RISDspeaks

Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy 41 students and myself are currently reading in class, makes great use of aposiopesis, a rhetorical figure where the sentence suddenly breaks.  Sterne piles a carnival of devices into that break—dashes, asterisks, even the sudden snapping of a tobacco pipe.  His characters have too much to say and rarely a handy way of saying it. There’s always a mismatch between thought and word, or sense and word, or image and word, or intention and word, or even desire and word.  Laced through the nine volumes of Tristram Shandy—which my students think is already more than enough—there are further volumes, only the entry points of which are marked.

Aposiopesis implies more than breaking-off: there is a freight of energy in that dash. 

When a speaker or writer suddenly breaks off in aposiopesis, the air or the line vibrates with the unsaid—or unsayable.  

I suppose it’s like ejaculation, an overflowing of bounds, with exquisite energy attached.  Silence breaking the bounds of text. 

Aposiopesis can also be the loss of desire to speak.  The sentence implodes, all the blinds come down.

Auscultation is another interesting word: the conscious act of listening.  In the act of auscultation, we position ourselves to listen, coiling the noise of our own bodies into quietness to build an auditorium.

Aposiopesis and auscultation seem to meet at their edges: the jagged edge of aposiopesis and the curve of auscultation; the emdash, and the stilled breath.

You can balance on that long emdash, surfing on charged silence. 
You can unfold, larval, into the moment of full attention.

Aposiopesis: a javelin of silence slicing through noise.
Auscultation: a listening so meaty it is dimensional.

A speaker, or writer, can ride the emdash right out of language, abandoning the realm of the social.  A speaker, or writer, can consume the listening of those listening, feeding it out into talk.

In the act of online writing, there is both aposiopesis and auscultation.  The chain of command is gone.   The circles of editor, subeditor, peer reviewer, art editor, are gone.  You jump off the cliff.

It is almost like speaking to yourself.  But you are listening.

There still is the moment of the dive, when we are poised in silence, ready to send.

Kenneth Goldsmith (RISD BFA Sculpture ’84) said: “If every word spoken during one day in New York were a snowflake, there would be a blizzard.”  What is the density of the online word? 

Both aposiopesis and auscultation occupy infinitely small points in time.  They are moments of balance outside the communicative norm.

My third A is audience: the living space between the finger of Adam and the finger of God.

In class, we are also reading Henri Bergson’s “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic”—“For the comic spirit has a logic of its own, even in its wildest eccentricities.” 

Poetry has its own economy too.  There is no market and it never crashes.

It is almost always true that the reader of poetry is the writer of poetry.  Online environments are like that: the reader is almost certainly the writer. Not that they are one and the same.  But each has the capacity of both and is likely to exercise it.

There are other As of course—argument, adjudication, authority.  These are defaults.  We have here a space of fragrant possibility.  George Lakoff has spent a lifetime demonstrating how our metaphorical systems derive from our bodily experience.  We communicate now in a culture of finger-tips. 

Our active creative audience is right here.