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This paper is intended

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.


Identities are not just defined,

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.

Text

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.