LPs

So, Gelpi is hot. I like the cut of G's jib. I like very much his formulation (postmodern=mod-rom). Very nice. I like too the very easy distinction, said elsewhere in far more complicated ways, that where the modernists pose a basic epistemological question in terms of romantic aims that the postmodernists see the problem as strictly ontological, doubting the being of the very reality the mods and roms are seeking/searching for. In the LP's we can as simply see this divide between the real and perception as a kind of fetishizing of the sign and its apparent plasticity. Yikes. The LP's in this vein seem a bit ridiculous when at their most plastic, when the thing most emphasized is the letter or word with its combinations and components, its contingencies and arbitrariness, and its obvious materiality as sign (dots or lines on pages), where the divide between the real and its sign is willfully made opaque. It's interesting that in the more engaging works I'm usually able to identify or interpolate a subject, in other words something beyond the plasticity of the sign itself, where we reach even on some distant shore a glimpse of a certain signified, if only through the context that juxtaposition provides, whereas the work that deprives me of that just makes me think of a bunch of broken tools: "Look, here are these tools. Check them out. Ignore their usual uses. They're broken because we don't even know if anything is ever even broken for them to fix. But check them out. Aren't they weird when they're not doing the job that we believe they were meant to do, but they they don't really do if you think about it? Listen to them we turn them on and they make their broken noises. They don't look or sound right. Awesome." I mean the proposition is relatively interesting theoretically speaking, much like a large degree of Abstract Expressionism, but the problem with LP's is that they don't have something to rely on like the basic properties of color and their emotional correlatives, similar to the notes of music, which at its most abstract still evokes particular feelings, once the letter is simply itself. Also, when you get down to the material of the written word, which, if we ignore Derrida, is simply an evocation of the spoken, a sign for a sign for a signified, what we get to if we get to materiality isn't really the basic material at all. The written word is simply an interpolation of the spoken and the thing it describes or names (there are problems with this description if we believe as Cynthia Ozick does that reading is what guarantees speech, and not the other way around). In this way the arbitrariness of LP is shown as a typical academic calculation guised in marxist rhetoric. The true materiality (I'm being silly in part) is the air, the tongue, and the teeth (other parts follow here, too).