As readers and viewers in western euro-centric cultures we are very attached to our traditional narrative arc – the satisfying conclusion – the plot that thickens then resolves in closure. We look to reality to copy fiction in this way. We do our best to project cinematic and literary structures onto the unstable folds of space and time. Realities that won’t fit into these configurations are more difficult to assimilate -- like the circuitous and circling narratives of addiction and poverty. There is a sort of structural failure, a formal dissatisfaction in their repetitions and returns, their non-rational movements, their lack of closure, their avoidance of identification and suture. The difficulties and dissatisfactions are not unlike those we experience when confronted with non-linear, hyper-textual, multi-vocal forms of writing, scholarship, documentary – like this publication and its objects of study. What is lost in this form is a kind of satisfying relationship between anticipation and certainty. What is gained? A link, a jump a stutter, a cut, a blank space for assertion, a recognition that there is no necessity for closure, and perhaps the conditions of possibility for a practice of fiction that -- “undoes, and then re-articulates, connections between signs and images, images and times, and signs and spaces, framing a given sense of reality, a given 'commonsense.' It is a practice that invents new trajectories between what can be seen, what can be said and what can be done…”

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