Cogito, Nada

“don’t say anything.” - Coda

Barthes spoke of the author in echoing of Derrida’s remarks against invectives of moral relativism against him - never that the center doesn’t exist, but that the center is a function. Not a noumenal ideal, but an emergent position in the motion of the flux of phenomena. 

When The Beginners Guide came out, countless Professional Critics emerged from the woodwork to engage in their favorite activity - self flagellation over the useless and parasitism inherent to their profession. Forgiving for a moment the pathos in their correct self-assessments, to take them at face values shows a reading of the game missed - that of the text as a text. Barthes by Derrida - not that the author doesn’t exist, but that the author is a function, a position in the topological space of becomings-in-flux, an emergent “center” of the strands and tensions that flow and swirl to form a text. The vortex’s center is the author-function, the voice of the text. In The Beginner’s Guide, Coda and Davey form two in the singlesame, each emergences of the author-function, as Coda becomes the facet of the author constructing the game as the world while Davey constructs it as diegetic and intellectual writing.

Davey obsesses through the text for meaning and his contributions are just that, the vertical signification that the author-function is assumed by the critic to provide. Davey becomes the critic’s author here, the vertical author. The lamps at the end of each level, the diegetic story, the “meaning” of the game laid out in plain English - all of which are functions of the critic which the critic then performs through the text’s author-function in their writing-within.

Coda meanwhile acts as the author-function’s horizontal properties, the author as flux. Coda constructs levels mutely, only speaking to rebuke the critic. Coda assembles and creates, as nature does, wind and water assembling forests and mountains without purpose besides motion. Coda provides the material of the world, the author-function as a magnetic center of flux into which flows revolve to form the text.

The game ends as Coda is destroyed by Davey. The critic, like the gun to destroy precious projects, is caustic. Criticism, a vertical imposition upon the text, comes first as dissolving agent and then a crystallization-imitation, a facade of the former remade in monochromatic ice, an intellectualization that reduces the work of the horizontal-author to a one-dimensional set of plain-english text to a single lamppost ending, a vertical cap to construct the author-function as a path, a path of words towards meaning.

The cleaning game was never meant to end. Between the doors, that black space of…

Coda preferred prison games, and why not? Does interpretation become demanded, does a vertical-author-function demand to be imposed on each text or is its imposition a product of the critic within themselves, a writing-anew where they take the world and remake it within their own prison, a world of ice of their own copying and creation?

Coda wrote poetry as Davey wrote criticism. Coda stayed in limbo, in flux, breathing motion as rivers and tides. Davey attempted to freeze. Davey trapped himself as the seduced husband,  stifled, lost, and loveless, in a torturing mechanism of his own design.