Badly-Drawn Birds Drawn Badly by Ben (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798218608163)

Badly-Drawn Birds Drawn Badly by Ben constitutes a semiotic exegesis on the de-reification of technê in its praxis as subsumed within the recursive dialectic of artistic process and anti-process. Through the liminal, yet intensely fraught, frames of Mad Bird and Sad Bird-avatars of modernist rupture and postmodernist resignation, respectively-Award-Winning Professor Benjamin Truitt orchestrates a metatextual interrogation of the fragmented yawp, here manifest as an aporetic interplay between sublimated rage and disaffectation.

Initially mediated through the hollowly authoritative narration that presumes to define the epistemological contours of their being, the badly-drawn birds are introduced not merely as figures but as discursive artifacts destabilizing their own textuality. Sad Bird, in an act of meta-discursive resistance, problematizes the structural framing imposed by the narrator, thereby inaugurating an epistemic crisis that prompts Mad Bird to reject, in a totalizing gesture, not only the narrator's motives but also the very ontological legitimacy of narrative control itself. As the imposition of external meaning is thus foreclosed, the symbolic vessels of rage and ennui, confronted with the abyss of their poorly-rendered being, attempt to seek solace in one another-only to be intruded upon by the totemic reverberation of past aesthetic hegemonies, embodied in Well-Drawn Bird (drawn by guest artist CarrieAnn Reda).

Well-Drawn Bird's passive-aggressive salutation-at once a trivializing interjection and an assertion of the primacy of traditional form-functions as a structural rupture that irrevocably fractures the fragile ontological scaffolding of Mad Bird and Sad Bird's precarious existence. The confrontation with the specter of aesthetic intentionality, rendered inaccessible to them through their own constitutive lack, engenders an explosive response: Mad Bird, in an act of performative negation, enacts kinetic violence. Yet, as with all gestures of resistance within the modern regime of meaning-production, this act serves only to reinscribe the very structures it seeks to dismantle. The spectral demand for order is instantaneously realized through the arrival of the badly-drawn bird police-an institution that simultaneously satirizes and literalizes the coercive forces channeled through modernity-who swiftly enacts the punitive logic of representation by condemning Mad Bird for badly-drawn bird violence and Sad Bird as an accessory after the fact.

Thus, incarcerated in badly-drawn bird jail, Sad Bird, engulfed in the inescapable malaise of historicity, attempts to articulate a retrospective lamentation for the destructive trajectory of contemporary being. However, Mad Bird, trapped within the closed circuit of his own semiotic negation, can neither process nor internalize this reflection, choosing instead to dissolve into an undirected yet totalizing eruption of rage. In this moment, the final dialectical movement is revealed: the impotence of melancholy collapses into the violence of the absurd, leaving behind only the detritus of inarticulate, impotent fury-a cipher for the modern condition, as irreversibly inscribed within the discourse of the badly-drawn.