is what Barthes describes as an ideal text, where there is a “…galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifies; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable…: the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language.

You’re the reason I do this. This reconfiguring of the notion of author is the world I want to live. I want people daring to reframe the world they live. How does this sound to you? This is an invitation.

~ by Reputationist on December 5, 2007.