Perpendicular Universes

GESO | “Glitch Photo II”

part one
Perpendicular Universes
 LaValle 318

Port Washington became Munsey Park, then Manhasset,

then Great Neck and onward in the journey out of Long
Island and back to New York City. Apollo felt a kind of calm
that might also be called certainty. The magic of the world
has been revealed. All the deceptions were gone. To
believe in only the practical, the rational, the realistic was a
kind of glamour as well. But he couldn’t enjoy the illusion
of order anymore. Monsters aren’t real until you meet one.

GESO | “Glitch Photo II”

 Gates 1552

This confrontation is both political and

metaphysical […] These tropes luxuriate in the
chaos of ambiguity that repetition and
difference […] yield in either an aural or a visual
pun.
 Gates 1552

We bear witness here to a protracted argument

over the nature of the sign itself, with the black
vernacular discourse proffering its critique of the
sign as the difference that blackness makes within
the larger political culture and its historical
unconscious.
 Gates 1553

The bracketed or aurally erased g, like the

discourse of black English and dialect poetry
generally, stands as the trace of black difference
in a remarkably sophisticated and fascinating
(re)naming ritual graphically in evidence here.
 Gates 1553

But to revise the term signification is

to select a term that represents the
nature of the process of meaning-
creation and its representation.
GESO | “Glitch Photo II”
 Gates 1555

Everything that must be excluded

for meaning to remain coherent
and linear comes to bear in the
process of Signifyin(g).
 Gates 1556

The motivated troping effect of the disruption of

the semantic orientation of signification by the
black vernacular depends on the homonymic
relationship of the white term to the black. The
sign, in other words, has been demonstrated to
be multiple.
 Gates 1556

Repetition, with a signal difference,

is fundamental to the nature of
Signifyin(g), as we shall see.
 Gates 1557

As anthropologists demonstrate,
the Signifying Monkey is often
called the Signifier, he who wreaks
havoc upon the Signified.
 Gates 1558

The speech of the Monkey exists as a sequence

of signifiers, effecting meaning through their
differential relation and calling attention to itself by
rhyming, repetition, and several of the rhetorical
figures used in larger cultural language games.
 Gates 1559

Essentially, Abrahams continues, Signifyin(g) is a “technique

of indirect argument or persuasion,” “a language of
implication,” “to imply, goad, beg, boast, by indirect verbal
or gestural means […] The Monkey, in short, is not only a
master of technique, as Abrahams concludes, he is
technique […] In this sense, one does not signify
something; one signifies in some way.
 Gates 1562

Directing, or redirecting, attention from

the semantic to the rhetorical level
defines the relationship, as we have seen,
between signification and Signification.
 Gates 1562

Signifyin(g) is
troping.

GESO | “Glitch Photo II”

 Gates 1562

Signifyin(g), in other words, depends on

the success of the signifier at invoking an
absent meaning ambiguously ‘present’ in
a carefully wrought statement.
 GESO
Joris
| “Glitch
Wegner Photo
| “P4A”
II”

part two
nepantilism
 Palmer 71

“Your father is an unrepentant sophist,” Phillip said, his voice still displaying
lingering traces of bitterness. “He wants to argue just for the hell of it. I don’t even
know if he believes what he says, or if he takes positions just because he wants to
provide me.”
“He’s always been like that.”
“And he doesn’t know how scientists use language, either. I am very careful when I
speak. The things I say are unambiguous. But he takes my words and twists them
and throws them back at me, and tries to make me mean something I didn’t”
“Of course.”
“It’s fatuous. It’s laughable.”
“You should hire a referee next time.
“Hmph.”

GESO | “Glitch Photo II”

 Anzaldúa 1583

Mestiza rhetoric deals with a condition

Anzaldúa analyzes as “nepantilism,” from an
Aztec word meaning “torn between ways”:
She sees mestiza rhetoric as a way to repair,
without erasing, the internal rips, that is, to
make internal multiplicity into a positive
discursive resource.
 Anzaldúa 1601

Admit that Mexico is your double,

that she exists in the shadow of
this country, and that we are
irrevocably tied to her.
 Anzaldúa 1585

And I think, how do you tame a

wild tongue, train it to be quiet,
how do you bridle and saddle it?
How do you make it lie down?
 Anzaldúa 1588

So, if you want to really hurt me, talk

badly about my language. Ethnic
identity is twin skin to linguistic
identity—I am my language.
 Anzaldúa 1592

The ability of story (prose and poetry) to

transform the storyteller and the listener
into something or someone else is
shamanistic. The writer, as shape-
changer, is a nahual, a shaman.
 Anzaldúa 1592

The problem is that the bones often do not

exist prior to the flesh, but are shaped after
a vague and broad shadow of its form is
discerned or uncovered during beginning,
middle and final stages of the writing.
 Anzaldúa 1592

My “stories” are acts encapsulated in times,

“enacted” every time they are spoken aloud or
read silently. I like to think them as performances
and not as inert and “dead” objects (as the
aesthetics of the Western culture think of art
works) […] Some works exist forever invoked,
always in performance.
 Anzaldúa 1593

Enthnocentrism is the tyranny of Western

aesthetics. An Indian mask in an American
museum is transposed into an alien aesthetic
system where what is missing is the presence
of power invoked through performance ritual. It
has become a conquered thing, a dead “thing”
separated from nature and, therefore, its power.
 Anzaldúa 1598

Rigidity means death.

Only by remaining flexible
is she able to stretch the
psyche horizontally and
vertically. La mestiza
constantly has to shift out
of habitual formations.

GESO | “Glitch Photo II”

 Anzaldúa 1593

Next day or the next, we remove the plates, bare the

tiny green shoots to the elements. They survive and
grow, give fruit hundreds of times the size of the
seed. We water them and hoe them. We harvest
them. The vines dry, rot, are plowed under. Growth,
death, decay, birth. The soil prepared again and
again, impregnated, worked on. A constant change
of forms, renacimientos de la tierra madre.

GESO | “Glitch Photo II”