http://www.christophebruno.com/2006/10/31/the-web-before-the-web
(((Christophe Bruno: "The Web Before the Web." Joyce, Benthan, Poe, Turing, the Oulipo Group...)))
(((Okay, this artsy stuff must be bonkers, but it's kind of interestingly bonkers. It was worth reading this to learn the neologism "hapax," a "word which appears once and only once in the written records of a language." Actually, "hapax" isn't a neologism at all – it's just new to me. A hapax itself would have to be a "unilogism." See, we really DO "need a new word for neologism.")))
"Stéphane Mallarmé
"In 1887, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), who translated many of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, published a poem called «Crisis in Verse», where he compares the use of language to the exchange of used coins of money, passed on from hand to hand in silence. This amazing intuition opposes a prosaic use of language to what he redefines as poetry, evoking «la disparition élocutoire du poête»: the vanishing of the poet behind the words, in the act of speech...
"I believe his intuition anticipates what happens today with the use and sale of language in the global never-ending hypertext linking process, as shown in my piece the Google Adwords Happening where I introduce the paradox of semantic capitalism that is at the core of Google business. As in Mallarmé, the Adwords Happening tells us about the vanishing of the poet... behind the market of words.
Related to this is the question of the hapax. A hapax is a word that appears once and only once in literature, and is therefore disconnected from the network of significations. The most famous is the hapax «ptyx» by Mallarmé in «Sonnet allégorique de lui-même»:
...
Sur les crédences, au salon vide : nul ptyx,
Aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore,
(Car le Maître est allé puiser des pleurs au Styx
Avec ce seul objet dont le Néant s’honore.)
...
The status of the hapax (within the context of the Web, cf my piece Hapax) deals with the question of the absolute separation from the symbolic field, which is an extreme position that negates the concept of network itself and therefore is one of the only places we can lean on to articulate the concept of network from outside the discourse of Science and Capitalism where the idea of irreducible loss, of irreducible separation, is unadmissible. Other extreme positions are the idea of pop or the absolute merchandise (Jean Baudrillard, De la marchandise absolue, in Artstudio, N°8, Printemps 1988, «Spécial Andy Warhol»).
