Loosely Bound: Negotiating Dispersion and Fragmentariness in Vivian Abenshushan’s Permanente Obra Negra Élika Ortega (bio) Vivian abenshushan’s Permanente obra negra (Fig. 1) is a unique piece of experimental literature that takes upon itself the significant task to interrogate the form of the book both as meaning-making object and as a commodity produced within neoliberal markets. Published in 2019 by the Mexican independent publisher Sexto Piso, Permanente obra negra (PON) is a complex gathering of book objects: a trade edition book, a die-cut book, a card catalog, and a web application designed and developed by dora bartilotti and leonardo aranda at the Medialabmx. The elaborate facets of the project that at times required costly artisanal work were financed by Fundación BBVA Bancomer. Relying on four deftly designed material objects and the instances where they intersect and pull apart, abenshushan builds a device through which her readers engage in processes of selection, collation, and combination of short passages, producing countless reading paths and modes. The author deliberately invites her readers to build a novel out of fragmentary, loosely held narratives. Crucially, abenshushan turns experimental techniques around by deploying them not as an affirmation [End Page 331] of individual artistic genius but as a conduit to include textual records of subjects erased from the history of writing and/or by the publishing industry. A profoundly self-reflexive work, PON centers on an exploration of the history of writing and the book in the West critiqued from a perspective of accumulation through dispossession: colonialism, slavery, and ghost writing. In this essay, I advance the notion of “loose binding.” Loosely bound books like PON are single works despite their multiple facets. In order to consider them so (instead of as editions, adaptations, or attachments to each other), loose bindings must be thought of as a remediation or a transfer of the affordances of a book’s binding onto bespoke literary and bookish strategies to attach, join, or fasten together two or more book objects. As I elaborate, “loose bindings” are the bases to establish the meanings of a distributed literary work by means as varied as book design and production, narrative, and reading practices. Further, I argue that this type of creation is symptomatic of the observable changes in literary creativity, publishing, and reading at the turn of the twenty-first century, a manifestation of “bookishness.”1 The notion of “loose binding” allows me to study the four facets of PON as working in tandem as a single work with an overarching poetics and politics rather than as separate ones or, as Carolina Magis Weinberg characterizes it, as “a dismembered, transitory, and ungovernable book.”2 Indeed, Abenshushan has saturated her work with a unique sensitivity of the meaning-making possibilities offered by various book objects and how they work together. Therefore, while PON is not the sole instance of this phenomenon, Abenshushan’s catalog of experimental writing techniques, such as “copying, rewriting, cut-up, citation montage, and the activation of machines of collective writing,” offer a multitude of opportunities to examine how “loose binding” are producers of meaning beyond text.3 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The three print objects that make up Permanente obra negra. Top left: die-cut book. Top right: card catalog. Bottom left: trade edition book. Bottom right: loose cards from the card catalog. Web application available at http://www.permanenteobranegra.cc. Image courtesy of Vivian Abenshushan. Due to PON’s complexity, an overview of the themes and structure of the novel is warranted. As the title in Spanish suggests, this is a work in a constant process of becoming: obra negra refers to an unfinished construction, a building made of just bricks and cement, a “rough-in.” The unfinished construction metaphor enables Abenshushan to stage the very process of writing and to lay bare myriad fragments, starting points, notes, sources, images, and possible storylines for the reader to “finish” it. Comprising more than a thousand fragments, the text is organized in six autonomous yet connected series. Each has a narrative thread and a distinctive typeface. “Baskerville 1st series → Permanent Rough-In” explores the process of writing the text, engaging the...
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Nov 22, 2024
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