User:Taltalim

The Justification of the Justification of the Justification

The Justification of the Justification of the Justification is a work produce by Tal Gluck for his COML4675: Creativity and Constraints course at Cornell University during the Spring 2010 semester. The work addresses two main aspects that had been dealt with in the course: the production of a work under a particular constraint, and the pitfalls that arise through writing and language due to the trouble of signifier and signified.

History

During the Spring 2010 semester at Cornell University, Tal Gluck enrolled in a course entitled "Creativity and Constraints" (COML4675), taught by Tracy McNulty, a faculty member in the French department. Tal had previous interest in the work of the Oulipo, and more specifically the work of Georges Perec, and he hoped to learn more about the function of constraint in producing a creative work. Tal was registed as a major in the department of Design and Environmental Analysis under the faculty of Human Factors and Ergonomics, but was fascinated by literary theory and material culture, and decided to try out this Comparative Literature to gain a better understanding of the theory behind some of the practice.

The Course

The course first delved into the more literal aspects of creativity through constraint by analyzing some of the works of the Oulipo and related works (such as those of Raymond Roussel and Francois Ponge). It proceeded to analyze the nature of language and writing as space (through studies of Heidegger, Lefebvre and Bachelard), before continuing into the relations between constraint and the law (with rigorous examinations of the written and oral laws of Judeo-Christian traditions).

After this groundwork had been laid, the course readings and discussion turned to Georges Perec's La Disparition, the idea of the "void" and a discussion of structuralism and post-structuralism through the lenses of Derrida and Deleuze. It was at this point, during discussions of signifier, signified, void and center that The Justification of my Existence occurred to Tal.

The Project

Tal wanted to produce something under a constraint for his final project for the course. But he also knew that a simple constraint would not be sufficient, especially since a fully self-imposed constraint was impossible. He knew that the constraint must have relevant content as well as a relevant style. And he also knew that constraints require an Other. Indeed, the very concept of Self requires an Other (see Hegel's Master-slave dialectic). And so Tal decided to use a preexisting framework to compose his project. He decided to produce the work within the framework of Wikipedia. This would provide him with both relevant style and relevant content. For the relevant style, he found a set of laws to which he must submit himself if he did not want his project to be deleted - his project must be formatted and phrased a particular way in order to seem valuable to The Free Encyclopedia. But in addition to the formatting and phrasing, a fundamental component of any Wikipedia article was the need for proper citations. And it was here that the relevant content came through. For Tal noticed in this aspect of Wikipedia a relation to many of the ideas discussed in his COML4675 seminar. The idea that a Wikipedia article was more proper and more correct, or at the very least more prone to survival, if it cited other Wikipedia articles and other sources on the Internet, seemed to illustrate perfectly the arbitrariness of the relation between signifier and signified. For though moderators were evaluating Wikipedia articles to determine that they had proper sources, no one was evaluating those proper sources. Thus, was The Justification of the Justification of the Justification of born. A self-referential constraint, The Justification of the Justification of the Justification of, questions the validity of Wikipedia pages in the guise of a Wikipedia page. Each of its content words are linked to their individual definitions on Wiktionary, the "wiki-based, Open Content dictionary," while citations abound, though the semantic validity of those citations is suspect. And so, through its form and its substance, Tal Gluck is able to present a reasonably adequate final project for COML4675: Creativity and Constraints.