[7a] ‘Artist’s Language 2’, Art-Language, New Series No. 3, September, 1999, pp. 36-46 (pp. 47-56).

Michael Baldwin

Consider a painting-like thing. It consists of 16 panels each measuring 48 x 68.5 cm. They are hung edge to edge, four wide and four deep, so as to form a continuous surface. The ground colour of the block of four, two wide and two deep, at the top left is orange, the four below pink, the top right the same pink, and bottom right grey. The surface is thus quartered. Through the centre of each panel a vertical and a horizontal strip, about 20 cm. wide, runs from edge to edge forming a cross. The horizontal strip which runs across the four panels comprising the top row is blue, on the next row down it is violet, then blue and finally violet on the bottom row.  The vertical stripe which runs through the four panels on the left is grey, next right it is red, then grey and then orange on the far right. The horizontal stripes are overlapped at the centre of each panel by the verticals so that the colours of the former just show through.

Consider also the proposition that this image – this painting-like thing – is genetically connected to – we might say implicated in – a pornographic text. The two are linked by some artist’s writing.  A claim like this invokes a narrative and some sort of analysis of the artist’s writing that makes the link. The narrative involves several portraits and several dreams.

The story begins with some intractable pictures. They formed themselves eventually into furniture. And they did this rather mysteriously. A single photographic image of an open book, largely legible but coloured so as to give the appearance of high genre abstract painting – shadowy and Rothko like – but also figurative in the sense that some still-life representations of bibles are figurative. A single image was always sufficient. Sufficient work for the beholder perhaps. If these images were hung like paintings in rows, or gridded on the wall, then their appearance was one of rather jolly repetitiveness. They were in fact never repeated in a very strict iconic sense. The text on the pages was never repeated and there were slight differences of angle, shadow, thickness of book, etc., between each image. They were to be, in part, a record of writing by us over the years. They were to be concerned with the ‘naturalism’ of turning the page, as it were from image to image. This potential repetition presented a problem. The solution to this difficulty came in a rather paradoxical guise. We found that if we assembled the canvases upon which the images were inscribed into chairs or tables – familiar domestic objects – the sense of mere repetitiveness disappeared. There was another solution. If the canvases were laid in very large numbers in vitrines in horizontal displays, some sort of difference between them could be preserved. Regarding them in really large numbers, one looks for differences. 

We made a large vitrine of 192 panels, several chairs, a couple of tables, a sofa and a bed. Each panel bore the image of a different page of text. This domestic furniture was, I suppose, a relatively exotic synthesis which displayed artist’s writing as relatively transparent or in relatively transparent pictorial images which could yet be connected individually with high genre (expressive) abstraction. 

How we kept the cultural clues together in being assembled as furniture, I’m not sure. We eventually made a small chair composed of panels each bearing a flat text. Its appearance or rather its effects were quite different from those which contained the book image. Firstly the text was relatively short and graphically open; secondly, the colour field upon which it appeared went to questions of the significantly decorative with more emphasis than to the pictorial. A different more factitious niche perhaps in abstract art. 

While the book image produced (involved) a complexity born of ‘transparent’ iconicity and text, its naturalisation or contingency was affected if the text became too large – a poster, not a book. The coloured painting-like surface while lacking the iconicity of the book image remained, however, highly pictorial. We saw the possibility of dropping the open book image in favour of a decoratively transmogrified form of the Conceptual Art blow-up.

What we needed was a form, something to put at risk – something such that the sedentary or decorative might bring a dialectic of the aufgehoben – or rather a sense of the simultaneously contradictory processes of cultural upraising and bringing low. Rather than rendering Conceptual Art pictorial and perhaps scandalously decorative (affirm its decorativeness), we could render it decorative (bring it low) and bring the decorative low in processing it into Conceptual Art. 

From the two obviously competing perspectives, to transform a representation of the significantly decorative into a textual display is to bring it low. Alternatively, and from the same perspective, the transformation in the opposite direction might be an upraising – eine Aufhebung.  And so on mutatis mutandis for the competing perspective.

The form we arrived at is derived from the Indexes of 1972 by Art & Language – in appearances at least. These were works of which much has been written. This formal relation of appearance is not uninteresting. One might say that it is a ‘variation’ or a ‘translation’ or just a mistaken homage. Is it a kind of misquotation or misuse? The Indexes represent a dialogical exercise of sorts. Suffice it to say also that they hold much of their textual content in metal filing cabinets and this they connect – or rather the user connects – by means of a big-board style wall display. The new work was on the other hand to have all its textual information on its surface. Nothing was to be hidden in archival style. All was to be a decorative surface ashamed of its mystifications and its role in the reification of artistic culture, its addiction to spectacle exposed. Conceptual Art had got the vulgar decorators in. This was a moment of artistic reflexivity which narrates a recent history of cultural suicide – of euphemised imperialism (or globalism) and of the managerial imperative finally convincing itself that the language and practice of dissent was entirely exhausted and under control.

The textual material chosen for this decorative hybrid or monster was itself possessed of a certain decorative monstrosity.

The vitrine contained a text which was based on a large fragment of terminologically low and expressively impoverished sado-masochistic pornography. This pornographic text, as it appeared in the vitrine had been visited by Mrs. Malaprop. It was no longer obscene but absurd. (Mrs Malaprop is a character in Sheridan’s play ‘The Rivals’, first produced in 1775.  She is the aunt and guardian of Lydia Languish. She is noted for her aptitude in misapplying words. Among her more vivid locutions – or among Sheridan’s cleverest inventions are ‘as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile’ or ‘He is the very pineapple of politeness’.  She has given her name to such solecisms.)

In the more recent work the original pornographic fragment appears on the surface of a plinth and two manifestly fake 1960s or 1970s card files. This is just the beginning. A malaproped version of the text is inscribed on the surface of a wall display which corresponds to this first piece of old executive equipment. Mrs Malaprop has transformed:

It was weekend, time for some real fun in the school. The entire weekend was one long torture session. Many of the girls, were tortured without letup from Friday night to Monday morning.

Valencia was in the great master dungeon, in chains, her ass covered with dozens of fresh welts. She whimpered and cried, but watched in fascination the torture of other girls. It was the wildest and most rousing thing she had ever seen.

Dominique lectured her girls. She was clad in a shiny black leather corset, with nothing else on save a pair of thigh-high rubber boots. She carried a whip which was constantly in motion upon soft flesh.

“Dominated girls must be constantly disciplined. They must be forced to orgasm and associate their sex with discipline. You owe it to them to stimulate and excite them, as much as you owe it to yourself to torture and debase them.”

Saying this, she seized the long nipples of a girl standing on her toes in chained bondage, her tits tourniqueted in cords.

“Watch this one come in her cunt.”

Dominique finger fucked the girl, gripping and mashing the cunt lips, sucking and chewing the nipples. The girl cried bitterly from shame. But her face flushed red and the hot come began to run out of her hairy box.

Dominique stepped before Valencia. She stroked Valencia's nipples and looked into her eyes with hot passion.

“This one is a fast learner. Already she knows how to make a public whore out of herself and come before others while showing the most delightful humiliation and degradation in her eyes.”

She took Valencia’s cunt lips, pulling the outer flaps apart. She stimulated the inner lips and the small pod of the clitoris.

Vickie moved behind Valencia and mashed her pussy into Valencia’s glass.  One pair of hands massaged her cunt, going in and out with thumbs and fingers, mashing and gripping the pussy lips, while the other kneaded and milked her tits.

Into 

It was weekend, time for some real sun at the pool. The entire time was one long scorcher impression. Many of the girls were torpid without let-up from Friday to Monday morning. Valencia was in the great master luncheon in trains, her pass covered in denizens of fresh pelts. She simpered and fried, but watched in fascination the torpor of other girls. It was the mildest and the most carousing thing she had ever seen.

Dominique hectored her girls. She was glad in a springy slack weather closet, with nothing else on save a pair of sky high rubber chutes. She carried a grip which was instantly in lotion upon soft mesh.

“Nominated girls must be consistently dissipated. They must be forced to sarcasm and negotiate their necks with asprin. You owe it to them to emulate and expedite them, as much as you owe it to yourself to tutor and debate them.”

Saying this, she teased the long ripples of a girl landing on her toes in strained porridge, her tipped tournesols in gourds.

“Watch this one run in her hunt.”

Dominique thunderstruck the girl, gripping and thrashing the blunt tips, ducking and shoo-ing the ripples. The girl tried Italy from strain, but her face flushed red and the pot scum began to run out of her scary socks.

Dominique stopped before Valencia. She soaked Valencia’s stipples and looked into her ties with hot fashion.

“This one is a fast learner. She already knows how to make a public bore out of herself and hum before others while showing the most insightful affiliation and deliberation in her guise.”

She took Valencia’s blunt grips, pulling the stouter straps athwart. She insulated the inner tips and the small pod of the cannabis.

Vickie moved behind Valencia and crashed her Uzi into Valencia’s glass. One pair of fans collaged her front, going in and out with crumbs and clinkers, slashing and skipping the slips, while the other heeded and bilked her tips.

After Mrs. Malaprop’s first visit to the wall display the text lands on the face of a second plinth and two more fake card files. But before it gets there it undergoes an executive summary – as befits all artistic production. It is now at 50% of its original length, having been shortened by the new executive resource of a text-compressing programme.

It was weekend, time for some real sun at the pool. The entire time was one long scorcher impression. Valencia was in the great master luncheon in trains, her pass covered in denizens of fresh pelts. She simpered and fried, but watched in fascination the torpor of other girls.  Dominique hectored her girls. “Nominated girls must be consistently dissipated.” Dominique thunderstruck the girl, gripping and thrashing the blunt tips, ducking and shoo-ing the ripples.  The girl tried Italy from strain, but her face flushed red and the pot scum began to run out of her scary socks.

Dominique stopped before Valencia. She soaked Valencia’s stipples and looked into her ties with hot fashion.

Vickie moved behind Valencia and crashed her Uzi into Valencia’s glass. One pair of fans collaged her front, going in and out with crumbs and clinkers, slashing and skipping the slips, while the other heeded and bilked her tips.

Mrs Malaprop visits this remainder again. 

It was weekend, fine for some reason at the pool. The entire time was one long torchlight procession. Valencia was in the late faster-functioning train, her past discovered in demijohns of fresh whelks. She sympathised and tried, but matched in fabrication the temper of other girls. Dominique heckled her girls. “Abominated girls must be resistantly anticipated.”  Dominique unstuck the girl, tripping and splashing the blurred drips, decking and shooting the cripples. The girl lied iteratively from Spain, but her face crushed bread and the shot crumb began to run out of her scanty stocks. Dominique stepped before Valencia. She revoked Valencia’s stipulations and hooked into her guys with hot rations.

Vickie improved beside Valencia and splashed her muesli into Valencias glass. One pair of plants enlarged her front, growing skin and snout with crusts and blinkers, slapping and skimming the pips, while the other hoarded and filched her sticks.

The echo is now the echo of a now unintelligible text. But the original pornography was an impoverished language which is largely monosyllabic in its anatomical detail. The echo remains, but weakened. The text, being shorter, is reduced in detail and narrative content but to some extent stranger (this is due to the strain imposed on the artist/writer by the difficulty of finding homophones). It is more fragmented, harder to read except in short phrases and details, more embedded in its own dreamwork as text. But it is also physically more sparse.  More of the picture shows through – it is more embedded in that other dreamwork which is the work of art.

Mrs Malaprop’s third visit is now made to the second executive summary which is now 25% of the original text. The first sentence is lost so we have:

The entire time was one long fortnight’s recession. Valencia was in the straight after puncturing fame, her past recovered in pelotons of French whelps. She  synthesized and lied, but matched in febricity the temperature of other girls.  Dominique recalled her girls. 

“Co-ordinated girls must be persistently emancipated.” 

Dominique unstuck the girl, trapping and splicing the blurted quips, heckling and hooting the criminals.

The girl sighed intimately from shame, but her case crashed dead and the short bum began to shun doubt of her scatty smocks. Dominique swept beneath Valencia. She invoked Valencia’s manipulations and hooked onto her guide with contradictions.

Vickie improvised beside Valencia and squashed her coulis into Valencia’s glass.

By now there is some danger, due to shortage of semantic and syntactic resources, of the text turning full circle and returning to its original form. The strain really shows now. But the trace remains and a competent reader might still with some difficulty do (a part of) the reconstructive job. 

The third malaprop is inscribed in the form of a third executive summary on the fourth of the plinths and upon the fake filling cabinets it supports. This plinth is, however, not a cuboid structure like the other three. The plinth has now become a complex structure of eight vertical faces which stand on a narrow stem supported by a rectangular foot. The last plinth is an Odradek, perhaps. An Odradek is Kafka’s name for an enigmatically useless and somehow instrumental object. The form is collapsing and the writing on it has run out.

I should make it clear that we intended from the beginning to let the writing run out at this point. We had, however, very little idea as to what would happen in the sixteen wall panels to which the last plinth corresponds. The prescription was something like ‘We’ll let the malaprop run out on the fourth plinth and then find out what to do with the wall’.

What is on the wall is a sort of plaid, its colour deduced from the coloured backgrounds of the preceding 48 panels. The criss-crossing bands are, perhaps, a marking of the absent lines of text and margin. The horizontals could be erased lines of text and the verticals might ‘add’ something in the sense that the whole thing may have turned into a matrix. Can we say that ‘This image is genetically connected to (has its origins in) a pornographic text. It is possible, indeed, that we could fill in this coloured matrix with some details of or an analysis of some kind of the preceding texts. The main question for us was how to do enough but not too much.  What would too much have been? What does that vague prescription say? It says that the text had come to an end and that something had to go in its place. It also says that our project was to produce an object of cultural reversibility, and reversibility requires two termini. This is the terminus that tells us that the artist’s writing (of sorts on the wall and on the plinths etc.) degenerates as it approaches the literal text of the language work, and that as soon as this degenerative point is reached the decline starts in the opposite direction. We might say that the pictures which are undisfigured by text are inscribed at the same moment as their neighbours run out of words. 

The connection between the texts and the plaid is not obviously descriptive. The ‘texts’ do not describe the picture although in some almost marginal sense, the picture does describe the texts iconically. But that doesn’t account for how they get to be as they are. There is no literal sense in which we could argue that the picture corresponds to the text. A picture is not worth a thousand words or any at all. Some of this picture is (has inscribed on it) more than a thousand words. One of the questions it might ask is how far we might be able to go in treating the illusion – a virtual world or extreme hybridity in which such an exchange might be possible. The viewer has been witness to an incrementally ‘decorative’ use of language.  In the picture the decorative principle has taken over. This is not the same thing as the words running out. We cannot finally say which of these two possibilities is correct. It is also possible that no such claims are required. The successive malaprops might simply be misquotations. What level of reification is allowed in the category of misquotation? Does the possible world of words being exchanged for pictures begin with the de-reification of the final picture as misquotation also?                  

The original text is misquoted by the malaprop perhaps. The echo of the pornography is there to be found – or heard. The reader is put to the test with regard to those normal competences of interpretative ‘translation’ which make (some) malaprops quite easy to reconstruct. The original form is, in part blocked off from the malaprop in virtue of what it is – pornography.  The reader is placed in the odd position of ‘hearing’ (or reading) the pornographic text in homophonic ‘translation’ while at the same time seeking generally to suppress it. One does not hear or read such material publicly in a public space. People who go to art galleries don’t generally read the type of material which has its largest circulation in high security prisons. The original pornographic text may in fact have some indexical connection with the confinement and dehumanisation in which these institutions specialise. The text as echo is, in other words, not for public use and concurrently is signifier of another form of social deprivation – a radical form because judicially enforced.

There is another sense in which the malaprop goes to fragmentation, and this increases with distance. That is to say, after a second or third visit by Mrs Malaprop the beholder is extremely hard pressed to make a continuous effort of reading. The text breaks up into fragments. This is due to a curious semantical clustering. Various sections of the text will coalesce around a particular theme or motif. This can be sustained for a relatively short time until one runs out of homophones – or imagination or both - that is until a sematically arbitrary malaprop is reached or fallen upon such that it suddenly shifts the fugitive sense of semantic (or thematic) coalescence. The text breaks up into bits, but bits that seem to hang together internally but which are radically distinct from other bits. A sentence, for example, will often be dominated categorically or thematically by its main noun and predicates, a paragraph will often involve repetitions of various main nouns and so forth. These passages will tend to make discrete units which differ radically in content and style from their neighbours.

Why did we produce these malaproped texts? What do they have to say about any artist’s writing to which they might be connected? And what is the cultural difference between both these types of text and an academic text – a theory or some ‘regular’ critical writing?

Donald Davidson quotes Jonathan Bennet: ‘I doubt if I have ever been present when a speaker did something like shouting ‘water!’ as a warning of fire, knowing what ‘water!’ means and knowing that his hearers also know but thinking that they would expect him to give to ‘water!’ the normal meaning of ‘Fire!’

This is not quite a classic example of malapropism – it is written without the homophonic component which makes a link with the ‘correct’ word – but the circumstance it refers to is, we argue, not particularly unusual. We might even say, widely distributed. What is noteworthy is that the hearer (or reader) normally doesn’t have huge trouble understanding what the speaker ‘intends’. Well not always. It all depends on what is written or how much it is disguised. There is a ‘mistake’ or a representation of a mistake involved. This mistake involves a sort of hiding. And the recovery of the speaker’s or writer’s intended word involves a degree of peeking or guessing (depending of course upon the difficulty which the malaprop entrains). And the guess will depend upon representing the desires, prejudices, assumptions or the cognitive style of the person or beholder doing the guessing. The producer of the malaprop has effectively written in a code – a ‘code’ worked by homophony.  But it is not poetry.  I suppose that we might say that the malaproped text also has a normal meaning  – or maybe what it has is a sort of constructive nonsense which nevertheless approaches some sort of sense, in which case it is at least a double text involving the literal meaning of the malaprop text and the recovery of the correct original. A malaprop is not poetry, but it must have some connection to the language’s normal dreamwork – and be sometimes poetic. But this is not a ‘poetry’ of intentionally produced rhetoric – of images and figures, of metaphors and so forth. It is a non-poetry, a non-rhetoric which at the same time can have the effect of figural language. And at what point does the normally needful attempt at recovering the original language entail some loss of the malaprop’s figural power? If the malaprop makes you think of something, to what extent are you entitled to feel a sense of loss if you actually look for the original – the ‘correct’ – text?

Is reading a malaprop ‘literally’ – that is, refusing or being incapable of looking for a ‘correct’ text – itself a loss or a mistake?

Could we say that the malaprop is in one sense paradigmatic of artist’s writing? It lives somewhere in the margins of the literal. We might say that a malaprop ‘theory’ would simply be the theory ‘translated’ into malaprop. Though we don’t talk malaprop normally we could perhaps try to translate it in order to recover the ‘theoretical’ text that lies behind it. Is this a dialogical diagram – a diagram of dialogue and of possible radical alterity – or is the malaprop just a reified text – a thing that possibly belongs on the wall?

We might ask if this hiding or reification has any structural similarities with ‘normal’ artist’s writing. A good deal of artist’s writing is concerned with or touches upon the author’s intentionality as an artist. We could say that artists typically represent their artistic intentions in writing. They are engaged in some form of reification – an empirical or introspective poetics is involved. In this regard they are just like anyone else in trying to reconstruct and represent some sort of mechanism which is causally implicated in the production of their work. A malaprop text is relatively inefficient at carrying an ‘explanatory’ message. It blunts the instrumentality of first-order communicativeness in the artist’s explanation – or in any instrumental text. It implicates the author of the malaprop in a set of conditions which may or may not be  visible to the reader of the first order text. In a way, the malaprop has hiding somewhere close the possibility that this or that word is not malaproped (it is what the artist used originally) or, and this may be a more interesting possibility, that the artist (writer) really should have used the malaprop word and not the original. In a way, the malaprop text works like the texts of Conceptual Art which are connected to an emergency conditional. That is, some texts of Conceptual Art are philosophical just in case they are something artistic or they are artistic just in case they are something philosophical.

If Conceptual Art was somehow connected to the Hegelian idea that art at its most romantic dissolves into philosophy, it does not follow that doing art is the same as writing philosophy. The writings which comprise some Conceptual Art are reflexively concerned with art as art in a different way than they might be concerned to reflect upon art in or as theory.

The malaprop goes to an ‘original’ or normal discourse, which is now haunted by the prospect that it is corrected or made true by the distortion. The malaprop is not strictly a textual distortion. It goes to speech and that goes to an agent and a situation. In the malaprop, the writer is therefore as much a speaker as writer.    

The malaprop might be said to challenge one’s sense of being ‘at home’ in the language one thinks one is at home in. We might adjust our passing theory – our recursive interpretive theory of a text – in accordance with certain ‘evidence’. This might be connected to gender, desire, something like ‘situation’ and so forth. (Mrs. Malaprop is pretentious, and a bit sinister.) Having done this we might make hypotheses about the ‘new’ words of the malaprop that connects them to the regular ones. But when I say the comestible imploded meaning the convertible exploded before someone can say ‘yes, that’s correct’ they have to know something about how those words were intended by me to be interpreted. The theory we use will therefore be situational – connected to an occasion.

Are we putting the reader to the task of translation? Is it the case that the interpretation of these texts amounts either (1) to a translation back to an original or (2) to no translation and an acceptance of the malaprop at face value. If so, the malprop as a highly figural or non-literal or nonsensical text requires a first-order interpretation. Now, do these possibilities (to translate or not to translate) go anywhere?  Perhaps what they ask for is a picture of the prevailing discourse. What do you do with the voice of Mrs Malaprop? How far do you account it as a psychological or social presence? If you ‘translate’, how far do you account for the malaprop in terms of desire or other propositional and cultural attitudes?

Perhaps the real text is sandwiched somewhere between malaprop and ‘translation’ or ‘original’. I’d say the malaprop is a non-literary writing which enables the artist to hide behind words which are not her own at that appalling (or interesting) moment when she might be philosophising and thinking that her philosophising was art, and when she might be making art and thinking that that was philosophising – or theorising. That’s the emergency conditional again.

One of the things I’ve neglected to mention is that for most readers the malaprop is also comic.  Not ironic or sophisticatedly funny but funny like constructive nonsense can be. And funny, perhaps in the sense that it’s funny to read cultural buzzwords mistaken for others.

The malaprop is in fact a very difficult feat in English-language pornography owing to the impoverished repetitive nature of the available obscenities. It ends up almost as demotic slang, a bit like Cockney rhyming slang. The pornographic original is nevertheless hidden and the viewer is bound to a textual voyeurism which parallels the peering that is necessary in order to recover the original obscured text. But what happens? The malaprop text produces various absurdities which are, on the second transformation at the hands of Mrs. Malaprop, quite remote from the ‘original’. 

It is perfectly possible for the malaprop text to stand alone – even any part of it. Though pornography is rendered harmless, its shadow just remains. The voice which utters the malaprop is odd. Does it want to hide the pornography from shame or merely as a consequence of a misreading? Does the malaprop represent a cultural upraising – aufgehoben – of the pornography or some other transformation? Did it need the transformation in order to become art? 

In producing malaprop the writer is ‘subject’ to a mechanical homophonic code. Not many words will do the malaprop job. The words of the malaprop are variously ordered and disordered in relation to cultural fetish.  Is it the concepts we want or do we simply take turns with the words? The writer is both running the artifice and run by it. Once the malaprop begins, the writer is in certain regards its victim. An artist writing in malaprop is both hiding and being hidden. Of course she may just be saying what she means and relying on the interpreter’s ‘competence’ to unravel what’s going on. In this case, she is assuming a character (as a first person speaker) or in the case of the pornographic text, creating a reader (as a sort of cultural character). Of course, this is what happens anyway. 

There is artifice as well as desire in the cultural establishment of theories (of culture). This is an artifice that both stands outside the sense in which such theories are intelligible and is at the same time a condition of their intelligibility. The malaprop exemplifies both artifice and a dialogical circumstance – a circumstance of alterity within a text. For one reason or another, the maker of the malaprop commits the solecism as intentional malaprop. This must always be based on an ‘original’ or ‘correct’ text. Mrs. Malaprop’s material world poetics are concerned with getting ahead in society. An artist’s malaprop may suggest a considerable range of material-poetic reasons. These stand ‘beside’ the text as they would in a conventional piece of Artist’s Writing, as a practical negation or reification. But the malaprop may be occasional or continual, heavy or light. It is still linked ‘genetically’ to an original text however ‘heavy’ it gets. Do we call the malaprop a representation of its original? The possibilities that the malaprop discloses are, one might say, merely diagrammatic. It is, in part, a diagram of cultural suicide – a peau de chagrin.

I’d like to colonise the university world of Cultural Studies with the malaprop. One moderately interesting question is: ‘Would this entail some sort of nervous breakdown or would it be a way of generating or of learning new concepts?’ The malaprop may also link pictures and thoughts.  If we try to interpret a malaprop text – try to read it ‘as’ the original – we are still left with the echo of dreamwork, even pictures. But these are pictures which are in some regards illicit. They are noise. The alternative is that they – the malaprop words-cum-images – are rather tenacious, functioning themselves as a sort of ‘translation’ – that is to say some kind of voiced interpretation.

The artist’s writing of Modernism’s nervous breakdown drew with it an ambiguity. While philosophy or theory of some highly reflexive kind may have become art, and art become philosophy, we surely cannot say that the writing of philosophy and the production of art were identical. Writing as philosophy as art and writing – or painting – as art – as philosophy are incapable of being interpreted in identical ways. So writing as art and writing as writing etc., etc., will always bear a non-identical relation – within what could well be a resonant or mesomeric pairing. The malaprop enables a text to be ‘read’ subject to a certain amount of determinacy; it also enables that text to be other than it is – reified somehow as allegory. That’s the art bit. It’s also part of the dialogue bit: the text contains ‘within’ it a radical alterity or otherness in which the symmetry of hermeneutic identity is always at risk. It also has an ‘alterity’ from the outside. It is not ‘in’ the regular code language, yet we can use that language – or rather we can use a competence with that language to decipher it. But not without loss, and not without awareness that the malaprop text is there for some reason – some awareness that the conditions of cultural exclusion may be allegorised in its operation.

As I suggested, I’m for cultural theory by Mrs. Malaprop. I spoke of colonisation. Is this necessary? She might be very helpful to us if she is not already in control, learning new concepts with Deleuze.