Pure Texture: an internet book [under construction]

1: "On reading" [draft] by Patrick Simpson

To Read is to repeat [link to "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" by Jorge Luis Borges]. In the act of Reading, one repeats what is Written in the Text in the virtual space of the mind.

One gets to know a Text the same way one gets to know someone: through repeated encounters. The Text always remains irreducible in its singularity [link to Gavin Young Philosophy video]; each encounter, then, becomes a scientific experiment in which the Text is the sole control.

So, what is a Text? For the purposes of Pure Texture, we will need to elaborate on this essential, paradoxical term. "Let us call a text," Paul Ricoeur writes, "every utterance or set of utterances fixed by writing" ("What Is A Text? Explanation and Interpretation" [link to essay]). He goes on:

"But what is fixed by writing? We have said: every utterance or group of utterances. Is this to say that these utterances must have been previously enunciated physically or mentally, that all writing has been, at least in a potential way, first of all speech?"

We shall say, for the purposes of Pure Texture, that a Text is not physical, nor mental---nor is it the two together. The Text is the Text is the Text. What defines the Text, first and foremost, is its fixity, repeatability: its ability to be Read. It is Written. It becomes speech again in the virtual space of the mind in the act of Reading (if one knows how to Read, that is: see below).

What, then, is Reading? It is, first and foremost, a sensation generated by the Text. The sensation strikes with inevitable force:

"Two women each receive a letter saying that her son is dead. The first one glances at it, faints, and until the day she dies her eyes, her mouth, and her movements will never again be the same. The second one remains unmoved; her face, her posture do not change at all: she doesn’t know how to read. It isn’t the sensation, it is the meaning that has seized the first woman by striking her mind, immediately, as a brute fact, without her participation in the matter, just the way that sensations strike us. Everything happens as if the pain were in the letter itself, and jumped out from the letter to land on the face reading it" (Simone Weil, "Essay on the Concept of Reading" [link]).

Pure Texture is meant to be an exercise in learning how to Read. Weil again: "What is peculiar here is that what we are given is not sensations and meanings; what we read is alone what is given." Pure Texture is everything I---as myself, the real human being sitting here, in a room in my childhood home (what my family has traditionally called "the den"; at the moment, there's music playing: "A Tooth for an Eye" by The Knife [link]), typing these words, sentences, paragraphs into a txt document on my laptop, which I will then copy and paste into the body of the HTML/CSS page you are Reading now---have to give. Think of it as a test---of myself, or of you [link to "Octet" by David Foster Wallace].

If you've Read your Hegel, your Lacan---or, alternatively, your Nagarjuna and Tsong-khapa---you'll have already seen the paradox at the heart of this, which (ultimately) concerns the nature of time and causality. The paradox is: Who causes the Text? Reader or Writer? It goes beyond recursive mirroring as well (how boring if it were only that!)---Deleuze (and, finally, Laruelle (I'm telling you now: this is foreshadowing)) will help us make the leap from Text to Texture (i.e., from dialectics to multiplicity). My only purpose here is to draw all of this out, make it visible [link to Klee essay]. This homepage is only intended as an "abstract or intro, meant to be very brief and sketchy" (David Foster Wallace, "Good Old Neon" [link]). My two essential words of advice, as we begin: Read Slowly.

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