pragmatic & Transcendental redactions

Introduction: This is a complete, 56-page, bound collection of all my Pragmatic and Transcendental Redactions, including “Transcendental Redactions,” “The Book of Misshapen Forms,” “Oblivion Can Be Forgotten,” and “Any Open Place Trembles.” Together, they form a single text, with thesis, argument, and conclusion. 

I am struck by the necessary illegibility of authorship. This is not the uncertainty that haunts Maya codices, or Egyptian carvings. In those cases, the questions “who wrote” and “who meant” have potential answers. The text in this codex is derived from canonical American work: two essays from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and two chapters from William James’s scientific research. But not a single full sentence from those original sources survives. I’ve mended and sewn fragments together, and woven new cloth. At the same time, this patchwork is not properly “mine.” Instead, we see ghosts. We hear indecipherable echoes, mangled remarks from James, from Emerson, along with significant deletions and silences that pull at semiosis. Nonetheless, voice and argument emerge, as if a hand were behind the marks. 

Abstract: In these pages, the authors argue that the birth of “new world” national identity was fundamentally bound to colonialism, racism, the exploitation of industrial workers, and the vicious competition for economic status, that these origins were systematically occluded and repressed, and that the resulting pathological individualism characteristic of this national identity is necessarily scarred by fear, resentment, and genocidal authoritarianism. When trauma distends the ocular nerve, reality rots from the political corruption of perception itself. 

Rules for “redactions”: The redaction method is a synthetic variation on a variety of experimental practices explored by William S.  Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Isodore Isou, and Guy Debord. I choose a source text from the public domain, and use the entire text, from the first to last paragraph. I extract at least one meaningful utterance, expression, or phrase from each paragraph of the source document. Every word or phrase occurs in the order it appears in the original manuscript. Finally, I do not read the source paragraphs. Instead, I scan them, looking at each as a whole, and letting my eye gravitate toward significant phrases and words. This process is neither entirely random, nor entirely intentional, but something more like a daydream. After completing these redactions, I add one more editorial layer, printing them beneath broken glass. Fissures intersect with deletions, suggesting meaning through visible marks of absence. 

This production process is entirely analog. The text is typed on onion skin, and contact copied beneath broken glass using an ortho-litho negative. The resulting negative “plates” contact print the text as cyanotype on archival paper, the paper then bound within a fabric cover. 

Sources: 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841) and “Fate” (1860).

William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course (1892). 

Materials: Cyanotype from ortho-litho negatives, based on broken glass over onion skin typing paper. Printed on cotton fabric and archival paper, bound. 

Dimensions: 7.5”x10.25”x3.5”