Whitney Anne Trettien

Gaffe / Stutter Whitney Anne Trettien

Gaffe/Stutter is a dead letter to Deleuze?s Logic of Sense. It began as a series of diagrams, two-dimensional memory palaces that sketch the vectors of each chapter?s paradox; it became an elaborate plan for a web-based diagrammatic (r)e(n)dition of Logic of Sense, built on zoomable, annotatable high-resolution scans of these diagrams. Conceived as an anti-book ? a visual reading schematic ? this project eschews the line of text in favor of regimented grids, the ink-soaked grain of the remediated pen over the laser-burned face of print; playful reaction rather than academic protraction. This is not an analogy, or a product of the imagination, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would write in A Thousand Plateaus, but a composition of speeds and affects on the plane of consistency: a plan(e), a program, or rather a diagram, a problem, a question-machine. It ended as a directory of inert jQuery demos and digital scans: an image of Trafalgar Square at dusk, annotated with the words ?Flag,? ?Small people on the steps,? ?A Statue,? and ?National Gallery Dome?; an empty html file titled ?delete.html?. The visitor who may happen to wander onto the website where these project demos are stashed would find herself stuck on Deleuze?s definition of a paradox as initially that which destroys good sense as the only direction of becoming, but also that which destroys common sense as the assignation of fixed identities. From a series of diagrams to a dead-end digital directory, Gaffe/Stutter re-interprets a book that itself resists scholarly annotation. As with sense, it subsists in language; but it happens to things.