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Ulises Carrión
THE NEW ART
OF MAKING BOOKS
page 4
THE LANGUAGE
Language transmits ideas,
i.e. mental images.
The starting point of the transmission of mental images is always an intention:
we speak to transmit a particular image.
The everyday
language and the old art language have this in common: both are intentional,
both want to transmit certain mental images.
In the old art the meanings
of the words are the bearers of the author's intentions.
Just as the ultimate meaning of words is indefinable, so the author's intention
is unfathomable.
Every intention presupposes
a purpose, a utility.
Everyday language is intentional, that is, utilitarian; its function is
to transmit ideas and feelings, to explain, to declare, to convince, to
invoke, to accuse, etc.
Old art's language
is intentional as well, i.e. utilitarian. Both languages differ from one
another only in their exterior form.
New art's language is
radically different from daily language. It neglects intentions and utility,
and it returns to itself, it investigates itself, looking for forms, for
series of forms that give birth to, couple with, unfold into, space-time
sequences.
The words in a new book
are not the bearers of the message, nor the mouthpieces of the soul, nor
the currency of communication.
Those were already named by Hamlet, an avid reader of books: words, words,
words.
The words of the new
book are there not to transmit certain mental images with a certain intention.
They are there to form, together with other signs, a space-time sequence
that we identify with the name 'book'.
The words in a new book
might be the author's own words or someone else's words.
A writer of the new art writes very little or does not write at all.
The most beautiful and
perfect book in the world is a book with only blank pages, in the same way
that the most complete language is that which lies beyond all that the words
of a man can say.
Every book of the new
art is searching after that book of absolute whiteness, in the same way
that every poem searches for silence.
Intention is the mother
of rhetoric.
Words cannot avoid meaning
something, but they can be divested of intentionality
A non-intentional language
is an abstract language: it doesn't refer to any concrete reality.
Paradox: in order to be able to manifest itself concretely, language must
first become abstract.
Abstract language means
that words are not bound to any particular intention; that the word 'rose'
is neither the rose that I see nor the rose that a more or less fictional
character claims to see.
In the abstract language of the new art the word 'rose' is the word 'rose'.
It means all the roses and it means none of them.
How to succeed in making
a rose that is not my rose, nor his rose, but everybody's rose, i.e. nobody's
rose?
By placing it within a sequential structure (for example a book), so that
it momentarily ceases being a rose and becomes essentially an element of
the structure.
 
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