Category Archives: Dichotomies

Performing Authenticity

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Francois Lachance

You gotta love the title of this paper which first appeared in New Media & Society. It quotes a Twitter user: “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience”. In the article Alice E. … Continue reading →

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They Are Other

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Francois Lachance

Marilyn Dumont The Pemmican Eaters The anaphora would be oppressive if these last three lines were not broken off into a separate stanza. these are not the lines between English and French these are not the lines between oral and … Continue reading →

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Rhythm: Seen and Heard

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Francois Lachance

This 1954 book by Langston Hughes with pictures by Robin King provides from its first pages evidence that there was an alternative to the eye-ear dichotomy championed by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s – a more holistic view of the … Continue reading →

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Artefact, Recursiveness, Focus

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Francois Lachance

Anne Carson in Eros, the bittersweet draws on the work of Eric Havelock postulating a shift in the Greek mind with the coming of literacy. She evokes this line of thought in the following terms: At the same time, a … Continue reading →

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A Column Electrified

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Francois Lachance

This bit from Hal Foster The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century has been reproduced with line breaks set at intervals similar to a newspaper column. Out of similar symptoms McLuhan arrives at a … Continue reading →

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Fictional Fuels

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Francois Lachance

Dichotomies can sometimes delight. Gass’s essays rarely pursue a single line of thought, and they offer not a progression of ideas so much as an experience, all feints and nuance, and with the argument itself vanishing within the sportive accretions … Continue reading →

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Capitalist Splitting

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Francois Lachance

My unfortunate encounter (work-mandatory) with a personality profile tool and its pseudo-science trappings (no it wasn’t Myers-Briggs), led me back, for my own sanity, to tracing out the origins of the split between affect and intellect (which readers of Berneval … Continue reading →

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Allergies of the Algebraic

Posted on April 25, 2010 by Francois Lachance

In “The Strategy of Visual Poetry”[Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of Intermedia. 1984.] Dick Higgins establishes a distinction between geometric and algebraic approaches to composition. I know about the difference between arithmatic and geometric progressions. However I am stumped in … Continue reading →

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Anchoring Freedom

Posted on September 26, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Mark Doty. Still Life With Oysters And Lemon. I found myself resisting intimacy as portrayed in the workings of breath and keen looking. This gesture of resistance had good reason — it was imitating what the author himself had done … Continue reading →

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World-Making Words

Posted on March 14, 2009 by Francois Lachance

Northrop Frye. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. I am tempted to be seduced by the tale he tells in a before and after fashion … […] when we speak of the subject of a book. These are puns, … Continue reading →

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