MetaFormances : the hermeneutics of play in language/art/life

Abstract

MetaFormances is a correspondence-based project that took place between 2005 and 2007. Miming the protocol of business form letters, the letters request their recipient to perform absurd, erotic, and illicit behavior in order to transform the letter into something else. As I see it, the recipients' correspondence signals their readiness to play, to accept their role in the transubstantiation of the letter, to believe in the metaphysical force of the delicate printed word, to extend a joke. Each letter was mailed via overnight express courier along with a disposable 35 mm. camera and self-addressed, self-stamped envelope. The project engaged a motley crew of 32 characters - a mailman, a confettiologist, a Dutch man, a computation origami expert (and his dad), a pom artist, a pinata factory, a psychoanalyst, etc. As stand-ins for my own body, the letters enable an exploration of the forbidden, the otherwise inaccessible, the abject. Through this process of substitution, the the letters (symbolically) venture towards carnality, enacting rites of death, wish-fulfillment, and regeneration. The letters thus provide a way establishing communion, limitlessness, and transcendence.

(cont.) As its title suggests, MetaFormances is a project that investigates the in-between, restructuring authorship as vector; content as traversion; form as process. This thesis explores various topics related to the notion of an epistolary game. For instance, in my examination of the suppression of the body within writing, I draw example from Julia Kristeva's notion of "obscene language", Jacques Derrida's "ecriture batarde", and Doris Sommer's "bilingual aesthetics." In investigating both the historicity and affective aspects of a scriptural economy, I consider literary critics (Barthes, Derrida) and cultural historian Francis Barker. I draw from film theorist Giuliana Bruno and the psychoanalytic perspectives (Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Zizek) to consider object-relations such as the substitute, the fetish, the specter, the transubstanciate. I conclude by comparing the eschatological figures of (in)finitude in the writing of Kristeva, Bataille, Foucault, and Derrida.