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Gaffe/Stutter

Whitney Trettien, Gaffe/Stutter
Whitney Trettien Gaffe/Stutter Punctum Books, 2013

Gaffe/Stutter is a dead letter to Deleuze’s Logic of Sense.

For sale at Punctum Books

Gaffe/Stutter is a dead letter to Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. It began as a series of diagrams, two-dimensional memory palaces that sketch the vectors of each chapter’s paradox; it became an elaborate plan for a web-based diagrammatic (r)e(n)dition of Logic of Sense, built on zoomable, annotatable high-resolution scans of these diagrams. Conceived as an anti-book — a visual reading schematic — this project eschews the line of text in favor of regimented grids, the ink-soaked grain of the remediated pen over the laser-burned face of print; playful reaction rather than academic protraction. This is not an analogy, or a product of the imagination, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would write in A Thousand Plateaus, but a composition of speeds and affects on the plane of consistency: a plan(e), a program, or rather a diagram, a problem, a question-machine. It ended as a directory of inert jQuery demos and digital scans: an image of Trafalgar Square at dusk, annotated with the words “Flag,” “Small people on the steps,” “A Statue,” and “National Gallery Dome”; an empty html file titled ‘delete.html’. The visitor who may happen to wander onto the website where these project demos are stashed would find herself stuck on Deleuze’s definition of a paradox as initially that which destroys good sense as the only direction of becoming, but also that which destroys common sense as the assignation of fixed identities. From a series of diagrams to a dead-end digital directory, Gaffe/Stutter re-interprets a book that itself resists scholarly annotation. As with sense, it subsists in language; but it happens to things.

Whitney Trettien
Written by
Whitney Trettien

Whitney Trettien is a scholar, creator, and teacher whose work weaves together archival research and creative use of technologies. She has a PhD from Duke University, an MS from MIT, and is an Assistant Professor of English at University of Pennsylvania. Before moving to Penn, she taught in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill.

Thesis: Computers, Cut-ups and Combinatory Volvelles: An Archaeology of Text-Generating Mechanisms

Whitney Trettien Written by Whitney Trettien