Eckhard Gerdes blurb for Voices

"What Kyle Muntz does in Voices is beautiful. So much innovative writing is purely cerebral and emotionally dead stuff. Muntz refuses to go that way. His work is as clever as the work of any other innovator—his use of homographs and their ensuing ambiguities and double- and triple-entendres is as deft as any author has ever accomplished. But here, what happens to the narrator is grounded in the senses and emotions. There is an emotional truth to the work that just plain hits home and makes one wonder why more innovative writers of fiction don’t do this. There is a sensuousness to the prose, to its sounds and rhythms, to its shapes, that makes one want to stop and linger on each page, to feel it, to let it work its pleasures over one, like a bath filled with exotic oils and aromas all known to stimulate the emotions. This is the kind of work that gives innovative writing a good name, and Kyle, bless you for it! Sure, I can think with the narrator, but so what? In Kyle Muntz’s wonderful work, I can feel with him. It’s a profoundly human piece of work, humbling, disquieting, and beautiful. Just touch it. You’ll see what I mean."

Existence as a Paradigm of Represented Space

I mentioned to Deep (my philosophy teacher) the other day that I was working on a piece of philosophy--which is true, but presently the project exists solely as scribbles in a notebook. Anyway, he mentioned I should bring something in, so I did a summary of my core concepts and the way I wanted to approach the final text.

The interesting thing about actually proposing an idea--as opposed to commentating, which is comparatively easy--is how naked it leaves you. For the most part, these concepts are natural extensions of who I am. Even recording them feels strange.

Existence as a Paradigm of Represented Space

Or:

Conception; Function; Actuality

—Kyle Muntz

I originally considered writing this in order to expand on themes I’ve introduced in my novels, particularly: self as mirror/process/artifice/illusion, society as a hierarchy of modulated symbols, multiple notions of static time (and its relationship to consciousness), and of course, representation itself. Probably I’ll get around to finishing it when I graduate college—I’d originally considered it as an option for my masters thesis, but the topics are too eclectic (philosophy, literary criticism—particularly deconstruction—linguistics, psychology, and maybe a bit of fiction/memoir too), especially for an English degree. All the ideas here are still at their early stages, but this should do a good job showing where I’ll take them in the future.

The main focus is perception—or, more accurately, the nature of perceived systems, as they exist within the mind and manifest within (seemingly) external registers. But rather than attempting to definitively isolate the formation of semiotic structures (even Roland Barths, Jacques Lacan, Umberto Eco, Levi-Straus, etc, succeed only in mapping the parameters of a limited model, when an infinite number of models exist), I treat them as continuously morphing abstract surfaces relevant solely to perspective, in various subliminal states.

Consciousness, I’ve been increasingly inclined to believe, is the passive modulation of unconscious function, in which self (illusory awareness of process, reshaped depending on context—node in a societal matrix, receptacle of experience, whatever—at even its most basic levels) is a secondary reactive construct, indirectly regulating input/output modules. This is basically Homuncular Functionalism, but the key difference is the necessity of perspective (or at least, its illusion), by which object becomes subject, creating represented space.

I’ve been really interested in representation recently (it was the subject of my eighth novel, Green Lights/Purity of Vision, which I just finished… last week), and to properly understand my position, I should clarity my view on it. Foucault (who hardly ever talked about pure philosophy, but dedicated a chapter to it in The Order of Things) sums it up best: for the perceiver, there is only representation, manifest in phenomenological qualities. Language, of course, is representation of a representation (of the represented); and it is upon this framework that we construct our society, transforming every action and object to referents within a formless, continuously fluctuating matrix; or, quite simply, a simulacrum, perceived (in inoculated fragments) from a perspective that is always singular. Information itself is a simulacrum; or, at the very least, relative to perception.

I aim to consider, beyond signification, our own role as interpretive fields. One of the most important things I have to emphasize is that, because of perception, there is only the individual; because existence is experience solely through perspective, there is no such thing as a group of people, but an array of singularities, equidistant. (If anything, this can only be expressed in binary, so that 3 becomes 111, or 1+1+1, but there is never any equation, because demographics are a delusion.) Another thing I’d like to investigate is the contrast between physicality and ideas—one of the things that makes ethics so difficult, particularly for me, because ideas are models of reality, and not reality itself. If moral qualities exist (and I believe they do, in a sense), it is only relative to perception; but because we are inseparable from perception, they are inevitably inseparable from us. The same is true, to a certain extent—this theory I’m less sure about—of mathematics: 1+1 will always equal 2, but quantity is essentially an observation of patterns expressed numerically, that are not in themselves numerical. Also, I’d like to touch on gender studies, critical theory, and of course, do some in depth investigations of time (which, more and more, I’m convinced doesn’t exist—in this case, I have quite a few arguments, and I’m not sure which to choose), alongside a variety of other topics. Most likely I’m going to use an informal structure, mingling essay with some kind of pseudo-narrative (to illustrate concepts in an actuated, maybe even emotive context), erratically juxtaposed, utilizing literary language for occasional emphasis, and maybe even a little poetry, too. The only problem is that I’m not generally an essayist, and I have doubts about my ability to sustain a piece that long—but the end result should be interesting, though I’m less interested in truth than the aesthetic of thought itself, which is why I work philosophical models into my fiction.