In her text about James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake identifies “Signifiers do not signify in a linear or hierarchical fashion but in mulptiple directions: they slide, they move, suggesting a space created by the signifier as it indicates the directions of its own movement through fields of knowledge. The material exhibits similarity on multiple levels to Freudian mechanisms of signification (condensation and displacement) in dreams.
The material is manipulated through strategies of:
-Deformation
-Splitting
-Multiplication
-Repetition
-Motifs
-Numbers
-Geometrical configurations (Euclidean and Non-Euclidean)
-Collision
-Portmanteau words (two or more words that “collide” to form one)
-Ambiguity
-Sliding signifiers
-Portmanteau words
-A dominant presence of hermaphroditic emblems
-Necessity to use extra –visual senses to decipher
-Blurring of distinctions between visual and verbal
-Homophonies
-Superimposition
-Of structures
-Of disseminated material
-Of sematic content (ambiguity)
-Fragmentation
-Thematic weaving and Layering
-“Phenomenal Transparency”
-Absence of hierarchies
-Plays of resemblances
-Presence of syntactic armatures
-Residues of processes left in the object
-Excess
-Reflexivity
-Self-allegorizing “
For Bloomer these moves are Joyce’s manipulations that shift the linear time based narrative to a space of the “potentially infinitely generative neighborhoods and spatial relations, not sequences of events and causes and effects”. These techniques allow us to enter the object of the book not chase its tale.