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to show how identity is constructed in Neoism by inscribing text into various
institutional fields; to demonstrate how these
texts and identities become
unstable and ambiguous at the same time. For the convenience of our
investigation, Neoism is presumed to constitute an epistemological 'grammar' by
locating itself in the grammar of its own narrative. On the premises that
language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique, these grammars
destabilize themselves by pointing to their inherent ruptures and
contradictions. Describing the coexistence of textual constructs with their
epistemological counterparts, this paper does not try to answer the question
whether any of both aspects is stronger, whether 'Neoism' or 'Anti-Neoism'
finally prevails. Since such a solution seems to be rather dependent upon the
particular reading, the term 'containment' is used here like in the essay
"Miranda's Bullets" in which we described Raissa Berenice's "A Brief and True
Report of the New Found Land of Nahmahod" as Neoist and Anti-Neoist at the same
time. The tension between disparity and congruence constitutes Neoism, like any
other text, as a challenge to the Neoist's interest. Similarly, the focus on
identity and textuality manifests a certain interest and does not necessarily
imply the existence of prevailing discourses in the pointless labyrinth of
Neoism.
It is intended to describe how 'social situations' in general and identity in
particular are constructed by texts, as textual or linguistic units. In the
case of Neoism, they often exist in a double structure, as text within text.
Each of these units is to be investigated in its own constitution and in its
dependence on the more general aspects in question, such as textuality,
narrative construction and the ambiguous space of disparity and congruence. It
seems important to consider Neoism as a textual construct in order to take its
position within a certain epistemological space into account. Our observations
of course depend upon a particular focus of the reading, as well as the
observations of their mutual interrelations--and even the discursive fields as
such--are founded on our deliberate choice. A reading of Neoism that tries to
dissolve both epistemological signification and narrative means, if they can be
differentiated, is neccessarily a construction itself.
but, in the Neoist's case, made problematic. The Neoist projects her desires
onto herself. She defines her identity through her never specified business.
Her desire is commodified. In her longing for man-woman-machine-hybrids, wish
machines, she destroys her property and ends up in self-containment. The Neoist
is determined by her alleged deficiency of an economic pursuit, but in turn
occupies a hybrid function as both groom and bride, clitoris and penis-tip,
prince and princess. Lacking a stable identity, the Neoist defines her own
narrative course, starting with her symbolic birth and ending with her symbolic
defloration. This is the most obvious ambiguity in Neoism. The Neoist is
constructed as a man-woman-machine fetish. She stays a lack, a non-person,
dependent on the machine that is both her wish machine and her virgin machine.
When the prince marries the princess, the Neoist marries and deflowers
herself.
is an agent of control. Selecting and combining a semiotic universe, the
Neoist play disproves the notion of textual aura being liquidated in the
'Industrial Age.' Just on the contrary, the text of Neoism is applied hegemony,
accumulated power in the space of an eternal reading-writing. Being subject to
its writing, the hybrid body of the Neoist dissolves in commodification and
fetishization. An ageless and omnipresent reader, the Neoist inscribes textual
order into an alphabetical territory. Neoism turns the 'private' into the
'public' and creates a state of confusion in the temporal-spatial gap between
writing and reading. Since confusion is necessary to challenge the reader's
interest, it also challenges the Neoist's identity. Through the fusion of two
identities, her writing and her reading, the Neoist re-organizes herself as a
self-contained body, the state of textual control Neoism, as the meta-text,
tries to arrive at.
Anti-Neoists transform the ambiguous agent of text into a fetish by
hypostatizing 'representation' and taking the fragment for an imaginary
'whole.' Their wish-machines are constructed as hybrids, by adding the
imaginary referent to its representation, man and woman, woman and machine.
Their desire includes more than just the material body and revolts against
their sequential-unifunctional identity. The Neoist on the other hand
constructs her machine not in order to fulfill her desire for an other, but to
fulfill the desire for herself, to melt her functions into a self-stabilizing,
self-referential (but still contradictory) mechanism.
Consequently, inscriptions into the Neoist's body are not persistent enough to
provide an identity independent from its 'presence' or 'absence.' Hence a
univocal identity can no longer be an exhaustive model for the Neoist. The
Neoist is trapped in circularity through her loss of a teleological
metaphysics, Ariadne's thread. Text and identity stand for the same concept,
since the Neoist has no identity beyond her reading. The Neoist reads the text
and acts according to it. Having married herself, she writes her text into her
own body: she is not only the man-woman and the machine, but also the
inscription of her name. Only through the disparity of her both unified and
ambiguous identity, the Neoist can remodel her wish machine into a virgin
machine and end up in self-containment.