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Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Link Degree Zero

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:17 pm

From a 2009-2016 exhibition by David Link

Related material —

The object now sails slowly ahead, before starting to climb up and up, until it docks some way up in the discourse. And it sits there glowing. Yes, in an elevated position, just as Roland Barthes describes it in Writing Degree Zero . We let the magnifying glass glide over Barthes’s text, and see the word “discontinuous.” We carefully study a sentence we love: “The interrupted flow of the new poetic language initiates a discontinuous nature, which is only revealed piecemeal. At the very moment when the withdrawal of functions obscures the relations existing in the world, the object in discourse assumes an exalted place.” It is absolutely no surprise that at this point we have the picture of a luminous green prism sailing in through the dark and taking an exalted place on our retina, a bit like when you’ve been staring too hard at a lamp on the ceiling and then close your eyes! How strange, we think, that a sentence that was written to explain an aspect of modern poetry can have roughly the same effect on our imagination as science fiction. In particular, the phrase A DISCONTINUOUS NATURE, WHICH IS ONLY REVEALED PIECEMEAL makes us imagine a vast darkness and then rectangular blocks of bright green sections of nature, and they are not lined up as such, but appear in flashes. The blocks of bright green and sudden nature appear in flashes.

Gunnhild Øyehaug, from 
"The Object Assumes an Exalted Place in the Discourse,"
in Knots: Stories  (pp. 139-140).
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
Knots  was first published in 2004, in Norwegian.

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