After some silence

After some silence and a private change of direction, please find page one of a new academic paper looking investigating incompleteness through the lens of Kafka’s The Castle and John Portman’s ‘marts’ in downtown Atlanta.

The desire for continuity and completeness of both physical and interpretive landscapes is a conscious choice made by a person. It is not the voracious yet blind devouring of the consumer, a grossly quantitative sequencing of objects and ideas, but the desire to pass through, or project lines through objects and ideas as a qualitative experience in which all elements come together progressively to form a world view and a relational network that trails the completist invisibly. These transgressions or penetrations involve a clean movement, a passing through, as through a shaft or tunnel for the maintenance of clearance around the path, for the perpetuation of distance, however minute, through which all trajectories are possible in a finely branching spine of tangential inquiries, each hollowed out and panoramically observant. This is penetration through the city, the continuity of the walking surface and the sometimes elusive yet wholly personal totality of the public way. This is movement through a text, an infinitely reducible series of interpretational chambers. This is life amongst a landscape of objects, the continuity of the urban surface and the subjective interpretational minutiae of naming, language, and memory. This is not the envelopment of consumption, in which the consumer is in fact consumed, but the construction of all things into the continuously deferring desire of asymptotic distance, where they can remain distinct, in place, yet locked into the trailing web of the completist’s penetrations. Inherent within these two opposing pursuits of consumption and inclusion is a desire for completion, an obsessive drive for a perceived totality. This perception is derived from the reading of a system that is assumed to be complete or continuous, such as ‘the city’ or a novel, and the desire to consume or include it in totality.