ABSTRACT
This article is composed of twelve paragraphs, so that one could participate in its composition by throwing dice to decide in which order to read them. Using the dice, one could choose to eliminate each number from future possibilities, until all twelve paragraphs had been read, or adopt the alternative constraint of re-reading paragraphs until finally each has been read at least once. Although adding the two numbers of the dice to make one is more usual, one could also read the two numbers together, thereby expanding the field of possibilities from 11 to 66, rather than 2 to 12. After all, the reader need not be confined here to the role of what John Cage called a ‘contractor’, interpreting text according to an academic ‘morphology of continuity’. As these paragraphs are read successively with the dice (rather than remaining simultaneous), the reader might then discover unforeseen continuities by chance. For interest changes when simultaneity is overtaken by succession – when the sense that any order could both be and not be at the same time gives way to the sense that there is one order or another; or when a combinatorial reading is overtaken by an expositional one.
