NEW-NEW-OLD-NEW-NEW
Society of the Friends of A/C
an imaginary community
a secret society
a community of thought and practice
an idiorrhythmic group
a milieu
Society of the Friends of the Text: its members would have nothing in common (for there is no necessary agreement on the texts of pleasure) but their enemies: fools of all kinds, who decree foreclosure of the text and of its pleasure, either by cultural conformism or by intransigent rationalism (suspecting a "mystique" of literature) or by political moralism or by criticism of the signifier or by stupid pragmatism or by snide vacuity or by destruction of the discourse, loss of verbal desire. Such a society would have no site, could function only in total atopia; yet it would be a kind of phalanstery, for in it contradictions would be acknowledged (and the risks of ideological imposture thereby restricted), difference would be observed, and conflict rendered insignificant (being unproductive of pleasure).
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller (Hill and Wang, 1975), pp. 14-15.
Charles Fourier, phalanstery, conceived 1808
A/C ≈ Art / Criticism ≈ Art / Critique ≈ Artistic / Critical
/ : an ideogram + a pictogram
/
Take this bar which separates the this from the not-this. That is to say any segment at all. Place it in a neutral space, say three-dimensional to facilitate the imagination’s highly crude intuition. Subject it to a movement of rotation around a point belonging to this segment, a movement yielding the following three properties: the rotation takes place on all the axes without exclusion, the central point is itself displaced over the segment in an aleatory way, finally it is equally displaced in the supposed neutral space. Thus a surface is engendered, which is nothing other than the labyrinthine libidinal band which was in question: this surface always has as its breadth the length of the segment, etc.
Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, translated by lain Hamilton Grant (Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 15.