Papers by Peter Schwenger
Phallic Critiques, Chapter 1, Oct 14, 1984
Critical Inquiry, 2024
The mark is the present moment of writing. It follows that if we give some thought to marks, we w... more The mark is the present moment of writing. It follows that if we give some thought to marks, we will also learn something about writing. The mark takes place in a certain space, from which it distinguishes itself. In George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, a right-angle mark becomes the founding gesture for a study of distinction, space, and the relations between them. The Spencer-Brown mark is presented as the elegant minimum needed to convey the idea of “continence” or spatial enclosure. Repetitive attempts to enclose a space are evident in the earliest circular scribbles of children. Serge Tisseron suggests that, later on, filling the space of a page with words proceeds by a similar circularity: thoughts are thrown out from an elusive inner space and pulled back in the form of written lines. When words fail us, we may revert to marks—as in cases of graphomania, like those of Emma Hauk and Charles Crumb. The artist Irma Blank devoted a lifetime to exploring the nature of writing through various forms of marking. Her series titled Eigenschriften presents a ritually repeated act of self-making through the mark.
Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, Oct 1, 1994
Critical Inquiry, Sep 1, 2022
The fiftieth anniversary edition of the Petit Robert dictionary had an unusual feature: color ins... more The fiftieth anniversary edition of the Petit Robert dictionary had an unusual feature: color inserts of paintings that attempted to depict the force fields shared by twenty-two pairs of words. This interposition was the result of a two-year collaboration between the dictionary’s editor, Alain Rey, and the artist Fabienne Verdier. Together, they were perversely resisting the usual project of dictionaries: to separate words from each other through precise definitions. Verdier is known for fusing the aims of large-scale gesture painting with those of Chinese calligraphy, which she studied for ten years in Sichuan. Her paintings for the Petit Robert project accordingly reflect the Chinese sense that a sign does not exist merely for the sake of its signification but has an energy of its own. Each of her paintings has been prepared for, in conjunction with Rey, by a long process of research, pondering, and drafting. The final painting, though, is made in an instant. In that moment, Verdier, with the full force of her body, swiftly moves a giant brush over a carefully prepared canvas. If the result does not capture the power she seeks, the canvas is discarded. There are no second thoughts or touchings-up. In a way, then, she is painting blind. Derrida’s ideas in Memoirs of the Blind apply both to painting and to writing: what comes to pass in both arts does so in the moment, by means of forces that are never wholly under control or predictable. In contrast to the limiting act of a definition, the force field between words is generative, even while it must necessarily elude our understanding.
Mosaic, Sep 1, 2017
Looking at first merely like 38 scribbled pages, Cy Twombly's Letter of Resignation shows how wri... more Looking at first merely like 38 scribbled pages, Cy Twombly's Letter of Resignation shows how writing's essence, as Roland Barthes argues, is most evident when it is illegible. The series illuminates letter-writing as a process; writing's relation to drawing; and the way the hand';s traces reveal the emotions that impelled it.
EIS, 2022
A screen of words covers the world. Upon it, habitual patterns of perception and meaning, pattern... more A screen of words covers the world. Upon it, habitual patterns of perception and meaning, patterns which have been established precisely through words are projected. The glacier is the perfect, unstable system to account for how the screen begins to crack, like a sheet of ice that is no longer transparent, as language is commonly supposed to be, but covered with a fine web of filiations. One thinks of the branching genealogies that linguists construct to trace the journeys made by linguistic particles from one language to another. Federici makes use of many languages in this work: German, Swedish, English, Latin, Italian, Sanskrit, French, Czech, Russian. These are sometimes translated in footnotes; but translation is less important than transition: that "shifting and sliding" from one language to another, words revealing their arbitrary and unpredictable powers.
Triple Canopy
The New York Declaration: INS Statement on Inauthenticity, announced by the International Necrona... more The New York Declaration: INS Statement on Inauthenticity, announced by the International Necronautical Society (INS) for September 25, 2007, supposedly took place on that date at the Drawing Center in Manhattan. I was not there and could not have been. Not because I was somewhere else (although I was somewhere else), but because it never happened. Despite the insistence of people who say they attended the event, and despite the ingenuity of INS Department of Propaganda, the evidence, properly examined, contradicts them. But, were it actually to have taken place, The New York Declaration would have gone something like this:
https://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/state_of_inauthenticity
Postmodern Culture, 2009
A profoundly "other" concept of writing is unfolded in Herschel Farbman's The Other Night--other ... more A profoundly "other" concept of writing is unfolded in Herschel Farbman's The Other Night--other than the commonly accepted notions of writing, and other than the subject from which writing is presumed to emerge. Rather, writing comes out of the night.
SubStance, 2022
Though we forget most of the fiction that we read, something remains. This essay asks what forms ... more Though we forget most of the fiction that we read, something remains. This essay asks what forms that “something” might take in readers’ memories. The plot line, the characters, and the images evoked by particular scenes all undergo transformations as they recede in a reader’s mind. When these have faded away, there may still linger an atmosphere peculiar to the novel, which is evoked by its title.
Art Journal, 2020
The striking and strange work of the Polish-American artist Jan Sawka (1946-2012) repeatedly addr... more The striking and strange work of the Polish-American artist Jan Sawka (1946-2012) repeatedly addresses the problem of what it means to see: in physical perception, in visual memory, in imaginative fiction. In all of these we can detect the mediation of what Lacan calls “the screen.” This essay explores the problem of the screen through a number of Sawka’s paintings—which are themselves, of course, screens.
Horror Studies, 2011
The recent rise of abstract comics raises the problem of how horror can be conveyed in a purely n... more The recent rise of abstract comics raises the problem of how horror can be conveyed in a purely non-representational mode. This article compares the strategies for evoking horror employed by three abstract comics. The shapes of Henrik Rehr's Reykjavik simultaneously evoke a threatening geological exterior and an equally threatening interior, accelerating from horror into terror. To make The Panic, Andrei Molotiu resorted to a lengthy technical process out of which ambiguous forms emerged spontaneously; this Rorschach-like effect becomes part of the horror of his comic. Alexey Sokolin's Life, Interwoven layers dozens of drawings in a steady progression of crowdedness and darkening, again moving from horror to terror. In all three comics the very obscurity of these abstract images contributes to their emotional impact. When 'comics' made the transition to 'graphic novels' it was undoubtedly a cultural step up. Graphic novels began to use more consciously aesthetic strategies, stretching comic-book conventions, in the service of complex and sophisticated subject matter. Yet from their rise in the 1970s graphic novels carried over from comics that which had previously relegated them to a cultural rubbish bin: the element of horror. In the second volume of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series (1999), for instance, we find-among other creatures at the border between the worlds of dream and reality-a living nightmare known as The Corinthian (Figure 1). A rather cool dude, he habitually wears sunglasses-until the point at which he removes them to reveal empty eye sockets lined with rows of pointed teeth. This explains a series of gruesome
Critical Inquiry, 2014
We will begin with a single remarkable scream or, at any rate, with the literary description of o... more We will begin with a single remarkable scream or, at any rate, with the literary description of one. This scream is emitted in the second canto of Comte de Lautréamont’s Maldoror. The narrator, like a perverse St. John, has a vision of an anthropophagic god, his feet immersed in a “vast pool of boiling blood, to whose surface two or three cautious heads would suddenly rise like tapeworms from a full chamberpot,” in reserve for the god’s next course. Maldoror is paralyzed with horror until, “my tight chest unable to exhale the lifegiving air quickly enough, my lips parted and I cried out . . . a cry so earsplitting . . . that I heard it!”1—a fact remarkable only because the narrator has been deaf from birth. Now this medical miracle is of less interest to me than what is said about this scream, and screams in general, by Douglas Kahn in his history of sound in the arts, Noise, Water, Meat. He writes of Maldoror:
Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics, 2010
Peter Greenaway’s film The Pillow Book depicts bodies treated as books, both being presented as i... more Peter Greenaway’s film The Pillow Book depicts bodies treated as books, both being presented as inscribed surfaces. However, just as the body has an interior topology, so do books. In contrast to the flatness of the page is the psychological sense of a book’s volume: the contents of a book occupy an inner space that is fully as dimensioned and complex as that of bodily organs. The cinema screen too is a flat surface, which in The Pillow Book Greenaway opens up spatially. This spatial sense is attained not only by the literary techniques of Greenaway’s script (disordering of time, repeated and varied themes) but by his innovative use of inset images. These intensify one’s sense of the screen’s surface at the same time that they interpenetrate it in the manner of the body’s interfolded organs.
Brian Evenson: L'empire de cruauté, 2021
Zero’s existence as simultaneously nothing and something is an extreme example of the paradoxes o... more Zero’s existence as simultaneously nothing and something is an extreme example of the paradoxes of any signifier, especially those of writing. We seldom recognize writing’s strangeness, unless it deliberately aims for what I am calling a zero effect. This is something that happens to a reader immediately after the book is closed. Instead of giving the satisfaction of an inevitable and meaningful conclusion, the zero effect takes everything away. It is comparable to the cataclysmic experience of Zen satori. This essay uses Roland Barthes’s theory and Brian Evenson’s practice to better understand what this zero adds up to.
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Papers by Peter Schwenger
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https://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/state_of_inauthenticity