Detective Pony When I Feel Like It

1 day ago

@inspectorEquine[IE]

themselves fly through the air; covered in radar-absorbent paint; heat ablating tiles covering their exhaust troughs; equipped with dual afterburning Pratt & Whitney F119-PW-100 turbofan engines that incorporate pitch axis thrust vecoring nozzles with a range of ± 20 degrees, each with a maximum thrust in the 35,000 lbf (156kN) class. That’s what Pam and Pawnee were just then. “Hey, Pawnee,” Pam whispered. “Or, should I call you Lulu now? You doing okay after your ego disintegration and resultant existential crisis?” Pawnee shrugged. “Nah, Pawnee’s good. And I’m more or less fine. I’ve decided to just not think about it too much. Really, is it that much more shocking than all the other shit we’ve been dealing with today?” “Yeah,” Pam said. “If you can accept that you’re a fictional character, any other personal revelations must be pretty tame by comparison.” She smiled and gave Pawnee a quick hug. “Regardless, I’m glad you made it through.” “—such as the Novgorod Codex or the Codex Guelferbytanus B,” Anna said, unaware that her friends/troops/fighter jets weren’t listening to her fascinating lecture on the history of palimpsests. Luckily, they tuned in just in time to hear her say, “But the underlying text isn’t lost forever. It leaves a mark — a trace. Because after all, what is a palimpsest? It’s simply a document from which the original writing has been scraped off so that the parchment or vellum can be reused. And that’s why Operation Palimpsest is such a clever name for what we’re going to do. We’ll restore the original document by repeating the very process that destroyed it. We’re going to scrape off Dirk’s text to re-reveal the text underneath it. It has been obscured, but by scraping off the top layer, it will be (obs)cured. We’ll re-present the representation.” Pam and Pawnee nodded along, pretending for Anna’s sake that “re-reveal” was a phrase that made any sort of sense. “The ultimate mechanism is a literal as well as a metaphorical flattening,” Anna continued. “Literally, in that we want to get rid of these pasted-on pages that are making this book three times thicker than it should be. But more importantly, figuratively. The center of the structure of a text is outside the structure itself, which is both impossible and necessary. The differentiation of inside and outside is the opposition by which all other oppositions are posed, but writing posits a deposition of this very positional opposition. Writing and its ‘meaning’ are external to itself, while also being nothing except the self. It can’t be outside the structure, because it is the structure; but how can something be described if not from the outside? And with this opposition destabilized, then writing, the signifier, representation, is both something and nothing in and of itself. It’s death. Or is it just a presentation of death? A performance of death? Life playing at, on, with, and as death. “But that’s how it should be! The problem with this text, Dirk’s text, isn’t that it’s exterior to itself; all texts are. The problem is that it’s explicitly exterior. And by so clearly identifying an exterior, the center shifts. This text is defined by its opposition to the texts that surround it, from which it draws. So, the center retreats, withdraws, becomes centralized. Now the center of this structure is inside the structure, which is both exactly where it should be, and where it cannot afford to be. The chain of signification is revealed by and to the author, and this revelation transforms it into shackles. “To save this text, to return it to what it should be, we’ll therefore need to repeat the original process that writes writing. It’s an expulsion, a purification, but inverted. The opposite of the scapegoat, which, in being cast out from the group, defines the group by opposition to it — which is what Dirk’s text did. What we need to do is to expel the parasite of writing, which is death, from writing, in order to define our life; this will return writing (and this text) to what it should never have ceased to be: an accessory, an accident, an excess. Which is exactly what makes it (writing) essential, valuable, necessary. But this therapeutic, cathartic elimination must call upon the very thing that it’s expelling, which means that the operation must exclude itself from itself. We’ll write out writing, and erase erasure. “Thus, our flattening will be an ironic one, in the proper sense of the word. We are 1. scraping off Dirk’s writing, which 2. literally flattens our text; this, in turn, 3. re-opens it to the possibility of exteriority as such, 4. freeing the center from the structure, and un-flattening it. “Did you get all of that, girls?” “…Yes,” Pam and Pawnee said in unison. “Good. And here’s how we’re going to do it: more dyslexia shenanigans. Pam, you will guide us to the point where the flattening must occur. In fact, you’ve already been guiding us there. That’s how you knew so much, so many things that you shouldn’t have known. It’s because Pam, you are our Map. Lead us.” Pam shrugged. “Sure, okay. Kinda lame, but whatevs.” “And Pawnee,” Anna continued, “you’re the key to all of this. You are the one who holds the future of two realities in her hands. Pawnee, Indiana. Lulu Sanders. One a being of this world, one of the world that should have been. Your very identity straddles the two texts. You #DetectivePony