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Diagram for A Thousand Plateaus, Introduction - Paragraph 13, 2010, Marc Ngui

I have all these thoughts that come out when doing mundane things. I think it's Dantec and D&G that provoke these thoughts as catalysts, I think, like latent crazy dreams that happen when there's only intake and no output in thought, reading essays but never writing them, looking at objects but never holding them, and so on.

the other day I was cleaning the fridge, or rather cleaning the dismembered and dislocated innards of the fridge in the bathtub, when it suddenly occurred to me (or rather, it suddenly formulated itself as a thesis) that self-reflexivity as an analytical methodology (ex: medium-specificity within art history) is an a priori method, yes, but more interestingly is perhaps born of an anxiety against groundlessness. that is: it's an approach that is specifically an anxious response to the encroaching territory of non-modernism, and thus an absolutely tacit but also absolutely solid acknowledgement of these happenings. or: a modernist autonomy is born only because (and _not_ in spite of) the proximity of a 'frontier' or a 'rupture', the lack of a tether with which art can be read, knots between 'meaning' and non-arbitrarity becoming untied. in that way, is it too trite to say that post-and-pre are two sides of the same coin, that the necessary conditions of its birth are exactly the same condition which it resists? or maybe the better image is of a fence in a field that ends up generating two spaces, rather than dividing one.

I've been looking for this quote for a while, and finally found it. It's never been typed on the internet before, but it's here now, fresh and new:

"I shall not explicate this text; I shall merely produce a number of fragments which will be, in a sense, outcomes of the text. These fragments will be in a more or less emphatic state of severance with each other: I shall not attempt to link, to organize these "outcomes"; and in order to be sure of frustrating any liaison (any systematizing of the commentary), in order to avoid any rhetoric of "development," of the developed subject, I have titled each of these fragments, and I have put these titles in alphabetical order -- which is, of course, both an order and a disorder, an order stripped of meaning, the degree zero of disorder. "

- Barthes, "Outcomes of the Text", 1972 (emphasis mine).