concept text an interface is a site or a skin, a place where information is exchanged, a membrane where distinctions are ordered.

In his book, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, media theorist Friedrich Kittler uses German literary hermaneutics and Western European pedagogical reform as lenses to examine significant historical exchanges and orderings of information. His main concern is the constructed interface between speakers and language. My installation, Specific Difficulty, and web project and videos, 12 Specificulties append Kittler's written history by illustrating an imagined "Part Three" (2000).

Complicating the implied trajectory established between Parts One (1800) and Two (1900), Specific Difficulty renders the discourse network which describes our current historical moment (2000) through an experiential environment, commenting from an embodied, feminist perspective on the preceding chapters. As noted by The Chicago Tribune, this work sets out a space to "focu[s] on the body as a vehicle for nurturing, sexuality and communication in an urban setting."

The hypothetically extended book could be outlined as follows:

1800:   ERA of Goethean Romanticism and the Transcendental Signified

Language is Whole and Oral.
Learning is the absorption of whole words from the Source: the Mother's Mouth.
In this discourse network, meaning is primary. The goal of reading is understanding. As material, Language is an exchangeable (translatable) sheath for pure meaning which is conducted through but external to a text. Women are natural readers who consume (as lovers) / understand (as mothers) the texts written by men who Write (the Law). The Law is ensured to be morally accountable because it is written by men who learned language from their mothers' pristine mouths. Women's bodies are reduced to this singular orifice, the mouth of One Woman, the originary source of natural language.

1900:   ERA of Modernity and the Typewritten Signifier

Language is fractured and mechanized.
Learning is the assumption of a given correct order of component parts: Memorization.
In this discourse network, assembly is primary. As material, language is a structured arrangement of syllabic modules, authored at the typewriter. Pure translation is impossible because any substitutions or rearrangements of these parts throw coherence into jeopardy. In that language is inherently fractured and tenuously held together by memorization, it is prone to occasional failures which register in the body as pathologies. Disorders in the arrangement of syllables reflect medical disorders. New institutions like psychophysics are required to capture and organize the resultant pathologies introduced to the body by newly fractured language.

2000:   Specific Difficulty: It-ERA-tion of Speechless Significance

Specificity is difficult because language is macroscopic. When we get down to details, we get down to syllables, but in the age of Information, we expect to be able to break things down much more finely to become microscopic: bits, or nerve pulses, or ones and zeros. Instead, when we speak, we find ourselves saddled with a lumbering tool: our own bodies — our blunt tongues. To articulate with a body, I appropriate the concept of movement vocabulary from the idiom of Dance. Structured articulations are rehearsed like tongue exercises. Insistent, communicative repetitions are reiterations, pronunciations of language's most basic element, the syllable. Language is seen manifest in the body, without its being pathologized. In this discourse network, language is learned by and returned to a body that talks without voice. It specifies generalities, dancing out the interface of a coherence it fosters within its own terminology, and on its own terms.