GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 8, Epilogue

So here we establish a provisional end [1] to this series of posts. What exactly has been going on here?

On a basic level, the “Gleaming the Cube” posts were a series of responses to Daniel Scott Snelson’s essay “Simultaneously Agitated in All Directions,” published in Mimeo Mimeo 3. The responses were more creative than critical, focusing on elaborating on ideas constructed or described in the essay.

The posts were an exploration of what it can mean to, and one way a reader can, engage creatively with any given text. The original essay was entered at various points, cut apart, re-presented, recombined, and placed in juxtaposition to new images and texts. I would not call it a “critique” or “deconstruction.” Perhaps the neutral word “response” is the most fitting. Perhaps. But the most important thing (to me, as I built those posts) was to elaborate on the source essay productively, to make that essay do more work. This is, after all, a blog focused on and of production, not reproduction.

What is reproduction in this sense? Are there two (or more) types of reproduction—one type that copies the object in question simply and transparently, and one type that re-produces or re-constructs the object in order to position it critically?

1. A “provisional” end because we will inevitably come back to it. The kind of engagement undertaken in the “Gleaming the Cube” posts provides a weird ownership of the source text, albeit in a distorted and personalized form. Although those texts have distorted “me’ as well, have changed the shape of this blog. Every time we enter or use an object it does the same to us.