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Ulises Carrión
THE NEW ART
OF MAKING BOOKS
page 5
STRUCTURES
Every word exists as
an element of a structure - a phrase, a novel, a telegram.
Or: every word is part of a text.
Nobody or nothing exists
in isolation: everything is an element of a structure.
Every structure is in its turn an element of another structure.
Everything that exists is a structure.
To understand something, is to understand the structure of which it is a
part and/or the elements forming the structure that that something is.
A book consists of various elements, one of which might be a text.
A text that is
part of a book isn't necessarily the most essential or important part of
that book.
A person may go to the
bookshop to buy ten red books because this colour harmonises with the other
colours in his sitting room, or for any other reason, thereby revealing
the irrefutable fact, that books have a colour.
In a book of the old
art words transmit the author's intention. That's why he chooses them carefully.
In a book of the new art words don't transmit any intention; they're used
to form a text which is an element of a book, and it is this book, as a
totality, that transmits the author's intention.
Plagiarism is the starting
point of the creative activity in the new art.
Whenever the new art
uses an isolated word, then it is in an absolute isolation: books of one
single word.
Old art's authors have
the gift for language, the talent for language, the ease for language.
For new art's authors language is an enigma, a problem; the book hints at
ways to solve it.
In the old art you write
'I love you' thinking that this phrase means 'I love you'.
(But: what does 'I love you' mean?).
In the new art you write
'I love you' being aware that we don't know what this means. You write this
phrase as part of a text wherein to write 'I hate you' would come to the
same thing.
The important thing is, that this phrase, 'I love you' or 'I hate you' ,
performs a certain function as a text within the structure of the book,
In the new art you don't
love anybody.
The old art claims to love.
In art you can
love nobody. Only in real life can you love someone.
Not that the new art
lacks passions.
All of it is blood flowing out of the wound that language has inflicted
on men.
And it is also
the joy of being able to express something with everything, with any thing,
with almost nothing, with nothing.
The old art chooses,
among the literary genres and forms, that one which best fits the author's
intention.
The new art uses any manifestation of language, since the author has no
other intention than to test the language's ability to mean something.
The text of a book in
the new art can be a novel as well as a single word, sonnets as well as
jokes, love-letters as well as weather reports.
In the old art, just
as the author's intention is ultimately unfathomable and the sense of his
words indefinable, so the understanding of the reader is unquantifiable.
In the new art the reading itself proves that the reader understands.
 
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