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Out of context: Reply #18053
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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.