VV(11): Outside the Pattern

[Dave Monroe]

"Stencil fell outside the pattern." (V., Ch. 8, Sec. iv, p. 225)

Okay ...

"I write four times here, around painting."

Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian 
McLeod.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987), p. 9 ...


"Our understanding of ... the experience engendered by television 
programming in general can be considerably expanded if we draw on Foucault's 
notion of the heterotopia.  The best metaphor for the heterotopia is 
provided by that complex and strange yet simple and familiar object, the 
mirror: a 'virtual space' underneath the surface; a place that puts me 'over 
there, where I am not,' in a kind of 'shadow that gives my own visibility to 
myself.'  It is a place both of ultimate reality and ultimate unreality: 
'{I]t makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in 
the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that 
surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has 
to pass through this virtual point which is over there.'  And, finally, most 
significantly, it is a place where 'all the other real sites that can be 
found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and 
inverted.  Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may 
be possible to indicate their location in reality' (Foucault 1986, 24).  
Quite obviously, our experience of television is heterotopic ...."

Michael Thomas Carroll, Popular Modernity in America: Experience, 
Technology, Mythohistory (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), p. 23, citing Michel 
Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22-7 ...


"'I dream of a great glass sphere, hollow and very high and far
away ... the colonists have learned to do without air, it's
vacuum inside and out [....] Inside the colony, the handful of men have a 
frosty appearance, hardly solid, no more alive than memories,
nothing to touch ... only their remote images, black and white
film-images, grained, broken year after hoarfrost year out in the
white latitudes, in empty colony, with only infrequent visits from
the accidental, like me ..." (GR, p. 723)

"The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent.  The film has 
broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us old 
fans who've always been at the movies (haven't we?) to tell which before the 
darkness swept in." (GR, p. 760)

Hm ...

"it's enough to say: abyss and satire of the abyss" (Derrida, The Truth in 
Painting, p. 17)

Something like that ...



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