Fountain; fragments and remains: an journal/essay of things orr Nude Descending a Staircase N°2; fragments and remains: a long form poem

Abstract

What Fountain wants here is to be both signal and noise at the same time, so that the signal is noise and the noise signal, in a constant feedback loop (both negative and positive, destructive and constructive) refusing to settle into either for long enough to “make sense.” The reader is, at least potentially, unable to reconcile one from the other, thus allowing a third state to come into being: that excluded middle that Western logics are so troubled by with the stated intent of troubling those logics. The entire project is dedicated to and bound (paradoxically) by these paradoxes. The paradoxes cannot be healed and so become a greater noise against certain hermeneutics of the world that seek always to “understand” each thing they encounter within the rules of system. Fountain becomes thus that system against system that it cannot seriously claim to be. And yet it makes this claim, and makes it seriously. There are, without exception, no absolutes. In a society in which logics are employed as weapons against discrepant persons. cultures, and (margined) societies, Fountain weaponizes dislogics and noise to infect disjunction into the signal (dominant narratives) that it itself sees as a destructive noise. Signal and noise are both rejected as dichotomous positions against which one must choose sides, and both are taken up (reupped) into a prepositional, unboundable, multidimensional open field of logics and dislogics, leaving the reader free to pursue the text (all text, everywhere) in their own unbounded freedoms. This “place” that Fountain points to is precisely (again, paradoxically) that place of mutuality, where in every actor is given full agency to be, and that commonality, that universal ontological fact, describes that inescapable network referred to by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever effects one directly, effects all indirectly."