Matt Kirschenbaum forwarded to me some of your responses/replies to
reading _Dark Decade_. I thought I would just try and answer a few of your
questions --a nd also tell you how flattered I am to think that the book
is being read with such attention and interest.
The marked "absence" of the women was in part an attempt to short circuit
the conventional objectified representation of women in descriptive prose
-- thus by keeping them "out" of the picture in which they are usually
fetishistically represented as the phallic replacement/substitute within a
masculinist imagination, they are made absent in order to avoid serving
that purpose. I saw it as a feminist gesture to refuse such
objectification.
On the other hand, the business of their being represented in so many
circumstances of restraint/constraint/enclosure has more to do with a
conviction that such are the circumscribed conditions of women in
patriarchal society.
As to the final point: "is not to mean but to be." I was asserting a
greater priority and emphasis to the efficacy of imagistic prose in its
condition of being -- so that it need not always be a surrogate, not
"only" a representation. Thus, as you rightly experienced, the language is
highly material in its density as prose as well as in its suggestion of
imagery. It wasn't an advocation of avoiding meaning as much as an attempt
to keep the writing from only being read through to meaning in a process
of displacement. So, you notice, it isn't the "language" or "text" which
is invoked, but the "image" so that the textual emphasis is shifted
towards a visual one -- not, in this case, the literal words on the page,
but the images in the prose as material. So, it's true that I am not
saying "this has no meaning" but rather, that it is not be understood as
having meaning _only_ in a surrogate/referential sense.
Hope that helps!
All the best,
Johanna Drucker