Collected References

“By materializing my experience I detach it from myself and allow it to survive me. I extract it from its experiential context and thus make it available to others, infinitely usable and appropriable (by whoever possesses the code.) I pass on the intransitive. I virtually make my singularity collective to make a return to the past and to identify me now (then) as having been singular. I give power of attorney to others to live and think vicariously what I lived or thought. And I myself cannot internalize anything but what has been externalized before me, in such a manner that the link from within one person to the inwardness of another who is not yet born will be made via an outwardmess, a crafted materiality, a witness to the great relay race of generations.” 

- Régis Debray, Transmitting Culture, 72.

“Any subjective sense of history, particularly one’s own, has points of reference around which it formulates and fixates. Traces of experience become identified with manifest forms---that which has been inscribed through the very act of making marks. There was a crucial pointing my own development in which I experienced a desire to copy marks, which already existed, to incorporate myself into them by repeating their shapes in the disciplined exercise of my own hand. I knew their significance was already determined, that they had a place in a larger context, a systematized framework. That was their power and their allure. Because to make them, partake of them, was to inset oneself into that order which connected outward as well as inward. The word, the sign, the statement became infinitely recollectable in the process. The record was no longer simply dependant on my own mnemonic prowess or idiosyncratic system, but was capable of finding its way through the devices of a social and collective memory.”

-Johanna Drucker, Figuring the Word, 239

“The trace does not reveal, does not permit the revelation of the real event. Rather, it provides he stimulus to project it into re-existence, new existence, again and again. Writing experience: continually renewing itself as a manuscript, the hermeneutic trace providing ample nourishiment to sustain its own conviction through the process.” 

-Johanna Drucker, Figuring the Word, 240

“I knew my name before I knew he alphabet. I knew the alphabet before I knew there was another. Language was absolute before it was demonstrated to be relative.” 

-Johanna Drucker, Figuring the Word, 253

“Dreams are no longer summoned with closed eyes, but in reading; and a true image is now a product of learning; I derives from words spoken in the past, exact recensions, the amassing of minute facts, monuments reduced to infinitesimal fragments, and the reproductions of reproductions. In the modern experience, these elements contain the power of the impossible. Only the assiduous clamor created by repetition can transmit to us what only happened once. The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books.” 

-Michel Foucault, Fantasia of the Library, pg. 90-91.

“’The blind man on the bridge is as gray as some abandoned Empire’s boundary stone.’ The human intelligence in the image joins itself to something not entirely human. The images always holds to on of the senses at least, to smell or taste or touch or hearing, the seeing of color or motion. If one says, ‘The good of one is the good of all,’ one abandons the senses almost successfully. The image, by contrast, keeps a way open to the old marshes, and the naked hunter. The image moistens the poem, and darkens it, with certain energies that do not flow from a source in our personal life. Without that moistness the poem becomes dry or stuck in one world.”

 - Robert Bly, What an Image Can Do, p. 38.

“Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.” 

- Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 460.

“Reenactment is distinctive in that it invites transformation through memory, theory, and history to generate unique and resonating results.” 

- Robert Blackson, Once More with Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Art, 29.

"The Text is "a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original." 

- Roland Barthes