Source: Music for Solo Performer by Alvin Lucier.
What Can Go Wrong in the Mirror (Excerpt)
What the orders of grammatization from primeval to communicative to situational call for is a unity of the text of self—that is, a final order of narrativization that represents a coherent story of self that acts as “justification” for the destruction of coherency inherent to original being. The reductive fracturing of grammatization self-transcends through this selective weaving. The self as story meaningfully compensates for the being-as-meaning of the pre-conceptual self. It is, in a sense, the unfolding of the trace of this impossible unity. But this is just what the post-modern self is denied. Narratives become objects of consumption rather than transformation, the novel rather than the sublime. They proliferate in every direction to feed choice and reactivity and become in their endless variety an obstacle to self-narration, to the self as self-legible coherent text. They make the self incoherent and illegible to itself through a constant “unsettling” of the self that leaves it all the more vulnerable to a desire to fill itself with whatever is presented to it. When this becomes a way of life, e. g. to the smartphone generation, textual unity, self-narrativization, becomes virtually an impossibility. The first step towards productive resistance then is to reject narrative as simple consumable, as commodity.
Source: What Can Go Wrong In the Mirror – Paul R. Buckle – Academia.edu
