Re-daseining in the Dazwischensein, Performing Liminality

On est toujours au milieu. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “we are always in the middle,” between geo-political, socio religious, racial and gendered codes, between humanity and technology, belonging and estrangement, where forms, identities, meaning are continually formed and deformed framed through interference, superimposition, semantic overlap. And i have dedicated my life to the dazwischen-sein, this state of betweenness — by way of a hyper-generative ‘inter-ventive’ poetics marked by neo- formalized post-consumerist media-infused transgressive linguistic practices, intertextually drenched palimpsestic systems, drawing on a range of neo Fluxus, post L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Sound Poetry, Concrete and Vispo models; framed by a fiercely feminist aesthetics of transgression, invasion, contradiction, ambiguity, ornament, excess, paradox and desire — occupying this liminal space — where meaning-making is always-already a praxis of rhizomatic schismatics: an arché-textural lexically exilic elixir, where subjectivity slips between difference, appliance, appearance —

A house of letters to live in: my milieu : )

‘cause focusing on the physicality, materiality of language, all intertextatically rapt, fundamentally affects the way we see, breathe, feel and act. It propels us to see the world in new ways — as parsed plays, liaised socio-political-lingual cultural shards, instruments of change, through which we may embrace the impossibility of the possible, the contingency of our finitude, our brokenness, excess and exuberance, within the fissures of being —

And when for Heidegger, beying “is an event / an unforeseeable rupture” —

within these fissures of being, is where we all live now — through media’s immediacy, en medias, intermediacy — re-mediated through modes, models, idyls, addles — overwritten by AI or increasingly attached to our screens, streams of syncretic deictics, lexical excess of pools spools arcs scars, scripts clicks — all extensions of ourselves. And as “we dance inside the machine” (Kit Robinson) and that machine “an aspect of our embodiment,” kinetic bodies that both generate and obscure signification (Johanna Drucker),

we are so in the middle of it : )

And in that hypernoetic space of the “the middle” — in the words of Marshall McLuhan, “we shape our tools as our tools shape us”: GPT (with its intellectual labor) overtaking our minds, GPS navigating our lives GPL’s eating our fat, GPA — i dunno ; ) we are all cyborgian now — in the transhumanist daswischensein:

All to say, as we negotiate this liminal space between our large language models and their impact on contemporary socio-philosophical, linguistic and political ethos, and when for Heidegger, “language is the house of being [where] humanity dwells” — what happens when AI also occupies this “house of being”? — when presence is relational and there is no fixed, locatable Truth, when everything is haunted by repetition, substitutions, veiled surveillance, within a scrolling corollary of coded communication // in the composite ventriloquy, electrical currency, mounting liquidity

What does it mean (pun intended) to be in the middle
What are the consequences of being between??

When every “truth” is represented as the image of appearance cloaked in the appearance of the image; or for Wittgenstein, “at the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded” or for Plato, “Knowledge is simply justified true belief,” or for Aristotle, “Certainty is impossible,” or for Lacan, being is nothing “but a fact of what is said — but what is said is always the other of the other concealed in the concealment of withdrawal,” what’s certain is never certain but a paradoxical complex of contradiction, juxtaposition, revision, inversion, elision, derision, all relational, elational, delusional, contextual ―

who can be sure of anything

Thus, ipso facto : ) we gotta remember that language is and has always been slippery, inherently metaphorical; a joining of heterogenous signals / codes propagating a polyontological disparity.

But this “polyontological disparity” is not just a “free-play of signifiers” (as we know from Derrida), but grounded in the trace of intra-subjective, socio/ideological / political and aesthetic specificities. For Charles Sanders Pierce, “a womb of indeterminacy inchoate in its limitless potential.” So, when all knowledge (and meaning) is a palimpsestic process of ever-emergent information; when i am multiple subjectivities inscribed along so many axes of influence,

we gotta celebrate that hell yeah, we are always in a state of between
Re-defined in the Dazwischensein

Take the idea of translation. Like how book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic, Johanna Drucker’s, 2026 “Re-Declaration Project” (commissioned by the American Philosophical Society for the nation’s 250th Anniversary), re-translates the 1776 Dunlap Broadside of the Declaration of Independence through a series of Oulippean-inspired erasure techniques, and typographic elements (replacing traditional patriotic state seals and flourishes with hand drawn solar panels & wind turbines); blending historic design with contemporary symbols of American democracy, installing it with a new set of symbolic and iconic values, asking us to re-think our relation to the received past by re-historicizing the original -----

Or Maria Damon, beloved Professor Emerita of U of M, cultural theorist, essayist, and textile artist, and takes artist, filmmaker, Derek Jarman’s, 1995 Chroma, his memoir on color, light and mortality written while battling Aids-related blindness, (published by University of Minnesota Press!), and re-fabricates it as polychromatic woven text-tiles, textures, ur-texts, sub-texts —

Specifically, when diagnosed, Jarman’s response was to build a garden on the coast in Dungeness, the southeast tip of England, in the shadow of a then-working nuclear power plant. That garden became his heaven in Hell — his queer Eden. Damon’s “data [re]visualization” of warped wefts, weaves all the colors of the garden, his cottage, with 4 colors to correspond to the 4 nucleotides that comprise all DNA sequences, and weaving the genomic sequence of an HIV/AIDS virus sequences in the UK in 1986, the place and year in which Jarman received his diagnosis: In “Blue,” in honor of his last film by the same name, Damon threads blue for the ocean; black for grief of death, metallic gold and/or silver, for Jarman’s flamboyantly queer artistry, and brown, for the reassuring stability of the earth which he worked while creating the garden and to which he would return. Through combination and relation across grids of time, space, color, form, pattern and chaos, she creates a kind of Deleuze n Guattarian, “rhizomatic” response, a non-hierarchical, interconnected network of multiplicity, heterogeneity, and fluidity — asking us to re-think the state of being between as she re-threads, histories, aesthetics, biography, biology, philology.

Or laterally read, this state of liminality could be seen as what L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, Barrett Watten might call a kind of “neo-mimesis” — a reproduction that’s not primarily concerned with “the truth” of representation or transparency of meaning, but moves transversally across modes of representation. And between replication and reproduction, both Damon and Drucker offer an asymmetrical neo-mimetic poetics, reminding us how the liminal, a critical network of thresholds, transitions, axes of interpretive possibility.

An adjacent example of playing within this liminal space of “translation” — through reflection, deflection, refraction and the fracturing of language — my 2023 Eicha: The Book of Lumenations, (written during Covid), homophonically re-situates the Book of Lamentation to the horrors and hope of a re-presented present palimpsesting language, history, rhythms, texture — which now speaks to not only the original destruction of Jerusalem but the destruction of all our “cities”, (Gaza, Ukraine, American democracy, bodies, politics, identities).

This act of reproduction, “re-creating” an ancient text, and re-visioning it through a fraught present, poignantly speaks to ways time is contemporaneous. Like Benjamin’s, “Jetztzeit” (now-time) outlined in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, a notion of time that is ripe with revolutionary possibility; time that has been detached from the continuum of history; poised, filled with energy, ready to leap into an ever-becoming future. Thus, this very mixing (and of being between time) speaks to ways the future sutures in a repast of a past, a prescient resonant present-non-presence, where the infinite is contained in each iteration, co/created anew in each moment. Or as Hannah Bloch might say, a ventriloquized latticework of interconstellated contingencies, referencing not only the specifics of its own historical circumstance, but a reminder of how like Derrida’s, homage and parricide, dis-ease is an ever-present condition.

Or read through McLuhan’s, Laws of Media whereby an artifact enhances, reverses, retrieves and obsolesces — these homophonic trans’lations, do not so much obsolesce the original but (as “trans” is moving across ‘n through), through redaction, rendition, additions, permutation, re-combination, maintains a fidelity to the “original,” but like the Aramaic neologism, atikin haditin, “ancient new,” it journeys deep within the original and makes it new / (uh hello Pound ; )

And given this fantastic conference celebrates liminality, poetry AND performance, i shd just add that Eicha was then further “re-newed” as a 5-part film, with a score by Grammy Award winning composer n trumpeter, Frank London. ((and like how Samuel Beckett said of Joyce’s prose, “it is not [just to] be read. It is to be looked at and listened to, here’s Eicha I )) —

Show clip: Eicha: The Book of Lumenations.

The shift from the page to the screen — with its recording and visuals, allowed me to highlight the physicality, materiality, viscerality of the language itself, as visio-textual- acoustic arenas of otherness — where identity shattered, displaced and palimpsested — and where the letters themselves, as almost living beings appear as sparks of light / in a multisensorious arena. Alive in the liminal — ((or the lumenal — as the case may be))

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Like how French Feminist theorist, Hélène Cixous talks about how we need to both work within the law and exceed the law, tear that law apart — or extending Emerson’s notion of the “antinomian” (an excess concern with the law) to a “hypernomian” poetics (one that transcends the limits of the law) — further highlighting an interventionist state of liminality and dare i say OUTLAW discourse, my 2018 Salomé: Woman of Valor — re-visions the apocryphal figure of Salomé who has been serially n violently misrepresented through history, re-inserts her back into her “rightful” place — where she is not repeatedly victimized, scapegoated and silenced, but rather occupies a space of empowerment.

Through a kinda Irigaraian celebration of “the excluded middle” (“that disrupts traditional rules of logic, allowing the “Other” to flourish without being trapped inside binaric hierarchies” — playfully traversing through homophonic translations, permutations, re-combinations of the Strauss play and Oscar Wilde monologues, midrashic aphorisms, 13th C. Kabbalistic infusions, pop cultural idioms — it exposes how Salomé like so many women’s stories throughout history have not only been silenced and misrepresented, but fraught with contradiction. As such, both in form and content, the work intertextatically draws from and celebrates this conflictual history.

Re-designed in the dazwischensein!

(((And for those of you who don’t have the story of Salomé at the forefront of your brain, she’s obsessively in love with John (the Baptist), but he’s obsessively in love with G-d! She’s uh SO in the middle of it —

Occupying a liminal space not just between histories and temporalities but between media. And re-produced intermediatically mounted on concert and theater stages worldwide featuring original Klezmer /bhangra / jazz compositions; contemporary jazz ballet dancers and screen projections featuring trippy vispo and montage of the Charles Bryant 1923 black & white film, with a layered mashup of the text. The libretto was translated into Italian, Bengali, Malayalam, German, Arabic, Czech and Yiddish; and then released as a CD. Itself occupying a diasporic space highlighting how when language is translated from the page to the stage to the screen how meaning slips; between the forces and intensities distributed through the texts’ syntactic economy, addressing the continuous process of mistranslation that goes on in every moment of our lives.

For, where everything is a re-articulation of a re-articulation, a translation of a translation, ’n the past is palimpsestically re-passed, surpassed in an irrepresentable present non present or resonant present that continually escapes itself into a promise of memory of tradition, of heritage, religio/socio/cultural knowledge that virally replicates itself — we must play inside the lexical excess, the flirty flexicon of fixity mixes, a nexus of synnexes, annexes, diexis of lexically-sugared circuits showing us how the future is always arriving from itself, in an excess of excess of transcriptions, translations, in (what Derrida would call), “a nonhistory of absolute beginnings,” celebrating all that is nomadic and vagrant and on the edge — through “lines of flight.”

So come fly / with me deep inside the liminal —

fly me by night to the river [de]river over the rainbow fly me faster than angels so fly as the sky flying without wings as sparks fly enfleurage i was born to fly so fly with me through the flux of form through refueled folly volleyed veils voiles volér réveillé all luminous voluminous flee flyten’ fly flug me by the seat of your pense fly me like a butterfly fly as flamingos flyin the coupe fly free and fly blind buttressed from the inside like a flying f*ck on the fly to the moon over the dateline as the sky flies awake

And inside the liminal, where “letters travelling through space / Seated letters speaking ourselves / against the sky inverted through flying circuits / coded ciphers secrets’ shaded silence / of shuttered truance… liaised in the labor of / hours / aisles / eros / sorrows / aeros” of projection, introjection, exilic trajection” —

as we caress the complexities, mounds, crevices, trigger points, in the interstices, aporias, this unheimlich space of multiplicitous systems of social and cultural signification; this hybridized / syncretic space between cultures and idioms; this “deterritorialized” space, marked by “zones of becoming,” a “nexus of possibilities”

highlighting language’s skin wet sweat seeping into not just textual but techno-political, visual and acoustic spaces, underscoring how language is always already in excess of itself, inscribed in multiplicity, fluid, in fluent effusion, diffused through migrancy, translation, that doesn’t close down dialogue but all slippery, HOT, multiple, resurgent and conflictual, prob-ey ‘n vibrational — OPENS up and into what James Joyce calls a “MindWar” — which combats and undermines structures of “awethororty” through humor, levity, linguistic tricks and “erotic magick,” // asserting how subversive language practices are themselves prophetic peace protests.

So — in a “war in words” i urge you, DECLARE WAR IN LANGUAGE, on language by language, powered by passion, play, comedy and cunning, jouisse-ly underscoring how flagrant intervention, linguistic friction; appropriation, translation, citation and sophistry, defy mastery —

And because everything is always-already fluid, in flux fleeting in this increasingly destabilized world, we are forever between time, space, language, being, humanity, technology; domains, demains, demands; forms, homes, pages, stages, ideologies, languages. Between re-cirqued sanctuaries, synchronies, inquiries, iniquities, shadows, screens and silences — All to say,

DAZWISCHE i may
DAZWISCHE i might