Resource
We offer readings in the most literal manner possible, without elision or commentary, with and without translation. We attempt to cite non-textual sources, or non-literal texts, as directly as possible within the current limitations of fair use.1
With each reading, we provide analyses of the unfolding structure of the idea. What we call ideation is a form of narrative concept mapping or eidetic diagramming in which we seek to animate the ideological structure of the accompanying texts. Every ideation is itself a text optimized for both human and machine reading. A text in which the words, phrases, images and clips you see on the surface are also encoded as arrays, objects, nodes, relations, parameters and states. These are being parsed and interpolated into a narrative unfolding by a script that we continue to refine and expand with each new reading.
Even in mapping what we just had literally before our very eyes, we must acknowledge potential for any number of deviations and it is out of respect for this generative power of textual aberration that we insist on separating reading and analysis, however redundant this may seem.2 If error occurs every time we extract structure from meaning (and vice versa), then no reading or analysis can be definitive. We anticipate this lack of closure with an analytical structure designed to be broken apart and repurposed for however long it may prove useful.
Only once we have substantial reading and analysis do we dare hazard an interpretation. Ideally there should be several times as many analyses as there are interpretations and several times as many readings as there are analyses. We mean to show that there is plenty of work to be done on the surface without tossing another interpretation on the stack. While the latter may take the traditional form of an argument or essay (as it does now) there is no reason that it could not mimic the form of the readings and analyses upon which it is based.
Within this reticulum of ideas, interpretation may become less of a an end product and more of a recommended itinerary from which one may depart at any moment. Citation may become virtually automatic, something to refine if necessary but no longer something that we need to explicitly graft into a text we call our own allowing us to analyze and interpret more spontaneously and micrologically without rehashing and reintroducing a context that has been rendered immanent — like an environment variable.
We hope that these ideations, these ancient forms animated by modern technologies, will discourage the generalized opining about meaning by requiring that analytical structure be interposed between reading and interpretation. We hope that this method, which is no less ancient in its origins, will promote a thoroughgoing exploration of all the texts that may be regarded as too heavy or too deep and all the ideas in danger of slipping away beneath the surface.3
Footnotes
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Cf. the problematic of ‘textuality’ e.g. Of Grammatology, Allegories of Reading (1979) ↩
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Cf. de Man’s theories of the ‘generative’ power of textual allegory in the Allegory (Social Contract) and Allegory of Reading (Emile) especially. Also de Man’s later work on the material inscription, the numerous treatments of this by Andrzej Warminski (in Material Inscriptions) and myself (Text Machines :: Mnemotechnical Infrastructure as Exappropriation) ↩
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I mean to say that this threefold method can be seen as a form of exegesis — an prolonged meditation (or askesis) on the epistemic questions of textuality. This threefold method (reading, analysis, interpretation) while it is particularly indebted to the theory of allegory propounded by de Man, can be traced back to the fourfold method of biblical exegesis developed by Origen, revitalized by Auerbach in his writings on Figura, politicized by Jameson (On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act). One might also cite various forms of Kabbalah and Talmudic mysticism of the sort Derrida traces in Ellipsis (Writing and Difference), Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book (and elsewhere) ↩