The Greatness Of My Techniques Whose Forging In The Frozen Tundras Are / Envious Of The Most Ferocious Ussuri
Review of >> Massive by John Trefry
Louis Armand
1/27/2025
Massive, John Trefry, Inside the Castle, 2024.
Late in Death & the Labyinth, his meditation on the writings of Raymond Roussel, Foucault writes: “There is no system common to existence and to language, for a very simple reason: language alone forms the system of existence.” To which he adds that language, “along with the space that it defines... constitutes the place of forms.” If such is indicative of the work of Roussel & those who came in his wake – from Duchamp to Sorrentino, Perec, et al. – then it is especially indicative of John Trefry's Massive. (Trefry: “a / renovelization of «La / Vie mode d'emploi» / by George Perec / that is eschewing the / chessboard structuring [/ potential, swelling] / [the dismemberment of] / mechanism is instead / [lexicon, all] / utilizing the structuring / ...the Daemonic puissance...”
Unpaginated, comprised of (mostly) three interweaving columns of textual collage of varyingly bold, italics, underlined, all-caps & regular serif, Massive evokes across its approximately 700 pages – as per its opening line – “(a manifold formation in concrete, vanishing / formlessness churning & seamy with coldjoints...” If, as Foucault has it, “Roussel showed death in the glass pane of a parenthesis,” so Trefry conjures the prima materia of “existence” in sheer concatenation. The linguistic “act” not a communication of some hidden plan secreted in the labyrinth of the world, or even in the labyrinth of the text itself, but a guise: the very camouflage of meaning. Which is to say, meaning as camouflage. An architecture of threads (Ariadne) that lead as if to an overwhelming question. But such a “quest” is first & foremost a setting off in search of itself, a weaving of its own premise into whatever it calls “the world” & thus “experience,” “reality,” but also what thereby “lies beyond,” the metaphysics of this premise, its form-of-forms.
Yet for language to form such a “system of existence” it must somehow avoid succumbing, in advance, to the very logic of form whose place, says Foucault, it “constitutes.” Concatenation opening out from the merely discontinuous, the merely circumstantial, into a precondition, without collapsing back into what, in “The Prose of the World,” Foucault calls “the hermeneutics of resemblance.” Trefry: “information it is pure / superimposition... being an oblate of more the ...malformation / structural fixation on / the Daemonic hierarchy...” Were Massive simply to articulate a desire to coincide w/ itself, as pure singularity (a “transformation without residuum”; a “total reabsorption of all forms of discourse into a single word, of all books into a single page, of the whole world into one book,” as Foucault says of Roussel), it wld amount to no more than a nostalgia for an impossible monadism.
We must therefore, as Foucault himself says, be careful not to invert the relations here. Massive isn't some sort of inspired “Tetragrammaton.” The constitution of form isn't a containment of all possible forms. Nor is it a programmable matrix, a word-machine, an artificial intelligence dreamt of by a language in confinement. For the concatenation at work here isn't that of a series, of an order, of a dialectic or algorithm, “on a slab...that in rotation is / adopting infinitely different silhouettes against / the notions of [/ apocryphal &] the sky its boggy [/ horizon]...”
Perhaps the closest analogy to Massive's “formal” construction is to be found, not so much in the work of Roussel or even Joyce [& Piranesi]'s “polyhedron of scripture,” but in the inertial frames of Einstein's general relativity, fed back into the “observer paradox” of quantum mechanics (the understanding, i.e., that the reference frames from which observers view quantum events can themselves have multiple possible locations at once). It wld accomplish nothing, other that a false resolution (an aesthetic “explanation”), to construct from this some sort of textual “hyperobject” that wld serve only to evoke, for example, a latter-day “cubism.” A cubism, moreover, wherein the old provisions of single-point perspective were simply replaced by a subjective “panopticism”: an, as it were, omnipresent subject in place of a centred one. But a subject nevertheless. (“solution is / redemption”)
Such a performance is nothing but a changing of the ceremonial guard. Whereas, in Massive, something far more “decisive” is at stake. For concatenation not also to be reducible to a costume pageant, a ritual multiplication, a variety act, a convulsive transvestism, behind which a signified nevertheless lies camouflaged, it is necessary to avoid anything like an assumption of an “author” & of a “work of literature,” as they used to say, but also of a “reader” or “readers.” Not only must it be conceived as objectless, but as radically subjectless also. Such categories, however complexified literary criticism has sought to make them, remain axiomatic, predetermining “datasets” for the manufacture of more or less probabilistic doppelgangers: “(extraction & / condensation of... Daemonic essence.”
If Massive arises from a fundamental ambivalence to what it calls the “Foundation of Administrative Clarity,” its “Demonism” (or Daemonism) is still not that of a rhetorical deus ex machina, as some might claim: a literary conceptualism for the sake of polemic or eccentricity. The problem for such criticism is that Massive isn't alien enough to be dismissed out-of-hand: it too closely resembles, in fact, the kind of problem socalled literature today studiously avoids. It does this by appearing to resemble nothing (or to resemble, in the broadest possible way, some species of anti-literature – which cld be anything, an attitude, a formalism, a tendency to be difficult): “the Daemon is / connection) but the liberty & openness in the / ...panorama of my being ...regretful terror is / nighttime in bondage / to that species of...”
Permitted the status of a problem, Massive might then be reduced to paraphrase, in the form of a question that literature is able to pose itself even in polite company, simply because it can (& usually is) glossed-over as imponderable: How does the proximity of resemblance itself “distort” the fabric of textual space? And how can such a “space” coincide with itself, in a “present” we might (still) call a text, calibrated to an act of reading/writing? (If to ask today, ventriloquising Foucault, Who is speaking? – or rather What is it that reads? What is it that writes? – unavoidably summons the spectre of generative-AI, this doesn't change the question itself in any way, other than to ramify the author-function/reader-function as the [techno-humanist] mystification they always were). So much for the metaphysics of language.
“...the recipient, «because / only proof of existence... of the death of the / … of death, addressee» , death of / ...the recipient John Trefry faciebat «non finito» / …death of the reader, the reader is dead)”
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Louis Armand’s critical works include Feasts of Unrule (2024), Entropology (2023), Videology (2015), The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture after the Avantgarde (2013), Event States (2007), Techne (1997) & Incendiary Devices (1993), poetry collections including Infantilisms (2024), Vitus (2022), and Descartes’ Dog (2021), & novels including Anizar (2024), Glitchhead (2022), Vampyr (2021), The Garden (2020), Glasshouse (2018), The Combinations (2016) & Clair Obscur (2011). He co-directs the Prague Microfestival & is the director of the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory, in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University, Prague. www.louis-armand.com
[image: Massive interior by Louis Armand]

